Travel for Agoraphobics

Remembering Billy

2012-02-12T07:47:00.000-08:00

My brother died on December 1. I had thought myself to chronicle his difficult and strangely fascinating life, but the great Madison journalist and family friend Bill Lueders beat me to it. And what a job he did. Lueders is one of Madison's great treasures for his fine investigative writing both for Isthmus and now for The Center for Investigative Journalism's Wisconsin Watch, and his passion to give voice to those who would not otherwise have one. He also happens to write with great wit and style.

Have a look for yourself and read Remembering Billy.

No More Vampire Love

2011-10-27T06:15:00.001-07:00

So I got home from yoga class last night and watched the last half of the first Twilight movie, which was apparently making its television premier. And all I could think was how dated it all seemed. Already. The movie came out in 2008 and the books aren't really much older, and yet, I realized, I am already so over vampires.

You might think that that would have something to do with the pulpy nature of these stories, the laughable writing, bad acting and etc. But sadly, none of these things deterred me the first time around, when even recognizing the bad writing, the pulpiness and etc., I indulged in an adolescent obsession with addictive outsider love.

What I'm toying with now is the idea that a significant part of the rising obsession with vampire love in our culture over the past several years has been driven by a need to make sense of key elements of living in a late-stage capitalist society where we understood only subconsciously that the wealthy (attractive, pale, powerful) are sucking the proverbial blood out of the rest of humanity.

While these books were being written and consumed, a lot of the mechanics of this were still sort of underground. Of course there were people who already understood that these were the mechanisms of our financial systems and what that was doing to society at large. But now, few people can be mistaken. It is all out there for everyone to see.

Vampires are the 1%, and we (okay, at least I) am just not that into them anymore.

Hunger Strike

2011-08-22T06:46:00.000-07:00

The Capitol Square is a lovely place to walk on a summer night. This past Friday night the car noise was minimal and a gentle breeze made the walking a pleasure after a very fine dinner at which we all ate a bit more than we needed. Groups of young men and women were chalking thoughts about the treachery of our current all-Republican-all-the-time, completely-sold-out-to-corporate-interests government onto the sidewalks around the Capitol building. They chalked with such admirable purpose in their body language, moving quickly from one place to the next.

At the head of the State Street entrance to the Capitol, I encountered Hallis Mailen, the man who has been on hunger strike for something like 70 days now. Hallis, even after two months on hunger stike, is still a portly man, though he looks like a much bigger man from whom half the air has been let out. He is 50 years old, bearded, usually wearing a blue bandana around his head. he says that he will remain on hunger strike "until the bitter end or until President Barack and Michelle Obama announce an official investigation into why our service women and men are not receiving the support they need from the Veteran's Administration as well as the Social Security Administration." He is a veteran, he told me, of the US Army, having served in the Korean DMZ.

There is nothing slick or sophisticated about Hallis or the way he has gone about articulating his cause. After talking with him for five minutes, I wanted nothing more than to hug him. He is a gentle bear of a man, who has been involved in the protests at the Capitol since the beginning. He clearly cares deeply about social justice, regardless of whether he can put his finger on exactly what needs fixing and how that should happen. He has been labeled a crackpot by some, a dirty hippie and a liar in a few of the blogs I've since read about him. Still, it is shocking to me that aside from Letters to the Editor, I have not seen a word written in the local press about him. Do they fear they will be giving air time to a crack pot, or fear that somehow they will be boosting the politics he supports?

Regardless of what you think about Hallis or the merits of his cause, going on hunger strike -- some have scoffed at the fact that he is still drinking liquids but I say to them, you try it -- and staying with it for over two months, is an act of amazing, some would say reckless courage. I remember the Irish IRA hunger strikers, dying one by one in the 80s. On the one hand, a crazy, seemingly empty gesture against the likes of Margaret Thatcher and her government. And yet somehow I was riveted by grandness of the gesture, and though I could not condone the violence the IRA was perpetrating in those days, my sympathies were with these men. They exposed the heartlessness of British government and its austerity policies of that time. Whether they had any lasting effect on anything is highly debatable. I doubt it. And yet I remember those Irish hunger strikers with wonder and horror for what they were willing to say by starving themselves to death on Thatcher's doorstep, so to speak.

Defend Wisconsin has posted some videos of Hallis talking about what he is doing and why.

In the meantime, if you happen to be up on the Square, make a point of talking to Hallis. He is in every way that matters a very good man.

Reunions

2011-07-26T06:28:00.000-07:00

A big high school reunion is looming for me. I find myself loath to say the number of years. A lot. That I'm ambivalent about joining the festivities has little to do with the pleasures and pains of meeting up with old high school classmates. My problem with this one is that I transferred to the high school I graduated from as a sophomore. I did not grow up with or attend elementary school with my high school classmates. I have almost no shared experience with more than a few of them, and looking through the reunion website, it would appear that all but one of those people will not be attending. When I look at the yearbook, I find I can't even remember an awful lot of my graduating class.

I do, however, have regular reunions with my core of friends from college. I've written about this before as I've described the yearly trips we join up to take. The second of those was a trip to England in 2007. We started with a 6-day walking tour of the Dorset-Wiltshire border country (Wessex to Thomas Hardy fans) and ended with 3 days in London. It was a summer of torrential rains in Britain, and there is nothing that solidifies old friendships like slogging through woods and over meadows in heavy rain gear day after day. It may sound like a nightmare, but that would be wrong. Oh, there was complaining along the way. But mostly we had a blast; we never ran out of things to talk about. And the beer was good, too.

Here's a poem I wrote last year, trying to recapture part of the experience.

HAYMARKET PUB

In the city at last we needed to stretch
our legs, to feel sun for the first
time in days, though it came with a scrappy
wind and we wore our long sleeves. Standing
half way across Hungerford Bridge we surveyed
the domain -- Thames high and churning after long
rains, the Houses of Parliament making their usual
postcard impression, the Eye in suspension over
the bank like the great and powerful
Oz. We snapped photos with hapless tourist
abandon, eyes squinting, hair flailing. I look
at those now and remember the unremarkable
pub where we sat to rest our feet and drink
for a while out of the summer squalls, how we must
have seemed loopy and loud, we middle-aged
Americans: old friends, companions,
the loves of each others lives, giddy
with joy to be reunited
once more.

--RZC

My Big Little Tea Party Experiment

2011-07-20T04:10:00.000-07:00

For a week in April and a week in June, I joined what might loosely be called "the conversation" at Andrew Breitbart's BigGovernment.com, or as I began to call it when my family wanted to know what the hell I was doing on the computer for hours, Tea Party Central.

Though I knew who Breitbart was, BigGoverment.com was not on my radar until someone sent me a link to an article there in which a friend working in the Obama administration was trashed. I was fascinated by the posting, which was based entirely on innuendo and included a number of misstatements and outright falsehoods. And then I began to read the comments.

Anyone reading the comments to online articles these days is well aware of the level of right wing nastiness on display. It's not that left wing commentators are always so nice, it's more the sheer number of right wingers who evidently spend large amounts of their time trolling news sources in order to trash any view that appears to support liberal values.

Because in the course of my daily life I rarely run into anyone whose political beliefs conflict much with my own, I often feel as if I live in an echo chamber. I have been starved for a little lively argument with people who think differently from me. And as I read the comments on this truly awful posting about my friend -- an old fashioned true heart who believes that government service is a treasure and a duty -- I found myself craving an argument (I am half Italian, after all).

I realized that in joining the conversation at Big Government I would be regarded as a liberal troll by commenting in a contrary sort of way to the postings, so I made a couple of rules for myself. I decided I would not trash anyone's comments or beliefs, only challenge them with questions or information. I would not use ridicule or sarcasm. In the course of my little experiment -- I lasted one week in April, and again, about a week in June -- I argued with Tea Party people about what they call Obamacare, about the various developments at that time in Wisconsin politics (Walker's budget, the Prosser/Kloppenburg election and recount), and briefly about the Anthony Weiner incident. I think in the back of my mind I had an idea of writing an extensive article about the experience, an idea which now seems too depressing even to contemplate.

At first I was invigorated by the arguments, though usually after getting past a barrage of insults for my evil liberal viewpoint. There were, a little to my surprise, some people who seemed to be willing to think and be challenged, particularly on the issue of health care. The libertarian right wing that seems to hang at Tea Party Central is in favor of health care savings accounts, which a couple of people defended creditably until we started to talk about such tricky problems as single parents and people without jobs. Let me put it this way. On every issue where I thought I was talking to an intelligent, thinking person whose views simply differed from my own, I eventually reached the point where what they believed or their rationalization for what they believed was, well, crazy. I don't know how else to describe it.

Like the guy I was talking to about health care who after a brief discussion of Planned Parenthood's mission (he believes all they do is abortions, of course) informed me that Margaret Sanger was an admirer of Adolph Hitler and that she founded Planned Parenthood as a genocidal tool for convincing black women to kill their unborn babies. Or the woman who felt that insurance companies are much kinder and more generous than the government in paying for health care services. When I described several examples of friends and family members who had been denied services by insurance companies or were paying exorbitant rates to keep themselves and their kids insured, fell back on, "Too bad for them, but why should that be my problem?" Or the comments on the Prosser/Kloppenburg race that invariably devolved into anti-Semitic, woman-hating garbage. I do not use the word invariably lightly.

A few months back I heard somebody say that conservatism is a form of psychosis. I balked at that at the time. I wanted to believe that people could hold different views from my own without being branded with a psychiatric diagnosis. But honestly, after spending two weeks of my life in intense conversation with the Tea Party faction of American conservatives, I'm not so sure. At the end of that first week in April, I found myself feeling unaccountably depressed. There were times I would close down my computer after a session on Big Government, feeling as if I'd been sucked into a vortex of negativity and paranoia, not to mention the sheer meanness of many of the comments I passed over and never responded to. I began to have nightmares. My husband insisted I quit. When I went back in June, I lasted only four or five days.

I would love to be able to share some pithy and enlightening conclusions from the experience. Instead all I have is this little poem.

TEA PARTY

No china cups at
this table, no clink
of polite stirring
spoons, only mad
hatters, shrieking
invective, upending
the cakes.

--RZC

Row Out

2011-06-22T09:38:00.000-07:00

Just a little summer poetry.

ROW OUT

I see the old woman I will
become in the dark screen
of my iPad, not my mother's face
yet, but she's there in the sag
and roll of the jaw line, a suggestion
of heaviness above the eyes.

I think of this later on my bike, racing
alongside the gray lake only hoping
to stir muddy air; it feels like wading
with my face, with every jiggle of loose
flesh as I ride over pebbles
and ruts. The crew team laps
silently away from the shore, shining
so brightly through watery shadows.

A sheen of dew coats the blades
of quack grass that cover the ground between
shrubs and it strikes me a person
might at some point begin
to think that this
is enough, that
this, in fact
is all

and I can see myself rowing
out from the sheltering green
of this path, from the amplified shouts
of the coxswain, reaching
for that swelling monochrome
quiet as my legs pump in rhythm
with my still
persistent
heart.

--RZC

Travel for Agoraphobics on Kindle

2011-06-20T15:01:00.000-07:00

Finally, here is a link directly to the Kindle version of Travel for Agoraphobics.

Reading Roundup

2011-06-20T13:27:00.001-07:00

I haven't been tremendously diligent about keeping up the blog posts in recent time. Blame it on Wisconsin politics and a persistent respiratory virus I feel inclined to blame on climate change. And the ever present struggle against my mother's voice in my head: "Nobody wants to hear every little thought that passes through your brain, Rosemary." Or words to that effect. It makes pretty much every blog post, every poem, short story, essay or chapter an act of rebellion. But I digress.

Reading itself has felt like an act of rebellion of late. Particularly reading that has no particular redeeming social value: the pleasure read, as it were. But there have been some small pleasures recently and one rather large.

Dean Bakopoulos's much anticipated second novel, My American Unhappiness, starts as a meandering, occasionally crabby, often big-hearted commentary on American life post 9/11 until events begin to pick up and you can't put it down until you find out what's going to happen to Zeke Pappas next. By turns heart breaking, funny and spot-on in its observations, I'd call it a pleasure read with soul. My favorite read so far this year. Bonus for Madisonians: the novel is set in Madison and part of the fun will be recognizing all the places, the people and neighborhoods we get to fictionally navigate.

Evenfall by Liz Michalski intrigued me from the first chapter, told from the point of view of Frank, a ghost still residing in the house where he lived his entire life. This is one of those books where everyone seeks healing -- the ghost, the woman, now aged, whom he loved but never married, a young niece who can't seem to find her place in life -- but Michalski handles it all with a light touch. A small, satisfying read.

Sometimes, when life feels hard, I like reading Young Adult fiction for its way of speaking directly and generally without flourish to my inner child badly in need of a good story. Thanks to friend, poet Andrea Potos, for tossing my way two charming reads from the genre of young adult historical fiction. The Betrayal of Maggie Blair by Elizabeth Laird takes place in the 17th century on the tiny Isle of Bute off the western coast of Scotland. A very satisfying story of a smart and brave girl who triumphs over her poverty and the adversity of the English Civil Wars on the Scots people. Another enjoyable read in this vein was Alexandra Harvey's Haunting Violet, about a teenage girl who finds she has real psychic powers while her mother, a fraud, works seances in Spiritualist circles in 19th-century England.

Now, if only I could wean myself from live-streaming increasingly dark and depressing episodes of MI-5, I could probably get pretty happy and productive again.

Yes, my heart bleeds . . .

2011-03-21T05:47:00.000-07:00

OMG. I just received an email from a friend who was accused of being too much of a "bleeding heart."

Yes! I wanted to scream. Yes, my heart bleeds. Am I supposed to be ashamed of this, as if that means there is something wrong with me, with my thinking, with my wishes for the world I live in? For the love of god, in this world, in this time, every one of our hearts should be bleeding.

Yes, my heart bleeds. What happened to yours that it doesn't?

No More Passivity (and Read My Book, Please)

2011-03-16T04:56:00.000-07:00

I have been just one of a couple hundred thousand people in Wisconsin who participated in the protests at the State Capitol over the last several weeks. So many others have written about this, and posted their incredible photos, videos and short films. But there is one thing I would like to say about a particular side effect of the experience.

Before Governor Walker "dropped the bomb" on the people of Wisconsin -- that is, the Trojan horse of ending collective bargaining that was part of his so-called Budget Repair Bill -- and made the tacit threat that the National Guard could be called if we resisted, I had been sleepwalking through much of my life.

That politics seemed hopeless was only a part of my general disillusionment. I am, after all, a writer. Over the last several years I've watched my livelihood as a freelance journalist shrivel considerably as the newspaper and magazines I wrote for contracted and assigned editorial staff to do writing that had previously been done by people like me. And I could not find an agent or publisher for either my novel or short story collection. I felt secretly angry but also strangely resigned to this. I knew the work was good -- many of the agents had confirmed this, saying rather that they didn't think they could sell the books in this market. The short fiction manuscript was a finalist for the Flannery O'Connor award in 2009, the novel a finalist in 2010 for the Bakeless Prize in fiction.

I see now that I froze. I was going to write that I froze "a little," but it was more than that. I froze a lot. I allowed myself to go completely passive.

So, thank you, Governor Walker, for threatening to turn the National Guard on your people. It got me right out of my chair and down to the capitol that day. And at some point in the whole thing I did what my daughter and son-in-law have been telling me to do for months. I published my novel on Amazon for Kindle.

I'd had the ms. ready to go before that, but in my hopelessness and passivity, I just couldn't pull the trigger. Not to mention that I was raised up in the era when self-publishing your work was considered disreputable. Ah, yes, when we still trusted the agents and editors to be the arbiters of taste and excellence. When we trusted (most of) our politicians to actually have the welfare of the people at heart. Well, that's over, at least for now.

So, you can find my book, Travel for Agoraphobics, at Amazon Books. It is only available currently for Kindle and Kindle for iPad at the bargain price of $2.99.

And this thing in Wisconsin ain't over either. I am committed to doing whatever it takes to stop the heartless and radical Republican agenda that is attempting to destroy the last vestiges of the social contract. My smart and generous editor at Isthmus Linda Falkenstein has been invoking Tom Joad's speech from The Grapes of Wrath lately: I'll be all around in the dark. I'll be everywhere. Wherever you can look, wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. ... I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad. I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready, and when the people are eatin' the stuff they raise and livin' in the houses they build, I'll be there, too.

No more passivity.

My Mother's Bones and the Uses of Poetry

2010-11-30T05:18:00.001-08:00

I often think more about my mother around this time of the year. She hated the holidays -- not for themselves, really, but for how much they disappointed her. She is buried in Resurrection Cemetery, on the Franklin Street side. I used to drive by there frequently, occasionally stopping for a few moments of one-sided conversation. Lately not as much, though over Thanksgiving weekend, with one of my sisters in the car, we drove by. My sister remarked that she is haunted sometimes by the thought of our mother's remains in the ground, the freezing and thawing with the seasons and so forth. I told her that I had been bothered by similar thoughts a couple of years back, until I wrote a poem about it. And somehow, without my noticing, I'd stopped thinking about it. Here is the poem:

MY MOTHER'S BONES

We buried her in pink Pumas -- her last
mail-order purchase -- and now I can't stop
picturing those sneakers cradling
the small, gnarled bones
of her feet. We ought to have dressed her
in woolens, a London Fog
for the damp, instead of the pale
summer dress she'd worn to parties
and teas, and matched
her vivid blue eyes -- so thoroughly
unsuitable for an eternity
in the ground.

--RZC

Hacking Hackery

2010-11-24T06:08:00.000-08:00

In these days when opinion journalism reigns, when any loud mouth with a dubious political or journalistic credential is given credence over plain reporting, and when any idiot can start a blog (yes, I include myself), I shouldn't be so surprised -- impressed even -- when one columnist decides to burn bridges and take on many of the most prominent people in his profession.

But that is what Alex Pareene, War Room columnist for Salon.com, has been doing all week with his Hack Thirty, a wondrously vitriolic analysis of the pundrity of such well-know opinion journalists as George Will ("The bow-tied pundit is as slimy and amoral as a spitball"), Joe Klein ("may not always know what he's talking about, but he knows politics was cooler in the 60s"), even Bill Maher favorite, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.

Pareene's list is not a perfunctory slash job; the "30 worst columnists and cable news commentators" who made his list have been well considered. Sure, you might expect to see Jonah Golberg, Bill Kristol, or David Brooks. But he also takes on such celebrated individuals as Tina Brown ("Newsweek's new editor just ran into somebody impossibly fabulous at dinner last month . . ."), Peggy Noonan, and MSNBC stalwart Howard Fineman.

The list is not yet complete. As of this post, the top 5 "hacks" had not yet been listed and analyzed. but I'm looking forward to it. Pareene writes with a straightforward clarity the journalist in me must appreciate. There is also the guilty pleasure of watching someone write exactly what he thinks about a large number of sacred cows.

Nobody expects the Reformation

2010-11-03T05:19:00.000-07:00

Whenever I read accounts of the Reformation, like Hilary Mantel's wonderful Wolf Hall (see this blog from October 12), it always strikes me as a time when Europeans were experiencing a huge shift in consciousness. And by consciousness I mean their awareness and understanding of the world, how they fit into it, and the meanings they ascribed to it.

Feudalism was being eclipsed as an economic system by mercantilism with its notion of markets and capital. Faith in the Catholic church as the premier moral authority was eroding, thanks to rampant corruption and the innovation of the printing press which got translations of the Bible into the hands of the people (well, those who could read, anyway). All of Europe was in a struggle over its governing principles, that is, by whom and by which moral authority. There were wars (the Pope himself was a hostage of the Holy Roman Emperor for years), there were hangings and the burning of heretics. They were tumultuous times.

I'm not a historian and I'm obviously glossing over a lot of fact and nuance. But I've been finding it useful lately to have this perspective. As new ideas took hold, waves of backlash tried to stop them. Bloody Mary -- who took the English throne in 1555, restored Catholicism as the state religion and beheaded or burned at the stake as many protestants as she could get her hands on -- was followed in 1558 by Elizabeth I who instituted an era of religious tolerance unprecedented for those times. The world had changed, England prospered. Once people begin to think differently, the old ways can only hold on for so long.

This historical perspective has calmed me some from the doom-and-gloom of watching an ultraconservative backlash take hold in my beautiful state. It can't last. Old systems are breaking down, and though I grieve for all of those who will suffer, I have to believe that even as this has happened, consciousness continues to shift. Call me naive, but I choose to believe we will find a better place, and I am committed to keep working towards that.

By Nightfall

2010-11-01T05:04:00.001-07:00

I fell in love with Michael Cunningham in 1996, when a friend in my writing group handed me a copy of Flesh and Blood. I fell in love with his writing in a way I hadn't with any author before in my long history of literary crushes. The things with Charlotte Bronte and Richard Brautigan, with Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie and Jerzy Kosinski all seemed like puppy love by comparison.

I went on to his earlier novel, A Home at the End of the World, and that only sealed the deal. My writer friend told me he was teaching in the summer program at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, a week long workshop, I quickly found out, by application only. Michael wanted a writing sample and a letter describing why you specifically wanted his workshop. God, how I labored over that letter. And after sending my application, I probably called the FAWC workshop coordinator once a week. He was kind; he never laughed. And I did get in, though I'll never know whether it was through the merits of my writing sample or because the coordinator asked Michael to get me off his back.

That was 1997, a year before The Hours made him a literary star. It was 2005 before Specimen Days, which was received -- somewhat indifferently, I thought. In my estimation it was a beautiful piece of work, one that will be far better regarded years from now than it was upon arrival. Its reception at the time reminded me of what happens when musicians switch up tone, style or genre. The fans feel rejected because they wanted more of what they already knew they liked. I get that, though it is very hard on the artist.

So, long introduction by way of making it clear that I have this history with Michael Cunningham and his work. I may be a more than average avid fan. And I have longed for his literary voice these five years since Specimen Days.

By Nightfall, just out this fall, is a slim novel, taking place over three days in the life of a New York art dealer and his wife, in which the cracks in their 20-year marriage will be opened by the arrival of her ne'er-do-well much younger brother. We get the sort of habit of living that Peter and Rebecca have fallen into over time. We get Peter's ambivalence over his marriage and the art world in which he works; the ideals of youth and Peter's worship of Beauty have become tarnished with age. Enter the manipulative, drug-addicted younger brother.

This is not a bad book -- I doubt Michael could write a truly bad book. There is still the great prose, and, for the most part, the prodigious nailing of character detail. But in some ways, I think, it suffers from its own economy. I did not quite believe the relationship between Peter and Rebecca. We got scenes of them at a party, having sex, reading the Sunday papers in bed. And yet, I had trouble seeing them as a married couple. Perhaps, considering that the book is largely about the ways we do not see each other and ourselves, it could have been intentional. Here are two people who somehow don't fit, though they have been living quite comfortably together for 20 years. But still somehow I think I should have been able to believe them as a couple.

The flashback scenes are characteristically on point -- Peter's courtship of young Rebecca, his falling in love with her quirky family, his adolescent memories of the golden older brother, long dead now from AIDS. But maybe I took it a little personally that he painted Milwaukee -- my hometown and the hometown that Peter escaped -- with such broad strokes that it could have been anywhere in the midwest, as if by merely invoking the name Milwaukee we would understand everything we needed to know about why Peter needed to escape. Likewise, his references to Joyce's story "The Dead," to Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary while apt, feel almost like shorthand.

I should say there was no point at which I wanted to put this book down. The voice, the observations about people and life, and particularly its depictions of the New York art scene, all pulled me through. It was a compelling read. But something was missing, something I can't quite name, though it may reside in the neighborhood of the author's choice to limit the point of view to Peter's alone. Peter is in no way despicable, but he's not very likable either, with his self pity -- particularly towards his floundering young adult daughter -- and twitchy self consciousness.

Mostly, I wanted this to be a longer book, with more voices, perhaps, more scenes of Rebecca. These are always specious criticisms, of course. This was the book Michael wanted write. I really hate to be like one of those ungrateful music fans, but I'm going to have to say that this just wasn't the book I was hoping to read.

Wolf Hall

2010-10-12T06:25:00.000-07:00

I often put off reading a book that I know would normally fall into the category of books I love because it looks like too much of a commitment, or I'm afraid to be disappointed (some books just get too much hype; others not nearly enough), or I'm too busy doing/reading/procrastinating on other things. And then I get the email from the library telling me the book is waiting for me on the shelf at my local branch. I bring the book home, open it, and from the first sentence I am thoroughly and unexpectedly gripped. Gripped to the point where I hate my husband. my friends, my life, because they demand that I sometimes close the book to pay attention to them.

This was my experience of Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel's extraordinary novel of Thomas Cromwell, most often represented (misunderstood?) as the great villain of Henry VIII's divorce saga. From the first few sentences, it was clear that this was more than an historical novel, that Mantel's read on the characters -- Henry VIII, Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas More, Cromwell himself, Anne Boleyn -- would resonate well past the time in which they lived. And that we were going to see each of these people in an entirely new light.

Cromwell as a humanist? Yes, yes indeed. Mantel paints him as a Renaissance polymath, a low-born pragmatist who does not shirk from a fight, and yet, cannot abide cruelty. Who despises religious excess, zealotry of any kind. He can barely stand Sir Thomas More, whom history and the Catholic church have sainted. We see More as an intolerant religious bigot, a Tudor Dick Cheney, who participates in what is essentially state-sponsored torture to preserve the society he believes in. Utopia, Cromwell observes, is not a place in which people can live.

Wolsey tells Cromwell early on that it is important to find out what people wear under their clothes. Queen Katherine, who will not give in to the divorce, wears a nun's habit under her ornate dresses. Thomas More wears a hair shirt that irritates the skin to the point of creating oozing sores.

It helps, too, that Mantel uses a quick-moving narrative style, unlike the usual plodding of long historical novels. She doesn't bother with stultifying attempts at 16th-century language tropes, and still, the action feels believably in the 16th century.

Mantel's Cromwell is a fascinating character, a man recognizably of his times, and yet thoroughly modern in his outlook. And having seen him represented in so many previous works as a villainous character, I fell completely under the spell of this revisionist rendition. From start to finish, Cromwell was a man I wanted to know, wanted to be with, never tired of his observations, his commitment to freedom and human decency in the midst of brutal times.

My dog writes a poem.

2010-10-06T07:13:00.000-07:00

AT THE DOG PARK

Just after the rain is best, when the earth
exudes its glorious scents of decay, worm flesh
buried deep and old piss soaked
into the dirt. In the woods, memories of Gus
the German short-haired pointer -- how we
howled that day -- the mud cool
and slick on the round tender
pads of our paws.

An odor of freedom gusts
over the wire fence, ripe with rabbit,
fox and squirrel, haunting
our dreams for days to come as we lie
by the fire, bellies pink and fat
and full.

--by Winnie

Everyone writes an Irish poem--

2010-09-30T08:17:00.000-07:00

--sooner or later. Here is mine.

MARY MacDONOUGH

We have made it to this coast, to these harrowing
Irish cliffs tufted with grass thick and cold
from the morning dew. Wind cuts the air
between us, billows our jackets. The ferries
won't take us to Inis-Mor because of storms
too far off yet to see; the roiling waters still glitter
where sun dares to glare from between
sulky clouds.

I think how she must have loved this place.
And hated it with all her desolate
half-starved soul, 16 years old, my great
great grandmother. How she must have keened
to leave this whorl of wind and rock and coal-dark
sea for the sunnier shores of South Carolina. And
still longed to escape.

Did she walk off without a backward glance? Or stand
here for hours, reluctant to be torn from this land,
this seascape that could rend a young heart, voices
wailing on the wind, hovering in gathering mist and foam
frothed up by furious waves, songs of the travelers
who never found a way back.

--RZC

What I Did Not Do for Love

2010-09-28T07:32:00.000-07:00

Just discovered this morning that I once again did not win a MacArthur grant.

Also realized that I am once again going to bail on Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs. This time I got up to about page 10 before I turned on the unconvincingly precociously witty narrator, Tassie, who while supposedly fresh from a sheltered upbringing on a Wisconsin farm and only introduced to Sartre and etc. as a college freshman, still manages to make the sort of sophisticated observations of someone who has spent her life in urban literary circles. It reminds me of the first 30 or so pages of Marissa Pessl's novel Special Topics in Calamity Physics, though I managed to stay with that one and it ended up being one of my favorite reads of 2006, once I got over the obnoxiously clever narrator.

I'm sure I'm being unfair to Lorrie Moore here. I'm equally certain I will pick the book up a year from now, read it through and pronounce it another work of genius. That's kind of what happens to me with Moore's work. I am actually a big admirer.

Speaking of writers I admire, Isthmus editor Bill Lueder's book Watchdog: 25 years of muckraking and rabblerousing is a terrific read for all (and especially interesting to journalists and Madisonians). For an offbeat, local review, I offer this Osmazone blog post.

New Tricks

2010-09-27T04:43:00.000-07:00

We have lived for almost a year now in the shadow of Camp Randall Stadium. Literally in the shadow. We get no direct sun through our east-facing windows because the stadium blocks it. And of the few things I worried about, moving into this neighborhood, surviving Badger football games was no. 1 on the list. Particularly since I am one of those people who will tell anyone who asks that I think football is a sport for goons, both on the field and off.

I won't pretend that there hasn't been some adjustment. I mean, an 11:00 am start time means the kegs are already being tapped at 8:00. I mean, Breese Terrace, has already become a sea of howling, undulating red by 9:30. On my way to drop off some books at the Monroe Street Library branch before last week's game, I was offered two chances to chug from a beer bong, and also a Bloody Mary. So was my dog. Little beagles are quite a hit with the college boys.

The surprise is that despite the noise and the hassles (parking our car four blocks away on Friday night because we will not be able to get in or out of our garage after 7 am on Saturday morning), I catch myself smiling hugely at people. Everyone is having so damn much fun.

This past Saturday, I woke at about 6:15 am to the sound of the UW Marching Band tuning up in the stadium. Through a muffled, echoing loudspeaker, I could hear Mike Leckrone call out "Good Morning Breese Terrace," before the band broke into On Wisconsin. As marching bands have only two volumes -- forte and fortissimo -- we could hear it all quite clearly. The band finished On Wisconsin and moved on to practice the rest of their repertoire.

This probably sounds outrageously annoying to anyone who has not experienced a marching band concert before 7 am on a Saturday morning. I would have said that a year ago. The thing is, I felt an almost physical experience of happiness. The Frankster rolled over to grin at me. We lay listening like happy children with nothing but play to look forward to. Simply put, it was a cracking good way to start the day.

It's All Work Now

2010-09-14T06:14:00.000-07:00

A new poem, after a long hot summer of nothing.

IT'S ALL WORK NOW

--Tuesday morning after Labor Day

The street sweeper
drones at seven a.m., brushing
with fury against the cigarette
butts, spent charcoal
from grills, spilled
beer and the greasy fast
food wrappers some teenager
tossed from his car window,
spray washing the summer
right off the streets as I
lay half awake, ticking
through my own
lists, procrastinations
kicked to the curb, swept
into the machine
of a new
season.

--RZC

Mormon Fantasies

2010-09-08T05:23:00.000-07:00

I was not among those who thought Stephenie Meyer in The Twilight Saga was using her fiction to preach a Mormon sexual ethic. I took her at her word when she said the idea came from a dream. It seemed clear to me she was writing from her own store of romantic/sexual fantasies when she created chaste, perfect, hyper-protective Edward, the vampire who wanted sex only after marriage. And Bella, the passive teenage girl who was more than willing to be absorbed completely by the "man" she believed to be her one and only love. As Meyer was raised a Mormon, why wouldn't her fantasies reflect that ethos?

For a more thorough -- and to me, far more incomprehensible -- look into the fantasy life of a Mormon woman, try Shannon Hale's 2009 novel The Actor and the Housewife. In it a Mormon housewife mother three (with a fourth baby on the way) from a Salt Lake City suburb, meets her absolute favorite heartthrob English actor (think Colin Firth) at a meeting to option the screenplay she apparently wrote in her free time while the children were napping. (Fantasy would be the operable word in describing this novel.) The housewife, Becky, and the actor, Felix Callahan, engage in some clever insults, find themselves staying at the same hotel where over dinner they engage in more repartee, thus beginning a deep and unlikely friendship which will be continued, chastely, over the next many years.

It became clear that Shannon Hale, whose earlier novel Austenland I enjoyed a lot and wrote about in this blog, is attempting an examination of what it means for a married woman to have a deeply close male friend. She ups the ante by making him a famous, wildly attractive movie actor who had previously been the object of her romantic fantasies. She, as a committed practicing Mormon wife and mother cannot, apparently, have actual sexual fantasies, even about her husband, who, it is driven home to us, is her soul mate, her true love, the only man she can be married to, etc. Hale gives us, in the husband, a character who is sweet and devoted, even mostly understanding, but ultimately dull as dust compared to Felix the actor.

An interesting question -- how close can married people actually get to friends of the opposite sex without falling into bed or disturbing the delicate balance of their marital relationships? And I suspect the book would have been more daring and interesting had the author chosen not to distract us with all the red herrings associated with Felix's Hollywood hunk status. We get a big look into day-to-day Mormon spirituality (lots of prayer, church going, common sense frugality), including Becky's deeply held beliefs about chastity, marital fidelity, and the meaning of marriage.

As the novel progresses --SPOILER ALERT -- Felix and his sympathetic French model wife divorce (not because of the friendship -- the wife wants a baby and Felix doesn't), Becky's husband leaves her a widow, and Felix, after 11 years of close and committed friendship with his Mormon housewife best friend, decides to woo her. This is where the novel pretty much jumps the shark, because Felix follows all her rules about courtship, shows how deeply he respects all her beliefs about family and church and all that stuff. But she clings to her belief that the dead husband is the only man she can ever really love in that way (i.e., share a marital bed with). I think we're meant to admire her character and that she remains true to herself. Except that she shows herself to be so closed off to genuine, non-church-approved self examination, its hard to cheer for her position.

Don't get me wrong. There is nothing in Mormon teaching as presented by Ms. Hale that would prevent Becky from marrying again. In fact, her family encourages her. Remember, this is a Mormon fantasy. In Hale's fantasy, Becky can only have one true love, and the actor, no matter how wonderful, interested, loving, perfect really, can only be a friend. Sheesh. Talk about arrested development.

Mormons are everywhere these days -- Meyer and Hale, Mitt Romney, Glenn Beck, Donnie and Marie Osmond (ha!) -- presenting their not-so-delightfully retro ideas about family, God and country. Sure I can see that there is a certain comfort in the idea of going back to more "innocent" times. I don't meant to say that Mormons are bad people. Only that it strikes me that all these chaste, God-loving, dare I say white fantasies can really only exist in a fantasy world -- the suburbs of Salt Lake City, say -- where a child can grow up without meeting a single person different from herself, without ever having to think about how others might think or believe or live.

I picked up Shannon Hale's novel because I liked her last book and thought of her as a nimble and perceptive writer. I kept reading this one because of her skills, and also from a certain curiosity about what she would do with this material. I ended up disappointed and a little scared.

See How I Run

2010-08-18T06:28:00.000-07:00

The good shepherd of the fields, whoever he is,
has so many wonderful and saucy tricks.

I want to find him,
I want to discover just one more trick.

Oh, nobody runs so hard
as the doubters running over the hot fields,
crying out for faith,
looking for it in the high places and the low places,
looking for it everywhere,

oh, see how I run!

--Mary Oliver
from The Leaf and the Cloud

Aloha

2010-08-16T05:39:00.000-07:00

The Frankster and I have the good fortune to be reconnected with great college friends, in particular, two sets of couples with whom we now travel once every year or two. We have taken a road trip to the Canadian Rockies, a walking tour of the Wiltshire-Dorset border country in southwest England, and ferried out to the wild west coast of Vancouver Island. They have been memorable trips, full of incredible sights, terrific eating, and endless hours of satisfying conversation.

That we experience remarkably few conflicts doesn't mean we don't encounter a few bumps in the road. Our English walking vacation fell during a period of freak torrential rains. Last year, driving from Tofino through the mountainous center of Vancouver Island back to the ferry, I got severely carsick from the miles of twisty road, which was not fun for me or my traveling companions. And then, there is that delicate interplay of personal idiosyncrasies, developed and hardened over time in a group of middle class white people all pushing 60.

These are very much in evidence right now, as we plan our next group adventure, a trip to the Hawaiian island of Kauai early next year. On the plus side of traveling in a group of six is the advantageous cost spread that makes renting a fabulous vacation home more feasible than a condo, hotel or resort. But of course, it can't be just any vacation home. Some of us need more seclusion, others more bathrooms. Some of us might not be all that crazy about sun and beach, though our husbands remind us that we had our turn to drag everyone on an English vacation and now it is time to let others have their way.

I am reading up on Kauai right now. Lonely Planet tells me that I will have a no-brainer vacation on a fabulous tropical island with an established infrastructure, everyone speaking English, and where, even in winter, temperatures will not fall below 65 degrees. I'm trying to get excited, but it is hard to picture the pleasures of a tropical vacation in the midst of a particularly hot Midwestern summer. (At least this morning's breezes seem to hold a promise of fall soon to come.) I am left to ask myself, not for the first time, what quirk in my development, causes me to feel anxious at the thought of a week ensconced with cocktail and book on the lanai, occasionally looking up to watch the aquamarine water roll up on the beach.

I expect my point of view on this will all change dramatically as February starts to roll in. As with pretty much everything, I'm told it's all perspective.

Reassurance

2010-08-09T06:57:00.000-07:00

REASSURANCE

I must love the questions
themselves
as Rilke said
like locked rooms
full of treasure
to which my blind
and groping key
does not yet fit.

--Alice Walker

Cicadas

2010-08-05T06:24:00.000-07:00

Like a child, I still live as if the year began in September when everyone goes back to school and to their more regular schedules. For me, all that end-of-the-year introspection catches me in August, stimulated by the unpleasantness of hot, muggy weather and the melancholic sawing of cicadas. The cicadas seem to be more numerous this year, their song more insistent, portentous.

But that could just be me. As I grow older, I seem to like the summer months less and less. Summer used to represent adventure, the outdoors and freedom from routine. Increasingly, though, the season seems more aptly described as relentless: the heat, the acceleration of social commitments, the guilt and confusion that come from the sense that really, I should be enjoying all this more than I do. I mean, even in the Lake District in the far north of England they had a heat wave in May, though the Cumbrians seemed get a big kick out of it. I did not appreciate all that raw, blaring sun. Which puts me in something of a bind, living here, because I'm not a huge fan of winter either. A friend who lives in the Puget Sound wrote me recently to say they were having a lot of cool drizzle, and I thought that sounded pretty nice.

I never intend for it to be so, but August always ends up feeling a little sad to me. Like leaving camp after making good friends. Or finding it harder than you'd expected, saying goodbye to the summer boyfriend. August reeks of things ending and restimulates all those incompletely mourned from the past. This is the month where I go under, preparing to re-emerge in the moderating influences and regularized rhythms of September.

I have a lot to look forward to in the next year. There's lots more to come. But right now I just want to wallow in sadness of certain things that are coming to an end.

Inception

2010-07-19T07:17:00.000-07:00

I saw the movie over the weekend, which makes a terrific heist film out of some fascinating philosophical questions about the nature of dreams and reality, including the notion that an idea may be implanted in a person's brain so that they feel as if it may be their own.

Once out of the theater, though, I started thinking that this is what is going on all the time with advertising. Think of how often you become hungry, seemingly out of nowhere, while watching television, and "awaken," as it were, to the realization that you've been watching a commercial for McDonalds or Cheetohs or whatever. For a really great analysis of how advertising created the cognitive dissonance we know as the American Dream, read Heather Havrilesky's brilliant essay in Salon.com ahead of the new season of Mad Men.

I began thinking, too, about all the behaviors I've taken on, the passions I've developed, that began as a seed from one novel or another that I read, particularly in childhood. I've written here about how the arrival of The Beatles in my life at age 10 made me curious about everything English. I began to read anything I could get my hands on --though mostly fiction -- related to England and its history. There were hundreds of historical novels by the likes of Rosemary Sutcliffe and Margaret Campbell Barnes, to name a few. And then a rash of current-day thrillers (then, in the 60s) by Mary Stewart, featuring plucky young Englishwomen who traveled to Greece or Capri or the South of France to have their adventures. So many English ideas had been planted in my head as a kid, that when I finally made it there, as a college student in the 70s, I felt an odd deja vu. Everything was almost exactly as I had "imagined it." I was ready to love it all and I did. I still do.

Most recently, though I read Alan Bradley's 2009 mystery The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. Recommended by countless friends, it did not disappoint, particularly in the wonderful creation of Flavia de Luce, our 11-year-old detective/chemist/poisoner who flies down the English lanes on her bike called Gladys. Now, it had been in the back of my mind that I should probably be riding a bike more often, living where I do now, about 1-3 miles from almost everything I do in the course of a week. But it wasn't until I read Bradley's passages about Flavia on her Gladys, that I fully recalled my days as a kid on an old fat-tired bike, free as the wind and moving as fast, that I began to imagine the sort of bike that is designed for short city commutes. A bike with a retro design, perhaps, fat tires and old-fashioned handlebars. I could now see myself zipping down to the Square or out to Picnic Point, old memories blending with descriptions of Flavia and imaginings for the future.

And so was born the notion that became the impulse that become my new Electra Townie bike, my Purple Pimpernel, perfect for quick rides to Union Terrace, to the Farmer's Market and my Nia class near the Square. Inception?

Happiness as Art

2010-07-15T06:30:00.000-07:00

On my desk is this quote from David Foster Wallace: The task of fiction is to surmount loneliness and to illustrate the toxicity in the idea that pleasure and comfort are really the ultimate goal and meaning of life.

It is a heavy, somewhat ponderous thought about the work of fiction writing. I can't imagine that it represents the view of even half the writers I know. But it is a thought I ponder frequently (as a writer and a human being), this very human tendency to get pleasure and comfort confused with real happiness.

I think of a recent Louis CK routine, in which he tells a comedy club audience that he drives a Lexus SUV, but feels bad about it because he knows he could sell the Lexus, buy a perfectly comfortable economy car and have enough money left over to support two homeless people. He concludes, "And every day I don't do it."

Just lately I've been struggling to remember the difference between happiness and pleasure. I'm not nearly as disciplined as I could wish for a person of my age. I still get caught up in the childish notion that things should be more fair. I have not been finding a constructive way to come to terms with my sense of powerlessness over the behavior of people (both at the public and the personal level).

I would very much like to channel this experience into writing -- an action capable of bringing, for me, great happiness -- but I find myself, perhaps just for this time, at this moment, rendered most unusually speechless.

I am told that this is only a phase and that it will pass. Maybe. I mean, yes, I think I will eventually relocate my words. But I suspect I will continue to grapple with what it means to be happy.

What the kids are worrying about.

2010-06-29T05:32:00.001-07:00

Last week in College for Kids, I had a class of all boys. This week it is all girls, and I have to say that I really like what happens in these segregated classes. The girls talk more in a room where there are no boys to worry about; and the boys are far less squirmy and jumpy when there are no girls to impress. Everyone's nerves are far less jangly.

Another observation: too often girls begin their contributions to a discussion with a disclaimer, like "This may sound stupid, but . . ." or "This might not be right, but . . ." On the other hand, the boys seem completely secure in their belief that pretty much everyone -- certainly I, the teacher -- wants to hear whatever they have to say, including their unbelievably long and convoluted retelling of the plots of their favorite books and movies (and pretty much all of the boys I get seem to be obsessed about certain books or movies at this age).

One of the nice things each week, when I have a new class, is learning what the kids are reading. These are all bright 11-year olds, with varying maturity levels, and so I get a wide variety of recommendations. Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson series is still going strong -- many of the boys and the girls are rereading that. One girl has branched out into Nicholas Sparks books (influenced, of course, by the Miley Cyrus movie, The Last Song, which I guess is slightly better than last summer, when the precocious ones were all reading The Twilight Saga).

When I ask, what do you love in the books you read, I get a lot paraphrases of this answer: "I like books where the main character is an orphan who finds out he is the chosen one, or has special powers and has to save the world." -- many of the girls in particular seemed to think the saving the world part was the most important. It makes me want to send a letter home to their parents. As if there was something they could do about it.

Of Wolves and Children

2010-06-24T05:31:00.000-07:00

It's College for Kids season once again, and this first week I am faced with a room of 12 boys who are remarkably well behaved and cooperative. It makes me wonder, do boys act up in class more when there are girls to impress?

I am using this week to experiment with spending an intense hour doing my internet reading and communicating in the morning, and then leaving it for the day, to check in late in the afternoon. This program is actually having the desired effect of opening large gaps of time in which to read books made of cloth and paper. Hooray.

I have a huge stack of back-up reading on my desk, but what I've chosen to do this past couple of days is reread Alice Hoffman's 1994 novel Second Nature.

Hoffman's work had been the subject of discussion at a party I attended over the weekend -- the magical realism, the unevenness of her work. I've read a number of her novels with varying reactions, but Second Nature had been a favorite, one of the few truly unforgettable novels I've read.

On this reading, I find that I still regard it as a masterpiece. The tone of magical realism, in which characters' thoughts and moods are reflected in nature, works perfectly in a story that is essentially a fable centering on the discovery of a man who from early childhood was raised by wolves. The characterizations are rich, precise, admirably unpredictable at moments, but always fitting. The work is a masterpiece of brevity, the story told so deftly, with all its shadings, in few words. It is about love and innocence, loss and trust. But it is mostly about the essence of what it is to be human -- the very nature of our existence.

It is one of those books that not so much breaks your heart as finds the places where your heart is already broken.

Austenland

2010-06-21T05:59:00.000-07:00

I read lots of books that were neither written by Jane Austen nor have a connection to her work. I tend to read far too many that do, though, and most of them are not very good. And why, you may ask, do I keep reading them (and talking about them here, you might add)?

The answer came to me this morning as I was reading Janet Maslin's review in the New York Times of A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, in which the terms dystopia and dystopic vision appear more than once. Now don't get me wrong. Egan is an amazing writer, probably brilliant. I have admired her edgy short stories for years, and loved her earlier novel Look at Me.

I am not sure whether it is my age or the times, but I am no longer interested in reading even brilliantly written novels about irredeemably damaged people or the hopeless worlds they live in. Conflict? Absolutely. Inklings that the artistically represented world, it's social order, and the people in it are flawed, grappling, wounded? I'm still there. But there is an invisible, admittedly arbitrary line where the work crosses into hopelessness and dystopia, and I have no wish to go there these days. I think of a conversation I had with an English woman, an editor of a small, feminist publication who told me she looks for art that seeks to enlighten or counsel, rather than art that appears to be seeking a counselor.

At any rate, I did recently read an actually quite good Austen homage book, Austenland, written by the YA fantasy writer Shannon Hale. In it Jane, in her 30s, dispirited and disillusioned by her failed experiences with romance, spends too much of her free time watching the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice (the Colin Firth one), and fantasizing about Mr. Darcy. A great aunt dies, leaving Jane the bequest of a three-week stay at Pembrook Park, a fantasy camp for rich Austenites on an English estate. Pembrook Park offers a full immersion into Regency life -- the food, the costumes, all the social customs -- along with actors to fill out the supporting roles, including potential suitors to the exclusively female clientele.

Hale's novel is several cuts above the usual Austen fan fiction, first for its witty dialog, and secondly for her attention to creating in Jane a believable, complex character, using the fantasy experience to figure out the reasons for her own failures at love and move herself beyond her Darcy addiction. Of course this is a fantasy novel, but one with underpinnings in the real world, delightful to read and easy to recommend.

Back by Popular Demand

2010-06-18T04:57:00.000-07:00

My public (thank you, Greg) has been clamoring for more of my wit and wisdom. As it happens, I am tanned and ready. So, without flourish (or pride), I return to this blog.

We visited England's Lake District last month, which is every bit as gorgeous and rugged as the pictures. The villages, not surprisingly, are crammed full of traffic and tourists. The English have not quite got the hang yet of turning a bit of history or literature into a complete theme park, but they are certainly on their way, with a place in Bowness-on-Windermere called The Beatrix Potter Attraction.

I confess, I am not entirely sure what the "attraction" offers, though it seemed to involve being driven around in one of those embarrassing open tour vehicles that look like a train of golf carts, and the opportunity to buy a lot of Peter Rabbit, Squirrel Nutkin and Benjamin Bunny tableware.

I did learn something about Beatrix Potter that I had not known before. In the second half of her life, after her first book had been published -- and after her fiance and editor died of anemia -- she began to buy land in the Lake District, and ultimately, alongside her other accomplishments, became a champion of the Herdwick breed of sheep. We saw these sheep everywhere, with their shaggy gray-brown fleece and I fell in love with them and their little black lambs. The Herdys are particularly suited to the rugged climate and terrain of the Lake District, and Beatrix Potter became an expert breeder and later a judge in breed competitions. One of our hosts told us that almost every Herdy you see is a descendant from Beatrix Potter's flocks.

As I learned more about Potter's later life in the Lake District, I found myself moved by the thought that while the first half of her life had been one of great loneliness and emotional hardship, she achieved great happiness -- or peace, contentment, whatever you want to call it -- in the second half with her farms and her sheep and the companionship of her solicitor.

Happy Trails

2010-03-16T06:13:00.000-07:00

I started this blog 11 months ago. I was between writing projects at the time, and I had been complaining to my daughter and son-in-law about the difficulties of finding an audience as the world of publishing has shrunk. They set me on this path and it has been a (mostly) daily pleasure.

I've loved sharing my observations and experiences, some of my work, the work of writers I care about so much. This blog has been a bridge between me and a subset of the listening, thinking, reading world, and also between projects and places in my life. When I began, I had no idea at what point it would end; I had wanted simply to live in the experience of the exchange.

In the last few weeks, though, I've had a sense that I've said what I wanted to for now, at least in this medium. I have new projects before me, and at another level -- spiritual? developmental? -- I want to contemplate other things, the sorts of things that don't in my mind lend themselves to the quick, daily formula of blog-writing. And so, with this post, I am putting Travel for Agoraphobics, the blog, to bed.

Luckily, there are thousands of other blogs out there right now. Some of them are pretty amazing.

Thanks to all of you who read me, sporadically or faithfully. I will be forever grateful. And with any luck, one of these days you could possibly be reading a published collection of linked stories entitled Travel for Agoraphobics. Fingers crossed.

Good Faith in Publishing?

2010-03-09T05:24:00.000-08:00

I wish I had the detachment to be merely cynical about the state of the publishing industry. To say that I find it disappointing would be an understatement. Which books get published, how and why, these questions have been the fodder for discussion among my writing friends for some time. Those who have succeeded in getting their work published seem to find it a flawed meritocracy, while those of us who are still struggling to find a publisher, not so much.

In this morning's New York Times, Motoko Rich writes of Pondering Good Faith in Publishing as an afterthought to last week's announcement by Henry Holt & Company that it would stop printing and selling Charles Pellegrino's discredited The Last Train from Hiroshima.

What Rich is actually pondering is the level of responsibility publishers bear for checking beforehand the veracity of what they publish. None, of course, according to publishers, who "say that responsibility for errors and fabrications ultimately must lie with the author."

Well, yeah. The author is ultimately responsible. But what happens when authors are liars and plagiarizers, or like poor old James Frey, so desperate to get their novel published, they'll pretend that it's really a memoir? I can tell you what happens. The publishers (and the agent too, in the case of Frey) all stand around like Sergeant Schultz in Hogan's Heroes, proclaiming "I saw nothing. I heard nothing," all the while condemning the author, who will end up admitting full responsibility for duping the public.

I have no trouble believing that editors today are overworked, perhaps ridiculously so. They are inundated with manuscripts to evaluate, and are probably responsible for bringing to print more projects than one person should handle at a time. These may be the facts, and yet, I don't think it absolves them from taking some responsibility for the power they hold in the bookmaking industry.

In 2008 I went to a panel discussion in which four editors from New York publishing houses talked about what the 400 or so writers, who came to listen and learn, could do to make their work more editor friendly. The main message, of course, was that in these times, editors do not want to read manuscripts that haven't been vetted first by an agent. Fair enough. And then one of them added, "Since nine-eleven and the anthrax scare, we no longer feel a responsibility to open unsolicited packages."

Seriously? Clearly, the terrorists have already won.

Who are we, anyway?

2010-03-04T05:27:00.000-08:00

I have been finding myself curiously at a loss for words lately.

It does not feel as if words have abandoned me in the way so-called writer's block often hits. This is a calmer, more waiting-and-watching sort of quiet. More like a shift in my awareness of the world and what things in it mean.

I'm pretty sure all of us experience these shifts from time to time in our lives. That is, if we're paying attention. Writers, or some of us anyway, pay way too much attention. We want to quantify every experience. Michael Chabon captured this impulse perfectly in that scene in Wonder Boys where Grady and his student James in screwball farcical manner have just shot the department chair's dog with a small caliber pistol. Grady knows he is in fifty kinds of serious trouble, but still, he -- and James -- can't resist pausing to observe the way a wisp of smoke curls up from the bullet hole in the dog.

A huge shift in awareness took hold of us as as a country after 9/11. In ways both subtle and obvious it changed the way we thought about the world. Many of my writing friends remarked in the months and years that followed that they could not write about the same things anymore, or at least not in the same way. I think the year since President Obama was elected has brought about its own series of shifts. The screws of capitalism have been tightening along with the accompanying political circus to create a myriad of confusion. Who are we now, anyway?

My response, it seems, has been to turn inward. I am more contemplative, without the usual accompanying need to turn the experience into words. I have been reading Yogananda and Rex Ambler's annotated writings of Quaker founder George Fox, works which inspire more quiet and waiting, less agitation and searching. I have no idea yet where I'm going with any of this.

I have had times of great emotional upheaval in which I felt storm tossed and at sea (the cliches exist for a reason, I guess). This period feels more as if I am in a boat, alone, on a glassy calm lake. I cannot yet see the shore and I do not yet know how or when I will get there. The good news, I guess, is that I feel no need to panic.

Door County Sunset

2010-03-02T06:20:00.000-08:00

Looking over my poems from last summer, I ran across this one that, for me, speaks to the mystery of a long marriage.

DOOR COUNTY SUNSET

We find the rockers, you and I
when the evening is spread out against the sky
like -- no, we aren't going there -- on the limestone
porch behind the visitor center.
And I recall the priest who married
us, who in his homily envisioned
our many years ending
with two codgers rocking side
by side. Had he imagined this rosy
orange light splayed over
the water, your fingers curled
around mine, faced etched in a backlit
dusk as the first star makes
its shy presence known?

--RZC

It Really Is the Little Things

2010-03-01T05:52:00.001-08:00

The dog pooped on the living room floor, I have one of those colds that has settled like rock salt in my sinus membranes, and yet this morning I am filled with happiness. This morning began our online subscription to the New York Times, including the precious Crossword.

Yes, I know you can read most everything for free online (for now), but I have missed reading The Times each morning these past four months since our move. The online subscription is cheap enough, and honestly, as a working writer, I have always been conflicted over the notion that newspaper and magazine content should be available for free online. The Times comes in a format that looks and reads reasonably closely to the real thing with the obvious nods to its virtual format. Yes, I do miss having the pages in my hands, though I do not miss having to wash off the newsprint. And it did take me a few fraught minutes trying to figure out how to print out the puzzle as a pdf file in a readable size. Done and done.

Adding to my happiness was the realization that I have not lost my crossword-solving chops in the months I've gone without the Times puzzle. I probably owe this to a Christmas gift copy of The New York Times Ferocious Crossword Puzzles. I have now done about 120 of the 150 puzzles, and frankly, "ferocious" is not the description I would have chosen. "Bogus" and "preposterous" are words that come to mind in describing a collection of crosswords that rely on clues that frequently stun me with their obscurity and in some cases, inexplicable relationship to the correct answers. I don't mind a hard puzzle, but I do demand a little fairness.

Nonetheless, having given myself the latitude to cheat at will (and I do, oh yes I do), the puzzles seem to have sharpened my skills somewhat. It was a joy, though, to do today's puzzle, a Monday, the easiest of the week, and to note how quickly it went. There are not many things in life that provide such simple and immediate satisfaction.

My Parents' Fiction

2010-02-25T06:30:00.000-08:00

I've been watching the 2002 miniseries of The Forsyte Saga, not without feeling some shame for enjoying it so much and having absolutely no intention of ever reading John Galsworthy's series of novels from which it was adapted. What is interesting about this (to me, anyway) is that The Forsyte Saga sat on my parents' bookshelf from as far back as I can remember. I had my hands on it many times, though for some reason, it never stirred enough curiosity for me to take it down and read it.

That was not true for many of my parents' books. My curiosity got the better of me with The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich at the age of about 13. I was not ready for the contents of that tome at that tender age; it was nightmare material. My dad, who vociferously defended the freedom of his offspring to read whatever they wanted, saw me with it one evening and asked, "Wouldn't you like to wait until you're a little older for that one?" I told him, "No," and that was that. He shrugged and let me have my way.

The Galsworthy was undoubtedly my mother's purchase. She loved family sagas and historical novels. Back in the 60s, when my parents' library was in its growing stage, thanks to the Book-of-the-Month Club, she was reading lots of James Michener, Leon Uris, Irving Stone. In later life, she discovered Ken Follett and Maeve Binchy. But back then, I remember her being excited about Exodus in particular. I know I read it on her recommendation. And The Agony and the Ecstasy. One of my favorites handed down from my mother's collection was The Burnished Blade by Lawrence Schoonover. It was one of the few I took with me when I left home, though it appears to have been lost in one of my subsequent moves.

My father would read just about anything. I have no doubt he read the ingredients on the shampoo bottle while he showered. We had copies of Franny and Zoey and Catcher in the Rye, John Barth's Giles Goat-Boy (which made no sense to me at 14), Updike's The Centaur, which I liked enough to try reading Couples a few years later, thus cementing my impression of the author as a misogynist (I'm sure at 15 I was not ready for that book either). We had Saul Bellow's Herzog and Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, too. My dad, who had once hoped to be a doctor, loved collecting used medical books. I spent way too much time alone looking at pictures of disfiguring skin disorders and parasitic diseases that caused people to swell up in a variety of uncomfortable places.

Most of those books ended up sold by the box at a garage sale years later, after my dad died and my mother decided to move to a condo. It is amazing to me, though, how well I remember each book and its place on the shelf, the color of its binding, what shape it was in from repeated readings. I wish now I had taken more of them with me. Sometimes when I'm browsing used book stores, I wonder if I'll ever run into one of the books I remember so well from my parents' bookshelf. So far I haven't.

Excerpt: Travel for Agoraphobics: BOMBS

2010-02-24T07:34:00.001-08:00

Here is a chapter that appears early in Travel for Agoraphobics called BOMBS:

Sofie followed Rupert up the walk toward Speakers Corner. Or rather, she walked alongside him but felt as if he was leading. Hyde Park was not at its best. A long spell of hot, dry weather had withered large patches of grass, leaving expanses of prickly, dun-colored lawn. Few visitors seemed inclined to spread blankets, though many still walked the footpaths or sat on shaded benches.

Rupert liked parks. For one thing, they were free. Sofie didn’t much care at that point, as long as she could just be someplace, as opposed to being on the way to or from someplace. By now she’d survived two days on the streets of Paris, the ugly catcalls of Italian men, the insinuations of strangers in Austrian train stations, flea-ridden pensiones, squat pissing over shit-splattered latrines, and a screaming fight in three languages with the woman who took the money at the public showers in Milan. That they’d settled on London seemed triumph enough, even in spite of the IRA, who seemed to be blowing things up every couple of weeks that summer of 1974.

“You should be interested in this, Sof,” Rupert said. “Karl Marx actually stood here 120 years ago.”

“I read the guide book, too, Rupert. Sunday Trading Bill, free assembly, et cetera, et cetera.” She tried to pronounce the last like Yul Brynner in The King and I, but was too self-conscious to make it sound right.

“So, I don’t get your problem.” Rupert pulled the handkerchief out of his jeans pocket and blew, the sound only a shade more quiet than a flock of migrating geese. Hay fever had plagued him all through Europe, but he refused to take anything for it. In Rupert’s mind, only the weak took pills.

“I told you. I’m just not that much into seeing ‘sights.’”

He snorted and lifted the handkerchief once more to his nose. Of course Sofie knew she was being irrational. Why backpack around Europe if you weren’t interested in seeing sights? She hadn’t yet found a way to explain her theory of being someplace. Traipsing from city to city and sleeping at hostels and campsites had put them mainly in the company of other traveling students. They were too poor to spend time with any real Europeans. They’d met a French guy, camping in Copenhagen, and she’d talked to a snotty young Englishman on the train in Germany, who let her know in vocabulary that highlighted the benefits of a Cambridge education how much he despised vulgar Americans. But mostly it was other Americans, Canadians, and the odd Australian here and there.

At Speakers Corner, two men were ranting. Each had attracted a small audience of tourists, identified by their cameras and backpacks. The speakers bore the poorly-groomed look of street people. Sofie didn’t try to follow the line of rhetoric, something about saving herself from sin. Members of the audience shouted insults, and Rupert reminded her that heckling was part of the time-honored tradition.

The morning began to grow warm. Sofie stepped from Rupert’s side and looked for some shade. She carried a copy of Crome Yellow in a cloth shoulder bag, along with her passport, a notebook, two pens, and £8 and change. Huxley had become Sofie’s dearest traveling companion. At the Lido Camp in Lucerne, she’d traded with a girl from New Jersey her copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude for the girl’s Point Counter Point. It read like a soap opera, only with characters who said interesting and intelligent things about the meaning of life while they fornicated, plundered the earth, and ran off with each other’s spouses. Beneath the intellectual gloss, Sofie detected in Huxley an urgent sincerity that touched her and felt somehow kindred. At the camp on the Piazzale Michelangelo, a kid from California had laid out rows of used books, among which she found Huxley’s first novel, Crome Yellow—a drawing room romp with ideas, which made it a great park and subway read.

She’d read a sentence or two when she looked up and spotted the white-blond head and wide shoulders of Mick Fraser, a fellow resident of their Earls Court hostel. She had flirted shamelessly with him last night, to Rupert’s annoyance. And why not? Mick was sunshine after five weeks of lowering clouds and intermittent drizzle. And it wasn’t as if Rupert and she even had that sort of relationship, because they didn’t. Wouldn’t. At any rate, she’d pretty well given up, though she still had this desire to assuage her humiliation by punishing him in whatever way offered itself.

Sofie walked towards Mick. “Australian?” she said, a repeat of her opening gambit last evening, when he’d smiled with a friendliness so lacking in pretension that she’d been certain he could be neither European nor American.

Mick laughed. “New Zealander,” he told her again. To her ears it sounded like New Zellender. Last night he’d asked if she was Canadian, guessing wrong as a sort of flattery perhaps, as if to signal that she seemed too appealing or well-behaved to be from the States. Although Rupert usually wore such a dour, tight-lipped expression that he’d often passed for Canadian on their travels. Americans were expected to be garrulous and loud. “Sofia,” Mick said now. “Lovely. Thought you might be here.”

“You were looking for me?”

He shrugged. “Plans with my mates fell through. You said you’d probably be checking out the Speakers Corner.”

“How sweet of you to remember.” She didn’t try to hide her pleasure. In fact, Sofie felt sure that her smile was garrulous and loud. She was starved for this sort of attention. “Yes, we’ve just about got Speakers Corner checked off the list.”

“So what’s next?” he wanted to know.

“Rupert wants to go to the British Museum.”

“Haven’t been there myself.”

Was he looking for an invitation? Mick had been in London a week already. “What have you been doing with your time here?”

“Oh, pissing around Trafalgar Square, eyeing the people. Took the Thames trip down to Greenwich. Caught the Tower of London a day before the IRA got their bomb off. I’ve been saving up to hire a car and do a wee bit of touring outside the city.”

“Oh, I’d love to do something like that.”

“Come along,” he said.

“I don’t know.” She couldn’t stop herself from turning to check on Rupert, still listening to one of the ranters. “I mean, I’d love to, but . . . “

“Your boyfriend is welcome, of course.”

“Rupert is not my boyfriend.”

“Right, then.” That grin. “He can still come.”

Sofie laughed. “I’m interested,” she told him, “but can I let you know later?”

There were supposed to have been four of them backpacking together in Europe. Rupert and Sofie lived in a housing cooperative near the university campus, and a couple of their co-op mates were in on the planning, but then dropped out when they couldn’t raise enough money to buy plane tickets.

Initially, Sofie had not been dismayed to find herself traveling alone with Rupert. He was tall and gangly and just shy of handsome. In fact, his face had more character than perfectly chiseled features might have allowed. A pale complexion and the light scarring of teenage acne hinted at a vulnerability his unsmiling demeanor generally concealed. In the way of a young woman who has read too much of the Brontës, Sofie had interpreted his moods and frequent irascibility as signs of a need to be loved, specifically by her.

By now, however, it was painfully clear she’d been wrong. She suspected that even years from now, any trip in a moving vehicle would bring back the disappointment and dreadful ennui of staring across train compartments at Rupert’s big nose stuck in The Gulag Archipelago, occasionally looking up to share a tidbit of Solzhenitsyn’s cheery gulag wisdom. Mostly, Rupert hated making conversation, particularly with foreigners, and the one thing that always brightened his outlook was news of the Watergate hearings. It had often struck Sofie that for a man who had just completed a master’s degree in molecular biology he could be an incredibly backwards dolt.

It came as a surprise, therefore, when she could not find a way to shake Rupert, once Mick Fraser joined them in the park

“So what do you do back in New Zealand?” Rupert asked, feigning amiability on their way to the British Museum.

“I sell aluminum doors and windows,” Mick explained. He said, “al-yoo-min-ee-um.”

Rupert raised one eyebrow. Sofie could not and it irritated her.

“Shut up,” she muttered and concentrated on Mick. “Do you like your work?”

“Oh, gives me plenty of time to ski and race cars.” They’d reached a busy corner, and Mick put a hand out to stop her stepping down from the curb into the street. A black taxi shot by from the right, brushing her further back. She had, of course, been looking left. “What about you, mate?” Mick asked across her.

“Research,” Rupert said, the civility already evaporated.

“Rupert’s a scientist,” Sofie explained, and then wondered why she was bothering.

“And are you also a scientific prodigy?” Mick asked her, flirty again.

“God, no. I’m still an undergraduate.”

“Cheers all ’round, then,” Mick said as if he held a glass in his hand.

“Wait.” Rupert came to a halt at a newsstand outside Marble Arch station and picked up a copy of the International Herald Tribune. “This is great,” he said, scanning the front page. “They’re serious about impeachment now. Nixon, you bastard, you’re going down.”

Mick raised his eyebrows in question while Rupert dug in his pocket for change.
Sofie just shrugged. She didn’t feel like explaining. Rupert took his paper and they all headed into the Underground station.

She was okay pushing through the stiles, but her breath caught as they started down to the Central line.

“You okay?” Mick asked.

“Probably,” she said. The only time Sofie let herself think about bomb threats was going down to the subway.

“You’ll be fine,” he said, and took her hand. His was big and warm, comforting and uncomplicated. She refused to look at Rupert.

The three of them were still together at supper. They ate back in Earls Court, at a diner run by a Greek family. Rupert and Sofie had omelets filled with spinach, tomatoes, and onions that tasted as if they’d been fried in good olive oil. They ate in silence, the better to concentrate on the sensation of their stomachs filling up. They hadn’t eaten this well since Italy.

Mick ordered a Coke and fried potatoes, from which Sofie deduced that he, too, was short on cash. She encouraged him to finish her potatoes. Rupert watched with an air of disapproval, though she suspected that Mick couldn’t distinguish this from any of Rupert’s other expressions. When Mick excused himself to go to the loo, Sofie decided it was time to confront the matter openly.

“Don’t you have something better to do?” she asked.

“Not at the moment.”

“I don’t need a chaperone.”

“Really?” The handkerchief came out and he blew. “You could have fooled me.”

Sofie gasped. She actually spluttered for several seconds like an apoplectic old lady. “How do you even dare? I mean, we’d need to have some sort of relationship for you to . . . to . . .”

“Of course we have a relationship,” he said, unperturbed. “We’re friends.”

Mick came back then, and Sofie said nothing while they divided the bill. She paid her share, and they walked the two blocks to the neighborhood pub. The air had begun to cool with the sun low now in the sky. The sidewalks and storefronts stood in shadow, though even at brightest day, this part of London seemed to be covered with a sort of gray film, the sidewalks pitted as if from centuries of acid spit and old gum.

The pub was full, rumbling with male voices. Mick led them to three guys from their hostel—Siddo, Gregor and Tod—Australians Sofie remembered meeting at breakfast. They spoke in quick, bantering cadences, their English so full of slang she found it hard to follow. Listening to them made her tired. Someone handed her a pint of lager, which she sipped cautiously. Beer was not her thing.

The conversation turned now to rugby and American football. Rupert willfully misunderstood all the Australians’ points about rugby, and the Australians willfully misunderstood all his points about football. Mick abstained from the argument. Finally, Sofie had reached her limit.

“I’m going back,” she whispered to Mick.

“I’ll walk you,” he said.

“I’m just going to read and go to bed early.”

“I’ll come anyway,” he said, and found her fingers under the table.

They stood up together, and Rupert shot Sofie the annoying and talented eyebrow. “I’m heading back,” she told him. “Don’t bother getting up.” He didn’t, which was a relief and a disappointment. Nothing could ever be simple for her with Rupert.

As they rounded the corner, Mick said, “I want to show you something.”

Their hostel was one in a row of identical brown-brick Victorian houses. He led her upstairs, past the long parlor where their cots stood in two rows of six. She followed him up a couple more flights and then to a much narrower staircase that opened to the roof.

“Here,” he said, and pulled her up the last step and into the red-orange glow of sunset. Rows of chimneys lined up, silhouetted against the deepening sky in a way Sofie recognized from every movie she’d ever seen set in London, a picture so familiar and so completely foreign at the same time.

“This is incredible.” She turned to Mick.

“There’s not much to see from right here—landmarks, I mean.” His eyes scanned the horizon. “Very nice, all the same.”

“It’s wonderful,” she said.

They watched the red melt like candle wax along the horizon while the city rapidly darkened to dusk and the first star pierced the violet sky. Across the street, a television flickered in a third floor window. In another, a woman paced back and forth, phone cradled to her ear. Sofie experienced a fleeting sensation of belonging, as if for the moment she was more than a tourist passing through.

When she looked up, Mick was waiting. He leaned toward her in a way so relaxed and natural that she let him kiss her. His lips were dry and smelled of beer. She kissed him back, friendly, she hoped, but with reserve. She was not experienced at this sort of flirtation.

“Come with me tomorrow,” Mick said. “We’ll hire a car and go wherever you’d like.”

“Stonehenge, maybe?”

He didn’t groan at the suggestion. “Sure.”

“Maybe stop in a little village somewhere for tea?”

“If I must.”

“You don’t like drinking tea?”

“I might survive it. Say you’ll come.”

“I’ll come, I’ll come.”

He laughed and kissed her again, and she thought how easy it was to be in the company of a man determined to find the laughs in any situation. It didn’t escape her that a month with Rupert had pushed her tastes in that direction. So long, Heathcliff; hello . . . well, that was a puzzle. There weren’t many cheerful, uncomplicated heroes in literature. Mr. Bingley came to mind, though Sofie quickly dismissed him, his literary life lived entirely in Darcy’s shadow. She thought of Denis Stone, the poet-hero of Crome Yellow, but supposed he was too much the reticent intellectual to really qualify.

Still, all the way back down the stairs she tried to imagine Rupert’s reaction. Mick hung a little too close, which Sofie interpreted as a wish to engage in a full-blown make-out session. She held him off with the excuse that she needed to get some sleep. He said he would go back to the pub. It must have been hours later when Rupert and the others crawled into their cots. The noise woke her, and then she rolled over and fell back asleep.

The next morning, Rupert managed to wake up and take his turn in the shower before her. He stood in the hallway outside the bathroom door, a towel hung over his shoulder, his hair damp and standing on end. They spoke in stage whispers.

“You don’t know this guy,” Rupert said.

“I’m not a completely horrible judge of character.”

“You get friendly too quickly. What about that guy at the train station in Salzburg?”

“I knew he was a con artist.”

“Then what the hell were you doing talking to him?”

“I wanted to see what he would say. And besides, you were right there the whole time, looking big and mean.”

“Well, I won’t be there if you’ve miscalculated with this guy.”

“Why are you so fucking negative?”

“I’m not negative. I’m a realist.”

Sofie rolled her eyes and watched Rupert’s face clench. The bathroom door opened and Gregor came out smiling, pink, and freshly shaved. “G’day,” he said, shouldering past them. Sofie and Rupert launched one more glare at each other before he stalked off.

They’d picked a good day to escape the city, she thought, reading the tabloid headlines on the newsstand outside the Earls Court Underground station. The British telephone operators had walked out because of an IRA threat to blow up their building. Sofie took a deep breath, steeling herself before running with Mick down the steps to the District Line to go pick up a rental car near Victoria Station.

The Aussies had warned her over their morning tea and toast that Stonehenge would disappoint, that it would seem small and hard to appreciate, enclosed as it was now by rolls of barbed wire. Still, nothing anyone said had prepared Sofie for the tingle that crawled up her spine when she turned to look north across the Salisbury Plain. The landscape lay out like a Brueghel painting, with fields of gold and olive and brown, delineated in places by the dark green of hedgerows. A warm breeze whined past her ears, oyster-tinged clouds raced across miles of summer sky, and she caught herself thinking thoughts too embarrassing to articulate, their theme centered on the idea of having been born at the wrong place and time.

“What do you think?” Mick asked. She hadn’t heard him come up alongside her.

“Cool,” she said. “It’s like the wind’s trying to talk to us.”

“What’s it say?” She could see by his smile he was teasing.

“Not sure,” she said, and shook herself free of the spell.

“Hungry?” he asked, taking her hand. “There’s another stone circle at Avebury nearby. We might find lunch at a pub in the village.”

They drove to the village, Sofie with the BP Road Atlas of Great Britain open in her lap. Mick had already marked out all their routes, even scribbled illegible notes in the margins, but looking at it made her feel more a part of the enterprise. He inquired about her family, and she learned that New Zealand had many big mountains which he liked to ski as often as possible. In Avebury village they ate roast beef and mustard sandwiches and drank pints of bitter ale, which she could not make herself like, no matter how hard she tried. It also went straight to her head, though that may have been the whiskey Mick got her to drink with assurances that it would improve the flavor of the beer. It did, sort of. She stumbled, coming out of the pub. Mick caught her, and one of his hands slid up her side, touching her breast.

Sofie laughed. “Let the games begin.”

Mick blinked a few times, perhaps unsure of her meaning. She focused on the flutter of his long white eyelashes.

“Steady now?” he asked.

Sofie smiled encouragement, took back his hand, and they walked to what she decided must be the village green—though it seemed to extend beyond the boundaries of the village itself, and into the neighboring pastures. Here, unsurprisingly, large stones jutted out of the grass. She remembered reading that two identifiable stone rings had been built at Avebury, but in her current state it all looked pretty random. If Rupert were here, he’d have known. By now he’d have lectured her on the mathematics of their placement. That was Rupert: hours of silence followed by a discourse on fluid mechanics when you stirred the milk in your tea.

With Mick there were certainly no awkward silences—awkward was just not a word one applied to him. Conversation flowed easily, if without any driving intellectual curiosity. And now, in a small English village called Avebury, the grass was green and thick—they must have got rain in this part of the country—and the air smelled of clover and sun-drying linens. How could she be missing Rupert?

They walked the length of the lawn-like expanse to where the terrain began to rise. With unspoken agreement, they stopped and sat cross-legged at the top of a small hill in the long, cool grass.

“Beautiful day,” she said, staring up at a mostly blue sky. Batches of classic, cotton-ball clouds zipped across as if in fast forward, so that Sofie wondered whether they should expect a change in the weather.

“Lovely,” Mick said, his face unexpectedly close. Before she could process her thoughts, they were kissing, his hands moving on her arms, her neck. Still tipsy, she kept her own hands anchored to the ground.

Small groups of tourists wandered the green, inspecting the various monoliths. Hearing voices draw near, she pulled back from Mick to see a group of children, eight or ten years old, about to run screaming past. The parents strolled at some distance behind. The children ran to the edge of the slope about fifteen yards from Sofie and Mick, and threw themselves on the grass to roll down. With more high-pitched squealing and shouting, each one climbed up the hill and rolled down again.

“Looks like good fun,” Mick said.

Sofie demonstrated agreement by falling back on the grass and rolling down the hill herself. Mick followed and managed to land half on top of her. When she opened her eyes the sky spun, so they lay there at the bottom, giggling like the children who were going now. Sofie heard their voices retreating towards the village. Before long she and Mick were groping each other and necking in earnest.

“I’ve been puzzling where we might find some privacy,” he said, breaking for oxygen.

“I hadn’t thought that far ahead,” she admitted. “Any ideas?”

“No.” He shook his head with apology.

“Hotel?” she said, and they both shook their heads. Sofie needed every shilling, and though Mick had surprised her with deeper pockets than she’d suspected, blowing money on a room seemed to cross his line, too.

He shrugged and reached for her again. Sofie lost track of time, lying with Mick in the grass, more companionable than sexually urgent, alternately making out and chatting about nothing she would remember later. She may have dozed a while. By the time a damp chill from the grass drove them to move, the afternoon had taken on shadows. Sofie walked slowly, the muscles stiff in her legs, still sleepy.

“I should never drink at lunch,” she told him.

“Maybe once in a while?”

“Okay,” she agreed. “Once in a while.”

As they made their way back to the traffic of rush hour London, an inward silence descended on them. Humidity had risen over the course of the day, hinting at coming rain and helping to concentrate the inescapable smell of diesel exhaust that for Sofie would characterize most of the cities in Europe. For the first time in weeks, she thought of home, of her parents, her friends at school. It occurred to Sofie that her whole theory of being someplace depended on having a home.

“Let’s not go back to the hostel just yet,” she said to Mick as they turned in their keys at the car rental place.

They ate cheap fish & chips near Victoria station and walked their way up to the gardens behind Buckingham Palace to the Green Park, and eventually—she had no sense of direction in London, she’d turned herself over completely to Mick—they were outside Hyde Park. At some point in their walk, Mick had put an arm around her shoulders. She reciprocated with an arm around his waist, content to enjoy his warmth. As they walked, she ran her hand along the miles and miles of wrought-iron fence railing that lined so much of the way, enjoying the sensation of sleek painted metal, the little slap and vibration as her fingers touched the next and the next.

The evening became night without Sofie noticing. Her feet ached.

“I don’t think I can walk much further,” Sofie told him.

“Nor me,” he grinned.

The explosion sounded very much like the cherry bomb that had gone off in the boys’ room next to Sofie’s high school algebra class. She felt it as a twinging pain in her chest, froze momentarily, then grabbed for Mick.

“It’s okay,” he said, wrapping her in his arms. “A truck backfired.”

She clung to him, waiting for the adrenaline rush to subside. Despite the reassurance in Mick’s voice, she felt his heart beating as fast as her own.

When she could force her fingers to unwind from his shirt, they went into the Underground at Marble Arch, and changed trains at Notting Hill Gate, a short journey at that hour, but when they came up, the sky had opened over London. They ran the two blocks to the hostel, banging through the door and falling inside, wet and huffing. When Mick kissed her, it started out nicely, and then they were grappling, all teeth and tongues against the wall. Sofie blamed the IRA terrorists. A short time before, she’d have walked away with a sweet kiss and “good bye.” Now she wanted—what did she want?—not to hurt him, but maybe to leave a mark, some impression of herself that would last a long time. Maybe she wanted him to mark her. It made no sense whatsoever.

“Wait.” Mick pulled away first, panting, one fist still caught in her hair. “Wait,” he said a second time.

“Right,” Sofie said as the hallway came back into focus. “God, I’m, sorry.” She wasn’t. She had no clear idea yet what she felt, but it wasn’t sorry.

“No,” he said. “It’s okay.”

They shook off like dogs and crawled up the stairs where the lights were off in the sleeping room. From the hall she could see a few body shapes, pushing up like relief maps from under their blankets. She recognized Rupert’s allergy snore.

They tried to tiptoe, searching around for dry clothes and getting ready for bed, but somehow they kept giggling and bumping into each other.

Rupert sat straight up and glared.

“We’re back,” Sofie whispered loudly. Then, still slightly tipsy from shock, she tittered like a teenaged girl in front of her father.

Rupert stared for another moment, then lay down with a lot of thrashing of covers. Sofie avoided looking at Mick, afraid she’d break into loud and hysterical laughter.

They were somewhere over the Atlantic when Sofie finished Crome Yellow, closed the book and said a silent goodbye to her good buddy Aldous Huxley. On the fold-down table in front of her, a cup of ginger ale sat in a pool of its own condensation. As she watched, the cup slid a few inches across the table’s surface.

“Squeeze film bearing,” Rupert said, stopping the cup with one long, outstretched finger. He took her napkin and began mopping the liquid.

“What?” Sofie’s head was still in the book.

“The film of water under the cup acts as a bearing,” Rupert explained. “A bearing,” he added, “is something that reduces friction.”

“Ah,” she said, understanding at last. She looked at Rupert and realized she’d been avoiding him since her day out with Mick. And now, here was the Rupert she loved, in one of those rare, lit-up moments when something really interested him.

“Good book?” he asked.

“Yes, good,” she said, weakly.

“So how about some Hearts?” He produced a deck of playing cards from his daypack under the seat.

“No,” she said. “It’s no fun with two people.” And she could never beat him at Hearts anyway.

“Cribbage, then.” He leaned forward once more to extract a traveling Cribbage board.

“Okay,” Sofie agreed, though he would probably beat her at Cribbage, too.

Rupert dealt and they looked at their hands, selecting which cards to put in the crib. Sofie cut and he grinned, turning over the card. They played the hand, counted and pegged, and then it was her turn to deal.

“I still sort of hate you,” she said as he placed his two cards in her crib.

“You love me,” he said, and laid down his opening card.

--Rosemary Zurlo-Cuva

Against the Gloom

2010-02-22T06:43:00.000-08:00

I find myself growing less annoyed with the general gloom this winter. For one thing, the new dustings of snow freshen everything up. For another, there is an unmistakable improvement in the quality and amount of light, along with a distinctly spring-promising feel to the air. I dreaded walking the dog first thing this morning, and then once out, I was happy to extend the walk by a few extra blocks. I looked ahead at the long term weather reports and by the middle of next week we may be seeing temperatures near 40.

Foot Trails, the walking company I so love in southwest England, sent me their spring newsletter, which never fails to perk me up. Springtime in Wiltshire looks pretty good right now (though I imagine springtime anywhere else might look just as good).

Yes, I read the damn Dan Brown book

2010-02-19T05:22:00.000-08:00

Oh, the shame of it. I mentioned the other day how terrible I find Dan Brown's prose. Yeah, well, I'm almost finished with The Lost Symbol anyway. In fact, the story is gripping and I'm finding it very difficult to put down. Somehow, in spite of all those writing tics, Brown has actually made me care about what happens to his characters. Actually, poor character development and stilted dialog aside, I am more curious about the characters and symbols in this book than I was for The Da Vinci Code. For one thing, he has put a family and its tragedies at the center of this book in a way that feels if not more real, then more human than in the previous work.

The study of Noetics, it turns out, really does exist. Essentially, it is an attempt to measure and generally apply scientific method to the understanding of human consciousness, feeling and belief -- subjective experience -- and its relationship to or influence upon objective experience. There really is an Institute of Noetic Sciences, and they're doing some very interesting things. Hard to tell how seriously they are taken in the scientific or academic communities. They at least don't come off as total crackpots, but what do I know? I stayed up late reading a Dan Brown novel.

Great Beginnings

2010-02-18T06:11:00.000-08:00

A lot of novels (and novel-like memoirs) start out slowly yet turn out to be worth the work. Others grab me from the first few sentences. So it was for me with Geoff Dyer, the British novelist/memoirist/essayist I discovered when I found his first novel, The Colour of Memory, on the shelf of my room at a writing residency. I enjoyed the book -- a fictional account of the author's time living in Brixton -- and went on to read everything else he's got in print. Last night, hunting for another book entirely, I got happily distracted, rereading these opening paragraphs, which never fail to remind me of what I want in a good read: wit, sharp observation, and a palpable love of language:

In August it rained all the time -- heavy, corrosive rain from which only nettles and rusty metal derived refreshment. The sky was a grey sea with no tide. Gutters burst their kerbs. When it didn't rain it drizzled and when it didn't drizzle the city sweltered under a thick vest of cloud. Even the clouds looked as if they could do with some sun. The weather was getting people down. I wasn't keen on the rain either but what really put a damper on things was being thrown out of my house and sacked from my job.

Being evicted from a house was a new experience for me but getting sacked was something I'd always had a talent for. I started early, when I was still at school. On Saturdays I worked in a sports shop and was laid off because there was a question mark against my honesty. Called in to the manager's office at four o'clock, I left for good at quarter past, helping myself to a generous silver handshake from the till as I went. A few years later I was fired from an insurance company for lack of attention to detail. My work involved checking someone else's figures for errors and I tended not to bother. There was no point; my checking was checked by somebody else and before anything went through the computer it was double checked, cross checked and double-cross checked by two or three other people. Would you have bothered? Of course not; you'd have been down in the basement playing in the ping-pong tournament like the rest of us.

--Geoff Dyer, The Colour of Memory

P.S.--Something I forgot to add to yesterday's post on our trip to Washington D.C. was JFK's observation that "Washington is a city of Northern charm and Southern efficiency." Which we certainly experienced standing on line for half an hour at the Tenley Town Whole Foods.

A few observations after our visit to the D.C. area

2010-02-17T04:49:00.000-08:00

1) Everyone loves a snow day (or four), though really, the federal employees we talked to had been working from their cell phones and laptops at home all during that time. They also get an inordinate kick out of wearing their jeans and corduroys and baggy sweaters to work, as almost everyone seemed to do last Friday.
2) Celebrity spottings in D.C. are difficult, since the big shots all drive around in the back seats of town cars with darkly tinted windows. We did see Judy Woodruff leaving the CVS Pharmacy in Tenley Town on Saturday.
3) The soups, sandwiches and desserts at the Museum of American History cafeteria are all homemade and particularly delicious after a long windy walk across the snow-packed, unshoveled Mall.
4) The National Gallery surprises me every time I go back with the depths of its collections.
5) Architecture. The marble and limestone in the District, the Georgian beauties of Anapolis, the colonial rowhouses in Old Alexandria, the Gothic design of the National Cathedral. A discussion of the Masonic influence on the neoclassical design of the capitol (and other Washington buildings) ended with my hosts dropping a copy of Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol in my lap.
6) Dan Brown really is a terrible writer. I have to admit, I am intrigued by the concepts he works with in this newer novel, just as I was with The Da Vinci Code. But all the stilted dialog, the short, cliffhanger chapter ends, cutting too quickly between the various threads of the story, the generally clunky prose. I hope I get the answers to my questions about the Masons and their influence before I lose all patience and put the book down.
7) Note to self: Find out whether there really is something called Noetic Science.

And you thought you were having a vacation!

2010-02-11T05:50:00.000-08:00

Somehow, we are headed off today to visit friends in the Washington, D.C. area. Shockingly, our flight has not been cancelled (yet). Apparently Monday, the day we are scheduled to fly back, more snow is expected. This could be an adventure. Wish me luck.

Happy All the Time

2010-02-09T07:58:00.000-08:00

Continuing with my theme of trust fund reading/viewing, last night I began rereading Laurie Colwin's Happy All the Time. Published in 1978, it tells the story of trust fund babies and best friends, Guido and Vincent, and their adventures with true love, although that description would not necessarily prepare you for the precision of Colwin's fiction craft or the delights of her prose.

Certainly, this is not a story for our times or of our times. Why should anyone be interested in the romantic angst of two extremely fortunate, heavily privileged ruling class men? Well, for probably the same reason people keep reading Jane Austen year after year -- the joys of her prose and her ability to make palpable the very human concerns of her characters. We feel their vulnerability behind the facades of money and the society it breeds.

I am interested also in the stories of happy people. I've blogged about this before -- my fascination with fiction that is about essentially happy or settled people. The first thing you hear in fiction writing workshop is that "fiction loves trouble." Colwin finds not so much trouble, but certain, entertainingly laid out conflicts for Guide and Vincent, and their loves, Holly and Misty.

To read a book like this feels like a guilty pleasure at this time and place, when just last night I had a conversation with an environmentalist friend about the likelihood that we have maybe 10 years to turn the tide on climate change, because after that we'll be beyond the point where change matters. Who cares what you'll be reading then, I wonder?

Poor Little Rich Girls

2010-02-08T07:40:00.000-08:00

I had never seen Gossip Girl, but season one came up on my Netflix queue and I watched the pilot and first three episodes Friday night, surprisingly engaged by the struggles of rich girl Serena van der Woodsen. Her sadness and guilt -- betrayal of best friend, brother in sanitarium after suicide attempt, selfish, conniving mother, vicious so-called friends -- along with her palpable desire to make things right and start over -- it all really got to me. Yes, I'd had two glasses of wine. But still, this was one sad little girl forced to be way too grown up for her age. I was feeling it.

Sunday, I watched the last installment of the new Emma on PBS and found myself heartstruck once again by a rich, privileged (blond) girl, whose circumstances are sadly narrowed by her station in life. Granted, Emma gets her Mr. Knightley in the end. But something about this production (perhaps the wonderful interplay between Romola Garai as Emma and Michael Gambon as her father) forced me to think how closed off Emma's life has been because of her father's anxieties. Of course she became a meddler. Of course she lost patience with attempting to rise above all the difficult personalities who comprised all the world she knew. Even Mr. Knightley points out that she must hold herself to a higher standard of conduct because she is rich. "Badly done, Emma," he scolds. "Badly done."

I made the mistake of mentioning these sympathies to a few friends and got soundly trounced upon. Rich girls cannot be tragic --or at least not these rich girls. They've got clothes, they've got spas and fancy real estate, they can eat whatever and whenever they want (though that does not seem to be where they go with their misery). I guess the point was, their suffering must be shallower, less than -- or at least less noble than -- the sufferings of those in the middle or lower classes.

I don't for a second belittle the sufferings of the poor, the disenfranchised. I'm just suggesting that the class system is oppressive for everyone, including the rich. The rich look less oppressed because they live amid luxury and have the freedom to attempt to transmute their suffering into golf outings, spa visits, island vacations and etc. But are they enjoying their journey through this existence any more than the poor?

I know, generalizations always lead to one kind of misrepresentation or another. And I can't help but believe that Jane Austen gives us the stern Mr. Knightley precisely because she wanted credible voice for the notion that privilege does demand more of those blessed with it. I just had this powerful sadness, watching two rich girls struggling within the bounds of their material largesse. I hear, though, that I'm not going to feel so much sympathy for poor Serena van der Woodsen if I make it into the next season.

Always Saying Goodbye

2010-02-04T05:36:00.000-08:00

A Facebook friend this morning posted the last line of Rainer Maria Rilke's Eighth Duino Elegy -- we spend our lives saying/goodbye -- which sort of hit me where I live. One of the things I've often thought about my mother, who died in in February of 2005, was that grieving her loss felt familiar, as if I had been doing it already from birth.

I have Stephen Mitchell's Modern Library translation of the Duino Elegies, and he phrases that last line slightly differently. Rereading it this morning, I felt Rilke's struggle that we humans do not live in the present only, that we essentially anticipate death and loss and that it makes our lives in some way smaller. He envies the animals that do not share our consciousness; they are always turned outwards in their awareness, and as such, an animal feels its life as boundless/unfathomable, and without regard/to its own condition: pure like its outward gaze.

Here are the last two stanzas, which pack a pretty powerful punch:

And we: spectators always, everywhere,
turned toward the world of objects, never outward.
It fills us. We arrange it. It breaks down.
We rearrange it, then break down ourselves.

Who has twisted us around like this, so that
no matter what we do, we are in the posture
of someone going away? Just as, upon
the farthest hill, which shows him his whole valley
one last time, he turns, stops, lingers--,
so we live here, forever taking leave.

Thank you, Susan, for starting me on that little journey this morning.

Mammo-Lammo-Gram

2010-02-03T05:32:00.000-08:00

I go for my annual mammogram this afternoon. Women have written all over the place about what a drag it is. Aside from the pain and embarrassment associated with having your tender flesh prodded, smashed down and occasionally pinched, it tends to bring up any residual dread you might be harboring about tumors, radical medical treatments for cancer, and death. I don't think this applies only to inveterate hypochondriacs like myself, though I'm sure we get an extra charge out of the whole experience.

I am not as preoccupied with the usual dread associated with my mammogram today. I'm up against a deadline for an article and I want to have a chapter under my belt before my new fiction group meets on Saturday. I'm annoyed right now that I even have to take the time to go have this thing done. I fantasize about daring to skip it altogether.

I have a friend -- a nurse practitioner to boot -- who refuses invasive medical screenings. She has not had a colonoscopy, though she is well past the age at which good medical practice dictates we have one. Swears she will never have one.

I'm pretty sure she's decided not to have anymore mammograms or pap smears either. She told me the other day that she doesn't go for annual physicals anymore -- just makes an appointment when she has a specific problem to deal with -- so she doesn't have to deal with the doctor nagging her to have the various screenings they encourage at our age. I look at her sometimes with wonder. Is she a fool or a pioneer? Fearless or nuts?

I don't know if we experience more medical hysteria in this country than in other places. I know that it doesn't help me to think very clearly about what I actually need and why. Years ago my primary care doctor was an internist whose response to any little worry or symptom I presented was to send me for tests. Doctors are not allowed to offer much reassurance, because if your unlikely little complaint does turn out to be something serious, they are open for recrimination, if not legal liability, for implying otherwise. The technicians who do the tests, likewise, are not allowed to give results or interpretations. So every little complaint my doctor took seriously led to more visits, more testing, during which I worried about the outcome. And then I would have to wait for my doctor to receive and analyze the results and get a free moment to call me, almost always to find out that it was, of course, nothing to worry about.

Eventually I changed to a family practice doc. She listens carefully and shows me plenty of respect, but thankfully, does not feel required to order a test for every little complaint I bring up. Maybe family practitioners are by nature less worriers than internists, I don't know. I do know I myself worry a whole lot less these days. Though when she tells me to continue having my yearly mammogram, I dutifully comply.

Famous Hypochondriacs

2010-02-01T05:36:00.000-08:00

I was just five years old when a beloved grandfather died. My well-meaning parents tried to explain Grandpa's disappearance by saying that God "took him up to heaven." My first reaction was naturally rage. And then I began to wonder who God would take next. I worried a great deal about the safety of my parents and sisters. Eventually it struck me that God might at anytime take me, too. And thus began a lifelong preoccupation with physical symptoms, among other things.

Hypochondria is not fun and the people who struggle with it are not enjoying themselves, although I, for one, have learned to have a sense of humor about it. I mostly know when to shrug worries off and when to check them out with my doctor.

I was fascinated this morning to read in Salon.com Laura Miller's review of The Hypochondriacs: Nine Tormented Lives by Brian Dillon.

It is satisfying in a way -- though not exactly reassuring -- to know that such talented folks as James Boswell, Andy Warhol, Charlotte Bronte, Marcel Proust, Glenn Gould, Florence Nightingale, Alice James, Charles Darwin, and Daniel Paul Schreber have shared my affliction. Dillon has theories about what purpose the affliction served for each of these creative people, a notion I find somewhat offensive.

To my way of thinking, hypochondria, like probably most emotional disorders, is an adaptation to some early trauma or confusion. The fact that these nine sufferers learned how to make their hypochondria work for them in the ways Dillon describes, seems a wholly separate issue from the one of how or why the disorder arose in the first place. Now I will actually have to read the damn book to see how he addresses that question.

Under Stars

2010-01-28T05:20:00.000-08:00

This is the Tess Gallagher poem I was trying to find yesterday, and it is subtly, deeply, about the power of words, or more precisely, the power of names. Thank you, Katrin.

UNDER STARS

The sleep of this night deepens
because I have walked coatless from the house
carrying the white envelope.
All night it will say one name
in its little tin house by the roadside.

I have raised the metal flag
so its shadow under the roadlamp
leaves an imprint on the rain-heavy bushes.
Now I will walk back
thinking of the few lights still on
in the town a mile away.

In the yellowed light of a kitchen
the millworker has finished his coffee,
his wife has laid out the white slices of bread
on the counter. Now while the bed they have left
is still warm, I will think of you, you
who are so far away
you have caused me to look up at the stars.

Tonight they have not moved
from childhood, those games played after dark.
Again I walk into the wet grass
toward the starry voices. Again, I
am the one found, intimate, returned
by all I touch on the way.

--Tess Gallagher

The Weight of Words

2010-01-27T06:45:00.000-08:00

As it turns out, the internets are not always the repositories of information I expect them to be. I'm so used now to being able to just plug in a string of words and get more info than I ever wanted about whatever subject I'm researching. Not always reliable information, but information nonetheless. I have often plugged in a line from a poem or song lyric and boom!, the whole piece pops up. But apparently, the work of living poets still under copyright is not so easy to find. Robert Frost, e.e.cummings, Neruda? Lots of their poems online. Tess Gallagher, not so much.

My curiosity began last night during a meeting with the women of my poetry group, when one of them spoke of a Tess Gallagher poem that had something to do with "the weight of words," or "the weight of names." These were intriguing thoughts to me, as was Katrin's poem, partially inspired by a Gallagher poem she could at that moment only remember by those phrases.

Google those phrases with Tess Gallagher's name, though, and no poem crops up. Only biographical information and invitations to book store web sites where her poetry is available for sale. Google those phrases without her name and it's all diet books. I believe there may even be a diet book called The Weight of Words. I did not investigate how the diet works, thought it is an equally intriguing idea to wonder just how much a word weighs, and which words must be eliminated to make the diet succeed.

There are also many works of fiction with titles relating to the weight of water, the weight of a soul, etc.

Ah, the Internet. On my way to the grocery store yesterday, I listened to Thom Hartmann rant for some time about how Wikipedia -- a once useful information tool -- is now completely unreliable for political and historical information, since conservative activists have made a mission of editing and rewriting so much of it to their own ends. I wondered then why progressives aren't doing the same, or if they are, why not as effectively? Are progressives simply less Machiavellian by nature? Why is Fox News thriving while Air America went broke? Consider that, in terms of the weight of words.

Deep Winter Ramblings

2010-01-26T06:17:00.000-08:00

I was at a workshop this past weekend on the subject of building community, and yet this morning I find myself feeling unmoored. I am between books and at the start of a new writing project, and I can see right now how these two activities -- reading and writing-- anchor my day.

It has not been quite three months now since we moved, and returning to our place at the end of the workshop did not yet feel entirely like coming home. It felt emphatically more familiar than unfamiliar, but I'm struggling with an old old thought that goes something like, Where is everybody? Only I know that everyone is pretty much where I last knew him or her to be.

I keep thinking about that saying relating to a parent's job as giving their children roots and wings. Stepping aside from the whole issue of parents, I can say that I feel strangely rootless and wingless at the moment. It is absurd, I know. The roots are all there, even if I can't feel them. Probably, to labor the metaphor, they're only frozen in the earth of this Wisconsin winter. Wings, however metaphorical, feel more elusive.

On the subject of community, everything in our culture -- along with Wisconsin winter -- conspires to make that difficult, though I will not stop plugging away. I'm pleased that I volunteered to organize regular get-togethers for the residents of our building, the first one in spring, which seems a long way away at the end of January, when temperatures are about to take another arctic dip.

Forgive the rambling. I really do need to get a little farther along on my new piece. And also decide which of the many books on my nightstand to commit to.

They are all Mr. Darcy

2010-01-21T05:17:00.000-08:00

I have written often in short bursts about the proliferation of Austen fan fiction of various types. Posted today on Salon.com is Laura Miller's look at Austenite fiction while noting publication of an anthology, A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Great Authors on Why We Read Jane Austen. The thing, as she points out, is that few of Austen's fans/admirers/imitators have been able to write with the same bracing wit and irony about the world she so carefully observed.

I, in the meantime, am trying to chose what to read next: Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi, or Martin Amis's memoir, Experience. Decisions, decisions.

Raising Dingy Shades

2010-01-20T06:53:00.000-08:00

I have never been a big fan of the window shade, but we have them here in our bedroom in the new apartment. If we don't pull them at night, too much light pours in from the spot lights, installed for safety around the back of the building. But there is a strange sensation, opening them in the morning. It has begun to feel ritualistic, a way of letting the world back in. I look out and start to wonder about the day, about the people awake or still asleep around us. Today I remembered this little snippet from T.S. Eliot, actually the second of his Preludes.

II.
The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer
From the sawdust-trampled streets
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.
With the other masquerades
That time resumes,
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.

Mr. Ftizwilliam Darcy to the rescue.

2010-01-19T04:43:00.000-08:00

I had my annual physical yesterday, so naturally I awoke with a feeling of impending doom. Irrational anxieties are exhausting, and no matter how many times my doctor tells me that I'm healthy and doing all the right things, I always think that this time she's going to find something. Something awful that will consume the rest of my life before I die a hideous coward's death because I am emphatically not the person who is going to have the words "courageous fight" in her obit. Hell, just going to the doctor is courageous enough for me. I will undoubtedly go out someday crying for my mother.

My doctor happens to be a rather wonderful woman who does not get hooked by my various worries. Talking to her is easy, and she responds seriously, helpfully, to my questions and concerns. And yet I still come away from my annual physical, which includes breast and pelvic exams, feeling as if I have been through an exhausting mental and physical ordeal. Under the circumstances, I cannot seriously consider getting any real work done.

I was out of the doctor's office by 10:30, and by 11:00 I was curled up in bed with a cup of tea and a fast-food novel -- easily gobbled in one day. Yesterday it was Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy: The Last Man in the World by Abigail Reynolds. Fast food indeed. There are scores now of novels devoted to the imaginings of women who were not satisfied with the endings Jane Austen supplied to her own novels. Or who couldn't bear for her novels to end. I get that, I really do. I always feel a let down when a book I love comes to an end. I have never, though, thought I might improve upon it.

It would be logical to ask here why I read these novels, which are only occasionally very good and are often embarrassing. The object, for many of these reworkings of Pride and Prejudice in particular, seems to be to hinged on getting Elizabeth and Darcy into the bedroom for some tastefully graphic sex and to provide more occasions in which the two lovers can have misunderstandings and then profess their love for each other all over again and then have some more tastefully graphic sex.

I suppose I read them for the same reason I read any romance novel. It is the ultimate in comfort reading, that habitually repeated pattern of conflict and a certain resolution. Love, safety, security, a little sexual titillation thrown in for entertainment value. I've already talked about the daddy longing, which sounds kind of sick, mentioned right after sexual titillation. But those of you who read romance novels know what I'm talking about.

As these sorts of novels go, Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy is not the worst I've read by a long shot. All in all, it was a very pleasant day: tea, the sun streaming through my bedroom windows, the dog curled up for extra warmth at my side. It was a wonderful time out. Besides which, I am apparently healthy. On to the next thing.

What kind of a day are you having?

2010-01-14T07:39:00.000-08:00

I had thought I'd weaned myself pretty well away from all the hysteria and punditry calling itself news, but old habits die hard. The excerpts from Game Change have been entertaining and disturbing, but not in a way to really mess with my psyche. And then the already beleaguered people of Haiti got hit with their devastating earthquake. And this morning a friend sent me Brit Andrew Stephens's column from today's New Statesman. I'm kind of depressed now.

For years I've struggled to find the right balance between living consciously and feeling beaten to a pulp by all the need that exists in the world I live in. Locally, nationally, globally. Where does my personal responsibility lie? Surely we are not all meant to be activists, but clearly, the numbers of them we have at work are barely stemming the tide of selfishness, power imbalance and other forms of bad behavior. Who to give money to and how much? Which organizations to work for and what sort of time and energy commitment to make? Does a thinking person of privilege get to have a life?

If you were hoping I have the answers to these questions, you're out of luck.

In good news, according to this New York times fashion piece, normal-sized women are making it back to the runways.

Mad Punditry

2010-01-13T06:01:00.001-08:00

I love good writing wherever I find it, and for some time now, I've been an admirer of Salon.com's television reviewer, Heather Havrilesky. She writes about television shows with passion, intelligence and wit. Her review today of Sarah Palin's debut on Fox News, Palin: Crazy like a Fox News pundit, is so good -- full of pointed sarcasm, vitriol, and brilliant observations about the state of political commentary -- I wish I had written it myself.

Unfortunately, I now have to ask myself whether I am just another phony, "gumming up the internets with [my] thoughtless reaction pieces."

Talking Monkeys

2010-01-12T05:25:00.000-08:00

I was fascinated to read this article in the Science Times section of this morning's New York Times about the research into understanding the communications between monkeys on the Ivory Coast. Scientists have yet to figure out why other primates, the apes in particular, do not develop language, though their speculations are discussed here. I couldn't help wondering if any of these scientists are old enough to remember one of my favorite Saturday morning TV shows, Lancelot Link Secret Chimp.

The Magicians

2010-01-11T05:19:00.000-08:00

Lev Grossman's The Magicians is often billed as "Harry Potter for adults." It is a story of a young man who finds himself, through a series of baffling circumstances, attending a secret, elite college for magical study in upstate New York. And yet, those chapters that deal with our protagonist Quentin's time at Brakebills learning magic craft -- the bulk of the book, really -- remind me more of Donna Tartt's The Secret History, in which a young man who feels himself to be an outsider, becomes part of a clique of fellow students at a small, cloistered New England college, with lots of drinking and sexual discovery, and personal, human mysteries that are more fascinating to consider in their way than the curriculum.

To his credit, Lev Grossman uses his magical conceit to create something that is neither Harry Potter nor Donna Tartt. We humans love the idea that we can harness and control mysterious natural and supernatural forces to our own ends and probably have since our earliest ancestors tried to make fire on purpose. Magic is ultimately about power. Creativity, inspiration, freedom, yes, those too. But power is the bottom line. A story about magic must ultimately grapple with the question of how we handle that power.

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD.

Quentin is many ways a difficult character to like. He cannot see himself properly, and as such, does not understand his own motives or the consequences of his actions (or unwillingness to act). He is competitive, an outstanding student, but beyond that, a bit of a blank slate. He longs for the magical, alternate world from a series of books about Fillory -- think C.S. Lewis's Narnia series -- wishing that he could stay in that seemingly perfect world forever.

Quentin -- aside from his outstanding academic record and magical abilities -- is essentially us: his reactions to his new world, his confusion and reluctance, his longing for the illusion of a better, simpler place, and perhaps especially, his refusal either to understand his own power or use it when the time comes to act. In the last third of the book, Quentin and his magician friends discover that Fillory was indeed real, an alternate plane of existence that the Chatwin children of the books actually journeyed to in the 1930s. And -- surprise! -- Fillory is not the all-good magical land of Quentin's longings.

A good friend who read The Magicians over the holidays was disturbed by what he saw as a very dark turn at the end of the novel. He wasn't expecting it and did not appreciate the surprise. Possibly I had more a sense of what was coming. I took the hints Lev Grossman dropped along the way that longing for the fantasy, for any world, really, other than the one you are actually living in will have a corrosive effect on your psyche, your decisions, your ability to be connected to what is real and good in the here and now.

The thing about magicians is they have the ability to play with other worlds, with alternate realities, with the power to bypass the quotidienne. Grossman envisions a world of ennui for his magicians once they leave Brakebills. They can live where they want, do what they want, and mostly, they drink and party and mess with each others heads. There is a wonderful section where Quentin visits the home of his girlfriend Alice's parents. The father recreates and forces the family to live in architectural masterpieces from history; the mother has her own pursuits as far away from her husband as possible. They are lost souls, with all the money and time and power they could want. No one, it appears, completes their magical education and tries to create a better world for those less fortunate once the power and privilege of a magical life take over. Magicians are, after all, no more than flawed human beings.

You could say that The Magicians is not really a book about magic, except as a vehicle to explore the ways in which humans squander their abilities. J.K. Rowling's books were never really about magic either. It is, like all books worth reading, about the meaning of life in the best sense. And there are passages that were just exhilarating to read: the unfettered joy when Quentin, as a goose, flies to Antarctica with his classmates, or later, when they all play as silver foxes; or the image of "The Beast" as a neatly dressed little man with a tree branch covering his face and the ability to paralyze a whole classroom for hours. Many of the images from this book have stayed with me almost as afterimages.

The fact that Quentin is in many ways a disappointing character does not mean that this is not a good book. I recommend it with pleasure.

Cranky About Blue People

2010-01-07T04:56:00.000-08:00

I have not yet seen Avatar, and I may not see it for some time. I have a sort of cranky response to any movie or book that I am repeatedly told I must see or read right away. It is an idiosyncratic response that greatly annoys my daughter and a few of my friends, but it works for me. I did rush off to see James Cameron's other must-see movie Titanic on Anthony Lane's recommendation in The New Yorker -- admittedly, he did not call it a great story as much as great moviemaking -- and I found it embarrassing and interminable in many ways -- the hand on the car window during the sex scene, the "I am the king of the world" part, blue Leo di Caprio (I guess Cameron likes blue people) at the end. Yes, I am a crank.

I resisted reading Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things when it was garnering all its literary attention and winning awards, which seemed curmudgeonly at the time. When I did read it three years later, I could no longer remember what reviewers and reading friends had been saying about it. I liked and admired it a lot when I finally got to it -- I remember savoring that read. Ditto with most of Lorrie Moore's work, which I mostly read years after publication. It's as if I can read with a cooler head once a work is no longer brand new. I have not yet even looked at A Gate at the Stairs, even in spite of a high recommendation by my favorite Geoff Dyer, though I know I will read it in another year or two and probably love and admire it as much as I do her earlier work.

I don't know about Avatar at this point. My son-in-law, who has a refined appreciation for animation and CGI, thought it was a beautifully constructed movie. Others have told me it is an anti-imperialist tale as a selling point. I guess they know I don't approve of imperialism. Last night, a friend called to debrief after watching the movie with her 11-year-old son. They had both been upset by the level of violence. "It's an incredibly sad movie," she said. "No one tells you that when they recommend it."

I am a crank who likes to find her own way to a book or a movie or a television program (most of which I watch in syndication or on Netflix when their freshness date has somewhat expired). Which is not to say that I never read anything that is brand new. I do. It just has to feel like my own idea. I am, in fact, reading Lev Grossman's The Magicians at the moment, a relatively fresh publication -- still out in hardcover -- that was all the rage with my book store co-workers a few months back. I didn't pay much attention then. Right now I am engrossed enough to have spent most of yesterday reading rather than accomplishing anything. I hope to have more to say about that tomorrow.

Melancholy

2010-01-05T06:01:00.000-08:00

I realize I've had a certain preoccupation with the darkness of winter mornings (how not, really, when you live in a northern climate?). It does not make me sad or depressed in the sense people usually mean. I do not want to cry. I like to think of it as melancholy, which sounds more arty and poetic. I think about loss, I write about loss, but it is sort of a delicious hurt, like poking your tongue into a healing abscess. Too gross? I am grappling with that mood, those feelings, as I work my way into a new piece of writing that begins just at this time of year. In the meantime, here is something I wrote years ago at this time of year. It has been said (in French, originally), the more things change, the more they remain the same.

Winter Carol

Epiphany has past and still
I listen to Christmas music
its tintinnabulations
like tiny shards of hope
jagged, hard
brilliant in the clear
cold light
of a winter sunrise; they pierce
before they heal. When

walking through dusky woods
I long for a soughing wind
to rustle the half naked limbs
and find only the hush
of a snowfall so quiet
even the trees are holding their breath.

I weep for a world in dark slumber
even as I hear the angels sing.

--RZC

Let the Wild Rumpus Start

2010-01-04T05:32:00.000-08:00

Most people dread the end of a vacation period, but I have been waiting weeks for this morning, and the main thing in my awareness as I got up was how dark it was. Somehow, as I imagined getting here, through the move, through the kitchen remodeling, through the rigors of the holidays, somehow I imagined more light.

In spite of certain joys -- family, friends, lots of cooking and movies, my new Wii -- I spend the holidays craving the quiet of a daily routine. Today I am remembering other returns to routine, and how the first day is not so much for huge accomplishment -- more like getting my ducks in a row. We routine people love having our ducks in a row.

It has been all too easy, as the year came to a close, to feel a little defeated by the cold, by the intransigence of politics as currently practiced, the certainty that economic hardship will continue through this year for large numbers of people -- a feeling that plays in the background like elevator music. I'm vaguely aware of it through everything I do.

There are remedies. One, of course, is good work, towards which I am moving. Another way to restore your faith in the human spirit, laughing all the way, would be to review the past decade in viral videos. If you missed this post from Salon or The Daily Beast's review of the best viral videos of the past ten years, you must take a few moments to view these together. One at a time, the videos are amusing for sure and ones you've undoubtedly seen before. But taken as a group, it is hard not to feel the wonder and ingenuity of human beings at play -- that is, both the humans in front of the cameras and those behind them. My god, the things we entertain ourselves with.

Having some fun, then getting back to work.

A Truce on Christmas

2009-12-23T06:24:00.000-08:00

I have a little bit of Christmas spirit this year. Not so much for the shopping and gift giving. In the best of years that exhausts me. Some people -- my daughter is one -- have a knack for coming up with thoughtful, useful, individualized gifts. I have scored on one or two occasions, but mostly, I don't know what to get people. I don't like the pressure of having to do all this thinking and buying all at one time. Too often I fall into the trap of getting people things that I would like. Which works for a few people who share my own tastes and sensibilities, but leaves others wondering, WTF? I would rather cook someone a meal or take them to the movies.

I do like the idea that in the dark of winter, we turn on lots of sparkly lights and spend time together and are especially generous with each other. It doesn't seem to matter that I am largely agnostic and have trouble with many aspects of Christian mythology. There is just something so perfectly human and good about reaching out to each other in midwinter. I like the way time seems to stand still for a few days between Christmas and New Year's, when we usually have company in the house and time away from work. Just as when we were children, we spend those days playing with our new toys and watching movies together, and cooking lots and lots of great meals because there is time for that and people around to enjoy it.

There has seemed to be so much to worry about in the world this year. I say "seemed to be" because I am never sure if the worry machine is being artificially cranked up and manipulated by all the opinion journalism and information overload we're bombarded with, or whether it truly is a time to be very scared. The world appears to be in a period of rapid change. As diligent and aware as we try to be, much is out of our control. The coming holidays seem as good a time as any to rest up, take note of good fortune, replenish the spirit for whatever is ahead.

I'm taking a few days off. Back sometime next week, whenever I recover suitably from the usual post-Christmas sloth. Happy Holidays.

Stories as Love Gone Bad

2009-12-22T06:09:00.000-08:00

In my crab walk towards getting seriously fictional again, something made me want to revisit Lorrie Moore's wonderful essay introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2004. Here, she attempts to characterize the short story genre as distinct from the novel:

Yet a story's very shortness ensures its largeness of accomplishment, its selfhood and purity. Having long lost its ability to pay an author's rent (in the golden blip between Henry James and television, F. Scott Fitzgerald, for one, wrote stories to fund his novels), the short story has been freed of its commercial life to become serious art, by its virtually every practitioner. As a result, short or long, a story lies less. It sings and informs and blurts. It has nothing to lose.

In adding my own heedless descriptions to the stew, I have often liked to think that short stories have something in common with songs -- not just the digested-in-a-single-sitting aspect of them, but their distillation of emotion and circumstance, their interest in beautiful pain. Like songs, there is often more urgency to them, less forewarning and professional calculation in their creation. Similarly, like songs, they are often about some kind of love gone bad -- love for an overcoat, a tenor, a babysitter, to name three famous ones (by Gogol, Joyce, and Cheever) -- or at random from this book, love for a ranch, a waitress, a goat, a daughter (Proulx, Boyle, Munro, Lewis). These love objects represent lives and possibilities, spiritual entrances and exits, which are at one time within reach of a person but, as the story tells us, due to interesting, musical, and sorrowful particularities, soon pass by and away and without -- like a long, empty train at a crossing.

Not exactly the inspiration I was looking for as I embark on a new novel, but lovely stuff to ponder, nonetheless.

Home is Where the Laundry Needs to Be Folded

2009-12-21T06:15:00.000-08:00

It feels kind of funny around here this morning, not waiting for a tradesman to show up. It's the week before Christmas and the whole building seems extra quiet. Or maybe I'm just extra exhausted from all the vacuuming, shopping, floor scrubbing, chandelier-installing, furniture moving and reorganizing we did over the weekend. I don't mind telling you that my legs ache and I need a bit of a rest. But the place is really starting to shape up.

A few stray observations. This past weekend was supposed to be the biggest shopping weekend of the season, but to my eye, the stores were not as unbearably busy as they were in, say, 2003, when Frank and I got caught in a traffic gridlock for over an hour on the lanes that circle the big shopping mall on the far west side of Madison. Everyone seemed understaffed, however, and you can see the effort store clerks are making to remain good-tempered and make all the stupid small talk they're required to engage in at risk of getting yelled at or even losing their job. I tried to be cheered at the thought that consumer-based capitalism may be on the wane, but really, it's hard not to think of all the people who have lost jobs or have been marginally employed for some time.

I also noticed this weekend that when I think of home, I think of our apartment, but not the building itself. When I lived in a house, the thought of home also contained the outside perimeters of the house and yard. I saw the whole package in my mind's eye, inside and out. Now, when we've been away for a long day of whatever and we approach our building, it doesn't feel the same. Or rather, it doesn't feel like home in the same way, until I enter the apartment. I wonder if this will change with time, of if there is some intrinsically different idea of home when you don't live in a single family unit.

So, Thursday is already Christmas Eve and I still have a lot of shopping to do. And I never did get around to cleaning the bedrooms over the weekend -- we were so preoccupied with the kitchen, living and dining rooms. And a big basket of unfolded laundry waits my attention. There is great comfort in getting the house in order. And yet, I do so miss the anticipation of the tradesmen.

Electric Dreams

2009-12-17T05:58:00.000-08:00

I did not capture the kitchen yesterday after all. Our electrician seems confounded by something he does not bother to explain to me, and so we still have masses of wire hanging like bad hair out of electrical boxes. We cannot yet use most of our gleaming new appliances. My ever-thoughtful carpenter hooked up the refrigerator to a dining room outlet with one of those fat yellow extension cords.

"Do you understand what's going on with the electrical?" I asked the carpenter yesterday afternoon.

"Not really," he said. He has had a number of conversations with the electrician, though, and told me he thought we should trust him. Old buildings are very complex.

The woman who lives below us met Frank early this morning as he walked our beagle. He apologized profusely for the necessity of the electrician going into her apartment yesterday. She asked him not to let Winnie pee on the snow piled up near the back door. The honeymoon is definitely over.

Today the tiler and his assistant come back, and I must say I look forward to that. I was very impressed with them when they first came the other day. The tiler himself is a very small young man of slight build, with wispy black hair and the sort of wet deep brown eyes that make him seem dreamy and artistic. His assistant is a young woman who looks at him with reverence. He speaks very softly but with unmistakable authority and she scurries without conversation or question to do what he asks. There is something Old World about their relationship and I like it. The tile work is gorgeous; I can't wait to see it all grouted.

Aside from that, though, there is little romance left in me regarding this kitchen. I want it over. I am looking forward to a weekend of no plans, so that I can think through which things go where. And then the whole apartment needs about three vacuumings and two floor washings.

After the exaltation of I Capture the Castle yesterday, which ended with an unexpectedly deep discussion of the craft of modernist fiction -- as well as intelligently resolving the fortunes of all its characters -- I have now sunk to Vampire Academy by Rachelle Mead. I picked it up thinking a quick revisit to the world of teenage vampires -- the angst, the blood, the hormones, the action -- would be diverting in the circumstances, but after Dodie Smith's elegant story about the loss of teenage innocence, Mead's work is almost unbearably clumsy and shallow, even for young adult fiction. We'll see if I'm able to finish.

I Capture the Kitchen

2009-12-16T05:08:00.000-08:00

My day started early, with emptying out the old refrigerator, as someone connected to someone else in my building is going to haul it away in a couple of hours. It needed a bit more cleaning than I would have expected after only 6 weeks of use. We are, apparently, pigs.

And then I had to have a very civilized struggle on the phone with the woman who lives below me and who had a great deal of difficulty understanding why my electrician had to have access to the box in her kitchen in order to finish the wiring for my kitchen. I couldn't really explain why either, as it makes no sense to me, but I am told it must be done. She didn't want anyone in her apartment while she wasn't there, which is completely understandable, but I eventually prevailed, wearing her down with apologies and politeness.

It all comes together today. The electrician will finish his work, the plumber will do his. By the end of the day I will have running water again and working appliances.

Hopefully also I will get to finish the last 30 pages of Dodie Smith's wonderful 1948 novel I Capture the Castle, the most reading fun I've had in a while. Smith is best known as the writer of The One Hundred and One Dalmations and its sequel Starlight Barking, but she was also a playwright and novelist. I Capture the Castle features one of the most captivating narrators I've come across in literature, and her observations are rich. The backdrop is 1930s England for this coming of age story told through Cassandra Mortmain's lengthy journals. There is so much here about becoming an adult in every sense -- not only the experience of first love, but also the experience of seeing the world -- family, social conventions, the ideas one has always taken for granted -- through more adult eyes. The story is deep in many ways, but it never takes itself too seriously. Must reading for Anglophiles.

I must sign off at this point, because the electrician will be here and he is turning off the electricity today. A vacation from electronics. Thank god this will all be done Friday, and then all we'll have to deal with is one colossal cleaning job.

Recourse

2009-12-15T07:14:00.000-08:00

It looks as if this is going to be a poetry week. Remodeling, pre-Christmas hoo-ha, family member in the hospital -- lots of fodder to write about and no attention yet for the writing. Here is a poem from last spring, before the idea of moving had even occurred to us.

Recourse

Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing.--Octavio Paz

I can recall a time lived
in the lilt of my mother's voice
singing to the radio, my father's white
shirt starched and cool
on my cheek, my grandfather's
Red Wing boots scuffed
and softened with wear and always
in my peripheral vision as I lay
on the carpet to watch
TV; these same details
I've tried to write over
and over, as if to render us
whole and together
once more.

--RZC

Imagine

2009-12-14T05:38:00.000-08:00

There is something about nightfall in early winter -- those days leading up to Christmas -- that makes me think of these lines from Rilke's Tenth Duino Elegy:

High overhead, isn't half of the night sky standing
above the sorrow in us, the disquieted garden?
Imagine that you no lnoger walked through your grief grown wild,
no longer looked at the stars through the jagged leaves
of the dark tree of pain, and the enlarging moonlight
no longer exalted fate's ruins so high
that among them you felt like the last of some ancient race.

Just imagine.

The Best Laid Plans

2009-12-11T05:50:00.000-08:00

Yesterday the kitchen remodel achieved critical mass. That is, several different things had to be done by this morning and half of them weren't going well. Which is pretty much my usual experience of this stage of remodeling. It was only that things had been going so well -- my carpenter is so efficient and meticulous and all deadlines to this point had been met with impunity. I had the audacity to believe that I might get through this remodel without a major hassle. Wrong.

The thing about this kitchen is that it is very small and the margins for error are tight. The plan necessitated placing a cooktop directly over a wall oven. The carpenter and electrician poured over the specs and discovered a small hump of unspecified dimension on the top of the oven insert. The uncertainty necessitated getting the appliances in early. Then we got 15 inches of snow on the day of the scheduled delivery.

Now, the delivery scheduling person called me on the eve of the big storm, and at that time, I said to her, "Hey what do you think about this big storm? Maybe we should just reschedule this delivery now." And she said to me, all god-like, "We'll be there." Famous last words.

I won't go into all the tedious details related to the lying customer service weasel who canceled Wednesday's delivery and promised delivery (though he could not guarantee the time) on Thursday. And who later lied about having talked to me at all. Or the tiresome woman I talked to on Thursday when it turned out that my delivery had never been rescheduled and could not get the appliances here until next Tuesday. Suffice it say that I spent the morning on the telephone with countertop people and appliance people and in conference with my carpenter about how to manage this turn of events. Ultimately, my carpenter went to the appliance store himself and measured the stupid bump on the top of the oven.

It is, as they feared, about 1/4 inch from fitting, so before the countertop people arrive today, he needs to construct an additional build-up to the height of the cabinets on that side of the room. No sweat, really. Except that he lost a day, too, from the storm. A day he had planned to spend sanding and painting. I have said before that he is a meticulous person, but I do believe he underestimated from the start the amount of wall and cabinet surface that would require painting. When he made his original bid, he made it both with and without painting. The painting number had seemed pretty reasonable to Frank and me. We'd considered doing the painting ourselves -- I actually like painting -- but when we looked the kitchen up and down, we realized it contained more surface area than it might at first glance appear. Still kind of recovering from the circus of moving, we decided we'd gladly pay the additional price to have the carpenter paint.

So the carpenter is working madly this morning, the countertop people, helpfully, don't arrive until this afternoon, and the whole kitchen needs another coat of paint. I had once had plans for this week as well. The new writing project beckons, and I had wanted to start some research on another piece. The stack of unread books on my nightstand grows. This has become a problem. I may end up one of these days writing blog posts not about the books I've read, but the books I have stacked up to read and why I want to read them.

Still, it could be a lot worse. Eventually, and before Christmas, I am assured, I will have a really workable new kitchen in our really wonderful apartment. The winter doldrums will arrive and I have a writing project to keep me busy. Life is good.

More on Daddy Longing

2009-12-09T05:43:00.000-08:00

It's a snow day here and I am, to paraphrase Ebeneezer Scrooge, giddy as a school girl. Everyone loves a day off, a found day, as it were, with nothing planned, no commitments. Free time to frolic or bake or lie in bed and read books or go sledding with the kids. For me, I get a whole day of having my husband to myself.

I wrote yesterday about daddy longing, and I suppose my husband longing is a sort of extension of that. I have, from the earliest days of our relationship, found myself feeling something akin to abandonment each day as he goes off to work. I've always known this is irrational -- particularly since I've never had the slightest notion that I am abandoning him when I go off to do my own work.

But I do remember being a small child, adoring my daddy, crying my eyes out when he left the house for work each day. My mother spoke of it often when I grew older because she had resented my devotion to him when she was the one who did pretty much everything for me every day. Or so it seemed to her. I remember that he was the one who provided all the humor, the fun and rough-housing. He often tucked me in at night, told me stories or read me books. At least when I was small. Things changed as time went on. Things do always change.

Unless I pay attention, which I've mostly trained myself not to do, I barely notice the small rush of feeling I get when Frank goes off to do his day. One has to accept the necessities of life and I do my best. We can't keep our loved ones with us every second of the day. Nor would we really want to. I think. At least most of the time.

But today is a snow day and we're going to hang out. I have no idea what we're going to do -- Frank is out in the living room as I write this, no doubt plotting all sorts of things. One thing we won't have to do is shovel. Hooray for apartment living. But there will probably be some dog walking and snow frolicking and maybe an afternoon nap. Being the purposeful guy that he is, he'll probably suggest we get something cleaned up or put away or re-ordered. Whatever it is, I'm there. Good times.

Forbidden Love

2009-12-08T04:52:00.000-08:00

The appetite -- among American women at least -- for stories of forbidden love is insatiable and permeates pretty much every subculture you can imagine. Think of the colossal success of the Twilight Saga, or even just the volume of vampire love lit available right now. A few months ago I wrote in this blog about the mainstreaming of juicy man-on-man love stories written for women.

Today, for those of you who didn't catch this piece when it appeared in the Wisconsin State Journal, I bring to your attention Amish romance.

Bonnet books, as they are also called, usually center on the story of a young Amish woman who has fallen in love with an outsider, say, a Menonite. These are chaste romances, generally offering no more than a few kisses by the end, but they are big sellers among Amish women, as well as other readers of religious fiction. The books are written by an outsider (she claims to do careful research), and some Amish critics do not find her depictions of their world completely realistic, but these small problems apparently do not affect sales.

What is interesting to me is that even in this chaste environment, the call of forbidden love is strong and pervasive. How does this fascination, this call develop in girls and women? Is it programmed into our DNA? Is it socialized into us?

I had a huge epiphany about the daddy longing behind my own love of romance a few years back, when I could not stop myself from compulsively watching the Joe Wright version of Pride and Prejudice with Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen. I mean, I deplored the Bronte-ization of Austen's work in that movie, and still could not stop wanting to watch it. The scene where Mr. Darcy strides across the field at sunrise to claim Elizabeth Benet once and for all was in many ways laughable. And yet it was the scene I waited for. I struggled with this cognitive dissonance for weeks until I was able to see the connection with my long-ago buried longing to be scooped up again into my daddy's arms.

I'd never really thought of Pride and Prejudice as a forbidden love story, but obviously, part of the novel's conflict is that Darcy is off limits for Elizabeth Benet because of her father's lesser standing in the strata of their society.

So really, is this what it all boils down to? Does the whole romance thing, chaste or otherwise, arise from a culture (or many cultures) of women who did not get enough of their fathers?

Live and Learn

2009-12-07T05:28:00.000-08:00

I've been teaching created writing to middle school aged children for almost 10 years in various enrichment programs. Usually I get the kids on a Saturday morning, or as part of a summer series like College for Kids. I look forward to these classes, and I'm generally proud of what comes out of them.

It seemed natural, then, to try teaching the class as an after school, extra-curricular offering. I thought I would start with bright, motivated students at a local private school, and see where I could take it from there.

I wish I could have realized in advance that kids who have already had a long day of sitting still and challenging their brains are not really up for more of the same at 3:30 in the afternoon. Even bright, highly motivated children who have an expressed desire to take a creative writing class. Or possibly even more so. You should see the size of the backpacks they drag around behind them on wheels. They need a big snack and some serious down time in front of the television, or possibly some physical activity -- sports or dance or just running around the neighborhood screaming at the top of their lungs.

The first evening of my after school class, many of the children came without snacks. I had actually thought of bringing a snack, but talked myself out of it for fear of students with allergies. Every summer I get a kid or two with allergies to dairy or wheat or peanuts. That first evening I had a class full of kids who were starving and not much up for any kind of brain work. One girl who did have a snack shared a few tidbits of sustenance, but not enough to really get any thoughtful work out of anyone. Oh well. We played games.

The second class, I brought a snack and eating that was the major class activity for the first 15 minutes. I theoretically get them for 90 minutes, but because of various things, most of the kids arrive 10 minutes late, so we're down to 70 there. We lost another 10-15 in gobbling and babbling and joking around at the beginning. At which point I began to feel a little desperate. I tried to share a point about writing craft, but it was clearly hopeless. They squirmed, they made jokes, they yelled across the room at each other. Oh, well. We played more games.

I've given up trying to impart any wisdom about writing craft at this point. Last week we started with snack and then went straight to writing exercises. These kids already have their heads stuffed with so much information, the last thing they really need is more of that. I'm scouring all my writing guides for exercises that are quick, entertaining, and at least partly interactive. The one they've liked best so far is one in which one child gives a few brief clues about an important event that occurred in her life, and from those clues the other children write a story about what they think actually occurred. They actually listened with great attention to each others' inventions.

I'm going back this afternoon, and not without a certain dread. I think I have something to hold their attention this time, but I'm worried about running out of material. Maybe next week, which is our last for this series, we'll just go back to play. I doubt I will try to teach my class again as an after school offering. As they say, live and learn.

A Whole New World

2009-12-03T06:00:00.001-08:00

I am trying to understand the weird mix of resistance -- almost to paralysis -- and anticipation I feel facing the first page of a new fiction project. I have been brewing a plan for this piece since May, when the idea first struck. I have journaled pages and pages thinking about it. I want to do this. But so far this morning what I have done is visit every online news source I could think of, watch (again) Beyonce's video for "All the Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)" -- I can't help it, I'm in awe of her sheer strength and flexibility as a dancer -- and lamented the loss of my Thursday New York Times crossword puzzle because for reasons too tiresome to go into, we don't get home delivery at the new place.

I will get started; I always do. But there is something about that moment when an idea is there in my head, all perfect and beautiful. The fact is, the minute I start blocking things out on the page, they become difficult, obscure. Unexpected puzzles come up in the rendering. Things never come out on the page entirely the way they looked and felt in my head.

And yet, I am entirely ready for a new project. A new world in which to immerse myself. It is what I love, what keeps me attempting this crazy thing called writing fiction. It is like opening the door to a dark and magnificent ballroom and turning the lights on one by one. Sort of. It's a lot of other things too, but I have no intention of exhausting myself to find metaphors when I have other writing to do. Forgive me.

I do just think I will take another half hour and head to Mickie's for some eggs and toast (no kitchen for a while longer yet). Maybe buy a New York Times while I'm there and knock off the crossword. I have a whole day stretched out in front of me.

State Street, Late November

2009-12-02T05:02:00.000-08:00

The remodeling proceeds apace and even my carpenter's cough seems to have cleared up. The electrician was in yesterday, and it was very sweet to be back in my study, dreaming up poetry while the men talked companionably, in brief manly sentences, about the project and its various challenges along the way.

Here is a small poem that came out of the day:

STATE STREET, LATE NOVEMBER

After rain, the street smells of fresh
meat and metal. A trail of leaves

iridescently gold on wet
pavement, marks a line

in the sidewalk. We keep
ourselves to the left, hand

in hand, our shoulders hunched
towards winter. Low

to the ground a crumpled brown
paper bag rolls across the street

like a small animal rushing
towards shelter.

--RZC

Save the Carpenter

2009-12-01T04:42:00.000-08:00

My carpenter has a terrible cough. He hacked all day yesterday while working on my kitchen. It doesn't seem to affect his work; he is meticulous and thoughtful to a fault and got an awful lot done yesterday. The renovation is perfectly on schedule.

But I'm worried about him. I'm feeling a little motherly. So far I have managed to mind my own business, but I want to ask whether he has seen a doctor. And wasn't he just getting over a cold when I saw him last at the end of October? Maybe he could use an inhaler to calm those broncho-spasms. I had to leave for a while in the middle of the day, just to give the worry a rest.

So, what is my problem? I mean, he's a grown man who can obviously take care of himself, even if he is one of those super blond, super pale Scandinavian types who even in perfect health always look a little bit sickly to me. And he is more or less the same age as my daughter, around whom I must still bite my tongue when she is sick or looking a little peaked. She is very good at reminding me that she does not need that sort of intervention from her mother at this stage of her life.

Last night as my carpenter was getting ready to leave, I thought of my Italian grandma, who always asserted that pale people needed to eat red meat to build up their blood. She also thought we needed several "wet meals" a week and to wear sweaters if there was a breeze. She had no idea that there might be such a thing as a vegetarian, but if she had, she would have worried about anyone on such a reckless diet. I come from a long line of worriers and feeders.

The carpenter will be back shortly and I dearly hope he got a good night's sleep. He is otherwise quite pleasant to have around. When he is not coughing, he whistles. I suspect, if the cough were actually to clear up, he might even sing while he works. And my kitchen is going to look fantastic.

To Live

2009-11-30T06:28:00.000-08:00

My friend Sally introduced me to this poem by Philippe Denis. I go back to it often for refreshment.
The translation is by another favorite of mine, Paul Auster.

TO LIVE

To live in the way one breathes,
to move on
in front of one's life--

what we reach
emerges from the day
like the wind,

binds our breath.

--Philippe Denis

Noisy Neighbors

2009-11-25T04:48:00.000-08:00

My brother-in-law left a can of Diet Coke in my refrigerator. I never have them myself because I know they are non-food chemical poison. And yet, there are times when I crave the flavor of a diet cola. So after ignoring it for a couple of days, I drank it. Unfortunately, my failure of will occurred at 6:00 in the evening, so the caffeine was still in my system at bedtime last night. No sleep for you.

I am not usually awake at bar time, so last night was my first opportunity to watch some of my student neighbors crawling home. They didn't actually crawl, but many of them talked in shouts and hooted. I have been marveling since the Badger game two weekends ago at the propensity for young drunken people to hoot. What are they trying to communicate with this loud, obnoxious sound? Frank thinks they are relieving stress.

Something to be thankful for here in the week of Thanksgiving is that if this is going on every night at bar time, I'm not hearing it. Possibly these are not the usual sounds of a late Tuesday night/early Wednesday morning, rather, the revelries of students about to take off for a long holiday weekend. I'm taking a couples of days off myself, and will return to the blog on Monday.

The Adventure of Late Middle Age

2009-11-24T06:04:00.000-08:00

Frank and I have decided to experiment with Thanksgiving on our own this year. I am currently without a stove as we get ready for our kitchen remodel, most of the family is headed somewhere else for the big dinner. A few friends have offered us a place at their tables, but we've declined, curious about what it would like to do the holiday by ourselves.

I can't think of another Thanksgiving when we have not felt obligated to be with others. I am struck now by how much obligation -- often happy obligation, but obligation nonetheless -- has driven the way we spend our holidays. I never minded. Well, sometimes I minded. But I rarely thought twice about it. And now that we are free, it seems a revelation, a wonder, to find ourselves able to decide on a restaurant in which to have our Thanksgiving meal. Or skip the thing altogether.

It is a function of getting older, I realize this, where you rediscover a chance to taste the irresponsibility of childhood. I think of my mother-in-law, pushing 91 now and recently moved to assisted living. She lived a life of great dignity and purpose, and now, as she recognizes her mind is not what it was, she experiments with what she really needs to bother with anymore. She doesn't see the point of changing her socks every day when they are often perfectly clean. Does she really need to put up with the confinement of a brassiere because, who cares? There is a gleam in her eye, a real enjoyment, as she challenges the aides or her adult children on these small matters of personal freedom.

My life is full of new things right now, and the future seems in some ways more unknown than it once did. It does not feel as if we are at sea, thankfully. We are full of excitement and possibility in a way I'd thought reserved only for people at the beginning of their lives. We are, in our tame, 50-something way, having an adventure.

Family Reunion, Italian style

2009-11-23T05:30:00.000-08:00

Italian family reunions are not for the weak hearted. I'm not sure the Italian half of my family is any more eccentric or excitable than any other. I'm just saying, you get a few dozen of them together, get them full of drinks and good food, and the noise level alone could send a more delicate soul to the hospital. Not to mention the face pinching and back slapping and other invasions of personal space that may or may not involve saliva.

For this occasion -- my auntie's 50th wedding anniversary at an Italian restaurant in suburban Chicago -- we rented a van so that my sisters and their husbands could drive down with us. Even with the van, we were short one seat, so my daughter and son-in-law drove their car too. One of my sisters flew in from Colorado, and just to add a level of complexity to the day, our agenda included a trip to Union Station to pick up her daughter, coming in from Galesburg, where she had just finished her first tri-semester at Knox College.

Our first challenge was getting everyone into the van. Not that there wasn't room, but you know, people need their coffee and their water bottles, and there was some disagreement about what food to bring along. Herding cats would be too strong. More like herding a pack of headstrong dogs who keep catching the scent of something enticing just off in the distance. And anyway, no one really looks forward to a trip down I-90 into Chicago.

After a few stops along the way -- gasoline, more coffee, toilets -- we met up in the labyrinth of parking and congested driving lanes around Woodfield Mall. Four of us decided to stay and shop while the other four intrepid travelers, including one anxious mother, set off into the belly of the beast to collect the college daughter. I was one of the shoppers.

Mega-malls have been known to suck the life force out of all but the most intrepid shoppers. I thought I knew this going in. I've been to the Mall of America many times and to Old Orchard in Skokie. But I have to admit, I was not up to the challenge of three-level Woodfield Mall the weekend before Thanksgiving. I was not prepared for the orgy of scents that are pumped out of the food and cosmetics stores -- grease and baked sugar (Cinnabon and McDonald's) blending with toxic clouds of perfume from Victoria's Secret, and the less offensive, more fruity scents from Body Shop and Lush and Bigelow. My eyes began to go so dry my eyelids felt sticky. I couldn't drink enough water. I looked over at my son-in-law at one point and he had developed brown circles under his eyes as if he needed a long nap or kidney dialysis. Music thumped and blared from the clothing boutiques. We had to sit down a lot. We were losing our mojo.

We were not really unhappy, therefore, to get back into the van, get back into the crush on 290 all heading home after a day of shopping, and find our way to the restaurant. Of course we had 10-mile-an-hour traffic from O'Hare to Cumberland, where we got off and found our way to a restaurant called Zia's.

The grabbing and pinching began as soon as we arrived. Don't think I'm talking about anything lecherous. This is simply the way my Italian family greets the world. The happier they are to see you, the harder they pinch. Wet kisses, cheers. Yes, they were happy to see us. I've got the bruises to show for it.

After the initial flurry of greetings as more and more people arrived, I was able to find a seat, where I could watch everyone doing their thing. This was my father's family, and he is gone now, as is his brother, the uncle who used to let us climb him like a mountain when we were small children. My other aunt is gone now, too. Auntie Grace is the only one left of that family, and she has survived two bouts of cancer and still seems to be going strong. She looked fabulous, in fact. Except for the white hair, she doesn't look a great deal different from her wedding photos, conveniently displayed for the party.

My cousins -- all pushing 50 now -- were channeling their parents. It was eerie to see my father and uncle in their faces, their voices, the joking and rough laughter. I might have been a small child again, watching my father and uncle -- already drunk on martinis -- prying open the clams and oysters for Christmas Eve dinner, loud and raucous with their shirtsleeves rolled up and wearing their wives frilly aprons. I got choked up a few times at the strange familiarity of it all.

The evening was a little hard on the husbands who married into the family. My son-in-law got stuck talking to the loudest of the loudmouths in the room, who apparently complained continually about all the things his wife (my cousin) "makes" him do. One brother-in-law looked like a deer in the headlights the whole evening. One of his few moments of enjoyment came when my aunt -- my uncle's widow from Milan -- corrected all the bad Italian on the menu in pencil and handed it to the waiter. Being from the north, she's a bit more of a stickler (not to mention more reserved and dignified) than the family she married into.

There were several rounds of toasts, the last silly and drunken, and a lot of glass clanging, which my aunt and uncle simply ignored. They've been married 50 years for god's sake. After the tiramisu, there was some dancing. My aunt attempted a tarantella with one of her grandsons, and also, for reasons I do not understand, the Greek party dance everyone knows from Zorba the Greek.

The talk amongst all the cousins was about how we all need to see more of each other. A lot of loose plans were made, and we'll see if anything comes of it. We are not famous for follow-through on that side of the family. It used to make my mother crazy. She'd married in, after all, and had thought the point of marrying an Italian was family cohesiveness. Not as much as you think.

And yet, there was so much bear-hugging, squeezing, back slapping, arm grabbing and cheek pinching on the way out, we all felt as if we'd been through a wringer as we piled into the van to go home. La familia!

Facing the Muse

2009-11-19T06:04:00.000-08:00

Nothing like a string of cloudy November days to bring on the poetry. Some weird combination of memory and melancholy gets evoked for me every year about this time. Here is a poem I wrote a few years ago after a prairie walk in the UW Arboretum.

FACING THE MUSE

At sunset wind rises
stirring tall grass the hiss
a murmur of childhood

a story a dream lost
in bittersweet colors
heavy metal November sky
trees going bare at winter's

breathy insinuations
so the bodies refuse
to stay underground
and the rumbling night train
calls me from sleep
run away run away run away

on the prairie at dawn
cold cheeks wet nose
wild asters periwinkle
at the edge of a swamp
it never ends
here never ends
lips moving the fingers
beginning to twitch

--RZC

Hooray for Taxes?

2009-11-18T04:57:00.000-08:00

It really should not come as a surprise that the healthiest states (excellent public health, low rates of obesity, smoking, cancer death, and higher numbers of doctors per capita) would be largely blue states. Likewise that the least healthy are mainly red states in the south. Check out the survey published by Forbes for the breakdown.

I think there should be a campaign on the order of Ladybird Johnson's Clean-Up America in the sixties to bring people back around to the idea that taking care of each other as a community (i.e., paying taxes to fund education, public health, health care for all, etc.) is actually the best way to take care of ourselves and our country's future. Let's put Madison Avenue on it. Seriously. I remember a time before it became shameful to just dump the garbage from your car on the street. I know it still happens, but nowadays, it is shocking, like watching a pregnant woman smoking a cigarette and drinking a martini.

Imagine a campaign to encourage people to enjoy paying taxes and the societal improvements that come from that.

Just a Touch of Chaos

2009-11-17T05:06:00.000-08:00

As of today I will have no stove, which was, I must remind myself, my choice. Next week we have to figure out how to get the refrigerator into the dining room, so that the week after, my carpenter can begin deconstructing the kitchen.

In the planning stages, this all had seemed like such a good idea -- get the carpenter in quickly after the move and get the kitchen in shape in time for the Christmas cooking. Now, of course, I'm asking myself why I didn't consider giving myself more breathing space before I turned my abode to (semi) chaos again. I don't like to think too much about the fact that the older I get, the more recovery time I want from every sort of change that comes my way. Even the good stuff.

My carpenter promises that he will be dedicated (his word, kind of lovely, I thought) to my job. I think what he meant was that he wouldn't be juggling me with another project for the space of our remodel. But the counter people and the electrician have given no such assurances.

What we're doing here is actually pretty simple. We love the old, original cabinets and we're keeping them. Mainly we're just moving things around to create better working space, bringing in appliances that better fit the scale of the kitchen and countertops that can stand up to a lot of messy Italian cooking. Okay, simpler than gutting the place and starting from scratch.

I suppose it is best to just get this over with. Sort of like couples who decide to have the second child before the first is out of diapers because might as well get it all over with up front. But I have enjoyed my -- so far -- one week of peace and quiet, with our things organized enough to begin to feel like home. I know where to find all my clothes and most of my shoes. We're getting the rhythm of trash removal here and everyone's laundry schedules. During the week, the students are mostly pretty quiet and we don't hear as much on the weekends as we thought we might. We've begun to sleep very well in our new place. I still need a good book to read, but other than that, the last 10 days have been pretty sweet.

I'm going to need a very good book to read.

Ave Atque Vale

2009-11-16T05:57:00.000-08:00

I love the way Billy Collins can wring so much humanity from a commonplace experience. This poem stopped me this morning. A touching and dignified eulogy to road kill.

AVE ATQUE VALE

Even though I managed to swerve around the lump
of groundhog lying on its back on the road,
he traveled with me for miles,

a quiet passenger
who passed the time looking out the window
enjoying this new view of the woods

he once hobbled around in,
sleeping all day and foraging at night,
rising sometimes to consult the wind with his snout.

Last night he must have wandered
into the road, hoping to slip
behind the curtain of soft ferns on the other side.

I see these forms every day
and always hope the next one up ahead
is a shredded tire, a discarded brown coat,

but there they are, assuming
every imaginable pose for death's portrait.
This one I speak of, for example,

the one who rode with me for miles,
reminded me of a small Roman citizen,
with his prosperous belly,

his faint smile,
and one stiff forearm raised
as if her were still alive, still hailing Caesar.

--Billy Collins

Just a Touch of Hypochondria

2009-11-12T06:45:00.000-08:00

I woke up this morning in my new bedroom, which now has curtains and walls in Andover Cream. Some of my favorite pictures are perched on dressers, waiting to be hung over the weekend. As I lay in bed I began to hear the slightly atonal song of the radiators coming to life and the hiss of plumbing from upstairs. None of these sounds were too loud -- they wouldn't have wakened me. But they made me remember that I am surrounded by people now, by other lives being lived in the other apartments around me and it made feel glad to be alive.

This gladness, of course, may be influenced by the fact that I fell asleep last night wondering if I might be having a heart attack and consigning myself to whatever powers may be. The life of a hypochondriac is ever complicated because every ache or pain suggests a myriad of horrible diseases and outcomes that almost always turn out to be nothing. I was half asleep when I felt a sharpish pain in my left chest that seemed -- I don't think it was my imagination -- to radiate into my left arm. I waited for it to get worse or for some other symptoms to appear. I considered the possibility that it was merely gas or some muscular thing trying to work itself out. I took my pulse, which aside from being slightly fast, seemed normal as ever. I noticed that I had no trouble breathing.

One may wonder why I did not wake the husband or call 911, but I have seen up close and in detail too many times what happens when a person goes to the emergency room complaining of anything that might be heart related. Honestly, I would prefer to be really dying before I put myself through that. So I waited. I got up, took some ibuprofen (note to self: keep some aspirin in the house for possible heart attack symptoms) and noticed that I did not feel weak or sick.

I went back to bed and decided to wait it out a while longer. The next thing I knew was the music of an apartment building preparing to meet the day. Life is good.

My Kingdom for a Book

2009-11-11T05:52:00.000-08:00

I'm between books right now and I'm annoyed at how difficult it appears to be, deciding what to read next. After I finished An Echo in the Bone, the seventh and most recent installment in Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series, I toyed with the idea of starting the whole saga over from the first book. I enjoyed this most recent outing of the series (there were a couple of semi-dead ones in the middle) and I wanted to hang on to Gabaldon's fictional world a while longer. It's always that way with the good books. You never want them to end. I get almost the same feeling coming home from a great vacation. I am not ready to come back to real life.

Then I read Michelle Wildgen's book which was so good and so satisfying, and I remembered how much I feel nourished by really good literary novels. I pulled Sarah Waters's The Night Watch from the shelf. Again. I've started that book twice before in the last year. I love her writing, and her earlier books, Fingersmith and Tipping the Velvet are favorites. The thing is, the book is one of those time backwards plots -- combining, as in her earlier works, elements of history and thriller -- starting in post-world War II London. The sort of lonely, bombed-out picture she recreates in the first chapter just made me think of all the suffering yet to get through, and I put it down again. I really truly will read that book, and when I do I will no doubt love and admire it. But at the moment, I just can't seem to face going through it.

I've considered re-reading Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles. On the plus side, she has created a flawed and enigmatic hero moving around in the fascinating, historical world of 16th-century Europe. On the negative side, I have read through this series twice before, and ditto the suffering.

In his marvelous little book The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot, Charles Baxter speculates that the reason we mainly see people in airports reading escape fiction -- romance, thrillers and the like -- is that the stress and anxiety of travel is enough challenge for most of us. We want something formulaic. We do not want difficulty or suffering unless we can be sure things will work out and the world will be returned to order at the end of the story.

Our whole lives seem stressful enough these days, with all the uncertainties of the economy, the long drawn out battle over health care and climate change and the conduct of our government in two wars and its schizophrenic approach to social justice. An uncertain future is certainly the background noise of our lives today in a way it was not 10 years ago. Add the various, unavoidable and stressful events of your own life to that, and escape fiction starts to look pretty good.

I'm happy to report that actually, I don't want to read something plainly formulaic. I'd like some good writing, an element of surprise. It's just the suffering I would prefer not to live through -- vicariously, as we do when we read good fiction. At least right now.

So, where does that leave me? Anyone out there got a suggestion of a satisfying, well-written novel that won't drag me through hell? I would be very grateful.

Laundry: Who Knew?

2009-11-10T05:10:00.000-08:00

Today is supposed to be laundry day, and I'm nervous as hell about it. That was embarrassing to admit -- even to myself -- but I have been planning for the last week that this would be the day and here it is, and I'm scared to go downstairs.

Let me back up. One of the reasons I fell for this building, the clincher, perhaps, after seeing the apartment itself and realizing it had a lot of potential, was the laundry room in the basement. The room is large, neat and orderly, with a high ceiling and windows set high up on two walls that look out to the south and west sides of the building. I first saw it on a sunny, summery day, with light streaming over the washers -- 4 of them, in fact. There are also three dryers, and gleaming stainless steel tables for sorting and folding. And then there are the laundry chutes that originate in each apartment and terminate above one of the tables. Unlatch the little door at the bottom and your clothes are meant to slide out. I haven't tested this yet. It is charming and magical and also part of what scares me.

I don't know the routines here yet. I walked through a wave of humid, fabric softened air on my way out the building yesterday morning. So, someone does their laundry on Monday. I'll admit, I feel intimidated by the possibility of having to compete for the machines. And the thought of anyone witnessing the sorting of my dirty laundry. Many years ago, when Frank and I first were dating, he suggested we do our laundry together at the laundromat down the street. He was all about how practical money-saving it would be to combine loads. I had to swallow hard at the image of our dirty underthings thrashing around together in a public machine. Were we ready for that yet?

I am in most ways one of the least private people I know, but there is something incredibly intimate about laundry, and I'm used to keeping mine to myself. I must have heard too many times the adage about airing one's dirty laundry in public. I understood it was meant as a metaphor, but it always grabbed me. No, we do not want that.

There are rules here at the co-op about what times you can do your laundry -- not too late, not too early -- but I can't remember them right now and I can't seem to find the stack of papers in which the co-op rules are hidden. I don't know yet, either, whether I need to worry about using up too much hot water, particularly now in the morning, when people might need to take showers and get ready for their day.

Oh, hell. It's just laundry, for crying out loud.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

2009-11-09T06:24:00.000-08:00

An old friend, the writer Rick Christman, had the habit of repeating odd, offbeat lines from his favorite books. He had a finely tuned ear for the absurd, and after reading Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, he often found occasion to repeat the line, "Where am I?" said Dwayne. It is those very words, in Rick's gravelly voice, that have been playing in my head over the last couple of days.

We've just moved, obviously. We've got 90% of the boxes unpacked, the walls that needed new color have it, and things are reasonably livable. Yet it still seems like a (wonderful) place we're just visiting, although every surface is covered with a film of black dust. I'm not sure how much we tracked in or created with the move or how much was there before. The dog lies down somewhere and then gets up a few minutes later to find somewhere else to lie down. She looks at us, clearly wondering, "When do we get to go home?"

I'm getting used to WiFi. Sometimes it is fast and great, and sometimes it is so slow I can't watch a You Tube video. Something to do with the old building or my router is about to go or maybe sunspots. I know nothing. My ipod was dead on arrival, but then, following the advice of a Facebook friend, I managed to revive it, which seems nothing short of miraculous.

I guess the main thing is that we made it through last week, which aside from our own move, included the necessity of moving my 90 year-old mother-in-law into assisted living. And learning that my daughter and son-in-law's very bad, very lovable dog (she was never bad to me) needed to be euthanized. It continues to amaze me, the way a pet can be the repository for so much feeling we don't let ourselves experience anyplace else. I cried more for that dog than for anything I've been through in the last few years. It could have been the dog herself -- the complicated mess of loving an animal that loves and trusts you, in spite of behaviors that make it close to impossible for it to be around strangers or children. Or maybe the dog was merely a pretext to feel a bunch of backlogged grief and sadness over life's harder necessities.

Things change. People move. Life goes on. "Where am I?" said Dwayne.

Bathroom Ruminations

2009-11-05T04:43:00.000-08:00

You know, at our house -- our old house, that is -- I had everything pretty much the way I wanted it. I thought that this morning as Frank and I struggled (not too hard and with some success) to be civil about sharing our small bathroom space. Timing, the placement of toiletries and equipment, it all becomes critical to peace and harmony. Marriages have broken up over bathroom strife, and I am happy to report that so far I am more upset by all the boxes that still litter the living and dining rooms than I am by the tiny, inconveniently arranged, though otherwise rather lovely bathroom.

I thought about our old house this morning, and the fact that in it I had most everything exactly the way I wanted it, without regret or longing. I have no desire to go back. It occurred to me that a certain amount of inconvenience was exactly what was needed in our lives. Don't get me wrong. We have more than adequate living space in a beautiful building where we can walk or otherwise easily get to everything we need. We have more than enough comfort and convenience. But the changes and compromises are throwing us back on our resources. We're forced to think harder and more creatively about what we're doing along with the consequences of our choices day to day.

Living consciously is never easier. The point, I think, is to feel more alive.

So, the painter will be here in a few minutes, and I have more boxes to unpack. Cheers.

New Digs

2009-11-04T04:03:00.000-08:00

There are adjustments in moving to an 80 year-old apartment building after some 30 years living in a house. For one, you can't put the cable where ever you want it. The positive spin we're putting on that is that it promotes better sleep hygiene not to watch TV in bed. Not to mention more time to read. And then there are the radiators, which are so cool on one level, but strange to get used to, pouring out waves of heat at appointed morning and evening hours, squealing as the steam inside them first gets rolling.

Our little beagle is nervous as a cat with all the new noises, though she really likes the new neighborhood with all its unfamiliar sniffs and also lots of students who are careless about dropping food on the ground. She can't see the sidewalk from our windows, though, and I can tell this disorients her. How can she survey her domain without a view of the sidewalk?

We have enough boxes unpacked for me to see the home that is starting to emerge, and enough still stacked against various walls for my internal chaos meter to jump from time to time. But this is happy stuff. And the writer in me is already feeling much less anxious as I get a few words down on the page.

I'm afraid that will have to be all for now. The painter needs to get in this room to prep the walls for some paint. Later.

Here We Go

2009-10-30T05:39:00.000-07:00

We're in the home stretch now. Most everything is packed and what is left will be dealt with over the weekend. There are still half-filled boxes all over the house, but I think we're almost there. This picture cannot fully document my internal sense of chaos, but it gestures towards it anyway. I'm taking down my computer this weekend, so this will be my last blog until I'm up and running again, which means, considering the cable company, an old building, and the usual snafus that occur in times like these, I may not be up and running until the middle of next week.

But Not For Long

2009-10-29T07:35:00.000-07:00

Michelle Wildgen's new novel But Not For Long is the best sort of literary novel: sure in its voice, rich in its characters, and with enough plot to keep you turning the pages. In a different publishing era, you would be hearing a lot about a novel this good, and let's hope it catches on by word of mouth, because it deserves to.

But Not For Long gives us three days in the lives of three members of a sustainable foods co-op in Madison, Wisconsin as the world around them appears to be inching towards apocalypse. The spring has been too warm, causing extended and unexplained power outages. There are gas and food shortages too and a complete lack of reliable information coming from government. These eerie, unexplainable events in the external world both reflect and exacerbate Hal, Karin and Greta's internal struggles as they come to grips with change and loss in their own lives.

Each one of them is reaching in his or her own way for comfort and grounding, a renewed sense of connectedness to themselves and the people around them. For Hal, after recently losing his mother and his father's retreat to a cabin in the north woods, it is difficult to find meaning anymore in his work for an organization that feeds the ever-growing ranks of the needy. Karin struggles to find more than fleeting connection to the people in her life while Greta has come to the co-op after leaving an alcoholic husband who chooses the first night of the blackout to show up drunk on their doorstep.

The book opens with the unforgettable image of a dock on Lake Monona loosened from its moorings, and a dog stranded out there on the water. Onlookers speculate where the dog's owner had gone and why he left the dog out there like that. There is something so ordinary and yet so ominous in the image of the abandoned dog, the loose pier, the unknown depths of the lake, and the image sets up perfectly the tone of this novel that continues with each new incident to supply a network of subtext that makes you recall images long after you've finished reading.

Michelle Wildgen gives us a stunning meditation on the state of our lives, and yet the large themes of post-industrial dystopia, climate change and sustainable living, alcoholism and aging never overshadow the individual and specific journeys of her characters. They feel completely real -- vulnerable, flawed and reaching for something outside of themselves -- never as mere props in a morality play.

I read this book as compulsively as a page-turner, but with a deeper sense of life in the bargain. Call it sustainable reading, a story that is so evocative of our times and so beautifully rendered that it stays with you, actually nourishes your heart and soul for much longer.

Tomorrow and tomorrow . . .

2009-10-27T05:58:00.000-07:00

We're about 75% dismantled and packed, I would guess. There are another 10 or so boxes of stuff scattered around the house that haven't made it yet to the garage. The back porch is filled with lamps and end tables we couldn't get any takers for on Craigslist. I suspect we still have more stuff than the new apartment can hold, but we'll have to jump off that bridge when we get there.

This morning I did the crossword puzzle with more concentration than I have mustered in days. The crossword felt critically important today, filling those little squares competently and completely. A little order in the chaos of life, which this weekend also included another emergency room visit, this time with Frank's ailing 90-year-old mother. I can say this for UW Hospitals: They treat old people very nicely, if not quickly.

The thing about having problems when you're old is that no one particularly blames you for them, the way they do for a younger person with chronic illness or an emotional handicap. There is no vague whiff of disapproval. People feel free to be genuinely kind.

In the meantime, I am, in bits and snatches, trying to finish Michelle Wildgen's wonderful new novel But Not For Long. I have so much to say about it, but I want to be completely finished. Too many interruptions at the moment. Maybe tomorrow. We'll all still be here tomorrow, I think.

Sing Out Loud in Public Places

2009-10-23T06:40:00.000-07:00

I defy you, my dear readers, not to be cheered and heartened by this video from Improv Everywhere performing their Grocery Store Musical to a group of unsuspecting shoppers at a Queens, New York grocery store. The shoppers' faces are equally, possibly more entertaining than the performance itself.

I watched it this morning still groggy from sleep, grumpy about another day of gloomy weather and tedious tasks to accomplish, completely unprepared for the rush of delight that swelled in my chest. It reminded me of a Co-Counseling workshop I attended years ago in which the leader insisted that learning to sing out loud in unexpected public places is transformative. I can believe it now.

I predict a trip to the phone store in my near future.

2009-10-21T05:51:00.000-07:00

As we talk about downsizing our expenditures along with our belongings, I keep offering up the idea of getting rid of our cell phones. I have ever been ambivalent about them. Sure, I've got one that's a great texting phone now, which is a nice convenience. Frank always points out how great it is to be able to find each other when we're not home, or in crowds at events, and etc. And at least for now, his company pays his monthly bill for the pleasure of being able to contact him anytime anywhere.

But still. Would it be so horrible to be incommunicado part of the time? Is that not why we have voice mail and answering machines (we are still of the generation that cannot quite give up the land line, robo-calls notwithstanding)? Sigh. And then there's the whole thing about radiation and tumors, though I notice that even the most super health nut, everything-must-be-completely-organic-and-natural-around-me trainer at my gym has a BlackBerry.

If anything goes wrong with my phone, I have a choice of driving to one of two places on the far edges of town to deal with it, which I may have to do very soon. I woke at about 2:00 this morning to the catchy tune my cell phone plays when it powers down. In my sleepy, semi-dream state I wondered whether Sprint was perhaps transmitting some new phone software that required a power down and reboot. And then I fell back asleep. When I turned on the phone this morning, the battery was completely dead. I'm pretty sure I recharged it yesterday morning, though it is hard to remember, and anyway, it has never gone completely dead on me before.

I know this stuff happens to everybody. This is our lives now and all that. I still hate that it takes up any of my time.

This is Our Health Care

2009-10-20T05:12:00.001-07:00

My brother got to take another ambulance ride to UW Hospital emergency room yesterday. He is chronically ill, a brittle type I diabetic with serious heart and lung problems. He is on an alphabet list of medications, patiently, lovingly and carefully administered by the staff at the group home where he's been living for almost three years. Yesterday he was at an appointment when his blood pressure dropped dangerously low. The EMTs were called, as well as my sister Kathy, who is my brother's legal guardian.

The emergency room was swamped yesterday morning by possible flu cases, Kathy judged from the number of waiting room sitters wearing surgical masks. She was ushered to the cubicle where my brother had been deposited. A nurse was hooking him up to telemetry to monitor his blood pressure, heart rate, and respiration rate. The blood pressure was very low and my brother was groggy, but able to talk.

When the nurse prepared to start an IV line, my brother roused himself to tell her he was a "hard stick." He has had hundreds of IV lines in his eventful life as a medical patient and he knows what he's talking about. He told the nurse she would need to use a very small "butterfly" type of IV. The nurse balked at this and said she did not approve of butterflies. My brother and sister both protested and told her she would not be able to do it.

"Don't put him through it," my sister said.

She was ignored. The nurse attempted to insert a standard IV needle into my brother's arm 7 or 8 times (does that count as torture?) before she gave up and called in another nurse, who took one look at the mess the first nurse had made and said, "Oh. We need a butterfly."

A doctor finally came in an hour and a half after my brother arrived. Kathy was starving by then, so she'd been watching the clock. My brother had dozed on and off during the wait. The machine took his blood pressure every fifteen minutes. His highest blood pressure of the morning, Kathy told me, was 90/50. He actually stopped breathing three times, long enough that the telemetry machine started clanging away. No one came in to look at him, so Kathy would poke him and he'd start breathing again. The third time, Kathy went out to find a nurse.

"Does anyone even pay attention to the alarms?" she asked.

"Oh, they're notoriously wrong," the nurse (not my brother's) said.

When the doctor finally came in, she took a short history and left. Kathy took that opportunity to run out to the nearest Subway to get a sandwich, and since there was a video rental place next door, stopped to rent a movie. Back at the hospital, she and my brother (he sleeping on and off) watched the entire movie on her computer, uninterrupted.

When my sister realized she would have to go, she went to find my brother's nurse.

"Oh, they're admitting him overnight for observation," the nurse said.

By that time, Kathy did not see much point in asking why none of this had been communicated to either her or my brother. She did feel the need to remind them, however, that my brother had not had any food since breakfast, had not had a blood sugar drawn, and had not been given any long-lasting insulin all day, which would be hard on any type I diabetic, but for my brother, who has always been extremely brittle and prone to wild ups and downs in his blood sugars, it can be catastrophic.

So, as far as I know at this moment, my brother is still alive, and his condition is probably much improved by today. I'm sure he eventually received some appropriate treatment. Mostly my family is grateful and profoundly humbled by the amount of care my brother has received over the years (thank you Dane County and State of Wisconsin!). He is exactly the person the public health opponents don't want their tax dollars supporting. He is very sick and has never taken (or been able to) very good care of himself. His case is complicated. His life is complicated.

And in defense of UW Hospitals, they were swamped. Their waiting room was packed and ambulance after ambulance arrived over the course of the day, dropping off equally sick and distressed patients. The system is stressed to its maximum. Staffing is short. Compassion may be one of the casualties of a system pushed so far.

My sister had no sense that my brother was being discriminated against because of his social or economic status. She observed that pretty much everyone was getting the same treatment. This is what it has already come to.

Stuff and Nonsense

2009-10-19T05:53:00.000-07:00

We have too much stuff. I mean, we still have too much stuff. We packed close to 90% of the kitchen yesterday, weeding out enough to overfill two bankers' boxes with items for St. Vincent de Paul (and that's not including the 4-5 boxes of household stuff we've already given away). My lovely brother-in-law packed about two thirds of my library. The CDs and DVDs are packed, as are maybe a third of our linens. So far we have filled 40 boxes. Granted, they are smallish boxes, gleaned from the back room at the bookstore. But still.

Stubbornly, I still have two sets of dishes. I say stubbornly because Frank has always been satisfied with our plain everyday diner ware and has no sense of occasion in relation to what he is eating off of. I'm not sure I care that much anymore myself, but it was drilled into me growing up that a complete, grown-up household requires a set of "good" dishes. My good dishes are also sturdy enough to be used on a daily basis, since my own streak of practicality always kicked in whenever I considered real china.

We also have too many glasses and that is not my fault. I blame IKEA, which is like a hardware store for housewares (in the same way that Trader Joe's is like a hardware store for food). The hardware store sensibility is important in that it attracts men like the Frankmeister, who normally don't like to shop. But if we're traveling anywhere near an IKEA, well, he can't get his hands on a shopping cart fast enough. And though he is completely unfussy about dinnerware, he is obsessed with finding the right drinking glass for every possible beverage and occasion. His most recent acquisition was a dozen 24 oz. water glasses. They are tall and wide and take up an unconscionable amount of space in the cupboards. I had to put down the hammer on that one. Only 4 of those glasses are making it through the downsize.

For some reason, over the years, we've collected 7 thermos jars, 4 coffee carafes and 6 travel mugs. Why? No frickin' idea. We also have hundreds of votive candle refills (IKEA!).

Speaking of travel mugs, Frank discovered this morning that the 4 (he insisted) we kept are all packed away. My sister is a kitchen-packing machine, and there was a little time there at the end when I stopped noticing what was going into the boxes and what we were saving to pack just before leaving. We also have only one dinner plate left on the shelf. But somehow, we still have dozens of glasses.

The Deliciousness of Paint

2009-10-16T05:40:00.000-07:00

So, we're doing paint colors now. Those who know me well have detected my obsession with paint. I love it. I love pretty much everything about paint, from the little tool I use to pry the cans open to the wet latexy smell. I love the way it pours in a v-shaped stream of thick, viscous color. I love rolling color onto the wall and standing back to admire. I even love the hollow sound of pounding the lid back onto the can.

I am going to paint the two bedrooms and the bathroom in the new apartment. I'm not in love with the living room and dining room colors, but I can live with them. The kitchen is going to get a total spruce-up this winter, so painting will be put off on that room. I had been to the Benjamin Moore store, to Home Depot, Ace Hardware, examining and comparing chips, hoping to find the exact colors to match those in my imagination. I am famous, among our friends, for having repainted the living room walls in our first home 5 times until I had found the exact shade of cedar rose. Few among my acquaintance understood the delicate balance between it looking either too pink or too beige.

And then yesterday I discovered Hallman Lindsay's Historic Colors of America collection. Sure, Benjamin Moore has historical colors as well, but I had begun to find them boring and predictable. And Hallman Lindsay's collection has better names for their colors. I am a sucker for these names: Melville (a gray sea green), Longfellow (another green with a bit more blue to it), Wooly Thyme (a rustic olive brown), Meetinghouse Blue (a clear blue gray with a hint of green).

The color that actually matches my idea for the bathroom is called Elise, but I am tempted, only because of the names, to go for Marrett Apple or Melville. The bedroom will be Andover Cream, and to my sensibility, there is perfect harmony between the color and the name.

My problem now is finding rooms to paint Milkweed, Woodstock Rose, Cottage Green and Flaxen Field. The colors really don't go with anything else in the house, but I feel now that I can't really be happy without those names gracing my walls.

Holding My Breath

2009-10-15T05:19:00.000-07:00

I hadn't been able to name it until this morning, this feeling that is in some ways not a feeling but an almost physical experience of anticipation and sort of mentally holding my breath. Things on both the personal and public --that is national, political -- levels have been set into motion, and yet nothing, exactly, has happened yet.

I care deeply about health care reform. I am unashamedly in favor of not only a public option, but a single-payer health care system. I assume the latter is not really an option just now, but with the sadly flawed Baucus bill out of committee, it is not yet impossible to find a way to the former. Like so many people I know, I write my letters, sign the petitions that come my way, telephone Herb Kohl's office from time to time to let him know what I want. But ultimately, this baby is out of my hands. I mostly stand by, waiting to see what will happen.

On the personal level, we have a little over two weeks now before we move to our new apartment. I am terrible at waiting. I list and re-list all the things that need doing, calls to make, paint colors to select, what to pack and how to pack it. It is not entirely different from when I was a child, waiting for Christmas or my birthday or the first day of school. Will that day ever come? And dreading it at the same time. I can always be disappointed. I've had some experience (haven't we all?) with that.

And though it has been hard for me to write much during this period of heavy anticipation, I have been sending out stories to literary journals and copies of my book manuscript to various contests. I don't feel particularly hopeful in the current climate of dwindling possibilities in publishing. It flies in the face of all the positive thinking claptrap I've been encouraged to apply to this and other areas of life, but my current mantra, the thought I invoke with each mailing is, This manuscript has a snowball's chance in hell. I doubt that it influences outcomes one way or the other, but it makes me feel ever so much more cheerful about the endeavor.

This is what we're doing now.

2009-10-13T05:02:00.000-07:00

People exhaust me. I'm glad I've been mostly staying away from news -- particularly cable TV news -- the past couple of weeks. Every time I take a small peek, it's the same old hysteria. I tuned in briefly yesterday and noticed that everyone is piling on President Obama for one thing or another. I guess he's been in office 9 1/2 months now, which apparently should be enough time to solve the economic recession and unemployment, climate change, Guantanamo, health care, gay parity, and get us out of Iraq and Afghanistan with some semblance of responsibility.

Perhaps time to review Louis CK's wonderful rant Everything is Amazing and Nobody is Happy.

I've had a cold. Not a bad one, but excuse enough to abandon the serious reading on my nightstand for a little British chick lit I picked up from the advanced copy shelf at the book store -- a book so scorned by my co-workers it practically begged to be read by someone: Perfect Timing by Jill Mansell. It is pure fluff, a romantic novel about mostly carefree young people living in London, partying way too much, hiding their torches for each other until circumstances create the perfect farcical situations in which they can finally declare themselves. The tone is breezy, which seems to be a requirement of the British version of chick lit (see Sophie Kinsella, Sarah Mason, Hester Browne), but there is enough character development to keep me interested and the writing is competent enough not to get in the way of my enjoyment.

I still haven't finished Diana Gabaldon's new 800-page Outlander novel, An Echo in the Bone, which finds our heroes Jamie and Claire in the midst of the American Revolution. Gabaldon weaves tons of historical context from both the British and Colonial sides of the conflict, and I enjoy reading slowly. Over time, the subsidiary characters --Jamie and Claire's children, their good friend Lord John Grey -- have come more alive, and their stories take up much of the book, which is actually a relief. This series has always been so much more than romance (history, adventure, science fiction), reminding me of the late Dorothy Dunnett's two incredible series, The Lymond Chronicles and House of Niccolo (though not so painfully erudite).

Soon enough I will begin to crave heavier-on-the-craft realistic fiction. But as an old therapist of mine once used to say, This is what we're doing now.

Galesburg Impressions

2009-10-12T05:55:00.000-07:00

We're taking this move from our home to an apartment methodically. For a few weeks now, we've been spending a part of each day and a large portion of each weekend going through all of our cupboards, drawers, file cabinets and bookshelves, giving away or selling off bags and boxes of books and housewares and clothes and linens. There is a pleasant tedium to the routine of sorting through, deciding the disposition of things, and then enjoying the empty space created by their leaving.

It was nice, though, to take a break from it all this past weekend, when we visited Galesburg, Illinois, for Family Weekend at Knox College. For one thing, it was a pleasure to see a young woman so completely content with her choices. Knox clearly provides a happy home for creative spirits. Knox College and the city of Galesburg are steeped in history as well -- a stop on the Underground Railroad of West Central Illinois, the site of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, birthplace of Carl Sandburg, college of Edgar Lee Masters (though he did not graduate).

Something like two-thirds of this country's railroad traffic goes through Galesburg. We learned this after taking a wrong turn Friday night, and ending up on a highway that crossed over a raildroad yard as massive as the one I remember from the heyday of Milwaukee's industrial valley when I was a child. It was eerie at night, all that track lit in the yellow-orange glow of sodium lamps. On one of our attempts to find the right road back to the hotel, we came across the abandoned Maytag refrigeration plant, a behemoth facility closed down at the end of 2004. Still brightly illuminated by industrial strength lights, it seemed ghostly, Titanic, a monument to American post-industrial despair. When we finally found our motel, we felt as if we had escaped the underworld.