September 2008 Archives
On Sunday mornings, James generally wakes up earlier than I do, and by the time I shuffle out to our living/dining/guest room/study, there's a big decaf latte awaiting me, together with the Sunday New York Times. We sit in cheerful peace on the sofa, passing sections back and forth, until I'm fully awake. Some of my happiest hours have been spent in that drowsy, companionable quiet, catching up on the world.
This morning, I learned three things of literary interest, and here they are:
#1: Margaret Atwood, who is interviewed in Deborah Solomon's regular feature "Questions for . . ." in the Magazine, is currently touring with a series of lectures on the issue of debt, drawn from her latest book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth.
I didn't know the average American family carries $9,200 in credit card debt. I didn't think we carried any, and I asked James to make sure; we don't. Student loan debt (still) and a car payment, yes. Insanely huge payments to Oberlin College every month, yes. But on the whole, we're fairly minimal in our purchases. We've made a fine art of doing without.
Long ago, when Sharon, my birth mother, and her first husband were young, married, and broke, they used to clip out pictures of what they wished they could give each other for Christmases and birthdays. They'd slip the little clippings into a card and give each other those instead. Sweet, right? James and I have often joked, when holidays roll around, about O. Henry's story "The Gift of the Magi," in which she sells her beautiful hair to buy him a chain for his pocket-watch, and he sells his watch to buy combs for her beautiful hair. (My favorite line is when she "leap[s] up like a little singed cat.")
Just last night, James said, "I don't want anything for my birthday this year." He rubbed his fingers and thumb lightly together. Money.
"Me, too, then," I replied. It's been our pact for most years of our marriage. Frugality and romance. (And hey, let's put it into perspective: if we can afford coffee and the Times on a Sunday, I feel rich.) Thanks to Tayari for the link to a blog-post by my favorite chica lit writer, Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez (about whom I've blogged before), who lost her house in the recent financial meltdown and is sounding off on the lie of trickle-down economics:
Featherweight or not, though, she sat down and politely shredded the story we were workshopping that day.
Now she's shredding, in lectures and in print, our economy, which has managed to end up in tatters quite well on its own. How did she come across the idea for a book about debt "two or three years ago," when "[e]verybody was happily buying subprime-mortgate vehicles"?
But just think what might have happened if, in chapter three, Harriet had gotten a Visa card.
#2: Hannah Tinti's new book, The Good Thief, got a positive review in the Book Review. Hannah, whom you have no doubt met and whose generous, informative presentations on publishing you have surely attended if you've been anywhere on the writers' conference circuit during the past few years, is the founding editor of One Story, that lovely little journal that features just that: one story per issue. She's got a book of short stories, Animal Crackers, and now Maile Meloy's heralding the novel as "a book for adults, in addition to being the kind of story that might have kept you reading all day when you were home sick from school," and credits it with a "steady, authoritative style." If you've been longing for a novel with a one-handed, orphaned child protagonist set in the mid-19th century America, Tinti has written your next good read.
Coincidentally, One Story is currently featuring fiction by Yannick Murphy, whose essay about calling her deadbeat dad to inform him of her brother's suicide is this week's "Lives" column in the Magazine.
#3: Dorothy Gallagher offers a eulogy-in-print for her mentor, copyeditor Helen Pleasants, as the back-page essay of the Book Review. The piece, "What My Copy Editor Taught Me," is also a love song to the sentence:
At the same time I'm poring over their pieces, my agent Mitchell is poring over my novel manuscript. (He emailed to let me know.) I'm waiting to hear news. Keep your fingers crossed for me!
This morning, I learned three things of literary interest, and here they are:
#1: Margaret Atwood, who is interviewed in Deborah Solomon's regular feature "Questions for . . ." in the Magazine, is currently touring with a series of lectures on the issue of debt, drawn from her latest book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth.
I didn't know the average American family carries $9,200 in credit card debt. I didn't think we carried any, and I asked James to make sure; we don't. Student loan debt (still) and a car payment, yes. Insanely huge payments to Oberlin College every month, yes. But on the whole, we're fairly minimal in our purchases. We've made a fine art of doing without.
Long ago, when Sharon, my birth mother, and her first husband were young, married, and broke, they used to clip out pictures of what they wished they could give each other for Christmases and birthdays. They'd slip the little clippings into a card and give each other those instead. Sweet, right? James and I have often joked, when holidays roll around, about O. Henry's story "The Gift of the Magi," in which she sells her beautiful hair to buy him a chain for his pocket-watch, and he sells his watch to buy combs for her beautiful hair. (My favorite line is when she "leap[s] up like a little singed cat.")
Just last night, James said, "I don't want anything for my birthday this year." He rubbed his fingers and thumb lightly together. Money.
"Me, too, then," I replied. It's been our pact for most years of our marriage. Frugality and romance. (And hey, let's put it into perspective: if we can afford coffee and the Times on a Sunday, I feel rich.) Thanks to Tayari for the link to a blog-post by my favorite chica lit writer, Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez (about whom I've blogged before), who lost her house in the recent financial meltdown and is sounding off on the lie of trickle-down economics:
It's nothing but gambling with rich liars, who, as we might have guessed, don't have much interest in letting any of their coins trickle anywhere. And here I was, lecturing my in-laws on their casino habits, when I did not know enough to see the fireball headed my way.Can I get an Amen? Anyway, Margaret Atwood's looking extremely well, with a cloud of gray curls and blue eyes lit by her smile. She's wearing a long bright pink pashmina over black pants and sweater--and the sturdiest black shoes you've ever seen. (Is she waiting tables on the side? Ah, the podiatric relief of becoming a woman of a certain age.) What doesn't come across in the photograph is that Atwood's a little slip of a thing; I once met her when she came to visit our class, long ago in Texas. Honestly, I had expected the author of The Handmaid's Tale to be statuesque, commanding, and maybe even physically intimidating, but she's a wee wisp of a gal. It's her imagination and intelligence, not her physique, that are scary.
But I am ready to suffer the consequences, because I have decided that, unless I can buy a thing in cash, I am not going to buy anything anymore.
Featherweight or not, though, she sat down and politely shredded the story we were workshopping that day.
Now she's shredding, in lectures and in print, our economy, which has managed to end up in tatters quite well on its own. How did she come across the idea for a book about debt "two or three years ago," when "[e]verybody was happily buying subprime-mortgate vehicles"?
Long ago, I was a graduate student in Victorian literature. When you think of the 19th-century novel, you think romance--you think Heathcliff, Cathy, Madame Bovary, etc. But the underpinning structure of those novels is money, and Madame Bovary could have cheerfully gone on committing adultery for a long time if she hadn't overspent.Ah, yes. James has been reading Emma aloud to me each night before we go to sleep, and we're just at the end, where Emma learns from a (rather smug) Mr. Knightley that Harriet Smith has accepted Robert Martin, the farmer suitable to her station. Everyone's happily paired off, each to his or her class-appropriate, heteronormative future.
But just think what might have happened if, in chapter three, Harriet had gotten a Visa card.
#2: Hannah Tinti's new book, The Good Thief, got a positive review in the Book Review. Hannah, whom you have no doubt met and whose generous, informative presentations on publishing you have surely attended if you've been anywhere on the writers' conference circuit during the past few years, is the founding editor of One Story, that lovely little journal that features just that: one story per issue. She's got a book of short stories, Animal Crackers, and now Maile Meloy's heralding the novel as "a book for adults, in addition to being the kind of story that might have kept you reading all day when you were home sick from school," and credits it with a "steady, authoritative style." If you've been longing for a novel with a one-handed, orphaned child protagonist set in the mid-19th century America, Tinti has written your next good read.
Coincidentally, One Story is currently featuring fiction by Yannick Murphy, whose essay about calling her deadbeat dad to inform him of her brother's suicide is this week's "Lives" column in the Magazine.
#3: Dorothy Gallagher offers a eulogy-in-print for her mentor, copyeditor Helen Pleasants, as the back-page essay of the Book Review. The piece, "What My Copy Editor Taught Me," is also a love song to the sentence:
In musical terms, she had perfect pitch. Helene had no literary theories--she had literary values. She valued clarity and transparency. She had nothing against style, if it didn't distract from the material. Her blue pencil struck at redundancy, at confusion, at authorial vanity, at the wrong and false word, at the unearned conclusion. She loved good writing, therefore she loved the reader: good writing did not cause the reader to stumble over meaning. By the time Helene was finished with me seven years later, I knew how to read a sentence and how to fix one. I knew what a sentence was supposed to do.Lovely--and a good reminder/model for me, as I end my Sunday-morning perusal and turn to student manuscripts. I'm so excited about my current graduate students. Their work is brilliant and moving. I'm so excited to be here at UNL, working full-time with graduate students at last, and to be working this semester with the MFA theses of Pine Manor students. It's a serious thrill.
At the same time I'm poring over their pieces, my agent Mitchell is poring over my novel manuscript. (He emailed to let me know.) I'm waiting to hear news. Keep your fingers crossed for me!
Tonight there's a presidential debate-watching party at Zen's Lounge in downtown Lincoln. The party starts at 7:00 p.m.; the debate is supposed to start at 8:00.
Zen's is at 122 N. 11th Street (a block and a half from our apartment! I love living downtown!) and the party is hosted by the Nebraska Democratic Party and Lincoln for Obama.
Maybe we'll see y'all there.
Zen's is at 122 N. 11th Street (a block and a half from our apartment! I love living downtown!) and the party is hosted by the Nebraska Democratic Party and Lincoln for Obama.
Maybe we'll see y'all there.
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Ah, eulogies. Today, as though the blogosphere weren't already groaning under their weight, we have yet another one for David Foster Wallace. This one's from A.O. Scott in The New York Times, and it's fueled, as one friend said, by Scott's unshakable conviction that "genius has a dick, and it's pink."
Yep, in defining DFW's generation, of which DFW is "The Best Mind," Scott limits himself to a cozy white male circle. The salient figures of the generation are named: Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Lethem, and Michael Chabon, along with runners-up Richard Powers, Rick Moody, and Dave Eggers--all of whom are responding to the "masterworks laid down by brave exemplars of experimentalism"--wait for it:--"William Gaddis and John Barth, Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut." And Scott's not hallucinating DFW's Laius; he quotes Wallace as saying, "If I have an enemy, . . . a patriarch for my patricide, it's probably Barth and Coover and Burroughs, even Nabokov and Pynchon."
Were there no writers of color or white women writers who were important enough, enough of an influence, to cause anxiety? Or did DFW just not bother to read them?
Has Scott? You wouldn't know it from the column, which is basically one long mancrush:
"Obsessive, ironical, needy: David Foster Wallace's voice was the voice in your head," reads the pull-out quote on the front page of the Week in Review section. (Let me just say that again: the front page of the Week in Review section.)
"David Foster Wallace's voice was the voice in your head"? Um, no. Not the voice in my head, thanks very much. I guess I'm not part of the same "unhappy collective consciousness" whose voice is "[h]yperarticulate, plaintive, self-mocking, diffident, overbearing, needy, ironical, almost pathologically self-aware" (though I've been known to act that way around the house--at least, the plaintive, overbearing, and needy parts).
I guess me and DFW were just not hanging out in the same milieu; the demons that haunt me and DFW just weren't the same. To wit, I love this line: "Even when his subject matter took him outside himself--into the world of lobsters, tennis players, cruise-ship vacationers, or presidential campaigners--the fundamental problems of writing remained in the foreground." I coughed: these are the worlds that took DFW "outside himself"? Lobster, tennis, cruise ships, and presidential candidates? Whew! That's a mighty privileged world he's wrenching his attention away from himself to obsess about. Gosh darn, fellas!
You've gotta love Scott's blitheness, too: "He was smarter than anyone else," he asserts offhandedly. Really?
Yawn. Can someone call a halt to the enshrinement process, the lionization?
An esteemed Chicana writer, teaching a workshop, once referred to a short story "by John Updike or one of those güero writers." I quietly gasped. After my long years of graduate training in the American canon, her remark smelled alluringly like heresy. To be so blunt about the fact that the biggest white male names in The New York Times Book Review do not define your canon--that really, you cannot be bothered to distinguish among them, as though they are unimportant, interchangeable, difficult to differentiate, perhaps a little blendy-into-each-other, a little boring? What a nice, cold swallow of clarity. Ahh. Bracing.
But she knew those writers were there. She'd read them, studied them, been forced to analyze and emulate them by her own graduate professors, been faced with their successes in the pages of the country's most hegemonic journals and magazines. No one let her just study Chicana writers. Shoot, there barely were any when she went to school.
In A.O. Scott's encomium, no writers outside the white, male world of privileged self-obsession exist. And he doesn't even acknowledge that.
Suicide is a tragedy, a sad waste. (As you may know from this blog--and not just once--it's something that hits me hard.) The loss of a bright talent is a shame, and it's sad that a good writer died. It's sad that he suffered extreme emotional anguish. It's really sad that he hanged himself and left his body for his wife to find, a choice that can be read right into the psychological narrative of suicide as a passive-aggressive act. Sad, sad, sad. My critique of Scott's in-group eulogy isn't to make light of the dead or their pain.
But suicide is also, as my sister-in-law Cool Julie once called it, "the ultimate chickenshit dance."
Okay, David Foster Wallace, we're sorry you're dead. Can we all quit dancing now?
Yep, in defining DFW's generation, of which DFW is "The Best Mind," Scott limits himself to a cozy white male circle. The salient figures of the generation are named: Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Lethem, and Michael Chabon, along with runners-up Richard Powers, Rick Moody, and Dave Eggers--all of whom are responding to the "masterworks laid down by brave exemplars of experimentalism"--wait for it:--"William Gaddis and John Barth, Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut." And Scott's not hallucinating DFW's Laius; he quotes Wallace as saying, "If I have an enemy, . . . a patriarch for my patricide, it's probably Barth and Coover and Burroughs, even Nabokov and Pynchon."
Were there no writers of color or white women writers who were important enough, enough of an influence, to cause anxiety? Or did DFW just not bother to read them?
Has Scott? You wouldn't know it from the column, which is basically one long mancrush:
He could have been a T.A. in one of my college courses, or the slightly older guy in Advanced Approaches to Interpretation who sat slightly aloof from the others and had not only mastered the abstruse and trendy texts everyone else was reading, but also skipped backward, sideways, and ahead. . . . But he also played tennis--Mr. Wallace, in fact, had competed seriously in the sport--and could quote lyrics from bands you only pretended you'd heard of. Without even trying, he was cooler than everyone else.Ooooh. Tennis. Cool bands. (And if there was a "slightly older" woman who'd "mastered" all that--and moved on--Scott wouldn't have noticed her. She wasn't interested in hanging out with him anyway.)
"Obsessive, ironical, needy: David Foster Wallace's voice was the voice in your head," reads the pull-out quote on the front page of the Week in Review section. (Let me just say that again: the front page of the Week in Review section.)
"David Foster Wallace's voice was the voice in your head"? Um, no. Not the voice in my head, thanks very much. I guess I'm not part of the same "unhappy collective consciousness" whose voice is "[h]yperarticulate, plaintive, self-mocking, diffident, overbearing, needy, ironical, almost pathologically self-aware" (though I've been known to act that way around the house--at least, the plaintive, overbearing, and needy parts).
I guess me and DFW were just not hanging out in the same milieu; the demons that haunt me and DFW just weren't the same. To wit, I love this line: "Even when his subject matter took him outside himself--into the world of lobsters, tennis players, cruise-ship vacationers, or presidential campaigners--the fundamental problems of writing remained in the foreground." I coughed: these are the worlds that took DFW "outside himself"? Lobster, tennis, cruise ships, and presidential candidates? Whew! That's a mighty privileged world he's wrenching his attention away from himself to obsess about. Gosh darn, fellas!
You've gotta love Scott's blitheness, too: "He was smarter than anyone else," he asserts offhandedly. Really?
None of his peers were preoccupied so explicitly with how it felt to arrive on the scene as a young, male American novelist dreaming of glory, late in the 20th century and haunted by a ridiculous, poignant question: what if it's too late? What am I supposed to do now?Oh, wait! I get it! If you define DFW as brilliant, and then say "us," "our," and "we" a whole bunch of times, then you are, by extension, also brilliant--perhaps even the Next-Best Mind of your generation. And if you define the most important subject matter that a writer can write about as being "a young, male American novelist dreaming of glory," then the rest of us can just hang up our hats and go home, leaving the field wide open for those folks who are invested in that particular story.
This is a common feeling for those of us born in the 1960s (for the record, I'm four years younger than Mr. Wallace).
Yawn. Can someone call a halt to the enshrinement process, the lionization?
An esteemed Chicana writer, teaching a workshop, once referred to a short story "by John Updike or one of those güero writers." I quietly gasped. After my long years of graduate training in the American canon, her remark smelled alluringly like heresy. To be so blunt about the fact that the biggest white male names in The New York Times Book Review do not define your canon--that really, you cannot be bothered to distinguish among them, as though they are unimportant, interchangeable, difficult to differentiate, perhaps a little blendy-into-each-other, a little boring? What a nice, cold swallow of clarity. Ahh. Bracing.
But she knew those writers were there. She'd read them, studied them, been forced to analyze and emulate them by her own graduate professors, been faced with their successes in the pages of the country's most hegemonic journals and magazines. No one let her just study Chicana writers. Shoot, there barely were any when she went to school.
In A.O. Scott's encomium, no writers outside the white, male world of privileged self-obsession exist. And he doesn't even acknowledge that.
Suicide is a tragedy, a sad waste. (As you may know from this blog--and not just once--it's something that hits me hard.) The loss of a bright talent is a shame, and it's sad that a good writer died. It's sad that he suffered extreme emotional anguish. It's really sad that he hanged himself and left his body for his wife to find, a choice that can be read right into the psychological narrative of suicide as a passive-aggressive act. Sad, sad, sad. My critique of Scott's in-group eulogy isn't to make light of the dead or their pain.
But suicide is also, as my sister-in-law Cool Julie once called it, "the ultimate chickenshit dance."
Okay, David Foster Wallace, we're sorry you're dead. Can we all quit dancing now?
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When I first heard Tracy Chapman sing this song, it was 1988. My son Grey, his dad, and I were living on about $600 a month in a barrio in San Antonio, and things were rough. Things were rough for everyone around us--for almost everyone we knew. And we were hoping, praying for change.
What we got was President George H.W. Bush, and we waited four more years.
When Bill Clinton was elected, people cried with happiness. These weren't liberal elites. These were poor people, working people, students. We believed--believed that the United States was going to change in all the ways Clinton promised. My friend Cyndy, may she rest in peace, talked with such excitement in her voice about how, just maybe, with this election, we'd be able to get insurance for our kids.
And those eight years were good--not perfect, not ideal, not a fulfillment of every campaign promise, but still: pretty damn good for the average working person, for the average mom and dad putting food on the table. We didn't get universal healthcare for our kids, but we got a fighting chance at a job that provided insurance.
Then--well, you know what happened then.
Now we've got another election coming, and we've still got singers singing about revolution. And as much as I'm pinning my hopes on Barack Obama and his plan for this, and his plan for that, and his plan for economic change (including 5 million new jobs in clean energy), I've got to agree with Angela Davis, who spoke last night to a huge and enthusiastic crowd at Lincoln's Malone Community Center.
As Americans, Davis said, we cannot afford to fall prey to a messiah complex. The man in the oval office may wield power--way more power than he should, in some cases--but we cannot pin all our hopes on him and rely on his good will to save the day. The movement for change has got to be grassroots. It has got to have staying power. We cannot relinquish our urgency once the election results are in, even if they're good; we cannot knock ourselves out to get Obama into office and then all go home and relax.
James and I went to see Trouble the Water today at a screening at Lincoln's art theater, the Ross, and I guess my heart is a little broken right now. The pain of Katrina just doesn't dim. Every new story is a revelation of more betrayal, more abandonment, and more government indifference, even hostility, to the suffering of people in need. Trouble the Water is an intimate, immediate, first-person view of that suffering.
There's still so much work to be done. As filmmaker Kimberly Rivers Roberts's cousin said up in Memphis, "If you don't have money, if you don't have status, you don't have the government"--a statement that the film and the historical events prove all too painfully.
Try to see the film. Hey, if it came to Lincoln, Nebraska, it might be coming to a theater near you!
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Hurray! At long last, an independent bookstore has opened in the Haymarket in downtown Lincoln! I'm so excited. Indigo Bridge Books is at 701 P Street, Suite 102, just two blocks from where I live, and it's great.
Though small, it features hefty sections on the environment, history, spirituality, and cultural studies. There's a well stocked fiction section and an inviting children's books area, where on Saturdays they'll be having storytime--bilingual storytime. A warm, light-filled, wood-floored space, Indigo Bridge includes a coffee shop, a community bulletin board, and comfy places to sit.
I bought a copy of Julia Alvarez's Once Upon a Quincañera and Rigoberto González's beautiful memoir Butterfly Boy. And I definitely plan to be there on Saturday morning, browsing, eavesdropping on storytime, and sipping hot decaf.
The historic Haymarket district is chock-full of coffeeshops, restaurants, and art galleries nestled into repurposed old brick warehouses, and it's home to the wonderful Haymarket Yoga and Pilates Studio, where I go to OM. James and I have loved living right on the edge of the Haymarket since we got to Lincoln. The only thing missing was a great independent bookstore.
As of last Thursday, Indigo Bridge Books has filled that gap, and here's hoping it stays around a long time.
Though small, it features hefty sections on the environment, history, spirituality, and cultural studies. There's a well stocked fiction section and an inviting children's books area, where on Saturdays they'll be having storytime--bilingual storytime. A warm, light-filled, wood-floored space, Indigo Bridge includes a coffee shop, a community bulletin board, and comfy places to sit.
I bought a copy of Julia Alvarez's Once Upon a Quincañera and Rigoberto González's beautiful memoir Butterfly Boy. And I definitely plan to be there on Saturday morning, browsing, eavesdropping on storytime, and sipping hot decaf.
The historic Haymarket district is chock-full of coffeeshops, restaurants, and art galleries nestled into repurposed old brick warehouses, and it's home to the wonderful Haymarket Yoga and Pilates Studio, where I go to OM. James and I have loved living right on the edge of the Haymarket since we got to Lincoln. The only thing missing was a great independent bookstore.
As of last Thursday, Indigo Bridge Books has filled that gap, and here's hoping it stays around a long time.
I'm so happy to be teaching with the practical and concise Telling True Stories
for the first time this semester. It's a collection of short advice
pieces from the best of the best of our working narrative journalists,
including Susan Orlean, Ted Conover, Malcolm Gladwell, Alma
Guillermoprieto--you get the picture. It also includes pieces by
screenwriters like Nora Ephron and essayists like Phillip Lopate.
A passage in Anne Hull's piece "Being There" caught my eye:
Of course, for my family members, it's a much different experience: it's as though they're trying politely to get the attention of a catatonic, hostile stranger. This summer, when Grey camped out in said living room for three months, he took to positioning himself in my peripheral vision and raising his hand.
It worked. Sigh.
Anyway, Telling True Stories is a terrific book for anyone who wants to write creative nonfiction more oriented toward world (journalism) than self (memoir)--lots of sound, sane advice. Co-editor Wendy Call was in our workshop this summer at Macondo, and it was great to meet and talk with her, as well as to hear her read her wonderful, sad, moving reportage piece about her participation in the protests by millions of people worldwide that took place just before the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
A passage in Anne Hull's piece "Being There" caught my eye:
If I didn't write, I can't imagine what I would do. It is all I've ever done. Often, we are out of balance because we write. We don't pay enough attention to our personal lives. We are difficult to live with because we're distracted; we want to be with our story.This resonated with me. I, too, am so "difficult to live with" because I get into my work. When I'm working, I don't notice people when they walk through the room (and because my mini-office is in our apartment's living room, they do walk through), and I have trouble talking when they address me. It's like I'm being wrenched from a lovely Otherworld into some foreign land where I don't speak the language (and don't care).
Of course, for my family members, it's a much different experience: it's as though they're trying politely to get the attention of a catatonic, hostile stranger. This summer, when Grey camped out in said living room for three months, he took to positioning himself in my peripheral vision and raising his hand.
It worked. Sigh.
Anyway, Telling True Stories is a terrific book for anyone who wants to write creative nonfiction more oriented toward world (journalism) than self (memoir)--lots of sound, sane advice. Co-editor Wendy Call was in our workshop this summer at Macondo, and it was great to meet and talk with her, as well as to hear her read her wonderful, sad, moving reportage piece about her participation in the protests by millions of people worldwide that took place just before the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
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Not long ago, I posted about the first five of Julia Alvarez's "Ten of My Writing Commandments." As the semester swings into full gear and writing slips to second place behind prepping, teaching, grading, and way too many meetings, I wanted to post the other five for you:
I'm not much in the kitchen, so the first one (about cooking a small fish) doesn't really compute for me. (One must write a poem the way one burns good food and sets off the smoke alarm? Probably not what the unknown author had in mind.)
But I love the Morrison line. The function of freedom is to free someone else. I love that. Like many people, I've been motivated by Morrison's words at different junctures in my life to make choices I might have otherwise been too complacent or too cowardly to make.
And the Rilke. You must change your life. If I took inventory right now, what would I need to change? Worth pondering. It's a little scary, always to be shaking down your routine like that.
James is escorting his folks back to their home outside New Orleans to assess the damage and get them set back up. I should get a call from them tonight. We were glad to have them here with us, safe and sound. But now, it looks like Ike could be on the way. We'll see how it all plays out.
One must write a poem the way one rules an empire, the way one cooks a small fish.Winners, one and all.~Unknown
El papel lo aguanta todo.
(Paper holds everything.)
~Mami
You must change your life.
~Rainer Maria Rilke
The function of freedom is to free someone else.
~Toni Morrison
If you want to be a writer, then write. Write every day!
~Samuel Johnson
I'm not much in the kitchen, so the first one (about cooking a small fish) doesn't really compute for me. (One must write a poem the way one burns good food and sets off the smoke alarm? Probably not what the unknown author had in mind.)
But I love the Morrison line. The function of freedom is to free someone else. I love that. Like many people, I've been motivated by Morrison's words at different junctures in my life to make choices I might have otherwise been too complacent or too cowardly to make.
And the Rilke. You must change your life. If I took inventory right now, what would I need to change? Worth pondering. It's a little scary, always to be shaking down your routine like that.
James is escorting his folks back to their home outside New Orleans to assess the damage and get them set back up. I should get a call from them tonight. We were glad to have them here with us, safe and sound. But now, it looks like Ike could be on the way. We'll see how it all plays out.
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Whew! The conventions are over. I managed to catch Michelle's and Barack's speeches last week, and this week, with James's folks, we watched Sarah Palin's and McCain's speeches. I also happened to walk through a sports bar while Giuliani was giving his speech--were those the flames of hellfire behind him? Weird background, but it sure fit his fiery rhetoric.
Brimstone aside, I honestly liked elements of all the speeches and all four of the candidates, but I didn't learn anything about the McCain-Palin platform or policies that swayed me. I'm an independent, but my beliefs run toward the very progressive, so most of my friends turn out to be Democrats, and the Democratic candidate usually ends up getting my vote due to his platform and policy record. This year, that will definitely be the case. For me, torture, economic injustice, global warming and the environment, and the preemptive, unjustified invasion of Iraq are key moral issues, and Obama's positions on all of these issues largely mirror my own. (I'm a little more hardcore than he is on clean energy.) The U.S. and the world are responding with enthusiasm to the promise of his campaign, and that's exciting.
After Sarah Palin's speech, though, I felt strangely depressed, because I saw clearly how appealing she would be to certain segments of the population. When Democratic commentators were being asked afterwards, "Was she effective?", they hemmed and hawed, focusing their comments on her inaccuracies and misrepresentations. I was like, "Come on, guys! Of course she was effective." To her intended audience, she was wildly effective.
Have I lived in red states too long? While I disagreed with her, I saw how her pomposity-puncturing shots at Obama (his memoirs, his styrofoam columns) would resonate with and delight a lot of people who don't really care for his Harvard education or elegant hand gestures. There's such a thick band of anti-intellectual, anti-liberal hostility that runs through this country. I heard a lot of that hostility in my seven years in College Station, Texas and my ten years in a small town in Indiana (a long way from Senator Evan Bayh!). It's there, and it's powerful.
People with little education and little experience of the world resent being reminded that other ways of being might be more effective in handling complex challenges and negotiating with a multiplicity of worldviews from around the globe. I empathize. Who likes being reminded that they're small or ineffective? Who likes having it implied that they're ignorant or inadequate, when they work so hard? It's infuriating, and Sarah Palin tapped into that rage. In that context, her sneers felt like wit; her spunk felt like courage. Her delegate audience was ecstatic, and I could imagine the many, many similar people I've met becoming equally thrilled.
This got me down, because it reminded me of Bush in 2004. A snappy, wisecracking persona, a terrible agenda and record--and success nonetheless.
So I've been relieved to see that a lot of people aren't buying it. Obama's campaign saw $8 million in new donations overnight after her speech, and I read a lot of comments online, not just from Democrats, not just from hardline Obama supporters, but from Independent and Republican women saying, "Come on. Do you think we're that dumb?"
I exhaled.
Brimstone aside, I honestly liked elements of all the speeches and all four of the candidates, but I didn't learn anything about the McCain-Palin platform or policies that swayed me. I'm an independent, but my beliefs run toward the very progressive, so most of my friends turn out to be Democrats, and the Democratic candidate usually ends up getting my vote due to his platform and policy record. This year, that will definitely be the case. For me, torture, economic injustice, global warming and the environment, and the preemptive, unjustified invasion of Iraq are key moral issues, and Obama's positions on all of these issues largely mirror my own. (I'm a little more hardcore than he is on clean energy.) The U.S. and the world are responding with enthusiasm to the promise of his campaign, and that's exciting.
After Sarah Palin's speech, though, I felt strangely depressed, because I saw clearly how appealing she would be to certain segments of the population. When Democratic commentators were being asked afterwards, "Was she effective?", they hemmed and hawed, focusing their comments on her inaccuracies and misrepresentations. I was like, "Come on, guys! Of course she was effective." To her intended audience, she was wildly effective.
Have I lived in red states too long? While I disagreed with her, I saw how her pomposity-puncturing shots at Obama (his memoirs, his styrofoam columns) would resonate with and delight a lot of people who don't really care for his Harvard education or elegant hand gestures. There's such a thick band of anti-intellectual, anti-liberal hostility that runs through this country. I heard a lot of that hostility in my seven years in College Station, Texas and my ten years in a small town in Indiana (a long way from Senator Evan Bayh!). It's there, and it's powerful.
People with little education and little experience of the world resent being reminded that other ways of being might be more effective in handling complex challenges and negotiating with a multiplicity of worldviews from around the globe. I empathize. Who likes being reminded that they're small or ineffective? Who likes having it implied that they're ignorant or inadequate, when they work so hard? It's infuriating, and Sarah Palin tapped into that rage. In that context, her sneers felt like wit; her spunk felt like courage. Her delegate audience was ecstatic, and I could imagine the many, many similar people I've met becoming equally thrilled.
This got me down, because it reminded me of Bush in 2004. A snappy, wisecracking persona, a terrible agenda and record--and success nonetheless.
So I've been relieved to see that a lot of people aren't buying it. Obama's campaign saw $8 million in new donations overnight after her speech, and I read a lot of comments online, not just from Democrats, not just from hardline Obama supporters, but from Independent and Republican women saying, "Come on. Do you think we're that dumb?"
I exhaled.
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James and I caught a triple act at Box Awesome Saturday night, including the terrific Denver band The Hollyfelds (great pipes, gals! and great slide guitar), but we were kinda low because our baby, Grey, had just flown out that morning for his third year of college. Oberlin's gain is our loss, and our nest was feeling way, way empty.
At the club, we sat with parents who were leaving their two-year-old with her grandmother overnight for the first time so the husband could play in one of the acts, and I don't know which set of parents was feeling more ambivalent about a night out. Let's just say we talked about our respective kids a lot.
But then yesterday, thanks to Gustav, we got a call from James's folks, who live in Mandeville, just across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans, and they're arriving here in two hours. So much for an empty nest! We're driving to Omaha here in a minute to pick them up.
Ah, chaos. Welcome.
Here's hoping that the other 2 million U.S. evacuees on their way north have places where they'll be as safe, and that the damage to people, homes, and land down on the Gulf Coast will be minimal. This is no small storm. Eighty people have already lost their lives due to Gustav in Haiti, the DR, and Jamaica, and Cuba got hit hard. I think that McCain is making the only decent, humane call in scaling back the GOP convention, but I sure wish his fellow Republican had been as alert three years ago.
Between watching the weather, preparing for in-laws, and missing our kiddo (and catching up on Mad Men in yesterday's watch-a-thon--it's a sick, sick addiction), I'm trying to read 100 pages of Mexican Enough for class tomorrow, and I have to tell you, the students (the vocal ones, at least) have been loving this book. Stephanie Elizondo Griest is so frank, so funny, so no-holds-barred. Her eager curiosity about and nonjudgmental observation of both herself and Mexico have endeared her book to us. Students love her candor, humor, and gutsiness. Where other travelers might fear to tread, she leaps in. It's a fun read and a painless way to absorb some of the history, culture, and politics that will ground our other readings this semester.
Thanks, Stephanie! You've got some fans up in Nebraska!
At the club, we sat with parents who were leaving their two-year-old with her grandmother overnight for the first time so the husband could play in one of the acts, and I don't know which set of parents was feeling more ambivalent about a night out. Let's just say we talked about our respective kids a lot.
But then yesterday, thanks to Gustav, we got a call from James's folks, who live in Mandeville, just across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans, and they're arriving here in two hours. So much for an empty nest! We're driving to Omaha here in a minute to pick them up.
Ah, chaos. Welcome.
Here's hoping that the other 2 million U.S. evacuees on their way north have places where they'll be as safe, and that the damage to people, homes, and land down on the Gulf Coast will be minimal. This is no small storm. Eighty people have already lost their lives due to Gustav in Haiti, the DR, and Jamaica, and Cuba got hit hard. I think that McCain is making the only decent, humane call in scaling back the GOP convention, but I sure wish his fellow Republican had been as alert three years ago.
Between watching the weather, preparing for in-laws, and missing our kiddo (and catching up on Mad Men in yesterday's watch-a-thon--it's a sick, sick addiction), I'm trying to read 100 pages of Mexican Enough for class tomorrow, and I have to tell you, the students (the vocal ones, at least) have been loving this book. Stephanie Elizondo Griest is so frank, so funny, so no-holds-barred. Her eager curiosity about and nonjudgmental observation of both herself and Mexico have endeared her book to us. Students love her candor, humor, and gutsiness. Where other travelers might fear to tread, she leaps in. It's a fun read and a painless way to absorb some of the history, culture, and politics that will ground our other readings this semester.
Thanks, Stephanie! You've got some fans up in Nebraska!
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