Our Sunday Morning Ritual
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!
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