Theodora Goss's Blog, page 35

Unnatural Woman

I’m going to go back to writing about social class, really I am. But something happened yesterday that made me think, and I want to put some of that thinking down. I was testing the camera on my new BlackBerry, and I took a photo of myself. You know, the traditional photo in the bathroom mirror. It looked like this:

In the caption, I mentioned that this was a photo with no professional makeup artist or photographer, taken in harsh bathroom lighting after I’d been refinishing furniture for hours. I was making fun of myself. What surprised me was that it got quite a lot of responses, and many of them used the words “natural beauty.” Quite a few of them also mentioned that I looked just fine without makeup. Now, I had said without a professional makeup artist. Of course the woman in the picture is wearing makeup. If she weren’t, she wouldn’t look natural, because the harsh light would have washed her out completely. (And by her, I mean me, of course.) But what really caught my attention was the concept of natural beauty. It reminded me of a comment someone had once made on a photograph of mine that I had posted on Facebook. It was, “I love the red hair. I hope you are natural woman.” I’m not sure on what basis he was hoping that, because the photograph he was commenting on was heavily photoshopped. I had meant it to be edgy, not natural. Here it is, in case you’re curious:

Granted, he was probably talking about the color of my hair. But I remember my first response to the words “natural woman”: I thought, you’ve got to be joking. Because in the modern world, there is no such thing as a natural woman.

And then I thought about all the things about me that were unnatural, from my toes up to the top of my head. Even if you took the curls out of the hair (because my hair was curled that day), there would be the haircut. Hair is not naturally cut in long layers by a genius named Robert, but mine is. And you would have to remove years of the sunscreen and moisturizing creams that have made my face what it is, because faces look very different without that sort of daily care. And you would have to replace about half of the eyebrows. Also, unmanicure and unbuff the nails, unmoisturize the hands and feet. But even if you did all that, you would have to take away all the years of dance that make me stand and move the way I do, of pilates and watching what I eat that give me the shape I have. Because none of those are natural either.

Since I was a child, I have been created and constructed, as we all are. I believe in the concept of natural beauty, but I think only children have beauty that is truly natural. The rest of us are made, like mad scientists’ monsters, but in this case the mad scientists are custom and society. When they go too far, we become truly and frighteningly artificial, like certain celebrities. But when we go only as far as we need to, and people say that we have “natural beauty,” what they mean is really that we have constructed something that looks like nature the way we wish it were, nature in a dream, the way a beautifully manicured park can look like nature at her best.

I wrote in a note to myself, earlier today, “There is no such thing as a natural woman, because being a woman is performative.” But beauty is a sort of performance as well, a sort of dance that takes place over time. Women, in particular, learn the steps when they are young, as I learned it back when my mother used to tell me, “You must suffer for beauty.” (No, I’m not joking. That’s exactly what she said, and I bet all European mothers, and many American ones, say exactly the same thing!)

If there is truly natural beauty in a woman, it’s not what we think it is. It’s at the level of the bones. Shortly before she died, I visited my great-grandmother. She was almost bedridden at that point, a ninety-year-old woman with white hair haloing her face. But lying on her pillow, she was beautiful: that beauty was written into her bones, which were more prominent than they had ever been in her life. They were sharp and delicate and lovely. But that is a beauty closely allied to death. It is the opposite of the natural beauty of a child.

I’m not sure where this train of though has led me, except back to where I often end up: the idea that beauty has a necessary darkness to it, that it is allied to our mortality. Which is probably as good a place as any to stop.

More Photos

I’ve had a very busy day. Ophelia is in Virginia with her father, riding horses and finding crawfish in the creek, and I’ve been preparing for our trip to Europe. I made sure our passports were still valid, applied for a travel credit card at the bank so I wouldn’t be charged for credit card transactions, asked about the best way to exchange dollars for forints and pounds (take money out of the ATM, evidently), and tried to figure out how to get telephone service in Hungary and England. I think I’ll be taking an unlocked cell phone and buying minutes, which means I won’t have my BlackBerry (the new one, since the old one stopped working two weeks ago, taking everything with it: contacts, texts, emails). It will be difficult being without a smartphone for five weeks, but at least I’ll have my computer, and I’ll have wifi in Debrecen, London, and Budapest. The plan for Europe looks something like this: Ophelia and I will be flying Swissair to Budapest, but going almost immediately to Debrecen, where she will stay with her grandparents. I will be flying Wizzair from Debrecen to London, where I will be staying with friends for a week and doing research. Then back to Debrecen, and on to Budapest to meet the wonderful Catherynne Valente for a writer’s vacation. We will be writing in Budapest for two weeks. Then I will meet up with Ophelia and bring her back to Boston. At that point, her Hungarian will probably be better than mine!

But before any of that can happen, I have all sorts of things to do. Administrative things, first of all, but also I have to get as far into the novel as I can. My writing group meets on June 3rd, and I’ve promised them about 10,000 words. Which I have written, but not completely revised. So it’s down to New York again next weekend, but I think that will be the last trip before Budapest. I write all this to explain that since I’ve been running around today, instead of writing a blog post, I’m going to post some photographs I received last night.

Remember the photoshoot during ICFA? Well, while I was in Florida working with Walker1812 Photography, I made a list of additional photos that I particularly liked, and would like to see edited. I received some of them last night, and I thought I would post my absolute favorite, and then an example of each of the outfits we used during the photoshoot. So here you go, this is my favorite of all.

And here are examples of the three outfits.

The hardest thing about the photoshoot, for me, was overcoming my own anxiety about it. After all, I’m not a model. What I am, most days, is that geeky high school student–at least, that’s how I still think of myself, even though I look almost nothing like her anymore. I still expect to see her in the mirror. And so I think I was probably more self-conscious than I should have been. But you know what? It was so much fun! If I ever have an opportunity to do something like this again, I certainly will. And next time, I’ll be better at it.

I just have to post one more of the pictures, because this is one of my favorites as well.

Eventually, I’ll post all the photos on the press page. There are more of them coming, as well as some special projects that I’ll post once I receive them. I’m very lucky to be able to do such interesting things . . .

And now, back to work! Because I go to Europe in three weeks, and there’s still so much to get done!

Photos by Jesse Walker

Refinishing Furniture

Today I’m going to take a break from writing about social class, although I suspect this post will touch on it anyway. I want to talk about something I did today, which was refinish furniture.

It was harder than it should have been, for two reasons. First, I started by making a stupid mistake. The furniture I’m refinishing comes from two places. There’s a wooden chair that comes from Goodwill. I think it cost maybe $10? Then, there’s a wooden chest of drawers that comes from the side of the road, where a woman who was moving out of her house put it. I asked her about it, and she sold it to me, together with three armchairs, for $25. When I got them, these items were not in particularly good shape. The chair from Goodwill wobbled, and although I liked its shape, it was stained a dark color that made it seem too somber. The wobbliness was easy to fix: it just needed putty, in a place no one would look anyway, to replace some missing wood. But what to do about the dark stain? The chest of drawers was painted black to emphasize certain details, so again it was quite dark. And the armchairs? Well, imagine wooden armchairs with orange velvet upholstery. Bright orange velvet, the color of a pumpkin. And yet, like the Goodwill chair, both the chest of drawers and the armchairs had interesting shapes. There was something there – and they were solid wood, or I would not have bought them, no matter how cheap they were.

So what to do? Well, I thought I would just repaint the chair and chest of drawers a lighter color, a sort of soft white. And I would of course get the armchairs reupholstered, after painting them as well. So I started by painting the chair and chest of drawers.

As soon as I had done so, I knew I had made a mistake. I’m not sure exactly why it didn’t work – I did a perfectly fine job painting. And painted furniture is popular nowadays – it’s in all the decorating magazines. And after all, I had used the same paint on a wicker chair and a birdcage that I had bought, with great success.  Maybe I just needed to get used to the painted chair and chest of drawers? That’s what I kept telling myself for about a week. At the end of that week, I knew I had to redo them. They just didn’t look right.

So that’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve been stripping the paint I put on, and it’s been an awful, awful job. Because you see, under that paint are layers of previous finish. On the chair, I think it was probably varnish. On the chest of drawers, there is a layer of paint that I suspect is an oil paint, by its goopiness, and under that another layer of something – maybe even some sort of shellac? Step #1 was paint stripper. On the chest of drawers, the two layers of paint together made what we furniture refinishers call, in technical terms, a “goopy mess.” Step #2 was Minwax Antique Furniture Refinisher, which is one of my favorite things in the world, because it really does take everything off, although you have to spend a lot of time rubbing and use a lot of paper towels.

I hadn’t refinished furniture for a long time, so there were some things I had to relearn, like the effectiveness of Minwax Furniture Refinisher. (I went through several cans of different refinishers, trying to deal with the aforementioned “goopy mess.”) Another is that when you buy gloves to refinish furniture, they must be gauntleted; otherwise, you will get small chemical burns on your arms. Small chemical burns sting like mosquito bites. They go away quickly, but I’d rather avoid mosquito bites if I can.

And what am I getting out of all this? Well, as it turns out, once I stripped the chair, I discovered lovely wood underneath. I’m not sure what it is, but it’s dark, with a close grain. And under all the paint and finish on the chest of drawers is a walnut veneer. They are going to look so much nicer when they’re done. I still have a long way to go, but I’m getting there.

There are two lessons in all this. The first is that when you take what you assume is the easy way, you often have to redo all your work anyway to get the job done properly. Second, if you buy solid wood, you can always take it back down to the core. So it doesn’t really matter if you make a mistake, because it can be fixed. But only if you buy good quality furniture in the first place, whether it costs hundreds of dollars or $25 by the side of the road.

The second lesson was taught to me over and over again, when I was a child. When I wanted to buy something that was fashionable but not of good quality, I was given the lecture again, told that something of inferior quality would not last. Furniture should be of solid wood, clothing should be of natural fibers, jewelry should be real, not imitation. And that’s pretty much the way I still live.

I’m not going to give you a picture of the furniture yet, since it’s still being worked on, but I will include a picture of a small antiques store I stopped in today, on my way to the hardware store. It’s one of my favorites, and the proprietor knows me well.

I’m leaving for Hungary in about three weeks. I want to finish the furniture by the time I leave, because once I come back things get complicated. So I have a lot of work ahead of me, but I love refinishing furniture – the hard physical labor of it. And I love seeing something beautiful emerge.

The Immigrant Class: Part 3

I’ve been trying to figure out how to describe the set of assumptions I grew up with because of my particular immigrant experience. It involved a double displacement: my mother had lost her home when she was a child (that’s what confiscated means, of course). She still remembers that house, and the pony she used to ride. She also lost her social class, because now there were supposedly no social classes, although of course that’s not what actually happened. What happened is that everyone still knew where everyone else fit in the social order, but the people who had once been peasants were now given preferential treatment – easier admission to the universities, for example. I wonder how much that really changed the social landscape of Hungary. I don’t know. But I do know that Hungarians still have an acute sense of social class. Once, I went on a skiing vacation in Austria with my father and his family. An uncle of mine was there, and I was told repeatedly that he was the one in the family who had inherited the title. Those sorts of things were not supposed to count under Communism, and yet they were always there – everyone still knew and remembered.

So I think that my mother grew up with a sort of double consciousness. She was taught that hereditary social privileges were ridiculous, outdated, and she will tell you that. Also that religion is the opiate of the masses. As is television. She believes, to her core, in hard work and individual merit. On the other hand, that core itself contains an instinctive conviction that there are certain ways to live. And those ways come from the ancient social structure that Communism was supposed to destroy.

I didn’t understand this, when I was a child. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t do the seemingly simple and innocent things that my classmates did. Wear an anklet or designer jeans. It took me years to understand that these things were about social class. I remember, as an adult, reading a column by Judith Martin, who wrote as Miss Manners. She was asked about the proper way to wear an anklet, and responded, “The proper way to wear an anklet is on your wrist, where it is called a bracelet.” I find Martin fascinating because she has a thorough understanding of the history of manners. Her knowledge goes back to Emily Post and the Victorians. And the reason I couldn’t wear an anklet or designer jeans is that, although I was an American middle school student, I was in training to be a lady. My mother would probably tell me that was ridiculous, because she was trained to regard those sorts of social designations as outdated. She would simply say I was expected to dress properly. But you know where those rules come from, what properly really means. It means properly for a particular social class.

One thing that happens in immigrant families that come from a relatively high status in their home countries is a deep anxiety that the status will lost. That children brought up in the new country will not rise to an equivalent status. Hence the focus on education, which is the easiest and most reliable way to rise up again.

I think back now to the strange disjunctions of my childhood: my mother was a doctor, but she was raising two children, so in terms of income we were nowhere near as comfortable as most of the children I went to school with. We shopped at discount stores, and I often marveled at what my friends had: the clothes, the houses with rooms just for watching TV, their own cars! On the other hand, I spent so much time at the museums that I can probably still remember my way around the National Galleries of Art, I had a favorite opera and Shakespeare play, and I knew from a young age how to behave at a symphony because I was expected (sometime compelled) to go. When my brother or I cooked, we made Kraft Macaroni and Cheese or Campbell’s Tomato Soup, but the silverware in the drawer was actual silver. The art on the walls was original art. I think I was the only person in my graduating class who applied to Harvard. I didn’t get in, and to be honest I’m not sure I would have survived it at that point. I was young and confused, and I didn’t know who I was or who I was supposed to become. I had both an inferiority and a superiority complex: inferiority because I was so obviously poorer than my classmates, which was even more true at the University of Virginia, and so much in America seemed to be based on wealth, but also superiority because I felt smarter, more cultured. And some of the things they cared about so much, I knew weren’t important.

A sort of aside here. I was taught from a young age that conspicuous display of wealth is vulgar – that it marks one as coming from a lower social class. Once, when I complained about my clothes, my mother told me with scorn that it was the children of the nobility who wore ragged clothes – that is, who wore their clothes out.  They were the ones who did not display their wealth. The real problem with designer jeans wasn’t so much the expense – it was that I would have a label on my butt. And that was something one simply did not do. I still can’t bring myself to wear anything with a conspicuous label, even if I bought it for $5 at Goodwill, which is more likely than not. I like Ralph Lauren, but anything with an RL visible on it would make me intensely and instinctively uncomfortable. I think this particular standard exists because in an aristocracy, everyone already knows who everyone else is. It is only in a socially fluid society that external labels mark status. So having an external label signifies that you are a wannabe. Someone whose social status is not already fixed. Complicated, isn’t it? Of course for me, it meant that I was doomed to being permanently uncool.

One of the reasons we had art on the walls is that my grandmother was trained as an artist, so we had her art, art from friends of ours who were artists, art that my mother had collected. She was used to living with art. I’ll end today by including two paintings by my grandmother. First, a watercolor of my mother as a child.

And second, a watercolor of geraniums. I have a painting of hers rather like this in my own collection. Because of course I have a collection of art myself. Art is the one thing I have always been extravagant about.

The Immigrant Class: Part 2

I asked my mother about some of the things I had written yesterday, and she gave me some more information on my family. I thought it was quite interesting.

Evidently, I’m related to the Romantic-era Hungarian poet Dániel Berzsenyi. According to Wikipedia, “Berzsenyi was one of the most contradictory poets of Hungarian literature. He lived the life of a farmer, and wished to be close to the events of Hungarian literature. This contradiction, which he believed he could solve, made him a lonesome, introverted and bitter poet. His works show signs of classicism, sentimentalism and romanticism.” Pretty neat, hunh? When I’m in Hungary, I’ll have to find some of his poetry.

I’m also related to the nineteenth-century statesman Ferenc Deák, who was a Minister of Justice and important in the political events of the early 1800s. Evidently, “0ne of the central squares of Budapest, Deák Ferenc Square is today named after him, which is where the three lines of the Budapest Metro come together.” Also, he’s on the 20,000 forint. Here he is:

And here is a 20,000 forint:

They are both on my grandmother’s side of the family, which was the noble side. My grandfather’s father was a teacher, as I mentioned, which I assume means he had a university education. He was in World War I and came back with one leg amputated. My grandfather’s mother was a “wealthy peasant” (my mother’s words, and for her I think the term peasant has a specific meaning, because we don’t usually think of peasants as wealthy). She was the one who brought money and property into the family. My grandfather was the oldest son, and oldest sons were usually trained as agricultural engineers, which was a university degree, so they could manage the family estate. But that property was confiscated under the Communists.

Some of my grandmother’s family came from Győr, where they owned a “small palace” (my mother’s words again, because what is a small palace?). The man with the sword was my grandmother’s grandfather, and the men in that family were lawyers, judges, administrators. People in those sorts of positions all had ceremonial swords, says my mother dismissively. I’m not absolutely sure, but I think this is a picture of the specific palace:

It’s a museum now, so you can go visit. Napoleon once stayed there, and a desk he wrote on is still in the palace. I think my ancestress Katalin actually lived there.

Also, there was a physician in the family, I’m not sure on which side, who was kidnapped by a bandit and forced to tend to his wounds. Afterward, he was paid and released.

It’s all pretty romantic history, but I think many families have romantic histories of one sort or another. The more recent history is less romantic. Under Communism, my grandparents on my mother’s side lived in Budapest, in an apartment across from the National Museum. The windows look out onto the park. The apartment has two large rooms, a living room and a bedroom. My grandparents slept in the bedroom, and their two daughters slept in the living room. There was also a kitchen and a bath. In the summers, they went to Lake Balaton, to a summer house that my grandfather built himself. I think it still has no heating, and at that point I’m not sure it had electricity or gas to cook on, although it must have had running water. They cooked outdoors. They were as poor as everyone was under Communism. I don’t think my grandparents ever owned a car in their lives, although of course Budapest had a subway system and there were trains all over Hungary.

Eventually, my mother went to medical school, where she met my father. And that’s what she had when she left the country with her two children: a medical degree. That’s what allowed her to build a new life for herself in the West.

I think you could call both of my parents workaholics and overachievers.  My father is an MD/PhD, a medical doctor and research scientist, faculty member at the Medical School of the University of Debrecen, and international expert on hemostasis and thrombosis (no, don’t ask me what those are).  Do you think he’ll mind if I link to his official university webpage?  I hope not.  (I would ask him, but who knows what country he’s in today.) And then there’s my mother, who is an MD and JD, because at some point she decided that she also wanted a law degree.  So she became a lawyer and patent attorney. Yeah, that’s what I came from. So you can kind of see why I ended up with a JD and PhD.

I think that’s enough for today. Tomorrow, I’ll try to write about what it was like growing up in the United States, coming from that background.  You know, growing up with the assumption that at any moment, the Russians could come and take over your country. In which case you would lose everything: all that was truly yours was your education, because it was in your head. It was the one thing no one could take away.

The Immigrant Class: Part 1

About a week ago, John Scalzi wrote an interesting blog post called Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is. It was an attempt to explain the social effects of race, gender, and sexual orientation in terms of gaming metaphors. Like this:

“Imagine life here in the US – or indeed, pretty much anywhere in the Western world – is a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane, where most quests involve the acquisition of money, cell phones and donuts, although not always at the same time. Let’s call it The Real World. You have installed The Real World on your computer and are about to start playing, but first you go to the settings tab to bind your keys, fiddle with your defaults, and choose the difficulty setting for the game. Got it?

“Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, ‘Straight White Male’ is the lowest difficulty setting there is.”

The post got quite a lot of attention, and some respondents suggested that John had omitted another important factor: social class. Christopher Barzak wrote a blog post on the effects of that particular factor in his own life, called Life on the Lowest Setting. I found his post fascinating because it was such a personal way to approach the subject, and I found his argument completely persuasive. He wrote,

“Class does matter. Wealth does, too, but class is an identity, an invisible identity in some cases, like mine. Many of my friends now say that they can’t imagine me having grown up on a farm, that I once took part in a 4-H contest to catch a greased pig when I was eleven, that I seem too intellectual and worldly for a background like that. They can’t put my past and my present together, because I’ve crossed over into their world, and I’ve learned their language and mannerisms, much as I learned how to speak Japanese. I can switch codes from the academic circles I work within to the circle of service industry oriented childhood friends who are waiting tables and retailing and fixing cars. And all of those features are part of my inherent personal nature, a personal nature that was nurtured in a working class environment in my formative years.

“I’d add class to that list of identity categories that determines privilege.”

I’m mentioning these two posts because I wanted to talk a bit away the way I grew up, my own awareness of social class. Unlike Chris, I’m not trying to construct an argument. I just want to put some things on virtual paper, so I can examine them myself. So I can understand myself in terms of this thing we call social class, which I have been intensely aware of since I was a child. And since I want to think about it for a while, I’ll explore it in several parts. I’m not yet sure how many.

First of all, if you’re an immigrant, you’re intensely aware of the fact that American has social classes. I think that often, native-born Americans are not as aware of class-based distinctions. Immigrants are more aware of them because many of them come from societies were social class is more overt, so they are taught to look for indicia of class. Also, when they arrive in American, they don’t belong to any social class. They have to learn the system, learn the indicia. That outsider status also makes them, and their children, more aware.

Of course, when I say “immigrant,” I’m eliding important differences between types of immigrants. My family belonged to a particular type: immigrants who were part of the educated or professional classes in their own countries and came to the United States either because of political oppression or because of a lack of opportunity in the home country. There is a commonality between immigrants of this type that can cut across boundaries of ethnicity or national origin. I have found common ground with people from India or China that may be more difficult for me to find with people who more obviously look like me – whose ancestors were European but whose families have been in this country for generations. We grew up with many of the same expectations, particularly educational expectations. We make many of the same choices.

I won’t go on much more in this blog post, but let me at least specify the sort of family background I came from, to give you some idea of what I mean by that particular immigrant class. In Hungary, my family was both educated and professional. I don’t have much information about it, in part because there are things I still haven’t been told. But here are the things I know. I know that I have an ancestress named Katalin Bezerédi, because I have a painting of her on porcelain. The Bezerédis were a prominent family in Hungary. I know that I have an ancestor who wore a sword to receive some sort of honor from the Emperor of Austria-Hungary, because my brother has the sword. I know that there is a famous poet in my family tree (although I’ll have to ask my mother who he was). Also that one of my great-grandfathers was a teacher, because I once saw his picture, looking stiff and respectable. In the black and white family photos I’ve seen from the nineteenth century, everyone looks prosperous. My grandmother’s father ran Szántódpuszta, a large farm close to Lake Balaton. It was owned by the Abbey of Tihany, and he was what my mother calls an agricultural engineer: someone trained to run such properties. It’s fun to visit, because it’s now a museum and you can walk around, seeing how people used to live in the late nineteenth century. It’s been frozen in time. My grandmother was born in this house, in the main room because it was the middle of winter and the other rooms were too cold:

She went to art school and married my grandfather, who was also an agricultural engineer. She was very proud of being a Székely, one of the Hungarian tribes in Transylvania. (I know how all of this sounds, but I’m not making any of it up. Yes, yes, Count Dracula claims to be a Székely in Stoker’s book. I love teaching that part.) The Székelys claim to be descended directly from Attila’s Huns, and sure enough, my grandmother always told me that we were descended from Attila. Remember that in Hungary he’s considered a cultural hero. She came from the lower nobility, and had the right to use some sort of crest, I’m not sure what. It’s pretty much the same story on my father’s side: there’s lower Transylvanian nobility there too. (But no counts, so don’t worry.  I don’t bite.) My father’s father was a doctor, as are my father and his sister.  He met my mother in medical school.

So, we’re taking about a family that came from a sort of upper professional, lower noble, financially secure class. Of course, everything changed during the Communist era. But I think I’ll write about that tomorrow.

Taking Stock

I thought I would post a few more pictures of Bok Tower Gardens in Florida, but mostly in this blog post I want to take stock. I actually took stock once. When I was a teenager, I worked for one summer at the jewelry counter of a discount store. I pierced people’s ears and replaced watch batteries. It was my only experience working in retail. After that summer, I worked in summer camps. So in a way, I was always preparing to be a teacher. That summer, one weekend, we took inventory, which is the same as taking stock: you catalog what you have on hand, in stock.

This is more metaphysical, of course.

I haven’t been posting, and I think that’s because of my impulse, now that the semester is over, to retreat into myself. I’ve been through one of the most difficult years of my life. (Since I teach, I always think of years in terms of academic years, September to September.) It was the year in which I finished my PhD, the year in which various personal crises happened. At the end of it, I’m tired both physically and in a deeply existential way. What I want, more than anything else, is to get on a bus or into a plane and go, which may be why I’m traveling so much this summer.

I should say that in the midst of all this, some wonderful things happened to me as well: I finished my PhD! I actually made it through the year . . . And I do believe, firmly, that what does not kill you makes you stronger. In many ways, I’m a stronger person than I was two years ago, when I began to work on finishing the PhD in a focused way. I’m a stronger person for having made it through the personal crises as well. But they’ve taken their toll.

What do I have in inventory? I have a PhD in English literature, years of experience teaching undergraduates, and a writing career that has started slowly because I’ve had to put so many projects on hold, but that I now have the time to focus on. I have determination, a knowledge of craft, and some wisdom (I think). Something to actually say.

So I think the stock is pretty good, actually. I have plenty in inventory. What matters now is what I do with it.

The plan is to recover, to find myself again after this incredibly difficult year. That’s something I haven’t done yet, but I think I’m on the way there. I’ve started working on the novel, and writing always helps. When you’re a writer, the cure for whatever ails you is always writing. (Someone quote me on Goodreads. That’s the secret, in good times and bad: keep writing.) To figure out, or remember, who I am as a teacher, a writer, even simply as a person. To act out of that knowledge, rather than out of stress or anxiety.

I’m going to try to get back to posting more often. That’s good for me too. But in the meantime, here you go: more pictures.

I love secret gardens, and the old estate near the tower has a number of them. Look at these magical doorways.

There was one wooden building were you could go and watch the wildlife through the window. The diversity was amazing. (Yes, that’s the back of my head.)

And finally, here is the tower again. Gorgeous, isn’t it?

Photos by Jesse Walker

Where I’ve Been

I know, I know. It’s been a while since I’ve written.

That’s because I’ve been in Florida. Last Monday I took the bus back to Boston from New York, and last Tuesday I took a plane down from Boston to Orlando, where I’m working on some projects with Walker1812 Photography. But I have gotten a chance to see a bit of Orlando. On Sunday I visited the Bok Tower Gardens.

The gardens were created back in the 1920s by Edward Bok, a writer and editor. (Evidently, writers and editors could do quite well in those days. I don’t know any writers or editors nowadays who are likely to found public gardens.) He asked Frederick Law Olmstead Jr. to design the park, and built a tower in the middle of it with a carillon. The bells ring every hour, and while we were there we heard a carillon concert.  (That included Erik Satie. It was quite an experience, hearing Gnossienne 1 on a carillon.)

So in the space of two weeks I saw two Olmstead gardens: Central Park by the father, Bok Tower by the son.

Luckily, I was seeing the gardens with a photographer, so I can show you some pictures.

This is what the gardens look like.  They are beautiful: old, very much Florida, with hanging moss in the trees. And ponds with giant Koi in them which we fed.  In the middle of the gardens is the tower itself, which I would have loved to see from the inside.  (But only special visitors get to do that.)  It is thoroughly Aesthetic in design.  Here you can see it in the reflecting pool (the one with the Koi).

Above you can see its golden door, and the grave of Edward Bok just in front of that door.  In the gardens I found a Japanese lantern that had been given to Bok by a man who had worked for him, and saved seven years to buy it.

On the grounds is an old estate, the Pinewood Estate, which was owned by a wealthy industrialist and is now a museum.  It has its own gardens, which included a secret grotto with a fountain and small pool.

Celeste Walker and I looked for ways into magical countries, but did not find any. Perhaps next time.

Going to places like Bok Tower Gardens always makes me think about stories I could write. Not about Bok Tower specifically, but about an old estate next to a large garden with a tower like that. It would be fun, wouldn’t it? I can already imagine the curious girl who might move into that estate with her grandmother, and what she might find there . . .

Photos by Jesse Walker

A New York Day

Yesterday was a perfect New York day. In the morning, I took the 3 train down to 51st street, where I met my father and his wife, who are not only family but two of my favorite people. We had brunch at Rockefeller Center: yes, right in front of that big gold statue. And then we walked up to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where we saw a new permanent exhibit called Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia.

It was gorgeous. If you’re in New York, you should absolutely go see it: for a writer, in particular, it’s a treasure-trove of history, ideas, images. What I remember best are the carpets, plush and richly colored, with dark reds and indigoes; the ceremonial daggers, deadly and intricately carved; the astrolabe that was a thing of beauty; the delicate nephrite bowls. And the sense of history, of armies sweeping across the land, taking important cities like Baghdad, founding new dynasties and artistic movements. Of how the ancient world was stitched together by trade routs.

After the lovely dream of that exhibit, we wandered through late nineteenth-century European Art, through rooms of Cezannes and Monets and Van Goghs. Which were as rich, although in a completely different way, and I thought of the different ways the human spirit had expressed itself, and how important they all were. And how I wanted to contribute to that history.

Then we met up with my sister Johanna, another one of my favorite people, and went to the Café Sabarsky, which is located in the Neue Galerie. I had a slice of marzipan chocolate cake and quite a lot of orange tea.

And then we walked across Central Park, back to the West Side. All the azaleas were in bloom, and people were wandering everywhere, sitting by the pond where children were playing with sailboats, standing on bridges across the lake. Walking their dogs, confirming what I have often thought about New York: that no matter how the people look, the dogs are always impeccably groomed. I thought of Frederick Law Olmstead and the art he had created, the series of scenes we could see as we walked along the twisting paths.

And then it was time to say goodbye, which was sad, but I’ll be seeing them again soon. I took the subway back uptown, and on the way I stopped at a wonderful Middle Eastern restaurant I had discovered the night before. I bought a thick stew with tomatoes, other vegetables, and goat cheeses in it, with pita, and a dessert I can’t quite describe that had yogurt and almonds and honey. Two deserts in one day: a bit much, I know. But I’d walked all over the city, and anyway it was delicious.

There is no particular point to this post, except that it was a wonderful day, and that I hope to have many such wonderful days this summer. When I got back to the apartment, I booked my flight from Debrecen to London and back, so my summer itinerary is now complete. I think I’ll be having many more days like that, days of exploring and learning and seeing beautiful things, in the near future.

Ordinary Things

Several days ago, I was on the telephone with a friend of mine. We were talking about his daughter, who had caught some sort of cold. She had been coughing for several days. He needed to get cough medicine. We discussed cough medicine. At some point I said something like, this is a scintillating topic, isn’t it?

But later in that conversation I said, you know why we talk about such ordinary things, sometimes? Because our lives aren’t ordinary.

I am writing this sitting on a bus to New York City. I think I’m somewhere in Connecticut? I was up late last night packing, because I’d had a lot to do yesterday: it was, for me, the last day of the semester. This morning I got on a bus at 9:00, slept for a while on the bus, and then started working. Thank goodness for Wifi.

I’m going to New York this weekend to see my father and his wife, who are in New York because he was presenting research at a conference in North Carolina and decided to visit New York as well to see two of his daughters – my sister Johanna and me. The last time I saw him was for Johanna’s graduation from a design program at Columbia, and he was headed to Cairo the next day for another conference. This summer I will be visiting them in Debrecen, partly so I can drop off their granddaughter before I go to London. I’m going to London to see friends, but mostly to research the Mad Scientist’s Daughter novel.

I feel as though I’m living an extraordinary life. I know, some people are race car drivers. Some climb Mount Everest. Some cure rare diseases. But I get to travel, to create art. To meet and interact with some extraordinary people. And I feel incredibly privileged to be doing these things. But it can also be a tiring life, and so I find that I hold on to ordinary things. My favorite things are quite ordinary.

A hot bath, for example.

Or a bed with comfortable pillows.

Or a castle.

Just kidding about the castle. (But if anyone wants to give me a castle, I’ll take it, of course. I’ll just make sure that it has a good bathtub and hot, hot water. And a bed piled high with pillows.)

I’ll be in New York in about an hour. Once there, I’ll find myself a good cup of coffee, which is another one of those ordinary things. I love living an extraordinary life, but there’s a comfort in the ordinary that nothing else can give. In Christmas trees, and a cat curled in an armchair, and your favorite book. Even in cough medicine. (After all, where would we be without cough medicine?)

And my friend? About an hour ago, he sent me a text: “This is the largest funeral I have ever been to. Over 500 people. Standing room only and all in Haitian French.”

So I think he gets it.