Theodora Goss's Blog, page 56

Dreaming of Fairyland

One of my favorite poems is W.B. Yeats' "The Man Who Dreamed of Fairyland."

He stood among a crowd at Dromahair;

His heart hung all upon a silken dress,

And he had known at last some tenderness,

Before earth took him to her stony care;

But when a man poured fish into a pile,

It seemed they raised their little silver heads,

And sang what gold morning or evening sheds

Upon a woven world-forgotten isle

Where people love beside the ravelled seas;

That Time can never mar a lover's vows

Under that woven changeless roof of boughs:

The singing shook him out of his new ease.

I have fallen terribly behind. As you know, I was sick for two weeks. And then my computer was sick, and now I have so much to do, and so I haven't been able to get to the smaller things at all, like answering emails or responding to comments on this blog. I've had to focus on the larger things: responding to copyedits on the Secret Project, preparing to teach at Odyssey, writing my next Folkroots column, and revising my dissertation. All very large things.

"His heart hung all upon a silken dress, / And he had known at last some tenderness": he found love, mortal love, but all the silver fish sang of Fairyland, "Where people love beside the ravelled seas; / That Time can never mar a lover's vows." Where love is immortal.

He wandered by the sands of Lissadell;

His mind ran all on money cares and fears,

And he had known at last some prudent years

Before they heaped his grave under the hill;

But while he passed before a plashy place,

A lug-worm with its grey and muddy mouth

Sang that somewhere to north or west or south

There dwelt a gay, exulting, gentle race

Under the golden or the silver skies;

That if a dancer stayed his hungry foot

It seemed the sun and moon were in the fruit:

And at that singing he was no more wise.

Some people work at desks, and when I type, I do it at a desk, of course. But so much of my work I do wherever I have space. So, for example, the work I was doing today, I spread out on my bed. (Today: responding to copyedits.)

When I write, I often do it on the bed, lying on my stomach and leaning on one elbow. Or leaning back against the headboard, with the notebook propped on my knees. Or in my chair, with the notebook on one broad arm. (It's a mission-style chair, the arms are very broad).

"His mind ran all on money cares and fears, / And he had known at last some prudent years": so finally he wasn't worrying about money, as we all do. At last he had some savings, but the lug-worm (which, by the way, is large marine worm of the phylum Annelida) sang of a place where there are no money cares and fears at all. Where value is calculated otherwise.

He mused beside the well of Scanavin,

He mused upon his mockers: without fail

His sudden vengeance were a country tale,

When earthy night had drunk his body in;

But one small knot-grass growing by the pool

Sang where – unnecessary cruel voice –

Old silence bids its chosen race rejoice,

Whatever ravelled waters rise and fall

Or stormy silver fret the gold of day,

And midnight there enfold them like a fleece

And lover there by lover be at peace.

The tale drove his fine angry mood away.

Today, I spread the copyedits out on the bed and knelt beside it, as though it were a low table. Which looked rather like this, except that this is obviously posed, because I'm holding the pen in my left hand (for effect). I'm right handed, so usually I would be holding it in my right hand. But I couldn't get a picture from that direction that wasn't backlit.  This is me in full working mode: glasses, comfortable sweater.

Don't I look all pensive and writerly? Which was I today, the writer in the world, thinking of cares and fears, or the writer dreaming of Fairyland? Because of course the poem is really about being a poet, a writer. It's about what the writer experiences, living that half-and-half life I described. A writer dreams of Fairyland, and that dream transforms ordinary life. Sometimes it makes ordinary life difficult to live.

He slept under the hill of Lugnagall;

And might have known at last unhaunted sleep

Under that cold and vapour-turbaned steep,

Now that the earth had taken man and all:

Did not the worms that spired about his bones

proclaim with that unwearied, reedy cry

That God has laid His fingers on the sky,

That from those fingers glittering summer runs

Upon the dancer by the dreamless wave.

Why should those lovers that no lovers miss

Dream, until God burn Nature with a kiss?

The man has found no comfort in the grave.

Even in death, he has found no comfort – the man who dreamed of Fairyland. Even in the grave he dreams of a place beyond the ordinary world. There is no peace for him, once he has seen Fairyland, and there never will be.

I'm not sure why I combined these two things, the pictures of me responding to copyedits and Yeats' poem. Except that I think they represent the two halves of a writer's life. One half of you dreams of Fairyland and will find no peace in this world, except perhaps when you are piecing together the fragments of that dream, turning them into a poem, a story, a novel. And the other half is depositing checks and responding to copyedits, which are both things I did today. It's a strange life, a life that takes a sort of double consciousness.

Which may be why I ended the day with a terrible headache.

The Scaasi Exhibit

I promised that I would show you pictures of the Arnold Scaasi exhibit, so here they are. The exhibit was small, all in one room, but quite rich in terms of its range and the outfits themselves.  You could spend an hour wandering around that room, looking at all the details.

These are clothes as clothes, not clothes as art.  For that, you're going to have to wait for Alexander McQueen.  So I'm going to critique them as just that – clothes one might actually wear (or not).

The first section of the exhibit focused on the 1960s. You can see the 1960s silhouette in the following dresses.  I like that the red velvet cape has a silver lining that echoes the fabric of the dress, and the silver dress has a red velvet bow that echoes the cape. You could be a sorceress in this dress. You would certainly cast a spell.

The polka-dot dress feels so contemporary. This is still the early 1960s, which was influenced by Christian Dior's New Look. The waist was still at the waist, and skirts were still pouffy. This isn't my style (there's no magic in it), but I like the dress.

I liked the details on several of these outfits, like the pink bow on the suit.  In any suit like this, I think we're seeing the influence of Coco Chanel.  It's still the Chanel suit silhouette. I would wear something like this, if it weren't so heavily beaded.

The short black dress was worn by Natalie Wood.  Here we get to the late 1960s silhouette, where you start to lose the waist. You could wear a dress like this to a party (I wouldn't), but it starts to feel retro, whereas the earlier dresses feel more contemporary.

One thing that startled me about the exhibit was the mix of fabrics and other materials.  Many of the dresses mixed silk and synthetics.  The beading on the turquoise and coral dress below is coral – and plastic.  The silhouette on the coral suit is still Chanel.

Here we transition from the 1960s to the 1970s.  The dress on the left is late 1960s, the dress on the right is already 1970s. Most of the 1970s outfits were made specifically for Barbara Streisand, and you can see that they represent a different way of thinking about the female body. It's no longer a woman's body. It's a pretty boy's. Slender, without an obvious waist. An Empire silhouette, with pants rather than skirts (although that may have been Streisand's individual preference.)  Honestly? I don't know who these would actually look good on. They certainly didn't look good on Streisand.

I do like the long white wool coat with fur collar, hat, and muff (although I don't wear fur).  It's very Dr. Zhivago. The black mesh outfit was the one Streisand wore to accept an Academy Award.  Under the lights, it looked see-through (although it wasn't).  Which was scandalous at the time, although nowadays we think of it as rather ordinary, don't we?  We expect wardrobe malfunctions. Bell bottoms: seriously, Scaasi?

You can see the Empire silhouette here – Empire silhouette jumpsuits, which are so 1970s.  As is that particular peachy pink, which does not look good on any skin tone.  I do like the detailing, though. It looks almost Egyptian.

Oh yes, the strange 1970s lightning-pattern outfit!  Obviously created for Streisand in her incarnation as a space alien.  Scaasi, what were you thinking?  And here we transition to the 1980s, which is the silhouette I grew up with, in the dress covered with black, white, and silver leaves. It's difficult for any woman to look attractive in a dress that fussy.

Didn't quite a lot of us wear a variation of this dress to prom?  Scaasi's is the high-end version, but it's no more attractive for its expensiveness.  It looks more dated, to me, than the polka-dot dress at the beginning of the exhibit.  And why would anyone bring back the bustle?

But this was a beautiful dress!  A Snow Queen dress.  I would wear this dress in a heartbeat.  Anywhere.  To the opera, to do dishes.  The mix of gauzy white fabric, silver embroidery, and luxurious fur make it magical.  You could walk through an enchanted forest in this dress. I want one just like it (with fake fur). It looks simple, without being simple at all.

I liked this dress too.  It's a bit over the top, with its feathers and fabric roses and silver embroidery and fur.  But still, it's a Queen of the Birds sort of dress.  It's dramatic, unusual, and lovely.  It just needs something around the shoulders. Or maybe a crown.

And here we come to everything that was wrong with the 1980s.  The black and hot pink dress! What were you thinking, Scaasi? It's not even appropriate for prom. And the shoulders! No one should ever wear puffed shoulders. Chanel taught us not to wear puffed shoulders.  Listen to Chanel, my sisters! And banish puffed shoulders from your closets forever.  On the other hand, the suit on the right is quite nice.

What ordinary dresses Scaasi designed in the 1980s! Or is it that I grew up seeing the knock-offs of these dresses? But there is absolutely nothing distinctive about these.

Or these. And the colors. Yuck! Like wearing scoops of sorbet.

And with the Watermelon Dress, we come to a silhouette that is attractive on no one (except perhaps a few select supermodels).  And the blue dress with the white lace appliques is just blah.

So what lessons can we learn from the Scaasi exhibit, my sisters?

1. Dresses from the 1960s can still look fresh and fabulous.

2. The 1970s were a regrettable decade. And let's just pretend that the 1980s never existed.

3. Chanel was always right about fashion. (Other things, not so much. Like collaborating with the enemy in World War II. But the woman knew what looked good on other women.)

4. If you get a chance to look like the Snow Queen, go for it. Don't even think twice.

Women Becoming

While I was sick, I watched a movie that had been given to us as a gift and that I had never watched: Julie & Julia. I thought it would be the sort of movie one could watch while sick, and it was.

It's about a blogger, Julie Powell, who decides to cook all of the recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Half the movie is about Julie's life, half about Julia's life in France learning to cook and developing the cookbook with her partners, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle. One criticism of the movie is that the Julia parts are more powerful and interesting than the Julie parts. And they are, because – and I write this with no disrespect to the actual Julie Powell – in the movie, Julia is a more interesting character. After all, she doesn't just try to cook from a cookbook for a year. She spends years learning to cook, mastering the actual art of French cooking, and then meticulously trying to adapt French cooking for the American home cook. In other words, she spends years becoming the person we now call Julia Child. The person who changed food culture in this country.

I don't think that's too broad of a claim. Child changed the way we look at food and cooking. I collect old cooking and gardening books, mostly because they are time machines showing me how people once lived. If you've ever seen a cookbook from the nineteen sixties, you'll know what I mean when I say that no one, nowadays, would ever want to cook from them. No one eats like that anymore. (If you've never seen one of those cookbooks, I'll give you an example from one of mine, called Cooking for Two, which charmingly begins, "You have returned from your honeymoon and are about to start the great adventure of homemaking." For dinner, Cooking for Two suggests that you serve the following: Broiled Liver, Potatoes Anna, Creamed String Beans and Mushrooms, Lettuce with Russian Dressing, and Baked Apple Dumplings. Or alternatively, Tomato Juice Cocktail, Halibut Steak with Cheese, Baked Potatoes, Wilted Dandelion Greens, Pear Salad, and Gingerbread with Whipped Cream. Which are the strangest combinations of foods I think I've ever seen.)

The Child sections of the movie were fascinating because it's always fascinating to watch someone work on a project that he or she cares passionately about. The number of eggs she had to poach, so she could get the instructions just right! The number of rewrites she had to do! And she was a fascinating personality, of course. And she was played by Meryl Streep, which doesn't hurt: one technical perfectionist playing another.

But the reason I thought about the movie further, rather than simply dismissing it as something I had watched while sick, was that I had recently seen Coco before Chanel. So here were two movies about women in the process of becoming what they were later to be, and be known as: Julia Child and Coco Chanel. It reminded me that some time ago I had seen The Hours, which is at least partly about Virginia Woolf, unfortunately played by Nicole Kidman in a fake nose.

Three women, each of whom changed the way we do things, deeply and fundamentally: the way we cook, the way we dress, the way we write.

Here is how we dressed before Chanel:

And here is how we dressed after Chanel:

Here is the beginning of Middlemarch:

"Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impression of a fine quotation from the Bible, – or from one of our elder poets, – in a paragraph of to-day's newspaper. She was usually spoken of as being remarkably clever, but with the addition that her sister Celia had more common-sense. Nevertheless, Celia wore scarcely more trimmings; and it was only to close observers that her dress differed from her sister's, and had a shade of coquetry in its arrangements; for Miss Brooke's plain dressing was due to mixed conditions, in most of which her sister shared. The pride of being ladies had something to do with it: the Brooke connections, though not exactly aristocratic, were unquestionably 'good': if you inquired backward for a generation or two, you would not find any yard-measuring or parcel-tying forefathers – anything lower than an admiral or a clergyman; and there was even an ancestor discernible as a Puritan gentleman who served under Cromwell, but afterwards conformed, and managed to come out of all political troubles as the proprietor of a respectable family estate. Young women of such birth, living in a quiet country-house, and attending a village church hardly larger than a parlour, naturally regarded frippery as the ambition of a huckster's daughter."

And here is the beginning of Mrs. Dalloway:

"Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

"For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer's men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning – fresh as if issued to children on a beach.

"What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, 'Musing among the vegetables?' – was that it? – 'I prefer men to cauliflowers' – was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace – Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished – how strange it was! – a few sayings like this about cabbages."

I'm not picking on George Eliot, whom I like, although not as much as Jane Austen or Charlotte and Emily Brontë. But you can see how her prose resembles those pre-Coco dresses. It feels heavy (what I've included here is only half of the first paragraph). You can't wear it in a modern city. It would get caught in the door of the bus. It would (to be more precise) sound like a caricature. I have never yet read an attempt to write nineteenth-century prose that didn't. Woolf's style is lighter, more modern. Now that I read it again, I can see how it's influenced me. I mean, it's all over "Pip and the Fairies," in which I skip between the past and present and even future based on what my protagonist is thinking about.

(Of course, Child, Chanel, and Woolf did not change things by themselves.  No one ever does.  But they were important parts of changes that were taking place at the time.)

Three women who changed things. You know me by now, so you know what I'm thinking. Will I change anything? Not that I have to, necessarily. At least, not anything on such a scale. But I would like what I do to count. Three women who became themselves. What will I become?

There's only one way to find out. Start cracking eggs.

Thinking about Cassatt

I was thinking about Mary Cassatt.

Actually, I was thinking about myself, and this past year. It seems to me that something happened last summer. Something changed or began to change. And I started to see both myself and the world differently. There are a number of things that can do that to you. A work of art can. A place can. A person can. Seeing yourself through the eyes of a person who sees you differently than you see yourself: that can change you.

This year, I've been thinking of myself differently, not just as a person but also as a writer. And I've been changing both as a person and a writer. I've believed in myself more, I've dared more in my work. I'm writing things I don't think I would have written before. It's as though since last summer, I've become more myself, more the person I was supposed to be all along.

I'm taking myself more seriously.

The reason I was thinking about Mary Cassatt is that often, I use other art forms to help me think about writing. So I'll use dance to think about writing, or I'll use music or visual art. And what Cassatt did was combine innovative techniques, taken from the Impressionists and particularly from her mentor Edgar Degas, with subject matter that was not itself particularly innovative. In a way, she combined Impressionism with certain aspects of Victorian genre painting. The mother and child paintings, for example. Like this one:

So often when we think of experimental art, nowadays, we think of art that is not particularly pleasant to look at. Cassatt created an art that was aesthetically pleasing, that actually created a sense of comfort and stability, but that was nevertheless challenging because it did not idealize, the way Victorian genre painting did. Her mothers and children were particular mothers and children.

What I like about the painting above is the richness of color. She had that glorious color sense that makes walking into a room of Impressionist paintings like walking into a garden. In the Museum of Fine Arts, there is just such a room, and when you walk into it, you feel free. You think, yes, I can breathe here.

You can see that color sense in the yellows and violets in the painting above. They remind me of France. But I also like the girl's plaintiveness, which is not the plaintiveness of children in Victorian genre paintings. This child looks as though she has lost something specific.  As though she is actually thinking about it.  Not as though she is a representation of loss in the abstract.

In the last two pictures, the painting above and the print below, you can see how she adapted techniques from Japanese prints. They are so flat, comparatively. I like the blues and yellows, so vibrant. There is a crucial combination in these pictures that I want to think about: the aesthetic pleasure they provide, which creates that comfort I described, and yet the challenge they present. They ask you, the viewer, to find aesthetic pleasure in a different way. We can tell they presented a challenge at the time: Cassatt's paintings were repeatedly rejected at the Salon.

Some of the writers I love from that time period, Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, were doing the same thing. Even James Joyce was. They were creating work that provided aesthetic pleasure and yet presented a challenge. I get a certain feeling from reading them, the same feeling I get from walking into the Impressionist room at the MFA. A feeling of lightness, airiness, and yet strength. Unity and structure, yet freedom.

Honestly, the writing I've been doing recently isn't particularly challenging in that way. I think I've been focusing on beauty and aesthetic pleasure, on providing those. I want to be able to write a prose that is filled with light, the way Woolf's is. But I also want it, or at least some of it, to go to an edge. Not in the way modern art often does, but in the way Cassatt did.

How difficult it is to describe all this! And it's the last thing I can think about, right now. But since last summer, I've been feeling more and more as though I'm moving toward something, in myself, in my work. Something that is the self I'm meant to be. And I want that movement to continue.

Catching Up

My computer is back!

I can't tell you how lovely it feels to be cruising through cyberworld at my usual speed. Like something out of Blade Runner, or am I thinking of some other science fiction movie?  The Fifth Element, perhaps?

I thought that I would post a few pictures I took during that time and could not upload. Just to catch up.

First, here is me on the day I relinquished my computer to IT, actually on the way there. I don't think I've ever looked so bedraggled in photographs I've uploaded here.  (Well, except for ones taken first thing in the morning, or in which I had green goop on my face.  But those were deliberately bedraggled.) This is me tired, frustrated, worried, on a day when I'd like to be working but on which I had to drive an hour to drop my computer off at the computer hospital.

And here are some things that cheered me up during that sad and lonely wait. First, after dropping my computer off, I went into the Boston University Barnes and Noble, and guess what I saw? Happily Ever After on the shelf, as a staff pick!

And remember when I said that I mended a tiered skirt? Well, this was the skirt.  It's made of a soft, swingy brown corduroy. It has all those tiers, and some of them were coming apart just a bit, so I had to sew them back together.

And I didn't mention this, but during that time I bought two pillows. I don't usually buy things out of frustration, but this time I have to admit that it did happen. But I like the pillows.  They have geraniums on them, and the colors match – well, everything else I own. Here's one behind Dani (the bear I got on my first birthday), on the mission-style chair in my room.

And finally, I didn't mention this either, but another thing I did was restring some of my pearls. In my family, girls are given pearls. I got mine when I was sixteen. Ophelia has already gotten hers. I had decided years ago that I did not like how mine were strung, so I took the strand apart but never put it back together. One night while my computer was being attended to, I sat down and restrung some of them, knotting the silk as one should between pearls, attaching a silver clasp. This is about eighteen inches, and I should have enough for another shorter strand. (I was given quite a lot of them, a long string. But I simply never wore them that way.)

No, I don't actually wear pearls around the house, especially not when I'm writing. (How can you tell I'm writing? The glasses. The hair up, out of my way.) But these had lain for a long time in a tin, and they weren't as lustrous as they should be. Pearls warm up, take on a shine, when they are next to skin. So I wore them today to get them to their usual pearliness.)

This is a nothing, an amuse-bouche of a blog post. A sorbet. So I'm going to post something else somber and serious, I promise. But I'm giddy with relief at having my responsive instrument back, on which I can type so quickly, which is such a part of my life.

Thank you, computer doctors!

A Sense of Discontent

I've stopped coughing, but I'm still very tired – the aftermath of the Coughing Plague, I think. Nevertheless, today I wanted to go to the Museum of Fine Arts, mostly for a banana split but I do also like those pictures and things they have hanging on the walls. So we went.

I can't show you any photographs, because this computer doesn't have a program that can download them. Honestly, I feel as though I'm stuck in the technological dark ages.

After the banana split, which was a thing of beauty that is a joy for at least half an hour, I focused on two exhibits. The first was Scaasi: American Couturier. There were two exhibits related to fashion that I wanted to see this summer. The first was the Isabella de Borchgrave exhibit I described in earlier blog posts, but it was too early in the summer. I couldn't make it out to San Francisco by the time the exhibit closed. The second is the Alexander McQueen exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which I'm definitely not going to miss. (New York friends, I should be there the first week of August, which is also the last week of the exhibit. New York is so much easier than San Francisco, just an inexpensive bus ride.) Because I missed Isabella de Borchgrave, it was nice to make the Scaasi exhibit, although not quite the same, not as artistically interesting. But still. (I have photos and will post them as soon as I have a twenty-first century computer and not one that runs on horsepower.)

Did you know that Arnold Scaasi was Arnold Isaacs (read Scaasi backward) when he first came to the United States? The dresses themselves were very interesting. You could see the fashions changing decade by decade, see the different silhouettes and materials. It was a useful education for a writer. I wish Genevieve Valentine had been there; I would have liked to hear her comments.

Then I went into my second exhibit, Artists Abroad: London, Paris, Venice, and Rome 1825-1925. And here I ran into a problem: my own sense of discontent. Because while Scaasi had been fun, here was real art: engravings and watercolors by Mary Cassatt, James McNeill Whistler, and their ilk. It was a small exhibit: small works (in terms of size, in terms of their importance) in a small room. But you could see, for example, how Cassatt was experimenting, how she was making these smaller works in preparation for larger ones. Experimenting with techniques. And there were two Whistler engravings that looked like no engravings I have ever seen. He had found a way to capture the sheen of light on water in an engraving, which seems like an impossible thing to do. I looked at them and thought, Whistler, you cool, crazy dude. And there were other artists I had never heard of who nevertheless belonged to the artistic ferment in those cities.

The discontent came from wanting to participate in something like that. An artistic ferment, but also more importantly artistic experimentation. Cassatt and Whistler were so clearly in the process of trying to find out what it meant to be Cassatt and Whistler. I wanted to be in the process of finding out what it meant to be me, artistically. Whether that was part of a ferment or not. (But Cassatt was deeply influenced by her milieu, as I think artists always are. And I do think I have a milieu, which consists of writers who are trying to blend what are often called fantasy and literary fiction. And that is currently in ferment.)

You know what Virginia Woolf said: five hundred pounds a year and a room of her own. I have often longed for the modern equivalent. I want to go deeply into myself, find out what it is I have to say. I don't know whether my doing so is justified or not. It may turn out that my writing is not important enough to justify that sort of immersion. That introversion and taking of time. But if I don't do it, I'm not sure that I'll ever find out. I'd like to find out what I can do, not in the rag-ends of time I seem to have nowadays, when I'm so often writing after midnight, exhausted. But in large swaths of time.

Well, all I can do right now is the work I have in front of me, finish that and then see where I come out. Where, after that's done, writing fits. But I'm working toward having the necessary space and time. Because, while I don't yet know what I can do, I think it's time I found out.

(On the way home, I read Cassatt's biography on my cellphone. It was nice to see that, even though her family was wealthy, she too had problems she had to overcome. More problems than I have, certainly – being a female artist in the nineteenth century. And I learned something useful: at one point, desperate to support herself, she decided to give up painting and move out West for a job. Luckily, she was given a commission and returned to Paris the next year. Mary Cassatt was going to give up. You know what that means, right? All of us go through the same things. Without exception.)

The Second Frustrating Day

Yesterday was the second frustrating day.

In the morning, I took my laptop into the Information Technology center at Boston University. I was told to call at the end of the day to see if it needed to stay over the weekend. Just to take the suspense out of this blog post: it did. This weekend, I do not have a laptop. That's not quite correct, because after all, here I am typing this post. I have my old, very old, laptop. The one I had before I bought the new one. Technology changes so quickly. A laptop that I used for years, and that was the best I could find at the time, now seems slow and clunky. It's difficult to type on.

Which makes me think of two things. The first is the extent to which I depend on technology that is easy to use. My laptop, where everything is configured for me, where I can move around the internet with the fewest possible clicks, going from my website to facebook to twitter without having to input passwords. It's almost as easy, for me, as writing on paper with a pen. My cell phone, which allows me to be in constant touch with the world, even in airports. When something breaks down, it feels as though I have been displaced, as though a part of me is in the wrong place. Donna Harraway is right: we are all becoming cyborgs. Or at least I am. I can live without my tech. But I can't live with tech that malfunctions.

And my life requires things to work. It's a life in which things happen quickly, in which I need to turn documents around. Not having the ability to do that is so frustrating.

The second thing I thought about was how I deal with that sort of frustration. What did I actually do to deal with it?

First, I cleaned and mended. No, seriously. I cleaned my closet, and I mended three skirts and one sweater. On one skirt, I needed to secure the hook and eye more firmly. On the second, I needed to sew up some tears near the zipper. The third was a skirt with seven tiers, each using more fabric than the last, so that it flares around my calves. On those sorts of skirts, the places where the tiers are sewn together are not always strong, and the thread can break. So I sewed the places where the tiers had come apart. And the sweater had a run, which I secured and sewed over. So, in a small way, I put things that had come apart, back together.  And in my closet, I put a set  of low shelves on which I could fold all my sweaters.  It's now much neater.  And there is finally room for all the shoes.  Although honestly, most women would probably laugh to see how few clothes I have, how few shoes. Everything fits into one closet, one dresser.  Which is all a part of traveling lightly.

Second, I read. Specifically Joan Aiken's Armitage family stories. The book I was reading is called The Serial Garden: The Complete Armitage Family Stories. It's published by Small Beer Press, and you can buy it from Small Beer Press here and from Amazon here. The wonderful thing about these stories is that there's no interference. What I mean is, I never find myself thinking, that could be been put in a better, clearer way. Aiken's prose is exactly what it should be: clear, lucid, precise. The sort of prose I would very much like to write myself. The sort I'm trying to write.

It's a story about a family that has magical adventures that, to them, are perfectly ordinary. The first chapter begins,

"Monday was the day on which unusually things were allowed, and even expected to happen at the Armitage house.

"It was on a Monday, for instance, that two knights of the Round Table came and had a combat on the lawn, because they insisted that nowhere else was flat enough. And on another Monday two albatrosses nested on the roof, laid three eggs, knocked off most of the tiles, and then deserted the nest; Agnes, the cook, made the eggs into an omelet but it tasted too strongly of fish to be considered a success. And on another Monday, all the potatoes in a sack in the larder turned into the most beautiful Venetian glass apples, and Mrs. Epis,who came in two days a week to help with the cleaning, sold them to a rag-and-bone man for a shilling."

And so on. Interestingly, typing those lines, I can see how Aiken's prose must have influenced Kelly Link, because for some reason that description reminds me of Kelly's "The Fairy Handbag."

Third, I danced. Sort of, not actual dancing but the dance and yoga and pilades moves I put together into my exercise routine. I put on S.J. Tucker's Blessings. And then, I moved: bending and twisting and lifting, making sure all the muscles were stretched and strengthened, going from downward dogs to pushups and back again, from roll-ups and rollovers to shoulder stands. Just trying to get the tension out.

It's difficult not to dance when you have music like this:

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Or this:

This is going to be a frustrating weekend. I want Monday to come already. Until then, I'm going to keep cleaning, mending, reading, dancing. What else is there to do, in the face of frustration?

The Frustrating Day

It's been a frustrating day.

I was in the middle of printing out the comments on my dissertation chapters – the comments on the revised versions that I need to respond to in the next set of revisions, when my computer told me it had a virus. So I had to shut it down. (First I had a virus and now, just when I've mostly stopped coughing, my computer has one.)

What could I do? Everything I needed to work on was on the computer. Except the YA novel, so I sat down with pen and paper to write the third chapter. So far I have two chapters typed, one chapter handwritten. I'm not sure what I'll call them yet, but here are some preliminary chapter titles.

Chapter I: 221B Baker Street

Chapter II: Seeking Hyde

Chapter III: The Mutilated Body

I'm not happy with the first one, but I'll work on it.

I was going to write about the YA novel tomorrow, tell you how I was doing at the end of the week. But I may as well write about it tonight, because I'm too tired and frustrated to write about anything else. Before I start, notice how many participants we have for the YA Novel Challenge! Remember that you can join and leave at any time. If you want to join, just send me your name and blog URL, and I'll add you to the list.

So first, there's been a lot of controversy over YA novels this week. Meghan Cox Gurdon wrote an article in The Wall Street Journal called "Darkness Too Visible," complaining about how dark and depressing YA novels are becoming. The article starts like this:

"Amy Freeman, a 46-year-old mother of three, stood recently in the young-adult section of her local Barnes & Noble, in Bethesda, Md., feeling thwarted and disheartened.

"She had popped into the bookstore to pick up a welcome-home gift for her 13-year-old, who had been away. Hundreds of lurid and dramatic covers stood on the racks before her, and there was, she felt, 'nothing, not a thing, that I could imagine giving my daughter. It was all vampires and suicide and self-mutilation, this dark, dark stuff.' She left the store empty-handed.

"How dark is contemporary fiction for teens? Darker than when you were a child, my dear: So dark that kidnapping and pederasty and incest and brutal beatings are now just part of the run of things in novels directed, broadly speaking, at children from the ages of 12 to 18.

"Pathologies that went undescribed in print 40 years ago, that were still only sparingly outlined a generation ago, are now spelled out in stomach-clenching detail. Profanity that would get a song or movie branded with a parental warning is, in young-adult novels, so commonplace that most reviewers do not even remark upon it."

In response, Sherman Alexie, the author of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which was mentioned as one of those dark, depraved novels in Gurdon's article, wrote a response, also in The Wall Street Journal, called "Why the Best Kids' Books Are Written in Blood." His article ends like this:

"Teenagers read millions of books every year. They read for entertainment and for education. They read because of school assignments and pop culture fads.

"And there are millions of teens who read because they are sad and lonely and enraged. They read because they live in an often-terrible world. They read because they believe, despite the callow protestations of certain adults, that books – especially the dark and dangerous ones – will save them.

"As a child, I read because books – violent and not, blasphemous and not, terrifying and not – were the most loving and trustworthy things in my life. I read widely, and loved plenty of the classics so, yes, I recognized the domestic terrors faced by Louisa May Alcott's March sisters. But I became the kid chased by werewolves, vampires, and evil clowns in Stephen King's books. I read books about monsters and monstrous things, often written with monstrous language, because they taught me how to battle the real monsters in my life.

"And now I write books for teenagers because I vividly remember what it felt like to be a teen facing everyday and epic dangers. I don't write to protect them. It's far too late for that. I write to give them weapons – in the form of words and ideas – that will help them fight their monsters. I write in blood because I remember what it felt like to bleed."

Where do I come out on this? First, I don't know how old Gurdon is, but the books that were around when I was a young adult were just as dark and depressing as the ones that are out now, my dear. For the most part, I avoided those books. That was partly because by the time I was eleven, I was already reading adult novels. I have a vivid memory of reading Angélique and the King in sixth grade. If you don't know anything about the Angélique series, it's about a woman in eighteenth-century France who loses her fortune and has a series of adventures, which involve her becoming involved in one torrid romance after another. In Angélique and the King, Angélique becomes the mistress of Louis XIV. What I remember most about the book is that it was a thousand pages long. It was excellent preparation for my future career as an adventuress.

I also, that same year, read most of the Anne McCaffrey Pern books. My friend Amy Lawrence and I would sit on the swings, talking about how nice it would be if a dragonrider came (a bronze one would be best, but we would make do with a brown) and took us to Pern. Again, excellent preparation for my future career as a dragonrider.

There were a lot of books out there when I was a teenager. I had an instinct for the ones I needed. I didn't need books about teen pregnancy or prostitution. What I needed were books that gave me a vision of life as more adventurous, more exciting, than the life I was living. The Angélique and Pern books did me no harm, if little good. But that year I also read The Lord of the Rings, and that book did me great good. It showed me a world in which beauty, truth, and honor were actually important. In which magic was real. It showed me a set of ideals that guided me later in life. It became part of who I am.

Young adults will find the books that they individually need. Some of those books will help them become who they are meant to be. I seriously doubt that any of those books will harm them. The more books they read, the more they will learn to judge for themselves, find their own way.

So what about my own YA novel? I don't know, I'm worried. Because what I'm doing in this first draft is simply getting the story down on paper, making sure the plot works, the characters are consistent. But at this stage, it's missing something – it's missing a soul. I hope I find that soul as I go along. I hope I find what the book is centrally about. I think it's about monsters, what it means and how it feels to be one. But I'm not sure that's anywhere in the first draft.

I think I'm discovering the soul of the book as I go along, and I'm worried that it's not going to be in the story itself. Or that I'll have to rewrite extensively to put it in. I don't know. I think there's going to be a lot of rewriting anyway.

There are two things I want to end with. First, I lost a week, but I seem to be writing an average of about 500 words a day. That's partly because I'm ending up writing the chapters by hand. They don't come easily enough to simply type. So I hand write a chapter one day, then type it up the next. Second, I'm having to remind myself of something that I emphasized in the Wiscon writing workshop. I'm going to write it here in case it helps anyone else.

Take a look at the ends of your chapters. Are they good places for your reader to put down the book? Take a short break? If so, you're doing it wrong. You want each chapter to end in a way that leads into the next chapter. That makes it difficult for your reader to put the book down. We have a tendency to seek closure. But closure at the end of each chapter defeats your purpose, which is to keep the reader reading. I'd like to give you an example from the end of Chapter 2, but it's on my virus-y computer. So here is a preliminary example from the end of Chapter 3, which at the moment is just a mass of handwriting.

"Mary was already thinking of the box of documents Mr. Guest, her solicitor, had sent her. It would take hours, perhaps all night, to go through them. Well, she would have Mrs. Poole make a strong pot of tea. What secrets had her father kept from his family? She did not know, but she wanted to find out."

That's all right, it does gesture toward the next chapter, but it's not as impelling (is that a word?) as I want it to be. It needs something more. The second chapter ends with the information that there has been another murder. I need something like that. Well, hopefully I'll find something.

And hopefully I'll get my computer back tonight. This has been a very frustrating day.

The Half-And-Half Life

Normal people sing in the shower.

I am a writer. Therefore, I am not a normal person. Instead of singing in the shower, I write dialog. There I was this morning, in the shower, imagining what Mary and Diana would say to one another as they were going through Jekyll's documents, what they would find. I thought, how will they learn about Beatrice? Then realized that of course, Mrs. Poole would tell them. She's the one who buys the penny papers. She would have seen the advertisement.

This blog post is a follow-up to the one called "The Inner Life." That post made me realize the extent to which I live half in and half out of the world. I think all writers do.

In that post, I mentioned riding the T, looking at the people. (Normal people don't look at one another, on the T.) Sometimes, I try to guess who they are, what they do, based on their external appearance. You can tell the students, for example, but you can even tell the law school students from the undergraduates. Our external appearance, how we present ourselves to the world, conveys so much information about who we are, who we think we are, what we want to be. It's fascinating to study people in that way, try to guess their stories.

And you can pick up details that you can use in your own stories. A construction worker and a student may wear the same pair of boots, but will wear them differently. Those boots will mean different things on the student and construction worker. If I say, "She wore a great deal of gold jewelry, around her neck, on her fingers," you will immediately start to get a sense for the kind of woman I'm talking about, although you'll wait to hear more details. But you will expect something different from a woman who "wore a necklace of small, regular pearls around her neck."

I suppose what I'm trying to say, really, is that as a writer you never turn it off. You are always only half in the world. You are also at the same time half somewhere else.

I'm not sure how that affects other writers, but it affects me in some relatively strange ways. For instance, it's easy for me to lose a sense for what's real. I will be walking through the Arnold Arboretum, looking at the lilacs, remembering them so I can describe their look, their scent. (English and Russian lilacs are completely different. Did you know? You need to pay attention to these details, when you're a writer.) So I can write, "She walked down the avenue of lilacs, their panicles just starting to open, trying to capture their elusive perfume." Something like that. And suddenly I'll remember where I am, somewhere much less romantic than where I imagined.

It can be a little scary, living half in and half out of the world.

On the other hand, the world becomes a magical place, filled with stories. With possibilities, because stories are possibilities. I think writers tend to seek out stories. Tonight, I watched part of a travel show on PBS. The traveler was visiting all the tourist sights in Budapest, a city where I have spent some time. And I thought, how dull! He's missed the whole magic and romance of Budapest. What you want to do in Budapest is walk along the twisting old streets, looking at the nineteenth-century architecture. Stop at a grocery store, buy bread and butter and cheese and salami and tomatoes. (Remember to bring your own bag, because they don't give you plastic bags in the grocery stores in Budapest.) Or stop at a restaurant that has been in the same place for the last hundred years. Sit in the courtyard, order a thick, spicy stew over dumplings with a Hungarian wine. And in the afternoon, go to the Café Gerbeaud and have chestnut paste with whipped cream (which is one of my favorite desserts in the world).

The half-and-half life is a life that becomes magical, romantic, because you can always tells stories about it. And you can always find stories in it.

I'm not sure that I'm describing it very well.

It's a life in which your imagination is always working. In which it is always gathering material for stories, and always imagining stories. Sometimes you have to bring yourself back to reality, make sure the bills are paid. But it also allows you to see the genuine magic of the world we live in, the romance of a city, the beauty of an avenue of lilacs (which does actually exist at the Arnold Arboretum).

It provides insight. It's like the fairy ointment that allows visitors to fairyland to see things they could not otherwise see.

(It also allows you to see that some of the things we believe are real are actually stories.  The stock market, for instance.  Can you think of a better example of magical thinking?  The value of a share of stock exists because we believe it exists.  Like fairies.)

And of course, the half-and-half life allows you to write stories. Which allow other people to see fairyland too. That's part of your function as a writer, allowing other people to see things they might not otherwise see themselves, to say, "Yes, that is actually how lilacs smell," or "I'd like to walk down the twisting, narrow streets of that city."

These are preliminary thoughts. What I'm trying to do is describe how I experience the world, which I think is as a writer. But it's a difficult topic, isn't it? And I don't know if other writers experience it the same way.

The Messes

I meant to start cleaning up the messes on June 1st, but I was too sick. And then I was sick all week.

By the messes, I don't just mean the physical messes, although there are those. Would you like to see? The mess beside the shelves:

The mess on top of the shelves:

The mess on top of the other shelves:

The mess on the desk:

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you know that I can't stand messes. So today, I started cleaning them up. That's what I'm going to be doing this summer, cleaning up the various messes in my life. The physical ones will be the easiest. I started today by making lists of the things I need to get done, the dates by which I need to get them done. Here's what the summer looks like:

June:

Make final revisions to dissertation, draft introduction.

Prepare for and teach Odyssey Writing Workshop.

Write Folkroots column on the myth and magic of Narnia.

Write first third of the YA novel.

July:

Revise dissertation introduction, draft abstract.

Prepare for and attend Readercon.

Write second third of the YA novel.

August:

Dissertation will go to committee.

Write Folkroots column on – I'm thinking werewolves or unicorns?

Write third third of the YA novel.

That's the general list. I also have a list of specific things I need to do now, sending in an invoice, doing an interview, that sort of thing. And I have some short stories I've promised to people. I have to go look at the deadlines – I know they're distant, but I should get started on some of the stories, or at least start thinking about them.

Of these things, the dissertation takes first priority, and the YA novel last. That's the one thing I'm doing purely for my own sanity, to keep myself from feeling as though I'm not doing anything at all for myself. I can't take a vacation this summer, I simply don't have the time, so roaming around London with Mary and Diana (they haven't met the other girls yet because I've only written two chapters) will be my vacation.

There is a sense in which, this summer, I will be working rather than living. But that's the price for cleaning up the various messes in my life. It's the price for getting to the fall and starting fresh. (Remember that messy bookshelf? Someday in the not-too-distant future, all those books will go back to the university library.)

Sometimes I'm overwhelmed, sometimes I'm not sure I can do it all. But I have friends who are usually reliable telling me I can, and why should I distrust them about this one thing? And I've already accomplished so much this year, I'm already in such a different place than I was last August. I'm already almost at the end of the road, and while I'm not sure where it leads, I think it will be somewhere exciting. Somewhere I can create the life I want for myself.

I don't want to leave you with images of messes, so I'll leave you with something that is not a mess, but a rather nice order. It's the top of my dresser:

In front of my mirror, I have a silver tray on which I have set my frog pottery bowl filled with acorns, a candle on a silver ashtray, a piece of driftwood with some shells, and my rock with BELIEVE carved on it. It's an image of order and natural beauty. And it inspires me.

As do all of you, writing about your own lives and the issues you're dealing with. If you're a writer, an artist, a creative type, those issues will always be there. And we have to deal with them as best we can. We will all find our own tools. I believe in making lists; in creating pleasant environments for yourself so you can pay attention to the messes more effectively; in finding inspiration where you can, even if it's a rock. And remembering that you're not alone. We're all in this together, cleaning up the messes, creating the lives we want for ourselves.