Jennifer deBie's Blog, page 3

The First Mistake

I remember the first mistake I ever found in a novel.

A tiny thing, a minor henchman in one of Brian Jacques’ Redwall novels (either Mariel of Redwall or Mattimeo, it was one of the ones I owned, not one borrowed from the library), who was described as a “her” first, and then as “him” elsewhere in the text. A nothing typo that had no impact on the adventure and didn’t change the character’s arc or eventual demise.

Served the varmint right, attacking the Abbey.

But I remember being stunned by the oversight.

Floored that Mr. Jacques, whose books gave me some of my earliest lessons in world building, dialect crafting, and weaving multiple narratives together, would allow a mistake of this magnitude.

At a time in my life when books were sacrosanct, not to be written in, I considered taking a pen and correcting my copy. Deciding once and for all the gender of this stoat (or were they a weasel? Definitely not a rat, because rats were almost always the lead villains, not the henchmen).

I remember telling myself that I, when I eventually exploded into the literary market as a fully formed and much lauded novelist, would never be so careless with my characters. That I would never forget any details about anything I ever wrote.

Sweet naiveté, thy name was Jenni.

Not only have I forgotten details from the one novel I’ve published; apparently I’m forgetting details of my research even as I enter the last hours of editing. Earlier this week, one of my mother’s comments as she proofread my doctoral thesis was: “Wasn’t the creature made in Ingolstadt, not Geneva?”

Yes. Yes he was.

Something that I really should know, seeing as I’ve devoted the last four years of my life to studying the creature, his construction, and Mary Shelley in general. You’d think that would be a detail I’d get right.

You’d think I would have found it glaringly obvious at some point in the hundreds of times I’ve read the passage she was commenting on. That I would have caught the switch myself and fixed it without help.

But I didn’t.

She caught that mistake, and it is no more but how many other little slubs like that lurk in my thesis?

In the novel I’ve published and the novels I plan to publish?

I know of at least six typos in published version of The Adventures of Dogg Girl and Sidekick, including a repeated, egregious misspelling of the word winery that someone really should have caught somewhere in the process.

How harshly will the future judge me for these mistakes?

In some, rational, corner of my brain I know that I’m grasping at these details because I’m in the last days of thesis editing and the stress of that is piling on. That I’m staring down the barrel of an uncertain future that could be determined by the quality of the work I eke out in the next week. That scares the living shit out of me.

And scared people make mistakes.

And scared people make mistakes.

And I am just a people.

One of billions of other people on this planet, all just as capable of making mistakes and just as capable of forgiving them.

With all the wisdom and experience of a ten year old, I found my first mistake in a novel. As an exacting reader with authorial aspirations and a memory that got me in trouble on more than one occasion, it seemed like a near-unpardonable offence.

Almost two decades later, I’ve a much kinder take on the gender of a single, barely named, character.

Would that my mistakes were so slight.

Chase thunder lovelies,

JdB

If you like Jenni’s writing, she has a book! It’s about super heroes and college students and friendship and fighting and all sorts of fun stuff, you can check out the first chapter here, and purchase it below!

Look at the whole board

The Bartlett Administration, cir. 1999-2000

In the early days of the pandemic, I started re-watching Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing (1999-2006), a much beloved drama chronicling the lives and intrigues big and small of President Jeb Bartlet’s eight years in office.

It’s dated, there’s no doubt.

The coats are boxy, the metaphors are heavy-handed, and the handling of LGBTQ issues is… of the time, shall we say?

But the characters are earnest, the president is intelligent, a Nobel prize winning economist, the dialogue is snappy, the bipartisanship is hard won, and at the end of the day literally every character wants to make the country a better place.

Wants to make the world a better place.

In those first weeks, as infections spiked and death tolls crawled skyward, as refrigerated trucks were parked outside hospital morgues and I learned to sew my own masks, slipping back to a place where the world was still complicated but the people running it were the most capable on earth, was nice.

It was hopeful.

Which is why, when the West Wing cast reunited in October for A West Wing Special to Benefit When We All Vote, a staged reading of season 3 episode 14, “Hartsfield Landing”, to help get out the vote, I was excited. Some of my favorite television characters would live again, exist in the beautiful minimalism that is a staged reading at its best.

And it was a good reading.

The staging was beautiful.

With little more than desks, doorways, and lighting, the White House was recreated and peopled by Josh and his harried assistant Donna, Sam deliberating over an antique chessboard, while President Bartlet deliberated moving aircraft carriers in response to military posturing from China. Press Secretary C.J. bought pizza and speech writer Toby cautiously mended metaphorical fences and, at the end of the day, things were fixed.

[image error]Martin Sheen, as President Josiah Bartlett, plays chess with Richard Schiff as Toby Ziegler in A West Wing Special to Benefit When We All Vote

Or if not fixed, they weren’t made worse, maybe made a little better.

And it hurt.

It hurt watching these clever, earnest actors play clever earnest characters from over a decade ago, spouting lines written by one of the best scriptwriters alive—it was a dream. An idealized version of a White House that hasn’t existed for years now.

Maybe never existed.

The same way Pete Souza’s documentary The Way I See It (2020) hurt.

Souza, White House photographer for Presidents Ronald Regan and Barak Obama, offers an intimate look at the life of the most powerful man in the world. Through his lens we see what America has been, narrated by a man who obviously loves his country and has loved those he was hired to document.

President Obama, photographed by White House Photographer Pete Souza

It was beautiful, but bittersweet.

Watching it felt almost like an act of mourning. Mourning for innocence gone, for possibility lost, for a country that has broken open and exposed her weeping edges to the world.

A country that I want so badly to see fixed.

Or, at least not made worse.

There is hope.

Glorious, delicious Hope and Change with capital letters, ghosts from a campaign a decade and more gone.

Hilarious Hope in the form of a time warp.

Delightful Change in the words of a young poet.

Reason for optimism in 91 million ballots already cast.

This is the world we recreate.

Recreate through our greatest civic duty. In the words of another great Sorkin protagonist: American elections are the envy of the world.

Every four years we peacefully overthrow our government, we have the opportunity to make it new again.

To make it better.

Every four years we get to look at the chessboard and decide if we’re going to keep playing this set, or if we’re going to get a new match. We ask the experts, we listen to the arguments, we consult our own gut, and we call the play.

I made my choice a month ago, when I filled out my ballot and put it in a postbox with a stamp and a prayer.

A prayer for another peaceful overthrow.

For a chance to make it better.

It’s time.

Biden-Harris 2020

Chase thunder,

JdB

If you like Jenni’s writing, she has a book! It’s about super heroes and college students and friendship and fighting and all sorts of fun stuff, you can check out the first chapter here, and purchase it below!

I have always wanted to be a Witch

I have always wanted to be a witch.

Part of that can be chalked up to my age.

My sister got the first two Harry Potter books as a Christmas present in either 1999 or 2000 when I would have been six or seven. Shortly thereafter our Mom started reading them to me as bedtime stories.

Chapter by chapter, night by night, we read through the first four in the series that way. Me leaning against her in the big brown, velveteen chair in our living room, or curled together on my bed, wrapped in the blue and red sailboat quilt my grandmother made just for me.

A nightly ritual, like magic.

From Harry Potter, I graduated to Redwall and thousands of pages of interwoven stories about magic swords and brave mice. The Jungle Book, with its clever rhymes and because ‘we be of one blood thee and I’. Nancy Drew, mysteries to be solved and a little blue sports car to zip around in while we did it. Tamora Pierce and the world of Tortall, full of lady knights and spies and mages who talked to animals.

At some point I started in on my Dad’s science fiction: Dune, Hitchhiker’s Guide, 1984, Around the World in 80 Days, John Carter Warlord of Mars, Tarzan of the Apes, The DaVinci Code.

Worlds so different from my small corner of Texas.

Worlds crafted by people who had the power to write with audacity.

People so different from me, as I was then.

Witchcraft, plain and simple.

Nothing but witchcraft could transport a young reader so far afield and bring her back in time for dinner.

Nothing but witchcraft could do so much with so little; just paper and ink.

I have always wanted to be a witch.

It shouldn’t be surprising, really.

The girl who studies Frankenstein wants to believe in some form of magic. That her bookshelves, the crystals she buys, the luck rituals she performs and jewelry she gravitates towards, all would reflect that.

That she wants to make a little magic for herself.

My fingers have never been clever enough for sleight of hand, my poker face never good enough to get through a trick without giving the game away.

Besides, what are cards or coins to world creation?

And world creation is what I’ve been training for my entire life.

What I’ve been reading for my entire life.

To write the history of a universe, of a country, a civilization, a city, a life, and then explode that history across a novel. And then share that explosion.

Share that explosion with people literally all over the world. People that you love, and people that you don’t, and people whose lives you can’t even imagine.

If creating worlds that others can see and experience with nothing but paper and ink isn’t witchcraft, then I don’t know what is.

So tonight, with my overfed familiar curled at my feet, my grandfather’s silver dollar in my pocket for luck, stacks of grimoire piled around my chamber and the moon waxing into her proper full majesty just in time for Samhain, I wish you magic.

I wish you explosions and transportation to worlds uncharted.

I wish you witchcraft.

Chase thunder,

JdB

[image error]Mija, the familiar, thoroughly unimpressed with her witch.

On Character

The Notorious RBG

I’ve been thinking about characters and characterization, about the way a writer can build and populate their work with ink and paper people. About the tricks we use to make those people real for our readers.

The foibles that need to be imbedded in them, the lexicons we design for them, the archetypes we use and abuse. The gritty cop, the plucky protagonist, the idealist, the best friend, the bitch.

We’ve all seen these characters in books and film.

I’ve written versions of all of them, several appear in the novel I just published. I’d like to say that those characters were written faultlessly; that they feel real rather than like facsimiles, but the truth is I’m not sure.

I haven’t re-read my own novel in over a year, and its been almost five years since the first draft of that story came out of my keyboard.

I’ve hundreds of pages and hundreds of thousands of words worth of practice crafting story and character since The Adventures of Dogg Girl and Sidekick.

Were I to write it today, how different would my characters be? What nuance would be used to draw their actions, reactions, conversations and confrontations? How would that nuance change the story, the arcs that I’ve set them on that (hopefully) continue past the final page of the book.

What prospective futures do they look to?

I’ve been thinking about this, about the building of fictional characters, as my country moves through the early stages of vetting our next Supreme Court Justice.

I’ve been thinking about this and considering the characterization of the legendary woman whose vacancy my Congress is currently attempting to fill.

I have never lived in a world without Justice Ruth Bader-Ginsberg fighting for my rights.

The Notorious RBG was nominated to the Supreme Court less than a week after I was born in the summer of 1993, she was confirmed less than two months later with near unanimous approval.

 Scholar, activist, professor, lawyer, wife & mother, tireless fighter for the underdog, whoever the underdog was, icon and subject of multiple documentaries, an excellent biopic, and delightfully portrayed by Kate McKinnon on SNL…

If RBG had never existed, or I never heard her name, and wrote a character with all these characteristics, so universally beloved and multifaceted, an editor would tell me with red ink that it was too much.

That I need to simplify my characterization. Round her rough edges, make her a little softer and smoother.

That Justice Ginsberg was unrealistic.

And she was, wasn’t she?

One of a handful of female law students in her class, she completed both her own course work while simultaneously attending her husband’s classes and taking lecture notes for him as he battled testicular cancer in a time when the recovery rate was miniscule.

She co-founded the Women’s Rights Project within the ACLU pursued legal equality for women by choosing cases that took on targeted discrimination in American law, dismantling legal barriers by pieces rather than sweeping changes.

She became a member of the US Court of Appeals for DC under Carter, a position she held for over a decade. A position she relinquished only to join the Supreme Court.

Only the second woman to sit of the Supreme Court, and one of only four women to sit on the Court in its 230-year history.

She was unrealistic.

She was born into a world that didn’t suit her, so she changed it.

She made it better.

As a novelist, I approve of her character arc. I like the way we can look back on her life today and see steady, fierce progress, even knowing that at the time it likely did not feel that way to the woman living it.

Maybe someday I’ll be able to write characters as compelling as her.

I’m still trying to figure out how to live in a world where an iron wall of a woman isn’t sitting on the highest court of my country actively defending my rights.

I’m still trying to figure out how to write my characters into real people.

They’re both going to be long processes.

Nevertheless, we persist.

Chase thunder lovelies,

JdB

I wrote a thing, and now it’s on Amazon!

[image error]Cover art courtesy of the ever-delightful Hope “Silver” Bobb!

Authorhood is a funny thing.

Just over five and a half years ago, in December 2014, I wrote a novel. It wasn’t the first novel I started, or even the second or third. Nor was it the first or second or third novel I finished, and any author will tell you that it’s finishing a novel, not starting it, that’s the trick.

But it was… different.

When I got back from Christmas, a friend with discerning taste agreed to be a beta-reader and asked me to send her the manuscript.

Beta-reader and manuscript are both terms that I have learned to use since, not words I would’ve applied to emailing a 200 page word doc to my roommate in January 2015.

I remember that night distinctly, because she came into my room after a few hours, and told me it was good, but didn’t say anything else because she needed to get back and finish it.

We were both 21, seniors in college, right on the edge of the rest of our lives.

The manuscript didn’t languish.

I toyed with edits.

I discovered Japanese jazz and video game soundtracks as writing music.

I moved overseas and earned an MA in Creative Writing.

I sent my manuscript and cover letters to dozens of agents and publishers.

There are myths among creative writers, about papering walls with rejection letters. About learning to laugh when the “thanks but no thanks” comes one night, and still send out another spate of manuscripts and cover letters the next morning.

About tailoring each submission so it looks like this agent or publisher was your first choice and not your thirtieth.

This agent wants the first two chapters and a cover letter, one document.

This one wants the first five pages and a cover letter, separate documents and no identifying marks on the first five pages, we blind read so you know it’s fair!

This publisher wants the first 10,000 words: .docx, or pdf format, .doc files can carry viruses too easily.

This one wants the first 50 pages physically mailed to them.

-We’ll send your 50 pages back to you with the rejection letter if it is a rejection letter.

-Thanks?

On December 31, 2016 I burned 50 pages and a rejection letter in my family’s New Years’ bonfire. A fresh start for a fresh year.

In the summer 2017, my novel was accepted by Dreaming Big Publications.

And here we are, October of 2020.

Five a half years ago I wrote a thing and I thought it was good and a few friends thought it was good and a publisher thought it was good, and now it’s on Amazon!

I haven’t been faithful blogger, and can’t promise to be in the future, but over the next few weeks I will endeavor to be better.

Isn’t that what we’re all doing every day? Just trying to be better?

This timeline is just a series of snippets from a long and, often, frustrating process.

A labor of love if we want to parlay clichés.

A labor I’ll try to share a bit more of.

There are some life lessons here, something about preservation and chasing dreams, probably. At least a few posts to be milked.

We’ll figure it out together.

Until then, chase thunder lovelies! And thank you for being here!

-JdB

A Time to Take Pictures

There are times for words and times for actions, times for art and music and protest. There are times to walk out into the world and say Today There Will Be Change, because change is good and evolution is powerful.

There are times to hide. Times of fear. Times of distress and anger and, times when the world screams down on all of us and we’re forced to scream back.

The Bible and Byrds both say something to that effect.

And in the spirit of all of these different ‘times’, there are also times to dress up in a cool costume and pose for a goddamn photoshoot.

[image error]

A couple of weeks ago was the latter.

Enjoy!

[image error]

When we first got the pictures, a friend told me he thought the ax would be bigger…

[image error]

Chibi version!

[image error]

Brownie points to anyone who guesses the number of tosses it took before we had a few decent versions of this shot.

Hint: I honestly don’t know the correct answer.

[image error]

Jenni, lean on that tree. No not on that way! The other way. Don’t crush the shoulder guard!  Look off into the distance! You’re just casually leaning against this tree. And stand straighter!

[image error]

Hold it! Right there! Flex your bicep a little! You are a badass. It’s okay that you haven’t been doing crunches. You are a badass. Your bra is not too tight. You are a badass.

[image error]

Now crouch and look like your tracking something.

Is this a snake hole I’m staring at?

You’re tracking something, don’t get distracted.

I think it’s a snake hole.

It’s probably not a snake hole.

Are you sure?

Umm….

 

And finally, friends, the artist herself, Silver! Who put a wig on in solidarity!

[image error]

Notice how this was taken post-shoot and we’re both a little sunburnt.

There are, of course, dozens more pictures and poses from this shoot. These will be forthcoming on the artist’s Instagram which I will definitely link to as soon as she builds it!

In the meantime, thanks for checking in!

Chase thunder lovelies, until next time!

Art & Apesh*t

 

 

Warning, contains sweeping generalizations and graphic art.

 

[image error]

Mary Patterson (1828) J. Oliphant

Recently, I came across the above image. A pencil sketch by John Oliphant of a young woman named Mary Patterson. The subject is nude, supine, and one of a long line of female artistic subjects laid in a posture that would be uncomfortable to hold for any length of time.

Among my favorites from the genre of uncomfortably recumbent:

[image error]

Henri Fuseli The Nightmare (1781)

[image error]

Antonio Canova’s Venus Victrix (1808

[image error]

Dirk de Quade van Ravesteyn’s Ruhende Venus (~1608), or Venus at Rest

[image error]

And Clemete Susini’s Anatomical Venus (~1770)

This final figure, a female wax cadaver designed to have her organs removed and replaced time and again for the edification of Florentine medical students is more apt a comparison than the previous three artworks:

Mary Patterson, the first artistic subject, is dead.

Her portrait is a post-mortem sketch commissioned by Dr. Robert Knox of Edinburgh, she was likely posed by his students. Mary herself was murdered by the notorious duo Burke and Hare, two men who plied their victims with alcohol, smothered them, and delivered their fresh corpses to Knox where they were paid handsomely for supplying material for his anatomical school.

At their trial, Knox would claim to ignorance as to the origin of the corpses he needed to train his students. Knox would not face formal repercussions for his part in the murder of over a dozen people.

Some versions of Mary Patterson’s story say that after the sketch, a horrified student (or maybe another anatomical instructor) insisted on an immediate burial for the young woman. Another version claims Knox could not bring himself to dissect her immediately, and instead preserved Mary in alcohol for months, presumably until her beauty was marred by the inundation and she became dehumanized enough to dissect. Other versions say she was dissected immediately, becoming less a person and more a series of pieces over the following days or weeks until Knox and his students had gleaned all the knowledge they could from her corpse, at which point any remnants would have been discretely disposed of.

The history of European art is dominated by depictions of white people. The history of female subjects of European art is dominated by white women in a state of undress.

Frequently, they look away from their artist.

This is a large reason why the most famous woman on canvas, Leonardo DaVinci’s Mona Lisa (~1500) is so startling. The Mona Lisa stares back, she observes her observer. She meets the gaze equally, judging DaVinci five centuries ago, and us today, even as we inspect her.

[image error]

Compare her with probably the second most famous woman on canvas, Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (~1480)

[image error]

Nude: Check.

Looking away: Check.

Uncomfortable: Maybe?

When was the last time you held your head at that angle and your thighs together and your leg half-raised for any length of time?

According to hundreds of years of Europe’s finest artists, this is what beauty looks like.

According to hundreds of years of Europe’s finest artists, beauty looks like me.

And my mother.

My grandmothers.

My sister and aunts and most of my friends.

The 20th century saw changes to the discussions surrounding art, beauty, and race. The 21st century, all two decades of it, has seen more evolutions.

Good.

Two summers ago, Beyoncé and Jay-Z thrust themselves into the discussion of brown bodies in classical art with the music video for their song “Apesh*t” (2018).

The song itself is middling to me, braggadocio about wealth, power and fame notable for coming from a woman rather than a man, but nothing groundbreaking. Nothing like the ferocity and reconciliation that spans her Lemonade album (2016).

The video, however, is art.

Directed by Ricky Saiz and shot on location in the Louvre, it offers a stunning commentary on black bodies, the way they have been placed in art historically, and the necessary space that they need to, and will take in the zeitgeist in centuries to come.

Better art historians than I have discussed the significance of the pieces highlighted by Beyoncé and Saiz, including the controversially obtained Winged Victory, Jacque Louis David’s Coronation of Napoleon (1807), and Jean-Louis André Théodore Géricault tragic Raft of the Medusa (1818-1819), two pillars of early 19th century French painting and an statuary emblem of colonialism.*

The final painting highlighted in Apesh*t is lesser known but no less stunning.

[image error]

Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s Portrait of a Black Woman (1800) stares at her observers, just as inscrutable as the Mona Lisa, a few galleries over.

In a time when people of color were shadowed servants in scenes crowded with white subjects, or appeared in illustrations with rough lines and little nuance as slaves in bondage, she is a rarity, possibly unique.

She is not as covered as the Lisa, not as nude as the Venuses.

Her clothing drapes classically, the blue fabric behind her is rich with an embroidered detail finishing the edge rather than a roughly sewn hem. The fringe beyond the embroidery is even, purposeful, not a crude fray.  An indication of either her skill as a craftswoman, or her ability to purchase the work of a skilled craftswoman.

Her breast is exposed, and one arm is bare. The arm is muscled realistically, her fingers are loose and natural. Her eyes meet ours, and her painters’, unflinchingly. Her shoulders have a natural arch I recognize from my own posture, even as I write this.

Despite her bare chest, this unnamed woman does not exude the same vulnerability as most of the previously mentioned artists’ subjects. She is not the sleepy Venus recumbent, the modest Venus covered delicately with hair and hands, the pinned victim of a night terror, or the dead woman with her spine exposed for artist, anatomist, and students alike.

Benoist’s subject is aware of what is happening to her.

Like the Portrait, Beyoncé spends most of her camera time pinning the viewer with her gaze. She challenges those watching to extend what is considered beautiful. She challenges artists to expand what they take as subject matter.

She is active.

Wikipedia has multiple pages devoted to lists upon lists of various supine nudes, artworks representing centuries of inactive white women, splayed and waiting for the eyes of the world. Women who invite this gaze, and women who were exploited by it.

We live two hundred years beyond Mary Patterson and her sad fate at the hands of Burke, Hare, and Knox and white women have started standing up.

Started standing with our sisters.

It’s beyond time.

 

 

 

*If you are curious about the art represented and juxtaposed throughout the video, I recommend Ellen Caldwell’s “What About the Art in “Apesh*t”?

On the seventh week of isolation

And on the seventh week of isolation, I started wearing jewelry again.

A watch, a necklace, two rings.

The watch is a sister to the one my dad gave me when I started getting serious about running back in high school. The silver cross necklace was a birthday present from my grandmother the summer I turned thirteen. My heavy, silver thumb ring was a souvenir from a day out in Jefferson with my mom sometime shortly after my sister’s wedding in 2016, the other is my college class ring.

Inside the band, where we could have our names inscribed, I put a line from Tennyson instead: to the lees.

The full quote runs “I cannot rest from travel: I will drink // Life to the lees”

The lees are the dregs of a wine cask, the very last drops.

The words are a promise I made to myself before I left the state and the people that I love so, so fiercely. It’s a promise that I’ve started wearing daily again, alongside the other reminders and tokens from a few of the people I love best in this world.

Quantum theory says that there is an alternate reality where Covid-19 didn’t happen. Where New York City, Chicago, New Orleans, and Houston never suffered ventilator shortages. Where protests in Michigan probably happened, but they weren’t about this. Where Austin got to hold SXSW, and high school seniors got to go to prom, and didn’t die in just over sixty days.

In that alternate reality, a different Jenni got to see her family last week. She got to hug them, and eat with them, and got embarrassed at how blatantly American they can be. She got to be proud of them when they disproved stereotypes. She got to see tulips and laugh when her brother in law’s carefully mapped schedule went out the window. Maybe alternate reality Jenni actually likes beer, and didn’t have to ask for cider at every pub they stopped at. Maybe she got high with her parents—who knows? It’s Amsterdam.

In this gentler, more innocent version of time, the closest she gets to plague is the Wiertz museum in Brussels, where she hunted out Antoine-Joseph Wiertz 1854 painting  L’Inhumation Precipitée, or The Premature Burial, an embodiment of black humour in the midst of a cholera epidemic.

In this alternate, kinder reality she would have gleefully explained the rampant fears surrounding live burial in the 18th and 19th centuries. Her family would have been polite enough to listen, even though they’ve heard her spiel on this before.

I comfort myself with this alternate reality. I pray that she, the version of me that exists on the other side of a fold in time and space, had a good time. That she held her people tight, and told them she loved them, and that she laughed when they all said goodbye at the airport because she would be home in August anyway.

I hold these imagined memories as I sit trapped across an ocean in this reality. A reality where my skin doesn’t feel like it fits. A reality where stepping outside is a calculation. A reality where sleep and rest are not the same thing.

On the seventh week of quarantine, I started putting my jewelry on again in the mornings, because it helps. A watch, to count days, a cross to hold when I need it, two rings. Links and anchors and tethers to keep me bound to those I love far over the sea.

Reminders that even over here, alone, and aching for human contact, they’re still with me.

Together, apart.

JdB

Eating Time

When I was six months old, my mom made a friend.

And when I say made, I mean made. His name is Herman, he lives in a Pyrex bowl in one of her cabinets, eating flour every few days, and turning out consistent loaves of the best Amish friendship bread in the world every time he’s called on.

I’ll be twenty-seven in June, he’ll be twenty-seven in December. In a few years we’ll turn thirty together. He’s been a part of our lives as long as I can remember.

The past couple of days, I’ve been thinking about Herman more than I have, possibly ever.

Under quarantine conditions, I’m thinking about a lot of things these days, but one of my primary preoccupations the past couple of weeks has been baking. Soda bread, cookies, scones, turnovers, sausage rolls, banana bread as soon as my bananas age a little more— they all help to eat the weary hours.

Thus, Herman.

I’ve kind of always figured I’d have a Herman of my own one day, but usually my plans for him involve stealing portion of mom’s when I finally find a place to land permanently. Herman Jr. and I would move to whatever city will hire me, I’d forget to feed him regularly, my loaves would never turn out as pretty as mom’s.

Now, with time on my hands, and a comfort-craving for starch of all kinds carved into my soul, I’m debating on making my own friend. The recipe is easy, water, flour, time, patience, and the sacrifice of a large bowl as his permanent home.

At the moment, it’s a dearth of the last ingredient that has me holding off on this endeavor, but if Tesco has an appropriately sized container for his residence, that might change.

This world was scary enough before a global pandemic threw a wrench in all of our collective plans, and if nurturing a bowl of soupy, starchy bacteria will help me keep breathing, then I won’t turn it down.

Besides, it’ll give me another way to ignore the research I should be conducting.

Stay strong lovelies,

JdB

 

Links to things I’ve wasted time with this past week:

Charade (1963) – Starring Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant

How to Murder your Wife (1965) – Starring Jack Lemmon and Verna Lisi

One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (1992)— David Suchet as Hercule Poirot in the 1990s BBC series

Lore Olympus (ongoing, updates Sundays)— a webcomic retelling of the Persephone/Hades myth

CV Survival (playlist)—my Spotify playlist (80 songs and counting) of music that keeps me from climbing the walls.

WaPo’s Sourdough starter— is this the one mom used all those years ago? Maybe, maybe not, but it’s the one I’m eyeing.

Howl (1954-55) — The poem that put Ginsberg on the map, some days Howling feels appropriate.

Together, apart

Fitzgerald Park, Cork, approx. 1:30pm March 18, 2020

In Defoe’s version of this story, the priests abandon their pulpits and congregations, fleeing to the isolation of country homes. In Shelley’s version, American refugees invade Ireland, and then Scotland, murdering and looting their way south to the gates of London, before the son of the last king of England reminds them of their humanity. In Poe’s version, the party ends because even high walls, loud music, and a prince’s hubris cannot lock out the unwanted guest. In Byron’s version, humanity circles her burning cities beneath a sunless sky, frozen, starved, hateful. For Camus, the last hope is meaningless, the coded messages from the other side of the ocean are nothing but the wind.

For the Greeks, it was a goddess who brought the famine, a mother’s wrath when a daughter was taken. For the Egyptians it was ten times the destruction visited by a wrathful deity that they did not worship, an anomaly in mythology. Usually plagues are wrought by one’s own gods rather than the gods of someone else, the pantheons do not often intersect.

In the past six months I have spent innumerable hours thinking about these things. The ancient destruction myths, the modern classics, and the eighteenth and nineteenth century pillars on which each of today’s apocalypse films and video games and comics and TV shows and novels is built.

Last summer, when I wrote a proposal to teach an entire second year seminar on apocalypse fiction from centuries past, the Wuhan flu a phrase in a Dean Koontz thriller from 30 years ago. Six months ago, when I began researching in earnest for my first lecture in January, if there was word of Covid-19, they weren’t reporting it outside of China. When I returned to Ireland from Christmas break, fresh and ready to utterly disgust my students with graphic descriptions of plague buboes, mass graves, and miasmatic transmission, reports of the coronavirus’ toll in China had only been on American radar for a few weeks, if that.

For three months my students and I watched it spread. We talked about the power of misinformation, the spread of panic, the rapid construction or acquisition of modern day ‘plague houses’, desperation and what it can lead to.

We talked about the way some things never change.

And, as of last Thursday, our classes were suspended. My university, like every school in Ireland, closed its doors at 6pm Thursday the 12th and will not open again until the end of the month. Classes will not resume, and seminars as small as mine will not be continued electronically.

Pubs closed over the weekend, and likewise will remain closed in the coming weeks. Theaters will remain dark. The demolition site across from my house has been abandoned for the time being. The major tech companies in the area are sending employees home to work. A budget airline in this country is considering grounding its fleet.

Walking around Cork yesterday, almost all independent stores, restaurants, and coffee shops are closed. Many of those businesses still open have hand sanitizer stations at their entrances.

Living through a minor apocalypse is a strange thing.

[image error]

Opera Lane, Cork, approx 1pm March 18, 2020

These past few nights I have dreamt that all water was connected. Last night I walked into the River Lee and emerged shivering from the pond in my parents’ front pasture. The night before that, it was the ocean and the creek I slosh across when we walk our dogs on the hunting tract behind their home.

They are safer and I am safer if these dreams stay dreams.

If I stay as I am, on the other side of the world, walking my empty city, maintaining my careful six feet between the wandering souls here, and baking more sweets than should reasonably be eaten by one person, then we will all be safer.

In literature, disaster divides humanity. It turns us away from each other and that is our downfall.

In history, disaster unites us. We rebuild cities, mend levees, donate blood and energy. We dig through rubble, put out fires, save so, so much. We save so many.

In this time of crisis, our best act of unity is separation. Not division, but distance. Our greatest act of love will be to sacrifice personal desires for companionship while we wait out this storm.

Together, apart.