Deborah Clark Vance's Blog, page 3

Would You Mind Smelling Like a Poor Loser?

I used to compare my family with characters in Edgar Allan Poe’s house of Usher who suffered from an acuteness of the senses. For Roderick Usher, “the most insipid food was alone endurable; he could wear only garments of certain texture; the odors of all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were tortured by even a faint light; and there were but peculiar sounds, and these from stringed instruments, which did not inspire him with horror.”

Our acuteness of the senses, unlike theirs wasn’t “morbid” but it was – is – pronounced. Especially our sense of smell. We have noses like hound dogs.

I’m married to a man who lost his sense of smell in childhood. He had asthma and allergies and grew up at a time when the best treatment for asthmatics was to get drunk (“you might have trouble breathing, but at least you won’t mind”). He was in constant misery living in a household with cats and a father who smoked indoors. Now he claims he can smell at the high and low ends of the spectrum.

Steve and I once went bike-riding along a trail created on an old railroad line. It abutted rural back yards and passed through wooded areas. Steve had found a new allergist who’d helped his asthma enough that he could occasionally smell things. It’s commonly known that the olfactory nerve connects directly to the brain so smells can trigger memories associated with the emotions they conjure.

That day as we rode along, Steve excitedly announced things he was smelling. Some I struggled to identify, confused about what he sensed as remarkable.

“What’s that? I smell flowers?” he said. It was early spring when the only blooms we passed were scilla and crocus which aren’t aromatic.

“I think it’s the air freshener in that outhouse we just passed,” I noted.

Then he said, “I smell something that reminds me of my childhood!”

“Well, we just passed a guy shoveling manure onto his garden beds.” I feel sort of bad about having been so precise. I was accurate, though.

Just last week I put some potatoes on to boil, laid down to read and fell asleep, which atypical for me. Steve coming in the door awakened me. I was disoriented and didn’t even know what time of day it was. I smelled something burning which he didn’t smell. It was the potatoes.

When we first got married, he liked to spend time in candle stores where he could sense the candle smells. We bought them for a while until realizing they kicked up his allergies. Then he discovered certain colognes, one of which I like a lot. It became his trademark fragrance.

A few weeks ago he switched a fragrance I didn’t particularly care for. I told him it just didn’t fit. He said he’d felt like a change so he went on Amazon and read reviews for colognes. Because it was funny, he liked the reviewer who said this one had the smell of a “rich white man.”

I told him I prefer his trademark “poor loser” scent. Perhaps I don’t have enough rich white men friends to have a positive association.

Have you read SYLVIE DENIED yet? I invite you to grab your copy, and please leave an honest review when you do.

Do You Think the Arts Affect Us Because of Vibrations?

Popular opinion says we’re simply a collection of stimulus-response and that our response to art is caused by effects of sound vibrations and light waves on our sense organs. Such thinking used to be avant-garde (remember the Skinner box?). Now it seems passe.

Here’s where I’m coming from. There’s a certain piece of music that has hold on me, no matter who performs it. We always take at least one of our several versions on road trips but I don’t typically play any of them at home. That’s because something compels me to listen to the entire thing. Even if it comes onto one of the classical radio stations, I’m transfixed and don’t budge until the final chord is played, which takes twenty minutes start to finish. I suppose such a weakness could be used to shake me down – fortunately my children weren’t wise to it.

It started when my grandmother arranged for the whole family to go to a concert that turned out to be one that no other concert has ever eclipsed. On an overcast July evening we went to an orchestra concert at Ravinia Park north of Chicago. The electric small of a storm floated with us into the covered pavilion’s open sides. We took our seats not far from the stage where I saw a grand piano and musicians dressed in black, tuning up their instruments. After a while, the conductor entered to applause, then the soloist sauntered in, shook hands with the conductor, bowed to the audience and sat on the piano bench.

The orchestra started playing with a rush and the piano joined in. Watching breathlessly, I wondered that people could make their fingers do such amazing things. The music seemed like a game of tag between the piano and the other instruments. When it stopped between sections, I could hear the wind picking up outside. By the time a sadly sweet melody appeared, I saw rain starting to fall.

The music moved from being angry, calm, sad, scary and arrived at a twinkly magical place that was so quiet I could hear the wind and rain in full force, like it was arguing with the music about how we should be feeling. When horns blared I knew the happy side was winning, except now it was accompanied by rumbling thunder. Then a pause and the most beautiful melody played as the thunder and lightning reached full force. It was so overwhelming I felt like my little heart would break. As thunder crashed, my eyes welled and then the music came back faster than before, sounding like thunder itself. Afterward when my grandmother asked if I’d liked the concert, I simply said, “Yes.” I had no words.

Much music criticism looks through an intellectual lens to focus on technical aspects like chord progression and performance. Much commercial music is meant to elicit a positive feeling between us and a product. Few people even talk about how music can carry you on a spiritual journey where you feel it connect you with thunderstorms the way this piece has knit with thunderstorms with my soul – I’m transported whenever I hear it.

I listen to music promiscuously and have very eclectic taste. In fact I studied jazz piano with a teacher whose background is hip-hop. So I’m not saying that only 19th century European classical orchestral music has this ability to the exclusion of all others. But I do think that was a period when people worldwide were beginning to unshackle themselves from a power structure that has oppressed human consciousness for eons.

As we look at the march of history, we’re taught to focus on technological advances. But we should be looking at how we’re  progressively liberating ourselves from a restricted view of  reality.

Have you read SYLVIE DENIED yet? I invite you to grab your copy, and please leave an honest review when you do.

Why Is It So Hard To Talk About the Most Important Things?

My dad thought his life had been spared. Multiple times.

He wasn’t a churchgoer, nor what you’d call a religious man. In fact, his two oldest children were off at college when he started attending the church we attended with our mom. It happened when a committee – doubtless trying to recruit him – asked his advice on repairing the church stairs. He kept attending because of the coffee-and-donuts social hour after services. Coincidentally, I think my mom was becoming agnostic during that time. But we didn’t talk about these things.

We did talk about lots of other things, especially at the dinner table, and sometimes got fired up, especially since my parents belonged to different political parties. Mom would complain if Dad told his army stories, saying he was glorifying war. But that was like saying “Catch-22” glorified war. Dad’s stories underscored the absurdity of bureaucracy and might have made for tamer conversations than discussing major events of the late ‘60s.

His irritation with bureaucrats dogged him. Once when angered by something my brother’s school had done, he called the prinicipal to complain. After listening to an explanation he roared, “Why did Napoleon’s invasion of Russia fail?” (pause) “Bureaucratic stupidity, dammit!”

It likely started when red-tape trapped him in high school until his mother came up with the tuition money, which took a few years. After they finally let him graduate, he joined ROTC so he could afford college. Having surmised that the US would enter WWII, despite all the doubters, he thought being an officer would be better than the infantry.

Upon graduation, he was an army man eager to go overseas. But bureaucracy reared its head and he was removed from his first unit because there were “too many Clarks.” That unit was sent off and experienced nearly a hundred percent casualties. This gave him pause.

Another time, martini in hand while at an officers’ costume party, Dad found himself chatting with a very tall person dressed as George Washington. He had just delivered the punchline to an off-color joke when he realized that “George Washington’s” spouse was standing behind him. It turned out that the spouse was the general and “George” was actually the general’s wife. Dad was again removed from his unit who were sent off mostly to die.

In his next unit he once was standing at a blackboard with his back to the room, drawing diagrams to show the class how tactics could help keep them alive, when a blackboard eraser was hurled at his head. Looking up, he saw the general du jour at the door who sputtered, “For Christ’s sake Clark! Do you want to get through this war unscathed?” Leaving Dad behind, that unit shipped off and suffered a high percentage of casualties.

Several more units met tragic ends after having transferred Dad as punishment for his perceived non-conformity that didn’t measure up to bureaucratic standards. He finally made it to France and Germany and, of course, garnered more stories of the absurd decisions of his higher-ups. After the war he faced a similar reception when applying for work at large companies, so he started and became successful at his own business.

As I indicated, my family didn’t talk about soul, spirit, God and religion. So imagine my surprise when, walking to the store with Dad – then in his 80s – he said, “One wonders what all this is about?” He elaborated by reminding me of how he’d been removed many times from his army units just before his comrades were sent to their deaths. He puzzled over why his life had been spared and he’d gone on to live a long happy family life. 

In that moment I understood that although Dad had never been a religious man, he was a deeply spiritual man. And none of us knew how to talk about such things.

Sylvie Denied by Deborah Clark Vance

Have you read SYLVIE DENIED yet? I invite you to grab your copy, and please leave an honest review when you do.

If We Grasped How Weird People Are, Would We Venture Outside?

Although it wasn’t my first call for jury duty, it was the strangest. On day one, I packed my lunch and hopped a bus to the courthouse, reporting for a five-day stint – longer if selected for the jury. (This was pre-Covid.)

Taking a seat at one of the tables in the jury room, I soon realized I’d be chatting with tablemates rather than reading. One of them, Judy, said for the past twenty years she’d gotten excused by saying she’d be travelling – until then. We all amiably discussed current events, pop culture and food. Each day we explored more personal matters like work, family and feelings. We never got as far as exchanging contact information, though Judy said if I went to Phoenix, I should look her up – not that I should look her up here in Cincinnati.

On day five I was selected as juror number nine and filed into an ancient courtroom to be scrutinized by counsel who’d veto the undesirables. Prosecutors sat smugly in their dark suits and ties and a stern-looking defense attorney hovered over the young black man who was accused of murder.

It seems the murder had happened at 3 A.M. in a dark men’s room in a bar where by then everyone was drunk. There were no witnesses, video camera or forensic evidence. The prosecution only had the arresting officer’s charges. Both sides wanted to know if we thought we could judge fairly with just the cop’s word. Among the first to be excused was the woman who said she didn’t automatically believe cops. For some reason, defense counsel while querying an engineer said lawyers love engineers because they’re logical and unemotional. Like machines.

Both sides asked about my being professor in a communication department, wondering if I knew the difference between a TV trial and a real trial. They wondered what I meant by answering yes to the question about whether I could make a fair assessment.

After pummeling the jury, counsel interviewed the alternates. The memorable ones are a scrawny half-deaf man who said he moved to Cincinnati from Alabama 40 years ago to be near his brother. He lived alone, worked at a menial job and watched sports on TV in his free time. The other was a woman who worked in a kitchen at a nursing home. She said she’d lost one job after voices in her head told her to wield one of the big knives and attack people, but medication had that problem in check for the moment.

One-third of us were replaced with alternates. They gave my seat to the deaf man. The knife-wielding woman replaced the woman who said she didn’t automatically believe cops. She and I walked together to the bus stop, agreeing that she’d been excused for her honesty. She said she thought I was excused because I’m smart. I guess counsel doesn’t want smart honest people on juries.

Wait – there’s more. Returning home I sat in the front row of seats on the bus facing a similar row across the aisle. After several stops, a frazzled man with bushy red hair sat down across from me and when I peeked, I could see his eyes fixed on my face. I was relieved when eventually he got up and walked to the back. But just as he returned to his seat, someone shouted, “Someone threw up back here!” The driver called the hazmat team and announced that they’d show up along our route and we’d have to get out and wait for a clean bus, but we arrived at my stop before that happened.

I felt like I’d been inside the looking-glass on opposite day. How could it not change the way I see people?

Have you read SYLVIE DENIED yet? I invite you to grab your copy, and please leave an honest review when you do!

Sylvie Denied by Deborah Clark Vance

Why Haven’t We Recognized the Inventive Housewives in History?

Let’s celebrate that women have been allotted one month to acknowledge all the many accomplishments of our sex! After all, one out of twelve is slightly better than the ratio of national female leaders. So, despite women having made significant contributions to civilization, due to lack of PR and funding (NB: I didn’t say sexism or misogyny), we have largely been ignored. Did anyone care when Mozart and Mendelssohn said their sisters were more talented than they? Women were written out of history in other areas where they excelled but were overcome by men, especially when profits started accruing — agriculture, pottery-making, narrative film-making, tennis, cooking, obstetrics — with such rumors as “the best chefs are men,” and – my favorite – “the best midwives are men.” Househusbands are a welcome change and thought they haven’t monetized housewifery, they’ve raised its prestige a bit.

Anyway, I want to set the record straight.

First, let’s define terms. In the meditative occupation of housewifery, menial tasks are performed with repetitive monotony, freeing the worker’s creative mind for synthesizing ideas and satori. Men crystallized the essence of housewifery by organizing themselves in monasteries and defining housework as a religious exercise. This is cheating, though, because in real life there are babies who destroy any alpha-state induced by menial work.

And because of this alpha-state, unsung housewives have made great discoveries. But these Zen-like noble researchers have been denied their rightful place in the science Hall of Fame.

One such discovery occurred in 1802. Rebecca Silliman of North Stratford, CT theorized that dust actually comes from disintegrated meteorites. She observed that the dust in her house was unlike outdoor soil. And though everyone scraped their shoes and brushed their clothes when they came inside, there was always dust. Pondering the dust floating in a shaft of sunlight one day, the thought came to her that dust comprises bits of broken-down heavenly bodies fallen from the sky. Five years after Rebecca expressed her theory at the dinner table, a meteor plummeted to earth. Her brother, Benjamin, researched the meteor’s chemical composition and proved his sister right. He published his findings under his name with no mention of Rebecca’s hypothesis.

Another discovery came from Mrs. Thelma van Leeuwenhoek soon after a bathtub was installed in her Delft apartment in 1650. She told her husband Anton she noticed a black substance migrating ever so slowly along the bathroom tiles and no matter what she did to remove it, it kept coming back. She theorized that the substance was alive – colonies of tiny animals, perhaps — because the longer she waited to scrub it, the bigger the black spots grew. When Anton scoffed, she challenged him to look at it with “those silly lenses you keep grinding.” She even offered to dab some with a wet sponge and squeeze it on a glass plate for him. Of course, Anton bragged to the world about “his” discovery of micro-organisms while Thelma stayed home cleaning bathtub rings.

Charles Darwin was similarly inspired by the family’s housekeeper who claimed that cockroaches in his Shrewsbury house were hardier than their counterparts in her country home because conditions for the beasties in town were more strenuous, so “only the hardiest could survive with all that competition.”

As male homemakers proliferate, theirs will become one of the more highly paid and prestigious professions, with full health benefits, unemployment compensation and social security. But for now, we must recognize the silent role women scientists have played throughout humankind’s long history. While men were out killing each other in battles – all duly recorded — women were home methodically seeking ways to make daily life more comfortable.

Everyone knows that women invented pottery, gardening and the johnny mop. Time now to document women’s role in the invention of chairs, carpets, stairs, forks, windowpanes and kitchen sinks. 

Sylvie Denied by Deborah Clark Vance

Have you read SYLVIE DENIED yet? I invite you to grab your copy, and please leave an honest review when you do!

How Do We Learn to Be Good Parents?

As a child, I was fascinated and horrified by a neighbor lady with freckles covering her face and limbs. As freckles continued forming on my face, my dad would look at me mornings and say, “Debbie, have you grown more freckles?” to which I panicked.

Now I wonder where and how Dad learned to be a dad.  He took us on nature walks and played board games like “Uncle Wiggily,” based on an elderly rheumatic rabbit character that debuted as a comic and became a book in 1913. Dad nick-named me Skeezicks, after Uncle Wiggily’s pal, a crow-like being in colorful clothing who, with Uncle Wiggily, played tricks on the other characters.

He would buy complicated puzzles, lay the pieces out on a card table and ask me to help with it. He was color-challenged and would ask me if the colors matched on pieces he was about to fit together. Usually they didn’t so he’d sit back and watch me find ones that did. He taught us “feet fights” which requires lying on your back with knees bent and feet placed on your opponent’s as you tried to push the other’s over an established boundary line. He told bedtime stories about “Itzy Wizzits”, a race of people so thin they disappeared when they turned sideways. As a youth he’d been a vaudeville fan and never lost his fascination for odd entertainment. He’d call us in to watch an Ed Sullivan show featuring a foot juggler or plate spinner who incorporated hardboiled eggs in his act. Dad usually quipped, “That’s talent!”  He’d buy recordings of quirky music, like Yma Sumac with her 5-octave vocal range, Gheorghe Zamfir on his pan flute and Los Indios Trabajaras of a north Brazilian tribe, and play them for anyone entering the house, remarking on their unusual abilities.

But how did he learn all this? His parents separated when he was young. His father was eccentric, especially after driving his car off a cliff, cracking his skull and living with a metal plate installed in his head that caused him to receive radio programs. This apparently also hindered his graduation from Harvard. Ironically, he had a career at WABC radio in New York and founded and managed a program called the Negro Achievement Hour (debuted in 1928).

To illustrate my grandfather’s irresponsibility, he sank Dad’s sailboat in New York harbor. To illustrate his mother’s meanness, Dad said she’d thrown a can of tuna at his head when he was about six years old. I heard this story for decades, somehow thinking it was just an empty tuna can which sounded abusive but maybe not heinous at a time when parents routinely beat their kids. When it occurred to me it had been a full can, I asked, “What were you doing that might have caused her to do that?” Without a beat, he replied, “I was sticking a fork into the electrical socket.” “Dad!” I said. “All these years you’ve maligned her but she probably saved your life!”

Like his conversations, Dad’s prose seemed impressionistic. Mom thought it was because he’d skipped grades in school and hadn’t mastered certain lessons. But he had a way with words. I thought he’d be a hit at a Chicago poetry slam but couldn’t convince him. His greatest image was when my parents had moved to a lovely retirement community. Dad likened it to a “cruise ship on the River Styx.”  He taught me a lot. He was a wonderful dad.

Do You See Yourself as a Person First?

Femaleness is an unmistakable theme in my novel “Sylvie Denied.” I was born female in a female body, never questioned it and am happy with it – though admittedly I didn’t relish the prospect of 40 years of monthly periods and the toll of pregnancy on my body.

My parents weren’t into gender stereotypes – my sister and I weren’t dressed in pink, my brothers weren’t made to be stoic – and we were mostly treated equally. Which is more than I can say for most of the world during the years I’ve been alive. (I was born to white parents and grew up in a predominantly white area which must be taken into account as I describe my experiences.) Although the political and economic power of females has risen worldwide, it’s still nowhere near equal to that of males.

My first inkling of a male-female power discrepancy dawned when I was twelve and my older brother asked whether I thought of myself first as a girl or as a person. Without hesitation I said I thought of myself as a person. He said he thought of himself first as a boy, then as a person. Of course, this gave me much to think about.

This brother is 18 months older and our mom encouraged us to play together, so I played sports and board games with him and his friends. My skills matched theirs and I liked winning. They let me play baseball with them sometimes and even when they assigned me to the outfield (which I later learned was to get me out of the way) I showed I could catch a fly ball rather handily. But that didn’t mean the boys gave me any leeway. They made it clear they controlled the field and I was only there with their permission.

This made me realize that to my brother, being a boy meant status. At twelve, I wasn’t in full-fledged puberty with all its attendant social rules and was just starting to notice the preferential treatment meted to boys.

My generation broke glass ceilings. I know women who were the first to have been admitted to all-male colleges or to a particular law firm. This is great. But females have spent a lot – maybe too much – time and effort buying into dominant arcahic standards imposed by males at the expense of fully investigating the strengths of their own perspectives and experiences. As persons, first.

Do You See Yourself First as a Person, First?

Femaleness is an unmistakable theme in my novel “Sylvie Denied.” I was born female in a female body, never questioned it and am happy with it – though admittedly I didn’t relish the prospect of 40 years of monthly periods and the toll of pregnancy on my body.

My parents weren’t into gender stereotypes – my sister and I weren’t dressed in pink, my brothers weren’t made to be stoic – and we were mostly treated equally. Which is more than I can say for most of the world during the years I’ve been alive. (I was born to white parents and grew up in a predominantly white area which must be taken into account as I describe my experiences.) Although the political and economic power of females has risen worldwide, it’s still nowhere near equal to that of males.

My first inkling of a male-female power discrepancy dawned when I was twelve and my older brother asked whether I thought of myself first as a girl or as a person. Without hesitation I said I thought of myself as a person. He said he thought of himself first as a boy, then as a person. Of course, this gave me much to think about.

This brother is 18 months older and our mom encouraged us to play together, so I played sports and board games with him and his friends. My skills matched theirs and I liked winning. They let me play baseball with them sometimes and even when they assigned me to the outfield (which I later learned was to get me out of the way) I showed I could catch a fly ball rather handily. But that didn’t mean the boys gave me any leeway. They made it clear they controlled the field and I was only there with their permission.

This made me realize that to my brother, being a boy meant status. At twelve, I wasn’t in full-fledged puberty with all its attendant social rules and was just starting to notice the preferential treatment meted to boys.

My generation broke glass ceilings. I know women who were the first to have been admitted to all-male colleges or to a particular law firm. This is great. But females have spent a lot – maybe too much – time and effort buying into dominant arcahic standards imposed by males at the expense of fully investigating the strengths of their own perspectives and experiences. As persons, first.

“Sylvie Denied” Sees the Light Today — 2-21-21

I celebrate today!

My novel is published after years of pondering, consulting my muse and crafting.

It’s out in the world and will land where it will.

Though it might not be for everyone, it might be for you.

May it move you in some way.

If it resonates with you, I’d love to know about it.

There’s much to discuss!

What Is Fiction About, Really?

What’s my novel about?  Allow me to take you down the rabbit hole.

Book publishing wants specifics about where to position a book. Bookstores want to know where to shelve it and Amazon wants to know how to categorize it for keyword searches. And since anyone anywhere any time can write and publish one of the million books published in any year, readers want to narrow down their choices.

“Sylvie Denied” is being categorized as women’s fiction, coming-of-age fiction, family fiction, women’s divorce fiction and women’s domestic life fiction, but not as chick-lit, romance or thriller. It’s too complex for young adult, and on Goodreads it’s on the American Novels and International Literature lists. although it takes place in the mid-20th century and contains accurate historical details, I wouldn’t categorize it as historical fiction because there’s one particular true event that’s off by just a few years. And it’s about understanding one’s true inner self and finding where it diverges from what society says.

You can accept this answer and stop reading now. Or go further down…

When teaching introductory media courses, I presented Antonio Gramsci’s explanation of hegemony. He says there’s a collective consciousness, a shared world view, a society that pressures us to think and behave in particular ways. He describes how, while there may be a dominant class or group with particular goals and values, everyone else with less power colludes when they internalize the dominant values and beliefs as their own, so much so that they see themselves as being of the dominant group. Gramsci calls this “wearing our chains willingly” especially when such values and beliefs oppress those without actual power. This is why people working in media aren’t exactly “they” (though media owners may be). After all, the audience shares the same general culture and speaks the same language. Yes, they present content. And we collude.

In my intercultural communication class, I used different terms for this shared worldview –the universe of shared meaning. Each culture is like a closed system, with its language that defines terms always within the language, within the history of people using the language, among its customs and institutions. Move outside this culture and into another with a different language,  history and institutions and you’re in another universe.

But our inner self stands outside all of this. It’s something religions present as the conscience – the little voice inside that knows what’s right and wrong and nags at us when we ignore injustices and act unkindly. When conscience conflicts with the social self, where everyday thinking presents as truth something we feel is wrong, how much do we trust our conscience? Do we listen to it or do we listen to what the world says is true?

My novel explores conclusions Sylvie draws and choices she makes from girlhood into womanhood among diverse situations and people, so it can be seen as basically a spiritual search. And yet, it would be lost among books categorized as “spiritual.”

These are the ideas that impelled me to write this novel, and none of it would work as a blurb. So you can ignore what’s down the rabbit hole and trust the blurb that summarizes the plot — and is what the book’s about.