Hanne Blank's Blog, page 6

behind the scenes

I’ve never understood why people get so excited about the idea of backstage passes, at least for theatres and concert halls.  Having more or less grown up in such establishments, I find nothing glamorous about wings and fly spaces, dusty stage curtains (and they are always dusty), green rooms (usually tatty and often dirty, with uncomfortable seating), dressing rooms, and so on.  I like visiting the theatres where friends work, but that’s more about seeing my friends’ workspaces than anything.  In general, though, offer me a backstage pass and I’ll suggest that maybe it be given to someone who, y’know, thinks there’s something there worth seeing.

Then I was fortunate enough to be invited on a backstage tour of something whose backstage is really fantastic and fascinating and worth every nanosecond: the Georgia Aquarium.  No grungy green rooms with cigarette burns in the upholstery on the couches around that place, let me tell you what.

That’s the coral reef tank from the topside.  The tilting buckets to the right create the effect of surf, dumping water into the tank every 20-30 seconds or so.

I got to get this close to a whale shark.  I was practically shivering, I was so excited.  Whale sharks have been an object of fascination for me for a long time and I had never actually seen one that wasn’t in a photo or on film… today I saw four.  The Georgia Aquarium has a 6.5 million gallon tank in which four of them live (it’s the only aquarium outside of Asia that has whale sharks, and apparently the aquarium was designed around their enormous habitat) along with a number of manta rays, groupers, a devil ray, and many, many other fantastic fish.  If memory serves, the name of this whale shark is Alice.

I really, really, really want to swim with whale sharks now.  Oh my, yes.

Another view of a whale shark, this one from the visitor side.  Yes, they are really that big.  Unlike most sharks, though, they’re filter feeders, and eat mostly krill, tiny shrimplike creatures.  Their mouths are enormous, but apparently their esophagus is only about the diameter of a US quarter.

Underneath the enormous tank in which the whale sharks and manta rays live is this gobsmacking filter room, which keeps 6.5 million gallons of water clean, oxygenated, and appropriately saline.  The hum is bonestirring, though oddly quieter than I’d expected.  It felt like being in the bowels of a submarine might, though a whole lot more spacious, I expect.

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In the filtration room you just saw, and along the walls of the loading dock nearby — a loading dock which is, by the way, big enough to bring in a whale shark in a specially-built UPS shipping crate, as this is apparently how you get a whale shark into an aquarium — are these cryptic inscriptions on the wall.  On the other side of that wall is that 6.5 million gallons of water I have mentioned.  The “1 HR” is how much time you have before the wall collapses if it starts leaking.  Yes, I imagine you would want to make sure anything that penetrated that wall was well and duly sealed…

There are also beluga whales, which I adore, for all the reasons everyone adores belugas.  I like a charismatic predator, myself, and smart ones like belugas are even better.

This is apparently what I look like when I am mesmerized by beluga whales.

There was lots more.  But you get the idea.  And we (that’s my Philosopher on my left, and a bit of Youngest Stepson’s head to his left) had a glorious time, and I feel very fortunate that I got to go both backstage and all around and through what is, without question, the most impressive aquarium I’ve yet been in.  Thank you, Jay, for the private behind-the-scenes walkthrough… what a wonderful gift.

 

                                      

Generosity of Spirit

I’ll make this short and sweet, because at this time of year — hell, at any, with the frequency with which email grovelgrams arrive in the average in-box these days — we are all tired of being begged for donations to this and that and the other.

There are two organizations I support that I think deserve yours, too.  They are not the only two organizations I support, or the only two that are deserving.  But unlike some of the others, you  may never have heard of these, and I want to change that.

What they have in common is that they are small, and they are doing unique, important work in communities and for populations where the type of advocacy they provide is delicate, personal, and not often available, particularly in ways that are financially and culturally accessible to the people who need their services.

I know my readers are generous of spirit, thoughtful and compassionate and caring.  If you are able to be generous in terms of a donation to either or both of these organizations, I would consider it a gift to me personally.

I should note that I know that many people reading this cannot afford to donate much.  I assure you that this is fine.  Small organizations live and die on the basis of tiny donations, much of the time.  Your $5, or $25, is much appreciated and will be well-used.

Thanks for reading this, and please do go learn about, and support

The Tahirih Justice Institute provides pro bono direct legal advocacy for immigrant women in the USA who are fleeing and/or dealing with violence.

Write Here, Write Now is a ministry in service to the sacred stories of the LGBTI community. WHWN began and remains grounded in offering literary services and continues to grow to offer more and varied pastoral and ceremonial care to the LGBTI community.

 

                                      

Have a body practice goal? Win a book!

Those of you who’ve already read my new The Unapologetic Fat Girl’s Guide to Exercise and Other Incendiary Acts – and there are a few of you, I know, even though it just went on sale yesterday! — are familiar with the idea of body practice.

 

For those of you who haven’t read it yet (click on the photo above to buy a copy!) body practice is just that: a practice you have that involve doing things with your body on a regular basis.  Preferably these are positive things that contribute to your well-being.  Feeding yourself good meals, brushing your teeth, and wearing clothes that you like are things that may already part of your body practice.

Deep breathing might be part of your body practice too, or walking your dog, or dancing in your living room with the blinds drawn but the music turned way the hell up.  Or playing wheelchair basketball on Thursdays after work.  Or Jell-O wrestling three nights a week.  Or doing your errands on foot or by bicycle on the weekends.  Or a bajllion other things.

You get the picture.  And I’m sure you can guess what a body practice goal is, right?  Right.  It’s some sort of aspiration, or something you want to do or to be able to do, with regard to your body practice. You may have thoughts about this already, as so many of us do.

I’m not talking about about the physical results of a body practice being a goal.  I’m talking about the practice itself.  For instance, one of my body practice goals right now is to figure out more weight-bearing exercises I can do with my bad arm and shoulder.

I don’t know what results I’ll get from that — the arm and shoulder might get stronger, or hurt less, or they might not.  I don’t know, and won’t know until I do it and continue doing it for a while.  But I can’t control that, so I don’t want to get too attached to a particular outcome.  I just want to do a particular thing with my body practice.

But even without setting my sights on particular results, I have a reason I want to do this.  We have our reasons, right?  My reason for wanting to exercise my bad arm more is actually about something I want to feel when I am using the arm:  I want to feel like I have a reliable idea of what it can and can’t do.

Right now, I’m never sure, and I don’t like being unsure.  I don’t care if it can’t do all that much.  I don’t care if the amount that it can do doesn’t change for the better. (I’m working on not caring if it changes for the worse.)  I just want to know what I can count on.

Thinking about body practice goals this way, in terms of what I want to feel when I do them, has become increasingly useful to me, and I encourage you to consider it as part of your tool kit, too.

Recently, I’ve been working my way through Danielle LaPorte’s The Desire Map.  Those of you who know me might be surprised at this.  These kinds of books are not normally my thing, aesthetically or metaphysically, and I definitely have my quibbles. But I am diligently working through it because Danielle’s right about one thing: knowing how you want something to make you feel really is incredibly useful.

When you know how you want to feel when you’re doing a thing, you have a star to steer by.  Right in that moment.  You don’t have to wait for any kind of external feedback or “results,” whatever form they may… or may not …take.  If you’re doing a thing for yourself and it makes you feel the way you want to feel, then you know you’re on the right track.

As I say in the book, you are the authority on you, and one of the things you’re the authority on is how the things you do in your body practice make you feel.

Might as well use it to your advantage, right?  Right.

So here’s what we’re gonna do, you and me.  It might just win you a book.

Step One: You’re going to dream up a body practice goal.  Big, small, doesn’t matter.

Step Two:  You’re going to think about how you want to feel when you’re doing it.

Step Three:  You’re going to tell me about these two things — either

in a reply to this blog post (http://www.hanneblank.com/blog/2012/1... in case you’re seeing it on a feed) or
via email sent to hanne at hanneblank dot com with the subject line “Body Practice.”

Don’t forget to include an email address!

On January 10, I’ll post a whole bunch of your body practice goals and ways you all want to feel when you’re doing them (no names will be attached), so everyone can share and get jazzed and inspired.

And three of you will get email from me, asking for your mailing address, so I can send you a free, autographed copy of The Unapologetic Fat Girl’s Guide to Exercise and Other Incendiary Acts.

                                      

Happy Book Day To Me

My brand spankin’ new The Unapologetic Fat Girl’s Guide to Exercise and Other Incendiary Acts is on sale today!

In honor of their wonderful support and friendship, their fantastic programming, and their overall marvelousness, why don’t you order your copy from Charis Books & More?

You can get an ebook version from them here if that’s your preference… and don’t forget that I will happily sign your ebooks for free via Authorgraph.

And hey, if you’ll be in Atlanta on January 5, c’mon over to Charis and hang out.  I’ll be reading, talking, answering questions, signing books…. say yes.

                                      

the fabulosity limit

So I’m struggling like mad with a book that is due in about twenty minutes’ time, and I hate it and it hates me and I’m convinced that it’s going to be the crappiest book in the history of crappy books, and yet I’ve got to finish the damn thing because see above about “due in about twenty minutes’ time.”

I was thinking about this while I walked the dogs this morning, and it dawned on me that part of the reason I’m having such a hard time with the book is that I desperately don’t want it to be crappy.  Naturally.  But the thing is, if I’m honest, “good” isn’t really enough.  I want it to be fabulous.  Not just garden-variety fabulous, either.  I want this book — as I want everything I turn my hand to, and certainly everything I write — to be white-hot incandescent illuminate-the-world-and-endure-forever fabulous.

Being a realistic sort of girl, I am aware that this is unlikely.

Being a neurotic writer, I immediately start thinking about why this is unlikely, and begin to contemplate all the writers I know whose version of this book I’m working on would automatically be far more fabulous than anything I would ever write, and that’s the reason they all have careers that are more fabulous than mine, and lives that are more fabulous than mine, and generally, I determine in the course of about 18 seconds that there is an uneven distribution of fabulosity, which is a limited commodity, and I am not a member of the  Fabulosity 1% and fuck everything sideways with a rusty garden weasel, why do I even bother, I’m just going to make a fool of myself anyway, what the fuck do I think I’m doing and who the hell do I think I’m fooling?

I stopped walking and thought “Well, hell.  You’ve got a book to write regardless.  What’re you going to do about it?  You’re 98% of the way to a serious case of the fuckits and you don’t have the time for that, you’re on deadline.”

I looked at the dogs, who were whuffling and snuffling and pissing on things in a matter-of-fact, first-thing-in-the-morning sort of businesslike dog way.  ”What’m I gonna do, dogs?”

The dogs ignored me, the panoply of rich aromas and excretory opportunities afforded by the great outdoors clearly being more interesting and important than the self-important wailings of human beings.   Dogs are sensible creatures.

So, in the absence of input from my trusted advisors, I decided that today at least, there is unlimited fabulousness.  Endless reservoirs of weapons-grade awesomeness, in fact.  Inexhaustible supplies of stupendous and inspired and perspicacious.   There is no fabulosity limit, and in the immortal words of P-Funk, “to each his reach and if I don’t cop it ain’t mine to have.”

That goes for you, too.  Just noting.

And with that, I have a book to write.

                                      

write if you get work

As a writer, I tend to work best when I know someone’s waiting for the work.  I’ve always written just to write, but as a professional, I work best when I know my work is wanted and expected.  It helps me to know who my audience is, and to have the project at least nominally defined.

As a result I tend to get a little squirrelly between contracts, between books, when I don’t have any specific thing I must be writing, any particular place to direct my thoughts and my energy. I have been fortunate that these periods haven’t been too frequent, I suppose, although they still fill me with dread.

Selling the book, then writing it, is an infinitely preferable state of affairs to me.  This past summer and fall, however, I fell into a between-contracts period and decided what the hell, I’d just write a book, and worry about selling it later.  It was a hard, tumultuous, time for me in many ways, full of leaps of faith.  What was one more?

So I went to work and wrote the book, then sent it out to some reviewers for feedback, moved on to other projects… got some feedback, did some revision, sent it out, kept working on the other projects, sent it out for some more feedback…

Occasionally I poked at writing a book proposal for it, but it never came together easily.  I decided that was a sign that it wasn’t cooked yet.  So I hung out with the book just sitting there on my hard drive, tinkering occasionally, but mostly waiting, really, to feel like the time was right to put a bow on it and send it out to see what a publisher might make of it.

The night before last, it felt like it was That Time.  A short-and-sweet book proposal came together quickly and simply.  Yesterday morning I looked it over, tweaked a thing or two, bundled it all up with an email bow and sent it off to one of my editors and simultaneously to my agent, under the sneaky aegis that it was a Christmas present.

Fingers crossed that sometime soon I will be able to announce that it has a publisher.

Write if you get work, little book, little leap of faith, little bundle of hope and perseverance.  Write if you get work.

 

                                      

boys

Against all logic and probability I have, here in my early 40s, become a parent.

No, you didn’t miss a birth announcement and you needn’t look for any star rising in the west or the Three Wise Drag Queens bearing Baby Gap gift cards and copies of Go The F*ck To Sleep — I acquired my kids the old-fashioned way: I formed a family with their birth parent.  My Philosopher is the birth papa of three wonderful young men, ranging in age from 18 to 21, and I… I appear to have become a stepmom.

Right now, we have two of the boys at home for Christmas, and tomorrow we’ll acquire the third, plus a bonus in the form of his girlfriend.  I had no real idea what to expect, having the kids come home for the holidays.  This hit me as I was driving to Tuscaloosa to pick one of them up and bring him home.  What’s that going to be like?  To suddenly have the household more than double in size, to have a handful of young adults show up, people sprawled all over everywhere and sleeping on all the couches?  Guess I’ll find out…

There are xBox games and controllers on the coffee table, bestickered laptops form an archipelago on the floor, shoes and socks and backpacks are strewn liberally across the landscape.  It smells like boy in here, though thankfully like clean boy, not it’s-been-8-hours-since-track-practice-and-I-still-haven’t-showered boy.  The dogs, mine and the Philosopher’s both, are delirious with joy that their boys are here, and are love-sponging and snuggle-slutting it up.  A pile of wrapped presents is accumulating next to the spot where the tree will go once it goes anywhere at all. There are huge vases of flowers everywhere, thanks to friends congratulating me on the new book coming out, and mounting piles of cardboard shipping boxes as things ordered for holiday presents arrive and get taken out of their shipping containers and wrapped in colored paper.

Pots of coffee get brewed, then disappear.  Plates of sliced summer sausage and cheese, with attendant crackers, evaporate with delighted murmurs and happy chomping.  A vast pot of oatmeal made for breakfast gets absorbed.  Video games are discussed, and class schedules and transfer credits, girlfriends and favorite TV shows.  There is silliness, and lighthearted mockery. Knobby elbows and knees are in ubiquitous evidence, and the fine-grained complexions of late adolescence gaining the dubious advantage of the early whisker crop.  One texts near-constantly with his girlfriend, who is with her own family in another state.  Another divulges tentative plans to chat up a girl he likes but isn’t sure he wants to actually date yet.

The Philosopher and I share a lot of long, fond glances.  He tells me these boys have needed a mother for quite a while.  I’m not sure I know how to be a mother, but I’ll do my best to do right by all these boys, Philosopher very much included.

Today, I think that might mean making a batch of Gramercy Tavern’s oatmeal stout gingerbread.

And maybe listening, again, to Tim Minchin’s “White Wine In The Sun.”

 

                                      

code id by doze

With impeccable timing, I have contracted a head cold.  This is not really a complaint.  These things happen.

It’s more in the nature of an observation, because every time I come down with some minor ailment or other, I am reminded of just how easy it is to take my body and its continued proper functioning for granted.

I am also reminded of just how distressingly easy-to-tip our bodily applecarts are.  Invisibly small viruses will do it without any apparent effort, and then the cascade of aftereffects, from sleeplessness to nausea to a sore and unhappy back, follow with appalling rapidity.

Fragile little humans are we.

I find it fascinating how we react to this fragility.

Some people seem to think that admitting this fragility is itself a weakness, and that slowing down even the tiniest bit in response to illness constitutes rolling over and giving in, or slacking off, or simply being lazy, irresponsible, and self-indulgent.

Some people get angry because things hurt and they feel unwell, and take it out on others, or on themselves.

Some people crumple in on themselves, as if the first casualty of infirmity was their ability to maintain a sense of self.

Some people just sigh and go get the cold medicine, and do what they can to get on with things, if somewhat grumpily.

Some people eagerly seize the opportunity to retreat from their everyday lives, and immediately dive into the stack of unread books or unwatched television shows and consider it a sort of grade-C holiday, like going to the beach and having it rain buckets the whole time.

Some people combine these things, or cycle through several, or add their own little personal variations to the mix.  This morning I am somewhere between grumpy resignation and wishing I could stage a complete retreat from everything including consciousness, being of the opinion that when one hits a certain stage of a head cold, one should have the option of being heavily sedated until the damn thing runs its course sufficiently that one can cease being a snot fountain.

Alas, alas.

 

                                      

no such thing as a routine surgery

My Philosopher has just been taken back into the operating theatre for a planned, non-emergency surgery.  He is in excellent hands, I have met his surgeon and anaesthesiologist and the surgical nurses, and the hospital is a very good one, and yet I cannot be comfortable with the circumstance.

Anaesthesia is a godsend, and I mean that sincerely.  Modern surgery is an amazing and wonderful thing, and I would be the last person to suggest, or think even for a moment, that it was reasonable to refuse a needed surgery.

And yet putting someone under general anaesthesia is as close as we can come to killing a person without killing them. Cutting into people’s bodies, removing bits of them, is violent and dangerous, no matter how skilled and knowledgeable the people performing the surgery.  Every body, on every operating room table, is a miraculous if not a unique thing, a delicate and fragile organism.

We treat surgery, particularly relatively minor procedures such as the one the Philosopher is undergoing today, as a routine thing.  We can do this thanks to the hard work of many, many people over quite a bit of time, work that has let us know how hard we can push the body, and in what ways, how to keep it from bleeding too much or getting deadly infections, which internal organs are actually somewhat optional to continued happy function and which are not.

But there is nothing “routine” about surgery.  Nothing natural, nothing organic, and, though it had better damn well have many healing qualities, nothing about it is soothing or kind or gentle.  Every surgery represents the triumph of human ingenuity and human resilience, physical and emotional as well.  Every surgery represents a fragile, tender human being being taken through an extraordinary and potentially deadly experience, courtesy of the cumulative labor, care, talent, and skill of generations of people.

There is nothing routine about surgery.  I am grateful, though, that we have the unbelievable luxury of telling ourselves that it is, even to the point where sometimes we experience it that way.  I do not take it for granted, though.  I cannot.  I will sit here, waiting, hopeful, anxious, on an imaginary bed of nails, until I know that the man I love has been to the banks of the Lethe and has come back to me again.

                                      

not dead yet

Last night I was hanging out with a bunch of writers and readers at Charis Books in Atlanta and we were talking about books and publishing and the industry and all the rest of it, like you do, and I ended up standing on one of my occasional soapboxes, namely, that publishing isn’t dead yet.

There’s a lot of yowling and howling from a lot of quarters about the death of print, the death of the book, how no one reads, how publishing is circling the drain and also the zombie apocalypse is coming and since no one outside the book business reads any more, only people in the book business still have brains, so as soon as the zombies get hungry the publishing industry will be dead anyway.

I really don’t think so. I do think that the ways people read are changing, and they’ve changed before but perhaps not quite so dramatically in such a short time since, well, probably since the time that printed material became economically accessible to a large chunk of the general European population, in the 18th century.

The paper book has had a long, wonderful life and I don’t think that life’s over.  What I do think is that it’s having to learn how to share space with other modes of text delivery, and that’s hard, especially when we are caught up in a culture that associates a lot of things with books as physical objects — things about class and education and wealth and cultural capital.

Certainly books have significance beyond the text on their pages.  But neither publishing or reading are limited to that one specific class of object any more, nor should they necessarily be.  In time, other means of delivering text to readers will evolve their own cultural significance and some of them may rival the paper book for status.  We’ll see.

But no, I don’t think publishing is dead, or dying, or even gravely ill.  I think it’s just learning new tricks.  It’s done it before.  It’ll do it again.  I suppose I take the long view partly because I’m an historian.  But I also take the long view because human beings love words, and love reading words, and that isn’t likely to die any time soon.