Madeleine E. Robins's Blog: Madeleine Robins: Journal, page 6

Teeth

WARNING: do not read if details about tooth problems give you collywobbles.

When I turned 21, my father took me out to dinner and gave me a piece of Fatherly Advice: take care of your teeth. This was more heartfelt even than it might have been, since Dad had, for about 20 years, neglected his teeth, and the bill, in every imaginable sense, had recently come due.

I inherited many sterling qualities from my parents. I don’t know which one gifted me with my teeth (I suspect my father, but he nev...

A Set of Dickens on the Whatnot

I run a small museum. It’s a museum on the history of the book, and of bookbinding, and one of the things we talk about when talking about the book as object, is about its meaning as an object.

Only a couple of centuries ago, most people in Europe could go through their entire lives without seeing a book up close. Books were irrelevant to their lives. More than that, books were insanely expensive; they were investments, luxuries. Granted, after Gutenberg comes along with the press, the price...

Creak, Memory

Anna Hoffman Robins, 1918

My father made it to almost-98, sharp as a tack the whole time (as near as I can tell, all his very long-lived siblings did except for the youngest one, who had some sort of dementia in the last few years of her life). My mother died relatively young, but was reasonably sharp. However, my father’s mother (seen left) also had dementia for as long as I knew her (I was 14 when she died, and felt deeply swindled by fate, listening to all the stories about a Grannie Annie...

I Was Raised in a Barn: Cars

I was thirteen when we moved from New York City to Sheffield, Massachusetts. There were many striking differences, but one of the big ones? Transportation. Unbeknownst to my mother, I had been secretly taking the subway to school in the mornings (this meant an additional 15 minutes of sleep, for the bargain price of ten cents a day…yeah, it was a while ago). In the mornings I would run to the IRT station and jam myself and my armload of textbooks in among a zillion of my fellow citizens (this...

The Habit of No

[image error] I had a co-worker some time ago, relatively young and new to the workforce, who, over the time we worked in the same company, got the No habit bad.

There are lots of reasons to say No, in pretty much every possible situation in life. Would you like a sip of cyanide? “No, thank you.” Wanna hook up? “Eew, no, sorry.” Would you be willing to do this illegal thing as part of your job? “No, I would not.” Do you want lima beans? “God, no.” Can you take my shift while I go to my aunt’s funeral? “No...

A Civil Society

I think I was 14 when I read Robert Heinlein’s Beyond This Horizon. One of the world-building details was that in this society many people went armed (almost all of them men, but that’s another essay) and ready to duel at a moment’s notice.* Those who didn’t wore a “peace brassard,” a signifier that they were not armed; they suffered a lack of status thereby. The argument was that an armed society is a civil society, because if everyone has a gun, everyone is going to be civil to each other,...

Notice, Class, How Angela Circles…

[image error]I was once chased around my parents’ kitchen by a friend of my father’s. But I’ll come back to that.

One of my favorite things to do when I was a kid was to leaf through a 25-year collection of New Yorker cartoons. Even at the time (the mid 1960s) many of them referred to a world that was vanishing or had vanished: references that must have been side-splitting at the time they were published, but were totally opaque to ten-year-old me. I still remember some of the cartoonists fondly–Chas. Add...

I Want(ed) to Believe

[image error]It was perhaps a mistake to re-read A Wrinkle in Timebefore I saw the movie, but I hadn’t read the book in a few decades. I enjoyed it, picked up things I hadn’t remembered, and went on to read (for the first time) three more books in the quintet (A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, and Many Waters) before I ran out of interest.  The overt Christian themes (which scudded right over my head when I was a kid reading Wrinkle in Time) didn’t particularly bother me–perhaps because I knew...

Mind the Gap

[image error]When I consider it, and I have been considering it lately, all the books I’ve written that I thought worked had a gap in the writing process, somewhere a little more than half-way through. I am a “night driver” (Kit Kerr used this phrase recently, and my brain went **ping!** with recognition). I write what I can see ahead of me, and I generally know where I”m going, but the terrain between where I am and where I will be in another ten pages is often unseeable (in the same way that driving in...

Did You See What I Did There?

Olympic figure skating is one of those things. I never mean to watch, and then, somehow, there I am and five hours have passed and it’s late and my head is full of salchows and axels and spangles.  There are a lot of brilliant technicians out there on the ice, and they’re riveting to watch, but the ones I love are the performers. Anent this, I was directed to Jason Brown’s 2014 performance at the US National Championships. He’s not just good–he is a brilliant performer, and more than that,...