Monthly Archives: January 2009

dirt music

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img_1398Dirt Music by Tim Winton is a character-rich, character-driven novel, with lots of plot and an equally strong sense of place.  What a read!  It’s written in short little unmarked sections–little moments that patch together the characters of Georgie Jutland and Lu Fox.

The first sentence of the novel, about Georgie:  “One night in November, another that had somehow become morning while she sat there, Georgie Jutland looked up to see her pale and furious face reflected in the window.”

Here’s the first one about Lu:  “Out in the shed with the dog at his shins he leaves the boat smelling of bleach.”

Dirt music:  “Anything you could play on a verandah.  You know, without electricity.”  But of course it’s more than that.  Tim Winton is an Australian writer, and that’s where this novel takes place.  There’s dirt and weather everywhere.  Rosy dirt, silt, and dust.  Opposing weather systems and typhoons and cyclones.  Killer heat and ocean and survival.

One of my favorite passages: 

“She only knew that love was impossible. It arrived and moved on like the weather and it defied pursuit. Not just romance–any kind of love. The emotion itself was promiscuous and not to be trusted. She’d thought all this before and failed to learn from it. The story of her life.”

Read it before the movie comes out in September (Rachel Weisz and Colin Farrell).

beach music

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img_1383Pat Conroy, a large white-haired man, stood on a stage in front of a seated crowd last night in Columbus, Georgia.  He’s the author of The Prince of Tides and Beach Music (my favorites), and he was the speaker at a black-tie dinner honoring a local doctor.  Prior to the event, I had some concern that even though Conroy was a great writer, he might not be a great speaker.  Not to worry.  The man can tell a story.  

And that’s what he did last night.  He leaned forward, his arms outstretched, one on each side of the lectern.  He looked at the audience as he spoke about how he paid to have his first book The Boo (which he admitted was not very good) published.  Then he told us that when his agent called two years later to tell him that his next book, The Water is Wide, was going to be published for $7500, his response was “I can get it done way cheaper down here.”

He looked a bit stuffed into his tux and his breathing was noticeable.  But with sincerity and without sentimentality, he told us stories–the truth about the last days of his mother and then of his father.

Pat Conroy was born in Atlanta in 1945, and he now lives on Fripp Island in South Carolina with his wife, the novelist Cassandra King, who came with him last night.  To see him interview her, check out this YouTube video.  

 Pat Conroy’s new novel, South of Broad, is expected out in September.

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the feminine mistake

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I made it.  Quit my legal career when I was pregnant with child number three and sick, falling more and more behind on everything with each tick of the clock.  For whatever reason, there was no voice, from inside me or from anywhere else, encouraging me not to quit, telling me that it would only be this bad for a very short time, and that the risk of giving up my ability to support myself was too great to give in so easily.img_1328  My husband was supportive of what I wanted to do, and even after I stopped work, he shared the parenting and the housework that was not done by others.  And I’m still married.  And I ultimately discovered something I enjoyed more than practicing law.  I was lucky.  A lot of women are not. 

Leslie Bennetts dedicates The Feminine Mistake to her mother, her baby-sitter, her daughter, and in memory of Betty Friedan, “the visionary who first opened my eyes.”

Betty Friedan is, of course, the author of the The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, the book that revealed women were unhappy in their limited roles of wife, mother, housekeeper.

Apparently, now, 40 years later, significant numbers of women are retreating from the workplace to the home.  Leslie Bennetts wanted to find out why and how it was working out.  It is the stories of these women–some using their real names but most not–that propel the reader forward.  It is unnecessary toward the end of the book, when the author writes, “So the main thing I want to say to other women is this: Protect yourself.”  A man is not a financial plan. 

Take maternity leave.  Work part-time.  Lower your standards (House, episode 1-19-09).  Switch jobs.  But don’t drop the thread.  It’s all but impossible to start over again from scratch.  And to quit work because you only make enough to pay the sitter is to ignore the long-term earning potential of your job.  “Your career is an investment you make in yourself…”

Women must take the lead in insisting that everyone wins when both parents participate in raising the children and taking care of the home.  Investment in a career you love as well as in your family will give each of us “the fullest possible life.”

“It has become inescapably clear that choosing economic dependency as a lifestyle is the classic feminine mistake…it’s simply too risky to count on anyone else to support you [and your children] over the long haul.”

playing with time

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img_1340Starting with the prologue, in which the narrator calls on the spirit of Vladimir Nabokov, time is everywhere present in Dani Shapiro‘s Fugitive Blue.  I read the novel in January of last year so time is playing with me and my memory as well.

“Nabokov did not believe in time…But I find it impossible to dismiss time, the very thing which has so intensely failed me.”

Dani Shapiro creates the story in Fugitive Blue using three different time periods:

1) the time from which the narrator is telling the story, which is told in the present tense, in which time is also counted in the number of days since she has stopped drinking;

2) the narrator’s childhood, which is also interestingly told in the present tense, perhaps to show that her childhood is ever present to her, perhaps to make it more immediate to the reader, avoiding the distance the past tense would add;  and

3) the narrator’s recent past in NY, which is told in the past tense until the past catches up to the present, and then with a paragraph break, it moves into the present tense, all the while dipping back into the past when the story requires it.

The transitions are flawless.  The tenses flow seamlessly one into the other, as do the different time periods of the narrator’s story.  An early example from the childhood present:

“I don’t know this now, but in the single motion of removing my white knuckles from the steel handlebars of my bicycle–a feat of which I have been terrified for months–I am entering a lifelong habit of bravado which will end twenty years from now on the steaming pavement of a New York City Street.  I don’t have that information.  I can’t see the future.  I have no way of knowing.”

Even in the present tense, the narrator can see the future and know the end of the story.  Time is on her side, so to speak.

the dawning of a new day

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Sunrise Miami Beach.  The dawning of a new day.img_1371 

On the front page of yesterday’s New York Times was the headline, 

“From Books, New President Found Voice.”

In case you missed it, here are some of the highlights.  Michiko Kakutani wrote that Mr. Obama’s  ”appreciation of the magic of language and his ardent love of reading” have shaped his “sense of who he is.”

She also commented on Mr. Obama’s storytelling ability as evidenced in Dreams From My Father, and I agree with this.  I listened to Mr. Obama read his autobiography on a recent car trip.  But my favorite example of his storytelling abilities is listening and watching him tell the story of the power of one voice (fired up and ready to go). 

Kakutani said that Mr. Obama took what she called “the magpie approach to reading,” which she defined as ruminating upon writers’ ideas and picking and choosing those that flesh out his vision of the world or open promising new avenues of inquiry.”

Then she issued, whether knowingly or unknowingly, the following warning to people who count their books at the end of the year, competing with others or themselves (50 for me for 2008):  Mr. Bush “tended to race through books in competitions with Karl Rove,” who apparently beat the President in 2006, by 110 books to 95.  Yikes.  We know who we are.

Here’s what she called “A Reading List that Shaped a President”: img_1356

  • The Bible
  • Parting the Waters by Taylor Branch
  • Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • Ghandhi’s autobiography
  • Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin
  • The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
  • Lincoln’s collected writings
  • Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
  • Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
  • Works of Reinhold Niebuhr
  • Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
  • Shakespeare’s tragedies.

Of these, I’ve read The Bible, The Golden Notebook, Song of Solomon, Gilead, and some of Shakespeare’s tragedies.

Kakutani concluded the article by making comparisons between Lincoln and Obama.  She quoted Fred Kaplan on Lincoln:  “He became what his language made him.”  Obama appears to be on the same track.  America and the world have a lot to look forward to.

one book at a time?

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img_1322Well, you can only read one book at a time, right?  Maybe not. 

There’s the book I’m reading.  That for me is the one I take to bed at night.  The one I read after dinner.  It’s the book I want to read just because I do–for fun.  Right now that book is Tim Winton‘s Dirt Music. 

Then there’s the book I’m reading for my writing.  At the moment this is Leslie Bennetts’ The Feminine Mistake–a must-read for every woman (more coming on this one).  I take this with me when I’m off to a solo lunch or to a waiting situation–doctors, children, airplanes.  I’ll read some in this one after dinner before I allow myself the book I’m reading. 

Several years ago, when I spent more time in my car and before the advent of One Story, I would choose a book that I wanted to read, but that wasn’t high on my list, and I might just leave it in my car.  It was my car book.  It was the one I would read while waiting.  If it stayed in my car too long before I finished it so that it bothered me that I was still reading it, then I might elevate it to the book I was reading–so I could speed things up a bit.

Then there’s the book on CD for long trips in the car, the book of poetry that I keep by my chair, the book in the bathroom…

If my math is right, and so often it is not, I could be reading 5 books at a time, plus a One Story story. 

Let me know how you read.

Dedicated to l.r.–thanks. : )

the street ran on

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img_1292One of my favorite things about William Faulkner‘s Light in August is the language.  His use of repetition is soft and alluring and draws the reader in.   

“He stepped from the dark porch, into the moonlight, and with his bloody head and his empty stomach hot, savage, and courageous with whiskey, he entered the street which was to run for fifteen years.”

“The whiskey died away in time and was renewed and died again, but the street ran on.”

The street running on recurs in the novel–in both language and image.

It should have come as no surprise to me when I recently discovered that Faulkner was also a poet. Apparently he referred to himself as a “failed poet.” Read this and see what you think:

“He thought that it was loneliness which he was trying to escape and not himself. But the street ran on: catlike, one place was the same as another to him. But in none of them could he be quiet. But the street ran on in its moods and phases, always empty…”

And if you’re one of those people (I am) who likes to hear the writer’s speaking voice, you can listen to part of Faulkner’s December 1950 Nobel Prize speech online. In the speech, he says that the only subjects worth writing about are “the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself.”

If you’ve never read Faulkner,I recommend starting with Light in August.

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frost finished

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 I spent any free minute I had yesterday looking for a poem to go along with this picture.  

This morning, when I found the poem, I knew I’d been looking for the wrong thing.

It was a poem to go along with how I was feeling that I’d wanted.

 

Perhaps the tiny crystals would last forever.

 

Once it seemed the function of poetry

was to redeem our lives.

But it was not.  It was to become

indistinguishable from them.

from Old Ice by Brenda Hillman

Bright Existence

women, why, and what

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img_1277In 1980 Janet Sternburg wanted answers to the question of why other women write and “how they see their lives and their work.”  Thus was born The Writer on Her Work. 

“It was a first,” writes Julia Alverez in the introduction to the reprint that was published in 2000.  She explains.  “Seventeen women laying claim to rooms of their own in the mansion of literature.”

In her essay, Joan Didion wrote, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.  What I want and what I fear.”

Many wrote about subject matter.  Mary Gordon was desperate not to be trivial or embarrassing.  She wanted to be serious.  She wrote: 

“I discovered that what I loved in writing was not distance but radical closeness; not the violence of the bizarre but the complexity of the quotidian….My subject as a writer has far more to do with family happiness than with the music of the spheres.” 

She writes that what she hears best are “the daily rhythms, for that is what I value, what I would wish, as a writer to preserve.”  Commenting on this, she adds, “My father would have thought this a stubborn predilection for the minor.  My mother knows better.”

Michele Murry, a writer unknown to me who died in 1974 of cancer, wrote in a 1966 journal entry:  “Words, reading and writing, will mark my life no matter what else I do.”  Yet she bemoaned the amount of  energy and emotion that “goes to tiny, fleeting facts of daily life! How easy to sink beneath the weight of newspapers, laundry, report cards, supermarkets and all the rest.”

In writing this post, I discovered there’s more:  The Writer on Her Work, New Essays in New Territory, Volume 2.

letting go of consciousness

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More from John Steinbeck…

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March 6, 1951, Tuesday.  “No sleep last night but I feel fine.  And I don’t even know why I didn’t sleep.  I was perfectly comfortable.  Just couldn’t let go of consciousness.  Funny thing.” 

Journal of a Novel:  The East of Eden Letters

I couldn’t sleep last night, and I don’t know why either.  I too was perfectly comfortable.  But I felt like my fingers were clawing the ceiling and refusing to let go, despite my brain saying, don’t think about that now.

Despite his lack of sleep, Steinbeck writes, “Now, once to the toilet and I will go to work.”  Then, “It is so strange what one writes down.”  After a space break,

“And there’s that day’s work done.”

last night

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Last Night is a slim volume of ten stories by James Salter.  img_1264 James is his real name.  Salter is a pseudonym adopted because he was in the air force when he began to write. He was a fighter pilot who flew with Buzz Aldrin, Ed White and Gus Grissom.  In July of 2004, just before this collection was published, I heard him read from one of these stories, “Such Fun.”  He was 79 at the time.  Someone in the audience asked him about what he liked to read.  His answer: “I don’t read for pleasure anymore.  I read because I want to see how they did it.”  He said he writes longhand first and then types.

From his story, “My Lord You,” here’s an example of Salter’s ability to say so much with so few words (the wife was in the bathroom getting ready for bed):

“–Tired? her husband asked as she emerged. It was his way of introducing the subject.  –No, she said.”

In “Platinum,” look for another example of his ability to say it without saying it….

Again in “My Lord You,” an example of Salter’s ability to create a world with a few details:

“The hallway was dim.  Beyond it was a living room in disorder, couch cushions rumpled, glasses on the tables, papers, shoes.  In the dining room there were piles of books.  It was the house of an artist, abundance, disregard.”

Also, in “Bangkok,”:  “The rooms had high ceilings, the bookcases were filled and against them, on the floor, a few framed photographs leaned.”

In “Such Fun,” an example of his wit:

“There was not much more to her than met the eye, but that had always been enough.”

In “Give,” Salter does what he is so good at–writes about marriage.

My three favorite stories:  “Give,” “Bangkok,” and “Last Night.”

there it goes

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img_1252New Year’s Day is a pause for me.  I lie on the sofa and watch movies and football.  I let life happen outside of me and around me.  Then yesterday I spent the entire day in action–restoring order after the holidays.   Chopping wood, carrying water.  Untangling Christmas lights.  Two very different days, but two days I let slip through–catching nothing.  Instead of an inner life, an outer life. Today, I’m hoping to restore order in my study; there are piles everywhere.  I’m starting here. 

At the end of each of the last few days, I’ve thought of the line from The Hours by Michael Cunningham:

“Laura reads the moment as it passes.  Here it is, she thinks; there it goes.  The page is about to turn.”

The last few days, nothing written on the page.  Today, big hopes.