monoceros blogsSo it is with a little shame that I've now become one of those folks who fill up their blogs with pictures of their pets.
Snowy loves apples and Chinese pears. She loves doggy mint bones, her toothpaste, following Gina to throw out the garbage, and barking at shadows and her reflection. She doesn't like riding in miniature shopping carts. She especially dislikes thunder and hides under my parents' bed if she can't get into my mother's arms (frankly, she'd push my dad off the bed and sleep in his spot if she could).
My recent memories are mostly green ones.
I took this while driving from Ann Arbor to Chelsea, a nearby town. It was a challenging shot - I drove very slowly, rolled down the window, and took the picture with one hand on the wheel and the other holding the camera as steadily as I could manage. Behind me, a semi was catching up with my stalling vehicle and in front of me, I could swear the driver of a Buick was laughing at the tourist he probably believed me to be. Hell, I could have been an intrepid reporter for all he knew.
This was my destination on that gloomy afternoon.
On more cheerful days, I did my Piglet thing and snapped up dandelion clocks from my friend Michelle's backyard (while she wasn't looking, of course, which was easy to manage since she was away on vacation and I was house-sitting for her) and blew the filaments into the summer sky.
And where have they all gone now?
Since my own are in hiatus, I thought someone else's words might bring some cheer to this site.
"Lute Music" by Kenneth Rexroth
The Earth will be going on a long time
Before it finally freezes;
Men will be on it; they will take names,
Give their deeds reasons.
We will be here only
As chemical constituents?
A small franchise indeed.
Right now we have lives,
Corpuscles, Ambitions, Caresses,
Like everybody had once?
Here at the year's end, at the feast
Of birth, let us bring to each other
The gifts brought once west through deserts?
The precious metal of our mingled hair,
The frankincense of enraptured arms and legs,
The myrrh of desperate, invincible kisses?
Let us celebrate the daily
Recurrent nativity of love,
The endless epiphany of our fluent selves,
While the earth rolls away under us
Into unknown snows and summers,
Into untraveled spaces of the stars.
A happy holiday season to all. (This is my safe-mode phrase which I've deployed ever since I wished a Jewish friend Merry Christmas and got teased about it.)
For some reason I'm incredibly lazy about putting up pictures on Flickr. And I'm even lazier about posting the pictures I do have in Flickr on my blog.
What got me tinkering around with Flickr again was a PostSecret card I read today. I read PostSecret every Sunday evening; it's become a ritual, a guilty pleasure. Reading secrets that are just like mine, secrets that startle or make me laugh, secrets that give rise to bitter thoughts.
When I saw this postcard, I wondered if the author had given Frank Warren, who started the PostSecret project, a translation. Then again, it wouldn't be too hard for anyone to make sense of each weeping idiogram.
Many of us have experienced grief in some form, even if it's merely seeing it manifest itself in another person's life. I don't believe I've attempted to explain or dissect the emotion; it's so common that no one ever gives it more thought. For some reason, however, I seem to have unconsciously featured it in several of the stories I've written. In thesis workshop, someone pointed out stories that appeared to pursue the path of grief as it moved from character to character and then the paths of the characters themselves after they become afflicted with it.
In The Year of Magical Thinking, the recent winner of this year's National Book Award for Non-fiction, Joan Didion, the great lady of New Journalism, takes grief in her hands, feels it shape, then breaks it open and looks deep inside. New Journalism often involves the author featuring himself as a character in the report, never fearing to provide intimate telling details, never fearing to be honest when it's most painful. Didion is unflinching as she writes about losing her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne. For forty years, they traveled, wrote, read, and walked together. They were partners in everything, intellectual equals. Five days before his death, they saw their only daughter, Quintana, slip into an induced coma because of pneumonia and septic shock. How much can a person bear in such circumstances? How does a person bear anything with grief crashing on all sides?
Since she was a child, Didion had been trained to, in time of trouble, "read, learn, work it up, go to the literature." Because "information is control." She pairs her experience with the research she carries out during the year after her husband's death. The result is piercing, insightful, and moving without ever being overly sentimental or precious. Neither is it didactic or patronizing. I've only read some 50 pages, but already numerous passages gripped me with a ferocity I did not expect. Many of these first pages would be highlighted in bright, inappropriately cheerful, yellow, that is, if I were one to highlight books.
The cover, I have to remark, has a clever thing going on -
JOAN
DIDION
THE YEAR OF
MAGICAL
THINKING
I can't quite capture it here, but you should take a look at it in the bookstore if you can. Four letters have been marked out in gold, and they spell "John." It seemed gimmicky at first, but then I found it strangely apt. A quiet dedication to Joan's husband. A note on covers: Both US and UK jackets seem to have the same barley white background, but the words are black and blue on the US cover, and red, blue and gold on the UK one. Since both are so similar, I wonder why they had to differ at all. Do British readers have a penchant for colorful letters? How bizarre these marketing decisions.
Today happens to be Ms. Didion's birthday. Here is a snippet about her from The Writer's Almanac:
It's the birthday of the essayist and novelist Joan Didion, born in Sacramento, California (1934). She grew up as a nervous, preoccupied child. She said, "I was one of those children who always thought the bridge would fall in if you walked across it... I thought about the atomic bomb a lot... after there was one."
She began keeping a notebook when she was five years old, and she later wrote, "Keepers of notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with a sense of loss." At one point in her childhood, she lived near a mental hospital, and she would wander around the hospital grounds with a notebook, writing down all the most interesting snippets of conversation.
Didion became associated with the so-called New Journalism, because she often made herself a character in whatever she was covering, and she went much further than most journalists in revealing her own states of mind. The title essay of her collection The White Album (1979) includes notes from a psychiatrist's evaluation after she suffered a nervous breakdown.
Her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, about her husband's recent death from a heart attack at the dinner table, came out this year.
Joan Didion said, "My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. . . . Writers are always selling somebody out."
I'll write more about Didion, whom I read as a student in college and graduate school, when I've finished the book. It's too sad to make a Christmas present, but it's one I found to be perfect for myself.
Here are a few questions Dimsumdolly and I attacked with fervor during the Pride and Prejudice program on Saturday:
1. If a man is in love, could he be easily persuaded by his friend and siblings to move away from his beloved? (We're talking about Mr Bingley, of course.)
2. Who in the novel marries or wishes to marry for status?
3. Who marries for necessity?
4. Who marries for money?
5. Who marries for security?
6. Who marries upon advice?
7. It's fairly easy to determine the reasons why each character marries, but can anyone figure out why an intelligent and witty man like Mr Bennet married a vulgar and very silly woman like Mrs Bennet?
8. Both Elizabeth and Mr Darcy are proud and prejudiced. How is each so? Think about why or what Elizabeth is proud of.
9. Why is Pride and Prejudice such a cherished novel? Why has it remained on reading lists all these years (or centuries)?
10. (I couldn't think of another question the organizers gave us so here's one of my own.) Does anyone think Lizzie and Colonel Fitzwilliam (Mr. Darcy's cousin) could have had a chance together? If you watch the 1995 mini series, he appears to be rather sweet to Lizzie and they get along very well while Darcy pads around them, smouldering and saying a few lines every now and then. In the book, Fitzwilliam shows a lot of interest in her. (I also happen to think that the actor playing the Colonel looks quite appealing.)
If this question isn't your cup of tea, here's one I just recalled - what is Mr Darcy's first name?
Is it December already? How incredible that the year's slipped by without my really noticing. I returned in August and for the longest time I felt as if I were still in the middle of 2005. Well, so much for that.
I'm still in the doldrums but life must go on. And life - lived rather well when it's filled with books and music - today centered on a Pride and Prejudice workshop organized by United International Pictures and The British Council. I managed to register Dimsumdolly and myself for places on a rather limited list. We met at the basement of the Central Lending Library and then watched as other assumed-to-be-P&P-fans-but-how-wrong-we-were showed up. I noticed several small children and a fair number of men. I was, at first, impressed by these men who've read or perhaps were interested in the novel, or okay, maybe just the movie. And then it dawned on me - and to Dimsumdolly too, who pointed out the blank looks on a number of faces - that they were there because of their girlfriends. Anyone who's said that Singaporean guys don't give a rat's ass about their girls should have seen these guys who were actually willing to attend a two-hour workshop about a novel they'd perhaps never heard of until today or when the name "Keira Knightley" became associated with it. Either way, good for them - or, anyone, for that matter - for wanting to learn about something new.
Dimsumdolly and I quickly got into the fun of brushing up on the text we studied more than ten years ago. We still knew the locations, characters, themes; yes, we held our own even against the much younger, fresher teenage students of Literature, one of whom I noticed wrote down every word the British Council organizer said. I'll have to confess that I couldn't help raising my hand or mumbling my answers to a number of questions that the organizers raised. There were only a few of us mumbling the answers anyway, and I figured I didn't want to hold back the way I used to when I was young and easily intimidated. If I gained anything from an overseas education, it was shucking off my inhibition of playing Miss I-know-the-answer on occasion (I learned the hard way how much class participation counts towards the final grade).
Speaking of overseas, Dimsumdolly and I conversed briefly with someone who'd already seen the film. She expressed her disappointment and displeasure with it; I mentioned that I'd read a few positive reviews in by American critics, to which she remarked, "Well, you know how they all think!" I was surprised by such an unfair statement, and all I could do was blink and mumble, "Well, I do believe there're some very good reviewers on that side of the world." Eh, she probably didn't hear me. I really should have said, "No, I don't know how they all think, but I do like what I usually read in certain movie columns."
Never mind, never mind. If I see her again, I'll set her straight.
I've decided that if I have a daughter, I'll have her read P&P when she's about thirteen and then again at seventeen (if she even needs the prodding); the girl next to me said she read it at eleven but I wonder if eleven's old enough for one to appreciate the difficulties of love. And if I have a son, I'll have him read P&P when he's fifteen (when I'm still able to tell him to do something at all) and then tell him to some day date a girl who'll appreciate him for having read any Jane Austen at all. Oh, I'll also tell the girl - be like Lizzie, and while you're at it, hope but don't hold out for a Darcy; and tell the young fellow - a lot of girls out there want a Darcy, you know, but they might settle for someone who actually knows who Mr Darcy is.