The MOST Wonderful Time of the Year

Happy Boxing Day, friends.

Not that I know what Boxing Day is about. Nobody does, really, although theories abound. When I was a kid, Boxing Day mean getting dragged going to the horse races because Dad came from a family of hippophiles. I expect I did my fair share of whining about this particular tradition, but now, looking back some 35 years, I have fond memories of the frosty air, the smell of horses and the noise and bustle of the punters around the bookies, who operated in the open air and communicated by tic-tac, a sign language that Dad actually understands but which is now dying out due to radio communication.

For me, Boxing Day marks the start of the Most Wonderful Week of the Year. The frantic days before Christmas are over, but the excitement of Christmas Day itself, with its presents and family get-together, still lingers. Gifts that have not yet been assigned their proper place in the scheme of things sit in the glory of their newness on my desk, and are not yet starting to look reproachful over my tardiness in using them.

The longest night of the year is past, and the days are eeeeever so slowly inching their way toward spring. I can rest in the knowledge that this is happening even though we are only at the start of the endless Illinois winter.

The house slumbers; the calendar is blissfully empty (there is nothing like a week without meetings to reconcile me to the human race). A faint sound of football drifts into my office from the family room, and the sound of Orangina doing her chores under Felsted's prompting. (One of her traits is an inability to accept a change of routine, even at Christmas.) Wasabi, on the other hand, has yet to make an appearance, even if it IS 3 pm. Teenage hibernation: annoying on some levels, but strangely peaceful on others, especially when I recollect that college is now a lock and these are her last few months as a child of this house.

For me, this week is a week of combined rest and preparation. The new year looms, with its challenges. Will I ever get my books to beta reader stage? Can I uphold my resolution to embrace the season and move my butt around more? Will I ever realize my dream of a colorful, decorated office? Will I earn enough this year? Who the heck knows?

Whatever happens, 2010 should go down as the year I learned that I could indeed write fiction. That I had the mental stamina to come up with a story and put it on paper. That I had the toughness to ignore everything else while I wrote.

And 2011, I suspect, will be another pivotal year. When I end it, I will no longer have any schoolchildren, and Felsted will be very, very close to the fateful big 6-0. Retirement, where and how we plan to live in the post-college years, and the care and keeping of Orangina "just in case" need to be addressed. Maybe I should find these intimations of mortality depressing, but to me they're just exhilarating. I did it! I managed to bring up, however haphazardly, the two sweet little scraps of life who grew into two impossible kids and then, somehow, miraculously, into two young women with the future in front of them. Wow.

So this is going to be a very nice week, the pause at the top of one really big hill before I jog down the next one to see what's on the other side: what will be there, of course, will be another big hill to climb. The photo at the top of this post was taken from the top of Bindon Hill following an absolute killer of a climb: little did I know that I had two more such climbs, and the corresponding downhill scrambles, before I came to a place where I could turn landwards and enjoy a little walking on the flat. At that point, I was simply celebrating having made it to the top! So that, metaphorically speaking, is where I feel myself to be now.

What is your metaphorical landscape?

Book Review: Nemesis by Philip Roth

Where I got the book: my own choice from the library.

I've only read one other book by Philip Roth, The Human Stain. And I wasn't crazy about it, although I thought the writing was superior. (And I guess a few other people thought so too, since it won a PEN/Faulkner Award.)

I liked Nemesis a whole lot more, even though I thought the novel was structurally flawed. Or is that genius, to build flaws deliberately into a novel and then get away with it? It's a fine line.

[SPOILER ALERT] Nemesis is set in Newark in the hot summer of 1944, specifically in the Jewish community in Weequahic. It begins in an expository style, explaining the origins of the polio epidemic of that year, before introducing the main character, Bucky Cantor. This young man, a superb athlete but barred from war service by poor eyesight, works as a playground supervisor and has a passion for helping children grow as athletes. He is a model citizen: brought up by his grandparents, he grew up working in their business and did well at school. He is small, tough, and respected, and his relationship with a doctor's daughter promises a rise in society.

But the polio epidemic hits Weequahic hard, and the playground is particularly badly affected. Children sicken and even die, and Bucky Cantor's faith in God is shaken as he tries to comfort the families and puzzle out why "his" children should be the victims of such a virulent strain. When he finally gives in to the temptation to leave it all behind and join his girlfriend at a camp in the mountains, Bucky's nemesis follows him and destroys his life.

This is a great story told mostly in a tight narrative style interspersed with dialogue. I loved the affectionate descriptions of the community and its people, and really got a sense of the suffering of the families. The writing is excellent: tight and compelling, it sketches scenes with great economy of detail but considerable power, and the dialogues and action are completely convincing.

Where the book fell down, for me, was the odd shock of discovering, about halfway into the book, that the narrator is not the anonymous "omniscient" so useful to novelists, but one of the polio victims; he tells Bucky's story (so that we see Bucky mostly as "Mr. Cantor") but really tells us almost nothing about his own part in it. The idea that he would have become friends with Bucky later in life and is now narrating what he has learned from him just doesn't strike true. I would have been OK with an omniscient narrator, but I find a second-hand narrative through a very minor character rather jarring.

The second thing I did not like was precisely the account of Bucky later in life, when he has turned his back on his former love and all that connected him with the playground. The embittered invalid is a familiar enough trope, but the way this section of the novel is sandwiched between the actual story and a final description of Bucky in his glory days (which strikes me as an attempt to balance out the present-day section) doesn't work for me. Bucky's anger against God is explored in this section, but I think it could have been worked more satisfactorily into the main narrative given Roth's great ability with the pen.

But I could be wrong. Maybe the flaws are deliberate attempts to break the rhythm of the narrative and shock the reader out of complacency. If they are, then I respect them. My overall impression is still of a powerful piece of writing that is well worth reading, and for that reason I'm giving Nemesis an "excellent" rating.

Making What?

I should be making goals right now. Don't you think? I've read quite a few writer blogs today that talk about goals for next year. INSTEAD:

I am dreaming about going to live in France. In a house that looks incredibly old, with vines all over it, but that miraculously has absolutely none of the problems of an old house BECAUSE it has been renovated to very high standards with extreme good taste AND it's on the market for something like $50,000 so that I can spend the rest of our money on, you know, whatever. Oh yeah oh yeah and in my dream I'm earning SO MUCH as a novelist that the money bit is all irrelevant anyway and I give tons of dosh away to charity and can afford an assistant to do all the writer stuff I don't like.

I am struggling to do lots of bitty bits of work. Having made a big push to catch up with my to-do list last week, I am now letting it go to rack and ruin. Again.

I am being a tad touchy with the fam. For good reason on many sides, as it has been quite a trying month, family-wise. From two out of three of 'em, anyway.

I am tired, headachy and the food I bought in desperation at 10 pm from a certain fast food establishment after the Christmas rehearsal has been getting its revenge ALL DAY.

I am completely failing to get my Christmas cards done. Yes. And it is December 22. I did manage to write a letter today, bragging on a few things we have all achieved this year as one does (one day I will write a Christmas letter that's actually interesting to OTHER people), but no joy on actually slapping a few cards into envelopes.

I have been culling my blog reader. I've deleted the feeds for quite a few blogs, some of which I used to follow avidly but they are now just failing to inspire me. Some are quite big names, blogwise. The ones that I am still enjoying, oddly enough, are often the least polished and are extremely obscure. Quite a few of the bloggers I've followed for the last couple years have given up lately: no more to say, no more desire to say it. The obscure bloggers, funnily enough, often still have fresh things to say precisely because they could care less that they only have five readers. They're not worrying about their stats. They're saying what's on their mind.

I have subscribed to my own blog just so I can compare its obscureness with that of others. Dang.

I have realized that I only really tweet when I'm actively writing. Right now, I'm barely on Twitter. Right now, my two novels are lying oh, so quietly in my computer (with clones in the cloud and on an external hard drive, oh yes I have learned THAT lesson the hard way). Come the New Year, I will revise one and rewrite the other. Those are my 2011 writing projects.

Wait. Those are GOALS! I have GOALS! GOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAL (OK here you have to imagine a latino TV announcer doing the GOOOALAGOOALAGOOLA thing because I can't reproduce it accurately in words.)

I feel better now.

Merry Christmas, and to those who don't celebrate it, Merry Christmas. Because personally I always feel warmed and included when people wish me a happy [insert name of holiday I don't celebrate] and I want to include YOU in MY happy holiday. I may throw out another post or two in the glorious post-Christmas lull, but if not I'll see you in 2011. And soon I will reach my 100th post and there will be a GIVEAWAY. Another goal! YESSS.

Embracing the Season

It is cold, here in Illinois. And we're the lucky ones - in nearby Indiana, they have had not only the cold but big piles of snow, blocking the roads with huge drifts.

We mostly have cold. A thin layer of snow and ice, left over from a couple of mild snowstorms. But boy, is it cold.

Why the weather report? Well, here's the thing. I'm usually the one who spends all year long complaining about this adjectival climate. Born to the cool summers and very mild winters of southern England, I really rather like the neither-hot-nor-cold days, especially if they're a bit misty, or breezy, or basically all the types of weather midwesterners DON'T like.

I moan on and on about the summers as soon as our short spring is over, the humidity mounts and the mosquitos arrive. "Too hot! Too buggy!" I miss being able to sit outside in the evening without being eaten. Let the record show that I never sit outside here, because the weather's just always WRONG.

Then the winter comes, often about one day after the warm weather ends, and I gripe about the cold. Driving in the snow--yuk. Agh. Especially after having sledded through a red light once or twice when my car just decided to do that thang. The salt that keeps the roads safe--oh please. All over my car, so I can't touch the thing for six months. Those big lumps of filthy black snow that accumulate on my wheel wells and then melt onto the garage floor, so it smells all damp in there like an old dog. And then there's trying to navigate an icy sidewalk or parking lot, during which maneuver I mutter under my breath like the old English eccentric I'm trying hard to become.

Yes, I am a Weather Grinch. But no longer! For I have decided to embrace the season. We have quite a few nice forest preserves around here, and I am walking in them. In windchills of -6°F (that's -21 for the sensible parts of the world where freezing = 0). This is not nearly as suicidal as it sounds; with the sun shining, suitably dressed and with a scarf over half my face, I am toasty and also look like Scott of the Antarctic, or the Yeti, depending on what you've been drinking.

Is there a point to telling you this, other than bragging on how hardy I am? Let me think. UNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG OK found it. I tend to find that if I face something I really don't like, it becomes something far less scary and unpleasant than I thought. I never used to like anyone reading what I've written, and yet now it's almost sad and pathetic how much I enjoy having people read my words. I just needed to take the step. Similarly, once I'm outside in the cold--it's not as cold as I thought it'd be.

So, question: what do you need to face right now? What is your equivalent of taking that step out into the cold? I also have some spiritual stuff I need to face: I know that I've got to stop reading and talking and writing and doing and do some thinking. I don't do enough of that right now, even if I'm walking by myself. If anyone out there has figured out how to make themselves think, I'd love to hear from you.

But I'd also like to know about your fears. What is your equivalent of hiding in your nice warm house and trying to ignore winter because you don't like it? If I get enough answers, I'd like to make them the subject of a future post.

Book review: The Brontës by Juliet Barker

I think I'll entertain myself (and you, perhaps. But you may not like the departure from the format) by posting my book reviews here. After all, I'm always banging on about the Life of the Mind. In my case the LOTM is based more on reading than on actual thinking, because I do like to be entertained. And when you're a writer, reading counts as Work, so I can put my feet up for an hour or so every day in the serene assurance that I am Doing Myself Good.

Ahem. Anyway, should you choose to read on, here is the review.

Juliet Barker's The Brontës, published in 1994, is a humungo 830 pages, followed by 170 pages of notes. It is frequently, so it seems, referred to as the "definitive" Brontë biography, which is why I asked my friend The Blond Knitter to buy it for me when I won her blog contest. (I like to think of the writers of definitive biographies crying "Follow that!" as they write the final line. I would.)

The Brontës totally lives up to its billing. Between the text and the notes (which I only dipped into), I really did feel that Barker had explored every possible source available to her. And yet not once, not once, I am not kidding you, was I bored. This could be due to my fascination with all things 19th-century-literature, but I think I'll put it down to good writing.

And I discovered so many interesting things, especially about Patrick Brontë, the father, and his most famous daughter, Charlotte. The book begins with the transformation of Paddy Branty, a poor but highly intelligent farmer's son, to the gentleman who outlived his wife and all six of his children; in some ways, he is the star of the narrative just by reason of his longevity.

Barker sets out to set the record straight about Patrick, who in Brontë legend is usually seen as mad and bad; in her book you get a portrait of a deeply devout clergyman (with a few foibles, such as a tendency to brag about himself and his children to the family he left behind in Ireland) who greatly loved his children, encouraged them to think and write, and was constantly worried about their ill health (which mostly seems to have been due to Haworth's generally unhealthy environment. The water supply was bad, and disease was rife in the village). Charlotte, on the other hand, comes across as less saintly than she usually does: she was rather on the bossy side, prone to outbursts and sulking, and decidedly manipulative.

Barker quotes extensively from the Brontës' letters and early poetry and prose, showing every alteration and insertion so that I got a real sense of their writing process. Fascinating. Her notes are detailed and written in just as lively a fashion as the text.

As the book advanced, it became increasingly hard to put down. A very nicely done treatment of a fascinating group of subjects. I'm actually racking my brains to think of a criticism, but the only one that comes to mind is that the collection of photos is a little idiosyncratic. But I've read enough about the issues surrounding the publication of photos in books to understand that this may have been a situation beyond the author's control.

I'm happy. Except that I have to inform you, dear reader, that this is a hard book to obtain. I was lucky and located a good copy at a reasonable price, but I see that on the day of writing we're talking about "collectible" (i.e. exorbitant) prices. I hope you have better luck.

Dying Well

One of the things that made me take the plunge into writing as a means of earning money, and then into fiction writing--which may or may not earn me any money, but I'm doing it anyway--was the question: would I write if I learned that my time in this world was very short? If I only had a year, two years, five years... HECK yeah. I would write MORE.

Maybe this change was also prompted by my age: I am 51, not old by the standards of the developed world, but still old enough to need both hands to count the people I know who have died, suddenly or slowly. My circle of female friends now contains quite a few widows. So, something inside me is undoubtedly prompting me to get on with something I've always dreamed of doing but never saw as a practical proposition.

(The corollary of this thought is: would I write if someone gave me a huge amount of money? Absolutely. This is not a "job" I want to quit. If you can answer both of those questions in the positive, you are doing what God made you to do. If not, a little thinking may be in order.)

I think I've written before about my fascination with dying words. I believe I'm acting on the assumption that people near to death have a wisdom and perspective that others who, barring accident, expect to live to see next year, do not.

So when I read last year that Anne Marie Schlekeway was blogging about her ALS and its effects on her life, I added the blog to my feed. Anne Marie died yesterday, at the age of 44. Her blog, Kiss My ALS, was a brutally open exposé of her symptoms and her feelings about them; they were often negative, an example being her anger at the hospital where she had surgery to insert a feeding tube.

There was also something terribly painful about her descriptions of her rapidly progressing symptoms when combined with her stubborn assertions that she was going to beat this disease, she was going to live for another twenty years. I kept wanting to cry out "Prepare!" I have read posts by Christian friends who face death--their own or a loved one's--with dignity and calm, and I wished, so much, that I could see that in Anne Marie.

Her last post was dated the day before she died, and ran thus:

Hi Ya’ll. It’s been a minute. Current Emotional weather: partly sunny with patches of upset, chance of tears with occasional high winds of frustration. Bad hands are causing a stormy and rocky foundation in my mental state via the absence of journaling~GOD I miss that release. And yet I remain…without my most basic tools for self/mental management… I am in a fairly decent place despite grasping to recall a turn of phrase for later use rather than letting go and flowing with the words as now even i cannot read what I have written.

The last 6 weeks have been a revelation, after they were a monumental setback. Soon after going all tube feeding all the time, I lost about 70% of my CAPACITY to do. literally.

The post ends as if she intended to come back to it later, but from the article linked above I gather she must have lost consciousness fairly soon after posting it.

So I'm all ambivalent about the fact that I followed this blog now. What I was looking for never came. And yet I'm sure that those who knew Anne Marie see only her optimism, her determination, her exuberant personality and her work to raise awareness and funds for ALS research. And she had all those things, and I admire her for all her good qualities.

I think that Anne Marie's writing, and her attitude toward her illness, was very symptomatic of a culture that values fighting against death rather than preparing for it. My beloved Victorians, surrounded by illnesses that they could not fight with antibiotics and advanced medical machinery, consciously prepared themselves for death at all times. When you read 19th century literature, you're struck by the constant awareness that "I may not be here a year hence." What a difference the medicine of the 20th century has made! Now we all seem to confidently expect to live to a hundred, and are bitter and upset when our skin begins to wrinkle and sag, our hair streaks with gray, and our joints become arthritic. We "rage against the dying of the light" as Dylan Thomas urged us to do in the first half of the "century of progress."

Why don't we celebrate our age? After all, to be gray-haired means that you have survived. You did not die as a kid when you scaled that very, very tall tree, or fatally injure yourself when you accepted that dare to jump from the top of the air-raid shelter (I still remember how my ankles felt when they hit the ground), or swam out into dangerous waters to bring back the two kids who were floating out to sea in a rubber dinghy. You survived the many, many stupid and self-destructive things you did as an emotionally immature adult. Wrinkles are a sign of triumph over time: you have not yet succumbed to a fatal disease, and all your planes have landed safely.

I will keep Anne Marie's blog on my reader for a while, to catch any tributes from friends and family. And then, eventually, I'll delete the feed, and she'll fade from my memory. But for a few months I followed her journey, and I guess I'm glad I stuck with it. Rest in peace, Anne Marie Schlekeway. And I'm sorry, if any friend or admirer reads this post and thinks I'm being unkind or judgmental or anything like that. I'm just trying to be open and honest here about my own feelings. And writing, while I still can.

Was that November that just ran by?

Hello? Remember me? I used to blog around here. Yes? Is some dim recollection of a crazy woman surfacing?

A month is a long time in the blogosphere, friends. The much-followed Rachelle Gardner, Literary Agent (a title that definitely has "Licensed to Kill" floating somewhere around it like a ghost of queries past) includes in her Blogs We Don't Like "a writer whose blog has irregular and infrequent posts."

I find myself wondering about that "and." So if your posts are infrequent but not irregular (for example, you post at 10 am EXACTLY on the third Monday of every April and December), are you worthy of love? 'Cos I could do that.

Excuse Number One for my (I hope) lamented absence is that I have been doing NaNoWriMo. Which is now, mercifully, over. Enough has been written about NaNo on other writer blogs to, well, fill the pages of a novel, so I won't go on about its joys and tribulations. I will simply state that I wrote the entire first draft (71,500 words) of a suspense novel in 29 days, and saw several other writer-friends crowned with the purple WINNER! bar of glory. Well done to everyone who even tried - it ain't easy grinding out words every day.

Excuse Number Two is that my writing business took an unexpected turn lately when my own church hired me for an extensive series of communications tasks. Including paying me for authoring content for their website, something I'd been doing for free anyway - but it's amazing how work multiplies when you're getting paid for it. But I am still freelance, folks! And would just love some nice editing work to spice up my life. Hint, hint.

Aaand then of course there's the family. I could relate the tale of Felsted's reactions to our new fleece sheets (Yes! I gave in to tackiness for the sake of warm tootsies) or Orangina's bizarre acquisitiveness. But reticence seems like a good idea. Unless I become like Jen Lancaster (who lives in a nearby town) and make my husband and dogs famous and wealthy by writing about them. Seriously, how does she do that?

But, alas, or perhaps fortunately, I must wrap up this post and go be a judge at a karate contest for four hours. And then come home, change into some glad rags, and head to church to sit in the Lessons & Carols service taking copious notes about angles and shots so I can brief my photographer.

Looking back over this post, I have once more realized how bizarre my life is. Thank heaven for the Life of the Mind, which is currently still occupied with the Brontës. I had not realized that Charlotte Brontë modeled her own characters so closely on real ones that they were easily recognizable, and let her psyche shine out quite transparently for everyone to analyze. It is possible that she died of embarrassment. I must go back over my draft and see if anyone I know is in there.