Reading and writing

It's 8:30 on Tuesday night, and I'm already in my pajamas, which is quite unusual for me. I'm sick. Nothing life-threatening, just an ugly cold, but I feel horrible.

I used to be able to say, truthfully, that I never got sick. Because I used to never get sick. My immune system was pure cast iron. Or titanium. Whatever is more impenetrable. But this is the fourth time I've been sick this year. Apparently, my immune system is now made of something squishy or porous or otherwise not akin to titanium. It's more like a sieve, or a butterfly net. I'm a runny-nose mouth-breathing mess. I think I'll go to bed (after Rachel Maddow.)

*****
So it's Friday night now. What with the round of one damn thing after another that constitutes my life (not original--P.G. Wodehouse, I think), I don't even remember most of the rest of the week. I'm not as sick as I was, but not 100% yet either. One son is at a high school football game (his school is losing 49-6), and the other son and I are watching the Houston Astros beating the Los Angeles Dodgers in Game 3 of the World Series. We're rooting for Houston. We love Jose Altuve, and Houston needs a win.

My older son, now a junior in high school, is looking at colleges. He's never been a particularly good student, but he started to work harder last year, finishing the year with a 3.5 GPA, and he's working very hard this year, too, though his math and science grades are not good. He might start at the local community college, but he might start at a four-year university. Anyway, he's looking at possibilities. He's actually reading the letters he's starting to receive. We'll schedule visits next spring, because that's what people do.

A few weeks ago, I spent Sunday afternoon at a college admissions seminar for parents of students with learning disabilities. It was not especially helpful (apparently, grades are important; and colleges also consider extracurricular activities in admissions decisions). In my usual vague and scattered way of gathering information, I managed to learn that November through April of next year will be the critical window of time during which forms will be submitted, and checks will be written, and decisions will be made.  That's plenty of time, so we'll figure it out.

*****
I joke sometimes about adult ADD, but that doesn't mean that I don't think it's a real thing, because I do and it is and I have it. It's only through living with my son for 16 years that I was able to figure this out. He's lucky that it's a recognized thing now, and that he's been able to learn how to manage it when he's young. I manage it by doing 20 things at a time, and somehow getting them all done, eventually.

This doesn't always work. Yesterday, I sat with the art director at my company, watching video footage that we need to edit into a two-minute video (and don't get me started on how we're going to get that done on time, but that's a story for another day). I promised that I'd transcribe my notes and send them to him as soon as I got back to my desk.

It would be not quite accurate to say that I forgot all about it five minutes later, because I think that I forgot about it before the words were even out of my mouth. I went back to my desk and finished writing a newsletter, and then wrote some proposal stuff, and then skipped blithely home, without another thought about the video. Not another thought. It was as if the whole afternoon hadn't happened.

When I did finally remember the video, and the notes, it was about 4 o'clock this morning. I was going to get up and just write the notes right away, but I decided to go back to sleep and do in the morning (because 4 o'clock in the morning is the middle of the night). And I did. And that was the end of that.

But it doesn't always end well. I'm pretty sure, for example, that I was supposed to go to the doctor's last week, but I didn't write it down, and couldn't remember for sure if it was that week or the next (meaning the coming week) and no one called me, so I didn't go. I'll find out, I suppose. The forgetting of the things and the appointments is becoming more of a problem. I have to write things down, and set reminders on my phone for everything. And I often forget to do either. And so I forget to do the thing that I would have remembered had I written it down.

*****

Well, that could go on all day. It's Sunday now, and the pointless rambling has to come to an end at some point. Several weeks ago, I finally finished reading The Crisis Years, and I also read Martha Moody's Best Friends. I had never heard of her, but I liked the book. I don't have much other than that to say about it, other than than that the protagonist, a doctor (like Moody herself), realizes at some point during her mid 40s that she is just then beginning to understand life and how to live properly. As someone who finished college at age 48 (summa cum laude, but still), I found this idea very reassuring.

Right now, I'm reading This is NPR: The First Forty Years, which I'll finish in a day or so. Fortunately, I have lots of other things to read. I went to the library book sale (a semi-annual favorite thing to do) yesterday, and bought $5 worth of books, which in library book sale terms, is a shitload of books. List to follow.

How do you take down a dictator?

I just finished reading, and looking at, Jason Polan's Every Person in New York, with foreword by Kristen Wiig. She writes that Polan finds and captures the "spark" in ordinary people.  That's why I love this book and these drawings so much. It's why I love to look at people and how they push their hair back and dig in their pockets or their bags for their keys or their phones and laugh at their kids and prop their sunglasses on their heads and all of the other little and ordinary things that people do.  No two are ever alike.

*****

12YO: Is Lent almost over?

No, sadly, Lent is nowhere near almost over. But now, in an entirely predictable development, the long mild winter actually IS almost over, only to be replaced by a freezing cold early spring. As my 15YO says, What in the actual hell? We're expecting our first real snow of the season, on March bloody 14th. At Mass this morning, the priest reminded us that God has a sense of humor.  I don't think He's very funny just about now.

*****

I'm taking a break from the Cazalets to read a math-for-idiots gift book called Math Squared: 100 Concepts You Should Know.  I'd have made the subtitle 100 Concepts THAT You Should Know, but that's just me. I like the relative pronoun.

Home office and workshop of Ralph Baer, inventor
of "the Brown Box," very early home video game
system.  That's a Simon game on the bottom shelf. 

I have written before about my lack of aptitude for abstract concepts, including such ridiculous things as imaginary numbers (I read that chapter twice--still don't get it.)  I distinguish math from math, in that calculations are fairly simple for me, once I understand the concept behind them. It's the concept that eludes me. I suppose that this is connected in some way to my fearsome lack of aptitude for spatial relations and my hideously bad sense of direction.  But gaping knowledge holes bother me, and I try to fill them whenever I can, as best I can. And again, it's Lent--math is nothing if not penitential.

*****
Just in case, after my failure to grasp the idea of imaginary numbers, I needed another reason to feel inferior, I went (finally) to see "Hidden Figures." I feel insulted, as a graduate of public schools and a state university, that I had never heard of Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughan before this movie was released. The movie itself is wonderful--every performance is true and human, and the story and script and pacing are tremendous.  And now I know the difference between a parabolic and an elliptical orbit. That's information that might come in handy one day. Imaginary numbers, however, are still beyond me.  Frankly, I think some joker at MIT made them up.

*****
My sister-in-law and my three-year-old nephew were at my house when we arrived home from the movie. He's a very active little boy. He makes me fight him. Fists up, or sword lifted, or Nerf gun aimed, he yells "AUNT CLAIRE. LET'S FIGHT."

I mean, it's fine for now. My size advantage is significant, and his hand-eye coordination isn't fully mature, so I remain undefeated. I worry about the future, though. He's going to get older, and grow.  I'm going to get older, and shrink. It won't be long before I'll no longer be able to take him down with  physical strength and agility alone, and I'll have to resort to cunning and treachery. Fortunately, I'm not afraid to fight dirty. Scruples are for suckers.

*****

So three weeks later, I still hate my hair.  But I've learned the hard way (which is the way that I learn most things) that the solution to a bad haircut--particularly a too-short bad haircut--is not another haircut. So I wait.

Julia Child's kitchen, recreated at the Smithsonian's Museum
of American history. I like the paintings hanging right on
the cabinets.  Note the odd placement of the trash can.

*****
Speaking of ordinary life (see first paragraph. No, I don't blame you if you forgot already. This post has taken rather a circuitous route to its conclusion), enjoy these pictures of ordinary life lived by extraordinary people.  Julia Child's kitchen is very appealing to me. I love the color of the cabinets, and the pegboard walls are both pretty in themselves and very useful. What I like best is the imperfection and lack of concern for magazine layout aesthetic.  The trashcan is molded plastic (though maybe she'd have had stainless steel if it had been widely available) and the clock above the sink, which you cannot see in this shot, is shockingly ugly--white with birchwood trim. Very 1984.  Likewise Ralph Baer's home office, above.  I would love to own the green toolboxes with the tiny drawers, and it's clear that he arranged his personal items and mementos in a way that was visually pleasing to himself.  Some of those mementos are hideous, though, and the chair on which he sat is repaired with silver duct tape. People lived in these spaces.  They pushed their hair back and laughed at their friends or their children (Julia Child, famously, didn't have children; Ralph Baer did, I guess, because there are Father's Day cards propped on his shelves.)  Maybe every so often, they thought that they'd like a fancier space; or that they should paint, or organize, or buy a nicer trashcan or a new chair.  But most of the time, they were busy living and working and being themselves, and they didn't have time to worry about what their houses looked like. That's a good way to be.

*****

In my own dojo!

This title makes no sense, does it? I was sick in bed on Friday night, watching "Mean Girls," and I thought I'd use that line as a title, and then let the rest worry about itself.  But I'm going to leave it there. There might be need some day to take down a dictator, and it doesn't hurt to start thinking about it.  Meanwhile, I'm nothing if not oppressed, living under the regime of a three-year-old madman who makes me fight to the death in my own home.   As Bertie Wooster said, sometimes you need to let dictators know where they get off. Pugnacious toddlers: Beware. Sleep with one eye open.

Bibliography, 2016

Although I hate winter like nobody's business, I do love the last few days of December and the first few days of January.  It still feels like Christmas; even better than Christmas because the pre-Christmas stress frenzy is over. Everything seems new and anything seems possible as the old year ends and a new one begins.  I went walking early this morning in clear still coldness slightly warmed by thin pale yellow sunlight, feeling optimistic about 2017.

*****
It's the end of the year, so it's time to post my "what I read this year" list. I read a lot in 2016; I didn't even realize how much until I went back and looked at my list.  Here it is:

The Takeover. Muriel Spark. Apparently, Muriel Spark wrote this, and all of her novels, on 72-page notebooks purchased from James Thin, a now-defunct bookshop and stationers in Edinburgh.  I don't know why this idea appeals to me so much, because I hate to hand-write anything.  I cry like a baby when I have to write a check (after complaining for at least ten minutes about not being able to pay whatever bill I'm paying electronically.) And that whole observation has nothing to do with this book, because I only vaguely remember it, because it was the first book I read this year.  This was one of only maybe two or three Muriel Spark novels that I hadn't already read (and I've read some of them, including Memento Mori, The Girls of Slender Means, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and Loitering with Intent, multiple times.) It's about a rich English woman living in Italy in the early 1970s, who is gradually robbed of everything she owns by a tenant who refuses to be evicted. There's more to it than that, of course, but that's the bare-bones plot summary.  It's not her best (read any of the other ones mentioned here if you haven't read Muriel Spark before), but it's still Muriel Spark, and so it wasn't a bad start to 2016.

Can We Talk About Something More Pleasant? Roz Chast.  This was one of my favorites of the year, by far.  I really love Roz Chast, and I bought this book in hardback, brand-new at Barnes and Noble.  It didn't disappoint. Although it's about one of the saddest subjects imaginable, the long decline and eventual death of Chast's elderly parents, it's strangely uplifting and hopeful.  Not as funny, obviously, as her other work, but when it's funny, it's high-larious.  And the book itself is beautiful.  Highly recommended.

The Beginning of Spring. Penelope Fitzgerald. I wrote a little bit about this one here. I just love Penelope Fitzgerald.

What's Wrong with the World? G.K. Chesterton. I'm a Catholic and a reader and writer, so I'm supposed to love Chesterton, but there's something about him that's not quite right.  His overpraise of women and our supposed exalted status, reigning as queens and supreme rulers of the home, blah blah blah, always reads as patronizing to me.  He's OK.  I can take him in small doses. I definitely prefer C.S. Lewis.

A Charmed Life, Mary McCarthy. I started reading this believing, for some reason, that it was a memoir or autobiography.  Even as I read the very novelistic description of Martha and John Sinnott and their marriage and home and life together, I thought that McCarthy was employing some sort of literary device, and that at any moment, she'd reveal that the Sinnotts were her grandparents or some other figures of importance in her early life.  It soon became evident that the book is really a novel.  I confirmed my suspicion by looking at the cover (in fairness to me, it's an e-book, so I had never actually looked at the cover when I started reading it), which reads "A Charmed Life (A Novel by Mary McCarthy.)" Not nearly as good as The Group, but probably none of her other novels are.

Our Man in Havana. Graham Greene. Another Catholic novelist.  That's four out of the first six.  Not an intentional theme for 2016 or anything.  This is a great novel; it's kind of Waugh-like in some respects-- a little more forgiving of humanity than Waugh, but it would be hard to find a writer who isn't. Very funny.

The Bean Trees. Barbara Kingsolver. I read The Poisonwood Bible years ago, and thought it was great.  This one was good, too, though I don't remember much about it, nine months or so later.

The Fountain Overflows. Rebecca West.  I wrote about this one here (same post as the one about The Beginning of Spring.)  If you can read only one Rebecca West book, then read Black Lamb and Gray Falcon, one of the best English-language books ever written. But all of her novels are great, too.

Local Girls. Alice Hoffman.  I bought this at a Friends of the Library used book sale.  I didn't know at the time that Hoffman wrote the novel on which the movie "Practical Magic" is based; had I known, I wouldn't have touched this or any of her books with a barge pole.  So I'm glad I didn't know, because I actually liked this very much.

The Mind of the Maker.  Dorothy L. Sayers.  Another Catholic.  Truthfully, I have never warmed to Sayers.  I find the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries tiresome, and I don't know why, because I love early 20th century English society novels.  Well, I love Wodehouse, and maybe I expect every other English society novel to be Wodehousian.  Anyway, this is not a novel; it's a Christian apologetics book.  I read it at night, over the course of a few weeks, and didn't absorb as much as I'd have liked because I was always exhausted when I was reading it, and I kept falling asleep--I think I started reading it when I was still adjusting to being back at work full-time.  I will probably re-read it.

A Separate Peace. John Knowles. I had to read this in high school.  Who didn't? I always felt a little guilty for not liking it.  I was an aspiring English major, and I thought that it was my duty and responsibility to appreciate whatever was officially considered good literature.  So I read it again, to either validate or overturn my earlier judgement.  Verdict: Neutral.  I appreciated it more than I did in high school, but I can think of 50 better 20th century American books that I'd make high school kids read before this one.

If You Lived Here, You'd be Home Now. Claire LaZebnik.  This is what I'm going to call a "Put Up or Shut Up" novel.  I liked it a lot, but I was also sure, after I finished reading it, that I could do a little better.  But I haven't. So that's the difference between what used to be called mid-list novelists like Claire LaZebnik and me.  She has actually finished a book and published it, and I have not.  80% of life is showing up, or something like that.

The Opposite of Loneliness.  Marina Keegan. She would probably have been a very fine writer if she hadn't died so tragically young.

The Americans: The Democratic Experience.  Daniel Boorstin. A bit of a slog, to be honest.   I love to read history, but this is my second Boorstin, and he's just not my thing.  Still, I learned a bit about everyday American life in the early to mid 20th century that I didn't know before, so it wasn't a waste.

A Woman in Jerusalem. A.B. Yehoshua. This was quite good, except for one annoying quirk.  The main character is the human resources manager of a large commercial bakery in Jerusalem, who is charged with investigating the circumstances surrounding the murder of one of his employees, a Russian emigre woman.  The writer insists on referring to the character only as "the resource manager;" the reader never knows his name. Although thinking back on it, I guess this was effective in some way; he's a man adrift, estranged from his wife, on rocky terms with his mother, with whom he lives; and not particularly secure in his job. Maybe he feels like a nonentity, and so that's how the reader is meant to see him.  Worth reading, and I plan to look for more of Yehoshua's work this year.

Away. Amy Bloom.  Astonishingly good.  The opposite of the "Put Up or Shut Up" novel, because no matter how hard I worked, I could never write anything like this.  Another story about another Russian Jewish woman far from home; this one alive, having barely escaped a pogrom that killed her entire family.  When she learns that the little girl whom she believed dead is actually alive, she goes back to Russia from New York to find her--only in the wrong direction, traveling on foot and by train across the U.S. and Canada, into Alaska (pre-statehood; this takes place in 1924) and eventually to Siberia. It's not spoiling the ending to say that it ends much more happily than anyone would ever expect, though not perfectly so.

Rocking Horse Catholic. Caryll Houselander.  So titled because Houselander converted with her family when she was a very young child--so not a cradle Catholic, but a rocking horse Catholic.  I learned about her from Heather King.  Both are brilliant.

Red Scarf Girl. Ji-Li Jiang.  As I noted last year, I like an occasional lighthearted and refreshing visit to the Cultural Revolution whenever I need a break from Stalin's purges.  Maybe this summer, I'll do some beach reading about Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge.  Party on, Wayne.

The Rothschilds.  I mentioned this one here.  Don't ask me to distinguish one Rothschild from another.  I read every page, but immediately suffered total non-recall.  Who knows how I managed to finish college.  Oh right, it took me over 25 years.

Monkeys. Susan Minot. Another one that I read a very long time ago, when it was first published in 1987.  I re-read it for the same reason that I re-read A Separate Peace: to see if I'd been right the first time.  Still great. 1 1/2 for 2.

Falling in Place. Ann Beattie. Selfishness and family breakdown in 1970s Connecticut. Very good, but depressing.

A Train of Powder. Rebecca West. I already wrote about this one, too, here.

Someone Will Be with You Shortly: Notes from a Perfectly Imperfect Life. Lisa Kogan. Filler reading; neither here nor there.

Rosewater. Maziar Bahari. Apparently, I'm not happy unless I'm living vicariously under a brutally repressive regime. Good to be prepared, I suppose.

Reading Lolita in Tehran. Azar Nafisi.  See above.  The fun never ends.

Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life. Amy Krouse Rosenthal. I have no idea what kind of critical reception this received when it was published, but I loved it. Apparently, she published a follow-up, Textbook, in 2016, which should appear on my What I Read in 2017 list, about a year or so from now.  Stay tuned.

With or Without You. Domenica Ruta.  I wrote about this one here. Domenica Ruta is a master of a very specialized art.  She can make squalor, loneliness, addiction, depression, and even monotony interesting and compelling. Not glamorous or appealing, but compelling.

Letters from America. Alistair Cooke. I read Memories of the Good and the Great a year or so ago, and so I picked this up at the previously mentioned library book sale.  Cooke was the BBC's American correspondent, and this contains some entertaining observations about American life and politics from a British observer, but the casual mid-century racism and sexism were kind of disturbing.

Trump: A Theory of Assholes. Aaron James.  My son bought this one. Truthfully, I didn't actually finish it.  The dry academic examination of the science of assholery was funny for the first chapter, but it lost me after that.  I just wanted to include it on my list, because Trump/Asshole.

7 Women. Eric Metaxas. A little disappointing.  I loved Bonhoeffer, and have a generally high opinion of Metaxas and his work (note how neatly I bypassed the need to use the possessive with a name that ends in "S"? Because I hate that.  I also hate when any number smaller than ten appears in print in numeric form, especially as the first word of a sentence or phrase. But that's probably just me.)  The Corrie Ten Boom chapter was especially disappointing, because I have read The Hiding Place at least 20 times; I have also read Tramp for the Lord,  and I didn't learn one single thing about Corrie Ten Boom after reading the Metaxas chapter (see, I did it again) that I didn't already know.

Every Exquisite Thing. Matthew Quick. No idea what prompted me to read this.  It's a misfit outsider teen romance novel.  If you've seen "The Fault in Our Stars" or "Paper Towns," then you've read this book.

Yes, Please.  Amy Poehler.  I like Amy Poehler (especially "Parks and Recreation," one of my favorite-ever TV shows), so when I saw her book offered as a $2.99 daily deal, I bought it and read it.  It's not that it was bad or anything.  I like memoirs in general, especially memoirs written by people whose lives are radically different from mine.  So I'm not sure what bothered me about this book.  Maybe she was just trying too hard.  Lots of mentions of New York City, Back in the Day--she even writes about "a Lou Reed sighting...like the first robin in spring."  Take a deep breath, Wannabe Nostalgic Baby Boomer, you're not even as old as me, for crying out loud.  I was waiting for a Woodstock story next, or maybe an eyewitness account of the Rolling Stones show at Altamont.  Sheesh.  Overall, though, it was fine.  Who am I to judge?  I wouldn't recognize Lou Reed if he made my latte at Starbucks.

Ship of Fools.  Katherine Anne Porter.  A German passenger ship brings a group of expat Germans, along with a handful of Americans and others, back to Germany from Mexico.  I wrote about this one here. 1933 Germany seems very relevant right now, but I've been thinking that for a long time now; before Donald Trump even rode down that escalator, in fact.

*****
Once again, a kind of crazy catch-all list.  Right now, I'm reading two more memoirs: Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run (in hardback; excellent Christmas present from my husband), and Ruth Reichl's Tender at the Bone.  Both are great so far, but I won't finish either until 2017.  Happy New Year!

Truth to power

I started reading e-books in 2010, when I bought a Barnes & Noble Nook device.  I still like actual books, but I love the electronic format.  It's nice to be able to carry all of your books in one compact device.

Right now, I'm reading Alistair Cooke's  Memories of the Good and the Great,  which I purchased for $1.99 on an e-book daily deal site. I have vague childhood memories of Alistair Cooke as host of "Masterpiece Theater," and I knew that he was a writer, but that was the extent of my experience with him.  I bought the book based on the description (short essays about 20th-century figures whom Cooke had covered as a correspondent for the BBC), and had no expectations at all.

I'm surprised by how much I like the book.  The very short essays telescope in and out: A short discussion of the person's significance (the subjects include FDR, Winston Churchill, George Marshall, George Bernard Shaw, Eleanor Roosevelt, P.G. Wodehouse, etc., so they're all pretty significant) and then a close observation of a moment in the person's life or a particular characteristic or event.  Cooke met all of the subjects at some point during his career as a foreign correspondent for the BBC and host of the TV series Omnibus, and although he clearly admired all of his subjects, the essays do not read as hagiographic.

A few months ago, more because I was avoiding other things than because of any burning desire to read it, I read  Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians.  Apart from the obvious similarities (both books contain biographical sketches of prominent people; Strachey covered the 19th century and Cooke the 20th) there's not much resemblance between the two books.  Cooke is an interesting contrast to Strachey, whose goal was to take his subjects down a peg or two.

Cooke approached his biographies with just the opposite in mind: He already saw his subjects as great and good and wanted his readers to see them the same way. In a possibly intentional metatextual comment on journalism, Cooke notes that many (if not most) Americans at the time of FDR's presidency never knew that he was unable to walk, and that even the Hearst organization, known for its hostility toward the New Deal and toward FDR personally, observed the taboo against mentioning his disability.   Cooke guessed that the almost 16-year embargo on reporting about FDR's physical condition wouldn't have lasted for a week today, that today being 1999, when his book was published.  Today as in 2015, it wouldn't last for five minutes.

Did the news organizations that didn't report or comment on FDR's obvious disability do a disservice to the truth?  Did people have a right to know that their President was in a wheelchair?  I don't know. I do know that I have no interest in the sort of spurious truth-telling that unmasks faults and shines a spotlight on blemishes, not for the sake of honesty, but for the sake of exposure.

Some people actually are great or good.  Nothing useful comes of breaking them down in print, making them smaller and more like the rest of us.    If unvarnished truth means unvarnished by flattery or a political agenda, then it might also mean unvarnished by kindness or sympathy for human failings.  I think I'd prefer hagiography.

The Taking up of Space Which I Require for Other Purposes

Q: Exactly how many containers of flour, confectioners' sugar, and bread crumbs do you need?
A: Far fewer than I seem to have.

Q: Why would you EVER embark on a kitchen-cabinet-cleaning-out project?
A: (deep, deep sigh).