fling o’ rama
Having accepted congratulations for putting flylady to the side for a time, I just spent probably two hours throwing away crap in my attick hideaway.
It’s a big lovely room. That also means it’s got room for a LOT of crap.
It has been a horror since Christmas. Which was FOUR MONTHS AGO.
I can’t remember what the argument right around Christmas time was about, probably division of housekeeping labor (the fact that there is none, but we’ve settled that reasonably happily now), but I remember crying and telling my husband- – I think I’m going to start abbreviating his name CKK (Curt Kirkwood Kinda)– anyway I remember crying and saying ‘That room is ME!’
Sure, it was theatrical. But it was also true. I was feeling pretty sorry for myself. Good old mommy, just throw it in her room, she’ll sort it out. Or, I am the only person in this house who can POSSIBLY take care of this. I’d better put it up in my study, on top of all the other crap nobody can possibly take care of but me. I’ll get to it some day.
Since Christmas this room has been at its absolute height of representing me, I’ll tell ya. It was full of globs of wrapping paper, shipping boxes, packing materials, gifts yet unwrapped, and just shit that the entire family figured I could somehow find a good place for. My healing table (like a massage table) had turned into a work surface/catchall/hidey hole for more shit. You could not see the floor in here.
Then, obscured behind Christmas, was all of my hoarded craft stuff. I have gotten so much better over the years, but… when it comes to crafts and paper products, I am a hoarder. I cannot, cannot cannot organize or let go of fabrics, old diaries/notebooks, items that need mending that I should really just THROW AWAY, unfinished craft projects, scrapbooking stuff… It’s a horror.
Everything I keep, you see, I have to organize.
This room represents me because it takes on everything, and everything never gets finished or processed. I just say, sure! And I take on another task, or pick up another item or commitment whether emotional or physical and figure I’ll get it sorted out somehow and then stow it in my room or in my consciousness until I can’t even think. It’s very sad.
I think of this when I’m in my office, too. I am a stickler about keeping public areas of my workplace clean– tables, dusting, bathrooms– but my office is a piled up mess. My file me pile takes up a table that is, I promise you, a square yard. I’m so busy taking care of my staff and my patrons that my office never gets clean.
I threw away and put away so much. I could just about vacuum up here now.
I have two attic storage areas. My back aches from stooping to come in and out of the mini doors to those dark, miserable little rooms. When I go in there I see all the crap I have still managed to hoard, for years and years and years through over a dozen moves.
I have thrown away so much at every stop, and still here I am. I have boxes and boxes of books, diaries, photos, fancy and expensive clothes that will never, ever, ever fit me again even if they were to be in style ever ever again, holiday decorations… to me that unwillingness to throw away symbolizes fear and denial.
If I could just throw (most of it) away, that would be the energy of a person who is ready to accept and embrace abundance. The more we accept or retain crap, the more we attract it. I believe that with all my heart.
When I shut the sweetly painted doors of my attic storage, I can try to pretend all that stuff isn’t there. But I know it is, and there is going to have to be a reckoning.
What book did I just read that in? “There will be a reckoning.” That echoes in my mind– I think it was kind of comic, but WHAT BOOK WAS IT?
Ah!! Wee Free Men. One of my girlfriends put me onto Terry Pratchett for my stepdaughter and I really liked that book meself. I need to go dig up the next one.
What do you think… is taking care of me first, even when it means that something for others will not get done, still best? We said at healing school that when we show up authentically– which includes setting boundaries and caring for ourselves first– it frees others to show up authentically. But what if I don’t get my goals met at work, or what if something doesn’t get done at home? What if?
This is at the very core of one of my greatest lifetasks, I believe. We just finished Jennifer Weiner’s Good in Bed in my women’s book group, and it’s such a witty, insightful book. The insight comes from the main character’s sense that she doesn’t deserve– anything. It traces back to her relationship with her dad, and impacts her dating choices as well as how she takes care of herself and creates incredible self blame and psychotic post partum depression when her baby experiences problems at birth. It is just ingrained in her that she doesn’t deserve these blessings. I think that’s the spiritual root of my miscarriage a few years ago. Somehow I didn’t deserve that blessing. I’m not saying it’s my ‘fault’– I’m saying I need somehow to get in touch with that essential worthiness that is in every single human being except, it seems, me. Somehow I’ve got to part that veil.
It’s actually a species of insane egomania… it brings everything back to oneself. If you’re religious, this conviction is a sinful denial of the nature of your loving higher power and it’s holding you back from your higher power’s ultimate plan of joy for you. If you’re not religious, well, this conviction is just– a species of insane egomania that’s holding you back from joy and growth.
But it is so easy to know intellectually that one has a problem with thinking they aren’t deserving, and another thing completely to say, oh, yes I am, and in fact if I care for myself I’ll be there for my family and friends and coworkers more than ever.
What if?
There’s no answer. It’s just something to think about.
And… I can reckon, I can shift my energy to the kind that accepts abundance, some other day. I’m just glad to be able to see the floor, and I’m hungry.
Eat Pray Love and Penn and Teller’s Bullshit
eat pray love and penn and teller’s bullshit
I can’t believe I didn’t have a religion category for this blog before now. Crazy! I think about religion, and pray, all the time. What the hell, how did I avoid giving it a tag here all these two years I’ve been doing this blog?
Tell me spirit, what has not been done? I’ll rush out and do it… or are we doin’ it now? I’m so behind on my contemporary independent music. But this My Morning Jacket song just sticks so sweetly in my head, and it’s so right.
What I have on my mind is something I’ve been thinking about for a good month, but haven’t been able to sit down to write about it for various reasons. Tonight I’m so tired… but I’m going to try to knock it out quickly.
My women’s book group read a book called Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. There were so many transcendent moments, and so many laugh out loud moments. She writes in a clean, self deprecating style that, if you’re not careful, will slip the profound sweetness of her experiences right past you. She had me from the first sentence, where she is lying on the floor in her bathroom at two a.m. in a pool of tears and snot, bawling because she doesn’t want to be married any more. She doesn’t want babies… she is depressed… she has always looked outside of herself to figure out who she is and what she should do… she is at an all time lifetime low and she has no idea what to do with herself. Somehow, though, doors open and she travels to Italy to eat for three months, to India to an ashram to pray for three months, and to Bali to learn from an old medicine man and find balance.
I’m calling this a three meeting book. I have only been able to meet once, but there was a meeting about it before that, and we need to have one more because some of us still couldn’t make it and I know so many of us have so much more to say. We read Shirley McClaine’s Out on a Limb in January, too. With both of those books, I just want someone to tell me– is there or isn’t there? Within us, or outside of us? And I just want to share it with the girls as much as I can.
Then around that same time I watched one of my husband’s Penn and Teller Bullshit dvd’s with him. It was about the funeral industry, life after death, twelve stepping, and a wonderful trick on bottled water drinkers– they filled different fancy bottles from a hose in the back of a restaurant in LA, and had people saying all kinds of ridiculous shit about the different kinds of water that had supposedly come from raindrops collected in the rainforest or whatever.
So to sum up, Penn and Teller said you need to live now, and be cognizant of the bullshit you or your family will face from the funeral industry when you or they are vulnerable when a loved one dies, and if you are fortunate enough to be able to do so, call your mother.
They also said that the bad thing about twelve stepping was that it forces people to admit that they are unable to handle addiction or its effects alone and must call on a higher power to help them out. Now, is there anything wrong with that, really? Not for me to say. I think their beef was more that folks are forced to go to AA meetings and espouse some kind of religoius belief whether it’s right for them or not, when twelve stepping isn’t the be all to end all in recovering from addiction, their success rate is no higher than any other method, that such meetings reinforce one’s sense of one’s own inadequacy, weakness and helplessness which helps to create the addiction in the first place, and that the slogans and rules and sense that you can’t kick it alone and you must continue to come to meetings smack of cult.
I dunno… I kinda like my twelve step stuff. But the bit about how the power of positive change– or negative choices– resides firmly within oneself is pretty important to me, as well.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how much I turn outward to see if I am okay, look for reinforcement as to who I am and whether I am good enough or ’doing it right’. I bust my ass, throwing parties, cooking dinners, helping others, serving, in my career and in my family and in my social life. Am I okay? Dunno, let me look at my paycheck, or around my house, or ask my husband, or my best girlfriend, or my mother, or God, but God doesn’t usually answer (or does s/he? that was one of the discussion questions for Eat Pray Love, and I am just not sure, in the context of her story, or in real life.). The greatest source of my okayness is actually my daughter, and that has got to be fucked up. Or is it? I think the love of a parent or a truly loving caregiver for a child (or other helpless entity) is the closest we get to God in this world– and all of us have experienced it, whether as a child or as a parent, no matter how briefly or how it is manifested.
But I’m so drained. My happiness, or sense that I’m doing it right, come from things I have to work really hard for, things I never can get quite right, not from some certainty within me. I’m spread so thin, and while I haven’t had the breakdown or the opportunities Elizabeth Gilbert describes, I think I recognize her crisis as my own, and as one every thinking person must go through, and as the nature of coming of age in our society.
And I’m still working on that. Stay tuned.
Well, I don’t have the answer to is or isn’t, within or without, angels and heavenly fire or spaceships and aliens or– just ravings written down long long ago to try to get people to act right. I think a lot of thinking people don’t honestly know for sure, either. It’s not that I don’t worship, or find happiness… my garden, my child, vegan cooking, literature or art that touches me, certain friendships or moments with family… so many things are both idols and sources of true understanding of the goodness in this universe.
But I do, at least, have an answer when people push me to go to church.
My marriage counselor encouraged me to go to church on Easter. She turned the knife by telling me to take my baby– I’m a bad mother if I deny her that comfort. I tried saying my husband is a bit of an atheist, and she said, well you go, because it nourishes you. I tried saying, I hate church in this town because church is segregated and she said, well mine isn’t. Sigh.
I feel like such a dumbass, going only at Christmas and Easter, although I have to admit it did my heart good to go to the Unitarian church Christmas Eve this year. The message was right up my alley, if you’ve read my annual post about the true meaning of Christmas–every time a baby is born it is a holy night. But…
I didn’t have time to, or didn’t feel she had the time for me to, explain. Three years of healing school… many years more of study in various religious traditions, not to mention feminism, marxism, and historicism… I actually embrace my husband’s atheism, at least for him, although my spiritual life has had a bit more dimension than his… hell, the hand of God has reached down and literally touched me a time or two. It was unmistakable. But… healing school… Jewish and Sikh friends… Penn and Teller… But now I think– well I can’t explain my whole belief system right here and now. But at least for that case, I think I have a pat answer that will shut most people up.
Don’t get me wrong. I love church. I miss it. I am telling you, I can spout random scripture for any situation. But…
So here’s my pat answer.
I’m actually ordained to minister by the Estuary in Nashville. I am my own church. Sometimes I worship by doing yardwork. Sometimes I worship by being the best parent, librarian, or social activist I possibly can be. Sometimes I worship through delicious vegan cooking, or through tending to relationships. Sometimes I worship through my healing work or consumption of literature or through my own writing or through spiritual study.
I don’t have my liturgy and apologetics quite written down yet– but I am my own church and I am pretty solid in a lot of my beliefs. I am ordained. And I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. And that’s a key part of my beliefs.
As my dear friend Annie Pearl said to me when we were both working in a terribly dysfunctional, abusive office (that’s not her real name, but I call her a pearl because she is just so amazing, one of my dearest mentors)– when you are a leader, it is just you and the lord. You can’t go giving your power away. You have to suck it up and stand up straight and do the work.
But it’s not just when you are a manager of a large agency or business. It is when you are trying to figure out what do do about your marriage. It is when you are suffering from loss, grief, illness, or paralytic anxiety. It is when you are biting your tongue when you are at your wit’s end with your child, or trying to figure out what do do with your life, or what you have done when it’s too late to change. It is just you and the lord. But really, it’s just you, and, well, you.
It’s just me. That’s not hubris talking. That’s humanity, humility, anxiety, and doing the best I can. That’s an open mind, an open heart, and some serious imperfections and knee jerk psychological defenses talking. I don’t know. But I do know it’s me, and me.
And I don’t need to go to church. Well, maybe I do, but not for that reason. I am my own church. And it’s just me and the Lord.
thank heaven for patricia evans and adderall.
dude! I got me some ADD meds!
I told the doc I was still depressed and I was willing to try anything. He was about to give me the same medicine I took before on top of my horse dose that made me feel so bad, and I was willing to try it again anyway because I’ve been feeling so emotionally poorly, when I said as an afterthought, can you test me for ADD? He said, there is no test. I said, well then how would you know? He said, you would have a history of irritability, distractability… I said if you ask my mother I believe she’d say that was true. When you invoke the mother, after all, it’s gospel. He looked like a light bulb went off in his brain. He said that in many cases if you treat the ADD the depression goes away, and that in women the distractability is often much worse than the traditional hyperactivity. Amphetamine for all! What a freaking relief. Now if we can try out an OCD med I’ll be in business [I've been having to drive back home check the stove lately].
Why am I so happy about getting ADD meds, when I was so unhappy about my stepson taking them? Because he is TEN. His liver and other bodily systems have got to last him a lot longer than mine have to last me. And because to me and I hope this isn’t wishful thinking his acting out is a result of needing his father, unresolved grief from his parents’ divorce, and the fact that his issues and his mom’s issues work on each other (and that new fiancee don’t help either). And because I want to observe him myself for a good long while, and get him evaluated if needed, and get his diet healthy if not completely free of sugar, dyes, dairy and white flour, before I allow him to pickle his brain with drugs.
I pray he’s not as miserable as I am, though… because if he is I am denying him something he really needs.
I on the other hand have to work, all day every day, in a regimented and toxic environment, parent, clean the house, try to have a life… I had to have drugs to maintain my rock n roll lifestyle. I don’t feel much different but it’s only been a few days. If anything I feel just marginally better.
What if, what if what if… what if this was the magic bullet that suddenly made me normal? Even as I was thinking that, the other day, I realized how diseased it is to think that a pill would make me normal. But what if… what if I’m not as miserable as I think I am and the ADD med (and/or an OCD med) helped me clear my head and just be where I am, instead of in about fifteen different exhausting states and scenarios at any given time?
Honestly, I’m a bit nervous taking so many meds. I am going to peel back on the anti-d this spring, and see how that goes.
I am reading (and LOVING) Skinny Bitch. I guess if I love that book I must be a bit sick, because it’s very mean. It really rakes the American diet over the coals, and it is just sickening. But it is just giving me a ‘girlfriend can we talk’ about things I really want to examine at this point in my life. I have now given up caffeine, and I put orange juice in my decaf constant comment instead of milk and sugar. I haven’t been able to completely quit smoking, but I don’t smoke in the morning until after I drop my children off at school, and the smoking window in my day is getting smaller and smaller.
As I incorporate lifestyle changes such as that, I will, I hope, also be improving my mental state. But I have my other foot in the camp that says that if you have it you have it, and saying that you can manage it with lifestyle is like saying you can manage a broken arm with lifestyle. It’s some of each I realize, and wellness is rooted in being willing to own it and take charge of it and take care of oneself. Meds, exercise, diet, family and social support, hobbies, job situation… they all contribute for better and for worse. It’s a continuum, with chaotic weather events at random places, and I just have to own it and go on. It’s a f*cking miracle I get as much done as I do.
In other news, we just got home from watching Night at the Museum. It was much more fun than I’d expected.
I wish someone would pay me to teach a course in which I explicate ‘books everyone should read because then the world would be a better place’. A Room of One’s Own is a key book on that list. Hell I’m a librarian. With a literature degree. And a vehement defender of marginalized groups. And I have years in the mental health field, both working in it and as a client. I have the credentials. I should just go ahead and offer it, and charge for it and see what kind of income I could pull down by starting my own secular humanism university. Okay I copyright that idea. It’s mine. I need that career. Nobody steal it. I’ll work it up.
But I welcome suggestions to add to the list.
Another is The Verbally Abusive Relationship by Patricia Evans. The sorts of thought patterns she describes– well, duh, we don’t call people names. We don’t interrupt them. We don’t scream at our children on any sort of a regular basis, preferably we don’t anyway. We don’t– xyz behaviors our parents tried to teach us. But when I read that book I am just stunned. So many things that pass for normal, at least in my house, my family of origin house as well as my current house, and in many of my friends’ homes (not you M!!!), are totally within the abusive pattern, so diseased, so damaging. It is unbelievable. I’ve become hyper sensitive to it, and I hear it EVERYWHERE, especially at my job. I hear it in the way some of my friends describe interactions with their husbands. It’s awful. I have been kind of depressed about it, that I’ve let this go on for so many years… that I’ve been on the receiving end and have just about bought into it, and that I’ve been on the giving end, and haven’t known it.
As devastating as that sounds, though… and it is… I am grateful that I know now so I can call it what it is and eliminate it. Luckily the book I’m reading, another one by Evans, gives some tools to replace those verbally abusive communication methods with. Cause if it didn’t… if we eliminated verbally abusive communication methods, we wouldn’t have a damn thing left to say. Even when we’re getting along we talk that way. No wonder our arguments are so horrible! Augh!
Also as devastating as that sounds, I am actually managing to have a bit of joy these days as well.
I am in the grip of Eloise Mania. I LOVE those books. I don’t know why. I LOVE them. They aren’t on the list of books everyone should read, but man I love to read them to my little girl. I have the Eloise movie too. I can’t wait to watch it with my girl. My stepson and husband might even like it. I’ve caught my husband listening and snickering when I’ve been reading the books out loud.
As I (hope I) become more focused, maybe some of this negative chatter in my head will die down and I can actually concentrate on just enjoying.
All right… that’s all for now. Thank heaven for Patricia Evans and Adderall.
what do you buy a girl turning four? and how I worked that out, with some goodies for me and parenting philosophy on the side
I know what I want to give my child, when she turns four in March.
But what for the little girls in her classroom who are turning four and giving parties this week?
The ridiculous and ugly stuff marketed to little girls these days reinforces so many things I don’t want to encourage– traditional female roles, consumer culture, ugly plastic aesthetic, low to fleeting imagination or creativity value… but I can’t impose my snobberies on others’ children. And I can’t afford Magic Cabin for everyone. I can’t even afford it for her. And plus it’s too late to order Magic Cabin.
I know if I called these parents they would say please don’t bring anything, just come. I know that’s what I would say. And I would mean it, too. But I have a feeling it would be a serious violation of Expensive Montessori School Social Code not to bring something. You play, you pay. One little girl is my child’s especial playmate, and I would really like to get to know the other’s mom…
[The next day]
I enlisted the help of my mom’s group friends, who had wonderful helpful ideas… and then wouldn’t you know, I had a Barnes and Noble gift card to spend on myself and my husband, so I walked into the book store and did the librarian birthday gift after all.
I purchased a Moongirl DVD/Book set for each girl. Ah, now it is done! But of course I don’t have any wrapping paper except Christmas. Too bad. I guess I better hit the Dollar General. Anyhoo, this is a wonderful story, with wonderful edgy art and a fabulous soundtrack for the DVD featuring the ever versatile and hardworking They Might Be Giants.
At first I wanted to give Robert Sabuda’s popup Alice in Wonderland, which is a truly complex and beautiful work of art. But there were two copies of Moongirl, and only one copy of the Sabuda… so guess who gets the Sabuda? That’s right. Moi.
I am a Tenniel Snob. Two brown ‘leather’ bound volumes, dated 1974 inside the front cover in my father’s handwriting, containing the entire unabridged stories and the original Tenniel illustrations, still sit on my shelf. They may be the two most important works to my inner and imaginative landscape, as well as my literary aesthetic, of my entire childhood. I remember being about four and having a pair of brown wing tipped mary janes (oh to have those shoes again, some for me and some for my girls!) that I called my Alice in Wonderland shoes.
I have raised my little girl to be sort of a rough-and-tumble consumer of all media, pedestrian and ugly as well as beautiful and original. Our home is a far cry from the dark, quiet, rarefied, nearly tv free space that characterized my childhood. Sometimes I wish I’d been more careful with her, but… ever since she walked at nine months I have sort of thrown my hands up regarding forcing her to conform to my expectations and decided to pick my battles and let her make (the less harmful of) her own choices. I scour my friends’ libraries for truly beautiful and rich works of art for kids– M and W have put me on to the awesome Miyazaki anime films, for example, although I am disappointed that I get them dubbed in English rather than in the original Japanese– and hope that I am giving her a balanced smorgasbord of choices of theme, culture, and artistic style.
But I digress.
Every once in a while I run across a work of children’s literature that restores my faith in the children’s publishing industry and in the media world’s power in general to produce something truly beautiful and worthwhile.
The Sabuda is sort of the Tenniel work on acid (as if the original Tenniel illustrations weren’t acidic enough!!). [And let me clarify that I have never done acid. Never. I did chew up a tiny shroom one time but it did nothing for me and it was too nasty to attempt to eat any more. But I think I know it, or what our society characterizes as it, when I see it.] The 3-dimensional popups are huge, intricately detailed, beautifully colored, and give delightful views for the story from many angles– look down the accordion-pleated rabbit hole, or through cellophane windows into the house where the giant Alice is trapped! I haven’t read it through, so I’ll weigh in on how well the abridgment of the story works soon. But since it makes me so happy artistically, I’ll love it no matter what. I’m such a hoarder I believe I may purchase another copy or two today off of Amazon…
along with a copy of Skinny Bitch. The title and cover illustration are a clever marketing trick which, I am ashamed to say, worked on me, but I cracked it and read a few pages in the store, and just now read the customer reviews on Amazon. You know I just quit eating meat (except last night I had a few bites of delectable lasagne that I made myself, with meat, because we forgot to make me a little meat free one on the side), and I gather this book gives a lot of information about nutrition and the food industry that everyone needs to make informed choices about what we eat. If it’s in a no holds barred, listen here girlfriend while I tell you straight so you can take responsibility and live a happier healthier life format, so much the better.
We just lost power here for several minutes. Our infrastructure in this community is such that the slightest variation in weather– today, heavy but not exactly monsoon rain– throws our power grid into a tizzy. Anyway, I adore wordpress.com because it saves posts constantly. I lost very little work.
So. It’s New Year’s Eve.
I have lots to do including all my housecleaning so that I don’t have to wash my good luck away tomorrow, soaking black eyed peas and cooking sweet potatoes for sweet potato pie, taking shaky baby to that party at about 12.30 which involves getting us both showered and dressed, and taking a fearless and searching inventory (to quote Lindsay Lohan) of last year’s accomplishments and my hopes for next year. I’d better run along.
my worst (literary) fears realized
My brother and sister in law sent me a wonderful book of fairy tales in their original, dark and depressing forms, with wonderful dark (mostly) illustrations by some awesome artists. I am a huge fan of dark and depressing fairy tales and dark and moody artwork.
I sat down to read Sleeping Beauty to shaky baby. She said, ‘I want to read about the REAL princess!’
I knew I’d live to regret that Disneyland trip.
I am so glad to be home
I can finally exhale, or something. I feel disoriented because I’m not being picked up from some airport or loading up a work vehicle. And I like it. I am going to feel like returning royalty when I walk into my office, because my two favorite and closet coworkers are so darn sweet. Closest. That’s closest, not closet. I hate to go back to work but I’ve had a productive and enjoyable weekend, especially yesterday when I went and did some practice healing work in the morning and had my women’s book (and gossip and cool moms’ support network) group (Little Earthquakes by Jennifer Weiner in November, How to be Good by Nick Hornby in December).
Thanksgiving week is finally here… well I shouldn’t say finally, because compared to how prepared I usually am for the holidays by this time of year (not perfectly, but due to obsessiveness and flylady, pretty darn good), the season has really sneaked up. I have to wait on reimbursements for work travel to buy Christmas presents, which kind of sucks, but at least I can start dreaming and working on it. Our list, including our kids who get big gifts and our nieces and nephews and kids of friends and coworkers and the children’s teacher and my, uh, stepwife (my stepkids’ mom) is up to 22. Uh, 23. I just thought of someone else.
The stepson’s red room looks great, after *four* coats, at least the areas we painted with rollers do, but the areas we brush painted look a bit thin. Sigh. I don’t know what we’ll do about that. I am DYING to get his stuff out of the girls’ room and back into his room and start loading him up with Kingdom Hearts themed stuff.
And then there’s the tree… and the groceries, which require even more thought cause I want to do something nice that’s not meat… It’s fun. And I wish I could stay home and do it from now til Christmas.
I just read
In between all the walter mittying I’ve been doing, I actually had time to read two Important Books.
I finished John Green’s An Abundance of Katherines, a candidate for an author award. Talk to me offline about the politics of author awards… much as I would like to act like I’m Somebody by blogging publicly about the process, I can’t do so without compromising it. But don’t get me wrong… the progress has great integrity. I am not saying anything about that. It’s just a group of humans like any other group of humans.
I have also almost finished Toni Morrison’s Beloved. I picked it up by chance at the local public library’s book sale for a buck on my way out of our last library association meeting. Now that is truly an amazing book.
A while back I saw the New York Times Book Review’s list of the best works of fiction in the last 25 years. Beloved won. I was very very happy about this, very ashamed that I hadn’t read it (or any of the other 25, but particularly ashamed that I hadn’t read Beloved), and very curious as to why it won.
It’s an amazing, disturbing, wonderful work. It’s also pretty darn accessible, and immediate, in my book (so to speak), qualities I wouldn’t ordinarily expect to be associated with authors’ and critics’ choice for the best work of fiction in the last 25 years. Women and minorities (not perfectly sure about the minority part, definite about the women part) are conspicuously poorly represented in that list. Is this because women and minorities don’t write as well? Or because we don’t think women write as well? And why would that be?
I’m especially tickled that the winner is not only by a woman, it’s by an African American woman. But did they pick it out of political correctness, killing two affirmative action birds with one stone? It stands on its own. But do our literary authorities really think it stands on its own?
What a terrible thing to say, I know. But I just wonder, because of the way we *still* treat women and minorities, and minority women, in this society. They can’t be president, they can’t take meaningful part in running the Fortune 500, but we can throw them a fish and let them dominate the arts, because you know, those people are so, like, deep or something. Everybody knows that unlike white people, ‘they’ got rhythm.
I need the Cliff notes for Beloved before I can talk much about it. I have my own thoughts, which are, I was told by my tutor at University College of Wales Swansea, much more important to my grade than parroting the words of other scholars about a particular work. I would love to share my thoughts, and I will. But I’d like some perspective from people more knowledgeable than I about the historical and linguistic context of the book. And when I’ll have time for either endeavor, sharing my thoughts or getting scholarly perspective, I have no idea.
But it is a fabulous book and I highly recommend it.
misc
Randomly:
I am off for two work days on the road and then healing school Friday night and Saturday morning. I have so much I want to write, namely a long one on the nature of friendship in general and the loss (through fighting and falling out) of one’s closest friend. It, that is, writing about it, will have to wait. It has waited a year, it can wait several more weeks or even another year.
Thank goodness Gymboree has nothing I want in terms of Halloween costumes, so I don’t have to spend a hundred bucks on that, at least.
Since our dustup last week, my husband has been really working to pull his weight in terms of dishes, cooking, household labor. I *think* he even cleaned a toilet for, like, the second time ever since we moved here.
Is he okay with that? Or is he doing it to spite me or worse to avoid what he perceives as my nagging and my view of ‘deficiencies in his character’? I’ve also been thinking a lot about the nature of intimacy, honesty, and accountability in intimate relationships. I’d like to write about that, too, in general terms of course, not in terms that would violate our privacy too much, but in my head, my worries and what I view as my shortcomings or my tasks as I grow into myself.
I read Deborah Wiles’ Each Little Bird that Sings last night. She notes in her foreword that she wrote this book after enduring way too many losses in her family in a way too short amount of time, so I don’t think I’m giving anything away by saying that I snuffled and bawled and squalled as the book came to its close.
The book has won many awards, and I guess, rightfully so. In my lowly opinion, especially lowly since I’ve never even written a book, children’s or otherwise, it’s not exactly great literature… and I am not one of those who thinks children’s literature should be held to a different standard than adult literature. Great writing is great writing, and I hate for it to be dumbed down. On the other hand, I absolutely love Wiles’ evocation of quirky southern life– yes, southern life can indeed be that quirky, even if the quirks are not layered on quite that thick in real life. And I do think it’s a wonderful book about handling grief. Sort of. If you’re really in the mood to handle grief, and Lord, who is???? I know, I know… it’s a reality, but… Anyhoo, the author does a wonderful job of creating a heartbreaking but still manageable (just barely) growth opportunity for little Comfort Snowberger, whose narrative voice is really too cute.
I’d love to hear what others think about this one. I am so impressed with Wiles. She’s won all these prizes, and I don’t think she started writing, or at least getting published, until she was in her forties. As always when I hear of such a thing, I think, hallelujah! There’s hope!
All right, dear reader (My friend M is the only one reading this, right? and maybe her husband???). I must jump up and get ready to hit the road. Talk to you soon.
defining my self through my media consumption
After an even more wonderful than usual conversation about AS Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale last night, I am reluctant to do this, but I have to.
I am about to once again spout off based on media fare I’ve consumed lately.
I hear my fellow book club member A (and listen, nobody is more cultured, more easygoing, or better read than this world citizen) reading the little snippet of short story that was so perfect for our discussion.
The upshot, sort of, of our discussion, is that I am very wary of the difference between consuming media on the subjects of how I would like to live, or the sort of community I would like to create, and actually living or creating. I mean, if you asked me, my stated purpose really is to live a certain way– sustainable, community, healing school, suburbanity, relationships, spirituality, nutrition, blah blah blah. But the discussion last night really pointed out (among some other delicious tensions within the endless meaning/meaninglessness of life) how much time one spends analyzing it (an awful lot) and how much time one spends doing it (not much).
But I’m going to sit here and talk about consuming media anyway.
colluding
My husband is coming home tomorrow. Do I have the house spotless, like last time he was out of town, to shame him because it’s clean when he’s gone? No. Of course the last time he came home I believe it was a Saturday. I’d had all day to clean. Not today. After a longish day– playgroup with lovely fellow moms in the morning, four hours of work in the afternoon– I am colluding with the baby in an evening of decadence.
We had Taco Bell and ice cream for supper. I haven’t folded a stitch of laundry or washed a dish or fed a dog. I’ve been lying on my back on my lovely black leather (pleather?) couch since 6pm finishing Irene Nemirovsky’s Suite Francaise. Every twenty minutes or so I would say to myself, I really need to get the baby a bath and get her into bed. Then I would say, wouldn’t you like to watch Dora again? We can take a bath in the morning. We don’t have to be anywhere until ten, after all. Honey, mommy’s going outside for a smoky treat. But Mom [holding up a lighter that fell out of my pocket] this is for your segwets. Thank you sweet heart. I’ll be right back. Okay Mom.
Suite Francaise, the unfinished and brilliant work, was interrupted by the author’s murder at Birkenau. It was the choice of a voracious and informed reader from my women’s book group. With two active little boys I don’t know how she finds the time or interest to read everything she does. She’s obviously got intellect to burn. I only read it out of loyalty to her and to the book group. It was her birthday so we let her pick for this month. It’s really much more serious a book than I would ordinarily read.
It is absolutely beautifully written, with wonderful cultural and scenic detail, incredible clarity and compassion (how else could she have seen so clearly, if she didn’t have compassion?) and a slow-burning, rarely revealed disgust and despair. I really see France in World War II much differently– before now, I have always chalked everything up to the understandable, in fact very reasonable, devolution of humans when they are living through a time of violence and loss.
But as I read, I rethought my opinion of the position France has taken on Iraq (because I am a pacifist too and have been horrified by the whole fiasco from the time it was first mentioned by this administration). But still… no *wonder* everyone hates France. Craven, spineless, xenophobic, unable to be bothered with the welfare of anyone except their immediate family…or were/are they just realistic?
Were things– that is, the prevalence of collaboration, collusion, loss of principles, hypocrisy, theft, desertion– really so bad? I can’t bring myself to doubt Nemirovsky’s vision, especially when it appears alongside bits from her notebooks at that time. I’m not in the least judging or doubting– but as an accomplished and well-heeled young woman of Jewish descent, whose mother abandoned her emotionally and whose adopted country abandoned her to terrible discrimination and death years later– could her vision, even as it was so encompassing and detailed, also be more violent than perhaps those poor beaten French people deserved? Tragedy and violence are no respecters of persons. She had a good deal as a young woman, which tragically turned to a bad deal at the end, at the age of 39, with two young daughters. She lived the same lifestyle, or better, really, of the cold middle class and little aristocrats she reviles in the novel, and as she rails against the fate she knows will overtake her, I don’t think she was unaware of that.
Wouldn’t we all be craven in the face of such events? When one is soaked in upheaval and violence is one able to rise above to see the plight of others? Wouldn’t someone seek some peace or comfort, or feed one’s children, where one could?
Certainly, after all they’d been through it’s no wonder they’re craven and spineless and xenophobic today. My husband went to Paris one weekend while he was working in Germany. He kept saying, I wish you could see it, I wish you were here, it’s so beautiful. While it did give me a tearful, proud vision of my little girl dressed up and trooping along with Madeleine and her school friends, chattering away in baby French, mostly I’ve never liked the French. I don’t have much use for their decadence or their coldness or their snobbery or the way they laugh at you when you try your best to speak French or their smelly cheese or the hard inedible crust on their bread. I like them even less now. At least for a while– til I go to Paris and get overwhelmed by the beauty and culture and make an American, uncultured ass of myself collaborating with the Anti Freedom French.
A final note on the book: I find I am much less horrified and heartbroken when I read about the holocaust, the gas chambers, than I used to be. It’s almost as if I am finally inured to it. I know when I was ‘coming up’, reading the Diary of Anne Frank and looking at pictures from concentration camps the horror truly dawned on me as much as it can on someone who didn’t go through it. I’m horrified by my lack of horror. The appropriate phrases– inhuman, incomprehensible, arbitrary murder on an unbelievable scale– come to mind, but my empathy doesn’t engage beyond ordinary bourgeois decency. Is it my anti anxiety pills? Or am I just overwhelmed? I don’t have a lot of emotional and spiritual strength left in my pedestrian days. Paraphrasing the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, I don’t know how I would get any additional if I were ever faced, as in, in my back yard with a true war crime or tragedy. I would probably curl up and die. We can’t, mustn’t forget. I checked out some pictures of Birkenau and Auschwitz on the internet, to bring it home.
* * *
Today when I dressed for work I rebelled. I wore capris, a business no-no, even if they are navy with white pinstriping and almost reach my ankle [also a no-no for most body types, mine included, a no no for everyone except my six foot tall friend S who can't find pants long enough to reach her shoes anyway unless she wears tall boots]. I wore a cutesy little white barette that belongs to the baby to hold back my bangs, fifties style. I am really too old– almost forty for heaven’s sake! to be cutesy. Most juvenile of all, I wore a bracelet of pearlized white plastic skulls and bones left over from last Halloween, on my wrist, hidden by the sleeve of my sweater, to comfort me.
I have a skull thing– it’s not morbid. It’s to do with the Hindu goddess Kali and the potentially creative meaning of the death card in the tarot. And things are so unbearable at my work. Well I should rephrase that. Everyone is so very kind to me. Seeing all that misery, a climate management has created on purpose, I feel ashamed taking the kindness coming my way. I believe the chickens will soon be coming home to roost, even as I dutifully, even joyfully, go about planning my work for the next several months. It makes me sick. I just want to wring my hands when these people who are so mean to everyone else but so nice to me, but I have to keep my job so I have to get along and make a good show of it. So I think of my skulls, hidden up my sweater sleeve, and they comfort me, reminding me that what comes around goes around, that this too shall pass, death comes to us all, the energy of the Universe is working in exactly the chaotic, creative way it is supposed to be, etc. and so on, even if they are pearlized plastic from Big Lots last Halloween.
Then the baby took my skull bracelet. I hope I can find it, or the other one laying around here somewhere, to wear tomorrow.
