Yes, probably starting another journal

For the audio version with extras, click here!

The thing’s become ridiculous!/Why am I so? Why am I thus? Concluding couplet of Dorothy Parker’s “A Fairly Sad Tale” 

I’m thinking about starting a commonplace book. They’re quite popular these days, if by “these days” you mean from Greco-Roman times through the present. The name commonplace harks back to  “loci communes,” which is evidently Latin for a place to collect one’s thoughts. A commonplace book is made by 1) gathering facts, quotations, anecdotes, observations, drawings, discoveries, etc., 2) classifying this information into various categories; and 3) using the collection to generate ideas and connections. I’m working on a complicated writing project this fall and feeling a bit overwhelmed by all the material and ideas I need to get into place. I keep turning my desktop and books into porcupines bristling with Post-It notes (some of them marking the quotes in this essay). It’s driving me nuts! I need a different method of data-wrangling.

And he strutted for money now, in schoolrooms built/On Ohio’s plains, surrounded by the graves/Of all of our fathers, but more of his than ours. Mary Oliver, “Learning About the Indians”

One of the Post-Its marks Oliver’s poor Mr. White, aka White Eagle when he is in full costume, doing his demeaning, mildly profitable, Indian dances in front of the class. I sat through similar stuff as a high school student. I’m a bit fearful that starting a commonplace book will provide me with about as much joy as writing a high school term paper. As taught by my sophomore English teacher, Mrs. White (no relation to Mr. White of the poem), data collection was a rigid, joyless process. Buy a package of index cards, research at the library, and write one fact or quote per card. Put a topic slug at the top of the card and the citation at the bottom. Dull, and something to abandon once there’s no grade at stake.

In my mid-eighties, I feel more strongly than ever that I have an endless amount of studying and thinking to do in order to become the musician I would like to be. Georg Solti, Memoirs.

Solti wrote those words when was 84. Learning is a lifelong process. It’s not just for  scholars, monks and philosophers, the great minds of the world. It’s not just for Victorian girls in high-necked dresses. It’s for everyone. Look at all those ideas that still need to be sorted! The good ones, the bad ones, and the puffy little thoughts scudding along!

Show your quick, alarming skill in/Tidy mockeries of art;/Never, never dip your quill in/Ink that rushes from your heart. Dorothy Parker, “For a Lady Who Must Write Verse.”

Not all of the quotes have to promote admirable traits. I’d love it if I could absorb enough elegant phrases to drop a few snarky Parkerisms into my conversations. She would have known how to reply to the shelf-stocker slinging (literal) baloney at Walmart last Monday. He wanted to talk to me about the violence in Israel and Palestine this week and whether we’re about to launch into World War III. I grabbed a package of brats and chirped “I sure hope not” while making a swift retreat toward the breakfast aisle. He kept slinging and talking, louder and louder.

Or the man on the street this morning who told me, excitedly, that today is Marie Arthur’s birthday. She’s 64. I know neither of these people. “Well, a very happy birthday to her,” is what I said.

That’s not really what I want out of a commonplace book. Just a distraction as I look at intimidating tutorials that showcase the aesthetics of decorating one’s (beautifully handwritten) quotes. I do like blogger Ashley Holstrom’s take on this method as making “a journal of what was meaningful to you at a certain point in time, but it’s not in your own words.” I just want to organize and sharpen my thoughts. Even when, as is the case right now, my eyelash keeps getting stuck in my eye.

Your goodness must have some edge to it,—else it is none. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance.”

Book Drop

Link to the audio version, with some extra thoughts

An abundance of summer sun and rain has led to the spectacular growth of the bushes in our yard. Things were starting to look a little too much like the hedge around Sleeping Beauty’s castle, so I’ve been pruning to clear a path to our front door.

I’m pruning more than our hedges this month; I’m also decluttering the closets and reorganizing my book and sheet music collections. This is slow work and not as much sheer fun as shaping a hedge—there is something so concrete and satisfying about the chop and then the fall of the clippings—but it does have its pluses. I’m reminded of books that I want to read, or reread, as well as music pieces that will be fun to get under my fingers, and now I know where to find them without searching for an hour. In the closets, I’m making more room as well as unearthing various items that make me wonder what I was thinking when I acquired them. No, that’s wrong: I know what I was thinking: that I was going to be a certain kind of person. Someone who needs an evening gown, or plaid Bermuda shorts, or platform sneakers. Some of the detritus is amusing enough to save, but most of it is going to donations bins.

Yesterday the bookcases in the sun porch were up for inspection. I came upon Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace’s mammoth postmodernist novel. Wallace’s writing is discursive, with lots of footnotes and meandering, which I’ve enjoyed in his essays. Infinite Jest was published in 1996, which is the year I started an MFA program in fiction at Emerson College. Most of the critics loved the book, and there was a lot of buzz about Wallace among my fellow grad students. The sight of it took me back to a version of myself who was determined to become the kind of person who writes serious books. Also the kind of person who naturally preferred to read serious books, rather than comic novels, detective stories, and space opera. That person bought Infinite Jest, the paperback version, in 1998.

As it turned out, 1998 wasn’t the best year for me to start reading a novel that clocks in at 1,079 pages. I was a new mother, we’d just bought a house, I was finishing my thesis, I had a job, and I was playing in an orchestra. Yada yada, all the things. I made it through the first 25 pages and then relegated Infinite Jest to a basement bookcase. When we moved to our present house, almost 16 years ago, Infinite Jest came along. Its new home was on the ground floor, although it had to share a shelf with mystery and science fiction paperbacks and a how-to book on personal essay writing that I plan to get around to someday. The sun porch is a great location, one of my favorite places to ruminate and read. There are lots of windows, and when the bushes are in full bloom the room feels almost like it’s in a forest. Somehow, though, I kept bypassing Wallace’s masterpiece for something by Rex Stout or John Scalzi or P.G. Wodehouse.

Maybe it was the extra light from the trimming that made me look harder at Infinite Jest. I pulled the book off the shelf. My right wrist twinged a bit, a sign that I might have overdone it with the garden shears. I opened to a random page and read, trying to absorb its serious thoughts. My eyelids kept drooping. I sighed and stuck the novel in the donations pile. I won’t be the kind of person who finishes Infinite Jest. Perhaps that’s a disappointing discovery, but at least the book has a chance to find someone who’ll read it through. And I’ll have an extra six inches of shelf space.

Haunted

Especially when the October wind

With frosty fingers punishes my hair, 

Caught by the crabbing sun I walk on fire 

And cast a shadow crab upon the land. 

                                      —Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems 

Until a couple of days ago we’d been having quite a temperate October. The trees were turning amusing colors, and most mornings there were more leaves on the ground, but there’d been no  need for anything more than a light jacket. Then I left book club on Wednesday night–we meet at a restaurant–and it was cold and windy.

“Bring a sweater!” Connie, Choir Director, email, Thursday afternoon

Something was wrong with the heat at St. Pete’s on Thursday. Since the choir rehearses in a room the size of a barn which is a bit chilly on a good day, a sweater would be a good idea. The parking lot was cold, windy, and dark. The only illumination came from the orange fairy lights outlining a sign over the entrance of the “Not Too Spooky Haunted House” for kids that St. Pete’s runs every October. The narrow, steep set of steps descending to a heavy door sure looked spooky to me. I shivered a little as I passed.

That wintry hint in the October breeze was still in my mind this morning, Friday, when I read the opening lines of Thomas’ poem. I’m not far into the Collected Poems yet, and I’m hoping I’ll start to catch on better to Thomas’ style eventually. The autism in my brain has accidentally cemented reading a couple of poems aloud into a morning routine and strongly suggests that I tackle my accumulated poetry collection one book at a time. There have been benefits. I can immerse myself in a single writer’s voice, and also it lessens the guilt I feel when, toting a laundry basket, I pass the bookcase whose contents consist of shrink-wrapped board games and worthy books that I should have read all the way through but haven’t. I’ve checked off Keats and Herrick and moved on to Thomas.

His poems are tougher than I anticipated, adding a frisson of fear to my morning reading. What if I don’t understand this poem? What if I can’t understand this poem? His pieces bring back memories of the star students in the poetry workshops of my past. I did quite a few workshops but never quite got the knack of writing anything that sounded like a real poem— dense, word-drunk, allusive, with subtle points that could only be understood after much reflection and analysis.

One time I came near to achieving something approaching this style through a writing exercise that involved taking a line from a real poet’s poem and manipulating it by using antonyms, changing the word order, etc., and then working from that first line. This technique produced something that sounded like a poem, although I had no idea what it meant. In workshop the teacher liked it, and so did most of the other students, who enthusiastically explained my composition to me. (The best poet in the class didn’t like it—he said he couldn’t make heads or tails of it; he was probably right.)

Thursday evening, most of the choir members wore sweaters. This was handy because after rehearsal we got to tour the haunted house. Five rooms, one ghost, one witch, a trio of singing jack o’ lanterns, an old-fashioned TV in a cabinet, Pirates of the Caribbean, and skeletons galore. We chanted as instructed to urge a ghost to appear. That was the most fun. Repeating short phrases, not thinking about them too hard. I think Dylan Thomas would have enjoyed chanting also. While a child he fell in love with the words of Mother Goose nursery rhymes as “words alone. What the words stood for was of a very secondary importance,” he recalled. As an actor, he’d probably have enjoyed playing one of the pirates, or a wizard.

Haunted houses have never been my thing; I usually find them overwhelming and confusing. (Scary movies have never been my thing, either: one horror film can give me a year’s worth of nightmares.) Maybe some of the issue is not being being exposed enough to these situations. The fundie churches of my childhood, generally suspicious of Halloween, didn’t host haunted houses. But surprisingly, I enjoyed the not-too-spooky house, especially the last bit.

In the final room we were given novelty spectacles that made the walls seem covered with floating, twinkling jack o’ lanterns. I loved the nonsense of it. It occurred to me while I was reading today’s selection that requiring that Thomas’s poems make 100% sense might not be the point. So I read without trying to stop and analyze and found my favorite so far. It was like my first time at the ocean, when I stepped into the water and realized the waves would never stop. A little bit frightening, but a bigger bit thrilling.

Here’s how the Thomas ends: 

The heart is drained that, spelling in the scurry

Of chemic blood, warned of the coming fury.

By the sea’s side hear the dark-vowelled birds.

Nobody blames the bears

On a morning of pitiless sunshine I pass a stand of trees across the street from an elementary school and what was, once upon a time, a sheep farm. Not that long ago, either. There were sheep grazing there when I picked up Sonny, then age four, from his nearby daycare. How dark and cool it looks under the trees, and how hard it is to see further than a few yards into that shade. For all I know there could be a cottage containing a witch, a pig, a woodcutter, or three bowls of porridge cooling on a table.

Once upon a time I would tell Sonny the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. He loved that fairytale. The voices, the motions, the house in the woods. He wished we had woods at the back of our home, rather than a sapling and a chainlink fence.

Goldilocks, which was originally called The Three Bears, arose from an oral tradition. It’s easy to see why this story survived. The components are economical and easy to remember. Four characters. Three activities. One setting. I loved performing it for Sonny, making my voice deep and growly for the papa bear, using a silly high voice for the baby bear, blowing on the oatmeal, collapsing the chair, jumping out the window…

 The earliest written versions date from the 1800s. There are usually three bears;  there’s always a wood. It’s possible that the original Goldilocks was actually a fox, Scrapefoot, who invaded the bears’ castle. Eleanor Mure’s handmade, illustrated pamphlet of 1831 may be the first time the story was written down. Mure’s intruder is an old woman, no name given. The three bears are friends and of approximately the same size. Instead of porridge, the bears’ kitchen has three bowls of milk. While the bears are out for their walk, having left the door unlatched (because they are too naive and good-hearted to conceive of thieves), the woman lets herself in. She drinks the milk, makes a mess, and takes a nap. This version has the most gruesome ending, and I kind of love it. The bears set her on fire, attempt to drown her, and ultimately impale her on the spire of St. Paul’s Cathedral. I find it fascinating that the story ends in such an urban location. The woods must have been much be closer to St. Paul’s than they are today!

I was 10 when we moved to Richmond, Virginia, and were finally near something that could be called woods. Nothing you could get lost in, but still remote-feeling and cool(ish) on days when the temperatures soared into the 90s. We built forts and clubhouses there in the summer. Sometimes we’d find other kids’ forts, in which case—as we had been brought up better than Goldilocks—we would neither scavenge their contents nor nap.

The poet Robert Southey published his version of the story in 1837. His bears are Little, Small, Wee; Medium-sized; and Great, Huge. The intruder is an unpleasant old woman who swears and finds fault with everything. She eats Little, Small, Wee’s porridge and complains that the bowl is too small. There are no illustrations, but Southey uses different typefaces for each bear’s dialogue. Great, Huge speaks in bold, big Gothic type; Little, Small, Wee in tiny italics. At the denouement, the old woman escapes through a window. Southey implies that eventually she comes to a bad end, either by breaking her neck or being arrested for vagrancy.

Just like me, Sonny was 10 when we moved to a house with a nearby wood, or at least more trees in the yard. By that time we’d abandoned fairy tales and were deeply into Star Wars and Doctor Who. The back yard had a little patch of trees that Sonny called “the forest.” It wasn’t big enough for a fort or cottage. That didn’t stop me from worrying that he’d figure out a way to break his neck in there somehow.

Authors kept tweaking The Three Bears. In 1850, Joseph Cundall turned the old woman into a girl with the name of Silver-Hair. This caught on, and Silver-Hair became Goldilocks. The bears turned from friends to family (siblings, then father-mother-child). Sometimes Goldilocks  repented and made amends, though mostly she just defenestrated herself and headed for home.

As a blonde I’ve occasionally been called Goldilocks, in a kidding way. It’s no compliment. Goldilocks is quite the brat. Most of the retellings emphasize her bad manners and fecklessness. She’s supposed to be on an errand for her mom, not stealing food and breaking chairs! Now that I know she started out as a filthy-mouthed old woman, I should relate to her better—but I don’t. She’s horrible.

Nobody blames the bears, not even after the cathedral thing. They’re punctilious about manners and social niceties. The porridge is set out to cool because the bears know that it’s impolite to blow on one’s food, even in the privacy of one’s own cottage in the woods. Their floors are swept spotless. Wee Little’s chair has been repaired. The beds have been remade. The bears pace warily through the forest. Once upon a time they left their door unlatched, but no more. 

Not without a fight

During the later 1990s lots of things changed in my life. I moved several hundred miles to Boston, a place where nobody knew my name, fell in love, got married, had a child, and became a homeowner. Also I went to graduate school to get an MFA in fiction. I enjoyed grad school but sometimes felt the need to take a break from the worthy but challenging manuscripts of DeLillo, Carver, Welty, Baldwin, Dubus, etc., as well as my own, lesser compositions, and sneak in an hour here or there with fashion magazines and chick lit. 

Candace Bushnell (Sex in the City), Helen Fielding (Bridget Jones), Sophie Kinsella (Shopaholic) and many, many others wrote stories with female leads who were unapologetically interested in shopping and romance as well as their professions. They followed gossip magazines. They groomed themselves to the nth degree, more than I’d ever be able to tolerate, and walked effortlessly in five-inch heels. They didn’t feel degraded if they’d dated some frogs before meeting their prince. The serious people in their orbit, the types who judged books by their covers, mocked them, but the heroines’ ideas, energy, intelligence, and decency ultimately won the day.

I felt that I had almost nothing in common with the chick lit women except for gender and being out of step with my social circle. My fellow grad students were interesting, talented, and perfectly pleasant. No one tried to bully me the way the Harvard Law students tormented Elle Woods in 2001’s Legally Blonde. I felt a bit excluded nonetheless. I was older, married and then pregnant, and lived too far up the Orange Line to go to parties or hang out much. I found comfort in my naughty reading.

Elle Woods has been on my mind the past couple of weeks. I’ve been prepping to play in the Legally Blonde the Musical pit. This made me curious about Legally Blonde the novel, by Amanda Brown, which was published in 2001. The book is based loosely on Brown’s experiences as a law student at Stanford in the 1990s and is full of both chick lit and 90s TV and music references. I recognized them all! And I recognized Elle, a bit. I’d encountered women with a signature color, sorority sisters, a purse-sized pup, and a nail salon habit. Like Brown’s Elle, they had no time for plebeians like me. This Elle is way more problematic than the usual chick lit heroine. True, she suffers from snide remarks and bullying from students and professors, and she’s chasing a frog way too hard, but she also is contemptuous and dismissive of pretty much everyone around her. The few people she doesn’t despise, she uses for assistance with her studies and her nails. She’s introduced as a person with “kind eyes,” but there are very few kind moments in the novel, and she offers only minimal help to the rest of the characters. She’s funny, though.

 Legally Blonde the movie, starring Reese Witherspoon, was a major success. This is partly because the screenplay makes a lot of changes to the novel—for example, moving the action to Harvard Law–as well as tightening the plot and raising the stakes. The most important alteration is to make Elle actually kind. She still has judgmental moments and lots of snappy backchat, but she values and supports others. We were able to get a baby-sitter for our three-year-old, so I even got to see this film in an actual movie theater! Maybe another reason it appealed to me?

Legally Blonde the musical, which debuted in 2007, uses a book by Heather Hach and music and lyrics by husband and wife team Laurence O’Keefe and Neil Benjamin (who, incidentally, met at Harvard). The show cuts some subplots but adds a bunch of catchy tunes. It’s a fun score for the pit. Musical Elle is similar to movie Elle.

Musical Elle has a couple of lines that I’ve been thinking about all day. They come after her first encounter with her rival, Vivian Kensington (for a time the frog’s fiancee). Vivian gets Elle thrown out of her first law class, and Elle says “Why would you do that to another girl?…We girls have to stick together. We shouldn’t try to look good by making each other look bad.” 

I drove home from rehearsal last night, the tunes running nonstop through my head, in a happy girl-power/sisterhood mood. Then I saw the news about the Supreme Court’s pending takedown of Roe v. Wade and felt despair and terror. All those rights that have been granted in accordance with Roe’s interpretations over the past 50 years, under threat. Not simply the right to terminate a pregnancy, but the right to contraception, to marry the person you love even if they’re of a different race or the same gender. Anyone who paid attention knew this was coming, but it’s still gut-wrenching. 

I called a ballet-slipper pink thought to mind. Hoping beyond hope that we’ll have the stamina and forces for this fight.  We girls (and all decent people) have to stick together. 

Dread-lines

Assignments without deadlines are far better at producing guilt than stimulating action. —Kerry Patterson

Assignments with deadlines are no picnic in the park, either. —Me

In 1929 Dorothy Parker—a master of short form writing such as reviews, essays, poetry, and short stories—signed a contract with Viking Press for a novel, to be delivered in a year. As was the practice of many writers at the time, she worked on her version of the GAM (Great American Novel) in Europe, but when the year was up she hadn’t managed to finish it. She hopped a boat back to the US, intending to give the news in person to her editors, but lost her nerve. Hoping to avoid the confrontation, Parker drank a bottle of shoe polish, nearly killing herself. She recovered her health after several months and would live on for nearly another 40 years, but never delivered the book. This turned out to be the longest unfulfilled contract in Viking’s history, but it was hardly the only one.

Who among us hasn’t missed a deadline or seventeen? I certainly have, although the deadlines that I miss are usually ones I arrange among me, myself, and I. (I can generally keep my commitments to other people.) Sunday afternoon I made a list for the week that included gardening, a haircut, and two blogs. As of Friday I have weed-choked flowerbeds, split ends that are 1/16 of an inch longer, a missed blog, and regret. Friday’s blog is the only deadline I might manage to hit.

Deadlines spring from morning thoughts, when coffee and the brightening sky make it seem possible to cram twenty-six hours’ worth of accomplishment into the next eighteen. Some writers, such as Douglas Adams, have an enviable attitude towards the issue. “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing noise they make as they fly by.”  Rita Mae Brown holds that “A deadline is negative inspiration. Still, it’s better than no inspiration at all.”

Experts on productivity say that we miss deadlines by underestimating how long it will take to do a task. (They also say that without deadlines nothing would get done, which is nonsense.) Allocate more time than you think the project will need, is the consensus guideline. Also, start far enough in advance to manage unanticipated obstacles.

The earliest use of “dead line” comes in the early 1800s and involves fishing: an angler’s weighted line that doesn’t move. The most sensational meaning comes from the 1860s, from Southern prisoner-of-war camps during the Civil War. These camps were notorious for their abominable living conditions and abuse of the prisoners. In order to keep the captive soldiers from escaping, a line was drawn (sometimes imaginary, sometimes an actual barrier of some sort) about twenty feet from the interior wall of the prison. The guards had instructions to shoot any prisoner who crossed the line, which therefore became known as the dead line.

It’s most likely that the meaning of deadline in its current sense evolved from the printing industry. Printing presses used printing plates, which included a guideline to show  where the text would be printed. Text outside of the guideline wouldn’t show up on the page, so those words would “die.” The guideline became known as the deadline.

Deadline as in a hard date for something to be finished became common (especially in the word-wrangling business) by the early twentieth century. Other industries have tried unsuccessfully to put a happier face on the concept by renaming it. My husband’s a computer guy. “Go-lives” are the bane of his existence.

I wonder whether missing a deadline, especially one I’ve set for myself, is shame-worthy. I may be continuing my A-student delusions, conflating metrics with being a worthy or lovable person. It’s silly to think of postponing a haircut as missing a deadline. Maybe. Yet I crave the endorphin hit of an impossible run of notes mastered in time for the concert or an essay that feels properly finished.

There are some good things about deadlines. I’m always dismayed by how long it takes to turn the sparkling concepts in my head into something halfway coherent; no blog ever writes itself. Still, on Friday mornings I sit down and work for as long as it takes, or until around 1:00 p.m., whichever comes first. Those can be fretful hours, but I never feel that they’re wasted. Then I can experience the joy and relief of hitting the Publish button…

Without a deadline, your work is never over. — Thomas Vato

Thank God it’s Friday afternoon! — Me

Keats for breakfast

I’ve nicknamed the latest additions to my a.m. routine the “morning meds.” I spend one to two minutes on a guided meditation from an app on my phone, and then I read a poem. A little later, weather permitting, I do a walk-and-think. Most of April I’ve been working through John Keats’s Poems, in order, as well as my town’s  connector streets.

Poems was published in 1817. Most of the poems are short. Critics reacted relatively positively, though most noted the unevenness of the work. This is an accurate assessment: some of these verses made me wince. Many deal with Keats psyching himself up for the profession. He wants to be a poet, but he’s not sure he’s good enough.

When I first imagined myself as a writer, Keats’ progression from a mediocre poet with promising flashes to a genius in control of his art over the course of four or five years was reassuring and inspirational. The critics were sometimes vicious about his work, but, as they say, nevertheless he persisted. As it turned out, I never managed to follow the same trajectory. I was easily deterred by criticism and (this may have been the deciding factor) not a genius. Still, there was the bond of insecurity. Mornings being one of the most insecure parts of my day, I find Keats’ worries strangely comforting as I get my headphones and jacket and head outdoors.

Connector streets are the ones you take when you’re trying to get from one end of town to another, biggish streets with a fair amount of traffic. I’m saving the side streets for later in the spring, when the trees and flowers are in full bloom. The morning’s connector streets are Main, which runs north-south, and Chestnut, which runs east-west.

I’m eager to see the progress on the new house near the intersection of Chestnut and Main. For years there’d been a stone house on the site. Whoever lived there held “garage sales” every weekend. A few months ago the lot had been razed to the dirt. Then appeared a foundation. Today there’s a frame and some walls. A contractor’s pickup truck blocks the sidewalk. I edge around it  and peek inside the skeleton. Two-car garage, central staircase. It’ll probably turn out to be yet another colonial with a statement window over the front door.

I wonder how Keats would feel about the scenery I’m passing on Main Street. There’s some green around—trees, some lawns, flowers in planters outside some of the stores—but maybe not enough to please him. I enjoy it, though: the teens waiting for the bus, a pizza shop, a gas station—finally regular is less than $4/gallon, hooray—the fire station, our dentist’s office, the rectory of St. Bernadette’s, a lawn with a sculpture of a Native American with a headdress in silver and bronze, a store that makes gravestones, and, on the corner, the best bar and grill in town.

This morning’s sonnet was the strongest so far in these April readings. Number XI, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.” It’s the Stout Cortez one, in which Keats and a friend flip through George Chapman’s translation of the Iliad, done in a wilder, less refined style than the versions in vogue in England at the time. On reading Chapman, Keats feels as though he finally “gets” Homer. He compares the experience to a scientist finding a new planet (Uranus had been discovered in 1781) and then to the explorer Cortez’s first glimpse of the Pacific Ocean from a peak in Darien. These are curious choices. Darien, a region in Central America that was intended to be Scotland’s big foothold in the New World in the late 1600s, turned out to be a failure that nearly bankrupted the country. Also the conquistador who encountered the Pacific was Balboa, not Cortez. Facts and history aside, it’s a beautiful poem.

The Iliad’s been on my mind this week, even before Sonnet XI. I’ve read translations, long ago, and recently finished Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles for book club. Miller’s novel focuses on two characters from the epic, Achilles and his lover Patroclus. At one point Achilles and Patroclus have been dragged into the Trojan war and they have a big meeting with Agamemnon and the other generals and I realize that these characters are just a little part of Homer’s enormous story.

I retrace my steps, again passing the new house. Will the statement window will be rectangular or arched? The exterior gray, white, or blue? Maybe the builders will add a wraparound porch. Maybe some Helen will live here and relax on that porch in the evenings, and some Paris will see her and spark a war…The Iliad is so damn big—vast as space, deep as the ocean. My mind spins towards heaven at the thought of it. I feel like a watcher of the skies/when a new planet swims into her ken.

At my leisure

“Give me books, French wine, fruit, fine weather and a little music played out of doors by somebody I do not know.” I ran across this line, from one of John Keats’ letters (to his sister, in August of 1819), a week ago. I was trying but failing to write that day’s blog. Maybe you’re familiar with the Keats saying—the quote’s on a variety of merch, tee-shirts and tote bags, key rings, decorative plaques, journal covers–pretty much anything that can be inscribed.

I must have read this sentence at some point in the past, since I’m a big fan of Keats, but it hadn’t stuck in my memory. However, on this snowstormy day his words set off giant-gong-sized sympathetic vibrations. It was a typical New England March, and I was typically sick and tired of bad weather. Everybody in layers with their heads down and shoulders hunched against the cold. I needed green grass and flowers and people eating their lunches outside, a downtown stroll with no destination, in no hurry.

That is, I wanted to go flâneuring. Flâneur is a new-to-me word. As usual, after I first noticed it, in a book about crimes of upperclass Londoners in the 1930s, it popped up everywhere, like dandelions. It means, according to  Dictionary.com, “a person who lounges or strolls around in a seemingly aimless way,” usually in an urban environment. The French poet Baudelaire, writing in the 1800s, called the flâneur a “passionate spectator” of city life. More resonating words, another hit with the big gong. I was vibrating like Wile E. Coyote after he boinged off the wall.

I think of walking generally—whether flâneuring in the city or hiking in the countryside or circling an indoor track—as something like George MacDonald’s “sacred idleness” rather than a way to get from point A to point B. When the roads are covered with snow and ice, I perambulate inside, my favorite route being living room, kitchen, dining room, sunroom, although it’s not as fun as being out in nature. Walking’s better when the weather is fine. All things are better with good weather.

Keats would seem to agree. The sentence preceding the quote above is “I adore fine weather as the greatest blessing I can have.” One of the world’s greatest poets and letter writers, writing about the weather! The opening quote is not the full thought, as he has 36 words to go in the sentence. Of course that’s harder to fit on a keyring. He gets more specific about what kind of music he wants—“not pay the price of one’s time for a jig—but a little chance music” and the desired effect: “and I can pass a summer very quietly without caring much about Fat Louis, fat Regent or the Duke of Wellington.” 

Detachment from the hamster wheel of worry. Otherwise the world overwhelms us all. Letting the cares fall away for a bit is good, although there’s a limit. One of the chief criticisms of the flâneur is the quality of being too detached, too aimless. The implication is that there’s a misuse of leisure time with all that loafing around.  But leisure time needs to be protected (I agree with Emerson: “Guard well your spare moments”) and needs to make sense only to yourself.

Perhaps more of the disapproval of the flâneur centers around the amount of leisure time he seems to have, rather than how the time’s used. We’re jealous, or nervous. Near the close of the letter, Keats admits to the drawbacks of too much free time: “I admire lolling on a lawn by a water lillied pond to eat white currants and see goldfish, and go to the Fair in the evening if I’m good. There is not hope for that: one is sure to get into some mess before evening.”

The mess before evening can’t be avoided. The snow will be back soon. Stroll while the weather is fine.

Walking the dogs

I’m housesitting this week. A mini-vacation! I thought, when I took on the commitment. Someone else’s house in a different town, a town where I often get lost. I’ll explore; it’ll be absolutely wonderful, plus I’ll be going back to my actual house almost every day. I forgot a couple of things: first, to check the weather forecast. It’s January, and there’s snow on the ground plus more snow expected all week, making exploration and the back-and-forth a bit more tenuous. Second, I forgot that every vacation includes a first day that ranges from tiring to terrible. The travel part wasn’t hard, being a half-hour drive, but everything in a different house is, well, different. It took me an embarrassing amount of time and effort to get water to come out of the kitchen faucet (tilt it sideways), and to find the light switches, figure out the appliances, locate the silverware drawer, and the like. I finally achieved the last item on my to-learn list, how to get hot water from the kitchen faucet, this morning, a mere 40 hours into my stay.

It took about a day to find my way around the house without having to backtrack. That surprised me. I live in an almost 90-year-old house with a more contemporary extension at the back, so I figured I was used to crazy houses and slanting floors. However, this new-to-me house is 200 years old, albeit also with a more contemporary extension at the back. There are two staircases going upstairs, leading to an upstairs landing/hall with several closed doors. One of those doors leads to a bathroom: guess which one it is? Never the one I open first; those are for a bedroom or another bedroom or an office or yet another stairway that goes up to the attic. In spots the floors make me wish I’d brought crampons and an ice axe. It’s a bit of a workout to get from one room to another, especially if I factor in the dog gates downstairs that are theoretically swing-open but in fact must be climbed across.

The dogs are Virgil and Dill (not their real names), blond and brunette, respectively. The dog in the photo up top looks a lot like Virgil. In comparison with our old dog, Watson, a tall golden retriever who weighed 90 pounds, they seem tiny, but they’re just on the smaller side for canines at around 20 pounds each. This is slightly bigger than Capone the cat, though the pups are not nearly as inclined to hook my pants with a claw when I’m passing them.

I like both dogs and cats, though I fall more comfortably into the camp of cat people. It’s been a real treat, however, to be around the dogs. I trotted them around town on my first full day in the house. Every dog I’ve walked has been different. My mom’s poodle, Leonidas, loved walks but hated leashes. He was hyper, curious, and a leaner out of car windows to the point where on a couple of occasions he fell out of the automobile and we had to reverse and retrieve him. He wasn’t trained; my mother had something against training dogs. On Leo’s walks he pulled and pulled. He especially loved dashing around the corners of things, probably in hopes of finding something to hump.

Watson, the dog Dave and Sonny and I had, was curious and moderately trained. On a walk he pulled a little, especially when he saw a hazardous and enticing item, like a cigarette butt or a bottle cap, but mostly once he located a good stick to carry he’d be content to go forward at an even pace. Choosing the stick took some time. He’d pick up a one, walk with it for a bit, then drop it for a bigger one. Eventually he would trade up to a stick as large as he could possibly carry. Often these were branches several feet long. For the remainder of the walk, Watson would look up frequently to make sure his walker appreciated what a great stick he’d found.

I’d never walked two dogs simultaneously. I’d seen enough rom-coms with the heroine being comically dragged through a park by her charges to be apprehensive about handling more than one dog at a time, but we had an easy time of it. Virgil and Dill together weigh less than half what Watson did, and they never took off full speed in the same or opposite directions. Virgil was the investigator, forging eagerly ahead, then stopping to sniff. He found something fascinating every few feet. He crossed from side to side, sometimes tangled the leashes, and, during our tramping bits, walked closest to the road. Dill, meanwhile, seemed mostly interested in keeping his short legs moving. He walked in the middle of us three. Sometimes he’d stop to examine one of Virgil’s finds, about one in every four.

I slid into the stop-and-start amble of dog walking, stepping into the verge to make way for the people with somewhere to go, crossing the street carefully, and keeping a wary eye for squirrels and other inciting beasts. It struck me that the experience was similar to what happens when I write. The world is full of fascinating stuff. A yappy bit of me loves every rabbit hole and can’t wait to tell Dave or Sonny all the stuff I discovered while writing that day. There’s a working-dog part that enjoys the exercise of putting the words on the page (and has already written about three times as many words as this piece will contain). And then there’s an animal in charge—probably the cat—pulling us past some of the rabbit holes, stopping for others, one eye on traffic, the other on the clock, reminding us that our deadline today is 11:00, so figure out an ending already!

A NaNoWriMo Carol

Maybe it was a hallucination born of one too many peanut butter cups on Halloween night, but methought I heard a noise. I bolted upright in the bed. Above the soft sounds of the house came a faint  tapping, a chittering of clicks and scritches. Far away at first, but getting louder, closer. I crept to the window. The floor was deadly cold. I peeked around the shade. The streetlamp gave an eldritch glow to the bare tree branches with their twisted, twiggy fingers. The clock on my nightstand read 12:01. A figure stood beside it.

She wore glasses and a backpack with a power cord sticking halfway out of it; she carried a paper cup with a plastic lid and smelled of ink and coffee. “Hey, How are ya? I’m the ghost of NaNoWriMos past,” she told me. “We met that time you went to Barnes and Noble for a write-in? We sat next to a window and typed.”

The Burlington B&N, with its long escalators. The cafe was full, and so was every chair.  “Humbug!” I muttered, remembering. “My back hurt for the rest of the day from being crouched on the floor.” I’d just found out about the annual event, in which participants try to get 50,000 words of some creative project on the page during November. (More information at NaNoWriMo.org!) I set up my free account, selected my region, read the motivational messages, and found a write-in.

“Nothing an ibuprofen couldn’t fix,” said the spirit.

“True,” I admitted. “The real pain came on November 30, when I hadn’t hit 50,000.”

“You had better luck some other years,” said the spirit. With a wave of her hand we were back in my home.

”Begone, spirit,” I replied. “I don’t have the time this year.” I gestured in the direction of my study. “Steve needs me.”  Steve being the first draft of a mystery novel that I finished this summer, now early in the revision process. “He’s just started teething.”

The spirit shrugged. “Maybe someone else can convince you. But I’ll remind you: you don’t have to hit 50,000. You can make your own goals: set a lower word count, choose a different genre. Maybe meet some new friends—there were more than 500,000 people writing in 2020. You included.”

“Points noted, but I’m not convinced,” I replied, getting back into bed. “I’m getting tired; how about you let me get back to sleep?”

She vanished. I pulled the covers around my ears and closed my eyes, only to have them snatched away. “Just ten more minutes, Mom,” I pleaded.

“I am the ghost of NaNoWriMo present,” said the spirit. He was an energetic man with silvering hair. He wore a gray NaNoWriMo word-slayer sweatshirt and was twirling a pencil. “We’ve been sending you emails for months. And now it’s go-time! We know you have some stories in there.”

“Normally I’d love to, but Steve’s not sleeping through the night,” I said. Steve has turned out to be quite colicky. I love him, I adore him, he’s always doing cute and funny things, but he’s a lot of work. 

 “Bring him along, then,” said the spirit, tossing his pencil into the air and catching it behind his back. “Come with me!” Across the world we flew. I clutched Steve’s binder to my chest as we peered into the midnight warriors’ windows. Fingers tapped on keyboards, two finger or touch type, as the writers raced with the dawn for their first thousand words. I saw some friends from an old writers group. Ed, sipping tea and watching the moon. Pauline, typing. Denise, writing longhand in her notebook with the flower on the cover.

Back to my bedroom. “Can’t I tempt you to join us?” said the spirit.

I peeked inside Steve’s covers. He needed a change. “Steve’s just not ready for a sibling. If I don’t raise him right he’s going to turn out like his sisters, stuck on a closet shelf.”

The spirit stuck the pencil behind his ear with a frown. “Well, there’s always time to change your mind. Remember, you can activate your account at any time. There’s no requirement to start on November 1.” 

“Begone, fiendish spirit. Not this year.”

The prospect was appealing. A shiny new story, a couple hundred pages by the end of the month…what a delicious prospect. But Steve can barely hold his head upright. I needed to be a responsible parent…maybe I could look through my poem files, work on some short pieces. Anything that would placate the third spirit. We all know the story: the last spirit is the most fearsome. A skeleton, maybe, or a big black nothing, eyes glowing with the fires of burnt books.

Or, as it turned out, my sixth grade English teacher, Mrs. Lynch, all angles, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail and laugh lines carved deep into her face. The first person in my life who thought of me as a writer. “I am the ghost of NaNoWriMo future,” she said in her smoker’s voice.

I showed her Steve. “I can’t shove 1700 new words a day into him,” I whined.

The spirit cradled Steve for a moment, then gave him back to me. The sky above us was gray, and the earth was crunchy with frost. Just beyond an iron gate were rows of tombstones. “Wait!” I said. “I don’t—“

“Don’t be silly,” said the spirit, and led me to the coffeehouse across the street. There were people writing, so many people, and coffee and donuts and not a mask in sight, just papers and laptops, and the happy, beginning-of-November chatter. Ideas ready to march onto the page.

“Begone, fair spirit,” I said mournfully.

Mrs. Lynch gave me a hug. Still wearing those scratchy sweaters. “Not this year,” she said, “but next year—all of this will still be here for you.”

In my bedroom, I hummed a lullaby. I took Steve downstairs to rest in my study.  In the moonlit kitchen, I poured tap water into my favorite glass and raised it to all the writers beginning their 2021 projects. Best of luck to you all, and see you next year!