Dear Blog

I wonder if I could use the blog to focus on the various subjects of my columns. I could write in a less formal way, be more speculative. At any rate, Happy Anniversary, Dear Blog. Thanks for the good times we have had together.

Anniversaries

Tomorrow is the first anniversary of this blog. It has wiggled and wobbled from subject to subject. What wiggles and wobbles at the bottom of the sea? A nervous wreck. I have got off the subject of tracing my way. I have noticed that other people periodically change the focus of their blogs. I think I will try that, but what should the focus be?

What I didn’t anticipate was the great fun of meeting up with other people and becoming interested in their lives and opinions. I have added and subtracted blogs from my blogroll because I realized after a while that I couldn’t read too many regularly; there just was not enough time. I do occasionally think to myself that since there are millions of blogs, there probably are quite a few by people who would turn out to be kindred spirits. I wish I had kept a journal of how I came to the blogs I regularly read. Usually it was “way leads on to way.” to quote Robert Frost.

I hadn’t remembered until today that I had started the blog on the anniversary of my mother’s death. I don’t know if I was aware at the time, although it was serendipitous because the first few posts are about her naming of me.

Labeling 2

I finished labeling and then consolidating the labels into fewer categories. I think I can consolidate some more. This may be a waste of time, who knows. I have a favorite joke. A farmer is holding a pig up to an apple tree. The pig grabs an apple, chows it down, and the farmer holds it up to another apple. This goes on a while. A man comes along and asks what the farmer is doing. "Feeding my pig." "Isn't that a time-consuming way to feed a pig?" The farmer says, "What's time to a darn fool pig." I laughed so hard when I was told that joke that my stomach hurt (you know the sensation.) "What's time to a darn fool pig" has been one of my mantras ever since.

Labeling

I have labeled 135 of my 168 posts, an interesting exercise. When I finish, I will go back and combine some of the categories. The exercise gives me a better idea of the structure of my blog, how I have kept to the theme, tracing, how I have deviated. Can I figure out which categories readers are interested in, because of course the idea is to communicate. Otherwise, I would write in a private journal, although most people who write in a journal have the idea that some day someone will read it. A friend was telling me the sad story of her mother’s journals, that her mother had obviously wanted them kept and read, but her brother and his wife had burned them, saying that they didn’t want people to know the family business. My friend harbors the hope that they didn’t burn the journals, just hid them. I treasure my grandmother’s two diaries and letters. They let me into a life I knew nothing about before.

Sharp Sand decided to start all over with his blog, giving it a new form, a new voice. I can see the temptation of that. Wipe the blackboard clean.

Tales from a Reading Room takes stock of her blogging year. She gives us a piece of etiquette that I didn’t know before, that it is customary to respond to the comments on your blog. That makes sense, to keep a dialogue going.

A New Year means something to students and teachers, starting a new semester. When I went to college, the old semester continued after New Years Day so I have never had that feeling. A New Year means something for my finances, my taxes. I begin a new calendar. I have never made New Year’s resolutions, so that aspect of the New Year is lost. Somehow the change seems arbitrary, unreal, even unimportant.

Fiddling with the Blog

Yesterday I sat down to the computer to continue revising the old novel. I had been up since 5:15 AM, so that after a while my brain became too weary even for revising. I began to fiddle with this blog, decided it would be fun to put on labels, learned how to do it (not hard, as I thought it would be), and did some of the 167. What use are labels, I wondered.

I found a blogspot page I didn’t know existed, telling how comments are to be received. It said that the only registered bloggers can comment. That must be the default. I didn’t know that. This must be why my friend Ted can’t comment. What function does this default serve – to prevent bad people from commenting? Do people surf the net looking for unprotected sites upon which they may type the f word? Or worse, I suppose. What would happen if I checked the box that allowed anyone to comment?

I found that I could have a comment window pop up, which I checked, that I could moderate comments, which I didn’t check, that I could have “type the funny letters you see here” section (I can’t remember if I checked that or not.)

I probably should have been following Another Country’s lead and re-organized my kitchen drawers instead of fiddling with the blog. The trouble with such re-organization is that for the next two years I would be looking in the wrong drawer for the peeler.

Pensées

Several of the people on my blogroll have changed templates: “Sharp Sand”, “pages turned”, and “my space” most recently. This creates a curious feeling, as if an acquaintance of mine should show up having had cosmetic surgery and dyed her hair.

For quite a long time I thought that Shameless Words was a woman, but then he wrote something that told me otherwise. He travels alone quite a bit, and I thought that was unusual, until he revealed himself to be a man and then it didn’t seem unusual at all. I began to think, Men do travel alone more than women do. The friends of mine who are my age travel a lot, all over the world in fact. That seems to be the thing to do with one’s retirement, but the widows travel in groups, never alone, and even the couples travel in tours or with another couple.

Bill and I are like the geese being fattened for foie gras: we are tied to a rope that allows us to travel in a certain small circumference of the northeast section of the continent.

A long while ago, the writer John Metcalf wrote an essay about how to punctuate a thought. Do you put it in italics? In quotation marks? After much discussion, he determined that it was best to use a comma and then a capital letter. He convinced me, and I have done that ever since. I did it in paragraph two.

Macs vs PCs; links

My friend Ted has discovered that because he has an older Mac he can’t have a blog himself and can’t comment on my blog. I have noticed that Mac users are utterly faithful and invariably love their computers, whereas Microsoft PC users invariably complain and curse theirs.

I have dropped three blogs from my link list. One hadn't posted since the beginning of August, one was too scattered and confusing to be followed and one just wasn't interesting enough to me. I notice that other blogs have very long lists of links, but I use my list to read every day and having a long one would mean I would never get anything else done. Still, I have room for a few others.

Comments

My friend Ted has been trying to figure out how to leave comments. He even has got himself a Google account and password in order to do so. Still he can't do it. So he e-mailed his comment to my blog on creative writing, and I put his comment on under my own name. Others have told me they can't record comments. I would like to make the blog comment-friendly, but I can't figure out how.

A Surprise

Bringing books home from my office, I unearthed the one from which the above quotation was taken. The quote but not the title was on my bulletin board. Ascent of the Mountain, Flight of the Dove was published in 1971. It is obviously a used book because someone else’s handwriting is in it, a textbook by the look of the notes. The back cover says that the author was an associate professor, and I wondered what had become of him, so I googled him.

My goodness. He has metamorphosed from a professor of philosophy and religious studies into a research fellow of the American Enterprise Institute. I know about this organization because an old Air Force acquaintance of ours is a member. It’s a conservative think tank. Novak has become such a partisan Republican that he could write just before the recent election that Donald Rumsfeld was the best Secretary of Defense that the USA has ever had. Even most staunch Republicans don’t think that. He has his own very elaborate web site. I remember now getting another book by him from the library and not being interested in it, but I can’t remember which of his many books it was or why I found it uninteresting.

I have been looking for the quotation to make sure I have it right and to see the context, but I haven’t found it yet. If I had tried to trace his life forward, to predict it from this one book, would I have got to the AEI?

When I was trying to figure out a theme for a blog, I thought of writing a kind of autobiography in which I could get a grip on what my life has been as a whole. I figured that the quotation was right for the project. When I was trying to get a name, Blogspot kept telling me that this or that title was taken, and when I hit upon the one that it became, Blogspot suggested hyphens. This has proven to be a very awkward title, but it is too late to change it now. I decided to use the name Nancy Ruth because I googled the writer of the poems that gave me that name and got so much information about her. I was especially tickled to find out that she was the rival of the much ridiculed Edgar Guest. Edgar Guest and Michael Novak. How strange life is.

Kindred Spirits

I daily read the blogs on my list. Recently I made the list alphabetical. Later I will reverse the list. Some of these blogs have short, anecdotal posts, some long, dense essays. If I am in a hurry, I give short shrift (or is this shift?) to the long ones at the end of the list, saying to myself that I will go back later and ponder. Some of them reveal the writer behind the blog quickly; some take longer to figure out. I can’t remember how this list was formed, and I wish I had kept track of that. Too late now. I am about to take Chopsticks, who hasn’t posted for three months, off the list and add a couple more. There are millions of blogs, and I fantasize that out there is at least one blog that would be completely my blog’s “kindred spirit”, to quote Anne of Green Gables. But how to find that blog? In my life I have met a couple of “kindred spirits”, but alas, they moved on and disappeared from my life. Does everyone long for such a rapport? When these kindred spirits change, as they must, they can become less attuned. Very sad.

Meditation on Psalm 139

I got the bright idea to make a failed novel into a blog, thinking that because the novel was written in journal entries, it would work as a blog. It didn't, so I have deep-sixed it. Are there any successful novels written in a journal form? I can't think of any at the moment. The pleasure of reading published journals is partly in knowing that the people are real and are going through real experiences, maybe even akin to your own.

The Beta Version

I have migrated to Beta Blogspot, thanks to the recommendation of ukbookworm, and I am now supposed to be able to do wonderful things. I haven’t yet figured out what. Fiddling with the technical end of the computer is relaxing for me in the way that doing the crossword puzzle is, but exciting also, the way no crossword puzzle could be. I am now on Instant Messenger, thanks to my son and his WebCam, two other marvels. According to The Female Brain what is missing is the actual physical touch. More about that later.

Whoopee

When I got back from Maine, I had a lot of catching up to do, reading the blog posts on my list, back nearly a month. I had to read them because of my insatiable curiosity. My kids have always kidded me about this curiosity about other people’s lives. “Who’s their doctor?”, they mimic me. This is a practical question, the only way really to find out who is a good doctor and who is a mediocre one. You have to be roundabout in determining this. At one point I heard many tales of a back surgeon who was bad. Eventually, probing, I realized that the many tales was just one tale of a person who had a bad experience and had broadcast this widely. Probing further, I discovered that the surgeon in question was really very good. Fortunately I have never had to use this information because none of us has had to have back surgery.

Blogs do give me some of that same kind of information. For example, today Anecdotal Evidence writes about Isaac Babel, one of the few notable Russian writers I haven’t read, giving me the urge to find one of Babel’s books.

Reading some blogs is very much like reading published journals, the ones of May Sarton, for example. After I had read one of her journals, I read some of her poetry and one of her novels, Anger. They are not nearly as good as her journals. In fact, she writes about the experience on which the novel is based in one of her published journals. This is so much more immediate and unmitigated. In the blogs, I follow the adventures of a man moving into a new house, of a woman with a new baby and still having time to homeschool her children, of the comforts of a woman having a toothache, the details of ordinary lives, but with those details thought about, philosophized over.

A while ago I went through my blog list and took some off it because it was becoming unmanageable to read all of them daily. Recently I added two. There are millions of English blogs (since I am unilingual, those are the only ones I know) and I have only found a tiny percentage of them. I am sure there are many that I would find fascinating if only I could discover their whereabouts.

Because I took as my theme, tracing my life from birth, I do not write about the day to day as much as others do. Saturday night Bill and I watched the end of the Detroit Tigers game where the young players were so excited by their victory that they ran out into the stands and squirted champagne at the fans, unadulterated joy and high spirits. Wonderful. A few days ago the new premier put the first Aboriginal to be elected MLA into the cabinet as Minister of Justice and Attorney General. The Aboriginal MLA was so excited that he used the word “extremely” many times in the newspaper interview. Today in a quote of a few sentences he again used the word three times. Is he going to do a good job? I would bet on it. High spirits and joy and thoughtfulness. Ah yes.

Yesterday we had Thanksgiving at our lake camp with part of our family and some friends, a delicious meal, a beautiful warm day, leaves turned, great company. While we were there our daughter phoned to say she was to be in a commercial in which she has to swing from a chandelier, shouting “Whoopee.” "Whoopee," I say.

But Not For Long

We are off to Maine again. I won’t try to post because I would rather spend my half hour allotment on the library computer reading other people’s posts. I am trying out Poor Mad Peter’s suggestion about getting rid of spam so that all of my time won’t be spent deleting.

Structures

I have been re-reading Ernest Buckler’s Ox Bells and Fireflies. I have compared the book I am reviewing, When I Was Young & In My Prime, to Buckler’s book. Both books are structured in small chunks, bits and pieces, unified by running themes, with little narrative thrust or plot. Buckler says straight out that his is a memoir, but he also suggests that it is fictionalized. Munce’s book, although a novel, strongly suggests that a lot of it is memoir, that the details are remembered, not invented. Both use the anecdote, rather than the scene, as building blocks. Munce uses many forms, much like Viktor Shlovsky and Guy Davenport do: prose-poems, a government pamphlet, an auctioneer’s patter at a farm sale. Both are interested in memory. A unifying theme of both is birds.

Many blogs do proceed by anecdote and by their very nature are structured in bits and pieces. Litlove, over at Tales From the Reading Room, is ruminating about the form of the blog, the blog as genre. A blog’s inherent structural difficulty is that it is read backwards. The writer begins at the beginning, with his first post, but the reader is reading only the latest installment. Of course a reader could go back to the beginning and read straight through to the present, but probably not many do. As a blogger, how do you use this backward quality? If a blog was made into a book, would it start at the beginning, at the blogger’s first post, and continue to the last one? This would destroy the intention, wouldn’t it? In a journal made into a book, the reader reads from the starting point to the end. There is usually a structure – a year in the life of, the constructing of a home, a journey.

The writer of the blog isn’t going to conform to an overall structure and probably isn’t going to envision an end. Some blogs do have a unifying theme – cooking, or making dresses, or homeschooling for example, but most have various concerns and passions.

Tracing My Writer Life

It was many years before I understood that I had surrendered myself to the chief temptation of the artist, creation without toil. W.B. Yeats

In 1980 or so, my friend Peter Thomas inherited Fiddlehead Poetry Books from Fred Cogswell. He decided in 1981 that he wanted to start a fiction imprint, Goose Lane Editions. He needed a first manuscript, he knew I had been writing novels, and he asked me if I would submit one to him. I chose two of the four I had written and submitted them. He chose Flora, Write This Down. I had been writing for fifteen years without any desire to publish, just for the pleasure of writing, and if Peter hadn’t asked me, I might never have got up the gumption to try to publish.

My novels are definitely not plot-driven, mainly because I am deficient in plot construction. I begin with an image, a scene, an idea, with no notion of where the novels will go. When people learn that I am a writer, they invariably ask me, “What kind of novels do you write? Mystery? Romance? Detective?” I have to answer, “Literary novels.” “What are they about?” I don’t have a good answer for that, but usually I say, “About different kinds of family.” If I had been born 20 years later, these plot-less novels would never have been published, and this life that I have been tracing would have been very different. Once when I was discouraged about writing, I said to Bill, “I don’t want to be a writer anymore.” He said, “What are you going to do? Send out an announcement that you are no longer a writer?”

Now I am once again discouraged; I am old; I no longer want to be a writer. But the thing is, the novels are out there. Unread, true, but still out there, so alas, I am a writer whether I want to be or not. I have been working on a novel for 15 years, writing, re-writing. Back in 1981 I would just have abandoned it and gone on to something new and exciting. But now, after all these years, it seems that the thing can’t rest until it is published. In its various shapes, I have sent it to two publishers, who wrote nice things about it but still rejected it, and one agent, who agreed to hawk it, but couldn’t.

Like Yeats, I have yielding to the temptation of creation without toil: this blog.

New Camera

My husband and I bought a digital camera as a present to each other for our 50th anniversary. The photo below is one of the first I have taken with it. Bill spotted this nest (wasp?) attached to a branch of a tree in our backyard. I used the zoom capacity to get the photo. I am curious what kind of a nest it is -- we watched it for a while but saw nothing coming in or out. Another Country and sbpoet manage to put stunning photos on their blogs -- wonderful colors and resolution. Something to aim for.

A New Venture

About 10 years ago, I decided to write a novel that I myself would like to read, not having a possible audience in mind, but hoping that it would be acceptable to others. Alas, it didn’t work out. For one thing, it didn’t have enough narrative thrust – none actually – and when I tried to insert some, it sounded artificial to my ears. I have been tinkering with it for some time now. While I was away in Maine, I had a eureka moment: it might work as a blog. I had written it as journal being kept by a woman who had recently been ordained and, along with her new husband, given a charge, roughly set in a fictionalized Baccaro, Nova Scotia, a spot I dearly love. The title of the novel is A Meditation on Psalm 139. One of the inspirations for the novel was a service I attended in Baccaro, where the woman minister read the psalm. As I studied it, I thought that it could have been composed by a woman. Harold Bloom had suggested in The Book of J that some of the psalms might have been written by a woman, that there were educated women high up in the courts of Solomon and David.

Still in this World

A combination of a lot of distracting talk around me, a lot of spam to clear away on my e-mail, and only 30 minutes on the library computer has spoiled my dream of posting while I am away. I shall return.

Challenge Met

Here I am posting to my blog in the library. I have only 30 minutes, so I won't be as long winded as I usually am. I have read The Red Tent, No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, House Thinking, and a Carolyn Roe mystery, A Draught for a Deadman. The No. 1 Ladies is quite different from what I imagined -- I can see why my friend likes the series so well. The central character is indeed a lovable creature. The Roe mystery is like the Brother Cadfael series, in that you are treated to historical settings as well as to interesting characters and of course a mystery to be solved. The House Thinking is like some of this kind of book -- there is a premise which after a while seems to be labored. One of its most interesting themes is the desirability of having both refuge and prospect in a home -- vistas and coziness -- and that men like a ratio of more prospect than refuge and women vice-versa. The Red Tent is quite a tour de force -- very convincing.

I have been writing about my grandfather, my mother's father, and I will put some of that on this blog the next time.

Thanks to poor mad peter for his advice.