State of the Art

I stopped blogging because I was asked to write a column on the arts for the New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal at the same time my husband became ill. I couldn't keep up with the blog, but I did enjoy doing it and enjoyed following other blogs--the bloggers seemed like friends.  I think I will try again.

Christ is Risen

He is risen indeed.

Last night we went to hear The Crucifixion by John Stainer, an odd composition with very little melody and a lot of recitative. Three times during the hour- long performance the congregation arose to sing along, but the tune was unfamiliar and my own singing voice is so off-key that I felt self-conscious. I think others must have too because although I could see people’s mouths moving, I couldn’t hear much volume beyond the choir’s. There were two soloists with wonderful voices, a tenor and a bass. My singing with them was like my trying to play with the Boston Celtics.

We didn’t go to the sunrise service this morning although this year because Easter is so early along with the earlier time change, we would really have seen the sun rise at 7. It was too cold and windy for Bill’s lungs. We didn’t go to Easter Sunday service either. Two years ago I had to sit in the balcony in back of a mother who was letting her two boys (about eight and ten) cross from the central balcony to the left one, hanging by their hands in midair. They did go downstairs for the children’s story and Sunday school, but by that time my imagination was in full agonized throttle.

This morning I remembered one Easter outfit I had when I was fifteen. I remember it as if it were on another person, from the outside, not from the inside looking out. Perhaps there is a photo of me somewhere. I had a navy blue short coat and a yellow hat with a matching leather purse. Twenty years later after we had taken a walk, my sister-in-law’s shoes were wet. My dad went into the barn and came out with the yellow purse and tin shears and cut her new insoles. I exclaimed about how long he had kept the purse, and he said, “I knew it would come in handy some day.”

Good Friday

We went to the Good Friday service this morning. I had been asked to be one of the scripture readers of the 15th chapter of Mark, the account of the crucifixion. The service was short—just a half hour. At the end I realized that all the participants were women: the student intern who planned and conducted the service, the four scripture readers, the two soloists. The last two verses read were 40 and 41, “There were also women looking on afar off: among whom was Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the less, and of Joses, and Salome; (Who also when he was in Galilee followed him, and ministered unto him;) and many other women which came up with him unto Jerusalem.”

It was about thirty years ago that a minister pointed out to me that only Jesus’ women followers had been at the scene. There are many historical reasons for women having been shut out of the hierarchy of the church, but it still seems incomprehensible to me that that exclusion lasted so long and lingers on in the Roman Catholic Church. I have thought about this a lot, not denigrating men because I have been blessed in having been surrounded by wonderful men, father, uncles, husband, two sons. I have never been subjected to my being thought of as inferior because I am a woman. But why have so many other women?

Once More, Without Music

This has been a dreadful winter with very cold temperatures relieved only when it snows. After Bill’s hospital bout and recovery from pneumonia, cold air bothers him a lot. His COPD and his missing lung lobe probably don’t help. At the moment there is freezing rain which is supposed to change to rain when the temperature goes above zero (above 32 F). We were planning to go to the grocery store but can’t decide if we should chance it. The chief meteorologist of Canada predicts that we will have a colder and wetter than normal spring. I say to myself, Don’t complain. You could be living in Darfur. You could be suffering from some incurable painful disease. You could be out of food altogether. Etc.

I somehow have got a little ahead in my column writing, the tax stuff is with the accountant, the planned grocery foray is on hold, and I want to resume my blog. For one thing, I miss the others on my blogroll.

Courage

I think I have figured out why I ignore this blog. I have only so much courage to publish and that must be spent on my column. I am loath to send any of the 8 or so novels I have written since the last one was published in 1994. I would never have published at all if the publishers hadn’t asked me for manuscripts. This sounds ridiculous, I know, because writers generally have such trouble getting a manuscript published. This didn’t have anything to do with the quality of my writing – it had to do with weird circumstances. I have been writing a column a week for nearly a year and yet every time I file the current one, I have a sick feeling at the pit of my stomach. I seem to have bequeathed this strange trait to my children. Why do I write then, you might ask. I write because it is what makes me happy. But why accept such assignments as my column? I do it because I can’t bear to be a coward. What do I fear? I fear offending someone. I have only written one negative review in my life and that caused me much anguish. I don’t agree to write reviews unless I first look at the book and see that I can say some positive things about it. The one negative review came about because I hadn’t seen the book first, just been told about it. I fear saying something dumb. And yet the few bad reviews my novels have received haven’t really bothered me much.

Memoir

I’m reading Patricia Hampl’s I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory; so far a wonderfully thought-provoking book. She tells the story of a childhood memory and then goes back for a second draft, dissects it, finding lies in the first draft. It is her theory that the first draft is valuable for what the heart reveals, unfettered by the will; the second draft, when you go back and analyze the details of the first draft, creates symbols out of these details. “For meaning is not ‘attached’ to the detail by the memoirist; meaning is revealed.” I have never analyzed the details of the first draft of a memory. This makes me want to go back to some of the earlier paragraphs of this blog and try to winkle out some meaning from the details.

Hampl’s prose style is so good that it almost, but doesn’t quite, call attention to itself. The first two pages are brilliant.

Noticing

Things I have noticed this morning: Bill and I never eat all the crusts of our toast. Why is that I wondered, and finally decided that the reason must be that it is difficult to put butter or jelly on the crusts. I noticed that our mutual handyman is at my neighbor’s. Joe has worked for Jack for 37 years, but for us for only a year. He has become absolutely essential to us. He also works for the family across the street. Whenever I see his van in the neighborhood, I feel secure. One of the three tomatoes left on the vine is ready to pick. Last May our son brought us a tomato plant in a bucket, and when the first frost was forecast, we brought it in. The tomatoes continued to ripen. We haven’t had a garden for many years although we do have our rhubarb patch and a plum tree. The squirrels get the plums before they are ripe enough to pick.

Getting Ahead

I appear to be on a roll as far as writing is concerned. I have one column finished for tomorrow’s deadline, one nearly finished for next Monday’s deadline, and one half-finished for the 19th. I have one other idea that is getting formed, and one that is formed only in as much as I have thought about it in the past. For the last few weeks I have been racing against the deadline, with nothing in view, and that is quite unsettling, so I determined to get ahead.

My son sent me an article about self-handicapping. I think I am the grand champion at self-handicapping. I get things written when someone asks me to write and gives me a deadline. My five novels have been published under those circumstances. Now I have eight novels in a semi-finished state, no one goading me to finish them and send them out to a publisher, and I procrastinate. Why is this? Fear of rejection? No, I don’t think it is that. Fear of bad reviews if they get published? No I don’t think it is that. Sloth? No, because I am quite diligent about most things. Perhaps it is because I have no reader, no one to bounce the thing off. I read bits and pieces to the two writers’ groups I belong to, but they can’t really criticize the thing as a whole, just individual details.

Design

The 2006-2007 Pen Canada annual report came the other day. The design and concept are quite remarkable. The report has a spiral binding, and inside there are handsome paintings of each of the detainees that Pen Canada supports. Attached to this is a tear-out postcard of the same very lively painting, already addressed to send to the relevant authority. The lettering and the typeface are good-looking as well. I seldom am as struck as I was with this production. For one thing, it did exactly what it was supposed to do, made me interested in the detained writer and determined to mail the cards. The report was created by an outfit called soapbox design. I wonder what else they have done. When I went on their website, I discovered that it is under construction, so perhaps this is a new company.

Changing

I have two new books, Patricia Hampl’s I Could Tell you Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory and Norman Doidge’s The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science. I ordered both on the basis of reviews I had read. The Doidge is about how the brain can change itself, case studies in the relatively new theory of neuroplasticity. I have read the first two chapters. At first I wanted to go right to the chapter on coming back from a stroke and the one on improving your memory, but I decided that it was better to proceed in an orderly fashion.

This morning I also received clothes I had ordered for Bill and me, part of my plan to improve us. I realized when Bill was in the hospital that his eccentricity had turned from being that of a lovable absent-minded brilliant professor to being that of a crazy old man. I resolved to change his outward appearance. This got me looking at myself. The difficulty with all my self-improvement schemes is that I don’t really know how to improve either him or me. I study other old women’s hair-dos and clothes, but I don’t really have an appropriate model.

Change

I am going to change the focus of my blog slightly. I realize that lately I haven’t been doing much “tracing my way from birth.” My preoccupation with Bill’s medical troubles has me looking forward rather than back. My blog has become more like a random diary (log, I suppose, web log) with no focus at all. I want a focus. Many years ago a writers’ group I was in heard our friend Ted read from his fishing journal, accounts of his various fishing trips. This gave him wide liberty to talk about himself, the weather, the setting, as well as the fish he caught. Bill decided he wanted to write such a journal, and his took the theme of his beer bottle trips. The boy across the street had bought a bicycle with the proceeds of his bottle hunting, and Bill was amazed and impressed that so much money could be accumulated just by finding and redeeming them. While hunting for bottles, he could note the birds, foliage, herbage he saw. He could ruminate. I forget how long he continued this journal, and I don’t know what became of it.

Corners

Gaston Bachelard devotes a chapter to corners in his The Poetics of Space. “The point of departure of my reflections is the following: every corner in a house, every angle in a room, every inch of secluded space in which we like to hide, or withdraw into ourselves, is a symbol of solitude for the imagination…”

I love the words “nooks and crannies.” I remember a space in a house we lived in for only a short time, when I was three or four. The space was enclosed, under the stairs to the second floor. I don’t remember anything else about the house. The house my parents were finally able to buy after moving from place to place (9 houses in 9 years) had a nook under the stairs, with bookshelves, a wicker loveseat, a lamp. When my younger cousin, a bookworm from early on, would come to visit us, he would sit there and browse, obviously at peace. He was only 7 or 8 when he began this custom. Our cellar here in this house has a space under and in back of the stairs, and it was inhabited by our son for a while, and later our grandchild made a clubhouse there.

When I decided to make myself a nook, I imagined being snuggled up in the chair, reading or writing, a snowstorm raging outside. It would be my refuge, yet still with a prospect to outside.

The painting is of my father, done by one of his colleagues in the artist room of the Boston Globe. The table was constructed by my husband of the box of a broken stereo and slabs of concrete, during his concrete phase of object making. The room was an addition to our tiny house. All we really needed was another bedroom and bathroom but the woman who designed it told us we could have a room on top of the bedroom for very little extra money. It has huge windows on all four sides with a sliding glass door leading out to a screened-in porch.

The Corner Dweller

A Holiday

I am taking the day off. Last night I got the coffee ready to go, bought an apple pie at the church bake sale (a favorite New England breakfast), and after the coffee was made, went back to bed to have my coffee and pie and read one of the three newspapers we get. Today I will only do things I enjoy. This afternoon we will go for our daily walk (we have missed it two days in a row) and either call out for Chinese or go to a restaurant for supper. A year ago I decided to make myself a nest, a refuge, a cozy corner, for reading and contemplating. Last week I finally got it done. Today I will make use of it.

Celebrity

Celebrity
I began writing a column on celebrity, intending to make something of the subject in relation to the arts. I have now written 623 of my 800 words and have no point to make at all. I still have 4 days to come up with some stunning insight, but I am not too confident it will happen. For quite a while I was ahead of the game, having one column nearly ready while working and thinking about another, but various circumstances have put me behind and I am now just barely one step ahead of the deadline. I worry that I am repeating myself or that the columns are getting less interesting. Ten years ago I also wrote weekly, but at that time the pieces were profiles of artists, writers and craftspeople, and so there was an endless supply of subjects with no chance of repeating myself. The people I wrote about made the articles interesting. Now I have to dredge subjects up out of my own innards although I do get inspiration from articles I read and conversations I have.

I usually start out with a subject, and just the process of writing gets me ruminating, lets me figure out a point or if I am lucky, several points. I wonder how long I can keep this up. When I was first asked to do the column, nearly a year ago, I said I would do it every other week, but the person they got to do it with me didn’t work out and they asked me to do it weekly. I wish now that I had declined. I have a new appreciation for those weekly columnists I admire: Rex Murphy, David Brooks, Garrison Keillor.

Various Edens

My cousin lives in southern California in the middle of the fires. She has a fantastically gorgeous garden. She lives in what appears to be the perfect climate in an area of stunning beauty. I, on the other hand, live in what most people would regard as an inferior climate. Once during an ice storm the power was out for 80 hours. We live at the top of the hill, and before we bought a four wheel drive Subaru we were often slip-sliding our way home from downtown. The temperature gets so low that when the kids were little, I would walk them to school for fear they would fall and die of exposure. When we first arrived here, people would ask, incredulous, why we had left North Carolina to come to this place. I would explain that in North Carolina we had encountered poisonous snakes, a rabid dog (fourteen shots in my abdomen when I was 7 months pregnant), black widow spiders and suffocating heat. Here we have black flies. We have a TV program on beautiful gardens, “Recreating Eden”, and two of these were set in Bali. But Bali has terrorists. My husband’s colleagues all retired about the same time he did, and most of them moved from here. They had to stay in Canada because of our medical system, but I am sure that if it weren’t for that, they would have moved to a better clime, and indeed most of them do spend winters in the south.

Journals

I have just filed my State of the Art column. This one is about memoirs and journals. I maintain that even people who don’t read much like them. Self-published ones are often more interesting than commercially published ones. I think this is the reason that reading blogs is so appealing. I find Zhoen’s accounts of her operating room experiences fascinating; they have the ring of truth, they are dramatic, they include the jargon of the specialist. And of course, every one of us expects sometime in our life to be the patient on the operating table, and we would like to understand what is happening. A nosy but practical interest. I ended my column with this paragraph.

“One of the most moving journals I have ever read is That Time of Year: A Chronicle of Life in a Nursing Home by one of my favorite professors. In his introduction Robert Tucker writes, 'I have asked myself, as one also interested in composition, how Joyce Horner manages so effectively to sustain a public interest (a stranger’s--my own, for example, as reader—for I never met her) in these originally private jottings.' I don’t remember anything about Miss Horner’s two novels, but I remember vividly this journal of her three years in a nursing home.”

How was it possible to make the account of such a restricted life so entertaining?

Beginnings

I have begun a new novel. Writing my arts column (the editor named it State of the Art), writing e-mails, writing on this blog, are all satisfying and keep me going. But creating a new world and new characters in that world is not only satisfying, it is joyful, one of the great pleasures of my life. I am trying something new. I am writing it on the computer rather than in notebooks. And for the hundredth time I am to trying to outline a plot. I seem to have no talent at all for plotting. I have a novel nearly finished, but it is about a woman whose husband has had a stroke, and because my husband had one in January, I can't bear to go back to it just now. I haven't published a novel for thirteen years although I have written many since then. If I needed the money, was more ambitious or wasn't so lazy, I would perhaps be more persistent at revising and sending the novels to publishers. Or perhaps I just can't bear the rejection.

Ready, Set, Go

Last week at our writers’ group we were discussing autumn. One of our members was bemoaning the turning and falling of the leaves. “Thank God for conifers,” she said. Another said autumn was her favorite season – the beautiful foliage, the cozy feeling when it gets dark early. The men didn’t seem to have an opinion one way or the other. When we first came to New Brunswick, for several years winter arrived without my being prepared. Lawn furniture or hose or bicycle was left outside and covered with snow. The kids didn’t have new boots. Our winter clothes weren’t out. The furnace hadn’t been checked. As the years have gone by, I have become more and more obsessed with getting ready for winter, and this year, having been battered by all sorts of unexpected crises, I am more obsessed than ever. The other day when my aunt phoned, I told her I was getting ready for winter. She was amused. Her parting words were, “Go get ready for winter.”

Rummage

Our church ladies are having a rummage sale tomorrow, and the gym is crammed with stuff, an unbelievable amount of clothes, lamps, geegaws, furniture. They never sell it all, and on Monday the Anti-Poverty people will come take the remains to their on-going rummage sale. I loathe rummage sales, and Bill loves them. I loathe holding yard sales and attending them; Bill loves having them and attending them. The university women’s club has a yearly book sale with thousands of books. The sheer number of books discourages me. The ladies have made some attempt to sort them, but with so many people crowding you, looking for any particular book is impossible. And yet in our basement, I have a room crowded with “archives”, my fancy name for the photographs, letters, clippings, kids’ report cards. Whenever I try to file the papers or otherwise make sense of them, I think I should throw some of it away. But I am unable to make judgments about should go and what should remain. When we were cleaning out our aunt’s apartment, we were faced with many photos, some of them of very interesting looking people obviously from a foreign clime, and knew there was no hope of figuring out who these people were, where they were from, how we were related. We reluctantly threw many of them out, but even now I wish we had kept the four or five photos of the young girls in embroidered pinafores picking grapes.