What? Oh, yeah, I'm still around.

Yes, yes, I'm around, and everything is mostly the same. You know. Working. Editing a new novel that's about to go out on sub. Chewing my fingernails to the nub over the election. Worrying about life stuff. Writing songs about Bigfoot for a choral performance. Eating. Drinking. Sort of sleeping. Oh, and tweeting. Lots of that.

Haven't had much to say in the long form lately (obviously) (as if a blog were "long form," good lord, how far have we fallen). But that will probably change as I climb out of the abyss of an odd summer and into a suddenly busy but more routine fall.

I like routine. Here's to more of it.

Why is writing so difficult? No, really--why?

It's the perennial question for those of us who call ourselves "writers." We supposedly need to write as much as we need to eat and breathe. Maybe more so. We don't even care if anyone ever sees what we create, let alone likes it. (This is a lie.) Writing is our identity, our passion, our reason for being. And yet, as often as not (at least for me, so I suppose I should say the "we" is royal here), we dread sitting down to do it. We do not want to. Our inner toddler begins kicking and screaming, maybe vomiting a little for good measure. If we manage to quiet this monster--or if we can endure him or her screaming in the background--we can get something done. And then we hate what we've written.

Why is writing so hard? Why do we hate what we love so much? And is there anything we can do about this?

If I knew the answer, I would tell you. I promise. But here are a few thoughts I have at the moment.

1. Writing is exhausting.

I'm closing in on the first draft of a new novel, and instead of feeling excited and exhilarated, I feel increasingly drained. Though I'm only actually "writing" for an hour or two every day, my head buzzes continually with ideas, corrections, doubts, aha moments ... It's like the Buddhists' "monkey mind" turned into a giant gorilla and running amok. I am burning glucose in large quantities. I feel dizzy and not entirely in control. I don't really like this feeling.

2. Writing is uncertain.

In fact, like faith, it's the opposite of certainty. Even as I put a word on the page, I think, "There's a better way to say that. What is the better way? Should I say that at all? Maybe I want to say something different. What should I say instead?" If it doesn't happen right away, it will happen as soon as I stand up to make a cup of tea, or--invariably--once I turn the computer off. Related to #1, above, writing means coexisting with constant doubt. Doubt fastens itself to me, like a twin conjoined at every point from head to toe. I drag doubt around.

3. Writing is exposure.

Even if no one ever sees your work but you, putting what's in your mind onto a page or screen makes the internal external. That means it can be seen, and, worse, interpreted. Maybe I think I'm saying A, but someone else thinks I'm saying B. And B is a very bad thing, which reveals my profound incompetence, wickedness, naivete, and general fraudulence. I don't want to face these things in myself, let alone allow anyone else to discover them. Why on earth am I doing this?

4. Writing is unrewarding.

Yes, I know, writing is its own reward. So is persistence. So is growth. But wouldn't it be much nicer if, after you wrote 500 words, your computer dispensed $500 into your damp and trembling palm? Or you received 500 prestigious awards? 500 compliments? Something?

5. Writing is self-indulgent.

I also know the arguments against this one. The world needs art, the world needs novelists. Although you're not directly feeding the hungry, or building a wall around Donald Trump, you're helping to create empathy and understanding--and increasing your own capacity for both. But shouldn't I really be building that wall right now? What was I doing while the U. S. descended into fascism? Finishing my satirical novel?

From all the think pieces I've read on this very topic, I've concluded that none of these issues can be solved. Again, like a Buddhist, we must just acknowledge them and press on. It's just that it's all rather disappointing. I thought this was supposed to be fun.

Well, sometimes it is.

Hovering and recovering

Ah, my poor, neglected blog. For the past two weeks I've been on vacation, trying and largely failing to say away from all electronic communications. The need to promote the book hovers, always, like a mild illness. I am not doing enough. I know I am not doing enough. But I cannot make myself do any more. Well, maybe a little more. Like what? I don't have the foggiest. Well, I kind of do. More appearances. More approaching strangers, offering the irresistible chance to meet me. More guest posts. More tweets (about what?). More Facebook (god help me). More ... just more.

It's certainly not the worst fate to befall anyone. And I brought it on myself. Maybe I'm even getting a little better at it. Then again, is it working?

Anyway, here's a picture from our trip to Olympic National Park. It was a beautiful day at Hurricane Ridge.

Is silence golden?

Insert usual excuses for not blogging here.

Plus:

I have been wondering lately about this whole imperative to say stuff on the Internet as often as possible. Where does this very recent, overwhelmingly powerful requirement to write in public come from? I think it's safe to say it comes from corporations, whose need to draw "eyeballs" to advertisements intersects powerfully with 1) the human need for connection and attention generally, and 2) writers' need to write and be read specifically.

Caveats:

1) This is not necessarily bad. There's a real discipline to rapid, public writing--which is still evolving, and whose shaky tenets many, many people don't practice. But still, discipline is good. Learning to write both reasonably well and reasonably fast is good. And who will finance this sort-of-real/sort-of-fake form of publication for aspiring writers, if not the makers of dangerous diet pills and fly-by-night, for-profit colleges?

2) My ambivalence about the compulsion to write is neither a satisfactory excuse for not writing, nor an indication I intend to give up blogging, or tweeting, or anything else.

3) I'm just saying.

What am I saying? I'm saying that last week I had in mind a post about the Ronco Rhinestone and Stud Setter, which was inspired by a pair of jeans I'd just bought at a thrift shop. They are Michael Kors, very nice, $14, but until I brought them home I was not fully aware of the large amount of studs adorning the front and back pockets. Normally I'm not a fan of adornments on jeans; I'm sure these will make my life a living hell if I forget and wear them through an airport scanner or if I happen to amble past a giant magnet. Also, they reminded me of Barbara Stanwyck in The Thorn Birds, stomping around the ranch with her dentures and bowed legs. By which I mean, too much stuff on jeans is either for 1) very young people or 2) old people trying to look young. Neither of which I 1) am or 2) wish to be.

But then the Sikh temple shooting happened, on the heels of the Aurora shooting, and those are just the awful happenings I happened to be paying most attention to, thanks to the Internet. A breezy post about the Ronco Rhinestone and Stud Setter had to be out of the question for at least a period of time (how long? Is now OK?). But was I supposed to say something instead about the shootings? Does saying something mean you are automatically more concerned than if you say nothing? I started to feel like the better move was to say nothing. Or, rather, that speaking just for the sake of speaking was not helpful. I don't know what *is* helpful. But maybe the traditional "moment of silence" is more than just a mask for "let us pray," when you're not supposed to say that publicly. I'd like to think it also means: let us shut our traps for just a second. Let us pause. Let us not jump and react and flail our arms and demand attention. Perhaps only silence is as enormous as certain events, and speech is too small a thing in such circumstances.

So there. I said something about saying nothing. You're welcome, Internet.

I am the grumpiest optimist I know

Having weighed in on busyness the other day, I thought I'd take a crack at "optimism." This article, too, is from the NYT. It's by Jane Brody, who I generally think is a good person and a purveyor of useful advice, although the chirpy puritanism of her columns always puts me on edge. I also rather dislike the Good Examples she often serves up, as in this one--as if all we must do is be like these wonderful people (who often include Brody herself)--and all will be well.

OK, I know: would I take health advice from an ironic, crotchety health reporter? Yes, I would, but probably others wouldn't. And certainly the column format is part of the problem. In the piece in question, for instance, along with the Good Examples, we get a series of bullet points on how to be an optimist. To wit:

• Face your fears. [...]
• Re-evaluate events in your everyday life. [...]
• Practice mindful meditation. [...]
• Take control over how you feel instead of letting feelings control you. [...]
• Laugh. [...]
• Be fully engaged. [...]

All six points include1-2 sentence explanations, which I'm leaving out. So the program is not quite this simple. But, you know, bullet points.

Oh, palm to forehead! If only I had known about these bullet points! How could I have been so foolish, and been a pessimist? Optimism is so easy, and therefore I, a sometimes pessimist, am a jerk. If only I had known to laugh, to be engaged!

Here's the thing. I agree with these bullet points; and in the course of a lengthy treatment for depression, followed by finding a really cool guy to marry, and then very gradually figuring out what kind of life I wanted to live, and how to live it, I practiced all of them, and I continue to try to do so. I think being happy is better than being sad. But not because it's my duty to be happy. Being sad is not a failure--it's often an accurate and sensitive reading of your situation, and of the world more generally. If anything, being sad feels like the proper duty, except that it prevents you, often, from trying to make things better. And it sucks. So it's all kind of a feedback loop, and part of the problem is this terminology.

I propose we dispense with the terms "happy" and "optimistic" as the stated goals for ourselves and the surly loved ones we wish to help. As this article sort of gets around to explaining, what we are really talking about is "confidence" and "persistence." A book called The Growth Mindset also talks about the centrality of persistence, and the new, confidence-building feedback loop that's created when we train ourselves--over time--to persevere.

In other words, optimism is not an attitude, but a practice. Sayings like "It's all in your attitude" give us the wrong idea--that we are thinking or perceiving wrongly, and all we have to do is make ourselves see the glass half full. This leads, in my experience, to a whole lot of mental self-kicking (see above), which makes the pessimism and paralysis worse. But persistence is often not delightful or easy. It's hard. That is the point. It is not a matter of flipping a switch in your brain. It means sticking with it for the long haul. It means learning to tolerate the unpleasantness of slogging through obstacles, even or especially when a reward is not certain. Yes, there are ways to do that, including meditation and laughing and so on. But the difficulty of persisting, especially for those who aren't used to it, somehow gets left out of these "just do it" articles.

I speak, of course, for the less chipper beings of the universe. I gather some people are either born with or endowed early on with persistence and confidence and even sunniness, and they can't understand why people like me are talking about having to learn these traits. Why wouldn't you just go out and get what you want? I can't really answer. But I also can't see how this column could help the type of person whom it's aimed at. Sunny just-do-it-ism is either going to bounce right off them, or make them feel worse.

A toned-down rant on education, with bonus crackpot theory

So this is very cool.

It's TED Curator Chris Anderson's animated talk, "Questions No One Knows the Answers To." Are kids everywhere watching this? And adults as well? I hope so.

As I have mentioned, I went to an excellent public school and had a presumably excellent science education therein. Yet never, not once, did it dawn on me that the purpose of this education was to be able to answer questions that were as yet unanswered. In doing countless experiments that turned out either right (yay, you got the blue foam!) or wrong (you idiot, you made black sludge!), and taking lots of multiple-choice tests, I was given to understand that science was about confirming what was already known. The black sludge was simply an error, not a result of processes that were just as real, and just as interesting in their own way, as those that made the foam. Science was proving you could follow the directions.

I can think of a number of reasons I got this message. One is that I was an extraordinarily rule-oriented child (I am only a little less so as an adult). After all, I also didn't get that art was about "expressing yourself," so much as properly rendering what you saw in front of you. So I may have simply missed the part about how we were learning scientific techniques through these repetitive experiments, so that we could later use them to make new discoveries. It may also be that my own teachers either didn't know or didn't think it important that science was about discovery. Their emphasis on mastery of the known might have reflected their own experiences and philosophies.

Or there may have been an even larger purpose behind this kind of teaching. The system cannot function if everyone in it is constantly innovating. Nothing would get done. In truth, we need people--lots of people--to implement known processes and principles. Maybe that's what this education was about: because most people will (by choice? by necessity? whose choice? whose necessity?) be implementers rather than visionaries, they must be trained as such.

Was there such a governing philosophy behind education? Is there one now? All the standardized testing going on now suggests that the answer to the second question is yes. Even if that is not the stated purpose of the testing, it will assuredly be a pronounced effect. Is that intentional on some deep, unacknowledged level? Or am I just being paranoid, or unrealistic? Should I just be grateful for the conscientious training of drones? I'm one, also, most of the time.

A brief but passionate rant about education

I break my usual Monday silence to share some thoughts that came to me after reading this article. Its overall point is that homeschooling must be more closely regulated. While the author, Kristin Rawls, acknowledges that few formal studies have been done on the matter, anecdotal evidence suggests many homeschooled kids, particularly in fundamentalist movements like Quiverfull, are not achieving even basic levels of literacy. The reasons this may be happening look compelling: overwhelmed mothers with large numbers of children to educate, along with full responsibility for household chores and an ideology that holds "moral" (i.e. religious) education far above the factual and intellectual kind.

Fair enough. But it's also true that public (and probably even private) schools across the country are also turning out illiterate kids at an embarrassingly high rate. The fact is, this country has always had a ferociously conflicted attitude about education: parents' aspirations for their children to better their circumstances crash head-on into the old frontier suspicion of "book learning" (you don't want some weakling with his nose in a book next to you when a bear, or an Indian, is charging). Although I have no evidence for this myself, I suspect our ongoing debates about education policy, and the current fad for threatening and punishing educators, speak directly to this ambivalence. American individualists (and I'm one, in my own way) hate that we need education and educators. We hate that someone else knows more than we do about something, and that we have to subordinate ourselves, or our kids, to that person's expertise. Hence the appeal of homeschooling: it says that no one knows what's better for kids than their own parents do--no matter what the subject. The rugged individual merges with the expert.

But it's not just homeschoolers who feel this way. The recent decision by the New York City Public Schools to publish their highly problematic rankings of teachers gives non-experts another weapon to attack those who think they're so damn smart. Look, I get that there are bad teachers who are hard to root out of the system. I get the need for some objective (or close to objective) measure of students' success, and for accountability to both the school system and parents. I was lucky enough to attend excellent suburban public schools, and I still had a handful of teachers who were out-and-out lunatics, who traumatized me. But in this country there's a deep suspicion and even loathing of anyone who dares to educate others. And while I lack expertise in education policy, let me suggest these two culturally based efforts, which all of us can apply this very moment and into the future:

1. Encourage the aspirations of children and adults who seek education. Do not mock them.

2. Encourage the aspirations and work of educators. Do not humiliate them.

Too much light!

Maybe it's the time change and the whole darkness-at-five-thirty-p.m. thing. Maybe it was our recent trip to Tahoe, when I woke up in the middle of the night enveloped in darkness--I couldn't tell whether my eyelids were open or closed--and felt utterly calm. Maybe I've developed some modern-day proto-vampiric ailment, exacerbated by staring at glowing screens for the majority of my waking hours. (God, that's insane.)

At any rate, I seem to have become deeply averse to artificial light, especially the uniform lighting one finds in office buildings and to some extent on our living-room ceiling. (My husband is very fond of this light and thinks it's sun-like, whereas I find it sickening. Light must be a personal thing to some extent.) I posted this TED talk awhile ago about uniform lighting in offices. We're not wired, so to speak, to handle it. We need shadows in the sea of light, and office design should take that into account.

Also there's a street light outside our bedroom window that nothing short of blackout curtains can snuff out. I suppose I could wear one of those masks that you used to see on neurasthenic starlets in the 50s, except that is a recipe for getting my face clawed by a cat in the middle of the night. On a larger scale, light pollution is a huge problem for astronomers, nocturnal animals, crime fighting (really bright lights create darker shadows that are easier to hide in), and, I would argue, life in general. The International Dark Sky Association is doing something about that--and homeowners can, too.

Now, if I can just get through the next four months of standard time...

Hope for writers

Via Nathan Bransford, a very thoughtful piece by author Natalie Whipple on the struggle to stay hopeful when your writing dreams don't seem to be coming true.

I would add that I think it's perfectly fine to feel like crap about your writing once in awhile. Even more than once in awhile. After all, we writers generally get a lot more bad news about our work than good news--and more often than that, we get no news. I am not a big fan of accelerated cheering up. If you need to sulk, sulk. Just be aware that's what you're doing, and be open to the good things, even little good things, that can crop up while you're in the midst of sulking. Maybe a solution to a plot problem that comes to you while you're muttering "fuck" to yourself in the car.

In short, here's another way to think about not giving up: you can still write when you feel like crap about writing. You still go to your job when you feel like crap about it, don't you? So you can write.

True stories about people's lives

So I was in a bookstore this past weekend. While picking out a large, lavishly illustrated book on forensic science (something I never thought I'd own in my life, but the new novel requires it), I overheard a woman say to the clerk: "Can you recommend any autobiographies? I don't want fiction. I only read true stories about people's lives."

I felt like throwing down my lavishly illustrated forensic science book and pouncing on her. But as I rounded a row of shelves, I observed that she was about six feet tall, resplendent in animal skins and platform boots. So I reconfigured my imagined pounce as a verbal one:

Her: I only read true stories about people's lives.
Me: Obviously you don't realize that fiction, although it is not "true" in the "factual" sense, puts us in touch with larger "truths" that strictly "factual" narratives can't provide. Jeez.

In reality, I said nothing. Having received some recommendations, she clomped off happily, and I plunked down my forensic science book, along with an impulse buy: Truth and Beauty by Ann Patchett, a true story about people's lives.

Specifically, it's about Patchett's friendship with the poet Lucy Grealy, who is best known for her nonfiction book, Autobiography of a Face. Grealy was hugely talented but hugely troubled, mostly by the aftereffects of the cancer she'd had as a child, which left her face disfigured. She'd since had dozens of reconstructive surgeries, all of which eventually failed, and which ravaged the rest of her body through tissue and bone grafts. While successful by any measure as a writer, and possessed of many friends as devoted as Patchett, she felt unloved. Despite her friends' heroic efforts to save her, Grealy died of a drug overdose in 2002.

As you can see, I have already finished the book. I inhaled it over the last two days. This total absorption is largely due to Patchett's writing. It's simply perfect, not an ill-chosen word or clumsy sentence in the entire book. To be able to write with such grace about traumatic experience is probably what defines the true artist.

However, I'm also convinced that knowing the story was true was part of the reason I could not put it down. I think it's because I was looking for answers in a way I don't look for them in fiction. In other words, I had a non-artistic purpose in reading, which was learning how Patchett got through this difficult experience. I don't like to think of art, which this book is, as self-help, and yet--isn't it always, on some level? Aren't we always seeking something better, new, different, in ourselves through the experience of art? Still, my goals were more practical: How did Patchett manage to love, and stick with, this very needy person right up to the end? How did she come away from it loving Grealy all the more, apparently without bitterness, only with gratitude? (It's true that bitterness can be edited out of a book, if not one's life, but I think Patchett is an honest enough writer that she would have allowed it to show if it were a significant part of her feelings toward Grealy.)

Did the ability to make art from the experience have something to do with the gratitude she now feels? I suspect so. Not that Patchett was thinking to herself the whole time: Well, this is hard as hell, but at least it's material. In the book, she explains it this way:

We were a pairing out of an Aesop's fable, the grasshopper and the ant, the tortoise and the hare. And sure, maybe the ant was warmer in the winter and the tortoise won the race, but everyone knows that the grasshopper and the hare were infinitely more appealing animals in all their leggy beauty, their music and interesting side trips. What the story didn't tell you is that the ant relented at the eleventh hour and took in the grasshopper when the weather was hard, fed him on his tenderest store of grass all winter. The tortoise, being uninterested in such things, gave over his medal to the hare. Grasshoppers and hares find the ants and tortoises. They need us to survive, but we need them as well. They were the ones who brought the truth and beauty to the party, which Lucy could tell you as she recited Keats over breakfast, was better than food any day.

So how did Patchett arrive at this understanding? Through art? Or is she just a more generous ant, by nature, than I? I will try to assume it's the former, and see what I can do.


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On not wanting to write

It's crazy. Writing is supposed to be what I love to do most in this world. I have time. I have solitude. I have emotional and financial support. I am very, very lucky in these regards. Yet when it comes to pouring out my required 1,000 words for the day on my novel, more often than not, I just don't want to.*

I know I share this problem with millions of writers; there's a whole industry dedicated to producing prompts, encouragement, and inspiring threats for writers, all for a low, low subscription fee. But what I still don't get is why I don't want to write whenever my self-appointed time rolls around each day. You'd think I'd be champing at the bit to write. You'd think I'd do it all day long, that I'd have to be pulled kicking and screaming from the computer. So again, I ask, why?

Here are a couple of answers I've thought of, none of which are fully satisfying:

• It's tiring. The intense concentration that kicks in, once I finally do get going, really does take something out of me. I don't like being tired. But what exactly am I saving myself for?
  
  
• There is no immediate (or possibly even distant) concrete payoff. If I cook a meal, I get to eat it. If I do a job for money, I get paid. I know one is supposed to write for oneself, ultimately--that publication, acclaim, any kind of payment, etc. are just icing on the much larger, more nutritious cake that is doing what you truly love. And yet. After a writing session, I may feel pleased with what I've written, but I may also feel that I've just spent two hours shouting into a great, dark canyon that does not even echo.
  
  
• When writing a novel especially, one tends to feel lost a good part of the time. Yes, I have a sort of overall outline, a general sense of where I'm going, but most days I feel I'm hiking through some vast wheat field, with only an iffy compass telling me I'm going in the right direction. I do not like feeling lost.
  
  
• I feel guilty. Most people never get the chance to do something they truly love. Who am I to be given that opportunity? Do I deserve it, when so many others can't even imagine having it? This is self-indulgence of the worst kind--and to top it off, I'm still procrastinating! I don't even appreciate what I have! Self indulgence and ingratitude!
  
  
• I don't like what I'm writing. Actually, this one does not feel so true at the moment. To be honest, I'm rather fond of what I'm writing these days. But perhaps I think that fondness is delusional. Because it really is terrible, what I'm writing. Yes, that's probably it! If I don't like my writing, I shouldn't be doing it at all. And if I do like it, it means I'm out of my mind!
  

I don't know. It's probably best not to think about this stuff at all. Just get over yourself and do it already, right?

Or I could clean the kitchen...

*Obviously writing about not wanting to write is no problem at all. This is because it is, at its heart, complaining. This is perhaps the easiest form of discourse, spoken or written, to generate. Maybe this is because complaining shuts off expectations of any sort--it's a substitute for doing something. And it's fun.

The year thus far

In Cleveland...helping mom recover from surgery...waiting for pathology report...torpor.

In Cleveland in winter, the sun does not always equal warmth, but it is still welcome. In fact it is craved.

Apparently some kind of rare bird appeared in a flock on Lake Erie this morning. I saw a bunch of birders out at the park with scopes. I think I saw the birds, too--like gulls, only smaller and whiter. By the time I decided to go down and ask the birders what they were, they--the birders--were gone. Note: They were not arctic terns. I checked on the Internet. They were something else.

In Cleveland it is possible to find organic shitake mushrooms for $8/pound.

Skype is awesome. My friends are awesome. My husband is awesome. I miss my cats, who are awesome.

That is my year thus far.

The fear tax

Via The Daily Dish, here's Seth Godin's take on "fear taxes" that we pay in all kinds of ways. For instance, airport security. We pay in time, money, aggravation, and humiliation, to go through it--and we are not reassured. We feel more anxious.

We pay the fear tax every time we spend time or money seeking reassurance. We pay it twice when the act of seeking that reassurance actually makes us more anxious, not less.

Ah, how easily extensible the notion of this tax is. Let's see...how much time every day do I spend seeking reassurance about, say, the political future of this country, on, say the Internet...and feeling more anxious as a result? What are other supposed sources of reassurance that actually--maybe by design--increase our fears?

Should I be worried about this?

Fiction over 40: Is it possible?

I am not sure what to be more depressed about: the fact that the New Yorker's "20 Under 40" list contains so many people who are more accomplished than I will probably ever be, or that Sam Tanenhaus thinks most people over 40 can't write. In Sunday's NYT Book Review, Tanenhaus lists all the great authors who did their best work--or what "history" has deemed their best work--before the age of 40. Well, the list, though impressive, isn't that long, really--when you think of all the great authors past and present. And he does give some exceptions--Virginia Woolf, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth--to give some of us on the downhill slope of artistic possibility the faintest glimmer of hope. (Or maybe that's just the abyss, which glimmers too.)

I would point out that many of the examples of those who peaked before 40 lived in the olden days. Like, before 1950, or even 1900. Might this early peaking be attributable to historical or sociological factors, rather than something innate? Tanenhaus seems to think not:

Not every major fiction writer is a natural, but each begins with a storehouse of material and memories that often attenuate over time. Writers in their youth generally have more direct access to childhood, with its freshets of sensation and revelation. What comes later — technical refinement, command of the literary tradition, deeper understanding of the human condition — may yield different results but not always richer or more artful ones.

Look, I'm more than happy to sink into despair at the slightest hint that I may not be up to achieving my dream. Give up? Give me a reason. But I don't think Tanenhaus has.

More direct access to childhood? So the best authors are, what, twelve? Sixteen? Four? Let's get those nursery school kids into critique groups, pronto! And do we really only want stories about kids, or people who think like kids? I'm all for freshets of sensation and revelation, but are these experiences really only possible for children? I would suggest that more than a few young people spend their days avoiding freshets and revelations of all kinds, and only later, with the perspective that comes with few forehead wrinkles, are able to open up to the world.

I mean, are all those books on finding your inner child just psychic snake oil? OK, yes. But it is entirely possible, as well as desirable, to find new ways to see the world afresh--at all stages of one's life. THAT IS WHAT ART IS FOR, FOR CHRISSAKE. Who are all these brilliant young writers writing for anyway? Themselves? If so, they would not be brilliant.

So if your life is short of freshets lately, even if you are really freakin old and should just give up, here are a few things to try before you do that:

* Art. Look at it. Read it. Listen to it. Feel it. Taste it. Talk about it. etc.
* Astronomy. Look at some pictures from the Hubble Telescope. Now look at, I dunno, anything. Changes your perspective, right?
* Water. Spend some time near it or in it.
* Meditation.
* Remembering your dreams.
* Taking a photo a day and writing a description of it.
* Look through the wrong end of the binoculars.
* Get away from the computer.
* And so forth.

None of these suggestions is particularly new, and some veer into "inner child" territory that I would rather avoid. (My inner child is a brat, turns out.) I'm just saying, we can train ourselves to observe, and to feel wonder. We can work on our memories. So if that's the only reason older people supposedly can't write--because their memories of childhood are too foggy--that is just no reason at all.

Again with the likability issue

Slate's Claire Dederer gives us the flip side to Monday's post on whether--and why--fictional characters should be likable. Reviewing Amy Bloom's Where the God of Love Hangs Out, Dederer delights in Bloom's ability to make readers love her characters. She goes so far as to make her review a primer on creating lovable characters, though she acknowledges she's not really doing justice to Bloom's gift.

First caveat: once again, I have not read the book being reviewed, only the review itself. I presume someone else has taken care of the blog post suggesting that those of us who read reviews instead of the actual books are foot soldiers in the army of the damned.

Second caveat: I am going to indulge an urge to speak somewhat sarcastically about this review. This sarcasm is simply not deserved. It's just that have issues about "liking" or "loving" characters, which probably speak to my own troubled psyche as much as anything. I taught an entire class on the reasons for, and advisability of, responding to literary characters as human beings. I just think it's weird. And I think we ought question the distinction, at least, and I'm interested in asking such questions through my own fiction. Yet, as a writer, I also want people to love my fiction, which, from all evidence, means making them care deeply about my characters. What does it take to do this? How much of my grumpy soul must I chop off and sell, in order to get with a program that's obvious to everyone else? These are burning questions for me. So anything that smacks of a "formula" for characterization just sets me off...even if that formula is helpful and correct, which I rather suspect Dederer's may be.

Anyway, here is my willfully nuance-free take on the formula for creating lovable characters:
1. Start with perfect human.
2. Add significant but understandable flaw (gout, mild alcoholism).
3. Refrain from judging character for this flaw, both via authorial voice and other characters. (Bonus if other characters are specifically attracted to the flaw.)

The more I think about this, the more I believe it *will* work. Consider: is this not the way most of us would strive to see the world? When we're being our best selves, don't we see (or want to see) people as basically good, with understandable flaws for which we do not pass judgment? So maybe reading Bloom gives us pleasure because she lets us be those best selves--people who give others the benefit of the doubt, who are intrigued or amused, rather than enraged, by people's faults. Books like hers give us practice in open-mindedness and forgiveness, and remind us of the pleasure such a worldview can bring. It's better to be this way. Gilead is Exhibit One for this theory.

So why do I fear the theory? Why won't I submit to its obvious truth and get on with it? I'll feel better. Writing will come easier. In fact, even as I grouse, I'm sifting through my novel for opportunities to make my characters more positive, their flaws less drastic.

Well, I'm worried about blandness, for one thing. I'm worried that all these lovable characters are all more or less alike, our reactions to them more or less the same (even if that reaction is the commendable one of loving). Moreover the fictional worlds they inhabit will have to be similar, in order to accommodate these particular kinds of creatures--the worlds are realistic, mostly comfortable, relatively safe. Again, maybe that's what reading fiction is all about. Surely some fiction can and should be about this. But all of it? Would something be lost if Fun with Problems vanished from the shelves?

I suppose one could push the boundaries of the formula to see if more interesting results ensue. Make the character ridiculously perfect, her flaw just on the border (or on the other side) of acceptable. Find some clever ways of passing judgment without forcing them upon the reader--because readers really don't like being told how they're supposed to think about characters.

No more tree

Sometime yesterday the neighbors took out the plum tree that I've been using to measure the passage of time. Now we have a lovely, unobstructed view of the carport, and no more white blossoms in March.

The sorrows and...something...of work

Via Heather Havrilesky at Salon, it looks like Alain de Botton's new book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, is well worth a read. A quote: "Our exertions generally find no enduring physical correlatives. We are diluted in gigantic intangible collective projects, which leave us wondering what we did last year and, more profoundly, where we have gone and quite what we have amounted to. We confront our lost energies in the pathos of the retirement party."

I write this while waiting for Dreamweaver to "clean up Word HTML" on a 41-page article with 167 footnotes. I've waited at least 30 minutes so far, and that's before the real scouring even begins.

Some graduation advice for young people: do not learn HTML. If you are going to learn how to write any kind of computer code, learn the hard stuff so people will have to defer to your expertise. If you only learn a little of some easy scripting language, you will be drafted into production tasks, no matter what kind of job you hold, or think you hold.

Dismay and Barthelme at Redwood City Honda

I took the car in this morning for an oil change. Still recovering from a cold, I decided I would tough out an hour in the customer waiting room, rather than walking several blocks down to Whole Foods and lumbering back with bags I can barely carry that far in the best of health.

Ah, but I had forgotten. The law dictates that any enclosed space shared by more than one member of the public must include a large, blaring, impossible-to-turn-off television. When I got there, President Obama was speaking about getting out of Iraq. So I at least had that moment of reassurance that, no, I didn't dream it; he is the President, and we maybe won't be in Iraq for thirty years after all. Then Charlie Gibson jumped in and cut off the rest of the speech (which was taped), summarizing briefly before turning it over to some blond woman who proclaimed the very idea of ever leaving Iraq total bullshit (She knew! She had talked to the troops!).

Then we were bounced back to Regularly Scheduled Programming, which was Regis and Kelly, only Regis was elsewhere so we had Anderson Cooper and Kelly. I had never seen this Kelly before; she is obviously insane. And wasn't Anderson Cooper supposed to be dignified or something? Well, forget about that! Anyway, first up was...

[Let me just point out here that I came prepared for the waiting room, or so I thought. I had brought Barthelme's Sixty Stories and was attempting to read "Paraguay," which is utterly brilliant; every story I read in this book--most of which I'm rereading--seems more brilliant than the last. Anyway, I did kind of read it, but this thing, this deranged televised festival of ding-dongery, kept intruding. BTW this is not going to be the post about Barthelme that I'm still planning. My point here is, once I realized my situation with the TV, I tried to put myself on the low-energy, just-get-through-it setting I use for plane rides and MRI machines. But I was overmatched. Of course, Barthelme's work is about various debased forms of language, like bad TV and instruction manuals and sanctimonious travel narratives, all slugging it out, so it was all kind of appropriate.]

...Tom Selleck! I kid you not. The man is alive, and doing some sort of "project" which is being filmed, and which he is getting paid to promote on Regis (Anderson) and Kelly. Kelly slobbered all over him about Magnum PI, and please, please, weren't they going to do a movie version of Magnum all these years after anyone has ceased to care, and Selleck said--well, I don't quite remember what he said, only that they might hire someone else to be Magnum because Selleck is now 100 years old. Kelly thought that was terrible, the possible hiring of someone else I mean. Then a chef came on and started frying bacon and dumping cream all over it. Then a guy in the waiting room got a call on his cell phone and stepped aside so as not to bother the rest of us--a full two steps away from the seating area--and hollered so loudly into his Bluetooth that he briefly drowned out the TV.

I tried listening to Beethoven on my MP3. Beethoven, Barthelme--I almost never pile the highbrow stuff quite so high, but this was my protest, except no one noticed or cared...

I'm happy but...monotheism is bad

I think I'm more stunned than anything about Obama's landslide. (Is it a landslide? What's the cutoff?) I'm shocked that there weren't more dirty tricks from the Repubs. I'm amazed that after everything BushCo did, we still have a functioning democracy. Our slide into a new Dark Age has ground to a halt.

Except:

1. What Aravosis said. I'm still mad as hell at the right in this country. I do not want to offer them a seat at the table. We did that before. Each one of their asses took up at least two seats. They made us say grace to their mean, nasty little god. They threw food and knives. They spilled blood, human and animal, on our tablecloth and claimed it was their own. They hollered with their mouths full and cranked up Rush Limbaugh while we were trying to talk. Then they left us their mess to clean up.

2. And they will scorch the earth in retreat. See: passage of Prop 8, in California. This is shameful. But already the good guys are fighting back (again from Aravosis).

So here's why monotheism is bad. When there's just one god, it's too easy to confuse yourself with him. (Isn't it amazing how God always wants what I want? What a great God!) Whereas, if there are many, you have to wonder--well, Dionysis seems to want x, but Appollo wants y. What are ya gonna do? Either you throw up your hands, or you have to choose a side and let them battle it out on Olympos. Sort of like representative democracy.

On gloom

I was getting ready to blog this morning about the end of Daylight Savings (I know it's "Saving," but I find that gross to say) Time--about how it seems to me like the end of the world--but then the power went out due to a storm. So here I am at a little after 5 p.m., the sky a pale green, darkness about to clang down all around us (not to mention sugar-crazed children and their minders out terrorizing the streets; thank god for our second-floor condo and security building). As a lifelong Californian, Trev does not understand my problem. It's true that here we have plenty of sun in winter, and much-needed rain, which causes spring to happen round about December, just when life is really starting to suck for the folks back in my place of origin. That would be Ohio. It's clear that my seasonal gloom is hard-wired into me from growing up there. Daylight Standard Time means Time to shrink. I feel my muscles contracting even now. Going anywhere is a project: you stuff your feet into boots which never, ever keep your feet warm, and wrap your neck in an itchy scarf which does not quite address the fact that your coat leaves a mysterious gap in coverage in the center of your chest, which the wind then finds and slugs with fists of ice. Don't get me started on hat hair. The fact that I don't have to deal with severe cold and snow anymore only engenders guilt and alienation, which causes me to focus more and more on the darkness, which none of us escapes. Dark at 5:00. That is madness.

However I would trade six months of a full-on Cleveland winter* for:
--Obama win
--Defeat of Proposition 8
*I offer this only if there are no alternatives; i.e. if these things weren't going to happen unless I personally volunteered to experience a full-on Cleveland winter for six months. In that case I'd do it for a year if I had to. But only if.**
**For an Obama landslide, I'm prepared to offer three months, with same conditions as above applying.***
***Lots of liberals, including me, think they are magic. That is, they think they personally can doom the election through any expression of optimism. Maybe we're narcissists, infants, just like everybody says; or maybe the fact that any human being could be so deluded as to vote for McCain/Palin or so cruel as to vote for Prop 8 is inexplicable by any form of rational thought, so we turn to magic.****
****We are not magic. But we have power.
Barack Obama for President.
No on 8.

UPDATE:
This cheered me up. Especially this part:

The I Forget How to Turn a Doorknob Effect This is expected to keep roughly one percent of Republican voters from leaving the house.