Book Needed Stat!

I need the perfect book, yet it escapes me.

I’m currently reading Nabokov’s Pnin and The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake by Breece D’J Pancake. I bailed on Didion’s The White Album and Alexsandar Hemon’s Love & Obstacles. I don’t have the attention span at present.

Books I’ve loved recently:

1. The Green Girl by Kate Zambreno
2. Incendiary by Chris Cleave
3. a visit from the goon squad by Jennifer Egan
4. Living Arrangements by Laura Maylene Walter
5. The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Obrect
6. The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
7. The Empty Family by Colm Toibin
8. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

I’m now in a heavy editing phase and I’m having trouble with my reading material. I’ve always been of the school to read above what you write. So Nabokov sets the bar and perhaps by osmosis my writing will improve. What I’m finding is that instead of him improving my writing, he is destroying my ability to believe in my writing at all. He’s just too good.

I just looked at my shelves and nothing, as hard as that is for me to say, nothing is catching my interest. So many spines uncracked, and I just want a well-written story, but not a story whose lyricism holds an impossible reach.

Short list of the books unread that are on my shelves:

1. Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question
2. Robert Bolano’s 2666
3. Ha Jin’s A Free Life
4. Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin
5. Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book
6. Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

I’m certain all of these are fine books, but not one screams out to me. Normally all books scream out and are competing for my attention. Right now? Nada.

So, my friends, what I’m looking for are suggestions for a good book with a great story. I’m looking for something that isn’t brilliant lyricism (no Rushdie, no Nabokov) so I don’t feel like a moron when I sit down late at night. I’m looking for something that keeps your attention, but is more character than plot-driven. I’m looking for something that screams beauty, and is complicated enough to make me strive harder without destroying my confidence. Essentially, I’m searching for your favorite comfort books.

What are those books that you return to time and again because they mean something to you, even if you don’t know exactly what it is? Any and all suggestions welcome.

Talk a writer off a cliff, won’t you?

Damn Good Fake

Tonight I sat in a pool with less than a foot of water before an all out gun battle broke out. I had filled up thousands, hundreds, okay, less than fifty water balloons and had rubbed my trigger finger raw.

I didn’t know the error of my ways.

Shot with water guns to my left, to my right, my sunglasses the only thing between me and certain blindness, I ran from the field of play. Little did I know the man I married would venture unseen into the fray with the garden hose.

Casualties fell on the battlefield. Collateral damage, brutal and well, wet.

But, but! we realized our ace in the hole. We soaked his jeans down to the undies.  We were in suits, quick drying, fantasies of science. He was soaked to the skin and a hundred pounds heavier. The minions prevailed!

Tonight was to be a heavy writing night. Then spur of the moment we had to buy a refrigerator and a stove, twenty years being the apparent maximum of the abuse these items will put up with.

Our next door neighbors stopped by, so we stretched some food, added some beer and watched as the kids welcomed their new friend to the fray. We sat telling stories and I couldn’t believe my good fortune to have people who knew the beauty of a good story. Isn’t that all friendship takes? People who know when to listen and when to talk?

I lost all of my nearby friends after my last relationship went kaput, sides must be taken, and I was to all parties considered the one who didn’t give enough. Sometimes people just don’t want to know anything about you other than what they already do. Those are people who weren’t meant to be my friends to begin with because if anything, I’m a loyal if ever changing creature. I lead with my heart, hoping it’ll all work out in the end.

So I’m off to write now, less time then I thought I’d have, but I’ll never chose writing over a good real life story. I’ll choose friends every single time. Maybe I’m not a real writer.

But I’m a damn good fake.

Love.

Inside and Outside the Point

Summers coming and I’m ready for some changes.

The problem is that my changes are contradictory. My desk is piled with junk and I’m torn between throwing all of the notes and clippings and minutiae away creating a clean, spare space for my ideas or loading it up with beautiful boxes to store my treasures, knowing in a moments notice I have the key to a memory, a locker to hold my AWP badge, my unsharpened Knot & Bow pencils, a Midwest Brewers Fest stub that they kindly laminated knowing beer drinkers are readers in drag.

I read recently about how we have become a consumer culture feeding upon itself. Between InStyle, HGTV and pictures of Kate Hudson reclining on the side of a bus in a yellow maxi-dress courtesy of Ann Taylor, we spend more and more just to keep up to basic levels, the levels having risen out of pace with our cost of living increases, that is if we are lucky to still be employed at all.

I immediately wanted to pare down, minimize, proving that I was in fact the exception to the rule. I want the room that has no clutter, no junk mail to be gone through, no bills to be filed, no children’s artwork awaiting the “filing system” only to be used under the cover of darkness.

I know these people. They must feel such a sense of relief upon entering their home, to find a picture out of Simple Life magazine, everything in its place and nothing extra, on a foundation of white with colors that pop. (For those keeping score at home, add “popping” colors to my list of insane words, alongside “my brand” and “networking”.)

The issue at hand is that I don’t know what they actually do with their stuff. Who can exist in a world of white furniture? What do you do with all of the stuff that doesn’t match? How much disposable income to these people have?? All of this is inside and outside of the point, my general way as you know by now.

Tomorrow I shall get dressed in my fancy gear and set off to talk more about me while inside I’m wondering what is the best thing to do for myself, my family and my quality of life. I will be wondering if energy does yield energy and if by pushing myself to a professional edge, it may be the kick in the butt I need to stop coasting and put it all out there.

Maybe by doing so, it’ll be the focus I need to redirect my attention to my book. I tend to be one of those freaks who get more done the less time they have. I wonder if I am making a decision toward or away from the book.

I have some dressers I want to refinish, a Crafty Von Crafterson project that involves either birds or penguins or owls on a garland, a repainting of the foyer because I must have a quote scribbled on a big blank lofty wall as you walk in my front door. George Whitman’s is perfection. And hell, if I’m going to model my house after anyone, it’s much more Shakespeare & Company chaos than Martha Stewart anyway. None of these things costs money, just time and effort. Lots of time and effort.

I worked on the book a couple of hours last night, type, type, typpity, type, because I was tired of hearing myself talk about it. It’s amazing how much I accomplish when I shut my mouth and use my hands.

This is all to say that summer is coming, life is passing us by and it is time that  the collective we stepped up to the plate and grabbed the bull by the testicles. You know, show him who’s boss.

Write on, dear hearts. But go wash your hands first…

Summertime

Cold train cars

Sweaty commuters

Three changes of clothes,

Three seasons in a day.

The smell of dried urine

In downtown Chicago alcoves.

Families touring the city,

The regulars tripping over luggage on wheels

Cursing not under their breath.

Sore, sour feet stuffed and swollen in dress shoes.

Hustlers scamming for a dollar or five to open a cab door.

Teachers off with their kids, going to waterparks, camps, swim lessons.

The rest of us, business as usual, but not,

The envy turns to a metallic taste.

Hot train cars,

Too hot to sleep

Or read

Or breathe.

Tangible body odor a taste as much as a scent,

Too many people,

Crabby and overheated,

The toxic waste of the commute

Overperfumed old ladies talking too loudly on their new cell phones.

Summertime.

Groovy Frogs

We drove down south to go hiking this weekend a beautiful area named Starved Rock, full of limestone canyons and cliff outcroppings. Because we didn’t have a cold enough winter, you can see the levels of the rivers are low, too much bank not enough water.

I heard on the radio this happens because without the temperatures low enough for long enough the water doesn’t freeze and there is too much evaporation during winter. What this means to Starved Rock canyons is that there is a trickle of waterfall instead of a gush, the water drips over the sides of the limestone forming still, stagnant pools. The mating frogs have less room to get their groove on.

As we were driving there, I talked with my husband about how I could live in such a place where there is less population, less consumerism, where there is a small tavern filled with Harleys, all of the bikers out on a ninety degree sunny day in the country.

My husband and I are polar opposites, he an introvert and me, at least by comparison, an extrovert. I thought it odd that he stated without hesitation that there is no way he could live in the middle of nowhere, less because of the spaciousness between neighbors and more because of the people. His thoughts, coming from a man who grew up in a very small, homogenous hometown, followed that the people would be nice as pie making assumptions about us because of the way we look. Essentially, we look the part, caucasian, not too thin, not too fixy. We blend.

But he’s familiar with small town mentalities. He and I both grew up in them, but mine being in upstate New York was wildly liberal by comparison. If you knew how not liberal my hometown was, you’d appreciate his comment. He feels that we would be treated well until the truth of our beliefs came to the forefront, and then our lives would be very uncomfortable.

And you see, that’s the thing about a small town. Things can get uncomfortable very quickly when you just don’t fit. As much as I don’t believe in getting political on this blog, I’ll state a few facts. We believe in people. We believe in women’s rights. We believe that you should have the right to marry whomever you want, and do whatever floats your boat to borrow a southern expression of my mother’s.

We believe in freedom of religion provided you don’t put it on anyone else, and lest you think that is the athiest/agnostic viewpoint, I’ll even share the fact that one of us was raised actively in a church and finds great strength in their religion. The other is a dyed-in-the-wool athiest.

All of this got me to thinking. He told me that he could live in a small town provided it was a small town of artists, whether actively so, or just people who believe in art, in humanity, in being kind regardless of color, gender, sexuality or class. Essentially, we believe in being kind.

Where does that leave? I know some great towns in upstate New York, places near where I grew up, New Paltz or Woodstock, then there’s always Portland and Seattle. There are many places in California, but all that sun and happy weather would do me in.

But what happens when the liberals among us all gather in these places? Yes, there must be a joy in being surrounded by like-minded individuals, but doesn’t that take away the opportunity to effect the landscape in the rest of the world, and by landscape I mean perception.

At different times in my life, I have been in the position to change people’s views on things. It happens because I look a certain way and work a certain job, and I am not what people think. My life hasn’t been what people may assume based on my picket fence and 2.5 children. It was at those times that people may have changed their views, based on knowing me and been forced to deal with liking me and perhaps not liking my views.

If we all congregate where we’re accepted, is it taking the easy road, not one where we can make the biggest difference?

And it doesn’t just go that way, it flips to the other side as well. If I lived in a like-minded area, I wouldn’t have met some amazing people who differ on what I thought were nonnegotiables. How could I ever write, honestly write, which has nothing to do with publication, if I was to seclude myself amongst people who thought and believed just as I do?

So, we had a beautiful hike, and touched some frogs, and got our hearts pumping. And I thought about how odd it was that I could live in an area so unlike my beliefs and my dear man who would just as soon not talk to someone as talk, needs more people, more stimulation, more art, more culture.

Or maybe it’s just that I need canyons and cliffs and trees. Because at the heart of it, I’m just a mountain girl.

Growing up in the Catskills does it to you. Maybe it was in the water.

Wishy Washy

Editing.

Or rather not editing.

I have a book. A finished book. All I need to do is type it up, but here’s the hitch. The only time I can do that is at night after spending nine hours in front of two computers at work.

I enjoy writing in the morning and didn’t foresee having a problem typing it up at night. I overestimated myself.

So here’s the deal. My circumstances may change and by that I mean I may be leaving for work earlier and moving from two screens to five. I’d work at a coffee shop but they won’t hire me, so let’s rule out downsizing.

I know how to do one thing so let’s also take that as a given.

I get to work on the book, oh, right about now, the clock says it’s 10:00 p.m.

Am I not working on it because it just isn’t important enough to me, or is it because the most I can formulate is this, and this is certainly not bookish?

I read about people who get up at 4 a.m. to squeeze in their writing and all I know is that I can set the alarm but when it goes off that early, I will hit the snooze with no remorse and no recollection. Do I just not want it badly enough? Am I just not a born writer?

I don’t know if I’m procrastinating or if I am just spread too thin.

It’s silly that I’m asking all of you to tell me, but my gut is totally off lately.

I’ve always been someone who followed her gut, once I knew what it was and I always knew…eventually. But I’m in uncharted territory. I have a work thing going on and I don’t know what to do. I have no one to consult as my heart is right-brained and my job is left-brained. That means that my friends easily fall into two categories, the liberals and the conservatives.

The former know I should jump off the wheel, the latter think I’d be a fool to not jump at an opportunity.

Where does writing fall in? That’s my right brain with my left shouting out about the chances for success and don’t lose a minutes sleep, all in good time.

Do you ever think about what would happen if you got sick? Would you be happy with where your life is? Would your decisions be different?

I’ve been thinking about this lately (no worries, it’s just the way my brain works) about those answers. I think of those who have been taken too soon, and it gives me pause as to myself and my decisions.

I keep waiting for a sign, a signal. I believe in them wholeheartedly and can tell you this week has been full of them. And every single one contradicts every other one.

So yeah, I wish this made more sense, but alas, tonight this is where I’m at.

May your writing be progressing in leaps in bounds. As for me, I’m going to go watch some junk television and try to get my head on straight. Some of these shows make me look downright together.

Flower Girl

I got a cape!

A cape!

Not just any old cape, but a ginormous turquoise on one side, silver on the other sheath of satin that velcros around my neck. A giant purple flower is emblazoned on the turquoise side. I am Flower Girl.

You may be wondering if these are my favorite colors. Nope. These are the minions favorite colors. They picked it.

And it came with…wait for it…a mask. A purple, satin cat-eyed mask.

Oh yes.

I’ll leave you with one image from Mother’s Day 2012, otherwise known as The Day Mommy Got Revenge.

Armed with Socker Boppers, I flew out of the back screen door into the yard to take on the minions, they themselves armed with Socker Boppers and Hulk Hands.

My cape flew in the wind as I spied them through my soon-to-be legendary mask. I crushed them. I pummeled them sending first one, then the other from under the shade of the tree out into the sun-laden grass otherwise known as lava.

My new neighbors sat quietly with friends and family in lawn chairs under their own tree trying hard not to look. The jealousy must have been too great. The power I beheld, the sheer awesomeness, yes, they looked away shielding their eyes as my sons screeched in horror as I thrust them one, two, too many times from the safety of the shade into the fiery lava pits then ran in circles around them in my cape of awesome and accessorizing mask.

Flower Girl Rules.

Happy Mother’s Day.

Crack in the Universe

I’m reading Incendiary by Chris Cleave. Within a page, I was pulled in and even as I wonder where the book is taking me, I know I’m in good hands.

And that is it. Despite the type of novel I read, I need to know that I am in good hands. Much like with dear friends, I invest when I’m reading. I pay attention. I may not remember the details, but I remember how you felt when you told me a story, and I know how the character would act or not act depending on a given situation.

It’s rare that a friend does something and I think, “Well, that’s surprising.” We’re rather predictable characters, the human race. A list of events happen and we are drawn to a conclusion, good, bad or indifferent. If that pull isn’t there, the story isn’t worth reading. It goes off the rails. The emotional integrity is lost.

Emotional truth.

Today as I sat on the train in a loud car (as opposed to the “Quiet” cars, the closest thing I’ve seen to a police state), two women got into an argument. The same people sit in the same car and as these two got into it, the first, an older woman with short blonde hair, smug and defiant, made a remark to the two sitting behind her. She and her friend have sat behind me in the past, and I think her comment was to the woman behind, to keep it down. It surprised me as she and her friend are loud in their own personal talk. I know as I’ve given up sleep on numerous occasions and been forced to listen to their sagas, overdramatic and full of self-congratulations.

She made a comment, and the woman behind her, another loud woman but of the hispanic variety, loud and brassy, peppered her commentary with token neck shakes and hand gestures, getting louder and louder as she went, putting on a show for the other passengers, a display of  “I will not be fucked with”. She and her friend, the hispanic woman I mean to say, gave each other looks and after the woman in front backed down, not without a smirk to save her dignity, she spent the rest of the ride being even louder to prove she could.

Predictable and without the least bit of emotional truth. The woman in the front was snide and condescending, the woman behind was a bully and out to prove a point. Essentially they were both idiots and putting on a show in a world where reality shows are the benchmark for behavior.

I wonder when I see two grown women going at it, not a bit of truth between them, what hope there is for quiet truth. I wonder which of them updated their status on Facebook to remark upon the idiot on the train. Maybe they both did.

I read my book, swept up in Chris Cleave’s ability to take a premise I wouldn’t have read had I known (similar to my feelings for Little Bee) and weave it into something so real and true that as I sat watching real life, I wondered if there wasn’t a crack in the universe.

Truth would now be found in books, and the mess coming out of people’s mouths was no longer to be more than a virtual chest-puffing-out charade.

Cleave does first person so remarkably, I read and felt like I was taking a class on writing and relieved to be among something real, something true in the realm of such utter bullshit. I expect my children to behave better those two adult women.

Lately I’ve begun to suspect that polite discourse is a quaint thing of the past, no more useful than a chamber pot. I teach my kids to say please and thank you, eat with their mouths closed and their elbows off the table. I tell them that sometimes you don’t know what someone has going on, so it’s better to be kind than to meet anger with anger. I wonder if I’m leaving them unprepared in such a senseless world where short tempers are bragged about and bullies are found in business left and right and sometimes the only way to survive is to squash them.

But that flattens the spark that makes you human, and makes you a character on a train, one that puts on a show for the others under the guise of defending yourself.

I don’t want my kids to have flattened sparks.

Lacking role models in this internet/reality tv age, I want them to have the emotional truth of a character in a novel instead.

That’s what I decided when I was not sleeping and reading a really good book while bouncing along a train track for an hour this evening.

Passion, Talent and Phyllis Theroux

The place where your passion meets your talent is where you will excel.

I believe that.

My passion is in writing, reading, my kids, my husband, my family, my friends.

My talent lies in numbers, in business, in being tough, in being ethical.

My passion and my talent do not intersect.

The further my talent takes me, the farther away from my passion I travel.

I am a niche.

When I was in school, I excelled in math, a subject for which I hold no passion. My dad is a retired shop teacher and before that a mechanic in the Air Force. I get my abstract reasoning from him. I can look at a picture on a wall and tell you it is off-center by an eighth of an inch. Ask my husband. This visual quirk of mine is the bane of his existence.

I’ve been working with my hands as long as I can remember, sawing wood, changing the oil, building things. I built a deck from my own blueprints, with my own hands figuring it out as I went. I just get it in the way that one does when things make sense.

One of my shop classes in high school was an architecture elective and the last time my dad was there, my blueprint was still hanging on the wall. I am precise. I am stubborn. Numbers make sense.

The other day driving in the car, my husband and I had a conversation about where we were in our careers and what we could do to change the trajectory. The answer is nothing. We don’t have money to put one or the other back through school and lose an income. We can’t afford to have me not work, so I can raise our kids and focus on my book.

So instead, I have to find a way to continue to grow, continue to learn even if it’s something for which I hold no passion. Such a strange world.

I always thought I be in some kind of service field, a social worker, a teacher, a psychologist. Yet I’m not. I don’t even have time to volunteer barring a one day session at one of my kid’s classes.

But I think life is bigger than the job, the house, the mortgage and watching the kids grow up in my absence while I’m commuting on the train.

I just finished reading The Journal Keeper by Phyllis Theroux. It fell in to my hands at such a perfect transitional time for me to be open to all of the spaces within her book.

Let me explain.

Her book is divided into small segments, thoughts that occur to her as she goes about living her life which involves reading, writing, and the small and large dramas of a small town along with falling in and out of love at sixty-something years of age. It is beautifully written, and the thing that struck me throughout is how humble she is, casting her sharp eye inward as well as outward, questioning her own motives for decisions she has made, and ways in which she would like to improve as a human being.

It struck a chord with me throughout as at least once a page-flip, I’d find myself rereading a seemingly simple comment to touch the deeper truth as she sees it. She sees her faults and contemplates them and in so doing, made me question my own as well as the path I’m on.

Now if only I knew what to do. I’m not sad, merely contemplative on where I want the second half of my life to go or at least where I should be directing myself tomorrow.

Near the end of the book, this quote struck me and I’d like to share it. I hope she won’t mind, but after reading her, I think she’d be okay with it.

“This morning, searching for an inspired bit of material to launch these pages, I opened Henry Miller’s On Writing. There is was:

The creative individual (in wrestling with his medium) is supposed to experience a joy which balances, if it does not outweigh, the pain and anguish which accompany the struggle to express himself. He lives his work, we say. But this unique kind of life varies extremely with the individual. It is only in the measure that he is aware of more life, the life abundant, that he may be said to live in his work. If there is no realization, there is no purpose or advantage in substituting the imaginative life for the purely adventurous one of reality. Everyone who lifts himself above the activities of the daily round does so not only in the hope of enlarging his field of experience, or even of enriching it, but of quickening it.

That in Miller’s beautifully strung-together words, is what we’re after-the joy of quickening the dead, of bringing something inert to life. Once you’ve experienced it, you want it again.”

From the quotes she picks to her commentary on them, this book was a much-needed perspective, a cool breeze cutting through an overcast day.

Thank you, Ms. Theroux.

Cupcakes and Superheroes

I write but I also do this.

And because we like to have birthdays together in our house, two weeks later I do this.

We believe in big. Why make cupcakes when you can make Supercupcake?

Worthy of Captain America, no?

One must be intense when they’re saving the neighborhood.

This was my son’s birthday gift from his aunt. She didn’t ask, just sent it wondering if he had gotten too old. He wore it from the moment he opened it until he went to bed. Then he woke up and the first question was, “Can I wear my suit?”

I haven’t been able to write in a couple of weeks. My parental units were visiting. I spent two nights after work shopping for work clothes which made me miss dinner and get home just in time to tuck in my kids.

I know many men who do this. They go to work and stop by the gym before they go home for dinner. Truly, I don’t know how they do it. I felt like a part of me was missing, and it was. The mom part was pushed to the side for the part that has to pay the bills and is constantly judging the now of the family versus the future of the family.

Right now I’m looking to the future of my family and what is best for them of the options I have. I don’t have the option to stay home with them and if you do, cherish it.

Because I would give it all away, just to spend more time with these tough guys.

I don’t know how long they sat there, but they staged this themselves so that when my husband and I pulled up from another shopping trip, this was our greeting. Did someone say, “Badass”?

Wait a minute. What did they do with Grandma?