Finally, finally, all things Italy are done.  The planning, the packing, the photos, the writing.  And when you’ve spent the time that I have getting ready for a trip like this, there’s a kind of void after it’s over.  A huge void.  Kind of like the Grand Canyon.

I just might be…

…and I’m not quite certain…

…but thinking perhaps that…

I’m bored.

Wait.

I’m never bored.

Ever.

I’m not quite sure what to do about this feeling.

And even more strange?

Because I’ve been up to my ears with all things flickr, Photoshop, iPhoto, and Blurb,  I’m not in the mood to sit here, either.  It’s Friday and the whole weekend is yawning ahead.  It is Friday, isn’t it?

I thought so.

I’ve got three cookbooks opened to some very nice brioche recipes all requiring overnight refrigeration, (I can’t decide if I want plain or chocolate…) and I’m wondering whether the MoH would like to go down to the water tonight to sit and stare at the horizon with a bit of food and something nice to drink.  Or maybe go see Mama Mia…

But there are other things to consider as well:

• Like how to get my doggo to stop her incessant scratching and my cat’s interminable yeowling. The fleas are beyond nasty this year, and although I’ve sprayed, and vacuumed, and washed, brushed, combed and yes, finally broke down and bought some Frontline (disgusting poison…), it doesn’t seem to have put a dent in them.  I.  Hate.  Fleas.  Which is why I hate carpeting.  And whomever conducted that study that reported simple vacuuming daily will eliminate up to 99% of the fleas because it destroys their shells?  What-ever, dood.  Sounds good, but no cigar.  Well, not around here, anyway.  My cat is the world’s greatest fleabus.  It doesn’t make sense to me.  We have almost NO dirt anywhere.  There are flagstones, and concrete, a few flowerbeds that are predominantly damp, a patch of damp grass…WHAT GIVES?
• I need a new book. I loved Such a Pretty Fat by Jen Lancaster (laughed my ass off…well…not quite since my scale still insists upon telling me the gawd awful truth).  It lambastes Jenny Craig and the whole concept of a weight-loss plan that includes packaged food AND has the greatest kiss-off line I’ve heard in a long time.  Click the link and watch the video.   I also just finished The Patron Saint of Liars by Ann Pachett, one of my favorite authors.  It was her first novel, and I’m letting it stew a bit before I say what I need to say about it.  But her books have that effect on me.  And since I’m on a “thinking about writing seriously” kick (again) and still have 8 gazillion books here I haven’t read that can inspire me from one perspective or another and keep me from actually doing my own writing, Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is next up.  It looks to prove that when you want to write a book, you can write whatever you want, and sometimes, people notice.  Yes, even people like myself, who notice, then let it sit on their bookshelf for, oh, about five or six years.
• I need to sign up for a photography class and a writing class (you know, because sometimes, homework is a good thing…) through one of the university extensions here.  I seem to have recovered from my post traumatic distress syndrome over all things “school,” and both of these classes will occupy my time, feed my creativity, and give me yet another excuse to not actually start my own real writing. Okay, so writing somewhere other than this blog.
• I have to make a fix-it list for this house. I know I used to joke quite a bit about it, but jeez.  I’m tired of putting money into having the carpet cleaned and want to rip it out of the house and heave it out the windows.  I need a painter to even out the walls where boys incapable of standing up without hanging onto the walls have left smudges that can no longer be wiped.  And the fence on the patio needs replacing (along with the neighbor it shields us from), along with the drip sprayers and lights.  Then there are the screens the cats wrecked (and the one I totaled while we were trying to break into our house last night after swimming because we were locked out….) because the extra key wasn’t in it’s normal place… and…yes, things need to be fixed.  I checked.  There is a Handyman section in the Yellow Pages.  My fingers will be walking.  Soon.  They will be walking miles.
• And last but not least, try not to feel so wistful about this blog. It’s sort of crawling along while my food blog is roaring.  Okay, so, not like the Internet Market type roar, but everything’s relative, yes?  As much as I enjoy both of them, this one is special because it’s just about whatever comes to mind.  It’s me.  And sure, so is the other one, but it’s about my food, which isn’t necessarily me, even though they say, “You are what you eat.”  Um, thank-you.  Next?  But the crickets have been chirping loudly here lately, and I’m trying to adjust to the idea that it’s okay and that I didn’t set out to write here to do anything other than expend energy and get back into the habit of writing.  From that perspective, it’s all been worth it.  One step leads to another, right?

Right.

So shut up and write.

On to the brioche…

Finally.  A new, peaceful theme.

I wasn’t truly loving the orange in my last digs, but something odd has happened as a result of that recent having to live with it for as long as I did and survive.  When I’m out and about, all things orange catch my eye.  And I have been doing a bit of shopping since our vacation is looming…

…in twelve days.

So why am I messing around with my blog theme, you ask?

I’ve been wondering that myself all afternoon.  Actually for quite a few days now.

I have this tendency to procrastinate when I least should.  Like there’s actually a good time to procrastinate?  Obviously, it’s some misguided passive aggressive behavior my subconscious has manufactured to lull me out of my humdrum existence.

Sounds good, right?

But back to the shopping and the orange.  I’d notice a sporty Carmen Ghia in a parking lot, patterns on furniture featuring a light rust.  Or cute cotton tees of a rich cantaloupe. And bright orange patent leather sandals.  I knew I had a fetish for red shoes, but orange?   Mmmmm….cute little summer sandals with little clicky heels.  Straps.  A smart bow.

Like I said, orange.  Did I actually buy them?  Sadly, no.  And that’s too bad, because they looked like a seriously good time waiting to happen.  I would not expect to have a good time walking about in Italy wearing them.  It’s so not worth the pain and scars.  Okay, so maybe sometimes it is, but not this time.  Does it count, however, that I now own an orange Mario Batalli lasagna pan?  And two — not one, but two orange tee-shirts?

When I was little, each time that I received a brand new box of Crayola crayons, first I’d inhale their waxy fragrance, then notice that two of those crayons fit right in in my “ugly color” category.  Purple.  And orange.

Who knew that I’d end up thinking about orange? Actually liking it.  And purple?  Hell will freeze over before I even think about liking purple.

So which came first?  My orange blog theme, or the fashion industry cajoling me to think about all things ORANGE?  If I learned anything from Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada, it would be that.

Who cares.  What does matter is that I also noticed I wasn’t keeping up with my writing here, and when that happens, I sort of begin to wilt a bit.  Sure, I’m spending more and more time in foodland, and…well

How could I get away with writing something as stoopid as this in foodland?

Nobody likes orange.

Do they?

Last night, I couldn’t sleep for some reason, so I found myself as I have so many times in the past sitting here, staring at my Mac. Midnight is most likely not a great time to open Firefox Firebug for the very first time (thanks very much Scott!) oohing and aahing over the newness of it all.

But I had just finished going through the comments pages on my dashboard , reliving the evolution of my patch of space in Bloggsville and remembering just how things have come to pass. For those of you who are number starved, and whom I promise to continue to try and understand, I’ve included some stats. Hold on to yourself, please.

 (more…)

The anniversary of my first year as a bonafide blogger is approaching. You might think, “So what,” at first notice, but there is so much more that I’m mulling over.

My blogroll is one of them. Although it’s changed depending on the mood I’ve been in, or what mattered on a given day, it’s remained remarkably the same since I began a year ago on March 15th.

The Ides of March?

 (more…)

November 10, 2007

Dear NaBloPoMo,

My tongue’s not quite hanging to the ground yet with daily blogging, because I’ve missed very few days since I began last March. I do have the ability to write my way around any situation while standing on my head and singing Yankee Doodle. Or something like that. But I have a tendency to not write both days in the weekend because my house really does need to be cleaned occasionally.

The other reason I may not write on the weekend is because of my food blog. It takes some time, and I enjoy spending time there with other foodies. And I fear that I neglect that world far too much compared to this one. And foodies are such a lovely bunch of people. I truly enjoy them.

So today, I’m deferring to said foodie haven & Veracity: Grilled Steak" target="_blank">Sass & Veracity for today’s qualifying post. Even though this actually counts as a post.

Besides, my post there is for a very worthy cause.

And thanks to Mike at Port 16 for the idea.

Have a lovely Saturday!

Me.

ambivalent (adj.) having mixed feelings or contradictory ideas about something or someone…

Yesterday late in the afternoon, I received an email referencing this piece. I’ve read it several times since, and caught myself mulling over aspects of it.

Politeness. Authority. Acculturation and silence.

Self-negation.

But Verlyn Klinkenborg’s piece is about writing, isn’t it? He acknowledges that when “you talk about writing…you always end up talking about life.”

I know. I see what he sees as he observes and writes. The students, the classroom. The quiet. It’s what gets in the way most often when you’re teaching someone to write and they’re struggling, not understanding that aspect of it all, thinking that it fits neatly into a formula with five double-spaced paragraphs in 12-point helvetica. It’s easier to think of those very concrete things. More safe. There isn’t a commitment, really. Is there?

Writing comes from life. Everything we’ve said or thought or done is a path from which words come in whichever voice we choose: one of passivity and compliance, or cold detachment.

Abject humor.

Writing is not linear. It’s messy. There are no clear cut rules even though most of us had rules thrown at us about what we should or shouldn’t do as writers. We were asked to complete lifeless narratives or produce dull regurgitations of information on gross national product and chief exports — if we were asked to write at all. We received letter grades for our efforts, in pen at the top of the paper where everyone could see it, and when you turned the paper over, could feel the embossment, and think about the teacher putting it there.

It’s safe to expect students to write about those things. Nothing personal will arise. There will be no worries about whether one piece on “Where You Went On Your Summer Vacation” will differ from the next. You don’t have to have confidence in anything like that because you just write it.

Unless you didn’t go anywhere on your summer vacation.

Or lacked the confidence to realize that it didn’t mean your summer vacation was insignificant compared to that of others. That lying in golden, waist high grass to watch clouds drift, or listening to pebbles clack hollowly against one other in a ditch as the water from lawn sprinklers carries them along may not be considered worthy of being written about.

That the teacher might look at your paper and think, “I knew there was something not quite right about this girl…Who must her parents be?”

We’re pigeon holed almost from the beginning to behave and think and act in particular ways. To speak in a specific fashion. To dress ourselves just so. To do and to be what others expect.

First at home, and then at school. Especially when others are watching.

There could be a high correlation between the seeming lack of confidence exhibited by students repressed by societal norms and the degree to which they let loose, get rowdy, and party hearty when they’re not being watched.

Or being controlled.

Eventually, they escape if they really want to.

Klinkenborg concludes by stating that when “a young woman suddenly [understands] the power of her perceptions, ready to look at the world unapologetically — I realize how much has been lost because of the culture of polite, self-negating silence in which they were raised.”

Lost as writers, or lost as humans with life to experience?

I’m still ambivalent…

I have been doing a fairly good job of reading books that have some degree of literary merit. It’s funny though, because I don’t find myself discussing them with anyone. The only gauge I have about whether what I’m reading has left an impact is that I find myself mentioning aspects of the books to the MoH. He’s just a sounding board, though, because he doesn’t read. Well, he reads numbers. Mmmm….numbers.

I can’t imagine not reading. Not being interested in reading. Not wanting to read. Being able to live one’s life each day without knowing that when it’s late, and it’s time for bed, there’s a book just waiting to be opened. If anything can take my mind off of my own pettiness and worth in this world, it’s a book.

The biggest difference between the books I read that I describe as having literary merit, is that I might be able to actually discuss them. You know, while standing in the line at the grocery store, or with the guy who comes around to check on the landscaping in the complex. “So, how do you feel about the dry wit of the storyteller in Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress and its juxtapositioning with the “re-education of the “young intellectuals” in China by Chairman Mao?” I could ask of one of those innocent victims.

If I actually did bring up something I’ve read (and no, not at the grocery store), the mention would only go so far as to sound as if I’m in the know with regard to said book. The next person would launch into her query,” Yes, but have you read…,” or perhaps, “I’m reading….” and there wouldn’t really be a discussion about any of the books mentioned. Or should I say titles mentioned. The idea of starting a bookgroup has come up, but that’s all. We do a lot of that.

So reading is yet another semi-private part of who I am. Who I am, not what I do. When I read books of a finer quality, it is the writing that fascinates me more than the story. I don’t know that the story would intrigue me without the writing. It seems ridiculous to separate the two, because how could one exist without the other? A good example would be to consider a less than literary book — one that is packed full or intrigue, or tear-jerking drama. Evocative desires and feckless females. Men with big pectorals. When I read books like this, it is the steamy sex and diabolical schemes of the evil antagonist story that keeps my attention, and I race through them. Although many are enjoyable — especially when I just don’t feel like doing the laundry, weeding the planters on the patio, or cooking dinner reading about the pain of all human suffering — I have difficulty remembering most of them for any length of time after I’m finished with them. And it’s not because my memory is going to crap. They all blend together. I remember the author’s name most of the time, but rarely the title. Yes, some of the writers are better than others with the best being those whose dialogue, or characters don’t interfere with racing through to the finish. But many aren’t. It must not matter, because they certainly can sell books. And they probably make quite a bit more money than most of those who publish “literature.”

Lately, I’ve been pressing ahead with choosing books for their writers first, and the story second. This has slowed my reading down quite a bit, but it has also kept me engrossed in the craft of writing. That has been very worthwhile.

For example:

“When they write my obituary. Tomorrow. Or the next day. It will say, LEO GURSKY IS SURVIVED BY AN APARTMENT FULL OF SHIT.”

 — From The History of Love by Nicole Krauss

How could I not want to read this book? The character and everything that I came to know about him is completely wrapped up in that very first passage. The voice chosen. The phrasing. The language. How does Krauss switch from Leo’s perspective, to that of fourteen-year-old Alma, the daughter of a woman who writes translations of books, and who is lonely after the death of her husband. Alma’s “chapters” not only sound different than those of Leo, they look very different.

25. MY BROTHER, THE MESSIAH

That night while I was reading, Bird came into my room and climbed into bed with me. At eleven and a half, he was small for his age. He pressed his little cold feet into my leg. “Tell me something about Dad, ” he whispered. “You forgot to cut your toenails,” I said. He kneaded the balls of his feet into my calf. “Please?” he begged. I tried to think, and because I couldn’t remember anything I hadn’t already told him a hundred times, I made up something.”

This is a book that I will pick up, turn to a page and reread a passage just for the way it sounds. The writing makes the story, a remarkable one, unlike anything I’ve read. The History of Love will not be a book that is forgotten, and I want to read more of Krauss.

I’ve been on an interesting train of reading translations or about translators. It hasn’t been by design, but it certainly adds to the thinking I do about what I read. A few months ago, I finally read the Carol Brown Janeway translation of Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader. I’ve had the book for at least five years, successfully moving past it on my shelf each time I searched for something new to read. No wonder. I wouldn’t have been able to contain my emotions had I read it earlier. I had trouble as it was.

Sometimes when the beauty of a phrase or the uniqueness of an idea expressed stands out, I turn down the page. I know. You hate that. They’re my books, I paid for them, and they’re trade paperbacks, not hardbacks, and certainly not first editions. Someday they’ll end up in a used bookstore, someone else will notice the creases in the lower corners and wonder what it was about that page that caught another reader’s eye. So yes, I turn down the page. Or in this case, turn up the corner. It would be a bit strange if i whipped out my yellow highlighter, don’t you think?

Fourteen of the 218 pages are turned down in The Reader. Going back to read some of the passages overwhelms me and I want to read each one again, and more. How does a translator capture the essence of a writer’s words, his characters, their thoughts? It makes me want to be able to read in another language to see for myself instead of wondering about it.

“But there was so much energy in me, such belief that one day I’d be handsome and clever and superior and admired, such anticipation when I met new people and new situations. Is that what makes me sad? The eagerness and belief that filled me then and exacted a pledge from life that life could never fulfill? Sometimes I see the same eagerness and belief in the faces of children and teenagers and the sight brings back the same sadness I fell in remembering myself. Is this what sadness is all about? Is it what comes over us when beautiful memories shatter in hindsight because the remembered happiness fed not just on actual circumstances but on a promise that was not kept?”

 — Michael of The Reader by Bernhard Schlink

And where do authors get their ideas? I know I have captured an interesting few myself over the years, but they’re just sitting in a notebook. Waiting. In The Ice Queen, by Alice Hoffman, the book I’m currently reading, a woman is stuck by lightning, causing her life to take a different course than one might expect it to after such an event.

“You’re always so negative,” my grandmother said.

“You got all the positive genes.” Amazing, considering her condition, considering the condition of the world.

Toward the end of her illness, even my grandmother had to face sorow. She cried in her sleep. I couldn’t stand to hear her suffering. I left the cat I’d adopted to keep watch over her, curled up on the hospital bed I’d rented, and I went to stand outside, where I could breathe in the brackish air. It was spring and there was pine pollen everywhere; things had turned a sulfury yellow. That night I wished that my whole life had been different and that i could start all over again, in Paris, or London, in Italy, even across the river in New York City, where I’d gone to school. I was still young. I wished I could shed my skin, walk away, never look back. But starting a new life was not my expertise. Death was my talent; before I could stop myself, I wished my grandmother’s pain would end. I wished that this world would no longer have a hold on her.

She died that night while I was sleeping on the couch.”

The woman has a knack for her wishes coming true, and it is with a sense of being no one, and having no life, that she tells her story. What makes a writer think of telling a story about someone being struck by lightning? Of telling a story that puts the reader so perfectly inside the head of a seemingly dreary woman, but doesn’t give her a name. Does she not have a name because of her existence? I’ve looked back through the pages I’ve read, and I still can’t find her name. It’s strange, but intriguing, and I need to know what will happen to her. To find out what sense she’ll make of herself and others in her life — several of whom have also been struck by lightning. Hoffman’s writing is almost stream of consciousness at times. Raw and private, evoking surprising emotion as I read. And hope.

In another day or so, I’ll start A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, a novel by Marina Lewycka. Of course, the title caught my attention, but so did the summary. It’s about two sisters who put aside their differences to save their father from a “voluptuous gold digger from the Ukraine.” It sounds hilarious, and better be, as I’ll be needing a break from the seriousness of what I’ve been reading.

Okay, so I did read Goodbye, Jimmy Choo before The Ice Queen, but I can’t just read earth-shatteringly serious books one after the other. They make my head and heart heavy. But now that I think of it, Goodbye, Jimmy Choos — was built around the idea of taking things for granted and how seriously lives can change after an unexpected event occurs. Sometimes, covers can be deceiving.

I did break down and buy a Nora Roberts novel at Target a couple of days ago, though. It seems ages since I’ve languished in one of her books, but it’s only been less than a year. Ahhh…it has bathtub and wine or staying up half the night with the light on while the MoH is trying to sleep written all over it. I can’t wait. I’ve read about 20 or 25 of her G.P. Putnam and Jove titles and am amazed at how she just churns them out. Think what you want. Look down your nose, say that what she writes is “easier” or takes less thought than someone who is recognized with the Pulitzer, the Booker, or the National Book Award. What it takes is discipline — something I seem to lack these days.

But I have to wait to read my new Nora Roberts. I have to read Fat Girl first. It’s a true story (something I rarely read) by Judith Moore, who struggled with food issues her entire life. And I say “have” because it’s sort of like taking 3200 mg. of calcium each day.

It’ll make my bones stronger.

Because I have something to write about that could be “brilliant and angry and unsettling,” too.

I just don’t know how to begin.

(And just in case you’ve been paying attention, all but two of the books I’ve mentioned are new books, purchased AFTER I said I had to read all of the books I own before I purchase another…So many books, so little time…)