Category: musings

Veteran, Author – Kurt Vonnegut

“The nicest veterans in Schenectady, I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who’d really fought.” – Kurt Vonnegut

One of my favorite authors, Kurt Vonnegut, was born on Armistice Day in 1922. His experiences as a soldier and POW in World War II influenced much of his writing, especially his novel Slaughterhouse Five, published in 1969. Slaughterhouse Number 5, Dresden, was Vonnegut’s address after he was captured by German soldiers. As a prisoner of war, he was held in the basement of a slaughterhouse, which ironically ensured his survival during the firebombing of Dresden.

Slaughterhouse Five is a novel I feel the need to re-read every few years. I believe Vonnegut’s ability to use time travel and aliens to show his readers absurd truths about real wars showed true genius. I will never forget the image of a soldier trudging for hours through the snow in shoes that are tearing his feet apart.

Happy birthday, Kurt! I know in some version of reality, you can hop in your time machine and come to 2011 to read this blog post.

 

 

Adventures in Communication

My day job (and often evening job and weekend job) takes place in a public library. For a middle-sized Midwestern city, my town is home to a fair number of non-native English speakers, probably because we also have a fair number of colleges and universities. Many of these folks find their way to the library.

I have a lot of respect for someone who is willing to move to a new land, learn a new language and actually go out in public to communicate with strangers. I’m not sure I’d have the courage, myself. It’s a good exercise for me to speak with someone who is still learning English. I have to practice true listening and I relearn the lesson that sometimes communication takes effort.  But if I keep trying and the patron keeps trying, we almost always end up arriving at an understanding.

I’ve had enough experience with this by now, some things are easy. Somebody looking for ESL materials? I get that one right the first try almost every time. Somebody looking for something more particular? Well….

This morning, it was a gray-haired gentleman asking for books by, um – Chaser? Much known English writer. Okay, I understood that part of the explanation. From age ago. Alright – not contemporary, then. My mind was working – much known, wrote in English, ages ago – Chaser? Chaucer! Chaucer! Did he want books by Chaucer? No, not Chaucer – Chaser.  Okay, let’s keep working.  Does the gentlemen know any titles by this writer? Yes – Juries Seize Her. We’re not quite to charades yet, but almost. Author sounds like Chaser. Title sounds like Juries Seize Her. Aha!  Julius Caesar by Shakespeare!  He wanted to read Shakespeare!

See: patience, listening, persistence, successful communication! We did it!

R.I.P. William Sleator

Singular author William Sleator  has passed away.

As a teen I read and re-read and re-read certain books. One of those was “House of Stairs” by William Sleator. It’s a science fictionish tale of a group of teens who are subjects in a behavior modification experiment. This book, for me, encapsulates one the most fascinating aspects of science fiction/fantasy. It explores the  question of how people will behave in unusual, even unprecedented situations.

I think this is why I tend to prefer “soft” science fiction. For me, the draw is not technology, it’s people. I love Ursula K. LeGuin for her anthropological approach. Ray Bradbury is another favorite in this area. I know some people are dismissive of genre fiction as “not serious” or something, and William Sleator was double-labeled, because he was also considered a young adult author. But I’ve read widely and eclectically throughout my life, and in my opinion, if you want fiction that explores the human psyche, you could do worse than picking up a book by Sleator.

Hmm…maybe it’s time for another reading of “House of Stairs.” I haven’t visited it in years.

The Anxiety Dreams of Writers

Right now I have 21 pieces of work – 4 stories and 17 poems – out for consideration. I know responses tend not to come in the summertime, so I’m bracing myself for rejections piling up like autumn leaves in two to three months.  Last night, I dreamed they all came at once. Every single submission was rejected on the same day, but it was all in one form. Sort of like the common application for colleges, I suppose, except there weren’t even multiple copies. It was one sheet listing everything I’d sent out everywhere and next to each entry was a red rubber stamp with the word “REJECTED” in all caps.

I woke up and mused on the fact that my unconscious has not yet adapted to the reality of most rejections happening by email now.

 

 

Dear Maeve Binchy

Dear Maeve Binchy,

Upon reading the first couple of chapters of Minding Frankie, I feel compelled to stage a a dialogue intervention.

Americans do not “take posts.” We “get jobs.”

Also we do not “fancy” anyone. We might “like” someone, or “like like” someone, or one of us might be “in love with” someone, or be “hot for” someone. But we don’t send emails talking about “fancying” another person.

You’re great at the relationship between characters stuff, but  perhaps you should get some help for your American dialect problem.

That’s all for now.

Mother’s Day Thoughts

One of my most memorable events in mothering happened when my daughter was around four months old. It was one of those fall days where people whose internal thermostats run hot are still wearing shorts and t’s, while those who run cold are wrapped up in their woolens.  And I had errands to do, including one to the post office.

I dressed my baby in pants, long sleeves and an adorable little sun hat that she kept snatching from her head and I kept putting back on because she was bald and pale and needed protecting from the sun. I set out on my jaunt around town, ready to bask in the adoring looks directed at the most beautiful child in the world, who happened to be with me.

Here comes the part at the post office.  I parked, removed my daughter from her car seat, and turned around to find myself face-to-face with an older woman, all bundled up, who met me with a scold “That baby’s going to freeze on a day like this. You should have it in a blanket.” I muttered something about how she usually let me know if she was uncomfortable and made my way into the building.

Stamps bought, mail mailed, baby riding on my hip, I made my way back out of the building. Only to encounter a man who felt compelled to instruct me on the dangers of overdressing a baby on such a warm day.

Thanks for the message Universe. As a mother, anything and everything I do is open to criticism from everyone I encounter. Therefore, my best bet is to use my own judgment and develop a case of selective hearing loss.

It has been my observation that mothers in general receive a lot of criticism. But most of the ones I see are doing their best, despite the slings and arrows. Happy Mother’s Day to all of the mothers who are soldiering on: from the mom soothing her crying infant in the grocery store, to the mom struggling with how much and how best to support her grown child who lives 1,000 miles away.

That one passage in a novel

  

    I felt the starched walls
of a pink cotton penitentiary
closing in on me.

*********

Novels are long and have plots and story arcs and subplots and things. But sometimes one single sentence or passage from a novel will stick with me for years.

Sometimes it’s because the language is poetic. In To Kill a Mockingbird, when Scout Finch’s aunt comes to stay, she tries to turn Scout into a little lady. Scout explains her situation thus: “I felt the starched walls of a pink cotton penitentiary closing in on me.” As a lifelong tomboy, this sentence speaks to me loud and clear.

Other times I’ll remember a passage that made me think about the universe in a new way. At one point in my life, my favorite book was Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh. I’ll never forget the nanny, Old Golly, proclaiming “There are as many ways to live as there are people in the world.”

A few years later I discovered Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, a book that remains on my favorites list to this day. It not only shook up my thinking on gender, but also on political boundaries, when one of the characters asks a not-so-simple question:
“How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply?”

Finally, I have to admit I’m a sucker for scenes where a character quotes Shakespeare and pulls it off. I like this especially when it comes from an Average Joe type character, such Barnaby Gaitlin in Patchwork Planet by Ann Tyler. Barnaby goes through a bit of character development during the course of the story. Without giving spoilers for anyone who hasn’t read the book, there’s a scene where he recalls one poem he learned in school that he understood, a Shakespearean sonnet. He turns to another character, saying “Haply I think on thee.” You’d never predict the words coming from his mouth early in the book, but it so works by the time he says it.

Yeah, novels are long and there are big things in them: plots, story arcs and so on. But attention to detail is still important. Paying attention to getting the right words in the right order at the right place. It matters.

Poem of the Day, April 5

So far, I’m meeting my goal of writing a poem a day. Okay, I haven’t put any words down yet today, but they’re percolating. I’ll have them written before bed.

Here’s yesterday’s poem.  It’ll likely be rewritten a few times.

 

Geography by Disaster

Fukushima, Chernobyl
Geography learned by disaster
I look at an atlas
When people die
When buildings collapse
When leaders shoot their citizens
In the streets
When the fallout might land here

In tonight’s news I’d like to hear
About a place where today
Tulips bloomed
Fish swam in clean water
Families hiked
Women and men went to jobs
While children learned math
And have this continuation
Of life be amazement enough
To capture my attention

 

To Do Lists

I was sorting through some of my poems, and came across this one I wrote in 2006.

To Do Lists

To be done before vacation:
Catch up all laundry
Make sure the grass is cut
And the bills are paid
Clean out the van

Upon returning:
Write a novel
Land a book contract
Transform my chronically messy house
into an aesthetically inviting
gathering place for the group of very hip
writers of which I will be a central figure
But first:
Clean out the van
Do the laundry
Pay the bills
And mow the yard

**

I’m still working my way through the line items. But I can check mark “write a novel.” And I’m making efforts at some of the others. Some photo evidence from the past year:

 

I still have a distance to go, however. One step at a time.

 

People Do Still Read

Despite the predictions made ever since the advent of television, my observation is that people do still read books. I work in a library, so I’m in a position to see this. Our circulation numbers go up every year. Okay, part of those stats come from dvd check-outs. But our book circulation is going up, too.

One thing I’ve noticed is that movies don’t necessarily supplant books. It’s not an either/or question, whether to see the movie or read the book. A lot of people do both. With the recent release of the movie, True Grit, our library suddenly has a waiting list for the book. The same thing happened with Shutter Island. When Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, P1 showed up in theaters, we were left with a couple of nearly empty shelves in the “R” area of children’s fiction, as patrons were interested in all of the books in the series.

My anecdotal evidence suggests we are not living in a post-literate society and are not going to be any time soon.