Last night I went with my daughter to see “The Secret World of Arrietty,“ a Studio Ghibly film based on “The Borrowers“ by Mary Norton. I adored these books when I was a kid. After seeing the movie, I remember why they were so captivating. Who doesn’t want to dream about little tiny people who genuinely could use the dollhouse furnishings? It made so much sense to me. Of course that’s where the stray buttons and spools of thread went when we couldn’t find them. They were borrowed by the little people. And yet, wouldn’t it be a life of adventure, too? All this needing to hide from the big people, encountering insects nearly your size and the borrowing itself, which requires a borrower to combine the hardiness of a mountaineer with the cunning of a spy.
I remember spending hours trying to create my own little borrower homes with items from around the house. Um, sorry Mom, that is where the missing buttons and thread spools went. I bent paper clips and stuck them through an upended cardboard bank check box to try to simulate a closet. It didn’t look great, but I give myself and A for effort.
It was a true joy watching this movie as an adult. As with all Studio Ghibli productions, the animation was outstanding. If ever a movie called for attention to detail, it’s this one. The fields of wild flowers, in particular, caught my eye. I could pick out individual types of flowers – black-eyed susans and bachelor’s buttons.
Though differing from the book in some regards, the movie was faithful to the basic story and the spirit of the original. My only quibble is with the character of the borrower named Homily, who is Arrietty’s mother. I thought the movie made her too panicky and fretful. If I remember correctly (and I do, because I looked it up), in the book it was Homily who sent Arrietty out borrowing. She wasn’t a mom who stayed home and fainted over things.
Still, I love that the movie, like the books, doesn’t go for the cheap, easy, saccharine ending. It keeps the complexities of the relationships between borrowers and human beans.
My recommendation: see the movie and read the books. I’m going to re-read them myself.
I don’t read genre romances. I’m not knocking them; only saying they’re not my thing. But I am a sucker for a love story, happy or tragic or confused, as long as it’s well done. Sometimes the relationship is the story, and sometimes it’s only part of the bigger picture. Off the top of my head, here’s a list of books with my favorite romances. These are in no particular order.
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. This is a tale of two magicians, a girl and boy, bound into a rivalry as children. The venue of their lifelong duel is a magical, mysterious circus.
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Oh Gatsby – you let Daisy consume you too much.
The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith. This series has two relationships I adore. Precious Ramotswe and JLB Matakoni is the first. Grace Makutsi and Phuti Radiphuti. They’re so real and sweet and awkward.
Second Nature by Alice Hoffman. Nearly feral love with a semi-werewolf.
Emma by Jane Austen. The intrepid match-maker who can’t see her own life clearly. For those who have never read Jane Austen and think she’s stuffy, you couldn’t be more wrong. This book is downright funny. Also touching.
Patchwork Planet by Anne Tyler. Flawed and wonderful characters who stumble through wrong relationships on their way to each other.
One day my son, who was around seven at the time, came into the kitchen where I was working. I’ve never heard more sincere effusiveness in a voice than when he expressed his excitement over what I was preparing for dinner. “That’s my favorite recipe out of everything you make!” he told me. I was opening cans of soup.
And he’s not the only youngster I’ve impressed with my cuisine. A friend of his spent the afternoon with us once and went home to tell his parents about what I had served for a snack. “She makes the best waffles!” he told them. “You cook them right in the toaster.” The kid’s mom is a friend of mine, so we were able to laugh when she related this to me later.
I’ve never been…enthusiastic, shall we say…about cooking. For me, it’s much more about the end result than the process. Frankly, I’d rather be writing. Which is why I don’t impress the adults quite so much.
The list of my culinary failures is long. When I was a young newlywed, my extremely large extended family held a reunion. One of my aunts put herself in charge of organizing the food. Which was probably smart and necessary, so we wouldn’t end up with fifty bowls of potato salad. But I think she made certain assumptions. Such as believing my two X chromosomes enabled deviled egg making abilities. Shortly before the reunion, I received a letter from my aunt listing what dish each family member should bring. And by each family member, I mean the adult females, even the ones who had married into the clan. Her own sons were responsible for nothing, but their wives were.
Next to my name, I saw the words “deviled eggs.” I had no idea how to make those. This was in the days before the internet, so I couldn’t have a recipe on my computer screen within five minutes. Oh, I suppose I could have cracked open a cookbook during one of my frequent trips to the public library. Or, you know, called my mom. But I decided I’d rather put my energies toward rants about the ingrained sexism in my family of origin.
“This is exactly why I hate cooking!” I’d say to my long-suffering husband. “Because women are just *expected* to do it.” Oh, I was happy to move away from my conservative old-fashioned upbringing, in which women were judged by cooking abilities. Meanwhile, I had a family reunion to attend, at which I appeared bearing a dozen hard-boiled eggs with devil faces drawn on the shells. Clever of me, wasn’t it?
In the more current meantime, I have friends and relatives all along the conservative-liberal spectrum. And I find many of the liberal friends are all about what and how people cook. Is it organic? Did you buy local? I like slow food. You’re not wasting packaging by buying pre-made foods are you? Where can I go that I’m not expected to cook??????
It’s not that I want to shirk the food prep altogether. I have learned to cook a few things along the way. I’m not bad at non-canned soups when I have time – you cut things up and throw them in a pan together. We even have a garden every year. Okay, mostly my husband has a garden every year. But I weed sometimes and I do use the food in our meals. I’ve gone as far as to make my own salsa.
About three years ago, I decided I would change my attitude. I would embrace cooking. I would enjoy the process, being in present for the experience, totally in the moment. I really threw myself into it, and I came to…eh, not hate the chore as much as I once did. I’ve come to realize cooking is necessary, and can even be enjoyable. But, while I no longer detest it, I also know it will never be The Thing That Fulfills Me. I will never find myself thinking “If only I had half an hour to myself to go into the kitchen and whip something up” in the same way that I long for a half an hour to write.
I did write a poem about my lack of domesticity, though:
What Gift Is This*
Next to us the neighbor grows
Peppers, chives, tomatoes, lettuce
Brings a gift of produce freshly
Picked to welcome us as we settle
Sisters, friends and cousins knit
Scarves and blankets, bake and sew
Cookies, quilts or crochet afghans
Always they are ready with
An Offering for any major
Life event – a baby, death
Or illness, they appear in front halls
Bringing sustenance, warmth and comfort
My dilemma – how to pay
In kind when I am overdone
In cooking, brown of thumb, too large
Of stitch, and plain old undomestic
What reaction would I see
If I showed up, a sheaf of papers
In my hand, a look of welcome/
Sympathy / congratulations
On my face and said to them Have some poems freshly penned
What kind of awesome was 2011? All kinds of awesome. This past year, I decided to use my Twitter account (I’m @damari19 if anyone’s interested) as a sort of personal/public gratitude journal. My goal was to tweet about something I found awesome every day for a year. I missed a few days, but very few. I highly recommend doing this, whether via twitter or post-it notes or a silent thought right before you go to sleep. Getting in the habit of noticing one specific good thing each day has helped my mood and attitude tremendously.
I tried to find something new each day, though sometimes I forgot I’d already counted something as awesome earlier in the year. Omelets got three separate mentions. So did Dr. Who.
Looking back over my year in gratitude tweets, certain themes are prominent:
My top category seems to be food, which might explain what’s happened to my waistline. See omelets, above. Pie got two nods from me, once on 3/14 and again at Christmas. But I was also grateful for lettuce from our garden, basil from our garden, and the salsa I made using jalapenos from our garden. Halloween candy. A falafel dog from Mutt’s in Oklahoma City. Also drinks – coffee and tea come up, tea more than once.
Family and friends garnered many mentions. My husband cleaned the windows. I noticed when my kids did chores without being nagged. Got to visit my mom. My brother and sister-in-law knocked themselves out as hosts when we visited for Thanksgiving. Coffee with a friend. Inside jokes with old friends. I am immensely and always grateful for my various relationships.
I notice I commented a lot on the trouble don’t last category. Getting over a cold. Kids getting over colds. Rain after a drought. Figuring out how we’re going to pay for unexpected expenses. Cicadas went away. It’s all good.
Then there was nature. Crocus. Daffodils. Peonies. Autumn leaves. Goldfinches who visit our yard every day. Playing in the snow.
I had lots of comments on internet stuff, either cool websites or links to inspiring stories. Here are a few.: 1,000 Awesome Things – my inspiration
ALEKS – my daughter does her homeschool math through ALEKS. Khan Academy – another educational resource TED Talks Fictiondb – near-comprehensive lists of fiction series.
Newsreel footage of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan. Project Gutenberg – free ebooks
Literature plays a big part in my life. This past year I’ve found awesome in authors’ birthdays – e.g. Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut. Various books. Meeting with a new writers’ group. Meeting writing goals. Getting paid to write blog entries and newspaper articles as part of my day job. My son asking to go to the library because he’d read everything he has in the house. A student running a banned books library from her school locker.
Events, small and large: Corn maze. 4th of July fireworks. Biggest family vacation ever – a trip to Florida where we visited Universal Islands of Adventure (one a side note, the Forbidden Journey is the best amusement park ride I’ve ever experienced) and my kids saw the ocean for the first time.
Those that defy categorization:
2/24/11: W. Shatner singing Mr. Tambourine Man & L. Nimoy singing Where Is Love on same CD
3/7/11: Using the large almost-vintage paper-cutter at work, with its dials and wheels. A combination of meditation & steampunk.
7/19/11: Seeing the interior lights come on when I click the unlocker in the direction of my van. It looks so happy to see me!
10/17/11: Curly hair being considered cool again. Thanks Alex Kingston and River Song!
And finally, one from a category I think of as “In Retrospect, the Joke’s on Me.”
“10/22/11: Procured winter coat for son at a great price.” Yeah, he’s already outgrown it.
6,207. I said it in my previous post, and I think I’ll have to adopt it as my motto: “No sneering, NaNoWriMo participants. I’m a busy woman.”
I know many of you cranked out 50,000 words this past month. Yay for you! I mean that; it’s not sarcastic. Or bitter. Really. No, really, I mean it. I’m impressed. Maybe some year it’ll be me.
Knowing I would have next to no time in November (day job at which I worked extra hours in early November, one homeschooling kid, one public schooled kid who has auditory processing difficulties and thus requires a fair amount of parental involvement to keep track of what’s going on, providing driving lessons to the older child who has a permit but no license yet, taking one of the kids to physical therapy appointments, taking the other kid to orthodontic appointments, assisting with the running of a writers’ conference, oh and a fabulous week-long vacation in Florida, which required planning and packing for and unpacking from) there was no way I could do NaNo. I regret nothing, especially not the vacation.
Still, I tried to absorb inspiration from all the dedication wafting around in my writerly circles. I decided to make an effort to write every day, even if I only had ten minutes, and keep track of my word count. This went okay until vacation, when I dropped the ball (or quill or something) and didn’t pick it back up for ten days.
I have written a bit of a novel. I also counted blog posts, both personal and work-related. Add in a couple of other miscellaneous forays into the brain-ink continuum and my 20 total days of writing resulted in 6,207 words. One of those days, I managed five minutes for a word count of 76.
Thing is, though, I can keep this up year-round, and accomplish a respectable amount, all things considered. For now, I accept my lot as a plodding SoMisWriYe (Solitary Miscellaneous Writing Year) tortoise amongst the crowd of NaNo hares.
Eventually, I might join the race. Or I might not.
And to think, I could have spent that time at a desk, subsisting on coffee and toast crusts, hunched over a computer, frantically typing until my fingers bled. Awww…too bad for me.
When I say love story, I’m not talking about the plot. I’m speaking of the relationship between me and my book.
I finished writing the first draft of my first novel a two years ago. A couple of people read and offered me their thoughts. I have done a couple of revisions. I’ve sent it out a few places and been rejected.
Now, I’m meeting with a novel-writing group and having my manuscript read by more people, who are giving quite helpful feedback. Hearing their comments, I’ve come to see the strengths and weaknesses I display should have been predictable. I’ve spent countless hours of my life immersed in poetry. In more recent years, I’ve produced a number of short stories. My strengths in my first novel, according to my first and second responders, are in dialogue, description and character development. I have many individual wonderful scenes with great dialogue. But it’s obvious this is the first time I’ve plotted something this size. I need to work on the story arc.
I’m trying to decide whether to do another rewrite and work on getting this volume published or whether to let it be and move on. I already have a start on my second novel. I’m about 5,000 words in at the moment. (No sneering at me, please, NaNoWriMo people. I’m a busy woman.)
The other night, while I was pondering my options regarding my firstborn book, I had a happy epiphany. I possess a very healthy emotional relationship with this novel. Whether I do any more revisions, whether I ever publish it or not, I’m so happy to have written it. It’s a story I needed to tell and I’ve told it, if only to a handful of my closest fellow-writers and my spouse. I’m not staking my entire self-concept as a writer on getting it published. I’ve gained some publication credits with several poems and a small handful of short stories. I’ve even been paid some of those times. I learned a lot in the first-novel process and my second book is benefitting already.
See, I don’t have a co-dependent thing going. But I do have a deep, true, abiding love. I’m able to see my novel’s flaws and still care for it – warty story arc and all. I love my characters. I love my sense of accomplishment in having finished an entire book. I love how much I learned. No matter what I do with my writing in the future, no matter how many books I finish, I will never forget you, first novel. You will always have a special place in my heart.
“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.
In honor of my favorite holiday, here’s a handful of books that scared me silly even as they were refusing to be put down. The fear came in a different flavor with each one. Not all of them are technically horror novels.
I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. For years – literally years – after I read this, I had nightmares about discovering that everyone in my life had become vampires. What if you were the last person on earth, so far as you knew, who had not been turned into a vampire? What if they came for you every single night? Brilliant book, but save up your money first to pay for the increase in your electric bill from sleeping with the lights on.
Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow. What’s so scary about werewolves is that they’re us. It’s been my observation that werewolves have been the most sympathetically portrayed monsters in horror. In Sharp Teeth, Barlow is masterful at building non-stock, well-developed lycanthropes. In verse. Did I mention he does it in verse? What made this book nail-biting for me was how much I cared about a couple of the characters and how human nature was just as threatening as animal nature. This is one of my all-time favorite books in any genre.
1984 by George Orwell. I value my privacy. The thought of being watched every second of my life is anathema to me. For the watched, even one slip-up in something as minor as facial expression can mean death. Add in the inability to trust anyone else and the constant head games played by the government and this is about as dystopian as it gets. Scary because it seems so possible. Oh, and the rats.
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. Again, scary because I can imagine it happening in real life. Extreme religious fundamentalists take over and implement selective Biblical practices. Not the ones about the rich selling what they have and giving money to the poor. Rather, the ones where many women are considered as no more than property and are pressed into service to bear children for those who have been rendered infertile by a wrecked environment. And as someone with severely dry skin, let me say how horrified I was by the lack of hand lotion.
The Dollhouse Murders by Betty Ren Wright. This is theoretically a children’s book. I read it as an adult and it creeped me out no end. But it impressed me, too, with its exceedingly clever premise. A big old house, with one room containing a dollhouse that’s a scale-model reproduction of the real domicile, including the furniture and dolls representing the original residents. Each night, the furniture and dolls are moved around to re-create a murder scene. Is it the victim’s ghost trying to communicate in some way?
Dracula by Bram Stoker. In the novel, Renfield scares me more than Dracula does. Actually, that’s true in some of the movie versions as well.
Beloved by Toni Morrison. There are ghosts and then there are GHOSTS. Knowing I would have reacted just as Sethe did and thrown away everything. That part gets me. The parts based on the true history of slavery are the scariest, though.
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!
Remember the Bronx Zoo Cobra. I almost didn’t until I was looking through one of my notebooks and found a poem I wrote about it at the time. I figured I’d better go ahead and share before nobody can remember what I’m talking about.
Bronx Zoo Cobra
Snake on the lam
America’s most wanted animal
The hooded Houdini of hiss
Slithered its way out of sight
And into mind
Who would have guessed
A poor humble immigrant serpent
Would become an asp of such ascendance
Climbing to heights of fame
Undreamt since the days
Of Cleopatra
Now it occurs to me this is the second snake-themed poem I’ve put on my blog. I don’t know if it means anything.
Nomadic Noesis 