For example, I must have been wearing my “capitalist blinders” when I set up the town’s managing committee, because I included businessmen on it (or maybe my “American blinders”?). In fact, at that time, men of business were not the mighty lords of the world, the actual lords were. And so the committee was made up of clergymen and gentry. Oops.

Good thing I could do this tour, and come over to Manchester itself. I may still get stuff wrong, but seeing and hearing it will help me get a greater percentage right.

On scene 50 of 98. “Finished for now” pages are on the top shelf of the stacked shelves, finished scene notecards below and cut-up pages of old manuscript under that. I am the queen of cut-and-tape this revision. Pages not yet started on are on the bottom, with the remaining scene cards above them (look, part of the shelf is empty!). “Blank” pages are in the center. I’ve gone through 257 of the 417 first-draft pages; the final scenes are shorter than the early scenes, but there’s also a lot of new writing coming up.

(p.s. comment if you want to see the whole, gory work area!)

Reported in The Guardian, “Bloody Sunday: the Saville report live”:
“This was the Guardian’s leader column on the killings the day after Bloody Sunday. It begins:”

The disaster in Londonderry last night dwarfs all that has gone before in Northern Ireland. The march was illegal. Warning had been given of the danger implicit in continuing with it. Even so, the deaths stun the mind and must fill all reasonable people with horror. And yet it is too soon to be sure of what happened. The army has an intolerably difficult task in Ireland. At times it is bound to act firmly, even severely.

Below is the current work-table. “Finished for now” pages are on the top shelf of the stacked shelves; pages not yet started on are on the bottom , scrap paper, notebook paper, and cards fill the rest. Today’s count: 21 finished, 390 not finished, scene 4 in progress.

In the foothills of the mountain, looking up, up, up. Wish me luck!

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WHEN full sedition’s stalking through the land,
It then behoves each patriotic band
     Of Noble Minded Yeomen Cavaliers;
To sally forth and rush upon the mob,
And execute the Magisterial Job
     Of cutting off the Ragamuffin’s ears.

HOW valiantly we met that crew
Of infants, men and women too,
Upon the Plain of Peterloo,
And gloriously did hack and hew
     The d—–d reforming gang;
Our swords were sharp you may suppose,
Some lost their ears—some lost a nose,
Our horses trod upon their toes
E’re they could run t’ escape our blows,
     With shrieks the welkin rang.

— from “ ‘The Renowned Atchievements of Peter-Loo’ by Sir Hugo Burlo Furioso Di Mulo Spinissimo, BART. M.Y.C. and A.S.S.,” which I found at the Manchester Education Wide Area Network site. Here’s a direct link to the full lyrics.

Great mock-science story in the Onion this week: Study Reveals Dolphins Lack Capacity To Mock Celebrity Culture. I love the “research will continue” and citations of previous studies. And, especially, the kicker. Good job, Onion folks.

Busting Some of the Myths of Attention: Multitasking, ADHD, and optimal study times were among the topics as scientists and educators shared their expertise during the “Attention and Engagement in Learning” summit this week.

The second event was the 3-day Learning & the Brain conference, held at the Capitol Hill Hyatt in DC. The topic this year also was attention and motivation; I learned a lot more science this year than the one last year. Another writer is doing the story on that one, but I’ll have some short stuff for the blogs later on it.

Also, I had only the vaguest sense of time – they’re wearing jeans, and they jump trains, so sometime between 1930 and now. There doesn’t seem to be a social worker when the girls drop out of school, so sometime before 1980. Does it matter? It did to me. I actually went to Wikipedia later to discover that I was supposed to know that a novel one character was reading was published in 1954, so I would then know roughly when this story takes place.

And this narrator, who dropped out of school and doesn’t show evidence of mighty reading or checking a dictionary when she does, drops words like immiscible, fenestration, lucifactions, calyx, spillet, and parturition into her story. Hearing those words in her voice was jarring for me. Part of the story is about the reader’s discovering how Ruth’s interpretations of events (“finding” the rowboat, what flooding meant for the house’s foundation) doesn’t match our interpretation (stealing the rowboat, the foundation is unsafe). That her narration uses these words makes it also untrue, as if some smart person were trying to pass herself off as this dreamy, drifty woman. These sort of words are all through the book, and each time I passed each one and wrote them on the inside back cover to look up (me, with the master’s degree in English), my faith in the narrator weakened. By the end, I thought she was a big pretender and I’m not sure what she says happened in the end really happened.

I was also put off by the “promises” the story starts with that it doesn’t keep. For example, at the start of the story there is deep detail about the narrator’s grandfather, then his grandmother and all her daughters. They are so lovingly detailed I expected we would hear more about them, but we don’t—or not all of them. One became a missionary and disappears out of the story (not even a note, that I remember). I read this over a weekend, and remember waiting to hear something later about this missionary-daughter, who was so important she got a description at the start, but never did. Why is this daughter even in the story? To paraphrase Checkov on playwriting: Don’t have a gun on the wall in Act 1 if you’re not going to fire it in Act 2.

The one that led me to close the book for the night, though, comes later:

But we went there, leaving the house at dawn, joined at the road by a fat old bitch with a naked black belly and circles of white around her eyes. She was called Crip, because as a puppy she had favored one leg, and now that she was an elderly dog she favored three. She tottered after us briskly, a companionable gleam in her better eye. I describe her at such length because a mile or so from town she disappeared into the woods as if following a scent and never appeared again.
(HOUSEKEEPING, Picador 1980, p. 111)

Argh! I just spent time picturing this dog, making her history, guessing what part she would play in the story, and she’s not in the story ever again. This is the sound of a book hitting the wall.
This is why Crip is in the story:

She was a dog of no special consequence, and she passed from the world unlamented. Yet something of the somberness with which Lucille and I remembered this outing had to do with our last glimpse of her fat haunches and her palsied, upright tail as she clambered up the rocks and into the dusty dark of the woods. (p. 111)

Again, beautiful, beautiful writing. And again, unbelievable. I’m more inclined to think that the experience of being caught outside overnight with no shelter and trapped by dark dreams would be a better explanation for the “somberness.” If it wasn’t for book club, I would not have read on; I’m glad I did. But I’m not running out to pick up another of these books.

One of the many things that worked for me was the consistent imagery of water as dangerous, deadly, dark, mysterious. I know that is true—every time I step into Lake Michigan I think of all the dead mariners somewhere below—but I quickly shake off that image with my preferred view that water is life-giving, healthy, and good, and dive in. The cumulative images and descriptions in the text did a great job of persuading me to the other point of view, to a better balance.

I also liked being reminded that a person outside looking through a window at a cozy family inside is not always envious, not always wanting the same thing or anything like it.

Also, there are so many great lines: “Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the worlds true workings.” (p. 116) “They were both long and narrow women like me, and nerves like theirs walk my legs and gesture my hands.” (p. 131) “It is better to have nothing, for at last even our bones will fall. It is better to have nothing.” (p. 159)

Next book-club book: THE POISONWOOD BIBLE, by Barbara Kingsolver