Aphaeresis

I Am Here

2012-01-28T19:44:00.000-05:00

NY, NY. Sunrise.

At Home

2012-01-22T13:05:00.001-05:00

I've been a performing musician for a decade, give-or-take, so I've played in variety of places. Inside (preferred). Outside (never as good an idea as the person who asked you to do it thinks it is). Big concert halls. Small concert halls. Universities. Black box theaters. Castles. Art museums. Lobbies. Conference rooms. Nursing homes. Elementary schools. Bitterly cold churches. Blazingly hot churches. Churches of blessedly middling temperature. Churches with boats hung across their upper reaches; with elaborate wooden screens; empty; full; round; orange; dark; with galleries; with cats; with crypts. More churches.

But I'd never, in all that time, performed in a private home. Which meant yesterday, when I played a house concert down the road in Charlottesville, was my first time.

The older we get, the fewer first times we have, so I tend to sit up and take notice when one comes my way. And this particular first time was worth noticing- house concerts may masquerade as smaller versions of traditional concerts, but there's some fundamental chasm, some alteration in the essence of the enterprise that sets it apart.

If you give a house concert, you like to entertain. You have a good-sized house and are willing to invest in a case of wine. You know some musicians, or you approach some musicians, and you send out a finite number of invitations, usually 20-30, to your friends and acquaintances. You set up a slew of chairs in your graciously-appointed living room; you serve wine and deserts. You charge $20-35 per person, which is how you pay the musicians. Then you sit back, sip your hooch, and enjoy a concert in the privacy of your living room.

As an audience member, I am all for house concerts. They're short, intimate, and tasty; they take music down off the shelf and put in in your hands for you to examine and wonder at and love. By bringing music to you, if forces you to engage with music in your own context, in the wild, so to speak, as opposed to within the square cage of the concert hall. It's the way music used to played -in the chamber- yet, somewhere along the way, at least in classical music, we've left it behind.

Accordingly, the format requires some adjusting to. We classical musicians have to re-evaluate, and perhaps relinquish, many of the trappings of traditional concert-giving. Sweeping in from offstage is awkward when offstage is the coat closet. Dressing in all black smacks of the funereal, as opposed to the professional, and maintaining the fourth wall, or silence in the face of your audience, seems cold.

Ultimately, we'll have to accustom ourselves to bringing more party-going into our playing. More jokes, musical and non-. More entertainment; more stories; back-and-forth. It's still a cocktail party- even if you do happen to be lugging a violin.

In the mean time, go host some house concerts!

The Uncoupling

2012-01-16T12:03:00.000-05:00

I like Meg Wolitzer because her writing is close-grained: this is the quality, more than any command of story or character or language, I value most in a novelist. When I dredge up a mental list of my favorite writers, this smallness, this upagainstness, is what unites them: Updike, Atwood, Tyler, Perrotta, Strout, Chabon, Goodman, Smiley, James. It's why I like, despite myself, Jonathan Franzen, and why the big-brush folks (numerous, usually men, Henry Miller- ugh!) leave me so cold.

The Uncoupling is Wolitzer's lastest novel, and I went so far as to contemplate paying $12.99 for it on the Kindle before I came to my senses and checked it out of library, together with the subject of my last post.

The book has got a strange, sweeping premise: the women of a close-knit community, in this case the faculty and students of a large suburban New Jersey high school, succumb to a spell that causes them to lose all desire to sleep with men. There's a Lysistrata angle- the high school is in the midst of mounting a production- though Wolitzer's novel is quite far from being a modern retelling of that play.

The premise was big, but the execution, I trusted, would be small enough to keep me interested. And, indeed, there were details aplenty. The sex lives of five or six women were entered, explored, and, abruptly, deflated. The fallout was dissected. Happy marriages were thrown on the rocks. Some women experienced empowerment; others, helplessness.

Wolitzer, like any good scientist, like any good novelist, is asking questions: What role does female desire play in our lives? What does its absence or presence mean to us? Who are we, as women, apart from our desire? The questions are not uninteresting and, in fiction, they are not particularly well-charted. The fictional upswing and downswing of male desire is by now so familiar it's reducible to a couple of viagra jokes and a nod to Philip Roth, but women's wanting, for the most part, has gotten short shrift.

With all that going for The Uncoupling, I thought I'd be no less bespelled than the novel's protagonists.   I wasn't. My apathy had less to do with Wolitzer's writing (close-grained as promised, and wry) and more to do with the fact that there is, ultimately, a critical difference between science and fiction.

Both novelists and researchers experiment, it's true. They ask questions; they frame scenarios to probe for answers. But where scientists merely observe results, fiction writers are responsible for creating their own experimentors, for bringing to life their own question-askers and hypothesis-generators. Wolitzer's enchanted protagonists make no choices. Unlike Lysistrata and her coterie, they do not choose chastity but are compelled to it; Wolitzer's women don't trade away their desire or suppress it, but merely proceed without it, like rats trundling through a maze.

Without choice-making, without want, there's not much story left.   Wolitzer plumbs the dregs, but, like her frustrated menfolk, I want to whine that it's not enough.

I Put a Spell on You

2012-01-14T13:44:00.005-05:00

I was enchanted. So I went to the library.

I should clarify, for any non-readers out there, that this marks a clear reversal of the proper order: customarily, you go to the library and become enchanted thereafter.

Or, more explicitly, you go to the library to become enchanted, to select a particular oblong, to take it home knowing that, despite its weight of less than a pound, it will inhale you, revealing itself to be magically capacious enough to take the whole of you into itself and spit you back out, visibly unaltered but with all of your organs, all the furniture of yourself, rearranged.

But I was already enthralled this particular Wednesday. Or, more exactly, in thrall. Eleven months into accidental Kindle ownership, I had become a One-Click-depressing, digital-book-jonesing Amazonian rat, nosing at plot summaries and thinking hey, what's another $9.99? Again and I again I pushed my button; again and again, the sweet words flowed.

I went to the library to break the spell.

It was not easy, this disenchantment. It required the payment of $9.60 worth of fines accrued during the great insect battle of 2011, during which concerns like reading revealed themselves to be as important, as necessary, as vestigial limbs, and during which the vacuum cleaner assumed a place within my personal cosmos of ineluctable significance: that time when, in the smother of summer, William Least Heat Moon's Blue Highways lay mouldering, unread, in a plastic bin.

There was an address change to take care of, the ritual placating of the dragon of the anti-theft machine. But soon enough it was mine, a real book, square and hefty and, due to its advanced age, not yet available in a Kindle edition. It was a book I miraculously hadn't managed to read by an author I reliably enjoy: Friends for Life, by Meg Wolitzer.

I paraded home. I curled up victoriously on the couch, made tea, prepared to be pleasantly engulfed. Meredith and Lisa and Ann were 28; they lived in New York; they had industrious, if angsty, love lives....small pings of familiarity were sounding themselves within me, like arthritic joints giving notice: you've felt this before.

By this time I was eighty pages in. Eighty pages in to a book I'd definitely read, sometime within the last decade but probably not within the last three years, because the heroines, at 28, reeked freshly, painfully, of youth; they'd been older the first time around. Eighty pages into a book the title of which, the jacket of which, the plot summary of which, for the love of God, had, in succession, failed to ring any bell.

It's undeniable; my mind is going.

This is not news. It's been a slow process of mental retrenchment, of resorting to list-making and calendar-keeping and all the circus tricks of leading one's life I remember, as a child, I scorned. Up through middle school I used to keep track of my assignments -multiple assignments for various classes, plus a full calendar of extra-curricular activities- in my head. Thursday, I'd think, and everything I had to do that day would appear before me. A planner, like an outline, like the dreaded "pre-writing" was just one more idiotic, wholly unnecessary intermediary adults kept trying to thrust upon me.

If the purpose of adulthood, of living, is to humble you, I am humbled.

At 31, I depend on ICal. I try to make to-do lists and can't recall what I was supposed to put on them. I forget appointments and lessons and get-togethers; I need reminder alarms and grocery lists and Facebook's sorry proddings to recollect my friends' dates of birth. In college, I easily tracked the names of everyone in a 100-member cooperative. Now, I can't retain the names of the group of a dozen music students I see monthly.

My mind is going.

I am, it should be acknowledged, mildly terrified. There's Alzheimer's in my family, a lot of it. What if the disease is misunderstood; what if you decline your whole life, but it's only in your sixties and seventies that other people start to notice? I miss, achingly, my own reliability, the trustiness of my short-term recall. I've never trusted much, in life, but I used to trust myself.

On the other hand, I'm sitting here with a book by one of my favorite authors. Sure I've read it before. But I don't remember a thing, so it's fresh and ready and waiting in the way of the best unread books, the most alluring doors, the muffling, late-spring snows that take what you love and transmute it -enchantment!- into a vast and terrible world.

TV or not TV

2012-01-09T18:12:00.003-05:00

One of the perks of blogging is that you can go back and see what your former self was up to. (A lot of the same stuff I'm up to now, apparently- so much for narrative thrust.) I don't read back very often, but I nearly always give in to an orgy of self-reflection round about the turning of the year, so what better way to get down and dirty than to revisit last new year's menage-a-moi?

(It's a teensy bit irritating, incidentally, to have a written record of your New Year's resolutions. Before I blogged I usually managed to forget about them sometime between March and April, rendering the question of success deliciously moot.)

Anyhoo, according to the archives, January of last year, I was:

1) Resolving to dwell.

2) Detoxing from an overdose of TV.

This year, coincidentally or not, I am:

1) Resolving to dwell.

2) Fighting an unholy and financially disastrous addiction to my Kindle. On the flip side, TV watched thus far in 2012 = one 25-minute episode of Parks and Rec.

I can't tell if this marks progress or very clever loss-leading marketing on the part of Amazon.

I do know that I am constitutionally resistant to the sort of living-in-the-moment-ness to which I have aspired and continue to aspire, which probably means I should stop bothering to try to come up with novel & exciting New Year's resolutions and accept that I'll be desultorily dwelling all the Januaries of my days.

I also know that reading, though considerably more expensive than streaming free crap though Hulu, is a deeper, richer, dwellier experience than TV could ever be. I just hope it doesn't bankrupt me.

Winter Blues

2012-01-06T17:14:00.003-05:00

Or rather, pinks. Our unprepossessing shrubs are a blaze of pepto-bismol glory. I'm not sure what to make of this. It feels off-kilter, like making dinner in a clown suit. Other wrongheaded flowerings: diet milkshakes, margarine, lissome nuns.

2011: A Year in Gratitude!

2012-01-04T18:46:00.002-05:00

12.31.11: Terminal! The movie, not the cancer.
12.30.11: Slow
12.29.11: Drive
12.28.11: Lemon ricotta pancakes
12.27.11: Pizza & beer
12.26.11: Boxing
12.25.11: Gifting
12.24.11: Tree's up
12.23.11: Reading in bed
12.22.11: Getting there
12.21.11: Internet
12.20.11: Sweet potato; art museum
12.19.11: Sunday NYT
12.17.11: Aerobics
12.16.11: Sleep
12.15:11: Teaching
12.14.11: Coffee
12.13.11: Coffee
12.12.11: Coffee
12.11.11: Singing
12.10.11: 60-minute run
12.9.11: Cider with rum
12.8.11: Crossing stuff off
12.7.11: Reading
12.6.11: Free coffee redux
12.5.11: Free coffee
12.4.11: Seat warmers (Volvo!)
12.3.11: Free wi-fi
12.2.11: Alterra (Milwaukee, WI)
12.1.11: Nice neighbors
11.30.11: 31 years
11.29.11: Gifts by mail
11.28.11: Go go go!
11.27.11: Lieabout
11.26.11: Slow drive
11.25.11: Pie!
11.24.11: Sun; quiet; mountians; coffee
11.23.11: On the road
11.22.11: Hoofing it
11.21.11: We made it!
11.20.11: Safe and sound
11.19.11: Reading in bed
11.18.11: Couple hours off
11.17.11: Just a sprinkle
11.16.11: Pizza
11.15.11: Houseguests
11.14.11: Toil
11.13.11: Green Tea
11.12.11: Marathon
11.11.11: 11.11.11
11.10.11: Really exciting low voice
11.9.11: Someone to care for me when I'm sick
11.8.11: The right to vote
11.7.11: Saltines/gingerale
11.6.11: Netflix
11.5.11: Sweat
11.4.11: The bursting trees
11.3.11: Help
11.2.11: Vodka tonic
11.1.11: Coffee
10.31.11: Pooh costume
10.30.11: Pesto
10.29.11: Sleep
10.28.11: Cash
10.27.11: Day off!
10.26.11: Daze
10.25.11: Warm fall days
10.24.11: First homemade meal in a week
10.23.11: Waffles
10.22.11: Kleenex
10.21.11: Drugs
10.20.11: Back roads
10.19.11: Coffee; taco
10.18.11: Coffee
10.17.11: Coffee
10.16.11: Half a day
10.15.11: Free tickets
10.14.11: Old Cabell Hall
10.13.11: Teaching
10.12.11: Sleep
10.11.11: Nate's Taco Truck
10.10.11: Coffee!
10.9.11: Midwesterners
10.8.11: Cheese
10.7.11: Fall
10.6.11: Writing
10.5.11: BOOM
10.4.11: Green tea
10.3.11: Coffee
10.2.11: Free WiFi
10.1.11: Enthusiasm
9.30.11: Zingerman's
9.29.11: Cake
9.28.11: Retinue
9.27.11: I only work there part-time
9.26.11: Parks & Recreation
9.25.11: Frozen pizza
9.24.11: Evening sky
9.23.11: WS
9.22.11: A multiplicity of jobs
9.21.11: Pesto
9.20.11: Five-minute commute
9.19.11: Cheese
9.18.11: Cool & cloudy
9.17.11: Runrunrun
9.16.11: Cooldown
9.15.11: Coffee shop
9.14.11: Lime
9.13.11: Preschoolers
9.12.11: Light
9.11.11: Freakonomics Radio!
9.10.11: Louise Penny
9.9.11: Reality check
9.8.11: Diminishing numbers of fleas
9.7.11: Gin
9.6.11: Coffee
9.5.11: Labor
9.4.11: Cookies
9.3.11: Music makers close by
9.2.11: Wine
9.1.11: Card of appreciation
8.31.11: Job flexibility
8.30.11: First time
8.29.11: Locomotion
8.28.11: Electricity
8.27.11: Shelter
8.26.11: Wine & friends
8.25.11: Dark clouds
8.24.11: Walking
8.23.11: Windows; wood floors
8.22.11: Tudor's Biscuit World
8.21.11: Catching up
8.20.11: Feast
8.19.11: Chocolate Moose
8.18.11: Chocolate
8.17.11: Wednesday
8.16.11: Tricky Fish
8.15.11: Slow morning
8.14.11: Fruit snacks
8.13.11: Rain
8.12.11: The Parking Lot Movie
8.11.11: Quiet
8.10.11: VMFA
8.9.11: Project Runway
8.8.11: Coffee shops
8.7.11: Bacon
8.6.11: Stone
8.5.11: Printers
8.4.11: Perseverance
8.3.11: Back to bed
8.2.11: Coffee
8.1.11: Weariness
7.31.11: Summitting
7.30.11: Vows
7.29.11: Fire
7.28.11: Midnight sun
7.27.11: TSA
7.26.11: Not sure
7.25.11: Friends
7.8.11: Cafeteria style
7.7.11: Good news
7.6.11: Mille Regretz
7.5.11: Extra blankets
7.4.11: Pleasant folk
7.3.11: Old mountains
7.2.11: Cincy
7.1.11: Getting through it
6.30.11: 3.5 cents per page
6.28.11: Really good coffee
6.27.11: Bike path
6.26.11: Leaving
6.25.11: Sleep
6.24.11: Zolpidem
6.23.11: Streaming video
6.22.11: Better coffee than expected
6.21.11: Hold your breath
6.20.11: Road BBQ
6.19.11: Porch; Globe Road
6.18.11: Meadow; fat man squeeze
6.17.11: Cornbread & honey
6.16.11: Mountains
6.15.11: Harrisonburg
6.14.11: I'm a regular
6.13.11: Backwoods Italian restaurants
6.12.11: Skipping church
6.11.11: Saturday
6.10.11: Lazy daze
6.9.11: Empty UVA
6.8.11: Perversity
6.7.11: Heat
6.6.11: Coffee
6.5.11: Gibbons
6.4.11: Castoffs
6.3.11: Carbonara
6.2.11: Yoga
6.1.11: Up and down
5.31.11: Good review
5.30.11: Empty town
5.29.11: Coming home; also, chocolate-covered espresso beans
5.28.11: Fortitude
5.27.11: Old dudes
5.26.11: Articulation
5.25.11: Safe travels
5.24.11: Pad thai & gossip
5.23.11: Coffee
5.22.11: Consolation
5.21.11: Beethoven; pink velvet jacket
5.20.11: Cream ale
5.19.11: Deli
5.18.11: Listening
5.17.11: Peonies
5.16.11: Our offer was accepted
5.15.11: Froth
5.14.11: Slow day
5.13.11: Decision-making
5.12.11: The fillings were bad, but not dire
5.11.11: Porch
5.10.11: My last kid is my easiest kid
5.9.11: Sleep
5.8.11: Chives
5.7.11: Guac
5.6.11: Empty restaurant, 9:30 AM, Friday
5.5.11: Glottis
5.4.11: Prix fixe
5.3.11: Free lunch
5.2.11: Teacher coffee
5.1.11: Enthusiastic amateurs
4.30.11: Someone to take care of me when I am sick
4.29.11: I own a swimsuit and it looks ADEQUATE!
4.28.11: No choir
4.27.11: Thunderstorm; porch
4.26.11: I am doing a good job
4.25.11: Coffee! Again! Suprise!
4.24.11: Lamb
4.23.11: Tears
4.22.11: Middle-aged women
4.21.11: My car is sturdy and small
4.20.11: Other folks' cooking
4.19.11: Nice people
4.18.11: Xanax
4.17.11: Sun; deer; home; singing; cats
4.16.11: Pie
4.15.11: Breakfast
4.14.11: Clear skies; mist over the rivers
4.13.11: Vacation. Even if unpaid.
4.12.11: Glossy Maganizes
4.11.11: Azalea garden; pollen; wind
4.10.11: Pavane
4.9.11: Biscuits; family
4.8.11: Theater
4.7.11: Pianos in empty rooms
4.6.11: NPR streaming
4.5.11: Lie in
4.4.11: Complementary skill sets
4.3.11: Recovery
4.2.11: 10K
4.1.11: Walking
3.31.11: Kindness
3.30.11: Light white wine; risotto; peas
3.29.11: Coffee!
3.28.11: Budding
3.27.11: Song
3.26.11: Forecasted snow
3.25.11: G&T at the art museum
3.24.11: Half and half
3.23.11: I figured out how to stream NPR
3.22.11: Daylight
3.21.11: Jambalaya for lunch
3.20.11: Gracious hosts
3.19.11: Old friends
3.18.11: Lowlands
3.17.11: Daffodils; lunch
3.16.11: Bad coffee
3.15.11: Coffee
3.14.11: My throat no longer feels as if it is trying to crawl up my nose
3.13.11: Teaching
3.12.11: Cancelled
3.11.11: Online yoga
3.10.11: The rain held off
3.9.11: Prosciutto & peas.
3.8.11: Extra hour
3.7.11: Coffee
3.6.11: Brass band
3.5.11; Movie night
3.4.11: Oberlin
3.3.11: QET payments, come to Mama.
3.2.11: Red wine
3.1.11: All the tomoatoes of tomorrow
2.28.11: Circumstance
2.27.11: Pomp
2.26.11: Shimmer
2.25.11: Flattery will get you everywhere
2.24.11: Coffee & chocolate
2.23.11: All by myself
2.22.11: Development
2.21.11: Kindle
2.20.11: Dinner invitations
2.19.11: Sweat
2.18.11: Teapot
2.17.11: Play date; sweather weather
2.16.11: Half-price bottle night
2.15.11: Shivery, silvery clouds
2.14.11: Millionaire's Meatloaf
2.13.11: Live auction
2.12.11: Biscotti
2.11.11: Tin roofs
2.10.11: Pro.duc.tive
2.9.11: Walking to the library = double pleasure whammy!
2.8.11: Very very early to bed
2.7.11: Walking
2.6.11: Artichoke dip
2.5.11: Widow maker chili
2.4.11: Back roads
2.3.11: Relief after puking
2.2.11: Fog
2.1.11: One mile to the library
1.31.11: Sun
1.30.11: Leftovers
1.29.11: Clean clothes
1.28.11: Cocktail
1.27.11: Lox in the Hood
1.26.11: Lightening
1.25.11: Coffee
1.24.11: Old friends
1.23.11: The smile before the cue
1.22.11: Too many cookies
1.21.11: Purcell
1.20.11: Chicago
1.19.11: Hidden chocolate
1.18.11: Soba noodles
1.17.11: MLK
1.16.11: Sprouts
1.15.11: Croutons
1.14.11: Downton Abbey
1.13.11: Bad puns
1.12.11: Coffee
1.11.11: Coffee
1.10.11: Coffee
1.9.11: Secret poems
1.8.11: Running in the snow
1.7.11: Tom Yum
1.6.11: Yanking up the blinds
1.5.11: Sleeping
1.4.11: Reading to kids. Handing them back.
1.3.11: NPR
1.2.11: Dwelling
1.1.11: Lifting fog

2011: Woah

2011-12-31T11:20:00.007-05:00

I halfway wish I were sitting down to peck out one of those nothing-doing Christmas letters, those reassuring missives in which KatieSophiaJennessica had another fabulous year in Middle School, we installed granite countertops, and the dog passed on. I like these letters. They allow me the comfortable illusion that time, though an inevitable murderer, will at least kill you softly, a la '70s pop rock.

But actually, for me this year, sh*t went down. Oddly, sh*t went down even as I succumbed to the lassitude-edged panic of knowing YOU'RE NOT ACCOMPLISHING ENOUGH and LIFE IS GETTING AWAY. Which is what makes reviewng all the sh*it that actually went down so WEIRD. But here goes.

2011 was the first full year of my thirties, with all the attendant freaking-out-about-mortality that decade entails. Some serious family stuff came up (more contemplation of mortality). OH MY GOD WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE AND I JUST WASTED THAT HOUR WATCHING MASTERPIECE MYSTERY. Right. All of that. Still going.
I read this life-changing article. I'm not prone to life-changing articles. The number of other life-changing articles I've read in my lifetime is zero. Yet, it somehow had never occurred to me that having multiple careers could be a legitimate life choice rather than a symptom personal failure & indecision or a waystation on the road to my capital C Calling. The relief of embracing what I actually do (many careers! few dollars!) instead of beating myself up for failing to find a Vocation was...incredible. Thank you, NYT.
I started getting paid, on occasion, to write. And thus I achieved, at last, the holy grail of making piddly amounts of money off of each of my three college majors (up with indecision!) Also I no longer have any hobbies & am taking suggestions (no knitting or crafts or anything in which I risk attaching parts of myself to other parts).
I bought a house. Goodbye, life savings.
The house came infested with fleas. Hello, psychosis.
With my friends, I won a national chamber music competition, which startled the heck out of everyone involved but was actually enormously gratifying considering I play an instrument no one takes seriously. Also, everything is now more complicated than it was before.
I changed speech therapy jobs, marking the first time I've voluntarily left one job and taken another. I don't regret it.
I started leading music workshops on a regular basis, which reaffirmed how much I adore teaching and how much I suck at conducting. (All in all, 2011 was a year for trying stuff I had no business trying, which is I guess what your thirties are for.)
I started a book club. This is actually the thing I'm proudest of for the entire year, because, unlike some of the rest of this stuff, it was not an accident, and in addition it involved things I've historically shied away from, like social maneuvering and cleaning house. I've wanted to be part of a book club for donkeys years, but I was always waiting for book club to pursue me, a la Prince Charming. Finally this year (see thirties, MORTALITY) I got tired of waiting and, with a little bit of help, made it happen. Prince Charming still AWOL, though at this point my husband would be pretty pissed if he showed.

Adios, 2011. What a crazy ride.

Books!

2011-12-30T18:28:00.000-05:00

Several centuries ago, books were precious. Not so much anymore, when you can sift through the bargain bin and come up with enough tomes to bury a moderately-sized elephant (also you will learn to knit, and how to talk to God, and that you are crap at sudoku.) With an overwhelming array of choices, what's a modern lady reader to do?

Give thanks she was not born during the storied precious-books time, for one (too much birthing and prayerfulness; not enough reading). And: harangue her friends and acquaintances into providing book recommendations. Say, the 5 most engrossing books you read in 2011.

I'll kick off. In no particular order, mind you.

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter (Tom Franklin). A page-turning, yet invidiously slow-moving, mystery(-ish) novel set in the deep South. Decades ago, lonely Larry Ott went on a date with a girl who never came home. Now, another girl in his tiny Mississippi town has gone missing. Suspense! Chickens! Kudzu! Writing that, for a mystery(-ish) novel, is a whole lot better than it needs to be.

The Women (TC Boyle). Frank Lloyd Wright's tangled tale of a life, read backwards. Women; architecture; fire; more of the Great-Man-&-his-acolytes thing Boyle explored so satisfyingly in his Kinsey bionovel The Inner Circle (which, to be honest, was the better & more cohesive of the two books, but I read it in 2010 so no dice!) Boyle is always engrossing, and if his accretion of detail doesn't quite hang together, it makes for smoky, engulfing read.

The Phantom Tollbooth (Norman Juster). I read this as a child and loathed it, I think primarily for its coyness and the fact that its narrative was employed in the service of its text, rather than the other way around. It felt cheap. Decades later I find it antic, brief, and fun- which just goes to prove, I suppose, the power of a re-read.

The Brutal Telling (Louise Penny). I read a lot of genre fiction this year, as I tend to do when things in my non-reading life are moving and shaking. Penny's novels, like the best mysteries, ask more questions than simply: whodunnit? They're all good reads, and I downed them all in 2011 (jag, anyone?), but this one, in particular, speaks to the power of words.

Johnathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (Susanna Clarke). People had been recommending this sucker to me for years. YEARS! I ignored them. Which was stupid. The book was awesome. Mea Culpa. That is all.

I Am Here

2011-12-30T12:53:00.000-05:00

Stupefaction? Asheville, NC

First Snow

2011-12-27T13:53:00.000-05:00

Far from home, but I'll take it, just the same. (Can I imagine myself refusing? It would be churlish, and impossible. A heady incentive toward yes.)

Passing the Duck

2011-12-26T19:11:00.010-05:00

Encouragement is an odd old duck. If you need it, you're pretty much by definition not where you want to be -which is, if you think about it, kind of discouraging. On the flip side, it's nice to be recognized as doing something not entirely inimical to the betterment of humankind. Not too many people are out there exhorting bloody dictators, after all.

A handful more are out there exhorting fellow bloggers, and Marci, over at The Midlife Second Wife, is one of them. Marci writes cleanly and feelingly about new beginnings and old recipes, and she believes, without reservation, in encouragement. Recently, she bestowed on me the Liebster Award, a badge of the keep-on-trucking variety for blogs with fewer than 250 followers. It even comes with a badge:

I regarded the badge, upon receipt, with deep suspicion. I'm a minimalist: no necklaces, no bracelets, no makeup, no belts, no scarves, no rings, no pictures, no vests, no tights, no postcards, no scrapbooks, no crafts, no knick knacks, no fruitcake, no Christmas tree, no Mahler, no David Foster Wallace, no stuff cluttering up my sidebars. I like bare white walls and a single bed, maybe some sun.

The award, on the other hand, pleased me. Often, blogging feels like tossing birdseed into the grand canyon. There aren't any birds in there, so what's the point? Occasionally you get a comment or two, but in the main just you're out there throwing handfuls of yourself into the void. You keep going, because there's a whole lot more to blogging than having an audience, but every so often it's nice to be told you're feeding someone or something.

The Liebster, like a zombie bite, is self-replicating: you're supposed to pass it along. I find, though, that I don't wish to encourage. Encouragement is not minimal. It's ornamental, a commentary on an existing arc, a rah-rah from the sidelines of a game that's already underway.

No, what I want to do is jump start. Take something dead or dying and give it some juice. I've bemoaned before in this space how few of my friends blog. I want to know your business, folks!

But I have not yet begun to bemoan my assorted friends who used to blog and, sometime between 2009 and the present, have fallen off the wagon. Back in the saddle(s), people! Or I'll launch more mixed metaphors at you.

1. In Time of Daffodils. Janey is wry and sharp and red-headed and insufficiently prolific! I always look forward to setting my eye to her telescope.

2. Belle Melange. Noa is a close observer of beauty. She's both analytical and lyrical, which is my preferred combination!

3. The Intrepid Soprano. Jaya gives us well-chosen snippets of...just about everything.

4. Delicious Bytes. Tess is a world-touring concert soprano who has been neglecting her fun food blog!

5. Je ne sais pas. I don't know why Molly's not posting more, either! I love a multi-career girl in Paris.

Terms

2011-12-24T17:12:00.001-05:00

I've seen nine deer since I arrived. They've ranged in size from a stolid buck with the profile of a smart car to a shivering wisp of a doe, the deer huddling in groups of two, three four. The human bustle of my hometown has ebbed as the holiday approaches, and the deer have surged to replace them, buff and sinewy and as not nearly as scared as they ought to be. On my walks, one darts in front of me, hooves clattering. Another eyes me disdainfully, flares its nostrils, strolls away. I raise one hand to my heart.

It was the deer my father was after when he bought the house. Never mind the bedrooms or the built-ins; forget the outdated kitchen, the nouveau 1970s master bath. Look, instead, out the window: the long spill of green two blocks long, the secret flickering forms. In the intervening years the green has grown up and the deer have multiplied. We're watching them now, his words skittering, my hand on my heart in my throat.

I Am Here

2011-12-23T15:55:00.000-05:00

Home.

Favor of the Month

2011-12-17T17:29:00.004-05:00

Wouldn't it be lovely if, at the end of every month, someone handed you a party favor? Thanks for visiting March- have an umbrella! Surrender to September- with chocolate! A little packaging, a trinket or two, and even February would start to look like a good idea.

Alas, reality triumphs. Which is to say that you made it through twelve whole months of Aphaeresis, and all you get is this lousy favorites list. Suckers!

Here's what I most enjoyed spewing in 2011:

New York State of Mind
All the People that on Earth Do Dwell
Singin' in the Rain
Always Look on the Bright Side of Life
Eight Six Seven Five Three Oh Nine

Take it away, friends.

Yes?

2011-12-16T14:41:00.001-05:00

So this year, I accidentally became a music critic. It was definitely not something I set out to do. No one grows up dreaming of hunching over her laptop at 6:00 AM trying to translate whatever-the-heck-it-was she scribbled on a notebook in the dark into comprehensible copy. You don't wake up one day and think, "for my next act, I'm going to earn piddly amounts of money being judgy."

But I've had a policy, for a while now, of saying yes. (I've ignored that policy recently, too, but that's another story.) There's a lot of self-help literature directed toward folks who don't know how to say no, but that's not my problem. No I've got covered. No, too hard. No, too scary. Nah, I'll just stay right here, thanks.

Not surprisingly, my affinity for no got me....nowhere. So, at some point in my early twenties, I started scolding myself into yes. Yes, I'll schlep to the party. Yeah, OK, here's my number. Yes, fine, I'll give it a shot.

Yes is not infallible. I've attended lousy parties, been on lousy dates, played some lousy concerts, and ended up helping more people move house than I really would have preferred. But yes has also made life a little more interesting.

Yes, I'll try my hand at music criticism, despite a lack of anything resembling qualifications. And do you know what? It turns out to be fun. I'm naturally judgy (sigh). I like to write, especially when someone tells me what to write about. I know some stuff about music. Since I've started, I've even been enjoying concerts more. Two hours of music gets...boring. Two hours of trying to translate what you're hearing into words? Much more interesting.

But here's what I don't like and didn't suspect -though should have suspected- would happen. Artists are using my quotes. "Harmonia Mundi just tweeted you," my husband informed me this morning. I'm on this soloist's website, that ensemble's blog. I'm plastered across the world wide web saying stuff it took me five minutes to write.

I've been trying to dissect why it makes me so uncomfortable. Lord knows I have enough press quotes strewn across my personal page. My ensemble quotes numerous critics and we've got the full text of several reviews available for download. I get it. It's just...scary.

I suppose it's kind of like becoming a parent. Suddenly you realize your own parents were regular people who didn't know what the heck they were doing. Doctors are human. Critics are plain old folks. The world is not safe.

Eat Your Heart Out, Martha

2011-12-11T09:42:00.001-05:00

Yes, friends, you see before you a poorly-shot, poorly-lit, bona fide CRAFT. As in, I made it. Yes, me, Anne, the bare-walled, knick-kncack-averse, no-Christmas-tree, Michael's-fleeing, anti-scrapbooking Home Economics dropout!

Admire my amazing centerpiece! It's got every quality I think is right and mete in a craft, which is to say the following:

Took three minutes to make.
Constructed entirely from free sh*t I found in the yard.
Tools required: hands.
No lurking in the storage closet during the off-season
Hopefully not poisonous?

Yeah, baby.

Annals of Illness

2011-12-07T18:40:00.003-05:00

You'd think opening up a cough drop would be an activity profoundly undeserving of a write-up, but that was before the folks at Halls got involved. On the wrapper of my current specimen, strewn like mines across a field of logos, I discovered the following:

Tough is your middle name.
Flex your "can do" muscle.
Impress yourself today.
Don't waste a precious minute.
Elicit a few "wows" today.

I pop another cough drop -because, hey, they're tasty- and discover:

Put your game face on.
You can do it and you know it.
Take charge and mean it.
Get through it.

First up, I find all of this a little bit preachy. If I'd wanted to cough in church, I could have wedged my hacking, phlegmy, bronchially-afflicted, disruptively loud rear into a pew. All I want from my cough drops is a little bit of...quiet.

But really, more than irritating, the aphorisms are interesting. Here, in series of cough-drop one liners, is the American attitude to illness and death writ large. We hate to be sick, we hate to admit weakness, and our stance on death is something along the lines of "HELL NO, WE WON'T GO."

Many of us, myself included, have a substantial financial incentive not to take sick days. If I don't go in, I don't get paid....So why the heck wouldn't I inflict my irritable, barely functional self upon my workplace? I've seen internal PR campaigns against taking sick days, yearly bonuses if you make it through without taking yours, lump sum payments for unused days upon retirement.

And it's more than finances. "Get through it," "tough is your middle name," push through the pain, no pain, no gain- these are cultural touchstones, signifiers of the pioneer heritage we are so fond, as a nation, of conjuring. Indisposition? Staying put? Tea-drinking? That stuff is for the British!

Though tea might beat this lousy cough drop.

I Am Here

2011-12-05T17:38:00.000-05:00

Or rather, was. With no camera and no internet access. Milwaukee, WI.

Yes

2011-11-27T16:54:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking, as I do from time to time, about want. As in desire, but also as in dearth, because they're more intertwined then we care, most of the time, to admit.

Friday I finished a whole book about want, Caron McCuller's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. I thought it was going to be about the capital S South, and it was, sort of, but it was really about the state, the trap, of wanting.

See, it's tricky. There's an inherent hollowness to want, a kickback of unfulfillment. If you want something easy, something you can identify and something that's within your reach, you get it. I want to go for a walk. Why, there's the door!

But in order truly to want, to writhe in a sate of unsatisfied longing like McCullers' sad sacks, there has to be a catch. You can't quite tell what you want, perhaps. Or you're mistaken about it. Or there's something preventing you from getting it. All those very tawdry, very human drivers of narratives sweeping and small, printed and real.

The appeased wants, the dull, compact satisfactions, seldom make it into print. Here's one for you anyway.

Large sweet potato, microwaved, mashed.
Bulgarian feta, crumbled
Capers
Red pepper flakes
Fork

I Am Here

2011-11-24T11:41:00.000-05:00

Asheville, NC. I have seriously missed a kajillion of these. But never mind! Back on the horse of heredom! Happy Thanksgiving, y'all.

After 8

2011-11-21T21:03:00.001-05:00

I've been walking more at night.

Partly, it's out of necessity. It gets dark MIGHTY EARLY on this here East Coast. Like 5:00 PM early. Like if I didn't work in the schools I wouldn't see the light of day on weekdays early. It's pretty egregious, and it means that, by the time I get home and finish practicing, the sky has been tarred and feathered.

Partly, it's that I now live in a neighborhood where walking at night is not majorly idiotic. My previous neighborhood was lovely and rambling, with brick streets and run-down Victorians, but it was also...hopping! Walk down the street and watch the drug bust! Dodge the deal going down on the corner! Inform passers by that you are not a prostitute! I once stepped out the front door with a bag of trash and then immediately stepped back inside, trash be damned, as three cop cars converged on a man across the street.

My new neighborhood is less exciting. The rustlings in the underbrush are squirrels. The folks on the corner are discussing remodeling. The individuals who pee on things are dogs.

And finally, there's this. One of my favorite food bloggers mentioned recently how much she loved what she described as the magic hour after it gets dark but before people close their curtains. I find that I love it, too. Up with nosiness! There's such pure pleasure in spying, in prying, in glimpsing, through half-covered windows, life loping along.

Photo: inkity.com

Shameless Self-Promotion

2011-11-16T17:28:00.000-05:00

Well, it's come to this. I've kept an anonymous blog for Lo, these four years, but today I'm outing myself in the service of Art. Or something.

Not that you don't already know who I am. MOM.

Basically, my early music group needs travel funds to take advantage of our recent AWESOME competition win. If you like music and are able to help, please consider donating to our Kickstarter campaign. Every little bit helps.

Marathon

2011-11-12T16:16:00.003-05:00

There's a rhythm to the morning jog.

Yes, there are the daily alterations, the small signs of the earth doing its thing. Slowly, the trees turn red, surrender their leaves. The sun slips lower. People start carting bigger mugs of coffee, scraping their cars.

But by and large, it's the same. I have my route. Out the door, down to the CVS, South on Brook, right, past the school, another right, right again. After the last right comes the tired dad waiting for the school bus with his autistic son. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I see the same large, middle-aged African American man huffing past me in the opposite direction near the CVS. We raise our hands, nod.

Same old, same old. Until this morning, when my route was taken over by 17,000 idiots in spandex.

I say "idiot" because, really, what else would you have to be to want to run 26 miles without stopping? I actually don't even know if 26 miles is the correct distance, because my brain shuts down after about 12. And really, if it were wise, said brain would refuse to contemplate any distance greater than six, which is the mileage at which I begin wheezing and praying for death.

If you need to wear something called a "camelback" to accomplish your goal, is it really a goal worth meeting?

Halfway along my route, I slowed to a walk. There's nothing like a surging tide of people running a distance you classify as "too long" for a car trip to make you understand that lurching through 2.5 miles is....lame. I slouched low and tried to pretend I had already run my own marathon, earlier, in private, and was now moseying back home.

And it was worth a mosey: The neighborhood was out in force, kids to grandparents to overexcited dogs. A red truck backed up to the "road closed" sign and unloaded five camp chairs, a beige couch, and a coffee table. Extension cords were snaked from windows into the street, where Lady Gaga battled with oldies. Folks at a station at the end of the block were holding out beer in plastic cups for the runners to grab as they passed. (Who drinks beer during a marathon? Young men and old people. Go figure.)

It was colder than it had been. The trees were caught midway through bursting, half their leaves scattered on the ground. The last stragglers from the half marathon were stumbling past mile marker nine, their faces red, their bodies heaving. The sirens came suddenly, then the police escort, then the pace car. Finally, impossibly fleet, the man at the head of the pack. I've never seen anyone run so fast. I never will again.

Bed of Roses

2011-11-09T15:46:00.004-05:00

My eyes were glued shut.

It's a familiar feeling. You know if from nightmares, long, tangled dreams in which you stumble from one room to another, unable to see the horrors pursuing you. You know it from slasher films, in which the heroine awakens in an abandoned hotel, manacled and blind. You know it from first grade, when you came down with pinkeye.

Oh yes, my friends. I suppose it's one of the perks of working with preschoolers. Cuteness and hugs and good, old-fashioned conjunctivitis.

But it sure isn't fun. My eyes itch, for starters. The whites are a bright, candy-striper pink, as if my twin windows to the soul suddenly decided to go around delivering shelter magazines to the hospitalized. I sport, in addition to vampire eyes, dry, pasty skin; bedhead; the hangdog look of the uncomfortable; ratty clothes; and a voice like a chain-smoking Barry Manilow.

I am monstrous.

I'm afraid to go outside, for fear of being burned at the stake or excommunicated or stripped of my charge card or however it is the masses show fear these days. I have it on the highest authority (WEB MD) that I am not supposed to return to work or preschool (they haven't cottoned to the fact that my work IS preschool) until I stop looking like a slavering zombie (WEB MD) because pinkeye is contagious.

As in Hot Zone, Andromeda Strain, 28 Days Later, Contagion, CONTAGIOUS.

If I come up with enough movie titles, do you think I can overlook the fact that I have to hang around the house for the next few days looking like something the cat was afraid to drag in because it looked so sad and awful?

Outbreak.