You Think Too Much

Book Review: So Much Pretty

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 20:15:00 +0000

This is the cover on my
ARC copy

I don’t think most of us in the book blogging world write reviews of every book we read. I know I don’t. How do we pick the ones we do decide to write about? For me, sometimes I review a book because I know it’s a book everyone seems to be talking about and I want to contribute my two cents worth. Sometimes I’m moved to write about books I really, really didn’t like, but that’s always a hard one; I feel haunted by my mother saying, “If you can’t say something nice...” Sometimes I review a book because I really, really loved it. Sometimes I review a book because it got me thinking about something, and mostly those reviews are about me more than they’re about the book itself. Sometimes I write about a book because I notice that I haven’t actually written about a book on my blog in a long time and I feel I’m due. I’m writing about So Much Pretty because it disturbed me. Disturbed me in the way that makes you want to force one of your friends to read it so you can see if it disturbs them as well.

So Much Prettty, by Cara Hoffman is set in a small farming town called Haeden in upstate New York. Or perhaps it’s better to say that Haeden used to be a farming town. Now, like many rural communities across the country, it’s part bedroom community and part holding place for folks who’ve been left behind, or for whatever reason, have chosen not to get out. The Pipers, on the other hand, are in Haeden to get back to the land. Claire and Gene move to Haeden with their daughter Alice to drop out of their lives in New York City fighting the good fight and live a kind of counterculture, anarchist, back to the land, dream.

And then things happen. A young woman with solid roots in Haeden who decides to stay instead of leave disappears, her dead body eventually found along the side of the road. A reporter from Cleveland becomes obsessed with getting at the “truth” of what is happening in Haeden, which includes the ways in which rural America is being used as a kind of third world dumping sight for our toxic waste located right in our own backyards. That’s just the beginning of the long list of things that happen in this novel.

Probably, too much happens in this novel. It feels a little to me like a very strange dissertation or thesis written as a novel. It’s a study of what happens when urban and rural cultures collide. It’s a study of the origins and implications of anarchist philosophy. It’s an exploration of the political economy of rural America and how that effects small town life. And there’s a message about the pervasive and sinister effects of widespread violence against women in our culture. Is this sounding creepy to you yet? Because it is. It’s creepy.

I don’t know if Hoffman quite pulls it all off, as that’s a lot to be going on in one novel. Nonetheless, I am disturbed. I finished the novel yesterday, and I am still distinctly disturbed. I am always unsure whether this state of disturbance is a sign of very good fiction, or very bad fiction, or something else entirely.

I think this cover might be better

There are some very sinister and disturbing things that happen in this novel. I’m not giving too much away to say they take the form of violence against women. That’s nothing particularly unusual. But Hoffman and her characters take quite seriously the idea that violence against women is systemic and a crucial element of women’s oppression and subordination. Violence against women is horrible, but it is doubly horrible in that even if you are yourself never a victim, it has affected your life. It is the cornerstone, many feminists would argue, upon which our oppression is built. In the sociology of gender course I teach, we read an essay by Melanie Kaye-Kantrowitz about women, violence and resistance. There’s a quote in the essay from Ellen Willis, and she says, “Men don’t take us seriously because they’re not physically afraid of us.” In a fair fight, they would win. Bottom line.

This seems to be the realization Alice Piper comes to in the novel after the body of the young woman is discovered dead:

...Women’s bodies, which first became their coffins at puberty, a skin coffin. A place from which you will never be heard, except maybe by those who are buried nearby, or those with their ear to the ground.
After Wendy White’s body was found, I saw the world as it was for the first time. When her body was found, I was also found. I woke up in her grave and gazed down at my legs, took in the power of my lungs, my biceps, my hands and feet, and knew what they were for.

When we read the essay in my class, the students often ignore this point, but I always lead them back to it. Is this true? Is it true that we cannot end gender inequality without making men afraid of us? If we live in a culture that so glorifies and feeds on violence, in a culture in which violence truly is power, are we not obligated to use violence ourselves? I tell my students that I don’t have the answers to any of the questions I ask them, but that is more or less true for some of the questions; when I ask this question, I am truly not sure what the answer is.

You’ll have to read the novel to see exactly what Alice concludes her body is for, but it’s a rather radical conclusion. A conclusion that has me disturbed for myself, but also for my daughter. I don’t think Alice is right, but the strength of her argument is, well, disturbing.

Book Review: Raising Stony Mayhall

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 16:56:00 +0000

What’s up with all the zombies? First there was Sean of the Dead. And then Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and all its spin-offs. And now it appears there’s a whole world of very good and interesting zombie fiction out there, moaning and lurching around your local library or bookstore, waiting to chew on your brain. Or maybe more accurately, waiting for your own brain to chew on it.

Last year, I read The Reapers are the Angels, and it made my list of top ten fiction books of the year. I was blown away by the way in which Alden Bell used zombies to tell a genre-spanning story that was firmly situated in the landscape of great American literature. Surely, this was the best zombie book ever written. It still may be, but Raising Stony Mayhall, by Daryl Gregory, offers some interesting competition.

The first zombie outbreak happens in 1968. It’s quick, though deadly, and the government manages to kill all the flesh-eating zombies within a couple of days. At least that’s what they tell everyone. But in Iowa, the Mayhall family finds a dead baby that unexpectedly opens its eyes and goes on living, despite his grey skin and lack of any internal organs. And then the dead baby grows into a young man–Stony Mayhall. Because the government kills all zombies on sight, the Mayhall family has to keep Stony hidden on their rural farm. But eventually Stony is discovered and taken into hiding by the Living Dead Army, an underground community of zombies who were not destroyed by the government in 1968.

In this particular zombie world, the living dead are only ravenous, crazed eaters of flesh for the first 24 to 48 hours of their infection. After that they’re just like you or me...except for the dead part. They continue to be dead, and sometimes they have imperfect memories of their lives before the disease. But otherwise, they go right on “living” despite the fact that they don’t breathe or have circulating blood or really even internal organs anymore. And no one knows why this happens.

Everything else in the fictional world of this novel is the same. The music, the television shows, and eventually, the terrorist attacks on 9/11. But beneath the surface of this normal world are the lives of the underground living dead, a community with organization and leaders who divide into camps based on how they understand what it means to be the living dead (or “living challenged” as they suggest they be called at their conference). The Perpetualists believe they should bite a few humans every now and then to replace the living dead who are lost to the government, which actively seeks to find and destroy the underground living dead. Another group believes that they’re all abominations against nature or God, and so should be completely exterminated. But the Big Biters believe that the living dead should rise up en masse and attack the human race, killing everyone or turning them into the living dead once and for all. At the middle of all of this is Stony Mayhall, the zombie who grew and who spent most of his life among the living, rather than in hiding like the rest of the living dead.

Good “speculative fiction” (isn’t all fiction speculative?) is firmly grounded in the familiar and the real. Here’s a world where zombies exist, but how would zombies behave if they became just like people who happen to be dead and therefore, in a strange twist, potentially immortal? Gregory’s answer to this question is so very believable and interesting. The story is by turns funny and sad and poignant. This is a novel that’s not afraid to poke a little fun at the whole zombie genre in general.

What I found especially fascinating about Stony Mayhall is the particular direction Gregory takes the zombie myth. I think it’s accurate to call zombies mythic at this point, in the sense that they have become a subject which our culture returns to again and again in order to tell important stories about the human experience. In this particular incarnation, zombies become a vehicle through which to contemplate the body and our relation to the physical world. Stony wants to know why the living dead continue to move. A mystic figure in the living dead world called the Lump says, “The stick moves in the wind and believes it is moving itself.” Stony’s question becomes, what exactly is “the wind” in this metaphor?

Over time, parts of the living dead wear out because, well, they’re dead and so there’s no cell regeneration going on. But some living dead discover that if you attach a prosthetic arm or leg in place of what you lost, over time, they can learn how to move that prosthetic. But it’s moving in the absence of any muscles or nerve fibers connecting it to their body. It appears to be an act of will that allows them to move these prosthetic devices. What’s important, Stony begins to discover, is what you believe to be part of your body.

Stony takes this in some fascinating directions by the end of the novel. I would recommend this book for the story alone. There’s real pathos in Stony’s life; you come to care for him as a character and there’s a beautifully sad arc to his life story. The questions the novel raises about the nature of our bodies is an added bonus. I’m sure these classes probably already exist, but if this keeps up, they’ll be Zombie Literature classes popping up all over, and they’ll really be able to call themselves “literature” classes.

A Year on Trail 3: January

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 15:04:00 +0000

January is almost over, and I came dangerously close to failing on my New Year’s resolution less than 30 days into the new year. As I wrote at the beginning of this month, I resolved to walk the same trail–Trail 3–in Clifty Falls State Park at least once a month. This is inspired in part by my almost perpetual re-reading of Annie Dillard’s great book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. And because being on a trail in Clifty Falls is quite helpful to my own sanity and mental well-being.

I will confess at this point that I gave Trail 3 a preliminary go in December. On Christmas Day, in fact. Not much has changed since then, or at least not much that’s visible to my untrained eye. The creek at the bottom of the part of the trail I’m walking was flowing a little bit higher after all the rain we had last week. And the way down was a bit muddier. But otherwise, everything looked mostly the same as it had in December. So despite the unseasonably warm winter we’ve had so far around here, there are no signs of spring yet.

For the first time ever on a trail in Clifty, I neither saw nor heard any other humans on the trail, except for my husband, who came along. Clifty is a well used park, and so in my experience, even if there’s no one actually on your particular trail, you can usually hear the voices of your fellow hikers off in the distance. Not on this Sunday, though.

Tree fallen over the beginning of the trail

There are several things I like about Trail 3. First, it’s fairly close to the south side of the park where I usually enter coming from downtown Madison. Yes, I know it’s lazy, but I don’t have to drive as far to get there. Second, there’s a lovely deadfall of trees across the flat part of the path towards the beginning. I love the tunnel-like feeling this fallen tree gives you as you walk under it, even in the winter. And I’m no naturalist, but I believe it makes a nice little habitat for birds. At any rate, I often see cardinals flitting across the path right at this spot.

As the trail heads down into the creek valley, there’s a lovely little place with a rock overhang which my husband has identified as a great location for outdoor meditation...in warmer weather. At a certain point on the way down the trail, you can catch a glimpse of the Ohio River in the distance. Or at least in winter you can.

Eventually you reach a fork where you can either head back towards the Clifty Inn or down again towards the creek. I have elected to generally head down towards the creek, because it is another one of my favorite things about this trail. The descent is quite steep in places; towards the bottom it looks less like a trail than a washed out creek bed. Only a very, very steep creek bed without the usual rocks that help you get traction when it’s wet. But when you get to the bottom, it’s well worth it.

The creek, and on the right, the
mysterious "wall"

I’m not very good at reading the maps of the Clifty trail system, and so I can’t say for sure whether the creek you reach at the bottom of Trail 3 is Hoffman Creek or Clifty Creek (I confess that I’m not even really sure at that point whether I’m still on Trail 3), but I do know that it is quite a nice creek all the same. After the treacherous climb, you come to a little area where to your right, the creek disappears up into a steep canyon, and you can see in the distance a series of waterfalls. To your left, the canyon flattens and widens out into a lovely little secluded area filled with sycamore trees. Even in the dead of winter, this place seems kind of magical to me, like you very well may have stumbled into a lost world at the bottom of that steep climb. I haven’t crossed the creek yet to go exploring in this flattened out area, but it looks as if it may be where two creeks join, or at least where one slows down quite a bit. This area at the bottom of the climb is yet another of my favorite things about Trail 3.

In Clifty, I sometimes find it difficult to tell what’s man-made and what is not. Down in this valley, there’s a little square stone structure that’s quite convenient for sitting on and looks like it may have had some life as a water fountain in the past. It is pretty clearly man-made and I feel (though I have no actual knowledge to back this up) it is a remnant of some great WPA project that took place in the park. I like to tell myself this, anyway.

Where the creek comes down through the steep canyon, it’s sides look like a wall that’s been constructed. Constructed with huge, heavy slabs of rock very neatly and uniformly lined up. It’s so uniform that you say to yourself, “This must have been built.” And then you ask yourself, “Why?” Why would you build a wall for this creek down in this fairly steep canyon? Perhaps the only answer that makes sense is to give people a job during the Great Depression. My husband and I are divided on the issue of whether this wall is man-made or natural. If I were a less lazy person I would go ask someone.

The fountain type thing

Or perhaps I would not. Clifty Falls is an odd combination of civilization and the lack of civilization. Of course the Department of Natural Resources manages the trails. They built the huge stone steps that take you down into the canyon. The evidence of how we have created the park is everywhere. But you, or at least I, can also get the feeling that you are discovering everything anew in Clifty. Hence, why my post about a trail which has been traversed by thousands of people over the years reads like the journal of one of those eccentric and egotistical European explorers in the Antarctic pretending to have discovered places where humans have been living for thousands of years. And yet, Clifty brings it out in me. “Look what I found!” Description is an act of ownership, after all. So I guess part of me doesn’t really want to know, though if anyone can tell which creek it is from my description, that’d be nice.

Here is what I have discovered is true about the woods in the winter–there is still color and still life. We think of winter as devoid of color, but there are still green things. Some of them are moss, but some of them are plants. If you look closely, there are still just a few red berries hanging on a bush and on the ground of the trail. On this walk, there was a little plant whose leaves were bright purple underneath, whether naturally or from being frost-bitten, I can’t be sure. The stalks of some plants dry up and turn a bright kind of tan that is almost white against the dark leaves underneath. And coming back up the trail on the way home, I mistook a collection of fungi on rotten logs for flowers, they were so bright white in the sunshine.

Fungus on a log

In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Dillard seems able to selectively shower us with information about the flora and fauna in her little neck of the woods. I am currently not in possession of such knowledge, which means there are things I see, and things I don’t see. Seeing and knowing are so deeply connected, you know. But as part of my year on trail 3 project, I’m looking for some books on the flora and fauna of Clifty Falls. Perhaps I’ll actually visit the Nature Center there next time around. It will be good to know the names of things, but also sad to have to remember that I’m not, in fact, the first one to discover them, and so I don’t get to name them myself.

Look for more pictures from Trail 3 on my Facebook page.

Book Review: The Paris Wife, gender and the writing life

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 23:38:00 +0000

I’m almost finished listening to The Paris Wife by Paula McLain as an audio book. One more round trip drive to Louisville should do it. It’s a lovely novel, and well worth listening to. I would say it’s probably a book I would have actually read, as well. I can’t say this for all the audio books I listen to; some of them are not quite worth the commitment of the printed page. But the book has gotten me thinking about gender and the writing life.

The Paris Wife is told from the first person perspective of Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley Richardson (isn’t Hadley a wonderful name for a woman?). In the novel, we get to see in a rather intimate way what it might be like to love, marry and have children with one of America’s greatest writers. Suffice to say, it’s no picnic. Certainly, in McLain’s version of reality, Hadley very much loved Ernest, and he loved her. I haven’t even gotten to the bits where I think their lives start to go very badly, but already what strikes me is the selfishness of the writing life. Or maybe of male writers? It’s hard to tell.

Not surprisingly, a lot has been written about writing. Not surprising because if you’re a writer, writing is something you’re going to find quite fascinating, and therefore want to write about. I remember a few years back now reading an essay by Orhan Pamuk about the loneliness of writing. He was arguing that for everyone who writes, there is a moment when you have to shut out everything and everyone else and leave them all behind. You must go and inhabit a world that’s all your own, all of your own making. He was arguing that you can write only if you are willing to tolerate this kind of isolation.

I remember at the time I read his essay, I had not been writing for years. I thought to myself, “Well, that works out well that I don’t write anymore, because I have no interest in isolating myself. In fact, it sounds downright self-absorbed and unhappy to live such a monastic life.” And then later I thought, “No, Pamuk has it wrong. You don’t have to go away and be alone to write.” But of course, he’s right. You do.

Virginia Woolf quite famously knew this. Women need a room of their own. Which is a damned liberating and radical idea if you’re Virginia Woolf, because women were given no space of their own in her day. But also means that there is some shutting out of the world that has to take place. And if you live in a world like mine, where the possibility of a room of one’s own is much more plausible, the problem is more about the loneliness itself.

Ernest and Hadley

My husband is always saying that there are people who absolutely have to write in order to keep from going insane or becoming addicts. Those are the Writers. And then there’s the rest of us who would like to write, but don’t feel compelled to do so. According to this dichotomy, Ernest Hemingway was a Writer. He was an unpleasant dick when he couldn’t write. He was kind of an unpleasant dick when he could write, so maybe the writing had nothing to do with it. More importantly, he had a wife and this allowed him to go off and do his writing. Hadley struggles with being left alone for Ernest’s writing, but she feels it’s important to him, and so mostly so far, she supports him.

I have a lovely husband who is quite willing to support me in my decision to shut myself in the back room to write. And unlike Hadley, I think he’s often quite happy to do so; he has his own interests to attend to. But here’s the difference between me and Hemingway. Or here’s what I imagine the difference is between me and Hemingway. I feel bad about shutting that door. I feel bad about spending time in the back room of our house typing away on a keyboard. Even when the writing is going well and is feeling enjoyable, I feel like I have let someone down. I don’t think Hemingway spent much time worrying about this.

Maybe my husband is correct in that there are Writers and the rest of us. The Writers will write no matter what the circumstances. And so the guilt I feel about shutting the door is because I am a writer and not a Writer. But then I wonder, how many of those Writers are men? Is that compulsion to write enabled if you’re a man in ways it might not be if you’re a woman? Or does gender really have nothing to do with it?

Here’s the flip side of shutting the door, though, which is also apparent in The Paris Wife. Writing can also be very much about community. I know Hemingway’s work, but I didn’t know much about his particular influences...his circle. If we can trust McLain’s telling, Hemingway’s writing was deeply dependent upon his relationships with people like Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and the rest of the ex-pat crowd in Paris and the rest of Europe. Figures like Pound and Stein literally helped him by reading his work and by talking about writing. But they also helped him do things like find an apartment, and discover the bull fights in Spain, a subject which became an obsession for Hemingway. They helped him to get his very first work published, and to find a job with a newspaper to make some money to support Hadley and their baby. Hemingway would not have been Hemingway without this community, let alone without his almost unfailingly supportive wife, Hadley.

Ernest and Hadley

I have a friend who’s a sculptor and her work is almost always deeply collaborative. The pieces are painstaking and they often take a village to assemble. She recruits friends and students and people from the community to come help her cut piping or assemble twist ties. It feels like a kind of quilting bee at moments, and I’ve always thought this was a rather unique way to do art because of its communality. But as time goes on, I begin to believe that the image we have of the artist, working in isolation for hours in his or her studio, is a myth more than a reality. Really, art is about the juxtaposition of the moments being alone and those equally important moments of being together. Hemingway talking to Gertrude Stein. A group of people assembling a sculpture together.

This vision of art makes perfect sense, because great art tells us something about ourselves as humans. Ourselves as people. This would be a very difficult thing to do if you truly shut yourself in a room; how would you know anything about people without interacting with them from time to time? But how would you be able to create great art if you didn’t have some time alone to think or write or sketch? Perhaps it is the very going back and forth which is so important.

I love Hemingway’s writing. Every now and then I read “The Hills Like White Elephants” as a lesson in the amazing things you can do with language. But I’m so glad not to have been married to him. And I don’t particularly think I would have liked hanging out with him much, either. I wouldn’t mind, as he did at one point in Paris, having my own little apartment space in which to write. Would it be easier or harder to walk down the street to a studio, rather than shutting oneself in the back room? I’m not sure. But I probably wouldn't mind giving it a try.

Book Review: Carry the One

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 23:36:00 +0000

I’m in a bit of a beginning of the new year book slump. In fact, I have to say that in general, the first 3 weeks of 2012 have been crappy for myself and many of my friends and family members. In protest, I’m just going to start writing the date, “20-bleh.” And I never thought I’d say this in the whole of my life because I think February is probably the worst month of the whole year, but here’s hoping next month is better.

In the meantime, I’m behind on the amount of reading I need to do in order to read 100 books a year (I know it’s a little early to be worrying about this, but you don’t want to leave all the reading for the end). And the local library website is down, which puts a serious wrench in all my reading plans. “A serious wrench in my reading plans” means I might actually have to pick out some of the books on my shelves that have been languishing un-read and actually read them instead of getting something shiny and new from the library.

Anyway, Carry the One, by Carol Anshaw, is the bright spot amidst all this beginning of the year mess. It came just at the moment when I needed a book that I could pick up and read in a couple of days. Which is not to say it’s particularly short, but that it’s interesting enough that I was actually motivated to read it in a couple of days.

Carry the One is the story of a group of people whose lives become intertwined by a car accident in which a young girl is killed. Some of the people are related to each other and some of them are not, but the accident forms a kind of bond in their lives that often brings them back together. The novel is episodic, and we dip in and out of the characters lives across the span of years, from the initial accident when they are in their twenties into their middle age.

I have developed a theory of great literature lately that in very great books, not much really happens. You can interpret “not much” any way you choose. In Austen, the “not much” is that people get married. In The Great Gatsby, people do not get married. I’ve been thinking a lot lately that great fiction takes fairly unremarkable events and shows us something interesting about them.

At any rate, Carry the One has a somewhat remarkable event–a car accident and the death of the girl. And this is an important part of the novel. But mostly what happens after that is unremarkable. People get married. People get divorced. Some people become mildly famous. Some people become drug addicts. Some people have children who grow up. I can not get enough of well written fiction that is about unremarkable things. And that describes Carry the One.

The novel is homey in the strangest way. The characters were not really like me, but I felt very much like I knew them and understood them. Even the characters whose lives were farthest from my own still felt like, I don’t know, a distant cousin or nephew? Strange and sometimes annoying and tragic, but like they might still live next door.

Carry the One floats every so gracefully on the surface of a novel that is about Important Things, without making you feel the kind of discomfort that sometimes comes with reading a novel about Important Things. For some reason, I can very easily imagine this novel as a movie, though most movies do not skip through time in the way this novel does (maybe something like When Harry Met Sally, only a little darker).

Carry the One will probably not change your life, but it will be enjoyable. And if you want to think about what it would feel like to live your life under the burden of having been involved in the death of child, you can. If you want to think about what it means to be connected to other people by such an event, you can. If you want to contemplate the ways in which we are perhaps all connected by events beyond our control, go right ahead.

You should also check out this review, at As the Crowe Flies (And Reads!), on whose recommendation I picked this book up from the pile of ARCs at our local bookstore.

The things we forget: the end of the massage

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 19:25:00 +0000

One of the greatest pleasures in life, one of the things that makes me feel truly affluent, is the luxury of a monthly massage. My massage therapist is also a friend, but even if she were not, I would still say that she is the best massage therapist ever. Just lying down on her heated massage table immediately relaxes me, like some kind of Pavlovian response. I walk out of a massage feeling a little hazy and dazed and just generally all over good. There’s nothing to compare to it, and so I am constantly buying massage gift certificates for anyone and everyone. And I am always puzzled when they don’t immediately schedule an appointment.

Most of the time I have an hour massage, though my next appointment will be for 90 minutes. This is the longest possible block of time, and yet I know that even with 90 minutes I will still be waiting for the end of the massage.

***

I have always been the kind of person who delays gratification. Give me a meal with three different things on my plate and I will eat them in ascending order of preference; at Thanksgiving, first the green beans, and then the mashed potatoes, and then the stuffing, because it’s my favorite. And yes, I eat them one at a time rather than all at once, which is a whole different story. If the pink candies are my favorite, I’ll eat all the other colors first and save the pink ones for last.

This is not to say I don’t procrastinate, because I do. I will put off taking the cats to the vet, calling the cable company, and deciding whether or not we’re going on vacation for as long as possible. But for the things that are really going to cause me maximum stress, I’d rather just get them done. So for example, I knew that I couldn’t handle the stress of an unwritten dissertation hanging over my head. It wasn’t fun, but every day I would get some of it done and then reward myself with an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But only after some writing had been done.

Recently I read in The New Yorker that this ability to delay gratification may explain why I was able to go to graduate school and get a Ph.D. and a fairly decent job as a college professor. In the famous marshmallow experiment, psychologist Walter Mischel put a marshmallow in front of small children and told them that if they could wait a few minutes while he was out of the room, they could have two marshmallows instead of one when he got back. If they couldn’t wait, they could ring a bell, and he’d come back, but they would only get one marshmallow. Could they delay gratification in order to get that second marshmallow?

Initially, that was the whole experiment, but over time, Mischel noticed trends in his childrens’ friends who had done the experiment. Those who had waited longest for the marshmallow seemed to do better in school and on SAT scores, while those who had snatched up the marshmallow almost at once seemed to struggle. Mischel called these high delayers (those who could wait very long for the second marshmallow) and low delayers (those who could not wait and gave up the second marshmallow). By looking at their test subjects years later, Mischel and his team hope to be able to tell us all about the nature of self-control–the ability in part to delay gratification.

***

Being a high delayer is good if you want to get your dissertation written. It’s not so good if you’re a practitioner of Buddhism who’s trying to stay in the present moment. Delaying gratification helps you get things done, but it can also incline you to take up residence in that distant future where you get to eat the marshmallow or watch the Buffy episode. And as many wise voices tell us, the present is always the only place we have. If you don’t pay attention to it, just like that it’s gone.

I’ve written before about my tendency to endlessly replay past events, but perhaps because of my high delaying nature, or maybe just because I’m human, I’m also prone to look for what’s out there on the horizon, especially if it seems potentially better than where I am right now. What is there to look forward to? What’s next?

A little of this is probably fairly harmless. And certainly better than projecting yourself into an unpleasant future. But it puts a lot of pressure on the future to live up to your expectations. And it’s worth repeating that in the meantime, you miss out on what’s happening right now.

***

Well let me confess that sometimes the present just seems so incredibly boring. When I had first started dating my husband, when we were in the very earliest and giddiest stages of our romance, I tried a Buddhist practice for keeping myself in the moment. As I’ve described it before, you walk around all day narrating exactly what’s happening. “I am opening my eyes. I am seeing daylight through the window. I am pushing off the covers. I am getting out of bed. I am walking to the bathroom.” Man, what a drag. Especially when you’re in love. All I wanted to think about was my future husband, and the next time I would see him, and what we would do. What did I care about paying attention to brushing my teeth? The future was so full of excitement and pleasure. How could that compare to anything in the present moment?

But then where would I be when I was finally done brushing my teeth and with my husband? Did I savor those moments? Did I relax into them? Or did I wonder what was next?

***

Getting a massage is an infinitely pleasant present moment. There’s the heated table and the music and the smell of the oil. And of course, there’s the touch. It is guaranteed to provide something close to heaven right there, in that present moment. But can I stay there? No.

I spend part of the massage talking to my friend, which is quite enjoyable. But I also spend larger parts of my massage than I’d like to thinking that it’s going to end. Waiting for it to end. Dreading the moment when it ends. And then it surely does. Can you imagine anything sadder?

As I lay there waiting for my massage to end, I think about what a waste it is for me to lie there thinking about the end of my massage. I’m aware of how insane it is. I just can’t always stop it. And this is life. How much of our life do we spend waiting for something to be over? I would like to say that we spend more time waiting for the less pleasant parts of our lives to be over, but there I am on the massage table, still thinking about the end. Still thinking about the next thing.

At this point I am always reminded of Star Wars. I see Luke Skywalker, standing above ground on Tatooine at the very beginning of the first movie, staring off into the horizon with the two suns in the distance, John Williams’ score soaring and the wind ruffling his hair. I know this is not the moment where Yoda actually says this, but in my head, I hear Yoda’s words superimposed over that image: “This one a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked away...to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing? Hmph. Adventure. Heh. Excitement. Heh. A Jedi craves not these things.”

There is magic in the present moment, but why is it so very hard for us to see? If we learn anything from the teachings of Buddhism, it would appear to be that our inability to firmly live in the present is ancient and really nothing new. In the small amount of time I have been working on living in the present moment, it’s quite easy to see why in the whole of our human history, we haven’t really gotten any better at it. Even when the horizon’s only going to bring you a problematic father and the loss of your hand, it’s still tempting. Even when it’s the end of your massage, it seems a feat of great magic and splendor to look away from the vision of the future and stay contentedly here.

Madison Monday: Voices for Children

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 16:20:00 +0000

I suspect it is not just academics whose working lives are ruined by the persistence of pointless meetings. As a sociologist, I fully understand that sometimes the point of a meeting is more subtle than what’s stated on the printed agenda; sometimes we meet merely to demonstrate the good will that comes from physically being in a room together. But I also know that studies have shown that Americans could cut their work day to 4 hours, working effectively only 6 months out of the year, and still have the same standard of living we had in 1948. I feel much of that wasted time in our work lives is taken up by meetings.

So a good and worthwhile meeting is worth noting. This Saturday I was up and headed to a 9:00 meeting here in Madison. It’s not rare for me to be up at 9:00, but rare to be walking around the streets of Madison in the dead of winter on a Saturday morning. It was a cold weekend and therefore, a quiet town. This Saturday morning, the sun was shining on the buildings in Madison, but the streets were so still that the only sound was the birds singing. And I have to say, I usually don’t hear birds singing on Main St. in Madison, but it’s a good way to start your day.

The meeting was for Southeastern Indiana Voices for Children, a nonprofit that’s probably more familiar to most people as CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates). Because that particular acronym (CASA) is already taken in Jefferson County, here we’re just Voices for Children. CASA programs across the country and here in Madison organize volunteers to be court advocates for children who become wards of the state due to abuse and neglect. The program started in 1977 when a juvenile court judge in Seattle became concerned about the drastic decisions to be made about children who were victims of abuse and neglect with insufficient information at hand. CASA volunteers are appointed to watch over and advocate for these abused and neglected children, making sure their interests are protected in our overburdened legal and social service system and that they don’t end up languishing in inappropriate group or foster homes. CASA volunteers are the last line of defense for abused and neglected children who have already been let down by their families and life circumstances that are beyond their own control.

To call the work of CASA volunteers intense is an understatement. Cases can last for years at a time as legal cases stretch out and the situation of children and their families morph and change. Volunteers must deal with parents who are often angry and living situations that look appalling to those of us lucky enough never to have been brushed by poverty. They negotiate with lawyers, law enforcement, teachers, pediatricians, and the Department of Child Services in order to try and understand what course of action is in the child’s best interests.

Old City Hall in Madison

The work of Voices for Children is a complicated mission, but an important one. For many abused and neglected children, their CASA volunteer is the one consistent adult presence in their lives. But as with many important social service agencies, funding for CASA programs is always precarious. Here in Madison, Voices for Children would like to raise money that would help them provide more support for the hard work done by their dedicated CASA volunteers.

Our meeting Saturday morning was to help educate the relatively new board members of Voices for Children and to help plan the Learn About Us lunch on this Thursday, January 19th from 11-1, at the Old City Hall building in Madison. There will be food, of course, and the opportunity to check out the beautiful offices in the refinished Old City Hall. The artwork in Old City Hall is all local images, so you might find, as I did, yourself looking at a painting of your own house in the bathroom. But you’ll also find out about the important work of Voices for Children volunteers. And that, unlike many of the things we do in the course of day, is an undeniably valuable use of your time.

Peace is every breath: sitting and breathing

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 22:22:00 +0000

In our house we have a little table that sits behind the couch. My husband calls the table an altar, but being a little less comfortable with any language that hints at religion, I’ll just go with table. On it sit some little statues of the Buddha and a singing bowl. Underneath it sits a little book my husband bought by Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, called Peace is Every Breath: A Practice for Our Busy Lives. I try to meditate every day, and after I meditate, I pick up this book and flip to a page at random and have a read.

The idea of the book is that we are all very busy people who also want some peace, contentment and happiness in our lives. How are we to achieve that? Thich Nhat Hanh’s book is filled with suggestions as to how to integrate a practice into the fabric of our daily lives that might bring us closer to peace and happiness. The book is divided into tiny little vignettes like “Preparing breakfast” and “Brushing your teeth” and “Shopping for happiness.” Peace Is Every Breath is Thich Nhat Hanh’s attempt to help people bring Buddhist-influenced practices into a modern and decidedly non-Buddhist life. The book is simple and easy to read and has been a great source of comfort to me, so I thought that over the course of this new year, I’d share bits and pieces of it on my blog.

Sitting and Breathing

It took me a long time to understand what all this sitting and breathing was about. I make no claim to fully understand it now. I do know that I am a happier and more compassionate person when I am sitting and breathing on a regular basis, and that’s enough for me.

Several years ago I was part of a small meditation group with some friends. It all seemed very intense. You were supposed to breathe, and count to ten without thinking of anything, but if you didn’t get to ten, you had to start all over again. It kind of felt to me like an exercise in becoming steeped in your own failure, because I never got to ten. Then I went and heard a Tibetan llama talk on campus, and he used the phrase “monkey mind,” and it was like a bulb in my head went off. Meditation is not a contest to beat your last best count—to get to 8 this time instead of 7. It is practice. You are practicing becoming aware. You are practicing mindfulness. This does not mean you can stop your thoughts. Your job is simply to get to a place where you can see them clearly. This sounds so incredibly simple, but is so incredibly hard.

The Tibetan llama used the phrase “monkey mind” to describe the way our minds work. Like a monkey, the mind is restless and all over the place. One moment you’re typing at your computer, the next you’re back in high school at your first dance, and then you’re replaying an interaction with a colleague, and then you’re thinking you should call your mother, and then you’re wondering whether it’s going to snow tomorrow. This is nothing to feel bad about. It’s just the way things are. Sitting and breathing is about being able to see the monkey at work, rather than getting lost in the chaos that is our monkey mind.

I try to sit and breath for 15 minutes every day, but Thich Nhat Hanh asks that you start with just two or three minutes. Find a comfy place. It’s good to sit in the lotus or half-lotus position, but you don’t have to. And then just breathe in and out. Try to focus your attention on your breathing. It sounds so simple, doesn’t it? It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

There’s nothing mystical or magical about sitting and breathing. You’re not going to suddenly see your spirit animal or hear the voice of god or be able to travel through time. You’re just going to learn to see your mind at work. You’re just going to become a little more aware. For example, I learned that my mind is quite good at replaying negative things that have happened. It’s quite good at imagining how future interactions might go badly. When I’m upset, it’s as if my mind is a skipping record. Most recently, I rehearsed a conversation with someone in my head almost without ceasing for two days straight.

The hope of meditation is that as you become aware of what your mind does, you can learn to do something different. Obviously, it doesn’t always work. And it takes time. Sitting and breathing is practice. It’s exactly like learning a musical instrument or the multiplication table. If you do it over and over again, eventually you will get better at becoming aware. And then perhaps after the 56th time rehearsing the same conversation, you can at last stop.

Thich Nhat Hanh also provides many gathas for daily practice. A gatha is a short poem or saying that you use to help you stay in the present moment. In a class I taught, I used to have students do an exercise where they walk around all day reciting in their head exactly what they’re doing at that moment–“I am walking towards the door to this building. I am placing my hand on the door handle. I am opening the door. I am walking in the door. I am walking down the hall.” They found this infuriating, but gathas serve the same purpose with an added bit of wisdom or insight thrown in. There are gathas for answering the telephone, peeing, saying hello, turning on the televison, etc. You can make up your own gathas, too, but here’s the gatha Thich Nhat Hanh gives us for sitting and breathing:

Breathing in, I feel my breath coming into my belly and chest.
Breathing out, I feel my breath flowing out of my belly and chest.
Breathing in, I am aware of my entire body.
Breathing out, I smile to my entire body.
Breathing in, I’m aware of some pains or tensions in my body.
Breathing out, I release all the pains and tensions in my body.
Breathing in, I feel well.
Breathing in, I feel at ease.

Book Review: Hannah Coulter, membership and modern life

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 13:23:00 +0000

It’s not a secret that I love Wendell Berry. One of the first posts I ever wrote on this blog was about Jayber Crow, and I find a way to include a Wendell Berry book on about every top ten list I possibly can.

Recently I re-read Hannah Coulter for a book group. Hannah Coulter is a novel very much in the vein of Jayber Crow. The language is beautiful in its simplicity. Nothing particularly exciting happens. Hannah lives her life. She gains wisdom. Her husband dies. Her children move away. She mourns the diminishment of the membership.

If you were to outline the plot of Hannah Coulter, it would sound so incredibly boring. Perhaps the plot of many great works of fiction would. And yet, you are moved. I am moved. I can’t tell you how many times Hannah Coulter makes me cry. And smile. And look out my window and contemplate the world.

What I contemplated mostly in this most recent reading is the idea of a membership. This is something you see in Jayber Crow, as well. The subtitle of the novel is, “The Life Story of Jayber Crow, Barber, of the Port William Membership, As Written by Himself.” What exactly is a membership?

Here’s an excerpt from Jayber Crow which perhaps describes what it means to be part of a membership:

Theoretically, there is always a better place for a person to live, better work to do, a better spouse to wed, better friends to have. But then this person must meet herself coming back: Theoretically, there always is a better worker, spouse, and friend than she is. This surely describes one of the circles of Hell, and who hasn’t traveled around it a time or two?

I have got to the age now where I can see how short a time we have to be here. And when I think about it, it can seem strange beyond telling that this particular bunch of us should be here on this little patch of ground in this little patch of time, and I can think of the other times and places I might have lived, the other kinds of man I might have been. But there is something else. There are moments when the heart is generous, and then it knows that for better or worse our lives are woven together here, one with another and with the place and all the living things.

This quote also makes me cry, partly because my niece read it at my wedding, but also just because it is such a wonderful distillation of wisdom and truth. To be a part of a membership is to belong to each other and to the place in which you live. It is to see the ways in which our lives are woven together.

In the novels, it is Burley Coulter, the itinerant rambler, who is always talking about the membership. Some people know they’re a part of it, and some don’t. But there it is all the same. If you read a Wendell Berry novel, you can feel the membership living in its pages. I grew up in a small, rural town that was disappearing out from under me, so I felt like I absorbed the ghost of a fading membership. For me that involved my family and my community, and the two of them were deeply intertwined. To be a part of that membership was to be known, not just for yourself as an individual, but for how you plugged in to a larger social fabric. You were yourself, but also and always, the daughter of someone, the granddaughter of someone, the niece, the neighbor, the friend, the classmate. You lived tucked neatly into a complex web of social life. You were woven together.

This is something that comes from having spent generations in the same place with the same families, and so it’s not something you can pick up and take with you. I cannot be woven into the fabric of Madison in quite that same way. Few people can because we are always moving around.

Berry doesn’t write about how this woven-together-ness isn’t always pleasant. I only missed and cherished my membership after I had left it. Up until that point, I just wanted to get out. And my parents encouraged me to get out. Here’s a quote from Hannah Coulter about education and “getting out”:

The big idea of education, from first to last, is the idea of a better place. Not a better place where you are, because you want it to be better and have been to school and learned to make it better, but a better place somewhere else. In order to move up, you have got to move on. I didn’t see this at first. And for a while after I knew it, I pretended I didn’t. I didn’t want it to be true.

Hannah loses her children to their education, and I lost my membership to education and to the forces of suburbanization that were destroying it anyway. Though perhaps it would have been there for me in another form even if I had stayed. And perhaps a membership is something you can carry with you, even after you leave.

I believe very strongly that humans are social animals. We need a membership, and in modern life, we have created a set of conditions that seem to work against the formation of just such a thing. Few of us can have the kind of membership that comes from spending generations in the same place anymore. But can we still weave our lives together? Can we feel connected to the place we live and the people who live in that place with us and all the living things?

The first week of 2012 was a hard one for me. There was ugliness and anger and anxiety, much of which probably didn’t have to exist, but there it is all the same. And in the midst of it, I forgot about my membership. A membership sustains you, and I have one here in my little town. A membership should make you feel cared for and uplifted and as if you belong somewhere. It should reflect back to you the best version of yourself. And it was there all the time, in the middle of my chaos, if I could just take a moment and see it.

I’m lucky to live in a small town like Madison and to have found a membership here. I don’t know if it’s as easy for people in other places. In Berry’s novels, nothing good ever happens when people leave Port William. They get divorced. They go to war. They become lost and alienated when they are removed from the membership. What does this mean for people like my sister in the suburbs? Or for my friends in the city? Or for all of us here in Madison? I would like to believe membership is possible everywhere, but it seems the difference might be that in our modern world, all the things that exist outside the membership in Port William are dwelling right on top of us. If Port William is an island, a sanctuary where membership survives and the current of the modern world has no pull, it is truly a fiction. I don’t believe there is such a place of purity for those of us living outside the pages of Berry’s novels. You don’t have to leave Port William for the bad things to happen in real life; they’re already there with you...in your town and your home and your living room. No matter where you live, the difficulties are the same. The stream of our modern culture does not flow towards membership. If you wade too deeply into that current, it will always drag you away. To be a part of a membership takes patience and generosity and love and kindness. And the conditions of our modern lives sometimes make those things feel as if they are in short supply. I believe that they are not. I hope that they are infinite.

The world Wendell Berry creates in Hannah Coulter and Jayber Crow is a beautiful one. But it is a world of the past, and perhaps a past that never completely existed for any of us. We cannot go backwards. We can’t all be farmers anymore. In one lifetime, we cannot recreate the generations-worth of relationships we may have lost. But we can try to fight the current of modern life that pulls us away from membership. It will be like swimming upstream sometimes in the face of our daily lives, but we can do the hard work of building a membership. We can rejoice in the short time we have here together and the ways in which we are bound together. We can’t live in Port William, but we can visit, and perhaps, take a bit of it with us.

Other lovely quotes from Hannah Coulter:

As the years passed and our life changed, the place changed. It emerged, you might say, from what it had been into what we needed and wanted it to be, never perfect of course, but always a little better. It came under the influence of what we foresaw in it, and our ways of using it and going about in it.

And again I come to the difficulty of finding words. It is hard to say what it means to be at work and thinking of a person you loved and love still who did that same work before you and who taught you to do it. It is a comfort ever and always, like hearing the rhyme come when you are singing a song.

You have consented to time and it is winter. The country seems bigger, for you can see through the bare trees. There are times when the woods is absolutely still and quiet. The house holds warmth. A wet snow comes in the night and covers the ground and clings to the trees, making the whole world white. For a while in the morning the world is perfect and beautiful. You think you will never forget.

You think you will never forget any of this, you will remember it always just the way it was. But you can’t remember it the way it was. To know it, you have to be living in the presence of it right as it is happening. It can return only by surprise. Speaking of these things tells you thatt there are no words for them that are equal to them or that can restore them to your mind.

Madison Monday: The Daryl R. Karns Natural History Trails at Hanover College

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 01:33:00 +0000

For many of us in the academic world, today was the first day back to classes. The first day back on campus. Does this seem infinitely harder to do in the middle of winter than it did back in September, when you could convince yourself that summer was not quite over? When you could ride the coattails of freedom into the semester and tell yourself that with the right attitude, summer didn’t really have to end? I think so.

My schedule last semester left me with only an hour between any given class on the days when I was teaching, and so no time for much more than gulping down some lunch and preparing for the next class. This semester, I have two hours between classes and so decided to incorporate a little moving around in that window. One of my New Year’s Resolutions is to walk the same trail in Clifty Falls State Park at least once a month, so I considered heading in that direction. But as I wrote before, the trails in Clifty are a little rugged, especially for those of us dressed in teacherly-type clothes. I decided to walk instead around campus, which is scenic enough in its own right, located as we are on a beautiful bluff overlooking the Ohio River, as any of our recruitment brochures would tell you.

Here’s a confession I have to make. I have known for a long time about the trail system on Hanover’s campus. I sat on an committee that talked endlessly about the repair, marking, and maintenance of these trails. I’d heard people roughly describe where these trails were and how you got to them. But I, myself, had never set foot on any of these trails. And I had no real intention of doing so this afternoon. But as I was meandering down the paved drive, I actually spotted the handrail and stairs that lead to one of the trailheads. And so I thought I might as well check it out.

The trails at Hanover are now named the Daryl R. Karns Natural History Trails in honor of a dear colleague in the biology department whom we lost last year to a sudden heart attack. I didn’t know Daryl as well as I wished I could have, but I know he was kind, and thoughtful, and could always be depended upon to be the voice of reason in a world full of hyperbole and drama. Perhaps all work environments are like this, but sometimes working with other academics feels distinctly like you’ve landed in the middle of a monkey farm; duck to avoid the occasional air-born poo. Daryl was ever the grown-up in the middle of this fray.

The small part of the trail system I sampled today are perfectly named for Daryl; they are an oasis of calm in the middle of the bustle that is a college campus. Head down these stairs and you can peer up at some of the academic buildings looming above you, but also see the river and its valley laid out in front of you. Finding these stairs and this trail feels like it must be something out of a children’s book, like a gateway to another world just waiting for you at the back of the closet. The part of the trail I was on heads down into the river valley through a path cut into the side of the hill with exposed rock formations all around. Other parts of the trail take you to waterfalls or along ridges above the river valley.

This semester I’m teaching environmental sociology, and one of the things we explore in this class is our relationship to nature. What is nature? Are humans a part of nature or separate from it? Can we ever see nature for what it truly is, or are we always peering through the particular cultural lens of our time and place? And what are the implications of the ways in which we think about nature?

Daryl was a biologist who was specifically interested in snakes, but more importantly, he was an advocate of the liberal arts. During my very first year at Hanover, when I was just getting my feet wet and feeling out what it meant to be here, Daryl gave the speech at our opening convocation. It was about rivers as a metaphor for the liberal arts, in the way rivers can tie together people and places and moments in time. Daryl used the trails at Hanover for his biology classes, but he would want everyone to use them. Take from your walk what you will. Today I needed a quite place to be in the middle of my day. I suspect students have much more creative uses for the trails. But what a gift for us to be able to enter that other world with such ease in the middle of campus. And what a gift for anyone else who happens to be passing by.

Madison Monday: A Year on Trail 3

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 16:48:00 +0000

It’s the new year, and time for reflection on the year past and the year to come (happy and healthy reflection, rather than the disassociative sort). Last year this time I was embarking on my happiness project. There were a couple of updates on my blog. And then...nothing. Did my happiness project tank? Yes and no.

Along Trail 3

I did give up on the very involved monthly chart. You might also say that I just discovered that I am not a daily check-the-box kind of person. Many of the things I did that were inspired by the happiness project became a part of my regular routine, such as meditating. My happiness project got me thinking a great deal about the things that actually make me happy as compared to the things I believe should make me happy. It gave me the courage to try new things, like playing the fiddle and knitting, which have increased my quality of life immensely. I think the most valuable part of the happiness project overall was that it empowered me to think seriously about concrete things I might do to make myself happier. So I declare it a honking big success.

This year, I’m going with a few concrete resolutions, rather than a more extensive happiness project. And number one on that list is to walk a trail in Clifty Falls State Park at least once a month. Specifically, I’ll be walking parts of Trail 3.

Now, in the past I’ve scoffed at the idea of hiking in a state park. This is because I was fortunate enough as child to grow up in the country on a generous piece of land. We kind of had our own little private state park, complete with woods and a creek, and if you went far enough down the creek, a waterfall and some cliffs. When you grow up being able to just walk outside your door and into nature, it takes a while to appreciate what a state park might be for–i.e., people who do not have their own little chunk of park.

I think these taken-for-granted assumptions explain a lot of things that rural folks find hard to understand. Like dog parks. If you grew up on a farm or out in the boonies, you didn’t walk your dog. If you were a small child who had grown up watching folks on Sesame Street walk their dogs (or their llamas) you might want to try to walk your dog as a kind of cool new thing to try, but your dog was probably having none of it. Your dog probably didn’t live inside with you anyway, so it certainly didn’t get all cooped up during the day. Our dogs could run when they wanted to, lay around when they wanted to, and even roll in horse poop when they wanted to (which was more often than we liked). So a space for our dogs to run around and be walked was nowhere on our list of public services we felt our local government should provide for us.

But now I live in the urban metropolis of downtown Madison, with a backyard the size of most people’s garage. I can walk down to the river, which is quite scenic, and before the bridge work started, I liked to walk east of the bridge along Vaughn Drive, where things get a little less crowded and a little more quiet. You can walk west towards the Heritage Trail and up the hillside. But downtown is downtown, and it is enjoyable in a way that is quite different from walk in Clifty.

The trails in Clifty are not particularly what you’d call an easy stroll. They range from “very rugged” to “moderately rugged.” There’s a trail marked “easy” on there, but I’m skeptical. If you hike most any trail in Clifty, which is to say walk purposefully for extended periods of time, you will have to spend all of your time looking down, watching carefully where you place your feet so that you will not fall and kill yourself. If you want to look up and around, you will have to stop walking, but this is what I prefer. Growing up, I spent a lot of time walking around the woods. But the walking was secondary. I was walking to get somewhere, to see something, to pretend that I was trekking through the snowy frozen landscape of Hoth on Star Wars or a treacherous jungle from Indiana Jones. If a hike is a walk that gets me someplace where I can stop and look around, then I’m all about hiking.

In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard picks a very small patch of the earth, a small area in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, and takes a long hard look. Lacking the benefit of a cabin on Tinker Creek, I intend to take a good long look at a small patch of Clifty Falls State Park. Trail 3 is only “rugged,” and believe me when I say, I won’t be walking the whole of Trail 3. But at least once a month, I resolve to check it out. To see what I can see. To chase the elusive moment when winter becomes spring. To discover that winter is not as dull and colorless as it looks in our imagination. To absorb the sound of the breeze that seems to always be blowing in the woods. To head for a spot and then sit quietly and look around. To observe a year on Trail 3.

As a teaser, here's a brief description of Trail 3 from the Department of Natural Resources website for Clifty Falls:

RUGGED (1 mile)—Starts at park road just south of Poplar Grove. Long grade descends to midcanyon, then follows along canyon. Steep grades rise to Poplar Grove. Easy walking to near side of Beech Grove connecting with Trail 4.

What are your New Years’s resolutions for 2012?

Book Review: Internal landscapes and The Road from Coorain

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 16:01:00 +0000

So, I exaggerated in my brief description of this memoir by Jill Ker Conway in my top nonfiction books of 2011. It’s only the first seven pages of this book that are description of the Australian landscape. But those seven pages were enough to make me pick up the book and put it down many times before finally moving past those pages recently. And now I’m quite glad that I did.

Coorain is the name of the sheep ranch in Australia where Conway spent her early childhood, and it is this bush landscape which very intentionally shapes the narrative of Conway’s life. Her family is driven off the ranch by a drought and the death of her father, but you know what they say...you can take the girl out of the bush, but you can’t take the bush out of the girl.

There’s nothing particularly extraordinary about Conway’s life. Her father died. She grew up on a sheep ranch. She had a difficult mother. Conway herself faced obstacles to her academic ambitions because she was a woman. There’s no particular suspense in this memoir; just a simply, honestly and beautifully told story of Conway’s early life in Australia.

It is a memoir very much about gender. Conway faces difficulties getting a job after university because she is a woman, but she also suggests that her mother is a difficult woman because of the ways in which the historical time period wasted her energies and her ambition. It is also a memoir about Australia as a nation. Conway becomes a historian, and specifically a social historian at a time when not much social history was being done in Australia. Her memoir becomes a kind of social history of one woman, surrounded by reflections on Australian life in general.

Most interesting to me, it is a memoir of landscape, and therefore, a memoir of place. By the time you finish the memoir, you understand exactly why Conway begins with a seven page description of the landscape of the bush. She cannot tell the story without the landscape.

The first time I became aware that I had grown up in a landscape was when I was in graduate school in Bloomington, Indiana. One of my fellow graduate students had spent most of his life in Arizona, and he was repeatedly exclaiming on the greenness and the lushness of Southern Indiana. For the first time I saw the landscape around me as something different and unique and beautiful, and not simply the way the whole world looked.

An image from the Masterpiece
Theatre film

I’d had hints of this before. Once in college, we drove west from Jackson, Mississippi, into Louisiana. After crossing the river, the great, flat delta of Louisiana stretches out in front of you for miles into the horizon. There were no rises in view, no depressions, nothing at all to disturb the straight line of land that seemed to go on forever. It felt wrong, frightening, and dangerous to look out into that landscape, though I couldn’t exactly articulate why. But of course, it felt wrong because my internal landscape is curved and hilly, riddled with valleys for creeks and rivers, covered with woods or rolling green pastures.

In graduate school, I began thinking for the first time of my landscape as beautiful in its own right and not something to be taken for granted. And I began thinking about it as mine. For Conway, this realization comes when she’s visiting England with her mother and discovers that though her education assumed England as the center of the world, it is not a landscape that is hers:

The Cotswold hills, the deer grazing in the park at Knote, even the great heath that inspired Hardy’s Egdon Heath in Tess of D’Urbervilles seemed on the wrong scale. I had imagined it on a larger scale, and kept wanting to get a longer perspective on things. It took a visit to England for me to understand how Australian landscape actually formed the ground of my consciousness, shaped what I saw, and influenced the way a scene was organized in my mental imagery. I could teach myself through literature and painting to enjoy this landscape in England, but it would be the schooled response of the connoisseur, not the passionate response one has for the earth where one is born. My landscape was sparer, more brilliant in color, stronger in its contrasts, majestic in its scale, and bathed in shimmering light.

What a fascinating thought. How does the landscape in which you grew up shape the very ground of your consciousness? How does it influence what you see or how you imagine a scene inside your head? I could not see the landscape around me at all until I could glimpse it briefly through the eyes of someone whose internal landscape was quite different. But if the ground of my consciousness is hilly and wooded, lush green in the summertime and thin tracings of gray in the winter, what does that mean? Is the territory of my thoughts similar, full of quiet valleys and steep ascents? It is not a landscape that inspires awe in the way of desserts or mountains. It seems to invite us in as humans, rather than making us feel small or inconsequential. It feels at times to me like being cupped in a great and gentle hand. And so is all this part of how I see the world?

At the end of the memoir, Conway leaves Australia for, of all places, the United States. She’s forced to leave her own landscape behind. I’m glad to have settled here, tucked neatly and contentedly in a river valley, surrounded by steep hills covered with trees and running water. It feels right and good. And perhaps when I look out my window, part of what I’m seeing is the landscape of my own mind.

Disassociation and the human condition

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 16:46:00 +0000

Everyone knows that the holidays, in addition to being a time of great joy and celebration, can also be a pretty sad time for a lot of folks. Rates of depression increase during the holidays, and suicides along with it. Why? Because people feel left out of the holiday cheer and more alone than usual? Or because the holidays are a time of intense pull into the future and the past? Christmas leads you to think about the past, loved ones who are no longer there. Or just to remember a happier time. And New Year’s is a holiday all about the future. What did I do wrong this year? What will I do better next year? The holidays, it seems to me, are fertile ground for disassociation.

This year I learned a bit about disassociation, something that often happens to victims of trauma. Disassociation happens when trauma victims believe that the traumatic event is happening to them again. When it’s very severe, they can’t distinguish between what happened to them in the past and what’s happening to them right now; they believe that they are being traumatized again, because it feels like they are in their bodies. They have all the same physiological sensations they did during the trauma. And their consciousness cannot convince their body that the trauma is not happening again. The Wikipedia definition of disassociation describes it as a “compartmentalization of experience”; when you disassociate, your consciousness, memory, emotions, sensory awareness and affect become compartmentalized, operating separately from one another rather than being unified as they are under “normal conditions.”

To put it very simply, when trauma victims disassociate, they lose touch with the present moment. They re-live their traumatic experience. They become trapped in a past where frightening things happened to them or in a future where they imagine those things happening to them again.

Maybe it’s just me, but does this sound eerily familiar to anyone else? You might substitute “anxiety-producing” or “frustrating” for “frightening,” but how many of us spend a lot of energy replaying unpleasant events from the past and imagining what might go wrong in the future? Is disassociation, in a milder form to be sure, actually the “normal conditions” under which many of us live?

***

Most of us, but not, I think, my cats. I don’t think my cats disassociate. I’m not an animal behaviorist, or a vet, or an anthrozoologist, but I think my cats spend most of their time pretty firmly grounded in the present moment. Look, there’s food in the bowl. Ah, here’s the toy that smells odd and makes me feel quite nice. Yes, an available lap to sit in. Damn, there’s another cat in the window and he’s pissing me off. Or if you have a dog, and have seen the movie, Up, simply, “Squirrel!”

We laugh at the dog in that movie, and at the flitting nature of his thoughts, but what would it be like if we could truly only live in the present? Each sighting of a squirrel would, in fact, be incredibly exciting. Worrying would become impossible because worrying is based on being able to project your mind into either the future or the past.

Which is not to say that animals don’t feel things; I believe that’s contentment I see on my cat’s face when she’s stretched out in a patch of sunlight. But think about how much complexity gets added to emotions with that ability to remember and imagine. With the addition of conscious thought our emotions develop a radioactive half-life; we can spend entire lifetimes experiencing emotions that date back to our childhood over and over again, like a feedback loop from hell. And then ask yourself whether that complexity is a good thing?

Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin suggested that certain features of an organism can be thought of evolutionarily speaking as spandrels. A spandrel in architecture is the curved space around an arch that results from decisions about the shape of the arch, but then gets used for artistic purposes. The beautiful designs that go into spandrels are not what they’re there for originally, but the architect thought, well, might as well fill in this space. In biological terms, a spandrel means that not everything about an organism is due to adaptive selection. Some things are just byproducts of the evolution of some other characteristic. They may later obtain some adaptive value, but initially they just, so to speak, look pretty without any other clear purpose. They’re spandrels.

The concept of spandrels is not without controversy, but Noam Chomsky, the famous linguist, suggested that perhaps language in humans is a spandrel. Some adaptive mechanism caused our human brains to get bigger and more complex; language is just a byproduct of that change. If you start reading into the research that’s being done on things like decision-making in humans, the idea of spandrels starts to make more sense. In a great book, How We Decide, Jonah Lehrer describes how the parts of the human brain to evolve most recently–the parts that allow us to think about our own thoughts and therefore be conscious–are nifty, but not without their kinks. They can’t help you say, hit a baseball, because they’re too slow; the gap between when a ball leaves the pitcher’s hand and the time it takes a batter to initiate his swing is one-tenth of a second. The batter has one-tenth of a second to decide how to swing, and under perfect conditions, it takes the brain about twenty milliseconds to respond to a sensory stimulus. There’s not enough time. So what does the batter do? The part of the brain which we don’t have conscious access to makes the decision for us, based on a complex set of “anticipatory cues” that happen before the ball ever leaves the pitcher’s hand. And so a lot of our decisions get made by the older part of our brain, the emotional part of our brain. We do something because it “feels right,” and this includes hitting a baseball, figuring out patterns and probability, and making moral decisions.

So what if not just the ability to use language, but also this ability to imagine the future and the past, is just another spandrel? Maybe our brains got bigger so that we could figure out which foods would kill us and which would not (suggested in The Omnivore’s Dilemma). Maybe our brains evolved to help us navigate our increasingly social world (an interesting twist on the nature vs. nurture question). Maybe our brains got bigger when we started moving around as a species and had to figure out how to live in new environments. And with that bigger brain came the spandrel of consciousness. And then disassociation.

***

When someone is disassociating, one of the best ways to help them is to try to bring them into the present moment. You try to help them become aware of their present surroundings so that they can realize that they are safe in the present, and that their traumatic experience is in the past. One good way to do this is to make them aware of their body through their senses. What do you see right now? What do you feel? What do you smell? What do you hear? How do you feel right now inside your body? Not surprisingly, I think of handing someone a ball of yarn. Feel this. Doesn’t this feel nice? Or spraying some of my lavender spray. What does that smell like? Or looking out the window at the trees and the birds, seeing the play of sunlight and shadow.

You might also encourage them to breath, to become aware of their breathing. Why breathing? Quite simply and beautifully because it’s always there. All of us can breathe. Or to say a mantra or a prayer over and over again in their head. Om mani padme hun. Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me. If they’re at all able, you might encourage them to meditate.

I read a great book a few years ago by Michael Gruber called Tropic of Night. It’s a mystery, but at its core is this idea that magic is nothing more than the result of the accumulated wisdom of what we now think of as “primitive” societies. Hunter/gatherer societies have a lot of free time. Whose to say that their explorations of the nature of existence and consciousness didn’t lead them in some very interesting directions? Whose to say that modern science isn’t just now catching up to truths that some cultures and societies figured out ages ago, but explained in a language that now looks to us like folklore or mysticism or religion?

The modern psychological definition of disassociation focuses on compartmentalization, the whole becoming fragmented. Our consciousness, memory, emotions, sensory awareness and affect cease to work together. In Buddhist practice, your five skandhas (“aggregates”) are your body, your feelings, your perceptions, your mental formations and your consciousness. The purpose of meditation and mindfulness is to bring all five of your skandhas back together as one, like a happy family all singing together. The purpose of meditation and mindfulness is to help us stop disassociating and to live peacefully in the present moment.

A lot of people in the Western world seem to struggle a great deal with the first of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism–life is suffering. It sounds so very grim to our upbeat view of the world. But think of it this way–life is disassociation. Your cat, or her distant relative in the wild, may have to face being eaten alive or going hungry or losing one of her young. Your big brain may help you avoid some of those things, but unlike your cat, you will not be able to walk away from those events and into the calm light of the present moment. Our big brain threatens to exile us to a life lived always outside of the present, when the present is all we ever have. Our big brain is capable of fracturing, fragmenting, and falling apart in ways that cause us incalculable damage. That is the suffering to which Buddhism refers. It is an internal suffering, a suffering that even the most privileged and pampered of us will inevitably face.

Why did we ever develop the ability to suffer in this way? It seems patently stupid from any perspective–biological, theological or philosophical. Perhaps it is a spandrel, a curious side-effect of evolution. With our big brains, it is interesting to speculate that the very thing that makes us feel so very superior to our animal family might also make us so much less...content? But Buddhism also suggests that the reasons–the why–is less important than the facts before us. The first of the Four Noble Truths describes reality simply and matter-of-factly so that we might be able to move on. This is how it is. Now what do you do? You figure out how to end that suffering. You figure out how to stop disassociating. Here’s how. Start with the fact that we breathe. In fact, just start by breathing.

Top Nonfiction Books of 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 16:45:00 +0000

I find comparing books of fiction to books of nonfiction too difficult. All in all, the experience of reading fiction versus nonfiction is very different, though one of the books below might be the exception to that rule. And separating the two provides an opportunity for another list. So here are my top nonfiction picks of 2011.

Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It's So Hard to Think Straight About Animals, by Hal Herzog. Great and well written assemblage of the growing body of research in anthrozoology. Herzog is neither condescending nor incomprehensible in reporting on fascinating studies about the connections between human and non-human animals.

As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto, edited by Joan Reardon. This book will make you fall in love with letter writing, as well as these two women.

Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir, by Lauren Slater. This is the book mentioned above that blurs the lines between fiction and nonfiction. Which is what Slater is all about. How much of this "memoir" is true? How much of any memoir is true? How much of my account of yesterday is true?

The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food, by Jennifer 8 Lee. These next two books I discovered in my quest to learn more about the world of Chinese restaurants, and the lives of Asian immigrants living in small towns like Madison.

Bento Box in the Heartland: My Japanese Girlhood in Whitebread America, by Linda Furiya. This is such an undiscovered little gem. Furiya grew up just up the road in Versailles, Indiana, and this book is lovely and honest examination of food, identity, gender, family, immigration, community, childhood. And...recipes!

The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University, by Kevin Roose. Questionable methodology in obtaining his story, but it's an interesting one all the same.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard. I've written about this book several times. I might have finished my first read in 2011. But I've started reading it again, so it counts either way. Like all great books, there's even more to be learned in reading this again, especially now that I have the vaguest sense of what Dillard is up to here. This book led me back to the woods, and helped me remember the peace that's there for the taking. It inspires me as a writer to be able to create that kind of beautiful, cagey, humorous and sophsiticated prose. It may be on my list of top nonfiction for the rest of my life.

The Road from Coorain, by Jill Ker Conway. This might be an honorable mention. This book sat on my shelf all year long. It begins with about 10 pages describing in great detail the landscape of the Australian bush. I couldn't get past that. And then in the last two days I did, and saw exactly why she starts with 10 pages describing the Australain bush in great detail. This memoir is a reflection on what it means to be a woman, Australian, a scholar, a daughter, a historian and a product of landscapes, internal and external. I'll hopefully be doing a review here soon, but there's also now a Masterpiece Theatre production of this book.

What nonfiction books knocked your socks off this year?

Top Ten Fiction Books of 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 16:38:00 +0000

As the last week of 2011 trickles away, I’m glad to report I have achieved my sole reading goal for the year and hit the 100-book mark. As of today, I’m officially at 102, which I believe bests last year by one book.

Last year I wrote my top ten list in complete ignorance of the existence of Top Ten Tuesday at The Broke and the Bookish. Thankfully, this year that ignorance has been corrected, and you, too, can add your own list by clicking here. Not all of these books were published in 2011, and a few of them are considerably older, but they were all read and enjoyed greatly by me in 2011. Look for my list of top nonfiction books tomorrow.

10. Sabriel, by Garth Nix. This is one of two books in the fantasy genre to make my list. Sabriel is not a new book, but it is quite a lovely and beautiful story. I read all the books in the Abhorsen trilogy this year, but Sabriel is my favorite. The idea of there being a thin boundary between the world of the living and the world of the dead has stuck with me since I read these books, like an intriguing taste or smell that’s pleasing to recall.

9. Winter’s Bone, by Daniel Woodrell. No, I have still not seen this movie, but the book was beautiful for the ways in which the things that were not said conveyed so much.

8. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, by N.K. Jemision. My second fantasy book. My quest for well-written fantasy was inspired by A Game of Thrones, and luckily, my book blogger friends had great recommendations. I also read the second book in this series, and am eagerly awaiting the third.

7. South of Superior, by Ellen Airgood. A well crafted book with characters that you can almost imagine walking off the page to shake your hand. This book makes my top ten list in part because it’s the book I read and said to myself, “Hey, that’s the kind of book I’d like to write.” And then I sat down and tried. The effort is still ongoing, but it’s good to have such a strong model for a book that is about place, and people, and community.

6. The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach. Be warned, this novel is a lingerer. There’s nothing particularly fancy about the story...no alligators, for example...but you’ll be thinking about it for weeks afterward all the same.

5. Emily, Alone, by Stewart O’Nan. I read both Wish You Were Here and Emily, Alone this year (Emily, Alone takes one character from Wish You Were Here and develops her life in more detail). They were both amazing in the way O’Nan makes mundane life fascinating and suspenseful. Emily, Alone is the newer of the two, and my favorite because Emily is like all humans, so very dull and yet so very fascinating all at the same time.

4. The Tiger’s Wife, by Tèa Obreht. A beautifully written story about borders that interrogates the nature of human conflict through the use of tigers and ghosts.

3. Hannah Coulter, by Wendell Berry. I’ve read this novel before and read it again for a book group this year. Of course, I love Wendell Berry. I don’t know exactly how he does what he does. Nothing much happens in Hannah Coulter’s life, and yet you want to read every word. Reading Berry’s novels feels the same to me as sitting quietly in the woods. It is peaceful and soothing and right.

2. Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, by Helen Simonson. Just perfect. A perfect book. Funny, serious, touching, well constructed, well-crafted. Just perfect.

1. The Reapers Are the Angels, by Alden Bell. I predict this book will be on no one else’s top ten (I might be wrong), but you should read it all the same. Yes, it is a zombie book. And yet, it is so much more. A fascinating journey through the genres of American story-telling. A female heroine who is complex and strong, both physically and emotionally. A story about the nature of god and existence and what it means to be human. It’s all in there. And some zombies.

What books would make your top ten list for 2011?

Book Review: The Art of Fielding

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 15:46:00 +0000

I finished The Art of Fielding a couple of days ago. I read it because my friend Emily at As the Crowe Flies (And Reads!) raved about it. And, of course, because it’s on The New York Times list of best books of 2011. And because after finishing it, I’d be just one book away from having read 100 books this year.

Despite being done with classes, it hasn’t been the best reading week, and at first, The Art of Fielding wasn’t helping much. It was entertaining enough, but wasn’t really demanding that I sit down in one day and tear through. I was mostly thinking, “I’m a little disappointed, here.” And then I got, about 1/3 into the book, to the bit about Steve Blass disease.

The Art of Fielding takes place at Westish College, a small liberal arts college on one of the Great Lakes. We learn about Henry Skirmshander, who has a pure and amazing talent at shortstop and helps to turn around the fortunes of the Westish Harpooners baseball team. Mike Schwartz is another student who mentors Henry and serves as Westish’s unpaid athletic director. Guert Affenlight is the president of Westish, an alumni and Melville scholar, who is in love with Owen Dunne, one of Mike and Henry’s teammates. Guert’s daughter, Pella, returns from a failed early marriage in California to try to re-direct her life and re-connect with her father.

At the center of this novel are baseball and college life, two things with sometimes dubious compatibility. The story arc that seems to unite everything else is Henry’s loss of his ability to throw the ball. The novel starts with Mike Schwartz witnessing Henry’s amazing talent in North Dakota, where Henry is playing for a summer league with no intention of attending college and nothing much in the way of plans for the future. Henry is baseball. Specifically, fielding. He’s not even very good at hitting. But he has absorbed a book by the greatest shortstop of all time, Aparicio Rodriguez, called The Art of Fielding. This book is like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for baseball. Or it is just zen. Forget the baseball.

Initially, there is not much to Henry besides baseball, which makes sense as the novel progresses, but may be part of what made the story hard for me to get into. He has to be all baseball at the beginning, though, because then he loses it. Henry is working on beating Aparicio Rodriguez’s streak for games without an error, when a ball goes sailing off his glove and smashes into the face of Owen Dunne, his roommate. Owen’s okay, but Henry’s baseball is not. He has begun to think about his throw, and this seems to spell the end of everything that could have made him the greatest shortstop ever. Because here is the art of fielding, according to Aparicio Rodriguez: “The shortstop has worked so hard for so long that he no longer thinks. Nor does he act. By this I mean he does not generate action. He only reacts, the way a mirror reacts when you wave your hand before it.”

There is no such actual book by Aparicio Rodriguez. Because I have a husband with a prodigious knowledge of baseball history, I can tell you that there is no baseball player named Arapacio Rodriguez, though Louis Aparicio is a real Hall of Fame shortstop from Venezuela. There is a real thing in baseball called Steve Blass disease, and all the players listed in the book really developed this “disease” at some point. When you read about Steve Blass disease, it becomes immediately apparent why you would want to center a whole novel around this phenomenon.

Baseball is a precise, tense and odd game. Great football quarterbacks throw the ball perfectly into a very tight window, but even if you don’t, your wide receiver can adjust; there’s some margin for error. But the strike zone, or the range of your first baseman to whom you’re throwing the ball, is smaller. And the ball is smaller, and harder, and being thrown faster, and more dangerous. It makes me nervous just to think about it. How nervous must it make a pitcher? Is it any surprise that sometimes baseball players just seem to lose it?

This disease is named after Steve Blass, a pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates who made the All Star Team and played in the 1971 World Series with Roberto Clemente. In the next season, Blass inexplicably lost the ability to throw the ball. By 1975, he was out of baseball altogether. Since then, Steve Blass disease had come into the baseball lexicon to describe a talented player who suddenly loses the ability to throw the ball. You might say it’s the baseball equivalent of the shanks in golf. One day you can throw the ball perfectly over home plate. The next day you can’t hit the side of a barn. For Henry, this happens because he begins to think too much about throwing.

I finished The Art of Fielding a few days ago, but it hasn’t finished with me. I liked the small glimpse Harbach gives us into the life of a small liberal arts college. I can’t say that it looked incredibly familiar to me, despite having gone to a small liberal arts college as an undergraduate and spent the last 10 years or so teaching a small liberal arts colleges. There’s a background hum of intellectualism in this novel, but it’s really about baseball. Those two things are not at all incompatible; many of our great American writers have also been baseball fans. Westish College is important to the novel, but mostly it seems to me as a setting for a baseball team. Which is okay, but not to be taken as in any way representative of what life is like for most students at small liberal arts colleges.

I find myself still thinking about the characters, and thinking very much about the ways in which too much thinking can mess things up. Yes, I see the irony there, heightened especially by the name of this blog. Is this the central theme of the novel as a whole? Is everyone just doing too much thinking?

I don’t know what the answer to that is, but I suspect it might be yes. It certainly probably is in my case. When Henry loses his ability to throw, he loses a kind of pure connection to the game he seemed to have. He loses his sense of purpose, of course. I wonder if Henry’s loss is the loss all of us have felt at some point, made visible and palpable. Not a fall from innocence, but the loss of that ability to surrender thought, to surrender action. To only react.

I leave you with Harbach’s description of this, through Henry, which is much better than mine:

“He’d never been able to talk to anyone, not really. Words were a problem, the problem. Words were tainted somehow–or no, he was tainted somehow, damaged, incomplete, because he didn’t know how to use words to say anything better than “Hi” or “I’m hungry” or “I’m not.”

Everything that had ever happened was trapped inside him. Every feeling he’d ever felt. Only on the field had he ever been able to express himself. Off the field there was no other way than with words, unless you were some kind of artist or musician or mime. Which he wasn’t.”

Madison Monday: At Springdale Cemetery

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 22:16:00 +0000

Springdale Cemetery

Today is the first day of holiday break for my husband and I. Technically, it’s still finals week, but all the finals for my classes are take-home or oral finals that are already done. And technically, it’s the beginning of my husband’s sabbatical, and not his break, but we’re not going to think about that, are we?

I guess not everyone would think the perfect thing to do on the first day of your holiday break is a stroll through the cemetery, but why not? There is much wisdom in learning to live comfortably with death, and wisdom is often in short supply around the holidays. So we headed down to Springdale Cemetery in Madison.

I actually had to search through all my old Madison Monday posts because I could not believe I’ve never written about Springdale Cemetery here. You could dedicate an entire blog to Springdale Cemetery and never run out of material. I headed there looking for names. Maybe all writers struggle with giving their characters names, and the Internet can help. But I figure there’s really nothing like a good cemetery to supply some interesting and resonant names.

Springdale Cemetery has been around since 1810, which makes it one year younger than the town of Madison itself. That seems about like the right order. Establish your town. Build a cemetery. Springdale is tucked into the little valley formed by Crooked Creek on the north side of town. There are very, very old graves tucked up on the side of the hill. And newer sections where people are still being buried. There are huge, strange monuments and tombstones. And tiny obscure ones.

Cemeteries tell a thousand stories. I could start now writing stories based on the gravestones in Springdale and never stop until I was ready for one myself. So, there’s no way I can begin to cover them all, but here are a few interesting pictures and stories just from today’s short stroll.

There are Civil War headstones in Springdale, and one in particular caught my notice. John L. Devou lived from 1843 to 1874 and served in the Indiana Division. Under his name was carved, “Musician.” Kate Johnson lived from 1860 to 1919 and spent 30 years as a missionary in Japan. One gravestone read, “Aged 84 years and 3 days.” Another gave the years, months and days. What compelled them to give us such detail about the length of someone’s life?

Of course there were mothers and fathers who lived to see three or four or all of their children die. There were stones which read only, “Baby.” Apparently, Max Healey had some interest in flying. Over in a corner by Crooked Creek was a gravestone that stood out among the winter gray as a spot of color. There were two headstones here, for a husband and wife. They were mulched and decorated, and on the bench next to them sat a little Christmas tree that obviously worked by motion detection and started singing Jingle Bells when we walked by. Wherever those folks are, they must be feeling very loved.

There are gravestones shaped as tree trunks and gravestones that look like reclining couches. There’s a large open space in the middle of the cemetery with a huge round tree and not much else. There are gravestones that have been so worn away by the years of rain and snow and wind as to be illegible.

To stand above the bones and think that these people were once alive like you, with their own fears and hopes, emotions and dreams, is almost too much. There are so many. And what can you make of that? That someday, perhaps, someone will stand above your own bones and for one second try to imagine your life based on the few words and dates carved into a piece of stone. Well, it’s too much for the first day of holiday break, that’s for sure.

For more pictures from Springdale, go to my Facebook page and like You Think Too Much.

Book Review: Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 16:18:00 +0000

I enjoyed this book very much, but confess that the window during which I was most likely to write a review had passed. But today it’s due back at the library, and I picked it up and looked at the many passages I had meticulously flagged and thought, “Well, I might as well write something.” Maybe that’s what happened. Maybe not. Who knows if half the things I write on here are actually true?

Every time I read a memoir, especially the ones that have very detailed scenes from early childhood, I think to myself, “How the hell did they remember all of that?” My memories from childhood are short and fleeting. What I felt the day we thought we’d lost our brother and then found that he’d gone to the store with our parents. The terror when I ripped my leg on a barbed wire fence and thought I might need stitches. My favorite place in the woods behind our house to imagine I was famous and in love. I remember these things, but if I sat down to construct a coherent scene out of any of them, I would, of course, be making most of it up. I would be projecting my best guess at what I had been feeling in that moment, of what was said, or what the weather was like. And that’s not even getting into the memories that I believe are based on things that I probably never actually saw and maybe didn’t actually do, but that have become standard parts of family lore.

So why not just cede to the dishonesty of memoir and lie your way through it? This is the conclusion Lauren Slater comes to in Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir. Slater may or may not have had epilepsy. She may or may not have had brain surgery to sever her corpus collosum in order to stop her seizures. She may or may not have gone to Breadloaf and had an affair with a famous writer. Who knows? Is a metaphor a lie? Is fiction? Is an essay? Every time we sit down or open our mouths to translate experience into language, have we not taken one small step away from the truth? Or are the lies we tell actually closer to the truth than the facts? As Emily Dickinson said, “Tell the Truth but tell it Slant/Success in Circuit lies.”

I liked Slater’s voice. I liked her narrative. I liked the premise of this memoir. I liked the way her battle with the truth and lies kept interrupting like an insistent and annoying voice, and those are the passages I mostly flagged in my copy, which may or may not be due back to the library today:

About truth, lying and memoir:

For my part, her predictions confused me, because they didn’t seem to match the facts of my mundane life–the facts, the facts, they probe at me like the problem they are...

That was the night I started to steal. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I really started to steal a few days after that, or a few weeks before. Maybe it’s just certain narrative demands, a need for neatness compelling me to say that was the night or and this led surely to this, my life as a long link of daisies, a bold of cloth unbroken, I wish it were.

Now we get to a little hoary truth in this tricky tale. The summer I was thirteen I developed Munchausen’s, on top of my epilepsy, or–and you must consider this, I ask you please to consider this–perhaps Muchausen’s is all I ever had. Perhaps I was, and still am, a pretender, a person who creates illnesses because she needs time, attention, touch, because she knows no other way of telling her life’s tale. Muchausen’s is a fascinating psychiatric disorder, its sufferers makers of myths that are still somehow true, the illness a conduit to convey real pain.

And I felt bad, because, finally, lying is lonely. No one knows you.

I am toying with you, yes, but for a real reason. I am asking you to enter the confusion with me, to give up the ground with me, because sometimes that frightening floaty place is really the truest of all. Kierkegaard says, “The greatest lie of all is the feeling of firmness beneath our feet. We are at our most honest when we are lost.” Enter that lostness with me. Live in the place I am, where the view is murky, where the connecting bridges and orienting maps have been surgically stripped away.

About her mother:

The year I turned ten, the year of what I called my colored hearing and my smells, my father gave her his surprise. I think he loved her, or, like me, her unhappiness was his.

What's wrong with Christmas: Best Buy vs. Santa Claus

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 15:15:00 +0000

I would hardly claim to be a media critic, and I don’t write much about the media on this blog. But because my NFL football watching has been repeatedly disturbed by this series of commercials, I feel the need to vent a bit.

I’m not the only one to have noticed the meanness of the current series of Best Buy commercials, which pit consumer-mad mothers against Santa Claus. A Washington Post blog asks, “Are ads getting meaner?” and lines up several ads in support of an argument that the answer might be “yes.” And you can follow a thread on the Best Buy Community feedback forum that is labeled “worst commercial ever,” making pretty clear how some folks feel about these ads.

In case you haven’t seen any of these commercials (and count yourself lucky if you have not), they feature women, always women, realizing how much stuff they will be able to buy at Best Buy that year, and then fantasizing about how they will rub it in Santa’s face that they have out-gifted him. One woman gulps down all of Santa’s milk, oozing hostility at him across her living room. Another woman meets Santa on the roof and tries to out “ho, ho, ho” him, and then kicks the lit up Santa off the roof, just in case he didn’t get the point.

At first glance when you describe a woman trying to out “ho, ho” Santa, it sounds funny. And maybe if that were it, just someone trying to out-laugh Santa Claus, it would be okay. But these women are hostile; they’re out for blood. And the question that goes unanswered in these commercials is, what exactly do these women have against Santa Claus? What did he do to them that makes them so eager to humiliate the old man? Maybe you could make an argument that these women are challenging a patriarchal figure, usurping the male authority that Santa Claus represents. But I just find the commercials to be really mean and sad in what they say about our sickly consumerist society.

The best answer to why the women are out to get Santa Claus appears to be because they want to be the ones to give their families the most possible stuff. They want to win the gift-giving death match. They want to hold Santa down until he taps out and passes their house by on Christmas Eve, I guess. And all I can say to that is, really?

I think our commercials have gotten meaner, and oddly so around the holidays. I think of last year’s series of cell phone commercials with people using all their abundant minutes and texting capability to abuse each other; the holiday one featured a man making fun of his neighbor’s Christmas lights and his family’s Christmas cards. Thankfully, those have not reappeared, as I felt compelled every time I saw the commercial with my daughter to say out loud, “I don’t like to see people being mean to each other.” There’s something especially disturbing about seeing meanness nakedly wedded to consumerism in the Best Buy ads.

I wrote a few weeks ago about how this year I’ve checked out of the buying frenzy that is Christmas. Partly because I hate malls. But also because it seems that much of the holidays have become about buying love and happiness. Our frantic trips through the malls are about buying gifts for others, yes. But it seems we’re buying out of guilt and a frenzied need to be loved. If I get my spouse or child the perfect gift, they will love me forever. I will have achieved the most perfect holiday ever realized....by buying the right thing.

Of course, this is exactly the purpose of modern-day advertising, as Raymond Williams argued 30 years ago in his essay, “Advertising: The Magic System.” Once upon a time, advertising actually told you about the qualities of the product being sold. Buy this bleach because it works better than the other one. But then men like Don Draper discovered that you could sell things even more effectively if you convinced people that the products had magical properties. This bra will make you irresistible to men. This lipstick will make you unique. This car will make you rich and powerful. All this stuff from Best Buy will make you better than Santa Claus. It will make your holiday perfect, and apparently, as a woman, it will make you the best mom ever. The advertisers who came up with these commercials seem to believe that fathers and men are less concerned with these things.

But of course, bras and lipstick and cars and electronics are not magical. Any happiness they provide is temporary and fleeting compared to the things that you cannot buy and sell. Like family. And good friends. And a place in a strong community. A feeling of belonging and contentment that comes not from what you own, but from how you are connected to other human beings. I can see why Best Buy is tempting, because even the hassle of lining up outside the store on Black Friday and fighting off all the other people who are trying to out-do Santa Claus is easier than the hard work of building strong relationships with other human beings. Who wouldn’t go for the false magic of the credit card over the real magic of sitting down and listening to someone?

I have several friends around town who recently saw It’s A Wonderful Life for the first time. They saw this movie for the first time because my little local movie theater shows old Christmas classics every year for the whopping price of $3 admission. That’s the kind of town I live in. It is Bedford Falls. Every year when it snows for the first time, and the Christmas lights are all up, I am struck by the urge to run down the streets of Madison yelling, “Merry Christmas, Madison! Merry Christmas, you wonderful old Madison Coffee and Tea! Merry Christmas, Ohio Theatre!”

That’s my great fortune. I live in a town where I believe many of us can still understand Jimmy Stewart’s joy running down the streets of Bedford Falls. Many of us can understand that that is what joy at Christmas should look like. And the Best Buy commercials are annoying intrusions from a sadder and less fortunate other world which we choose not to live in.

Book Review: The Tiger's Wife

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 15:02:00 +0000

I like this cover

A few weeks ago I wrote about the certain specificity of not liking a book compared to the fuzzy amorphism of liking a book. When I don’t like a book, I can tell you exactly why, but when I like one, I’m often not quite sure what to say. So it is I sit here staring at a blank screen thinking about The Tiger’s Wife, by Tèa Obreht.

This is the 97th book I’ve read this year, and it made it onto my list because I’ve been seeing it in the bookstore, and it’s on the New York Times list of top ten books of 2011. I can already tell you that I don’t really see why Swamplandia was on there (I think it’s really just the alligators). So I was prepared for The Tiger’s Wife to be one of those novels that everyone else raves about, but leaves me kind of cold. Happily, I was wrong.

It’s present day in an unnamed Balkan country and Natalia, a young doctor, has just found out about her grandfather’s mysterious death. The answers to the mystery of his death lie both in the present where Natalia is across the new border giving medical aid to orphans, and in the stories of her grandfather’s past across multiple wars and the shifting contours of his country. Who is the deathless man her grandfather told her stories about? How might both her grandfather’s life and his death be connected to the fate of the tiger’s wife from his past?

Shortly before reading The Tiger’s Wife, I had started The City and The City, by China Mièville. I didn’t finish it, but it’s also set in another anonymous country “on the edge of Europe.” In this country, two cities occupy the same geographic territory but are separated by sheer force of psychic will. The residents of Beszel must “unsee” everything that is in the other city, Ul Qoma, though they share the same streets, blocks and even buildings. Obviously, The City and the City is a novel about the power of borders.

Borders play an important part in The Tiger’s Wife, as well. We are constantly reminded of where towns and cities and even vineyards used to be before and after various rearrangements of borders. At one point in the story, Natalia’s grandfather is interrogated as to his exact origins, as suddenly where you are from in relation to these shifting borders has become important. In the present, Natalia spends a great deal of time crossing borders and being reminded of which side of the border she is from.

And then there are the deathless man and the tiger’s wife, two stories that are rooted in superstition and the way in which small fears can become large dangers. You should stop here if you don’t want to know any more about this novel. The deathless man, according to Natalia’s grandfather, is not Death himself, but Death’s nephew. He is cursed to never die, but he can tell foretell the death of others with, of all things, a coffee cup. He shows up periodically in the grandfather’s life whenever death is rampant, and in this worn-torn country, death appears to be everywhere.

Don't like this cover much

The tiger’s wife is a deaf-mute woman from the grandfather’s childhood village. She is also, like Natalia’s grandmother, a Muslim. The story of the tiger’s wife appears to be in microcosm the story of what happens in this Balkan country. There is distrust and fear and superstition. The villagers look for someone at whose feet they can lay all these fears. The tiger’s wife is it, because of her otherness in her inability to hear or speak, and also because of the strange connection she forms with a tiger that has escaped from the city zoo to live in the hills above the village. As a small child, the grandfather sees in stark relief the exact forces that will lead to war after war, conflict after conflict, death and more death. At one point he tells the deathless man: “This war never ends...It was there when I was a child, and it will be here for my children’s children.” And he’s right.

The Tiger’s Wife is a novel of subtlety. Its message about borders and conflict is subtle. It is not a political novel. It is a human novel. Its language is subtle, simple and yet moving. It sneaks up on you. In the first 20 pages or so, I might have been compelled to stop were it not for the book’s presence on the NY Times list (oh, the power of that list) and my own need to get to 100 books for the year. But it rewards you for sticking with it, and once the enticing stories of the deathless man and the tiger’s wife are dangled in front of you, it’s hard to resist.

I leave you with the very last paragraph of the book, which is beautiful and satisfying in the way the last paragraph of a novel should be, which you may be able to appreciate even if you have not read the book:

There is, however, and always has been, a place on Galina where the trees are thin, a wide space where the saplings have twisted away and light falls broken and dappled on the snow. There is a cave here. My grandfather’s tiger lives there, in a glad where the winter does not go away. He is the hunter of stag and boar, a fighter of bears, a great source of confusion for the lynx, a rapt admirer of the color of birds. He has forgotten the citadel, the nights of fire, his long and difficult journey to the mountain. Everything lies dead in his memory, except for the tiger’s wife, for whom on certain nights he goes calling, making that tight note that falls and falls. The sound is lonely, and low, and no one hears it anymore.

P.S. When I got to the end of writing this post, I realized I'd had "The Crane's Wife," a song and an album by The Decemberists in my head the whole time, which, of course makes sense. And then I saw the second cover above, which really goes with the idea of literally a woman who is married to a tiger, and I just think is wrong for a cover. But I started to wonder, why are there never any animal husbands? Never "the tiger's husband" or "the crane's huband"? Do men not marry animals? And why not?

Sunday Salon: books and the cutest thing I've ever knit

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 18:59:00 +0000

Here in southern Indiana, we’ve reached that moment in the semester where you simply cannot believe that you still have to go in and teach classes for yet another week. Surely it is time to be done. This last week will thankfully not be too hectic for me, but I know what is ironically called “Dead Week” for our students will be dead only in the sense that they will probably feel dead by the end of the week. And then there will be piles of grading for me.

Morehouse Farm's Amanita hat

There are three weeks left to Christmas now, and so much knitting to be done. This month I finished a scarf, another pair of fingerless gloves, and two hats. The second hat I knit is, in fact, the cutest thing I have ever knit. This is Morehouse Farm’s Amanita hat, inspired, of course, by the mushroom. The gills you make with a knit/purl rib on the underside of the hat’s brim is just about the coolest thing I have ever seen. And the fuzzy merino wool really looks, well, mushroomy. I’m knitting a second one of these in purple and yellow. They’re meant to be gifts for my nieces, but I’m wondering if I’ll be able to part with them. At the very least, I might have to get another kit for myself.

I’m five books away from having read 100 books this year, which is the very modest goal I set for myself each year. Here’s what I’ve read this month:

Across the Wall: A Tale of Abhorsen and Other Stories, by Garth Nix.

The Way of the Pilgrim, Anonymous, reviewed here.

The House on Fortune Street, by Margot Livesey.

After Dark, by Haruki Murakami, reviewed here.

Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir, by Lauren Slater. This was a really interesting read in which Slater reflects on the nature of narrative, metaphor and deception. Where’s the thin line between fiction and nonfiction? She should have started her memoir with a line from Emily Dickinson: “Tell the truth/But tell it slant/Success in circuit lies.”

American Uprising: The Untold Story of America’s Largest Slave Revolt, by Daniel Rasmussen

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, by Ransom Riggs. Jacob had long stopped believing his grandfather’s stories about a mysterious school for children with special abilities, run by a bird and located on a mysterious island. Then his grandfather is brutally murdered by a monstrous creature who only Jacob can see. Jacob’s search for the answers to his grandfather’s last words leads him to Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. This compelling story borrows a bit from graphic novels by including photographs within the story. If you liked Little, Big, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake or Her Fearful Symmetry, you might like this book.

Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat, by Hal Herzog. Emily at As the Crowe Flies (And Reads) was correct as usual. This was an amazing book. So well written and Herzog is such a careful and conscientious scientist. He describes findings from the area of anthrozoology without dumbing them down too much or making them too difficult to understand. I especially appreciate the way in which he deals with the topic of gender differences. This will probably make my list of top books for the year.

What I’m reading now:

Swamplandia, by Karen Russell. This made the New York Times top ten. I tried to read this and couldn’t finish, so now I’m listening to it, which I find takes less commitment. It doesn’t seem any better in the listening; I think it made the top ten because there are alligators.

The Emerald Atlas, by John Stephens.

What’s next:

The Tiger’s Wife, by Téa Obreht. Also on the New York Times top ten list.

Madison Monday posts for the month:

Madison Monday: a local holiday. All about shopping locally for the holidays

Madison Monday: Village Lights Bookstore. Much love for our local, independent bookstore and its owners.

Madison Monday: a local holiday

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 22:14:00 +0000

Eco-Massage

Greetings from Madison, where it’s raining and gloomy. But after a Friday and Saturday that were warm and sunny, I can’t complain too much. As I’ve already reported last week, I have sworn to buy all holiday gifts this year locally or to make them myself. The only real stunning revelation here is asking, why I didn’t do it before? I have enjoyed Christmas shopping in only very small, sporadic bursts, and I really hate malls. I’ve lived in a town for the past 9 years or so which makes it relatively easy to shop only locally. Why did it take me so long?

One answer is surely the power of the consumer impulse at Christmas. It’s nothing new to go on and on about how Christmas has become a holiday that really celebrates consumption rather than anything else. But it seems to me that it celebrates consumption by playing on guilt. Yes, we are consuming like mad around the holidays. But we are, mostly, buying things for other people. And we must get them the right thing, the perfect thing, the thing that will make this Christmas the most amazing one ever and ensure that they will love us for all eternity. Or maybe at the very least, we must get them the thing that doesn’t make us look like complete schmucks. With that mindset, it’s harder to say you’re only going to buy locally or make it, because then you might not get everyone the perfect gift. And then...schmuckdom.

Well this year all my presents just might read, “From: The Schmuck.” Maybe because I just like saying that word in my head.

Sweater from Little Golden Fox

There are, thankfully, a lot of gifts you can buy around Madison. Books. Jewelry. Candy. Yarn. Art. Nuts. Bird feeders. Stuffed animals. Clothes. Pottery. Cupcakes. Beer (who doesn’t want beer for Christmas?). Massages. Antique sewing machines. Soap. Perfume. Bath bombs. Musical instruments. Coffee and tea. Dinners at lovely restaurants.

If this list isn’t specific enough, I’ll share just four purchases I made this Friday evening strolling around Madison with the spousal unit, my stepdaughter and her friend. Some of these actually are gifts for me, but you get the idea.

Gift #1: We started at Eco-Massage, the lovely little yellow building on West St. at the end of my favorite alley. There was quite a spread, and I purchased a gift certificate for a 30 minute massage for someone whom I cannot name for fear of spoiling their holiday surprise (don’t you wish it was you?). A massage from Jennifer Payne, who owns Eco-Massage, is really the best present I can possibly imagine getting, personally. Luckily, I give myself this present as least once a month. If I moved slightly up in my income bracket, I would give myself this present once a week. Or, maybe Jennifer would just allow me to come in and lay down on her massage table, which has an instant Pavlovian effect for me. I feel relaxed as soon as I lay down on the massage table, because my whole body knows what’s coming. That’s priceless, but in Madison, highly affordable.

Solid perfrume from All Good Things

Gift #2: After Eco-Massage, we headed up to Main St. and down to Broadway to check out the Christmas tree. I asked my daughter, jokingly, if she wanted to get her picture taken with Santa. “Well, I guess, we could,” she said, and I’m not sure if she said this because she thought it was I wanted to hear, or if some part of her really still wants to be able to get her picture taken with Santa. At any rate, the line to see Santa was long, so we stopped in at Little Golden Fox, a new store in Madison located at the corner of Broadway and Main. This was our first time in Little Golden Fox, and we were quite pleased. They sell a nice assortment of locally handmade items as well as upscale consignment. I bought a beautiful sweater from American Eagle there for $8.75. Crazy! The next day, my husband and stepdaughter went back to buy me a new Christmas stocking. They also have incredibly adorable handmade baby clothes.

Gift #3: We had passed one of my favorite Madison stores, All Good Things, on the way to the Christmas tree, but it was packed. On the way back, we stopped in to take advantage of their special on soap, because I’m running low on Lemongrass Sage. I’ve been thinking a lot about smell lately, and am contemplating a whole post on the subject, but just let me say here, you cannot underestimate the effect of good smells on your quality of life. I’m very into lavender, and bought a little tin of their solid perfume, Lavender/Patchouli. With this perfume dabbed on me, it’s like I’m walking through my days with olfactory Prozac; each whiff of lavender makes me happy. Possibly because each whiff reminds me of my massage (see Gift #1), but also because lavender just smells really good. The scent is supposed to be soothing, calming and help with emotional balance. If you see me walking around constantly smelling myself, just know that I’m trying to maintain my emotional balance.

Yarn from Harriete's Knit Knook

Gift #4: We were going to eat dinner at Shooter’s, a lovely sports bar which also has some great beers from Sun King Brewery in Indianapolis on tap. But they, too, were packed. The whole town was packed, all weekend long, which was stupendous, if just the smallest bit annoying in that moment when you were wanting a beer with your dinner. Instead, we ate at Hong Kong Kitchen, where we were treated to free sugary peanuts for dessert. My husband headed to Blush with the girls, another new store that’s very popular with my stepdaughter and her friends. I headed to Harriette’s Knit Knook to buy some yarn. These three colors will soon become a hat to match my stepdaughter’s new purple pea coat.

My parents and grandparents tell stories of doing all their holiday shopping in downtown Cincinnati or Covington. By the time I was small, you went downtown only to see the toy train display in the window of one of the department stores. Walking around Madison on Friday night, it wasn’t particularly winter-like weather; the temperature was in the 60s. But you could imagine that maybe this is what shopping would have been like back in the day, before people pepper sprayed each other to get the best deal on an Xbox.

It reminds you that buying things used to be a largely human transaction, a social transaction. Buying and selling doesn’t have to destroy communities, but can actually make them better. It certainly makes me feel better about spending money when I know, like, and care about the people I’m buying things from. If most of the power we have as individuals in the world has been reduced to our power as consumers, the least we can do is consume carefully and in a way that might help to create the kind of world we’d like to have.

Simple Saturday: a couch in the kitchen

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 17:03:00 +0000

My kitchen couch

Simple Saturday is the culmination of a list I've been compiling in my head of some simple things I’ve done that have made life for me and my family easier and generally more enjoyable. Some of them are things that you can buy, and some of them are not. But all of them are things that I thought it might be worth sharing.

Yesterday was Black Friday (or Plaid Friday, which my friend Emily at As the Crowe Flies pointed out as a nice alternative) and today is Small Business Saturday. I have sworn to give no gifts this year that cannot be either made by me or bought in my little town of Madison, which feels very freeing. I really hate malls, and just the thought of not having to go anywhere near one this holiday season makes me want to skip through the streets singing Christmas carols. So for this Simple Saturday, I offer something that you might buy, but might also just involve some furniture rearranging.

Putting a couch in the kitchen happened mostly by happenstance rather than any brilliant planning on my part, I have to confess. When I moved into my house, there was no room in the living room for my smaller couch, but plenty of room in the kitchen. So there it stayed. I still claim my decision to leave the couch in the kitchen as one of the best ideas I’ve ever had.

There have been essays and articles about the shift in American family life from the living room or family room into the kitchen. Kitchens have gotten increasingly bigger and more elaborately designed in new houses. I don’t think hanging out in the kitchen is a bad thing, though some argue that this contributes to our obesity epidemic. Growing up, the kitchen was the beating heart of my family, and I think that’s okay. When you have a party, where does everyone immediately congregate? The kitchen. Putting a couch there is just surrendering to the inevitable.

The couch is a nice place for folks to hang out while someone else does the cooking. Both my husband and I like to cook, and both of us also like to lounge while someone else does the cooking. Which is more pleasurable--lounging or cooking? It’s hard to say. But drinking a nice glass of wine, chatting, and smelling all the aromas of good food being prepared on a comfy couch is one of those small experiences that makes life more pleasurable. Recently, our daughter has started cooking with us some, and watching my husband instruct her in mise en place is quite entertaining. And of course, when you have friends over, they can sit on the couch while you cook for them.

But having a couch in a room without a tv has also been advantageous in our household. It basically means that I can sit in a comfortable spot reading or knitting without having to listen to Spongebob or whatever happens to be on Teen Nick while our daughter watches tv. And she has a place to escape from another football game should the need arise. In general, it’s nice to have a comfy spot where all three of us can sit without the temptation of a television in front of us. Things like actual conversation are likely to break out.

We also have a small island with stools in our kitchen, and I think this is probably more common than an actual piece of living room furniture. Having a place to sit in a kitchen is nothing unusual, and not everyone has enough space for a couch. But there’s something extra nice about a couch...especially if it’s a comfy one. It invites you to linger, to lounge, to get comfy, to take a nap (which I do from time to time on our kitchen couch), to all crowd in together. It is the piece of furniture that everyone who comes into our house heads for immediately. And if you’re so inclined, it is a furniture arrangement I highly recommend.

Madison Monday: Village Lights Bookstore

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 20:12:00 +0000

Oscar in the chair

Earlier this year, the father of one of my friends passed away in a place he had only lived for about six months. The place he had lived happened to be just down the road from where I myself had grown up, and so the visitation was held in the same funeral home where I attended visitation for almost every person I knew who died when I was growing up. This odd confluence of events left me with a horror of dying in a place that was not home to me, in a place that had never felt like home to me.

What does that have to do with a local bookstore? The owners of Village Lights Bookstore in my lovely town of Madison, Indiana, decided to move to Southern Indiana and start a bookstore after watching a close friend grow ill and die in a place where he had said he did not want to die. That experience was part of their motivation for deciding that life is short, and if they wanted to turn to a new page in it, they’d better get to it. Luckily for all of us here in Madison, Nathan Montoya and Anne Vestuto chose our town and gave us Village Lights, the kind of bookstore that makes you say, “This is exactly what a bookstore should be.”

What’s the most important thing in an independent local bookstore owner? Probably that they love books. That they still get excited about opening a box of books or finding that prize rare book find at a used book sale. That they care enough about books to meticulously clean all their used books before they put them on the shelves. That they’re interested in the history of books, the repairing of books, the making of books. That they have a passion for books and a knowledge of books that you won’t find online. It doesn’t hurt if they’re also highly educated (between the two of them, Nathan and Ann have degrees in biology, psychology, religious studies, environmental studies, ballet, opera directing and nursing), well-traveled (they’ve lived in New York, Germany, Great Britain and Texas), and oh, maybe also that they’ve trained and performed with the Martha Graham Dance Ensemble. How many local independent bookstore proprietors have that on their resumes?

Nathan and Anne

What makes a good local independent bookstore? At its best, and in a town like Madison, which as much as I love it, can be a bit, well, provincial, a bookstore is a gateway to another world. As Nathan described, it’s a gathering place, a literary/cultural/social nexus. At Village Lights, there are books on the shelves, art on the walls, music from the grand piano, comfy chairs to sit in and perhaps most importantly, two cats to play with or pet. There are poetry fairs and author readings and open mike nights and gallery openings and musical performances.

The rate of turnover for businesses in Madison has always seemed fairly high, but lately the speed at which businesses have been opening and then closing their doors has been enough at times to make your head spin. Village Lights has been around for 3 years now, and will hopefully be around for years to come. What makes the difference between a business that’s here to stay and one that’s here for a couple of weeks? Of course a good business plan, a good product or service to sell, and maintaining regular hours all help. But maybe even more important than all those things is that you are invested–emotionally and financially. That your business is also your livelihood is important financial motivation. When you think about books as more than commodities to be bought and sold, that is emotional motivation. Nathan describes books as “vessels” and “things of beauty.” A book is more than just words on the page.

It also doesn’t hurt to have a physical space that is beautiful and comfortable, the kind of place that invites you into its doors. In his study of public spaces, William H. Whyte noticed a distinct effect that a good space has on people walking by. They do a double-take. They stop in their tracks. They take backward steps in order to get a better look. They smile. If they’re in a group, they consult with each other. Good places seem to have an actual gravitational force; they draw you in. On a nice day in Madison, when there are lots of folks wandering up and down the street and the doors of Village Lights are open, the inside of this bookstore has the same effect. Folks stop and look in the windows. They might point at Oscar or Trudie, one of the two resident cats napping in the window. They hesitate for a moment, and then they go in. Hopefully, some of them buy some books, but some of them may not. What they all get for free is the experience of a beautiful space that has been built for the enjoyment of books. The people browsing in Village Lights are happy, because good places make us happy. This is just part of what a good bookstore can do for a town.

This Thursday is Thanksgiving, and then Black Friday, when Americans all over the country engage in a frenzy of consumerism. Folks get up at ungodly hours of the morning in order to buy things and to buy them cheap. I suppose that’s appealing to some people, though to me, a mall on Black Friday is pretty close to what I imagine my own personal hell would look like. If you share my particular vision of hell, you might instead try Small Business Saturday. Or you might just try shopping at a local business any time, Saturday or not. There will be no frenzied sales at places like Village Lights. There will be very few books that are “cheap,” because there’s more to a book than how much it happens to cost. You will be able to take your time. You could sit in a chair and actually read some of a book before you buy it. You could read some of a book and not buy it at all. You might find some books that you'd never heard of before browsing their shelves which quickly become some of your favorites. Books I've personally found which fit into that category include Quite A Year for Plums, Rural Free, The Winter Queen, and The Year of Pleasures. You won’t have to fight off a crowd to nab the latest bestseller at the lowest price, but you could ask Ann or Nathan to suggest some good books for people on your own gift list, knowing that they’ve handpicked every book on their shelves.

Most importantly, at a local, independent bookstore like Village Lights, you can experience what it’s like to be in a store where selling things is not the only thing. You can be in a place where people and community and the environment and beauty and relationships are also important. A good community is made of many such places, and here’s hoping for many more like Village Lights in my town and yours.

Village Lights Bookstore is located in downtown Madison, at 110 East Main St. If they don’t have the book you’re looking for in their store, they’re happy to find it for you, even if it’s rare or out of print. In their three-year history, there’s been only one book they haven’t been able to find, so the odds are in your favor. They offer discounts for book clubs, as well as meeting space upstairs for events. You can do a book registry for your special event, get a book gift basket, and have your books gift-wrapped. Village Lights also offers book repairs and hope to eventually offer classes in book-making. You can check out Village Lights online, here, where in the future they will also have an online store specializing in antiquarian and rare collectible books and the capacity to sell e-books.

Even if you have no interest in books at all (as frightening as that may be), there’s something for you at Village Lights. Once a month on Saturday from 1-3, you’ll find Tom Schneider playing American Songbook standards on the grand piano in the Twain Room. Every other month, there’s open mike night or a gallery opening. And in April, look for their Poetry Fair, featuring three current and former Indiana Poet Laureates (Karen Kovacik, Norbert Krapf and Joyce Brinkman), one former Kentucky Poet Laureate (Richard Taylor), as well as Ruthellen Burns, Jonathan Greene, Joseph Heithaus, Jack Ramey and Ron Whitehead.

Happy football and turkey day!

Book Review: After Dark

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 21:59:00 +0000

Do you ever read a book and like it very much but can’t quite figure out why? Disliking a book is easy. Most of the time I know with immediate certainty what I don’t like about a book. The stronger the dislike, the more specifically I’m able to pinpoint the exact source of my displeasure. But a good book, and especially a good book like After Dark, is diffuse and ethereal and uncertain. I can’t tell you what makes a good book, but I know it when I see it.

After Dark, by Haruki Murakami is a novel set in Tokyo after dark...or to be more precise, between 11:56 p.m. and 6:52 a.m. Mari and Eri Asai are sisters. Eri is in her bedroom, in a sleep described as “enchanted.” It is a strange sleep. Her sister Mari is hanging out at the Tokyo Denny’s and various other all-night establishments, including at one point, a love hotel. A love hotel being pretty much what it sounds like...a place where people go to have sex. At the Denny’s, Mari runs into Takahashi, who went to school with her sister, and they have many interesting conversations. Sleeping in her room, Eri Asai is sucked into a television set. A mysterious salaryman beats up a Chinese prostitute at the love hotel and then goes home to his family. These are some of the things that happen in Tokyo between the hours of 11:56 p.m. and 6:52 a.m.

I read this book for one of my book groups, and the member who selected it endorsed it in the following way: “It’s not as weird as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and I think I know what he’s up to.” Our book group has not met yet to discuss the book, so I’m still not sure what Murakami is up to. Here is a quote someone posted recently on Facebook from Murakami: "If a person would just make the effort, there's something to be learned from everything. From even the most ordinary, commonplace things, there's always something you can learn." Does this quote hold the key to After Dark? Who knows?

I’m not always a fan of the book that makes me feel like I need to figure it out. I feel sometimes that these books are written by people who are deeply insecure and want to make the rest of us feel stupid. And quite frankly, I can feel plenty stupid on my own, with or without the help of your book. I don’t think Murakami is trying to make any of us feel stupid. I think that perhaps he has stories to tell which he feels cannot be conveyed without a little, shall we say, reality slippage?

Here is a list of the things I like about After Dark:

- The characters. Eri Asai is sleeping mostly, so there’s not much to say about her. But Mari, Takahashi and some of the folks they meet in their night ramblings are interesting and compelling people. Despite the very weird things happening in their lives, you can kind of relate to them. You can imagine someone like Mari or Takahashi. You can imagine thinking some of the same thoughts they think. In After Dark, the weirdness doesn’t get in the way of solid characterization.

- The tone and style. I have no idea if I’m using these terms correctly...it’s been a long time since I took an English class. But I love the way the characters talk to each other. It’s strange in just the right amount. You think to yourself, “Does anyone really have conversations like this?” And my answer is, maybe in Japan? Or maybe in the middle of the night? Or maybe just in Murakami’s world? But there’s an essential truth to the way they talk that keeps it from being too strange.

Haruki Murakami

I like the style of narration. Murakami invites you to be a disembodied point of view, but a plural disembodied point of view. A whimsical, but thoughtful, plural, disembodied point of view: “After a quick survey of the interior, our eyes come to rest on a girl sitting by the front window. Why her? Why not someone else? Hard to say. But, for some reason, she attracts our attention–very naturally.” Oh, does she? And I believe the narrator. She does attract my attention. Our attention. We float around like a camera in Eri Asai’s room. Our field of vision moves here and there. There are times when we would like to become involved in the action we see, but we can’t. And yet, we are complicit all the same. We are complicit in our watching.

- The watching. I think the watching is an important part of whatever Murakami is up to here. We are invited to be like a camera. Eri Asai is sucked into a television. We’re not sure how. Why? What is all the watching about?

I confess, I have no real idea. From the little I know about Japanese culture, I know that conformity is very important. You can get in trouble for running to catch the bus. Perhaps in that kind of society, you would be especially concerned with watching. Perhaps in any society today there’s a tendency to feel watched. Perhaps we’d all like to imagine ourselves in the center of some reality television show, as horrifying as that might actually be.

I don’t know what the exact story is that Murakami is trying to tell, and that’s okay with me. It still feels organic. I believe there’s still a story that’s at the center of the novel, and that it happens to involve a girl in an enchanted sleep being sucked into a television without much explanation seems incidental. The story being told is also deeply about connections. Connections being made and lost and re-established. And that’s a kind of story I understand.

I’ll spend the next couple of weeks thinking about what the rest of it means, and maybe in the end, that is the whole point. To inject the story into your brain like a virus that works its way through your neurons. To write a story just weird enough to avoid any easy dismissal...that’s not a bad idea at all.