Save My Neighbors From My Wrath

I passed a fitful night listening to puppy noises.  Actually, puppies noises.  As it turns out, my brilliant neighbors brought home two large, mixed-breed, very young pups last night.  Said neighbors did not proceed to cuddle the living crud out of these bundles of joy, but much in the spirit of our entire neighborhood, which releases toddlers to run unsupervised through the streets with nothing but a diaper for protection, my neighbors dumped the new pups on their balcony.  The balcony affixed to my balcony.  My bedroom balcony.  They are affixed. 

These pups were in a strange environment, without food or water and also, naturally curious.  I should add that they look much fatter than they are.  Thusly, after refusing all night to look outside at what had to be tiny little helpless creatures (because seriously, I CANNOT BRING ONE MORE LIVING THING INTO MY HOME) I arose (not awoke mind you) looking like a zombie to find two excited puppies staring at my through my balcony door.  Apparently seeing no help in sight from my useless neighbors, the pups squeezed through the balcony slats onto my domain where they proceeded to await a more positive response.  In the meantime, they turned my balcony into a toilet. 

I am not angry with the pups.  In fact, I think they are super-cute and in need of a good worming.  The neighbors though, how does one handle this sort of situation? My instinct was to immediately take constructive possession of the little guys and then start advertising for an actual home.  And all of this because I cannot take in the neighborhood children and give them to caring families.  Sigh.  David has actually told me to stop feeding the nameless hordes of kids.

Photorealism

Ever since my obsession last year with the Dutch Masters, I’ve had a keen interest in photorealism.  If I had to analyze this curiosity, I’d say it in part stems from being a child during all of this Neo-Impressionism. Our world is saturated with artists who create abstract or Neo-Impressionist art because it is cheap, fast, and profitable.  Far too many of the artists today fail to appreciate the vital significance of color theory, composition, and form.  There is so little study, so little homework these days and in shows in the art of my generation. 

It is not completely our fault.  We lack the resources of our ancestors.  Without masters to pass on the years-long process of method, we are alone and adrift with our creative impulses.  Perhaps because of this, when I see an artist practicing realism with skill, I am struck dumb. How did this person develop this talent?  Who taught them their craft?  More likely than not, this artist is the result of a tenacious brilliance that casts a different glow than that of the masters.  A self-generating heat from within.  It is not something passed down, it’s something pulled out.  I love this.

With the advent of photography, the audience began to lose interest in realistic painting.  There was a new medium to compete with and it was accurate in a way that painting could not be.  In the last decade, there has been a resurgence of realistic painters willing to try to bring something new and different to the table.  I can’t over-emphasize how important I think these painters are to the preservation of the trade.  These are the folks who are going to save art. 

For example, wouldn’t you so much rather look at Yigal Ozeri’s work than some muddy Neo-Impressionist or abstract junk art?

Death Comes to An Austen Classic

It’s going to take me a little time to get over the disappointment that was Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James.  Pemberley will be a familiar word to all Austen fans since it’s the family estate that belongs to Darcy family.  Yep. Of Pride and Prejudice fame.  

This novel was marketed as James’ fun invention of life at Pemberley after Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy tie the knot.  For all of us who loved that couple and also love P.D. James, this should have been an easy win.  Instead, James who is usually an astute developer of character, seems to go terribly wrong in her interpretation of Austen’s cast.  I tried to hang in there until James has Elizabeth musing about Mr. Wickham.  MR. WICKHAM!!

Gazing down on him, Elizabeth was visited by a tumble of eomtions.  Her mind unwillingly jerked back to memories so painful that she could recall them only with self-disgust.  She had been so close to falling in love with him.  Would she have married him if he had been rich instead of penniless?

This is so far afield of the Elizabeth Bennett created by Austen that a fan feels boggled.  I can’t imagine Elizabeth Bennett ever questioning the circumstances that could have brought her closer to the ridiculous Wickham. 

Not to mention this book is clunky in plot.

Total Fail.

2011 – Life in Review

Having completed the all-important reading list, I suppose I should make time to consider my larger experiences of 2011 as well.  This was a game changing year for me.  Below, I’ve listed the big moments and what I (hopefully) learned from them.

1) Enter Stage Left –  Love of Your Life: Meeting David last January was, almost instantly, a knowing sort of thing. There was a recognition between us of mutual interest, affection and respect.  David is the first man I have been in a true partnership with.   I have very satisfying and reciprocal partnerships with several long-time girlfriends and these are deeply important to me.  Still, a man to share intimacy and friendship with seemed hard to come by.

While our transition from dating people to folks sharing a household has not been easy, moving in with David and making the big partnership transitions have been some of the best decisions of my life.  I am more content and peaceful with him – even in the storms of life.

2) Stepfamily:  Holy unexpected 7-year-old!  I was not prepared for Ilenia’s entrance into my life but her presence makes me a BETTER person.  Let me explain:  sharing your life with a child you have no biological ties to is a singular experience.  You are forced to grow, to challenge your own beliefs, to assess how you want to live.  I am amazed daily by how painful and beautiful the experience of life with a young person can be. 

3) Standing my Ground: When I declared that I would move unmarried into a home with David, I had to face the inevitable hard questions from my family and friends.  When you know something is right for you, even when it defies tradition, it’s a formational experience to dig your feet in and follow your gut.  In the past, I have not gone the way of my instincts if I thought it might make waves with the people I love.  Good news:  The people who love me kept right on loving me. I started living my own life not the life I thought I was expected to live.

4) Laid Off:  Failure, real or perceived, is a tough one for me.  We work really, really hard to avoid failures at all costs.  The expense of being a “success” had long taken its toll on me.  I was highly educated but on career path I found ethically questionable at best. I could have really wallowed over finding myself so well-educated, a good employee and suddenly jobless.  I decided to see it as the opportunity to move to the Northshore.  It was the jolt I just might have needed even if I didn’t want it.

5) Goodbye Lafayette: Leaving my beloved Lafayette was a big deal.  I ate Sunday dinner at my grandmother’s every week.  Clearly, I’ve got ties to that place. I didn’t really want to leave my friends and family but I wanted a life with David.  In some ways, it felt like the first truly brave decision I’d ever made.  Sure, I went off to college and lived in Atlanta alone briefly but those decisions were not bittersweet.  Back then, I had not settled on Lafayette as a home.  Re-evaluating home as the place where David is was a big step.

6) Big City Job: My first job offer and therefore the one I jumped on was to work for a law firm in the greater New Orleans area.  My gut told me that I couldn’t be happy there. My gut was right.  Sometimes though, you take the offer presented to you at the time; you make the decision that’s best for your whole family.  A year ago, I could have just walked away from a crap job.  Now, I have David and Ilenia to think of too.

I did learn that my suspicions about my suitedness for big city legal work were correct.  I’m not a machine and I don’t work well when the humanity is sucked out of a process.

7) The End of an Era: When Oscar died this year, it felt like my childhood fully gave up the ghost as well.  As my girlhood pet, he was more than just the family dog.  He was a breathing, interactive connection to another time.  With his death, I felt alone in a chilly adult world.  When I really looked about though I realized that being an adult is a world full of wonder as well.  You’ve got to give up something of  childhood to reap the benefits of a grown girl’s life. It’s a good trade after all.

8) Antidepressants be gone: several years ago I went through a dark night of the soul.  In today’s world, it is commonly believed that there is a pill for that.  Unfortunately, I found myself caught between the advice (demand) of a medical doctor and my own instincts. Once medicated, it took me years to trust myself enough to ween off.  One of the most poorly understood side-effects of every anti-depressant is the self-doubt attached.  These are little pills with heavy burdens. 

I was so very lucky and found two amazing counselors and a crew of supportive women.  Those people did so much more for me than a medication ever could.  With their support and years of work, I had the courage to fight the awful battle required to get medication free.  I don’t advocate this for everyone but for me it was a great, life-affirming decision.  I am more myself today than I have been in years.

9) So Long Control: several people walked out of my life this year.  People I loved.  I let them go.  The addiction to control is gross.  I don’t want to control anyone else and I want folks to have my blessing to live as they please.  I would have fought in the past less for that person than to prove myself worthy of their love.  Today, I find it easier to love people enough to trust that they know what they are doing with their lives. 

10) The Big Questions : This has been the year where I really asked myself to think hard about the big questions: 1) How do I want to use the life I’ve been given?  2) Do I want to/should I have biological children?  3) What does marriage mean to me?  4) What are the beliefs I’m not willing to compromise on?

Most of these questions don’t have clear or direct answers.  All of them are still milling around in my mind.  But you know what?  I think it’s important to be introspective enough to actively evaluate these things.  When I reach the moments where I’m called on to stand somewhere on one of these questions, I’ll be able to say, “I’ve thought this one over for a long time and here’s where I am..”

Authorship

I just finished reading Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card and LOVED it.  To me, the important questions are so easily transposed onto the film that is SF.  Maria Doria Russell addresses it all in her Children of God books. Card has been around forever and I just never picked him up and he is another example of a fabulous SF writer asking the hard questions.  I just adore these writers for their courage and ability to tackle the big issues like: what does it mean to be human? What are my responsibilities to myself? To my species? To other species?  How does our sentience change our rights/responsibilities to the world?

Anyway, Card does a brilliant treatment of these and other conflicts in Ender’s Game.  I was all set to pick up the next book in the series when I did the thing I shouldn’t have : I googled Orson Scott Card.

Let me be clear – in literary theory classes I spent an inordinate amount of time considering the dangers of injecting the author into his/her work.  Taking a biography and overlaying onto the body of work is both dangerous and stupid.  You can reach all kinds of erroneous conclusions.  More importantly, a work of art stands alone.  It is, at some point, an individual separate from the creator. 

So imagine how pissed off I was when I found this article and started to change my mind about how clever/enlightened/brave Mr. Card is.  Can I undo the change its wrought in my thinking about his writing?  Probably not. 

What do you think about digging into the author’s history and beliefs?  Relevant to the work are needless speculation on the motives beneath the text?

For your Friday Reading Pleasure:

Here’s a great list of 100 books about nature et al.

2011 – Reading in Review

Of my personal traditions, I like this one almost best of all.  Reflecting on the past year’s reading list and picking out the highlights is such a wonderful exercise.  It gives the reading enthusiast one last bite at the apple, a few more moments with the novels, before moving on. 

I’m pleased to report a good sampling: 46 books in many different genres.  As you know, I limit my year in review to fiction so a few will get bumped automatically.  I estimate then, that this list is compiled from about 40 books.  My top ten in order of my esteem are:

1) Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

This is a beautiful love story.  Anna is described this way,

He went down trying not to look long at her, as though she were the sun, but he saw her, as one sees the sun, without looking.

But like other Tolstoy novels, it is also the story of a time, a society, of humanity.  I particularly fell in love with the treatment of class and the consideration of urban and rural life.  Anna is so deeply tragic as an individual but also as a symbol of womanhood in the 1800s.  Freedom, for all of these characters, comes at an unspeakable price. 

2) Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

A novel as much about who we are as what we are, Eugenides uses the lens of hermaphradism to consider gender, culture and family.  This is a coming-of-age story told the best way – full of memory and insight. One of my favorite lines,

I’m the final clause in a periodic sentence, and that sentence begins a long time ago, in another language, and you to read it from the beginning to get to the end, which is my arrival.

3) Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens

I’ve lived in Charles Dickens’ head so much this year that I’ve begun to think a bit like him.  He was a funny man and an ironic man  -  he’ll get you calling places of inefficiency “circumlocution offices.”   I picked Little Dorrit above A Tale of Two Cities chiefly because Arthur Clennam is such a loveable idiot. You can’t help but root for him even as he misses the most obvious signs of love and betrayal.  And I couldn’t help but enjoy Dickens’ craftsmanship in creating truly good and wickedly evil characters.

4) Possession by A.S. Byatt

I love Maud Bailey and I love the mystery at the heart of this novel.  As always, Byatt offers so much in one novel : poetry and short stories are woven delicately into the tale.  I think this is probably a literature lover’s novel.  I might have liked it better than The Children’s Book.

5) The Little Stranger by Sara Waters

I didn’t originally rate this novel as highly as some others but it has lingered with me as I’ve continued to think about the characters for some time.  I think that counts for something.  The people who Waters creates are the real mystery in this book and she leaves it just open-ended enough that you continue to ask long after you’ve turned the last page, what was really going on with those people?

6) The Passage by Justin Cronin

What strange places our lives can carry us to, what dark passages.

This book is as goofy as it is completely awesome. Full disclosure : it’s about a vampire apocalypse.  It’s a good story  – scary and touching at the right moments.  More importantly, Cronin allows the reader to consider what it really means to be human without pushing the issue.  Best scary story I’ve read in FOREVER.

7) Califia’s Daughters by Leigh Richards

Another gender bender that asks the audience to reconsider how we live and how we could live.  Richards creates characters that a reader can really invest in and no more so than Dian.  Her personal journey is epic. 

8) The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

Beautiful, beautiful book.  I just loved the circus and want to live there, challenge be damned.  This is an example of a vibrant and alive setting and I’m a sucker for those. 

9) The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

An oldie but a goodie.  Collins really knew how to craft a mystery.  I didn’t find the storytelling dated as sometimes happens with these old, old books.  This is obviously the primogeniture of Rebecca and The Lantern. 

10) The Samurai’s Garden by Gail Tsukiyama

I debated long and hard about the book for this last slot.  There were several tremendously entertaining and well written books in the running including one by Agatha Christie.  In the end, this is the right book to round out this list.  It is so touching and so poignant.  A very beautiful story about a very harsh life.

Goodbye Year. Goodbye Good Dog.

Oscar died yesterday.

I’ll let the genius Pablo Neruda take it from here: 

My dog has died

I buried him in the garden

Next to a rusted old machine

Some day I’ll join him right there,
but now he’s gone with his shaggy coat,
his bad manners and his cold nose,
and I, the materialist, who never believed
in any promised heaven in the sky
for any human being,
I believe in a heaven I’ll never enter.
Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom
where my dog waits for my arrival
waving his fan-like tail in friendship.

Ai, I’ll not speak of sadness here on earth,
of having lost a companion
who was never servile.
His friendship for me, like that of a porcupine
withholding its authority,
was the friendship of a star, aloof,
with no more intimacy than was called for,
with no exaggerations:
he never climbed all over my clothes
filling me full of his hair or his mange,
he never rubbed up against my knee
like other dogs obsessed with sex.

No, my dog used to gaze at me,
paying me the attention I need,
the attention required
to make a vain person like me understand
that, being a dog, he was wasting time,
but, with those eyes so much purer than mine,
he’d keep on gazing at me
with a look that reserved for me alone
all his sweet and shaggy life,
always near me, never troubling me,
and asking nothing.

Ai, how many times have I envied his tail
as we walked together on the shores of the sea
in the lonely winter of Isla Negra
where the wintering birds filled the sky
and my hairy dog was jumping about
full of the voltage of the sea’s movement:
my wandering dog, sniffing away
with his golden tail held high,
face to face with the ocean’s spray.

Joyful, joyful, joyful,
as only dogs know how to be happy
with only the autonomy
of their shameless spirit.

There are no good-byes for my dog who has died,
and we don’t now and never did lie to each other.

So now he’s gone and I buried him,
and that’s all there is to it.

 

I am lucky for having so many good years with him.

The Sense of An Ending

It’s going to be hard for me to write about this book without doing some gender griping.  In so many ways, it is the same complaint I have about The Great Gatsby, The Catcher in the Rye, and oh, everything ever written by Hunter S. Thompson.  I refuse to accept that men are generally as obtuse as they are sometimes made to look in literature.

To be sure, Julian Barnes wants his audience to feel ambivalent, even distaste about the narrator in The Sense of An Ending.  But I’d dare any reader to find one character that is likeable.  These are people who, when recounted through the eyes of a pretty dense man, appear miserably disengaged as well.  A book about miserable people slogging through their own personal miserable memories isn’t literary magic to me. 

So was there anything redeeming about this highly acclaimed novel?  Of course.  Most of all, I found the author’s writing about memory and experience fascinating.  I felt it was more than a little corrupted by the silly characters and their silly storyline.  Unlike Middlesex, a novel where sex and love are properly elevated, The Sense of An Ending somehow makes these important themes seem deeply unimportant.  Perhaps its the type of love and sex addressed. If, in thirty years, I find myself absorbed in the conflicts of my youth again, troubled by lost loves, and no further along in my retrospective insights about that time,  I promise to go the way of Adrian. 

Julian Barnes is a wonderful writer though.  One quote I liked particularly:

Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does: otherwise there wouldn’t be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change, we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that’s something different, more like decoration. Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that character peaks a little later: between twenty and thirty, say. And after that, we’re just stuck with what we’ve got. We’re on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn’t it? And also – if this isn’t too grand a word – our tragedy.

Fair Isle Hat

I’m proud to share this project because it marks a new skill set for me in knitting.  Although I’ve attempted basic stripes before, I’ve never been brave enough to have a go at a true pattern.  This project from Boutique Knits was the perfect first step.  Hats are small projects that are hard to get lost on – making it easy for me to concentrate on the 19 rows of fair isle pattern involved. 

I anticipated feeling dislike for the numbers game that fair isle necessarily requires.  I thought I’d hate the counting and repetition.  Instead, I found it soothing and relaxing.  It’s also not nearly as difficult as the beautiful and intricate finished product would suggest.  

 As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a continental style knitter - a style that originated in continental Europe and is best recognized in German knitters.  It’s chance I learned this technique since my teacher learned  to knit while in England.  Most Americans do not knit this way.  I feel lucky, though, to have learned continental since it makes this kind of detail work breeze by.  Unfortunately, to Ilenia who is a beginner English style knitter, it makes watching as I knit very confusing.  I’m glad I didn’t attempt to teach her one style when her teacher at school instructs in another.  Still, I feel bad that she is learning the less efficient method first.   I can see why professional knitters prefer the continental method.  It’s probably better for your hands too and my genetic predisposition to arthritis will thank me later. 

I have a giant head and although I followed the pattern, this hat fits me like a yamaka.  It fits Ilenia and David fine however, as my model below demonstrates.  Let’s hope Julia’s head is slightly smaller than the planet Neptune.