Mindscale

There and Back Again

2010-04-29T11:39:00.000-05:00

With apologies to J.R.R. Tolkien, I wish I had hobbit feet, given the amount of trekking around I’ve been doing lately. Nothing so interesting as Middle Earth, however. I’ve been sightseeing nursing homes and extended care facilities for my dad, thus, the hiatus in these blog posts lately. So it is with delight that I return to an exotic voyage, and wind up my reviews of books on India with Jhumpa Lahiri’s Pulitizer Prize winning collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies.

The fact that I’m commenting on this now is a sad demonstration of how little I am caught up with modern authors. Lahiri published this in 1999, but by the time I get to it, it’s already enshrined in the modern canon. I first heard about it while wiling away the hours driving the Nikipedia back and forth, back and forth. There has to be something worthwhile to do with all that car time and given my proclivity for productivity, we were listening to the Teaching Company’s Art of Reading. If it hits the sonorous products of the Teaching Company, you can be certain it’s gone from trendy to enshrined.

While the three previous books I’ve mentioned about India mostly dealt with India and people arriving there, this one pretty much concerns people who’ve bought a one way ticket and landed in the other direction—Indians lost and wandering around the U.S.

Ms. Lahiri’s spare use of language nevertheless manages to create some resonant tone poems. I’m always interested in finding a way to understand people whose culture, values and choices appear very foreign to me, and Ms. Lahiri really gives voice to a subgroup that is sometimes voiceless in the juggernaut of American culture. Even though I think I’m pretty much a squeaky liberal, I am certainly guilty of thinking of some groups as “those people”, and find it really soul-expanding to be helped to understand. Both Ms. Lahiri (and another writer I love, Nahguib Mahfouz) really help to create a feeling of commonality, without betraying their culture’s uniqueness.

I just wish her characters weren’t so sad. Wow, it’s really bleak for Indians in the U.S. Even with family and a good income, Ms. Lahiri’s characters are really in a struggle to define themselves, eke out happiness, achieve authentic relationships, and they have a tough time succeeding, if at all. For anyone who has trouble wrapping their mind around arranged marriages, Ms. Lahiri offers a window into what they might be like—i.e., not much different than the Western choose-for yourself-and-be-miserable. I wouldn’t say either system has a lock on the secret to happiness or misery. Maybe people operate much more out of their own characters, even within different cultural contexts.

The stories are soulful and ambiguous, and normally I really like narratives that serve up stuff you’re still chewing on later. But jeez, couldn’t she have left some of them at least a little happiness? Maybe it’s the economy now compared to 11 years ago; maybe it’s my own personal life experiences lately. But I’d like to see a little hope, a little romance, or, gosh, the tiniest touch of humor. I’ve heard Lahiri compared to Raymond Carver, but no dice, in my opinion. I mean, Lahiri’s characters have jobs, families, spouses, big houses—couldn’t they enjoy a little of it? Carver’s characters are often busted, sick, broke, and they still sometimes have hope and happiness. Okay, what Carver and Lahiri have in common is—they both write/wrote short stories.

All said and done, it’s a helluva first publication (although my guess is she’d been cranking the hard disc for a good long time.) She’s gone on since the 2000 prize to become a literary lion with a veritable bookstore shelf all to herself. Yeah, I’m jealous. She’s a good read. Just not on a dreary day.

An Indian Epic

2010-04-08T14:40:00.000-05:00

It’s harder to comment on excellence than on the mediocre or mundane, but I’ll give it a try anyway. Paul Scott’s magnum opus, The Raj Quartet, is just that: excellent in every way. The characters will haunt your thoughts for years, the setting is so vivid you’ll look for turmeric stains on your fingers, you’ll never be able to hear the sound of a sitar again without it meaning something to you, and seeing Indian locations in the news will forever after remind you of defining incidents in the book.

The Raj Quartet is, obviously, four books that make up an entire saga. All of the characters are somehow inter-related, and many know each other. Spanning the early part of the 1940’s, the past events in the lives of the characters keep intruding on the lives of others. What emerges is a portrait of Anglo-Indian relations and relationships, the political and the private, as complicated as a mandala. There are enough broken love relationships for a Hindu epic; characters who could behave well but choose the opposite; rather ordinary people who somehow rise to greatness; the silly, the sordid, and the sots. You’ll find yourself in love with a few of the characters, and some of them you’ll wish you could shake firmly (or worse). Good people are not necessarily rewarded, and by the end you feel sorry for even the worst villains, or at least understand them a bit.

Yeah, it’s long. Like everyone, I hope for short books that give me a satisfying sense of accomplishment—gee, I actually completed something. But, fond though I am of my blue pencil, I don’t think an editor could have cut a word in the 1,984 pages that make up my edition. Don’t let it stop you—consider it a cheap vacation. You might even learn more than you would on an actual trip to India, at considerably less cost. Although once you read this work, you’ll be looking at airfares the same way I am.

In the interest of honesty, I must admit that I saw the 14 episodes of The Jewel in the Crown before reading the books. This PBS series from the 80s is also terrific. Because I saw it first, I don’t know if the visuals would have matched my imagination, but I will say that the series is worthy of the book—subtly acted, not too many pretty boy actors, minor characters and subplots given their due. Fourteen episodes are a lot, but I’ve seen it twice now, and truthfully I’m thinking about watching it again with the Nikipedia. She won’t get all the subtlety at 16, but it’s no bad thing to see how complicated life can be, and what a variety of choices people make, with sometimes appalling consequences.

Along with Kristin Lavransdattir and Middlemarch (gosh, maybe I really do like LOOONNNNGGG books) this is probably in my 10 top list of all time. Read The Raj Quartet and expand your soul.

More ladies in distress—India

2010-03-19T11:29:00.001-05:00

It’s tough out there. My previous post was about the plight of young Indian widows. It wasn’t so hot (or maybe it was, groan) for Western women who made their way there, either. East of the Sun, by Julia Gregson, is a chunky bedtime read about three women who travel to India pre-World War II to find husbands.

I didn’t love these characters, but I did find myself reading to the end because, ultimately, I did care what happened to them. Not all of the women are equally appealing, nor are they all as thoroughly fleshed out as one might wish, but you know all of them—everyone with female friends does, although I had some trouble actually identifying with any of them. I suppose I have a blind spot that happily ever after doesn’t necessarily mean getting married.

What Ms. Gregson has done superbly well, in my opinion, is handle point of view in an extremely interesting way, and anyone working on fiction should have a look. She does a masterful job of switching between how her characters see themselves (in chapters where one woman dominates) and then how other people see them. She does this quite well with one character in particular, Viva, whose interior monologue is confused and scared, but whom others see as, well, their mom or big sis.

One plot strand that was unusual in such a gal pal book was the introduction of a whacked out stalker for whom Viva has become responsible. His mental illness is never really specified, but Gregson does a great job of portraying his behavior and how the other characters understand and react to it.

Despite the exotic local, India just provides the excuse for a story that is really closer to Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants than it is to the Jewel in the Crown. But more about that in my next post. East of the Sun is a great book to read under an afghan with a cup of Darjeeling, when the Sunday New York Times is just a bit too much reality.

Booking a passage to India

2010-03-17T11:50:00.001-05:00

Ever notice how ideas cluster? I didn’t actually set out to read a ton of material on India, but for some reason several books have recently insinuated themselves into my six foot high bedside stack. So, the next few blog posts will be discussing books set in India or about Indians. For some reason, most of these have a 20th or 21st century setting, so I’m going to skip the Mahabharata and Ramayana retellings which both Nikipedia and I read last year. If you’re interested, the R. K. Narayan versions were terrific.

I don’t read anywhere near as many YA novels as I should, given that I’m working on one, but those I read I generally enjoy, and highly recommend them to adults as well. Usually they’re easy to follow, tell a good story, and can be completed in two or three nights of bedtime reading. Homeless Bird, by Gloria Whelan, is one such and it won a ton of prizes, including the National Book Award in 2000. Spoiler alert—don’t read further if you don’t want to know the plot of the book.

Homeless Bird is about Koly, whose dirt-poor parents marry her off at a very young age to the son of a family they barely know. He turns out to be hopelessly ill (the family is trying to use dowry money for one last desperate attempt to save him).

After he dies, she has a miserable existence with her mother in law, who’s in pretty desperate straits herself, and who ultimately abandons her on the streets of Vrindavan, a city known as the City of Widows. Widows become a huge economic liability, and this is a city where some can stave off starvation by chanting at temples all day long. It’s a hopeless survival. There are several twists of fate, and Koly ends up (presumably) living happily ever after.

To some degree, this is a Cinderella trope. At first, I had a hard time placing what era the story was set in, until I started to see mention of computers and realized to my horror that Ms. Whelan was describing present day conditions. It’s particularly horrifying to be reminded that in this huge country there is no real social safety net and that in a place where I talk to well spoken people every day in call centers, other people—young and helpless girls—can starve to death any day of the week. It’s easy to shrug off horrors set in the past, but Ms. Whelan’s choice to set this story in the present day is arresting and impactful.

Ms. Whelan does an excellent job of portraying three dimensional villains. Her bad people make cruel choices, but you do have some understanding of why they make those choices, and you find yourself pitying or at least being able to forgive them. Also, characters are introduced subtly, and unfold over time, rather than the stock and unchanging minor characters one often encounters in a short novel.

The introduction of Vrindavan is fascinating—well off the familiar settings Westerners might stereotype as India. It had me running to a map and doing an internet search for more info. I think she includes the right amount for the average YA reader. However, I always wish for notes in the back of any novel that deals with historical or foreign settings. At least some links on the writer’s website would be nice. It’s a quibble. Maybe it’s a tribute—the writer has made you want to know more. To her credit, Ms. Whelan does supply a page of further information, but no links. Maybe that’s appropriate for YA readers. On second thought, maybe this book is intended for middle grades—I’m never quite sure where the cut point is.

I’m not very fond, any more, of books where the happy ending is that the girl gets the guy. Based on my own experience, that’s neither the end, nor necessarily very happy in real life. Given the realities of poor women in India, it appears that was one of the few resolutions available to the heroine, but I’m glad Ms. Whelan also gives her a trade where she can earn money and have some independence.

This book might be distressing to sensitive readers, adult or YA, but it provides a rich and thoughtful picture of a contemporary culture with troubling issues. It caused me to think a lot about the differences and, more disturbingly, the parallels between women’s situation in India and my own home culture. BTW, I've classified this as historical fiction, even though in my estimation it's not, because that's what the librarian who told me about the book billed it as.

Cookbooks for when you’re broke

2010-03-11T10:09:00.001-06:00

Which is nearly always for us, mostly due to the amount I spend on food and books! February’s “cookbook of the month” experiment turned out to be two: Ann Rogers’ The New Cookbook for Poor Poets (and others), and Mary Ostyn’s Family Feasts for $75 a Week, which I picked up for about $10 while shopping at Sam’s Club to “save” money. (BTW, for the Rogers book I have the earlier version, but since Amazon is currently selling that one for $50, the link is to a cheaper one.)

Let’s attack the $75 a week one first. Can’t be done in my house. Ms. Ostyn seems like a terrific person, and in addition to 4 biological kids, she’s adopted 6 from other countries—Korea and Ethiopia. Since I’ve barely been able to cope with one child, I’m surprised all her recipes don’t start out with, “First, take a large swig of whiskey”, but she seems a more sensible and able person than I am. Some weeks, I’d be doing well to feed us each on $75 a week, and when we decide to try some new diet book with prescribed menus, well, checkout sticker shock can be pretty devastating. Too bad anxiety doesn’t cause me to lose weight.

If you buy organic food, I just don’t believe you could possibly feed 4 people on $75 a week, and I’d like to hear from anyone that can and how you do it. Maybe if you grow all produce yourself. However, I must admit that following Ms. Ostyn did cut the grocery bills somewhat. I’ve also noticed that if I actually make out a week of menus, this in itself cuts down what I spend dramatically. Even though she didn’t save me a ton of money, her recipes were interesting, as they include a lot of Ethiopian dishes, and a few techniques I’d never heard of, like dry frying onions, then adding oil. Surprisingly, it didn’t not end up being “Cajun blackened” frying pan.

Except for the addition of cayenne pepper, we found the recipes to be somewhat bland. As Nikipedia put it, this is food kids would eat. Just not MY kid, who has always liked highly seasoned food. For example, we tried the white chicken chili recipe, but it just lacked something—maybe a handful of cilantro? And the portions are small (unlike a lot of cookbooks). Now, you have to remember that my idea of portions is pretty skewed. As a kid my aunt used to cook 3 pounds of pasta for 5 people. Even so, I need more than a scant cup of chili for dinner. Hats off to Ms. Ostyn for what she is doing, and her “front of book” is interesting, but the recipes need some work.

Whenever I open Poor Poet’s cookbook, I feel 40 years younger. I bought this book as a teenager when I first ran away from home (something I still would like to do at times). I spotted it in a bookstore in Berkeley, and it was my introduction to budget cooking. At a time when I was lonely, lost and broke, she taught me that style was not necessarily linked to money.

I remember showing it to my mom several years later. She was unenthused—“they’re cheap recipes”. Yeah, well…after a childhood spent gnawing bones clean, Mom believed in MEAT on the table. The rest of us have since realized that maybe that isn’t always such a hot idea.

The Poor Poet eats well—lots of flavor, interesting ingredient mixes, easy to make with ingredients I tend to have on-hand, and cheap for the most part. Ms. Rogers believes that food should feed the soul, and a good meal inspires the creative spirit. I’ve enjoyed this book for many years, but this last month I tried many recipes I’d ignored, although I already had plenty of favorites in the book. Only one flatbread recipe was kind of a dud—it ended up being 4 inch crackers rather than any kind of bread.

My one quibble with this book is that it often substitutes easily available ingredients for authentic ones. Since this book was written in the 1960s, it’s an interesting time travel to realize that most of these ingredients simply weren’t available in the U.S. at that time. These were the days when dinner at a restaurant was your choice of roast beef, ham, fried chicken or roast turkey, not matter paneer or pesto something-or-other. So, Ms. Rogers paneer uses cottage cheese, her Noodles Basilico is delicious, but not pesto, etc. The flavors, if not the ingredients, have stood up well to the test of time. If you can get your hands on a copy (it’s long out of print) I recommend it just to absorb Ms. Rogers’ attitudes toward the art of food. The recipes are a great bonus.

Columbia University College Tour

2010-03-04T09:39:00.000-06:00

It’s hard to be running late when you’re in charge of the deadlines, but somehow I manage. So, this is late—in the sense that I’m writing a report about a month after we toured Columbia. Assuming, however, that the throes of college applications have passed by this time of year, perhaps I can just declare that this is EARLY for the next admissions season. There, I feel better.
The Nikipedia is only sophomore-level, but given how LATE we are on just about everything, it seems reasonable to check things out when we’re in an appropriate city. Thus, trip to New York = visit to Columbia. Why were we interested? Okay, I feel a digression coming on.

In the few schools we’ve so far toured (Oberlin, Peabody, Northwestern & Univ. of Chicago) there seems to be two prominent methods of organizing an education. First method: have few to no required courses—student is free to concentrate heavily on major or professional training. This method often allows the student to double or triple major. One might wish, as a parent, that this would result in complementary majors—say, French and Education, or Marketing and Art—you know, something that is likely to enhance the probability that Junior will actually be able to pay off those college loans. Unfortunately, in my observation, it usually results in bizarre mash ups, like French and Accounting, or Piano and Biology, where the kid is majoring in what they really love, and double majoring in something they force themselves to take to get a job. Not so good.

The other route is to require a significant core curriculum, which nearly everyone takes. These often feature heavy reading of classics, along with math and science, or at least enough math and science that the kid will graduate with some idea of the topics (at least enough to discard all the creationist/intelligent design crap.) The idea is that the student will have a depth of cultural knowledge that they can then apply to a concentration in the last two years.

We can argue about the benefits of each until the gargoyles fall off their perches, but at least right now, the Nikipedia’s (and my) strong preference is for the core curriculum approach, à la University of Chicago and Columbia.

Okay, we already all know Columbia is a terrific school. I mean, it’s Ivy League (which really only speaks to sports, but who cares?) and has a roster of famous alumni as long as the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge (including our beloved Barack, who by the way was a dorm daddy while there). If you want to know more about the core curriculum, check out the book Great Books, by David Denby. He’s a journalist who graduated from Columbia, then went back as an adult and retook the curriculum. Education is so wasted on the young.

My top concern in sending my precious to Columbia was safety and security. For a lot of people, that’s a concern for the Univ. of Chicago, too, but I live here and even went there in the bad old days—it wasn’t all that scary then, and it’s a lot safer now. Same with Columbia. I was really impressed with the attention to security, especially in the dorms. Something like 98% of students live on campus—no duh there, given the price of New York City housing. Even better, the admissions counselor said the overwhelming majority of professors live within walking distance of campus.

Mostly what I was impressed with at Columbia was the sense of a real campus community. The layout of buildings tends to feel like a giant hug around the main plaza, with the dorms anchoring the corners and edges. The architecture is interesting with a nice mix of old and modern (engineering, what else?) We ate in a dining hall that could have been lifted from Harry Potter (lots of wood paneling) and the food was terrific. Ever had dessert pizzas? Pineapple, coconut, omigod.

What we both especially liked about the dining hall (okay, after the food) was the interactions we observed. Columbia touts the number of minorities it admits, and that’s lovely, but I always watch to see if all groups appear to be interacting. I mean, it’s not fostering communication if all the Asian or African American kids sit off at their own tables. Not so here—totally interactive.

One interaction we couldn’t help but observe. We happened to sit down next to an African American girl (girl to me, at least, given what an old bat I am). She calmly checked us out, then began talking to Niki—obviously recognizing us as on visit. Her boyfriend appeared, she had a quiet set to with him where she read him the riot act for keeping her waiting—lots about honoring commitments. Yay! just the kind of girl I want my girl to be! After he left, she calmly picked up a book, then kindly spoke a little more to Niki and left—what self possession!

As 1 o’clock approached, the dining room emptied—another yay! No lolling about cutting class. In fact, my dominant impression watching students was, these kids are moving.

The admissions counselor cautioned everyone not to say in their application that they wanted to come to Columbia because it’s in New York, but let’s be real—that’s a huge attraction. I mean, the museums, the arts, the business—geez, imagine the internships. There’s a subway stop right at the entrance to campus, and you can be in midtown in about 15 minutes. My main worry is that Niki would skip class to inhale museums (I guess that’s better than the other stuff you can inhale). With most everyone living in dorms, and not a big Greek scene, it didn’t appear that drugs or alcohol were much of an issue. Or as the tour guide said, who has time? There’s just too much to do.

How would I compare Columbia with other schools we’ve seen? Well, the most comparable would probably be the University of Chicago. My totally unscientific feel is that there’s more eccentricity at the U of C. More kids look like mad scientists or poets, the purple hair quotient is higher, discussions overheard are more serious and esoteric at the U of C. The kids at Columbia look more normal and, dare I say, attractive, with more conventional albeit big city style. Not the chi-chi coed look you see at Northwestern, but polished and clean. I bet Columbia is more fun for social kids than the U of C would be, and U of C a better fit for real academics on the geeky side.

What they have in common is that kids at both campuses seem to love and cherish the common core. But then, if you didn’t want that already you most certainly would not go to these schools. I dunno, but to me it seems to produce an intellectual confidence that allows them to tackle further studies with direction and assurance. I was very impressed that our tour guide had a clear plan for graduate school, was carefully assessing how much money she could land to pursue it, and also had a Plan B that she was enthusiastic about if Plan A didn’t work out. That’s what I’d like to see in Nikipedia by senior year.

As a good daughter of the U of C, I still hope the Nikipedia might get in there, especially because, sniff-sniff, she’d only be a 45 minute drive away. But we’d do a very happy dance if the fat envelope eventually comes from Columbia.

Cooking up January

2010-02-15T12:23:00.001-06:00

Julia Child apparently could not get it together enough to send out her Christmas cards in December, so she and hubby made a practice of sending out Valentines instead. Boy, can I relate. Forget the cards, ain’t going to happen. However, I do feel the need to catch up, since I’ve had precious little time to post here since January, due to actual big paying writing gig, trip to New York, class, and grandpa canning himself while I was away and breaking his collar bone. But you don’t want to hear about this, right? Let’s talk about what’s to eat.
As I mentioned in the last post, we are going to select one cookbook a month and actually cook from it. I absolutely have to pay homage to Julia, so the first one (January) was Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 1. I’ve mentioned before how Julia Child taught me to cook. Back when I was in college, I actually had a printed copy of the television show recipes in paperback, which I still have of course. But for most of college and grad school I was way too broke to afford the actual bible, which was not then available in paperback in the U.S. To my extreme delight, I discovered that it was available in England in a Penguin edition and snatched up a copy when I spied it in a bookstore in Salisbury. This became my bedtime reading for the rest of the trip.

By the time I got home, I’d learned a lot about technique and treatment of ingredients, but I can’t actually say I cooked much from the book. Somewhere I read an article that it took more than two days to make the Beef Wellington preparation. About this time I had also discovered the cookbooks of Elizabeth David, and her somewhat sketchy directions and loose approach seemed much easier to me. I understand now (especially after January) that Julia Child’s recipes are not so much difficult as they LONG and precise, but who has time as a grad student, or for the rest of life, for that matter? So MAFC became the go-to if I didn’t understand a technique or wanted the definitive recipe for Gateau Pithiviers or some such, but I generally used someone else’s recipe.

I used it enough that the Penguin edition began to yellow (rapidly) and lose pages (slowly but consistently). Finally, 20 years later, I looked at my baby daughter and wondered what legacy I would leave her. Seriously, she was in danger of not inheriting a copy of MAFC. Cannot be. This was just about the time that there was a buzz about re-issuing MAFC, and when I saw the pre-publication price, I started combing used bookstores, nabbing both volumes for about $5 each (made me happier than a good stock pick).

From the condition of the books, it became obvious that using MAFC is like saving money or losing weight—everybody talks about it but nobody actually does it. So, when Nikipedia and I began this cookbook-of-the-month project, the very first one obviously had to be MAFC, volume 1.

My conclusion after about a dozen recipes? If you have any interest in eating, you must have this book. Notice I did not say “cooking”. You don’t need to know anything about cooking. Believe me, Julia will tell you everything you need to know—don’t think about it, don’t try to improve, don’t skip any ingredients—just do exactly what she says and you’ll have a taste orgasm. I mean, the Casserole-roasted Chicken with Tarragon smelled so good and tasted so transcendent I wanted to take a bath in it, smear it on my face, take the pot into a corner and snarl away my beloved child, eating it all myself.

I’ve been making omelets for more than 30 years, but never tried them Julia’s way. Who knew two crummy eggs in a pan could cause your eyes to fly open? And the Gratin of Creamed Salmon! We barely got that one to the table and when we did, it already had two forks sticking out of it.

Maybe there’s a bad recipe in there somewhere, but we didn’t unearth it. A lot of people have joked that you can make anything taste good with enough butter, but canned salmon? These recipes are just superb, and represent a kind of cooking that can rarely be beat, here in the U.S. or even in much of Europe, any more.

There were a few things I didn’t like about the book, however. The recipes are set up with ingredients running down the left column, and how and when you use them running parallel in the right column. Myself, I like recipes to list all the ingredients at the beginning, in order of use. Just easier for me. The instructions are LONG, however simple their actual execution, and this may be either intimidating, comforting, or over-kill depending on your level of cooking expertise. I’ve been cooking for at least 40 years now (I started in infancy), but I have to confess I learned a few things. I hate the index for several reasons—the typography is just horrible—can’t distinguish heads and sub heads. The recipes are not listed by exact title: if you want the Chicken casserole I mentioned above, you have to look it up under Casseroles, where you’ll find “Chicken Fricasees”, or under “Chicken” or under “Poulet”. For me, a pain.

This is not a budget cookbook. But, even with the butter, floods of vermouth and cognac, and all the très cher seafood, it’s not terribly expensive or caloric either. Why? portions are small to reasonable. In fact, Julia mentions that the portions are even larger than she wished, but her editors convinced her to change her expectations from the multi-course French way to the fewer, larger American expectations. If you can control your gluttony and stick to the portions sizes, it’s not so bad.

What about the time factor? As long as you read the entire recipe beforehand, and that’s an important caveat, the recipes weren’t bad at all. I wouldn’t attack a major entrée at 6:45pm on a week night, but many of the recipes are minutes to prepare—takes longer to read them.

January with Julia was great. We didn’t put on an excessive amount of weight. The Nikipedia groaned when I announced February would have a cookbook of its own. Onward and upward.

Shop at home

2010-02-15T11:24:00.000-06:00

First, shop at home. This is one of my mantras for 2010. Actually, I’ve been telling myself this for much longer, but I’m hoping it will actually sink in this year. Have you ever been really hot to buy something, and then, by the time you get it home, you don’t have the time to read the instructions, or the book goes on the shelf for later, or it’s just too good to use? Well, at least one of those describes my software shelf, probably one third of my book collection, and my entire stash of fabric and yarn, to say nothing of the grand piano. So this year, I’m going to try to use some of this stuff to create beautiful things and beautiful experiences (and finally understand how some of this software works, beyond just the basics.)
Is this really about art? Well, gee, it’s my blog, so I guess I can write about what I want to. But isn’t at least one of the purposes of art to beautify life? To lend creativity to the mundane? To spin dross into gold?

Where to begin? Just choosing what to get to is an overwhelming project in itself. However, I happened to be wringing my hands while in the kitchen, and realized that I was facing my wall of cookbooks. I have upwards of 220 cookbooks; depending on how you count pamphlets and specialized guides, even more. And how many of these do I ever use on a regular basis? Maybe 5. Okay, you clutter control freaks are now saying, get rid of the rest. But I must tell you, if there were a fire, after getting my kid out of the house, and making sure the pets were safe (with the possible, er, exception of one cat) I’d grab the cookbooks and run out naked. For certain, these are the possession my child will need to sort through when I croak. She doesn’t get rid of anything either, but I digress…

Possibly still inspired by envy at Julie & Julia, which everyone knows I should have written, better (and been cashing the checks on by now), I decided to select one cookbook per month for the next year, and cook a recipe from it at least twice per week. I’ve run out of shelf space, so I’m hoping this “shop at home” will stem the tide, although truthfully I bought 2 more cookbooks over last weekend.

I can dine in for years with this. Of course, the Nikipedia, dedicated foodie that she is, was ecstatic. And she uttered those fatal words, “Mom, I can HELP you,” more than doubling the potential workload of this project.

Next post will be about our January experiments. Let me know if you have any nominations for a cookbook you’d like to see tested—chances are, I probably have it!

Magic in the kitchen

2010-01-20T19:31:00.000-06:00

I’ve fallen in love again. Maybe I’m particularly susceptible and lord knows I’ve made some bad choices in the past, but this time I think it’s the real thing.

I’ve fallen in love with Paul Child. If you’ve seen the movie version of Julie & Julia (not, for heaven’s sake the dumb and self serving book) or read My Life in France by (somewhat) Julia Child and (mostly) Alex Prud’homme, well, you can’t help but know what I mean.

A dear and now deceased friend of mine used to say, when looking at potential dates or other women’s husbands, “Where are the new men for the new women?” Well, Paul Child was that new man, and Julia was that new woman. Here was a guy who could fall madly, passionately in love with a gawky, quirky, strident woman at least a head taller and not be threatened. Nay, it appears that he felt himself among the happiest of mortals, and so was she. I wish she were still around, there’s a lot I’d like to learn and I don’t mean French cooking.

What strikes me particularly is how their marriage seemed to blend an impish sense of fun with the ability to endure, persevere, and make the best of some not-so-good situations. So little ego involved—she supported his career through a lot of ups and downs, and he plunged into assisting hers when, after many years, she actually had one and it became the better of the two. And which of us cannot cheer on a woman whose best career years were after fifty (and she didn’t even have the excuse of raising kids)?

Meryl Streep chews on the scenery a bit, and Julia wasn’t really that weird. I know; I learned to cook by watching her every day when I got home from college classes. She and I share a birthday (along with Napolean, hmmm) so I’m sure we share a connection. I hope some of that fairy dust will sift my way. Think I’ll go watch it again.

Avatar—Second Coming?

2010-01-11T12:00:00.003-06:00

I figured I had to like it—if it’s got the Fox News guys’ shorts in knots, well, generally it’s my kind of movie. Plus, if it’s supposedly quality science fiction, the Nikipedia is all aflutter, so I agreed to pop for the tickets.

We haven’t been serious movie goers since acquiring the big screen tube and Netflix, but the availability of 3-D got us into those new reclining seats. All the while we were waiting, I kept feeling like I was going to slide off the pseudo leather, and spent my time grumbling about the $30 for the movie, for which we could have had 2 months and 24 movies from Netflix, which is why we’re not big customers any more. But if I needed any further nudge in the direction of my own comfortable couch, it was the rest of the audience. Now, I’ve complained about bad behavior before, but, jeez, EVERY TIME? The elderly couple next to us got up 4 times during the movie--why don’t these people sit on the END of the row if they need that many bathroom breaks? Or maybe consider not drinking the super humongous size? The little lady behind me hung her feet, with drippy boots, over the empty seat next to me. I wonder what her house looks like. Actually, no I don’t.

If my fellow audience members aren’t bad enough, well, the theater had more in store for us. Now I admit that I haven’t been to the movies since seeing Star Trek this summer, but the previews before Avatar made my fillings ring from the volume, steady stream of gorey mayhem, and the actual shaking of the seats from explosions and car crashes. The Nikipedia was ready to post a picket sign for the very lengthy National Guard recruiting ad. Apparently, the only people worth marketing to are adolescents so dumb that they can be induced to be cannon fodder by a good ad campaign. Anyone thrilled by this “preview” ought to take another preview. Say, sit in the lobby of the new Marine Corps museum and watch all the injured 18 year olds with missing limbs wheel around the lobby for the day. Find out what the price really is, how glamorous it really is, and, I guess, go watch a movie instead if you need a quick pumping of adrenalin.

Apparently Fox News thinks that the tough, virile, technologically savvy guys should not be beating up on the skinny, primitive natives. At least, that’s what I hope, and I’m glad to hear it. However, not so glad about the movie.

It’s some kind of mishmash of pseudo earth goddess worship, cowboys and Indians, sweet sassy chick transforms tough dope, and bad guys who keep on coming finally get creamed after the good guys’ world is flattened. Yadda, yadda, I mean couldn’t we have the tiniest shred of a decent plot? How about a hero that’s not a complete meathead? Plus, everything in history tells us that superior technology usually wins—just ask any group of native peoples. By the middle of the movie I could barely suppress the, “OOOHH PUUHLEEZ”

Okay, it is gorgeous. The world is one almost anyone with a shred of nature-loving would adore. I haven’t seen such a visually gorgeous “world” since What Dreams May Come, and you have to die to get to that one.

If you can see Avatar in 3-D, bring ear plugs and enjoy the light show. Otherwise, believe me, you can wait for the DVD.

Off we go

2009-12-27T19:49:00.002-06:00

I just took a caravan to Afghanistan, didn’t buy an airline ticket, and thank heavens didn’t get shot at. Rather, I’ve been snuggled under the cover of my very own down comforter, reading about other people getting knifed, mummified by desert winds, running off with tribal chieftains, and marrying men who already have several other wives in tow. Sometimes you just have to get out of yourself, know what I mean? If you want to know a whole lot about any number of countries, check out James Michener’s oeuvre. Chances are, he wrote about it.

The Michener book that’s been keeping me up nights is Caravan, published in the early sixties. It just goes to prove that if you do enough research, you can look prescient, even if the information was there all the time. Michener accurately predicted tribalism resulting in near civil war, Soviet invasion, extreme abuse of Afghani women, and a whole host of stuff you can read about any day in your newspaper’s front page. And if you want to get a really good perspective on why a war in Afghanistan is probably even more unwinnable than one in Iraq, why, look no further than this 40 year old book. The Afghanistan of Caravan makes other messed up countries, like Somalia and Nigeria, look like child’s play to get organized.

Nobody will ever accuse James Michener of intricate plots, psychodrama, or brevity (my soul mate!), but he knows how to amass a mountain of data as high as the Hindu Kush, twist it into a forthright yarn that shadows real characters, and by the time you plow through 300 to 1,000 pages, you know everything he knows about the subject. He wrote big books, but ones where the storytelling is so engaging that you find yourself reading over lunch, carrying the brick into the bathroom, and, in my case, burning yourself because you were stirring something with one hand while holding the book in the other.

In addition to Caravan, I’ve read Tales of the South Pacific, Hawaii and Caribbean. Hawaii is fun and poignant (don’t bother with the awful movie they made from part of it). After reading the horrifying Caribbean, I don’t think I’d ever be able to vacation there again. Best of all, though, was Michener’s autobiography, The World Is My Home. It was a pleasure to visit with this seemingly kind, self made guy who seldom has a bad word to say about anyone. Whether he was really that way in person (hmmm, he was married 3 times), we’ll never know. It’s a big book, but it leaves out perhaps as much as it includes. Nevertheless, if you’re looking for an easy read that will give you more entertainment than whatever you just rented from Netflix, check out Michener, any Michener. Years ago any of his books was eagerly awaited and an instant bestseller. You don’t hear about his work much since he passed away. More’s the pity.

A Christmas sugar plum

2009-12-17T13:36:00.001-06:00

I went to the opera recently and nobody died. Franz Lehar just isn’t like that. The Merry Widow is a huge whipped cream torte of music, frivolity, and child-like swirls of emotions. The Lyric Opera of Chicago has done it up right, with great costumes, beautiful voices, and a cast that makes a serious stab at acting.

It does seem that these financial times have returned us to more conventional productions. A number of years ago the Lyric was experimenting with “modernizing” some operas. For me, the nadir was reached in their production of Gluck’s Alceste, where everyone was costumed in beige and gray. At one point there was a pile of naked, writhing bodies on stage that, far from being erotic, resembled a plate of Klingon Gagh, or the earthworms in my compost heap. My guess is the people who pay for the big ticket seats didn’t exactly relish it either.

Opera, well done, can be the best of all theater experiences: music, dance, plot, lyrical language, voice, orchestra, acting—it CAN have it all. Okay, sometimes it’s a little weak on a few of those things. Acting can be a bit dubious when the two “young lovers” are pretty clearly pushing fifty under the spackled on makeup, or when they’re as big as two belugas circling each other. And the plots, well, I’ve been meaning to write “the three plots of all operas” for a long time. But sometimes the lyricism can move me to tears. Maybe it’s my age, but the regret of getting older in the words of the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier, or just about any line in La Bohème, have me crying like I’m peeling onions.

The Nikipedia only likes happy endings, and by that standard Lehar ought to be her favorite composer (he’s not, but that’s another blog post). Both the Merry Widow and his other well-known work, The Student Prince, have all the problems you’d like to have, and even the villains are not so bad and have good reasons to oppose the hero/heroine. If only life were like that.

I have one horrible problem in viewing opera, and that is that after nearly freezing to death getting to the production (never once have I bought tickets that the day didn’t turn out to be a ride on the polar express), once I sit down and the overture starts, the combination of warmth and relaxation often puts me right to sleep. Usually, I have the Nikipedia to poke me in the ribs ruthlessly, but sometimes the Sandman even affects her. Not so this time—the constant action, the music, the dance, the colorful costumes kept me charged from beginning to end, and that’s saying something because it’s a 3 hour production. However, thanks to this somnambulance affliction, I’ve discovered that I quite enjoy opera on DVDs as well, where you don’t have to watch the entire thing at once. Also, while nothing compares to the live experience, you can wait a long time to see the opera you want produced within driving distance. DVDs fill the gap, and may be an easier introduction for squirmy kids. I haven't seen either the Merry Widow or one of the available versions of The Student Prince on DVD (the old version is available on Netflix), so let me know how they are if you check 'em out.

NaNoWriMo: alas, No Mo’

2009-12-11T11:16:00.002-06:00

NaNoWriMo wound up on November 30th, so I think I’ve finally recovered enough to pontificate. Some have said it’s pretty hard to teach me anything, but I did learn a few things about writing and life from the experience.

Writing a novel is a humbling experience.
As is probably evident from the length of some of these blog posts, I’m no slouch at spewing words. I’d thought about my novel, researched it for months, even translated tons of material from French reference books. I’d outlined it, summarized it, plotted crises and down time. None of it was enough—I was done with my first draft at 40,000 and really had to struggle to make it to 50,000. Sure, it’s a teen historical novel (also known as YA), and they can be shorter, but probably not that short. Halfway into my story, which is set in a girls’ school during the time of Louis XIV, I felt like all my characters did was eat meals and walk around the corridors. My respect for another author, who sets her story in a similarly closed environment, went up a thousand per cent. Hats off, J.K. Rowling.

Forget the research until you’ve written the first draft
I know this is heresy for historical fiction. Okay, maybe you can read a Time Life book or some background piece so you don’t make glaring mistakes. Even though I have a file drawer and several shelves worth of books on Louis XIV, everyday life in the period, carriages, maps, etc., I couldn’t remember any of it while writing at the speed required by NaNoWriMo. Far from combing through files, I didn’t even have time to look at the binder I put together of essential details. Know what? Didn’t matter. I just stuck in brackets and moved on with the story. Now I can see exactly what details I need to round out the story, rather than trying to cram in all the interesting facts just because I spent so much time accumulating them. Plus, I could have saved myself months of work.

I think historical novelists need to distinguish what is fun to know from what is essential to the story. Unless you have a publisher that is willing to print a brick, your attention is better focused on the plot and characters rather than your file cards.

Forget the outline
I had an extensive outline which was little help in gauging how much needed to be written to get my characters from plot point to plot point. Also, it encouraged me to feel that I had to begin at the beginning and work through to the end. Not much room for innovation there.

Maybe if I wasn’t working on the thirty day deadline, an outline would have worked better. But if I ever do NaNoWriMo again, I’m just going to have 30 sections that I can write 1,667 words on, probably also called “chapters”. The whole point of this speed writing exercise is that you finally get something down. It doesn’t have to be good, and believe me, mine isn’t. But you have something to work with. Either an outline or a 30-points list works for that, but the 30 points would have had me writing faster, and better spread out over the time period.

If something’s too hard, make it harder
For most of my life I’ve been the type who can only write during the day (preferably morning) with significant quiet. During NaNo, I wrote while in coffee shops with kids screaming next to me, wrote while the Nikipedia clacked along on her keyboard, wrote at 12:30 at night and woke up with my hands still on the keyboard. You can type in unexpected places like the bathroom, as long as you’re sitting down (eeuw, gross).

Also, making it harder really cures writer’s block and perfectionism. I wrote 6,000 words the Saturday before the deadline. There wasn’t any time to think or worry. As my friend Pat Bracewell (another historical novelist) advised me, “Bang it out, baby”—four sage words of advice.

On the other hand, you can’t keep up that kind of pressure
One of the reasons it works is because it’s time-limited. You can’t go forever without cleaning the bathroom, or ever reading a book, or eating Spam and lettuce for dinner. A month a year, yes, but it isn’t a lifestyle.

Even though I can dither for a long time about a single sentence, not thinking at all just isn’t fun. It’s a fine first draft method to crank, but a little slower and I’d have enjoyed the writing. Actually, 1,700 words would be doable, but what with Thanksgiving, house guests, etc. I missed several days. Which brings me to the next principle…

Front load it
I knew there would be days when I couldn’t write, but I didn’t realize how fast they’d pile up. Hey, it’s been a year or two or 30 since I’ve been in grad school. If I do NaNo again, I’m going to lock myself in my room for the first weekend at least. They tell you this, but until you’ve lived it, you won’t realize the number of ways things interfere.

Don’t be intimidated by what other people seem to be doing
One of the virtues is the buddy system, where you can see how much your friends are writing every day. One of my buddies wrote about half her novel the first weekend. She never wrote another word. She’s not a close friend, and I haven’t had the heart to ask her what happened. Other people made extraordinary leaps at times when I was grinding along. But out of the 8 people I watched, only 3 finished (one being the Nikipedia). So, don’t assume everyone else is having an easier time with anything than you are. And maybe don’t front load so much you never want to see the thing again.

You will be very proud of yourself if you accomplish something hard
The Nikipedia has been so excited she’s been carrying her printed copy everywhere. It’s hard to resist the urge to buttonhole total strangers in coffee shops and bookstores and tell them all about it. I was sure I could write a novel, but not sure I could produce a first draft of 50,000 words in a month. Now I know. I have the winners’ certificate right in front of me.

Nobody wants to hear about your great idea
I learned this at the final party when one woman talked me cross eyed. Even I didn’t want to hear the whole thing, which she seemed determined to punish me with, line by line. You need an elevator speech for any great idea, and those were quite interesting to hear. But the idea isn’t the product, the manuscript (or invention, or report, or new business) is, and unless that is produced in finished form, the draft is pretty useless to anyone but the creator.

Nothing is as famous as you think

NaNo has over 120,000 participants a year. Except for few friends and some other writers, no one I mentioned it to had ever heard of it. Think about that the next time you make a gaffe or mistake and think "everyone will know". Also, no matter how much publicity you generate, there will still be plenty of people to reach.

Now…on to revisions.

What do you want for Christmas?

2009-12-01T21:06:00.003-06:00

If your answer is more time, world peace or true love, well, mine too. But I don’t think I can do a whole lot to get them, so I have a few other ideas for gifts that might do a tiny bit of good in this world. Since I’d almost prefer being run over by a Hummer (at least it’s quick) to having to brave the mall on a Saturday, I’ve come up with a different list. This is a tough Christmas for a lot of people, and an awful lot of businesses, too, and I’d like to see people who put out a creative and useful product stay afloat.

My first suggestion is, shop locally. No, I don’t mean your local Ann Taylor or Coldwater Creek (okay, please shop at Coldwater Creek—I have stock in them and it stinks lately), I mean creative, single store merchants that have a personal vision and are selling something unique—the individual clothing shop, the local antiques merchant, the floral or plant store. People that own and run these stores are doing it as much for love as money, and they’ll be willing to talk over your problem giftees and help you come up with something. Shop there before all individuality is eaten alive by mega-corporation homogenization.

Second idea is, how about donating to a charity that has a nifty premium for a gift? National Wildlife Federation has a lot of adorable plushies and great magazines for adults and kids. Ditto World Wildlife Fund, Sierra Club, Audubon, Defenders of Wildlife, etc. I admit I don’t get a real gift thrill out of just making a donation, but these organizations have figured out that it’s a lot more fun if you have something to wrap up, or a nifty magazine.

While we’re on the subject of magazines, most of them are struggling. You can find a magazine for nearly anyone on your list—New Moon is terrific for tweens, and Carus publications has a ton for different age brackets (literary, social sciences and science). For adults, too—go to your local (preferably independent) bookseller, look through the racks and racks, pick one out, mail one of the hundreds of blown-in subscription cards and wrap up the sample. Me, I love Somerset Studio, Belle Armoire, Threads, The Washington Monthly, Marie-Claire Idées, Poets & Writers, Piano, and an armload of others (hint, hint).

A more unusual variation of the magazine gift is the literary journal subscription. In my book these have some distinct advantages: they don’t publish as frequently, hence they don’t remind me of the kind of machine that keeps spitting tennis balls at you, and I don’t add to my six foot bedside stack; and they’re smaller and you can stuff them in a pocket or purse more easily. Ones that I really like or have liked in the past include Alimentum, Granta, Glimmer Train, The Believer, and The Sun. I’ll be reviewing these in more depth one of these days.

If you’re really broke and live near a major city, I have three ideas. Do a search of second hand stores and library used book sales. The stuff at second hand stores can be unbelievable—recent finds include an Irish fisherman handknit sweater for $5, a sequined top for $1 and a Kenneth Cole dress for $5. Call it “vintage” not used and add instant chic. The Nikipedia is the queen of finds, but it really just takes a little browsing, particularly if you can find one that specializes in upscale second hand. Library book sales are amazing—it just makes me heartsick to see books for which I’ve paid $29.95 (still unread) going for $1. A lot of libraries in our area have permanent for-sale shelves or even for-sale rooms. You can come up with a nice armload of mysteries or historicals or biographies, wrap it in a big box and give a huge present for $10, while helping the library. Cheaper than the fines some of us pay, ahem.

Those same libraries, or nearby universities, have concert series for no or very low cost. How about making up a schedule and buying tickets, or designing some fake ones and provide the transportation and companionship to go with them. Me, I’d be delighted to have a friend make a commitment to attend a free series with me—so often I don’t go if I don’t have someone to go with me. And wouldn’t it be fun to have a regular “date” with a friend to do such a fun thing? Or if you’re going to purchase tickets for someone, how about favoring small theater groups, new music or early music ensembles, or student performances? These people can really use support in building an audience, and you’ll be giving something a lot more original than a gift card to the local megaplex.

Finally, don’t buy jewelry as gifts until you check out your local crafts fair or bead store. To my intense aggravation when I’m a seller, people at craft fairs often price jewelry ridiculously low, and have said to me that they just want to get their materials costs back so they can make some more. Grrrgh, but it’s great if you’re the buyer. Also, if you have the slightest jewelry making skills, at a bead store you can put together a nice gemstone bead necklace (often with loaner tools on the premises and the help of the owner) for a fraction of the department store cost. One of the bead stores in my town used to display pictures from the Sundance catalog next to nearly identical beads that you could use to make your own for about 25% of the cost. Also, take a look at the stuff on Etsy.com. My New Year’s resolution is to put stuff in my own “store” there, but in the meantime, there’s plenty of nifty things to buy, all made by highly creative kitchen table entrepreneurs.

Now, do I get an award as Santa’s little helper?

It’s a living

2009-11-24T17:51:00.001-06:00

It ain’t easy making a living as any kind of artist. I wish I had a signed contract for every time I’ve heard a parent tell me, “Oh, my kid is so creative [fill in artist, actor, writer, dancer, whatever] but I’m telling him or her to major in [physics, accounting, chemistry, education—whatever the parent thinks is “practical”] because, of course, you can’t make a living at it.”

Well, the truth is, you can and this is dumb advice. Tons of people make a living every day at these professions, and there are plenty of out-of-work computer science majors. But, the employment path is fairly clear for computer science or chemistry: get the degree and get someone to hire you. The path for the arts is not: get the degree (or maybe not), get someone to hire you (or maybe not), sell your services, get a day gig (or maybe not)…but just because it’s not clear doesn’t make it un-doable. What does it require? Well, duh, it requires CREATIVITY.

If you want to eat and be any kind of artist, you need to think outside the box, not only with your art, but with your marketing, packaging, and bill paying. Maybe you will need to cobble together several jobs, sell several different versions of what you do, find a non-demanding dumb job (plenty of novelists have worked for the customs house, or the post office, or waiting tables) so you can still think and are raring to go when you get home.

But what these parents don’t tell their kids, what actually would be worthwhile advice, is that if you want to live by art, you'd better minor in business or plan to teach at some level. Acquiring the acumen to run a business, market, set up your website and social networking blitz—they’re all essential or no one is ever going to hear about your art.

Just like dating. It’s unlikely that anyone is ever going to arrive on a white horse. And if they do, it’s because you already have the door open and are looking out for the whinnying.

Two good books about making a living in one of the arts (writing):

NaNoWhat?

2009-11-12T14:08:00.002-06:00

On November first I transformed my writing life. No, I didn’t get the advance I think I deserve, no super agent has had the good sense to sign me yet, and I didn’t land that million dollar corporate communications contract. I signed up for NaNoWriMo.

For anyone (like me) who’s been living under a rock for the last several years, NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month, where you take leave of your senses and actually volunteer yourself to produce 50,000 novel words in 30 days. Yes, I already know it’s impossible, but that didn’t stop me. After all, the Nikipedia joyously plunged in and I’m not going to be outdone on my home turf by a 15 year old. Well, okay, she outdoes me on nearly everything, but I’m not just going to lie down and die, right?

We went to a kickoff party November 1, where the average age was a whole lot closer to hers than mine, but it was awesome to be with a lot of writers talking about writing. Of course, they weren’t actually doing it, which is similar to a lot of people that get together and TALK writing. However, I had smugly banged out 2500 words that first day, and believe me that entitled me to a drink.

You already know how this story is going, right? It’s been dang near impossible to make the daily quota, 1,667 words if you are to have any hope of actually finishing up in the allotted time. I’m talking headaches, evening meetings, assignments where someone actually called ME, missives from the divorce lawyer, and other unpleasant, time wasting events. This morning, when the cat decided to run away, I was certainly tempted to shake my fist at heaven.

Now, note I did not say you had to produce 50,000 good words, and believe me, I have not. But what has astounded me is how much I have produced. I’ve been yammering about this novel for at least 5 years, spent months doing research, translating material from the French, making what I thought was a detailed outline, but written nary a word in that whole time. Well, okay, I wrote a first chapter which I labored over for several months for a contest. It’s horrendous, and I tossed it and started over for NaNoWriMo. Just goes to show the stuff you agonize about ain’t necessarily any better.

So, what have I discovered so far? I don’t have to be in a good mood, or inspired, or know where I’m going with the chapter, or even awake. What I have written has mostly happened at 6 am, or 9:45 pm with the Nikipedia sitting next to me on the couch and both of us clacking away. The stuff is awful, but there’s no way to go back or you can’t possibly finish the word count. I’m 2 days behind and hope to catch up this weekend, but I’ve written over 15,000 (hopefully revisable) words. This is the most I have ever written on one subject in my life.

I’m determined to win this, although my writing buddies (on the NaNo site) must be related to Road Runner as some of them have far EXCEEDED the needed daily count. I wonder if they would like my pets for a month? Next year (or next novel) I’m not going to bother with research, or outlining, until I write the first 50,000 words. I haven’t had time to go look up the details I recorded, name all the characters authentically, consult the timelines, nada. But I am going to have 30 distinct “talking points” so I’ll be able to figure out what the heck to write about. It ain’t easy getting my characters from chapter to chapter.

Now, if I could just add the 600 and some words from this post to my NaNoWriMo total...

Modern Romance

2009-11-05T10:11:00.002-06:00

Sunday’s New York Times Magazine has an interesting article on “The First Marriage”. No, that’s not Adam and Eve; they’re talking about the Obamas. It was a delightful thing to read in bed on Sunday morning, almost as good as a juicy romance novel. I mean, wouldn’t we all like to be tall, thin, rich (well moderately, anyway), have a great career and a spouse that adores us?

Oh, I meant Barack. No, seriously, I think the Obamas are a great example of middle aged love, one to be admired and emulated insofar as possible, just like I hold up Barack’s life story to my daughter as an example of someone who can take bad life events and make something beyond the ordinary out of them. But the story in the Times is really about effort, not romance. Here are two people with ferocious intelligence, significant ambition, and apparently tons of energy. That combination can equal fireworks or synergy, and it clearly works because of real effort to understand, make compromises and trades, and take the best available to them (as opposed to seeking perfection.)

Unlike the bombastic buffoon we were beset with for the previous 8 years, one of Barack’s salient traits seems to be the ability to shut up and listen. How incredible to have a President who actually thinks he has something to learn from other people, maybe even his wife! As is obvious from the interview, Barack is still struggling to understand Michelle’s needs, and she struggles to mesh her personality with the needs of his role.

It ain’t easy being a mom and having a brain. Michelle’s career has certainly suffered for her support of Barack. It strikes me as so sad that, although feminism has certainly opened doors for women never possible before the ‘70s, it ended up costing women a lot as policies were implemented. Traditional work place protections were swept away, women who had spent many years raising children suddenly found themselves eligible in a divorce for only “rehabilitative” maintenance (as if motherhood made them handicapped…well, come to think of it…) or (very temporary) alimony, and now we are expected not only to have a career, be a spouse and bear children, but also do all the housekeeping and nurturing that used to be considered already a full time job. When my mother was a single working woman in her 20’s, she lived in an apartment building that was designed for working women and had maid service, because someone working a full time job couldn’t be expected to clean a (small) apartment! Dream on…

The other societal support that feminism did not achieve was the establishment of quality, easily available child care. Any woman that wants to pursue a career usually has a part time job arranging for the safety and well being of her children. Here’s where Barack and Michelle really won lotto. Michelle’s mother, Marilyn Robinson, is the unsung hero of their marriage.

Think about it—if you had a devoted, non-working grandmother who adored your kids, probably didn’t need to get paid, and was still spry enough to chase after them and young enough to drive without running over people on the sidewalk, wouldn’t you feel a great sigh of relief? Okay, if you have that, I’m green with envy. My mom was 80 years old when I had the Nikipedia, and she babysat a total of 4 times during Nikipedia’s childhood.

So now we know the secrets of the Obama marriage. Well, it wasn’t exactly a big secret—they love each other and work at it. It may not be perfect, but, gee, I’d take it. Now, what’s the other secret about the Obamas that I’d really like to know? What exercises does Michelle do for those arms?

Not born yesterday

2009-10-27T09:59:00.002-05:00

Commercials seldom sell me anything. We don’t watch TV much anymore, preferring to control the images and pursue our obsessions by Netflix. After watching all seven years of Star Trek Voyager and half the French movies of the last decade, it seemed time to check out broadcast TV for an evening or two. What we ended up watching was, sigh, more Star Trek (Next Gen, this time) on something called MeTV. That’s when I fell in love.

No, not with Data. With the commercials. Specifically, with all the commercials for E.D. prescription products. (If you don’t know what that is, think Bob Dole.) The guys in these commercials look great—slim, intelligent, relaxed, successful and, well, juicy. Like, maybe you wouldn’t even care if they had a problem or two, no? But it’s not the guys I’m so in love with.

It’s the image of the women “in their lives” that blows me away. These women look like no other media image I’ve seen. There’s always plenty of fairly good looking if weather worn guys in the movies, but they usually have arm candy young enough to be their granddaughters. (Don’t these over the hill actors ever feel just a teensy bit silly and embarrassed?) But where have you seen a decent looking, tastefully dressed older guy lusting after (gasp!) a woman about his age? Oh, thank you, thank you advertising agency!

What I especially like about these women is that the air brushing isn’t obvious—they have lines around their eyes (albeit nice straight ones, not crinkly puffs), they don’t appear to be wearing Miracle Bras, and they’re relaxing in tasteful settings with guys who look happy. Sure, there’s no teenage kids begging for the car keys or slamming doors, we don’t see what the women look like first thing in the morning, and they’re not standing at the refrigerator gulping a pint of ice cream. They’re not annoyingly slim, but they certainly aren’t plump.

It’s fantasy land, but it’s a tiny blow for women who aren’t on their first round. Oh my gosh, it might be possible to be desirable after, say, 25 years old.

And if it’s all too much, you can always wait for the ads telling you how to get Medicare to pay for your electric “scooter”…

Maybe it's NOT the schools

2009-10-16T11:06:00.002-05:00

The recent talk given by Dr. Edward Gordon at the Independent Writers of Chicago (IWOC) meeting made my brain hurt. The talk was supposed to be about how independent writers can thrive in the global marketplace. I had hoped Dr. Gordon was going to talk about how to get out of cold, grey, drizzly Chicago and catch the transporter beam to Paris or Amsterdam (which are equally cold and grey this time of year but who cares?)

Unfortunately for me, Dr. Gordon’s talk was not exactly nuts and bolts. He focused on what workers need to compete in the coming world order as he sees it. His central point was that there is more demand for certain kinds of skills than people to fill them. No duh there. But then he started sawing away on the same old, “Schools need to educate our kids better. We need more math and science. We need to teach writing skills.” Doesn’t anyone ever question this? Even my beloved Barack Obama has been known to blather about these tired chestnuts.

I never got to argue with Dr. Gordon as he was beset by other writers handing him their business cards and giving their elevator speeches (which I usually do and I’m only mad that so many beat me to it this time. ) As with so many examples of entrenched wisdom, maybe the reason we can’t solve this issue is that we’re starting from the wrong premise. What if, in fact, the schools ARE doing a (fairly) good job and the problem is entirely elsewhere?

I live in Evanston, where the schools are supposed to be good to excellent, the median income is nearly $70,000, and the poorest segments of the community are not living anywhere near the level that they are in, say, Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood, where the median income is more like $19,000. No matter which school your kids attend, they’re sitting side by side with kids of other races and income levels. Let’s put it another way, though—no matter the race or income level, from first grade on, kids are sitting in the same classes, with the same (multi-racial) teachers, using the same materials, for the same amount of time a day. However, from the early grades through high school, testing shows a gigantic gap between the achievement of African-American and Hispanic students, and Caucasian students. The most recent data, for example, on Evanston Township High School seniors’ ACT scores shows Black students (their term) attaining an average score of 19.2, Hispanic students averaging 19, and white kids getting 27.2. Folks, this is a GIGANTIC difference. These kids had the SAME schooling.

Even more interesting is to look at the pre-high school statistics. From third grade on (the first time the kids are tested) on through 8th grade, African-American students lag the performance of white students by 20 points or so, and for the most part the gap gets worse the longer they’re in school. (I’m omitting Hispanic kids here, because I have no way of gauging the impact being a non-native speaker might have. Cop out, I know.) Now, in third grade you can hardly blame the schools—they haven’t had the kids long enough to “fail” that dramatically. Is it biological inferiority of one race over another? Oh come on, only Southern Republicans and Fox News fans are dumb enough to believe that garbage anymore.

So what is it? If you give kids functionally identical education and they score wildly differently, maybe it isn’t the schools. I think Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers, has a clue. In it, he talks about the difference between music students who go on to study and become performers (his elite) versus those who either do not go on, or go on to music education programs. The difference is, he says, the amount of time each practices. The magic number, according to Gladwell, is 10,000 hours. 10,000 hours spent doing anything is a gigantic amount of time, but some kids achieve it early on (practicing 6 or 7 hours a day from early childhood) and some never make it. Figure it out—a kid practicing an hour a day, five days a week, 50 weeks a year is only going to put in 250 hours a year, and is going to need 40 years to reach that 10,000 hours mark. A kid practicing 4 hours a day will need only 10 years. Butt-in-seat time makes a huge difference.

My proposition is that it’s the exposure that kids gain outside of class that makes all the difference. Put another way, it’s the haul-your-kid-around factor. Evanston is filled with anxious white parents with eyes on the prize—an Ivy League education for the little darlings, or as close as they can get. From kindermusik on, (white) Evanston parents begin hauling the kids to library story hour, crafts day at museums, soccer, Northwestern kiddie concerts, music lessons, ballet lessons, theater performances and workshops, you name it. Schools eliminated music and art? The parents find it, whether at the lower cost park district or the private music and art programs. Let’s not even get started on all the play groups, support groups, and better parenting seminars. And show me the parent who hasn’t got the kid’s summer all laid out—camp, enrichment, language or creative writing intensive. You can go all summer before you see white kids riding their bike in the street (unless they have an instrument slung over their back on the way to music lessons.)

As a battle scarred veteran of the hauling routine (those moms have sharp elbows) I can attest to the overwhelming color of the participants: white. I don’t know why black kids don’t show up at free storybook programs, or library science night, or why music scholarships go begging. But they don’t show up, at least here. Every once in a while there’s an exception (I bet the Obamas are fine “haulers”), but for the most part, the crowd of kids at any cultural activity is 98% white, even though Evanston itself is nearly 30% African-American. It doesn’t take a sociologist to figure out that white kids in my neck of the woods are getting exposed to, and have the opportunity to learn far more than kids who don’t constantly participate in these enrichment activities.

Wealthy parents know it. Pick out any high priced private school and you’ll see floods of art, music and literature classes, and enough afterschool and before school activities to fill just about all the waking hours of the kids, and the parents or au pairs that drive them. Pick any Saturday at the Evanston Arts Center or Piven Theater workshop and you’ll get run over by all the parents driving Hummers and Mercedes SUVs.

Maybe what we need (with apologies to Dr. Gordon) is to stop wringing our hands over providing “the basics” in schools. Maybe all the enrichment that some kids get really makes the difference—gives them a broader context and a head start on absorbing what schools actually can accomplish. Maybe all the stuff we’ve eliminated from schools (art, music, Great Books clubs) is what really makes the difference. I don’t know how to get all kids participating in enrichment. At least here in Evanston, it’s been “built” but they haven’t come. And there might be a topic for some worthwhile research.

Writing Mentor

2009-10-12T17:49:00.001-05:00

I’m always on the lookout for mentors. I’ve had the privilege of a few good ones over the years: professors, an editor, a therapist or two. But as I get older, it’s increasingly difficult and depressing—I see from my alumni magazine many of my old professors are passing on, ones I wish I could have one more talk with. Perhaps I’ve arrived at an age in life where I shouldn’t need a mentor, but such is not the case.

Being a devotee of the printed word, my natural ecosystem involves books, and increasingly I find that they can serve well as mentors. I read a lot of books by writers on writing, but I find most of them are aimed at beginners and the never published. Like knitting books and jewelry craft books, the first third or half seems to be devoted to the same basic instructions, instructions I could have written myself long ago. No time anymore to wade through all that, especially given what books cost. So it was with great delight that I came across Word Work, by Bruce Holland Rogers. No idea where I heard of it.

Rogers considers so many facets of a writer’s concerns and issues that his book ought to be shaped like a dodecahedron. Each of the 35 chapters is short (3-4 pages) and many were apparently written as magazine columns. Don’t let the length fool you—these are nuggets that profitably can be read 3 or 4 times. I got it out of the library, but it’s a compelling buy—you just can’t absorb it all in one reading.

Rogers considers topics such as how to get started, how to fight for your identity, how and whether to form relationships with other writers, fighting negative feelings, and all the usual topics, but always with something fresh to say, or something which recasts the traditional wisdom, or something that draws from other fields in the service of the writer. Rogers must read a lot, and omnivorously, because he draws in wisdom from Kierkegaard to Maslow to S.I. Hayakawa, with a lot of stops in between. I found nearly every chapter worthwhile, so I’ll just pick out a few examples.

I’ve heard people prattling on about affirmations for years, but they always felt silly and self-deluding to me. Rogers explains how to write ones that won’t make you throw up, and why they work (hint: it ain’t magic). His discussion of time management showed me why I can stop feeling guilty about not writing much when the Nikipedia was younger—he says that you can only fulfill so many segments, and , “If your multiple callings require conflicting sacrifices, you probably won’t be able to balance them perfectly…” How many heroic roles can you take on? Parent, lover, friend, writer, and a full time job? Something’s got to go. I found this oddly comforting. In order to write, you will have to find ways to defend and protect your identity, and this book gives many techniques that show how. In fact, in most of the book musicians, artists, etc. could profitably substitute their own art every time Rogers says “writer” and probably find the techniques just as relevant. It’s all just very wise, fresh and, well, creative.

I tried to find more info on Rogers, but the web results were pretty thin. Apparently he’s living and working in Europe, having landed a Fulbright for 2010. I hope he comes back soon. I want to move in with him. Darn, he’s already married.

Good books about Great Books

2009-09-28T14:19:00.002-05:00

Whenever non-homeschoolers find out that I’ve homeschooled the Nikipedia for the past 8 years, I immediately get one or both of the following questions: What about socialization? and, How did you know what to teach? The first question is usually asked by someone who has just spent a lot of time complaining about peer influence on their kids, disinterested, crazy or cruel teachers, etc., so I’m usually able to answer, “Yes, I’m so glad she’s avoided most of that.” The second question always leaves me square mouthed.

Why? Because it’s invariably asked by a college educated adult, often one with many years of post- graduate study. Holy baccalaureate, Batman, if you’ve spent more than 16 years in the halls of academe, you should have some idea what you found valuable to study, some grip on the basics of at least an elementary school education, and some ability to organize information into a logical order. Add to that the amount of sample syllabi online, the plethora of educational materials catalogs that are often as thick as phonebooks (particularly if they’re peddling to homeschoolers), and I don’t think it should take a parent all that long to come up with some direction. How on earth do the same parents judge whether they are happy with the education their children are receiving in regular schools?

My guess is that most parents don’t think so much about what content their child is learning so much as whether said offspring is “doing well” according to the school’s standards. Maybe if the child starts zooming through math or gets in trouble for inserting a more interesting, higher level book inside the duller, dumber book the class is reading, the parent will get an inkling that the child needs more challenging material. By the time college application season rolls around, some parents will start to seek lists of 100 books Every High Schooler should have read.

There’s a minor industry, however, in books about books, telling us what we should have read in high school, college, and most of our adult life, instead of being the slackers that many of us were. Because the Nikipedia was bored with kid’s books by about sixth grade (except for science fiction and an 8 foot shelf of Star Trek novels she bought at a used book sale), I’ve acquired quite a collection of these books on great books. In case anyone else has many spare hours that they can’t think what to do with, or actually might consider homeschooling, I offer this review. Beats Cliff’s notes.

The granddaddy of the genre has to be Clifton Fadiman’s The New Lifetime Reading Plan. Fadiman has been dead for 10 years, and the book was updated by John Major, especially to include non-Western literature. A lot of people have objected to the revisions, but I am so grateful to finally have solid suggestions for something not written in Europe. I find the summaries to be a bit short, however, and not all that opinionated or thought provoking. Still, it’s a good catalog to order from, so to speak. Definitely a book shelf basic.

Susan Wise Bauer has a collection aimed at adults who would like to self-educate, The Well-Educated Mind. Bauer wrote a homeschooling war horse that we have followed more or less closely for curriculum suggestions over our homeschooling career, The Well-Trained Mind. WTM is definitely aimed at parents trying to think through what to teach, but I suspect Well-Educated is for all those parents who took a look at WTM, gulped, and decided their own education was woeful. Bauer treats great lit by genre (WTM works through it chronologically by subject, which I prefer, actually) and is heavy on the ancients, although she does include some modern literature as well. I’ve enjoyed owning both of these, but I’d browse them at the library to see if you need all the background instruction in how to read each genre. Otherwise, you may just want to note her suggestions.

Book Smart is billed as “Your essential reading list for becoming a literary genius in 365 days”. I like this one, but I suspect it’s because I’ve read a lot of the books she suggests and so I feel smart and smug. Jane Mallison has organized her lists by month, and given each month a theme. She has some good advice on how to work your way through the list and which ones to choose (way more than I could possibly get through in one 365 day period and I read pretty quickly). All of the selections are fiction, and most are Western. However, the non-Western works are terrific, and she includes two of my favorite lesser known authors, Sigrid Undset and Naguib Mahfouz (both Nobel prize winners). Nice book for ideas, but not, and not intended to be, a comprehensive compendium.

A great one for browsing in the little room is Steven Gilbar’s Good Books, which really is a compendium of books that you should have read, have read, never heard of but want to read now, etc. Good Books has plenty of info for non-fiction selections, and is organized by topics (e.g., the World, Society, Work, Nature, etc.). I stuck so many post-its in this one that it looks like a porcupine, and you never want to have this in the same room as you have access to Amazon. Each description is only a few sentences, but it was enough to do me in.

I’m not a huge fan of Michael Clay Thompson’s homeschooling books, but I really enjoyed Thinkers. This consists of essays on why you should want to read the 20 books discussed: literature, history, and science, for the most part, with satisfying discussions of each book. You’ll feel compelled to read them all, and wish for a sabbatical to do so. BTW, I'm not including a link for this one, as Amazon only has a listing for it at $100. Geez, it's a small paperback. Try to get it from the library.

David Denby makes me crazy with Great Books. It recounts his effort to go back to Columbia, attend their core curriculum classes, and re-read all the books he had first read when he attended college there 30 years earlier. As I’ve said before, education is so wasted on the young, but this guy made a book of taking that literally. I got through about 96 pages until I realized I have to read or re-read along with him, and boy that’s a big project. If you want to embark on a similar project, or just look up what he has to say on the books he covers, I can’t imagine a more entertaining companion. Definitely a personal vision.

Invitation to the Classics is beloved of homeschoolers, although more so with those of the conservative Christian stripe. I’ve found it to have very useful summaries and backgrounds on the authors and their time periods, but I think the authors have sometimes selected lesser works by great authors. It includes college-type discussion/essay questions, but they nearly all ask you to think of these works as a Christian, or what would Christians do. I suppose how you define Christian will have something to do with your answers. I’m still wondering what a “Christian world view” is, and I don’t think Jesus joined the Republican party, but what do I know? Not a bad reference work to inflict on your high school age child, with some lively discussions possible.

If you can dig it up used, Gail Thain Parker’s book College on Your Own is a great edition to refer to. Parker kicked up quite a bit of controversy while she was (briefly) the 30-something president of Bennington, but this is a very serious look at the basics (and then some!) of various fields of college study. It’s dated (1978) and contains a lot of really dull books, but it’s great for a glimpse at what you might read if you had majored in the subject (or have a child who’s thinking about the major). That said, I majored in Sociology at just about this time, got a stellar Graduate Record score, and read maybe 25% of the books suggested. But I do feel guilty. You can, too.

Beowulf on the Beach (Jack Murninghan) is one I just picked up last week. It’s highly opinionated and personal. So far I’m not totally in sync with what he likes and dislikes, but he is funny. It’s pretty clear that he’s a lot younger than most of the people who do these greatest hits books, and it’s nice to see that sort of take on some of these hoary chestnuts. No non-Western stuff (he says it’s beyond him to compile). I really appreciate that he’s willing to wade through some looong works that I’ve always meant to get to (Canterbury Tales, Decameron, etc.) and picked out the “good parts”. I think the Nikipedia will also appreciate some abridgement in her assignments.

A sub-genre of books-about-books is writers-about-books. In this category, I’ve enjoyed the following for browsing (haven’t read them thoroughly).

The Top Ten, edited by J. Peder Zane, allows you to look up what an awful lot of contemporary writers like. There was apparently great agreement on some books, but many writers mention some very offbeat but interesting selections, and quite a few contribute memoirs and appreciations. Nice book for a Sunday afternoon.

Francine Prose (no slouch herself at the book production biz and is that a perfect name?) tells you how in Reading Like A Writer. While this is a very different format than the other books I’ve mentioned (the chapters focus on how to improve your writing, with examples from great books), she does provide a neat list of “books to be read immediately” at the end. You’ll have to read the rest of the book to find out why. This would be a great companion to a reading program (or high school class) introducing reading from a more skills oriented perspective; call it creative writing through literature.

Finally, A Passion for Books is one I’ve enjoyed for its often thought provoking essays by prominent literati about books, experiences, and just general book amour. It’s another one for the little room or in bed for nights when you really should already be asleep, as most of the essays are just a few pages long.

Okay, if you’ve read this far, I get to gripe a little. What about modern works, and I don’t mean Hemingway and Faulkner? Can’t someone stick their neck out a little and pick something less than 50 years old? Gosh, maybe I’ll write one myself. And another thing, what about creative non-fiction? Tracy Kidder, John McPhee, Peter Matthiessen, M.F.K. Fisher…?

But, as they say, that’s a story for another time.

University of Chicago tour

2009-09-26T19:20:00.003-05:00

This week we bagged school for a day and trekked down to the University of Chicago for an unofficial college tour. Sure, it’s early for the Nikipedia, but hey, with three years to go before grinding out the college essay, there’s plenty of lead time to get the anxiety level to the appropriate fever pitch. Although we live in the area, the connection was actually made through a friend in West Virginia (long way ‘round!) We met a third year student, who I’ll call V.S. (for very superior, like cognac) since I don’t have her permission to identify her.

It appears that things haven’t changed much since the days I was there, in grad school. According to V.S., there are actually clubs to join and some kids who (try to) play sports, but pretty much it still appeals to the same kind of nerd that loved it 30+ years ago. I mean, broomball is one of the main sports on campus. As Robert Hutchins once proclaimed, “Whenever I feel the need to exercise, I lie down until it goes away.” You don’t get into the U of C (or enjoy it there) if you were homecoming queen, or because mommy went there (although I’m hoping it helps), or because you had an armload of volunteer experiences. You find yourself there because you’re SMART, and because you want to be with 4,000 other undergrads who won the eccentricity award at their own high schools. I mean, the school has the unofficial motto, “where fun goes to die”.

As luck would have it, we ended up there the same day as freshman orientation, with tons of geeky looking parents wandering around with apples who didn’t fall far from the tree. Nikipedia was rubber-necking like crazy. Not one to be attracted to football players, these were her kind of (guy) people. I was particularly bemused by the name tags on the parents—“I’m the proud parent of a University of Chicago student”. I’m glad that wasn’t me because I would have felt obligated to take a sharpie and alter that “proud” to “exhausted” or “soon to be broke” or maybe “free-at-last”.

I pretty much knew my way around campus, and Nikipedia was anxious to dump me anyway, so I hiked over to the Seminary Coop bookstore, where I bought the traditional shopping bag full of books you’ll never hear of at Barnes and Noble, and which I won’t get to for another 4 or 5 years. Meanwhile, Nikipedia and V.S. must have travelled in a hovercraft, because when I next located them about an hour later, they were in International House, having already covered Rockefeller Chapel, the Music building, Fullerton Hall, and another dorm or two. We met for lunch at the Medici, where Nikipedia had written her initials on a wall when she was 3 (don’t worry, it’s traditional.) I’m going to try to work that into her future admissions application.

Being the old bag that I somehow have become, I often lament the state of young people today. Except for Nikipedia, who keeps talking even in her sleep, I often find young people to be, well, rather dull and inarticulate, and sport that deer-caught-in-the–headlights look. Not at the U of C, and certainly not V.S. She was poised, articulate, and able to talk clearly about her impressions, the development of her ideas and change of focus over time, and how her education was exposing her to far more ideas and possibilities. Really, she should be the poster child for the value of a liberal education. When we made contact, she told me she was an anthropology major with an interest in Hindu epics. Now, that kind of passion makes parents shudder. I mean, we’re forking over $200K and facing the fact that the kid with that major will be living in the basement until they’re 45, right? Not so fast. Turns out V.S. worked for an international non-profit this last summer, and got interested in non-profit management and international development. She’s now headed for a semester in India, with the background to know what she’s seeing, and an interest in a field where that background will be unique and valuable. My guess is that while all those people who majored in something practical like physics or accounting are grinding it out in their cubicles, V.S. will be traveling the world, doing something that actually is meaningful and productive.

Hutchins once railed against the impetus to make college a trade school, and the U of C is still a bastion of a core Great Books-style curriculum, although it has been modified over the years. People complain it’s been dumbed down, but compared to what? Not much of this double-major stuff, where you major in one thing you love, with the recognition that you’ll never work in it, and another thing so you can sell your soul in the marketplace. Those kind of students always tell me how grateful they are not to be stuck with “requirements”. But if you belong at the U of C, those arts and humanities classes are why you picked U of C, a school where English is still one of the most popular majors. Or put another way, as one Northwestern student tour guide once told me, Northwestern trains CEOs, Chicago trains professors. She did not seem embarrassed by this.

V.S. emphasized to both of us that classes were really HARD. Given the fact that plenty of these kids have 99th percentile SATs and a string of AP classes (for which they get little credit towards a U of C degree), this puts the school in perspective. On the other hand, V.S. glowed about her professors, and said she had never seen so much depth and detail in her readings before being re-sculpted by the core curriculum. One of my standards of a school is to listen to the conversations around me in the student union, the campus hangouts, etc. At Northwestern, I hear a lot of analysis of parties and the weekend’s date (or shortcomings). At the U of C, you hear snippets of “I have never experienced such transcendence as when I read…” or “I finally got the breakthrough I needed to explicate…” I kid you not. Yes, they’re 19 years old.

At Northwestern, they know designer brands, and the coeds are beautiful. At the U of C they’re still wearing the same stuff they beat up in high school, no one bothers about hair “product” as far as I can see, and significant butt-in-seat time is spent at the library. That’s not to say there’s not plenty of drinking, both when I was there and now. It’s the only time I’ve ever attended parties where you could be having a very significant discussion with someone who suddenly keeled over like a felled tree. It’s one of the few places where the campus drinking hole (Jimmy’s) has an encyclopedia over the bar to settle arguments. V.S. didn’t seem all that into the booze scene (her parents can probably sigh with relief) but didn’t seem to lack for fun. After all, she pointed out, it’s a little college surrounded by a big graduate operation, and you get to know everyone, while being able to take advantage of great facilities and connections. While the school is an ivy covered enclave, downtown Chicago, with its great museums, arts scene, opera and symphony is a public transit ride away.

One thing has changed—safety. When I was there, muggings were not uncommon and you never went anywhere at night without a group. The University really stepped up security in later years, and Hyde Park became much safer. However, about a year ago there was a terrible murder, and the consensus of the community was that security had become complacent. That consciousness has really been raised, and V.S. says she feels comfortable and safe, although it ain’t Kansas, and one needs to exercise the caution that would be reasonable in any major city in the U.S.

All in all, it’s still a great place, but certainly not for everyone. It might be the back up school for a lot of Easterners who really hope they get into Harvard, but for those for whom the University of Chicago is first choice, there just really isn’t any other place like it. Education is so wasted on the young. I want to go back.

Jewelry: art, craft, whatever

2009-09-18T10:57:00.004-05:00

I must be stuck on jewelry making this week, because I keep coming across ideas that reel me in. I’m so taken with the artistry that is put into craft these days that I often wonder why we even bother to make a distinction between craft and art. Well, sure, I can tell the difference between a crocheted toilet paper cover and the Mona Lisa, but I also see a lot of jewelry and artwear that easily belongs in a frame.

I like gems and precious metals as well as the next rapacious female, but I tend to like big and bold. (As an aside, can someone tell me why huge ladies seem to love teensy gold chains just long enough to let the charm dangle on top of their amazing shelves? Like mom used to say, a peanut on a watermelon.) Anyway, I’m not little and I like jewelry that can be seen across the room. It’s supposed to attract attention, right? So far no one has offered to give me rocks the size of Liz Taylor’s, and I wouldn’t have any place to wear them anyway, so I go for “unusual”.

I’ve just mentioned steampunk, and am really looking forward to Jean Campbell’s upcoming book on it, but in the meantime, I’ve been really intrigued by books showing how to make jewelry from hardware. There are plenty of instructions out there on using hardware, paper, or various recycled materials. Nicole Sherman's got a great one on mixing industrial with beads and precious metals, and there's another one (link below) that is more "purist" in just using hardware--and it comes with a spiral binding so you can actually follow the instructions rather than wrestling the book. After spending a lot of time being awestruck by these folks’ creativity (still am), it finally hit me that the key to selecting and using such materials is shape, not actual object. If you take traditional bead shapes (cylinders, spheres, cubes, tubes) and check out what objects from (anywhere) might be the approximate similar shape, you’re off to the races. And isn’t abstraction of form what all artists do?

Steampunk—what is it?

2009-09-14T11:55:00.001-05:00

Unless you have a fifteen year old hanging around your house, you may not have heard of steampunk yet. (I do, aka known as World’s Foremost Authority on Everything. However, she has recently informed me that she prefers the moniker Nikipedia, so WFA will be hereby retired from this blog. But I digress…) I felt that perhaps I had qualified as a true cool artsy, though adult, type when even some of the jewelry artists at the recent American Craft Exhibition had not heard of “steampunk”.

It’s interesting and weird, and you might keep your eye out for examples. Right now the term seems to refer mostly to jewelry and clothing designs. As near as I can fathom it (lots of pointing to items and being told, no that’s not steampunk), it’s a combination of Victorian filigree and lacy looking objects combined with industrial components like wire, gears, and clock parts. Almost as if you were punk styling but lived in the 19th century. There’s some good examples of jewelry on www.etsy.com (where apparently it is one of the most searched terms) and Wikipedia has an entry on it, also, detailing its roots in science fiction and fantasy.

I like the style a lot—it’s off kilter and abstract and not easily mass produced—just my kind of look (or at least I try…)

American Craft Exposition--the real bling

2009-09-07T19:38:00.002-05:00

For the last weekend in August, Evanston becomes the center of the crafts universe, when the American Craft Exposition runs at Northwestern University. If you have the slightest interest in artful objects for every day use—clothing, furniture, jewelry, ceramics, baskets, you get the idea—this is a not to be missed date, up there with tax day (and for that, you can get an extension.) Yeah, this is a late post, but if you weren’t there, it’s too late anyway. Mark your calendars and be there next August.

This year, my impression is that the crowds were a little thinner and there were fewer exhibitors, but it may just have been that I was there on closing day. There were the usual plethora of women d’une certaine âge, and thankfully I’m still a little younger than that âge. However, most of them were in black, and didn’t hesitate to try stuff on (which I do, knowing I’m not going to buy). After watching a few modeling sessions, though, I can confidently say a lot of stuff that doesn’t look so hot in the case looks AMAZING on, so it’s definitely worth trying and watching other people, and if you can’t be beautiful, be rich.

Art clothing has changed a lot over the years, and though you still see a lot of Asian themes and shapes, the formless kimono jackets have been supplanted by much more body conscious cuts, and coats of many colors were less in evidence. On the other hand, sheer layers seem to be in, with many designers showing chiffon and organza overblouses, jackets, and dresses. I’m not sure exactly what you wear under them, but it probably isn’t your basic Hanes t-shirt.

Why would anyone pay $1,000 for a stupid plastic purse with LV's all over it when they could have John Milligan's work for $300-500? I don't think I could use them, though. These purses are so beautiful they belong in a frame. Ditto Kathleen Dustin, whose polymer clay work I have long admired. There aren't many place where I need to carry an artichoke, but the purses she makes would be startling art objects on a coffee table or a curio cabinet.

In jewelry, it seemed to me that gold was a lot less in evidence. Aaron Macsai, whose work I have loved for many years, showed a lot of well done gold. I particularly liked the gold bead strands, with every bead different, and lots of gemstone beads mixed in. I used to like his incorporation of found objects, but I didn’t see so much of that in his current work. I know Aaron’s mother, an amazing quilter—in fact, the whole family is wearingly creative. When dear daughter was young, I called Gerry Macsai for advice on how to raise creative kids. Aaron well maintains the family tradition.

Some other booth had doorknocker cocktail rings for the impulse buyer at about $28,000. Someone was actually trying them on—when I think that some people might spend that kind of dough on impulse, I become even more of a socialist. If you’ve got that kind of money to flip, the government ought to take it away from you since you obviously don’t know how to spend it in any defensible way.

Is there a way to make gold look cheap and tawdry? Yup, after seeing the booths of Hongsock Lee and Pat Flynn. Both these artists use silver in amazingly restrained but stunning designs. Lee has an stunning feel for shape and line. Flynn creates breathtaking work combining precious metals with black iron—stuff that looks like it came from another planet. I wanted to send him whatever I own (not much) and have him melt it all down or reset it.

When the next book advance comes in (power of positive thinking!) some part of it will be sent to Christina Goodman. She paints the most incredible miniatures on jewelry objects, originals reminiscent of Camille Corot or Italian landscapes. I don’t necessarily want to wear the stuff, I just want to look at it, with my reading glasses on. In a frame. Too good for us mortals.

Once I got away from jewelry I couldn’t afford and clothes I could make (better, faster, cheaper), I was stopped dead in my tracks by the most amazing piece of craft I’ve ever seen. I wanted to remortgage my house, I wanted to sell my car, hey, I offered to trade my only-born child if only I could have the cabinet Anthony Beverly (apparently no website: woodenworks@msn.com) displayed at the show. It looked like Prairie style until you peered inside and saw the gilded dome. Like stepping through a Stargate or, no, worshipping at a shrine. It was a not so stunning-for-furniture $8,500. However, I tore myself away when I realized 1) I have no place in my house to put it and 2) nothing I own is worth displaying in such a space (oh, sure, I have $8,500 lying around just waiting for an impulse to strike). But when I finally bag it all and move to Paris with a 20 year old lover, I’m having that cabinet shipped to me. I’m thinking I’ll fill it with an assortment of antique Japanese tea ceremony cups, none of which I own at present.

While at the show I ran into Virgil Robinson, with whom I studied metal casting. Virgil makes some pretty amazing jewelry himself, but was just there, as he said, taking notes. I talked to three other artsy-craftsy people I know over the course of the last week, and in each case I asked, “Buy anything?” No, just taking notes. As was I. And drawing pictures. Now, none of us have ever exactly reproduced what we’ve seen, and the AmCraft is a potent source of inspiration. But my aim next year is to go with SOME money. The amazing artistry offered to us deserves our support. And if you have any interest at all in supporting, making, or educating yourself about what fine, non-production line work is really about, do not miss the Exposition next year. Forget the manufactured bling and go for the real thing.

New Music

2009-08-31T13:05:00.002-05:00

Unless you majored in music at the university level, “New Music” is probably not what’s loaded on your ipod under “classical”. I’m not even sure what to call it, and I don’t think even its fans do—new music, twelve-tone, atonal, experimental, fashion-forward, whatever. However, World’s Foremost Authority on Everything (aka, my daughter) spent her pacifier days being entertained (read, shut up) by a video of the Three Tenors, so traditional classical music is so, well, BTDT that we trot off to “New Music” a lot.

WFA was delighted, early on, by hearing John Adams conduct his Grand Pianola Music, Shaker Loops, and other works during his guest artist gig at Northwestern. We progressed on to attending a performance of his opera A Flowering Tree, which oddly enough I loved and she detested. It made her so aggravated she wanted to argue with him in person, but Mr. Adams escaped her clutches, luckily for him. However, my toleration for pure orchestral new music only goes on for so long, but unfortunately most orchestral performances go on for about twice that long.

Therefore, it was with some shaking in my crocs sandals that I agreed to form part of the cheering squad at the final concert of Camposition, a showcase for music composition students in the summer program of the Chicago Academy for the Arts. Dal Niente was playing the music composed by these students, and I was delighted to see a harpist, and even more delighted to see that that harpist was Ben Melsky, from whom WFA took a few lessons before he graduated from Northwestern. Well, I’m certainly not qualified to say that Ben is the best harpist of his generation (although others have), but I can certainly report he hasn’t been slacking off since graduating, as the guy has forearm muscles like steel bands.

It was a most interesting chamber music ensemble overall, with Mabel Kwan on piano, Paul Mulligan playing clarinet and Ryan Muncy on saxophone—a different set of instruments than the omnipresent violin, cello, etc. The piece I most enjoyed was Monica George’s One Day a Rabbit of My Own. It was the longest work, and employed a lot of innovative techniques (striking harp strings, for example) which actually enhanced the music. Monica put a lot of thought into the piece and how to use the available instruments in the composition. I know so, especially since she came over to borrow WFA’s harp composition handbooks several weeks earlier.

Student composer Brendan Mohr gets the prize for the most works generated, with 4 works on the program. I found most of them a bit difficult for me to click on, but his endings were particularly striking and exciting. WFA and I had a fine time arguing about Lauren Williams’ work Illusions and WFA was thrilled to get the sheet music for Jahan Nolley’s piece Wane.

Maybe it was because the entire concert only lasted an hour and I knew relief was in sight if needed. Maybe it was because the room and the audience was small, with black walls, but it seemed like a velvety experience to me: intimate, engaging, and an exciting showcase of personal vision. My only gripe is that, in an educational setting with a production of music most of us still need to learn to appreciate, there was no information whatsoever provided. Come on folks! How about some liner notes for us dunderheads who would like to know about your inspirations, what you were thinking, even why you chose your titles?! And Dal Niente! PR, guys! I don’t want to have to go chasing you down on the internet just to find out who you are! What if I were super rich and wanted to hire you? (Okay, I’m not, but I wish…)

Anyway, I’m not quite a convert, and I do think listening to music with no clear theme and a lot of mathematics is a bit of a stretch. But that Sunday, in that setting, with so much earnest talent, it was a privilege, a delight, and why I am so happy to live near a big city.

The Modern Wing of the Art Institute

2009-08-24T12:34:00.005-05:00

There’s been a lot of buzz lately gushing over Renzo Piano’s design of the new Modern Wing of Chicago’s Art Institute since it opened in May, but I’ve just now had the chance to hike down there and take it in. Now, be forewarned that I may be irrationally prejudiced in my comments—I was wearing what turned out to be the most uncomfortable shoes of my life, and it was a teensy bit hard to focus on the architecture when you are developing 5 blisters the size of lollipops. Oh well, they match the mosquito bites all over my ankles. So much sacrificed in the attempt to look arty and chic, vs. crocs and gone to seed!

Photographs of the outside of the building have produced some spectacular images of line and negative space, but from street level, gee, I dunno—looks like an industrial park building to me. Inside, I really really wanted to see the collection, much of which has been “in the basement” for years. We wandered in the door, asked for information, and were told to start at the third floor and work our way down. Getting to the third floor, that was the trick! Asked a security guard, took the elevator he pointed at, ended up on the third floor in the restaurant/drinks area. Can’t get there from here—back downstairs, long walk to another elevator, not the right one either. Another security guard, another elevator. I felt like Pac man in the maze, and needed to sit down even before, on the third try, we finally reached the galleries.

The galleries themselves strike me as being exceptionally well lighted, and glare and shadow free. Although there was quite a crowd, it was easy to move around the rooms, and there’s plenty of space between paintings to take a good look without having to listen to someone else’s ipod. However, I wish my companion’s name had been Ariadne, because I needed a large ball of string to find my way in and out of each gallery, and make any sort of efficient progression from room to room, out of one level and down to the next. Maybe we’re supposed to feel the delight of discovery and surprise, but I like some sort of sensible path, myself. I don’t want to be aware of the route, or need to pay close attention, when I am trying to focus on a display. So, as an interior space, while Piano’s design may work well for the art, it doesn’t work all that well for the humans who want to use it, and thus fails my own personal architecture test.

As to the art—it was great to see the Matisse Apples again, as my daughter and I had spent several delightful hours copying it several years ago. (Hint: nonchalantly swipe one of the folding stools and just sit down as if you belonged there. Confine your art materials to colored pencils and paper and no one will bother you.) Also, I really enjoyed seeing the Giorgio de Chirico Eventuality of Destiny. I asked about this painting over 17 years ago, was told it was in storage, and it’s been moldering there ever since, to the best of my knowledge. It’s a very interesting work with figures who look like Greek statues, dancing like the Graces, but far out of proportion to the room they’re in, with the ceiling closing in on them. I’m still thinking about that image. I’m not sure it’s entirely serious, although with that ponderous title De Chirico might not have actually been joking, either.

I particularly enjoyed seeing the collection of Joseph Cornell’s boxes. These works resemble the little personal shrines you see in Japan, and I think they do a very good job of focusing your attention down on the artist’s personal iconography and drawing you into an intimate visual experience. There are quite a few of them, and seeing them all together helps somewhat to explain each one. I’m anxious to go back and spend some time just focused on that selection. There’s also some nice Legers, albeit mostly smaller works. The place to see Leger is definitely the Pompidou Center in Paris, where it’s a breathtaking experience to see the Legers in the context of a building that looks so much like them.

After about two hours of wandering (45 minutes of it futilely), we ended up with dinner at the eponymous Renzo Piano restaurant. Delicious, but definitely in the cute food category. It does seem to be a trend that the more you pay for the meal, the less food you get. My companion’s face really fell when the “red plum upside down cake” arrived and it was the size of a spool of thread. All very delicious, but I wasn’t worried about the scale the next morning.

Anyway, it’s a fine collection and well worth a look see. But clutch your map, and, oh yeah, wear comfortable shoes.

Live music’s dirty secret

2009-08-17T11:15:00.002-05:00

It’s been unintentional, but it struck me recently that I’ve stopped going to the movies. I used to enjoy the dimming of the lights, the giant screen, the hushed concentration that the theater offered. When the hush disappeared, slowly so did I.

There are certain types of features where you’re prepared for having the back of your seat kicked constantly: mostly pictures made by Disney, Pixar or the Harry Potter series. After all, it’s a time honored tradition to dump your kids off at the Saturday matinee. When it’s an adult movie, at the ten o’clock show on Saturday night, I can’t bear the sound of wailing infants. In fact, some of us went on Saturday night to ESCAPE the sound of our wailing infant. My take on it is, if you can’t afford the $15 for a babysitter, you can’t afford the $20 for the tickets, either. And running a baby around at 10 o’clock at night, with a ton of other people, and the oh-so-clean state of most movie theaters—ugh!

Babies are only half the problem, though. The other half is people old enough to know better—senior citizens. Some seem to think they are still sitting in their living rooms, where they apparently talk throughout the programming, and ahem! some of us have become a trifle hard of hearing. Or maybe it’s just that they have to ENTIRELY DROWN OUT the sound of the movie. And when we run out of commentary, some of us just seem to have to find that little piece of wrapped candy (or four or five) that’s wwaaaaayyyy down at the bottom of our purses.

Thanks to a giant screen tv and Netflix, I can now watch a movie with someone who knows how to behave, and the snacks are cheaper chez nous, also. Surely, though, a classical music concert attracts a different audience, no?

Well, maybe an evil fairy waved her wand over the Yo Yo Ma/Chicago Symphony Concert at Ravinia on Saturday night, but the same brigade showed up. The lawn seats there were $20 (special and dare I say cynical increase over the usual $10 for less pop star performances?), so I know the couple on the next blanket had enough dough to cover the babysitter. They had a stroller the size of a Hummer, and decided to keep their infant quiet by rattling a large set of toy keys throughout the performance. Then there was the three year old who began her aria just at Yo Yo Ma’s longest cello solo cranked up. But the most enjoyable performance was the mother-daughter team, now dubbed the cackle hens. Want to know all about daughter’s roommates, shopping expeditions, friends’ love affairs, problems with finding good shoes? I can tell you. In fact, so can anyone sitting within 100 feet of them. MY daughter was reduced to tears of frustration trying to hear.

For many outdoor classical performances you can get away from these boors by moving your blanket. But Ravinia seems to have no limit to the amount of tickets they will sell. (We once were forced to sit on the sidewalk during a performance of the Gypsy Kings. I wonder what would have happened if someone had shouted “fire!”) In an attempt to squeeze the juice out of anyone dumb enough to attend, there is obviously no concern that there be any type of quality to the experience.

I had resolved never to attend again unless I bought seats in the Pavilion. That is, until I remembered the Lyric Opera’s matinee of Der Rosenkavalier that daughter and I attended a couple of years ago. We had good seats on the main floor, and my memory is that they cost around 70 bucks a pop. However, I have no idea of how the opera ended, as the entire last scene of the opera was utterly drowned out, and the sight lines totally obscured, by the amount of elderly patrons who decided to get up, leave early, clank their walkers up the aisles, discuss the exact time their trains left, and slap-slap-slap the exit doors, not necessarily in time to the music. Haven't these people learned any manners in their seventy or eighty years? Where do they have to be that is so much more important than where they are? Has attention span become so short that a stellar production requiring hundreds of hours of work and thousands and thousands of dollars, and for which they paid a tidy ticket price, cannot hold their interest?

I did complain several times to Lyric management. They don’t let people in once the music has started, and they make an announcement to turn off cell phones. I asked them to add a request that people who must leave early, do so at intermission. Although they said they would consider it, nothing has been done. They lost my yearly subscription. Although I’ve been a subscriber off and on for nearly 30 years, never again until something is done. We buy individual tickets only, far fewer, and only for evening performances.

Maybe nobody cares. Maybe the bean counters are satisfied with their gate. Maybe I’ll switch to music dvds.

Skyline from a different angle

2009-08-11T16:43:00.004-05:00

It’s generally a good event if you’re thinking of it two days later. Sunday I had the opportunity to go on a Chicago lakefront architectural cruise guided by Geoffrey Baer, who has hosted a number of PBS programs on Chicago architecture and history. As is always the case with this oh-so-architectural city, there was a lot to take in.

For many years (years ago) I sold real estate on Chicago’s near-downtown Gold Coast and Lincoln Park, and during my college years worked for temp agencies so there is hardly a pre-1977 office building or pre-1992 apartment or condo that I haven’t been in. In short, I thought I had seen ‘em all. But, in a metropolitan area we tend to see things either from street level or from the windows of another building. Seeing the downtown area from river level, while details were pointed out by a knowledgeable guide, really knocks your perceptions out of whack.

It’s hard for me to see architecture as pure art. To me, a building is mostly about usability and function, and harmony with its surroundings (with nods to Mies and Wright). I’ve been particularly impressed with the kind of analysis Christopher Alexander et al make in the book A Pattern Language, which ably documents how space can influence and shape behavior, use and comfort. Building as fine craft, yes, but as art, not so much.

Seeing downtown skyscrapers, infrastructure and transportation from river level somehow abstracted the beauty of the structures for me, and I was much more able to appreciate line, surface and inter-relationships. That was awesome enough. But then the magic happened. As we headed back in from the lake portion of the trip, a fog began rolling in, obscuring the lower half of most of the buildings hugging the beach. Suddenly, Chicago seemed some hi-rise Brigadoon or Fata Morgana. Truly, we were in the fairy realm.

Clear Glass

2009-08-08T20:22:00.002-05:00

I’m very fond of music DVDs. No, not the MTV kind, but the kind where a usually classical artist talks about his work, plays, and we get to follow him around. Sometimes the talent is so overwhelming, it’s hard to picture a Leif Ove Andsnes or Boris Berezovsky inhabiting the same recognizable universe as the rest of us.

While these videos somewhat cut them down to human size, in other ways they elevate these artists—even though they live in the same cities we do, the excellence of their art transforms them and shapes their world. Recently, we had the opportunity to see Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts. I wouldn’t say I was the biggest fan of Philip Glass’s music—I’ve found it hard to listen to, sometimes harsh, and repetitive. But after watching this, and hearing the snippets of pieces in the background throughout the DVD, I feel a serious need to get my hands on some of his works. It’s absolute torture not to hear any complete works while watching the program.

The people surrounding Glass also captured my heart, especially his latest wife. She clearly loves him, and early on is clearly so thrilled that this genius loves her. As time goes on, though, and they have children, she appears to become lonely and filled with longing for a deeper relationship with a man whose deepest relationship is with his music. I wanted to send her a copy of Middlemarch, but I didn’t think it would help her be any happier.

I once heard a Spanish proverb, “Take what you want. Take what you want and pay for it.” Everybody in this film has gone after what they want, and they have all paid, heavily. The music is stunning and complicated, but you will want to hear more of it after watching portrait. I got it from Netflix, but it’s also available on Amazon.

Fair’s fair—throw the bums out

2009-08-05T09:02:00.001-05:00

The recent University of Illinois admissions scandal has the Chicago Tribune in a tizzy, but most of the reports I’ve seen are missing the critical ethical point. The press seems to be riled by, gasp, the fact that patronage and privilege has entered into college admissions. Next we’ll see headlines about rich kids doing better in school than poor kids. Or that the sun rose in the east this morning.

Influence, money, and where daddy or mommy went to school have always had a profound influence on where junior gets in. But not at STATE universities. Those are the ones that are supposed to be fair—that striving, hard working kids who are smart, get good grades, and test scores above a certain level can rely on admission (barring getting arrested, having a known drug habit, or plagiarizing someone else’s novel—which, by the way, don’t seem to bar you from some Ivies.)

If you were smart enough to get into Harvard, but your family had 8 kids and you spent your summers working on the loading dock, the University of Illinois was always a place you could depend on for a solid education, one that you might be able to pay for. Sure, maybe the dorms have the hardest mattresses on earth, and many of your classes will be taken with 200 of your favorite freshmen, but the instruction’s fine, the libraries extensive, and sooner or later you’ll cut the herd experience down to size via all the campus groups available. When we toured the U of I, it bothered me more to see the extensive tutoring facilities for athletes and the attention paid to them than the quality of the student digs. Sports bring in money and alumni loyalty, I guess. Never been a big factor for me at the University of Chicago, and maybe I’m wrong, but studying at the Sorbonne probably doesn’t have a big athletic component, either.

The University of Illinois has always been the place for smart strivers, a place where you could be certain you could get in on your own merits, not because you knew someone. It was pretty easy to figure out the rules—right GPA, right test scores, you’re in. No sucking up to daddy’s law partner, no beating yourself into meaningless volunteer activities just to look good. No wondering what you said wrong in an admissions essay read by a snooty admissions officer five years older than you. You got in based on what you had achieved, not whom your family knew.

The trustees and politicians who put the fix in have destroyed something good and true, fair and dependable, something truly democratic. If I were a University of Illinois graduate, I’d be organizing lanterns and pitchforks rallies in front of their homes.

No rapture

2009-08-02T15:52:00.002-05:00

Okay, I know they’re two of the hippest authors around; Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, that is. I know so because my in-house authority on everything cool (aka teenage daughter) has assured me so. I even heard Neil Gaiman speak at the Printers Row Lit Festival in June, and liked him a lot. He was self effacing, dressed in black (the color of the entire contents of my closet, also), and reassuringly middle aged. He had some good jokes, too, although I’ve since seen the same ones at venues all over the internet. So, the guy recognizes a good thing (in fact, several good things) when he sees it. In the weeks after the Lit Fest, I saw him here, there and everywhere. Was I just being hyper-aware? No, he gets his name and face around as much as Obama on campaign—okay, maybe I’m just a tad jealous of his promotion machine.

With great trembling and anticipation, therefore, I picked up Good Omens, which my authority cites as a cult classic. No, actually, my daughter insisted I would be hopelessly déclassé (yes she uses words like that) if I did not instantly consume it. Read it I did, all 367 pages, and the month and a half it took me to force myself to finish it seemed longer than waiting for the Second Coming. It’s a so-clever novel about the Apocalypse (wink) which you’re not supposed to figure out right away unless you’re a teen (wink, wink) or a 50 something writer who’s seen this kind of “clever” for about 45 years now. Oh, and the good angel has some faults (wink, wink, wink) and the bad angel isn’t so bad (wink). I got all that by, maybe, page 20. Then, for 347 more pages I have to trail these guys around England while they do absolutely nothing, have no character arc, and nobody in the book has the slightest human appeal. Pratchett and Gaiman must have developed serious ticks by now from all that winking. I do get to figure out who are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and other stuff that’s so obvious my Giant Schnauzer could spot it.

My opinions on this book naturally elicited a huge sigh and significant eye rolling from world’s foremost authority. However, there is one thing I’m very grateful for—I’m going straight to heaven. I already did my time in purgatory.

Personal stimulus plan for the arts

2009-07-29T18:31:00.002-05:00

If everyone who ever has ever thought about writing a book or majored in English would subscribe to one literary journal, those tiny and usually struggling publications would see their circulations skyrocket. If everyone whose child has ever taken dance lessons would attend one dance performance a month (hey, once a quarter), many dance troupes would find they could actually afford to continue. If everyone who ever enjoyed acting in a high school play would attend three or four experimental theater events or independent movie festivals, these projects wouldn’t have to function in borrowed spaces and decrepit venues.

My point is, all of these things are the training and proving grounds for the arts. If we want to enjoy innovative and creative arts, there has to be an audience that supports them. Plenty of us are interested in being seen ourselves. Couldn’t we benefit by seeing what others are doing? Wouldn’t it just be fun to get our car out of the usual ruts and drive somewhere different?

Not only do the arts desperately need support, but artists also crave feedback. Personally, I have really enjoyed meeting writers at bookstore signings. Hearing Robert Coles speak years ago, I’m still thinking over some of the things he said, and it was a great thrill to meet him in person, to find out how soft spoken and shy he appeared. That kind of opportunity has really diminished in the last year or so, and why? Because publishers are reluctant to take on the expense of sending an author on a book tour where she may find herself sitting alone at a table for hours. People just don’t come, unless the writer is a blockbuster. If we do read a good short story in a lit journal, would it kill us to drop a line to the author? Ever considered that it might be helpful to tell a director of that play what staging you thought worked? Sure, bestselling novelists get more mail than they can handle, but the mid-tier artist often gets very little feedback. At its best, art communicates; it would be nice if the conversation were two-way.

Most of us have cut back on eating out, and perhaps traded first run movies for discs from Netflix. If there’s any room for a tiny bit more belt tightening, perhaps those savings could be put into supporting the small arts production of your choice. I’m currently trying to pick up at least one literary journal per month at the local bookstore, with an eye to finding one or two to subscribe to that I really enjoy and will actually read. Artists and people who would like to see a vibrant arts scene might well consider the wisdom of Rabbi Hillel, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, then what am I? If not now, when?”

Seen any good dance performances lately?

STEM the tide

2009-07-27T14:11:00.001-05:00

I’ve been listening to the ballyhoo about the need for more trained graduates in math and science since Sputnik shot up in 1957 and if I’d been around earlier, I’m sure I would have heard it then. Now the “rose” has another name—Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM)—but I’m not sure it doesn’t still smell of wrongheadedness. Corporations have been crying to the government for more support for these training programs for over 50 years now, and if I live another 50, my guess is I’ll still be hearing about it.

However, as soon as the STEMmys get jobs, the corporations start howling about how they can’t think beyond their technical specialty, can’t see the big picture, and can’t write any better than a fifth grader. Duh, why not? Could it be that they never studied anything that allowed them to see beyond the edge of their computer monitors? And a degree in STEM is no guarantee of a job, either, despite what the corporations would like us to believe. Ask anyone who’s worked for Motorola or Lucent in the last 20 years.

Unfortunately, even our beloved president—no graduate of STEM, he!—seems to be mouthing this conventional wisdom. It’s shocking that a guy whose thinking is so innovative on so many fronts seems to have a big blind spot where education is concerned. So, Mr. President, I’m going to make a really radical proposal.

Drop all special initiative for STEM. If the corporations need specialists, let the corporations PAY for that training. Maybe they’ll get the employees they need if they design the program. And why shouldn’t they foot the bills? They’re not going to reimburse the feds, like the banks have. But the role of government should be to support those important programs that do not necessarily have a direct profit price tag attached, but enhance and protect the quality of life. We are living in a world where too many governments have taken on the role of corporate partner, and in fact are impotent in the face of multinationals. But government is of, by and for PEOPLE, not business.

If government is going to support educational programs, I suggest we should be supporting the liberal arts and humanities. These are the areas of learning that lend intrinsic meaning, expression and connection to life, all things the robots of STEM cannot replicate. Maybe they don’t ring a corporate recruiter’s bells, but most of the English, or history, or French lit majors I know do find jobs. I also know plenty of computer science majors who are out of work right now.

More and more, arts instruction has become the province of the children of the upper middle class, whose parents know the value and purchase after-school instruction. But move down the economic ladder a bit and you’re out of luck—music, art, dance and theater programs have been sliced out of nearly all public school budgets.

We are seeing a country where the children of the rich are helped to express themselves, develop thinking ability, access culture and broaden their (already broad) experience, while the children of the working class and the poor are told to focus on getting a job, and get training for—for what? When I took computer science classes, we spent tons of time learning COBOL. I don’t think the schools know what technical skills will be useful by the time the kids graduate.

Mr. Obama did his undergraduate work at Columbia University (a school renowned for its Great Books-style curriculum) where he majored in political science. It doesn’t seem to have hurt his employability any.

10 classic books; 5 enjoyable, 5 not so much

2009-07-22T20:02:00.003-05:00

From the 6 foot high pile next to my bed, five classic books I just can’t seem to finish:
1. Moby Dick
2. Don Quixote
I’ve made a run at both of these so many times over the years. I’d like to assign them to my daughter. I’m afraid she’ll call family services on me if I do. Has anyone besides an English professor ever finished these books?
3. The Bible. Even read as literature, I can’t do it. I’ve made it through Genesis, Daniel, Ruth and Matthew. That’s all. Several translations.
4. Herodotus, The Histories. We have the Landmark edition, which weighs a thousand pounds and stops my breathing when placed on my abdomen while lying in bed reading. My daughter “assigned” this book to me. She loved it—calls the guy the ”Ancient Geek”.
5. Sei Shonagon, The Pillow Book. This one begins with a dog story that makes me ralph. It goes on for hundreds of pages that have no point that I can ascertain, about people that make reality tv contestants look smart. Except that they murder each other. I guess it just proves that people can be vile and shallow no matter what century they live in.
And five classics that kept me up all night:
1. Sigrid Undset, Kristin Lavransdatter. Actually, this kept me up for about a week, as it’s a trilogy. I bought the first book on a Friday evening, thinking that I wasn’t sure if I wanted all three. Saturday morning I helped them open the bookstore, and the whole weekend was shot after that. Great medieval saga, heartbreaking and compelling.
2. George Elliott, Middlemarch. This was in the other pile when I was younger, but when I picked it up a couple of years ago, it suddenly had transformed from dull to compelling. Certain books speak to certain ages, and I think you might need to be over 40 to really get this one. A great delineation of older, but sadly wiser, and what we pay for that knowledge.
3. Mark Twain, Joan of Arc. Twain thought this might be his best book. It isn’t, but it’s sweet and believable, and the man sure could tell a story.
4. The Epic of Gilgamesh. Okay, maybe this is cheating because what we have is fragmentary and pretty short. But I found it a touching portrayal of friendship, the quest to find and develop an authentic self, and the despair of confronting mortality.
5. Charlotte Bronte, Wuthering Heights. I just read that this is one of the most hated books assigned to high school students. Is thwarted romance and heartbreaking yearning dead? Do we have no time for vividly evoked place and passion? Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier are probably rolling in their graves.

I do suspect that different books speak to us at different ages and after different life events. For years, I could not get through the Iliad, then forced myself to read it before dear daughter found it on her reading list. Where before it had seemed to me a simple gory catalog, now it seems one of the greatest anti-war works ever written. Who can fail to read about all the painful, individual deaths without mourning the lost lives, the tragedies of someone’s brother, son, father? Who can fail to root for Hector, trapped in a situation not of his making, trying to do the right thing as it destroys his life? Can we not all identify with Achilles, who makes such bad decisions in anger and finds out too late what really means something to him? It didn’t keep me up nights, but it did make for compelling reading.

They’re called classics because they bear up well for a second, a third, a late-in-life reading. Just maybe not all of them. Or maybe I’m not old enough, yet.

Buy Homer, not a Hummer

2009-07-20T13:07:00.002-05:00

Recently I heard a school librarian and a reading specialist discuss what kids are reading. It’s enough to chill the bones of any author. I don’t mean only serious children’s authors who have to compete with the likes of Captain Underpants. Adult authors, too, have plenty to worry about. Looks to me like serious writers might need to worry that they’re about to follow newspapers down the sink hole.

According to these women, historical fiction is out. Kids just don’t get enough history in K-8 to have a context in which to place these stories. The organization, content and expectations are just pitiful. Here’s what one local school system does:
3rd Grade: Early Illinois history
4th Grade: Geography
5th Grade: More geography and U.S . History through the Civil War (if we’re lucky, commented the librarian)
6th Grade: Prehistory to Ancient Rome (okay, I’m on board here)
7th Grade: back to Geography
8th Grade: U.S. Government and U.S. History from Reconstruction to the Cold War
Why on earth kids need so much geography, and why it can’t be taught in the more meaningful context of history, is beyond me. At my house dear daughter never studied geography as a separate subject (oh, okay, she did some workbook pages on Fridays in 3rd & 4th grade) until 8th grade, when dd took AP Human Geography, easily passing with a 5. What’s missing from the above curriculum? How about all of European, Middle Eastern and Asian history, with only a smidgen of African history thrown in for political correctness?

By 8th grade, some kids have discovered historical fiction on their own, but the bulk of their early reading is focused (according to these speakers) on fantasy, relationships series (if girls) and horror (if boys). Also, the classic children’s books of the past have either been moved up to high school, being too long with too difficult vocabulary, or eliminated all together, being at odds with modern political correctness. In high school it’s better—our local high school requires 4 history or social studies courses, and a judicious choice can get some pretty good survey courses. Too bad it’s their first encounter.

I firmly believe in the “inoculation” theory of education, by which I mean, you give kids a shot of something several times over a period of years, and eventually that exposure strengthens their bodies’ response to the stimulus. The kid who read a picture book of the Odyssey in 1st grade and a retelling in 5th grade will be raring to go on the real thing by high school (not bored out of their gourds, as my daughter observed at a local high school class.)

Grappling with serious literature, classics, and lengthy works only becomes easy with exposure and training. The child who is exposed to the arts early on, in a meaningful context, by a teacher (or parent) who is knowledgeable and enthusiastic, will be a lifelong fan—at least an appreciative audience if not a creator.

All the stats show that newspapers have failed to reach a younger audience, who has never developed the habit of reading the morning paper (or the afternoon one, remember those?) But ultimately, we as parents and we as artists can’t leave it up to the schools. As an old poem says, children learn what they live. Children who see us anticipating concerts with enthusiasm, reading challenging books, and actually using our museum memberships for our own adult benefit will have a whole different cultural vocabulary from those whose evenings are spent watching reality tv. If only we valued season tickets to the opera as highly as we value ownership of a Hummer.

Nag, nag, nag!

2009-07-17T12:28:00.005-05:00

When my daughter was first taking music lessons (piano) her first teacher wisely told me that she had never seen a student progress well without a parent who kept on them. Since I vacillate between being a drill sergeant and a pushover, I never quite got my nagging program in gear. As might be expected, piano progress was so-so.

However, when she began harp lessons, I was convinced that I might as well throw $55 out the window, and my nag switch opened full throttle. Besides the fact that harp turned out to be “her” instrument (see my post on harps), she readily admits that without the...er...motivation I supplied she never would have made the progress she has.

It strikes me that as teachers and learners, we really should just admit something to ourselves and our students: some things just aren’t fun to learn. Fields that require memorization or significant practice to master are going to have a huge quantity of things you have to beat yourself into doing: the foundations of music, math and foreign languages are, let’s say it, dull and repetitious. No amount of cute computer animation or music enhanced audio flashcards, or any of the other tricks we try really make a difference. Expecting a child to have the discipline needed is unrealistic. Someone else, someone who can visualize the long term benefits, needs to supply the superego.

As I used to pound into my daughter, memorizing the 2500 or 3000 words needed to read a French newspaper is no fun, but being able to pick up a French language fashion magazine or make yourself understood while travelling is a lot of fun indeed. Getting to the fun part, at least in some fields, requires a significant amount of grinding away. For me, and for her, the study of literature or history has been intrinsically pleasurable, because it exercises the brain, but requires no particular skill building exercises once you’ve learned to read. But not so with math, languages, music and advanced art: it’s practice, review and memorize for a long time before you can think big thoughts or work with anything interesting.

“Child-led learning” sounds great and is certainly a popular concept in both traditional and homeschool settings. I wish I believed in it. I wish my child had known what she wanted to do and pursued it wholeheartedly at an early age. I wish I could fly. While I recognize that there are kids like that somewhere on the planet, I think it’s a disservice to expect all of them to be that way, or to wait until they are. How could a child discover a passion for Javanese gamelan (or harp) if she was never exposed to that possibility? So, until I’m confident that she can drive herself, I still direct the tour.

Self-publishing, traditional publishing or somewhere in between

2009-07-15T11:19:00.003-05:00

No doubt about it, publishing a book is a pain no matter which way you go. If you go with a traditional publisher, you get a pittance of the sale price. (I don’t say profits, because I’m not so sure publishing houses are seeing much of that these days.) If you self-publish, your sales may be minuscule and your costs high. Still, the relative boom in the self-publishing industry of late says there are a lot of us out there that at least consider the possibility.

Last night Jim Kepler of Adams Press spoke at the Independent Writers of Chicago meeting (great organization—check it out if you’re in the Chicago area.) Jim’s an old friend, and his operation is the old-fashioned kind: honest, full-disclosure and service oriented. He had a few warnings and war stories about what kind of contracts the new self publishing industry can put out, and more than ever it’s clear you better read the fine print and know what you’re signing.

Can self publishing ever work, or is it the last refuge of authors who have been rejected by 75 editors, or think someone will actually be interested in their poems, autobiography or Vietnam War stories? Well, if you’ve made a serious effort at peddling your manuscript (not 2 or 3 lame letters, but a well researched campaign), and everyone’s rejected it, maybe you do need to take a second look or hire a rewrite person. But what it really comes down to is platform. Do you have a way to move a lot of product on your own? Unless your book is a blockbuster (but then, your agent would have already auctioned it) you’re going to get the plain vanilla marketing plan, and most of the marketing will really be done by you, or not at all. At that point, most of us will start thinking about the spread between our 10% royalty on a $19.95 book, the $5.00 in printing costs, and how we could better spend the remaining $12.95. If you’re a speaker who can sell your book in the back of the room, have a company that will use the book as a promo, or can find a way to peddle it yourself (how big is your car trunk?), you might break even or be better off publishing it yourself. Do the math—if you sell 500 copies, and make, say, $10 a copy for a $19.95 book, a publisher is going to need to sell more than 2500 copies for you to make the same amount in royalties. Many, many conventionally published books sell 5,000 or less. Not much for 6 months or a year’s worth of work.

But it’s going to cost you in other ways, mostly in huge amounts of time. I’m not talking about promo here, because you’re probably going to have to do that anyway. I’m talking about shipping, printing, design, editing, order processing, etc. You’ll either do it yourself or find services that you can contract to do it for you, but it’s work, and hours and hours away from actually writing. The whole self publishing industry has thrived on doing all that for you, but that’s going to cost you, too. So, self publishing really comes down to how bad you want to see your book in covers (they don’t call it “vanity press” for nothing) or how good you are at peddling your wares.

Don’t do it without reading up on it first. Dan Poynter is the granddaddy of self-publishing, and it’s worth memorizing his book before you take the plunge. He’s very pro self-publishing, but very honest about how much work it takes. My friend Jim’s operation puts out some good looking books, in case you don’t want to do it all yourself. Elizabeth Lyon’s and Michael Larson’s books are great on the real mechanics of pitching a book. For a dose of reality, check out Elaura Niles’ book. If you read that and still think you can publish a book, my best wishes to you. I’m still thinking it over, myself.

Not a book review

2009-07-13T11:57:00.004-05:00

Reviewers hate to give a sincere effort a bad review. Sure, if the book is an obvious stinker—say, a children’s book by a so-called celebrity author—it’s easy to pull out the long knives. When the book obviously entailed a lot of effort and research, and (even worse!) the author appears to be a decent and dedicated person, it’s a lot harder.

Years ago I’d read and enjoyed the first book by she who will not be named. Recently, I even heard her speak, and she seems like a serious and thoughtful writer, my kinda girl. So I was prepared to like her book, and picked it up with great anticipation. It’s an absolute train wreck. Billed as an historical NOVEL, it is blissfully free of any semblance of plot. As one editor put it about bad historical fiction, you can almost see the index cards laid out on the dining room table. I don’t think there was a single fact about the book’s subject that wasn’t crammed in somewhere. Often, the facts were foisted upon the reader by the execrable and neophyte practice of having characters tell each other about facts that each of them had every reason to know already. I probably ground my dental work down by several millimeters while reading those sections.

On and on it goes, for 870 pages. Doesn’t anyone at her (major) publisher own a blue pencil? Is the delete key missing on their keyboard? I wasted night after night of bedtime reading, hoping against hope that somewhere in this phone book this author would eventually hit her stride and give me something to think about. Plus, her main character is such an impossible twit that by page 350 I was rooting for the bad guys to do her in, and ready to cheer when they finally did.

All serious authors by now are asking themselves how this stuff gets published. Disabuse yourself of the notion that you have to be good to get published. There’s a huge greenbacks factor here—the first book made a ton of money, and I’ll bet the presales on this one were enough (ahem) to cover the paper costs and gold foil on the cover. I can’t believe I did my small part by purchasing this brick.

Still, I’m not going to out her. She’s gone on to publish a bunch more books, so someone must like them, and she had many fans when I heard her speak. A lot of work went into this book, and I do applaud that. I’m also a chicken—if I run into her again, I don’t want to have to hide. But if it’s 870 pages long, a Literary Guild Selection, and published by St. Martin’s, don’t buy it!

Anywhere But Now: the Historical Novel Society Convention

2009-07-10T08:03:00.004-05:00

Renaissance Venice, Heian Japan, or sailing with the Norsemen, conference goers at the June Historical Novel Society meeting were anywhere but in the rather anonymous suburban hotel. But bring the participants (briefly) back to our 21st century publishing scene and you’ll find out that historical fiction is a sort of uber-genre: it covers mysteries, romance, thriller, fantasy, chick lit and serious fiction. Think of the range from The French Lieutenant’s Woman to Fabio.

It was a well heeled crowd, albeit more Ferragamo than Manolo. Predominantly female, conference goers clearly know their way around the research stacks, and one seminar on researching when you can’t go there elicited oohs and aahs for the presentation by author Roberta Gellis on accessing resources for ancient maps. Apparently plenty of authors need to know how to turn right at the correct medieval mud hut and proceed along to the barley fields.

Writers using historical settings may not be afraid of dragons, but they live in terror of reenactors, who can be counted on to point out the anachronisms the author has overlooked. Balancing the needs of a plot versus what actually happened can be more difficult than getting out of your armor after a rainstorm.

These are not the kind of writers to be daunted by a little inconvenient travel or tough research, however. Some described learning Latin in order to translate medieval manuscripts, deciphering spidery script in caches of personal letters, and constructing and wearing clothing of excruciating complexity and discomfort. One evening’s entertainment offered the opportunity to costume yourself as your character. One participant demonstrated a spectacular use for your grandma’s old fur stole: think sumptuous sleeve trim on blue velvet. Clearly, however, some eras have had more fashion sense than others, and based on the clothes, I’m not moving to the early middle ages any time soon, unless the burlap is lined. No wonder skin diseases were common.

Writers are readers, too, and publishers know it. The goodie bags given out to participants included a bushel of books, along with the usual printed pens and bookmarks. One clever and pricey promo was a wax sealed bottle of lavender water, packaged in a lace handkerchief, promoting a book called The Tory Widow by Christine Blevins. I wonder what the guys did with it. There were so many books I hauled them out to my car, but I must admit I was sore tempted to sit right down and read them all, bagging the rest of the conference.

That would have been a mistake. The Conference was replete with editors and agents, and they were in a buying mood. Every participant I spoke with who had taken advantage of the 8 minute pitch meetings had been asked to forward a manuscript. And authors who are ready to wrestle with samurai sword play are not easily daunted by the realities of 21st century marketing.

There was plenty of advice on making sure that the novel you spent 6 years researching doesn’t become a six week wonder. Speaker after speaker talked about developing a platform, courting readers, and using the latest cyber techniques and social media as a cost effective way to reach book buyers interested in worlds where the height of technological innovation might be the spoked wheel. As editor Trish Todd of Touchstone/Simon & Schuster put it, “I wouldn’t send my worst enemy on a book tour right now”, but virtual blog tours, connecting authors with book clubs via Skype, and webinars and podcasts were all thoroughly vetted as means to maximize “reader touch” while minimizing author wear-and-tear. Even though authors might find it as pleasant as swallowing an emetic, author Michelle Moran advised coughing up at least 5% of your advance for your own marketing efforts.

If you still harbor any illusions that publishing is about art, not marketing, you’re as out of date as a wimple. Your editor is going to take a hard look at her spreadsheet before she takes a look at a second manuscript from you. Remember Mr. Micawber’s famous advice to David Copperfield, "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery." Turns out that applies equally well to advances. If you get a $15K advance and your book sells 20,000 copies, you’re a hero. But cage a $50,000 advance and sell the same 20,000 copies and your agent will be repurposing your next manuscript. Still, I’d rather have one partridge on a pewter platter than still in the pear tree—there’s no guarantee what the market might be like down the [dirt] road.

For now, however, everything’s coming up fleur de lys—apparently authors of historical fiction aren’t the only ones who like to time travel. So, based on what I heard, if you’re writing serious fiction, a mystery, a thriller or maybe even chick lit or teenage angst, I’d find a historical period to set it in. It’s a good horse to ride.

2009-07-09T11:54:00.001-05:00

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Why do kids quit doing art?

2009-07-08T11:56:00.004-05:00

My daughter played startlingly beautiful improvisations when younger, but as her music study went on she began to focus more and more on her lesson material and on learning to play her instrument with increasing expertise. The improvisation dropped off due to no time and a lot of demanding skills acquisition. I worried about the loss of joy, especially during those practice times when I heard her growl in frustration.

Many children produce wonderful images and sounds early on. Think of the freshness of much child-written poetry, melody, or art. Picasso and others often spoke about the need to remain as a child when approaching art. The challenge is to mature into an understanding of what you’re doing, while still maintaining freshness and innovation. Not easy. But also, without training, most artists will eventually get frustrated with their lack of ability to produce the skillful and sophisticated works rattling around in their heads. Perhaps this is why, without serious training in drawing skills, so many kids give up drawing at about age 10 or 11--they start to know that there's something better out there, but need the training to access it.

The age when children decide to give up in frustration is also the age when schools start to regard all the arts as a nice supplement, if they can afford the time and the money (NOT!). Sure, a huge after-school industry in arts instruction has developed, but only for the parents who seek it out and can afford it. We are now a nation who can’t draw stick figures, pick out a simple melody, or even dance. Yet we stop offering any instruction at just the age when children might make some real headway in learning the skills, and then be able to apply those skills to their own creative inspirations.

Real music composing, at least classical, is a very complex endeavor, requiring expertise with a variety of instruments, a historical vocabulary, and much theory. If the spark is truly there, and opportunities and encouragement are offered, I think the young person will return to their art interests with a vengeance. Mine has.

Homeschooling and my own interests have provided my daughter with a veritable flood of arts instruction and activities. Thanks to the greater interest in homeschooling, there’s a cornucopia of self-instructional materials available. If you want to be overwhelmed with what’s available to play with, check out the Rainbow Resources catalog. It’s a treasure trove for homeschoolers, after-schoolers, and even adults. Self-instruction programs are a lot cheaper than many classes, portable, adaptable to your time schedule, and teach self-reliance and how to be a life long learner.

And if you just want to learn to draw a (much better) stick figure, check out Mark Kistler’s books. Talent may be a spark within, but anyone can learn the skills.

Harp on it

2009-07-06T14:30:00.005-05:00

For years my daughter begged to study harp. I ignored her pleas because, to put it charitably, she was an indifferent piano student. Although she began lessons at 6 years old, she never seemed to find the right “click” in a teacher, and there was no real spark, although in general she loved music. I hoped to put off harp lessons forever, as I didn’t need any more giant instruments that sat around our house unplayed.

About 4 years ago, I heard an interview on NPR with Max Zbiral-Teller (whose family happens to live a few blocks from us). He’s an extraordinary hammered dulcimer player who described how he had begged for years to be allowed to learn the instrument, finally convincing his parents. The NPR commentator went on to describe him as probably the best in the world (Max was then about 16). A chill went up my spine. What if people are meant for certain instruments, and I was preventing my daughter from discovering her real calling?

Yup. Three years later, she is playing in two youth orchestras, practices three hours a day voluntarily (I could barely nag 30 minutes out of her on piano), and adores it. I have come to believe that, even though most children begin on piano or violin, they should have an opportunity to try out other instruments whenever possible. I had originally agreed to let her try 10 lessons, and even though the first harp teacher was dismal, I could see a difference in my daughter’s commitment from day one.

Harp playing sounds beautiful from the first day, something that cannot be said for violin. It has a great range, and many styles of music—folk, Celtic, jazz, blues, and of course, classical—sound extraordinary and unique on harp. But harp’s reputation is that it’s the exclusive province of angelic little girls from wealthy families, and that points to the main problem in its lack of popularity: there’s no easy entry point.

You can pick up an electric piano at an electronics store for a few hundred bucks, or haul one out of someone’s basement for about the same price, and see if your kid will actually work at the thing. School orchestras and bands often have loaner instruments for violins, flutes, you name it. However, you’ll be very fortunate if your kid’s school orchestra owns a harp, and even more so if it has been restrung and regulated in the past ten years. Harp has no “try-out” instrument that costs less than several thousand dollars.

We were lucky to find a used Dusty Strings lever harp for $2100 (plus another $125 for restringing), but it was a fluke. A decent lever harp is going to set you back upwards of $4K, and the half-way decent student will be whining for a pedal harp in two years or so. Don’t even think of spending less than $10K for a pedal harp. This level of entry is beyond what most parents can stomach without knowing whether the child has any commitment to the field. If you’re lucky, the teacher will have a harp or two to rent, but they go fast.

Unlike many other instruments, harps don’t last. They get beat up easily and the sound board lifts up. A used harp or one that has been rented extensively should be approached with the caution you’d apply to purchasing a used car: take your mechanic (harp teacher) with you. And be warned, six different harps of the same model will have six different sounds. Not an easy thing to purchase online.

It’s too bad that it’s so expensive to get started, because it’s an instrument that children are naturally drawn to. Whenever my daughter plays, kids can hardly keep their hands off the harp.

The other problem harp has is that there is relatively little music written for it in the classical sphere. Although it’s one of the most ancient instruments (think Greek vases), the harp had a limited range until the double action pedal harp (invented in the early 19th century) made it more versatile and appealing to composers. Repertoire available for harp is pretty much limited to works composed after then, with a bigger role for harp in opera and ballet music, whose heyday coincides more closely with the double action harp. Of course, numerous transcriptions of earlier music are available, and harp has a huge repertoire in folk and particularly Celtic music. Nevertheless, the harpist for an opera company is likely to be busier than the harpist in a symphony orchestra.

There’s some sensational stuff out there, well beyond the angel choirs type stuff. Give a listen to Kim Robertson (Celtic), Joy Yu Hoffman (Chinese, and btw my daughter’s current teacher), Deborah Henson-Conant (jazz & pop) or Judy Loman (classical). Prepare to be transported.

Portuguese? Sim! Easy? Não!

2009-07-03T18:19:00.004-05:00

If you want to learn French or German, Italian or Japanese, you’ll have an exhausting array of choices. (I put learning Spanish, at least in the U.S., in a category of its own. It’s so prevalent it’s hard to avoid picking up at least a little.) You can choose among immersion style conversation (Pimsleur or Rosetta Stone), intuitive computer game style workouts (Auralog), and shelves and shelves of workbooks, listen in your car, and book/cd combinations. But venture off the path beaten in the aisles of your local Megabooks or library, and you will truly be in another world—following a narrow path with little signage.

I’m on a quest to learn Portuguese, and not the Brazilian kind. I have an idea for a novel set in medieval Portugal and I know from long-ago travel in Portugal that finding translated resource material, even the glossy coffee table books sold at cathedrals, is a quest not for the faint-hearted. All of my favorite language programs are either produced in Brazilian Portuguese or not at all. Think you can find everything you could possibly want by googling it? Take a spin with European or Continental Portuguese. I did run through the 10 lessons of Continental Pimsleur in ten days, and now I can introduce myself, but I don’t think that’s going to be very relevant to reading scholarly works on the 14th century. I’m working through the only other program I’ve so far been able to find, Portuguese in 3 Months (Hugo), but it’s not going to give me anywhere near enough expertise.

Among other ideas I’ve explored are finding a group on Meetup.org (only a Brazilian one in my area); local university courses (all in the area assume that you already speak Spanish), and Live Mocha (not bad, but I need to move faster with heavier grammar). Apparently there’s no market for teaching Portuguese.

It saddens me that learning can be so market driven. Portugal has no strategic political importance like Arabic or Chinese; no cool factor like Japanese (anyone remember when THAT was considered a strategic language); no perceived daily utility like Spanish, and no place in glamorous travel or graduate studies, like French, Italian or German. Still, isn’t it worth learning something for the joy of it, to pursue an interest not shared by everyone, to travel in another culture through the window of their language?

The positive effect of this quest is that I am ever more determined to speak it, and I’m filled with daydreaming about how surprised natives will be if I actually manage to communicate when there. It’s really a beautiful language, filled with soft and wispy sounds, like the beautiful and heartbreaking sounds of the national music of fado. I just with it wasn’t going to be such a solitary pleasure.

Used books use authors?

2009-07-01T11:34:00.003-05:00

Blogs are all aflutter with countless schemes on how newspapers can find a way to “monetize” their content in an on-line world where we all expect to get our info for free. The Author’s Guild has fought the good fight in trying to secure electronic rights for authors, particularly those of us who signed contracts before there WERE electronic rights. I regularly see a 26 year old article of mine pop up on websites. Needless to say, I never gave away those rights. So, given these huge issues, maybe my concern seems a little trivial, but here goes.

What about used books? Hasn’t an author’s work always been sold and resold without any further compensation paid to the author or publisher? Once upon a time, this wasn’t much of a market. Used bookstores were mostly on college campuses or hidden away in quaint neighborhoods. You poked around and found interesting books you’d never heard of before. But attend any library book sale these days and you can hardly get within spittin’ distance of the shelves and crates. The place is swarming with desperate looking people with portable bar code readers who are checking market prices (used) for every book on the shelf, and dropping the books into crates without even looking at the titles.

Used book selling must be a decent business (if you have sharp enough elbows). Like every other business you can imagine, there’s even a book on how to do it: The Home-Based Bookstore, by Steve Weber. As a seriously addicted book-buyer, I adore used books. Don’t we all love getting something for a buck that used to be $24.95? As an author, not so much. So many writers make so little off their labor, I wish the author’s groups would give a little re-thinking to the whole area of copyright, resale, and author/publisher compensation.

Two Rare Birds

2009-06-29T07:47:00.010-05:00

Karen Essex had so much élan and verve when I met her at the recent Historical Novel Society’s conference that I couldn’t wait to get one of her books. She had a great deal of marketing savvy and cast a steely eye on the publishing scene. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted her work to be as excellent as she seemed, or whether I was actually filled with envy and hoping to be able to feel superior to a creature of publicity (oh really I’m above all that. I wish.)

Essex has written two biographical novels about Egypt, Kleopatra and Pharaoh, but I happened to stop in at the local and massive Little City Used Book Sale and there, in a pristine cover, was her book Leonardo’s Swans. It was Fortuna, as one of her characters would say. This book (344 pages, Doubleday) is a fictional exploration of the lives and relationships of two incredibly gifted and powerful women who were also sisters: Isabella and Beatrice d’Este. Both were patrons of the arts: Isabella supported Andrea Mantegna and many others, while Leonardo da Vinci did what some consider his best work while under the patronage of the Duke of Milan, Beatrice’s husband Ludovico Sforza. Leonardo’s Swans does an excellent job re-imagining what might have been the psychological truths and interpersonal relationships among these people based on the known facts. This is what the best historical fiction does: helps us to see as living people those who are frozen in artistic styles that look like no one we know, or who have accomplished deeds (or descended into infamy) that we, on the surface, can hardly imagine.

Essex makes these women so human that you can almost think of them as members of your book club or someone you might have lunch with. Also, they both seem so accessible that I had to keep reminding myself that these were two of the most powerful and influential women of their own (indeed of any) time. During the period the story covers, both Isabella and Beatrice were only in their late teens and early twenties. Maybe speaking several languages and being well read in the classics can produce this, but it’s still very hard to believe that teenagers could achieve the levels of intellectual, political and artistic sophistication that these women apparently did. The details of their lives are better than any complicated family saga, and I polished off the book in a few very late nights.

While I highly recommend this book for either a long day at the beach, a time when you are stuck in an airport for twelve hours (that’s where I cracked the covers) or in front of a fire with a nice afghan cradling you, I must say that certain aspects of the book made me angry at her publishers. First, the cover. The hardcover has a very sensuous nude reproduction of a painting by Cesare da Sesto of Ledo and the Swan. This is purportedly a copy of a lost Leonardo. While the theme of the painting is certainly part of the book, so many other great paintings are mentioned in the book that the reader craves to have them at hand while reading. Leonardo painted very few portraits of contemporary women, and four of them are integral to the plot of this book: Cecilia Gallerani ( a mistress of Ludovico Sforza), the gorgeous Lady with an Ermine, which toured the U.S. several years ago; La Belle Ferronière, reputed to be Lucrezia Crivelli, another mistress of Ludovico Sforza; a portrait of Beatrice (Ludovico’s wife—busy guy) and a sketch of Isabella, who spends most of the book consumed with envy of the oils of the others. (The other two non-religious portraits are, of course, the Mona Lisa and Ginevra de’ Benci, the only Leonardo in the U.S., at the National Gallery in Washington.) The paperback version has another beautiful painting, but not of these ladies.

My other (minor) gripe is that I spotted two paragraphs (or their very near cousins) that were each repeated in other sections of the book. After my own experiences with editing, I can well understand how multiple revisions and edits can make that happen. Still, I’d have been happier if someone caught that. It may not be noticeable unless you are reading through the entire book in two sittings, as I did, while stuck sleeping on the floor of an airport at 1 am.

Ludovico Sforza and Isabella d’Este aren’t exactly household words, and unless you have a particular interest in the Renaissance, you may not have run across them before. But once you read this book, they’ll seem like fascinating people from your past. As indeed, they are.

Bag the Sudoku

2009-06-26T07:46:00.002-05:00

I will never understand how people can waste their time doing Sudoku or the myriad of other puzzle books I saw displayed at several airports last weekend. Maybe I’ll make an exception for crosswords, as you actually might learn something and build your vocabulary. But so often these are touted as ways to keep your brain alive, stave off the effects of aging, and sharpen your reactions, blah, blah, blah. So, I make a modest proposal: let’s all learn at least one other language!

Americans are simply woeful about this. There are plenty of reasons why: Europeans have access to all sorts of media in other languages, speakers of other languages who wish to do business in our world use English as the lingua franca (a term that should give ample warning in itself of how languages can diminish in importance), and Americans are pretty much isolated from daily opportunity to use other languages. But of course, all these excuses fall apart if we ask one simple question: why aren’t most of us English speakers at least conversant in Spanish? Although Spanish is ubiquitous in nearly every major city of the U.S., the knowledge of it by non-native speakers certainly is far from routine.

So, this is a pitch for considering learning a language—really learning, reading newspapers, novels, listening to newscasts from other parts of the world, with their often very different take on world events and policies. Not only will it keep your brain alive, but it will give you increased social opportunities to interact with people outside your own small community. And maybe, just maybe, it can make a small strike for world peace. I’ve never met anyone who could thoroughly study a language, and the cultures it represents, and still maintain prejudice or loathing for the people who speak it. The complexities of understanding bring respect.

Newspaper Implosion

2009-06-25T12:06:00.004-05:00

The seeming collapse of newspapers reminds me of the children’s story about the grain of rice, where the heroine asks the mean king to pay her with double the rice she has each day, beginning with one grain of rice. Of course, by the end of thirty days, she has a massive amount. So, too, the newspapers, but in reverse; for years they’ve been in trouble.

Because I took a hiatus from writing during the time I was raising and homeschooling my daughter, I have the Rip Van Winkle experience of returning to the “world” with a frame of reference 15 years old. But even when I was freelancing features 15 years ago, I heard all the same comments, “We can’t hire freelancers—we’re struggling to keep our full time reporters employed” or “We have to cut back on editorial, the ads just aren’t there” or “We can’t figure out how to make money on the internet.” Sound familiar? It’s clear to me that newspapers had plenty of warning, and that a new business model was called for long ago.

I’m positive I don’t have all the answers, but I do have a few ideas.

Freelancers vs. full-time
Here’s one where newspapers, some magazines, and many corporations still haven’t seen the forest for the trees. Maybe publications should consider that what they really need is a tiny core staff and a phalanx of freelancers—just the model that newer and more successful media uses. What they’d get is fresh, diverse style, a plethora of ideas, and a bench of people with their ears to the ground. Freelancers get variety, working conditions that can be tailored to optimum personal performance, and the opportunity to pursue passions and develop expertise.

Business costs
It’s no news by now that the elephant in the room is benefits. Even lean and mean companies are sinking under the weight of health care costs. Serious full-time freelancers are also crushed by the costs of individual healthcare. A change in healthcare policy could make a tremendous difference for individuals, start ups, and any struggling business. But we all know that, don’t we?

Reaching the audience
In their desperate attempt to clutch at readers who have moved to the internet, newspapers have transformed themselves into Life Magazine—full of pictures, little content. In doing so, I believe they’ve lost their core audience: READERS! Myself, I’ve gone from reading two newspapers a day to reading two on Sunday and the Economist the rest of the week. The book The Long Tail ought to be required reading for any publisher. The masses have moved elsewhere for entertainment and information about their interests. Newspapers are going after the wrong market.

It will be interesting to see how marketers of consumer goods are going to reach a mass audience without newspapers. Not only is readership down, but it’s easy to tell from six feet away that so is advertising—newspapers and many magazines are about half as thick as they once were. Add to that the proliferation of cable stations and it begins to seem like we are living in a “long tail” world. We are already seeing the proliferation of ezines, targeted websites, and (ahem) blogs. But I’m going to miss the sense of common conversation, exposure to stuff I didn’t know would interest me, and the pleasure of sitting on the porch with a cup of coffee and the paper. The computer screen just isn’t the same.