Love and the Reader-Self

Coat of Arms of the Sûreté du Quebec

I am a little behind in posting on both of my blogs this week because I am in love again. It's all there: the preoccupation, the what if, the setting aside of important tasks while I immerse myself in his world. I don't fall in love with fictional characters as often as I used to, but it happens, and then I live in a state of suspended reality until the book or, if I am lucky, the series has fluttered to a close.

This time, the object of my affectionate stalking is Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, head of the homicide department of the Sûreté du Québec, and thankfully the recurring character in a series of novels by Louise Penny. Gamache is intelligent, dignified, courteous and compassionate-- a rare combination for anyone, let alone a homicide inspector.  His character is well-layered, becoming more complex and compelling with each page of each book. Rather than developing the psychological calluses that plague the stereotypical "hard-boiled" detective, Gamache becomes more thoughtful in his approach to witnesses and suspects, more aware of how the world's gifts of love and beauty can become burdens that become motives.

This is not the first time I've fallen for a literary character. When most girls were angling for prom dates, I was falling for Fitzwilliam Darcy. I had seen the 1940 film version of Pride and Prejudice with Laurence Olivier, but I didn't fall in love with him. It was the book's Mr. Darcy who enchanted me to such an extent that I read the book seven times the year I was fourteen, and of course many times after. Like E.A. Robinson's "Richard Corey," I imagined him as. "A gentleman from sole to crown/Clean favored, and imperially slim..." Mr. Darcy formed my ideal for many years, and in life I found myself attracted to men who were emotionally distant, mistaking it for reserve.

As in life, however, you can't go home again. You can't re-read a book with the same "eyes hanging out" novelty as you did the first time. You know too much. There are no surprises in the re-read book. Even though the text on the page remains the same, you have changed, and filter all those fairy tales with jaded eyes.

And yet, I re-read books all the time, and I know I'll re-read the Gamache series. In fact, I've come to judge a book's quality based whether it can be re-read with any further enjoyment or insight. The Grand Sophy? Yes. John Carter on Mars? No. Re-reading is different, of course. I focus more on language and the subtleties I missed the first time and fourth. I even re-read Pride and Prejudice from time to time, especially this year as I write my sequel. I still find a thrill in the scene where Mr. Darcy shows emotion for the first time, when he discovers Elizabeth distraught over Lydia's elopement. His reserve breaks down: '"Good God! what is the matter?'' cried he, with more feeling than politeness..." Such a simple line with such great impact.


I wonder sometimes if my reader-self, she who enters a variety of worlds unafraid, isn't the real me, the one I've never achieved in real life. There's no one to perform for or conform with. It's all right to be surprised by the event I didn't see coming. I can absorb everything, move slowly or run. Dream and see the dream come true. At least she's there on command, though. And perhaps I can someday become the reader-self in the life that's still being written.

Gin soaked digressions (with a side of olives)

Some of my friends call me Sister Mary Martini. And they're right; I am religious about my martinis, a purist. My bar order: dry gin martini, up, olives on the side. By dry, I mean that, if the bartender wants to dab a little vermouth behind each ear, I don't mind. But that's as close as the vermouth bottle should come to the martini glass. I also want good gin, preferably Tanqueray 10. Some may prefer to drink martinis made with vodka if they like. It's up to them.

Gin. Or vodka.

Note: A martini does not contain crème de menthe. Or peach schnapps. Or melon liqueur or any other such component more traditionally found in the test kitchens of Godiva Chocolates, regardless of what upscale "martini bars" may list on their little dance-card-esque menus.

But I digress.

I was attracted to martinis early on. Like all good parents in the 1950s, mine drank martinis. (My father also prospected for uranium and brought it home, stored it under our beds and let us kids play with the Geiger counter. Tick. Tick. Tick. Ah! The 50s! Again, I digress.) With martinis came green olives, to which my siblings and I shared a dedicated addiction. Once a month or so, my parents used to take us all to the Belvedere, a supper club in our little town. On one occasion, the manager brought a big bowl of green olives to our table. Apparently some of us were going about and asking the other patrons if they planned on eating their olives. Not acceptable behavior. By the time I was in college, I could walk into any bar in Moscow, Idaho -- and there were a lot of them -- and the bartender would bring me a martini glass full of olives and a double shot of gin on the side. (The innocent olive, you understand, leads to the hard stuff.)

Gin Lane

 H.L. Mencken called the martini "the only American invention as perfect as the sonnet. And E.B. White called it "the elixir of quietude." Gin did not always have such elegant connotations, however. Take a look this Hogarth etching, titled "Gin Lane." (I love this picture. It looks like some of my parties, although I trust no children have come to harm here.)

Beer Street

"Gin Lane" depicts eager traders as they present a saw and cooking utensils (instruments of their livelihood)s to the pawnbroker, an old man gnaws a bone as a wistful dog looks on, buildings decay and fall on hapless pedestrians. Dear, dear! Bad gin! (Hogarth contrasts the evils of gin to the healthy benefits of beer in a companion piece, "Beer Street." Gin, after all, was a foreign import.)

The evils of gin are illustrated in this cautionary verse, origins unknown but undoubtedly of more recent creation than Hogarth's work:

One martini's my limit --
Two at the very most!
For with three I'm under the table--
And four I'm under the host!

Well, we are all forewarned!

Here's one of mine, likewise cautionary:

Martini Girl

by Mary Chase

Born on the cusp

Between vodka and gin

Her mom was an olive

Her dad was a Finn

Old Mom walked on toothpicks

Her dad – not at all

(seemed like fate they’d conspired

to conceived at all)

When she was a toddler

She staggered and reeled

As a girl her aroma

Got her pitched out of school

Her elegant figure

Made a hit with the guys

(til they looked into

those bold pimento eyes)

One night she rambled

The streets full of grief

She encountered some rough boys

-- they all sought relief

They left just enough

For the coroner’s art

(and when he was finished

they pickled her heart).

A little dark, perhaps, but I like it just the same. Let me know if you think I should switch to beer.

Bless

In 1998, I traveled to Iceland to teach a short course in "writing with technology" at the university. The opportunity came about because my colleague, Donald Graves, couldn't make the trip and he asked me to fill in. That's the mundane reason for this sudden chance to go someplace new. But I was also at a strange place in my life, and traveling to Iceland took me into a stranger realm, beautiful and surreal. It was fitting.

Gulla -- a double for Liv Ullmann -- met me at Keflavík Airport and we drove into a moon-like terrain. Iceland is studded with volcanic rocks and lava formations, and it was easy to see in them the faces and shapes of trolls turned to stone when caught in the sunlight. Icelanders like their trolls and respect them. As with the elves, they maintain a quid pro quo relationship, returning good for good and avoiding the mischief that arises when this pact is ignored. When we arrived at the seaside apartment I'd been assigned, Gulla and I walked out to the shore at the edge of Faxaflói Bay and poured some gin on the rocks (I'd brought several bottle of liquor as gifts) as an introductory offering to ensure a trouble-free stay.

Galleries and gift shops boasted shelves of troll dolls, stuffed troll mamas with babies snapped to their pendulous breasts, elf maidens and Vikings. But no one in Iceland apologized for the seamless overlap of folk belief with daily life in the twentieth century. One night we had dinner with a science professor and his wife, and the subject of trolls and elves came up. The year before, a highway had been re-routed so as not to interfere with a rock dedicated to elves. The  professor smiled when he told the story, but he didn't laugh. "After all," he said, "it's best to be safe, especially with a highway." 

 Throughout my stay, I poured gin on the rocks every morning and nodded to the troll faces that blinked back at me until I looked again. Elves were more reticent. I didn't see them, but they were there, especially, I think, in the sudden green of of valleys and among the small herds of Icelandic ponies that rose up in the mists.

I taught my class, met students from all over Iceland and some who had traveled from Greenland. They all spoke English, but when they chatted among themselves I listened to their ancient language which, by design, allows no interlopers from other languages. It was beautiful to hear. Only one word sounded familiar: Bless. As words will do, it had passed from Old Icelandic to Old English and down to us. Bless. That is how Icelanders say goodbye, and every parting was sacred to my ear.

I said at the outset that this was a strange time in my life. A few years prior to this adventure, my sister Sue had been diagnosed with and died of Inflammatory Breast Cancer, an insidiously fast moving form of the disease, often misdiagnosed or ignored until too late. That year was my turn. Just before my trip, I discovered symptoms identical to my sister's: a painful lump under the arm and slight rash that, because of its similarity to orange peel, is called peau d'orange. My doctor wanted to do a lumpectomy immediately, but I couldn't bring myself to cancel my trip. I was supposed to  leave the next day. The odds of dying from this disease were good. Even if I didn't die, the treatment itself would be so rigorous, I wouldn't be able to travel for a long time. Adventure, whether it would be my last or merely the next, spoke to me and I listened. I decided to go, and scheduled surgery for the day I returned.

Standing on the shore of the North Atlantic against a backdrop of story, gin bottle in hand, the deep magic of the land and whatever or whoever peopled it seeped into me. I already knew that death was nothing but a crossing between realms, but I learned here that in life we cross into other domains as well--if we are open to the offerings of chance. I returned home more peaceful than I had left, despite the tumor that had doubled in size. I sunk under the anesthetic as into another world where adventure might reside. I came out the other end with battle scars like the Vikings of old Iceland, but nothing to be mourned.

So, whatever journeys lie ahead, let's embark. Cast out to sea and let the waves take us or the gulls lead us. Let's listen to stories and believe for a time what those we encounter believe. And when we turn our sails towards home, leave behind the word "bless."

The Terrified Writer (It's for my own good!)

Inside my blocked brain

Well, now I've done it. Ever since I entered the writing funk I've been in for the past several years, I've been blaming my lack of productivity on an accompanying lack of a contract and a due date. I used to write a couple of chapters and a synopsis, send it off and someone would offer me a contract. But those days don't seem to be returning. After a lot of complaining about how hard it is to write when no one is making me do it, I started this blog as a way to jump start the writing habit I'd neglected.

As it turns out, I love writing my blog. I didn't expect to. I thought writing nonfiction would be tedious, but it isn't. It makes me think things I would never have thought if I hadn't written about them. It makes me look more deeply at life around me. It forces me to be social.

The problem is that I still wasn't writing fiction. In fact, I was so happy with my blog that that's all I was doing, and that's no way to earn a living (unless there is an unprecedented rise in the number of visitors clicking ads on this page). I knew I needed to do something more if I was going to finish one of the dozen or more partial manuscripts I have floating around.

There's one in particular I really wanted to finish, a Pride and Prejudice sequel: Mary and Kitty: A Tale of Two Sisters. It's been rejected as "too literary" by numerous agents and editors (but isn't being literary the point of attempting to write in the style of the august Jane?)  Since I didn't have a contract to jump start me, I decided to "simulate" one. Early last week,  I began to serialize my book, giving myself a weekly deadline .

Readers traditionally love Jane Austen sequels, so it wasn't long before I had followers and a lot of hits. Well, now I have to write the silly thing and I am terrified.

Picture me here

One would think that the notion of emulating Austen, borrowing her characters and settings, as well as her audience would be the scary part, but it isn't. I must be alarmingly arrogant because this doesn't bother me a bit. Regency England was the setting for one of my past lives (more on this another time) so it comes to me naturally.

No, what scares me is having an audience who will necessarily see the rough spots as I compose. The composing process is messy, but readers rarely have to bear with it. Moreover, writing a chapter a week, is one thing, but when you're trying to write like Austen it's like trying to compose with an embroidery needle. There are bound to be a few loose threads and awkward tangles. And what if the readers don't stay with me? How humiliating! How good it will be for me ---and my outsized ego!

So, read Mary and Kitty  if you like Austen. Forward the link to like-minded friends. Send me comments and suggestions, please. I will need them all!

Rain At Last

As you may have noted, we've been having some weather over here on the left coast. Yes, we had some snow out here in Portland. That may not surprise some readers, considering that we're located on about the same parallel as St. John, New Brunswick, but snowfall is about as common here as it is in Atlanta. Our climate actually has a lot in common with London, except it rains more here, an admirable 37 inches per year compared with London's measly 29 inches.

Sometimes, children must borrow snow from the neighbors

We do get the odd freak storm every other year or so, generally between half an inch or two, and up to six once a decade. Communal fear (adult) and joy (kids) reign in equal parts. From the first hint that a cold front may be headed our way, the grocerers are packed with shoppers laying in provisions. My husband, who regular readers will recall is a Brazilian, even bought a kerosene stove, a couple lanterns and a propane space heater one year. Kids listen for school cancellations and gather cookie sheets to sled on.

The most amusing aspect of an impending storm, however, is the television coverage. There is NO OTHER NEWS than the possibility of snow. Every station sends their lowest seniority reporters out to watch the roads and submit reports every 10-15 minutes. These brave souls are posted on highway overpasses, dressed in ski hats, mukluks and their most recent Christmas sweater, and submit such stories as this:

Field Reporter: Hi, this is Scoop Porter out here in the Columbia Gorge where, as you can see, it has not begun to snow yet.

Anchor:  Any reports from the road, Scoop?

Field Reporter:  Well, there aren't many out there tonight. People are playing it safe. We did talk to a truck driver headed toward Pendleton, though. He told us that was indeed carrying traction devices. These traction devices, chains he called them, are specially designed to prevent a vehicle from sliding or getting stuck in snow.

 Anchor:  That's good reporting Scoop. However, we all know there's nothing anyone can do in the event black ice forms on the road surface.

 Field Reporter: Right you are. Black ice is treacherous.

 Anchor: And why do they call it black ice, Scoop? Is it actually black?

 Field Reporter: Heh, heh. No, no. It's called black ice because you can't see it. Ice is transparent, as you probably know, and against the pavement the ice is invisible.

Someone has scraped the black ice to check for visibility

 Anchor: So you say this ice is invisible. So suppose little Tommy or Joey scraped some of it up. Would they be able to see it?

 Field Reporter: Well, I don't know, but I sure wouldn't encourage kids to be outside tonight scraping up black ice or anything else.

 Anchor: Cold out there?

 Field Reporter: My grandpa'd say it was cold as a -- just a minute! I thought I saw a flake of snow. Yes. Yes, that was actually a flake of snow out here. The first winter storm of 2012 has arrived.

 Anchor: (cutting back to the newsroom, now with a backdrop reading Winter's Wrath) There you have it. It is officially snowing out in the Columbia Gorge. The list of school closures will be available after this quick break.

This dialog is only slightly exaggerated, as other Portlanders will affirm. And the reporters are almost correct in calling snowy weather treacherous -- it's actually Pacific Northwest drivers who are dangerous. I recall watching with disbelief  as a driver spun out of control coming down Queen Anne Ave. in Seattle. He was so terrified, he jumped out of his car and almost ran himself over. Of course our lack of expertise is exacerbated by the fact that it doesn't snow often enough for the county to purchase snow removal equipment. It's just as dangerous to be on the sidewalk as it is on the road. And it upsets the livestock, as you can see here.

So, it's raining here again, and I am grateful. The primroses are already peeping out. The grass green stays year round. And rain -- you don't have to shovel it.

A Story from the Road

Jose and I left for Las Vegas and the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this week, not really looking forward to the trip. I generally don't mind two or three days in Las Vegas. It reminds me how much I love my home. This time, however, we're in LV for a full week. That's way too much glitter and greed.

The CES attracts 167,000 gadget geeks and nano nerds to the Strip; while people-watching is always promising, flights are full and fraught with more than the usual discomfort. Seats in the coach section are about as accommodating as veal-fattening pens, but this time ours didn't recline. The seats in front of us did, of course, landing a bald head very nearly in my lap. I am an advanced soul, however, and refrained from connecting his freckles even though I happened to have a pink felt pen on me.

As ever, the high point of the flight was the arrival of the beverage cart. I opened my tray table into my gut and discovered an enormous ad for Dramamine® emblazoned upon it. Product placement or a warning? Time would tell. I received my six ounce glass of sparkling water and had no sooner taken the first sip when the steward called out to her colleague down the aisle and asked if her ice had "funny stuff" in it too. Hmm. I didn't see anything amusing in my glass, but I set it down anyway.
     "You mean the little black specks?" she responded. Pepper? Fleas in mukluks?  "It's OK. All the ice bags have them."
     "Huh...weird." And they continued serving.
When the steward came by again, I asked her what as in the ice. "Oh," she said dismissively, "it was just some black stuff." I gathered that much, as had the back twenty rows.
     "What do you think it was?" I asked.
     "Probably the lettering from the ice bag," she said. "It rubs off on the ice."
     "There's lettering on the inside of the bag?"
     "Yes," she replied in a tone suggesting everyone knew that and off she trotted.

So, long flight. Unremarkable, aside from the suspicious ice. Old plane. Rattling from Portland to Phoenix. Shuddering from Phoenix to Las Vegas. Still, we arrived in one piece and found our luggage, too. We stepped out into the evening, ready to face more madness. But something else happened instead.

From the taxi line, we could see the Vegas strip glowing in the alien landscape. A nearly full moon floated over the desert like a slice of apricot. As the cab driver tossed our bags in the trunk, I pointed it out.

He looked away. "Where I come from, we don't look at the moon."

It was such an odd response I assumed his heavy accent had interfered with my understanding. Once we were on our way, I asked him how things were going and he began with the usual discourse on how the drivers can't make any money if they're honest. He was honest, so he didn't make money. "Well," I said, "make a wish on the moon and maybe tonight will be better." Turns out I had heard him correctly the first time.
     "The moon is not good for wishing," he said. "It's a dangerous thing."

Taxis, and the conversations within them, sometimes go places you'd never expect. Our driver -- I'll call him Boris --told us he was from Bosnia where he had spent three years in a concentration camp and emerged half dead. But life, he told me, is nothing.
     "And the moon is dangerous?" I asked.
     "It's full of bad humors. It's a dead thing so we never look." Then he turned the conversation. "What is the moon to you?"
     The moon. Artemis. Diana. Selene. Chaste Goddess. "Serenity," I said.
     "For us it is the opposite. Crazy and dangerous."
     Ah. Luna. Lunacy.

     "It's all right if you have found the rose, but I lost my chance. I have not led a good life, so I will not find one. If I am lucky, someone will give one to me." I think of myself as generally informed in matters of mysticism. I know a symbol when I see one. I was lost, though, and it showed."You know what I mean when I say the rose?"
     I thought of the various roses in Eliot's poetry. The 'multifoliate rose', 'disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves', 'the door we never opened into the rose garden'. But Boris didn't mean Eliot. The Virgin Mary, the mystical rose? The rose of the medieval iconography, encompassing both the sacred and the profane? The roses in the Garden of Eden which, according to St. Ambrose, grew thorns after the fall of Adam and Eve? The "healing rose" of alchemy? I had an idea, a "felt-sense", as Eugene Gendlin would say. Perhaps Boris's rose encompassed all these things. 
     "A path of salvation?" I asked.
     "Yes," he said. "It is a path and more."  And then we were at the hotel.


This conversation created a still space that has stayed with me even here in this place of gratuitous noise. It reminds me that beneath this Oz-like city, so full of humbugs, the desert still sends up a primal call that can make us look twice into memory and myth. The glow of the moon may be no more innocent than the neon lights surrounding us here. Even the roses spinning away on the "Beauty and the Beast" slot machine may summon our hearts in ways we can't begin to know. Nothing is what we thought, not even a taxi driver hoping to find his path.

Entering Educational Dead-Time

 Let not young souls be smothered out before
They do quaint deeds and fully flaunt their pride. 
It is the world's one crime its babes grow dull... 

                                                                            From "The Leaden-Eyed" by Vachel Lindsay

It's January. Students and staff have returned to school. September is a distant dream, and the long march through February, March and April stretches ahead. It's like the sequence of the python eating an antelope on the Nature Channel: It's hideous, but you can't look away. It's the beginning of the dreaded test preparation season.

Standardized testing—especially that borne of  No Child Left Behind and further supported by Race to the Top and the Common Core standards—is an entrenched ritual of the education industry driven by profit and politics. On January 8, it will have been 12 years since NCLB oozed its way into the system. With it came a lot flawed ideas about education and, as always, any number of idiocies that had nothing to do with classroom reform, including the little-discussed mandate that any school receiving federal funding must allow access to military recruiters.

My chief complaint about NCLB is supposedly its chief asset, one that most politicians praise: the mandate that funding will only be used for programs and teaching methods supported by "scientifically-based research." Did congress have any idea what this would mean in practice?

[Boredom Alert: you may find the following paragraph tedious. Feel free to skip to the next.]
Research in education has traditionally followed the methodology of the social sciences. This sort of research focuses on humans in the course of their lives rather than rats in a lab, and tends to be observational, descriptive and qualitative. This is necessary because we can't control variables outside the lab, and every human in a group represents and behaves according to a great quivering mass of unpredictable, heterogeneous idiosyncrasies. The literature of education, as anyone might guess, speaks to behavioral and cognitive tendencies that appear to occur in certain situations. Such studies are held to a moderately rigorous statistical probability level of  p 0.05—there is a 5% chance that differences between an observed group and the rest of the population is due to chance. Like the rest of the social sciences, education also makes use of meta-analyses, a  statistical method of combining the results of studies even though they may have been designed differently. Scientifically based research, on the other hand, reflects the lab setting and is held to a very rigorous probability level of p 0.01, the same as is used with pharmaceutical testing.

As Stetphen Metcalf puts it in his seminal article, "Reading Between the Lines,"

[NCLB] ...  led to a feeding frenzy. Educational Testing Service, maker of the SAT, has always been nonprofit; but it recently created a for-profit, K-12 subsidiary, ETS K-12 Works, to provide "testing and measurement services to the nation's elementary and secondary schools." To help market it, the company replaced CEO Nancy Cole, an educator with a background in psychometrics, with an executive from the marketing wing of the pharmaceutical industry.

And so it began. Several decades worth of research, teacher practice and educational materials were no longer valid or funded because they did not meet a pharmaceutical measure for predictability.  And out with the bathwater went a lot of curriculum that was no longer emphasized because the results of its study (and testing) couldn't be replicated scientifically. Instead, emphasis was on "minimal competence along a narrow range of skills, with an eye toward satisfying the low end of the labor market." (also Metcalf). Most schools, faced with "exposure" as failures, complied. It wasn't just art and music that suffered this time; free reading time, projects that put learning in real contexts, guest speakers, even class discussions -- cut back or, in some cases, banished. Publishers whose reading series had been adopted included mandatory classroom checks by company representatives to make sure schools were complying with the new curriculum to the letter. I know a teacher who was written up because the script with which he was provided was sitting on his desk rather than being held directly in front of his face. No kidding. And all of this was followed by tests, often designed with the help of the publisher with whom a district had contracted.

 NCLB is now subject to flexibility waivers, but the new legislation still mandates that annual standardized test scores are used as a "significant factor" in the performance evaluations of teachers. Change takes place slowly education. I'm afraid we'll continue to see children and teachers marching leaden-eyed to the drumbeat of institutionalized boredom and mediocrity unless there is a push to re-liberate enthusiasm and intellectual curiosity in schools  -- a push just as compelling and well-funded as the one that stifled education 10 years ago.