Out of the fog, into the blog

Well, I am back. The flu seems to have run its course after eight days of fever, bad temper and upper respiratory effluence. I cannot recommend it, except for the fact that I lost 7 pounds. It is nice to sit up in a chair today, answer questions without a scowl, put in my contacts and lay off the drugs.

While I was sick I was following an extremely long and convoluted discussion on LibraryThing about the future of reading and education. Lots of lamenting about today's high schoolers and the primacy of texting as a means of communication, grousing about teaching, lack of critical thinking and on and on. They're right.  It's alarming, but I'm not so sure -- with the exception of texting -- that these are recent phenomena. I can't recall that I or my companions in high school were any more likely to express ourselves in sentences, let alone paragraphs. Our utterances may have been more multi-syllabic, but what, after all, does "keep on truckin'" really mean? Today's youth may be more incoherent than ever, but I'd venture to say they communicate at a greater rate about less substantive issues than any group in history.

That sounds suspiciously like faint praise, doesn't it?

Approve of texting or not, the fact is there is nothing we can do about the shifting paradigms that turn language on its ears about every 500 years or so. There's little doubt the internet and other electronic media have affected our ability to concentrate. Why read, when there's one more thing to click on? It's little wonder that the sound bytes that drive our political thoughtlessness should transform into similarly simple exchanges of information characterized by texting, replete with equally dangerous opportunities for misinterpretation. Neither is the disapproval unanticipated -- witness the outcry against Gutenberg when it became evident that literacy might not be the sole turf of the elite. Changes in literacy bring about changes in society -- chain main and book clubs, for example -- and that is what really scares people.

Lamentations make us old before our time. As is always the case, we have to use change, whatever form it takes, because nothing will stop it. I'd suggest that teachers challenge their students to translate the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet into text messages, tweet about what they're reading, create a FaceBook page for Captain Ahab or Blanche DuBois -- anything that the immediate incarnation of communication dictates. Just suck it up. Times change.

Taking Advantage of the Plague

I've been way under the weather for the past few days, as you know, and fretting about not meeting the demands I'd committed to for National Writers Month, e.g. writing a novel in a month. As a basis, I was going to use a synopsis I wrote a few years ago: The Ghost Doll. I like the story, I know just enough about the characters for them to start telling me who they are, I'm looking forward to researching/visiting the south for background.

I like the title, too, but when I started thinking about it I realized that it really does tell the whole story -- and if it does, there's not enough story there. I need a physical antagonist for this story -- not just a paranormal one -- who will provide not so much a secondary plot as a concurrent one. But who is s/he and what's the motivation? No clue. So here we go again: this novel isn't going to be written in a month or even two. At best, I will have to set myself the task of rewriting the synopsis in a month and making sure it makes sense.

This experience reveals a nasty secret about the synopsis: if you can write one quickly, clearly and compellingly, so that the story seems to flow like silk off a spool, there's something really wrong with the story. There's not enough there -- at least not for mystery/suspense/thriller --whatever it is I'm writing now. I'm not knocking romance - that's where I came from - but it's a whole different kind of writing. The task in romance is to create circumstances that keep the protagonists apart until they're about nuts and then find a way to fling them together. The romance story goal is clear, but what I'm writing now demands a lot more of me - or at least different stuff. It's as if I have to write the story in such a way as to mislead the reader while always telling the truth. I'll need to layer all the little byways, assumptions, miss-steps so that the story the reader can play detective. There should be no clear feeling that all will work out in the end.That makes for a very difficult synopsis.

So, while this flu is bad, and keeps me from my work, it also keeps me from writing too soon and having to toss some chapters. As far as goals, the last book took 15 years. With any luck at all I'll finish this in 10.

The Quarantine as Habitrail

I am still in self-imposed quarantine today with this hideous flu and I feel more and more like a be-plagued hamster. I am shredding kleenexes into my nest, following paths for food, sleep and calls of nature.

I have no little tricks so no one comes to see me except the dogs and they make me skittish. All I'm missing is the water bottle suspended from the ceiling, and I wish I had one.


I'm telling myself I will start writing tomorrow, and am pleased that little snippets of back story are coming to me already. I write them down in a crabbed and cryptic hand for later transcription. It's nice that the brain keeps working and that I have enough strength to run after it taking notes.

Back to sleep ...zzzzzzzzzz

Flu and Writing

Today is day two of NaNoWriMo: National Writing Month, and by now I should have launched into my second chapter. My synopsis is ready to go, I know what 's in the opening scene, but I haven't written a jot.

I have the flu, you see, and my brain feels as if it's been wrapped in painful cotton candy. You know the feeling, so I won't go on to describe it in any further detail.  Having the flu is one of the worst things about not being a child any more. No mama armed with vaporizers, thermometers, cool cloths, or entreaties to try to eat a little something. These little comforts are not the same coming from my husband, although he tries. What's more, he's just getting over this too, and it's a long slow trudge to wellness.

 I will try to get well, take my vitamins and sleep the good sleep. Tomorrow I'll get three chapters done -- right?

The Feast of All Hallows

Today - the day after All Hallows Eve - is still celebrated in the Catholic Church as All Saints Day. It is set aside to honor the unknowns who had achieved sainthood, but flew under the radar of the Church's basilisk eye. My childhood was full of saints, but not in the saintliest of ways.

Among the favorite books in our sibling library was a small red volume: The Little Pictorial Lives of the Saints. Intended to edify, its graphic descriptions of martyrdom were grist for our Gothic creativity, especially before Halloween. The nuns at school were determined to avoid the holiday's heathen roots by requiring that we dress as saints for our costume parade. We kids perused the pages of LPLS for costume ideas as if it were the Sears catalog.

There were lots of ghoulish choices: St. Sebastian, riddled with arrows and St. Brigid who washed her face in lye to avoid offers of marriage en route to the convent. Trials with nary an "ouch!" And St. Christina, one of my favorites.

When St. Christina (apparently something of a bad girl) destroyed her father's idols he had her whipped with rods and thrown into a dungeon. Tough love! Unrepentant, she was torn on iron hooks and fastened on a rack over a fire (which God turned on her tormentors). Then a heavy stone was hung about her neck and she was thrown in Lake Bolsena. She was rescued by an angel and outlived her father who, we are told, died of spite.

St. Christina! Victorian waifs and drudges had nothing on her.

Whatever the nuns had in mind, our little procession around the school yard was as macabre as any of Wes Craven's imaginings. Their good intentions may have been thwarted, but nuns are generally Pollyannas, so I'm sure they didn't see it that way. They'd have looked past our intention to appall and recreated it as soul-lifting dedication to faith, sacred emulations of the holy by the innocent. Lest ye become as little children...hmmmm.


I wonder why children are so grisly sometimes, and why we adults become more queasy about such things as we age. Maybe because, as Twain once noted, babies come into the world screaming with fists clenched like Munch-esque depictions of infantile outrage and horror. Life tames us and we leave silent, slack-jawed, our hands falling open to receive parting gifts-- surely, an equally disturbing image.

Ghostly Meanderings

Happy Halloween! My favorite childhood holiday,when we cast off our little selves and became dreadful creatures of the night. It's Samhain, Witches' New Year, All Hallow's Eve. Whatever you call it, the dead are with us today. They always are, of course, because we carry them with us wherever we go. We choose to be haunted, and this holiday celebrates the otherworld and acknowledges its overlap with ours.

A few years ago in Munich I was taking notes for a poem about the ghost of Hitler, doomed eternally to bus tables at the Hofbräuhaus where it all started. I saw him harried, ordered about by Teutonic waitrons, toting empty steins to the kitchen while trying to grab a bite of schnitzel between tables.

That's where the poem began, but that's not where it ended. All that's left of my original scribblings is the phrase: ...night along the River Isar... 

Poetry is headstrong and tricky. Like an evil parent who promises a treat then takes you to the dentist, it leads you on to places you wouldn't have gone if only you'd known. Places you didn't know were haunted:

Ghost Poem, I

I have seen them too,

These tricks of light.

Or felt them

No one stands there at the window

Gazing through the watery panes

As if waiting

In the alley

No washwoman treads the

Stones ahead singing of spring cuckoos

And that night along the River Isar

The bright moon revealed nothing,

When empty dreams rang out with echoes

But the whispers are different.

No trick explains the sudden voice that says

“Bring me my cane, Rose” or

“That was the other one. I did not mean this.”

A place does not know quiet or alone

Where memories range like scattered leaves across a floor,

And burdened shadows hide no tranquil void

Where tides of murmurs plunge and rise.

And so you see. Someday I'll go back to the Hitler poem. We'll see where it takes me next.

The Drive of Dexter

Tonight's the night. It's Sunday. Dexter is on at 9 p.m. and I can hardly wait.

Why do so many of us love to watch this serial about a serial killer? I'm fascinated by Dexter's character, but I wouldn't want to have a beer with him. The stories are good, the acting is great., and, sure, he was raised to rein in his sociopathy and only strike at the guilty who slip the noose. He's a grand avenger who sets straight the slip-ups of the criminal justice system. His killings are grisly, but tidy. There is no sentiment. These are well deserved executions.

That's not reason enough, though. In daily life, I'm against the death penalty.

Dexter calls himself a monster, but we're drawn to him as if he's some long-awaited good guy hero we've all yearned for to bring scales of Justice back in balance. It helps that the actor, Michael C. Hall, is a genius and awfully good looking. I know I would not have the same attraction to the program if Dexter were portrayed by Jack Black, say, or Don Knotts. Evil must take care to be attractive.

So what it is that draws me and so many other viewers? On this eve of All Hallows Eve, my thoughts run to the show's examination of the monster within. We all have one, whether it be serial killer, neocon mouthpiece or proponent of traditional grammar as I once was. Perhaps from Dexter we learn there is a saving grace for all of us, and context can make monsters of us all, if only metaphorically.