On a Tuesday

Getting our next foster on Thursday night; a 10-month-old male found as a stray in Stanley. That’s all we know about him, except for the fact that the shelter staff described him as “very gentle, sweet.” Which is encouraging, at the very least. Expecting an adolescent tornado. Just hope he can keep the humping to a minimum. That is one dog behavior that Pyrrha and I cannot abide.

Kelsey and I are going to do an e-mail Bible study together on 1 Peter. (One of the more interesting, aggressive little letters in the New Testament.) What a sweet and genuine sister I have. We should go visit them in D.C. Anyone want to watch Pyrrha for a weekend?

I read a New Yorker profile on Rob Bell from November 2012 that has me thinking a lot. How he interests me, how I don’t know what I think, how I don’t personally want to “become merely one more mildly spiritual Californian.” I gravitate toward about half of the things he says; the other half make me turn up my nose. (His disdain for tradition and beautiful church structures I find particularly grating, having grown up in a wannabe megachurch with the same Gen-X ideals.) In the last line of the profile, he is quoted as saying about the Church: “‘It is the most frustrating institution in the world,’ he said the next day. ‘And yet, when it’s firing on all cylinders, there’s absolutely nothing like it.’”

It’s about time gender roles were under attack. (More on that later, perhaps.)

On the nightstand: Anna Karenina, which continues to be marvelous; The Age of Wonder, by Richard Holmes, which I am somehow struggling to pay attention to; and a whole spate of books about how not to kill houseplants. Can’t focus on Spring Torrents (I. Turgenev) right now, so I will attempt that later in the year. One Russian at a time is enough.

What should we name our next foster? A masculine name ending in “o,” to keep with our current trend (Brando, Laszlo)?

The books we need

Epigraph to Anne Sexton’s book All My Pretty Ones (1962):

… the books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation — a book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.

— from a letter of Franz Kafka to Oskar Pollak

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Frightening and lovely!

Thinking about: how I really need to get serious about training the dog, all-black outfits, how much I dislike the word “outfit,” courgettes, lemonade, North Korea, if I will ever read fiction again, mantis shrimp, and the farmhouse smell and feel of our house (hovel) in the summer. (I am calling it summer now, since we hit 90°F this past week.)

Looking forward to this weekend: Kathryn is coming to stay with us, and then we’ll be traveling to see Catherine, Russ, Ava, and new baby Auden!

Tuesday thoughts

Crocus in our yard. Also, what is the plural of “crocus”? Crocuses? Croci?

I have been thinking about:

Divinity and distance

Lately, I feel like God is very far away from me. Or that I am far away from God. I can’t quite tell which it is. I don’t like feeling this way, but I am not sure how to find a way out of it. Instead, I keep telling myself, “God does not want to let go of you.” This is actually something that Jonathan once told me.

Nonfiction

Since finishing Infinite Jest, I’ve felt a little “broken,” reading-wise, and suddenly, I only have an appetite for nonfiction. I am reading photo-filled, potentially frivolous books about fashion, personal style, and a history of the (demise of the) luxury goods industry; another dog book; and a how-to guide on copperplate calligraphy (a birthday gift from my excellent in-laws). I have never felt this way before — utterly uninterested in fiction. It makes me nervous. But I am planning on re-reading Anna Karenina* soon, so I am hoping that will reinvigorate me.

*Side note: Grace, Guion, Sam, and I watched Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina on Saturday night. Tom Stoppard’s hand in the screenplay and in the overall creative direction (filmed almost entirely within a theater or on a stage) was appreciated, but I finished the film feeling that a.) my dislike of Keira Knightley will never die, and b.) this is not a novel that should ever, ever be made into a movie. I know it’s been done before (like five or six times, all terribly), but really. Leave Anna alone. Read the novel.

Ballet

I continue to be terrible at ballet. I am now taking a second ballet class, the follow-up intermediate level, and I am taking it with Celeste. Yes, the I-took-ballet-for-18-years Celeste. She is beautiful to watch in class, and I had hopes that she would distract everyone else on how plainly terrible I am. This class is about 10 times harder than the prior one, and I do not seem to have improved at all. When we all filed out after our first session, our instructor was congratulating everyone, telling them how impressed she was, etc. And then she looked at me, and said, with a sweet and sympathetic smile, “Don’t give up! You’re so close. I just hope you don’t quit the class.”

And here I was naïvely thinking that no one noticed how terrible I am.

No matter. It’s fun, and I like it. It’s been a nice exercise in subtle humiliation, to stick with something that I have so little natural aptitude for.

Wednesday thoughts

Piecemeal thoughts on a Wednesday:

“Like” and “like” and “like”—but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?

— Virginia Woolf, The Waves

♦

It is easy for me to forget that God cares about little things. I’m a little thing, after all.

♦

Even though I very much hope one of the candidates loses, if I am really being honest with myself, I don’t think much will change at all, regardless of the victor. Such is the nature of the American political machine. It has made me an unapologetic cynic with regard to all politicians everywhere. Machiavelli was the one to convince me not to become a political science major during my freshman year and I still think of him when I watch the debates or muddle through social media posts; it’s all a farce, all a dirty game.

♦

I miss my family.

♦

I need to read some lighthearted, dreamy fiction. Flannery O’Connor and Jesmyn Ward and Samuel Beckett all back-to-back = Violent, dark times. I need some fluttering, social web-spinning, 19th-century British ladywriters, STAT.

♦

Lately, I have been so thankful for my job and for the work that I do. I am grateful for my coworkers, for the camaraderie that we have, for the rarity of our very happy workplace coexistence. I love being an editor. I’m so glad I found this profession.

♦

New Life Goal: Read 100 books a year for the rest of my life.

We are saying thank you

Photo by: Flickr user dolfi.

Thanks
W.S. Merwin

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
smiling by the windows looking out
in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

We have been talking about gratitude lately. I read this poem at small group this past week and it made me feel hopeful and sad and focused all at the same time. I think it is a beautiful one. It always hits me right where I am.

I made a list of the 100+ best novels I have ever read. Feel free to voice your objections, opinions, etc.

Rose and Kemp are coming this weekend; we are expecting bouts of busyness and cold weather; apples to be picked, dogs to be walked, farmers markets to be visited. Have a good one, y’all!

Thinking, breathing

Thoughts, on this first day of October:

• What a lovely, lovely wedding, Chris and Sallie. We are so happy for you two and delighted that you will remain in our lives in town. Don’t ever leave!
• I tried to be brave like Maddy, but I’m apparently not over my stink-bug phobia. I looked like a foolish, fretful 3-year-old while Maddy calmly and competently plucked stink bugs off my back and chair and plate all night long. She is a gem.
• These days, when I look at Pyrrha for a moment, these words well up in me: Thank you thank you thank you.
• Reading The Second Sex and Rebecca simultaneously is very jarring.
• Rose and Kemp are coming to visit this weekend! On the agenda: Hiking, apple picking, solving the American political system, and in Rose’s words, “intimate woman-time.” While the boys are presumably doing man stuff, like talking about beer and comparing muscles or whatever it is that boys do when they are alone…
• Speaking of intimate woman-time, on this day in 2008, this is where I was. Missing it (and them) now.
• I try to be calm when I look at the calendar. I fail.

The Internet’s bad attitude

Our gargantuan crape myrtle in the front yard.

I wanted to write a post about feminists, about how no one wants to be one, but then I thought, “No, Abby. More importantly, no one wants to read that.” So, I will keep it to myself. (You’re welcome.)

Guion said the other night at dinner that he wants the Internet to be a nicer place. He noted that nothing is worth posting unless it is a meme, preferably a sarcastic meme, or a jab at someone, preferably a famous someone. The Internet is all snark and no sincerity. At least, that is what Social Media has wrought. Heaven forbid I contribute to that snarky, pointless vortex, but I do. Every day. What’s the solution? How do we fix it? Get off the Internet. Take one’s dog for a walk and wait for seemingly endless minutes while she sniffs every sixth blade of grass. This, I have found, is the only solution to the Internet’s bad attitude.

I started three new books last night, each one quite different from the next: Binocular Vision, collected stories of Edith Pearlman; The Right-Hand Shore, by Christopher Tilghman, who runs Guion’s creative writing program at UVA; and The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes, which won the 2011 Booker Prize. I liked noting how differently they all started their books.

On the subway Sophie recited the list of stations like a poem.

— ”Inbound,” Binocular Vision

We see Miss Mary Bayly and her distant and much younger cousin Mr. Edward Mason sitting on the porch of the Mansion House on her ancestral farm, Mason’s Retreat.

— The Right-Hand Shore

I remember, in no particular order:

• a shiny inner wrist;
• steam rising from a wet sink as a hot frying pan is laughingly tossed into it;
• gouts of sperm circling a plughole, before being sluiced down the full length of a tall house;
• a river rushing nonsensically upstream, its wave and wash lit by half a dozen chasing torchbeams;
• another river, broad and grey, the direction of its flow disguised by a stiff wind exciting the surface;
• bathwater long gone cold behind a locked door.

This last isn’t something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed.

— The Sense of an Ending

All possess very disparate styles and priorities, but so far, I’m enjoying each one.

I have thought: I will always be reading and I will never finish my to-read list. I will die not having read everything I wanted to, even if I read 100 books a year for the rest of my life. The other day, I whittled my to-read list down to about 156 books, down from about 270. But I keep adding more and the count is gradually creeping up. (I need some solid nonfiction recommendations, by the way. Mind-broadening books.) Some time, I’d like to discuss the troubling note of xenophobia that has crept into my reading preferences, but that’s a different boring topic for a different boring blog post.

A wolf in the house

Yes?

“Isn’t it strange,” Guion said, looking at Pyrrha today, sprawled out on the kitchen floor, “that an animal THIS BIG lives in our house? With us?”

It is. It is also extremely delightful. Sometimes I catch a glimpse of her, slinking into another room, and think for a split-second, “We adopted a WOLF.” Albeit a very timid, sweet wolf. I love her a lot already. She has so much to learn and so many fears to conquer, but I have a lot of faith in her.

Breaking up with Jhumpa Lahiri

I’ve more or less regained some of my reading momentum. I just finished, for the second time, the thoroughly wonderful (and surprisingly funny) Madame Bovary, in Lydia Davis’ new translation. I started Marilynne Robinson’s new collection of essays, When I Was a Child I Read Books, and finished the very disappointing Unaccustomed Earth, Jhumpa Lahiri’s latest.

Here’s my beef with Lahiri: Lady, you write so well and you write so clearly. I gravitate toward your stories, because deep down, I really and truly love unexciting domestic narratives about relationships, dishes in the sink, and building ennui. (This is why Jonathan Franzen will always have my undying affection.) BUT. You keep reusing the same story, every time. I’ve now read all of your published work. It is a formula and it is so tedious and predictable: Bengali family immigrates to America; their children have tension with their traditional parents, because they want to be American; kids go to Ivy League colleges; kids fall in love with Americans; parents forbid it, try to arrange a marriage with a Bengali; kid marries American anyway; marriage disintegrates into boredom and unrequited longing for some vague thing. BLEH. It is narrow and it is dull. Over it.

The Practical One

I have a great, patient husband. Last night’s revelation: I want to be a dreamer, too, but I say that I can’t be, because I’m The Practical One. However, in reality, that title is just a disguise for what’s really lurking: Fear. I am practical because I am afraid of the unknown, afraid of risks, afraid of starting a brewery with my friends, afraid of quitting a job and becoming a dog trainer. And yet I am content. I like where I am. But is that a cover, too?

Faulkner: Our way of living needs slamming

William Faulkner, chillin'. Source: This Recording.

Q: Are we degenerating?

William Faulkner: No. Reading is something that is in a way necessary like heaven or a clean collar, but not important. We want culture but don’t want to go to any trouble to get it. We prefer reading condensations.

Q: That sounds like a slam on our way of living.

William Faulkner: Our way of living needs slamming. Everybody’s aim is to help people, turn them to heaven. You write to help people. The existence of this class in creative writing is good in that you take time off to learn to write and you are in a period where time is your most valuable possession.

– William Faulkner answers questions from his students at the University of Mississippi in 1947, republished on This Recording.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

Taking off early this week to spend a weekend in the Triangle with old friends! Can’t wait. Pax. Remember what Faulkner says.

Today I feel like

Blooming tree in the Arboretum, Chapel Hill. Source: Me.

Today I feel like:

• A thirsty daffodil.
• Still yelling about the injustice of my first-ever speeding ticket.
• Painting from Grace’s big tray of watercolors, using the little eye dropper and a stiff brush.
• The dog in the shelter that no one wants to walk because she’s always barking ferociously.
• Giving up on I Sailed with Magellan. Turns out I can’t relate very well to Chicago’s inner-city boys from the 1960s.
• Painting my nails.
• Going outside and never coming back in.