Pearls My Mother Wore

This image is almost as comforting to me as the actual walk was.  I’m so fortunate to live near such natural beauty.

I think I wrote myself out on the last two, long blog posts.  I’ve had several people tell me they liked what I had to say about Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye.  I’m glad I wrote that one.

My current lit-challenge is Anna Karenina.  That will take me awhile to get through.  My paperback copy is 855 pages and almost two inches thick with minuscule type.  I was happy to discover upon starting that the chapters are generally about five pages long, if that.  I like those small, bite-sized chapters.  I can really imagine getting through the whole thing, eventually.

Last Saturday night I participated in an open-mic event called “Random Acts.”  The event is held from 5:00 – 7:00, on the second Saturday of every month, at Readers’ Books here in Sonoma, and it’s open to anybody who cares to attend.  The fee is five dollars.  Anyone can put their name in a hat to be pulled in random order.  When your name is pulled, you get five minutes of microphone time to do with as you please: sing, play an instrument, tell a joke, do a trick, or read.  Many poems were read – a couple powerful ones by war veterans, a movie review was read for The King’s Speech, and a published letter-to-the-editor was read.  I read from my novel, Pearls My Mother Wore.  I kinda bombed.  I choked under the time constraint and just started reading from the first page.  I should have read less but provided the audience with more of an introduction to the story.  I’ll do it again, but with a better lead in.  Live and learn.  Nobody booed, and I got plenty of applause.

One of the poems that was read had to do with what will future generations call us.  Not the iron age or the stone age, the information age or the space age.  She named several different ages in history.  She prefaced her reading with how deeply affected she was by the horrors that were taking place in Tucson, Az.  Her voice was shrill, and she was obviously very shaken.  Although she didn’t answer her own question posed by the poem, it’s tenor suggested we would be referred to as the moronic age, or the age of ignorance and aggression, something bad and unflattering for sure.  I had been working all day and knew nothing of the murderous ambush.  The poet happened to be sitting next to me, and when she sat down, I could actually feel the heat of her body radiating off of her.  At the break I asked her what had happened.

All week I’ve been watching way more CNN than normal.  What I’m most struck by is the clash between love and hate, goodness and evil.  Those who were killed and injured and those who responded to them were so enormous in their heroism, and that young man was so enormous in his hate.  The outpouring of love is in such stark, stark contrast to that deranged mug-shot of a lone gunman.  The divide is painful to comprehend.  Heaven help us.

What I know is that I reside on the side of love.  I don’t mean for that to sound like I’m bragging.  Declaring this stance of general caring, compassion, and good will is only to say thank you to whatever force tips the scales.  Thank you that I was never tipped into the house of hate with all its wicked mirrors that reflects not what we are but what we lack.

Thanks for reading.  I’ll post again next Friday.  Have a great week.

I’m officially embarking on my personal lit challenge to read several of the significant books from both the recent and distant past and then write up some of my thoughts.  The Catcher in the Rye is first on my list.  Until now, I had never read it, and I would always shrink with embarrassment whenever a reference to it came up.  It feels great to be among the millions who have read this gem, and now I can contribute my own observations.

If you want to know the truth, I think Holden Caulfield is an alcoholic; that’s his problem.  Teen angst is one thing, but when it’s combined with alcoholism, Holden Caulfields are what you get.  For anyone out there who believes alcoholics are toothless bums sleeping in their own urine in dark alleyways or on bus benches, think again.  That depiction is the end of the line for some alcoholics, not all, but it must be understood that the beginning of the line usually looks much different.  Recognizing the disease in kids is tough because their behavior can so easily be dismissed as normal adolescence — children bumbling and stumbling into maturity.  The signals are subtle, but what tipped me off about Holden were his endless resentments and delusions.  Alcoholics have a particular kink in their systems.  That kink causes both alcohol cravings and a habit of mind that savors resentments stewed in a sense of superiority.  On top of that is a constant undercurrent of doubt, giving rise to the phrase “egomaniac with an inferiority complex,” often used to describe alcoholics.  In The Catcher in the Rye, don’t be fooled, or charmed, by the multitude of digressive incidents that obfuscate the real deal, which is alcoholism.

It’s impossible to know where J.D. Salinger stood on this subject.  Was there a conscious intention to craft this character that brilliantly portrays the nuanced behaviors of alcoholics, or did he luck into a direct hit?  I’m going to say he knew what he was doing.

Let me just jump right in at the title.  Forget that noble crap about catching children in a field of Rye before they plunge off “some crazy cliff.”  The original poem, “Comin Throu’ The Rye,” was writen by Robert Burns in 1782.  Like most poems, it can be read on many levels, but the most commonly accepted interpretations include sloppy, surreptitious, drunken sex with a peasant girl — where complicity is questionable.  Rye is understood to represent rye whiskey.  Holden is an unreliable narrator, but he tells us that English is his best subject, and we can clearly see he’s sex-obsessed, so it’s hard to believe he misunderstood the poem’s allusions.  Dressing up bad ideas with good motives is nothing new in the world of addiction.  The author, by way of the narrator, pretzels the poems sexual vise into the virtuous act of rescuing innocent children.  Holden’s contorting the words of that poem to meet his psychological needs is subconscious but telling.  His perceptions are keen but can’t always be trusted.  His perceptions can be flawed.  Why can his perceptions be flawed?  One big reason is because he’s alcoholic.  If anybody is headed over a crazy edge, it’s Holden, and, like it or not, he’s going to have to be his own catcher.  It’s called taking inventory.

What did J.D. Salinger know of Alcoholics Anonymous?  I think it’s interesting that a very famous article by Jack Alexander appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, just four years before excerpts from this book began appearing in magazines.  The Jack Alexander piece was titled “Alcoholics Anonymous,” and it’s credited with launching worldwide awareness of AA’s method for recovery from alcoholism.  Prior to the 1941 article, AA membership had grown to about 2000 since its inception in 1935.  By the end of 1941, following the article’s publication, AA’s membership skyrocketed to around 8000.  It’s hard to overstate the impact that this one article had in households across the country.

Salinger wouldn’t want to be too obvious, surely, but there are several scenes in The Catcher in the Rye where Holden’s attention is drawn to magazines.  On page 9, Holden’s history teacher throws an Atlantic Monthly at the boy.  Page 16 has Holden confessing to his proclivity for lying and he gives the example that when he goes out buying magazines he might just tell a person he’s going to the opera instead.  On page 53 he says how he sometimes buys four magazines at a time.  On page 124 an actual Saturday Evening Post is referenced.  And on page 195 he’s concerned about a couple of health articles he’s read in a magazine he just picked up off a bench in Grand Central Station.  With all of that fictionalized magazine reading going on, it doesn’t feel like a huge stretch that the author may have been aware of one of the most widely read articles ever printed in The Saturday Evening Post. Oh, and by the way, a P.O. Box at Grand Central Station is the mailing address for all AA related inquiries.

Alcoholics can be very complicated people, and Salinger’s Holden is a great example of just how knotty they can get.  Holden is young, which buys him a lot of the slack he needs because on the surface he’s a chronic-malcontent, self-righteous, socially inept, paranoid, delusional, deceitful, narcissistic, insecure, mildly suicidal, inappropriate bonehead.  In other words, he’s an untreated alcoholic.

Looking at some of his drinking history confirms my diagnosis of alcoholism.  Because Holden is five years under the legal drinking age, I believe his limited consumption is mostly because of access, not preference.  He’s not just aware, he’s hyper-aware of all the drinking that’s going on around him, even when he himself cannot procure a drink.  Examples of that preoccupation are evidenced in Jane Gallagher’s father being described, accurately no doubt, as a “booze hound.”  Two of the three tourists from Seattle are apparently committing a drinking faux pas by ordering Tom Collinses in December; the third is putting away bourbons and water.  Carl Luce is having dry martinis.  Mr. Antolini is loaded off highballs, Holden even taking note of how many ice cubes go in the drink.  That’s an alcohol fixation.  Another suspicious detail is Holden’s preference for scotch and water, a stout combination that implies serious drinking.  There was a red-flag incident when he was at The Whooton School when he and another boy drank a pint of scotch in the school’s chapel.  On his ice-skating date with old Sally Hayes, he orders liquor for himself and Coke for her.  Holden knows from an untold number of previous experiences that he will be served alcohol at Ernie’s Piano Bar in Greenwich Village.  Holden doesn’t go so far as to beg people to drink with him, but he gets pretty close to it.  Mrs. Morrow (the fellow-student’s mother on the train,) two different cab drivers, Faith Cavendish (the supposed good-time gal,) and the stage entertainers all rebuffed his invitations.  Technically, drinking in a bar is not drinking alone, but if you are getting shit-faced at a table all by yourself, you’re drinking alone.  And just because Holden claims to have great drinking capacity, that doesn’t exempt him from the disease.  In fact, resistance to the effects of alcohol can be a symptom of alcoholism just as much as intolerance can be.

John Hopkins University compiled a list of twenty questions to help evaluate a potential alcoholic, such as:  Do you drink alone?  Do you turn to lower companions and inferior environments when drinking?  Does your drinking make you careless of your family’s welfare?  Is drinking making your home-life unhappy?  Is your drinking effecting your reputation?  The questionnaire suggests that if you answer yes to any one of the twenty questions, the potential for alcoholism exists; yes to three or more, you are definitely an alcoholic.  It’s a rare sixteen-year old who can consider the questionnaire seriously and honestly, most adults can’t handle it either.  But Holden is no dummy, so there’s hope.

Getting back to The Saturday Evening Post article and where it bumps up against The Catcher in the Rye.  The article starts with three men in a psych ward, two ex-problem drinkers visiting one patient.  Holden is telling his story from inside a residential psychotherapy center but he’s without friend or visitor.  The sober two give testimonials that include how they confounded doctors, family, friends, and relatives for years.  Holden is certainly confounding.  The men in the article tell the patient how they would be willing to drop everything if it would help truly sober him up.  Mr. Antolini extends a similar offer, but it falls flat because he himself is drunk and has questionable boundaries.  Jack Alexander tells how members of Alcoholics Anonymous recognize that it takes one to know one, so they “do not pursue or coddle a malingering prospect, and they know the strange tricks of the alcoholic as a reformed swindler knows the art of bamboozling.”  Caulfield is one shifty dude, often in the same breath he’ll state two completely contrary points of view: he likes and hates, he feels good then bad, he’s happy then sad.

Jack Alexander also observes, “By nature touchy and suspicious, the alcoholic likes to be left alone to work out his puzzle, and he has a convenient way of ignoring the tragedy which he inflicts meanwhile upon those who are close to him.”  Holden is not ready to accept responsibility for where he finds himself.  When he wraps up his narrative with, “Don’t ever tell anybody anything,” it’s tragic.  That kind of secrecy and isolation keeps alcoholics sick.  But Holden’s follow-up statement and concluding remark sparks a glimmer of hope, “If you do, you start missing everybody.”  There is a chance that Holden could find his way out of the lonely, irresponsible, shortsighted, self-punishing, indignant, cowardly, abusive morass he finds himself in.  Mr. Antolini foreshadows this possibility on page 189 when he tells Holden that many men throughout history have struggled with moral and spiritual dilemmas, but it’s the educated ones that can tell of those struggles in the most stimulating ways.  He says, “Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles.  You’ll learn from them – if you want to.  Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you.”  That’s so AA.  AA literature is filled with stories of personal triumph over the physical and psychological ravages of alcoholism.

Why does it matter that Holden Caulfield is seen as an alcoholic?  Because there is help for alcoholics and because more often then not, the message of The Catcher in the Rye is that misery is cool, which it’s not.  Intelligence, humor, emotional acumen, physical health and so much more are inexorably diminished over the trajectory of alcoholism while disdain and disillusionment grow.  Halting and reversing this course is possible, and the earlier the better.  Holden, like so many alcoholics is uncannily perceptive, but it’s what he does with those perceptions that will make him or break him.  Understanding the disease of alcoholism and recognizing the stilting effects it has on a developing mind are the first steps toward correction.  But ultimately, that’s an inside job.  The person must want to catch him or herself first.  Until then, these Holden Caulfields of the world just kill me.

Click on these references to open them, and then click again on the next screen.

Robert Burns’ Comin Thro The Rye

Jack Alexander article in the Saturday Evening Post

20 questions by John Hopkins University

Any thoughts you care to share with me?  Holden Caulfield?  The Catcher in the Rye?  J.D. Salinger?  Alcoholism?  I’d love to hear from you.  Have a great week, and I’ll post again next Friday.

My December 3rd post was the beginning of my declared commitment to read several literary treasures from both the near and distant past.  First, I wanted to finish the books I already own.  I’ve done that, and it’s most fitting that the last in my stack was Pat Conroy’s:  My Reading life.

I’ve written two reviews, one short one that I’ve posted at Amazon and one long one that I wrote for today’s blog.  Writing these reviews has definitely caused me to read the book more carefully.  Reading books as if I were in school is my goal.  The good part is I don’t have to worry about grades or due dates.  Hopefully, my skills will improve as I continue down my own reading list.

Here’s what I wrote for Amazon.com:

It wasn’t long before I realized that the title, My Reading Life, pertained as much, if not more, to how the author reads people and situations as it does to the books he’s read, studied, and admired.  My Reading Life has a memoir quality to it, which is good for me because I can’t get enough of his take on the world.  Finding refuge in the written word armed Conroy against the epic dysfunction he faced at home and provided him with a framework in which to view the world, to read the world.  I’m forever in search of a kindred spirit, a person who has endured harrowing events and is willing to write about them with a “mind blazing with the dignity of language.”    About his brutal, fighter pilot father and cronies, Pat Conroy wrote “For the most part, they were third-rate men who spread rich marmalades of loathing over their own wives and children.” Right on!  It’s his unique powers of interpretation that I’m drawn to.  With great literary flair, Pat Conroy communicates what it means to be seen — whether it is comic or tragic.  My Reading Life is the philosophical aftermath of events he’s endured and now speaks of with the lustrous and precise language of the classics.

And here is what I spent more time on:

Pat Conroy, author of several books including The Great Santini and The Prince of Tides, has a new (2010) work of non-fiction out:  My Reading Life.  It didn’t take long before I realized that the title pertained as much, if not more, to how the author reads people and situations as it does to the books he’s read, studied, and admired over the course of his life.  The works of literature that he references are seamlessly interwoven with descriptions of friends and family, work and retreat, giving My Reading Life a memoir quality.

From early in his youth, Pat Conroy’s mother nurtured his extraordinary appetite for the writen word by regularly taking him to libraries and co-reading every single schoolbook he brought home.  The mother of six children, Peg Conroy’s education was piggybacked onto Pat’s.  When they came upon an unknown word, they’d look it up and discuss its meaning until it was understood.  Shakespeare’s use of the word “surfeiting” in Twelfth Night was one such word.  Peg’s adult sophistication enhanced the definition and its overall context in the comical play about love when she suggested that the word was being used in a pun.

In chapter two, we learn what sway Gone With the Wind had over the Conroy household.  Margaret Mitchell’s novel was read over and over by both mother and son.  To know the character of Scarlett O’Hara is to know Peg Conroy.  Pat Conroy’s mother was a southern beauty with as much determination to turn her son into a famous southern writer as Scarlett was determined to turn adversity into triumph.  We get it that Peg was a force not to be denied.  Unfortunately, her powers of persuasion were mute when it came to the routine beatings Pat received from his father.  Apparently, Peg’s role was to sooth, not protect.  A pure Pat Conroy zinger of a sentence comes as a description of his brutal, fighter pilot father and the man’s Marine cronies:  “For the most part, they were third-rate men who spread rich marmalades of loathing over their own wives and children.”

Finding refuge in the written word armed Conroy against the epic dysfunction he faced at home and provided a framework in which to view the world, to read the world.  Committed to reading a minimum of 200 pages everyday, Pat Conroy was pleasure reading Balzac, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky in high school.  Enraptured by the character developments and detailed plots of the classics, Conroy unapologetically owns his preference for rich stories told with elaborate and skillful phrasing.  It’s with this preference in mind that we meet Gene Norris, Conroy’s English teacher and life-long friend — a dedicated yet irascible educator, forever attempting to reign-in Conroy’s extravagant literary flair.  Norris, also a lover of the perfect word choice, referred to Conroy as “creature,” and “scalawag.”  When controversy over J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye erupted, the English teacher coached his young student to write an essay that was brave and from the heart.

Conroy seems to have a penchant for the cantankerous type, perhaps in an effort to find his father without the fists.  Gene Norris was no pushover, neither was Miss Eileen Hunter, the school librarian.  She was “wrathful” and “troll-like,” a closeted alcoholic and blatant racist.  Then there was Cliff Graubart, the cashier and owner of The Old New York Book Shop.  When Conroy pointed out that the man never said hello to him, he received an uninterested “Hi” for his efforts.  Conroy volleyed, “What warmth, what charm!”  To which the gentleman replied, “You want a hand job instead?”  Conroy’s book rep wasn’t much warmer.  He got described as “pugnacious,” “caustic,” “wintry,” and “implacable,” yet Conroy wooed his affections and actually spent some time living with the man and his wife.  In the chapter titled, “My First Writers’ Conference,” we see where Conroy couldn’t befriend every prickly character he encountered; he was unable to win over Adrienne Rich and Alice Walker despite their rudeness of the first order.

My Reading Life is chalked full of titles and literary characters, authors and celebrities that Conroy has befriended both literally and figuratively.  He’s well read and well known, but all of that seems to fade into the background when it comes to his stated standards as a communicator.  In 1978, Conroy found himself in the crosshairs of fate when he encountered two separate bombing incidents while living in Paris.  In their philosophical aftermath he discovered something about himself as a writer.  He discovered that a writer must endure harrowing events, whether they are familiar or distant, and then speak of them as if on fire, his “mind blazing with the dignity of language.”  And it’s his opinion that the more lustrous and precise the language the better.

And while I can’t claim to possess such skill, I agree with the sentiment.

Pat Conroy “grew up a word-haunted boy.”  Here are a few of his words that had me reaching for my dictionary:

Insouciant (p. 14) – free from concern or worry, carefree, nonchalant, blithe, indifferent

Zeitgeist (p. 31) – a general trend of thought or feeling during a particular period of time

Flummoxed (p. 46) – perplexed, bewildered, confused

Milquetoasty (p. 51) I’d heard this word before but I thought I was hearing “milk toast.”   – sissy, timid, meek

Amanuensis (p. 216) – secretary or typist

Fulminations (p. 223) – vehement protest, thunderous verbal attack, violent explosion or flash like lightning, rant

Inchoate (p. 249) – just begun, not fully formed, rudimentary

Ordure (p. 281) – excrement, dung

Abjure (p. 301) – to renounce under oath, to recant solemnly, repudiate, to abstain from

Glockenspiel (p. 327) – percussion instrument with a series of metal bars played with two light hammers

Inimitable (p. 294) – unsurpassed, incapable of being imitated, matchless

Kvelled (p. 298) – Yiddish-beaming with pride

And my favorite: Clochard (p. 227) – a tramp, vagrant, beggar of food and wine

I wonder if I’ll ever have the confidence to wield such a vocabulary?   Are there any words here that are new to you?

The Catcher in the Rye is next on my reading menu.  I know,  just about everybody has already read it, but not me.  I can’t wait to learn what all the fuss was about.

Oh!  By the way, HAPPY NEW YEAR and HAPPY NEW DECADE!

Yesterday, I arrived at work only to discover the doormat outside my salon had been stolen during the night.  Stolen!  Who steals a stupid, dirty, doormat?  It wasn’t decorative; it was an absolutely basic, black rubber and carpet rectangle.  I swear, if it’s not bolted down, somebody will take it.  My neighbor’s mat was also missing.  Can you believe it?  I stood at the doorway and said out loud, though nobody was around, “I can’t believe this shit.”  Bitch-dog-irritated by the pettiness of it, I dialed the local police and filed a complaint, shaking my head in disbelief as I gave the report.  Who would do such a ridiculous thing?  Who’s out there roaming the streets in the middle of the night?

When Lutrell got home from work, I told him what happened, reigniting my earlier ire.  “Now what am I gonna do?  If I replace it, then the pig will have a new one to sell at some flea market and get even more money.  Where will it stop?  Every week there will be another brand new mat of mine to hawk.”

His response was a sympathetic, “Oh no.”  Then he offered, “Maybe a homeless person took it to get off the wet ground.”

This is why I love my husband so much.  I suspect he’s absolutly right.  It’s been raining like crazy the last couple of days.  Now, not only do I want to replace the rubber-backed doormat, I want to add a blanket and a couple of pop-top cans of Dinty Moore stew.

I so have nothing to complain about.

Peace and good will to all during this season of wet and chilly dark days.

There is no date on the calendar that I look forward to more than the December solstice, and this year, I’m extra excited because it coincides with a total lunar eclipse.  This is not just a once-in-a-lifetime event; its a once-in-several-generations astrological phenomenon.  According to the Montreal Gazette, the last time this happened was 456 years ago in 1554.  (The Gazette sited NASA as their source for that date, but I couldn’t personally verify it.)  I wonder if it’s been calculated when in the future this coincidence should occur again?  I feel so fortunate to get one in my lifetime.

The winter solstice generally falls on Dec. 21st or 22nd but is capable of happening as early as the 20th or as late as the 23rd (http://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/december-solstice.html.)  Anticipation of winter solstice starts building within me right after we pass over the summer solstice in June, when my beloved daylight shrinks and nightlight grows.  It’s not that I have a severe aversion to longer nights, it’s just that I prefer those glorious sun rays.

Because half of the year is weighted in the moon’s favor, I needed to and basically have succeeded in making peace with it.  Nightfall draws me in; it’s time for pajamas, for curling up with a good book, for hot cocoa and contemplation.  Contemplation, that’s where I get squirrely.  Too much thinking time turns Terry Sue into a lunatic.  I know this about myself, and I watch it.  It’s ironic because, if the cosmos have anything to do with it, I should feel most in balance during solstice phases, but I don’t.  I watch it that the long days don’t send me into manic territory, where I want to concur the world and then share it with my friends.  Alternately, I watch that long nights don’t drive me into depression, where nothing makes sense and everything hurts.  Mindful of these propensities, I thankfully stay a pretty even course.

I don’t think I’m very unusual in these susceptibilities, and that’s why we humans have so many effervescent celebrations during this time of year; they save us from the doldrums.  I’m grateful for the colorful lights, the snappy tunes, the rich food and warm drink, the plays, ballets, and pageantry, the traditions that gather friends and family together, and the gift giving.  It all helps brighten the day.

The history of “Yule” is long and varied.  It’s celebrations are always during the days surrounding the winter solstice when joy and gratitude are expressed for the return of sunlight, warmth, and life sprouting anew (.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yule.)  This year’s yule-tide includes a full-moon, lunar eclipse.  In the spirit of yule-time gratitude, late Monday night and early Tuesday morning will have me admiring the moon with my binoculars.  It’s an auspicious double-dip occurrence of light returning.

Happy solstice and eclipse.  Have a great week.  I’ll post again next Friday.

Just in case you haven’t had an opportunity to visit the snow yet this year, here’s a teaser.  And just in case you can’t quite believe it’s December, well, this is December at Sorensen’s Resort up in Hope Valley, near Kirkwood.  You got to love a place with the name, Hope Valley.  We were there this week for three glorious, mid-week nights (a pay for two, stay for three special rate.)

We used the resort’s complimentary snow-shoes for a spectacular adventure and strenuous workout, about five miles round-trip, and up to about 7500 ft.

Pristine wilderness and breath-taking beauty.

Behind Sorensen’s is also a good, long fire-road that supposedly goes all the way to Markleeville.  On day two, we made it up a fraction of the way when we couldn’t resist making a snowman.

Last Friday’s submission to this blog had me declaring a commitment to reading.  While on vacation I managed to tick off one of the many books on the long list I have for myself.  I read After Long Silence by Helen Fremont.  I’m thinking I’ll write small observations about the books I’m reading as a way of helping me understand them better.  Kinda-like what I was supposed to do in school, except hopefully these will have a slightly more adult perspective.  In addition, this exercise may also help me be a better writer.

My apologies if this comes across as a clumsy beginning.

After Long Silence was recommended to me by a friend who knows that I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what, for a lack of a better phrase, I’m calling shamed silence.  What I’m mulling over in my mind has nothing to do with restraint; restraint suggests self-discipline and control.  I’m not thinking about willful withholding either.  Shamed silence is not a carefully measured response to a situation; it’s when a person is faced with something that is categorically incomprehensible.  It’s cognitive dissonance.  It’s what happens when fragmented, incomplete thoughts get banished to our psychological  dungeon to rot.  Shamed silence occurs in both the victim and the perpetrator.  It happens all the time.  Sometimes it is confused with some virtuous notion of suffering in silence, but what I’m thinking about is no virtue; it’s dysfunction.

In After Long Silence, Helen Fremont carries a flickering torch into the dungeon of doom where her family history smolders and fumes, a history that includes her Jewish relatives and the mind-blowing atrocities they were subject to during the WWII holocaust.  She interlaces her current personal life as a reluctant Boston attorney and partially-out lesbian with startling  glimpses into her parent’s lives and the lives of lost friends and relatives.  But this memoir is not only about the shattering inhumanity that annihilated her family or her sexual orientation.  Her chronicles are also about baring witness to the unspeakable.

Without sentimentality, in this memoir, Fremont  presents both historic and contemporary details as if laying out a case for the reader to judge.  What are we being asked to judge?  Not the Nazis, the jury has long ago delivered on that horror.  We don’t necessarily have to judge the choices and sacrifices made by those she uncovers in her research.   We are being asked to judge ourselves.  Fremont presents, through one incisive portrait after another, a spectrum of courage that inexorably challenges her readers to place themselves on the continuum.

This is a brilliantly crafted memoir.  It’s sobering, enlightening, infuriating, tender, mysterious, gripping, and it is also funny in parts.  She hits on so many human emotions, and that’s it’s gift to the reader.  We get to feel.  I believe it is my right as a human being to feel my feelings, to think my thoughts, to speak whatever truth I can.  This right becomes a higher calling when considered in opposition to shamed silence.

Well, so there’s my brief essay.  It’s a start.

Have a great week, give me a comment or two, and I’ll post again next Friday.

Today’s post is going to be on the short side because my hip doesn’t seem to want to cooperate with my leg or my desk chair.  It’s been acting up for a couple of days and is probably trying to tell me to slow down.

This pictured stack of books has been on my mind for a while now.  It, and half a dozen others on my Kindle, is where I’ve put significant chunks of time this year.  I keep trying to get ahead on my reading list, but I’m not succeeding.  I so wish that I was one of those kind of people who reads a book a night.  They really do exist.  Even a book a week would make me happy.  Each of these books has been wonderful to read, and I’m glad to have read them.  Many were written by my new friends in the writing world, people I have met through my Left Coast Writers group that meets at Book Passage in Marin once a month.  Many others have been recommended by loving and supportive friends.  The problem is, I don’t have enough time to read everything, and I’m frustrated.

Last week a Facebook friend sent out a list of 100 of Britain’s favorite books.  The survey suggested that the average person will have read only about six of them.  Then it asked how many has the viewer read.  I have read 15 of them cover to cover: 6/8/10/17/19/29/32/43/52/53/62/70/88/90 & 97.

Here’s that list:

1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
4. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
12. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
13. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
14. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
15. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
16. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
17. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
18. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
19. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
20. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
22. Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone, JK Rowling
23. Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling
24. Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling
25. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
26. Tess Of The D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
27. Middlemarch, George Eliot
28. A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
29. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck
30. Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
31. The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
32. One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
33. The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
34. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
35. Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
36. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
37. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
38. Persuasion, Jane Austen
39. Dune, Frank Herbert
40. Emma, Jane Austen
41. Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
42. Watership Down, Richard Adams
43. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
44. The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
45. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
46. Animal Farm, George Orwell
47. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
48. Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
49. Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
50. The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher

51. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
52. Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
53. The Stand, Stephen King
54. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
55. A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
56. The BFG, Roald Dahl
57. Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
58. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
59. Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
60. Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
61. Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
62. Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden
63. A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
64. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
65. Mort, Terry Pratchett
66. The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
67. The Magus, John Fowles
68. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
69. Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
70. Lord Of The Flies, William Golding
71. Perfume, Patrick Süskind
72. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
73. Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
74. Matilda, Roald Dahl
75. Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding
76. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
77. The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
78. Ulysses, James Joyce
79. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
80. Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
81. The Twits, Roald Dahl
82. I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
83. Holes, Louis Sachar
84. Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
85. The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
86. Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
87. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
88. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
89. Magician, Raymond E Feist
90. On The Road, Jack Kerouac
91. The Godfather, Mario Puzo
92. The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
93. The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
94. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
95. Katherine, Anya Seton
96. Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer
97. Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
98. Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson
99. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
100. Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie

The Facebook questionnaire also had a U.S. version of book favorites.  On this list I remember reading 23 of them cover to cover: 3/5/8/10/22/37/38/39/43/48/49/50/51/60/61/62/66/80/83/84/85/87 & 98.  As on the previous list, there are many that I have tried to read.

Here’s that U. S. list:

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch – George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald

24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis

34 Emma -Jane Austen

35 Persuasion – Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving

45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding

50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel

52 Dune – Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens

72 Dracula – Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses – James Joyce

76 The Inferno – Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal – Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession – AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks

94 Watership Down – Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

The thing is, I’d like to take a more serious crack at many of the books on this list, which means I have to stop reading my friend’s books and get going on these.

This is what I’m going to do instead of re-enlisting in college.  I’ll finish what books I’ve already purchased, but then, I’m going to dig in and try to read the ones that I didn’t finish the first time around: 1/7/13/18/19/20/24/27/28/29/31/41/70/76 & 91 .

Any thoughts?

What do you think of these two lists?

Have a great week, and I’ll be back next Friday.

Here we are, the day after Thanksgiving, and I can’t complain.  I can be such a contrarian.  It’s kooky for me to bristle at Thanksgiving because I’m generally so incredibly grateful for the wonderful life I have.  I’m pretty much thankful everyday of the year.  There’s just something about being told to be grateful that gets me.

But as I’m writing this, I realize that I express my appreciative heart more at this time of year.  I told my husband that he was at the top of the list of things I’m grateful for.  I’ve told several friends this week that they are why I have such a grateful heart, and in each case the sentiment was reciprocated.  If it weren’t for the holiday, those statements would have been awkward.  So I guess I should add Thanksgiving to the list of things I’m grateful for.

I have to say, Thanksgiving day started out on a stellar note.  Early in the morning I received an e-mail from somebody I’ve never met telling me that she “LOVED” Pearls My Mother Wore.  So cool!  I’m still smiling.  She also posted an Amazon book review and gave the book five stars!  Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Next, I got to spend a couple of hours in my garden tidying up, and that always makes me happy.

We had dinner at my father-in-law’s house.  There were four young (mid-late twenties) couples, an infant and a toddle among our group of eighteen.  We were a lively group and it was a lot of fun.  One of the highlights of Thanksgiving at my father-in-law’s is that he has a gorgeous piece of property in the Napa Valley, and we all walk the perimeter with their nine goats and the llama, Raku.

A couple of posts ago I wrote how I thought Halloween should be New Years Eve.  Well, while walking with the goats I had a conversation with Lutrell’s step-mother and discovered that the Celts of old did in fact celebrate New Years at the end of October.  It’s called Samhain (pronounced ‘saiwin/’sau.in/ or ‘saun.)  Having Scottish heritage myself, my inclination now doesn’t sound so off the mark.  I Googled Samhain and discovered it’s celebrated in part by demonstrations of trickery, disruption, and contrariness!  I also read that it was believed that Samhain was a time of year when the dead would come back to warm themselves at the hearth fires and that poets could visit the underworld at this time by passing through the doors of a sidhe, or burial mound.  Poets, contrarians, Halloween/ New Years:  I like it!

My contribution to the Thanksgiving feast was what I’m calling “Amber vegetable medley.”  It was pearl onions (get it? pearl,) golden beets, carrots, butternut squash, cauliflower, and pine nuts all tossed in homemade pesto.

There were leftovers, so today will include a second Thanksgiving meal.  Yum, yum.  All things considered, I really can’t complain.

Have a great week.  I’ll post again next Friday.

* Yesterday, a high-school boy told me that the cover of Pearls My Mother Wore was “Dope.”  High Praise indeed.  Thanks Luis.

* “Pearls” is being read by two loved-ones in Thomaston, Georgia.  Helloooo Thomaston!  On my wish list:  A book-talk in Thomaston, GA.

* This week I received my second revenue check from Lulu Press in the amount of $28.49.  Broken out, there were two books sold directly from Lulu (my favorite method of sale,) three e-copies were up-loaded to Apple ipads, and seven paperbacks were sold through U.S. distributors such as Amazon and Barns and Noble.  The book is priced at fifteen dollars; my cut from this revenue disbursement averages $2.37 per sale.  I’m sharing this information because it highlights just how little cash is being made off this book.

Good thing I didn’t write this novel to make money.  I wrote it, in part, because I wanted to prove to myself that I could.  Growing up, I hated to read, mostly because I didn’t know how.  Going from not being able to read as a young adult, to then learning how and eventually getting an English degree, and then writing a novel of my own, is a very, very rare author bio.  People with my history generally do not write books.  Again and again, author biographies tell of a literary foundation established early on.  Most authors grew up loving books and gobbling them up as quickly as they could.  That was not me, and yet here I am, an author.

Every time I doubted my “author-ity” to write, I remembered the amazing people and circumstances that helped me escape the bondage of ignorance, illiteracy, poverty, low self-esteem, alcoholism and drug abuse, and I kept typing; I kept trying.  I pursued this story because I could.  I’ve broken out.  That makes me incredibly fortunate, and I’m forever grateful for the twists of fate that got me to where I am today.

* Speaking of authority, a hairdressing client of mine told me about the grief her son is getting from his editor.  Her son is a leading expert in his field.  He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard, teaches, and has written and published over a dozen books.  Even with his sterling credentials and breadth of knowledge, his latest, cutting edge, scholarly work was disparaged as “New Age” and “irrelevant.”  This tells me that I can relax about going back to school.  Clearly, all the education in the world does not secure a comfortable publishing life.  I’ve pretty much decided to keep reading good books, sign up for classes and seminars that are specific to my interests, and continue to write for pleasure, not punishment.

* And my last random thought is to report that I posted an Amazon review for Jeff Greenwald’s newest book, a memoir titled Snake Lake.  He wrote back a very nice thank you note.  Here’s what I wrote in the review:

Snake Lake, a telling title for a book that chronicles the ever-changing nature of life, and I mean life in the fullest sense, which includes death.  Jeff Greenwald does a superb job layering Nepali history, culture, mythology, and religion with his own deeply personal pleasures, conflicts, and resolutions.  His powers of observation and the rich, generous details of his experiences drew me in as if I were a trusted friend.  At once journalistic and vulnerable this memoir does what I think a good memoir should; it tells an amazing story about something I knew very little about, in a way that captured my imagination and held my interest from start to finish.  I’ve already recommended it to several friends.

All and all, it’s been a very nice week.  Next Friday I’ll post again, and odds have it, it’ll be about Thanksgiving.  Until then, enjoy the week, and I’ll try to do the same.

I’ve been scratching around for something to post this week and getting nowhere.  This is a miserable state for a writer to be in.  I’ve been jumping from one possible subject to another like some philandering wordsmith romancing whatever topic comes my way.

Yesterday, in an email to a friend, I wrote:  “I have felt a lot of shoulds.  I should write more, I should write better, I should read more, I should read better, I should exercise more, I should clean my house and tend to the garden more, I should reach out to more friends, …O.K. let me stop.  I’m sure you get the idea.”

You know what she wrote back?

“Don’t should all over yourself.”

That was so perfect.

I’ve been chasing something that can’t be chased.  The words arrive when they want to, not when I need an ego fix.  All week I had been “shoulding” on myself starting with the thought that I should go to school and learn how to be a real writer.  I looked up the requirements for a Creative Writing MA at Sonoma State and found them completely daunting.  One of the requirements was that I be conversant in a foreign language.  So that’s not gonna happen.  I’d love to speak Spanish, but I’m not going to pay college tuition to do it.  And then there are the grades; my GPA days are over.  Going back to school and navigating academic waters just isn’t how I want to spend my time.  I’d like to have big, fancy credentials, at least my ego would, but I’d much rather go mountain biking with my husband, read fun books, have lunch with my girlfriend, putter in my yard, oh yeah and then there’s also the hairdressing work I do and love and it puts money in my pocket.

The bottom line is something I know one day and forget the next: I AM GOOD ENOUGH.  Why is that so hard to remember?  Why is it so hard to believe?

The good news is that I have far more days that I feel all is well, then the days of self-doubt.

I’m gonna sign off now and go enjoy the day as it is, not as it should be.

Have a good week, and I’ll post again next Friday.