God Can’t Be Shocked

Some people criticize John Updike, saying he objectified women, portraying them as mere sex objects and so on.

I never saw it that way, even though I read Rabbit Run the summer of my 13^th year and felt my world split open upon reading the sex scenes.

‘Grownups do this?’ I asked myself stunned. This is what they’re up to when they’re not buttering our toast or rotating the tires on the family car?’

My big sister Nan had tried to clue me in on the particulars of sex; by the time she was ten she had sent away for a thousand pamphlets on the subject.

And certainly her information was better than what the boy down the street said happens after you get married: He said they then take you into a secret room and tie you together by your underpants.

What Updike described was much more specific. And once you got used to reading the actual truth, anything but shocking.

No, he never objectified women, in my book; in my book he only loved and noticed them.

He is the person who singlehandedly opened my eyes to writing.

Three years he is gone now and it has taken me almost that long to read his final collection of short stories, slim as it is. I just didn’t want it to end, knowing there would be no others.

Here’s one thing he said that I love and agree with. He said his theory was that God already knows everything and can not be shocked.

In the same essay he also said,

Only truth is useful. Only truth can be built upon. From a higher, inhuman point of view, only truth, however harsh, is holy. The fabricated truth of poetry and fiction makes a shelter in which I feel safe, sheltered within interlaced plausibility in the image of a real world for which I am not to blame. Out of soiled and restless life, I have refined my books.

I love that last sentence: Out of soiled and restless life I have refined my books. And I understand exactly the part about the shelter his creative writing made for him, remembering a description earlier in this book of the place he loved best as a child: it was the spot on the side porch of his first home where he would upend and then hide under the wicker furniture to become the observer unobserved.

It’s what I wanted to be since my own baby days, only my spot was under the dining room table. Now I lurk in my car or on the park bench, listening to the old men and yelping teens and the women together talking. It’s what I have been since the dawn of the Reagan years when I began writing my column. For all these years I have written every week for the papers and now, here on this blog, I write every day.

Seeing and then telling what you have seen is for me what I think it was for him too: merely a way of saying thanks for it.

 

Playdate

On bright days like we’ve been having I want to be like those lucky housepets who spend the day moving from room to room in pursuit of each warm pool of sunlight.

Here’s a sunny room above.

And here’s a cat who knows just what to do with it:

I want to go down on my stomach and rest my chin on my paws too – ah!

This winter sun is still slanty enough so that it’s right in here with us, like that warm light on top of your fish tank.

It’s more than ‘in here’ with us; it came expressly to spend the day with us, as with a playdate arranged by unseen parents. It makes me want to put on skates and hold a roller derby zooming around the rooms. It makes me want draw 50 pictures and tape them to the wall going up the stairs like my sister and I did that Saturday morning our mom dared sleep until 8.

She was pretty mad when it turned out to be a permanent exhibit.
(Who knew the tape would take the wallpaper with it when we pulled it off.)

We kids didn’t mind it; so for us it just made a nicely unusual art gallery, like the kind Jack Nicholson-as-the-Joker makes when he and his goons come calling at the Gotham City museum. (That’s below if you want to take a peek.)

But listen the sun really is getting stronger every day, can’t you feel it? And yet it’s still so close to us. It likes Earth better than those other planets, that’s all.

Yeah I’ll say it again. A day like this just wants to make you stretch right out.

Now for some weird late-80s pop and Jack Nicholson with the ultimate Face Lift Gone Wrong.

 

Enough for Meryl? Never

Doesn’t Meryl Streep have enough Oscar nominations? I’ve loved her forever but should she win for playing Margaret Thatcher? Can’t any one of us ladies tease our hair into a Buzz Lightyear helmet and get a film crew to follow us around the house talking to the pictures?

Ah but that’s mean of me. I love Meryl. Who has better skin, and a greater laugh? Who else dares sing and hop around on the Greek isle for that film version of Mamma Mia?

Also she and I are the same age.

The same height too.

We’ve both also had our pictures taken by the famous Bachrach studio, the outfit that did the official portrait of JFK just after his election to the presidency. The Bachrach photographer who took my picture there told me she was a real challenge what with that crooked nose, but “What a face!” he said. “What a face!” The picture of me that day makes me look a cross between a mother superior and a flight attendant circa 1960. It would work propped on top of my casket someday, if it had a sign next to it saying “Really she looked nothing like this.”

So it’s not that I don’t love Meryl. It’s just that she I wanted to see Keira win a chance at the prize, as I was saying yesterday.

But the more I write here the more I see how irresistible Meryl is.

I was watching Woody Allen’s Manhattan the other night and there she was lighting up the screen as Woody’s ex-wife. And whenever I get brave enough to watch The Deer Hunter again it stops me in my tracks every time to see her in that final scene with her friends following the funeral of the Christopher Walken character, when they sing this song:

She’s modest, you hear, from people who’ve met her and I bet she sighed on hearing the news of yesterday’s Best Actress nomination. “Another pair uncomfortable shoes!” she probably thought. “Another night where even my scalp will ache from all that compulsory smiling!”

Now I’ve just watched a scene from Sophie’s Choice, the 1983 film about a woman’s secret history and the way what she did, and saw, and endured, has changed her forever.

Just watch it yourself now. What an actress! And how lucky we are to be living at the same time!

 

Give That Girl an Oscar

I’m really hoping Keira Knightly is named for her role in A Dangerous Method when Oscar nominations are announced today. In this latest David Cronenberg film she plays a raging and distracted mental patient, who, when introduced to a calm empathetic listener sitting in a chair behind her, recovers clarity of mind and goes on to graduate from medical school and become a psychotherapist herself. (OK it’s also true that this calm empathetic listener sleeps with her too, then puts her aside when it suits him, but she expresses her feelings on these events in one blindingly fast three-second gesture that made the audience I was part of gasp with surprise.)

But this is Jung and his onetime mentor Freud we’re dealing with here, in the first decade of the last century when people were just getting the idea that they weren’t in Kansas anymore. Freud had just dropped his bombshell of a theory about the dark impulses involving sex and aggression that lurk just under the surface of our conscious thoughts – and as you can imagine, sex and aggression would rattle the teacups in any polite society back then, in those quiet years before the slaughter of World War I commenced.

I’m wondering now if Freud’s ideas didn’t take hold more easily on account of that war, which killed an entire generation of young men and exposed how thin a veneer ‘civilized’ behavior really is.

The losses from the “war to end all wars” were felt even over here in the States, however slow we were getting into it. It wasn’t just the speakeasies and the bathtub gin that made the Twenties roar, I don’t think. It was also the horror people felt after witnessing the carnage caused by trench warfare: A million casualties in the Battle of the Somme alone! They just wanted to forget it all. They roared too because Freud and his sometime protégé Jung had let this particular genie out of the bottle: no one in polite society had ever before spoken of our so-called baser impulses.
In one of his plays 200 years before, Molière satirized the class of “genteel” people who refused to use the word for ‘legs’ – too coarse! Too vivid! They wouldn’t use the word ‘teeth’ either, calling them instead ‘the furniture of the mouth.’

But Freud and Jung? They kicked all that over. They kicked it into next week as the saying goes.

The woman Keira Knightly plays was a real person named Sabina Spielrein, who suffered humiliation at the hands of her spanking-obsessed father, but then recovered just as she does in the film and contributed greatly to the understanding of our deepest impulses. (My heart squeezed shut when they rolled the credits to reveal that she and her two daughters were shot to death in a barn by SS officers. (They were Jews, as was Freud.))

What I will remember is the image of her so sharply suffering at the beginning as Keira Knightly plays her. She writhes in the arms of the hospital orderlies; extends her already long lower jaw in a simian rictus of agitation. She looks like an animal being tortured. Poor young woman! Poor all women in those days when they called our anger “hysteria” and took away our humanity. Tough century, the 20th; thank God for every Suffragette and Feminist who worked to put things right.

Anyway here’s the trailer under one last picture of our girl:

 

Fret Not

I guess everyone knows who Tom Waits is, the singer with a voice like rocks being dragged over sheet metal – go ahead: take a quick listen - but I’ll bet not everyone knows how grateful and quietly pleased he seems to be with life. It’s something I learned by hearing him talk with Terry Gross of NPR’s “Fresh Air” a few months ago when his latest album came out.

The first cut on “Bad as Me” is one where you’re just sure you’re hearing the pops and clicks of vinyl; you think it’s a record. Nope: that’s the sound of chicken on the barbecue, a sound so like the sound of a record you’re positive he had a phonograph there in the studio.

So too he said he could name no better way to get the sound of snare drum than to jump on a trampoline in November when it’s all weighed down with an autumn windfall of sticks and branches.

The man takes that kind of delight in the world; a child’s delight.

He said he’s been known to put a tape recorder inside a trash can and wheel it around the yard to see what kinds of sounds he gets, what kinds of rhythms suggest themselves.

You don’t need to worry even if you haven’t written for a whole year, he said, because the music is always there and all music has rests in it; you know that. You, you’re just on a rest if you’re not creating right now. No worries.

He also said he often just sings spontaneously, making up any old tune as he goes along, as does his collaborator and wife Kathleen Brennan. “What’s the choreography of a bee?” he said rhetorically near the end of this interview. Bees don’t have instruments. Bees don’t take lessons in how to weave the patterns of their flight. They just fly.

It seems like a perfect lesson for a brand new week: Just fly. Just sing. You don’t need a guitar, he said, ’cause one thing is sure: “There are no frets on your neck.”

No there aren’t. In other words, sing or write any old way. That’s what I take this to mean. In other words, we make the path by walking, as the proverb goes.

Now here’s the nicest tune on Bad As Me, in my book anyway, something called “Back in the Crowd” which owes a lot to Elvis and a lot to Mexican music as you’ll probably hear right away. Enjoy!

 

Love This Month

January is the month of the plain days, when we return to our right minds, the way that old Prodigal Son did, waking among the pigs. I’m guessing that happened in January too.

It’s the month when we breathe free again, for behind us is December’s delirium; behind us the scorekeeping, the anguished thoughts about just exactly who we exchanged with last year and should we buy them all gifts again this year?

Now it’s Plain January and January’s no month for keeping score.

January’s the month for letting go and letting it happen.

Cold happens in January. Sometimes it happens in such a big way you can’t wear jewelry without causing the flesh it touches to freeze in sympathy.  Last weekend my ears looked like two little dried apricots just pulled from the freezer, even without the steel posts of earrings skewering their lobes.

Snow also happens, as the folks in Cordova, Alaska can testify with their house-high amounts.

But snow too we just have to have to let wash over us.

In fact that’s all we need do in January: endure the weather and try to get to the Superbowl without giving ourselves coronaries.

I love the month for its blankness. It’s like the yearly planner before we fill it with all our appointments. I love it for its rhythms, the 31 days all alike with one welcome holiday weekend smack in the middle. I like the way we can set our alarms for 6:00 or even 5:00 and then just lie there a while in the pre-dawn hush. Because even a full month after the shortest day, it’s still not light until 7:00 and there’s something cozy in that early morning darkness.

Sometimes I rise from my bed at 5:00 and see old Orion, armed to teeth, and leaning in my window. “Go back to bed, fool,” he seems to be saying. “Can’t you see it’s night still?”

I follow his orders and dream just one more dream.

So though the days are short still, there is something nice in that fact. It lets us not be fibbing when we tell our pillows, “Be back real soon!” And in another four weeks, a muscular young sun will be pulling our covers right off us, impatient as a puppy eager for breakfast.

That’s true, hard as it may be to believe on this 22nd day of January, when just halfway through the Patriots-Ravens face-off, our little patch of earth will be plunged once again in darkness. But think on this; just think on this: Right now, the Almanac says the sun came up at 7:15 A.M.  A month from now it will be up by just after 6:30. And by the 21^st of March? By then, we’ll be two whole weeks into Daylight Savings, with sunset not due until 7:30 P.M.

In sum, I love this month for its message that all we need do is snooze and wait, just as the seeds are doing in their deep earthy beds. Then one day, when we’re busy with other things, we’ll turn and spot that one frail crocus blossom and see that Life really is as ever-regenerating as the poets have always told us.

just look at that blue sky and tell me it’s not thinking ‘robin’s eggs!’

 

Don’t Worry. Be Happy

Here’s a tip on how to write happy: be like Francis Ford Coppola who says he does all his writing very early in the morning because nobody else is up, nobody calls, and no one has hurt his feelings yet.

Pretty sweet little insight into this giant of American cinema, eh? But also a good insight into what we all need in order to create or even just do our work: we need to feel unencumbered in our spirit, free from self-obsession, ready to stop focusing just on ourselves and start focusing on what-all is around us.

I love hearing writers of fiction say that they’re as curious as anybody to see what will happen next in the stories they’re writing. They almost all say it too: that they invent these characters and the characters just start talking… That must be so nice, to feel that you’re just the stenographer in a way. It must be very freeing.

I write only non-fiction and find that I’m happiest when I wake up early enough to work for a good two hours before the ‘real’ work day starts. I go right to my laptop at 6:30 with that first cup of coffee and feel as if I’m just opening a wide window onto the world. Today I felt even happier than usual knowing that it would snow all day, and here it is a Saturday so we can just relax and watch it fall.

We’re meant to love our time here. We’re meant to love our work too. Many people hate it when their work involves deadlines but what can you do? Deadlines come with the territory in life.

I used to fret so over this column that I’ve been writing since 1980, because it goes all over the country and that’s a lot of people to let down if I write something glib or half-baked or inauthentic.

I also used to get all whiney about how hard it was to write once a week. Then, three years ago, I decided to try writing every single day, and now I never feel whiney at all but only happy. A paradox!

Francis Ford Coppola once said, “It’s ironic that at age 32, at probably the greatest moment of my career, with The Godfather having such an enormous success, I wasn’t even aware of it, because I was somewhere else under the deadline again.”

Maybe we all do that early on: fret over the deadlines in our lives. Then slowly, over time, we learn to enjoy life more and fret about it less – and hopefully check our fat little egos at the door.

Here’s a great short interview done when Coppola was only 36. I really love what he says a minute and 20 seconds in. The great ones are often humble like this, ever notice?

 

Stirred AND Shaken

I have to pause here and just show you these images of the little jewel of a pond I go to every day.

It’s tucked in the corner of a nice old city once known for its tanneries and its fruit trees, its pastures and its dooryards. Even just 40 years ago you could still feel the presence of the farm families and the mill folk who lived here.

The island you see across the soon to be icy waters once had a pavilion on it where an orchestra would set up of a summer night for dancing under the stars. The ladies and gents  would step in their evening slippers into launches that carried them across to it. Today there isn’t a structure upon this island , but only the walking trails and the tenacious oaks so slow to relinquish their fawn-colored leaves. If you dug a couple of feet under the topsoil, I imagine you would also find the implements of the people who first settled hereabouts some 60,000 years ago, having walked across the land bridge that is now the Bering Straits.

You have to know that I’ll never run out of things to say about our natural endowment as describers and storytellers – what I promised to do  but I will wait to say more about that topic from yesterday. How can I not use today to show you these images?

Of open waters on the brink of freezing?

Of gulls struggling to fly in a 30 mile an hour wind?

Of the way the water looks right at shore’s edge where the ice is starting to form in earnest?

I watched it chuckling and churning as those strong winds dragged the new ice this way and that. It made me feel wonderful, as though I were inside tall silver cocktail shaker, both shaken and stirred!

See how it makes you feel when you press ‘Play’.

 

How to Write a Paper

I think writer’s block is only a problem if you’re afraid to begin. “JUST BEGIN!” I tell students in any writing class I teach.

“Write any old thing at first,” said my hero Brenda Ueland. “Be a lion! Be a pirate!” in your writing. Put anything on the paper to get the waters flowing and the mind inching along its little pathways.

She said too that you should picture someone who loves you listening as you talk.

I was the baby in my family, the amazing good news at the end of all that bad news, my mother abandoned, my father four states away and not coming back – and that was all before the real ugliness started. But then this baby got born at the end of that bad period and our whole houseful of five oldsters just melted. “Look, it’s a BABY!” they said to each other as if they were expecting maybe a mole. And then there was the added darlingness of my sister Nan who was also just a toddler and the next thing they knew they were all laughing at the dinner table again, same as always.

I really do just picture those kind faces when I sit down to write.

Or else I picture David who may love me too after all these years because why else would he keep shaking his head and saying “TT! Old TT!” as he did again the other day when he caught me picking cherry pits up off the floor with my toes.

I had my reasons:

“I’ve decided not to bend over more unless I’m paying someone to MAKE me bend over” I told him.

I meant in Hip-Hop Cardio and all those other dance classes I take at the Y.

“You want me to be in shape, right?” I added.

“I’ll show you in shape!” he says every time. “How ’bout you quit the Y, give ME the 60 bucks a month and I’ll beat you into shape?”

Who wouldn’t feel happy with someone like this in their life?

With writing, the real main thing is to stay calm and remember that you know how to do this. Just talk in your own voice.

I mean don’t you feel sorry for the young woman at the top? She’s bound to panic and freeze, panic and freeze; that’s what I think looking at this picture, since it appears to be a sort of term paper she’s working on.

If that’s the kind of writing you’re doing, here’s my advice:

Take notes on all those books on good big index cards, then set the books aside, deal the cards out on the floor and walk all round them until you figure out what order you want to put them in as you spin out your argument.

I have more tips but I’ll save them for the next time. Time to go do my pale imitation of Julia Stiles in Save the Last Dance at the good old YMCA.

 

Undies in a Bunch and Other Matters

Just to be clear: the underpants flung across the hotel room weren’t ours. (See Sunday’s post Fun at the Fancy Pants Hotel.)

We’re not that kind of hotel guests,; we’re the other kind: when we first walk into a hotel room we pick up the bedspread with a set of tongs practically to drop it in the closet so there’ll be no chance of accidentally touching it.

It’s David really. He’s the kind of hotel guest who’ll hardly even walk barefoot to the bathroom. ‘Who knows how much beer, or Pepsi, or nacho sauce is worked into that rug?’ is his reasoning.

We’re also the kind of guests who leave money for the person making up the room of course but I often leave a note as well.

The other night when I pushed open the drapes and found some guy’s bunched-up undies I knew I couldn’t call Housekeeping; that would bring trouble to whatever people had cleaned our room because they had missed seeing them. They clearly didn’t pull the drapes back enough to find then there lurking like a dark family secret.

The only time I was ever in Palo Alto was to visit Stanford with our oldest girl when she was looking at colleges. She had packed in a kind of quilted laundry bag that she flung over her shoulder. I, on the other hand, was in a stage where I was madly overpacking all the time, and when the day time came to leave, I just couldn’t jam everything back in that suitcase.

I had this bright-pink wool jacket that just would NOT squeeze in there. As it happens, it was part of the ‘going away’ outfit my mother wore on the day of her wedding, and all those years later it was still great-looking, and had about it somewhat the same party-hat air as those gaily-flung boxer-briefs.

Dope that I was, I left it behind with a note to the chambermaid, suggesting maybe she could find a use for it.

I think of that bad decision every time I leave a hotel room.

Sigh.

In the end Carrie didn’t go to Stanford; she went to Wellesley.

And I have never been back to Palo Alto nor do I expect to go there again – unless Mark Zuckerberg decides to call me on the carpet for filling his site with a million links to a blog whose posts are just all over the place, funny and sad and crazy all at the same time and seldom casting their author in a flattering light.

What can I say though? We write, as we talk, to ease our burdened hearts. How did  this guy know that, at only 19, when he founded what was then called “the Facebook”?