muttering

Inquiry into the acquisition of language, part 2: point of view

2009-12-02T10:40:00.004-05:00

Now she is learning the language of subject, of a subject acting in the world. I go to school. I like vanilla. Sophie [a doll] feel sad. She is still not so good with the difference between subject and object. Her is sleeping, she will say. Also gender is a vague—inconsequential?--concept. She uses him and her indiscriminately, he and she.

Listening to her reminds me of my own struggles in novelistic storytelling. A novel offers endless choices in point of view and, along with tone, it’s one of the greatest challenges to try to find a point of view that fits with the story’s throughline and author’s intent. (Wow, sorry, that was a dry sentence!) Each offers its own take on the sense we try to make of our essentially random lives.

First person has the power of memory; third person the power of distance, of the space to act more visibly as storyteller. This morning, I am contemplating which one works better for a particular scene, and I’ve sketched out two options—one in first and one in third:

Rachel let me sleep in her bed. She took the couch. I wasn’t going to school anymore. I was too embarrassed to be seen, even by the Mexican girls. I woke up one night with vice-like pains squeezing my sides. I felt like my belly was a cement mixer. Pain ran up and down my back. The sheets beneath me were soaking wet.
Mom, I called. Mom! Rachel came in. She was pale. She was already dressed.
Okay, Isabelle, she said. We’re going to get through this.

That's the first person. Or:

Isabelle slept in Rachel’s bed and Rachel took the couch. She didn’t going to school anymore. She was too embarrassed to be seen, even by the Mexican girls. She woke up one night with vice-like pains squeezing at her sides. Her belly was a cement mixer. Pain ran up and down her back. The sheets beneath her were soaking wet.
Mom, she called. Mom! Rachel came in. She was pale. She was already dressed.
We’re going to get through this, Rachel said.

Her is sleeping...
She is sleeping?
I am sleeping?

Story in memory?

Or memory in story?

The Novel Project (Resurrected)

2009-11-03T13:32:00.002-05:00

I ‘m writing a novel again. I’ve tried to write it before. I know. For some of us this is like saying I’ve joined Weight Watchers again. What is different now? I no longer care how I lose the weight, what my smaller body actually looks like. I no longer care if it is bad. I just want it to exist. It feels hard, not romantic, not fun, not like “Oh I’m writing a novel” which really means looking at the tops of trees and pondering life.

It feels like moving bags of concrete from one place to another. Swimming, Stairmaster, Caloriecounter. My arms hurt at the end of the day. And my neck. And my head—the inside, the outside—my whole head. It is still one of the hardest things I have ever tried to do.

Inquiry into the Power of Signifying Objects

2009-09-03T15:31:00.004-04:00

Here’s a question: What is the worth of that horse-and-rider necktie your grandma gave you when you were four? That mix tape that doesn’t work anymore that your first boyfriend made for you (he drew on the plastic tape case with glitter markers)? The Sanka ashtray that you took from your dad’s home office after he left you and your mom?

Who can say? In the zany world where economics, human sentimentality and hunger for meaning meet, there is no such thing as objective. But there is Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn’s fascinating Significant Objects project, which has been written up in The New Yorker’s books blog and BoingBoing. A Doug Dorst story attached to a bedraggled tsotchke figurine recently sold for $193.00!

Which brings me to the penguin creamer.

My assignment turned out to be not a Slavic totem or a Sanka ashtray or a Chili cat. Yes, I too have tried my hand at Inventing an Object’s Significance. I was a bit daunted by the other storytellers involved in this project—Lydia Millet, Luc Sante, Lucinda Rosenfeld, Doug Dorst, and Curtis Sittenfeld to name a few—but I mediated on my humble object and a story emerged for me. You can read it here. I hope you find it of interest; perhaps even of significance?

You can read more about the Significant Objects project here and follow it on Twitter.

Inquiry into the acquisition of language, part 1

2009-08-13T22:13:00.004-04:00

Most of her sentences these days begin with I want or I need. This follows I like and I love, which were her first two sentence constructions.

A friend whose mother taught two-year-olds says, “Two is all about language development.” It’s amazing to watch this, this language development.

So we come to language full of desires, wants, passions. We learn through language to distinguish them.

In Michael Pollen’s fascinating recent New York Times magazine cover story on Julia Child, I was reminded of this tension in the mothering/work paradox: What do we need? What do we want? What are we allowed? How do we choose?

A recent conversation with new mother who feels feminism did not prepare her for the joy she would feel as a mother—that it let her down—because its message focused more on the triumphs and challenges of proving oneself in the work world. The phrase “the burden of choice” surfaced. This silenced us. Cut through our joy (she held a two-week old baby in her arms), brought us back to the earliest questions.

What do I want? What do I need? What do I like? What do I love?

Notes for a Feminist Comic

2009-05-30T12:41:00.003-04:00

Image ideas:
• Simone de Beauvoir sitting in an armchair with a long cigarette holder saying, "Women are oppressed by their biology";
• Sari, 19,1980s, putting on jacket w/shoulder pads and going off to summer job as a clerk in a law firm...;
• me, bags under eyes, saying to my homemaker mother (mother of 4 kids) "you didn't tell me how HARD it was"

Possible title: Snapshots from a New Mother's Life in Which Age-Old Feminist Conflicts are Acted Out

Overview: A patchwork quilt of the last year of my life in which I have had to confront some basic issues of feminism in a more bread-and-butter way than ever before (such as economic self-sufficiency, gender roles, and childbearing).

Script ideas:
Have baby.
Lose job.
Discover that baby needs lots of care.
Lose health insurance.
Start blog!
Baby wakes in middle of the night.
Journalism collapses!
Join coop. Shop for food.
Freelance for less than you were getting in-house. Can afford some daycare!
Publishing collapses!
Baby wakes in the middle of the night.
Shop for food.
Widespread layoffs!
Baby wakes in middle of night.
Baby wakes in middle of night.
Too tired to blog.
Against all reason, wish to have another baby.

Point is not to ridicule feminist thinkers but juxtapose theoretical pronouncements and mass messages women receive with the hard-knock realities of women's lives through the centuries.

Shine some (hopefully humorous) light on the gulf between theory and inevitable realities of life.

passover reading

2009-04-08T13:29:00.003-04:00

I’m going to be doing a reading tonight at a bar. A bar on Passover. I said yes, because it’s a great chance to read with other Slice writers, and to further the mission of this really great, ambitious publication. It’s funny; the question of whether or not to read on Passover never would have entered my mind ten years ago when we were living in Wicker Park (okay, technically, East Village) and driving the Gusmobile to Cub Foods through the often-still snowy March streets.

I remember when, one day, Josh said to me: Hey, it’s Passover tomorrow! So what? I said and then we stood there looking at each other waiting for something else to be said.

We'd never cared if it were Passover before (that was the day my parents, back in New York, went to the Bridge Club with my cousins). But the next day, I found myself going to Waterstone’s after work and buying two Haggadah’s. We thumbed through them as we ate the pad thai we ordered. We made a half-hearted attempt to conjure up a seder plate: a carrot for the haroset, a bean sprout for the pascal lamb, a piece of parsley for the bitter herbs. We did all this reluctantly, with a kind of shyness, as if someone were watching. Every year since then, we’ve found a way to have some form of a Passover seder.

Not this year. I’ll be reading at Pacific Standard, a bar on 4th Ave. I’m excited and nervous. I’ve never read this story aloud and reading aloud is always a different experience. The work enters the world in a new way. I hope I do it justice.

Reading on Passover has made the think of the story of exodus in a new way; the risks of leaving bondage; and how the decision to leave one life can give a renewed strength but also many years of living in the wilderness before one can find a new home.

slice of slice

2009-03-19T22:36:00.003-04:00

There’s a new lit journal called Slice. I’ve been reading issue 3, In Translation. It’s a pleasure. Their format is visually engaging and the writing is smart and thoughtful. The interview with Kathryn Harrison is stellar, as is a memoir by William Giraldi of Agni. There's a powerful piece by the Diazesque Patricia Engel.

Slice releases their fourth issue next week. The theme is Home. It includes interviews with Aleksandar Hemon, Paul Auster, and Lisa See, among others. And: a short story of mine called Patriotic Dead. Pick it up at a newsstand or your independent bookstore. (If they don’t have it, request it!); and let me know what you think.

inquiry into the naming of the world, part 1

2009-03-06T20:13:00.004-05:00

Mine, Mine, she says, clutching a box of tissues. She grabs the remote control. Mine! Her voice: part entreaty, part demand.

I pause, in the grip of this newscycle. Who does the TV remote does belong to. My husband, who uses it most? Phoebe, who holds it at the moment? Our neighbors, who gave us this TV (along with the remote) when they upgraded to a flat-screen? Listening to the news these days, one wonders at concepts that appears so elementary getting day by day fuzzier and fuzzier.

That is—we “own” our apartment. This means we pay a mortgage to a bank. Thus, the bank owns it. But shareholders own the bank—right (and who are shareholders but the royal “we”)? Or maybe the government now owns it?

She points to Naomi Klein’s giant book of Disaster Capitalism (right now lying beside my bed being used as a coaster; no reading time). She points to a dictionary. An umbrella stand. Mine.

I'm reminded of the story of the wise people of Chelm who capture the moon in a water-filled barrel. They gather around night after night to admire it. One night, when it is cloudy, they stand looking at the barrel and wonder how the moon had escaped.

Yours, I tell her. For today. Enjoy it.

A week as a single Stay-At-Home Parent

2009-01-07T20:59:00.007-05:00

Over break, I had a week as a single Stay-At-Home Parent. Josh was back in Brooklyn working hard on making the deadline for A.D. Phoebe and I went upstate to my parents’ place. It is a big house full of people who sleep until at least 10:00 or so. Phoebe got up before it got light, usually at 6:30. We slept in the same room. I fed her, read to her, dressed her, played with her. It was cold and snowed a great deal. Going out took a long time to prepare for. (It was actually our main activity—not going out but getting ready to go out.) While I did have some help, it was pretty much me caretaking for her all the time.

At first, I felt a mighty resistance. I thought of all the better things I could be doing with my time—writing and sleeping came to mind most—but after a couple of days, I gave into the restrictions of that life. And then a strange thing happened: I began to enjoy it. The simplicity of it. The single-minded purpose of it. We woke up, I changed her diaper, I made her a bottle. I looked out the window and in the early dawn you could see the snow falling steadily. It was very white. It was covering everything. In the cold kitchen, she sat on my lap in a chair and we watched the snow fall. At that moment, the seemingly small world of the Stay-At-Home Parent seemed a portal to something rich and wonderful.

Inquiry into the nature of cute, # 1

2008-11-25T13:10:00.008-05:00

Oh! She’s so cute!

Folks say, bending down to look at her in her stroller.

I smile proudly. When she toddles down the block with her candy basket swinging from her arm in her in her bat cow costume (yes, same as last year, but it actually fits now, I snap away. Cute! Cute, like pornography, impossible to define; you know it when you see it.

But we Americans are only interested in one side of cute. Unlike the Japanese. They seem to inquire, as a culture, into the nature and being of cute.

At my old job folks would gather around every so often and ooh and ah over something cute. A kitten (supercute.com). A baby panda (pandacam). At first I was resistant, but I came to appreciate the softening in the face and in stomach, the warmth behind the ears. I became a convert to the power of cute! And parenthood has given me many more moments of cute therapy: When she walks around with the towel on her head like Max in Where the Wild Things Are; when she gives that fake smile, with eyes shut, in the middle of eating; when she purses her lips and pecks at the air; when she raises her shoulders emphatically and proclaims a string of nonsense from her perch on the broken scooter in our living room.

But there are the moments when I am too tired or stressed to fall for cute. Here’s when my feelings turn deviant. When my fifteen-month-old daughter toddles about the apartment with her pajamas trailing, or yet again takes the dishrag off the refrigerator and wraps her stuffed animals with it, well, then she looks bizarre to me. A stubby top-heavy creature that has taken up residence in our home, a homunculus who has crazily strong opinions on things she knows nothing about.

At nine months, I took her to the Murakami show at the Brooklyn Museum. As we wandered through the rooms plastered with smiling bunny wallpaper, as we circled the enormous totemic super-cute bunny, she grew more and more agitated. Then she began to cry. Howl. We had to leave.

This made me think. What lies outside the small window of cute? Why do we crave to reside in this small window? This window is where we find the helpless, the eager, the absence of will, and the desire to please--the qualities we look for in a pet.

Well, of course, the Jungian side-show of cute is the grotesque, the creepy. The deformed. The Japanese get it. Cute is the narrow zone that does not violate our will to agency. On either side of that zone is the screaming child, the squalling child, the demanding child, who is categorically not cute. As she becomes more willful, as she discovers her own agency (and she is doing so with increasing frequency), I will do well to disinvest myself in her cuteness for danger of it turning—in my own eyes—grotesque.

And what lies beyond cute for the baby? She'll tell me, no doubt.

Cute may be good therapy but it's not a good life-script for her. Or for any of us.

Inquiry Into the subject of play, part 1

2008-09-02T11:29:00.004-04:00

I’ve been reading a lot about play. It’s is a big subject now. The theory seems to be that adult work is—or, at least, optimally, should be—a kind of play. The kind of work most of us need to know how to do, the kind that requires “soft skills.” Play at least as my generation knew it. That is, imaginative, creative, participatory. Playing house, playing doctor, playing store. As I mother, I am beginning to observe play and the striking thing about it, when it does happen—for it seems not easy, not predictable, the conditions have to be right—is that it is absorbing and difficult. She puts things into a basin and takes them out again, fitting them into holes that require her to identify matching shapes. Her head is tilted down, her eyes focused intently. When she fails, she looks up and cries out in frustration. This kind of play is not passive, not even fun in the sense we think of play as adults; it requires effort, but it leads to discovery.

So, okay, I buy the work analogy.

Now folks seem to be mourning this kind of play we knew as children’s play as it disappears amidst scheduling and demands of the modern entertainment juggernaut for kids. Or so the argument goes.

But I don’t know if I buy it. First off, play is, of course, a subjective term. Did it even exist in the, say, 1600s—before the modern concept of a childhood took root? In these agrarian, pre-democratic years, children had chores and began them as early as 5 or 6. They were not family mascots; they were necessary members of the economic unit.

So, maybe here’s the question: are adults really mourning the disappearance of play from kids' lives—or their own lost childhoods? Yes, this generation will have a different relationship to play—and we hope it is not one which confused play with entertainment (more about that later). . . So perhaps this generation will tell us what it was like to be consumers from a very young age. But they will tell us in their own way. It is an essential nature of humanity is to consume; but it is also essential to transform.

Smith mag's new Next Door Neighbor comic-essay

2008-08-06T17:32:00.002-04:00

Back in the 90s, Josh and I collaborated on a few comics pieces, including the famous (or rather, infamous) “Gynecology on the Go”—an extended “travel tip” for ladies backpacking in the tropics—and the duet “Cave of Fear,” which I provided the journal entries for. Josh and I have teamed up again for the new Next Door Neighbor story. Next Door Neighbor, edited by Dean Haspiel, is the ongoing feature on Smith mag that features a rotating comics-essays, about, well, our next door neighbors, those we’d like to remember—and those we’d like to forget. Our story features a next door neighbor I had growing up in Brooklyn in the 1970s. A beekeeper, in fact. Josh took a break from A.D. to render it. I think he did a fine job. It’s been my first time working in the comics form in awhile and it was interesting to think visually again. I’m pleased that the initial reviews have been positive. Take a look and let us know what you think.

I can only hope “The Beekeeper” has as long a life as “Gynecolgy on the Go,” which may still be doing the middle school health class circuit.

The Comics Revolution in the Classroom

2008-07-30T15:09:00.003-04:00

I have a piece in the summer issue of Teachers and Writers on using comics in the classroom as a reading source and the, ahem, challenges of getting comics into textbooks. (One of my pet projects while I was at Holt.) T & W magazine is put out by the Teachers and Writers Collaborative.

This issue of T & W is devoted entirely to comics and education. It contains an article by Michael Bitz, founder of the groundbreaking Comic Book Project; an interview with Françoise Mouly about Toon Books; a very cool five-page comic by Youme Landowne; a piece on poetry comics by Dave "Mr. Alphabet" Morice; an interview with Ben Katchor; and my piece "The Comics Revolution in the Language Arts Classroom: An Editor's Perspective." The article is an inside--and humorous--look at how comics are infiltrating the educational publishing industry. The wonderful cover is by Josh Neufeld (yes, the one who is related to me). At the back of the issue, is an excellent resource list for parents and teachers interested in using comics as education tools.

This special issue of Teachers & Writers magazine is available at the T&W website for $5.

the mother wars

2008-07-09T11:13:00.007-04:00

In the firmament, the mother wars are raging. Not the old son-father thing, or lovers spatting on Mount Olympus, that sound is of mothers waring.

A friend turned me on to the piece about Rebecca Walker in the British Mail. Based on an interview with Walker about her new book Choosing Motherhood After A Lifetime of Ambivalence (I will be reading this), Walker excoriates her mother Alice (of The Color Purple fame)--and all second generation feminists--for teaching her that motherhood was a form of servitude. Phyllis Chesler tried get them to kiss and make up on Salon.

I have to say that I am sympathetic to Rebecca Walker’s complaint about the feminism she was reared on. It has been surprising to me how empowering many aspects of motherhood are—from delivering a child to caring successfully for her needs. It comes as a surprise because the feminism that politicized me in college (and to which I owe much) pretty much gave the message that motherhood could be great, sure, but it was essentially a defeat. It was something, that like all aspects of female biology one gave into.

Which goes back to the PC wars of the late 1980s. This was not girl-power feminism. Womyn. Herstory feminism. Take Back the Night marches. It was a puritanical kind of feminism. I remember talking to a friend who had been reading Andrea Dworkin crying over the realization that consensual sex with her boyfriend (which she previously enjoyed) now seemed like rape to her. I remember walking around assigning the “male gaze” to everything. Yes, no two ways about it--female biology decreed victimhood in a patriarchal society. We modern women were charged with gaining command over these primitive, biologically essentialist impulses. Motherhood? A desire for something like motherhood was weak, atavistic—it had to be squelched—it was a siren song from the past. (I’m thinking here of de Beauvoir especially.)

How screwed up this now seems. I know that many second generation feminists were themselves mothers—often too-young mothers—and that they struggled with the conflict between duty to family and to self. They wanted their daughters to be saved from that conflict. Understandable, yes. But at what cost?

So I find myself sympathetic to Rebecca Walker’s complaints as a later-life mother that it delayed her decision to become a mother. (I sometimes wonder whether it delayed mine.)

Does feminism matter still? With Gucci advertising its “hysteria collection” of handbags (what would Germaine Greer think?)? Yes, yes, yes! It matters even more than ever. But I agree with popfeminist that it needs to be more inclusive kind.

What do other mothers, women, feminists of my generation think? I really want to know. . .

Cures for Heartbreak

2008-06-09T18:07:00.005-04:00

I just finished reading Margo Rabb’s novel Cures for Heartbreak. It is a novel about a girl named Mia whose mother dies of cancer when she is a fourteen. There are many things I love about this book. I love its sense of humor. I love that it is unapologetically a novel about a girl. I attended a reading of Margo’s recently and asked her about whether she wrote the book for an adult or a young adult audience. She said she wrote it for adults and when it sold as a young adult novel, she was surprised. I enjoyed it as much--if not more--than many other “adult” books. It has gotten me thinking about what makes a young adult versus and adult book.

Some of Alice Munro’s best short stories are about childhood. Why do we think that childhood or adolescence is not of interest to adults—or only if it is filtered through an adult frame or tone?

As some of you know, I am working on a novel. It is also about a girl—and as one friend who has read parts of it said, “girlhood.” A little while ago, I showed it to some agents, a number whom raised the adult versus the young adult question.

It seems to be, to a certain extent, a question of tone. A young adult editor I asked to take a look said she thought it was definitely adult. The theme and the prose level make it so. I have decided the same thing and am writing forward, thinking of it as an “adult” book.

Yet it is still a book about a girl—and about girlhood.

So, my question is: Must a book about girlhood necessarily marketed as young adult? After all, writing is about exploring human experience—all of it. The terms “childhood” and “adolescence” make us perceive those states as something other than adulthood but I wonder. I think it is more fluid than that. As Faulkner famously said, "The past is not dead. It is not even past.”

muttering #3

2008-05-20T13:45:00.006-04:00

An illicit quality to the simplicity of this relationship. It is the illicitness of lovers—early lovers. Early lovers who can’t do anything but stare at each other amazed at each other’s presence. The rest of the world does not intrude. I’ve heard it called "being in a bubble with your baby." But the way women talk about it does not really tell the truth. Because if the truth were spoken, it might be taken from them. It might be shameful--misconstrued. An all-encompassing love. A jealous love. A myopic love. A competitive love. A love of that leaves you with a confusion of bodies—of whose is whose.

A woman whose mother was dying once said to me “Our mothers are our lovers.” I thought she was crazy.

to bear

2008-05-13T10:17:00.004-04:00

She hugs a stuffed bear. She opens her mouth and a word—or something sounding like a word—comes out. Bear. . . It comes out like a half world. “Ba.” The B is solid, but the vowel sounds strange. Not quite an e—nor an a, nor an o. A floating vowel. She hides her face. Without the final consonant it is strangely naked, a half formed word.

This is the astonishing thing: she grows shy.

Yes. That’s it. I say, bear, and she avoids my eyes.

The whole world of meaning and symbol.

It is difficult to bear. The transition from—what?—to differentiation.

She pulls an object out of the undifferentiated mass of objects and she shrinks as if from the implications of this.

It is difficult to bear.

To hear language in formation.

For a few more days, she does not try to speak.

A part of me mourns the loss of the unnamed world,

In the beginning was the word. To name things. Then the symbol of the thing. The beginning of “as if” time—a time of metaphor.

object permanence

2008-04-16T14:35:00.004-04:00

That’s what they call it. They. In this case, the smiling man on the cover of the well-thumbed tome in our bathroom. A good book, it is. Though large, doesn’t pretend to be all-inclusive. Though opinionated, doesn’t pretend omnipotence. Arranged according to “touchpoints,” the developmental milestones in baby’s life (no article needed, now I see why).

This is the stage when she learns that an object, when not visible, is still there. Peek-a-boo. Where’s Phoebe? There she is. She gives her rabbit-toothed grin. Where’s Phoebe? There she is! She gives her hiccup-laugh. Where’s Phoebe? There she is. She reaches out her hand and screws up her face.

So we have to learn this. A stage. We are not born knowing of object permanence.

But how real is object permanence? How much should we be taught to expect—to anticipate—the reliability of “objects”? How misleading is it? In the era of string theory, dark matter, spooky particles, who can say that an object is permanent? What does permanent even really mean? As I understand it, these theories say that what is invisible to us in the universe is as binding as what is visible. There also seems to be some question, at the subatomic level, of the permanence of particles: they appear, waver, disappear. This is Schrodinger's Cat territory.

My father worked for a good company for thirty-eight years. This company put us through high school, college. I watched as father/object left in the morning (peppermint smelling, with briefcase) and returned that night (hungry, piqued smile, tie loosened) return. Objects roll out of sight. Then they reappear. A good job. A good family. I learned the lesson well: The universe is dependable.

It often seems to me that I have spent my adulthood since unlearning this lesson.

So what? Jobs come and go. People come and go. Technology comes and goes. Even our various selves come and go. (I am cleaning out my desk and find old photos, old letters; is that me? Did I say that?)

We must learn again and again that we essentially groundless beings: all that seems permanent, will indeed change, will pass.

So: If an object goes in one end of the tube, does it always come out the other end?

Really?

What can I tell her?

mutterings #23, 2

2008-04-02T18:54:00.000-04:00

Muttering #23 (on subway): In a big house, many people and their needs. Giant. A dog panting. Hopeful. Hopeless.

This is America. Astonishing.

Dark wood, moist, confusing.

Lydia Davis's committment to words.

Two kids sleeping after prom night.

Muttering #2 (waiting for elevator;posted belatedly): I assume someone pressed the button.

(Pause.) No one pressed the button.

the pincer grasp

2008-03-10T11:08:00.000-04:00

Oh, said one person we recently ran into, the flapping stage. Yes, especially when she was excited, she would beat her hands--her entire arms, really--against her sides like a chicken flapping its wings. The effect is comic. But this morning I watched her in her high chair as she tried to pick up a slippery piece of tofu between her thumb and forefinger. The pincer grasp! The same dexterity we admired in a nine-month old baby playing with a piece of lint on the floor, at her six-month doctor’s visit. So, here I am, glued to the spot, riveted really, in front of her high chair, NPR blaring the recession news around us, the kettle on the stove whistling, as she carefully maneuvers a piece of slimy tofu, between her thumb and forefinger, turns her wrists and brings the whole operation, now the BBC announcing itself with its cascading electronic muezzin call, toward her mouth. My goodness! Such work we are born into!

My Six-Word Memoir

2008-02-27T20:01:00.000-05:00

Hey, I have a six-word memoir in Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous & Obscure the new book from SMITH Magazine (yes, the same SMITH that publishes my husband Josh's A.D.)

Not Quite What I Was Planning originated from a contest SMITH held with Twitter last year, inspired by a possibly apocryphal tale of Ernest Hemingway's six-word short story: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." The pieces ultimately chosen for the book are a good mix of the silly, absurd, straightforward, sentimental, and ironic (lots of those). Mine is "Suburban Girl Tries to Make Bad" (p.152). Okay, so I fictionalized the setting somewhat, but my purpose was noble: to reveal, as any good memoir does, the deeper emotional truth. (That's what they all say, no?) Josh is in there too: "When she proposed, I said yes." No fiction in that. Other contributors include Sebastian Junger, Aimee Mann, Dave Eggers, Douglas Rushkoff, Nick Flynn, Stephen Colbert, Jonathan Lethem, Amy Sedaris.

The book's been getting tons of press, including an excellent interview with co-editors Larry Smith and Rachel Fershleiser on NPR's "Talk of The Nation."

The New Yorker even wrote a Talk of the Town about it--composed all in six-word sentences.

Forgive my bias when I say the book isn't just a novelty piece. It feels trenchant. There is something haunting in the brevity of these mini-memoirs and in the inevitable self-interrogation they inspire--after reading it for awhile, you will start to naturally compose six-word sentences about yourself.

Oh, and go ahead and submit your pithy memoir to sixwordmemoir.com — a sequel is already in the works.

Our Saturday Nights with Carmela and Tony

2008-02-23T22:44:00.000-05:00

Now that are home so often, we watch The Sopranos (better late than never, no?). At the center of it is the power stuggle between Carmela and Tony. The struggle has the name of marriage. An institution in crisis. Still, it does not interrogate the power of the mother. Here is Carmela, standing in the kitchen with her sponge, as if at the helm of a battleship, wiping the decks down, getting ready to hoist the flags. No, true, not a financial power, a kind of moral power. The power of disapproval.

back to the office

2008-02-08T09:51:00.000-05:00

On the 4 train into Manhattan. Already, there are things I forget: the breast pads, bottlecaps for pumping bottles, the slim freezer packs that make the bottles fit. I tried to prepare Phoebe for me being gone all day. It has rarely, if ever, been so long. One or two times before, I guess. But that was an aberration. This is the new normal. How will I do without the naps I have become so accustomed to? Will I need to start drinking caffeine again? How will Phoebe adjust? How will Josh adjust? (He will now be with her in the mornings.) At 3 months, it seemed hard; at 5 months, now it seems possible. In Josh’s arms this morning, she looked down coyly and bounced her leg, gave me an uncertain smile.

I’ll call you, I said. I’ll call you.

The office. The cube. My company has been bought by another company. The Technical Help Desk has moved to Orlando. The guy I talk to reset my computer password has a lower voice than the guy I used to talk to in Austin. It is cold there—30 degrees. A cold front. I moved here, he says bitterly, for the weather . . .

Inquiry into the celebration of Firsts, part 3

2008-01-29T22:19:00.000-05:00

It's capitalism, says Grandma R. Firsts can be easily commodified. How does one make spectacle of 100 days? Unwieldy, too specific and too general at once. But Firsts are ongoing, ripe for stirring memories--cards, keepsakes.

Is nostalgia a byproduct of capitalism? Is that a ridiculous question?

inquiry into celebration of Firsts, part 2

2008-01-08T11:07:00.001-05:00

It comes back to me: being in the poster and t-shirt store on 8th street. 1984. That poster everywhere of the baby with the spaghetti bowl on its head. Remember that? It was everywhere when I was a teenager--why? Why? I hated that poster. But then I have trouble with the awkward, the imperfect, the struggle. . . That ballet training, the yearning toward perfection and fear of failure overriding natural curiosity. The First? So. Then. I think maybe there is something to celebrating firsts. A need to celebrate the awkward, the misshapen, the mistake. Something in that, in the don’t watch me do this thing I don’t know how to do . . . Like all things about babies, they are both Present and Future. Everything they do contains a nugget of the future, all the other times this task or motion will be done without thought, just a part of life, part of the routine of life.
So, yes, one day she will eat. By herself.
Snap. Click. . . .