“

OKAY, BACK UP, WE CAN’T LET THIS PASS. YOU LIVED IN A TREE HOUSE?

The tree house is a structure on a friend’s property in North Carolina. When I left my very first job, I retreated to said tree house for several months. Then I went and worked for some friends of mine who are weavers in Italy for several months for the winter. When I came back in the Spring, the friend and I decided we wanted to make the tree house bigger. So I drafted plans for an additional part and we hired a carpenter. For about four months, I worked on building the second part of this tree house, which I then lived in for several years after.

YOU’RE DRAWN TO THE MAKING OF PHYSICAL THINGS.

I’m a builder.

OF BOOKS, OF TREE HOUSES, AND ALSO OF SHOES, RIGHT?

Oh gosh, shoes, yes! As I started getting more and more involved in bookmaking and my work began to be collected, I would see my books go into special collection libraries, put behind glass boxes in exhibitions, and stowed away deep inside buildings, never to be handled again. … Making shoes is a way to take the tools, materials, and processes I know and understand as a bookmaker, and using them in service of making a utilitarian object.

- from an interview with Jennifer Brook, who I nominate to succeed the Dos Equis “Most Interesting Man In The World” guy.
I’ve been having trouble reading, trouble focusing, trouble thinking. But this is off to a dazzling start. Here, have a passage: As for The Defiant Ones, its suggestion that Negroes and whites can learn to love each other if they are only chained together long enough runs so madly counter to the facts that it must be dismissed as one of the latest, and sickest, of the liberal fantasies, even if one does not quarrel with the notion that love on such terms is desirable. These movies are designed not to trouble, but to reassure; they do not reflect reality, they merely rearrange its elements into something we can bear. They also weaken our ability to deal with the world as it is, ourselves as we are.

I’ve been having trouble reading, trouble focusing, trouble thinking. But this is off to a dazzling start.

Here, have a passage:

As for The Defiant Ones, its suggestion that Negroes and whites can learn to love each other if they are only chained together long enough runs so madly counter to the facts that it must be dismissed as one of the latest, and sickest, of the liberal fantasies, even if one does not quarrel with the notion that love on such terms is desirable. These movies are designed not to trouble, but to reassure; they do not reflect reality, they merely rearrange its elements into something we can bear. They also weaken our ability to deal with the world as it is, ourselves as we are.

Click for high-res photo
THAT THING WHERE YOU’VE FINALLY SLEPT BETTER THAN A COLICKY INFANT BUT BOOKS CAN’T HOLD YOUR INTEREST AND YOU DECIDE THAT BURROUGHSING YOUR KID’S TAYLOR SWIFT SONGS MIGHT RESTORE YOUR SOUL TO FACTORY SETTINGS We were both young when I first saw you make your way through the crowd and say hello Little did I know you can take me down with just one single blow We were both young when I first saw you A one-hand feel on the steering wheel The other on my heart Our song is the way you laugh Something that’ll haunt me when you’re not around Our song is a slamming screen door I keep waiting for you, but you never come Crying on the staircase Go and tell your friends that I’m obsessive and crazy I just want to feel okay again Watch me strike a match on all my wasted time Sparks fly whenever you smile We were both young when I first saw you We’re on the phone and you talk real slow ’cause it’s late and your mama don’t know She’ll never know your story like I do Our song is the way you laugh Our song is a slamming screen door Play it again Play it again Drop everything now Meet me in the pouring rain Click for high-res photo

THAT THING WHERE YOU’VE FINALLY SLEPT BETTER THAN A COLICKY INFANT BUT BOOKS CAN’T HOLD YOUR INTEREST AND YOU DECIDE THAT BURROUGHSING YOUR KID’S TAYLOR SWIFT SONGS MIGHT RESTORE YOUR SOUL TO FACTORY SETTINGS

We were both young when I first saw you

make your way through the crowd

and say hello

Little did I know

you can take me down

with just one single blow

We were both young when I first saw you

A one-hand feel on the steering wheel

The other on my heart

Our song is the way you laugh

Something that’ll haunt me when you’re not around

Our song is a slamming screen door

I keep waiting for you, but you never come

Crying on the staircase

Go and tell your friends

that I’m obsessive

and crazy

I just want to feel okay again

Watch me strike a match on all my wasted time

Sparks fly

whenever you smile

We were both young when I first saw you

We’re on the phone

and you talk real slow

’cause it’s late

and your mama don’t know

She’ll never know your story like I do

Our song is the way you laugh

Our song is a slamming screen door

Play it again

Play it again

Drop everything now

Meet me in the pouring rain

“

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.

With sadness there is something to rub against,

a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.

When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,

something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.

- from “So Much Happiness” by Naomi Shihab Nye

sights from this afternoon’s dog walk

sights from this afternoon’s dog walk

“
Many of his casual opinions on the people and scenery of this country are ludicrous.

- Nabokov, writing as John Ray, Jr., Ph.D., in the foreword to Lolita

I love this sentence. There’s an Updike quote that often shows up on the covers of Nabokov books: “Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically.”

John Ray, Jr., Ph.D. does not write ecstatically. That, perversely, is why I love the sentence. I love it but forgot about it and only found it just now while searching my computer for something unrelated. I’d stashed the quote in Evernote and attached this reminder: “Lolita snippet for VWP (corn reference in Nebraska).”

VWP stands for Void Where Prohibited, my own version of a “put my first book into the drawer, and shut it” unpublished novel. The “(corn reference in Nebraska)” bit refers to these two paragraphs:

Morning in Nebraska is something I’d rather forget.  I had wanted to go looking for the real Nebraska — a place a journalist from Omaha once assured me really existed.  This is a place of sand dunes and true natural beauty, if my memory isn’t confusing that reporter with one of the hundreds of others who interviewed me over the years.

Interstate 80 breathes not a word of this secret paradise to the travelers who speed through, counting on something better in Colorado.  Having confined my drive to that deadening corridor, I can scarcely pass blanket judgment on the state.  An unchewed corn kernel bumming a ride aboard a piece of shit knows as much about the beauty of its digester as I do about the beauty of Nebraska.

Which is to say that my narrator’s casual opinions on the people and scenery of this country are ludicrous. He admits as much.

From People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks: I love the Tate. I really do. Despite the fact that its collection of Australian art is pretty sketchy. Not a single Arthur Boyd painting, for one thing, which has always bugged me quite a bit. There are times when my own ignorance yanks me out of the flow of a book so badly that it’s best to do a quick Google search. In this case, who’s this Arthur Boyd? The painting above is Boyd’s “Portrait of Alannah Coleman I.” I also found this landscape called “Shoalhaven River afternoon.” And then it was back to the novel.

From People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks:

I love the Tate. I really do. Despite the fact that its collection of Australian art is pretty sketchy. Not a single Arthur Boyd painting, for one thing, which has always bugged me quite a bit.

There are times when my own ignorance yanks me out of the flow of a book so badly that it’s best to do a quick Google search. In this case, who’s this Arthur Boyd? The painting above is Boyd’s “Portrait of Alannah Coleman I.” I also found this landscape called “Shoalhaven River afternoon.” And then it was back to the novel.

sights from this morning’s dog walk

“
A new report on why children in day care are sedentary suggests that it’s not the care providers, but the parents, who are mostly to blame.

Parents are the biggest obstacle to letting kids play, says study in Pediatrics - On Parenting - The Washington Post (via npr)

This is why I just let Bean crawl around. If he wants to eat the rocking chair legs, who am I to say he shouldn’t?  He’s learning about those legs!

(via italicsmine)

======================

Exactly! Let Bean crawl. Let Bean gnaw rocking chair legs. Let Bean become close personal friends with our planet’s pitiless, fascinating gravitational tug.

A few things.

First, a deep breath and a quote from the actual study:

Our findings should be interpreted as exploratory, because this was a qualitative study of child care providers within a single county in Ohio. The primary purpose of qualitative research is to probe phenomena in-depth, not to generalize the results to other populations.

Also, they talked to “nine focus groups with 49 child care providers” and zero parents, so the stuff I’m about to quote about parents being “mostly to blame” is, in some sense, secondhand.

Still, this craziness:

Another surprising finding was that a societal focus on “academics” extended even to the preschool-aged group. Several commented that parents wanted to know what their child “learned” that day, but were not interested in whether they had gone outside, or had mastered fundamental gross motor skills. Participants felt that academics were valued by both low- and upper-income parents, and thus were motivated to demonstrate a “purpose” for gross motor time so that the children would not be seen as  just “running around.”

There’s pretty much only one question I ask our kids at the end of their school day. I ask it with genuine enthusiasm because there’s literally never been a time that asking it has yielded a sighing, stereotypical “Nothing.” This is the question: “Hey, what did you guys do at recess today?”

I like the study’s marching orders for doctors:

Recognizing that school readiness is a prevalent concern, pediatricians may need to highlight for parents the many learning benefits of outdoor play (better concentration, learning about science, negotiation with peers), and reassure parents that active time does not need to come at the expense of time dedicated to “academics” and “learning.” Because we have previously reported that children sometimes are dressed unsuitably for active play, pediatricians can remind parents about the importance of “dressing for success,” which in preschool would be dressed for active play. … Last, in dispensing injury prevention advice, pediatricians should be careful not to reinforce messages that physical activity is inherently dangerous.

Speaking of dangerous, I came home from the library yesterday with a somewhat unhinged book called 50 Dangerous Things (you should let your kids do). The kids and I ended up chewing on aluminum foil and tasting the meaning of, in the book’s words, “foil will create a weak electric current when it contacts the acid in your saliva. If you have any fillings, you may experience an odd tingling in your teeth as the metal in the fillings conducts the electricity to the nerves nearby.” (This would be a good point to stress that our kids aren’t nearly as young as the kids in the study. Start with chewing rocking chair legs. Your preschooler has years to work up to chewing foil.)

- David Quigg, 1/4/2012

(this post was reblogged from italicsmine)
“

So my notion of poking fun at (Ayn Rand) evolved into an idea for a more sophisticated satire that would try to play fair with her philosophy, and present not just the bad and the ridiculous, but the good and the thought-provoking, and try to give some sense of where her ideas had come from and why they had such value to some people. And I also decided that I wanted to bring Rand herself into the story, so that she could defend herself, and so that I could give her her due.


And this idea would eventually become my second published novel, Sewer, Gas & Electric, which to me represents the point in my career when my dad’s influence caught up with my mom’s. Many of the elements in that book—the fantastical setting, the flashes of missionary zeal when my protagonist, Joan Fine, engages Rand in debate, the bicycle trip to heaven—these are things that I would associate with my mother. But the decision to treat Rand and her philosophy as more than just the butt of a joke—as a person, not a perversity—that’s Dad.

- from Seattle novelist Matt Ruff’s 2010 speech at the Calvin College Festival of Faith & Writing, which I found tonight by a strange route.

Ruff’s words fit well with my favorite bit of that Camus quote I blogged in December: “true artists scorn nothing; they oblige themselves to understand rather than to judge.”*

Or, as Geraldine Brooks asked in that Best American Short Stories intro that I seem doomed to quote from at least once daily, “why, if religion turns up in a story, is it generally only there as a foil for humor?”

More than just the butt of a joke. To understand rather than to judge. Not just a foil for humor. Ruff and Camus and Brooks aren’t saying exactly the same thing, but they’re singing in the same key.

I’ve typed and retyped and retyped this sentence. Every attempt ends up being about fiction I’ve written or fiction I hope to write and about how devoted I’ve become to the idea that I can’t be worth a damn as a writer unless I understand all my characters. Not admire all my characters. But understand, be able to step in and serve as their court-appointed defense attorney in a pinch.

I know what you’re thinking. Please, oh unpublished novelist, give me at least seven more paragraphs of your beliefs on this important topic. Tragically, I’m heading to bed.

——————

* This is my latest stab at improving on the official Nobel translation. I explained my thinking in the December post. If you understand French, you can decide for yourself. The original is “les vrais artistes ne méprisent rien ; ils s’obligent à comprendre au lieu de juger.”