Guido Brunetti Mysteries

I've been saving this distorted Grand Canal picture for a while (thank you, Google Maps) to accompany the recent list of Guido Brunetti mysteries that I've been reading.  Dave started reading them, getting in the mood for upcoming travels to Italy this fall, and I was jealous of all the fun he was having.  So even though I had a full plate of things to read, I jumped in.  Luckily they read quickly.  Quite a few people I know have read/are reading these: my sisters Susan and Cynthia, my brother-in-law Bruce, a quilter friend, and on Rick Steve's radio show this week, they were also mentioned.  As the woman said, "I may never travel to Venice, but by reading these, I feel like I have traveled there already."  Or something like that.

These little books are addicting.  I finish one, saying not another until I get the grading done, but after that, I find the next one on my nightstand (where Dave puts them after he finishes them) and dive into another.  I've been in Venice, these past few weeks, courtesy of Donna Leon.

Guido Brunetti is the Commissario of the Questura, the police department in Venice, and has two teenaged children and wife who teaches English Literature at the local university.  I can relate definitely to the wife-teaching-English-Lit part.

Here's what I've read, so far:

1. Death at La Fenice

2.  Death in a Strange Country

3.  Dressed for Death, also published in Britain as "The Anonymous Venetian."

4.  Death and Judgment, also published in Britain as "A Venetian Reckoning."

5.  Acqua Alta (one of my personal favorites)

6.  Quietly in Their Sleep, published in Britain as "The Death of Faith""

7.  A Noble Radiance

8.  Fatal Remedies

9.  Friends in High Places

10.  A Sea of Troubles

This last one is set on the neighboring island of Palestrina, and had me reading and flipping the pages at the end as fast as I could.

This summer I've also read (with my mother):

The Sense of an Ending: A Novel

Turn of Mind

The Buddha in the Attic

On Canaan’s Side: A Novel

The Shadow of the Wind

How It All Began 

 

I'm still thinking about On Canaan's Side, as well as Turn of Mind. 

 

 

Carry On. Sort of.

Occasionally, I Write

Robert Frost wrote to his editor about their summer rental house, in an area of New Hampshire where they rented for many years: "Our summer was one of the pleasantest we have had in years. . . . There is a pang there that makes poetry."

I know that pang--it can trigger poetry or fiction or even a good blog post.  It's a subtle thing and has to be encouraged and given time to spread out into a life.  A life I don't think I have anymore. 

 All this is triggered by the pang when I read the most recent cover on my Poet's and Writer's Magazine: This Is Your Last Issue it proclaims, in bold black letters on red background, as if the gravity of that pronouncement needed any more heft.  The envelopes started arriving a few weeks ago, little reminders that it was time to write the check that would keep it coming for another year, or if you act now, a special deal for two or more years.  I have a stack of these magazines on the shelf above where I'm writing this now.  I can glance up there and see them--the two I saved from ages and ages ago (with the story of Stones for Ibarra and its author, my heroine Harriet Doerr) when it was more of broadsheet-type publication with a soft fold and staples holding it together.  Now the magazine is smaller, has more color photographs, more contest announcements all with a tidy little spine that looks very nice. 

And that's the problem--it looks nice, but I don't read them.  Haven't read them for about the last 18 months.  Opening them reminds me of another time in my life when I thought I would write, when I thought I had the power to push through the ennui of life and Produce the Novel.  Write that fiction that would be talked about in literary circles.  I would be the one of my graduating class to be on NPR one day, reading an essay into a microphone, spreading the gospel of my writing throughout the broadcast world.  I really believed I would do it.  Then I really wanted to believe I would do it.  Then I sort of believed I could do it.  And then I stopped opening up the magazines.  I hated going to gatherings of my grad school colleaguesor UCR's Writers Week, or anything where they talked up what they were writing, and what magazines were accepting their stories.  It didn't really matter to me what mags were, because I wasn't writing.  I wasn't getting those 9 x 12 envelopes all lined up, sending my little pieces of fiction or poetry out into the world, like little flat children.

I was teaching.  I was getting a child (or two)  married.  I was dealing with the illness of a daughter.  I was traveling.  I was meeting new grandchildren. I was building memories with my husband.  I was sewing, quilting.  I was carefully not writing about the things that caused that sharp turn in my heart, for they were too overwhelming.  I was reading.  I was listening to music.  I was loyal, holding back, preserving privacy.  I was reconciling what I thought I was going to do with what I was doing.  I shuffled through doctors.  I graded papers.  I wasted time.  All the while, the binders with various drafts of my novel were like those eerie-but-wise stone carvings in Lord of the Rings flanking the calm river where Frodo paddles past, on his way to his uncertain future.  Today I am moving those binders to the garage.

I'd be lying if I said I weren't sad. 

We used to say in Creative Writing that you can't go back to your earlier writing because you change, and that pang that triggered what you wrote then, is not longer there.  This I know is true.  And I am sad that I will never figure out how to move that character in my novel from her ways of avoiding the emotional center, keeping a careful balance, to the place where she deals head on with the awful calm and crazy that is her life.

Until I can figure this writing thing out (and I may never do that), this blogging forum will be my place to write, to craft something wordwise.  For even though I may have left Margaret stranded in Wisconsin, I can keep the writing muscle limber enough to find her--or some other creature--again.

Reading and Memory

In a recent New York Times article about memory, I was fascinated by this section:

" Memory training was considered a centerpiece of classical education [as] . . . . [s]tudents were taught not just what to remember but how to remember it. In a world with few books, memory was sacrosanct.

[T]hrough the late Middle Ages, books were thought of not just as replacements for memory but also as aides-mémoire. Even as late as the 14th century, there might be just several dozen copies of any given text in existence, and those copies might well be chained to a desk or a lectern in some library, which, if it contained a hundred other books, would have been considered particularly well stocked. If you were a scholar, you knew that there was a reasonable likelihood you would never see a particular text again, so a high premium was placed on remembering what you read.

To our memorybound predecessors, the goal of training your memory was not to become a “living book” but rather a “living concordance,” writes the historian Mary Carruthers, a walking index of everything read or learned that was considered worthwhile. And this required building an organizational scheme for accessing that information. When the point of reading is remembering, you approach a text very differently from the way most of us do today. . . . If something is going to be made memorable, it has to be dwelled upon, repeated.

In his essay “First Steps Toward a History of Reading,” Robert Darnton describes a switch from “intensive” to “extensive” reading that occurred as printed books began to proliferate. Until relatively recently, people read “intensively,” Darnton says. “They had only a few books — the Bible, an almanac, a devotional work or two — and they read them over and over again, usually aloud and in groups, so that a narrow range of traditional literature became deeply impressed on their consciousness. Today we read books “extensively,” often without sustained focus, and with rare exceptions we read each book only once. We value quantity of reading over quality of reading. We have no choice, if we want to keep up with the broader culture.


While I have a family room full of bookcases, I can't say that I've read the books in them more than one time through.  Reading about this alternative way of consuming books--only a few, over and over--makes me wonder if I'm missing out on being able to think deeply about one single tome.  I'll probably not change--too many good books out there I want to read.

Writing is a Game of Inches

My son recently linked me one of his favorite blogs titled Rands in Repose (another reason to raise children well: they turn out to be very interesting adults who can bring new ideas into your life).  While I liked the post about bookshelves, I was very interested in his new post about writing a book.  (The title to this blog is taken from that post.)

He has lots of great advice, but it begins with the bold statement:
"Don’t write a book. Even better, stop thinking about writing a book. Your endless internal debate and self-conjured guilt about that book you haven’t written yet is a sensational waste of your time. My guess is if you took all the time that you’ve spent considering writing a book and translated that into actual writing time, you’d be a quarter of your way into writing that book you’re not writing."

Somedays I think I'm about there.  It's been roughly five years since I graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing, and the (hideously complicated) novel is tucked away safely on some dusty shelf, the strains of pomp and circumstance long gone.  But so is the notion that I'd ever complete another book.  Or write and be paid for it.  I immediately went off on sabbatical with my husband, and I dutifully re-wrote the (hideously complicated) novel once but when I started in again, I realized it could probably never be re-written to my satisfaction.

One day I took an inventory of a few of my fellow graduate students.  Sherri is a roller derby queen.  EJ got one of the few available full-time faculty positions at the local community college.  Melanie is a teacher at one of the high schools in the area. Motherhood has captured Jenny.  Elizabeth spent the years after graduation nursing her son through his (eventually fatal) brain cancer. Kate still teaches part-time at the institution we all graduated from and is the only one I know that is writing (drama, for local productions, but I don't know if she gets paid for it). And me?  I write blogs and teach part time at a local community college.

The guilt over Not Writing at times is huge.  My sister told me she thought that my blogging was a way of getting my writing out there.  She's probably correct.  So when I read Michael Lopp's post this morning, it resonated.  I do write nearly every day, in short bloggy forms.  The habit--and the urge--is compelling.  But, in spite of that writing degree, the encouragement from people that matter to me, and that nagging thought that I if don't take a leap off the cliff I won't know if I can fly, I still don't know--even though I have the basic plot line and the characters for a novel--if a book will ever come out of me.

So instead, I just pull up the keyboard, open a blog, and start writing.

Objective Reality of Humanity

I put up the recipe for from-scratch Angel Food Cake over on ElizabethCooks.com. I started thinking about this after I visited Matthew's home for his birthday back in April. Kim and I were discussing angel food cakes, you know--the usual: store-bought vs. home-made. So I thought I'd make a cake showing all the steps in case anyone wants to try making it for themselves, and deciding which they liked better.

I've been reading the book Shop Class as Soulcraft, by Matthew B. Crawford and so far it's been an interesting read. I gave it to my brother as well, as he also likes to work with his hands. Crawford quotes from the philosopher Alexandre Kojeve:

The man who works recognizes his own product in the World that has actually been transformed by his work: he recognizes himself in it, he sees in it his own human reality, in it he discovers and reveals to others the objective reality of his humanity, of the originally abstract and purely subjective idea he has of himself.

Does this idea extrapolate to angel food cakes? Perhaps. I just know that I like items made from my own hand quite well, and perhaps that is the reason that I have one blog dedicated to quilting and sewing and one dedicated to recipes.

Old Provence Quilt

I have had some spectacular failures. On this, Crawford notes that "creativity is a by-product of mastery of the sort that is cultivated through long practice." Yes folks, it's not like it is on TV. Sometimes cakes fall, dresses turn out to be horrid, a quilt may hang in the closet until I get the energy to pull it out, unpick it and re-invent it, revealing the "objective reality of my own humanity" in my handiwork.

New Provence Quilt

And unlike a trip to Target, where I knowingly buy cheap stuff that I know will be tossed away in the future, and unlike a furied session of housecleaning that I know will come undone and need to be redone in the future, the things I make have staying power, if only in memory (as in the case of the French Berry Tart, which we are still talking about this week).

I've made quilts for all the grandchildren, although some are kept put away for the future. After reading in this book, I want to say--Take them out!! Let the children play with them, use them for picnics, wrap up toys and dolls and treasures in them, for they reveal me, these things that are "transformed by my work,"and perhaps that is really all I have to give to these children of my children.

While the emphasis of Crawford's book is examining "manual competence, and the stance it entails toward the built, material world," in discussing the idea that things will outlive us, I'm reminded of one of my father's favorite poems by James Russell Lowell: The Vision of Sir Launfal. In this poem a knight who travels the world over looking for The Holy Grail returns home, defeated in his quest. At his door he encounters a beggar, and the knight shares his last bit of bread with him. The beggar reveals himself to be the Lord, the very Christ which Sir Launfall has been searching for in one way or another. The final stanza reminds us that:

Not what we give, but what we share,--
For the gift without the giver is bare;

I hope that these small grandchildren will remember their grandmother from the quilts I've made them, among other things, much as I remember my Grandmother Sessions by her stories told on her swinging glider on the back porch, and my Grandmother Bickmore by her bent hands teaching me how to knead homemade bread.

Headlong. Ruthless.

I have had this book for many years, so many that I can't remember, although the initial publication date was 2001. Then the movie came out and I studiously avoided any mention of what happened, who did what, how the book turned out.

I wanted to discover it for myself, for one of the few pleasures of reading is turning pages, building up anticipation, hardly waiting for the climactic denouement and knowing that no pages can be skipped, that a reader must doggedly keep at it until the last page is turned. I wanted to savor a story.

It centers around forgiveness, the lack of it, repentance, atoning for one's errors and misjudgments and sins and mistakes. It's our lives that this book reveals, for as I've gotten older I realize that life really is all about repenting of mistakes, forgiving others for theirs.

Briony, the center of this book, is a young girl of 13 when the novel opens and she wants to be a writer. She's begun by writing plays, stories, and in her mind, struggling to see the future, half-seeing it, half-imagining it. She takes after her mother in this regard, and in one scene, the mother--fighting off a migraine--lays in her bed and imagines that:

"There was a presence in the room, her aggrieved, overlooked ten-year-old self, a girl even quieter than Briony, who used to wonder at the massive emptiness of time. . . . It was haunting Emily once more. Briony was her last, and nothing between now and the grave would be as elementally important or pleasurable as the care of a child. . . and she, Emily, would grow stiffer in the limbs and more irrelevant by the day; . . . And here was the ghost of her childhood, diffused throughout the room, to remind her of the limited arc of existence. How quickly the story was over. Not massive and empty at all, but headlong. Ruthless." (141-2)

The tangled web of mother, father, family, lovers, war, sacrifice, error, injustice all combined to propel me through the book. I finished last night, interested in the structure that was built, yet dismantled in the end.

I do recommend it.

My Life in France

One bit of silver lining about being sick is the chance to reach into your nightstand drawer and pull out one of the books tucked away in there, and finally read it.

I just finished My Life in France, by Julia Child with Alex Prud'homme last night, laying low because Dave said I needed a rest (Did that mean I was a bit crabby?  A bit.).

I ripped through this pausing only for a snack or two, but that is to be expected considering the entire book is about her experience with food.  She begins in Paris, then to Marsaille, and the writing of her cookbook manuscript takes over and becomes the thread that runs through the other places that she lives: Germany and Norway, then finally back to the United States.

 If you've seen the movie Julie and Julia, much of the information in this book feels familiar, as Nora Ephron leaned heavily on this book for her screenplay.



From the New York Times:
Child also did a lot for France — and the American palate — by introducing French cuisine to American homes. But this book, written with her husband's great-nephew, Alex Prud'homme, before Child's death at 91 in August 2004, is really a love story: she loved Paul Child, 10 years her senior; she loved France; she loved French cooking; and she loved life. Listen to her: "The sweetness and generosity and politeness and gentleness and humanity of the French had shown me how lovely life can be if one takes time to be friendly." And a few pages later: "Oh, how I adored sweet and natural France, with its human warmth, wonderful smells, graciousness, coziness and freedom of spirit." 

I liked reading about her love affair with food, with France (Paris and then the south of France), and with her husband Paul, who seemed to have a generous heart and was very supportive of her endeavors (I love the photo on the original cover of the book, on the right. It is from one of their Valentine's Day cards, preferring to send those out instead of Christmas Cards.)

One thing I did find interesting is the references to "bilious stomach" and dieting and portions in this book.  Seems Julia and her husband Paul balanced their sumptious meals with leaner, lighter fare on other days.  Makes sense. This is a pretty fast read and I much enjoyed it.

I think about the list of cooking blogs I have now on my Google Reader (including my own as well as my daughter Barbara's) and have to think that Julia's enthusiasm for cooking from scratch has played a role in this burst of food writing.  I cooked from scratch for many years, and nearly every recipe began with: "Thaw one pound of hamburger. . ." the assumption being that everyone had a pound of hamburger in their freezer--and we did.

My friend Judy and I were discussing this last night and we both realized that we now rarely cook with hamburger.  Our tastes seemed to have changed (last night I just read Cooking With Dorie's discourse on butter, and now am going to track down "cultured butter" to see if it's similar to the butter I had in France on my Paul sandwich), and we're more adventurous with more time and more money to spend in the direction of cooking.

I don't think she and I cook as much as we did when we both had children growing up around us--we just cook differently.  A home-cooked meal two or three times a week, leftovers or a visit to a restaurant the rest of the time.

Something to Think About

So do yourself a favor today.
Click on the picture above to head to Maira Kalman's essay on Lincoln, published in the New York Times.
Rummage around a bit and find her essay on the Inauguration if you want a double treat. (Or click below.)

Italian Chapel
July 2007

"But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."

last line of the novel Middlemarch (1871–72), written by George Eliot

While in Utah, my father showed me an article reviewing Jill Bolte Taylor's new book. In this article, it mentioned she had done a TED talk, so we immediately pulled it up on the web. She'd even brought a few visual aids to illustrate her talk. (See the video below to see what I'm referring to; then head to www.ted.com for more great talks. Or you can click *here* to be taken directly to her talk on TED.com.)




After watching, my father and I discussed the video, creativity, nirvana, the seeming dissolution of boundaries between life and energy, all while he fixed a mango, the knife cutting, slicing and cubing sweet pieces of fruit.

The hands busy, the mind at work.

Does my father also seek that balance that I struggle to find? The see-saw between right brain/left brain, time for creativity, time for reality and how to move between the two parts in order to forge a whole? It sounds so lofty, but this tension sometimes clouds the clearheadedness I try to find. It was strangely comforting to know that it was still part of his life's work, although I think he's more settled than I am, with his studio and painting and the sheer joy of creativity. I seem to slog (by choice, I must admit) through grading, detritus and minutia.


In conjunction with this talk, I read the review of Sex and the City in the Los Angeles Times, and it lauded the movie for celebrating the 50th birthday of the one of the characters, saying that the film had transcended their earlier niche and really moved ahead to capture a "real" woman's life, as if it was the birthday number that was significant rather than the growth of the person who is attached to that number. (I guess, for Hollywood, acknowledging that anyone is over 30 is a big deal.) The reviewer did nail that idea to the wall, saying that in spite of the glamorous clothes and the fabulous real estate they do tackle weightier issues. I wonder though, if those women, even if older, have changed. Or do the same things still satisfy them at fifty that intrigued them in their earlier years: clothes, shoes, revolving relationships?


Another facet of growing older is the letting go. (I know you'd never know this by looking at my garage, but the cleaning out is currently underway.) My brother-in-law and I were discussing Steven Covey's mantra to be proactive. Dan made the comment that it meant you had to have an opinion about everything, make a decision about everything, charge ahead in every area of life, never trusting that it might all work out, after all. I said that being "proactive" was great if you were in your thirties and forties. I do think that the cliches and sayings that I once embraced (that Striving for Excellence business) are now like too-tight shoes: they don't fit.

And unlike the Sex and the City women, or a brain scientist like Ms. Taylor, or a time guru like Covey, who seemingly have all the answers, I'll need to keep at it.

Like these fellows.

What's the difference between lucky and blessed?

What's the origin of each? How was it originally used? I started thinking about this after hearing the phrase "Yes, the Lord has really blessed me" too many times in church, usually in response to a compliment about their children, or other such tangibles.

Joan Armatrading has a song that begins:
I'm lucky
I'm lucky
I can walk under ladders
Yes I'm so lucky
That I'm as lucky
As me

Richard Wiseman thinks that he can help you find some luck; in fact he's broken it down into four parts. I'm sure if you want to part with some money, he'll share the secret with you in his book.

Another question: Does my good luck in achieving X-quantity imply that you have bad luck if you haven't achieved it? The X-quantity could be a good marriage, children who are happy and adjusted and nice, grandchildren, wealth, health, or good teeth, ankles and bones. We might as well add in being cancer-free.


Wikipedia posits that luck refers to that which happens beyond a person's control. This view incorporates phenomena that are chance happenings, a person's place of birth for example, but where there is no uncertainty involved, or where the uncertainty is irrelevant. Within this framework one can differentiate between three different types of luck:

1. Constitutional luck, that is, luck with factors that cannot be changed (place of birth and genetic constitution are typical examples)
2. Circumstantial luck, that is, luck with factors that are haphazardly brought on, such as accidents and epidemics
3. Ignorance luck, that is, luck with factors one does not know about. Examples can be identified only in hindsight.

If I say I'm blessed, does that imply I did something to cause that? Is blessed different than lucky? Is blessed an adjective, or a state of being?

WordNet says it's an adjective meaning highly favored or fortunate (for example, by divine grace) as in "our blessed land" or "the blessed assurance of a steady income."

Blessed is also used informally as an intensifier in a phrase; "not a blessed dime"; "I'll be darned (or blessed) if I'll do any such thing"; "he's a blessed fool," "Bless me if it isn't my old friend!"

If I were a Roman Catholic and proclaimed to be one of the blessed, I'd be worthy of veneration. I think the term I hear is more along the lines of the final definitions: enjoying the bliss of heaven and characterized by happiness and good fortune.

But doesn't fortune imply luck?

Does one word imply a spiritual dimension, and does the other reside in a secular world with rabbit's feet, four-leaf clovers and found pennies?

I guess my answer to above is blessed is personal, luck is not. Today while pondering and writing this post, I received a package from someone who has known me for a very long time. I opened it, set it up to gaze at it. One might say I'm lucky to have such a friend, lucky to receive such a gift. But this was a deeply personal gesture of sharing, and it came because of our relationship--honed, crafted and tempered over years of thrust-and-feint, forgiveness and kindness. In an instant, the answer to the question was made apparent. Blessed happens on a much deeper level, and bandying it around in response to compliments is a trite use of the word. Perhaps luck is more appropriate to that scenario.

But blessed in the higher sense comes from the most extra-ordinary feelings of inclusion, of being given gifts for no other reason than the giver is good, is kind, and loves unconditionally. The feeling and emotions that spill out are a sign of the profound and mysterious, the unexplainable. Blessed is something, then, that you can only know, can't easily articulate, and can happen even in the midst of what others might call bad luck.

And that's the difference.

I have been on a reading craze lately, making up for lost time. Magazines, with only a brief attention span necessary, don't really do the trick.

I have thought a lot about writing, and have long wondered how to write and be loyal and sensitive to the people in my world. Rue Rude, an interesting ex-pat blog captures it well (click on the words Diary vs. Blog to read the entire entry--it's worth a diversion):

Diary vs blog

" Sometimes I wish I could write hilarious posts about my family and friends, like other blogs, or moving stories about my child or my personal life, or even just make things up off the top of my head. But I can't. For one thing, I'm not that funny or sensitive.

"But anyway, all that stuff goes straight into volume XXXIII of my real diary, which is indeed scintillating ("One should always have something sensational to read on the train"). (Volume II, left. Ages 9-13.)

"Much of the reason is just that being older than a lot of you, I don't feel I can expose my life to that extent, because it's not just my own life that would be exposed.

"I was once very poor and everyone I knew was poor, and that's easy to write about, thank goodness: one of the few blessings of poverty. I still know plenty of poor people. "For ye have the poor always with you." But now I also have friends and acquaintances who get cars and airplanes for Christmas, tied up in a red bow; who own castles; who know the Presidents of the United States; who are well known or famous in the media; who run large companies; who have become major donors to museums. Frankly, you can't write about them. Not in a blog. Too bad, it would be great copy. But I'd rather keep my friends. And that's the last I can say about it."

I guess that's why fiction is safer, although after reading Joan Didion's A Year of Magical Thinking, I may re-think that idea as well. She recounts how her husband "lifted" parts of his young daughter's sayings in order to write one of his novels. And I think of my father's admonition that if you don't want to be written about, don't be acquainted with a writer.

I go round and round with this.

Einstein's Dreams, by Alan Lightman

In class, we've started reading Einstein's Dreams again, a book set in Berne Switzerland. We traveled there last year which makes for great teaching material, so I set up a blog for my students to look at the city.

If you are new to the book, I have other posts on this blog. Click on the following to read about some of the chapters.
The Red Hat
The Great Clock of the World
Time is Local Phenomenon
The Nows and Laters
There Is No Memory

I read this slender book last night, a tribute by Calvin Trilling to his wife.

In one chapter he recounts Alice's sympathy towards the daughter of an old friend, who'd been raped by an intruder. Alice said that her lung cancer was comparable to the attack "only in that both were what she called 'realizations of our worst nightmares.' She said there was some relief at surviving what you might have thought was not survivable. 'No one would ever choose to have cancer or to be raped,' she wrote. 'But you don't get to choose, and it is possible at least to understand what Ernest Becker meant when he said something like "To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything," or to begin to understand the line in "King Lear"--"Ripeness is all." You might have chosen to become ripe less dramatically or dangerously, but you can still savor ripeness."

Three Things

While I've been down and out, I've watched two movies--one terrific, the other we won't mention. Here's the terrific one: Seducing Dr. Lewis. A French-Canadian movie with subtitles, its actors and storyline make it an entertaining watch.

I finally got this novel read. I paid 50 cents for it at a garage sale and it's sat for probably five years in my house. My mother always said it was good, and she's quite the reader.
I started reading and couldn't put it down. Good fiction does hold up, although at times I wondered what the PC police would say about things, I pushed that to the back of my mind in order to follow the story of Wang Lung and his amazing wife O-lan (although interestingly the book cover doesn't even mention her). When I was so sick this weekend, I kept thinking of how O-lan would carry a baby to term, deliver it herself, and on one occasion went back out to the fields to help hoe the weeds. Of course, compared to her I felt like a wimp, laying there with drugs to relieve my symptoms, a stove to cook on that I didn't have to gather fuel for and freshly-squeezed orange juice if I wanted it.

Today I ventured out to get more of those drugs (we'd run low) and while I was in the car I went for gas at Valero near the grocery store. I didn't want to get caught tomorrow with no gas and fatigue setting in after a long day.

This gas station has screens atop all their pumps. They didn't seem to be working, but all of a sudden as I swiped my credit card, this voice commented on some credit card evils that I should be aware of. Big Brother at his worst. Then it switched to something else, the cacophony assaulting me as I hooked the hose into my gas tank. Whatever happened to being alone with your thoughts? I jumped into the car while the tank filled in order to get away from the noise. I'll choose a different gas station in the future.

Okay, enough fun. I'm tired. Back to bed.

Be Very Happy
Montalcino, Italy
June 2007

"The world is this way, we wish the world were that way, and our experience of the world—how we see it, remember it, and imagine it—is a mixture of stark reality and comforting illusion. We can't spare either. If we were to experience the world exactly as it is, we'd be too depressed to get out of bed in the morning, but if we were to experience the world exactly as we want it to be, we'd be too deluded to find our slippers."
--from the book Stumbling on Happiness, by Daniel Gilbert

There's a place in Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, where her main character, an old preacher working on living gracefully as he's dying, muses on his choices in the face of his physical discomfort: "I have decided the two choices open to me are (1) to torment myself or (2) to trust the Lord. There is no earthly solution to the problems that confront me. But I can add to my problems, as I believe I have done, by dwelling on them. So, no more of that."

At times I envy the stoicism of age, the willingness to go around that which is in the way. When younger, the motto is confront! solve! do battle with! Yet as I age, sometimes more world-weary at the end of the day than I like, I like this man's solution of dwelling less on earthly troubles, a challenge for a born ruminator.