Monthly Archives: May 2012

Demolition

24 Thursday May 2012

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When I left my house this morning, my master bathroom looked like this:

When I got home this afternoon, it looked like this:

And thus begins the process of renovation, which has already disrupted my life for the past three weeks as I’ve shuttled back and forth numerous times to Home Depot and Lowe’s to pick out and return materials, and which promises to continue disrupting my life for the next three weeks and drain my bank account in completely unanticipated ways.  For example, the removal of the floor revealed that the toilet flange (I learned a new word!) was broken and has been leaking water, as has my shower basin (or whatever you call it–the floor part you stand on), which led to wet wood, which led to a ready-made, easy to chew feast for the subterranean termites who have subsequently infested it.  So now I have a termite guy coming out tomorrow to assess the situation and probably charge me several hundred dollars or more to kill the little buggers.  Added to that will be the cost of the plumber who will install a new non-leaking flange.  I guess this is all better than falling through my floor one day mid-shower because the termites finally ate their way through and caused my bathroom to cave in, but still.

Faced with this unpleasant revelation, I am now in full practical “let’s just get everything fixed and finished” mode, but last night and this morning, I was surprised by how reluctant I was suddenly feeling about having the bathroom torn up.  In retrospect, however, it’s actually not that surprising.  That bathroom held a lot of memories for me.  Growing up, my bedtime seemed to coincide with my mother’s washing her face, and it became a kind of ritual for me to watch her pat her face dry, dab on some violet & rose toner, and lean towards me so I could kiss her goodnight.

Starting in high school and extending through college, quality time in the master bathroom came about when my mother decided part of the economizing she and my father were practicing in order to pay my siblings’ and my college tuition was to make me her hair colorist.  I complained mightily every time, and my mother hissed and scolded me whenever I applied the product too roughly or combed too vigorously, claiming I was trying to pull out all of her hair; but truthfully, we both enjoyed this forced time together of chatting about whatever was going on in our lives.

In the last several months of her life, this bathroom was where I helped my mother wash and change into her nightgown.  It was where I rubbed lotion into her hands and feet.  It was where I combed her hair and did my best to style it to her liking.  She had stopped worrying about coloring it, and it was growing out in a beautiful silver.

Of course there are all those things that people say, like memories last forever and no one can take your memories away.  But the reality is that many of our memories are rooted in physical locations and are triggered by tangible things we see or smell or hear.  So there is a real loss in this demolition.  And yet for the very same reason, there is also the hope and excitement a fresh start brings.

[The Lo Family Beauty Parlor circa 1995.  It’s okay to laugh.]

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Notes from the Festival (Part 3)

20 Sunday May 2012

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Sadly, the festival is starting to feel like some hazy dream I once had a long time ago, but I am doing my best to keep hold of some of what I experienced and get a few more chunks of my notes up here before it slips away entirely.

The following are excerpts of Marilynne Robinson’s talk at the Festival, in which she primarily addressed the fear that has become such a large part of our culture, adapted to some degree from her essays in her latest book When I Was a Child I Read Books.

1.  The only people we should fear are those who could make us not love;  that you have one set of beliefs does not mean you are accusing others of not having them; people are willing to be gracious to religious expression that is gracious to them

2.  fear is a stimulant that makes you focus on things that aren’t there; it’s addictive and becomes normalized

3.  we think ourselves weak and threatened, which makes us deal unwisely and insensitively with others; we act as though people are justified in their fear and that it’s okay to act pre-emptively; in the old Westerns, the heroes were the ones who were reluctant to shoot–the cowards were the ones who shot first and didn’t want to take off their guns.

4.  we think we can’t write about what is most important to us, which creates tremendous anxiety; people get alienated from themselves because it’s so easy to stigmatize words and identities–this makes people vulnerable to having their identities stripped away.

5.  Whatever is essential to you is the basis of your human dignity.  There is a great dignity in refusing to fear.

6.  We need to talk people out of their crouch; if you’re frightened, you’ve let yourself be deprived of an important part of your dignity; if you’re frightened, you don’t trust God.  Trust God and abandon fear.

7.  In regards to writing Gilead and how popular it became:  “I was writing about something important and interesting to me, and that’s what people want for themselves.”

From a later interview:

1.  She loves Wallace Stevens–“he saturates experience with attention” and there is no greater writer in the American language; she admires his “devotion to the idea of the ordinary perceiver” and the transformation from the ordinary to the beautiful/transcendent.

2.  When asked about her popularity in fairly diverse settings (both liberal and conservative) and how that’s possible, she responded “I don’t recognize any obligation other than to speak what’s true.”

The Christian Science Monitor also did an article about her talks, which you can read here:  http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/chapter-and-verse/2012/0424/Marilynne-Robinson-Why-are-we-so-afraid

A Small History of Mothers

13 Sunday May 2012

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I may not be able to call my mother or take her to lunch anymore, but that doesn’t mean that I think of her or love her any less.  On a day like today, I am remembering her and the mothers that came before her with tremendous gratitude.

My great-grandmother with her firstborn (my grandmother):

My grandmother with her firstborn (my mother):

My mother with her firstborn (my brother Ben):

Decision-Making

12 Saturday May 2012

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This past week, I had to make a number of decisions in a very short space of time. Part of that had to do with the fact that I’m about to start a major renovation of my master bathroom (which light fixture? which tile? which grout? which sink? which faucet? which edge on the countertop?), and part of it had to do with a professional opportunity that came somewhat out of the blue. I’m pretty good at making short-term decisions, such as what to order in a restaurant or whether or not to buy that sweater. I am also excellent at making decisions for my friends about their lives, although I’ve learned over the years to sometimes keep that gift to myself. But making decisions about things that will impact my life for years to come is typically very stressful for me. I suppose that’s true for many people, but it seems like there are some folks out there who can take risks and dive boldly into decisions without needing medication or large amounts of sugary foods. I’d like to be one of them (or at least a little closer to them on the spectrum), and so I’ve made a conscious effort in the last year or two to either figure out some decision-making strategies or learn them from someone savvier than I am.

For those of you who struggle like I do, here are a few things I’ve found to be helpful:

1. Think about your death. Now this might sound morbid, but I’ve often found it very clarifying to consider whether I’ll give a damn about doing or not doing something on my deathbed (or wherever I am when that time comes).

2. On the opposite end of the spectrum, think about only the here and now. Do I want this thing and get excited about it right now or is this something I’m choosing because I think it will be good for me (or please someone else) someday down the road (maybe)? My wise friend Jani once suggested that I imagine saying yes to something and then live in that reality for a full 24 hours and see how it felt.

3. Resist the all-or-nothing mentality. This is a hard one for me, but I am starting to learn that few decisions in my life (if any) have options that are all good on one side and all bad on the other. And that once I start down a path, it is still possible for me to make changes and go a different direction in the future vs. having that one option/reality FOREVER.

4. Ask for input from friends and family. Everyone already knows this one but I’m saying it anyway. In my experience, hearing other people’s opinions confirms my own decision whether I agree with them or not. If their opinion agrees with what I’m leaning towards, it will usually give me the encouragement and boldness to take the step to actually say yes. And if their opinion doesn’t agree with what I’m leaning towards, it will often make my opposition even stronger. I don’t know that my family and friends particularly enjoy that latter process, but it works.

I managed to make my decisions this week with far less stress than I’ve typically experienced in the past, but I’m still learning. What are your techniques/tricks/strategies for making big and/or difficult decisions?  Do tell.

Notes from the Festival (Part 2)

07 Monday May 2012

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There were a number of poets at the festival, and it was wonderful to hear them talk about their work and especially to hear them read their own poems.  Hearing any author read his/her work adds a depth and dimension that you just can’t replicate when you read it to yourself from the page, but I think this is especially true of poetry.  Maybe because poetry is (in part) a kind of music–as much an auditory experience of rhythm and sound as it is idea and meaning.  Below are some nuggets from three different poets.

      Li-Young Lee:

1.  He continually revises poems, even after they’re published.  Poems have two lives–they participate in a market economy and then there’s the level where they’re between him and God.  He does find that sometimes after he revises a published poem numerous additional times that the published version is actually the best version of it.

2.  He comes to the page each day and asks if there’s any word from the Lord, and then he writes and writes, but often, it’s just his own words.  He doesn’t want to be a writer/poet so much as he wants to make contact with the divine.  When he’s revising the poem, he’s also revising himself.

3.  Safety is of great concern to him.  The poems he heard in high school were beautiful but ‘unsafe.’  Christ’s voice in the New Testament is safe.  Blake’s voice in his poetry is safe.  Lee also wants to be a safe person.  When asked to define more clearly what he meant by ‘safe,’ he replied that safe poets are fully realized or wise; they bless what needs to be blessed and kill what needs to be killed.  Poets he put in this category are Adrienne Rich (“her later poems”), Philip Levine (“early poems”), Louise Bogan, Rilke, and Lorca.  Also loves John Logan (Catholic poet), Blake, and Dickinson.

4.  Prayer and poetry are refuges.  The paradigm for poetry is DNA–a compact structure that you can unpack infinitely.  “Practice until you feel the language inside you.”

5.  Commenting on his experience as an immigrant:  being a stranger is a powerful place to be–you can see things others can’t; you ask questions others don’t think to ask.

Poem he read at the beginning of the interview:  http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/182921

Maurice Manning:

1.  Part of what we do as writers is preserve things–writing has a ‘fixing’ effect.  Our country is becoming increasingly homogenized.  He loves meeting and talking to the ‘old-timers’ in Kentucky (his home) because they talk in a way that’s different and unique to their particular region.  That’s disappearing.

2.  Asked why he can be so honest in his poems (referring in particular to his poems written as prayers):  poetry implies a greater degree of intimacy (or can have) than prayer, which can be too formal for intimacy;  poetry needs to be a little messy–a few things out of place, “not like a linen closet.”

3.  He admires William Blake and feels that if you’re going to follow an impulse, you have to acknowledge its opposite.

4.  “It’s a great delight to take your dog on a walk on the leash and at a certain point, taking off the leash and letting it go.”  The same is true for poetry–the leash can be a good thing, but there are also moments where you need to let the poem go, let it run away from you and see where it goes.  “I follow my curiosity.”

Read more about and by Maurice here:http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/maurice-manning

Susanna Childress:

I attended a talk Susanna gave about using fictive elements in poetry, so most of these notes are related to that topic.

1.  the social contract between poet and reader isn’t as clear as it is with prose, which has fiction and non-fiction categories.  In poetry, it’s not always clear when the content is about the author, whether the speaker is the poet, etc.

2.  she likes to write a kind of hybrid of persona and personally fictive.  She will draw from friends’ experiences/stories as well as her own, and she will change details to fit whatever she’s trying to get across in the poem.

3.  there is the literal/historic truth about what really happened, and then there is the underlying truth–the poet’s allegiance should be primarily to the latter.  Sometimes content needs to bend to the truth.  Christian Wiman quote:  “To be a writer is to betray the facts

4.  using the fictive/imaginative in our own poems is important because we need to distance ourselves from our own experience.  We’re too tied to things and this can help us step back and focus on craft.  Also, when we employ fictive and imaginative elements, we haven’t arrived at meaning already.  Scott Cairns quote:  “The poem is where our words teach us what we haven’t yet apprehended.”

5.  It is the process and the place it takes us into–the threshold/sympathy.  When we can get there with other people’s experiences, it makes us wider and takes us out of ourselves.

6.  When asked about revision later, she said that her main ‘test’ of whether a poem is finished or not is if she can read it aloud all the way through and not think “chickenshit.”

Read one of her poems here:  http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v4n1/poetry/childress_s/what.htm

Notes from the Festival (Part 1)

01 Tuesday May 2012

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As I mentioned in an earlier post, I had the opportunity recently to attend the Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College in Michigan.  It was three very intense and jam-packed days of listening to lots of different authors and poets talking about lots of different topics and reading their work.  I came home with a small notebook full of scribbled notes and a suitcase heavy with books.  Partly to give myself a chance to process some of what I experienced and heard, and partly because so many friends have asked about the festival, I’ve decided to post some ‘excerpts’ over the course of the coming week or two.

I’ll start with Jonathan Safran Foer.  He was the keynote speaker on the opening night and, in spite of the fact that he had just come down with strep throat, gave a talk that really was a set of stories about his experience of going to Israel one summer as a teenager and meeting the poet Yehuda Amichai and what a formative impact that had on him.  Amichai and his poetry made such an impression on Foer that he sought him out in his adult life and ended up connecting with Amichai’s widow years later.  He also shared some extremely humorous excerpts from the journal he had kept that first summer.  I didn’t really take notes that first evening, but at one point he said something beautiful that I did manage to scribble out, which is that “A pencil disappears with use, and so does an artist.”  Also, “Parents and teachers disappear into children as pencils into drawings.”

The next day, Foer was interviewed in front of a large audience, which provided a number of interesting insights and perspectives.  The following are close paraphrases of what he said in the course of the interview:

1.  In regards to what he decides to write about, he said that you have concerns in life that tumble around in you like clothes in a dryer, and at some point they’re ready to take out.

2.  In regards to the style of his work and the sometimes competing elements of the text (ex: a letter in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close that’s marked all over with red circles):  We’re living increasingly dissonant and fragmented lives, which should be reflected in art.  At the same time, literature is still very traditional–unified, chronological, etc.  Literature is compelled to be more traditional than visual art (needs to be liked by a large number of people vs. a painting liked and purchased by one very wealthy collector).  He likes that about literature because it’s more democratic, which keeps it more grounded.

3.  Art takes things that are not valuable in one context and makes them valuable in another.  When you shape your story into something more than just your story, it takes on another kind of value (how you put it together).

4.  In regards to becoming a writer, he was very inspired by sculptor Joseph Cornell.  He loved the feeling of the effect Cornell’s art had on him and wanted to create that effect himself.  He went from appreciation to trying to make something out of that appreciation.  Becoming a writer meant moving into becoming a participant.  He did not really ever think about being a writer until he one of his professors (Joyce Carol Oats) referred to “your writing” and he realized he actually had his own writing.  Her naming it helped make it more real to him.

5.  A lot of his writing has come out of not being able to communicate something in life.  He writes to fill the holes.  The older he gets, the more he believes that there is nothing we shouldn’t be able to write or talk about.  Silence is not good.  Quiet is good, but not silence.  If you don’t create, it’s like the dryer door is broken and you never get to take its contents out and see them.

6.  When asked about the series of final images in Extremely Loud, he said he likes seeing/imagining things go backwards.  It makes the mundane fascinating–weird and beautiful.  He likes things that make him be/feel in the present moment; things that surprise and delight him.  If there’s a way to re-envision something ordinary so that it’s beautiful or revealed, that’s amazing.

7.  With regards to religion, he’s interested in a religion that makes things harder, not easier.  He’s not interested in it for comfort but for pushing him to question who he is and to ask hard questions.  He believes in the value of stories in the Old Testament (esp. Abraham and Isaac) but feels the question of whether they literally happened is irrelevant.

8.  When religion is used so that we can have things both ways, that bothers him.  He likes when it narrows things and provides a framework.  When asked about prayer, he quoted Heschel–“I don’t pray for the things I want.  I pray to be worthy of the things I have.”  He believes in that kind of prayer–one that articulates who you are.

9.  When asked if he believes in God, he responded that he couldn’t really answer that.  “What do you mean by God?”  If you can put God into words, that’s not really God.  Doesn’t have a clear answer, but he finds wrestling with and thinking about this very fulfilling.

10.  Regarding his editing of the New American Haggadah (‘guidebook’ for Passover), he said that the tradition is that you are supposed to be part of the story.  You are the one being liberated, which he sees as similar to the demands of the novel–the reader needs to feel complicit in the story.

11.  Novels give room to the reader and require work.  Through their reading/imagination, the book takes on their own experience and meaning.  He gave the example of saying the word ‘tree’ and how everyone in the room would picture a different tree, each with its own reason/meaning.  Reading is personalized vs. a movie that you just receive.

Also mentioned Kafka as an influence (in addition to Joyce Carol Oats, Amichai, Cornell).

Here’s me doing my best not to completely geek out while he’s signing my book (I was barely coherent when he greeted me).  The pen is a nod to the writer’s group I’m part of at church.  We’re so excited we have our own pens that we’re trying to take pictures of it in as many locations as possible.