Counting Down

In just over three hours, NaNoWriMo starts. Time to get those words out of my head and onto the page. And to keep hitting Save every couple of minutes. Wretched old Word just crashed and took half a page with it.

I was talking about the difference in the way I feel tonight and the way I felt last night. Now I’m feeling the same tightening focus that I felt when I acted in college as I got ready for a performance. Last night — well, last night I hit a wall.

It had been a long rough day at work, and I was concerned about how I’d handled some issues. I stopped for dinner on the way home. I let myself relax: ate slowly, read a little, took time to think. When I got back out to the truck, though, it started. Who was I kidding? I wasn’t going to write 50,000 words. I probably wasn’t going to write any. This was going to be another failure.

Within minutes I was flung into the far past. Helpless, crying, couldn’t speak. I wanted to die.

There’s no way to write from that place, because it’s preverbal. I can go there, I can bring back memories, and I can try to explain it, but it’s always going to be an explanation. Not the place itself, or who I am there: helpless, suffering, self-loathing, with only death as a possible escape. These are flashbacks, the exact equivalent of the veteran who crosses Fifth Avenue and finds himself in a rice paddy with helicopters raining fire on him. In my flashbacks, I am little, helpless, terrified, and longing for death. I’ve failed again. I can never get it right. The early rape and violence would be bad enough to live through over and over; the self-betrayal, helplessness, and self-loathing are a thousand times worse.

But my writer’s mind, observing, saw something there, and gave me a rope to climb back. Just as my writer’s mind, all those years ago, said: Make it into a story. Tell yourself stories to get through the bad times. Remember this and tell it later. Stories will help you survive. You have to live to tell the truth.

That’s the geas upon me: I have to live to tell. Almost as strong is the other one, the curse: Don’t tell anyone what goes on in this house.

Speaking of my childhood — the fear, suffering, violence — is not self-indulgence. It’s an act of defiance, and it takes courage. Breaking the curse of silence is terrifying. I expect to be killed for it. Or to be forced into that place where death is a gift.

Live. Speak. Write. Tell the truth. I’m going to die anyway. Let me first speak the truth.

Funnier than James Lileks

Baby’s Named a Bad, Bad Thing. Read it and wet your pants.

Seriously, James Lileks posts some of the funniest pop-culture commentary on the Internet. (Fifties motel architecture. Fifties food.) D. Goodman posts hilarious commentary on suggested baby names. If, like me, you were raised in the mid-twentieth century, you may not know about the current trends in baby-naming. These people scare me.

Mea Culpa

I’ve been neglecting this blog in preparation for NaNoWriMo, which I tend to think of as “Nanorama” — National Novel Writing Month. Fifty thousand words in 30 days, on top of work, commuting time, sleep, eating, housework, church, family. . . . Obviously it’s not going to be deathless prose, but it *is* going to be 50,000 words written down, which I can then edit into some kind of shape. I’m hoping it will give me some momentum to carry into December and beyond.

Today I downloaded an Excel spreadsheet that will enable me to chart my daily progress toward 50,000 words. I’ve been corresponding a bit with other NaNoWriMas. I’m letting my mind fuill with characters, incidents, narrative techniques. I’m carrying around index cards in half a dozen colors so I can take notes. I’m serious about this.

Peripatetic Musings

Wow. Beautiful blog by Vagabond, who enjoys the worlds of thought and senses and feelings.

Inside the Writers’ Studio

Imagine these questions being asked in a mellifluous voice by a condescending jerk.

What turns you on? Fall, woodsmoke, rising winds, good music, intense conversation.

What turns you off? This misuse of the language. I’m sorry, but “turn-on” and “turn-off” ceased to be amusing about 30 years ago, and they were never evocative metaphors.

What is your favorite word? “Complex.” So many meanings.

What is your least favorite word? “Shut up.”

What sound or noise do you love? The wind in the trees.

What sound or noise do you hate? Gunfire.

What profession other than yours would you like to attempt? Bread baker.

What profession other than yours would you not want to attempt? Soldier. I don’t do obedience.

What is your favorite swear word? I’m trying to clean up my language, unfortunately, or I could share quite a few startling nouns and verbs.

If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say to you as you enter the Pearly Gates? “Welcome home.”

“Let’s write laughably awful yet lengthy prose together.”

You are an arteest, and no longer have time for things like cooking and grocery shopping and laundry. Start demanding favors and treats from friends and loved ones now. That way they’ll be fully acclimated to the new you once November rolls around.

This alluring invitation is from the folks at National Novel Writing Month. The idea is to start writing a novel at 12:01 AM, November 1, and get 50,000 words done by midnight, November 30. You can research, plan, plot, outline, and agonize before November, but you can’t *write*.

This is a great way to get a first draft done, especially if you’re a perfectionist. You get emotional support from other writers (there are message boards and 3D meetings), plus the motivation of a solid drop-dead date. And you can reassure your family that you’ll be back to normal by the end of November. Once you have a draft, of course, it’s much easier to sculpt it into a finished work.

I signed up yesterday. I don’t have time enough as it is, without adding thousands of words of writing every day, so it seems like a crazy idea. But it also is a good focus to get my work rolling. Also, given the recent changes in my schedule, I know *when* I can do the work: at 5AM, which is when I have to get up these days.

Also, I figure that for a month I can cut out everything extraneous. My life is going to be ruthlessly simplified to work, sleep, housework, and writing. Oh, and church. I’ve always gone into a state of house arrest at the end of a book anyway. It’s the only way to do it. By the end of a book,all I want is to focus on the book. Just to write, just to disappear into the page. And I miss that. I miss working at the top of my form, fast and pure with no rewrites.

Can I write 50,000 words in 30 days? Easy. My first book, The Crystal Tree, was written in fifteen working days. Of course, I wasn’t working at an outside job then, I’d been thinking about the ideas for years, and I had written a solid outline. It was one of the great experiences of my life — three weeks of ecstasy. (I took weekends off.)

Can I write all those words while working full-time, commuting a long way, and keeping up my end of the housework? That’s a tougher question.

Wish me luck.

Baseball Notes

I’m rooting for the Giants in the World Series, and not just because I prefer the National League. Barry Bonds, one of the greatest players we’ve ever had, deserves a World Series ring. Plus, I have a love/hate relationship with the Disney Corporation, and it’s simpler for me to root for the local boys.

I’m a fourth-generation Phillies fan, an allegiance I’ll never surrender, no matter where I pay rent and taxes. When I moved here I knew I had to pick a local team to root for, at least if I ever wanted to watch any games. The obvious choice was the A’s, since they used to be in Philadelphia. They’ve given me a lot of pleasure already: for much of the season, they had the best record in baseball. However, they are not in the World Series. That fact indicates that the A’s are well-prepared to administer the suffering the Phillies are famous for inflicting on their fans. A comforting sense of continuity there.

San Francisco Giants fans are in general a talented, intelligent bunch, or at least no weirder than fans of any other frustrated, championship-hungry franchise. Some, however, seem to take the desire to see the World Series a smidge too far.

These ads from both buyers and sellers are to be found in the Best of Craigslist:

Recent Reading

Inventing the Victorians by Matthew Sweet

A readable, spirited examination of what the Victorians actually thought and did, as opposed to the starchy stereotype. (Did they *really* cover up piano limbs? Read it and find out!) Given the amount of research I’ve done on the nineteenth century over the years, I wasn’t shocked to find that Victorians weren’t all stuffy prudes, but I did find a lot of interesting information. However, the author sometimes defends the Victorians against well-justified complaints about, for example, clitoridectomy and infibulation for masturbators, by pointing out that such practices weren’t confined to Victoria’s reign but continued well into the 20th century. “Well, everybody else does it too” is not a scholarly argument.

Grade: B

In a Sunburned Country and I’m a Stranger Here Myself, both by Bill Bryson

I love Bill Bryson. He’s one of the few authors who can get me into an uncontrollable laughing jag, which sounds like I’m crying or possibly being strangled. It’s not just the individual lines, but the cumulative effect of pages of hilarity. Bryson is mostly a travel writer (he’s also done several excellent books on the English language), and he specializes in Things That Go Wrong, without being nearly as whiny and mean-spirited as Paul Theroux can be. Also, he comments on the kinds of things I look at when I’m traveling: landscape and architecture, for example, and food.

I’m a Stranger Here Myself could be subtitled “Tales of Culture Shock.” It started as a series of columns for a British weekly, explaining Life in America to his British readers. Bryson had just moved back to the US after spending 20 years (his whole adult life) in England. With his English wife and their 4 kids, he settled in New Hampshire and promptly freaked out at the new commonplaces of American life: 24-hour hotlines for every product, including dental floss; junk food; cable TV; the varying quality of consumer goods (“If my son can have his choice of a seemingly limitless range of scrupulously engineered, biomechanically efficient footwear, why does my computer keyboard suck?”).

In a Sunburned Country is a classic travel book about Australia. I learned a great many things I didn’t know about Australian history, geography, culture, trees, and architecture. But there just weren’t that many funny bits. I’ve no objection to learning about Australia, but I got the book from the library in hopes of laughing until the tears ran, and it just didn’t happen.

I’m a Stranger Here Myself: A In a Sunburned Country: B-

Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality, and the Catholic Church by Uta Ranke-Heinemann

Whew. Two thousand years of theological misogyny and what the author calls “sexual pessimism,” which sounds like being afraid you won’t get any; in fact, the term implies being afraid you might, since it means “thinking all sex is sinful.” It’s all carefully documented and exhaustively researched (though secondary sources tend to be in German; many of the primary sources are, of course, in Latin). The author quotes at length from papal bulls, accredited books by various Doctors of the Church, and other documents that bear the imprimatur of the Catholic Church.

The book is organized by topic, as a series of short essays on various specific areas of concern (contraception, abortion, homosexuality, incest, and so forth). The discussions of doctrine and practice are fascinating and horrifying. Did you know that until the 1700s, the Church taught that deaf people were automatically damned? “Faith comes by hearing,” according to St. Paul. Therefore, no hearing = no faith = damnation = treat them like dogs. There was an uproar in the pulpits when some brave and kindly soul started to educate deaf people. It was unnatural! Contrary to the will of God!

The book is generally witty and well-argued, though I certainly don’t agree with all of her conclusions. For example, in discussing the Church’s doctrine of the Virgin Birth, she lists the three points of that doctrine: that Mary remained virgo intacta (that’s right, her hymen remained in place despite bearing a child), that the birth occurred without pain, and that there was no afterbirth. Baby Jesus apparently emerged “like a ray of light” from her body. (This vaginal laser beam conjures images too dreadful to contemplate — definitely much worse than a nice normal afterbirth.)

Yes, this all argues a pathological loathing of the flesh and of women. But Ranke-Heinemann pushes her argument too far. I cannot agree that the Church is trying to rob Mary of her motherhood. In my book, motherhood has at least as much to do with raising a child as with conception and birth, and you don’t have to pant and ache and bleed to become a mother. (Anyone raising a child is going to do enough of all three over the years.) The author doesn’t seem to notice that she’s belittling adoptive mothers, plus falling into the error that the pain of childbirth is what makes it “real.” Does anesthetic somehow negate the experience?

Some sections reminded me of the classic “Every Sperm is Sacred” scene in Monty Python’s Meaning of Life. Reading this book, I got the distinct impression that Cleese, Idle, and company were in no way exaggerating the theological importance of semen. Python, however, didn’t touch the corollary, which is that female emissions like menstrual blood and afterbirth are beyond profane. The disgust and shame and loathing many theologians felt for these normal God-given fluids is sad and puzzling.

The section on homosexuality is cursory, and there are times when the writing style is awkward. Nevertheless, I highly recommend this book. It demonstrates all too clearly the difficulties that can result when visceral hatred is cloaked in the language and techniques of logic. Even St. Thomas Aquinas ends up tying himself in theo/logical knots.

I don’t think that pointing out the Church’s flaws is blasphemous. Nor do I condemn the entire history of Christianity on the basis of various human theological distortions. (I am in fact a devout Christian.) We need to know and understand where we make mistakes and what the consequences of prejudice are.

Though it doesn’t deal directly with pedophilia, Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven can help readers understand why the Church has not been able to recognize and deal with sexually exploitive priests. After 2,000 years of twisted, self-contradictory rhetoric about sex, the Church may have been too blinded by hysteria to see even normal needs in any kind of perspective. Compared to the sheer horror felt at having sex with women, molesting little children just may not have carried the grave weight it should.

Grade: A

The Harlot by the Side of the Road: Forbidden Tales of the Bible by Jonathan Kirsch

How often does a book of Bible stories keep you up reading half the night? I recently reread this book, and I was as fascinated with it as I had been when it first came out some years ago.

Kirsch looks at a number of neglected, difficult, or mysterious stories about women in the Old Testament. Some are more familiar than others: the rape of David’s daughter Tamar by one of her half-brothers is a a fairly well-known story. But the tale of Zipporah’s ad-hoc circumcision of her infant son is not one I had ever heard in Sunday School. These stories — some given no more than a few lines in the Bible — rival the X-Files and General Hospital for labyrinthine plot, inexplicable motives, dysfunctional families, unbridled lust, and bloodthirsty violence.

The book combines storytelling with analysis, so you can read two versions of the story: as told in the Bible and as fleshed out and reimagined by Kirsch. Then Kirsch brings together Bibilical scholarship, traditional Jewish commentary, and various other interpretations to throw light on the meaning and origin of these strange tales.

The result is riveting. These tales hint at the great difference between God’s standards and those of human beings, and they promise forgiveness for even the most dreadful sins.

OK, Three Weeks in Scranton

The word I was goping for in that post (Nothing Wrong with Me that Two Weeks in Scranton Couldn’t Cure) was “gritty.” Suburbs are not gritty. Cities are, farms are. Coal mines may be the epitome of grit. Suburbs are designed to be gritless.

Also, to be fair, I have always disliked suburbs and developments. It’s not just the ones in Silicon Valley. It’s the whole worldview they represent. Sometime we’ll get into why I feel that way.

Scary Couples

Rabbi Fred Neulander is apparently dating Miss Vicki.

If you’re wondering who are these people, here’s a quick rundown of their claims to fame:

Rabbi Fred is now on trial for the second time, accused of paying a total lowlife to murder his wife. He is innocent until proven guilty, yes. Even if he didn’t hire the guy, who just happened to kill the rabbi’s wife right at the time the rabbi’s lover was threatening to end their relationship if he didn’t get a divorce, he’s still scary. Under the guise of counseling a young, beautiful grief-stricken widow in his congregation, he seduced her within a week of her husband’s death. Sleeping with a member of your congregation — especially someone you’re counseling — is a breach of ethics for any clergymember; and it’s particularly exploitive of a newly bereaved person.

Miss Vicki married Tiny Tim on the Tonight Show back in 1969. They had a daughter they named Tulip and got divorced a few years later.

OK, time to be serious. Yes, I think Fred Neulander is a dangerous man. I don’t know about Miss Vicki. Imagine having that kind of idiotic adolescent decision follow you your whole life. Most of us screw up privately. She did it in the highest-rated talk show until that time. Whatever her reasons then for falling in love with a man old enough to be her father, the notoriety must have cast a shadow over her life. She may be a warm nurturing person, or she may be especially vulnerable to manipulation by men she perceives as powerful, or both.

But yes, a scary couple.