Video: Joss Whedon and Strong Female Characters

Ms. J. sent me a link to this video ages ago. Just this morning I found a mere eight minutes of free time (while I sipped my morning coffee) to view it. It was well worth my time! Thanks Ms J.!

Before I saw this clip, I didn't know Joss Whedon, but many of you may recognize him as the writer of Buffy the Vampire Slayer--a cult hit to say the least.

In this May, 2006 clip Meryl Streep presents him with an award on behalf of Equality Now to honor his creation of many strong female characters.

In case the video doesn't work, here is the link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYaczoJMRhs

Bookshelf Update

I created the bookshelf on my sidebar a few weeks ago as a way to prioritize my reading. I wanted to complete my virtual bookshelf before I allowed myself to be enticed by other titles. Alas. I have not managed to trick myself as effectively as I had hoped. I am a sucker for suggestions--especially impassioned ones. I am also a sucker for a good cover and pithy summary on the book jacket.

I have finished several of the books on my bookshelf and intended to create a blog entry for each one. This is not going to happen. Not enough time, mostly. Also some of the books were good, but didn't inspire me to go further or deeper this time around.

I will post the titles I have already read here as a way to store them in my virtual memory in case I revisit them one day.

If you have read any of these, feel free to comment! Or if you are curious about a title, let me know and I can give you my impressions...

Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious by Timothy D. Wilson

Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See

The Dog of the Marriage by Amy Hempel (short stories)

One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd by Jim Fergus

Before You Know Kindness by Chris Bohhalian

Lula's Cafe in South Bend

The two-day drive home from Boston was relaxed and delicious.

We stopped in Buffalo, NY where we ate buffalo wings at the restaurant that invented them, the Anchor Bar. I am not a fan usually, but these wings were meaty, crispy, and just-right spicy. Next time, we have to remember that hot is too hot for us. We are medium wings people.

The next day we decided to detour into Cleveland, OH to visit the pastry shop that had baked our wedding dobos cake. A perhaps little known fact: Cleveland is the largest (or was, at least) Hungarian city outside of Hungary. The shop has been located in the same spot since the 1950’s on a street that used to be lined with pastry shops, but I believe Lucy’s Sweet Surrender is a last holdout now. The baker is an American married to a Hungarian from Romania and he very generously gave us a tour of the shop, showing us where they make the strudel and all the other baking machinery.

I highly recommend ordering a dobos torte online. He will deep freeze it and then overnight it--very tasty and very authentic. (It is better to do this in the winter to avoid summer temperatures melting your torte en route.)

I spent one night back in South Bend before I headed out for a quick trip to St. Louis. I drove the six hour trip straight down Illinois in perfectly clouded skies. A long drive to be sure, but stops in Odell for pie at the Wishing Well Cafe and Towanda at the diner make that jaunt satisfying.

St. Louis always manages to surprise and delight. This time I got a tour of the botanical gardens to see the Chihuly blown-glass exhibit. More importantly I spent lots of time on the couch making googly-goo faces at baby Henry.

Now I am at Lula’s, THE café still in South Bend, despite several new ones that have arrived over the years. They still do not have wireless, however, which I support. It is always good to isolate myself from the Internet when I want to work on my writing.

We leave in a week for our “vacation” in Transylvania, our usual summer trip. This time my parents will join us for a week—it will be their second trip to Budapest, but their first to the Carpathian mountains and villages of Transylvania. I look forward to showing them life lived in the Székely way.

Day Trip to Concord: Thoreau and Walden Pond

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan- like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion."
from Thoreau's Walden


I learned this, at least, by my experiment;
that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams,
and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined,
he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
from the "Conclusion" to Walden

It was difficult to tear myself away from the city for the journey to Walden Pond. Today was a perfect first day of summer—76 degrees with clouds enough to make the sky picture perfect. I worked in the morning at the Trident café and then stopped by the Sonsie to say hello to L. who lunched there for business. Back at the apartment I chatted with the gardener and then decided I had to mail a batch of letters this afternoon. Then I was hungry for lunch.

Finally at three o’clock I got myself on the road toward Concord, MA and Walden Pond. Traffic through Cambridge was brutal and slow enough for me to notice that it is exactly two miles from Hereford (our street) to Harvard Square. I would have sworn it was at least five miles.

I found Concord with ease and started my visit at the Concord Museum. I watched a brief video and toured the rooms—some of which where set up to be authentic period rooms from early American history. My favorite things: a temporary exhibit about woman’s handbags spanning many eras and the Thoreau t-shirts in the gift shop. Key new fact: I have been mispronouncing Thoreau. I used to say tho-REAU and now I have learned that the accent is on the first syllable: THO-reau. This makes sense as most two syllable names are accented on the first syllable: KEL-ley, RO-bert, MAT-thew, etc. (A quick check at Merriam-Webster.com gives several acceptable pronunciations. When in Concord, do as the Concordians….)

After having my pronunciation corrected, I headed off to find Walden Pond. I expected a sanctuary where I could walk and ponder my deepest nature in the light of nature and be moved to a life of deliberate simplicity and slow burning fires to warm me after bracing swims across the pond. What I found: lots of people in beach wear, squealing kids, preening teenagers, and even a half-clad adult male who gave me the jeebies when he followed me in the narrowly fenced trail.

I was trying to commune with the trees and gently lapping lake waters. Instead I fingered my car keys and told myself I could use them as a weapon. I also learned at that time that I had a signal at Walden Pond on my cell phone. I slowed down; so did he. Eventually he passed me and I slowed way down to created a safe zone between us.

As I circled the lake, I realized that the area was mostly safe. At least there was no shortage of people enjoying the water and the perfect weather. It was gorgeous and I regretted being fully clothed and without a swimsuit or at least appropriately bathing-suite-ish underwear. Shoot. Note to self: next time you come to Walden, bring the bikini.

About halfway round I found a spot to let my feet drink in the waters. I rolled up my pants and waded into pristine lake waters warm on my skin. I wanted to dive in, but restrained myself. I wanted to call someone to share the moment (I had a signal). I settled for scratching a mosquito bite and contemplating that I may have just gotten bitten by a descendant of a bug that had bitten Thoreau. Sweet. But itchy.

I then hiked around to find the house site where Thoreau’s cabin once stood. After he lived there two years, the cabin was dismantled (the roof was used for pig sty) and the location forgotten. Years later an archeologist dug for three months before he finally located the chimney stones. Now there is a memorial and next to it a large mound of rocks. A placard noted that visitors add a stone to the pile to honor Thoreau. I tossed a pebble and watched it settle deep in a crack.

The lake was beautiful--the color of the water changed from blue to green to crystal clear as I turned each bend. I wound love to return to take a long swim in its depths.

I walked the lake’s perimeter and into woods for about an hour and a half before heading back to my car. I made a stop by the Old North Bridge, site of “the shot heard round the world” where the Americans first defended themselves against the British in 1775. Just nearby was the Old Manse, the house built by William Emerson and where Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathanial Hawthorne penned their works.

The landscapes around Concord are serene. The town quaint. And the cappuccino in this café has a respectable froth. This is a place to return. It was painful to leave the city, but while I walked around Walden’s Pond, I thought to myself: the city is overrated; I could make a life in the woods with a stack of books, a gaggle of kiddoes, and regular trips to modern healthcare facilities. Resolution: a minimum one month per year in the wilds of extra-urban life.

Luckily, Walden Pond and the surrounding woods look a lot like Transylvania, where we are headed next month.

More about Henry David Thoreau

On The Move

This past weekend I spent Saturday night in Chicago for a friend's wedding--the most lavish wedding I have ever helped to celebrate. Best of all, the bride and groom had love-silly grins plastered across their faces the entire time. The bride did the limbo; the groom (and all 15 groomsmen) changed into black and white Chuck Taylor All Stars to better groove to the live band. Did I mention the twelve bagpipers piping in a parade into the grand ballroom to lead the 450 guests to dinner? Outstanding.

This week is all about packing. And all about reading instead of packing. We leave Boston to return to our Indiana abode on Monday of this coming week. By this time next week, I may already be "home." I am in exquisite denial. The truth is that I can be happy here or there, which is a good thing. Any transition, however, can be fraught. Change is good--in theory.

Speaking of change, welcome to my newest niece! She is tiny, but tough with lots of black hair.

In the meantime, I am typing away again on my novel. Today I passed the 50,000 word mark. (Author pats herself on the back and grins to the chagrin of her fellow cafe hunt-and-peckers on Newbury street.) Actually, my original plan for the piece was 50,000 words. It is quite clear, however, that I will need at least another 20,000 to round out the story.

For the record: since my last blog we dined at an amazing restaurant, Sorellina. The setting was ultra-cool and the food was divine. This was an eating experience made all the more transcendent by our company--a Roman and an Athenian! Go for the truffled fries--seriously the best french fries I have ever eaten (and I am, sadly, an expert.)

Ugh. Time to pack up my laptop and head home to face the boxes. Packing is lame.

The Myth of You & Me by Leah Stewart

All right kids, this is it: I am in full flush after just finishing a new novel. This book wasn't even on my bookshelf!

Yesterday I was browsing at the Brookline Booksmith and the red cover caught my eye. The book jacket blurb went something like"blah blah blah captures the intensity of a friendship as well as the real sense of loss that lingers after the end of one blah blah etc." I bought it. And a little shy of 24 hours later, I have turned the last page.

These characters are my age and might as well be my reflection in terms of experience. The tale is simply told and captures the beautiful angst of frienships forsaken (and reforged?). What a delicous read--especially if you too used to have big hair shellacked with AquaNet and then grew up together with your college friends. Read it. And beware: I may be forced to send this book via Amazon to you and then compel you to read it too....

The Myth of You & Me by Leah Stewart

Her website is: http://www.leahstewart.com/

Walt Whitman

excerpts from Song of Myself

You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor

look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres

in books,

You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things

from me,

You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

*****

Urge and urge and urge,

Always the procreant urge of the world.

*****

Do you take it I would astonish?

Does the daylight astonish? does the early redstart twittering

through the woods?

Do I astonish more than they?

*****

I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones.

*****

I believe in the flesh and the appetites,

Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of

me is a miracle.

*****

All truths wait in all things,

They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it,

They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon,

The insignificant is as big to me as any,

(What is less or more than a touch?)

*****

Enough! enough! enough!

Somehow I have been stunn’d. Stand back!

Give me a little time beyond my cuff’d head, slumbers, dreams,

gaping,

I discover myself on the verge of a usual mistake.

*****

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Mrs. World Fiasco

The following horrible real life drama is almost too painful to watch. Mrs. DF sent me the note below and the link to a video. Please read first and then view the fiasco.
Ouch.
It makes me feel both sad for the women involved and grateful for my far less dramatic (and less public) life.

********************************************************************************

at the 2006 miss world pageant in russia---did you hear what happened?

they were down to the last 2 girls, miss russia and miss costa rica and neither spoke english . . . nor did most of the audience

so allan thicke is the host and he has some woman helping him who barely speaks english and you know how they usually tell you the first runner up . . . and then the camera goes to the winner and they all celebrate?

well allan says "the runner up is miss costa rica!" and there's a cheer and then you can kinda hear him say "the winner is miss russia" but the celebrations have begun and the woman helping him puts the miss world sash on miss costa rica.

girls come running down to congratulate those that speak english look confused a little girl dressed as an angel is lowered from the ceiling with the crown and they put it on miss costa rica.

allan walks off the stage, the producer is furious and yells at the helper woman.

so now they have to do something, right?

so the go back out and tell everyone the mistake---miss costa rica is dethroned, she's bawling, many of the other contestants are furious and storm off. . . .

and they replay the WHOLE thing there are only about 10 or 12 women left on stage miss costa rica i think is still there crying and they say "the winner is miss russia!"

the angel comes back down, . . . etc. etc

*******************************************************************************

Now view the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TJ_UKt4QtQ

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

I picked up a copy of Robinson's novel Gilead after it was recommended to me by a literary agent at the Grub Street conference. The agent had read a sample of my novel and suggested Robinson's work as an author I could learn from. As I made my way through the text I noted her flawless prose and use of details. I also read to notice how Robinson makes use of a first person narrator. My own work is currently told from the first person and I find that I need more writerly tools to make the most of his point-of-view.

Gilead is a ponderous novel. It is an epistolary novel written by a 76 year-old pastor in 1956 Iowa to his seven-year-old son. The pastor is near death and wants to write to his son who will not remember him after his death.

I finished the novel a few weeks ago and only today picked up my copy to give it more thought. As I paged through and reread sections, I was impressed more deeply by the language and the ideas in the novel. So please forgive the extensive excerpts. (I actually left out sections that were noteworthy!)

Memorable Quotes

(hardcover first edition, 2004)

I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said, Why, and I said, Because I’m old, and you said, I don’t think you’re old. And you put your hand in my hand and you said, You aren’t very old, as if that settled it. I told you might have a very different life from mine, and from the life you’ve had with me, and that would be a wonderful thing, there are many ways to live a good life. And you said, Mama already told me that. And then you said, Don’t laugh! because you thought I was laughing at you. You reached up and put your fingers on my lips and gave me that look I never in my life saw on any other face besides your mother’s. It’s a kind of furious pride, very passionate and stern. I’m always a little surprised to find my eyebrows unsinged after I’ve suffered one of those looks. I will miss them. (Opening paragraph)

You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it. A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension. (p 7)

There is a reality in blessing, which I take baptism to be, primarily. It doesn’t enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is a power in that. (p 23)

That was the first time in my life I ever knew what it was to love another human being. Not that I hadn’t loved people before. But I hadn’t realized what it meant to love them before. (p 55)

I was always amazed, watching grownups, at the way they seemed to know what was to be done in any situation, to know what was the decent thing. (p 95)

So you must not judge what I know by what I find words for. (p 114)

There is something in her face I have always felt I must be sufficient to, as if there is a truth in it that tests the meaning of what I say. (p 137)

But I believe that the rewards of obedience are great, because at the root of real honor is always the sense of the sacredness of the person who is its object. (p 139)

And often enough, when we think we are protecting ourselves, we are struggling against our rescuer. (p 154)

Because nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense. (p 177)

My custom has always been to ponder grief; that is, to follow it through ventricle and aorta to find out its lurking places. (p 179)

The tact was audible. (p 186)

I don’t know exactly what covetise is, but in my experience it is not so much desiring someone else’s virtue or happiness as rejecting it, taking offense at the beauty of it. (p 188)

One interesting aspect of the whole experience was that I simply could not be honest with myself, and I couldn’t deceive myself, either. (p 203)

. . . that was the first time in my life I ever felt I could be snatched out of my character, my calling, my reputation, as if they could just fall away like a dry husk. (p 205)

Love is holy because it is like grace—the worthiness of its object is never really what matters. (p 209)

There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal. So how could it subordinate itself to cause or consequence? (p 238)

There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient. (p 243)

It seems to me that when something really ought to be true then it has a very powerful truth, which starts me thinking again about heaven. (p 244)

A Few Good Words

susurrus: etymology: Latin, hum, whisper; a whispering or rustling sound

crepuscular: of, relating to, or resembling twilight OR active in the twilight

Model sentences

Here I am trying to be wise, the way a father should be, the way an old pastor certainly should be. (p 56)

I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens it eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. (p 57)

In any case, it felt so necessary to me to walk up the road. . . . (74)

I was standing there, taking it in, trying to decide what to do, when the old man wheeled around and planted that stare on me. (p 98)

I conceal my motives from myself pretty effectively sometimes. (p 147)

Your mother looked at me, so I knew I must have sounded upset. I was upset. (p 152)

Useful Links

NPR Terry Gross Interview with Marilynne Robinson on Gilead
(I highly recommend this interview--very thoughtful)

Saturday by Ian McEwan

I recently finished Saturday, by Ian McEwan. I consider his book, Atonement, one of my favorite novels. So I was intrigued to read another piece of his work.


Saturday is set in London post 9/11 and just before the war with Iraq. The events take place on one Saturday and are told from a neurosurgeon's point-of-view. Henry Perowne is happily married with two artistic children--a poet and a blues musician. His cherished Saturday begins early when he awakens and views a burning plane make an emergency landing. We follow him as he interacts with his children and wife, plays a mean (and long) game of squash, shops for dinner, and cooks a fish stew for a family dinner. (Yes, he even cooks.) This typical Saturday is laced with conflict brought about by a random encounter with a less-fortunate street guy--a tough guy whose Huntington’s Disease the neurosurgeon readily diagnoses in the middle of road rage in the streets of London.

I admit that I was not immediately hooked by the story. The characters, however, and the choreography are finely drawn. And I did feel my pulse race as McEwan built tension and suspense into the narrative. Any book that elevates my heart rate is doing something right.

This book made the New York Times top ten books of 2005. Indeed it does capture modern life and a thoroughly recognizable attempt to "make sense" of a world on the brink of war.

Memorable Quotes
(page numbers from paperback First Anchor Books Edition, April 2006)

The primitive thinking of the supernaturally inclined amounts to what his psychiatric colleagues call a problem, or an idea, of reference. An excess of the subjective, the ordering of the world in line with your needs, an inability to contemplate your own unimportance. ( p 17)

She remained in silent contact with an imaginary intimate. (p 48)

Happiness seemed like a betrayal of principle, but happiness was unavoidable. (p 49)

This reading list persuaded Perowne that the supernatural was the recourse of an insufficient imagination, a dereliction of duty, a childish evasion of the difficulties and wonders of the real, of the demanding re-enactment of the plausible. (p 66)

Work that you cannot begin to imagine achieving yourself, that displays a ruthless, nearly inhuman element of self-enclosed perfection—this is his idea of genius. This notion of Daisy’s, that people can’t “live” without stories, is simply not true. He is living proof.

There is much in human affairs that can be accounted for at the level of the complex molecule. Who could eve reckon up the damage done to love and friendship and all hopes of happiness by a surfeit or depletion of this or that neurotransmitter? And who will ever find a morality, an ethics down among the enzymes and amino acids when the general taste is for looking in the other direction? (p 92)

There are so many ways a brain can let you down. Like an expensive car, it’s intricate, but mass-produced nevertheless, with more than six billion in circulation. (p 99)

A race of extraterrestrial grown-ups is needed to set right the general disorder, then put everyone to bed for an early night. God was once supposed to be a grown-up, but in disputes He childishly took sides. Then sending us an actual child, one of His own—the last thing we needed. A spinning rock already swarming with orphans. . . (p 122)

It isn’t rationalism that will overcome the religious zealots, but ordinary shopping and all it entails—jobs for a start, and peace, and some commitment to realizable pleasures, the promise of appetites sated in this world, not the next. Rather shop than pray. (p 127)

Unlike in Daisy’s novels, moments of precise reckoning are rare in real life; questions of misinterpretation are not often resolved. Nor do they remain pressingly unresolved. They simple fade. People don’t remember clearly, or they die, or the questions die and new ones take their place. (p 159)

There are these rare moments when musicians together touch something sweeter than they’ve ever found before in rehearsals or performance, beyond the merely collaborative or technically proficient, when their expression becomes as easy and graceful as friendship or love. This is when they give us a glimpse of what we might be, of our best selves, and of an impossible world in which you give everything you have to others, but lose nothing of yourself. (p 176)

When there are no consequences, being wrong is simply an interesting diversion. (p 198)

Useful Link

Ian McEwan's Website: Saturday
(Includes a reading guide, reviews of the book AND a recipe for the Fish Stew)