If I had not been so determined to set seriously to work, I might have made an effort to start at once. But given that my resolve was unbreakable, given that within twenty-four hours, inside the empty frame of tomorrow, where everything fitted so perfectly because it was not today, my best intentions would easily take material shape, it was really preferable not to think of beginning things on an evening when I was not quite ready--and of course the following days were to be no better suited to beginning things. However, I was a reasonable person. When one has waited for years, it would be childish not to tolerate a delay of a couple of days...Unfortunately, tomorrow turned out not to be that broad, bright, outward-looking day that I had feverishly looked forward to. When it had ended, my idleness and hard struggle against my inner obstacles had just lasted for another twenty-four hours. (from In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower)
How easy it is to justify not beginning to write. My favorite method of stalling is to read books on writing. I confess to having read The Courage to Write twice already. This is symbolic writing. It's a little like reading a book on weight loss with a pastrami sandwich in one hand, telling oneself the diet will start on Monday.
A great way of procrastinating is to read about the rituals of famous authors. Kent Haruf, for example, sits in front of a typewriter blindfolded and types as quickly as possible. As in an Catholic church service, there are a lot of smells and bells.
Some authors, like Anne Lamott and Natalie Goldberg and Julia Cameron, are better known for their books on how to write than for their other works. My favorite guide is Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer. These books can be as helpful as they are seductive, yet in the end nothing but putting pen to paper will suffice.
It seems that a great many people feel they have a book in them (as opposed to a painting or a song or a dance) and they are just yearning for a stretch of free time to kick back and set to work. The novel is almost complete--it just hasn't been written yet.
Part of the problem is having such high standards: "I must wake up at 4 am to work on my novel" or "I must sit in front of my computer for 5 hours a day." Everyone at least marginally interested in writing has heard the advice to write at the same time each day, everyday, for at least an hour. Why is this simple prescription so hard at times?
I think many people are unknowingly afraid of what the act of writing will stir up. It's a form of perfectionism. If they abandon themselves and lose a minimum of control, they may end up broke, drunk, or crazy.
In the end, not writing is quite difficult. Once you plunge in, even for a few minutes, there is a great sense of relief.
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Celebrity Crushes
My mother is in love with Paul McCartney. "Oh, Paulie!" she says. In her youthful sixty-nine-year-old face is the first flush of adolescence, the breathless "I would die for him!" swoon. This is my mother, the seventies disco queen, the eighties jogger, and the nineties horseback rider, the former school psychologist who now cannot shower or dress by herself.
Alzheimer's crept up on my mother unexpectedly and damaged her orbito-frontal cortex and thalamus and hippocampus, making it difficult for her to control her impulses. Maybe this can explain the sort of Beatles fan she is today, the boy-crazy alter ego who would like to tear her hair out, stomp her feet, and scream the way lovesick girls do, in a horrific frenzy.
I'm a little embarassed by this woman who says, "I hope Paul visits today" and carries around old CD liners with his picture on them. "Look at Paul," she says in doctors' waiting rooms and in the supermarket line. All she has to do is fish into her purse or coat pockets and Paul appears as unexpected as if he had just made a fresh entrance into her life. Paul is more real to her than her husband or her daughter. To her, we are rude, nonsensical creatures who help her dress and undress in a tug of war over arm holes and buttons and the subtle differences between right and left.
It reminds me of my first celebrity crush. I was a young girl at summer camp and my cousin in another cabin had a poster of Tommy Howell (the centerfold in Teen Beat) taped to the wall of her bunk. I had to have one just like that and I kissed my glossy flat poster boy with quick, shy pecks on the mouth. He was my practice boyfriend.
The adolescent Marcel experiences something similar with the actress La Berma. He yearns for "the unique and ungraspable object of so many thousands of dreams." While Tommy Howell doesn't necessarily compete with La Berma as a masterwork of dramatic art, there is still that unfulfilled desire for a well-known actor.
At its absolute best, my relationship with my mother is a form of "karma yoga" or selfless service. I try to perform some small kindness. Sometimes that means offering her a bowl of vanilla ice cream. Sometimes that means talking about Paul as if he were a dinner guest. And sometimes all that means is putting on a Beatles CD and watching her sway back and forth like a fish swimming upstream, mouthing all the lyrics. For a moment, she is a boy-crazy teenager, biting her knuckles and screaming through her tears. And then the moment passes and we have to navigate the rest of the day as mother and daughter.
Alzheimer's crept up on my mother unexpectedly and damaged her orbito-frontal cortex and thalamus and hippocampus, making it difficult for her to control her impulses. Maybe this can explain the sort of Beatles fan she is today, the boy-crazy alter ego who would like to tear her hair out, stomp her feet, and scream the way lovesick girls do, in a horrific frenzy.
I'm a little embarassed by this woman who says, "I hope Paul visits today" and carries around old CD liners with his picture on them. "Look at Paul," she says in doctors' waiting rooms and in the supermarket line. All she has to do is fish into her purse or coat pockets and Paul appears as unexpected as if he had just made a fresh entrance into her life. Paul is more real to her than her husband or her daughter. To her, we are rude, nonsensical creatures who help her dress and undress in a tug of war over arm holes and buttons and the subtle differences between right and left.
It reminds me of my first celebrity crush. I was a young girl at summer camp and my cousin in another cabin had a poster of Tommy Howell (the centerfold in Teen Beat) taped to the wall of her bunk. I had to have one just like that and I kissed my glossy flat poster boy with quick, shy pecks on the mouth. He was my practice boyfriend.
The adolescent Marcel experiences something similar with the actress La Berma. He yearns for "the unique and ungraspable object of so many thousands of dreams." While Tommy Howell doesn't necessarily compete with La Berma as a masterwork of dramatic art, there is still that unfulfilled desire for a well-known actor.
At its absolute best, my relationship with my mother is a form of "karma yoga" or selfless service. I try to perform some small kindness. Sometimes that means offering her a bowl of vanilla ice cream. Sometimes that means talking about Paul as if he were a dinner guest. And sometimes all that means is putting on a Beatles CD and watching her sway back and forth like a fish swimming upstream, mouthing all the lyrics. For a moment, she is a boy-crazy teenager, biting her knuckles and screaming through her tears. And then the moment passes and we have to navigate the rest of the day as mother and daughter.
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Proust for Pleasure
I would stop by the table, where the kitchen maid had just shelled them, to see the peas lined up and tallied like green marbles in a game; but what delighted me were the asparagus, steeped in ultramarine and pink, whose tips, delicately painted with little strokes of mauve and azure, shade off imperceptibly down to their feet--still soiled though they are from the dirt of their garden bed--with an iridescence that is not of this earth. It seemed to me that these celestial hues revealed the delicious creatures who had merrily metamorphosed themselves into vegetables and who, through the disguise of their firm, edible flesh, disclosed in these early tints of dawn, in these beginnings of rainbows, in this extinction of blue evenings, the precious essence that I recognized again when, all night long following a dinner at which I had eaten them, they played, in farces as crude and poetic as a fairy play by Shakespeare, at changing my chamber pot into a jar of perfume.
I was first attracted to this passage found in the first section of In Search of Lost Time because it appeared to be a still life for vegetarians, not a routine carnivorous description of bifteck aux pommes. This is truly Proust for pleasure: the voluptuous passages ignite all the senses. Certainly no one reads Proust for plot, yet his detail and description can be so flowery at times that his words border on purple prose. Not so here--every bit of paint applies itself to the canvas.
In this passage, we get a sense of what it feels like to be asparagus. You could say he masters asparagus psychology. They are "creatures" with "feet" and "firm, edible flesh." Yet, at the same time, they are not what they appear; they are not of this world.
He depicts more than a pretty picture. There is a certain sexual undercurrent to his fascination with asparagus. What's more, his vegetables have undergone an Ovidian metamorphosis.
He begins with what seems calm and collected in English ("what delighted me were the asparagus"), yet sounds more emotionally charged in French ("mais mon ravissement etait devant les asperges"). Besides "delight," "ravissement" can mean "ecstasy," "rapture," and even "rape." And in his ecstasy (almost drug-induced in its intensity), he sees it all for the first time as in a case of jamais vu--as if he had never seen a countertop of raw asparagus before.
And his ecstasy in seeing the asparagus has something to do with young Marcel's first stirrings of sexual pleasure. A little further on, we see the secret life of asparagus exposed "in those early hints of dawn, in these beginnings of rainbows, in the extinction of blue evenings" ("en ces couleurs naissantes d'aurore, en ces ebauches d'arc-en-ciel, en cette extinction de soirs bleus"). This is the climactic phrase in the passage: we go from dawn to evening, from birth to death.
What is this build up to a beautiful death? I suggest it has to do with la petite mort ("the little death," a metaphor for orgasm). Looking the term up in my trusted Wiki, a more far-reaching definition of la petite mort refers to "the spiritual release that comes with orgasm, or a short period of melancholy or transcendence, as a result of the expenditure of the 'life force.'"
Roland Barthes, the literary critic, spoke of la petite mort as the main goal of reading literature. When I began writing, I wanted to show Proust as hearty and vital, not as stodgy and quaint. Presumably, we all experience a little death in reading Proust through the portal of his attention to detail and description.
And this is truly Proust for pleasure.
I was first attracted to this passage found in the first section of In Search of Lost Time because it appeared to be a still life for vegetarians, not a routine carnivorous description of bifteck aux pommes. This is truly Proust for pleasure: the voluptuous passages ignite all the senses. Certainly no one reads Proust for plot, yet his detail and description can be so flowery at times that his words border on purple prose. Not so here--every bit of paint applies itself to the canvas.
In this passage, we get a sense of what it feels like to be asparagus. You could say he masters asparagus psychology. They are "creatures" with "feet" and "firm, edible flesh." Yet, at the same time, they are not what they appear; they are not of this world.
He depicts more than a pretty picture. There is a certain sexual undercurrent to his fascination with asparagus. What's more, his vegetables have undergone an Ovidian metamorphosis.
He begins with what seems calm and collected in English ("what delighted me were the asparagus"), yet sounds more emotionally charged in French ("mais mon ravissement etait devant les asperges"). Besides "delight," "ravissement" can mean "ecstasy," "rapture," and even "rape." And in his ecstasy (almost drug-induced in its intensity), he sees it all for the first time as in a case of jamais vu--as if he had never seen a countertop of raw asparagus before.
And his ecstasy in seeing the asparagus has something to do with young Marcel's first stirrings of sexual pleasure. A little further on, we see the secret life of asparagus exposed "in those early hints of dawn, in these beginnings of rainbows, in the extinction of blue evenings" ("en ces couleurs naissantes d'aurore, en ces ebauches d'arc-en-ciel, en cette extinction de soirs bleus"). This is the climactic phrase in the passage: we go from dawn to evening, from birth to death.
What is this build up to a beautiful death? I suggest it has to do with la petite mort ("the little death," a metaphor for orgasm). Looking the term up in my trusted Wiki, a more far-reaching definition of la petite mort refers to "the spiritual release that comes with orgasm, or a short period of melancholy or transcendence, as a result of the expenditure of the 'life force.'"
Roland Barthes, the literary critic, spoke of la petite mort as the main goal of reading literature. When I began writing, I wanted to show Proust as hearty and vital, not as stodgy and quaint. Presumably, we all experience a little death in reading Proust through the portal of his attention to detail and description.
And this is truly Proust for pleasure.
Sunday, August 8, 2010
My Year of Turning 40: In Search of Lost Time (Introduction)
To my surprise, I turned 40 one month ago. Where did the time go? In this youth-obsessed culture, 40 feels like a turning point. The grim reaper appears, licking the tip of his pencil. Married? No. Children? No. Successful career as a bestselling author? No comment. Live boldly or else.
Two years ago, I moved back home to help take care of my parents. My mother has Alzheimer's. Just dressing in the morning is an exercise in frustration: putting her arms through the right holes in her shirt, pullling up underwear facing the correct way, lacing up shoes that match on the proper feet. At night, she is confused about why her daughter and husband are telling her to take her clothes off and put on a nightgown. It just doesn't make sense.
As my mother loses her memory, I am reading Proust. Finally. The last time I was in Paris, I bought a knapsack to smuggle all of Proust's masterpiece (in a dozen paperbacks) out of the country. They remained untouched until a year ago. I read the first section--"Combray"--twice in French before I read it in English. To my dismay, I realized that because I had missed so many nuances, I needed a translation. Now I'm just past the "At Madame Swann's" section of the second volume (In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower).
My task: to read 50 pages in English (and then in French) each week and write two pages that will provide a taste of Proust as seen through my own warped lens.
Proust turned 40 in 1911. In January of that year, he wrote in a letter that he existed "suspended between caffeine, aspirin, asthma, angina pectoris, and in six...days out of seven (between) life and death." He had just started a book. "God knows if I shall ever finish it."
And what do I have to show for myself? Two short plays, some poems, an unfinished (yet not abandoned) novel, and a memoir I'm in the middle of completing. Mere lines in the sand. (Disclaimer: not to compare myself in any way with the budding master novelist.)
How will my blog differ from two recent popular books on Proust? Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life is clever and makes for a fun read, but it doesn't focus on the language. And Phyllis Rose's The Year of Reading Proust: A Memoir in Real Time left me stranded by chapter two, in which she devotes many pages to a blow-by-blow account of channel surfing that has little or nothing to do with Proust.
I pledge to keep on topic, to share what it is I love about Proust without being doctrinaire. I pledge to illuminate the crosshatching where my life and Proust's words intersect without too many sentences like, "Of course, what Proust is trying to say here has everything to do with what happened to my cousin three years ago on the A train." I pledge to make this blog accessible to everyone, whether they've never read a word of Proust or if they read him every year. I pledge to find my way lit by the headlights two feet in front of me as I drive through the night, seeing where this experiment takes me.
The year I turn 40 will be the most bold yet. I won't sit safely by the hearth, remembering things past, but I will go in hungry pursuit of lost time. So as I type this, I am dipping a madeline in my tea and mumbling a prayer I used to hear at Unitarian services: Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
Two years ago, I moved back home to help take care of my parents. My mother has Alzheimer's. Just dressing in the morning is an exercise in frustration: putting her arms through the right holes in her shirt, pullling up underwear facing the correct way, lacing up shoes that match on the proper feet. At night, she is confused about why her daughter and husband are telling her to take her clothes off and put on a nightgown. It just doesn't make sense.
As my mother loses her memory, I am reading Proust. Finally. The last time I was in Paris, I bought a knapsack to smuggle all of Proust's masterpiece (in a dozen paperbacks) out of the country. They remained untouched until a year ago. I read the first section--"Combray"--twice in French before I read it in English. To my dismay, I realized that because I had missed so many nuances, I needed a translation. Now I'm just past the "At Madame Swann's" section of the second volume (In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower).
My task: to read 50 pages in English (and then in French) each week and write two pages that will provide a taste of Proust as seen through my own warped lens.
Proust turned 40 in 1911. In January of that year, he wrote in a letter that he existed "suspended between caffeine, aspirin, asthma, angina pectoris, and in six...days out of seven (between) life and death." He had just started a book. "God knows if I shall ever finish it."
And what do I have to show for myself? Two short plays, some poems, an unfinished (yet not abandoned) novel, and a memoir I'm in the middle of completing. Mere lines in the sand. (Disclaimer: not to compare myself in any way with the budding master novelist.)
How will my blog differ from two recent popular books on Proust? Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life is clever and makes for a fun read, but it doesn't focus on the language. And Phyllis Rose's The Year of Reading Proust: A Memoir in Real Time left me stranded by chapter two, in which she devotes many pages to a blow-by-blow account of channel surfing that has little or nothing to do with Proust.
I pledge to keep on topic, to share what it is I love about Proust without being doctrinaire. I pledge to illuminate the crosshatching where my life and Proust's words intersect without too many sentences like, "Of course, what Proust is trying to say here has everything to do with what happened to my cousin three years ago on the A train." I pledge to make this blog accessible to everyone, whether they've never read a word of Proust or if they read him every year. I pledge to find my way lit by the headlights two feet in front of me as I drive through the night, seeing where this experiment takes me.
The year I turn 40 will be the most bold yet. I won't sit safely by the hearth, remembering things past, but I will go in hungry pursuit of lost time. So as I type this, I am dipping a madeline in my tea and mumbling a prayer I used to hear at Unitarian services: Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
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