*For everyone who has to revise…again

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: it won the Pulitzer prize for 2007, today number 544 on Amazon more than a year after being published in paperback. That is the kind of success that authors crave. And how did it come? Fast, easy, cranking out book after book, as authors also crave?

Five years after writing eight hours a day, he had seventy-five good pages and a lot of crap.

It was like I had somehow slipped into a No-Writing Twilight Zone and I couldn’t find an exit. Like I’d been chained to the sinking ship of those 75 pages and there was no key and no patching the hole in the hull. I wrote and I wrote and I wrote, but nothing I produced was worth a damn.

He failed every day for five years. He despaired. He put the book away. He tried to think of anything else he could do instead of writing. He wept. He didn’t even care anymore about writing a great book, just a readable one. One night he dug out the manuscript, deciding that if he could find one good thing in it, he would keep going. This is where he finds the golden line and it inspires him, right? No–he found nothing of worth in it other than the above mentioned seventy-five pages.

But he went back to it anyway. For two more years it was a futile task. But then something started to take shape, seven years from when he’d started, and in another three years, the book was finished. Something beautiful. A beauty that was recognized.

And he says:

Junot Diaz, photo by Christopher Peterson, Wikipedia Commons

You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway. Wasn’t until that night when I was faced with all those lousy pages that I realized, really realized, what it was exactly that I am.

(Full story here.)

Someone might find this story discouraging–after all, the prospect of ten years of labour! But not me. I’ve already been there, as you know if you follow my blog. Instead I’m heartened because a fellow writer says it’s worth it, not only for the success which he couldn’t know that he would find, nor can I or any other writer, but for the thing in itself: “you keep writing anyway.”

Thank you Junot. You wrote honestly from the heart, and in doing so, put your hand out to me and every other writer who despairs at midnight.

h/t Sandra Gulland

*Flight

*1768–what’s changed?

From the 1768 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica:

Stock brokers: “Are those who are employed to buy and sell shares in the joint stock of a company or corporation … as the practice of stock-jobbing has been carried on to such an excess as became not only ruinous to a great number of private families, but even affected or at least might soon affect, the public credit of the nation, the legislature thought fit to put a stop to it, or at least bring it within certain bounds, and under some regulation … “

To celebrate the most recent edition of Encyclopedia Britannica, the publishers are looking for the oldest set in private hands. The first edition of EB was put together from 1768-1771 in Edinburgh by a printer, engraver, and editor. Each weekly section cost six pence or eight pence for nicer paper. (Full story here.)

It was an Enlightenment project at a time when rational thought and science were expected to fix the world. We are still seeking enlightenment, still getting hoodwinked and bamboozled, then calling for better regulation. However, despite our failure to avoid the same old with the stock exchange, we have antibiotics, indoor plumbing and sewage treatment. If we could just bring those to the whole world, we’d have great cause to celebrate. And maybe, also, an Encyclopedia Britannica for every village.

h/t Bookninja

*Monday Oct 19/09

Untitled (does it need one?), originally uploaded by BethJansen.

This picture makes me smile. It reminds me of my children not so long ago and yet ages.

*Peak Sand?

What would happen if the desert became communist?

Nothing for a while, and then there would be a sand shortage.

That’s just one of the jokes collected by West German spies in East Germany back in the day. From Der Spiegel:

The jokes were gleaned from secretly opened letters and phone conversations that agents from West Germany’s Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) would monitor in their quest for East German state secrets during the Cold War.

The joke report was by far the most popular service the spies provided. “It was our biggest hit,” recalls former BND spy Dieter Gandersheim, whose real name is of course quite different. The Chancellery and the ministries couldn’t wait for the file, he said.

Here’s another one:

Christmas has been cancelled. Mary didn’t find any diapers for the baby Jesus, Joseph was called up to the army and the three kings didn’t get a travel permit.

Full story here.

My eleven year old asks me why I’m laughing. I tell her the jokes. She says, “I don’t get it.” The Soviet Union isn’t a part of her world. It’s ancient history, like my childhood, only slightly more recent than the dinosaurs. It was in the last millenium, after all. The same millenium as the world wars and the bubonic plague. Yeah okay we have climate change–but from the perspective of a thousand years, I would say there is hope.

h/t The Galloping Beaver

*More tea?

So this poor guy who drank black tea for 25 years decided to switch to Earl Grey, thinking it would be better for his stomach. A week later he suffered from muscle cramps that required medical attention. The cause? Toxicity from bergamot oil, made from the rind of the bergamot orange, which gives Earl Grey its particular flavour. I had to ask, how much tea did the guy drink to get poisoned by tea?

Four litres a day. That’s about 16 cups folks. I wonder how he got out of the bathroom long enough to boil the kettle. Full story here.

*Blog Action Day: Bikes and Feet

The theme of this year’s Blog Action Day is climate change. There are many science bloggers who have a lot to say about this a lot more knowledgeably than I can. But my post today isn’t here to warn, admonish, or predict.

I want to talk about bikes and the joy of them. My first bike was a red Raleigh. Its name was Queenie. My best friend’s bike was Bluebell. I was seven and I chose both names. Our bikes were horses and we were accompanied on our adventures by an assortment of imaginary animals. We rode up and down our street and around our suburban neighbourhood. When I was a teenager, I got a second hand blue bike and rode it downtown. Downtown is a misnomer, because in fact it was all uphill as the centre of the city in which I was born was an extinct volcano.

I rode slowly uphill, standing to get more force into my pedaling, and flew all the way back downhill. I didn’t know that I was experiencing the freedom that bikes gave women in the late 19th century. The new woman of that era took to the bicycle and was suddenly free to ride unaccompanied by chaperones. It may even be proposed that the bike was instrumental in making the 19th century woman anew. Tea houses sprang up, catering to women riding out and having their own adventures–just like my best friends and I when I was seven and seventeen.

I wrote the first draft of my first novel in Prince Edward Island. I had no car and so I discovered exactly how far I could go by foot. From the cottage I was renting on the south side of the Hillsborough River to the good coffee shop in Charlottetown (now there are many, but that year there was one and also a really good Middle-Eastern restaurant that made great fallafel) was a fifty minute walk. It was a lovely and contemplative walk over the bridge that ran parallel to the posts of the old bridge where black birds held parliament. It was about a twenty minute bike ride and a seven minute drive. I bought a bike.

But here is my sad confession: I don’t own a bike anymore. I left it in PEI, where, after riding it twice, I chose to walk instead. The reason was that the bike seat hurt my tender parts. I am assured by people I know that there are new high-tech magical seats that do not cause soreness there. And when Toronto gets bike lanes, I am certain that I will get a bike and the type of seat of which they speak.

But here is my happy confession: I don’t own a car. When our twenty year old car finally bit the dust in August of 2008, we decided not to replace it.

I thought I would miss it. I don’t. I walk, take the subway, and have a membership in Autoshare, though I haven’t used it yet.

Maybe….just maybe….I’ll get a bike. Or learn how to go downhill on inline skates without bonking my head. And when I am old, I will wear purple with a red helmet. Perhaps I ought to start practising now.

*Fabulous Photography

I’m linking to a blog that displays the gripping work of Vivian Maier,

a street photographer from the 1950s – 1970s. Vivian’s work was discovered at an auction here in Chicago where she lived for 50 years but was originally a native to France. Her discovered work includes over 40,000 mostly medium format negatives. Born February 1, 1926 and passed away on Tuesday, April 21, 2009.

I’ve never heard of her and I should have: her photos are gripping and original. I’ve subscribed to the blog on her work created by John Maloof, who found and purchased the negatives in Chicago.

*Monday October 12, 2009

Mortlock Library, 3rd Level – HDR, originally uploaded by Dale Allman.

Today is Canadian thanksgiving. So I would like to bless the world of books, which is made with the hands, eyes, and hearts of writers, printers, publishers editors, cover designers, paper makers, along with the trees, soil, chemicals and sun which provide the materials, truck drivers who deliver them, unloaders, store clerks, librarians, reviewers and readers who partner with writers to give books meaning.

*Standing on the Roof

We took the air conditioner out of the bedroom window on Wednesday. The window now offers a good sized view, just over four feet by four feet, or 1 3/4 sq metres facing east. The window slides sideways, which is a pain for the a/c but lovely for a breeze, and I climbed out to stand on the flat roof above the kitchen and back balcony. This is the view:

Those are garages behind the houses that have them, these houses having been built over a 100 years ago, when the park nearby still had horse troughs.

And this:

I see that birch in all season, generously shading our house though it grows next door, making my daughter sneeze in spring, serving up seeds to squirrels, bare and brightly white in winter moonlight.

While I was taking the photos, I heard a man swearing somewhere to the north. I couldn’t tell what he was angry about but whatever it was, he was emphatic. Now there’s just the sound of the rain and and the slur of wheels: traffic that can’t been seen from my window, just heard behind the green and gold and red of trees, brick, chimney pots that have no function now that high efficiency furnaces are the norm and exhausted through pipes.

I like chimney pots. They’re old and these houses are old and they are comforting. I want to show you a picture, so I just walked over to the west side of the house, thinking I might get a better view. But no–trees are in the way. And then I went back to my desk, put my head out the window and noticed that, yes, there is a chimney visible from here and it’s smoking. There is still an old furnace among my neighbours. (Further down the street someone has a 19th century boiler; it was the only heater in the neighbourhood that worked during the power outage last winter)

Last night I had worries. I woke up from a bad dream. I forgot what I was supposed to keep at the centre of my heart. It is here: beauty of the chimney pots on a day of rain.

*Positive Psychology

About ten years old, positive psychology studies how individuals and communities can thrive. A reaction against psychology as the study of mental illness, it aims to redress the imbalance in understanding human nature and what makes us happy and healthy and peaceful individually and socially.

This reminds me of a book I read years ago: The Psychology of the Female Body by Jane Ussher. What she noticed while looking at studes on pms was that subjects were asked only about negative symptoms around their periods. She repeated the study with a change: she asked as many questions about positive symptoms as negative ones. To my surprise, she found that as many women were energized as more tired before their periods, as many were happier as angrier, as many felt more enthusiastic as felt depressed.

The questions we ask open doors to possibilities.

My one concern about positive psychology is that it can add to the American frenzied preoccupation with happiness. And in my browsing around the web, I found that websites on positive psychology do have that scent of buy now! Find the secret to everlasting happiness! Be better, prettier, more successful in five easy steps! The secret is yours for only $19.99! They never use those words exactly, but they tend to have that glossy, breezy feel to them, the sound bite rather than the thoughtful lesson.

I can tell you from personal experience that it is just as hard, if not harder, to meditate, have an open heart, be hopeful, remember what really matters, be mindful and enjoy the present moment as it is to face pain, work through traumatic memories, and express anger. Both are necessary to healing and making a better life and a better world. And I also believe that we have a collective responsibility to do something about poverty, environmental destruction and violence.

One thing I like about the short videos by Tal Ben-Shahar, a professor of positive psychology at Harvard, is that, although their brevity leads inexorably to cliches, he speaks frankly and sincerely of the fact that life includes pain. He says that the only people who don’t experience painful feelings are psychopaths and the dead. So take heart! If you are sad, anxious, angry, upset–you are alive and you are not a psycho.

This is what I think we need: the balance of accepting pain and sorrow, while also being mindful and making space for the good. There is so little of that in our society. On the one hand, we are bombarded with fear mongering news stories. On the other hand we are bombarded with the notion that success and beauty are in our hands and with them we will be happy; if not we are ignorant, lazy or otherwise lacking. (And if you tune in to channel X at 4:00 pm you’ll learn the secret; or for $19.99 you can buy it.)

I think that this incongruity comes from a simple fact: media is all about making money and you can’t make money by giving away the truth. No you have to scare the crap out of people first and then offer to sell them the crap cure.

Yet the truth sounds cliched because it’s so straightforward that there isn’t much of a buck to be made out of it. These are the notes I took from several of Ben-Shahar’s videos:

• keep a gratitude journal
• spend time with friends and family while not multitasking
• exercise 30-40 min 3x a week
• simplify: turning off phone, have email-free time
• ptsd is real and requires healing, but so is post traumatic growth: look for meaning and share experiences rather than shutting down
• recovering from a tragedy takes time and has to run its course
• learn to fail or fail to learn; through failure become resilient and have deep learning: Thomas Edison patented 1093 inventions more than any other scientist and has also failed the most times, his attitude was that he wasn’t failing he was succeeding in finding what didn’t work

I think that deep down, or sometimes not even so deep, most people know all of this and more. They know what makes them peaceful people and good neighbours.

I just have to look at my children. Their behaviour lets me know when our home is in good order. It’s no surprise that hanging out with me and my husband, having a solid routine with enough sleep and good food, learning, exercise, fresh air, a smattering of new experiences, drawing and painting, time to play create an atmosphere of good will and amicability.

Are my kids pinching each other? Whining? “Mommy she did, no she did…liar!” Sometimes it’s just a passing mood. But often enough chances are that mom and dad are distracted and preoccupied and something has gone off balance.

Although I haven’t been to synagogue in ages, and my spirituality consists of daily meditation and talking to the light, we light candles on Friday night, say a blessing, and have a Shabbat meal with juice and wine. We look around the table, consider the atmosphere, and my husband imitates the bad angel, face scrunched up, who reluctantly has to say, “May every Shabbat be like this!” Once in a while, the good angel looks around at angry, resentful faces, and my husband’s face sadly falls as he says, “May every Shabbat be like this.”

We are blessed that mostly it’s the bad angel who has to stamp his foot in frustration and give in to the peace of our home after the candles are lit.

It doesn’t cost $19.99. It does cost effort and we all know that it isn’t easy, but it is simple.

Peace slips away but we can always come back to it. All we have to do is take a breath. And another breath. And another, until love settles again into our heart, and compassion causes us to reach out our hands to hold each other’s.

h/t The Situationist

*The Viriginity Kit

For only $29.90 you too can restore your hymen. No more surgery! Hymen restoring surgery is a popular procedure in the middle-east, but it costs big bucks, and of course there is the medical risk and all.

Now you can just send your money order to Gigimo, a Chinese mail-order company. Yes everything these days is made in China, even your virginity. (Actually it’s made in Japan, but it’s the Chinese who know product demand.) You can have your first night (or day) back anytime, the company advertises.

On the magic night just insert the little pouch. It’ll tighten you up, and when pressure is applied, something like blood will leak out in just the right way. Add some wincing, tense at the pain, and nobody can tell the difference between you and any other virgin. This is an up to the minute product with assured satisfaction, unlike the messy chicken blood method of old. No more honour killings, ladies. All smiles among the manly men.

Of course the conservative mullahs of Egypt aren’t too thrilled about this product. They are agitating to have it banned and anyone caught selling or buying it severely punished in the ways that cultures that sequester women and kill them for acting like real people prefer.

Read all about it here.

H/T The Galloping Beaver.