Cleaning out old files (Oh my god, my college papers…) I discovered this: the letter I got from the Bank when I finished paying off my college loans–a little less than ten years after I was graduated from college. If the rather fulsome praise for the “excellent manner in which you handled the repayment” and offers to provide credit references sound…quaint, it’s because they were. The world is a whole lot less forgiving than it was when I took out those loans, and I, for one, don’t think that’s an improvement.
Everything cost less in those days.
I went to a private, top tier college, and between a $3000 loan every year (the maximum amount permitted), and grants from a private foundation, plus work study and summer jobs and typing papers, I was able to cover the entire cost myself. I think my senior year room, board, tuition, and fees came to a little more than $5000; even with travel to and from, and the odd living expense, I was okay. Quaint, right?
At this busy time of year my thoughts are full of plans, and recently whilst ruminating on various plans I found myself remembering a classic acronym: KISS. It stood for Keep It Simple, Stupid.
It occurred to me that this is an example of negative self-talk. Why call myself stupid? That just puts me down, and heaven knows I don’t need that. It’s so easy to put ourselves down without being aware of it. These patterns are part of our culture, but we have a choice about them. We can discard patterns that are unhelpful, or convert them to new meanings that are more supportive.
Therefore, I hereby define a new meaning for this acronym: Keep It Simple, Sweetheart (or sugar, or uplifting s-noun of your choice).
Self-talk that is kind uplifts us. We all need that, especially when we are busy with all sorts of wonderful plans!
As we launch into the winter holiday season, I invite you all to find moments of silence and stillness, and to remind yourselves to Keep It Simple, Sweethearts!
There is a constant buzz around concerning new books, old books, favourite books.
I’m part of that buzz. I write about books all the time. I analyse story and describe narrative. If I were someone who was confident about her work, I’d tell everyone my list of things to consider for prizes, but I’m not, and my big work this year is a little book, Story Matrices, looking at story and how we transmit culture through it. For me, its big achievement is that I’ve finally managed to find a way of explaining important things so that writers and editors can work with some terribly important concepts. Too many have (in my presence) said “I can’t handle this” about these ideas. Some still will say that they can’t handle things.” But writers are now coming up to me and saying, “I think I understand.” They understand how culture can be more safely tackled in fiction. They understand how to weave culture into their writing, just as people who read History and Fiction could see how history is used and what research for story is all about and…
I spend so much of my life trying to understand and then explain, that these two books are very important to me. What I want is people to read them and to argue with them and to annotate them and to find their own understanding of story. I want readers and critics to take what I’ve described and say “But” and “I can do better than this” and “Wait, I have an idea!”
Awards help people find the book they want to read next (so nominate the books you want seen), but the biggest reward of all is someone reading my books. Intelligently, Argumentatively. Not arguing with me, but with what I’ve written. Finding their own path through this argument.
All my books are meant to be read actively. Maybe not all with argument – that’s the academic books – but with criticism and thought and feeling. And…
Maybe it’s time to do a blog series that introduces all my books. Today you’ve had Story Matrices and History and Fiction. Short academic works that people tell me are surprisingly readable. Over and over again I am told this. Every time, I hope that this means that the person telling me has frowned over one page and laughed at a comment and taken notes to find a book I mentioned and said, at some point, “Yes, this is what I needed to read right now.” And then they put the book down and think about what it says and how that applies to their favourite writers. And to their least favourite. And to the book they’re reading because the book club says to. And to the book they got from the library by mistake. And to the book their favourite bookseller says “You really need to read this.”
I love readers who think for themselves and have their own opinions. I won’t agree with all their opinions, just as they won’t agree with all of mine, but it’s such a joy to hear them. Of all my books, the two that were written to provoke interesting discussions are Story Matrices and History and Fiction. They’re short on character and plot, and long on research, but that’s fine, other kinds of books have character and plot.
I love it that some books are read because they’re like others and are comfortable, and we read others because they pull us into new worlds and light up our minds with concepts and humour. I’m not sure whether authors are the right people to describe their own books, but … I’m going to try. This post is the first in a series that may well last right up until the next author interview.
Here in the United States, we are taught in elementary school that our annual Thanksgiving holiday goes back to the story of the Pilgrims celebrating survival and harvest with their Native American neighbors.
But while that myth does underlie the holiday to a degree, Thanksgiving as a holiday started during the Civil War, when first a governor and then President Lincoln proclaimed it after the tide began to turn for the Union.
That is, we are giving thanks for the survival of our country after a rebellion.
Historian Heather Cox Richardson explains it here.
I find the Pilgrim story problematic, given the genocidal history of European settlers and the indigenous population.
But the Civil War history is something I can get behind these days, especially after a week when some leaders of the January 6 insurrection have finally been convicted of sedition.
I am thankful that the country survived the latest effort to destroy it by white supremacist authoritarians. The current crop of extremists are very similar to those who started the Civil War in that they believe the country should be run by white men, preferably wealthy white men.
We are still at risk from these people and should they succeed, Thanksgiving would become a travesty. But so long as we can keep holding them off, it is a tradition I can believe in.
I suspect that the Pilgrim bit was emphasized in an effort at “unity” post war. I’m not sure we were even taught that Lincoln started it in my Texas schools, where the Civil War was taught as between “us” and “them.”
But I felt renewed this past Thanksgiving when I realized I could give thanks that our democracy is still hanging in there. The U.S. has a lot flaws, but what it would be under the kind of authoritarians who think slavery was good and women shouldn’t vote is not to be contemplated. Continue reading “The Last Holiday and the Next One”…
For the privilege of sharing a common favorite book and an interest in natural history with the noted British author John Fowles, I earned a book hurled at my head.
Not by Fowles!
It began with Wiwaxia and ended with the jacarandas and a cup of tea.
My aunt, I told Fowles as we walked among the beautiful jacarandas in bloom on the Chapman University campus, always had loved these trees. Although their purple flowers always draw comment and interest, their pods were what she had loved so.
The pods are like purses, or perhaps herbaceous oysters. They’re strong and durable.
Fowles’ voice was soft and he spoke carefully, with a bit of sibilant whistle with some of his “esses.” I’m sure this is a British mark of something … but he wasn’t the least bit “crusty” (as in upper-crust). He was down-to-earth and courteous.
He was curious, almost relentlessly so.
He asked about the many rabbits on campus — escaped from labs ages before.
He asked about the large flock of green parrots — escaped pets, now breeding in large numbers (as did the rabbits).
He asked about the jacarandas. I had always thought this tree was from Australia, as were the many varieties of gum and eucalyptus we see everywhere around Southern California. But it turns out that jacarandas are from Argentina and in the wild, they are regarded as a threatened species.
But they are planted as landscape trees around the world and their purple flowers rival cherry blossoms for beauty.
I’ve been going over my work today and thinking, “Fowles treated me as an equal.”
Because he was egalitarian? Perhaps. Fowles is the author of one of the least-objectionable of the “man kidnaps, rapes, and tortures young woman” books, his first bestseller, The Collector. At the time I was walking with this man on the Chapman University campus, it hadn’t yet dawned on me that this type of literary subject might represent an extreme form of toxic patriarchy and that sane people might not regard such a tale as a subject for light reading prior to bedtime.
That issue was never raised at the time, not in any seminar where I was present, and not between Fowles and me.
We talked about Wonderful Life, a mutual book favorite of ours, written by the late (both men dead, now) Stephen Jay Gould. This book tells the story of the discovery and interpretation of the Burgess Shale animals, and Fowles had just returned from a trip to Canada to see the Burgess Shale with his own eyes. He wrote about other fossils, those found on the beach at Lyme-Regis. Collecting and studying these fossils formed a significant part of the story of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, which was made into a well-received film in the 80s starting Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep.
I insisted that Hallucigenia was groovier than Wiwaxia, although now, I’m no longer sure. What do you think?
Hallucigenia (l) Wiwaxia (r)
Fowles read some of my work and pronounced it good.
He spoke with me some about being a writer.
He said, “You must always do what you do for yourself first and only. Never do what others want or demand.”
He signed one of several of his first editions, and a few not-first, to me. I took those with me in my single box of books when we moved to Florida.
I’m reading something of mine today, preparing it for publication.
In book form.
And I saw something else, as well.
Via social media, a young woman asked, “Are you proud of your skin color?”
I understand the reason why the question was asked, and though my answer to that question is “No,” I ask myself the question, “Are you proud of your work?”
The work I’ve done for a lifetime.
And to this, my answer, is “Yes.”
And I think, now that I am ten years younger than the 70-year-old Fowles was when he walked with me on that long-ago day on that far-away campus,
He was right.
I’ll never know why Fowles wrote The Collector. I see some material online that says he wrote it to “Fulfill a boyish fantasy of imprisoning a woman.” I hope that’s not really the case; certainly there was little to nothing of this left in the kind, thoughtful, gentle older man I walked and talked with.
He seemed to me to have been a man who had grown tremendously throughout his life. A thoughtful man, interested in the world around him and all of its creatures. All of life.
“You must always do what you do for yourself first and only. Never do what others want or demand.”
Cleaning out old files (Oh my god, my college papers…) I discovered this: the letter I got from the Bank when I finished paying off my college loans–a little less than ten years after I was graduated from college. If the rather fulsome praise for the “excellent manner in which you handled the repayment” and offers to provide credit references sound…quaint, it’s because they were. The world is a whole lot less forgiving than it was when I took out those loans, and I, for one, don’t think that’s an improvement.
