I love reading author interviews.  I particularly like to know whether a writer uses a pen or pencil and what kind of notebook she writes in.  So, it occurred to me the other day when an author I like sent me a copy of her new book that I should do some author interviews.  There are tons of writers who come over to BlogLily — I should hit them up, don’t you think?  It could be fun.  You don’t even have to have published something.  Writers in progress are fair game too! 

The thing is, though, that beyond nosy questions about what kinds of writing utensils a writer employs, I’d have to think of some other questions — more literate questions.  So, I did what we all do when we have no idea what we’re doing, which is I googled “author interview questions.” 

Wow.  I found some very bad stuff (not bad, really, but not that interesting), and then the Paris Review’s author interviews which pretty much scared me because they were so smart, and then some other interviews which I loved because writers would draw stuff to illustrate their answers, or at least give the answers in their own handwriting, which I like, because I enjoy seeing how people write.  Literally.

Anyway, I realized that you can do two kinds of interviews (obviously you can do many more than this, but I’m going to just keep it to two because — right! — this is a blog.  We don’t have to be complicated.)  The first kind is more like a questionnaire — you ask everybody the same thing.  (And no, I will not be asking things like if you were a color, what color would you be?  although, in case you are wondering, the answer is orange.)  And then there is the second kind of interview in which the interviewer reads the book and asks questions that are quite book-specific, like “why did you give Harry a scar on his forehead?  Do you have any interesting scars you’d like to tell us about?  Also, what on earth are you doing with all that money?  Are you giving a lot of it away?”  That kind of thing. 

Okay, so say I decide to exploit the people I know who’re writers and force them to answer questions — what kinds of things would you like to hear them talk about?   Another way to ask that question is “when you read author interviews, what are your favorite questions?” 

See?  I’m interviewing you, dear readers.  You’re my warm up to a summer of impersonating Terry Gross.

It was a surly weekend, dear readers. Maybe the surliness was about having so many revisions still to do. Or maybe we’ve been staying up too late. I don’t generally talk about my surly days, because I think they’re a little boring. But sometimes at the center of surliness lies truth, or something true anyway, or maybe something sort of amusing — who knows, maybe when I get through with this post the surliness will have evaporated.

Our little family is probably the worst family in the world at playing games together, a terribleness in inverse proportion to how badly the children in this family want to have family game nights. The troubles are many. First, I refuse to play Risk, a game that goes on forever, is not very interesting, and has a goal I think less than admirable (world domination). Second, THEY refuse to play Scrabble, a game that does not go on forever, because I always win, and has a goal everyone but me finds less than admirable, namely my domination of them, word-wise. Third, that leaves pretty much only games nobody likes to play, so we end up watching a movie together, which is fine, but not as fine as playing a game sometimes.

Anyway, a few weeks ago they were at their aunt’s house and played a game they loved, Apples to Apples. A lot of fun, mom, they promised. You’ll like it because it’s about words

For the few remaining people on the face of the earth who haven’t played this game, basically, you get seven cards with nouns on them: funeral, Mata Hari, firefighter, George Bush, haunted house, for example. And then a person designated as the “judge” (a rotating position), turns over another card, which is always an adjective. Funny, cool, outrageous, sadly misguided, stupid. You lay down the card that you think is the most like the card that’s been turned over.

Fair enough. So, you’d think that the person who wins would be the person who has the good luck to have the noun that best matches the adjective — I mean, really, we all know which card goes with “sadly misguided.”

Sometimes, the cards don’t match up perfectly, and there the judge has to make the best call he or she can make.

The trouble is that people don’t always WANT to pick the best card. Sometimes they pick the dumbest comparison. Or the exact opposite. Or the one they’re pretty sure their brother put down, because they want to do something nice for him since he’s just picked THEIR card, which wasn’t anywhere nearly as good as mine.

Okay, so I’m a grump for not being amused by what is, by all accounts, a fun party game. But, really, what good is a game when there’s a judge who gets to be subjective about something that’s not actually all that subjective? Maybe the trouble here is that I work for a bunch of judges and I’m just not able to let go of my strong feeling that judges are supposed to do one thing: get it right. Or  maybe the truth is that I just hated losing.  Especially when I had the George Bush card.

You never know, when you move to a city, what it is about it you’ll fall in love with. I moved to Berkeley in 1982 because I wanted to go to graduate school at the university. I didn’t know it would smell so good because of a combination of star jasmine and eucalyptus, or that the fall would be hot and beautiful and seem to last forever and that summer would be a so-so season of fog so heavy you think it’s raining. Nor did I have even the slightest inkling that this is a place where people have strong opinions about food.

The other thing I didn’t know is that the kids who work in places like the Star Grocery, which is a few blocks from my house, would have strong opinions about pie crust, and pie crust makers. One thing I should have guessed is that Nick, the guy who owns the Star, would be totally fine about little expressions of disgust with the world as it is, which is to say the world outside Berkeley.

How could it be that I have managed to store 13,000 e-mails in my earthlink inbox? The reason I know I have that many e-mails is because every week or so, a little icon next to my e-mail inbox goes into red, danger territory.  That’s how earthlink tells you that you have to pay them $10 more a month so you can store all your spam in case, you know, you suddenly wake up and decide you DO in fact want to buy cheap pharm, and enlarge  the penis you don’t happen to have and maybe, who knows, send the entire contents of your IRA to some guy in Nigeria who really, really needs it. 

When I glance at that red line hovering in the dangerous-you-have-too-much-crap-in-here territory, I feel like I’m sitting on a nuclear reactor.  Except I’m not Homer Simpson, and I actually DO feel kind of bad knowing the whole thing’s going to go up in a big mushroom cloud. 

Every once in a while, I try to delete some of those e-mails.  But the whole effort is very lame.  I search on things like “cooks illustrated” and “publishers lunch” and “amazon” and delete three or four pages of e-mails at a time.   My inbox goes from 13,000 e-mails to 12, 937 e-mails.  A day and a few visits from energetic spammers later, I’m back at 13,000.  It’s a little like trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon.

The whole thing was making me feel bad.  

So, this morning I took a deep breath, and figured out how you delete the whole inbox at once.  That’s when I discovered that if they ever need someone to push a button that blows stuff up, I’m their woman.  I LIKED it.  Steely eyed, I sat with my finger hovering over the “enter” button.   And then I just tapped it sort of lightly, in a carefree manner.  I didn’t for even a second feel worried that there might be something in that in box that mattered, some e-mail so precious I had saved it to re-read to my children or pass on to my literary executor, or an e-mail with good news that might sustain me on a bad day, or a gift certificate you can only get if you have the proper number, or the details of the bus that picks kids up from skatecamp, or the confirmation number for my trip to New England tomorrow, or litlove’s e-mail address….

Oh my god.  Tell me this wasn’t a huge, huge mistake. 

PS:  To the person who found my blog today by googling “how to be smart, organized and look beautiful”:  I hope you got here in time to see that the way to accomplish these not inconsiderable goals is to delete your e-mails.  It takes years off your life, pounds off whereever you don’t want them, and generally gives you an aura of invincibility.  Until you need the skate camp bus schedule, of course.  Then you’re on your own. 

and one more PS.  Obviously, my method of inbox decluttering is a little extreme.  My friend Debby, who was once my co-worker, and used to pretty regularly inform me that my shoes and outfit didn’t quite work and was always right about that, e-mailed this far more helpful decluttering routine, which I reproduce in its entirety.  Debby (who is not my college friend Debbie, although I’m guessing that Debbie doesn’t have 13,000 e-mails either) has many skills and talents, not least of which is her ability to pull off something like this: 

On my yahoo account, I empty the spam folder every, single day.  And I delete all unnwanted emails every single day.On my work account, I delete all non-work “sent items” emails every day and delete all non-work emails in my inbox every day.  I then delete all deleted items every day.  After I’ve finished doing my timesheets, I delete all the unnecessary emails for that time period and move the important ones over into the appropriate folders.I also delete all my cookies and browsing history every day before I leave the office.

This is probably the only thing I do religiously.  I have almost no emails in my inboxes. 

There was a big thing in the New York Times Magazine yesterday about “equal parenting,” which apparently is a kind of stealth movement out there in parent-land, where both parents juggle it all instead of just one parent juggling it all.

I was sort of busy revising my novel while W (my husband) was outside finishing the skateboard thing he’s building for the boys and running around town to buy Jack some last minute items for his choir tour, but I did register the thought that we’re those kind of parents. I mean, I think we are, because I didn’t have time to read the whole article and most of what I know about it comes from the captions on the pictures of people who looked awfully young to me.

The thing is, though, that the last time we were able to talk about our shared parenting (in some way other than a two second conversation about who’s going to pick up William from his drum lessons) was in 1990. Okay. Since it’s been 18 years since I last really articulated the thinking that goes into the parenting I do with W , I’m due for a little talking about it. Oh, and also, it was Father’s Day yesterday, so it seems appropriate to talk about fathering.

Here’s the setting for that conversation. Fall 1990. We were probably having a drought here in California, because it was hot, hot, hot and we had all the windows open. We were driving to Yosemite, on one of those very windy roads where to keep yourself from getting sick and to make sure the driver (in this case W) is not falling asleep at the wheel, you must absolutely bring up a controversial topic in a loud voice so you can be distracted from getting sick and he can be distracted from falling asleep.

We were about to get married, so there was a ton of stuff to talk about. (Don’t get me started on why it was that I had to wear the complicated dress, complicated both from a fashion and political point of view and he got to rent the same penguin suit thing all men wear.) The discussion I chose to start had to do with whether we were going to have children. Of course, the reason we were getting married was because we were pretty sure we’d have some children, but we’d never really discussed it, so it seemed like a good thing to bring up.

At that time, I could still remember some of the feminist theory I’d read in college. There hadn’t been a lot of stuff about parenting. In fact, the only thing I knew about feminist parenting came from Dorothy Dinnerstein (remember her? Mermaid? Minotaur?). From her, for some reason, I had drawn the conclusion that the Reason There is So Much Fighting in the World is because men aren ‘t properly parented. Which is to say they don’t have fathers who mother them and so they end up killing each other. Or something like that.

So I said, honey, I’m not going to have children unless you’re going to raise them as much as I am. Half and half, okay? At that time, W was busy thinking about whether he was going to take one of those jobs where you go to far away places and make a bunch of money as a consultant, and see your wife and family not that often. So he took this statement seriously. We drove and drove and drove on that twisty road talking about mermaids and minotaurs and consulting jobs and stuff, and by the end of it, we’d agreed — we would be equal parents. I am not surprised that he agreed to this because he is a person of integrity and fairness and he likes to work hard at things, which, it turned out, is what parenting is all about.

He bought a small company of his own, in the end, and never did become a consultant, in part because when you are the boss you get to decide how you’re going to run things. Which is to say that the single best way to institute family friendly work policies is to own the company at which those policies are in force. What are those policies, you ask? The ability to work at home is one. The flexibility to do things with your children when those things must be done, and then stay up until midnight doing the other things that could wait just a bit so you could take your child to the orthodontist is another.

It turns out, though, that our equal parenting also had a lot to do with having twins. I can see how we might not have ended up the way we did. That’s because my impulse when I became pregnant was to just take over. Look, I can carry two at once! Next, I’ll give birth to them in beautiful pain! And then, hey, how about all that nursing I will do! I had no idea what he’d do, before he started doing it.

That happened when they arrived — both of them. Fortunately for me, the babies and W, you can’t monopolize parenting if you have two babies at once and you discover all that nursing is making you really, really tired. And so, because we started off having to share, it just never ended. It’s not exact — but for both of us it feels pretty even. (Lately, W would say it is not even, and that I spend so much time writing that our children don’t know what a mother looks like, unless it’s the OTHER mothers they see way more than they see me. He might be right, you know. I wonder what Dorothy Dinnerstein would make of that. Still, equal parenting can sustain a little unequal stint every once in a while — it rights itself, I think, if you pay attention to it.)

This is what it looked like today, for example. It is summer vacation. We both work. Jack had to be taken to the airport. I took him and came into work. Charlie and William have no plans today. W arranged for them to meet a good friend at his work, and go to the park with her. (Please note that I did not make this plan. Shared parenting means being totally responsible for the planning of the days you are on duty as the parent.) I am writing this afternoon and tonight. W is taking the boys out to dinner. Tomorrow he is working at home, while they are at home hanging out. I am working, and writing. I’m in charge of Wednesday and am working on childcare arrangements for the time I will be at work. Thursday he is in charge. Next week, after I get back from a weekend away, he and I are on vacation and we will all be in charge. That is usually a very exciting free-for-all of strong willed people that sometimes ends in tears or a lot of yelling and sometimes is a lot of fun. After that, the camps I organized, and the two nice young women I’ve hired to hang out with the boys take over the childcare.

Which brings me to another important point.  We share parenting between more than  just the two of us.  Important people in our lives and the lives of our children have helped us raise our children.  I have always worked part time (except for a year or so of full time work) and W has always worked a schedule where he either does the morning shift at home or the afternoon school pick up shift.  When the boys were little, one woman — Aurelia Madrid — cared for them during the days both of us had to be at work.  It is hard to think of a name for her — she’s neither an aunt nor a nanny.  She’s a third parent, really.  She brings things into our lives that we wouldn’t otherwise have:  she has a better sense of humor than I do, she’s more easy-going, she keeps them busy really beautifully, and she loves them, as they do her.  So, you see, shared parenting isn’t a two people endeavor, not at least in our life.

And so it goes. A lot of stuff around here gets done at the last minute. Sometimes it is more W doing the child care, sometimes it is more me. We are both sometimes up very late doing the things we love to do that we did not get to do during the day because we are also parents. Shared parenting may not change the world and stop wars, but it does make people happy — both of us. My husband loves his fathering work as much as he loves being an engineer and designing amazing things, and being a windsurfer who’s very fast out there on the San Francisco Bay and a great skier and rock climber to boot. He does all these things, and feels, as I do about my own passions, that he doesn’t do any of them as well as he’d like, but at least he gets to give it a shot. So, yes, I can honestly say, 12 years into the shared parenting endeavor, that it’s a good, worthwhile thing to do. Not everyone can do it, or wants to do it and that’s fine too. I know plenty of families where one parent specializes in the on-site parenting work and, honestly, I no longer believe those children are going to go out and start a bunch of wars. The funny thing is that if people choose that sort of parenting arrangement (women mostly, I think), rather than have it thrust on them, that works pretty well too.

I can’t think of how to end this post except to say that my husband is a remarkable man, and I am lucky to have met him and married him and had those three children with him. He’s a gem. Tired, but a gem.

Three months ago, I submitted the first fifty pages of The Secret War to The James Jones First Novel Fellowship contest.  ($10,000!)  I’d actually intended to mail them the first fifty pages of my second novel, but since I was only on page 22 or so back then, I had to make a little last minute substitution.  

They e-mailed me this morning to say the book’s in their finalist round, which makes me happy.  It’s always terrific to make somebody’s cut, and this one is particularly gratifying because the award is intended to “honor the spirit of unblinking honesty, determination, and insight into modern culture exemplified by the late James Jones. . . .”  I also happen to love Deborah Kerr (okay, Burt Lancaster figures in there too),  who was so magnificent in From Here to Eternity. 

I don’t know if you’ve been following the saga of my short stories – the ones that keep getting dinged by one fine literary journal after the other — but I think it was about time for a little good news around now, don’t you? 

It’s been a terribly busy week, which is why, if you’ve checked in here this week, you kept seeing that post telling you it’s Friday when it’s actually NOT Friday.

There have been performances (William was the bus driver who denied Rosa Parks her seat — he played this key role in a choral performance dedicated to the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King), and projects due (Charlie knows a lot about Venus Fly Traps),  and two of the boys are going on tour with their choirs in a week or two, which means you have to buy black pants that fit and also you have to find their passports, tasks that sound pretty simple but, in reality, turn out to be odysseys of epic proportions. Somewhere in the middle of the week someone managed to break two bones in his hand playing football, which necessitated three trips to the doctor for diagnosis, x-rays, and a very handsome black cast.

That is why, during the week, I have read a couple of short stories, and written the beginnings of two stories, and revised another one, and have not worked on revising my novel. The best novel writing requires that you stay in the world of your novel while you are writing and revising it so you remember what the weather is like, and the shifts in your characters’ emotional states, not to mention the color of their hair you mentioned 100 pages earlier.  That is simply impossible, I’ve concluded, when people go out of town and children break bones and I have to drive kids to school, and pick them up and work and do the dishes.

I know that writers don’t choose literary forms entirely because of time constraints, nor do readers chose poems and short stories because they don’t have the concentration necessary to stay with a novel, but I do think the reason I am writing this post this morning, and not working on my novel, or even on a short story, is because it is 6:45 a.m. and William is sitting on my bed writing, in very competent cursive handwriting, a report about Jimi Hendrix’s life and the only thing I can do while he’s asking me how to spell England and counting out the number of paragraphs left to write and losing his pen, is this blog post, about how you fit what you write and read into the life you live.

I will be so happy when school is over and summer arrives and there is time to stretch out and read novels, not to mention edit them.

Writing confession time. Actually, the church now calls it reconciliation. Isn’t that what accountants call it when they settle the books? Anyway, I write about writing over in the page called (no surprise here) “writing.”

This comes from Marie. You’re supposed to bold which of these 100 canonical books you’ve read. I’ve added comments. I couldn’t help myself.

Here’s what I’m wondering — does it count if you’ve seen the movie, or if you’ve seen the movie and it wasn’t by Disney? What if the movie had songs in it? What if the movie had Daniel Day Lewis in it? You can see the trouble here.

Also, in this list I lay bare certain reading prejudices, some of which I didn’t even know I had. Please don’t think less of me because of it.

In fact, do this yourself and tell me you don’t have your own prejudices and don’t feel the strong urge to explain that the reason you haven’t read, say, The Stranger, is because it was never made into a movie with Daniel Day Lewis.

Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family (I read the other one — the one with pictures, the one with Walker Evans)
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain — ok here’s one I need to read.
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger (I believe this is about the plague. Of course I didn’t read it.)
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop (I re-read this recently on a trip to the southwest and loved it even more the second time.)
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales — in college, and then I had to memorize the prologue, which comes in handy when there’s a lull in conversation
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans — surely the movie counts? Let me just say three words: Daniel Day Lewis. (Okay one more: shirtless.)
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage — I probably have read this, because it’s the kind of thing you have to read at some point if you’re a student but honestly I can’t remember a thing about it.
Dante - Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment — I did, however, see an intense movie version of this when I was in my twenties and inclined to be depressed and it was awful. I think it’s time to revisit this one though. I’m a lot cheerier than I used to be. I think I could even read all of Native Son on a good day.
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy — I think Sister Carrie is THE Dreiser book, but that’s just my, you know, opinion. I love Sister Carrie and don’t want to read any more Dreiser and ruin my admiration for him by finding out why it is that one critic described him as a guy who wrote like a person who didn’t have a native language. ouch.
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury — Couldn’t read this, and don’t know why. I’ve tried the first ten pages at least five times. But I loved Absalom, Absalom. Maybe you have a Faulkner limit and mine is two.
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones — movie! (Wasn’t it a movie? You know, with Ryan O’Neal when he was gorgeous and filmed by candlelight?)
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier (I keep thinking this will be good, but then I always put it back on the shelf…)
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame — the movie! I saw the movie! okay. it had songs in it. Yes, it was a cartoon. Perhaps that should not count.
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World — this is fiction? I always thought it was a travel memoir or some kind of long essay.
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll’s House
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis — I mean, I do know what it’s about. But it’s never interested me. Did anyone ever make a movie of this?

Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt — I don’t like strident realist fiction. I know, I know. How do I know if Sinclair Lewis writes strident realist fiction if I haven’t read it? Wasn’t he responsible for that really, really long movie that Daniel Day Lewis was just in (see Last of the Mohicans above for other sort of unreadable books that made good Daniel Day Lewis films.)
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain — do the first twenty pages count? I was afraid I’d be stuck in the sanitarium forever if I didn’t make a run for it right then.
Marquez, Gabriel García - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener — people love this. I have never been able to get past the first page. It depresses me.
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
O’Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O’Neill, Eugene - Long Day’s Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago — the movie, I love the movie!
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel - Swann’s Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49 - no way. I do not like Thomas Pynchon. I don’t know why. Maybe it is because I am afraid there will be no plot and a lot of Symbols.
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front — this I must read. Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac — movie! With Daryl Hannah and Steve Martin, remember that one?
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep — I keep seeing things about Henry Roth. DIdn’t he wait fifty years between novels?
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion - movie! I could have danced all night!
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich — is this any good? It looks so… long. But then he is Russian and long is his job.
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island — yes, I know, the movie doesn’t count, because it was, yes, by disney.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom’s Cabin — does the King & I count?
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver’s Travels
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire - Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five — I do need to read this. But I avoid it, along with Catch 22 because I am afraid it will be ironic and not entertaining.
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple — I happen to have an autographed first edition of this book. It is autographed in purple. I did not see the movie, which looked awful.
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories (Not all of them — nobody reads every single one of the collected stories of anybody unless they wrote, you know, six stories.)
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass (could someone please explain to me why Leaves of Grass is on this list? I mean, these are mostly novels and plays and Homer. Last time I looked, Leaves of Grass was a super long poem. Okay, some of Shakespeare is poetry, and Dante too. But if poems are okay to include, then this list would look a lot different.)
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son (Okay, I quit when Bigger Thomas stuffed the body into the incinerator.)

Well that was fun.

I mean, you might think it’s the other way around and the angel comes out better than the dorf. Go here to the May 23, 2008 entry and tell me who you think comes out better in this literary exchange: William or his third grade teacher. (Two sentences! A two sentence post! A miracle of brevity!)

Okay, okay, a third sentence: I actually do read books, and I’ve updated my “reading” page up there at the top to prove it, and discovered at the very end of that update that I actually don’t like Hemingway’s early short stories (okay, I HATE them), and I’m mystified by that discovery, so pretty soon I’ll update that page and talk about that. (Whew.)

The Civic Center Farmer’s Market (Wednesdays and Sundays) is one of my favorite things about working where I do. There’s no avoiding it (although who would want to?) because it’s right outside the entrance to the BART station. Just as there’s no avoiding the fact that it really, truly, finally is spring. Peaches are here! And how about that use of the word “rich”? 

It has indeed been a rich May around here.  When you look up from the peaches you can see the State Building, which is where I work, adjacent to San Francisco’s golden domed City Hall and the Asian Art Museum, which represents THE finest example of how to turn a grand library into a really beautiful museum.  One floor above the court where I work is the California Supreme Court, and haven’t THEY made this a richly happy month? 

If you happen to be visiting San Francisco on a Wednesday in the spring, all you have to do to check out these many riches is hop on BART and get off  at the Civic Center stop.  Buy some fruit, and maybe a tamale.  Go into the Asian Art Museum, which is ahead of you and on the right.  If you can’t afford to pay the entrance fee, you can ask for the red chopsticks pass, which gets you into the cafe, where you can have a cup of tea and sit on the lovely veranda overlooking the farmer’s market.  And you can still see the beautiful job they’ve done converting the library into a marvelous museum space. 

Don’t forget to visit City Hall – and the Main Library, which is across from the Asian Art Museum.  There’s cheap food to be had down Polk Street, which is officially “Little Vietnam.”  And in another three weeks or so, the Supreme Court’s marriage decision will be final, and they will begin to marry people at City Hall.  You can sit in the grass and congratulate people, while you’re eating your tamales, or your fruit, or your vietnamese food. 

Some people find this extraordinarily rich neighborhood a little scary.  The tenderloin is home to a lot of people who are right on the edge of being okay — and many people who’ve fallen off the edge.  And no, they’re not always pleasant.  But they’re part of who we are, and there’s no denying their existence around here, and that is as it should be, I think. 

Tonight, I overheard one of our children — the one who had to stay up late to work on his science project — telling my husband he had a headache. “Maybe I should take some advil, dad. Or some tylenol.” There was a pause. “Or how about some morphine?”

Clearly, it’s time for summer vacation. It’s also time to answer litlove’s questions about being a mother. Always happy to help with scientific and literary research, I provide my answers below:

How do you view your role as a parent? What are you there to do?

I’m here to keep them from being killed crossing the road, and from chewing with their mouths open when they’re having dinner with the first person they’ve ever loved. Beyond that, I’m pretty sure I should be standing out of their way, and letting them become the people they’re meant to be. Being a terribly bossy woman, I have an awfully hard time with that, but that’s what I aspire to.

In your social circle, are mothers expected to work or are they encouraged to stay home with the child?

Every mother I know well (and those are the mothers I think of as being in my “social circle”) has a sense of herself as having work in addition to her work as a mother. Even if she is currently staying home with her children, the women I know are still thinking about this work, and how to fit it in with their lives. So, I’d say, the women in my social circle are expected (because that’s what they expect of themselves) to have pursuits in addition to caring for their children.

As for physically staying at home, rather than going out to a paying job, that’s a very fluid thing in my community of friends.  There’s a lot of in and out — being home for a while when the children are very young, working part time, working from home are all common choices.  Very few women I know who have children my children’s ages (middle and elementary school ages) work full time at those terribly high powered jobs where they travel a lot and wear clean, pressed clothes — the kinds of jobs where you don’t have time to have much time with your children.   I have noticed though that as my friends’ children get older, their clothes are getting cleaner, and they are traveling more for work, and getting to put more time into the things they like to do besides raising children.  One thing I do know is that most of the women I know are too smart and too busy and too aware of how hard it is to parent and work to buy into the false dichotomy that is the stay-at-home mom vs. working mom thing. 

How do you feel about your child’s education? What’s good about it, and what do you wish could be done differently?

I have three children, and what their early educations all have in common is that they have involved the acquisition of a second language because I think that is a hugely important thing for Americans to do for reasons that should be obvious. In the case of my twins, that language was French, which was acquired at a private French school. My youngest child is fluent in Spanish, a language he learned completely free of charge, courtesy of the Spanish immersion program run by the Berkeley Public Schools. What’s good about their education is that we have lots of choices about how to educate them, both public and private. In some ways, that’s also what’s bad about their education. They don’t all go to the same schools with the children in our neighborhood and that makes their social lives a little scattered.

How do you share the childcare with your partner (if it is shared)? Do you tend towards different activities or different approaches to parenting?

We’re into being “equal.” What that means is that my husband does the morning childcare jobs (lunch making, breakfast making, dropping off at school) and I do the afternoon childcare jobs (picking up, homework browbeating, taking people to lessons and sports). I tend to specialize in instilling them with a love of reading and a little bit of religious education, despite the fact that I don’t actually believe in God most of the time. He specializes in making them fabulous skiers and windsurfers (and rock climbers). We’re nothing alike, and we think that’s probably good for them.

What are the most important virtues to instill in a child?

To keep their eyes open for the thing they love, and to figure out how to do that thing for a living — or to find a decent day job so they can do the thing they love the rest of the time. Is that a virtue? Yes, in fact, it is.

The other important virtue is a skill as much as a virtue. It is learning to really see other people — to listen to them, to try to understand why they do what they do, and in so doing to become a compassionate and loving person.

What’s the relationship like between mothers at the park and the school gate? Would someone you didn’t know help you out in a stressful moment?

I rush in and out of school so much these days I can hardly tell. I probably feel guilty at some level that I’m not participating in the mother-life of my childrens’ schools. But I feel ruthless these days about doing the things I want to do and not getting sucked into running the school auction. But yes, even though I’m not so great about school participation these days, and so am a virtual stranger to many of the mothers at my children’s schools, I’m pretty sure that anybody I asked for help would pitch in and help me. And I’d do the same for them.

What do you fear most for your child?

That they won’t ever find the thing they love to do.

How do you discipline your child and what are the errors you would put most effort into correcting?

I don’t think anybody learns anything from being punished except to sneak around and to be afraid. That said, I have the terrible flaw of yelling at my children when they fight with each other, or are rude to me, or do other stuff that bugs me. I apologize, and try not to hate that about myself too much. How do you get children to do what they should? Well, you model it, of course. Unfortunately, even though I do know this, I still lecture them like crazy. Poor things.

The errors I tend to focus on beyond table manners?  In giving freely, without expecting things in return, there is an enormous amount of happiness.  So, I try to model that, and try to encourage them to be that way.  It’s a work in progress.  I’m not always as generous as I could be, that’s for sure.

Do you think the life of a child has changed much since you were young?

Well, their childhoods look different from mine, with much more privilege and a different style of parenting, but no, I don’t think the fundamental nature of being a child — the imaginative life, and the way children develop — has changed one bit.

What’s the best compliment your child could pay you for your parenting skills?

You might have yelled at us and lectured us and never made brownies like the other moms, but we know you love us and we’d like to invite you to come see us do the thing we love. (Oh, and by the way? We know how to chew with our mouths closed. We always did know how. We just pretended like we didn’t to bug you.)

Thoughts about my writing week are over here. And be sure to check out litlove’s post about her week of thinking about and working on her new book about mothering.

If you are feeling the need to do some confessing (whining, moaning, bragging, fantasizing are all okay too!) about your writing week, go sign up at the Literate Kitten’s blog. I like reading these posts. They’re fun and inspiring.

And one other thing:  You’ll notice there are a lot of pages at the top of my blog.  I’ve added a new one called “Reading.”  It’s a list of what I’m reading, with some notes about why I’m reading what I am and what I find there.  Much of my reading is related to my writing — for example, I’ve been thinking a lot about short stories, and about clean, clear, third person narratives (which is what I aim for).  The Collected Stories of Wallace Stegner (and I picked up Recapitulation for good measure) seemed to speak to that.  My next novel has a lot of echoes of Shakespearean comedy, and the only one I haven’t re-read recently is The Taming of the Shrew, so I checked that out.  If you’re interested in this sort of thing, that page will be updated every few days.

It’s a lovely day in San Francisco, a day so warm it feels like summer. A perfect day to issue an opinion, if you happen to be the California Supreme Court, in which you say that it’s no longer acceptable for the state to call committed, loving, gay relationships anything other than marriages.

The opinion’s here, on the court’s website. To find it, you just have to scroll down to “In Re Marriage Cases.”

Today I am so proud to live in California, and very proud of our court system.

This is a post about criticism: how to do it well and not so well.  It begins with an illustrative anecdote:

I feel for the poor bloggers among us who click the “publish” button and send out into the world a post so misguided and poorly targeted that it opens them up to a storm of fury in the blogging world. I wish there was a way to spare bloggers like that — well-meaning, innocent blunderers — from the churning stomach-ache they’ll have to endure for about a week while they get yelled at by a bunch of really mad people.

You want to go check out that car accident don’t you? Okay, here’s a summary. Waldo Jaquith over at the Virginia Quarterly Review, which is a literary journal, posted a bunch of the mean comments their editors have made about fiction submissions. They’ve since been removed, so you’ll have to trust me that they’re not the meanest thing I’ve ever read, and some of them aren’t even all that original. (I’m sorry, but “barf-o” is not a critical term I have much respect for, perhaps because I hear it out of the mouth of my three sons — who are 12, 12, and 8 — all the time).

Still, the post touched a nerve. Okay, it ripped the skin off some people. Readers responded, here, and here and here and here.

One of many points made was that airing the negative reactions of the people who are, essentially, judges in a highly competitive game in which the participants suspect there is already a lot of unfairness (elitism and cronyism being the big two) is a no-no. It comes off as disrespectful, arrogant, mean-spirited. In my view, it is also a breach of an implicit promise of confidentiality a journal makes to its submitters. It’s other things, some that aren’t so bad. But you have to read those links to find out.

In his defense, Jaquith isn’t an editor — he’s the web guy. And he’s got a great name. He was just trying to amuse and entertain. In the law, there are some crimes where you do a lot less time if you didn’t intend them to turn out the way they did. Like murder. (If you hide out in someone’s garage, and then shoot them and maybe also steal a bunch of stuff, that’s way worse than if you’re the PG&E guy and you mistakenly turn on the gas in someone’s garage and kill them because, unbeknownst to you, they had chosen that inopportune moment to take a nap in their car).

If Jaquith is guilty of anything, it’s a misdemeanor. Lashes of the wet noodle rather than the solitary confinement at Pelican Bay with people blaring Ted Nugent at you (which is what he got). Not everyone would agree, but it’s my blog, and I’m the Legal Professional, so I’m going to go with me being right about this.

Jaquith then made an effort to be nice about it and apologize (sort of) by posting some of the good things people at the VQR have said about writers. Whew. I’m glad to hear that over at the VQR they know how to be nice. That effort didn’t really get him all that far, though, because people were still mad at him, so pretty soon, an editor at the VQR posted his own response. It’s a deliciously weird non-apology — the kind of thing that starts off apologizing and then goes on into a sort of blame the victim defense (you know, when a defendant says, well, I wouldn’t have killed the victim if the victim hadn’t asked for it by writing such a stupid story.) Anyway, sometime, check it all out (the link above to the VQR will lead you to the first, second and third posts). The whole thing is smoldering and just about out.

Me, though, I have no interest in that smoldering pile. I’m more interested in telling you about somebody who really DOES know how to condemn and praise, a guy who’s a real critic. I started thinking about him partly because of the whole VQR controversy, but also because of a post over at Ward Six about good writing that comes from unexpected places.

Now, if that isn’t the longest damned introduction to a book review about a book that illustrates How To Write Beautifully and Be a Proper Critic in an Unexpected Place, I don’t know what is. I love blogging. Digressions, smoldering controversies, strong words, mad people — I feel like we’re all in a smoky coffee house in London ready to draw swords over the things we feel passionate about, but unable to do so because we’ve had too much (a) coffee (and our hands are too shaky) or (b) wine (ditto) and, anyway, we sort of like each other. Fortunately, we have all the time in the world to wander around the coffee house yelling about this and that, and then maybe getting to the point before everyone falls asleep, but maybe not, which is okay too, because we are not in a hurry here at BlogLily.

Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez’s Perfumes: The Guide is a messy, opinionated, and very smart collection of reviews of more perfumes than I ever knew existed. Turin and Tania Sanchez smelled a lot of stuff, wrote about it, alphabetized it all, added a couple of good essays about perfume (how to wear it, its history, for example) and sent the whole thing out into the world.

It’s a great book. I don’t even care that it’s so badly indexed you have to rely on karmic convergence to find some of the perfumes you want to know about. Or that he dismissed a Guerlain perfume that was described by the New York Times perfume critic Chandler Burr (there’s another whole long coffee house discussion of a blog post about what the Times is doing with a perfume critic on their staff) as “a crepuscular, rose-inflected darkness suffused with a luminosity that floats on the skin.”

I asked for that perfume for Christmas, being in the market for a little of that inflected darkness suffused with luminosity. Luca Turin gave it a respectable, but mere, three stars and summed it up as “handsome, striking, but a little tiresome in the long term.” Apparently, crepuscular gets old. It’s just that it’s a HUGE bottle of crepuscular. Still, I do like it, and I’m going to keep wearing it when I want to be luminous and yet plan to depart the party before I grow tiresome.

The thing I love about Turin as a critic (and this applies to Sanchez as well) is that he has a huge amount of respect for the past — he obviously knows and has experienced great perfumes, ones that still form the basis for what he thinks about things people are making today. I like that. I think it’s hard to be a good critic in a vacuum. 

Another thing I like about him is that he’s an enthusiast. If he likes something, he REALLY likes it. There’s no tiptoeing around it.  It helps here to be French.

He’s also unafraid to champion things other people won’t have anything to do with because that thing happens to be sold at Target.  That’s one of the hallmarks of a true critic — he thinks for himself and he finds wonderful things where other people are too good to look. I mean, really, have you tried Tommy Girl?  I have.  It costs $28 or so and it smells lovely. 

Qhen he hates something, he’s very funny, and a little mad. I like this one:

Delices eau de toilette (Cartier) * vile fruity

Probably called Delices the way the Furies were called Kindly Ones, for fear of upsetting them. This is a woody-vanillac fruity so loathesomely potent and crass that I cannot find a bad word to say about it. On second thoughts, I can: it’s not even vulgar.

Now that’s good stuff there.  FIrst, it made me laugh.  The whole thing about the furies was not something I knew.  Second, the idea that there is something even worse than being vulgar surprised me and made me think.  There’s a lot going on in this little tossed off paragraph.  It’s way better than “barf-o,” although that is exactly what he’s saying here. 

He does all this wonderful work in a paragraph, or even a sentence. When he gets up to three paragraphs, you know you’re reading about a perfume he considers a work of genius.

I’d recommend this book for anybody who cares about how we praise and condemn that which we love, which would include short stories.  I’d also recommend it for anybody who wants to smell good. And I think that somebody should send it to Waldo Jaquith, completely for free, because he deserves a little pick me up after the smelly week he just went through.