out and about…

Several weeks ago, I took a new position within the company. 

It’s been full tilt around here since then, either with planning and studying work stuff, getting around the country for meetings, getting the household on track and on schedule, doing taxes!, having excellent time with HM (who is also incredibly busy) and time with the kids when they visit, helping our lovely Nor plan her wedding, meeting up with friends, catching the occasional show on the telly, catching a few winks and reading. (None of the activities listed in the prior sentence have been prioritized in any way. In fact this whole blog entry is a melting pot meant solely to say I’m here and haven’t completely given up on blogging.)

Oh, you’d be shocked and appalled at my reading choices but when you’re on a plane or in a taxi or just waiting in line for something, you’ll read just about whatever is at hand, or that fits into your purse.

I have returned to Franzen’s FREEDOM, though, intending to finish it because I stopped halfway through it months ago. He’s just so darn real but the book hums with a disturbing undercurrent. Can’t put my finger on it. 

I’ve barely picked up my camera, either, not to mention the pencils and yarn that show up in my prior blog entry. Harumph.  That’s about to change. Like the weather. This morning had that very subliminal hint of spring in it, with that moment, that color, that says “spring is not far off!” And my journal waits patiently on the desk. Have not done anything but cram pictures, tickets and other ephemera into it. I missed journal class for good reason – HM’s band had their premier gig at a local pub and tho’ it was a Thursday night, the place was packed. A far cry from journaling, it was great – yes, dancing!

I will now stop treating this like a wandering entry in  my handwritten journal and will go for a walk with my camera.
And think of something to actually say, to share and tell you.

signed, Oh, the new road warrior

I gotta go find those pencils and some paper.

Writer Envy…

The saving grace of this lovely large annual issue last month was not so much the fashion as it was an article about Jonathan Franzen and FREEDOM along with a bonus. The article about him and his new book, also mentions his girflfriend (ex?), Kathryn Chetkovich and an essay she wrote called “Envy.”  A writer (she’s well published) writing about writer’s envy.

Her essay is actually found  in the Life’s Like That Granta 82, Summer 2003  (and you can read it here,  in The Guardian).

Well, didn’t I have to run to the shelf and take it down and read it! I had no idea he had a girlfriend (why wouldn’t he?) and that she would be a writer (why wouldn’t she be?) and since I’m always so damn curious about writers and writing and writers who hang out together and the writing process, yada yada yada , well, I had to read her essay and then re-read it.

And discover the links to Franzen whose Confessions I own, whose book of essays are on my wish list and whose Freedom, landed him on TIME’sAugust 23, 2010 cover.

So what does a writing girlfriend say about her writing boyfriend who is on the cusp and then in the thick  of uproarious success with his novel despite its timing of coming out a week within 9/11?

Actually, she writes of her own struggles about putting pen to paper, how she reads his manuscript when he asks, how he disclaims on the few pages he was able to knock out and how horrible he thinks they are, and she thinks they’re brilliant and adds that even on a good day, she doesn’t write stuff that even comes close to what Franzen might refer to as crap for his own part.

Yikes. Competition. I’ve seen it at work in the writing world, but on a journalistic level.
It’s different, I think, with fiction. With fiction, the writer has to come up with everything.  So the competiation between two fiction writers may be more quietly, clandestinely tooth and claw, a very edge-y ego thing.

 Chetkovich realizes in the closeness of their relationship that Franzen is a stunning writer, and that she is not only envious but doomed to keep scratching away and…feel terrible about her own process along the way. 

It wasn’t love at first sight for them. They met at a writing retreat (oh, geez, pls just knock me over with a feather – they met at a writing retreat? how about just going to one to begin with?)  Anyway, they had a kind of  growing friendship, one that intensified through conversation and conjoined by both being writers.  

Then she was called away from the retreat ; her father was ill and she had to go home. And while there, found that the now long distance Franzen was the person, the friend, she wanted and needed to call and talk to.

Together again, she watched his Confessions go ballisticly popular, even the sight of the book stacked in bookstores was tough for her  to tolerate. Overall, Chetkovich discovered that she must, above all, continue to write, which is her work. The envy was a “thing,” a truth she had to endure as she realized it is her lot to write…no matter what, envy, notwithstanding. 

Had I not read that page in VOGUE, the overblown review of the book (overblown meaning “long” in this sense since VOGUE usually gives book talk nothing more than one page and covering several books), I would not have connected Chetkovich to Frnazen. He is a quiet guy, in his way, at first decrying Oprah footlights, and other small things, like use of a touchtone phone.

We allow him his quirks and give him his fame, and so does Chetkovich.
There arel essons to be learned here.
Above all, push on, endure. Don’t not write. Write.

Red white and blue …

HAPPY 4TH OF JULY!!!

and happy fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth…ad infinitum 

fireworks in our neighborhood…

… and hope for all …  (done by the kids in the sand at Daytona  Beach)

Get to What?

I purposely photographed this book on my pillow because the pillow is one of  the things I leave every morning, sometimes unwillingly, to hie myself off to work. (You can’t tell it’s my pillow, though because I have big pillow and this is a small book and I had to zoom in on the title a bit.)

And though it’s not hundreds of pages long, the book is pretty intense, with some good and interesting points.  Hirshman is taking up where the venerable Betty Friedan left off. That’s not entirely fair, making her an extension, but it sharpens the point and she does mention Friedan often enough.

Part of Hirshman’s plan: “Don’t study art. Use your education to prepare for a lifetime of work.” “Never quit a job until you have another one. Take work seriously.” “Never know when you’re out of milk. Bargain relentlessly for a just household.”

I mentioned the book to HM several years ago when I read  a sharp review on it.  He surprised me with a copy of it. I had forgotten about it. I am still reading it. I read it in bits. And I reread some bits along the way because I forget her adamance, the reason for it.

I believe she might be correct,  that smart, educated women take themselves or are “taken” out of the job market in order to raise families and we all lack, that is, suffer for not having their acumen, judgment, knowledge, energy in the work world. 

Another of her points: we started a “movement” but didn’t finish it.

t’s often interesting to sit on a different side and take a look at the thing, the object, the item under scrutiny, see how it appears from “over there.”  Sometimes I’m looking for verification of the fact that I do go out there to work but then, I’m a near-empty nester so it’s not the same push-me pull-you that it is for younger mothers.

I haven’t said an awful lot about the book but I haven’t really ever finished it. Sometimes you have a book that you read as you need it or as its topic strikes you on a certain day. 

You might give it a whirl, as you’re standing in the library or bookstore. It will make you feel good about whatever it is that you choose to do.

The thing is, we’re needed everywhere, we moms and wives and girls and individuals and students and smarty-pants.

Six Word Sunday nite …

THE CALL OF THE OPEN ROAD …

 (photos taken on Pinellas Bay overpass, FL)

 No, I don’t ride. But I wouldn’t mind it. The lure of the open road on a motorcycle calls to a lot of us.

Does anyone remember the TV show “Then Came Bronson?” (1969-1970) It was before the movie Easy Rider.  Actor Michael Parks played Jim Bronson, a news reporter who heads out on the road after the suicide of his best friend and an argument with his editor boss. Bronson helped people in his travels, helped them affect a change in their lives. It is (perhaps incorrectly) compared to the image of the lone cowboy tooling around in the West. I don’t remember it that way.

I do remember that when touring France with a friend on motor bikes (they were NOT Harleys), I named mine “Bronson.”  Oh good grief, how corny! Really? My friend’s moto was tagged “Rocinante.”