Loves me, loves me not.

A friend recommended this book because it is written by a professor who has a vocation to the single life. The book, ironically, is about romantic relationships. I think I am done reading books on this topic for the next few months.

Loves Me, Loves Me Not.
The Ethics of unrequited love.
by Laura A. Smit

This book seeks to answer the questions surrounding the experience of unrequited love in the context of the Christian life. The author looks at the process and trajectory of relationships that end in rejection from the point of view of both the reject-er and the rejected party and asks what purpose this experience has in a Christian's life. Is it just a sad consequence of sin? Does loving someone who doesn't love you back mean that you didn't really love them? That God didn't want you to love them? When you reject someone, are you displeasing God?

Author Larua A. Smit starts by defining love, God's plan for love, and the effects of sin on that plan. She writes about what a virtuous love, mutual or otherwise looks like, vrs. a love that is tainted or crippled with vice. She goes on to examine the influences of American culture on our romantic imaginations; on the script, as it were; the story that the culture tells us that we try to conform our lives to.
Finally, she analysis different responses and ways of dealing with the role of reject-er and rejected, trying to find the most godly one.

I think that her conclusion is that holy love, the kind that mirrors God's love, is always good, even when it is not returned. The experience of being in love, and seeing beauty in the beloved is a glimpse of the glory that will be revealed in all of us in heaven, which comes from the image of God in all of us. Christians should work, and pray to conform their love to God's love, which loves regardless of whether we love him in return or not. Love that is rejected especially can be turned to a longing and desire for the beauty of God that we see in the beloved who does not return our love.

While I was reading, I was constantly thinking of friends that I know who would relate to or appreciate the book in some way. If you are a friend of mine, and we have ever talked about relationships, or friendship and love, I would recommend this book to you. It was a really good read.

Here follows the parts that struck me the most in relation to my own vocation and experience.

Protestant Professor Smit makes some arguments that are probably shocking to her Protestant audience. I expect some cold water in the face whenever I read about romantic relationships. Such reality checks are necessary in this topic. I'm used to reading a very unromantic debunking of the soul mate myth. Smit addresses this, and also tosses a different glass of cold water. She argues that all Christians should assume that they will never marry until proved otherwise. It was kind of interesting to read as a Catholic, because I have grown up with the understanding that celibacy is a healthy and laudable option, and I have seldom heard celibacy defended to a Christian audience that would challenge it as Smit's Protestant audience might. In Catholic circles we hear that celibacy is a special calling (that may be superior in some way to the vocation of marriage, but that is usually down played) for a few, and the rest of us are called to advance the kingdom of God through marriage and family life. Generally the result is that we all assume we have a vocation to marriage, and we are all obligated to honestly check in with God to see if he has something else in mind for us.
So here is a Protestant professor claiming that single life is the default vocation and the burden of proof must now rest with the one who is asking you out.

I am not sure that I agree with her all the way. But I sure liked the idea that I don't have an obligation to try out a relationship with any good upstanding Christian man who asks me out with godly intentions. Instead of the burdensome (in my mind) assumption that every relationships between single adults of opposite sexes has this explosive potential to be a romantic relationship, she offers a community where everyone assumes nothing more than friendship is ever intended. That sounds like a great idea to me. But it is, of course, a rather far off hypothetical ideal. In that ideal world, I bet people who spend less time writing about romance and more time writing about friendship, which is, in my not so humble opinion, the lost art of our culture.

Sometimes I feel a little inhuman because the parts of the book that are about romance, building relationships, relationship advice, interest me in the way that hearing about Buddhism interests me: it's very fascinating in the abstract, but I really have no desire to try it, and can't actually relate much, accept from situations I have been outside of, watching. It's like I'm the wrong kind of being to get into that. Most of the book is about people who want to be in relationships and cause themselves and other a lot of pain. My self centered, smug, and cynical voice says "or you could just be friends and avoid all this nonsense." So I have to admit that I am completely ignorant when it comes to the desire to be married, or even just in a committed relationship that may lead to marriage.

The part of the book that reminded me of myself and my attractions to people in the past was near the end when she was talking about the after effects of a rejection. What do you do with the love that you feel for someone who won't love you back? The answer is complicated, but gratitude is the eventual end point. God leads the rejected love to gratitude for the glimpse of the image of God that has been seen, gratitude for the love that can continue to transform the lover for the better.
That has always been my experience of having a crush. I have never felt more than a faint desire to admit my affection to the object thereof. Mostly I have longed to spend time with the person as a friend. I distinctly remember getting up in the morning and sincerely thanking God that the man I was attracted to existed in the world and that I got to exist in the same place once in a while and bask in the light of God reflected off him. (This is the part where all my friends laugh and shake their heads at the idea of Zita Lousie that far gone. Some of you remember.) I had it pretty bad. But I really didn't want anything but friendship. Can you have a friend crush? By that I don't mean a crush on a friend, but a crush that longs for Philia instead of Eros. Anyway, it was a completely pleasant experience, until it was clear we couldn't even be friends because I was no longer going to be in the same place as him. I seem to have missed out on all the pain and soul searching that was supposed to make me a better person. I don't know whether to feel cheated or blessed.

At the end of the book, Smit called out the Protestant community for disparaging the single life, in their attempt to honor marriage. I appreciated that little afterward. The Catholic community could hear that one also, in so far as we have as much trouble as our Protestant brothers and sisters when it comes to integrating single people into the community outside of religious life. I have been surprised at how uncomfortable people tend to be when I tell them I don't intend to marry, or join an order. They do tend to think I will grow out of it, that I'm just not ready yet. I suppose that may be the case. But I'm not going to wait around for it, and neither should my Christian community.

Reading out of Jealousy

I don't think I'm very funny as a writer. When I get a laugh, it's usually when I'm being completely serious and don't expect anyone to laugh. Actually, the last time it happened, I thought it was a rather sad moment. But my teacher laughed. I don't mind. Whatever.

I have this imaginary version of myself who is funny. She is the sort of writer who skillfully wields understatement and hyperbole to draw out the ridiculousness of a situation without breaking her readers suspension of disbelief. Usually when I actually try to do this, is falls flat. And when I am being truly myself, I don't want anything to be ridiculous. I just want to be taken seriously. I flash back to my three year old self; my eyebrows sore from being pushed up to their highest possible elevation in an attempt to convey the tragic situation of a few stick figures I had drawn, to an adult who thought I was adorable, but was completely missing the point. I can take myself lightly, but everyone else must assume I am deadly serious at all times. And for goodness sake, don't smirk at me like that.

But enough of my wounded psychology.

I've been enjoying the Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan. I grabbed it from the school library to look at the action sequences. I hate writing action scene because I think I'm pretty bad at it. So I am looking for examples (if anyone would recommend a middle reader or young adult book with fist fighting, chase scenes, spies, ninjas, or super hero type action, I'd appreciate it). Percy is a first person narrator. He has that dry humor that I always think I ought to have. It has taken me a book and a half to realize that this is the concrete realization of the humor for which I strive. I am not sure if I should adore him for pulling it off, or find it slightly annoying in person. 

Ironically, two other authors who pull off variations on this style of humor are Austen and Dickens. I can only read one Austen novel a year or I shall become very depressed and raw from the cynicism. And as for Dickens... When I am not reading Dickens, I very rationally tell people that I appreciate his work for it's humor, the intricacy of the plot details, and the character sketches. But when I'm reading him, those are exactly the things I hate the most.

Back to Percy Jaskson. These books are kind of a Harry Potter knock off, when you look at a summary, which may be why they got published. But, like all good books that look like Harry Potter, no one thinks of Harry Potter when they are reading it. It's a completely different world. It's America, it's Greek mythology, it's really geeky in fact. I would probably read it for the references to Greek myth alone. I don't know a lot about Greek myth, but mythology in general makes me happy. Then there is the wackiness of the premiss. If the god Hermes was running around in modern Delaware, what would he look like?

It's a bit too odd, in some ways. Perhaps it's a hair too believable. Only in this kind of culture could you write a book for middle schoolers in which the main characters are the illegitimate children of Greek gods, who haven't changed at all since they were sleeping around with mortals and not giving the products a second thought in ancient Greece. The driving force for many of the demigod characters is this complicated, angry, hurt, betrayed relationship with their parents, mortal and immortal. That's gotta be a product of the cultural decay of the family. It's quite sad.

Anyway, I have tried very hard to dislike these books. They aren't really my thing. When I am imagining my type of fantasy book, I want it to be taken a little more seriously. But every now and then, I get totally sucked in. At one point a very frustrated daughter of Athena is trying to spell cyclopes and can't do it. She is generally a Heromine Granger type know-it-all. So this made me very happy. I instantly identified with her, naturally. She just wants to be taken seriously, and she can't spell. All the demi god characters are dyslexic and ADD which makes the whole thing pretty goofy, and also makes me feel like I would fit right in.

Northern Courage.

I read this book once, called The Sea of Trolls. It was religiously pluralistic to the point of being sickening. But what stuck with me was the picture of northern culture. That Northerness that Lewis talked about loving and having in common with Tolkien. In the story, there were vikings who would tell fabulous stories that always ended with the gruesome death of the hero.

Tremendous problem, hero overcomes it in epic battle, he emerges triumphant, and trips on a shoe lace, hits his head and dies. Or, he gets one bad guy and the other one eats him. That kind of thing

Basically, it doesn't matter what the story is, it can't end well. Death or destruction always has the last word. You would think that this would be distressing, but the characters in the book loved it. They are describes as holding back the punch line, grinning with glee before announcing that the hero gets his head bashed in.

John Howe. :)

It doesn't inspire despair, but a tough kind of courage. Death is the last word for everyone, so you better prepare yourself to go in the most glorious way possible, which also might be the most gruesome way possible.
In Lord of the Rings, I always associate this kind of courage with Gandalf and called it hope. But in my Tolkien class, we have talked about it as an influence of Norse mythology. It is especially exhibited by the Rohirim.

We cannot break the armies of Mordor, but we will meet them in battle nonetheless.

...because we are just that bad ass.

This is not an argument for why it's worth it. It's not a test of strength. It's really very simple. Eomer is a courageous mortal. He stands against Mordor. Mordor has send out an army. Therefore, they go to battle, with or without hope. That's not really true. They have hope. It's just not hope of victory. They hope that Mordor's armies are at least as insignificant as they are, in the long run.

This is the sort of thing that gets labeled stupidity, or stubbornness, or even stuffiness in our very civilized society. If we are going to go out and give our very precious lives, it better be a hopeful, and worthwhile endeavor that couldn't be dealt with any other way. But I admire the training implied.

Eowyn vs Nazgul // by oliverojm
Or so said the blog where I found it. I like it.

My inclination is to become cynical when things get tough, never mind hopeless. This "realistic" view of my prospects in a given situation quickly become a paralyzing weight that makes it difficult to act in any direction at all. That interior critic tells me the paper I am writing is rubbish. But does this enable me to fix it, or throw it out and write a better one? No. It makes me slam my laptop closed and hide under my blankets, pretending that Monday will never come.

But in such a situation, Northern Courage would prompt a final defiance. I would whip that paper into whatever shape I could and turn it in on time with as much pride as I could salvage.

Nor is Northern courage a kind of unquenchable cheer leader. It can be grim. It's not about feeling happy. It's a recognition that most of my life is out of my control. In fact, the only thing I can control is how I respond to the challenges of each day, and that only when I have trained myself for such challenges.

But this courage, I begin to think, is actually necessary to do anything worth doing. The people in the world who do great things know the odds of failure, and keep going to find out the odds of success. The people in the world who don't do great things know the odds of failure, and don't care to find out if one of the chances of success is theirs.

It's almost finals week. I'm procrastinating. Also, this is the second to last finals week I will ever have to deal with. I hope to grow some courage before I get through my final finals week.

I am unemployable in a horrible economy. But I will dress up in uncomfortable shoes and turn in my resume anyway.

Enjambment

I don't understand prose poems make me rethink my major is art mostly looks like someone let their three year old finger paint on the wall was a face with only the colors out of the tube can't get any brighter than the sky today.

Confused? Me too.

I'm not a poet. The art of poetry writing is interesting to me, but not enough to make me pursue it through the dark and sticky mire of my inadequacy. There are other things that are as challenging that I find more rewarding. But I will probably continue to dabble in it. One thing that I like about poetry is the device of enjambment. Basically enjambment happens when the line ends, but the sentence in a poem doesn't. It can be used to break a pattern and then catches the reader (or maybe just me) off guard. I get used to pausing and, or, finishing a thought at the end of a line. So the instant after I have comprehended the meaning of the line, I find that the idea continues on the next line and must adjust my understanding. That haltering thought adjustment, like the quick step one takes to avoid falling when one's foot has caught on a broken edge of sidewalk, is an interesting thing to be able to cause in someone else's mind.

(Does that make me a sadist? I want to mess with everyone's mind. *evil laugh*)

I also like the way the word sounds. Enjambment. It looks rather like a word I would type out and then realize I had made some egregious spelling error.

(Had to attempt "egregious" three or four times before I looked up "terrible" in my thesaurus and found it. I would never have guess it began with an E. I thought I had the last part wrong some how.)

The B belongs there so delightfully adding to the surprise of the idea. I can think of several words that ought to have Bs in them and don't. And some that have them and shouldn't. So the spelling pleases me. And the way it looks, that poor B squished uncomfortable between Ms and the J looks like the N has stepped on it's tail and it is about to trip over the A, rather they way my mouth and nose feels trying to get all those sounds in between nasal consonants.
Cough.
Sometimes my mind feels like an enjambment. If I start talking before a thought it fully formed, I tend to start multiple sentences before I decide which one I really want to say out loud. This leaves the person I am talking to rather confused. I suspect that I will do this without realizing it when I get old. It will be very amusing. And I find that I change my mind about where a sentence is going half way through it. I usually start over. But now and then, I find a sentence that started to say one thing and half way through decided to conclude a different thought. It is not always clear when the shift happened. One or two words might belong in either sentence. I used to see this in other students' writing a lot when I was a writing tutor.

(Who thought it was a good idea to make me a writing tutor?)

Learning to write was a challenge to me because I didn't think in sentences.

(Sound off, people. Who thinks in complete, grammatically correct sentences? Anyone?)

I think in a tangle of related ideas that exist in a images and key words that act like hinges, swinging one idea to meet another. I can be frustrating to try and express these thoughts because they are a web rather than a string.

(Thus, the loosely organized chaos of this post and many others like it.)

Sometimes I sit down at my keyboard and can't write a single sentence. Sometimes I free write, letting words connect to each other independent of the words preceding or to follow.

(Preceding is a rather confusing word. It means "come before" something and "go ahead of" something. Does anyone else find that spatially confusing. I want to it be in the back, or in the front. The head or the foundation. but not both.)

I think it would be fun to try and express a very specific idea that way; weaving together ideas and images that suggest something larger without completing a single sentence. It would continually trip up your brain, like an enjambment. (Like those school yard songs that always change the subject just as they are leading up to saying a dirty word.) All those ideas bounding around and you catch glimpses of them as they flash past in a whirling jumble of possible sentences.

I spun ideas till I got dizzy and wanted to hurl magic words at all the misunderstandings could be avoided like the plague wasn't started by rats but we continue to ignore them and they get bigger all the time until they walk out the door and parents remember all the things they should have told me how to do this in school today I met a person who raised his hand and made us all be quiet until he thought of exactly how do you ask the right questions anyway.

Music and Writing

Looking at grad school programs. Some of them are really interested in making sure writers know how to talk about their writing process. This is a mysterious and personal subject. Certain things help everyone, but no two processes are exactly alike and no method will always work. Everyone hits a wall sometimes.

I like to listen to music. But it has to be a certain kind of music. I love music I can sing along to, but that makes trouble when I am supposed to be writing because I end up typing song lyrics in with whatever I'm working on.
The solution to this is sound tracks and classical music without vocals, or with vocals in another language.

Recently I have been reading various authors talk about what it feels like when they are writing well. A lot of people describe a feeling of discovery rather than creation, letting characters go their own way, rather than inventing a character and making them do certain things. I don't know if I've ever had that experience. But I have slipped into a mode where ideas come and language flow easily and it builds until I am not stopping to scratch my head about how I'm going to describe something or come up with a motivation for a character to do something. It's a really great feeling.

In trying to articulate this, I found myself using the same kind of language that I might use to describe some of the music I like to listen to when I write. This is what it feels like. 

(and if you haven't seen How To Train Your Dragon, you should look up the clip that corresponds to this track. Animators having fun with body language, no dialogue necessary.)

And before this dragon movie became my guilty pleasure, (along with kung fu panda) I listened to this:

That's what a good writing day sounds like.

Reading for spite

The Tapestry:
The Hound of Rowan
By Henry Neff 

I had to look it up to figure out which of these titles was for the book, and which is for the series. My research says that the book is called "The HOund of Rowan" and "The Tapestry" is the name of the series. Neither title makes much sense to me, but whatever.

This series seems to be a shameless knock off of Harry Potter. It involves a boy named Max who discovers that he has magical powers and is immediately swept off to a school where he will learn to use them. There are magical creatures, wacky teachers, special games, lighthearted banter between new friends, a bully, and rule breaking. What would happen if Harry Potter went to school on the East coast of the good old USA?

Some special and unique features of this book are an ogre and a hag who make the meals at the school. Magical bedroom and room mate selection, creatures that can only be described as seriously evil werewolves on steroids, a singing bullfrog that removes, ahem, social inhibitions, magical pets and an ancient ship which student must not sleep on lest its sea dwelling guardian make waves that toss them overboard.

Generally, I think knock offs are rather annoying. But I gave this one a chance because I am curious to see if other authors are trying to amend Rowling as I would like to. I rather hate Rowling for failing to deliver on so many good ideas. She is really good at half the things you need to tell a good story. But this is a rant for another post. I can't help comparing this book to Potter, since it's clearly in the same sub-genre. It's an interesting comparison.

I enjoyed this book because most of the characters were believable. They were distinctive and memorable, yet not overly simplified. The adults were reasonably competent and mature and also had believable disagreements, personal grudges and biases. The children were petty and rude, often terrified, secretive, hot tempered, and sometimes rose above what was expected of people their age to show real virtue. There was one exception. I guess you could call him the Draco Malfoy equivalent. They never gave him even Draco's excuse for his bad behavior. He was just mean for the sake of being mean. Maybe they will further explain his character in another book. I was awfully proud of Max, however, because he was willing to put aside their animosity when it really counted.

I disliked some of the narrative choices the author made. There were scenes that were merely passing jokes and insignificant insidence that were not written as such. They were sometimes given more narraitve weight, so to speak. A reader can sense when the author is giving them a detail they are supposed to pay attentiong to. One of Rowling's strengths is that she is really good at leaving hints around, leading her reader on, and then tying it all up like a Christmas package. In The Tapestry there are several dramatic events that ought to hide some kind of secret or clue to be reincorporated later, and they don't. It would be tempting to dwell on such events just for the sake of the humor or drama of the whole thing. But they didn't actually have the significance in the greater story to merit it.

Another stylistic thing that bothered me was the Neff's habit of ending chapters with drawn knives, pointed guns, strangers stepping out of shadows, or new clues being uncovered, only to pick up two weeks later in the next chapter. We are not given the benefit of seeing how the characters process these dramatic events. We must just assume that they did and latch on to whatever they are interested in now.

Another thing I loved about this book was that there was no thirty pages of exposition right before the final action of the climax. The explanation of the mysterious bad things that keep happening is revealed slowly throughout most of the book and the last hundred pages are pretty non stop action with only minimal explanation. Some questions are never explained but merely proved. A character who has been portrayed as a villain for the first half, swears his good intentions half way through, leaving us in confusion, and then proves what side he is on in the climax. No explanation necessary.

Speaking of the climax, wow. The immediacy of the whole thing and the high stakes made it pretty darn intense. The climax of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (my favorite book so far) comes close. Creepy ritual, blood, desperate fighting, painful sacrifice, heroics. Only without the long monologue from the big bad guy.

Overall, The Hound of Rowan's tone was less charming (if just as whimsical. Did I mention Max has to babysit goslings for a goose who likes to shout insults at the referee at sporting events?) and darker than Potter's world in the early books. Come to think of it, it was less emotional. There was no lack of children with tragic pasts, but no one was threatening to take away Maxes birthday, so there was not the same tug on the old heart strings. Neff is weak in some of the areas in which Rowling shines, but also very strong in some areas that I think Rowling could use some work.

So, what about knock offs? Do we give our unswerving allegiance to originals only? Or do we allow imitation to be the most sincere form of flattery? If it is obviously an imitation, but done really well, does that make a difference? Is it a crime against the original creator, or homage to their art?

Reading for pleasure

Rosemary Sutcliff liked to write in very ancient ages. A clash of invaders and natives of the British isles, usually. Knight's Fee, which I just finished reading (in tears) is set at the end of the eleventh century. That's a little more modern than some of her stories. The Eagles of the Ninth just got made into a movie. I haven't seen it yet. I wonder how Sutcliff would translate to screen. If any of you have seen it, (and better yet if you have also read the book) please tell me how you liked it. That one, of course, is set when the Romans were running around Britain. King Arther figures in one series and my favorite was set in the Bronze age.


She does not have a lot of flashy marketing appeal. It is sort of a dense read, thick with atmosphere and rich language, not the snappy images that we get in a lot of youth lit. I like to write a picture in a few words, but there is also something about describing a voice as "hairless" that makes for more sensual experience. She dips her reader into this lugubrious world so that we start to smell and taste it.

The story itself was not fantastic or even very original. It's simple and true, exploring the growth of a human heart. I guess she probably could have sold it as a rags to riches cinderella story. Boy raised among hunting hounds (and beaten with them) becomes a knight at the age of twenty-two. But that's like saying that The Lord of the Rings is about lost jewelry.

I suppose I like this, and most of Sutcliff's books because it is really a friendship story. Mostly, she writes stories about male friendship. I wonder if she ever wrote about girl friends... I'll have to look it up. The heart of this story is the little moments that make a friendship. In this book, a goldfinch is the beginning of the central friendship. The two boys being quiet together, beating each other up, sharing a public moment in a very private way. These slow, subtle events are so true to real life, though few of us really think about the difference a goldfinch makes in a relationship.



So, the bottom line is, I would read Rosemary Sutcliff no matter what she wrote about because her language is so beautiful. It just so happens that she likes to write about one of my favorite topics; friendship.

P. S.
Sun Horse, Moon Horse was not the first Sutcliff book I read, but for some reason, it is my favorite. I don't remember much about it. Spoiler: it ends with the death of the main character and it's quite a horrible death. But I would have been disappointed with anything less. For a long time I thought I had imagined that I had read it, or dreamed that it was a Sutcliff book, because I couldn't find it on any of the lists of her books and I couldn't remember the name. But there it is. It's real and I liked it.

Beloved strangers

Books (good books) are kept alive by readers, but authors die.

Brian Jacques died on Saturday and I (who found out on Tuesday) haven't been able to get him out of my head since I was talking about Redwall with a friend on Sunday. This grief I find at the death of a man I didn't even know... I have been trying all day to find a way to explain it.

It happened when Lloyd Alexander died. When Alexander died, I wrote in my journal for psychology class that I was illogically sad, since the characters I loved were still alive and well. My teacher wrote back that the man himself was a role model through the characters he created and that I had a right to grieve. That is true, I suppose.

But as I think about Mr. Jacques now, I think it was more than his characters. He is also the first in a long line of authors who taught me to read. The ripples of that accomplishment are quite far reaching, in my life at least. On top of that he is part of a large crowd of authors who taught me to write. Every time I learn something new about what makes good writing, I see it in my favorite authors. "Show don't tell" my teachers say over and over. I think of Brian Jacques sitting (as I always imagine him) in an orchard not unlike the one inside the walls of Redwall abby, with a small crowd of blind children sitting around him. He tells them stories and makes them see what is happening. His writing is full of images, not just visual ones, although those are certainly memorable, but sounds, in the way the different creatures spoke, and tastes and smells (oh those Redwall feasts).

These beloved heros of mine, so few of them are alive now. There is a mighty generation of writers for children (most of them born in the 20s and 30s) who have been important to me. I think Susan Cooper is one of the only ones still alive.
My intellectual and imaginative grandparents have passed on, and the world seems a little less colorful.
Is it pretentious for me to want to paint it again? I just want to be one of them.

Roses are red... what horrible passive language.

I don’t know if I have explained my battle with poetry on this blog. Poetry is like this 

My poetry text book says poetry is all about showing rather than telling, so I thought I’d try and work an image into this post.

I’m an explainer. Maybe I should go into academic writing. Or maybe it’s all the academic writing I have had to do all these years that has really caused me a problem.

No, the real problem is that I don’t read poetry. So I have no idea when I am reading good poetry. If I can’t identify good poetry, I can’t pick it apart and find out how it’s done.

I know when I am reading a really good story. The way I learn to write is by imitating the best things I see in good stories that I read. I guess I started by actually imitating the plots and characters that I liked, but that turned into the plot devises and other tools. The closer I looked at my favorite books, the more subtle my imitation becomes. Generally, can any of you tell that I learned to write from (to name just a few) Brian Jaques, Lloyd Alexander, C. S. Lewis, Rosemary Sutcliff and Tolkien? Do I sound like them? In one way, I hope I do, Because they are really good writers, and story tellers. But on the other hand, I hope you can’t tell because I want to have my own voice.

So, poetry is difficult because I haven’t formed enough of my own opinion on it. My teacher says that I have a natural ear for it because of my back ground in music, but I actually don’t usually hear when my own poems sound musical. I can hear when something is not quite right, occasionally. But I never hear when something is good.

            I really want to be good at poetry. I wasn’t really attracted to it… at all. The more I study it, however, and learn… what it is… what it does… the more I want to be able to play with words in that way. Who knew.

            Like many of the things I love to do, I have to get over a feeling of inferiority, or inadequacy. It seems really pretentious to write poetry, or stories, or draw or sing for that matter. These voices in my head tell me I’m trying too hard, or making an image overly cliché or flowery. Meanwhile my teacher tells me I really am a poet, though still a developing one. So here I am, hating the struggle of writing poetry and longing, painfully, to be able to do it well.

            Can you get good at something just by wanting to?

Fictional men

I should be reading Middlemarch. I am 300 pages behind and it really is fascinating. Whenever I am deeply appreciative of art of any kind, I find myself fleeing from it in an agony of creative restlessness. Thoughts beget thoughts and ideas, ideas. Wonderfully written descriptive passages make me want to draw and beautiful images make me want to sing, and wonderful music makes me want to write. Hurray for the liberal arts!
So here I am, typing away to try and alleviate the creative pressure that has built up as a result of George Eliot.
I am reading Eliot because Heidi invited me to join her college friends for a book club. Otherwise I would be much too distracted to get through any such literary work. I loved Silas Marner when I picked it up some times in high school, but I seem to have lost the stamina required for deep reading since my motivation became all entangled with that highly prized and practically useless black smudge on paper (or on my computer screen) known as a grade point average. Self motivation is a luxury of the home scholar and the exceptionally gifted. I'm slowly turning into a drone.

(A bottle of bright purple nail polish remover sits innocently on the desk next to me. I keep absently picking it up as if to drink it. When did my subconscious accept neon purple as an edible color? I'm starting to worry about myself.)

This book club, which has so advantageously saved my brain from the plague of summer idleness, is made up of five or six girls with bachelor's degrees and a female English professor. Perfect. Middlemarch involves several plots and subplots that can be more or less classified as romantic. At least they involve courtship and marriage. Naturally, we girls have more or less given our allegiance to one or the other (or several) of the young men in the story. I was surprised to find, on reflection, that I was actually rooting for two men who are seeking to marry the same woman. I see that both characters are not people I would want to have a relationship with in real life, but this doesn't keep me from kind of liking them. That seems to be true of many of the fictional men on whom I have had "crushes" in my career as a sappy romantic reader; I wouldn't actually like to know many of them in real life. What strange relationships we have with characters in books. That is the power of the author, I suppose. My class last semester in reader response theory has made me hyper aware of the author's power to shape my opinions of the fictional people I love. Sometimes they misjudge me and fail utterly to get the reaction they are attempting to prompt. Other times I find myself completely sucked in and there is nothing I can do about it. And this makes me want to write.

I find myself rather fascinated by those elusive personalities that may or may not be the voice or the author, known as "narrator." I really liked my reader response class, and not at all for the reasons I thought I would like it. Traditionally, if that word can be used in a free and developing form like fiction, the narrator is not strictly a person, and you can safely assume that he or she is the voice of the author giving you fact, impressions and whatever bias serves the purpose of the moment. Narrators who step out of these guidelines are an interesting breed. The impression they make is subtle. Jane Austen follows the rules and still manages to make you love her personally because of her wit and intimate tone. We get an impression of knowing Jane personally. I don't think I would like her. I seriously doubt that she would like me. But in any case, we assume that the narrators voice conveys something of the author's personality.

(Who decided that purple was a good color for nail polish remover?)

George Eliot is kind of interesting, first of all because she is not really George at all. The male pen name gives an aura of dishonesty to her writing. I can't help but wonder if she would have written some things a little differently if she was using her own name. Female authors always seem a bit self conscious. They have a distinctive voice, as they should, that is different from a male author. Some of them are preoccupied with giving special depth to female characters, as if to rectify the violence done to us by men who write about female symbols more than female characters.

("Dear Mr. Dickens, I hate your female characters... and most of your other characters too. But that's okay because you are amusing anyway and you certainly couldn't be expected to see the feminist movement coming.")


On top of that, she breaks the fourth wall. George, the narrator, speaks in the first person, talks about his opinions of the character he is creating for us, and tells us little anecdotes about his social life. These are all in the service of the story, or commentary on the story for the reader's benefit, but it is still remarkable. He is certainly not a character in his own story. But like Toni Morison's narrator (oh Queen of the post-modern novel), he questions his own conclusions and assumptions about his own characters. He stops in the middle of a description of one character's thoughts to question why he always tells the story from that character's point of view.

("Warning: ...Harmful if ingested. In case of accidental ingestion, give fluids liberally and consult with local POISON CONTROL CENTER..." see Zita, no drinking the nail polish remover unless you want to spend the night in the ER)

I was paying so much attention to the narrator of Middlemarch that for a while I wasn't really paying attention to the characters and the plot. They are all very engaging and everything, but I just got done with Dickens and Stoker who pretty much beat you over the head with clues as to who are the "good guys." Eliot gives her characters enough depth and realism that they have as many obvious flaws and inconsistencies as they have lovable traits. She allows readers to suspend judgment, or make up their own minds, more or less, at least for a while. Slowly it becomes clear who the virtuous characters are that she is upholding and prompting her reader to fall in love with. They are not without their flaws, but we see that they are generally a good sort of people with the important things set straight. And one odd consequence of this subtlety is that I like Fred (who is what we call a Loser) and Will as much as Mr. Stuffy-Procrastinating-Scholar and whatever that other curate's name was. I certainly would not want to be the object of their affection - any of them - but I find them equally interesting as characters and I hope they all end happily. I remember my reaction was similar with Silas Marner. The characters were painted so vividly that I could not fully approve of any of them, but I was interested in all of them.

("Strengthening Nail Polish Remover is formulated to help soften cuticles and add strngeth and resiliency for more beautiful nails" and drive dehydrated writers to violent distraction by it's unnaturally bright and appetizing color.)

I begin to wonder about my previous book crushes. The next time I manage to get through The Lord of the Rings without running away to draw a picture, I will have to pay attention how Tolkien sets me up to be hopelessly in love with Faramir. I'm pretty sure he doesn't do it on purpose, while some of my favorite female authors are obviously trying to get me fall in love in order to create sympathy for her female characters. Eliot is doing her best to dissuade me by making flaws obvious. This makes me wonder if I only fall in love with flat, unrealistic characters. Vices are hard to live with, but sometimes a charming demeanor can cover them in real life. They are harder to ignore when they are printed in black and white.

(The smell of nail polish remover is especially unappetizing. Gives me a head ache.)

However, I can never allow that. First of all, because I have an inflated opinion of my own ability to resist the charms of characters designed to be too perfect for real life. Secondly, I would never let anyone say that Faramir is a flat character.

I'm not sure what I wanted to say with this post. The goal was something between intellectual reflections on my reading experience and how it has changed since I pretended to be an English major, and a humorous exploration of the cultural phenomenon of book crushes. (By the way, I am pleased to hear rumors that boys have book crushes too.) I guess I pretty much failed on both counts. I'm blaming the nail polish remover.

Maybe Love

Jesus was nailed to a Maybe.
He opened his arms,
committed to welcoming Anyone,
Anyone who would come.
We put nails through His hands
to keep them that way,
in case we need them that way
later,
maybe.

Some of us decide to say No.
But He waits anyway,
with His hands nailed far apart,
reaching,
because maybe
we will turn back.

It’s hard, this love –
this Love
that gives us a choice,
this hard choice.
Most of us are not strong enough
to say anything but
maybe.

To say Yes
would mean committing,
opening up my arms
to welcome all these creatures
like me, imperfect and selfish.
Maybe they will support and bless me.
But Maybe they will betray me,
fail and wound me
as I hang there, vulnerable.
And I would have to say “yes” anyway.
That’s not a kind of love
that comes easily to
Gods or mortals.

So most of us say
maybe.
And we come back now and then
to ask this man - bloody, nailed to a piece of wood -
why people die and why people kill.

This Love longs, dreams,
aches to welcome us until He needs
nails to hold His arms open wide enough
to let in everyone who might deserve it,
or want it, somehow, sometime,
maybe.

Oh, may it be!
This maybe is a prayer.
Pray that it might be!
Pray that those arms are wide enough
for me.

Breath of Life

My Lenten reflection on living on purpose has had some interesting repercussions. I'm in a creative writing class this semester (Very Happy), and it's the sort of class that prompts me to spill whatever is in my head. My poor teacher has had to read some rambles that might even rival the ones I post here. I was brainstorming, prompted by an assignment from my text book, about all the things I would like to learn. My greatest frustration and challenge this semester has been to own and invest myself in my work as an art major.

(Oh My Gosh, I Just Admitted To Being An Art Major On My Blog Where Anyone And Everyone Might See It! AAAAHHHH!!!)

*cough*
I have begun to realize that my eagerness to try new things and be open to the direction of my teachers has sacrificed my investment in my art work. I am going through the motions of creating art with little intellect and no heart involvement. Nothing I have made thus far merits posting on this blog or even bringing home. I would like to learn to try new things and follow directions while still making the work mine, and taking pride in it. Things I do for my own amusement are done too cautiously and carefully. They become too precious too fast. My class work never becomes precious.
The following is the result of my brain storm. I wrote out lots of key words that were relevant, but when I shifted to actually writing, the first thing out of my pen was some advise my dad once gave me about our lawn mower.

When you start this stubborn old lawn mower -- the kind with the cord you yank on -- you have to pull as if you would pull your arm right off. It’s the only way to get the darn thing going. You look kind of foolish, standing there giving your all to a lawn mower, but it just won’t settle for anything less than your whole arm, from the shoulder down. See, the more power something has, the more of yourself you have to give it before it will move. If you think a lawn mower is hard, try moving a human heart.

Learn to give everything, if you are going to create. That’s why you create, isn’t it; to move human hearts? It’s going to take a lot. Everything. Bleed all over the stage, smash yourself against your sculpture, spill your guts all over the page. Does that scare you? It should, but not more than the less dramatic giving. It doesn’t have to be violent. It can be the delicate touch of your fingertips on a spinning lump of clay; as gentle and steady as the rise and fall of your chest as you sleep. Even when you hold yourself still, to let the air move with the last fading overtones in the wood and strings of your cello, be still and will those vibrations as if your life depended on their echo.

Nothing exists without God willing it into being. He can do that all at once. But if you, mere mortal, want to make something beautiful, you’d better concentrate your whole life on that piece of silver you are beating into shape. You have to give it some of your life because, after all, it doesn’t have any life of its own. How will it move hearts if it has no heart of it’s own, beating life through it? It must use life borrowed from its maker, just like you do. You know, these are just black smudges on paper. You are the one that makes them mean something. You are the one that makes the air vibrate.

You have to give everything. No, more than that. Don’t just do it. Embody it. Be Giving! And when you want to start a lawn mower…

-like a Frog-

Emily Dickinson might be the bane of my existence. In my mind – wrecked with sleep deprivation and overburdened with many concepts waiting to be processed – she has taken on the form of a fiend who wishes to drive English students mad. Half way through a simple – if a little nonsensical – poem, she adds an image or word entirely foreign to her subject. Before I can recover from the shock, the poem is over and I am left pondering how to reconcile the twist in her thoughts with my own. She has leaped away from me, across a chasm to some higher meaning. She leaves me few stepping-stones to build a bridge to follow her. I too must make the dizzying leap. Mustn't I? At the first reading, I think maybe she’s just crazy. Maybe she is laughing because I try to follow, groping for her meaning. She watches me perform mental acrobatics to give deep, intentional meaning to her every word and dash. She is pleased at having fooled me, kept me up late into the night. When the panic has subsided and I can read her poem again, the meaning is clear. I can easily bend my mind to catch her meaning and step neatly over the crack between her words and my expectations. A second reading (or third or forth) does not exclude the possibility that she was a crazy mental sadist. But now that I am of the elite who can understand her, I am far more likely to consider her benignly clever in frustrating my expectations to prove her point. I suspect she is still laughing at me, but after a few mores readings, I can usually laugh with her.

Americans

Sometimes you hear a song that you used to listen to as a child and you understand the words for the first time. Sometimes you realize that you understood the song even though some of the words were just sylables. How does that happen?
I listened to Laura Ingalls Wilder's stories of frontier life when I was very small.I can't have been much older than four. Being the second child, I always identified with Laura. I was nothing like her. But we were the right age to be friends in the first book and no matter how far apart we grew after that, I always thought of her as a friend. Images stick in my head from each book. The first one that comes to mind is Laura and Mary playing catch with a pig's bladder. After that there are too many to mention.
I listened to mom read them aloud to Maleny and David recently. I hadn't realized, those books made a much bigger impression on me than merely giving me a picture of life in another time. The famous American spirit - responsible, industrious, careing towards neighbors and, above all, fiercly independant - resonates from those books so strongly, even a young child like me could learn to love those elusive qualities. They don't make Americans like that much anymore. My early understanding of those virtues has its roots in her stories. The roots have certainly grown, but I could still trace their development back to the source.
I listened to the stories and remembered them like the words to a song, and I understood them for the first time, even though their lessons have been with me all along.

Writeing lab reflections

It's so nice to see people's faces again.

People have always interested me but I kind of like to have them at an arms length; being an introvert in hiding and all. Here in the tutoring lab, I very rarely meet people who I should like to meet outside of the writing lab. I usually like to get them done and out very quickly. But sometimes I think I really like people.

A student came in near the beginning of my shift today and presented me with her paper, covered in English teacher hieroglyphics. She needed a little help decoding, but mostly just a sounding board, like so many student who come to me. She was about my age. She said she had studied overseas but I was not sure if that meant she was an ESL student, or if she had just traveled. She did not write or speak like an ESL student. She may have been an ethnic minority, or she may have just had a tan. Her hair was very carefully tousled and jelled; longer and messier down the middle. She had a lip piecing and wore black, edgy clothes. She could have been an art student except she didn't seem to be trying to get attention quite as much as my art classmates do. There was something a little more thoughtful and confident about her appearance and demeanor. It is terrible to be a confident person in a vulnerable position. Like many students, she was a little unsure if she really wanted me to to tutor her. There is a faint hope that I will taker her paper and let her escape. I finally got her to sit down (next to me rather than across the table, which is pretty extraordinary) by pulling out the chair and verbally asking her to take a seat. So much for first impressions.

Her assignment was to describe a place with a function. She chose her kitchen and explained, very humorously, why it failed miserably to live up to being the heart and center of her home. It was not brilliantly written, but I could sense thought and even enjoyment behind the writing. We moved very quickly through it, working out her teacher's comments and discussing concepts and writing strategies. She seemed very intelligent and genuinely interested in making the paper her own, rather than just getting me to feed her sentences. She didn't want me to "fix" it for her and that was refreshing. I really enjoyed reading and discussion her paper, despite it's just-out-of-high-school feel. I gathered that writing sort of intimidated her. I also sensed that she could really enjoy writing with practice and confidence. Her teacher kept writing "show us" on her very detailed descriptive paragraphs. This happens a lot with English teachers. They always want more detail just as we think we have described everything. What they really want is a different kind of detail, but of course they don't say that. He was wanted her to be more specific about what why it was dangerous to open her cupboard. She left her readers' imaginations with many wide open spaces in which to play. She observed that her imagination goes wild and needs no further guidance. I told her that she ought to lead a little further us into her mind so we don't get lost. "I don't really like letting people into my mind," she said with a small smile. Neither do I. She said she felt much better about the paper when we were done.

I don't really know what it was about this girl that made her worthy of a blog post. I liked her a lot. Both of us were uneasy, in a way, because we didn't know each other. I had the advantage, since she came to me for help, and I've had a lot of practice talking to strangers in this job. But there was something friendly about it too. She is one of those people that I'm sure I could be friends with, even if we have nothing in common beyond a small, hazardous kitchen. Funny how that happens.

The Keys of the Kingdom

A. J. Cronin's The Keys of the Kingdom is a must read for every Christian and probably everyone who knows a Christian. One of my top five favorite books of all time. Right up there with Lord of the Rings. It's all about what really mater in life; our walk with Christ and our relationships with other Christians and with people who believe radically different things. Humility and charity and courage and all sorts of little adventures on the way. I don't know how much to tell you about the story. It traces the life of a Scottish Priest from the death of his parents in his childhood, through his youth and missionary work in China (which is the main part of the book that got made into a great old movie with Gregory Peck!), to his old age. He is an utter failure in the eyes of the world and the more worldly members of the Church but he is a great hero in the kingdom of God. There is a proud German nun, some Protestant missionaries who rock my universe, lots of Chinese villagers of various wonderful characters, and an atheist doctor who doesn't go to hell. This one will be going with me to college, or anywhere else I end up. Go read it! NOW!

Treasure Island

I got a lot of stories in the early 90's. It was the era of the return of the Disney Musical. Little mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Lion King. While those stories are amazing and I love them, I have to admit that some of them were a bit morally bankrupt. Aladdin is a jerk, Ariel is an obnoxious teenager and her father is just what every teen thinks their parents are in their self centered teen age world. As much as we loved them, I'm sure my parents really hoped I didn't take Ariel as my role model. (I did, but mostly the singing on tall rocks part.) I guess the assumption of story writers was that if a character was too virtuous, we couldn't identify with him and grow to love him. Beast was great that way, that was the point of the movie, but I wonder why they didn't give Belle some major flaw. We sure like her a lot despite her virtue. There was also a sense that if the characters didn't have some moral flaw there would be no story cause they would never get into any trouble, or have any fun. It was the age of "Follow your heart" which was often in direct conflict with "Do what's right." In any case, I always got excited when I read or watched a story in which the main characters were somewhat admirable. When they did the right thing even when it was hard and it meant a sacrifice. It's kind of refreshing when you don't want to slap the main character for being such an idiot. You can overcompensate; thus we have characters in a Jules Vern novel. They are so perfect you just have to laugh at them. I'm very fond of them too. Likewise Robert Louis Stevenson. I loved Treasure Island for many reasons (one of them being that it involved pirates) but one of the biggest was that the main characters were fairly admirable. Jim was a good kid. Dr. Livsey is my hero. The Captain is like a rock! While the Squire was kind of a dork he wasn't a bad sort. I hate every movie adaptation for Treasure Island with a passion (except the Muppet version, and I don't know why I forgive them so much) because they always mess it up in one way or other. They make Long John too much of a good guy. Yeah, he was redeemable but they never make him quite as bad as he is in the book. And they never make Jim quite as brave and noble. I think of the old Disney version with the Shirley Temple's male counterpart as Jim. *shudder* I have heard people complain that the book glorifies violence because the climax of the coming of age story is when Jim shoots one of the pirates. In Jim's defense, a real man destroys evil when he cannot redeem it, especially if it's about to destroy him. I like them that way. I love all the adventure in that book too, of course. Jim manages to get into plenty of trouble without off-putting character flaws.

The Girl Son

The Girl Son appealed to my tom boyishness when I was just starting to read. It was about a girl's struggle for freedom as she grows up in 19th century Korea. There are a lot of bits that are important. There was a scene that is very vivid to me in which she is all by herself for the first time and trying to make a bowl of rice. The driving and supporting force in her life has been her mother up to that point but her mother just said goodbye and left her at a boarding school. She is all alone now and has to make her own rice. She tries and fails several times before she manages to make some she can eat.

She is all grown up by the end of the book and she is arrested and put in solitary confinement because she is an advocate of women's education. There is a scene where she is being taken somewhere by a female guard and she reflects that she is more free in her small cell all by herself than the woman who is her captor. That idea intrigued me. The way she described her inner freedom was really beautiful.
It's based on a true story though I didn't ever do much research on the real person. She must have been quite amazing.

I, Jaun De Pareja

Elizabeth Burton De Trevino is a cool writer and I have loved every book of hers that I have read. The first one I read was for a book club when I was about ten. I, Jaun de Pareja was about the slave of a famous painter. The most important part of the story for me was one little scene when the artist is talking about color. I haven't read it since I was ten but this is how I remember it. The artist pointed to a cloak and asked Jaun, or someone, what color it was. Jaun answered that it was blue. The artist disagrees and starts pointing out other colors blended into the blue cloak, in the highlights and shadows. Purple, black, green, red... and suddenly Jaun can see them. He sees color the way the artist does. My mother actually read this out loud to me and I stared at something, I think it was our curtain, and tried to see all the colors the way the character in the book did. I didn't hear the next part of the book at all cause I was too busy looking at all the hidden colors in our curtains.

Meet Addy

I was an American Girl. Addy was my favorite. She's probably responsible for my love of Civil War history. I was a romantic little stoic child. Or at least I was helplessly romantic and tried desperately to be stoic. Addy and her struggle to keep her feeling on the inside when her father and brother were sold to another plantation and when she was terrified on her run North was one of those things that got my little imagination running at ten or twenty time my reading speed. I made up stories about runaway slaves and tragically separated families for the next five or six years...

And it was the history too: the little details of how they lived and what they wore and all that. American Girls was really good at that. There is a long list of historical fiction set in that time that came after Addy and I would probably have missed if I wasn't introduced to the time through the Addy stories. I can't remember many of the names. There was one about a quaker community... Who Comes With Cannons... I think... Across Five Aprils is great... lots of slaves hiding in hay carts and that sort of thing. I would probably not take the Addy books with me to school (though I might bring my mini doll just for old time sake) but those stories were definitely important.