Chapter Fourteen

"What happened?" was the first question. ...
     "Hives," I said. I was getting used to them.

--From Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

I completely understand Ann. I imagine her million red blotches, constantly imploring to be scratched.  I remember when I had hives all over me--I was utterly shocked by the fact that I was, in fact, allergic to something in this world, for the first time in my life. I stopped using shampoo, body wash, lotion once at a time but even after three immensely long months, could not determine what I was allergic to. I rubbed all kinds of skin ointment, scrupulously medicated myself Benadryl, and tried very hard to resist the urge to give a little scratch. So after five months, I was on the verge of giving up. 

In the end, it turned out to be my laundry detergent. I therefore immediately banned my use of All and bought Tide--the one that's fragrance-free, colorless, and most importantly, dermatologist-tested. My hives began to disappear. You don't know how liberating that felt--to not have any more red blotches that became bumps that eventually bled and finally left scars. To not be sleepy and tempted all the time. To not be asked questions. 

Chapter Thirteen

Then she got a note from George Staphanopoulos. 
...
Of course that must have been the thing that everyone was thinking, everyone she told the story to. Did you tell him about your face?
     After that she asked me constantly, "Why didn't he call me again?" 
     "You said that he wouldn't. You said mutually no sparks."
     "It's because I'm ugly," she said. "I know why."

--From Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

Poor Lucy. Mr. Staphanopoulos should have known better. Lucy was a brilliant writer--successful, famous, adventurous. Perfect, except she thought of her small defect called a face too much. She needn't.

Chapter Twelve

     "You're a poet," I said when she read me everything she had.
     "I want to be a novelist."
     "You're a novelist, too. Don't worry about that." I believed at that moment there was nothing to worry about. Her writing was gorgeous. She could write a novel as long as she could find a way to stay in her chair.

From Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

I wish I could be a poet and a novelist at the same time like Lucy. 

I read a very worthwhile passage in the SAT yesterday. It said that one needs 10,000 hours of practice to become an eclat professional in whatever skill one wanted to perfect. 20 hours a week for 10 years. I think Lucy became one in less than 10,000 hours. 

Chapter Eleven

      Lucy knew which cat wanted to be held and which one wanted to be smacked. The weight she put on things so often struck me as backwards, but in some ways she had a deep understanding of the logic of the world. I would have thought that the prospect of getting teeth after twenty years spent without them would have been thrilling or daunting, but she shrugged it off. She had no interest in obsessing over possible outcomes. She would simply go and see what they had to say and that was all there was to do. And she was right.

--From Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

Getting teeth. Most of her teeth was gone because of radioactivity since she was ten. So chewing and swallowing was a very strenuous undertaking for Lucy. She was humiliated lest anyone see her drooling, unclosed mouth. She was embarrassed to eat in front of people. So getting teeth was supposed to be exciting for her. After talking with good doctors who suggested her nearly impossible options, she cried. But Lucy didn't lose hope. Perhaps she was so hopeful that she chased after even the most impossible.

Chapter Ten 2

     "I didn't remember it," Lucy said pointedly. "I wrote it. I'm a writer."
     This shocked the audience more than her dismissal of illness, but she made her point: she was making art, not documenting an event. That she chose to tell her own extraordinary story was of secondary importance. Her cancer and subsequent suffering had not made this book. She had made it. Her intellect and ability were in every sense larger than the disease.

--From Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

Because it is so good I write another post on chapter ten. 

 There are those gaps you have to fill in. There are those names and faces and places and things you do not remember precisely. So nonfiction cannot be completely true. But what Lucy wrote was true nonfiction. She was a cancer survivor, yes, but a better writer first.

Chapter Ten

Lucy's favorite rhetorical question was, "Will I ever have sex again?"

     Lucy had plenty of other questions as well: "Do you love me?" "You think I'm pretty, don't you?" "Do you think I'm a good writer?" But the odd part was they were all so interchangeable. What all of the questions really meant was, "Everything is going to be okay, right?" 

--From Ann Patchett's Truth and Beuaty

Lucy wanted to make sure she was going to be all right in the end. Lucy had her question answered in complete affirmation by Ann, almost all the time without any objection to why she was asked so many times a day and why so many variations? I can only imagine how hard it must be to have a face that is constantly changing. How confounding you would find yourself before a mirror and see how the face you remember from last week is replaced by a new one. So you don't know who you are, really. There is no connection between your face and your name. But you would be special--to be on TV and have friends all around you and be a bestselling writer. To be Lucy Grealy. 

Chapter Nine

     "I'm ugly," she said.
     "You aren't ugly."
     "I'm ugly and I'm going to be alone for the rest of my life."
     "Listen to me, pet. What you're going through is awful, it's really awful, but it isn't a judgment on your future. You aren't ugly and you aren't going to be alone forever just because things didn't work out with this guy."

     --From Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

Lucy always wanted to be loved. And for that, she thought being beautiful was what it required. Lucy kept thinking she would never be picked up by anyone and thought that it was because she was ugly. I don't think she is ugly. She has eyes that draws you in and I can almost see her long lashes make shadows as she reads or writes a famous book. She is like a child. I think she is quite beautiful. 

Chapter Eight

There are trails to walk in the woods and rules that say if you pass someone during the day you may simply drop your gaze to the path as a signal you are thinking seriously about your work and do not wish to engage in conversation.

--Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

I like this rule. I don't think it's rude because I would like to walk on those trails and see what it feels like to drop my gaze when I meet someone. I can only be jealous of Lucy and Ann whom I imagine to have walked those trails countless times and dropped gazes at many other writers at Yaddo. 

Chapter Seven

Levi did kill himself after all, but it interests me greatly precisely because I am at a total loss to describe how I am different, how what I know now differs from what I knew then. This is a language problem: the disparity between the two selves, between the two sets of truths, is very real and clear to me, yet my ability to control this knowledge in any sort of narrative or verbal way veers off constantly. 

--From Ann Patchett's Truth and Beatuy, an excerpt from Lucy's letter to Ann

Lucy comes to believe that there are some people out there who has suffered far more pain than she did. Levi is one of them. And here in her letter, Lucy is trying to find out the subtle difference "between the two sets of truths"--that separates her accusations of ingratitude towards others and her own lack of gratitude for what she already has: life. Later, in her book Autobiography of a Face, Lucy writes a very truthful and beautiful story of herself, ultimately about that difference, with stupendous poignancy. 

She did not veer off. 

Chapter Six

     As much as Lucy liked my friends, it was important for her to know at every moment that she was my uncontested favorite. There was nothing subtle in her methodology. When we had lunch with Elizabeth, Lucy would inevitably leave her chair at some point during the meal and come and sit in my lap.
     ..."Do you love me?" she said.
     "Of course I love you."
     "Best?"
     "Yes best, but you are crushing my thigh."

--From Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

Lucy has been frozen in her ten-year-old self; she is like a child even in her mid-twenties. She wants to be loved and she wants that love to be expressed to her directly. She asks for it, too, like a child. 

I used to be like Lucy. Did not want to feel less important. Asked the same question Lucy did to Ann, except I asked mom and hoped and hoped I was far more important and lovable than--well, of course--my younger brother. 

Chapter Five

There on Scottish TV in the dead of night was Allan Gurganus, talking about the publication of his first novel, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. Allan had been my most important teacher in college. He was the person who had taught me to write. Now he was there in the living room in Aberdeen, handsome in his bow tie, calmly discussing his life as a writer. ... I decided then and there that I would be like Lucy. I would be like Allan. I vowed that I would write my way into another life. I, too, would try for everything.

--Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

Ann says she decided to try for everything by becoming a writer. She doesn't say she would try everything; there is a distinction, I think, that Ann adds the preposition "for." 

I know Ann is not happy on page 71. She has gone through so much with Lucy and without her. She is twenty-five and divorced. She is broke. She is a waitress in Tennessee. She does not write much, save her letters to Lucy. And here Ann decides to become a writer, to "try for everything." For Lucy. 

Chapter Four

     One night after work I was sitting on the edge of my mother's bed, reading her Lucy's letter.
     "Save all of those," she told me when I was finished.
     "I save some of them," I said, but she and I both knew I never was much on saving anything.
     My mother said it again. I was to save them all. "Someday you'll both be famous writers," she said. "And these letters will be very important to you."

--Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

I save those long letters from friends faraway. I tuck them inside my journal. They are the extra pages of my book, and the book has become quite thick and ajar since I've tucked them all in. 

I love letters. I love photographs. Anything that contains the essence of a person. I even keep the article about open source with daddy's picture in it, even though I have no technological understanding of what great work he does. I keep your emails too, Mrs. Bell! (I know--this is beginning to sound like some fan letter...) 

I'm glad Ann read Lucy's letter to Mrs. Patchett. I'm glad Mrs. Patchett told her daughter to save them. I wonder how she knew Ann and Lucy were both going to be famous. She was more right than the fortune teller who told Ann she was forever going to be with Dennis (whom she divorced a year after their marriage) and told Lucy nobody's ever going to find her (Ann did!). I should listen to my mom more. 

Chapter Three

Grief isn't something to 'be gotten through.' It has no life of its own like that, it's just plain and simply there. It's one of the things which tells us we're human. It's funny, but I'm always forgetting I had cancer. It seems like a different person that happened to. ...
     It's much the same with my father. Like the chemo he comes back to haunt me all the time, but it's often a detached sort of haunting. Or it is very emotional, very joyous. That might sound odd, but often I feel better able to live and love life through remembering my father. James Tate has a wonderful poem about his father called "The Lost Pilot" (also the name of the book); have you ever read it? It's about the advantages (I don't mean to be crude, using that word) of his father's early death, how now as an adult he realizes his father would already be dead, or very old and decrepit. I have a very pure image of my own father, one that is almost a myth. It has more to do with me than with him. 

--from Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

One of the letters from Lucy that Patchett kept. Or I should call her Ann. Reading her memoir brings me very close to her. Like I've known her at Sarah Lawrence or in Iowa or Nashville or the TGI Friday's she waited tables at. So I shall call her Ann. 

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=177311 

Probably Ann has already read this poem. I just finished reading it. It's lovely. I'm listening to him now. I think in every person who was once a child there is an image of whoever was dear to him or her kept frozen in time. I'm reminded of this frozen image. 

Chapter Two

     "You girls pick up hitchhikers?"
     "I do," Lucy said, meaning that if she had a car she certainly would.
     He nodded and we watched the back of his head, his long ponytail caught up in a greasy knot. "I tried to hitch from Chicago to Cedar Rapids one time," he told us. "Didn't have enough money for a bus ticket. I started walking on the interstate and not one person stopped for me. Nobody. Ended up having to walk the whole way. It took me three days and I'll tell you, it was cold. Not one person cared if I needed help."
     We were all silent. I didn't know whether or not I should apologize, since I was sure I wouldn't have picked him up either.
     "You got to stop for people," he said, punctuating every word. "That's what you owe me for this ride. You have to pick up somebody else up. Do you understand me? Pick them up no matter what they look like."

--from Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

I wonder if I ever picked anyone up. I remember my first time skiing. I was too scared to go down the hill. But then somebody held my hand. He was not like my kidnapper when I was six in any way. (By then I knew how to distinguish a kind stranger from a kidnapper.) He held my hand and went down the hill with me and told me, "this is what it is to ski." That this kind stranger who came to my rescue was a middle-aged African American man contains something anthropologically important. He picked me up.

Antique

I drowned in the fire of having you, I burned
In the river of not having you, we lived
Together for hours in a house of a thousand rooms
And we were parted for a thousand years.
Ten minutes ago we raised our children who cover
The earth and have forgotten that we existed.
It was not maya, it was not a ladder to perfection,
It was this cold sunlight falling on this warm earth.

When I turned you went to Hell. When your ship
Fled the battle I followed you and lost the world
Without regret but with stormy recriminations.
Someday far down that corridor of horror the future
Someone who buys this picture of you for the frame
At a stall in a dwindled city will study your face
And decide to harbor it for a little while longer
From the waters of anonymity, the acids of breath.

--Robert Pinsky's "Antique"

I had meant to post this poem since a long time ago. I don't know why I forgot to. There is something in its meaning I wish to understand better. Like drowning in a fire and burning in a river. Of having you. Who are you? What does it mean to have someone? And I am left hanging, bereft of a verb in the twelfth line. (Yet I did not come to know this until the third time I read it.) So the frame must be more beautiful than you for that someone in the horrid future buys the picture, but why are you being studied so, that he will keep you? And the verb harbor. Harbor: v. 1. to keep (a thought or feeling, typically a negative one) in one's mind, esp. secretly 2. to give a home or shelter to. You must have lost the battle and hence  become anonymous--perhaps why your are less beautiful. But are you alive? Or are you kept alive by that someone--become an antique relic of a past? 

March 24, 2010

I want to right write all over the page with feverish speed and intensity, like how I imagine Beethoven to have written his music. I wish I wouldn't hesitate too much lest I misspell or write crookedly. I wish this ink were infinite and time irrelevant to the clock. I wish my hand would never fail this pen. I wish this pen would never fail you--my reader.
     "But perfection is my enemy." --Francesca Battistelli's "Free"

Journal entry dated March 24, 2010

It's so funny I misspelled "write" the first time I wrote this. Perhaps I wished to write right. 

Sea Level

So this is what the ocean has been pushing across the table at us


all these years—

the dry, white spot that opens like a moon at the back of the throat


the quieted tongue, the last of all words.

Our ever-faithful dinner guest—who kept her wet fingers lined up at the edge


of the world, who politely folded and refolded her napkin—stops 


passing the peas, leans back quietly into her chair to watch

what we'll do now. She's done, the sea quits, stands without comment on the shore, is


just another dumb, beautiful animal considering the cliff, the final leap 


back into itself.

At least say we were among those who kept the conversation up for so long—


you and I handed always and never back and forth again and again

while our arms distressed the surface.


Let's just say the table was too large, that we lifted the heaviest dish


and got tired—

that only the ocean knows how to spoon salt over a great distance


under any kind of light. 

--"Sea Level" by Kim Van Voorhees

Mrs. Bell, you're finally published! I was doing calculus drawing the polar curve of r=4sin2x when I suddenly remembered to google you! I listened to you reading it and I read it again (and again) and your poem is just lovely--I am officially your fan. I am going to write it in my journal tonight and will probably be very tempted to rip it out and keep it in my pocket or something--or I might even memorize it. But that's okay with you, right, because I'm your fan? 

http://www.slate.com/id/2253446/#add-comment  

Listening to Ann Patchett

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1892114  

I am listening to Ann Patchett talk about her memoir, about Lucy Grealy.
"I don't think this is a sad book. I think this book is about loving someone who lived to be thirty-nine years old and really, really accomplished a lot."

I should have bought Lucy Grealy's Autobiography of a Face. 

Truth and Beauty

About Ann Patchett's friendship with Lucy Grealy.

Who is Lucy Grealy?

When I flip over her book, my gaze meets with a woman who looks sophisticated yet sad. The sadness comes from her mouth, which is a little crooked, and her jaw is somewhat misplaced. But there is depth in her eyes that one cannot easily swim out of. Lucy Grealy, the caption reads. But this is only her name.

History of a Disturbance

You said, "Do you love me?" Your voice was flirtatious, easy--you weren't asking me to put a doubt to rest. ... I said nothing. ... What was wrong with me? Did I love you? Of course I loved you. But to ask me just then, as I was taking in the night... Besides, what did the words mean?

     And if I hesitated, it was also because of you. There you were in the house. Already we existed in a courteous dark silence trembling with your crushed-down rage. How could I explain to you that words no longer meant what they once had meant, that they no longer meant anything at all?

--From Steven Millhauser's "Dangerous Laughter"

So here the healthy and successful forty-three-year-old man tries to tell Elena that words became meaningless to him. But how does he explain to his wife in words when the very act requires enough words to understand? She is undeniably confused, angry, stressed, in denial. And I don't believe he actually tells her, or even writes a letter. Perhaps he is talking in his mind, for words formed in that sacred space remains in that sacred space unless told or written. And so Elena never really gets to understand her husband's sudden loss of words. 

I must say the book is a little bit puffy. The pages are wavy and has another coat of thickness, a touch of antiquity, almost.

On Chesil Beach

"Then came a searchingly expressive Adagio of consummate beauty and spiritual power. Miss Ponting, in the lilting tenderness of her tone and the lyrical delicacy of her phrasing, played, if I may put it this way, like a woman in love, not only with Mozart, or with music, but with life itself."
     And even if Edward had read that review, he could not have known--no one knew but Florence--that as the house lights came up, and as the dazed young players stood to acknowledge that rapturous applause, the first violinist could not help her gaze traveling to the middle of the third row, to seat 9C.

--From Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach

Why did Edward forget Florence? Why did he not come to her debut performance and sit in seat 9C as he promised? How could he let her down when she played with every pulse in her heart? I was disappointed in Edward. And I can only imagine how much he hurt Florence. Because she played not as if she was in love with life itself, but with Edward only. And she wanted him to know that, but he wasn't there. Didn't even read the review. And how infinitely sad the narrator, to tell this story to me. 

How funny one must think to open the fridge in the morning and find a book lying next to last night's dinner. But that was what my science teacher in middle school told me to do: put a wet book in the fridge overnight and it will dry without wrinkles. So my water bottle leaked and soaked Steven Millhauser's Dangerous Laughter, which happens to be a library book. I think the fridge idea worked. A little. Because I was too impatient to wait a whole day so I just took it out only after a few hours.

The Room in the Attic

He himself would love to have a nice little breakdown, to use that word, though frankly he'd prefer to call it a fix-up, but he suffered from an embarrassing case of perfect health, he couldn't even manage to catch a cold, something must be wrong with him. --From Steven Millhauser's "The Room in the Attic"

My brother used to be very sick once. Had fevers and I couldn't see him for a while. He got better, eventually, but I wondered why I was too healthy. Had perfect memory of names, faces, time, places. But it's funny one day during spring break I woke up thinking: "It would be so weird if you wake up one day and think you skipped a day. Either you overslept or just don't remember." Common symptoms of junioritis.

The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman

What bothered me wasn't so much the disappearance itself, since I had scarcely known her, or even the possible ugliness of that disappearance, but my own failure of memory.

--from Steven Millhauser's "The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman"

I wanted to see if there was more of Ian McEwan in the library. There wasn't. Instead I picked up Steven Millhauser. 

I like his sentences. Particularly: "One night I dreamed that I was playing basketball with Elaine Coleman. The driveway was also the beach, the ball kept splashing in shallow water, but Elaine Coleman was laughing, her face was radiant though somehow hidden, and when I woke I felt that the great failure in my life was never to have evoked that laughter" (Millhauser, 33). 

Made me think about dreams that I wake up from, not because they're bad dreams but because of some invention called an alarm clock. And so you wish you could hold on to that dream, to hear someone laugh again, or to make him laugh, but you're already awake. 

Ruffle

I used to think looking up words in a dictionary was something very cumbersome. But I grew used to digging up an unknown word, and found it quite worth the shuffling of those dangerously thin pages. I don't use a paperbound dictionary now, but one time I typed in "ruffle" and just loved the example sentence:

"He ruffled her hair affectionately."

A dad and a daughter. A brother and a sister. An old man and a young girl. 

First Sentences

Ms. Hawkins at Ragdale always started the day with a list. Make a list of all the teachers you've had. Of all the childhood memories you have. Of people you are jealous of. And this is my list of first sentences I liked from The Best American Short Stories 2005:

"The girls were searching Arleen's room and had just come upon her journal." --Joy Williams' "The Girls"
I keep a journal, and I felt that Arleen and I have so much in common. And the girls. Why are they so desperate to read someone else's documented life? They must be friends with Arleen if they're in her room.

"He did not have friends." --Alix Ohlin's "Simple Exercises for the Beginning Student"
I did not cheat and read the second sentence this time so I have not the faintest idea why he doesn't have friends. I imagine a boy and I imagine a grown-up man. Probably a friendless grown-up man.

"They caught him after he had killed the second man." --Edward P. Jones' "Old Boys, Old Girls"
"They" are probably the police. "He" is probably some criminal. I wonder who the second man is.

Eight Pieces for the Left Hand

Nothing like I have read before. After reading it, I considered if it really is a short story after all. Almost a metafiction, like Margaret Atwood's "Happy Endings." And the best and worst thing about J. Robert Lennon's "Eight Pieces for the Left Hand" is that there are eight little stories, all unrelated, told by one consistent narrator. It's not even in chronological order--all the more confounding. I wish I could take out a quote and write it down, but it wouldn't make sense because that would not even amount to an eighth of the whole story. So I quote my favorite part:
"One night, while our cat was curled up on my lap, placidly purring, I noticed that his collar was somewhat crooked, and in the process of righting it I happened to catch a glimpse of the identification tag that hung from it. The tag, a worn, stamped-metal disc, told me that the cat's name was Fluffy.
     Our cat, however, was named Horace" (Lennon, 61).

Hope Was Here

I hate leaving places I love.

--Hope Was Here by Joan Bauer

Shakespearean Idol

I wish this story were different. I wish it were more civilized. I wish it showed me in a better light, if not happier, then at least more active, less hesitant, less distracted by trivia. I wish it had more shape. I wish it were about love, or about sudden realizations important to one's life, or even about sunsets, birds, rainstorms, or snow.

            Maybe it is about those things, in a way; but in the meantime there is so much else getting in the way, so much whispering, so much speculation about others, so much gossip that cannot be verified, so many unsaid words, so much creeping about and secrecy. And there is so much time to be endured, time heavy as fried food or thick fog; and then all at once these red events, like explosions, on streets otherwise decorous and matronly and somnambulant.

            I'm sorry there is so much pain in this story. I'm sorry it's in fragments, like a body caught in crossfire or pulled apart by force. But there is nothing I can do to change it.

            Nevertheless it hurts me to tell it over, over again. Once was enough: wasn't once enough for me at the time? But I keep on going with this sad and hungry and sordid, this limping and mutilated story, because after all I want you to hear it, as I will hear yours too if I ever get the chance, if I meet you or if you escape, in the future or in heaven or in prison or underground, some other place. ... By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being. Because I'm telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are. 

--Excerpt from Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale

Offred's tape recording lest she does not get to tell her story to anyone. A tape recording because she's not allowed to read or write. I imagined her hushed voice, somewhat urgent and with hopeful desperation. 

When Mr. Lewis asked me what my favorite book was, I told him it was this one. Because a favorite book should definitely make an under-pressure junior read and stay up late and finish it in three days--forget the pile of homework she has. So I picked it as my Shakespearean Idol piece during spring break and would say it like some lucky spell. It became a lucky spell.  

Hannah--

What a delightful occupation: to sink into one's couch, rain falling outside and read your thoughts on your reading! These are wonderful explorations of literature. Keep up the good work!

Mrs. Bell

Frankenstein

It's incredible Mary Shelly conceived Frankenstein when she was only eighteen, and threw bold sentences like "But revenge kept me alive; I dared not die, and leave my adversary in being" (205). How horrid it must have been for Frankenstein to see with his own eyes the destruction and death his creation has done. And to hear it say to him, "You hate me; but your abhorrence cannot equal that with which I regard myself" (224). I imagined Frankenstein's face, his old and weary face after years of chasing and being chased, when he hears this. I imagined sadness pass over his tired eyes as he finally understood the  infinite dejection of the brute he created. 

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

     He had the same attitude to his life as a sculptor to his statue or a novelist to his novel. One of novelist's inalienable rights is to be able to rework his novel. If he takes a dislike to the beginning, he can rewrite it or cross it out entirely. But Zdena's existence deprived Mirek of his prerogative as an author. Zdena insisted on remaining part of the opening pages of the novel. She refused to be crossed out.  --From Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting


I like this passage. It's about forgetting. And here is why it is funny: "She was ugly." Hence The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.  It may not be funny at all if one has not read the book, or does not know Kundera as an author. He said that humor is "a trustworthy sign of recognition," I believe, between the reader and himself. 

Veronika Decides to Die

     "I want to feel the rain on my face, to smile at any man I feel attracted to, to accept all the coffees men might buy for me. I want to kiss my mother, tell her I love her, weep in her lap, unashamed of showing my feelings, because they were always there even though I hid them.
     I might go into a church and look at those images that never meant anything to me and see if they say something to me now... I want to give myself to one man, to the city, to life and, finally, to death." --From Paulo Coelho's Veronika Decides to Die

Veronika's speech after her failed suicide attempt. After being told she only has a few months to live. She was not poor, grew up in a good family, healthy, beautiful. Young. She is talking to Dr. Igor. I wonder what he is thinking about the patient he carefully saved. But I hoped Veronika told this to Eduard instead. Because later he tells her:

"I want to tell you that I love you. You don't have to believe me."

But I believe him, even though he has schizophrenia.

Milk

Drinking milk before bedtime may induce sleep because milk contains large amounts of tryptophan, the amino acid from which serotonin is synthesized. --Biology, Neil Campbell and Jane Reece

Serotonin is the neurotransmitter of sleep-producing centers in the brain.  I've always wished to fall asleep the moment my head hits the pillow. Perhaps I should stop wishing and drink milk before bed. And so should have Kafka.

Bible

I did it again. I flipped the page and there was nothing more than:

Where was she now, this Clara? What had become of her, this ardent, hopeful girl in her white dress, surrounded by her family, godparents, friends, that her Bible should end up in a Goodwill bin? Even if she no longer read it, or believed it, she wouldn't have thrown it away, would she? Had something happened? Ah, girl, where were you? --From Tobias Wolff's "Bible"

The last sentence is in past tense. I wouldn't have flipped the page if it were in present.

Puppy

... Josh had said, such nostalgia in his voice, "Mom, remember when Goochie was a puppy?" Which was when Abbie had burst into tears, because, being only five, she had no memory of Goochie as a puppy. --From George Saunders' "Puppy"

After the first page, I was at a loss of knowing what was happening. I was reading every word, knew what each word meant, but when those words are sprawled with narration--with all-over-the-place, hilarious narration with "ha ha ha" and "ho HO"s--I had no idea what they became. So I don't know why I didn't stop reading. I don't know why I kept turning the pages. Perhaps it was because once in a while I would come to a part where I understood wholeheartedly what it all meant, like the passage above. Or below.

Marie stepped to the window and, anthropologically pulling the blind aside, was shocked, so shocked that she dropped the blind and shook her head, as if trying to wake herself, shocked to see a young boy, just a few years younger than Josh, harnessed and chained to a tree, via some sort of doohickey by which--she pulled the blind back again, sure she could not have seen what she thought she had--(Saunders, 265)

So much childish suspense. Like I just dropped the blind.

Awake

A beautiful and blinding morning

The world outside begins to breathe

See clouds arriving without warning

I need you here to shelter me

And I know that only time will tell us how

To carry on without each other

So keep me awake to memorize you

--From Josh Groban's "Awake"

I had this as my wake-up song last year. Never got tired of it. Especially when you get to hear your favorite singer's voice every morning! 

At the Art Institute

The man looks infinitely old, almost to death. Only his hands seem alive in flesh, his hands that once held pen and book before he was blind.

I did not intend to see Henry Fuseli’s “Milton Dictating to His Daughter.” I only intended to see Antonio Mancini’s “Resting.” Katherine wrote about it, alluded to it in her essay “Captive: A Love Story.” I always wished to see it. The painting looked as if Mancini himself was sick as he drew the sick woman in his picture. It was blurred, groggy. Her hair did not seem to be intact; it was as if it were matted by some thick wig.

Anyway. I did not know Milton was blind. Became blind, at least. And in the painting he is carefully dictating “Paradise Lost” to his daughter, with lips slightly parted. I wish I could read his lips. 

http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/44739  

Bel Canto

"When the lights went off the accompanist kissed her."

That's the first sentence of Ann Patchett's Bel Canto. She's a Ragdale alum. Ms. Hawkins was reading all the first sentences of alumni books and this one's my favorite. So later that summer I went to the bookstore and happened to spot the book right there, and right there I started reading. I don't judge books by its first page, or its first sentence for that matter, but I loved it so much I bought it. And then here is what happened. I kept the book on my shelf, unread, and then one day sent it to Katerina in Maryland. I don't gift books I've not finished reading, but I knew it would be good and I wanted her to read it so much I forwent reading it myself.

The King of Sentences

At the explosion of such a sequence from our green young lips, we’d rashly scribble it on the wall of our apartment with a filthy wax pencil, or type it twenty-five times on the same sheet of paper and then photocopy the paper twenty-five times and then slice each page into twenty-five slices on the paper cutter in the photocopy shop and then scatter the resultant 625 slips of paper throughout the streets of our city, fortunes without cookies. 

--from Jonathan Lethem's "The King of Sentences"

Perhaps Jonathan Lethem is the King of Sentences himself. 

Man and Wife

"On sick days you could escape the movement of the world. It was always difficult to get back into it, to catch up on schoolwork and eat real food again, but this time I wasn't sure I ever wanted to rejoin the world." --Mary Ellen from Katie Chase's "Man and Wife"

Year That Trembled and Reel'd Beneath Me

Year that trembled and reel'd beneath me! 

Your summer wind was warm enough, yet the air I breathed froze me, 


A thick gloom fell through the sunshine and darken'd me, 


Must I change my triumphant songs? said I to myself, 


Must I indeed learn to chant the cold dirges of the baffled? 


And sullen hymns of defeat?

 --Walt Whitman's "Year That Trembled and Reel'd Beneath Me"

I thought of my junior year when I read this poem. Some poems you feel it right down your spine, and this was it. Last summer I slowly dreaded my junior year. I thought of all those unpleasant Saturday mornings with a standardized test in front of me. I imagined myself with dark circles, with unkempt hair, as a time chaser. And afterwards, into my junior year, when tragedies came I thought of this poem. And then I thought of Whitman. The man I tried to analyze, the man whom I thought was so difficult a poet I peeked in Sparknotes for the first time. But I understood him. That he must have gone through so much more than I have. That I wasn't the only one. 

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

And indeed there will be time

For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,

Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

--from T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=173476 

I read the poem. I have not the faintest idea, but loved this stanza. That time will hold its breath lest it goes away, that you and I will both have it--"the time to murder and create," "that lift and drop a question on your plate." I don't think Eliot uses any hard language here, although he did knock me over by the word "etherized" in the beginning. And what does it mean to have measured your life with a teaspoon, like Prufrock states he has? I cannot even dare to try and analyze this poem, or a line of it. I just like it. 

Hamlet

So I've been very curious about it. About him, actually. How he pretends to be insane after hearing that his father was murdered by his uncle. How clever of him, to act like he's mad but carefully choosing his words, like here:
POLONIUS: Do you know me, my lord?
HAMLET: Excellent well. You are a fishmonger.
Of course literally a fishmonger is someone who sells fish, but what Hamlet implies underneath means one who deals with flesh. He is slyly mocking the King's advisor in a double blow, first calling him a lowly salesperson, then as a dirty dealer.

I just picked up Hamlet a few days ago, and I can't wait to finish it. I had read it in Korean several years ago, had no idea what was happening, gave up, and thought it would be so much better to read it in Shakespeare's own language. So much better, yes, but so much more difficult because of his brilliance.

The Worst You Ever Feel

Until he was ten, whenever Aaron was sick or bleeding, his father would say the same thing: “May this be the worst pain you ever feel.” –Rebecca Makkai’s “The Worst You Ever Feel” 

When I went to Mrs. Freeman's reading on that Wednesday night in the Garden Room, the line I remember and loved was this line. I understood. I've had such experiences. There need not be some intricate connection with Aaron, who can sense ghosts, nor his father who had felt all the pain of "getting out." ("And so what was wrong with getting out? Except that escaping is its own brand of pain, and tied to you always are the strings of the souls that didn't save themselves.") I don't know much about the Communist takeover in the 1940s (not much about history, for that matter). But there must be some other attaching force that makes you nod your head, makes you stay up late, almost sense the ghosts Aaron does, feel the painful guilt of Aaron's father. 

Child's Play

It was one of those stories that make you stay up late, even though you know it's a school day and you'll regret the next morning wanting to sleep more. But I read on anyway. I thought I'd rather finish up a good story than wait until tomorrow. I'm one of those people who has to finish something right there and then or else I'll have wandering thoughts, out of nowhere, just like that. Well. I was almost done reading, I had one more page to go, so I flipped it, but that was it. The last page. The end. I uttered an obviously audible "oh" out loud, as though that would make appear a line I missed. But of course--the reason why Alice Munro's stories are so good is that she leaves you hanging, so blasé. 

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

He promised us that everything would be OK. I was a child but I knew that everything would not be OK. That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father. --Anna's sister in Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Inredibily Close

"Sea frozen inside us"

If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read? So that it shall make us happy? Good God, we should also be happy if we had no books, and such books as make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. But what we must have are those books which come upon us like ill fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves; like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.

Franz Kafka 

I used this quote to argue the value of books over that of films, but there is better reason I like this quote. I like Kafka. How Kafka feared his father so much he stuttered in his father's presence, how he was an insomniac and spent those long nights clinging to literature is reason enough. But ever since I read "A Hunger Artist" I could not but marvel at his storytelling. His translated version did not suffice; I wished to read it in its original German language. I think this was when the sea frozen inside me finally broke. 

Free to be me

I got a couple dents in my fender

Got a couple rips in my jeans

Try to fit the pieces together

But perfection is my enemy

And on my own I'm so clumsy

Francesca Battistelli's "Free to be me"

From the Desk of Daniel Varsky

"There are moments when a kind of clarity comes over you, and suddenly you can see through walls to another dimension that you’d forgotten or chosen to ignore in order to continue living with the various illusions that make life, particularly life with other people, possible.” --Nicole Krauss' "From the Desk of Daniel Varsky"

I wonder why she never opened the locked drawer. Carefully. I would be too curious to find out what was contained in it. A secret--ripped first drafts, photographs with creases, scribbled love letters. And when I open it, I would not find the things I'd liked to find. When I open it, there would be my favorite pen I had lost, or just heaps of candy wrappers. Or perhaps, there would not be anything but blank space, neither Daniel Varsky's nor mine--but dust, maybe.

Guyland

"Privilege is invisible to those who have it." --Dr. Michael Kimmel during his speech on gender and gender inequality

Lift

This tug-of-war often obscures what’s also happening between us. I am your mother, the first mile of your road. Me and all my obvious and hidden limitations. That means that in addition to possibly wrecking you, I have the chance to give to you what was given to me: a decent childhood, more good memories than bad, some values, a sense of a tribe, a run at happiness. You can’t imagine how seriously I take that—even as I fail you. Mothering you is the first thing of consequence that I have ever done. --Kelly Corrigan's Lift


There is only one letter I remember getting from my mom. I found it much later, about five years after the written date. It was addressed to my elementary school. Perhaps my old, bald, frightening first grade teacher slipped it to me, somehow, I don't remember. What I remember from her letter is that it was quite short, and she told me she'd make spaghetti for me when I get back. In my childhood haste of growing up between two countries, I had thought spaghetti as very American, and I loved it. She knew this and I understood. I believe she never broke her promise. I remember eating her spaghetti, those long, yellow noodles wrapped in tomato sauce. I don't think she liked it much, so she just sat there, watching me eat. She asked me if it tasted good. Of course, I told her. I don't think I wrote back to her thank you. 

Buying Lenin

     "I wish you had died!" I shouted. "I wish you had died right there in your sleep."
     "Sinko," he said.
     "Don't call me sinko!" I shouted. "Your son is dead. They are both dead because of you."
     On the following day Grandpa left the city. ... I never heard him call me sinko again. 


     "Dear Grandson," it said. ...
     "Grandson, we've had a hard life, you and I. We grew old, not with years, but with deaths. You are now one death older. ... Be thankful for what you have. For what you've seen and for what you've been spared from seeing. ...
     "My dear one, forgive me."
     And at the end Grandpa had written just four words.
     "Sinko, I love you."

                   --Miroslav Penkov's "Buying Lenin"

     I like stories about grandpas. Maybe because my own grandpas didn't tell me stories. But that doesn't mean I don't have stories to tell about grandpa, what lovely things he quietly did for me. 

    He walked fast, and I had to trot along to keep up with his pace. He did not talk. But I remember holding his hand. Firm, like an adult's, but without that affection or protection for a child. It was an objective hand. I looked down as I wondered where we were going. I did not think he was a stranger. And of course it was much later when something finally hit me that he was my kidnapper. I don't know how far we walked when I heard grandpa shout my name. So loud, again. And again. I turned around, and I don't remember much from there. Except that that was the first time I saw grandpa run, except that his wrinkled hand held mine. Except that grandpa saved me, and I never told him thank you or I love you. 

An expression

An expression I still remember. My seventh grade teacher was a new one. Taught Korean. My classmates disliked her. But I liked her expression. It wasn't exactly hers, for it belonged to another student. "I hated my brother so much I wanted to push him off a cliff." Struck me. I wished it were my own. Just like the nameless narrator in Old School. 

Convergences

"An old man loses half his weight, as if by stealth" --Donald Hall's "Convergences"


My favorite line in this poem. Kept me reading until the end, the only reason that made me want to understand, to read again. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=238396  

Wednesday

The man is against the wall of 1234 South Michigan Avenue, every Wednesday, with a book. He is not precisely leaning--no--perhaps standing, slanted as if the wall may move. His book is always open, and he is intently reading, almost casually. The book is not flimsy; it is dense with words and pages. He has a beard and his hair is blonde, almost brown. He is in the shade and looking down, one leg crossed over the other so that the tip of his shoe touches the ground.

This is how much I know of him, how much I remember from last summer. I asked him what book he was reading those Wednesday afternoons?  Waiting for someone, a bus? Of course, he never told me. I never asked.

Reviving Ophelia

Thursday, F-day. Reid hall by the green stairs. 1PM break. Three feminists intent on discussing women's equality and identity.

DASHA: (with her Ukrainian accent) Because women are multitaskular.
ME: Yeah, and guys are just muscular.
EMILY: (laughs)

"A personal reflection unrelated to literature"

The boy's father was blind. He met the boy's mother, or really, she met him when she was volunteering. They fell in love. Despite her family's crossed arms and shaking heads, they happily married. And they had a baby boy, healthy and sighted. 
The boy grows up. His father reads to him every day, or really, every night. Even in the blackening darkness the boy is not afraid. His father reads on, page after page, braille after braille, into the inky blankness. The boy later says, this is how I imagined, through my father's voice. This is his love. 


I wish I were the boy. To have a father like his.


Daddy never read to me. He was either away or too busy or sleeping in. But he always read on his own. Books on computer science, on economics, on English grammar, the Bible. When we were in Minnesota, I found the most creative book ever: Invisible Man. I wondered how you could see and be unseen at the same time. A childish curiosity. I asked him, can I read it? His answer, to my shock was: “Oh, that. That’ll be boring for you.” Of course I was dumbfounded. My favorite person in the world had just rejected the greatest proposal a child could make. So I did not read it. I later understood why he had said that, because Ellison was a mastermind and I was just a child then. But I wish daddy read to me nevertheless. I wish I had asked instead, can you read this for me? A children's book, an impression on a soap bar, a label on a milk carton. 


I wish I were the boy. To be a fearless child. 


So I thought this would be unrelated to literature, and I tried. But it is, it became to be. 

The Great Gatsby

I don't think so. I had thought it was just a sad romance, but it's so much more than that. It's about a man chasing after a dream, a lost dream called Daisy. He does not know that time cannot be unwound.


His head leaned back so far that it rested against the face of a defunct mantelpiece clock... Luckily the clock took this moment to tilt dangerously at the pressure of his head, whereupon he turned and caught it with trembling fingers and set it back in place (86). 
--F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby

When Gatsby uneasily rests his head on the wall, he inadvertently leans on the clock, and accidentally drops it only to catch it riskily the last moment. Time for Gatsby is no longer functioning properly because of his strife to compensate the time lost in search of Daisy, in search of wealth, in search of his American Dream. And in this moment when he finally meets Daisy after five years, Gatsby is out of his time zone. What is even more striking is that the broken old clock is not Gatsby's nor Daisy's, but Nick's. It is also Nick's time that Gatsby attempts to rewind, and time is thus suspended. 


We overlook some things. Like a word misspelt. For Gatsby, he wanted Daisy so much he overlooked time. For me, it is not a matter of overlooking, but choosing to forgo instead. 

Our Town

EMILY: (Softly, more in wonder than in grief) I can't bear it. They're so young and beautiful. Why did they ever have to get old? Mama, I'm here. I'm grown up. I love you all, everything--I can't look at everything hard enough. --Thornton Wilder's "Our Town"

I was looking for a piece to do for my sophomore Shakespearean Idol. I wanted to do something from Ian McEwan's Atonement, but it was checked out from the library then. So I asked Ms. Frkovich and she recommended "Our Town" to me. Lovely play. It was simple, but then left me thinking about the little things in life. And that was just what Thornton Wilder wanted from me: "to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life." I do not know much about plays or theatre or Thornton Wilder, but Emily's monologue rang so true to me. We overlook the small worth and luck, we all, like Emily, "can't look at everything hard enough." I remember Lina's essay at Ragdale. She wrote about her grandparents. How they were growing old and how she was growing up. How dumbfounded she was to realize something so profound, only so much later in time. I agree with her belated insight. On a journal entry dated November 8, 2009 I wrote: "I would like to see my parents age as much as they would have liked to see me grow."