life changes fast: thoughts on Joan Didion

It was the moment when I realized that I'd had my workout pants on backwards the entire time I'd been at the Y that I thought: Well, that's about enough for today.

I'd spent 31 minutes biking furiously on a stationary bicycle, although "furiously" is the wrong word for it. While I biked, I read Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, about her grief in the year after she lost her husband very suddenly to a heart attack, so I suppose you could say I was biking "grievously," a misused word here, but one that makes me smile with the word play of it.

And now inevitably, I'm thinking and writing in the voice of Joan Didion, one of those writers I admire so much that I've written about her before. She has this chopped but lyrical style, a way of conveying so much emotion in these scattered phrases {and really, isn't that what all writers are going for?}.

She writes:

Life changes fast.
Life changes in the instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

and

In time of trouble, I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information was control. Given that grief remained the most general of afflictions its literature seemed remarkably spare. There was the journal of CS Lewis kept after the death of his wife, A Grief Observed. There was the occasional passage in one or another novel [...]. There were, in classical ballets, the moments when one or another abandoned lover tries to find and resurrect one or another loved one, the blued light, the white tutus, the pas de deux with the loved one that foreshadows the final return to the dead: la danse des ombres, the dance of the shades. There were certain poems, in fact many poems. [...] The poems and the dances of the sades seemed the most exact to me.

It's in Joan Didion's repetition of phrases that I could get lost—that I did get lost, pedaling as if her grief depended on it, as if my grief depended on it. By the time I finished those minutes on the stationary bicycle, I had gone 8.21 miles, and my legs ached.

Read this book, and you will hear echoes throughout of that "Life changes fast" idea.

Read this book, and you will want to absorb grief literature right along with Joan Didion, sinking into poems by Auden and ee cummings, wrapping yourself in words by others who have found a way to write about something we all feel but can so rarely describe.

Read this book, and you will start to think in Joan Didion's voice {if you are lucky}, and so even when you have a realization about how your workout pants are on backwards, it will be in her clipped but soaring take on life.

You'll hear it in your head, and you'll laugh at how you summed up that moment. You'll think then: Thank the Lord for this ordinary moment, this ordinary reason to smile because life changes fast, life changes in the instant.

5 things that prove I love Garrison Keillor

My love of Garrison Keillor has finally paid off, in the way only an English major raised on a steady intake of A Prairie Home Companion would consider a pay off:

As a promotion for his new CD, My Little Town, he's doing a "submit your favorite story about your little town" contest, and he picked this thing I wrote to publish on his site. {I'll tell you more about the thing in a minute.}

  Note several things:

• I keep saying "he," as if Garrison is there coding the submission form. {You can see it for yourself and admire his handiwork. Such a renaissance man, he is.}
• Or as if he's staying up past his bedtime reading submissions from people around the country who are trying to make their town sound like Lake Wobegon.
• I mean, I realize that Garrison probably didn't actually read my poem, but I'm going to pretend. After years of listening to him him spin tales about a town that seemed so familiar and home-like to me, I'm going to pretend that he read about my little town—out loud, obviously, in that deep, nostalgia-creating voice of his—and thought to himself, 'Well, oh my, I'd like to go to this town this Kamiah girl is from. Maybe the next time I'm doing my show at Ravinia, I'll pop out to Glen Ellyn and visit her. We'd get along like gangbusters.' I just know he'd use the word gangbusters.

Yes, I'm going to pretend that my poem has now become one of Garrison Keillor's favorites.

In my mind, he's going to read it on that Writer's Almanac podcast of his someday {which I just wrote about yesterday. Garrison and I are already displaying best-friends-who-think-alike behavior}.

Please don't take my fantasy away from me, but give an NPR nerd her moment in the pale Minnesota sun that's shining down on Lake Wobegon right now.

A Little More about This Thing I Wrote

All you had to do was tell a story about your hometown, and I, in a rare moment of turning my back on Iowa, submitted a poem about Glen Ellyn that I wrote about two years ago. The carnival comes to town every year, and there is nothing like the smell of corndogs to put me in a poetry mood. {That's just the kind of statement Garrison would relate to.}

You can read the poem here on my blog.

Or, if you'd like to see it in its Prairie Home Companion glory, you can see it here. {You, sadly, have to scroll down to the bottom. I need to call Garry and get him to put my poem on the top.}

So, there you have it: Garrison Keillor is, I'm sure, going to visit Glen Ellyn soon in order to meet me. If he comes during the carnival, I would most definitely buy him a funnel cake.

The following list may help really convince him that he should come.

5 Things that Prove I Love Garrison Keillor

1. I own this t-shirt:
   
   It is, for those of you who don't know {I scoff at you}, the shirt for the Professional Organization of English Majors, this group that Garrison made up and sometimes does sketches about. If it were real, you know I'd belong.
   
   If you're an English major and you'd like a shirt, too, you should order one from Garrison.
2. I once met him—at Tanglewood. My family, we're kind of Garrison groupies, and we went out to western Massachusetts to see him do his show live one summer. Afterwards, we stood in line to meet him. When he heard my name, he said, "Kamiah. Kamiah. That sounds like a name that belongs in a limerick," which is not something I've ever had said to me before, nor is it the conversation I envisioned having with him, but that is all right.
3. When I was in middle school, someone asked what I liked to listen to on the radio. I said, "A Prairie Home Companion," before I realized that I should've said, "Really awesome music that kids my age would know."
   
   That experience mirrors the time in elementary school when we were asked our favorite band, and I said, "Peter, Paul, and Mary."
4. My parents go on the Prairie Home Companion cruises almost every summer. I realize this doesn't really prove why I love Garrison, but it clearly shows that it's in the blood.
5. Someone once told me, "Your stories sound like something Garrison Keillor would tell. You're like a 30something girl version of him." I had just recently met the person, and I wanted to hug them. That is the 3rd best compliment I've ever received.

thither and felicity: talk like Jane Austen day

It's Talk Like Jane Austen Day, according to Twitter—and if only I had known before noon today. So many missed opportunities for Jane-ness! I could've demanded someone bring me tea in bed or made the guys at the front desk of the gym call me Miss Walker early this morning.

{However, if I were true to my Jane Austen-ness today, I probably wouldn't have gone swimming. Even my very practical one piece would be rather shocking, although perhaps if I called my swim cap my "bonnet," I could've gotten by.}

There's a website devoted to Talk Like Jane Austen Day. You can see it here, but I would like to warn you that it's not the prettiest of sites and it includes this gem: "All tolled, Jane Austen published four novels in her lifetime..." as if her novels were part of the Illinois Tollway and you need an iPass to get from here to there.

So, praytell, how does one talk like Jane Austen?

For starters, work in the word praytell wherever you can.

Also, use one a lot. Whenever you would say you, you should say "one," even if leads to awkward constructions/social moments.

For example, when offering someone coffee, ask, "Does one take cream or sugar?" This will make the person feel like 1) you maybe can't remember their name and you're disguising it by being so formal, 2) you were raised by the Queen of England, 3) you don't like them very much—certainly not enough to call them "you."

To increase the social awkwardness, one might want to ask about how much money one "has" every year. It's basically asking for their salary so that you can judge them worthy of your company at the ball you're both attending.

That's the other thing: if you really want this Talk Like Jane Austen Day to be a success, you might want to attend a ball. Then you can say, "To be fond of dancing was a certain step towards falling in love." People will be impressed that you're quoting Pride and Prejudice, but do watch who you say this to. Imagine if one said it to someone one didn't care for very much: it could give the wrong impression.

{Bonus Jane Austen fact: The original title of Pride and Prejudice was First Impressions.}

Or you could watch this clip from You've Got Mail where Kathleen Kelly {Meg Ryan} tries to convince Joe Fox {Tom Hanks} to read Pride and Prejudice, which she has read about 200 times.

{And which I re-read every year, making it easy for me to offer these very helpful Jane Austen tips.}



Thither.
Mischance.
Felicity.

Work all three of those into conversation tonight, and you will officially be a Jane-ite and part of the club. We meet quarterly and wearing an empire waist dress is not required.

esso: les parapluies de cherbourg

I am in Quebec City at the Hotel Le St-Paul on rue St-Paul. So many things about writing that sentence make me happy:

• getting to use a "le"
• hyphenating St-Paul
• saying "rue"
• trying to remember how to make the circumflex {you know, the accent that looks like a roof} over the "o" in "hotel" {I was clearly not successful}

I am somewhere where they speak French, and I am happy—no, more than happy. In French when you want to say, "I am happy," you can say, "Je suis contente." Contente. Content. That's what I am, here in this place that reminds me of France and what it feels like to be there.

Even this hotel, Le St-Paul {Le! Hyphen!}, looks like it was transplanted from Europe: barely a lobby, twisting staircase, and oh, my room.

My room has an exposed brick wall, no closet {but it does have an armoire}, huge windows, and a radiator. The bed takes up a good portion of the room, and if I purposely forget that it was just a couple hours in a plane to get here, I can trick myself into believing that this is France, I'm far from home, and I get to reconnect with that French part of me.

Isn't it amazing how simply being somewhere else—away from the known and the normal—can feel so alive? I realize, looking back at that sentence, that it's a rather obvious, silly sort of thing to say. I've essentially just said: Isn't it cool how, when you go somewhere else, it feels different?

But do you know what I mean? As soon as we step away from the day-to-day cares of the place where we pay the mortgage or the rent—as soon as we get away from the place where you have to go the grocery store and then put the groceries away and then figure out what sort of meals to make with all that food—as soon as we leave, there's a little more room to breathe.

And to think, and in my case, to write. Even though I'm here on business {I'll be spending most of my day at sessions for the American Thyroid Association Annual Meeting. If you have any questions about your thyroid, now is a good time to ask me}, the mere fact that I can run down a cobblestone street in the early morning and have a glass of wine with dinner in a tucked-away restaurant gets my heart and mind twitching with words to write.

Even this room makes me writerly. Not a word, I know, but in a room like this, in a place that feels like France, I can do whatever the heck I want.

I read a review of this hotel on TripAdvisor from someone who was clearly very displeased and not inspired by their room. They complained that the paint around the windows was chipping and that their view was of an Esso gas station. How banal! How ugly! To be forced to look at a place where people have to go to make sure they can get somewhere else! The symbolism of it all!

I see chipping paint and think: How full of character!

And I see the Esso station out my room here {I think I have the same room as the dissatisfied person on TripAdvisor} and think: Les Parapluies de Cherbourg.

That's a musical I watched in my film musicals senior seminar class at Truman. {How good it is to be an English major: my capstone project involved musicals with friends and then dissecting them, in the way that only 22-year-olds can do.} Every word—from hello to yes to important speeches—is sung, and it's in French.

It's quirky and beautiful in that way that movies shot in technicolor are: intense colors, deeper tones, and you think watching it that you've stepped into Oz and that nothing in our world could look so rich.

The last scene of the movie takes place in an Esso station in Cherbourg, and a gas station never looked so enticing and romantic. You see it and long to be part of the scene, of Genevieve and Guy's lives, of a world where you believe youthful idealism and passion will always reign.

Just see for yourself in the clip below {unless you want to watch the whole movie and not be spoiled by this from-the-end clip}.

Watching this, you may want to come hang out with a view of an Esso station, too, but I suggest you find your own Esso station: this one in Quebec is currently taken by me.

america by the front door {a poem}

It was 7:30 on a Monday morning, and I'd run 6 miles and walked the dog and then not gotten ready for work: it was Memorial Day, and so I was on the balcony drinking coffee and writing.

Memorial Day, and I was writing about the American flag without even realizing it. I mean, of course I knew what I was writing; I'm not one of those writers who can say, "The words just flowed with barely any input from me" and not feel like a fraud. I was aware that I was writing about the flag, but I was halfway through this poem before I thought: Oh, how significant for today, to write about America and the flag and such. Good job, patriotic self.

But here's the deal: the finished poem doesn't feel very patriotic, which is a funny thing for me, the girl who often cries at "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," to say.

You could very easily go all pretentious English major on this poem and start interpreting the symbolism—and then extrapolate it to how I feel about America now. You could so easily do that: No, really, try it.

What would be your most hoity-toity literary interpretation of this poem?

Here's how to go about this:

• Pretend to be a literary critic. Or an English professor. Or hearken back to your college days and remember how deep you used to try to sound in literature class. {Don't deny it; we all thought we were deeper than we really were, and we tried to showcase it in interpretations of Wordsworth.}
• Consider affecting a British accent in your review, which would be even more hilarious, given that I'm writing about America, and we long ago told them no, thank you. And by "told them," I mean, "fought a war with them as a way of telling them that we didn't want to eat Marmite and that while we're thankful for BBC miniseries, they can pretty much keep everything else."
• Tell me how I feel about America. Or how you feel about America. Or whatever interpretation comes to mind. That's the point of literary interpretation, isn't it? That you can basically make it up as you go along?
• Awards in the form of Internet high fives will be given for the most creative interpretation.

{And then I'll tell you what I think of this poem, should you be interested in hearing that.}



America by the Front Door

Who, upon moving, left that American flag flying by the front door?
Faded old glory now of orange, cream, and violet,
it is barely a reminder of what it once was.

The stitching unravels, each stripe
whipping dejectedly in the breeze,
so the flag waves like
a bleached-blonde woman wearing a too-tight tank top
wiggling her fingers as a goodbye
to a friend she's never liked: glittery jewelry clanking
as her fingers fly in false kindness.

The house sits empty now.
The grass a forest and
the bushes grown so unruly they must be hiding something:
A secret garden or an enchanted labyrinth, maybe.

Or the truth of this little decaying graying house,
once a strong defender against the Midwestern winter—
now wholly open with its gaping holes
and its missing living room window.

Someone once sat behind that window in a rocking chair
and watched the just-hung American flag,
a bold red, white, and blue,
whipping defiantly in the breeze.

And as she waved to a passing neighbor,
the thought never crossed her mind
that one day
the flag would fade and the house,
why, it would fall,
and there'd be nothing left but
the memory of what used to be—
once when the flag was flying by the front door.

sigh no more. also, happy birthday, shakespeare!

When I was a sophomore in high school, I had the kind of English teacher Garrison Keillor might write a sketch about for A Prairie Home Companion.

She seemed to have been inhabiting that room in the English wing of Burlington High School since before it was even built. In fact, they might have brought her over from the old high school; standing at the chalkboard and diagramming a sentence, she probably didn't even notice when they moved her from the red brick building on top of a hill overlooking downtown.

Back in the late 1960s, the town decided it was time for a new, modern high school and so they built one out of a bland, creamy-colored brick: two stories and sprawling, but none of the classrooms had windows, oddly enough.

There was room to grow, though, out in the newer part of town, away from the train tracks that had brought Burlington so much power, away from the river that had brought Burlington so much beauty, away from the factories that had brought Burlington so much stability.

So the new high school with no classroom windows {maybe sunlight while learning damages the brain?} was where I found myself learning about Julius Caesar and Huckleberry Finn and how to properly construct an essay, although I would've rather been learning all that in the old high school, which looks like this:

Doesn't a building like that just embody girls in full skirts and boys in letterman jackets carrying those girls' books as they walk to the pep rally?

It does for me, although how I got to talking about full skirts is beyond me. My sophomore English teacher would probably mark up this bordering-on-stream-of-consciousness piece writing with her bright red pen: Fragment! Run-on sentence! Confusing!

But she probably isn't going to mark this up, partially because it's very difficult to mark things up on the Internet and partially because she may still be standing in that room at BHS waving around a copy of Julius Caesar and shouting, "Oh, the symbolism of it all! And what do you think, students, of his hubris? Why isn't anyone answering me?" {The "answering" would be sung out, a high-low melody as she looked at the class over her glasses, the classic English teacher move.}

I'm thinking of her today because it's William Shakespeare's birthday, and do you know what she did every year on Shakespeare's birthday? She wore a t-shirt with his face on it and would proudly point at her chest at the beginning of class and say, "Today, we celebrate him!"

And then most everyone would avert their eyes—this is when windows in the classroom would've come in handy—because who wants to look at your English teacher's chest?

Especially when it has a picture of a dead guy with funny hair on it, who, it seems, was very good at writing plays that high schoolers would love to mutilate for centuries to come. You can count on a 15-year-old to suck all the life, romance, daring, heft, challenge, and poetry out of Shakespeare when they're forced to read aloud in class.

They'll say, "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him well, Horatio" as if there were no punctuation in there: AlaspoorYorickIknewhimwellHoratio. And then they'll sigh. And roll their eyes. And make a half-hearted attempt to push their hair out of their eyes. And make a side snide comment about the depressed guy talking to a skull. Creeeeeeeepy.

Then, about 10 years later, they'll voluntarily go to a production of Hamlet* and wonder why their English teacher didn't teach them this version—this exciting, moving, and sometimes terrifying version of intrigue and delusion. Why did they have to do all that boring reading? Didn't their teacher know how amazing Shakespeare's words are?

Of course she knew. English teachers always know; mine certainly did, as evidenced by her t-shirt.

In tribute to my sophomore English teacher—and, of course, in tribute to dear Will—here's a passage from one of my favorite Shakespeare plays: Much Ado About Nothing. Please read this with an English accent. Please do not read this as if you were 15 and weirded out by your English teacher's t-shirt.

Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,
Men were deceivers ever,
One foot in sea and one on shore,
To one thing constant never:
Then sigh not so, but let them go,
And be you blithe and bonny,
Converting all your sounds of woe
Into Hey nonny, nonny.
Sing no more ditties, sing no moe,
Of dumps so dull and heavy;
The fraud of men was ever so,
Since summer first was leafy:
Then sigh not so, & c.

* This experience—this going to a play 10 years later and being astounded that Shakespeare is so good—is not my experience at all. My parents took me to a Shakespeare festival for the first time when I was 9. I had an eraser when I was in 8th grade that said "Out, out, damned spot!" In middle school, I went to nerd camp to study Shakespeare with a college professor.

Why am I telling you all this? Is it to cement, in case you were concerned, my English major nerdiness? Is it to try to convince you that I was ridiculously smart and you should, therefore, be intimidated? Is it to try to make you imagine me as a 15-year-old, rolling my eyes at my teacher, as I tried to blend in with the other kids, even though I really wanted to say, "Yes, I do see the symbolism"?

No, I tell you all this merely as a precursor to this: I also had a William Shakespeare t-shirt, and I kind of wish I still had it so that I could've worn it today.

waking up before the sun

I saw my sister a couple of weeks ago on a business trip to Palm Springs, California.

I was there to make a video series with some doctors, which is a part of my job I never envisioned.

Actually, when you have a degree in British literature and you've spent your college days reading Wordsworth and Katherine Mansfield and TS Eliot, you rarely envision your job involving studio lights and a two-camera set-up and making decisions on what color the backdrop should be.

A degree in British literature makes you think you'll spend your days writing in a cottage in Devon. You'll have a wooden desk that's been used as a place to set Deep True Things down on paper for so long that it will have a patina of literary zeal. Of course the desk will be next to an open window, and there will be sheer curtains that flutter in the breeze.

But Palm Springs is not like Devon at all, and a couple of weeks ago, I was not next to an open window but in a windowless conference room that had become a makeshift studio.

To get over the slight road bump that I had very little idea of what I was doing, I pretended to be Mary Richards.

That statement makes sense if:

• You've seen The Mary Tyler Moore Show and know that Mary Richards is MTM's character and that she's the associate producer of a news program in Minneapolis.
• You buy into the concept of "Fake it till you make it."

I was pretending to be Mary Richards, charming producer in a newsroom full of men, a sweet 30-something who knows she's going to make it after all.

This little clip may help you relate to me in Palm Springs:


It did not hurt that I was wearing an outfit that always makes me feel like Mary Richards: pencil skirt, silk shirt, and heels.

Let's ignore for a moment that the heels were causing a blister as I scurried after the hotel banquet manager to make sure our lunch arrived on time and as I stood making polite small talk with the doctors who were waiting for the shoot to begin and as I offered condfident-sounding opinions on what portions of the video needed to be re-shot.

For the day, which began long before the sun came up, I was Mary Richards, and that worked very well for me.

But the next day when my sister arrived—she lives in LA, so it was just a two-hour jaunt out of the smog and into the desert—I got to be just Kami, my little sister self.

I don't mean to imply that I have this split version of myself: fracturing away into who I am with my family, who I am at work {and how I pretend to be Mary Richards sometimes at work}, who I am with my friends.

But I think most everyone can agree with this: there is something about being with your family, with these people who have known you since you couldn't talk, that makes you realize you don't always have to talk to be understood.

Now, of course sometimes with family, you have to talk more to be understood; family dynamics tend to get etched in the heart before you even get to your first day of school, so we spend part of our lives reminding these people we used to eat dinner with every night that we are not still the tattletale or the spoiled princess or the self-absorbed kid who spent too much time in her room.

That dynamic, though, is not what I want to talk about: I want to talk about how when you're with your family, especially siblings, you can quickly dip into the family shorthand of experience.

edith wharton, get out of my life

This must've happened to you before: you learn a new word or hear about a TV show or read an article on an obscure-sounding topic on page D13 of the Chicago Tribune—and then suddenly, that word or TV shows or apparently-not-obscure topic is everywhere in your life.

Did you simply glaze over all of it before because you weren't familiar?

Or, in some odd universe coalescing way, is this word/show/topic now being served up to you on a silver platter, ready for your consumption?

That second question holds a twinge of conspiracy theory in it, and I apologize for sounding suspicious of...the universe.

{Parenthetical Justification for Suspicion: In a world where Google dominates and tracks our every {Internet} move, it's hard to avoid going down the conspiracy theory/someone is stalking me route sometimes.

Example: at work today, I looked up a news story about Senator Mark Kirk {R-IL}, and not too long later, the ads on my Grooveshark were all about asking for donations for Rick Santorum. I hit re-fresh, and they were about donations for Newt Gingrich. In my Google-why-do-I-let-you-know-everything-about-my-life distrust of the Internet, I'm convinced the ads were a direct result of the search.

End Parenthetical Justification for Suspicion.}

I ask all this because I'm going through this experience with Edith Wharton right now.

It's not that I recently heard of her—oh, no.

When I was in middle school, my parents took me to visit her house in Massachusetts, the Mount. I remember seeing her big writing desk in the upstairs sitting room—big windows, lots of light, overlooking the gardens—and thinking that I'd never stop writing if I had that kind of set-up. Or maybe I'd just have very literary-looking photographs of me taken.

The Mount: I would also throw excellent garden parties if this were my house.

Through high school and college, I read several things by her, including her short story "Roman Fever," which has such a twist of an ending that you actually gasp and sit dumbfounded for several minutes afterwards.

If you lived in the Mount and you read that story, you would be forced to take a walk in the gardens {carrying a parasol}, focusing all the time on your breathing and how beautifully blue the sky is, in order to recover from reading it.

So, Edith has been part of my life for some time, but she'd been relegated to the back recesses of my mind, the way things that you did in middle school often are.

Last week, though, she came back.

I was sick and had just finished a book. Standing at my bookshelf with my head tilted, reading the titles to try to find something, anything, that would take my mind off the thumping headache and my self-diagnosis of tuberculosis, I came across my Edith Wharton section.

Edith Wharton? Images of the Mount and me gasping violently {to the consternation of my roommate} after reading "Roman Fever" while curled up in my dorm room bunk bed floated past.

Yes, I could go for some Edith Wharton, I decided, but not any of these that I already own. The next day, when I mustered enough energy to make it to the library {I live half a block away from it, but getting there did involve me changing out of my sweatpants}, I checked out The Buccaneers.

Should you be a visual person who'd like to know what kind of book you're dealing with, here's what it looks like. Now stop judging a book by its cover.

{Parenthetical Downton Abbey Disclosure: This book was recommended for people who like Downton Abbey, and as we know, I'm way beyond like when it comes to Downton.}

In the little sick nest I'd built for myself on the couch—out of Kleenex, antibiotics, pillows, a cuddly pug, and a wool blanket from PEI—I remembered why I like Edith Wharton so much: She makes you feel as if you were in on a delicious secret. And that secret is well-dressed and has a house on Fifth Avenue.

I couldn't stop reading Edith all weekend. The Buccaneers is about American heiresses who go to England in the 1870s to use their Papas' wealth to buy themselves a husband and a title. I assume you're all thinking of Cora Crawley in Downton Abbey now; if you aren't, I obviously haven't done my job of talking about Downton enough.

Yesterday, I made it back to work, and this was waiting for me on our office's Book-a-Day Calendar:

Look closely. Or, you know, click on the image and it will be blown up. Not in the TNT sense.

The Book-a-Day Calendar was telling me to read Edith. I'm way ahead of you, buddy, I told it. Or would have, should I be the kind who talks to paper products.

And then today, Twitter taught me this: Edith Wharton was born 150 years ago today.

Okay, I get it, universe: You want me to pay attention to Edith Wharton.

Or marry an English duke, since she often wrote about that.

I'm sure the message will become clear by tomorrow, when Google will start showing me ads that have to do with visiting the Mount or buying a writing desk to place in my sitting room. {Joke's on you, Google: I don't have a sitting room.}

In conclusion: Happy birthday, Edith Wharton!

jane austen did prepare me for: downton abbey and entails

As you may recall, I went through a little "obsessed with Downton Abbey" phase in the early fall. {This little "I heart fanfic" confession may help you remember that.}

And by "went through," I mean: I'm still in the phase; I'm simply hiding it better.

Okay, I can't lie to you.

By "simply hiding it better," I mean: if you've talked to me at all in the last month, you'll know that I'm obsessed with the show Downton Abbey.

I'm just not good at putting up a facade, which, if I were a real member of the Crawley family, posh aristocrats that they are, would be a very unfortunate trait.

Oh, to be Lady Mary Crawley with her icy, monied, landed gentry composure—that hides vulnerability and deep emotions and fears. She's got a lot going on under the surface, but that girl knows how to pull it together to get through a boring dinner with other icy, monied people.

If Lady Mary is staying up too late reading Elizabeth Gaskell novels and spending her every waking minute wondering if Mr. Thornton and Margaret Hale will finally clear up their misunderstandings, get together, and be happy in that wicked little town of Milton—well, you'd never know it from how she gets through those society functions.

I am not like Lady Mary in that regard.

As we've gotten closer to the Series 2 premier of Downton Abbey on PBS {OMG, IT'S ON SUNDAY! SUNDAY IS ONLY 2 SLEEPS AWAY!}, my obsession for this fictional family and their servants has come out more strongly than ever before.

Like just a couple of paragraphs ago: I was talking about these people as if they were real.

They're not real, Kamiah. I have to keep saying that to myself.

Also: don't talk about them as if they were your friends {or enemies} to real people. You are not a Crawley. You are not Lady Mary Crawley. Don't assume other people know who you're talking about, or that, when they find out you're talking about fictional characters, will have the ability to not laugh at you.

Or here's an actual email I sent to a friend after she admitted that she hasn't yet seen Downton, as I've told her repeatedly she should do:

WHY HAVE YOU NOT WATCHED IT YET?!?!! {Note: Downton, for some reason, brings out the shouter in me.}

I refuse to talk to you until you do.

Goodbye.

And there's also this for a sign: I was in a wedding last week, and when I went to the salon to get my hair done, I brought in pictures of publicity shots from Downton Abbey to help guide the hairdresser.

The last time I was in a wedding—in August, just as the Downton obsession {obsession is such a middle-class, depressing sort of word; I think I'll start referring to this as my Downton fondness} was beginning—I told the hair stylist to channel Jane Austen and/or Audrey Hepburn.

I casually threw out a reference to Downton, mentioning it lightly, as if I'd seen it once and was sort of intrigued by it. But then I totally blew my cover by talking a lot about having a lady's maid to the hair stylist. I still don't know if she enjoyed being called a servant, but I think the hair still turned out all right. You can see it here.

For this wedding last week, though, I was in full Downton fondness mode.

Of course I found pictures of Lady Mary Crawley; she's a brunette with long hair, too, so I figured that if I could get her hair right, then maybe I could transform into her. Not that she's real. Or I've ever thought about what it'd be like to be her.

Here's how it turned out:

The only thing holding me back from being Lady Mary in this picture is the incredible amount of skin showing. Well, and the color of the dress. And that it's above the knee, a length certainly not acceptable in World War I England. I guess the other thing holding me back is that I don't have a lady's maid. Maybe we can just assume she's taking the picture.

Oh, yes, I have Downton fondness.

I fully accept this and have become somewhat of a Downton evangelist/translator to my friends. When PBS started to re-broadcast Series 1 in preparation for Series 2 {OMG, SUNDAY}, I watched it with a couple of friends.

And it was at that point that I realized that Jane Austen did, in fact, prepare me for something: for explaining entails.

Until I had this conversation, I didn't entirely realize that a working knowledge of entails wasn't something that everyone had, just like we all have a general knowledge of the Revolutionary War or how we all agree that Saved By the Bell: The College Years was a mistake.

The conversation went something like this:
Friend Who's Never Seen the Wonder that Is Downton: Wait, why can't the snooty older one—
Me, aka, Lady Downton Explainer: Lady Mary. And she's not snooty. Okay, she is, but...No, I won't explain more on that right now. But wouldn't you be snooty if you'd been raised in a house that looked like this?

Friend: How did you get a picture to appear in our conversation?
Me: Because of Jesus and Dame Maggie Smith, who is, as you know, in Downton playing the feisty Dowager Countess. Let's try to focus. What was your question?
Friend: Why can't Lady Mary, who apparently isn't snooty, inherit?
Me: Because the estate is entailed to the next male heir. Now, hush, Dame Maggie Smith is about to say something witty and caustic and I want to see the look on your face when you hear it.
Friend: [after slightly smiling at Dame Maggie] But what do you mean, entailed?
Me: Like in Sense and Sensibility or Pride and Prejudice. Ooh, here comes Thomas the Evil Footman. Dang, I shouldn't have called him evil and let you make your own decisions. But seriously, look at him; he's brooding and dark the minute he walks on-screen. You would've picked up on your own that he's evil.
Friend: Just listing other period dramas isn't exactly helping right now. Why can't she get the money and the pretty house?
Me: Just think of Mr. Collins getting Lizzy's father's house in Pride and Prejudice or that weak half-brother of Emma Thompson's—I mean, Elinor Dashwood's—getting Norland while the mother and girls are sent to live in a drafty cottage on the edge of the ocean. Women getting kicked out of their houses was a very big plot point back in the day.
Friend: How is that possible in a country that had Queen Elizabeth I {not to mention II} and Queen Victoria?
Me: Um, those eras aren't covered in Downton, and I may have a degree in British literature and I may have lived in England for a little bit and I may watch A LOT of period dramas, but I can't know everything. What do you think I am, a historian magician?

Just suffice it to say: the entail for Downton Abbey—the estate, the title, the money—was written so that it can only pass to men, and sadly, the current Earl and his wife have the three girls. As you can see. In their pretty dresses throwing haughty looks at each other and dinner guests.
Friend: Wait, an entail is written?

It was at that point that I wished PBS had a pause button so that I could get into the details of inheritance law.

Sadly, it didn't, but I think my friend got the point, especially from the number of times various characters repeat lines along the lines of: "Oh, I wish we could break the entail, but alas, we can't!"

Oh, Downton, how I am obsessed with you.

I mean, am slightly fond of you and look forward with an appropriate level of excitement to Sunday evening when we shall be reunited.

when it turns cold, my thoughts turn to england

When the weather turns cold and damp—just as it's been this week—my thoughts naturally turn to England, and my reading choices soon follow.

My mind associates the wet cold with England because:

• That's what it was like when I lived there. It was a semester abroad—the fall term—and while I'm sure there were sunny days, what I mostly remember is wet leaves, an ineffective umbrella, and slick steps outside the National Portrait Gallery, where I'd go to look at Wallis Simpson, the American divorcee who caused a king to give up his throne. In her portrait, she almost smirks haughtily down at you as if she's in on a joke. {The punchline for that joke may be, “...and then I almost destroyed the monarchy!”}
  
  I was drawn to her portrait time and again, possibly because other wings of the National Portrait Gallery involved many, many oil paintings of people in lace collars who looked like they'd been eating lumpy porridge for every meal for 13 years.
  
  In Wallis' portrait, though, she has a sprig of flowers pinned to her blue shirtdress, and when I looked up at her, she seemed to be saying, “Oh, forget these British people. They're a tricky lot to figure out, so show them some American gumption, just like I did.”
  
  It seems silly to say now, especially after reading more of her story and seeing how she was portrayed in The King's Speech, but when I needed a boost on a foggy day in London-town, I'd go visit Wallis, my fellow American. She made the rain and cold and loneliness seem laughable, like a big joke that we were both in on.
• of that scene in Sense and Sensibility when Marianne and Margaret Dashwood are on a rainy walk through the Devonshire countryside. “Is there a felicity in the world superior to this? Margaret, we will walk here at least two hours,” Marianne enthuses over the little bits of blue sky peeking through, as Jane Austen describes it, “a showery sky.”
  
  Don't say things like that, Marianne—that thing about felicity and walking. You are the personification of flights of fancy in Jane's world, and I think I should let you know: she's using you to teach a lesson about how impulsiveness and unguarded emotions lead to tumbles down rain-slicked hills overlooking the sea. Literally and metaphorically.
  
  Going on and on about blue sky and the animating gales of a southwesterly is not going to end well for you, Marianne, so you may as well come in from the rain and embroider something.
  
  I am so like Elinor. Thank heavens. But that also helps explain why rainy days make me want to stay inside with a book, preferably one set in England.

I went to the library recently with this goal in mind: get something set in England.

Having just re-read Persuasion and wanting to avoid appearing like a one-trick pony {not that I'm concerned about my personal brand, but I do think it should be more than "I am obsessed with Jane Austen"}, I decided to expand beyond Jane; I went for Elizabeth Gaskell.

That's Elizabeth Gaskell of Cranford, Wives and Daughters, and North and South.

The Elizabeth Gaskell who wrote in the mid-1800s and who has been so good to the BBC and its desire to make every book written in the 1800s into a period drama they can cheer the nation with on Sunday nights through the cold, damp England fall and winter.

I pulled Wives and Daughters off the shelf and then glanced to the right at the book right next to it. This is one of great pleasures of the library, by the way: going to a section where you need one book, and then taking a look around to see what else that section has to offer.

If I'm ever in a reading bind—and it does happen, especially when I have no seasonal promptings to read things set in England—I pick a letter and then go to that section of fiction. With my head tilted and my fingers tracing the spines, I don't let myself leave until I find a book or two, maybe even something out of my typical reading likes.

Right next to Wives and Daughters was a book by Whitney Gaskell. 'Maybe she's a great-great granddaughter!' I thought, nerdily excited by this idea of a modern-day Elizabeth Gaskell.

I stood on my tippy-toes to pull the book down and saw there was no way in heck I was checking this book out.

That is, until I read the back cover.

-----

I'll tell you why soon, I promise.

what lent is teaching me about distraction

For once, there was no music or radio going in my car. And in that silence, I heard a noise. A whir? A ping? {Is ping a word used to describe car noises?} Perhaps it's a scraping, metal-on-metal sort of noise?

After listening for awhile, I've decided it's really more of a creaking noise coming from the back of my car.

Is that a normal noise? Does my car always do that?

And here's where the panic/self-reassurance cycle sets in.

Panic: My tire is going to fall off, omg.

Self-reassurance: I'm sure that's a normal noise, and you've just never heard it because you always have some other noise distracting you.

Maybe it's Robert Segal on NPR explaining why the economy is recovering even though jobless claims are up for the millionth month in a row.

Or maybe you're distracted by singing along with Carol Burnett in Once Upon a Mattress. "Though a lady may be dripping with glamour / As often as not, she will stumble and stammer / When suddenly confronted with romance..." Don't you kind of want to sing with me now and forget your panic?

Panic: Remember that one time you went to the mechanic, and he said, "Now, I don't want to alarm you, but your hose {internal side note from the past: what hose? How many hoses are in my car?} could be corroding right now. And you'd never know it until something bad happens"? Remember that time? Your hose, one of them, all of them, could be about to explode. Or something.

Self-reassurance: But remember, too, how you figured out that that mechanic was just trying to take advantage of you? You with your 'girl alone in a new town and unsure of what hose he's talking about' look on your face? If there was something wrong with your car, your new mechanic would've told you when you got your car checked recently. You are all right; the car is all right.

Panic: My tire is going to fall off, omg.

Self-reassurance: Sigh.

My internal voices are no help when it comes to my car because my car is a mystery to me. A mystery that came with a very long instruction manual explaining everything, but still a mystery because I haven't read that manual.

When something goes wrong with my car, I do what any typical 20something with a liberal arts degree would do: I take it to someone who knows what a chassis is.

{Case in point: When I hear the word "chassis," I think of the Irish play Juno and the Paycock, where Captain Boyle, drunk and confusing his words, declares, "Th' whole worl's in a terrible state o' chassis..." This is useful knowledge, I guess, when wanting to dig into literature, but it does nothing for trying to figure out my car.}

In short, when I'm in my car, I'm not paying attention to my car. It does its job, and I fill the time and space with noise, a little bubble of entertainment.

Except for right now.

Right now, I'm halfway through Lent, and for Lent, I have given up distraction.

Sounds deep, eh? I can make it sound deeper and more spiritual: I have given up what is distracting me from a fuller communion with God.

I'm not trying to be flippant {all internal dialogue above aside}.

I really am seeking a more connected time with God this Lent.

But it's one thing to sound deep, and it's another, more challenging thing to take a look at your day and pinpoint distraction so that you can figure out how to break the deep into the practical.

For this big Lenten idea to work, I broke the pretty rhetoric into practicalities {necessary for a perfectly practical girl like me}:

• no TV or movies when I'm alone
• no music or radio in the car

And so this leaves me in silence. A lot.

Ostensibly, this silence is to focus on God, to pray, to sing random church-y songs that are in my head {I have many of those}.

But as you can see, my brain usually takes the silence in the car as an opportunity to panic, which I wish it wouldn't do.

-----

I have more to say on this Lenten distraction fast, and I'll say it soon. In the meantime, I'll reassure you: my tire did not fall off. Yet.

jane austen couldn't spell this

Jane Austen didn't prepare me for this.

I have another thing to add to my list, my list of things in my life that Jane Austen {with her witty prose and her strong-willed women and her challenging men} did not prepare me for.

Or more precisely, could not have prepared me for. Jane Austen could not have prepared me for a spelling bee.

There's a professor at Oxford who analyzed Jane Austen's manuscripts and then created a tsunami in the English major world: she said that Jane Austen was heavily edited. By a man, most likely.

This author we've put on a podium—the one who excelled in a man's world by so clearly taking us into the mind of a woman—this woman's words were seriously changed by a man.

But Jane had to be heavily edited because she couldn't spell and grammar was low on her priority list. Who needs to think about subject-verb agreement when you're trying to create Elizabeth Bennet?

Aha, someone will say, aha! What if Jane Austen didn't really create Elizabeth Bennet as we know her today?

What if, at the end of the original draft of Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth did not say:

"We will not quarrel for the greater share of blame annexed to that evening. The conduct of neither, if strictly examined, will be irreproachable; but since then, we have both, I hope, improved in civility."

Nor did she say:

"But think no more of the letter. The feelings of the person who wrote, and the person who received it, are now so widely different from what they were then, that every unpleasant circumstance attending it, ought to be forgotten. You must learn some of my philosophy. Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure."

Instead, she said {and as you read these, feel free to pretend there are spelling errors and grammar errors; I can't bring myself to write quite that lax}:

"Um, let's not fight about what happened that one time. I was wrong; you were wrong. Everyone was wrong. But I think we're nice now."

Or she said:

"Ok, get over your letter, your crazy letter that you wrote a long time ago. You've changed; I've changed. Move on, buddy. Move on. I mean, just be like me: I think about stuff only if it makes me happy."

Is Elizabeth Bennet still Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennet?

I bet she is. I read in the Telegraph that the Oxford professor would describe Jane Austen's style as close to Virginia Woolf's. Stream of consciousness, jumbling together of dialog so that the reader is kept on their toes {wait, who's talking?}, a lot of internal thoughts going on as external action is described.

One main idea from this Virginia Woolf comparison tells me that Elizabeth Bennet, regardless of Jane's ability to keep track of the "i before e, except after c" rule, would still essentially be the same from first draft to the well-read copy on my bookshelf: stream of consciousness.

Stream of consciousness gets your ideas out on paper—quickly. It's messy, but I often find it to be the most revealing kind of writing, this trying to write without lifting your pen and certainly without stopping to judge what you've said. I've found in my own writing that allowing myself the freedom to write without constantly self-editing {self-judging, self-condemning, self-revising} has made me write more to the heart of what I want to say.

Stream of consciousness in literature—as in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway—is when you're given access to a character's inner thoughts, streaming along as they go about their day. You know, kind of like how you go about your day, driving to work but not really thinking about driving—instead, you're thinking about last night's conversation or what you'll have for lunch or the book you're reading.

Most likely, you're thinking about all of those things {and more} at once, so stream of consciousness aims to get you into a character's head so that you better understand them and their motivations.

{End English major discussion.}

I'm not saying that Jane wrote her books in one sitting, or that Pride and Prejudice is nothing more than an extended journal where she was simply getting down her thoughts without self-judgment. {Stream of consciousness, as a side note, works wonders for journalling when you're perturbed by something and need to get to the root of it}.

What I'm saying is:

Even if Jane Austen's original drafts were dashed together messes and even if her editor had to do some major work to get the books ready for print {and ready to be read by a public not quite ready for Virginia Woolf}...even if all that, I bet Elizabeth Bennet is still Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennet.

I don't think the essence of Jane's characters were created by her editor as he put in commas and paragraph breaks. I'm an editor and a writer, and I know that you can only work with what you've been given: I bet Elizabeth came to the editor as the sharp-tongued girl we all love, contained there in the heart of messy scribblings and an inability to spell tomato correctly.

I'm going to keep Jane Austen on her podium in my mind. I might even raise the podium a bit, knowing that she was, perhaps, ahead of her time in terms of literary style.

Actually, yes, I'll definitely raise the podium, simply because I like Virginia Woolf and I like the idea of Jane Austen being compared to her.

Also, I think tomorrow I'll do some stream of consciousness writing in honor of Jane and Virginia.

{You should try it, too, and let me know how it goes.}

what do you do with a BA in english?

The other morning on NPR, I heard this statistic:  English is the sixth most popular college degree.  Glad to know I was in the Top 10.  Although for all the jokes and charges of impracticality, I would think that fewer people would choose to study English.

Even I joke about it.  My senior year roommate was an accounting major.  “With an accounting degree, it's pretty obvious what you're going to be,” I told her once when I was mired in that fear-of-what-comes-after-graduation-when-it-doesn't-matter-that-you-can-recite-Wordsworth.

{“And then my heart with pleasure fills / And dances with the daffodils.”  Name that poem, you non-English majors, you.}

“You're going to be an accountant.  But I'm getting an English degree.  What am I going to be?  England?”

{insert laugh}

I wasn't whining then, somehow blaming someone else—anyone else—for what I had chosen to study.  I had wanted to be an English major.  I'd wanted to explicate poems and understand why comma splices are bad and deconstruct Romanticism.

I was more pointing out what everyone already knew—and what, according to NPR {and they never lie}, is still true:  the English major, while a cool major, does not line up with one specific job.  And that can feel a little scary as you try to find one specific job.

This reminds me of a song from Avenue Q, a musical I've never seen, but the songs pop up on my Pandora station for Belle.

Belle as in “Belle” from Disney's Beauty and the Beast.  I don't understand why Pandora thinks songs from a musical with lyrics like “The Internet is for porn” should be played on a station built around Disney {Disney!  That bastion of good-upbringing and rosy-tinted memories!}.

But the Pandora algorithm is not for me to understand.

Besides, this way, I get to hear “Belle”

Look there she goes, that girl is so peculiar.
I wonder if she's feeling well.
With a dreamy far-off look.
And her nose stuck in a book…

and I get to hear

What do you do with a BA in English?
What is my life going to be?
Four years of college and plenty of knowledge,
Have earned me this useless degree.

I have no monumental thoughts on this, besides to say that the English degree is not a useless degree.

My entire proof for that is that I’m not useless, and I have an English degree.  Not that my degree defines who I am {please see previous reference about how studying English does not make you England}.  I never was very good at those calculus proof things.

{My university had a class called Liberal Arts and Calculus; it combined essay writing with equations.  I remember very little from that class, except that my professor made a big deal out of the etymology of calculus. Etymology does tend to excite a certain brand of English major—my brand.  And calculus, for anyone who’s also etymologically excited, means “little pebble used for counting.”}

I really just wanted to share what I thought about on the way to work one day this week.

A musical.  Two, actually.

My degree.  I tried to remember where my diploma is.  I couldn’t.

My calculus class.

Etymology.

Wordsworth.  Daffodils.  Wandering like clouds.

NPR.

Oh, and driving.  I did think about driving, signaling, braking, etc.

But let’s face it, it’s more fun to try to follow the circuitous, perhaps random route of my mind—much more fun than following my practically-straight route to work and to my cubicle and to my computer.  To what my BA in English prepared me for.