things that might be better than a new library book

What is better than getting a new book from the library?

No, really, I'm asking. I have some thoughts about what might be better, but I'm not convinced, particularly because I just picked up a delicious book {The Girl You Left Behind}, and every day, I can't wait to crawl into bed and start reading.

{Given that I recently wrote about how much I just want to hang out in bed, ever since I put on my flannel sheets, you may be concerned that I'm spending too much time in bed and not enough time upright and going about my normal day. Fear not, though: I am upright right now, and I manage to muddle through the days, no matter how much time I spend thinking about how I'd rather be in bed with a book.}

Things That Might Be Better Than a New Library Book

1. Maple-bacon biscuits. Any recipe that begins with "Fry the bacon until crisp. Then pour fat into a measuring cup and stick it in the freezer; you will be incorporating the solidified fat into the dough" is a recipe for me. The step where you drench the crispy bacon in maple syrup only intensifies the pleasure.
2. Staying inside on a rainy day. But then again, this activity is only made better by having said library book that you want to devour. Imagine it: Fireplace. Wind whipping outside. The smell of a caramelized onion, Gruyere, and ham tarte filling your home. And you on the couch with your book. It is almost too perfect, isn't it?
3. A surprise of a card in the mail from an old friend. There is nothing like being reminded of why you're friends with someone: the way she can pull out just the right words, the way she knows what to joke about in a tongue-in-cheek reference to some shared memory, the way she can convey in just a few lines just how deeply she knows you. Add to that the delight of finding something other than a bill in your mailbox, and you have a serious contender for something that is better than a new library book.

But that is where I stop.

I cannot make it any further because I am thinking of my book and my bed. And maybe, one day when I finish this book, I will tell you about why you should rush to your library and get it right now. For the moment, I will say: This book, The Girl You Left Behind, involves France, World War I, impressionism, tempting descriptions of those unforgettable French meals, and a mystery.

Now do you see why I have no time for anything but reading?

7 ways to celebrate Pride and Prejudice without being obvious

If you're a particular kind of literary nerd, you know that today is a very important day: It's the 200th anniversary of the publication of Pride and Prejudice.

I've known about this for weeks, and I've tried to figure out how best to commemorate this day that, for Jane Austen fans, is like a blend of the Fourth of July and the Queen's Jubilee.

{That's because we feel, instinctively, that a day as momentous as this should involve fireworks and people speaking in British accents while wearing pretty clothes.}

Sure, you could be obvious and re-read a favorite section of Pride and Prejudice, but that idea just lacks imagination. That's exactly the kind of thing Caroline Bingley would come up with, and we all know that we don't want to be like her.

This morning on my run, I channeled the spirit of Elizabeth Bennet {although if I were really chanelling her, I probably wouldn't have been in quick-dry shorts that exposed so much of my legs...}, and came up with:

7 Ways to Celebrate Pride and Prejudice without Being Obvious

1. Walk across a muddy field. Arrive somewhere fashionable and proper looking distinctively messy and unproper. If you can find a stile to cross, all the better. If your walk ends at a house like Netherfield, you may be in some sort of Austen-themed amusement park. Watch out.
2. Refuse to read any article about this anniversary that starts with "It is a truth universally acknowledged..." They're not even trying to be original. Whoever writes like that probably starts every other article with "Merriam-Webster defines [hope, growth, whatever] as..." If you like Jane Austen, you're allowed to be a words snob.
3. Never use anyone's first names. Call everyone you know Miss This and Mr. That. Your boss may especially like this one, and if your company is like my company and your annual review is coming up soon, he/she may be so taken with your return to this level of formality that you get a raise.
4. Wear an empire-waisted dress. No, wait, that one is a little obvious.
5. Don't watch Lost in Austen. It was made by ITV {they of Downton Abbey fame} and the premise sounds so good: a modern-day woman gets transported back into the story of Pride and Prejudice. She realizes that she has the ability to change the novel, and oh my, what to do with such power and lack of modern conveniences? I can tell you what: NOTHING interesting. It's mostly her saying to characters, "Oh, I remember when this happens in the book!" and then, understandably, them looking at her in confusion. Four hours of confused people in period costume is not entertainment.
6. Watch the Colin Firth-coming-out-of-the-water-in-a-white-shirt scene from the BBC version. That scene wasn't in the book? Elizabeth actually started to fall in love with Darcy when she saw how beautiful Pemberley was, not when she saw Darcy's abs? No one cares. More Colin Firth. Colin Firth all the time.
   
   
   
7. Read a favorite section out loud in a British accent. Oh, I'm a girl with a British literature degree: I am already obvious in my love for Jane Austen, so I may as well celebrate today in a very obvious way. I might as well go all the way and drink a pot of tea while I do my reading. This doesn't, by the way, mean I'm like Caroline Bingley, who I earlier accused of lacking imagination. In fact, it means I'm like Elizabeth Bennet: aware of her own mind and unafraid to speak it.

   And my mind right now says: Go read Darcy's second proposal.
   
   My mind also says: Consider embroidering it onto a tea towel and selling it on Etsy. Jane Austen fans love that kind of stuff.

if only i were in Little Women: thoughts on cross-stitching

"I'm not afraid of storms, for I'm learning how to sail my ship."

Amy says that in Little Women, and perhaps because I've been re-reading that here and there, I've had a hankering to cross-stitch. {Meg would probably admonish me for saying "hankering," since it sounds so slangish and colloquial.}

This cross-stitch desire has only been intensified by how I'm also re-reading Pride and Prejudice. Elizabeth Bennet, when staying for several days at Netherfield while Jane is recovering from a severe cold—

Sidenote: Do you ever wish you lived in the time where you came down with a cold and it was perfectly acceptable to lay in your bed all day, maybe even for several days? A person got a headache and down in the drawing room, everyone else was all, "Oh my, shall she ever recover? Shall we take her tea? Have the pillows been fluffed? Can she have a clear broth?"

And then they rang the bell and somebody would take it up to them.

I'm suspecting what is most appealing in this scenario is the part where someone brings me stuff in bed.

I don't actually want to live in the time when medical knowledge involved leeches and bleeding out the sickness; I'd rather just have a lady's maid who brings me stuff. Maybe somebody from Downton Abbey could pop over.

So back to my point: While Elizabeth is staying at Netherfield, she, at times, takes up her needlework. She then has very witty conversations with Mr. Darcy that make him smile as he turns away {lest he betray his true feelings by, gasp, smiling at her}.

You can see the obvious link between Mr. Darcy falling in love with Elizabeth and her doing needlework, and with an example like that, who wouldn't want to go buy embroidery floss right now?

No, seriously, who wants to go? Get in the car, and we'll meet at Hobby Lobby. I'm sure that's exactly like the store where Elizabeth went in Meryton to buy her thread to do her Darcy-attracting needlework at Netherfield.

Before we go, I'll research Little Women and Jane Austen cross-stitch patterns so that we know what we're buying. I'm sure that somewhere on Etsy, someone has made a pattern for that storm quote, and maybe it's on special today since it is Louisa May Alcott's birthday.

But wait.

{I'm going to Internet shout; prepare yourself.}

LOOK AT WHAT I FOUND.

I may love Pride and Prejudice and I may love the BBC production of the story, but never, under any circumstances, do I want something like this in my home.

Also, it would take me approximately 17 years to complete, and don't you think there's something accusatory in Darcy's eyes? It's like he's saying to you, "I'm a classic character from British literature and this is what you turn me into? Why couldn't you have gone for the much more mundane and obvious choice like the one below?"

I bet those eyes of Darcy follow you wherever you go in the room, and that has made up my mind: a Little Women cross-stitch project is the only way to go.

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.

french enough for me

A few weeks ago—no, over a month ago now—when I was in Quebec, I picked up a French book at the airport. This may have been a desperate attempt to keep my French self happy as I left a cobblestoned, francophone area, headed back to the suburbs and the dare-I-say-it harsh tone of our wide-mouthed American English.

{If you disagree with me on this harsh tone point, please just watch any period piece from England and tell me if you don't wish you had a mellifluous accent like that.*}

I found a book by Philippe Delerm and snatched it up immediately, as if there weren't 10 other copies. Philippe is one of the French writers I can understand without too much thinking. He is, I mean to say, a writer I can read as if he were writing in English, and when I read his books, I sometimes have to stop to think: OMG, I might be bilingual. {If I'm really immersed, that might even come out in French.}

But really, it's Philippe Delerm bilingual, but I'm okay with that. I live in the middle of America and go to French-speaking areas, on average, once every year. In other words, my French brain doesn't get much use, although I'm forever telling myself that I should watch more French movies or read more French books or join a French conversation group.

That doesn't happen, though, when I get caught up in my very English life here, and so I use Philippe Delerm to make my French self feel better: At least you can still read this, I tell myself.

The thing about Philippe Delerm {besides that he's from Normandy, where I used to live} is that he writes in French about stuff I like to write about in English: brief snatches of every day life. Little descriptions of how the sun played off the roof on a walk. What the first sip of a coffee is like.

We are surrounded by insignificant-seeming moments, but Philippe Delerm shows them to us and gives them a glow of great significance. That's what I try to do in {some of} my writing and maybe that's why I can understand him so easily: we speak the same language, of a sort.

My new book by him is Le trottoir au soleil: The Sidewalk in the Sun.

Just listen to this:

On arrive là en fin d’après-midi, on fait une grande balade autour des champs qui encerclent le hameau. Le soleil commence à fléchir quand on revient vers la voiture. Il y a une petite terrasse de café. On ne resiste pas au plaisir de s’y installer. […]

La lumière est en vous aussi. Chaque seconde qui passe vous rive advantage à ce miracle. Un soir d’été. Comment partir?

Beautiful, n'est-ce pas?



*My gosh, I am so classist, but I'm trying to hide it in a footnote. When I watch English shows—Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility or of course Downton Abbey—I wish for the mellifluous accent of the upper classes. I would also like someone to bring me tea in bed every morning, but I would be demanding/unusual and request coffee. I would also be unpredictable and sometimes want it from a French press and sometimes from an Italian press.

for darkness shows the stars: a new take on jane austen

I swung by the library last night after work to pick up a new book.

At home, I am surrounded by books, and in case you can't tell from that widget over there on the right {scroll down: see the one called "Also, I Heart Reading"? Yeah, that's what you need to be looking at}, I'm almost always reading multiple books at once.

Stacked around my apartment in odd places—no, let's not call them odd. Let's call them quirkily surprising places. Let's call them proof that I love reading; surely I must if there is a stack of books on top of my microwave.

And on that tiered lamp from Target; one of the other shelves is currently holding nesting dolls from Russia {well-travelled and literate and a stacker!}.

And by my fruit bowl.

I am surrounded by books wherever I go, and so it's always surprising when I find myself uninspired with my selection. I have—literally but not in a hoarder kind of way—stacks of books to choose from. Books that at one moment I found interesting enough to buy but that, at this moment, aren't meeting my reading need.

I read multiple books at once to fulfill multiple reading needs. I like non-fiction for the weekends and travelling, when I have more time to read.

I like literary prose for the early mornings, when I do my best writing.

And I like engaging stories for bedtime, and that was what I was missing. I was trying to read literary prose {Dearly Beloved, a stream-of-consciousness novel by Anne Morrow Lindbergh—yes, that Lindbergh—that makes me think of my beloved Katherine Mansfield} at bedtime, and instead of calming me and transitioning me into sleep, it somehow made my dreams fantastical and memorable and I woke up more than I usually do.

No, that wouldn't do at all, so I swung by the library last night to pick up For Darkness Shows the Stars, a young adult book set in a dystopian future.

Nothing says "will not give you fantastical dreams" like "dystopian future," eh?

Oh, but it's more than a dystopian future: it's a re-imagining of Jane Austen's Persuasion in that dystopia.

Last year at this time, I re-read Persuasion {you can read about it here}, so maybe this is just my Persuasion season. Maybe next year, I can read a utopian future re-telling of it.

But for now, I hope in this For Darkness Shows the Stars, I get:

• discussions of how many pounds a year a man has: Unless this dystopia has no money and therefore no way to judge a man by how much he's worth.
• a silly, overdramatic scene that takes place on the pier in Lyme Regis: If you've read Persuasion, you'll know that there's a pivotal scene involving some jumping that is too precipitate, poor communication, and an unfortunate hitting of the head on the pier. I think in this re-telling, Lyme Regis should still exist—it should represent some indestructible part of society, and it should be the only place left to have fun, even though, in the movie version of Persuasion at least, it looks like a wet, windswept, unfun place to be.
• a letter written by the Wentworth character that makes the rest of the story worth it: As I wrote about last year, I will read 234 pages of that story, just to get to the point where Wentworth passionately declares his love—in a letter. {Um, sorry if you've never read the book. I probably should've said: SPOILER ALERT.} In this dystopian future, I will accept a hologram communique {you know, like in Star Wars} as the form of this letter.

a wagner matinee: thinking of willa cather in nebraska

Shostakovich's 5th Symphony is on the radio—it's Saturday night and Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion is featuring the St. Olaf Orchestra, and that's what they're playing.

Shostakovich. Just saying his name makes you sound like you're in the cultural know, as if you've taken in hundreds of concerts in hundreds of gold-edged halls from London to St. Petersburg and you can remember each of them with clarity that rivals the tone coming from the St. Olaf first-chair flute.

Shostakovich. I say it aloud in the car. I'm out on the edge of the prairie—Garrison Keillor reference there, don't know if you caught it—and heading east on I-80. I'm in Iowa but thinking of Nebraska and Willa Cather.

It must be the classical music: she wrote a short story called "A Wagner Matinee," and it's hard now for me to look at the prairie and not think of its main character—an old woman who years before gave up the music and culture and dances and high teas of Boston for a Nebraska farm and the man she loved. She returns to Boston in the story—leathery, work-worn hands, eyes that have squinted in the sun for too long, having heard no music since she left the East but splayed notes coming from an out-of-tune piano. Her nephew takes her to a Wagner concert, and it's no longer the prairie she hears and sees but the life she could've had.

The music crescendoes in the story, and I've always wanted to be sitting next to that old woman—no, more than that. Willa Cather makes you feel that you are that old woman: living and thankful for a life on the prairie that has its own richness, songs, color, and crescendoes, but at the same time, yearning {secretly, quietly} for the clash of the city, the hush of the concerts, and the beguiling knowledge that you're in the center of it all.

The concert ends. The Flying Dutchman and Tannhauser are over, but Aunt Georgiana doesn't want to leave. Her nephew thinks, "I understood. For her, just outside the door of the concert hall, lay the black pond with the cattle-tracked bluffs; the tall, unpainted house, with weather-curled boards; naked as a tower, the crook-backed ash seeldings where the dish-cloths hung to dry; the gaunt, moulting turkeys picking up the refuse about the kitchen door."

Out on I-80, I understood, too: with Shostakovich strains filling the car and abandoned barns and windmills, cows in their pasture, and dried out fields of corn {oh, the drought} filling the landscape, I understood.

The 5th Symphony became just the right soundtrack for that moment on the road. The swelling stings matched the swell of the hills, and I thought about what gumption, what daring, it must've taken to move out to the prairie and try to make a life here, as Aunt Georgiana did in the story and as my family did generations before me.

The piece ended and the audience at A Prairie Home Companion clapped. Wild applause for the orchestra, and I pretended it was a round of applause for all those who made the prairie a home so that years later, I could drive across it on a freeway and marvel at the orderly beauty of agriculture and hard work.

dinner alone with annie dillard {part 2}

And who wouldn't want to learn about writing from Annie Dillard?

In other words: what I gleaned about writing from the book Holy the Firm—and then put into a book report for my summer writing class.

Read the beginning here.

----------

Write in the Voice that Works for You (Syntax Can Go by the Wayside)
I get the sense reading Holy the Firm that I’m reading Annie Dillard’s journal.  She’s writing in spurts; she’s writing in half-sentences and quarter-sentences, and she’s writing, at times, like she’s praying.

Holy the Firm has the feel of Virginia Woolf’s or James Joyce’s best stream of consciousness:  there is the feeling that these thoughts are tumbling out of Annie Dillard’s brain, and this propels you to keep reading, to keep going, to tumble with her until she ends up making a beautifully profound point.  And you feel that the only way you could’ve gotten there is through her breaking-all-the-rules syntax.

Now, normally, I’m all for rules, but in a book as personal, reflective, and spiritual as Holy the Firm, breaking the “rules of good writing” is perfectly appropriate. It gives it a raw quality that is part of what drew me in so deeply in that Argentinean restaurant in Houston:  who cares about steak when there are words like this to read?

For outside it is bright.  The surface of things outside the drops has fused.  Christ himself and the others, and the brown warm wind, and hair, sky, the beach, the shattered water—all this has fused.  It is the one glare of holiness; it is bare and unspeakable.  There is no speech nor language; there is nothing, no one thing, nor motion, nor time.  There is only this everything.  There is only this, and its bright and multiple noise. (pp 67-68)

Or what about this?

Hoopla!  All that I see arches, and light arches around it.  The air churns out forces and lashes the marveling land.  A hundred times through the fields and along the deep roads I’ve cried Holy.  I see a hundred insects moving across the air, rising and falling.  Chipped notes of birdsong descend from the trees, tuneful and broken; the notes pile about me like leaves.  Why do these molded clouds make themselves overhead innocently changing, trailing their flat blue shadows up and down everything, and passing, and gone?  Ladies and gentlemen!  You are given insects, and birdsong, and a replenishing series of clouds. The air is buoyant and wholly transparent, scoured by grasses. (pp 72-73)

Following these phrases can be dizzying, but by letting the thoughts twirl, Annie Dillard invites us in.

I have so much underlined in Holy the Firm—words and phrases that stuck out to me—but as I went back to find examples of her free-flowing, unstructured voice, I discovered that often to get to the root of why I underlined a word or phrase, I had to read back a few paragraphs.  I had to start the journey again to remember why the ending place was so significant, and I like feeling that I’m along for a wordy adventure with a writer.

The Routine of Writing
I don’t have specific excerpts from Holy the Firm for this lesson; it’s more a lesson from Annie Dillard’s life.  I have yet to read her book The Writing Life, but from her works that I have read, I know that she is a routine writer:  she writes whether she feels like it or not.

Getting across your message—those nebulous thoughts in your head—is not always an easy task.  In fact, it rarely is, and the writing advice that seems the most useful and most mundane is:  write every day.  Be in the practice of writing—even when you despise every word coming out of you.  You sometimes have to write ugliness to get to the prettiness underneath; you sometimes need to start down one path to realize that the story you need to tell is actually a path taking off from that first one.

In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard talks about taking the same walk every day—to the point that she is so in tune with nature and the changing world around her that it almost seems like an extension of her.

This is how, in part, we should see writing:  as something we do every day so that we can feel more connected to the world around us.  Annie Dillard teaches me this, just in the way she writes.  It’s as if she’s saying:  pay attention to the world, and you will have things to say.

In Short, I Wish I Were Friends with Annie Dillard
I felt like, in a way, I had dinner with Annie Dillard in Houston.  Reading Holy the Firm while sitting at my table for one—fending off the waiter who asked if I’d like to stay after close and open up a bottle of Malbec with him—I forgot that I was in a strange city.  I forgot that I’d been gone from home for five days.  I forgot that my head was spinning from all the meetings I’d gone to.

I was in Annie Dillard’s world—seeing the moth, smelling the air on Puget Sound, looking for God in the small things.  And that, for me, is good writing:  when it takes you away from where you are, and when you close the book, you start to see the world around you in a new light.

dinner alone with annie dillard {part 1}

In my summer writing class, I get to write a book report. This is, in fact, the third time I've taken this class, so for the past three summers, I've been able to delve back into that particularly primary school-sounding "book report."

Two years ago, I wrote about the book Nothing Remains the Same.

And last year, it was Why Is My Mother Getting a Tattoo? And Other Questions I Wish I Never Had to Ask.

Don't get the wrong idea here: these are not five paragraph essays about character, setting, and dialogue. We're supposed to choose books in genres that we write in, so I choose personal essay books, and then use the book report to work out my aggression toward the author.

About how they're funnier than me.

Or sharper than me.

Or had a book published by the time they were 30.

Or say things that I have most definitely thought before—but they have said it better.

My book reports are really more about catharsis and working through my issues, so when it came time to do this year's report, I thought—why change that approach? It's working so well!

My target this year: Annie Dillard. Darn her and her Pulitzer Prize.

I've written about Annie before—I read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek while vacationing out West with my parents a few years ago, and it's hard to be surrounded by so much expansive nature, be reading Annie Dillard, and not write these reflective, searching for meaning essays.

Hiking in Zion National Park and reading Annie is basically the perfect set-up for a nature essay about seeing beauty everywhere {you can see me attempting this here}.

Earlier this summer, I picked up another Annie Dillard book at a Friends of the Library sale: a quarter for Annie? Oh, yes.

And look what I got from my quarter: a book report and a chance to work out my envy of Annie Dillard. Money well spent, I tell you, money well spent.

What I Read This Summer: Holy the Firm by Annie Dillard

I was in an Argentinean restaurant near the Galleria in Houston, but that’s not where my mind and heart were.  I had come in from the heat, the oppressive, pushing heat, into this cool, dark place with red accents to catch the eye.  Come in to the hostess asking, “Just you tonight?

A table for one, please, and I held my held my head high and my Annie Dillard book tightly as the hostess—a tall girl made taller by her black heels; she should be dancing a tango in the streets of Buenos Aires—took me to a tucked away table in the back.

I chose to sit not facing the wall as the hostess had offered, the chair pulled out for me so I could easily sit down and then avoid eye contact with anyone who might look with pity on the girl eating alone.

Instead, I told her I’d rather sit facing out, facing everyone, facing the eyes.  I am not bothered to be eating alone, I wanted to convey.  This is what happens when you go on business trips alone, but I’m not lonely.

The waiter made a show of removing the other setting at the table, and I made a show out of opening Holy the Firm after asking the waiter to recommend a good glass of Malbec.

And then.

With that first crack of Holy the Firm, my mind and heart were elsewhere.  I was no longer worrying about projecting the careless, independent air of the nonchalant solo diner—I was on Puget Sound with Annie Dillard, rejoicing in how the act of stringing together words can bring meaning, beauty, reflection, and the ability, for just a short space of time, to be elsewhere.

Annie Dillard’s writing is transcendent; that’s the best way I can describe it.  When I read her, time slows, my breathing deepens, and that thin veil between us and the eternal is pulled up just enough to make me aware that this side of the veil is the temporary one, a mere blip in time, a shadow of the other side.

How does Annie Dillard do it?  I’ve been wondering this since I read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek while in Zion National Park and wanted to award her, if I could, a million more Pulitzer Prizes for it.  Holy the Firm is shorter—but not less dense yet ethereal in true Annie Dillard style—so it gave me a chance to study her craft (over a glass of a good Malbec in Houston).

I’ve come up with three lessons on writing from Annie Dillard that I hope to apply to my more reflective pieces.  When I write about nature and really taking notice of it, I’m invariably thinking of Annie Dillard.

Notice Small Things
This lesson reminds me of that gift/self-help/encouragement book you often find in the checkout line at Barnes & Noble:  Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff…and it’s all small stuff.

This is:  Notice Small Things…and it’s all small things that make up big things.  By paying attention to the little things in her day, Annie Dillard is really saying something about the bigger things, about that thin veil, about how every tiny created creature is just that:  a creation.

For example, she writes about a moth.  An ugly, drawn-to-the-flames moth.  More specifically, she writes about the death of a moth she once witnessed while camping in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

One night a moth flew into the candle, was caught, burnt dry, and held.  I must have been staring at the candle, or maybe I looked up when a shadow crossed my page; at any rate, I saw it all.  A golden female moth, a biggish one with a two-inch wingspan, flapped into the fire, dropped her abdomen into the wet wax, stuck, flamed, frazzled and fried in a second. Her moving wings ignited like tissue paper, enlarging the circle of light in the clearing and creating out of the darkness the sudden blue sleeves of my sweater, the green leaves of jewelweed by my side, the ragged red trunk of a pine. At once the light contracted again and the moth’s wings vanished in a fine, foul smoke.  At the same time her six legs clawed, curled, blackened, and ceased, disappearing utterly. […]

And then this moth-essence, this spectacular skeleton, began to act as a wick.  She kept burning. […]

She burned for two hours without changing, without bending or leaning—only glowing within, like a building fire glimpsed through silhouetted walls, like a hollow saint, like a flame-faced virgin gone to God, while I read by her light, kindled […]. (pp 16-17)

Reading this, I am watching the moth’s death with Annie Dillard.  I am drawn in like (forgive me) a moth to the flame, and in two short pages, she conveys the fragility of life and the beauty and dignity possible in death without saying:  Now, here, I will talk about death.

She’s just writing about a moth.  She’s just opening her eyes to the small things that make up the big things, and she’s writing.

-----

There are two more lessons from Annie Dillard that I learned by reading this very thin book.

If you're eager to learn from Annie, too, you can jump ahead to the lessons here.

to try with the pug

Really Awesome Idea to Try with Little Pug

I can wear a pretty dress.

She can row the boat.

Just-picked flowers are essential to this idea, as is that hat.

I don't know, though, if I can pull off looking so bored. I'll be ON A BOAT. WITH A PUG. AND FLOWERS.

I bet tucked under that brocaded-blanket {seriously, it looks like curtains} is a copy of a Jane Austen novel—or maybe it's "The Lady of Shalott." Maybe I could have my own Anne of Green Gables re-enactment while I read "The Lady of Shalott." You know, like here:

And then Little Pug could rescue me.

These are the kinds of things, by the way, that you think about when it's such a glorious May day outside your office window.

blue nights

Every now and again, you come across prose so perfectly on point that you can't stop reading.

This is how I feel with Joan Didion.

This is how I felt when I opened Blue Nights and read:

In certain latitudes there comes a span of time approaching and following the summer solstice, some weeks in all, when the twilights turn long an blue. [...] You notice it first as April ends and May begins, a change in the season, not exactly a warming—in fact, not at all a warming—yet suddenly summer seems near a possibility, even a promise. You pass a window, you walk to Central park, you find yourself swimming in the color blue: the actual light is blue, and over the course of an hour of so this blue deepens, becomes more intense even as it darkens and fades, approximately finally the blue of the glass on a clear day at Chartres, or that of the Cerenkov radiation thrown off by the fuel rods in the pools of nuclear reactors. The French called this time of day "l'heure bleue." To the English, it was "the gloaming." The word "gloaming" reverberates, echoes—the gloaming, the glimmer, the glitters, the glisten, the glamour—carrying in its consonants the images of houses shuttering, gardens darkening, grass-lined rivers slipping through the shadows. During the blue nights you thing the end of day will never come. As the blue nights draw to a close (and they will, and they do) you experience an actual chill, an apprehension of illness, at the moment you first notice: the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer is gone.

Two hours later, I stopped reading, and it was the latest I had stayed up since...since who knows when. That a book about grief and love and life and aging can keep me awake says quite a lot about the book. {Similarly, that I keep falling asleep reading Margaret Thatcher's autobiography may say quite a lot about that book.}

The book is not on an easy topic, a fact that was brought home when someone in my office, after listening to me praise its wonders, asked for a summary.

"Well, you see, Joan Didion had a rather traumatic 20 months; she lost her husband suddenly {and subsequently wrote The Year of Magical Thinking about that journey of grief}, and then her daughter died. So Blue Nights is about her loss but also about her life with her daughter. It's about memory and how it can get muddled. It's about love and how it can get muddled. Did I mention the prose that makes you long to sit with Joan Didion over a cup of strong black coffee—and just listen?"

Blue Nights isn't easy, but it's honest. Real. Scathing. Introspective {at times, you feel like you're reading her journal, and you think perhaps you should close the cover and put it back where you found it}. Emotionally dizzying.

But oh, it's achingly beautiful.

Please go get Blue Nights now, should you be in need of a little pretty prose in your life. I know I generally am.

God's grandeur: on listening and good literature

I sat in church and tried to focus, but the pastor had mentioned Gerard Manley Hopkins in his sermon.

In the face of Hopkins, it's often hard to concentrate on anything but the images that fill that movie screen in your mind as you read his poems.

Word by word, verb by noun, that man could create the most dazzling, glowing images with just a few strokes of the pen.

I imagine that, if he were a painter, he would've used entire tubes of color on one painting.

He would've created the kind of paintings that imprint themselves on your eyelids—the kind you can still see when you close your eyes. He would've painted the kind you can see for years after you leave the white, hushed space of the museum where you first saw the boldly declarative painting.

Hopkins' poems let you make your own paintings in your mind, the kind that come back years later when you hear or read the poem again.

So, in light of Hopkins' image-laced words, I can't be blamed for not paying attention to the sermon, even if it was, ironically, about listening {to the Lord, of course, not just to the pastor}.

As quickly as the images came back for "God's Grandeur"—images formed when I read the poem for my Modern Brit Lit class at Truman State University—I stumbled around my brain for the literary details I'd learned about Hopkins as part of that class.

Not just the facts of his life: those are not interesting to trot out, even in the dullest of trivia games.

I mean those literary details that explain why he was an important writer and what his traits were and how you can identify him in a poetry line-up {which is the kind of line-up interesting to English majors and perhaps not to any one else.

Gerard Manley Hopkins was known for developing his own rhythm. He gave it a particular name, and as I sat in church not bothering to listen, I was trying to remember what he'd called it.

It seemed, in that moment, that the entire point of my English degree dangled dangerously off a cliff, hanging on with fingers that were quickly tiring.

A bit dramatic, a bit Gothic, a bit exaggerated, and perhaps that's what my English degree was good for: for creating overwrought sentences.

How could I study for years—analyzing, deconstructing, comparing, contrasting, writing, reading—and end up, not even a decade later, unable to recall the word for that kind of rhythm Hopkins created?

This disturbed me.

It made me wonder what else I would forget, but that didn't seem like a thought worth pursuing during church, when you're supposed to be remembering Jesus and not worrying about tomorrow {for tomorrow will care for itself}.

Through the Nicene Creed, through the Confession of Sins, through the Doxology, through the Lord's Prayer {so many words ingrained in my soul!}, I tried to come up with that one word for Hopkins' rhythm.

I could come up with:

• fragments from his other poems: No worst, there is none. Oh the mind, mind has mountains. Glory be to God for dappled things.
• where I was when I first read all those poems: mostly in Pickler Memorial Library, on the second floor and tucked away in a corner next to a window where I could see the bell tower.
• an image of my Modern Brit Lit textbook open to the Hopkins' section: Notes everywhere, in the margins, in between the lines, many things underlined as I tried to get down the essence of the poem. As I tried to distill it into ink and lodge it in my brain.

But I could not come up with that particular vocabulary word, and I finally had to let it go.

I could remember the essential of the poems, and when it comes to literature, isn't that what matters? Literature, good literature, is about getting under our facades and niceties. It's about challenging what we've always thought. It's about figuring out a new way to say what we've always thought.

Good literature isn't about memorizing every word; it's about taking in every word and letting it soak into who you are.

If the feeling of a poem is still with you years after you've read it, you know it was good literature. Even if you can't remember the name of Hopkins' rhythm.


God's Grandeur
Gerard Manley Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

-----

It's sprung rhythm, by the way. It came to me the next day when I was at work, and I breathed a sigh of relief. My English degree knowledge and trivia may be slipping away by degrees, but it's not all gone yet.

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 may have looked like this

On Monday, big news hit the Jane Austen world: she may not have been ugly.

No, seriously, this was one of the headlines: Jane Austen wasn't as ugly as people think.

Jane has been in the news quite a bit over the last year or so—

Last fall, it was revealed that Jane's original manuscripts are full of terrible spellings and laughable attempts at grammar. The Queen of the Period Drama, unable to make a coherent sentence? If I knew what smelling salts were, I'd call for them; instead, I just wrote a little thing on her spelling mistakes, which you can read here.

Then there was the time a few weeks ago when a murder mystery author suggested that Jane Austen had been poisoned with arsenic. You can read about it in the Guardian here.

But—and my crime knowledge mostly stems from watching Law and Order with my parents {that chung-chung clangy thing they do at the end of scenes is addictive, I think}—don't you have to have a motive to have a murder? And who would want to kill Jane Austen?

I guess you could say someone who was jealous, but Charlotte Bronte {never Jane's biggest fan} was only 1 or so when Jane died. I don't think even the author who put a crazy lady in the attic of Thornfield Hall would've been familiar with arsenic in the cradle.

But—ooh!—maybe someone wanted to kill Jane because she was NOT ugly?!?!

Yes, it seems that Jane Austen was murdered because she was fairly all right looking. Let's go with that theory. I think that sounds like it should be the top item on the BBC News tonight.

This whole not ugly thing came about because an author who's writing a biography about Jane discovered what may be a portrait of her—and up until now, there have been just two accepted portraits of Jane.

One is an 1810 sketch by her sister Cassandra, and everybody says she looks cross about being a spinster in it.

This raises an important question: How do they {you know, smart academics} know she's cross about spinsterhood in the drawing? Couldn't she just have been upset that Elizabeth Bennet's character wasn't coming out right? Or maybe her sister was teasing her, or maybe she had a case of the mean reds.

One frown in a woman who is not married does not a cross spinster make. But you can judge for yourself—see the picture below. What do you think she's upset about?

The other accepted portrait is an 1870 re-doing of the sketch, one where Jane is not frowning but is looking off to the side, as if she's daydreaming about Mr. Darcy. This is the one used on most of the book markers and book jackets for Jane because who would want a picture of an angry spinster staring at you every time you picked up Sense and Sensibility?

So those are the two images we've had of Jane for hundreds of years, and when you're talking about a woman who couldn't spell and who may have been murdered, it's tiring to have to trot out the same images.

Enter the new portrait—and a sigh of relief that Jane wasn't ugly, although...

Okay, look at this potential new portrait of Jane.

Do you think this proves she wasn't ugly?

I see a crazy cat lady writer with a really long neck.

And I also think this: Why is it so important that we think of Jane Austen as pretty? As a successful woman? As a non-cross person? Why, if we can see so much of ourselves in our characters in their flaws and small joys, do we want Jane to line up with some sort of ideal?

Please discuss via a five-paragraph essay format. I will not judge you on your grammar and spelling, but do please include a picture.

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.

you pierce my soul: a jane austen letter

I read an entire book to get to one letter. It was 234 pages in Persuasion before I got to—

Miss A.E—

I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own, than when you almost broke it eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. You alone have brought me to Bath. For you alone I think and plan. —Have you not seen this? Can you fail to have understood my wishes?—I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine. I can hardly write. I am every instant hearing something which overpowers me. You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice, when they would be lost on others. —Too good, too excellent creature! You do us justice indeed. You do believe that there is true attachment and constancy among men. Believe it to be most fervent, most undeviating in

F.W.

I must go, uncertain of my fate; but I shall return hither, or follow your party, as soon as possible. A word, a look will be enough to decide whether I enter your father's house this evening, or never.

Emphasis mine, all mine. And were this letter mine.

There is something so rewarding in getting to this letter from Captain Wentworth in Persuasion. I can't believe I'm about to say this about Jane Austen, but there are some clunky, mediocre sections of this book, but I push through those because I know this letter is at the end.

Yeah, I totally just critiqued Jane. To atone for that {someone with Jane Austen in her blog name, digging into her beloved idol!}, I'm going to offer this praise and hope I don't get kicked out of the I Heart Jane Austen Society {that I don't actually belong to}: No one else can so exquisitely create insufferable relations like Jane Austen, and she showcases that in Persuasion.

With a completely quiet and straightforward delivery, she gives us characters so laughable that we can't help but thank our lucky genealogy that they aren't in our family. I think her genius lies in never allowing Anne Elliot, our lovely heroine, to mock her father or her sister, no matter how much they warrant an eye roll or a derisive snort.

Jane does the same thing in Pride and Prejudice: Elizabeth knows how ridiculous her mother and most of her sisters are, but we see that she knows how to deal with their emotions and dramatics and self-centered drivel. In Elizabeth's position and given her verbal prowess, most of us would take every opportunity to cut and dice and remind her mother that the world does not revolve around her and her hypochondriac histrionics.

But Elizabeth doesn't do that; instead, she guides her silly sisters and sets a good example and tries to cover their social gaffes.

In Anne Elliot and Elizabeth Bennet {and Elinor Dashwood; I can't leave her out of this list}, we have examples of how we ought to act, and just reading about them makes you feel like a better person, like someone who can handle tricky co-workers and meddling mothers {not talking about you, Mama!} and people who are more concerned with the latest fashion than with what's happening in the big world.

Thank heavens for Anne Elliot's example and ability to manage her preening, egotistical, out-of-touch father: that and the letter from Captain Wentworth at the end of the book are what keep me reading Persuasion, even as I roll my eyes at some sections.

{I may have read Jane Austen's books repeatedly, but I have yet to learn her heroines' ability to not roll their eyes at silliness.}

Take the big drama section when Louisa Musgrove takes a tumble on a pier at Lyme. It's written in a "this happened and then this happened and then this happened and after that, there was this" style that doesn't lend itself to getting emotionally caught up in the moment—as clearly all the characters are.

I mean, it must be shocking to see someone smack her head against a stone walkway, but when I read this section, I mostly think, 'Was it really that bad? Or are these people overreacting? This is the time when they believed that if you had a cold, you should be kept in bed for three weeks. And they believed in using leeches to suck your blood to make you better. They clearly were not health authorities; maybe Louisa just needs some smelling salts and then the story can move on.'

By the end of the scene, though, you realize that this is a pivot point in the story—from this moment, something changes in Anne and Captain Wentworth's relationship—and you find yourself needing to re-read the last few pages to try to get into the drama.

Or at least I do. But the second reading leaves me cold still and I blame it all on Jane's prosaic, practically bullet-pointed presentation of the drama.

Eh, I think. At least there's that letter at the end of the book to redeem this.

After spending 234 pages with insufferable relations, self-centered people, and blase descriptions of action, when you get to this written declaration of love, you stop breathing, just as, I'm sure, Anne Elliot did when she read this letter for the first time.

And that is why I keep reading Persuasion: to get to the point where I don't breathe.

more things i said in vegas

The last time I was in Las Vegas, I made a list of things I said there, all of them saturated in a "I don't think Las Vegas is for me" tone.

This time was no different.

• If I had to imagine hell, it would be the Forum Shops at Caesar's Palace. Some co-workers and I wandered over there after dinner one night because, as they told me, I just had to see it—it perfectly exemplifies Vegas. And they were right: it's this mall built to look like ancient Rome, except it smells better {I would assume} and there's indoor plumbing {which helps it smell better}.
  
  Also, ancient Rome probably didn't have an H&M that looked more like a nightclub than a store. I'm pretty sure I saw a mannequin posed as if she were doing a pole dance.
  
  There are fountains and statues and the facades of the buildings look like stone in the Forum Shops. Look like stone, yes: as with many things in Vegas, where nothing is that old, the Forum Shops are trying to look old when really they're made out of, I'm relatively sure, drywall and creative painting.
  
  The Forum Shops are in my version of hell because there are about 3 million people crammed into the fake cobblestone walkway {Did they even have cobblestone in ancient Rome? Why is it here? Shouldn't this be dirt?}.
  
  And all 3 million of those people are not watching where they're going because they're distracted by the biggest copy of the David they've ever seen. Or they're distracted by how the ceiling is painted to look like a dusky sky. Or they're distracted by the pole dancing in H&M. They're just distracted and aimlessly wandering, and I don't like dodging 3 million people while on fake cobblestone streets. Or real ones, for that matter.
• Vegas makes me cranky. I said this to a co-worker, and she did not disagree with me. She's true and honest like that. And it's hard to miss how cranky I get around too much noise and bright lights.
• Last night, I took a bath and read Persuasion. To which my co-worker said, "You do realize you're in Vegas, right?" Immediately after she said that, I realized that I'd become a stereotype of myself.
• Tub does not stop filling automatically. I read the sign above the bathtub in my room aloud. {But no, I did not read Persuasion aloud while in the bathtub, and certainly didn't do that using a fake British accent.} Back to the sign: You know that when there's a sign, that means that someone has done it before, surprising as that may be.
  
  Someone—WHO has such a smart bathtub at home that it stops filling when it's reached the perfect level?!?!—started the bath and walked away. And then an entire floor of the Paris Hotel flooded. Or maybe just their bathroom flooded. Regardless, there was a flood, and now there must be a small sign above the bathtub warning you to not expect too much from the bath equipment.
• This room also doesn't have a coffee maker. My room at the Cosmopolitan didn't have a coffee maker, either, which leads me to believe that they're illegal in Vegas. You can drink on the street and smoke indoors, but you cannot—on penalty of being sent to the Forum Shops at Caesar's—make your own coffee here.
  
  Perhaps I should start bringing one of my own coffee makers to Vegas; I have four, after all.

And the most indicative quote from my Vegas trip: I think Vegas and I should break up. We just weren't made for each other.

jane eyre: reader, i married him

Tonight, I'm going to see the new Jane Eyre, and the weather is behaving appropriately: it is gray and windy and cold.

It is easy to pretend I'm on a moor with a brooding Rochester.

This seems like an ideal time to say: Jane Eyre was my favorite book when I was 12. I read it and instantly connected with her, which is odd because I'm not an unloved orphan nor do I live in England nor had I ever seen a moor.

{Later, when I saw Othello, I got a little confused by that use of the word moor, and I had this perplexed period where I was convinced Othello took place on some windswept hill in England.}

But oh, how thrilled I was when Jane said, "Reader, I married him," and as a 12-year-old, I started imagining my own Byronic romance, although I had no idea what that would be and I was apparently ignoring the part where Rochester had a crazy wife kept in the attic.

A final confession: I didn't know how to pronounce Eyre when I first read Jane Eyre, so in my head, I said "Eye-ree."

Sort of like India.Arie but on a moor {perhaps with Othello}.

Clearly, I was a confused 12-year-old. Maybe this movie will straighten me out or maybe it'll re-start that longing for a Byronic romance.

{Oh my, I hope it doesn't.}

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.

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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.

birthdays and a sharp tongue

I realized that I've been writing about Christmas a lot recently—well, 'tis the season and all that.

However, I'm taking a break from Christmas today, and instead going on a little literary diversion.

Did you know that LM Montgomery and Louisa May Alcott's birthdays were last week?

No?

Well, I didn't, either. Then Twitter, that source of knowledge and wasted time, taught me something. Louisa's was November 29 and LM's was November 30.

I should've had a party, and I am, I must say, slightly disappointed that I missed a chance to have a literary nerdy party.

Next year. There's always next year. I'll start planning my costume now. You should, too.

As if wanting to further cement this LM and Louisa connection—and their separate but similar effects on my life—someone got to my blog by searching "little women and anne of green gables similarities."

Google sent them here, and while yes, I have written a little about both Jo and Anne, I like to think of it this way: Google knows that I am the embodiment of both Jo and Anne. The search results prove it, people. What do Little Women and Anne of Green Gables have in common? ME.

To celebrate—belatedly—I'm offering an excerpt from Little Women, one that has been particularly helpful to me today.

Jo, Anne, and I have this in common: Wayward tongues. Sharp tones. Tempers.

We have the ability to slice with our words and the knowledge that we can cut people down with well-placed verbs.

But we also share an earnest desire to control the sharpness. To use our words to build others up or to make them laugh. To be practiced in the art of thinking before we speak.

When I have days when my tongue has been sharper than a doubled-edged sword {and not in the Word of God way}, that's when I need to turn to Marilla or Marmee. I need to read, in tough love language, that this will be a life-long challenge—this learning to rein in my words—but that it is worth it. That other people struggle with this. That every time you speak harshly, that is an opportunity to speak kindly in apology—to carefully consider those words so that you can suture up the wound you caused in a friendship or relationship.

I spoke out of turn today, but I know that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it {there's my tribute to Anne}. And I need to read again what Marmee says to Jo about controlling her tongue.

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"It's my dreadful temper! I try to cure it; I think I have, and then it breaks out worse than ever. Oh, mother, what shall I do? What shall I do?" cried poor Jo, in despair.

"Watch and pray, dear; never get tired of trying; and never think it is impossible to conquer your fault," said Mrs. March, kissing the wet cheek so tenderly that Jo cried harder than ever.

"You don't know, and you can't guess how bad it is! It seems as if I could do anything when I'm in a passion; I get so savage, I could hurt anyone, and enjoy it. I'm afraid I shall do something dreadful someday, and spoil my life, and make everybody hate me. Oh, mother, help me, do help me!"

"I will, my child, I will. Don't cry so bitterly, but remember this day, and resolve, with all your soul, that you will never know another like it. Jo, dear, we all have our temptations, some far greater than yours, and it often takes us all our lives to conquer them...."