Mommy Brain

Although we may have brought forth some fruit and have a joyful hope that we are abiding in the vine, yet there are times when we feel very barren. Prayer is lifeless, love is cold, faith is weak, each grace in the garden of our heart languishes and droops. We are like flowers in the hot sun, desperately needing the refreshing shower. In such a condition what are we to do? The text is addressed to us in just such a state. “Sing, O barren one…break forth into singing and cry aloud.” (Isaiah 54:1) But what can I sing about? I cannot talk about the present, and even the past looks full of barrenness. I can sing of Jesus Christ. I can talk of visits that the Redeemer has paid to me in the past; or if not of these, I can magnify the great love with which He loved His people when He came from the heights of heaven for their redemption. I will go to the cross again. Come, my soul, you were once heavy-laden, and you lost your burden there. Go to Calvary again. Perhaps that very cross that gave you life may give you fruitfulness. What is my barrenness? It is the platform for His fruit-creating power. What is my desolation? It is the dark setting for the sapphire of His everlasting love. I will go to Him in my poverty, I will go in my helplessness, I will go in all my shame and backsliding; I will tell Him that I am still His child, and finding confidence in His faithful heart, even I, the barren one, will sing and cry aloud.

~from Morning and Evening by Charles Spurgeon

Deja watches and smiles. “Sometimes I just can’t get over it,” she says.

“What’s that, Dej?”

“You’re all just so . . . beautiful,” she says. “I have the most beautiful sisters in the world.”

We all share this feeling, but only Deja could give it voice. In anyone else’s mouth, these words would sound syrupy and insincere. Deja manages to convey their real meaning. My sisters are lovely, but she’s not talking about physical beauty. Together, we illuminate each other. When we reflect off each other, whatever light we possess individually is made that much brighter. It is this brightness that Deja finds beautiful. It is the brilliance and power of sisters.

~ from About My Sisters by Debra Ginsberg

The people at Amazon.com are very smart. That whole “Free shipping on orders over $25″ gets me every time. I found this wonderful little chapter book series called Andrew Lost that Jonathan is devouring. Since this is the first series that has really grabbed him, I wanted to make sure and keep them coming, but the library only has a couple of titles. Fortunately, the books are paperback and only $3.99 apiece. Which brings me back to the $25/free shipping thing. When I order a few books for Jonathan, and a new handwriting book for Natalie, and I’m still slightly under that $25 mark, I can’t let it go. I have to add something from my wish list to get that free shipping. This time, it was The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop by Lewis Buzbee, which has turned out to be a gem of a book.

I’ve read a lot of books that are love letters to reading or to books themselves, but this book is a love letter to bookstores. Buzbee worked for several years as a sales employee in various bookstores, then moved on to work as a sales rep for several publishing houses. He loves books - and he is addicted to bookstores. Buzbee talks about his own experience as a bookseller and rhapsodizes on how the bookstore is basically the perfect retail destination. Along the way, he also talks about the history of the bookshop, beginning with the bookseller’s stalls outside the library of Alexandria and taking the reader up to the famous Shakespeare & Co. in Paris, whose owner published James Joyce’s Ulysses when no British publishing houses would touch it. This book is just full of little nuggets that will stick with me for a while.

Four out of five stars.

“The invitation of the bookstore occurs on so many levels that it seems we must take our time. We peruse the shelves, weaving around the other customers, feeling a cold gust of rain from the open door, not really knowing what we want. Then there! on that heaped table, or hidden on the lowest, dustiest shelf, we stumble on it. A common thing, this volume. There may be five thousand copies of this particular book in the world, or fifty thousand, or half a million, all exactly alike, but this one is as rare as if it had been made solely for us. We open to the first page, and the universe unfolds, once upon a time.” p. 8-9

“The deepest connections with customers usually come at the front counter, precisely because that island of counter between customer and bookseller creates an imaginative space for the two to occupy. There’s the safety of the physical barrier, which allows both sides to be a little freer; you are close to each other, face to face, but a barrier remains. Both parties are free to leave at any moment, the clerk to her duties, the customer to the world.

But finally, it’s the cash register that holds sway, for it implies the exchange of goods for money, and it’s during these transactions that a bookseller learns the most about a customer. Out on the floor, it’s all possibility, what a customer might choose to purchase, but at the counter, once the register starts ringing, that’s where the revelations are. These are the books the customer will take home to read or stack up or offer as a gift, and each book, in some way, represents a part of that person’s life. It’s not a mere tally of reading tastes, who likes what authors, it’s a gauge of what concerns people, what occupies them. There, face to face over the elbow-polished wood of the counter, bookseller and customer share a silent but telling moment. Travel guides, cookbooks, a book on divorce, one about ailing parents, a book of baby names, one about the horrifying spread of war in the new century, maybe the vampire novel that will take your mind off everything else, if only for twenty minutes at a time. It’s a little like looking into another person’s heart.” p. 106-107

“By the sixteenth century, the use of coffee had become commonplace in the Middle East, and the Arabic coffeehouse was a long-established cultural fixture. Patrons of early European coffeehouses would have recognized the style and intent of the Arabic coffeehouse. Customers were invited to stay for a long time and to engage in impassioned literary, political, and theological debates. One European observer of the Arabic coffeehouse called it a “theatre for the exercise of profane eloquence,” And Ralph Hattox in his Coffee and Coffeehouses has referred to it as “an excuse for sociable procrastination.” Same as it ever was.” p. 111-112

“A bookseller frequently hears the same dismaying comment, “Well, I’d like to read it, but books are just too expensive.” Considering that books might have cost 50 cents when you were a child, or that you might be able to find the same book for free in a library, then I suppose that a $25.00 hardcover novel does seem extravagant. But a little comparison shopping might help the recalcitrant customer rethink the book’s long-term value.

Today a San Francisco movie ticket will set you back $10.00. Two hours later, give or take, and poof, that money is nothing but your memory, at least until you pony up another $20.00 for the DVD. A 400-page novel will probably take at least 8 hours to read. Once you buy a book, it’s yours, and you can mark and look up at your leisure that one terrific paragraph that keeps floating through your head.

The technology of the book is much more flexible than film, more user friendly. The reader can dip into the book at will, without electricity, and is always aware of where she is in the book, halfway through, a third of the way, mere pages from the end, her fingers helping to measure the excitement of coming to the conclusion. Watching a scene from a film in slow motion is possible, but there’s an unreal air to it; reading a passage from a book slowly does nothing to rob the words of their power. A film presents images; a book creates them inside the reader, with the reader’s active participation. Books are good for your brain. Neurologists have found that, when watching television or film, the viewer’s eyes remain idle, straight ahead, but when reading, the actual physical movement of scanning the page from left to right (or right to left, or up and down, depending) stimulates and conditions the brain, a Stairmaster of the mind.

The same $25.00 you’d spend on a hardcover novel could easily be spent for the entree at a tony restaurant, salad, dessert, and wine not included. A terrific time is had by all, but the meal is quickly a memory. Chef Glenn Groening of Kezar Bar and Restaurant in San Francisco has created a duck breast over risotto - I claim it’s one of the finest meals on the planet - and reasonably priced at $15.00, or roughly the price of a new trade paperbck, but when I’ve finished the duck and want just a few more bites, as I always do, well, I’m out of luck unless I order another entire serving. Books are digested, Francis Bacon reminds us, but never consumed.” p. 131-132

“I buy books when I travel because the bookstores I visit then surprise me with their selections. The new novel by Brazilian writer Moacyr Scliar may be in my local bookstore, or cheaper on Amazon.com, but I haven’t stumbled across it yet. But if I’m at Square Books in Oxford, Mississipi, where the staff member has read the book or simply liked the cover, it might be displayed to catch my eye. Or it could be something as simple as the light in the Fiction section on that given day and how it strikes the book’s colorful spine and calls out to me. Every bookstore has its own delights, and that’s why we can never have too many. The hard part is getting all those books in the suitcase.” p. 193

“We still prefer that quiet rustle of the pages, and besides, how do you press a wildflower into the pages of an e-book?” p. 202

The books of our childhood offer a vivid door to our own pasts, and not necessarily for the stories we read there, but for the memories of where we were and who we were when we were reading them; to remember a book is to remember the child who read that book.

from p. 36-37 of The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop by Lewis Buzbee

Standing by Words: Essays by Wendell Berry

If both writer and reader assume that the writer’s gift makes him or her a person of a radically different kind, then it seems that the relation between writer and reader must be radically reduced. Reading a book becomes merely a diversion. A writer such as Shakespeare is of course distinguished by his language, which is certainly his gift and his love. But his language is, after all, the common tongue, to which his gift is uncommon grace and power; without his commonness we could neither recognize nor value his distinction. p. 9

The trouble, as in our conscious moments we know, is that we are terrifyingly ignorant. The most learned of us are ignorant. The acquisition of knowledge always involves the revelation of ignorance - almost is the revelation of ignorance. Our knowledge of the world instructs us first of all that the world is greater than our knowledge of it. To those who rejoice in the abundance and intricacy of Creation, this is a source of joy, as it is to those who rejoice in freedom. (”The future comes only by surprise,” we say, “- thank God!”) To those would-be solvers of “the human problem,” who hope for knowledge equal to (capable of controlling) the world, it is a source of unremitting defeat and bewilderment. The evidence is overwhelming that knowledge does not solve “the human problem.” Indeed, the evidence overwhelmingly suggests - with Genesis - that knowledge is the problem. Or perhaps we should say instead that all our problems tend to gather under two questions about knowledge: Having the ability and desire to know, how and what should we learn? And, having learned, how and for what should we use what we know? p. 65

The names poetry and marriage are given only to certain things, not to anything or to everything. Poetry is made of words; it is expected to keep a certain fidelity to everyday speech and a certain fidelity to music; if it is unspeakable or unmusical, it is not poetry. Marriage is the mutual promise of a man and a woman to live together, to love and help each other, in mutual fidelity, until death. It is understood that these definitions cannot be altered to suit convenience or circumstance, any more than we can call a rabbit a squirrel because we preferred to see a squirrel. Poetry of the traditionally formed sort, for instance, does not propose that its difficulties should be solved by skipping or forcing a rhyme or by mutilating syntax or by writing prose. Marriage does not invite one to solve one’s quarrel with one’s wife by marrying a more compliant woman. Certain limits, in short, are prescribed - imposed before the beginning. p. 93

If people only made prudent marriages, what a stop to population there would be!

~ William Makepeace Thackeray

I am enjoying The Warden by Anthony Trollope very much. It is a lot like reading Austen. I especially enjoy his wry comments to the reader on what is happening or about to happen. For example:

“And now I own I have fears for my heroine; not as to the upshot of her mission–not in the least as to that; as to the full success of her generous scheme, and the ultimate result of such a project, no one conversant with human nature and novels can have a doubt; but as to the amount of sympathy she may receive from those of her own sex. Girls below twenty and old ladies above sixty will do her justice; for in the female heart the soft springs of sweet romance reopen after many years, and again gush out with waters pure as in earlier days, and greatly refresh the path that leads downwards to the grave. But I fear that the majority of those between these two eras will not approve of Eleanor’s plan. I fear that unmarried ladies of thirty-five will declare that there can be no probability of so absurd a project being carried through; that young women on their knees before their lovers are sure to get kissed, and that they would not put themselves in such a position did they not expect it; that Eleanor is going to Bold only because circumstances prevent Bold from coming to her; that she is certainly a little fool, or a little schemer, but that in all probability she is thinking a good deal more about herself than her father.

Dear ladies, you are right as to your appreciation of the circumstances, but very wrong as to Miss Harding’s character. Miss Harding was much younger than you are, and could not, therefore, know, as you may do, to what dangers such an encounter might expose her. She may get kissed; I think it very probable that she will; but I give my solemn word and positive assurance, that the remotest idea of such a catastrophe never occurred to her as she made the great resolve now alluded to.”

Alan Alda on acting in live theater (I miss it!):

“Sometimes, standing on the stage, I have an experience of unusual awareness. I know I’m in a theater and that an audience is watching, and I know that the woman across from me is not really who she’s claiming to be. And in spite of knowing we’re in front of other people, I know we’re alone in this room. I’m also aware of something much weirder than that. I’m aware that the two of us are other people, someplace else, arguing over something. We are so completely involved with this struggle, we could say almost anything at this moment. But we say the same thing we said last night. And I’m aware that this is because we’re acting. It’s like an endless arc of images in paired mirrors curving off into infinity. And when this moment is at its most intense, it’s at its lightest. There is no strain, in fact, there’s a feeling of floating. But, of course, I’m aware that, far from floating, I’m standing on a stage that’s raked for the audience to see us better, and I have to be careful where I plant my feet or I’ll lose my balance.

This multiple awareness is for me the ecstasy of acting. When this happens, there doesn’t seem to be any part of my brain that isn’t working on something. The clock stops, and an intricate pas de deux takes place in slow motion. You choke with emotion, yet you feel nothing. You know everything and nothing at once. You walk a narrow beam a hundred stories high, but your steps are as sure as on a sidewalk. Failure can’t happen. Death is remote. There is no way to know what you’ll say next, and then you say it. And you notice that you’re saying it slightly differently from the last time you said it at exactly this moment.”

~p. 79-80

On September 11th:

“They were buildings so tall, they had thrown out television signals across all of New York City and beyond, so simple and staunch that one glimpse of them, in a movie or on a souvenir plate, instantly said, This is New York. One by one, they descended to the ground, billowing an ugly, toxic cloud while disbelief and confusion rose in each of us from a place in our chest where once we had felt safety and comfort.

The towers came down, carrying with them the lives of people who had left us not at the end of their time, or even in an unexpected accident, but in an act of ignorant, malicious hatred. When that happened, a little patch of meaning seemed to come loose from us, like a layer of skin gone dead. Remember how after the disbelief came a desperate urge to do something? We all felt it. It was intolerable to think there was no action you could take. Out in the countryside where we lived, I went with three of my granddaughters to a shoe store. The girls were four, seven, and nine years old, and we gravely picked out a dozen pairs of heavy work boots for the rescue workers. We brought them to a truck parked across from the village commons, where two women on the back of the truck were hoisting up contributions meant for Ground Zero. In the days that followed ths attack, so many people sent truckloads of boots, blankets, and work clothes that trucks piled up along the Hudson and many tons of supplies never made it across the river from a warehouse in New Jersey. But it hadn’t been wasted effort, because we all needed to take some kind of action. The satirical website The Onion published a fake news article that, while it may have been meant to be funny, captured with poignancy our desperation. It told of a woman in Topeka, Kansas, who felt so helpless, so in need of doing something, that she baked a cake. Then she covered it with strawberries and food coloring in the shape of an American flag. Like her, and like millions of others, I made American flags, too. I went to a website and printed out flags that I taped to the rear windows of the family cars. I nailed a pole to the fence at the end of our driveway and tied a hardware-store flag to it.

As you walked the city in the days following the attack, you would see dozens of flags thirty stories high in the windows of apartment buildings. People had pasted the flags to their windows on the chance that someone would look up and know that someone else was pulling for them. During those weeks, the flag had stopped being an expression of particular political leanings; it belonged to all of us again.”

~p. 91-92

Advice for living:

“1. Make someone happy. Learn how to laugh and how to make someone else laugh. Take pleasure in who they are, as they are. In other words, love someone. Surrender to the person you love. I don’t mean give in. I mean surrender. Put down the arms of war and open the other kind. You don’t need to debate and compromise with someone you love. Just make them happy.

2. Find out how you can be helpful. It didn’t occur to me at first that being helpful was better than being the center of attention. That’s not an idea that would tend to occur to an actor. But it turns out that if you can really find a way to be helpful, more satisfaction and praise than you know what to do with will come your way. Being helpful assumes that the people you help actually want your help. And that you know enough to actually be of help and not make life worse for them than it already is. This means getting as smart as you can. But getting smart is a tricky business. The smartest people I’ve ever met are the ones who knew exactly what they were ignorant of. If you don’t know much about something, assuming that what little you know is all there is to know is not the way to find out more. And try not to assume you can just take a stab at complex things. Complex things bite. So be wary of simple answers to complex questions.

3. If you keep score, keep score your way. Don’t let the world tell you success is a big house if you think sucess is a happy home. If you meet a bully who says, “I’m stronger and richer than you, and you’re nothing if you’re not richer or stronger than I am,” and if he’s richer and stronger than you’ll ever be, wouldn’t it be stupid to get into a pissing contest with this guy?”

~p. 206-207

I’ve had a little bit of a crush on Alan Alda since I was in sixth grade and would sneak downstairs after everyone was asleep to watch M*A*S*H reruns at 11:30 p.m. I would hunch real close to the TV, the volume down almost so low I couldn’t hear it, so as not to get caught.

Of course, I guess you could say, I’ve had a crush on Hawkeye. He was smart, funny, loved the ladies - and was an all-around nice guy. I know that Alan Alda is not Hawkeye, but after reading Never Have Your Dog Stuffed, and Other Things I’ve Learned two years ago, and now having just finished Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself, I do know that the smartness and humor are present in the actor, not just the character. Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself, his second memoir, takes up where the first one left off, but is more than just a list of experiences. It is Alda’s attempt to make sense of life. What does it all mean? I may not agree with some of his conclusions, but I thoroughly enjoyed reading about how he came to them.

5 out of 5 stars

I finished Kristin Lavransdatter II: The Wife by Sigrid Undset last night. (review of part one) I enjoyed part two very much, though not quite as much as part one. In this installment, Kristin’s husband Erlend gets involved in some royal intrigues, and much of the politics of Norway / Sweden / Denmark went right over my head. The book occasionally bogged down during those details (the endnotes in my Penguin Classics edition helped tremendously), but it is still very much worth reading. I don’t have time for a more detailed review, but here are a couple of passages that demonstrate what a gifted author Undset was - and what a gifted translator Tina Nunnally is.

Saying goodbye

“It was the most beautiful springtime weather on the following day, as Kristin stood behind the corner of the main house looking out toward the slopes beyond the river. There was a verdant smell in the air, the singing of creeks released everywhere, and a green sheen over all the groves and meadows. At the spot where the road went along the mountainside above Laugarbru, a blanket of winter rye shimmered fresh and bright. Jon had burned off the saplings the year before and planted rye on the cleared land.

When the funeral procession reached that spot, she would be able to see it best.

And then the procession emerged from beneath the scree, across from the fresh new acres of rye.

She could see all the priests riding on ahead, and there were also vergers among the first group, carrying the crosses and tapers. She couldn’t see the flames in the bright sunlight, but the candles looked like slender white streaks. Two horses followed, carrying her father’s coffin on a litter between them, and then she recognized Erlend on the black horse, her mother, Simon and Ramborg, and may of her kinsmen and friends in the long procession.

For a moment she could faintly hear the singing of the priests above the roar of the Laag, but then the tones of the hymn died away in the rush of the river and the steady trickling of the springtime streams on the slopes. Kristin stood there, gazing off into the distance, long after the last packhorse with the traveling bags had disappeared into the woods.”

Heritage

“The beautiful large estate lay below her on the hillside, like a jewel on the wide bosom of the slope. She gazed out across all the land she had owned along with her husband. Thoughts about the manor and its care had filled her soul to the brim. She had worked and struggled. Not until this evening did she realize how much she had struggled to put this estate back on its feet and keep it going - how hard she had tried and how much she had accomplished.

She had accepted it as her fate, to be borne with patience and a straight back, that this had fallen to her. Just as she had striven to be patient and steadfast no matter what life presented, every time she learned she was carrying yet another child under her breast - again and again. With each son added to the flock she recognized that her responsibility had grown for ensuring the prosperity and secure position of the lineage. Tonight she realized that her ability to survey everything at once and her watchfulness had also grown with each new child entrusted to her care. Never had she seen it so clearly as on this evening - what destiny had demanded of her and what it had given her in return with her seven sons. Over and over again joy had quickened the beat of her heart; fear on their behalf had rent it in two. They were her children, these big sons with their lean, bony, boy’s bodies, just as they had been when they were small and so plump that they barely hurt themselves when they tumbled down on their way between the bench and her knee. They were hers, just as they had been back when she lifted them out of the cradle to her milk-filled breast and had to support their heads, which wobbled on their frail necks the way a bluebell nods on its stalk. Wherever they ended up in the world, wherever they journeyed, forgetting their mother - she thought that for her, their lives would be like a current in her own life; they would be one with her, just as they had been when she alone on this earth knew about the new life hidden inside, drinking from her blood and making her cheeks pale. Over and over she had endured the sinking, sweat-dripping anguish when she realized that once again her time had come; once again she would be pulled under by the groundswell of birth pains - until she was lifted up with a new child in her arms. How much richer and stronger and braver she had become with each child was something that she first realized tonight.”

“The trouble with poetry, I realized
as I walked along a beach one night -
cold Florida sand under my bare feet,
a show of stars in the sky -

the trouble with poetry is
that it encourages the writing of more poetry,
more guppies crowding the fish tank,
more baby rabbits
hopping out of their mothers into the dewy grass.

And how will it ever end?
unless the day finally arrives
when we have compared everything in the world
to everything else in the world,

and there is nothing left to do
but quietly close our notebooks
and sit with our hands folded on our desks.”

~from the poem “The Trouble With Poetry” in The Trouble With Poetry: And Other Poems by Billy Collins

“With its spiraling metal body
and white pages for wings,
my notebook flies over my bed while I sleep -

a bird full of quotations and tiny images
who loves the night’s dark rooms,
glad now to be free of my scrutiny and my pen point.”

~from the poem “The Flying Notebook” in The Trouble with Poetry: And Other Poems by Billy Collins

“What kind of friend was Bobbie? We couldn’t go to museums. She talked in front of pictures. There you’d be, lost in a painting or a sculpture, and she’d be babbling her brains out, ruining it. “The Standing Woman’s name was Isabel Dutaud Nagle. She was ten years older than Gaston Lachaise. It took him seven years to talk her out of her clothes. She came from Boston. He first saw her standing on a bridge in Paris.” And Bobbie hated going to museums with me. “You know what you are?” she’d say. “You’re a Museum Martinet.”

I can go to museums with Jill, but I can’t eat in a restaurant with her. “Is the pastrami fatty or lean? Is the coleslaw made with vinegar or mayo? This coffee doesn’t taste fresh. Could you make another pot? Could you fill my cup to the brim?”

Dana can keep a secret, and better yet, knows when to shut up about it. As opposed to Carol, who brought things up long after they’d been buried. If a child failed a math test in the third grade, when the kid was a senior, Carol would still be asking in a sad, worried voice, “How is poor so-and-so doing in math?” No one was better when you were home with the flu.

Bobbie had a special place. We brainstormed challenging cases. She was a gifted therapist. We loved each other’s daughters. We took trips. I was the funniest with Bobbie. We’d crack up in the chemo room. Was that everybody’s experience with her? She saw me the way I hoped I was.”

from To My Dearest Friends by Patricia Volk