Monthly Archives: February 2012

True Love

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This Valentine’s Day, I thought I would talk about true love for a little while.

I took a course on Jane Austen while I was in college, taught by one of my favorite professors. One day in class, we were talking about a somewhat dramatic episode in Austen’s life. At a house party near Christmas, a comfortably well-off friend of the family around her age, with a good reputation, proposed marriage. She accepted, only to refuse him the next morning. We don’t know what she was thinking. If she ever wrote about it in letters, they have been lost to us. Some of my classmates immediately started to clamor that maybe she was in love with someone else, that she was unwilling to compromise her romantic ideals, that she didn’t love him… And my professor just looked around at all of us with the look on her face, familiar to us by now, of a woman who was tired of hearing the words “love” and “Jane Austen” in close proximity.

“She knew she couldn’t get married and continue to write.”

“She could have…”

“She absolutely could not have,” my professor said. She reminded us of all the reading we’d done about life in the early 19th century. The endless chores, how long everything took, how even if you had servants you needed to be constantly checking up on them, how once you had children they had to be taken care of. There would be parties and balls to go to and to throw, and all of that would now be her duty, not a diverting pleasure. Sensing that we were still resistant to the idea, she lowered her copy of the biography we were reading.

“You cannot be a woman with a family and an artist at the same time. You must choose between being the best mother you can be and your creative life. It is possible to do both, but not both equally well. You have to understand,” she said, looking around at each of us, mostly girls, hardly worthy of being called women yet, “that you must choose.”

Here was a brilliant, successful scholar, respected in her field. We knew from other conversations in class that she had a child, now grown. She knew whereof she spoke, and she was telling us that if we thought we could do it all, we were going to break our own hearts in the process. I will never forget the impatient gentleness in her voice. It should have been obvious to us. It clearly was not.

Perhaps it became obvious to Austen as she lay awake that night, over two hundred years ago. Perhaps in the rush of the moment, she couldn’t have done anything but say yes. But then she must have realized. And so she chose.

It’s an easy choice for me to make right now. I don’t have children who need me as much as my writing does. My relationship isn’t suffering. It doesn’t seem to hurt my friendships much that I say, “I can’t come out this Friday – I’m writing.” I know they would all love it if I actually produced some work I let anyone read, but I’m going to just gloss over this. (Manuscript, I’m still mostly ignoring you…)

The Princess Bride, an anthem of our time if ever there was one, has a lot to say about true love. True love is magic, true love is the worthiest cause of all. In the movie, it’s two people in love with one another. But one’s true love does not have to be another person.

My true love is a cause no less worthy for being between me and myself. My true love is writing. Creating. Taking the things I have in my brain and transmitting them to words on a page. I’ve always done it. I used to scribble in notebooks before I could make words. Sometimes I wish I could go back to that, it was much easier then.

There are other people I love. I’m in a solid, wonderful relationship with someone who likes the craziness and waking up in the night finding that I’m hunched over my computer, and the occasional wails of, “I don’t know what goes in the middle of a book any more!” I’m lucky. I’m grateful. But it feels like a betrayal to be so clear that there’s this overwhelming need in my life that has nothing to do with another person. Even though everyone has things they love so much.

I’m not going to feel guilty about it. My family, friends and boyfriend all love me, and writing is such an intrinsic part of me that if they love me, they love the fact that I write, too.

Attention!

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Everybody to get from blog!*

Henceforth, this blog shall be known as inthebookfort.com. I feel very comfortable here in the book fort, and decided to stay. It’s enough to make me wish I could draw, so that I could make a nifty image of a book fort. At some point I hope to use all my books to build an actual fort-shaped thing out of my books, but that won’t happen for a while yet. I hope you continue to read, comment, and enjoy my ranting. Eventually I’ll get around to actually writing and posting some book reviews, posting that list of strong female characters, and of course, continuing to write about my epic quest to live a balanced, creative life.

*If you have never seen The Russians are Coming! The Russians are Coming!, you owe it to yourself to track down a copy, sit someplace comfortable, and howl with laughter for an hour and forty-five minutes.

Feel the love. Or else.

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Unrelated tangent: George Lucas, you managed to create something I love with all my heart. For that, I thank you. But as I used to say about my ex-boyfriend’s mother, just because you gave birth to it doesn’t mean I have to like every crazy thing you say.

Moving on.

As Valentine’s Day rolls around again, we are inundated with the yearly outpouring of commercials, status updates, and angst surrounding this special day. Every restaurant in the city has special menus, prix fixe dinners with wine pairings, stores are covered with red hearts and little bears in cunning shades of white and pink. The world is filled with sappy pop songs, heart-shaped containers of candy, and ads for discounts on lingerie.

My problem with Valentine’s Day is that it doesn’t actually make anyone happy. One party in a relationship (usually the man) is worried he’s not going to ‘screw it up.’ He’s not going to acquire the right present, or he doesn’t know where his girlfriend wants to go for dinner, and ohgodohgodwe’reallgoingtodie. The other party, usually the woman, is worried because of what the holiday means. Because if it isn’t observed correctly, the relationship is doomed! It means he doesn’t love you! It means you’re a failure as a lover! It must be a PERFECT NIGHT. So, we have a situation in which everyone is anxious, and nobody wins. I have never either heard of or experienced a Valentine’s Day where both parties were truly happy with how things went. And believe me, I’ve heard about some failures that were doozies. Even when things go well, the feelings are of relief, not joy.

And never mind couples. If you aren’t in a relationship, this day usually makes you feel like a bitter failure, as everyone in the world besides you (it seems) is off celebrating happiness that you don’t share. This isn’t always true, or isn’t always true to that extent. But it can cause a pang. In the interests of full disclosure, the best Valentine’s Day I’ve ever spent was by myself. I ate lobster alone in my apartment in front of one of my favorite movies, then took a bottle of sparkling cider and a box of strawberries into the bathroom and read a book in the tub.

It’s a holiday, like Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, designed to sell stuff. It doesn’t celebrate anything in particular except “love,” defined as, “romantic congress between two people, both of whom should be prepared to spend lots of money, or else they’re doin’ it wrong.” Statistics show that there is a spike in breakups right around Valentine’s Day. People buckle under the strain of everything their relationship is supposed to be, and everything they’re supposed to be in the relationship. Key words here: supposed to be.

A relationship is a complicated organism. Its success or failure as a going concern can’t be reduced down to the behavior on one arbitrarily chosen day. Love is expressed, or not, a thousand different ways between people who have decided to be together. No one is perfect. There aren’t any rules you can follow that will make you a good partner. If you don’t feel it to begin with, no amount of behaving is going to make things better. And if you do feel it, you don’t need one particular day a year to let you show it.

Random Thoughts of a Thursday Morning

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1) My hair is wavy most of the time, but occasionally I will wake up with these banana curls that please me no end. They always come out in the shower, but I have to wonder how they get like that while I sleep. Yes, I sometimes find my own hair charming. No, I don’t think that’s wrong.

2) Reading Sarah Rees Brennan’s tumblr page is often the only reason I stay awake in the morning. My phone is my alarm clock, so when I go to turn my alarm off I have a tendency to go, “Oh my bed is so warm and cozy, I’ll just stay here and axe having a productive morning. Sounds like a great idea!” But instead, I check Twitter to engage my brain an extra teensy little bit, and then Sarah’s posted something, and I click on the link, and by the time I’m done reading, I am too awake and amused to go back to sleep. So thank you, Sarah, for providing this excellent service to your fellow humans. Also, your books are good too.

3) I can’t decide whether to read more Terry Pratchett now or to give myself a break. I don’t want to burn out, and there is just so much good stuff to read. But then I think over what I might read instead and all my brain does is go, “But it’s not Pratchett!” and then I read Pratchett and my brain goes “So…much…Pratchett…erglp.” And then I think over what I might read instead and my brain goes, “But it’s not Pratchett!” My poor brain.

4) Hazel Rowley’s biography of the Roosevelts irritates me. I stopped reading halfway through, and I don’t think even the siren call of another book on my spreadsheet is going to help. Perhaps I need a new tab for the books I couldn’t finish/haven’t finished yet. This, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Meaning of Night, Black Sun Rising, Lonesome Dove…

My parents would frisk me before family events. Before weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs, and what have you. Because if they didn’t, then the book would be hidden inside some pocket or other and as soon as whatever it was got under way I’d be found in a corner. That was who I was…that was what I did. I was the kid with the book.
- Neil Gaiman (found at booksandnerds via Sarah’s tumblr, linked above)

I didn’t get to do this. My parents, prolific and dedicated readers themselves, believed in pre-emptive strikes. “Is that a book? You can’t bring a book to this. Why not? Because we can’t bring our books, so you can’t, either.” On the other hand, there were places I was allowed to bring my books. To small dinners with my grandparents, to the theater for before the show, to doctors’ waiting rooms, to most meals… I had it pretty good.

I think I ought to go write something else. Or take a shower. Or something. (Brain hopefully goes, “Pratchett? We can take a little more… Erglp!”)

Keeping Track

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I keep track of the books I read.

It started because I home schooled, and my mother recorded everything I read against the day we’d have to prove that I was an educated human being instead of some kind of feral sociological experiment. At some point early on in high school I took over the recording, and at some point during college, I took all my faithfully kept Word documents and turned them into one large spreadsheet of my reading habits, a monument to Bibliophilia run amok. (I do not remember exactly when I did this, but I have a strong suspicion I was avoiding a paper at the time.)

Whenever I turn the final page of a book, I open my spreadsheet and enter the author, the title, and the date it was completed. There are other columns for rereads, for whether I read it on my Kindle, whether I’ve entered it on Goodreads, or if I got the book from the library. This ritual means something to me. It makes finishing a book more final. It gives me a feeling of accomplishment. Sometimes the only reason I finish a book I’m not loving is so that I can add it to the spreadsheet. It motivates my otherwise fickle reading brain. I read a lot, and I’m usually reading, and I know I will forget otherwise. On three memorable occasions, my spreadsheet stopped me from buying a book I’d already read. On one even more memorable occasion, I realized I’d bought and read a book two separate times while I was entering it, for the second time.

It isn’t just a list of what I’ve been reading. It’s my biography. A small sampling is below.

November 2003: I read The Crimson Petal and the White, my favorite book, for the first time during a bout with pneumonia.
2004: I wasn’t recording dates that year, but I read Timeline (Michael Crichton) and Oracle Night (Paul Auster) that year.
August 2006: The last book I read before I start college is Robert Heinlein’s Have Spacesuit Will Travel.
August 2008: I blast through the first four books of A Song of Ice and Fire, only managing to finish the fourth one out of sheer momentum.
January 2010: I read Swan Song and love it so much I am late to things on purpose because I’m hanging out under a streetlight.
June 2010: I find the Pendergast series, and love it so much I read all ten books in twenty days.
January 2011: I only read the first two Harry Dresden books. I reread them in a week and a half. I was living in another country, so much newness going on I can’t bear a new book for the first couple of weeks. Then I read Shogun. It mirrors how I feel.
January 2012: I read Wodehouse, Pratchett, and Bujold, all for the first time, all on the recommendation of our affectionate correspondent.

There are a few books I only read because someone I really liked at the time wanted me to. I know how much I like an author’s writing based on how many of their books I read in a row. There are a couple on this list I don’t remember at all. I’ve read some a dozen times or more. I used to leave all the rereads off, but I add them now. This is about more than simply recording what I’ve read. My spreadsheet has become the witness to how I’ve spent my time, and what I cared about. Every entry is a story.

Books hold memories for those of us who read them religiously. They are our palimpsests, our reliquaries. They know our secrets. A book is a time capsule of everything that happened while we were reading it. I look at the book, and it sets off memories. I keep track of the books because I’m writing myself down.

It’s been a while!

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Hi, Blog! I missed you! I have been neglecting you terribly, but I promise there are good reasons.

I now have a Real Job, which I’m happy about for a number of reasons. I like the work, I like the people, and I think I’m settling in well. The drawbacks are that I don’t have the time to write as much as I did. But I’ll try to post more again.

I also just started watching The Tudors. I have never seen any of it before, by popular request. I have been fascinated, nay, obsessed by Tudor England since I was an ickle girl. My friends didn’t want to hear me snarling, “That’s historically inaccurate!”* However, our long-suffering correspondent turned the first episode on. We’d been talking about it, you see, and he wanted to know if the stories were true. I made it into the first shot. “Those windows are double-hung! They didn’t have double-hung windows in Tudor England!”**

Our long-suffering correspondent is now off in the kitchen, snickering quietly to himself.

But I’m enjoying it. Though the women in Tudor England have an astonishing lack of body hair.***

http://seanan-mcguire.livejournal.com/416779.html

Fantastic blog post from a writer I like very much. I would add that I think the decision to treat women badly in TV shows and books is because a lot of men (the key demographic for a lot of the media under discussion) are programmed from early life not to hit girls, and that violence against women is bad and wrong and horrible. So it’s done with so little thought because it’s an easy way of upsetting or discomfiting your male audience, raising the stakes. It’s a cheap shot.

*While frothing at the mouth, no doubt.
**There was definite frothing at the mouth.
***All right, all right. I’m done.