Worst title ever: Wednesday, Jul 1 2009

“Chicken Soup for the Unsinkable Soul”.

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This is a real book! I found it in my Mom’s scruffy paperbacks while we were switching bookcases.

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It worries me to think that the Chicken Soup people are running low on titles, (surely someone in the concept meeting must have asked if “unsinkable” people need Chicken Soup books? Did they have an alternate title that was worse?) so I am providing a public list of options they may not have considered yet. You’re welcome, Internet.

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Chicken Soup for the Lonely and Friendless Soul

Chicken Soup for the Socially Inept Soul

Chicken Soup for the Weepy Soul

Chicken Soup for the Easily Thwarted Soul

Chicken Soup for the Soulless Soul

Chicken Soup for the Soul Who is Addicted to Sad Self-Help Books

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The word “normal” means nothing to me now Saturday, Jun 27 2009

A few days ago, we took the kids to a science museum – one of those vast noisy ones with exhibits of motors and magnets and various taxidermied animals standing around looking gloomy – and Cupcake and I ended up at a thing where you could put golf balls in a series of gutters. The golf ball would roll down and ping on chimes and go through hollowed-out wooden chickens and light up lights and what have you, all very fascinating to the shortest and bossiest member of the family. But eventually she found another little kid she wanted to befriend, so she gathered up all the golf balls and gave them to him, but he ran off. Twice. He would have done it a third time, but she hit him, roared, and grabbed the golf ball back.

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“Oh dear,” said the other kid’s mother.

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“Come-here-right-now-young-lady-we-do-NOT-hit” was the only thing I could think of to say, and it came out more squeaky than authoritative.

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As we were sitting in Time Out, it suddenly occurred to me that I was actually really glad to have witnessed the whole incident. Well, obviously, not the hitting, but the part where she tried to get someone else to play with her; it’s so normal. In many ways a young kid with mild autism, like Henry, is easy to take to a playground, because he’ll sit and do quiet repetitive behavior for as long as you can stay. I guess I’ve gotten used to his play habits, to the point where the other kids at the playground seem like wild animals – running, shouting, throwing things at each other, getting in fights – while the boy sits in the midst of the chaos, calmly digging and filling hole after hole after hole. That’s what I’m used to.

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At eighteen months, his sister shows no signs of having any autistic traits. She’s still young enough to regress, of course, and I know I’m going to be keeping a close eye on her developmental progress until that big third birthday, but so far we are all encouraged by her vocabulary, her imaginative play, and her wild-animalness. At the same time, dealing with these behaviors are going to require a whole new skill set (do I have the brains and energy to learn a new skill set?); it’s so different from anything we were used to with her brother.

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In last month’s Forbes, Simon Baron-Cohen talks about the autistic spectrum, and how he believes that most of us have some autistic traits. He thinks that autism is genetic, and therefore hereditary. This made a lot of sense to me; I prefer to be alone, and I have a lot of small, repetitive habits. Henry’s dad can remember phone numbers for years, and does math for fun. We are both quirky. We are both a lot like Henry.

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Yet our same gene pool has produced a child who goes by the affectionate nickname Girl-rilla (on a noisier day, Girl-zilla), who uses words to get things – Juice! Shoes! Up! – and tries to make friends with other kids, and gets mad enough to punch them when they give her the cold shoulder, while I sit there thinking, holy crap, what am I supposed to do now? Not only do I not know where she gets her bossiness from, I seem to be overeducated on how to avoid autism-related meltdowns, and completely at sea when it comes to a typical toddler one.

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I wish Simon Baron-Cohen would take a few minutes and identify the bossy gene, because it’s going to cause me many more sleepless nights than the autism ones. I mean, if she’s this assertive over golf balls, what’s it going to be like if she decides to enter politics? Because I know you’re not allowed to sit politicians in Time Out and let them scream it out.

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Tee Bee Arr Tuesday, Jun 16 2009

I am trying to be more responsible, now that I am old, so for the past few years I have been saving money to pay off a credit card I maxed out three years ago. The interest on this particular card was so horrifically high, and the balance owed so depressing, that for a long time I thought it would never happen. But last week I wrote a check to pay it off, finally, and I put it in an envelope and slapped on a Homer Simpson stamp and put it in the mail and now I am debt free. How grown up.

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To celebrate being debt free, I went shopping. Isn’t human nature bizarre? My rationalizations: 1, Used books are cheap. 2, I have not bought any books since coming back to America, even though they are abundant and tempting. 3, I am running out of books at the town library and a recent forage in my mother’s bookcase turned up only Small Miracles II and A Woman’s Voyage: Tales of Outer Travel and Inner Discovery, both of which I was desperate enough to read. Also, 4, I will pay with cash.

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I bought a whole stack, and put it on my bureau, and it makes me so happy to have a TBR pile again that I am now going to list them in loving detail:

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The Earthsea Trilogy, by Ursula LeGuin. I have been looking for a set of these books for years now, but a very specific edition – the Bantam paperbacks from the mid-seventies, which have maps and woodcut pictures and very beautiful cover paintings. Finding those particular books, all 3, was extremely pleasing.

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Life with Father, by Clarence Day. I love how collecting a series forces you to read odd esoteric books you wouldn’t normally pick up. This book is a very nice Modern Library copy, and it’s good and odd. Apparently it was one of the bestsellers of the 1920s; even reading the dustjacket copy makes me feel like ordering a pink gin and a shingled haircut.

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More Modern Libraries: The Sound and the Fury, by Faulkner; New Voices in the American Theatre; and Irving Stone’s Lust for Life, a lurid fictionalized biography of Van Gogh. I read this book when I was in college, and have been looking for the ML edition for ages. My new copy comes with a beautifully preserved dustjacket upon which Van Gogh’s most tortured, scabby, nauseous-looking self-portrait is reproduced in color.

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The Bostonians, by Henry James. I like Henry a lot, and haven’t read anything by him since The Spoils of Poynton, last summer, which made me cry.

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We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson. Jenny said this was good; I had only ever read her short stories and The Haunting of Hill House, so when I found out there were more Jackson novels I cackled with delight. However, finding this book took twenty minutes of sorting through the Gothic Romance section, so I am hoping it doesn’t let me down.

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Two under the Indian Sun, and The Diddakoi, and China Court, all by Rumer Godden. Jenny is to blame for these too; she very kindly sent me a copy of In This House of Brede last winter when I was feeling very low and bookless and debt-ridden and depressed; it was so gloriously good, I am on a mission to read all twenty of Godden’s other books. This is my start. It feels good to be out of debt, but it feels better to have reading plans again.

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Am I late to the party? Monday, Jun 8 2009

When we were living in California and Henry was a wee baby I bought him a set of Harry Potter books. There were five published at that point, and our library book sale had the whole set, hardcover, dustjackets, rubber-banded together, for four dollars. So I trotted them home and put them in a box thinking that maybe he’d like to read them when he got older; and then we moved three times and they ended up in the bottom of my closet, where they spent the next few years being squashed under two dictionaries and a copy of Fish! Their Lives and Habitats (with 2,000 color pictures).

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So the other day I finally dusted them off, found them a place of a bookshelf, and started reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, because there was not anything else around and I am on a strict book-buying diet. (Incidentally, I always check the verso before I start reading, just to see if I should keep coffee and babies away from it, and my copy turned out to be the first American edition, fortieth (!) printing, which was a little staggering. I mean, I knew they were popular books, but forty printings in a year? Holy goodness.) It’s pretty good. I don’t know, though, the Quiddich rules seemed overly complicated, and some of the writing is a little sloppy, and Harry doesn’t have much personality yet, but overall it’s okay. Probably if I’d read it when I was twelve I would love it.

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So far, my favorite part is:

He finally tore his eyes away from the druidess Cliodna, who was scratching her nose, to open a bag of Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans. “You want to be careful with those,” Ron warned Harry. “When they say every flavor, they mean every flavor – you know, you get all the ordinary ones like chocolate and peppermint and marmalade, but then you can get spinach and liver and tripe. George recons he had a booger-flavored one once.” Ron picked up a green bean, looked at it carefully, and bit into a corner. “Bleaaargh – see? Sprouts.”

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Sprouts! Ha. So, I guess my main question is, if I finish reading Years 2-5, will I feel compelled to rush out and find 6 and 7? Also, does it get addictive from here? Does it get better? How much more Quiddich is there, and does Harry get more interesting?

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Retold by me. And him. And her, and also those two guys over there. Monday, Jun 1 2009

Since we are all different people, it stands to reason that fairy tales get retold in a dizzying variety of styles. I am now deep in research to write my version of a story called The Blue Light for my massive fairytale undertaking, and I am completely fascinated by how different each version sounds. While retaining the same basic structure, fairy tales are extremely flexible, swapping fairies for ogres and princes for soldiers and poisoned apples for enchanted hazel trees; change the title and poof! They have morphed into new stories entirely. I’ve been reading them steadily for the past year, and I conclude that fairy tales are the soapbubbles of literature.

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Retelling a story, then, becomes easier than you might think; read six versions of Cinderella, and one is left with a sense of license. Why not lose the severed toes, the amateur reteller thinks brightly, but introduce a wicked fairy at the end? Surely if the Grimms used a talking bird and Perrault calls her Cindercrawler, I can change this, this, and this, and retell it my way. The sense of control you can get from this is intoxicating. In fact, if you want to try something fun and liberating, write down your favorite fairy tale, from memory, and then change anything you want. Poof! You have Retold, and added your own little bubble to the collection.

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Anyway, I finally settled on two widely read versions of The Blue Light to use as a basis for my story. One is by Andersen and one is by Grimm. Andersen’s version has giant dogs, while Grimm uses a magic dwarf, but both appear, like genies, when a magic flint is struck. The flint comes into possession of a soldier, who uses it to get rich and kidnap a princess. At the end of both versions, the soldier is tricked by servants of the Princess, arrested, and tossed in jail. At the last minute, his flint arrives, and he escapes.

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Up until now, both stories travel the same track, if you can excuse the dwarf-dog mixup, but the endings are subtly different. Andersen does it like this:

The dogs took the king, and the queen as well. They tossed them high in the air, and let them fall squashed onto the ground. The soldiers were terrified. Everyone cried out, “Soldier, be our king. Make the princess your queen.” So the princess came out of her steel castle and became a queen, which pleased her very much. The wedding feast lasted a whole week, and everyone had a very good time.

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Whereas nobody is left feeling good at the end of the Grimm version:

Then the mannikin fell on them like lightening, darting this way and that, and whoever was touched by his cudgel lay dead on the ground. The king was terrified; he threw himself on the soldier’s mercy, and merely to be allowed to live at all, gave him the kingdom for his own, and the princess to wife.

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And here is my goofy ending:

But the soldier had been long at war, and was weary; so he said, “Blue Light, find me a cottage in a quiet meadow, and let me take the princess there, (for I’ve grown fond of her company) and I shall be satisfied.” And the blue light flickered once, twice, and they were gone from the gallows, just like that. Where they went, no one knows; but there they are, and the blue light was never seen again.

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Ha ha. It’s so girly, I bet the Grimms and old Hans Christian are rolling their eyes at me right now from the afterlife. 

(if you want to read the full, annotated Grimm and Andersen versions, go visit the best fairy-story website in the world, Sur La Lune.)

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Riding in the Wayback Machine Monday, May 25 2009

I’m not really too passionate about music. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I have a handful of CDs I keep by the stereo (Queens of the Stone Age, ZZ Top, Persephone’s Bees, the soundtrack to Everything Is Illuminated, plus an excellent mix Pete sent me for Christmas – thanks again, Pete!) but usually when I put something on it’s to distract the children or entertain company or because I have some really noxious chore to do. You know what I am passionate about now? Quiet. I love quiet.

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When I was a teenager, though, I took music very personally. I thought U2 wrote most of their lyrics with me in mind, and I could not possibly be friends with someone who didn’t care for Bjork; I had a Walkman, and I listened to it all the time as I went around being moody and artistic. I also had a whole lot of cassettes, and when I left for college I stored the best ones in a shoebox, and they sat in the junk room until last week, when I found the box again.

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It was a little bit of a letdown, to be honest. I remember having tapes I really loved, and twelve years later I was faced with the sad fact that I had been in love with a bunch of really bad music. Why did I have a complete set of REM albums, right up through Automatic for the People? Why did I identify so strongly with the EP of Peter Gabriel’s “Steam”, or, for that matter, Terrence Trent D’Arby’s Symphony or Damn? Why did I scotch-tape the liner notes to The B52’s Cosmic Thing to the outside of the case? Why was I so attached to that one mix tape my friend made me just before she dropped out of school and vanished, the one with the Twin Peaks theme on it? Most pressingly, what was I supposed to do with a shoebox full of Teen Angst?

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So I carted everything out to the car (my hot new wheels came with a tape player) and have been listening to them as I drive Hen back and forth from Special Preschool, and I have learned a lot:

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1. I still really like Depeche Mode. I know, mope rock, but they’re so gorgeously morbid I just want to give everyone some cookies and a hug, and in the meantime, lyrics like:

Everybody’s looking for a new sensation,

everybody’s talking bout the state of the nation,

everybody’s searching for a promised land,

everybody’s failing to understand

pleasure, little treasure.

still make me want to sit down and draw vampires.

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2. I don’t like REM anymore. I used to think they were really profound, but now they just sound whiney and sad and pretentious.

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3. Dire Straits made some really lovely albums, didn’t they? I used to like them for their depressing ballads, but now I think songs like, oh, “Money for Nothing”, or “Romeo and Juliet”, have a subversive kind of sexiness to them, which I never noticed as a teenager. And I am sort of impressed that I still know all the words to “Sultans of Swing”:

You get a shiver in the dark,

it’s been raining in the park,

but meantime….

South of the river you stop and you hold everything.

A band is playing Dixie double four-time,

you feel all right when you hear that music ring

There you go. Sexy!

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4. I was insane to buy anything by Prince and the New Power Generation. Also, I was insane to play that tape, the one with “Diamonds & Pearls” on it, to the point of fuzziness. Dear goodness, that falsetto! No wonder my hearing’s bad.

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5. I still enjoy Dead Can Dance, even though they still make very little sense. I am particularly, though ignorantly, fond of a song called “The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove”:

Dream on, my dear,

and renounce temporal obligations.

Dream on, my dear,

it’s a sleep from which you may not awaken.

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6. Midnight Oil made some really boring albums, although Blue Sky Mining came in a pretty translucent blue case.

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7. Rage Against the Machine? Still awesome, especially on cold mornings.

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8. Beastie Boys? Still awesome. I will probably still be humming “Sabotage!” when I’m ninety and living in Assisted Care.

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9. Morphine’s Cure for Pain? Let me share the awesomeness, because maybe you haven’t heard of these guys – they’re not around anymore – and they’re really, really good:

She said, You’ll get me when I’m old and wizened

and not a day before that.

The devil said, Honey, it won’t be that long!

Besides, I’d like to see a little more fat.

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Riding in the Wayback Machine (my car becomes the Wayback Machine when there is something old on the stereo; otherwise it is a normal mom hatchback) brings me back to a time I would really rather forget; I was not a very smart or happy teenager, and I had very few redeeming qualities. These days, having retired the Walkman and swapped The Joshua Tree for The Knife , I am kinder and healthier and more confident. Is it personal evolution, or stopping the relentless flow of REM? Or both?

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Anyway, as time capsules go, it was interesting.

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