To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior…Whenever and wherever a foehn wind blows, doctors hear about headaches and nausea and allergies, about ‘nervousness,’ about ‘depression.’ … . Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Even for Livingston, a place where the wind routinely blows so hard that they have to divert truck traffic off the interstate …
We got a little snow last night, and as I opened the door this morning to let the dogs out and get the paper, a very cheerful-looking man zipped past my house. I’ve never seen him before, but there he was on his 4-wheeler equipped with a snowplow. He plowed my whole side of the block. The dogs barked, the man grinned, happy to be zipping around the neighborhood like some early-morning sidewalk elf. And then he was gone. It was a strange and fleeting little small-town moment, and it’s kept a smile on my face all day long.
My latest novel is Oran Pamuk’s Snow and it has finally happened. I picked up the paperback in bed the other night, opened it up, looking forward to a good read, and realized that the type is very very small! I’ve worn glasses since my late teens when I discovered that there was a reason I’d never mastered that essential skill of 1970s’ upper-class life — tennis — I have no depth perception. Astygmatism. No wonder that all those years when I’d been stranded out there on hot tennis courts bending my knees, keeping my eye on the ball, and following through that I’d never been able to hit the damn ball (not that I’m bitter or anything). At any rate, I’ve spent most of my adult life quite attached to my glasses and my corresponding nerdy-girl persona, but this! Such tiny type! Ten point, would be my guess and now that I am officially launched into middle-age, it is just too small. While I am quite liking the Pamuk novel, it would be so nice if the type was just a tiny bit larger. Oh lordy — am I now facing the prospect of glasses and bifocals? Sigh.
Not much to say, really, except it’s twenty below zero this morning! Twenty below! When I was a kid that was the magic number — the number at which even the grownups would concede that it was Really Cold Outside. Twenty below and Dad would drive me to school instead of making me go wait for the bus. Twenty below and the parents would set the egg timer when we were really little, so we wouldn’t get frostbitten (except for that time Up North when they all got chatting and forgot us, and I had to sit on Ray Kennedy’s lap while he thawed out the little white circles on my cheeks with his big hands). Twenty below was mythical … and what with global warming, we almost never see Twenty Below! anymore. But this morning, it’s twenty below here in Montana … the sun is shining, the sky is blue, the snow is sparkling and it’s a moment of real winter. Twenty Below!
… instead of pulling characters and situations from his imagination, he had borrowed them from real life. Perry and Dick, Herb Clutter and Alvin Dewey were as much figures in history as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. He could no more have altered their characters for the sake of his story than he could have affixed a moustache under Washington’s nose or shaved off Lincoln’s beard. He was fenced in by the barbed wire of fact. … In Cold Blood may have been written like novel, but it is accurate down to the smallest detail — “immaculately factual” Truman publicly boasted. Although it has no footnotes, he could point to an obvious source for every remark uttered and every thought expressed. “One doesn’t spend six years on a book,” he said, “the point of which is factual accuracy, and then give way to minor distortions.” (Capote: A Biography)
After seeing the movie last week, I picked up Gerald Clarke’s very fine biography partially because I’m trying to figure out how to adapt my own book into a screenplay, and I was astonished that …
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Despite having grown up deep in the heart of the preppy, upper-class suburbs in the 70′s and 80′s (Ordinary People was shot in my high school my junior year), I had grown weary of the pink-and-green design. So voilà! A new design — I’m still no webmaster since as you can see, this is one of the standard Typepad layouts, but I’m hoping that like re-arranging the furniture once in a while, re-designing the blog will help me come back to it more often and with renewed energy …