Category Archives: other

Glorious Day

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Today was like being let out of jail. The sun was shining. There was no wind. The sun, did I mention? It was shining. It was warm outside — 40s up into the 50s.

I cleaned up the yard (dog poop patrol), cut some hollyhock stalks and put them over where I want hollyhocks to grow next year. I turned over a garden bed. I pulled all the dead stuff off the herb bed so the parsley and the chives can start coming back. I pruned a couple of errant branches off the greengage plum tree.

Then I hung out on the outdoor furniture, read a lovely book called Tinkers, and generally just enjoyed the gorgeous weather. My cheeks feel a tiny bit pink.

It’s been kind of an overwhelming couple of weeks — and I had all these things I was going to do today — taxes, housecleaning, writing — but mostly I turned over a nearly-thawed garden bed, read a book, and enjoyed a beautiful beautiful day.

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Winter Clothesline

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Winter Clothesline This is the first winter I’ve had a clothesline and I find I use it fairly often. If it’s sunny, and above freezing, I’ve been hanging things outside. Today is very windy, which is a bit of a challenge, but there they are, some clothes, getting dry without using my dryer. It’s a small thing, but makes me weirdly happy. (Plus the sheets smell so nice.)

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Why I’m Not Mourning John Updike

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There’s no shortage of praise going around for Updike’s work in the wake of his death, and I’ve been hesitant to jump in because well, there’s that prohibition against speaking ill of the dead. For all I know, in his personal life he could have been an exemplar of many fine qualities — I wouldn’t know. He was certainly productive, writing three pages a day over a lifetime he produced more than 40 novels, collections of essays, and short stories.

However, I found his work repellent.

The pervasive and unrelenting misogyny is only a part of what I hated about the airless worlds John Updike created. David Foster Wallace names this quality “phallocentric narcissism” which seems a pretty apt description. The only characters with interiority in his books are the protagonists, and his protagonists are a series of men so stupendously narcissistic as to believe the entire universe exists only to fulfill or thwart their desires. There is no agency in any of the secondary characters, nor is there empathy for the lived experience of any characters except the protagonists.

If exegesis is your thing, go read this terrific entry over at TigerBeatDown, or Anna Shapiro’s piece in the Guardian. I can’t bear to go back into the books to pull quotes. It just depresses me. Just as the many comments justifying or denying that misogyny is a driving force in Updike’s work depress me. These are such old old arguments. Such old old denials. It makes me tired that we’re still, after all this time, having the discussion about whether or not Updike was a misogynist rather than discussing what effect his solipsism and misogynism will have on his legacy.

There’s a whole generation of them — the Great American Novelists: Roth, Bellow, Updike, Mailer (and I’d throw Kundera in even though he’s not American). Triumphalist. Battling it out for their place at the top of the heap. Contemptuous of everyone who isn’t themselves. Dismissive of all artistic projects that they don’t share (which would be all artistic projects other than their own). The voice of my Phd advisor who said about the feminist critique of traditional plot that I wrote for my qualifying exam in literary theory that “just like your subject, the essay didn’t make any sense.” (Exams I passed unanimously, by the way.)

To those who will reply that Updike was of his generation and these things are to be expected and it’s all different now, I’d reply, go into a chain bookstore and give me a count of the serious novels being published by women, novels that don’t have a pink shoe on the cover. It’s enough to make a person want to revert to publishing under gender-neutral initials.

And so whatever John Updike’s qualities as a person, I will not be mourning the the death of his artistic project which was, as far as I could tell, to express a repellent world view in lapidary prose. I am also not mourning the passing of those lions, the ones who believed in singular world views, who believed it was all a contest, a contest that could only have a single champion.

And here’s to the thought that into the inevitable vacuum the passing of the lions will create, that there will be room for more voices, expressing the lived interiority of all those whose existence was denied in those Great American Novels.

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Two Dog Night

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Last night was one of those bad white nights where you wake at two and worry. The kind of night where you’re haunted by worries that are just practical enough to be real, and which yet, you know you can do nothing about at two in the morning. Or three in the morning. Or four thirty, when you know you only have another hour until the alarm goes off. And of course, by the time the alarm goes off, you’re finally finding yourself slipping under the wire into real sleep. Except that now, you must get up.

The saving grace on nights like that is my Raymond. Somehow, he can tell when I’m upset, and stewing, and he comes in and hops up on the bed with me and my Owie. Owen sleeps up near the top of the bed, curled up not quite on the pillows, and on bad nights Ray will curl up at the foot of the bed. It’s almost enough, on those insomniac nights, that there are two sleeping creatures, who will flop a head over an ankle, or curl up in the crook of your knees. It’s almost enough, as you’re lying there worrying about loved ones, and job security, and debt, and mortgage payments, and all the other things that keep us up during these dark times. It’s almost enough to make you remember that you’re in a house you worked two jobs to buy, a house you have a hope of paying off, a house to house you and your beloved creatures. A sleeping dog to ward off monkey mind. And just as it’s working,  the alarm goes off.

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My Non-Local Breakfast

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My Non Local Breakfast Mornings in Montana lately have featured subzero temperatures and, as is the case this morning, 30-50mph gusts blowing right up against my kitchen windows (that sun porch I want is seeming less like an indulgence and more like an investment in insulation on mornings like this). At any rate, it’s been deepest winter here. Dark. Cold. Windy.

And so, I’ve become addicted to this stuff, Zergut Hot Ajvar: My Non Local Breakfast
It’s from Bulgaria. It contains peppers, eggplant, sugar, sunflower oil, salt, garlic and hot peppers, oh and some acetic acid (Vitamin C). It’s bright red. It tastes like summer. The jar says this is hot, but to me it just tastes slightly warm — the peppers aren’t hot but sweet and lovely. Like I said, I’m in love.

I’ve been making a nice big piece of toast out of my own bread, then slathering it with this stuff and a little cheese. Essentially I’ve been eating pizza bread for breakfast. With an orange, my other wintertime non-local indulgence. These are from California, so that’s not so bad — the ones from Australia kind of freak me out. That just seems wrong. But a nice juicy California orange, and a piece of toast spread with peppery summery goodness and well, the blasts of snow blowing past my window don’t seem so awful.

I’m all for eating local. But there’s something to be said for a world in which we can find out that in Bulgaria they make this fabulous pepper/eggplant spread, and then we can find it on a grocery shelf for under five bucks. To me, this seems like a good byproduct of globalization.

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