My Jane Austen Action Figure

So I open my front door, step onto the green outdoor carpet that covers my front porch--sorta like a mini putt golf course, with a few wrinkles and badly in need of a manicure. I’m gonna get the mail when I almost trip over a small box on the porch floor. I haven’t ordered anything and the box doesn’t have a return address. It’s small and light enough that I can pick it up with one hand. It’s addressed to Beth’s Front Porch.

When I open the box and brush away some of the white packing peanuts, I see the words with writing desk & quill pen! I pull out the clear package and can see a six inch high woman dressed in a regency white and green dress, complete with curly brown hair under a cap, Pride and Prejudice in left hand, quill in right. At the top, in large white letters on a black background: Jane Austen Action Figure: “For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?”

I flip over the box, and on the back of the package are some interesting facts about my new action figure. For example, her Weapon of Choice: Character Study. There are these quotes:

I do not want people to be agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking
them.

People always live forever when there is an annuity to be paid
them. (Sense and Sensibility)

There are people who the more you do for them, the less they will do for themselves. (Emma)

If there is anything disagreeable going on, men are always sure to get out of it.
(Persuasion)

The packaging tells me, in case I don’t know it, Jane Austen was an enduring and much loved English author who wrote novels which reflect universal and timeless truths about humanity. It also tells me there are small parts not suitable for children under 36 months.

In fact Jane has figured tangentially in my work. There is, for example, this paragraph: Frizzy asks if Jane Austen is ok. I say she is, as far as I know. It’s a touchy subject. Jane is Frizzy’s dog, the one she got after Emily Dickinson passed on. Frizzy says when she was in high school she didn’t like Emily’s poetry much, so when she got her first dog she named her Emily. In that way Frizzy hoped she’d some to appreciate Emily’s poetry in a better fashion. I figure Jane got her name in the same way. Later, Frizzy calls and says she has to move because the family she’s living with is allergic to Jane Austen.

But that’s another story.

There’s a small card buried in the original box that was on my front porch. It says:

With Love for Beth’s Front Porch. And won’t the green outfit
go well with the orange carpet? Love you, Dan.

(For those of you following my blog, you may recall that the orange carpet is in my magic carpet-ride writing space.) So whoever would send me such a thing, eh?

This is from the guy who went to Parris Island with me to see his nephew--my son-- graduate from the USMC boot camp. (If you’re reading Beth’s Front Porch, you know about this, and Jarhead, and you deserve to graduate from boot camp, too, for sticking with me.) It’s early in the morning, and he and I are in the stands, and the ceremony is taking place on the parade ground, and the unpredicted rain begins. It’s relentless, torrential. Most of us are unprepared: no hat, no umbrella, no jacket. But I have mascara. Evidently it is not waterproof. It burns when it gets in the eyes. It leaves football player like smudges on the skin. So Dan turns to me and with a compassionate look, pulls out a handkerchief—a real handkerchief—and gives it to me. But it’s the look that gets me. He looks compassionately at a woman whose mascara is running and whose son has become a jarhead. She needs that moment. She remembers what it feels like.

Well, that’s just a little aside. For me it’s the best moment in the trip.

Oh, and he’s the same person who when I'm a senior in high school gives me a poster of a woman on a beach, which at the top, in script, says

I long for what might be.

This is my brother. As a child, I used to imagine I was adopted. Maybe, after all, I am not. Maybe, after all, my tribe is my tribe.

I want to thank my Jane Austen Action Figure for serving as a catalyst for this epiphany. This is much more than the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ever accomplished. At my house, anyway. And, although I don't much like talking to someone through a blog entry...thanks in all ways, Dan. Love, Beth

The face in the blog

Dear Friends,
Today I link my face to my blog in the "profile." It’s a slightly younger face than the one I’m currently sporting, since the photo was taken in November 2004. And thanks to the miracle of sun and chemicals, I’m blonder now.

On either side of me, cropped from the photo, are awesome friends. It’s a pre-Thanksgiving shot, and there was another person with us whom I had never met who took the photo. We were at a restaurant, and somehow the subject of the Iraq war and the understanding and feeling of students about the war on college campuses arose. I sat, not saying anything. Maybe I looked at my comrades. Maybe I looked down at my plate.

The other people at the table were not aware my beloved younger son had enlisted in the Marines and at that moment was preparing for deployment to Iraq. I could not have said anything if I wanted to. I was anguished by what was happening with regards to my son and what he had chosen. I was afraid. I would expound at length, but this isn't a political column. I'll only say that at the dinner I retreated into the well of myself until the subject changed.

This was what was happening when the photo was snapped.

So I was puzzled when someone said to me about the photo: very cute. To me, it’s a troubled face. This face, this mask I wear to the world, to people who don’t know me: I’m fine! I’m marvelous! Wonderful! Fabulous! I can use a lot of exclamation points. Maybe it helps me bridge the gap of alienation I sometimes feel. I look normal: therefore, I am normal. Maybe it’s how I thumb my nose at the world: I was a homely child, taunted. Hurrah for this face, poetic justice! I could slip on a banana peel tomorrow.

Those particular troubled personal times are over now: the younger son is no longer on active duty. Still, the photo represents the start of a metamorphosis. It is troubled before becoming relaxed. It looks smiling but it has a well of sadness: dip down, sweet down with your bucket. It reminds me of Anne Sexton: poetry is my kitchen, my face. ~Beth

Various and Sundry

In the middle of the night I woke up and knew I was looking for my tribe. I’m a little worried that it consists of a lot of dead people – Brautigan, Faulkner, Forster. (For a little more on finding your tribe, check out Theresa’s blog entry on this subject.) It could be that I’m destined to be a nomad, going from thought to thought, the thread of my path being writing and the creative process, to wit:

The hypnagogic state. A little googling after my last entry, I see the hypnagogic state of consciousness is recognized throughout history as the source of creative thought by distinguished philosophers, artists and scientists including Aristotle, Brahms, Puccini, Wagner, Goethe, Keats, Coleridge, Neitzsche, Poe, Dickens, Dali, Ford, and Einstein.

In fact, when Thomas Edison would reach a ‘sticking point’ he would take a ‘cat nap.’ He dozed off in his favorite chair, holding steel balls in the palms of his hands. As he fell asleep—in the hynagogic state—his arms would relax, the steel would fall into pans on the floor, and he would wake, usually with an idea to continue his project.

The United States of Hypnagogia: a place of relaxed consciousness between wakefulness and sleep, during which flashes of inspiration and creative insight often appear. The mind is open and totally free to new ideas. I try to drink from this well as much as I can. I'm very thirsty.

Molly Ivins. I commute, and currently I’m listening to Molly Ivins read her own liberal political newspaper columns. Besides the loud laughs and guffaws coming from my auto, for some odd reason the phrase she used that stuck in my mind is “national laboratory for bad government, Texas.” I like her columns best—and this is a personal preference only—when she writes about a person she likes, such as Jessica Mitford or Ben Bradley. Still, it’s hard not to forget phrases like “if his IQ went any lower we’d have to water him two times a day,” or “his brain’s so small if we put it in a bumblebee it’d fly backwards.” I get energy from Ivins’ writing. I love what she says: keep fighting for freedom and justice, and don’t forget to have fun doing it.

Sometimes I wonder if I said what I think, would I be fired from humanity? Thank the universe for fiction. Writing: it’s like a blood test; it shows what’s going on inside of you. Meek, mild mannered Clark Kent enters a phone booth, bedecks himself with spandex and voila! Meek mild mannered BethsFrontPorch puts on her Olympia typewriter and voila! (For those of you trying to visualize what this might look like, the typewriter would be something like an accordian.)

Harper Lee. Much ado was made of Harper Lee this week in our beloved NYTimes. The headline called her “Gregarious for a Day.” It seems there was an awards ceremony in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, for an essay contest on the subject of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and Lee put in an appearance. Lee is “one of the most reclusive writers in the history of American letters,” says the Times. She has an “outsized reputation for shyness.” Lee is a shining light for those of us trying to create our own incubators, where our seeds of creativity might germinate.

(It may be that gregariousness is good, but I am of a mind that it is good only in small, sincere doses, if it's given through an eyedropper on a piece of skin that is unscathed and won’t absorb too much. To date, there is no known antidote for an overdose of gregariousness. It is certain death.)

It’s a good thing I’m having company for dinner! It’ll be chicken pesto pasta. Say it 10 times, fast. I’ll be listening, authorized under the National Homeland Wiretapping Act, soon to be passed in a theater near you!

Not my best bon mots...

...or, Perfection is the Enemy of Good.

As promised in an earlier entry, here are some of the thought I was gonna blog about, when I had the time to fully hold up the thoughts to light and see some funky prisms shining down. But here it is, Sunday night, and where are those thoughts? Still waiting to be held up to the light.

I have a file I call "shrapnel," full of bits of paper with ideas and thoughts. That's where they remain: in a file called "Shrapnel." They're waiting for some elderly gent to come along with a metal detector and find them, I guess.

So rather than adding to my shrapnel file I'm gonna make haste and say, here are some sticky-note thoughts:

Joan Didion. In The Year of Magical Thinking, she writes: "Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?" And I thing, yippee, I have found someone else like me! Affirming that I am not the only person in the zoo who thinks "How can I know what I think till I see what I say?" But then, E.M. Forster said that. Good company.

The Alchemy of Personal Writing. That's what the back cover of The Sun says. "...the surprising alchemy that occurs when we write in a rigorous and intentional way; when we hide nothing, especially what we most want to hide; when we find the never to go back into the fire again and again and again." Ok, so what're you trying to hide? Hey, what am I trying to hide? What aren't we talking about?

When I talk to myself. When I talk to myself, I know I'm writing. You will think I'm silly, and slow, and perhaps there's a tad of truth in that, but it's taken me a while to learn this. When I talk to myself, I know I'm writing. So now I immediately grab a pen and get it down. For example, last night, in what I think Poe called the hypnagogic state--right before sleep--I said to myself, Currently the neighbors to the south have no known qualities except for the solar powered lights lining their sidewalk, which when lit up look like an airport runway waiting for the extra terrestrials to come in. This wasn't always the way it was. Before, there was Ruby Shue.

That's all for tonight. Thelma, if you're there, I'm with you all the way. Step on the gas.

Beth

Six degrees of blog separation

Today I move a second item into my studio. Actually, two items: a wizard and an enchantress. They each stand about three inches tall and sport glitter and magic wands. I place them on a shelf slightly above my desk, so they might bestow wonderful gifts upon my imagination. These items were a surprise gift, delivered to my office unbeknownst to me, by a friend of mine, whom I shall dub scr for the present. Somehow they seem to have more power in my personal space than at the office.

Six degrees of blog separation: scr, bearer of the above gifts, introduced me to mcfawn (please, if you haven't visited her blog, check it out! Reading her blog for me is a bit like looking at my Kachina Still-life: it's beautiful and I come away feeling like I've been in a different place).

As it turns out, mcfawn knows Chris who knows Theresa, and this morning on a blogabout, I see some connectivity taking place, and I am delighted by it and just wanted to share it.

Forgive me.

My Olympia

Dear all,

The first item I moved into my new writing studio--after the desks and art I mentioned in the previous post--was a manual typewriter. Yes, it's true: I am the proud owner of The Olympia, and of course, when I am at Olympia, I am Hercules-ette.

My Olympia is a gift from my magical and beloved friend Theresa Williams-Author. When she first mentioned the gift of the typewriter to me, I said I loved the idea. I said with a typewriter each word seemed important, and I felt I could be Faulkner, or am somehow connected to the great writers of the past who couldn't turn out a lot of folderol just because they had a computer. The great Shelby Foote never used a computer. Each word is a conscious, loving effort. Like Faulkner, I'm gonna pencil in my plots on the walls.

Now I think I won't even put the computer in my studio. This idea gives me energy. Just me and the silence. Way cool. I walked into the space this morning and had goose bumps.

Maybe it's part of.... Richard Brautigan's

Karma Repair Kit: Items 1-4

1. Get enough food to eat, and eat it.


2. Find a place to sleep where it is quiet, and sleep there.


3. Reduce intellectual and emotional noise until you arrive at the silence of yourself, and listen to it.


4.

You get the idea ;-)

Now, I owe my first Olympia-born to Theresa. I'm working on it.

Beth

Extreme makeover: or, a room of my own

Dear Friends,

Lately I’ve been working on creating a personal space for my writing. As I mentioned yesterday, I’m using a vacated kid-space to do this.

When we moved into this house, the room had a hideous orange 1970’s shag carpet. Still, it was ok with my son (and with my budget), so we kept it. I thought perhaps when he moved on, I would change it.

Now, however, he has moved on, but the orange seems just right, a fiery, passionate shade with yellows and reds. It fits well with my internal fire. Now I’m moving all kinds of things into the room that seem to go together in a serendipitous kind of way, ya know what I mean? There is the Kachina Still-Life signed poster by Michael Kabotie with royal blue and shades of orange, and the Mexico beach bag and blanket with pink and blue and red. There is my Matisse poster of a woman at a desk, and the Paul Klee rug of “The Village,” which I’ve had for eons. Lots of orange.

It is a giant genie’s lamp, and I am the genie inside of it, making my wishes and dreams come true.

Perhaps you have three wishes you’d like to share?

I am loving this space.

Commitments:

1. When I traveled on my vision quest this past summer – perhaps you may remember the unfinished serial blog – I visited an art gallery that had inspirational quotes written in crayon on the wall. I’m going to do this too, and want to share with you the quotes I’ve collected and I’m gonna put on my walls.

2. On my table is an 8 ½ by 11 paper that is covered with yellow sticky notes (you know the ones) that have my handwritten notes to self: “brilliant” blog thoughts. Well, forget that. I’m just going to share these without worrying about developing them or being “Brilliant!” I seem to write best when I write fast.

Beth aka woman who talks to herself

Back to Kindergarten

Dear Friends,

Today I posted the sidebar information under the link "View my complete profile." I think it's too long for the sidebar, but I'm having a heckuva time getting it to wrap and connect to the lnk.

Also, I've been visiting some of your blogs, and trying to figure out how to make an easy link to them on my blog. I'm still working on it. The cut and paste thing didn't seem to work for me. They're sending me back to kindergarten.

By the way, I'm also a woman who talks to herself, but I can't put that in the profile. I mean, I wouldn't want to advertise that I'm slightly bizarre, would I? But then, it's nice to know someone is listening :-)

Commitment: I have been working on creating my own writing space in a now-deserted kid's room. I'll be back to talk about the writing space and also the little post it notes I have all over, things I'm gonna blog about in my next life.

Until we meet again--

Beth aka woman who talks to herself

What's fact got to do with it?

Dear Friends,

Have you ever made frosting for a cake or for cookies? We're looking into the mixing bowl, and the creamed butter and sugar and vanilla, and it's just that: vanilla frosting. What we need is pink, and just a drop of red food coloring will do the trick. We reach into our baking supplies cupboard, take out the small vial of red, unscrew the tiny yellow cap, and watch one drop of red bing into the frosting.

We turn on the mixer, and lo and behold, the entire mixture first becomes swirled like a candy cane, and then, aha, it's pink. All of it. No way to change it.

Fact and fiction is like that: one drop of fiction into the facts and ***poof*** it's all fiction. Too bad for the memoir. Great for us fiction writers.

I wanted to share the NYTimes op-ed column by Tim Carvell, a writer with The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Please! No laughing.

Op-Ed Contributor
A Million Little Corrections

By TIM CARVELL

Published: January 11, 2006

IT is with great sorrow, and no small amount of embarrassment, that I must confess to some inadvertent errors, omissions and elisions in my best-selling memoir, "A Brief History of Tim." In the wake of the recent revelations about the work of J T Leroy and James Frey, it seems inevitable that some of my small mistakes will come to light, and so I feel duty-bound to be upfront and honest with you. Plus, I hear that reporters have been sniffing around.
I feel that none of the slight liberties I took in writing my memoir really affect the overall work, but nonetheless, you should know a few things: I am not, in fact, black.

Nor am I, to the best of my knowledge, a woman. Anything in my book that suggests otherwise is the result of a typographical error. That this error was compounded by my decision to pose for my author photo and bookstore appearances in drag and blackface is, I will acknowledge, unfortunate.

The portions of my book dealing with Depression-era Ireland are, I have been reliably informed, copied verbatim from Frank McCourt's "Angela's Ashes." I can only conclude that I accidentally confused my manuscript with my notes for my memoir in which I copied large portions of other writers' works, just to see how they were structured. In hindsight, the fact that I was born 40 years after the Depression should have been a tip-off.

My parents are both alive; any reference to my being orphaned at age 12 was meant to be strictly metaphorical.

Furthermore, my parents and their lawyers would like it known that neither they, nor any other member of my family, ever beat and/or had sex with me. I thought it was clear that those parts of the book were meant as a joke. (That's what the emoticons were for.)

In writing a narrative, it is sometimes necessary to compress or combine certain incidents for dramatic effect. I did much the same thing in the chapter of my book dealing with my prison term, although in reverse: in the interest of dramatic clarity, I expanded my 1993 arrest for jaywalking into a seven-year stint in Sing Sing for manslaughter.

Okay, it wasn't so much a jaywalking "arrest" as a ticket.

Fine, it was a stern warning. Happy now?

The death of my older brother, my ensuing severe depression and subsequent emotional breakthrough with the help of a caring psychotherapist did not happen to me, but rather to Timothy Hutton in the film "Ordinary People," which I saw at a very impressionable age, and which I could have sworn happened to me.


Ditto for the part about accidentally hacking into Norad and being saved from causing a global thermonuclear war, with an assist from Dabney Coleman. That was "WarGames." Really, the fact that I could remember his name only as "Dabney Coleman" should have given me pause.

And, finally, since people are getting all "fact-checky" on me, I should just confess that my life did not, in fact, shatter into a million little pieces. I just went back and recounted. It was six pieces. Consider it a rounding error.

Tim Carvell is a writer for "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart."

Deleted Scenes and Trailers

Dear Friends,

As promised, here is the scene I deleted from "What Killed Frizzy":

We say our goodbyes, and I leave work early for my shopping excursion. I take the scenic route to K Mart, through extravagant old-guard homes with expansive green lawns and red brick Georgian exteriors and porches hels up by white Corinthian columns. The neighborhood is calming. I don't have to be worried about being unwelcome, as I'm not one of the nouveau riche. I'm not even nouveau poor. I'm old money poor, one of the finest old money poor families in the state.

In my rear view mirror I see flashing red lights and then hear a siren. I pull over and a white and blue police car pulls in behind me. The officer asks for the usual, the license, registration, insurance. I'm a heavily insured, middled-aged woman in taupe four door sedan who can find those documents easily.

As he starts to tell me that the speed limit on this street is only 25 miles per hour, and perhaps I'm confused, cars speed by us, while teenagers laugh and point and give us the finger. They press their faces to the glass, mouthing with I think is f*** you and kiss me, but is more likely kiss my a**.

I liked the alienation in the scene above and the image of peering through the glass at a world going by. It echoes some of the scenes in the story. But, when I read the story, it was distracting.

It's 9:15 here, and that means I need to get some rest (I know, I know, party girl!). I'm a glutton for sleep. Good night.

Beth

Poor Woman's Maureen Dowd*

My Dear Friends,

Today I ready copies of my manuscript "What Killed Frizzy" to send out tomorrow (missed the .37 cent mailing). At long last, I finish something, put it in a bottle, and send it to sea. The thing is, I like this manuscript. It seems fresh and original. My 22 year old son sits in an easy chair and reads the whole thing today -- a high compliment, as he's not fond of reading -- and says, "it could be longer."

The story incorporates some of my new words (schmarmy and bureaucratina, the feminine of bureaucrat). The truly, truly odd thing is that I don't seem to care if anyone else likes it. I think it's good. What a momentous event. I have been overwhelmed by the simple tasks of marketing, copying, revising, addressing, and now I have gone and done it. It is truly a red letter day.

Yesterday I mentioned that I want my writing to traffic in emotional truth. I now need to work on what I mean by that. I am interested in love, death, sacrifice, and responsibility. You know, the everyday stuff of life. I love the comments you leave for me, so heartfelt and honest. These are not the themes of an 800 word column. Hence, I'm a "poor woman's Maureen Dowd."

*Thanks to SR for the title of my entry.

Tomorrow, I'll try to give you an out-take from Frizzy.

Later,
Beth

Is Sex Necessary?

Dear Friends,

I find it a difficult to write to you during the work week. Somehow, after a busy day, I don’t feel that my writing is particularly mindful, and I am drained. My entries, which I draft off-line, seem harsh and unlike me, a “let’s just get it over with and put me out of my misery” kind of writing, like I’m taking a dose of bitter medicine. I need a teaspoon of sugar. Ooops, make that an IV....

Several times I started writing you. For example, on Monday I drafted Today I decide to do the unexpected: following through on my one new thing each day, I become the owner of a book with a pulp-fiction jacket, a buxom woman in red, and the title, “Are Men Necessary.” Yes, it’s true. I decided to challenge my assumptions of a few days ago, dismount from my high horse, and surprise my high falutin’ self. I was flipping through the opening pages at the bookstore, and I saw a reference to Thurber’s satire, “Is Sex Necessary.” And I saw that I didn’t see it, I missed the step, I fell off the dock and was gurgling for air.

I never quite finished that letter.

But today, speaking of Maureen, I wondered if you've visited the blog Wonkette, or heard of Ana Marie Cox, or her new novel, Dog Days? Because today I read that, according to the New York Times’ reviewer Christopher Buckley, she’s more self aware than Maureen Dowd, and he likes Maureen. Per NYT’s David Carr, the Wonkette “traffics in tips and rumors about all the Senate aides quaking in their cubes.” (Also he says she’s Katherine Hepburn with a severe case of potty mouth, but that’s an aside.) What do you traffic in?

I want my writing to traffic in emotional truth. What’s it like when a friend commits suicide? What’s it like when your son is deployed to Iraq (I say hurrah to Cindy Sheehan)? Your husband says, you’ve been a wonderful wife and mother, I’m having an affair with a colleague? Your boyfriend says, oooops, slight problem, didn’t want to distract you, I’m actually married? Your friend of over 20 years says, had cramps, went to doctor, diagnosis ovarian cancer? And that's just the tip of our communal iceberg. Ghandi said my life is my message. What is my message?

Come to think of it, it would be easier to write about Bushworld, but I’ve lost the desire to read Maureen. I’m gonna send Are Men Necessary to a friend whom I think will enjoy it, and ask for a full book report. Maybe I’ll try Thurber’s Is Sex Necessary, instead. I hear it’s fun to walk around with it, title showing, of course. So it’s a full circle week: I got the book, I got rid of the book.

Tonight I have company and we’re doing quesadillas and Coronas, and tomorrow I’ll be trying a new recipe for Italian vegetable stuffed steak and pasta. I think a good merlot is in order. Come on over. I've got plenty of grub.

Until we meet again,
Beth

PS McFawn, I love your questions about time and space. Yes, it's a new definition, for me anyway. I hope to elaborate on it at some future point. Thanks for calling me on being evasive...I hate sloppy thinking, and it's so easy to do.

Duck: it's what's for dinner

Dear Friends,

Tonight I’m fixing duck with curry and honey, pine nut couscous with Gorgonzola cheese and dried cranberries, and an herb salad. You are invited. I wish you weren’t so far away. I’m feeling a little bit alone right now. I won’t go into that.

The cooking thing is something new I’m going to try this year. In fact, I am a woman who has has never used yeast. My ex-mother in law once gave me a pie crust recipe. I didn’t have the heart to say I have never, and never will, make a pie crust. Then again, she never read Tristram Shandy. But we got along ok. That, too, is another story.

At any rate I decided this year to try and become a gourmetrina. That’s a little like being a gourmet, just a teeny weeny bit, but not too much. I’m hoping that by being smaller than a gourmet I'll encourage folks to leave their expectations at the door. Oh, by the way, did I tell you I sometimes make up words?

Speaking of new things for the year, are you doing the resolution bit? I decided to take some time and look at various categories of my life, where I’m going, where I wanna go, blah blah very boring. In the best information gathering self I have, I came up with lots of stuff, but three areas came to surface, the kind of stuff that I thought, wow, what would push my envelope? I call this broad area my time and space goal, and anything that’s important spiritually and artistically has to fit that, except for the two other areas, and I’ll elaborate on those, if you ask me about them.

Meanwhile I’m back in my mode of doing one new thing per day. This means seeing something new, meeting someone new, consciously having one new thought, doing one unexpected action. Done with intention. I also collect off-beat posters of places I’ve been and things I’ve seen, and I’m happy to report that I now have a great poster of Marilyn, I wanna be loved by you.

Today, in addition to making the pine nut couscous, which is new for me (and so easy, I know what you’re thinking) I am going to a movie I’ve never seen, although I haven’t decided as yet which one it will be. Also, I’ve never gone to a movie on New Year’s Day, that I can recall. So you see, my requirements for one new thing per day aren’t too difficult to accomplish. Some might even say, cheesy.

I’m looking forward to seeing you over the duck. Here’s to pushing our envelope.

Warmly,
Beth

I wanna be loved by you

Today I visit a museum exhibit, “I wanna be loved by you.” It's a series of photographs taken of Marilyn Monroe. I feel as if I've had a personal visit with her.

My image of her is from the early ‘60’s: on the cover of Life, a celebrity who committed suicide, once married to Arthur Miller and Joe DiMaggio, and someone took a rose to her grave every year. I think it was Joe.

A burgundy floor to ceiling poster says:

I knew I belonged to the public and to the world, not because I was talented or even beautiful but because I had never belonged to anything or anyone else. The public was my only family, the only Prince Charming, and the only home I had ever dreamed of.—Marilyn Monroe

The photos in the exhibit are poignant yet erotic. Come to think of it, there are a lot of men at the Marilyn photos, men of all ages, with ball caps, with spikey hair. Clearly she looked fabulous in a sheet. There’s a celebrity section: “Marilyn and Jack Benny,” “Marilyn and George Cukor,” “Marilyn and Tony Curtis.”

But there’s one photo of her in a white V-neck sweater, at a lunch room, pointing at the camera. The title of the photo is “Marilyn caught off camera.” She looks smart, savvy. Her eyebrows are up and she looks about to say something. She could be in the courtroom. She could be my dentist. She doesn’t look ready to kiss anyone. She could be me. That's my Marilyn.

It’s said she completely changed before a photo shoot, rearranging herself, a consummate actress for the camera. Then there are the 100 life-size Marilyn cutouts grouped behind movie ropes and a video playing of her singing happy birthday to JFK. I wonder what she’d think of all this cardboard homage to her. All these models of yourself with your skirt blowing up from the subway air, dressed in red, white, blue or green, like so many Christmas lights. Twinkle, twinkle. Did anyone really love her?

Then, hidden in the back corner, there’s the room of Norma Jean Baker, a slightly prettier than average girl who worked on an assembly line, before she imagined herself into being, before she took unprecedented control over the movie Bus Stop with her savvy, and before she left the planet.

Marilyn said The public was my only family, the only Prince Charming, and the only home I had ever dreamed of. The title of the Marilyn exhibit is “I wanna be loved by you.” I didn’t realize she maybe wanted to be loved by me.

Are Men Necessary?

Dear Friends,

Pardon my dust while I try to figure out what I want my blog to be. (Blog-to-be: is that sort of like I may marry it, after we set the date? It's my blogicee?)

While I originally thought I’d share my errant but brilliant, pithy thoughts (on a daily basis!) many of them are unbloggable. Not x-rated—ok, maybe some of them—but not of the sort I want to place in this forum.

Instead, I’ll share with you that I dream of being a sort of Maureen Dowd, and saying wildly funny and insightful things about my daily surroundings, an archaeologist of the present, sending letters from today, without being so strident and as self-consciously clever as I find some of her writing.

By the way, Maureen, I’m sorry, that’s the way it is here, in the hinterlands, today, although your writing makes me smile, and sometimes it exposes actions I haven’t known about, a marvelous combination. But I’m bothered a bit about the strident nature of some of your comments, which come across as, well, sort of self-righteous. Still, I like your NYT column. This leads me to your book, Are Men Necessary.

As a single 50-something who raised two sons alone and who is managing her own brilliant career, I find the title a little off-putting and not ironic. I guess I’d wonder a little if I saw the title, Are Women Necessary? There’s a he-man on the cover, a cartoon spidey man replete with bulging muscles and saviourism shining is his bright blue eyes.

Excuse me while I run right out to the kitchen and throw a roast in the crock pot and be sure to take my hair out of curlers at 5 pm, comb my hair, and surround myself in saran wrap. I’m busy being swept back to some earlier, black-and-white, slightly-post Leave It To Beaver time where my role is defined, and I am necessary. Please keep me, Walter. The severance pay is lousy.

Then again, perhaps I’d just find Are Women Necessary a buzzing annoyance and swing at it with my fly swatter, a mere trifle to be put out of its misery. Are Women Necessary? And I care what the writer thinks because why? I seek engagement, not estrangement.

But, Maureen, I know you will write back, and tell me things like I’m taking all of this too seriously, and how, since I haven’t even read the book, I have missed the boat. In fact, I fell off the dock and nearly drowned.

All that’s going to change, though, because you’ll convince me to read it, and I’ll share what I learned from your book as a potentially sympatico 50 year old single woman. Perhaps we’ll be friends for life. Looking forward to hearing from you.

Beth

Techno Butterfingers

Dear Mary,

Thank you for your kind words in my last entry. I'd like to visit your journal and make a comment. In fact I'd love to visit many entries, numerous journals, whip out brilliant thoughts and perhaps engender world peace.

But the problem is, among other things, I am a techno butterfingers. Just moving to blogspot has created a bit of a boondoggle for me. Taking time to create links, search, upload pictures, and (yikes!) think about what bloggers are saying has me downright frazzled. Plus, I have a tendency to break mechanical things when I touch them. Truth is, I can't be trusted with a toaster.

Which leads me to my thought process. I hope it's not a butterfingers, too, but it may be. It's way slow, with good thoughts coming after I've put them on the stove to mull and stew for a day. Now, why is that so? Can I hasten things up a bit? Is there a thought enhancer, a mind speeder-upper? (I'm not talking illegal substances, mind you.) Could it be the irony of slowing one's thoughts, meditating, in fact increases thinking ability? And then are the thoughts themselves sloppy and slippery, based on hidden and perhaps inaccurate assumptions? Or are they pithy and original?

Well, as you can probably see, I like to ask questions a lot more than I like to fiddle with sites and keys and scanning and downloading and figuring out techno stuff, so please just know that until I figure everything out, which may be a few weeks, your comment, as are the comments of others, affirming to me. I truly appreciate them.

Beth

ps haven't seen jarhead yet. Of course, also haven't cleaned house or shopped for company yet, either. ***sigh***

Nouveau Knitting

So I’m walking into the gym where I spin, and five or six women are grouped around a bike, with this expectant look, as if someone's about to have a baby. They look a little glum for such a special event, so I wonder if someone’s hurt, but that doesn't seem quite right, and I wonder if it’s just that the bike is broken. Maybe it’s just a look of expectation. Usually the black steeds are lined up against the back wall like stallions, waiting to be taken out for a ride.

I see then that something is sitting on the handlebars, wrapped in tissue paper, and I think it’s someone’s birthday. That’s cool. So I start to reach down to pick up a mat for my stead, when someone says there’s a card, open the card, read it to us, we wanna know what it says, it’s right there, in the box! And then it dawns on me that this is all about me, this is for me, and they are all looking like I should have known this.

Except I am dumbfounded.

For the record, spinning at a women’s gym is nouveau knitting: ten or so women form a semi circle, work intensely to rock ‘n roll, talk about what it’s like to teach children in an inner city school district, or how the traditional American Thanksgiving is going to have a touch of Brazil this year, or whether the woman who went walking topless on the Slippery Elm Trail should be arrested. Then we check our heart monitors, instead of the scarves we might have been knitting in previous times, and go home.

Except now there is a new thread: It turns out the packet wrapped in tissue paper is a single rose in a crystal vase, brought to the gym personally by a man I’d met once just, two days earlier. His entrance into my personal sphere while I was unaware is described this way by a woman who was there: he sashays into the gym, not like our husbands and boyfriends who cast down their eyes, and asks if you exercise here.

I don’t say anything. Then I say I am dumbfounded. Two women look at me—we’re doing a standing climb, hunched over handlebars while being exhorted by a computer printout sign that exclaimsIt’s your ride!—and say, you look dumbfounded. At the end of the class I ask meekly, what was he wearing? They hoot and holler at this.

And so the new thread weaves its way through each spinning class: I didn’t want to ask, but are you still seeing Flowerman? Party girl! Do you, like, need the fan turned directly on you? I’m living vicariously through you!

There are laughs and I knit my own scarf, telling about how before I met him I stared at a piece of paper with his name on it so I’d remember it correctly, or how some odd coincidences have me puzzled.

There is the nodding and the clicking of the pedals. Such is the way with nouveau knitting. Perhaps it’s a bit like nouveau journaling, weaving a garment out of the unknown strands of life, perhaps over time inevitably constructing someone’s destiny, possibly mine.

Quotation of the Week

"Writing itself is one of the great, free human activities. There is scope for individuality, and elation, and discovery, in writing. For the person who follows with trust and forgiveness what occurs to him, the world remains always ready and deep, an inexhaustible environment, with the combined vividness of an actuality and flexibility of a dream. Working back and forth between experience and thought, writers have more than space and time can offer. They have the whole unexplored realm of human vision."

--William Stafford

When an ad banner for love or credit ratings appears at the top of our journals, the writing doesn't seem free: it seems like an endorsement of some dufus product about which we don't care, don't like, or perhaps in some way pains us.

I am traveling from aol to blogspot. It pains me to move, and I understand I may move yet again. I am a nomad, after all. I hope that I don't get unwanted pop-ups instead of ad banners. My journal at my bedside gets winestains. At least that is my own personal endorsement.

Jarhead

Today I realize I want to see the recently released movie Jarhead.

This is not a small matter. Two years ago at this time, my younger son declared that after much thought he was enlisting in the Marines as soon as he graduated from high school. He and I went on a reading bout: Frank Schaeffer's Keeping Faith, Thomas Ricks' Making the Corps, Daniel DaCruz' Boot, Anthony Swofford's Jarhead. ("In time of trouble," Joan Didion writes in The Year of Magical Thinking, I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information was control." Certainly she wasn't the only one who believed information was control.)

In fact my son picked up a first edition of Jarhead at the wonderful bookstore "Bound to be Read" in St Paul, MN, where were on vacation in the summer of 2003, visiting a family member. It's by a sensitive and intelligent writer on what his experiences were to become and be a Marine in a strange and puzzling conflict. It is, in fact, more than that. I appreciated Swofford's journey in the book very much.

Somewhat like the father Frank Schaeffer in Keeping Faith, I was a graduate-degreed liberal who was aghast at the idea of my child choosing an occupation in which I thought, perhaps mistakenly, he'd lose his individual identity, learn to point, shoot, and kill, and become insensitive and cruel. I had campaigned for McGovern in '72, for crying out loud. I wore the original tie-dye, bell bottoms, and jean jacket.

So after he told me of his intention to enlist, I drove to Carter Park, a small park with ball diamond where my sons used to play, and cried. Probably he thought me a wimp. Probably I did not care. I considered him a sensitive and intelligent young man, and much as I tried to dissuade him, I was ineffective.

One week after his graduation, he departed for Parris Island, South Carolina. For those of you familar with the USMC, you know that to some extent loved ones and friends are incommunicado with the recruit except for letters. Perhaps I'll share some of these wonderful letters with you, as I desperately tried to hold on to a young man growing up and to an idea of myself that no longer exists.

For now, I think I'll just go and see the movie, and see what it has to say, even though the reviews are not especially positive. I want to feel re-connected to who I was, and who we were, at that time. It is, in fact, a good feeling.

I think I'll go this weekend, and I'll let you know how it goes.