4: Mourning Diary

Consists of the notes Roland Barthes took after the death of his mother, Henriette. She was widowed (via WWI, that recurring theme) when he was a baby and they lived together most of his life. The notes are transcribed as they were written, one note to a page. There’s a center insert with family photographs and scans of a few of the diary notecards.

(Sidenote: I didn’t realize Barthes had a brother. Specifically, a younger half-brother (Michel) born out-of-wedlock to his mother when Barthes was 12ish. This info seems to be elided from his standard bio; it isn’t on his Wikipedia page. Kinda weird, because reading MD, it seems like they were pretty close. Makes Mme. Barthes seem more human, less martyr, too!)

It’s likely the notes would have become the basis for a book but Barthes died (he was hit by a truck and succumbed to his injuries) only months after the diary stops. So what’s here are basically personal/private notes not written for a public audience. Except it’s Barthes, so…

At the same time, I think calling the diary whiny/self-indulgent (as I saw in some reader reviews) is silly because it’s a diary. If you can’t whine in your diary, please. 🙄

Some quotes:

In taking these notes, I’m trusting myself to the banality that is in me. (17)

Solitude = having no one at home to whom you can say: I’ll be back at a specific time or who you can call to say (or to whom you can just say): voilà, I’m home now. (44)

Depression comes when, in the depths of despair, I cannot manage to save myself by my attachment to writing. (62)

I have not a desire but a need for solitude. (91)

if these ‘changes’ … make for silence, inwardness, the wound of mourning shifts toward a higher realm of thought. Triviality (of hysteria) ≠ Nobility (of Solitude). (95)

M. and I feel that paradoxically (since people usually say: work, amuse yourself, see friends) it’s when we’re busy, distracted, sought out, exteriorized, that we suffer most. Inwardness, calm, solitude make us less miserable. (100)

Only I know what my road has been for the last year and a half: the economy of this motionless and anything but spectacular mourning that has kept me unceasingly separate by its demands; a separation that I have ultimately always projected to bring to a close by a book — Stubbornness, secrecy. (231)

Reading this got me thinking again about the difference between loss by death vs. loss by leaving again. When someone dies, those left behind still have their (good) memories. This, I think, makes it hard(er) to move on, because it’s possible to dwell in the past, in happy memories of the person who is gone. Whereas, when someone leaves, those left behind can’t dwell in the past—at least how they’d always remembered it—that’s gone. If it’s to be remembered, it needs to be reconstituted/reconstructed in a completely different way. So while death-loss drags you backward, leaving-loss pushes you forward. It almost forces you to move on, because there are no happy memories to return to.

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2: The Rules of Gentility & 3: Jane Austen: Blood Persuasion

Janet Mullany was one of our original forum hosts at Toasted Cheese.

Janet’s writing at TC:

“A Perfect Evening” (fiction in the September 2001 issue of TC)
“The Companions are Chosen” (Best of the Boards in the December 2001 issue of TC)
“Snow, the Seven, and the Moon” (Winner of the first annual Dead of Winter writing contest)
“Enter At Your Own Risk: The Strange, Twilight World of Writing Competitions” (Absolute Blank, November 2002)

In the decade since she left TC, Janet has published more than a dozen books. Amazing right? I figured it was about time we at TC checked out her work, so I headed down to the library and picked up a couple books.

The Rules of Gentility by Janet Mullany

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The first book I read was The Rules of Gentility, which was what I’d call a gentle parody of Regency (Jane Austen era) romances. She pokes fun at the conventions of the genre, but in a way that shows her genuine fondness for it. A Bridget Jones influence was apparent here as well, especially in protagonist Philomena’s penchant for making lists of potential husbands, making this a kind of a regency/chick-lit mash-up. Janet’s writing always showed her sense of humor and that was readily apparent here. The story, with its increasingly improbable situations, was at times hilarious. Recommended if you don’t take these things too seriously.

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Blood Persuasion by Janet Mullany

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This, as you may have guessed, was a Jane Austen/vampires mash-up (and a sequel to Jane and the Damned). The protagonist here is Jane Austen herself (age 35, an aged spinster), who harbors a secret: she’s not-quite-human. She used to be one of the Damned (see JatD), but she took ‘the Cure’ and now she’s caught midway between human and vampire. She’s busy being a respectable spinster when her vampire buddies reappear as the new tenants in her brother Edward’s mansion. Their presence pulls Jane back to the dark side, which she resists less because she’s worried about her soul and more because she’s worried about not being able to write (a problem when she was previously Damned). I didn’t like this as much as TRoG, but that’s definitely a matter of personal taste; vampires (werewolves, zombies, ghosts, etc.) are really not my thing. Recommended for fans of the romantic vampire genre.

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1: Turtle Valley

Turtle Valley by Gail Anderson-Dargatz

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

So, way back in the day when she was just Anderson without the -Dargatz, I knew Gail. Not well, it was more a friend-of-a-friend situation, but there you go.

Previously I read A Rhinestone Button (in 2003) and A Cure for Death by Lightning (in 1999, which I weirdly remember because I read it on a trip). Which predates me keeping track of my reading, so no links. I can’t say I have any strong memories of either book, but then, it’s been a while! This is why it’s good to write things down.

Anyhoo. Turtle Valley. Purchased at the VPL Book Sale, October 2010:

Turtle Valley is set just outside Salmon Arm during the August 1998 wildfire. Some of the hyper-local place names are fictional (Turtle Valley, Promise), but the general geography is authentic. The fire was to the west of Salmon Arm and this is where protagonist Kat’s parents live.

She has returned home (accompanied by her husband, Ezra, and son) to help her parents move the possessions they want to keep safe from the fire to her sister Val’s garage (in Canoe, east of SA). They do this at what feels like a rather leisurely pace, intermingled with reminiscences, reconnections, and revelations.

Kat + Val’s father, Gus, is dying. Val thinks their mother, Beth, has the beginnings of dementia. Beth + Gus’s neighbor, Jude, is Kat’s ex. Kat married Ezra on the rebound. Ezra has had a stroke and Kat feels more like his caregiver than his wife.

There’s a parallel between Ezra and Beth’s long-deceased father, who suffered from PTSD as well as a brain injury (cause: WWI). There’s another parallel between Kat/Jude’s relationship and the one between Beth’s also-deceased mother, Maud, and Gus’s deceased uncle, Valentine. There’s a third parallel between war and the wildfire (smoke fills the air, ash and sparks rain down, army trucks race past the house, helicopters and water bombers fly overhead). There’s a fourth parallel between the wildfire and Jude’s kiln (he makes raku).

And… there are ghosts.

To be clear, these are magical realism style ghosts. But there is plenty going on in this story. Did it need ghosts? I think no. I think the ghosts were superfluous. The story would have been just fine without ghosts. But it’s true I’m not a vwzg* person. I know other readers love the ghosts.

This story feels very personal. I try to avoid conflating author/narrator, but… Kat is a writer. She’s the same age as the author. They both worked as reporters for the Salmon Arm Observer. They both had husbands who had strokes. etcetera. Obviously a lot of this story is culled from real life. It made me wonder how the real-life counterparts felt about this story. How do you pull from real life so transparently and survive the backlash? That’s something I still struggle with, will maybe always struggle with, though I tell myself I need to get over my hang ups and just write.

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*vampires, werewolves, zombies, ghosts

Deja Vu

So I’m perusing The Kitchn, as one does, and I see this post (Why This Is My Favorite Cake Pan) and I laugh because that’s my cake pan, or rather pans. I have two:

I’ve always said they’re the best and I’d never get rid of them, but you know what’s even better?

Pie plate with slider bar. Sure, it’s hideous. But it’s also awesome.

Fun with quotes

let go of that which does not serve you

Make your own here.

Weekend Reading (+ Listening)

Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one. If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter—as indissolubly as if they were conceived together.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald,
in a letter to his daughter Scottie
via Brainpickings

Melissa Gira Grant – Girl Geeks and Boy Kings

Roxana Robinson – How I Get to Write

Gretchen Rubin – Four Personality Types: Which One Are You?

Other People: Episode 139 — xTx

Spring 2013 – Week 1

What I did this week:

Updated WorldCat lists + library lists.
Ran across a new Nicholas Carr article which led to new Pew study re: ebooks/pbooks.
Scanned + printed 7 books.
Filled in book data for 7 books.

Spring 2013 – Week 0

What I did this week:

Planning (aka making lists).
Cleared out sfu inbox.
Printed out list of books for library run.
Took out 7 more books for analysis (bringing total to 58).
Trekked up the mountain to the library for intro/lit review books. Eliminated some immediately (getting ruthless); brought home 13.
Did some thinking about intro/lit review organization. Think I’ll focus on: 1) book as object vs. book as words; 2) effect of digital shift on brain/reading; 3) effect of collaboration on writing. These seem to be the areas that come up most frequently in the “hell in a handbasket” articles.
Updated Goodreads lists.

This was a kind of bonus week (hence week 0). The spring semester actually started today.

disproportionate guilt

If we do not respect ourselves … we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out — since our self-image is untenable — their false notions of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gist for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. Of course I will play Francesca to your Paolo, Hellen Keller to anyone’s Annie Sullivan: no expectation is too misplaced, no role too ludicrous…

It is the phenomenon sometimes called “alienation from self.” In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the specter of something so small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that answering it becomes out of the question. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves — their lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.

—Joan Didion
via Maud Newton