Bird by Bird

Several weeks ago I finished the monstrosity of schlock that is the Twilight series. I refuse to call it a saga. No freaking way am I putting that silliness up there with Roots. Afterwards I needed something to get the saccharine taste out of my mouth.

So I picked up Dante's Inferno and a collection of T.S. Eliot. The Dante was specifically related to Sanctuary (sort of - I can justify a lot in the name of research); I haven't a clue where I got the idea to pick up Eliot. I returned the Dante unread. I've really enjoyed the Eliot, even the Choruses from the Rock, which were written after he had some kind of Christian conversion experience. I think my Dad would really enjoy it. I hadn't realized he'd written Murder in the Cathedral. I wish the library had a platinum plan, where you could check out books for six months at a time. I'm getting attached to the damned things and it's getting harder and harder to send them back.

I started from the beginning, with the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. I'm not a poetry kind of person, because I sometimes feel that I'm an idiot because I don't often understand what the fuck the poet is really trying to express, and I really hate feeling stupid. But with Prufrock I decided to step away from left-brain understanding and just be aware of the words, how they relate to each other, and the odd currents they made in my head. Kinda fun to just play with it. So I'm plugging along and I hit a verse set apart from the rest:

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

I stopped there and repeated it to myself, fascinated by the desolation of the image (at least it was to me) and trying to figure out exactly how it evoked that desolation with just a few simple words. Nothing fancy, really. But there's just something about Eliot that gets to me.

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

(The Waste Land)

That line produces such cold dread in my gut that I am tempted to read Stephen King just to lighten the mood.

I've just talked myself into buying the book tomorrow. Crap.

*****

I liked Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird after the first page - probably after the first sentence. But I fell head over heels when I got to page xiii of the Introduction, where she's talking about a home video that was made of a birthday party she attended as a child, "with all these cute little boys and girls playing together like puppies, and all of a sudden I scuttled across the screen like Prufrock's crab."

That sounds familiar, I thought. Who's Prufrock? Didn't I just read something about -- Then I remembered, and was so fucking pleased with myself for actually getting a literary reference, and for an insight into how someone else reads it, and to realize that we were kind of on the same page, that I couldn't stand myself for at least five minutes. I can be smug and watch myself be smug and be disgusted by it all at the same time.

So after that I was ready to fall into bed with Lamott no matter what she wrote for the rest of the book. I was hers.

The books I seem to enjoy the most, the ones that I like enough to want to buy and somehow find room for, usually offer up ideas and phrases that I want to write down and spout to strangers. It turns out that one of my favorites, one that I almost used in our company newsletter, was also written by Anne Lamott:

Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work; you don't give up.

At the time I first read it, I didn't know it applied to writing. I thought it was just something I could put in the newsletter as a little gift to the people who were paying attention to the fine print. 2009 has not been an easy year, and I was trying to share the piece of myself that has been putting one foot in front of the other, trudging along, sometimes so weighed down by troubles that I wasn't able to look up and around me, but doing it all the same. I wanted the people who read it to know that if they stopped at least trying to do the right thing, they were pussies. Or at least that I thought so.

When I ran across that quote about a third of the way through Bird by Bird, I felt a shiver of recognition, then a surge of elation from making yet another true and honest connection to this writer. I think my mouth actually dropped open before I said out loud, "That's so fucking cool!" Luckily I was the only one in the lab at the time.

That's what I want people who read my stuff to feel. I want to tell a good story, and I want to tell it well enough that pages turn quickly, but I'd also like to give someone a moment or two where they might think, "Yes. Yes. That's exactly it." And maybe make someone feel a little less alone. Which is what Lamott has been giving me over the last week.

I switched to Misery last night. I think it's because I don't want Bird by Bird to end, because then I will have to give it back.

*****

Aeryn's still miserable. Her fever has been responding well to the (generic) Tylenol, but it comes right back after five hours. At least she's not hurting and achy like she was last night. But her eyes are starting to get glassy again and I think it's about time check her temperature and put her to bed. She's not even interested in hot chocolate - what the fuck is that about?

I'm going to slog through another few pages of Sanctuary tonight, but I've promised myself that I'll take tomorrow night off. I just can't go all week on five or six hours of sleep a night; it does really bad things to my moods and thus really bad things to my family.

That's ok, right? Please tell me that's ok. I'm so tired. I'm not even going to spell-check this bitch, and I don't even care that Blogger lost all my careful italics and formatting; I'm just going to post it and sign off.

I hope you're both doing well. I had a lovely time in our "conference" last night (I love that; it makes it sound so legitimate) and I look forward to the next one.