Photo of the Week--9/28/09

Pigeons in Vatican City? Sacrilege! So during this visit in winter 1999, we had Boy chase them around St. Peter's Square. You can see they're fat and lazy, and probably used to having people moving about. I guess that's why you don't see any of them flying away, even with an almost-five-year-old Boy barrelling down among them. Pigeons are so blasé; one more reason to despise the little sky rats.

Anna Karenina: The Official Haiku Review

Finally! After three renewals, six weeks, and 850-plus pages, I have managed to finish reading Tolstoy's classic Anna Karenina. It didn't take so long because I thought it was boring; it took so long because I've been very very busy. Anyway, let's get to the haiku review:

Poor Anna; she found
passion, but could have used more
mundane happiness

As the title suggests, Anna Karenina is a main focus of the novel; but the first sentence hints that she is only part of a wider story: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Besides Anna's family, which includes her boring, passionless husband and her son, there is the family of her brother Stiva, a spendthrift who cheats on his wife Dolly; Dolly's sister Kitty, who rejects the honest earnestness of Levin for the pretty face of Count Vronsky; Levin the farmer and his tubercular brother; and Vronsky and his class-conscious mother. When Anna meets Vronsky and they fall into passionate, obsessive love, it sets in motion several plot threads that end in both happiness and despair.

Anna's story is the tragic one; she finds real love and passion with Vronsky, but can never be satisfied after consummating the relationship. She becomes pregnant, the affair becomes public, and she must choose between giving up her son or giving up her lover. She chooses the former, but cannot feel at ease: she misses her son, and cannot bond with her new daughter because of it; she cannot marry Vronsky because her husband will not give her a divorce; she cannot go out in public because she has been made a pariah; and as a result she cannot stop worrying that Vronsky will abandon her and she will be left with nothing. Her anxieties eat at her, poison her relationship with Vronsky, and ultimately lead to her destruction.

This is all set in contrast with Levin's journey, and I would argue that Levin is really the main character of the novel, with Anna serving mostly as contrast and object lesson. Levin is of the nobility, but makes his living farming and is always seeking ways to improve things—not just for his own profit, but for those who work for them. He is a man of deep and sometimes contrary thoughts, which we see laid out in great detail as he considers farming, Russian politics, religion, and love. After Vronsky's affair with Anna, Kitty reconsiders Levin's suit and eventually marries him. This brings Levin great joy and great pain, as he must fight his jealous impulses and learn to be a good husband. In the eighth and final part of the book (in which Anna does not appear, as she met her end in Part Seven), we see Levin enjoying the mundane happiness of family life, appreciating his new son, and discovering his faith. Levin seems to be a stand-in for Tolstoy, who wrote about religious struggles of his own, and it's hard not find Levin the book's hero as he concludes that his discovery of faith may not change his character, but now "my whole life, regardles of all that may happen to me, every minute of it, is not only not meaningless, as it was before, but has the unquestionable meaning of the good which it is in my power to put into it!"

One last note on Anna Karenina: yes, it's very long. Yes, it's filled with details about farming, Russian politics, social movements, and religious musings. But unlike Melville in Moby Dick, Tolstoy knows how to make these interesting. We consider all these topics through the eyes and mind of Levin, who is continually struggling to make sense of the world. Where Melville's narrator gives us endless lists about whale parts, Tolstoy's Levin considers what new farming techniques mean to him as a landowner, an employer, even a human being. Anna Karenina has the quality of good historical fiction, where the details transport us into another world and another life, rather than bore us into a stupor.

So, you might have noticed it's now the fall. So much for my good intentions of reading lots of foreign-language classics for this summer's Remedial Lit Project. All those French classics will have to wait until next summer. I'm going to take a few weeks to read just for fun (I've also spent the last six weeks reading biographies for work), and then I'll bring back Janespotting. The library just ordered a copy of Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters (!), and then I think I'm moving on to Northanger Abbey and its offspring.

I don't care what the calendar says...

... when I look at recent additions to my garden, I think it's still summer! Last year I planted a white climbing rose, and this spring a pink one:


The white rose didn't do a whole lot last year, but this year it's thriving and spreading beautiful blossoms all over the side of the garage. The scent is sweet, but even nicer are the beautiful buds, which start out a lovely blush peach before turning white. When the pink climber gets going next spring, it's going to look incredible.


Not long after we returned from England in 2002, I dug up little beds along each side of our garage, so that I could plant bulbs and annuals. The bulbs never did well; between bunnies and our very clay-ey soil, they were doomed. But I've tried different annuals over the years. I did begonias a few times, and they spread very nicely. They're not very bright plants, though, so last year I tried red and white salvia. Those were bright enough, but they didn't spread very well. I didn't want to try impatiens because they are so prevalent, and I worried they might not do well in an area with so much sun. So I tried vinca, aka periwinkle, and we have a winner! Look how many blooms and how much color I have after a few months!


So although fall is my favorite season, and I prefer cooler weather, I'm going to dig my fingernails in and try to hold onto summer a little longer this year.

Photo of the Week--9/21/09

Here we have the first in our ongoing series, "Boy Terrorizes the Pigeons of Europe." This was our first major trip, a week in Italy with my parents and my paternal grandmother. (Her first trip to Europe, taken at age 79!) The six of us flew into Florence, where this photo was taken, and then after a few days took the train to Rome. Boy was pretty portable then; we could get a couple of quiet hours in a museum by promising a trip to the gelateria (ice cream store) afterwards, and by pointing out all the naked people in the pictures. When you're almost five years old, that's a sure giggle. And this photo, taken in front of Florence's Palazzo Vecchio, includes a copy of Michaelangelo's "Naked David," as we liked to refer to it. Bonus! So Boy was in a pretty good mood and cooperated for this shot, where he's giving those fat pigeons some exercise.

Still sitting at the kids' table...

2009 has been a weird writing year for me. I've greatly increased the amount of paid assignments I've been taking on; so far this year I've invoiced almost 20 pieces, which is double the number of invoices I've issued in the last three years combined. (Unfortunately, this is not double the revenue, as many of the pieces are shorter and don't pay as well as the one project I worked for those years.) Of course, the other side of more paid work is that I've had very little time for my own writing. Over the last eight months I think I've managed a few chapters (and chapters is a generous term) in the middle grade novel I'm writing. I've only sent out four query letters on my three finished projects, and all four of those were rejected. (Although my picture book manuscript did get a champagne rejection, and one editor did request the full manuscript of a novel before sending a form rejection.)

On the other hand, I did get a very nice "maybe" from an agent I wrote to last year. After holding on to my novel for a few months, he finally wrote and said he was intrigued, but thought the manuscript needed work before he could represent it. He said he'd be willing to consider a revision, or another piece of mine. This was very exciting news, but it's left me in a kind of limbo. He wasn't specific about what revisions he was looking for, so I'm not ready to drop everything else and start rewriting. In the meantime, I'm hesitant to send out anything else to an editor or another agent, in case this does pan out. I'm going to a writers' conference in a couple of weeks, and I didn't try to sign up for any critiques—partly because I'm still in limbo, and partly because I've already had most of my stuff critiqued at other events.

This whole pursuit of publication and the upcoming conference reminds me of when I was a little kid at family gatherings and I would watch the older generation play cards. It looked like fun; I wanted to join in; but I was told, "your nose is too short." I knew this meant I wasn't old enough, or didn't know how to play well enough, but when when when would I get to play with the grownups? (Eventually I discovered the truth: when they were desperate for a fourth for euchre.) This is how I feel at these conferences: I see the writers who are already published, and they are encouraging, but when when when will my book get to play with the publishers?

I know each query, rejected or not, is making progress. I can see the progress: from form rejections, to personal comments, to this "maybe." It's still very frustrating, and combined with the focus on paid writing it's making it very hard to get back into writing fiction. So I've decided I'm going to participate in National Novel Writing Month, aka NaNoWriMo. In November I'm going to write an entire 50,000 word novel from scratch. I'm giving myself permission not to worry about plot or language or making it to the big kids' table; I'm just going to write. I've got six weeks to think a little bit about what to write; I have a germ of an idea—a character and a narrative device, really—and we'll just see what ensues.

In praise of libraries...

I wasn't really thinking of writing in the blog today; I have a deadline Friday and I wasn't feeling particularly inspired, but then I read this in an industry blog: the Free Library of Philadelphia has announced it is closing. Philadelphia is a city of over 1.5 million, although, like Detroit, it has lost about half a million residents in the past 40 years and is in poor financial shape. Now granted, the library could be (and probably will be) rescued by last-minute financing from the state of Pennsylvania, but to me the thought is unimaginable. No library? No free access to books and movies and magazines and newspapers for 1.5 million residents? No reading programs for kids, no afterschool activities, no school or day care visits? No computer classes, classes for small businesses and job seekers, no visits to senior centers? No space for community meetings, GED classes, and ESL classes? No internet access to reference databases (without which I couldn't do my job)? Seriously, no library?

I know the financial situation is dire ... but I also know from talking to librarians and people in publishing that when the economy goes down, library use goes up. More people seek out free entertainment or use the free internet or take classes to improve their job skills. So seriously, no library? It's like roads or police services—everybody uses them. Everybody should be willing to pay for them, you would think. I don't want to get into the politics of library funding, since there are always some who complain we're taxed too much as it is, government should cut waste, blah blah blah. I don't care if that's true: some things are worth the money, and public libraries are high on that list. Ben Franklin founded the first public lending library in the U.S.; what's more democratic, more American, than the library?

No libraries? That's like no music, or no air.

Photo of the Week--9/14/09

I'm on my second cycle of vacation photos, this time featuring people; this one was taken 11 years ago, on a trip to Amsterdam. I didn't take many pictures on this trip (this was pre-digital photo era), mostly because we didn't see many "sights" but just walked around the city, taking in the canals and the gabled houses. It was fun seeing all the different ways people used the canals (for transportation, or even for homes), and you can tell Boy was fascinated. On that trip we traveled by bus, ferryboat, train, and yes, via canalboat. I love the photo because you can see Boy's stubborn double cowlick, which refuses to be tamed unless his hair is cut short.