Postcards

I have a fascination with postcards. My father, who nurtured this fascination (along with our shared love of any kind of box), once sent me an entire series of postcards that were supposedly damaged by the claw of a wild beast, the tire of a speeding car, etc. His ultimate achievement arrived in a plastic bag with an apology from the post office.

Once, interviewing for a job, I met a delightful couple in McAllen, Texas (he's a professor and she's an artist) who share my love of tacky postcards. Their favorites are the kind that have multiple views of a place, so when I see ones like that, I put them aside to send to them. Right now I have one of Ohio, Missouri, Graceland, the Greater Columbus Convention Center, and U.S. Route 40. I also have a great shot of the highway sign for Ouachita National Forest Scenic 7 Byway and the heavily curtained interior of the Jewish Chapel at the U.S.A.F. Academy in Colorado. My other prize postcards include an exterior view of the Indianapolis International Airport, a photo of a "mechanical cotton picker," and a train labeled "Metro Link at Union Station" from St. Louis. The crown jewel of my as-yet-unsent collection is a photo of the exterior of the Kentucky State Penetentiary, Eddyville, Ky. I've been keeping these to send to McAllen, but they've sort of piled up in the last few years while I've been meaning to buy a postcard stamp.

Once you start talking about postcards, you find aficionados everywhere. One of my college professors asked us to send him a postcard after we graduated, one which imitated the message on a fictional postcard in a William Faulkner story entitled "Old Man." You put an x across the window where you supposedly spent the night and write "This is where were honny-monning at." I did this more than once, and sent the results to lots of people in addition to that professor.

Here is a poem about postcards:

Once I got a postcard from the Fiji Islands
with a picture of sugar cane harvest. Then I realized
that nothing at all is exotic in itself.
There is no difference between digging potatoes
in our Muriku garden
and sugar cane harvesting in Viti Levu.
Everything that is is very ordinary
or, rather, neither ordinary nor strange.
Far-off lands and foreign peoples are a dream,
a dreaming with open eyes
somebody does not wake from.
It's the same with poetry--seen from afar
it's something special, mysterious, festive.
No, poetry is even less
special than a sugar cane plantation or potato field.
Poetry is like sawdust coming from under the saw
or soft yellowish shavings from a plane.
Poetry is washing hands in the evening
or a clean handkerchief that my late aunt
never forgot to put in my pocket.

by Jaan Kaplinski, translated from Estonian by the author with Sam Hamill and Runa Tamm

I like the comparison of postcards to poems, like images you can save in a drawer for years until you get around to them.

There are places you can go where it's difficult to find an odd or tacky postcard--many big tourist destinations are like this, whereas a trip through Indianapolis or West Virginia can yield unexpected bounty (even if you don't do what I consider cheating, which is to pick out one of the cartoon pictures of an outhouse or whatever).

If you think about it, it's not that hard to pick out something to amuse a friend and parody "wish you were here" or even "this is where I spent my honeymon." I guess I really should be getting along to the post office to buy several postcard stamps, so I can send some of my backlog off to McAllen.

It would help me find a way to part with one or two of my favorites if you tell me about the best postcards you've ever seen.

Shakespeare Meme

Just got back from my vacation from the virtual world and saw some interesting questions about Shakespeare over at A Guy's Moleskine Notebook. The one that compels me to spread the meme is the question about whether Shakespeare is "important." Well, duh. But I don't mean "important" in the sense that we all admit--even brag about--knowing the plays. Shakespeare is important in the way any good writer is important; because the issues he raises are ones that many people struggle with, and so the plays show us sides of human nature that we don't always see in our own lives. What's more important than expanding your view of the world?

Here are the rest of the questions:

What was your first introduction to William Shakespeare? Was it love or hate?

My father, who taught in the theater department of a state university, took me to see all the plays they did each year, and so I saw Shakespeare's plays before I could be required to read them or think of them as "difficult" or "boring." They were way more interesting than, for instance, some of George Bernard Shaw's talkier plays (Misalliance) when I was very young.

Which Shakespeare plays have you been required to read?

I think I was required to read Romeo and Juliet in High School. (I already loved Zefferelli's movie version, which I saw when I was 9 or 10, younger than Olivia Hussey, who played Juliet at the age of 15.) In my sophomore year of High School, when I was 15, I was required to read Julius Caesar, but didn't find it interesting, and since I could evidently do well on the test without reading it, I never did. In fact, I finished a PhD in English Literature without ever reading it. Just this year I went to see it at Otterbein, and it was a good production, set in the future. I enjoyed it thoroughly.

Do you think Shakespeare is important? Do you feel you are a “better” person for having read the bard?

The less we revere Shakespeare and ask dutiful but ultimately silly questions like does reading him make us a better person, the more we can love the plays. They're fun. And why read them? SEE them! The sonnets are worth reading, but I wouldn't recommend them to anyone as a kind of self-help book!

Do you have a favorite Shakespeare play?

Yes, as I've said before, I'm completely fascinated by Othello. I'm also very fond of Antony and Cleopatra, and wish there were more productions of it.

How do you feel about contemporary takes on Shakespeare? Adaptations of Shakespeare’s works with a more modern feel? (For example, the new line of Manga Shakespeare graphic novels, or novels like Something Rotten, Something Wicked, Enter Three Witches, Ophelia, etc.) Do you have a favorite you’d recommend?

Most "adaptations" aren't that good, if you ask me. Jane Smiley could have written something better than A Thousand Acres, and reading that The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is a version of Hamlet doesn't make me want to rush out and find the book. If modern writers actually did what Shakespeare did, which was to base his plays loosely on several different stories while adding his own twists, that would be more exciting than adapting only one story. But, as Harold Bloom observes, The Anxiety of Influence is too prevalent in the 20th--and so far the 21st--century.

What’s your favorite movie version of a Shakespeare play?

I think I'd have to say that it's Oliver Parker's version of Othello, with Kenneth Branagh as Iago and Laurence Fishburne as Othello. But I am very fond of Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing, too, with Emma Thompson.

Traditions

We all went to see The Nutcracker this weekend. The review in the newspaper had said it was a "very musical" production, and we were almost entirely enchanted by it. Ballet is not something we rush out to see, as a rule, but the band director and history teacher at the high school have together managed to get Eleanor interested in Russian composers, and as my Christmas letter reveals, this is a particular interest of mine, too, so I leaped (metaphorically) on the chance to help hers along. Walker and I thought Act 2 got a bit long, but he also recognized enough of the music to stay interested through the more virtuoso dance numbers. The spectacle helped--the sets were truly gorgeous, with one of the best snowy woods I've ever seen on stage. And the emphasis on comedy helped; we especially enjoyed the doll's dance and the parts where they appeared to slip on ice.

The kids are out of school this week, so we're finished with all the holiday performances. I always enjoy reading David Sedaris' "Front Row Center With Thaddeus Bristol" after the last week of school before Christmas, because the final paragraph of this essay captures my feelings about having to sit through those school performances so perfectly. I'm a snob about amateur theater and music programs, and won't go to them unless my own children are involved. When they are, I get everyone ready, rush over to the school unwillingly, settle myself while complaining to the other parents about how hard it was to get everything coordinated to be able to be there, and then once the performance starts, there's usually a moment that brings tears to my eyes, and I remember why I'm there:

The problem with all of these shows stems partially from their maddening eagerness to please. With smiles stretched tight as bungee cords, these hopeless amateurs pranced and gamboled across our local stages, hiding behind their youth and begging, practically demanding, we forgive their egregious mistakes. The English language was chewed into a paste, missed opportunities came and went, and the sets were changed so slowly you'd think the stagehands were encumbered by full-body casts. While billing themselves as holiday entertainment, none of these productions came close to capturing the spirit of Christmas. This glaring irony seemed to escape the throngs of ticketholders, who ate these undercooked turkeys right down to the bone. Here were audiences that chuckled at every technical snafu and applauded riotously each time a new character wandered out onto the stage. With the close of every curtain they leapt to their feet in one ovation after another, leaving me wedged into my doll-sized chair and wondering "Is it just them, or am I missing something?"

You've got to love Thaddeus, bless his clueless little heart. Reading this passage this year makes me think of Walker's recent question when we had our annual viewing of Love, Actually. In the final Christmas pageant, there's a little boy playing a wise man who has on Spider-man face paint, and Walker asked why. I told him that it was for the same reason that when he was three years old and was cast as an angel in our church nativity play he refused the part until we amended it to "flea angel" and allowed him to hop everywhere he went. He was very big into Bug's Life at the time.

Now that we're done with most of our public traditional activities, we're going to start in on some more personal traditions at my house, so I'm taking a week off from the virtual world. We've got dinosaur cookies to cut out and decorate with red and green sugar, presents to wrap, cats to tease with ribbons, and, of course, books to read on long, cold afternoons. One of our book-centered traditions for the past few years is to read David Sedaris' essay "Six to Eight Black Men" (from Dress Your Family In Corduroy and Denim and also included in Holidays On Ice). Walker, who is 12 this Christmas, likes us to recite from it when we tuck him into bed on Christmas Eve:

"Listen, you might want to pack a few of your things together before going to bed. The former bishop of Turkey will be coming tonight along with six to eight black men. They might put some candy in your shoes, they might stuff you into a sack and take you to Spain, or they might just pretend to kick you. We don't know for sure, but we want you to be prepared."

There's nothing that makes my family feel more sentimental than reading David Sedaris. He puts the wide back in wide-eyed for us, giving us back some of our sense of wonder. Then we get all sappy, like me hearing the traditional final song for the Wiggin Street Elementary School Christmas Program:

One song
for all of us
One song
could bring us peace
One song
could make a miracle
For all of us
a song of peace.

"It's a great song," says Eleanor, who just joined with Walker to sing it for me, complete with the hand motions.

Vive La Difference

Last May I reviewed Generation Dead, by Daniel Waters, and said it raises some interesting issues, like the difference between fiction and lies, and what it means to wear ultra-pale makeup and black clothing in a world in which teenagers come back from the dead, and the teachers at the high school require their classmates to use the politically correct term for them, which is "differently biotic." Well, a few weeks ago I was excited to receive an advance reading copy of Kiss of Life, which takes up where Generation Dead left off. This book won't be published until May, 2009, and I'll be waiting impatiently for you all to be able to read it, because it continues the story of the acceptance campaign for the dead kids, who call themselves zombies, and shows how easy it is to spread fear of those who are different.

Like Stephanie Meyers' Twilight series and Cassandra Clare's City of Bones series, this series deals with how difficult it is for a girl to choose between a guy who has always been a friend and a guy who is new, exciting, dangerous, and different. Also like Meyers and Clare, Waters is more interested in the effects of the dead having risen than he is in the cause of their rising.

And yet the "cause" of the dead is the focus of the book. At various points, the way the dead and their advocates work to advance their rights implicitly compares them to people who work for affirmative action, homosexuals, the blind, the paralyzed, and the deaf. Early on, some of the zombies call themselves "sons of Romero" and declare themselves uninterested in mixing with "the beating hearts," much like some deaf people declare themselves uninterested in learning to read lips and being able to get along in the hearing world. The way some churches are arrayed against their cause and revelations like "it was common practice for bioists to blame zombies for the 'crime' of being undead, as though they'd chosen such a fate" are clearly akin to current gay rights struggles. The parallels with the civil rights struggle are most striking, of course, with one zombie girl "passing" as a live girl, and Tommy, the hero of Generation Dead, striking out to combat prejudice in the style of Martin Luther King, Jr., while Tak, who was a more marginal figure in the previous book, rises to prominence in the style of Malcolm X.

The fun part of Kiss of Life is the ironic attitude of the "zombies," and the wordplay inevitably associated with talking about them. At their hangout from the first book, the "haunted house," they have an "unliving room." In Kiss of Life, there's a zombie nightclub called "Aftermath," and the decorations there include a series of posters from movies like "Night of the Living Dead." At one point Colette, who has become more functional as she has been more loved, is talking to the lead zombie singer of the band Skeleton Crew, who have been playing at Aftermath, and Phoebe sees them "talking animatedly" and then thinks "wrong word." When she asks Colette what they were saying, Colette tells her "That. . . annoying boy . . . kept saying the word . . . 'groundbreaking.' Not good . . . word choice . . . for a zombie."

The ironic centerpiece of Kiss of Life is the murder trial of Pete Martinsburg, who shot Adam at the end of Generation Dead. As Pete's lawyer says, why is he required " to go through the charade of a murder trial when the supposed victim walked into the room under his own power"? And yet it seems that most of the people at the trial fail to understand how profoundly Adam's "life" has changed.

I like the chapters in which Adam, or "FrankenAdam" as he calls himself when he first comes back from the dead minus most of his ability to move or talk, speaks for himself. They make the book's later reminders that he has no legal rights, as a dead person, even more horrifying. While one dead kid laments the fact that although he has plenty of time to read he can't get a library card, Adam escapes being hauled off to prison, at the end of the book, for the crime of being undead merely because his parents have not rejected him, although one of his brothers fears and hates him.

As there always is with prejudice, there's fear on both sides. The zombies fear being "reterminated." There are stories of people crucifying them, burning them at the stake, even impersonating them and framing them for crimes designed to turn public opinion against them. The "real people," as they call themselves, say that the activities that the zombies design to raise consciousness about their plight are wrong because "that kind of activity just scares decent living folk." By the end of the book, it's clear that the two sides are at war because they don't wait to be introduced before labeling the other: names for the dead include "corpsicle" and "worm burger," while names for the living include "bleeders" and "beating hearts." In public, they call each other "traditionally biotic" and "differently biotic," but we see how much use that is at Aftermath where one bathroom door is labelled "Trad" and the other "Dead," even though the doors open into the same room. There is a name for sympathizers, "necrophiliacs," and also for separatist zombies, "trulydeads."

The Kiss of Life turns out to be a lipstick color, not something that will magically make the dead "normal" again. It's clear that cutting up a dead girl to see what makes her work is not the answer to finding "the secret of life." But as the song from Casablanca says, "a kiss is still a kiss." It's still something everyone desires, living or dead, and perhaps the only good answer to the question of what to do in the kind of world in which necromancy has become a reality. There's the potential for a later kiss in Phoebe's answer to the trick-or-treater who sees Adam, newly dead, sitting behind her in the kitchen and asks "That a dead guy?" She says "That's Adam."

And the kid's reply is like my response to this book. " 'Hey, Adam,' the kid yelled. The little vampire turned back to her. 'He's dead. Like me!' " Only by identifying with someone different can you understand what their life is like, and hope for something more than just tolerance, as people did watching The Laramie Project in the wake of Matthew Shepard's murder. But the humor inextricably tied to the ability to (literally) embrace difference is what humanizes the monsters, dead or alive.

Comfort and Joy

This really happened (as Cody used to say every time he told a story about his childhood, in Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant).

This is the end-of-dinner conversation at my house on a wintry Tuesday night:
Ron comes out of the kitchen, where he has been making tea, scoops the cat (Sammy) up because he's been following him around squeaking insistently, and holds him near Eleanor's face, as she eats her doughnut. I say don't hold the cat up to peoples' faces when they're eating. Ron says that Sammy wants attention and kisses him. Walker and I tell him to take the cat in the bedroom. "Forbidden love," the kids say and then we all chorus "the love that dare not squeak its name."
“I’m laughing too hard to eat my doughnut” I choke.
“That’s the ultimate sign that your life is good” Eleanor declares.

Gradually, I recover from my laughing fit. The parakeets in the corner of the dining room adjust their volume down a notch as I do. Ron goes back to telling Eleanor what she should say to the teacher who told her she had a red face today in the cafeteria. "That's racist," he insists. "She'll give me detention for being a smartass," Eleanor replies.
We continue discussing the school dress code and wondering why it's not allowed to wear a t-shirt with a heart on it if the heart has spikes through it.

After dinner, we watch a heart-warming Christmas special in which Santa and Jesus do a nightclub medley of Christmas songs and Satan sings "It's Christmastime in Hell." Later I have to drive to work in the freezing drizzle, but Ron is reading to both kids and what I have to do ends up taking only a few minutes, so I'm back in time to say goodnight.

Eleanor's declaration has colored the whole evening, for me. It's like this Wallace Stevens poem, Anything Is Beautiful If You Say It Is:

Under the eglantine
The fretful concubine
Said, "Phooey, Phoo!"
She whispered, "Pfui!"

The demi-monde
On the mezzanine
Said "Phoeey!" too,
And a Hey-de-i-do!"

The bee may have all sweet
For his honey-hive-o,
From the eglantine-o.

And the chandeliers are neat...
But their mignon, marblish glare!
We are cold, the parrots cried,
In a place so debonair.

The Johannisberger, Hans.
I love the metal grapes,
The rusty, battered shapes
Of the pears and of the cheese

And the window's lemon light,
The very will of the nerves,
The crack across the pane,
The dirt along the sill.

Sometimes you take a step back to be able to see something you've missed from day to day, like the dirt along the sill, in order to clean it up before you invite guests for dinner. And then sometimes you are spurred to take a giant step back ("mother may I?" "Yes, you may") and you can see everything, even the dirt, as part of the particular joy of that moment.

Becoming My Mother

I've been thinking about ways I'm becoming like my mother lately, for one thing because of my automatic response to being asked to bake for any kind of fund-raising effort, which is refusal. When I was a kid, if I asked my mother to make something for me to take for a bake sale, she'd say "I'll give you the money it would cost me for ingredients plus some extra for labor." Now, of course, I repeat this to my own children, who seem to me to be more accepting of it than I ever was.

When Ron wants to get to me, he tells me I'm acting like my mother. While it doesn't earn him points on that marital scorecard that all oldyweds keep in our heads, it does occasionally cut through whatever else I'm thinking and make me stop what I'm doing.

Oscar Wilde said:
"All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his."

Yesterday Lemming said that she was 30 years old before she owned a purse. I thought all mothers had to have a purse; my own has downsized slowly over the years from the diaper bag days. And thinking of a purse, which is kind of a funny, old-fashioned word, I thought of how hard it is to carry things with a purse over your arm, and how hard it is to keep a shoulder strap on your shoulder when you're wearing a scratchy cloth coat, and all those thoughts reminded me of this poem, Second-Hand Coat by Ruth Stone:

I feel
in her pockets; she wore nice cotton gloves,
kept a handkerchief box, washed her undies,
ate at the Holiday Inn, had a basement freezer,
belonged to a bridge club.
I think when I wake in the morning
that I have turned into her.
She hangs in the hall downstairs,
a shadow with pulled threads.
I slip her over my arms, skin of a matron.
Where are you? I say to myself, to the orphaned body,
and her coat says,
Get your purse, have you got your keys?

I like the idea of putting on the mother costume. Well, no, I don't really like it, but it happens. We think our mothers are, to some extent, rigid and respectable, however reckless and individual they may have been in their prime, and then one day we wake up and find that our children have absorbed the stories of our wild and crazy youth until those stories seem quaint to them. Like us.

Some Books Make Nothing Happen

Yesterday a friend who just moved to town was looking at our books, and he held one of them in his hand and said "this is the right size for a book; it fits in the hand just right." Usually I don't think about books this way, but sometimes I do read something because it fits into a pocket or purse or whatever bag or armful I'm taking with me. I have a stock of paperback Tess Monaghan books, by Laura Lippman, that I'm very gradually making my way through, primarily when I need a small paperback to take somewhere with me, and the most recent one I read is entitled In A Strange City. Tess is a private detective in Baltimore, and this one centers around the mystery of the annual visitor to Edgar Allan Poe's grave. It's a good story, as usual, and I enjoyed it thoroughly, especially when I got to this:
Tess had a poetry-loving friend given to fits in which he rearranged Auden's famous edict about the inherent limits of verse. " For journalism makes nothing happen," Kevin Feeney would begin to intone, somewhere between martinis three and four. "For government makes nothing happen--thank God. For God makes nothing happen. For nothin' makes nothing happen."
Don't you just wish you knew someone who did things like that? I do. Characters in books who quote poetry are so clever, almost as if they had time to think of the things we all wish we had said! (And if the quotation is still tickling your mind and you can't quite place it, it's here.)

I've also been reading some smallish library books, YA books that fit well in your hand. One I picked up because it's a post-apocalyptic tale, The Secret Under My Skin, by Janet McNaughton. It's a good story, although the degradation of the environment coupled with growing distrust of scientists strikes me now as a derivative type of apocalypse in fiction (The Handmaid's Tale showed that so much more forcefully in the 1980's). (Not that the environment is no longer a concern.) But the book is well-written and has some original ideas, like the story of the protagonist's name and the interruption of the fictional world by the "technocaust," which is a word I enjoyed every time I saw it. The protagonist's guide through the adult world is a woman who used to be
"A historian at a university. If people like me told the truth, everyone would know that the degradation of the environment goes back centuries. I know about the growing hole in the ozone layer, the gradual rise in the earth's temperature. I've seen the treaties signed at the end of the twentieth century, supposedly to limit CFCs and CO2 emissions. I saw how those people, our ancestors, refused to take responsibility for the future, for our lives and the world we would live in." She sighs. "And I know what the world was like when there was democracy. Near the end of the technocaust, history was outlawed. Libraries and archives were destroyed, and I ran."
So, all in all, a perfectly acceptable book for whiling away a winter afternoon.

The third small book I worked in during my course of things to do and people to see is Peter Cameron's Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You. The title is taken from Ovid, and as Pages Turned revealed, there are some stunningly original facets to the protagonist's (James') character:
"The main problem was I don't like people in general and people my age in particular, and people my age are the ones who go to college. I would consider going to college if it were a college of older people. I'm not a sociopath or a freak (although I don't suppose people who are sociopaths or freaks self-identify as such); I just don't enjoy being with people. People, at least in my experience, rarely say anything interesting to each other. They always talk about their lives and they don't have very interesting lives. So I get impatient. For some reason I think you should only say something if it's interesting or absolutely has to be said."
I've had first-year college students like this in the classes I teach, with a similarly disdainful attitude toward their peers and an unwillingness to be interested in anything that is said in class. I've always been impatient with their behavior, especially their rudeness when they're asked to participate in small group work. Reading about James didn't give me any additional insight into why they act the way they do. Despite a formidable intelligence, he remains a child, emotionally, growing increasingly scary as his emotions grow increasingly disembodied, like one of those children who accuses an adult of some dreadful crime and then sits there satisfied, watching adults run around in panic. By the end of the novel, James begins to budge from his stubborn refusal to like anything or anybody, but there wasn't enough resolution to satisfy me in the way he doesn't manage to avoid taking a phone call.

All three of these books are worth carrying around to forestall a few minutes of boredom (maybe to forestall actually having to interact with people while in public?), but they aren't books that made anything happen, for me. No new ideas, no new perception of the world, just entertainment.