It's the fate of most Ping-Pong tables in home basements eventually serve the ends of other, more desperate games. After Alfred retired he appropriated the eastern end of the table for his banking and correspondence. At the western end was the portable color TV on which he'd intended to watch the local news while sitting in his great blue chair but which was now fully engulfed by Good Housekeepings and the seasonal candy tins and baroque but cheaply made candle holders that Enid never quite found time to transport to the Nearly New consignment shop. The Ping-Pong table was the one field on which the civil war raged openly. At the eastern end Alfred's calculator was ambushed by floral print pot-holders and souvenir coaster from the Epcot Center and a device for pitting cherries which Enid had owned for thirty years and never used, while he, in turn, at the western end, for absolutely no reason that Enid could ever fathom, ripped to pieces a wreath made of pinecones and spray-painted filberts and brazil nuts.

---

"She takes pills for three months, the pills make her unbelievably obtuse, and the obtuseness then defines itself as mental health! It's like blindness defining itself as vision. 'Now that I'm blind, I can see there's nothing to see.'"
Denise sighed and let her cone of flowers droop to the sidewalk. "What are you saying? You want to follow her and take away her medicine?"
"I'm saying the structure of the entire culture is flawed," Chip said. "I'm saying the bureaucracy has arrogated the right to define certain states of mind as 'diseased.' A lack of desire to spend money becomes a symptom of disease that requires expensive medication. Which medication then destroys the libido, in other words destroys the appetite for the one pleasure in life that's free, which means the person has to spend even moremoney on compensatory pleasures. The very definition of mental 'health' is the ability to participate in the consumer economy. When you buy into therapy, you're buying into buying. And I'm saying that I personally am losing the battle with a commercialized, medicalized, totalitarian modernity right this instant.

---

And one Sunday morning, after he'd stood at the window counting squirrels and assessing the damage to his oak trees and zoysia the way white men in marginal neighborhoods took stock of how many houses had been lost to "the blacks," Alfred had performed an experiment in genocide. Incensed that the squirrels in his not-large front yard lacked the discipline to stop reproducing or pick up after themselves, he went to the basement and found a rat trap over which Enid, as he came upstairs with it, shook her head and made small negative noises. "Nineteen of them!" Alfred said. "Nineteen of them!" Emotional appeals were no match for the discipline of such an exact and scientific figure. He baited the trap with a piece of the same whole wheat bread that Chip had eaten, toasted, for breakfast. Then all five Lamberts went to church, and between the Gloria Patri and the Doxology a young male squirrel, engaging in the high-risk behavior of the economically desperate, helped itself to the bread and had its skull crushed. The family came home to find green flies feasting on the blood and brain matter and chewed whole-wheat bread that erupted through the young squirrel's shattered jaws. Alfred's own mouth and chin were sewn up in the distaste that special exertions of discipline – the spanking of a child, the eating of rutabaga – always caused him. (He was quite unconscious of this distaste he betrayed for discipline.) He fetched a shovel from the garage and loaded both the trap and the squirrel corpse into the paper grocery bag that Enid had half filled with pulled crabgrass the day before. Chip was following all this from about twenty steps behind him, and so he saw how, when Alfred entered the basement from the garage, his legs buckled a little, sideways, and he pitched into the washing machine, and then he ran past the Ping-Pong table (it had always scared Chip to see his father run, he seemed too old for it, too disciplined) and disappeared into the basement bathroom; and henceforth the squirrels did whatever they wanted.

---

"So, what, you got cigarette burns, too?" Gitanas said.
Chip showed his palm. "It's nothing."
"Self-inflicted. You pathetic American."
"Different kind of prison," Chip said.

---

The more Gary thought about it, the angrier he got. He sat by himself in his study, unable to stem his rising agitation or to slow the steam-locomotive pace at which his breaths were coming. He was blind to the pretty pumpkin-yellow sunset unfolding in the tulip trees beyond the commuter tracks. He saw nothing but the principles at stake.

---

It was true that Al had asked her to move the jars and magazines, and there was probably a word for the way she'd stepped around those jars and magazines for the last eleven days, often nearly stumbling on them; maybe a psychiatric word with many syllables or maybe a simple word like "spite." But it seemed to her that he'd asked her to do more than "one thing" while he was gone. He'd also asked her to make the boys three meals a day, and clothe them and read to them and nurse them in sickness, and scrub the kitchen floor and wash the sheets and iron his shirts, and do it all without a husband's kisses or kind words. If she tried to get credit for these labors, however, Al simply asked her whose labors had paid for the house and food and linens? Never mind that his work so satisfied him that he didn't need her love, while her chores so bored her that she needed his love doubly. In any rational accounting, his work canceled her work.

---

"And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight – isn't that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you're less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn't it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you've experienced before? You see things more clearly and you know that you're seeing them more clearly. And it comes to you that this is what it means to love life, this is all anybody who talks seriously about God is ever talking about. Moments like this."

---

The main difference between America and Lithuania, as far as Chip could see, was that in America the wealthy few subdued the unwealthy many by means of mind-numbing and soul-killing entertainments and gadgetry and pharmaceuticals, whereas in Lithuania the powerful few subdued the unpowerful many by threatening violence.

---

He looked at the window through which he was ready, at last, to throw himself. Or give him a gun, give him an ax, give him anything, but get him out of here. He had to make Chip understand this.
Chip covered his shaking hands with his own.
"I'll stay with you, Dad," he said. "But I can't do that for you. I can't put an end to it like that. I'm sorry."
Like a wife who had died or a house that had burned, the clarity to think and the power to act were still vivid in his memory. Through a window that gave onto the next world, he could still see the clarity and see the power, just out of reach, beyond the window's thermal panes. He could see the desired outcomes, the drowning at sea, the shotgun blast, the plunge from a height, so near to him still that he refused to believe he'd lost the opportunity to avail himself of their relief.

Labels: general, literary

posted by Jennifer at 2/03/2007 02:55:00 PM | 0 comments

she said, "yes"

I just finished The Year of Yes by Maria Dahvana Headley, and I enjoyed it. So, I'm sharing:

According to the literature you're choosing to apply to your current situation (you've carefully forgotten that you ever read Last Exit to Brooklyn), you are supposed to be wearing sequins to breakfast and getting your hand kissed by a heterosexual version of Cole Porter. Incandescently intelligent men are supposed to be toasting you with Dom Periognon. Instead you're sharing a cockroach-ridden outer-borough apartment with two roommates and one dysfunctional cat. You're spending your evenings sitting on your kitchen floor, drinking poisonous red jug wine, and quoting Sartre. Hell is not only other people, it is you, too. You're not getting laid, because even if you were meeting something other than substandard men, you don't have a bedroom to call your own. And instead of the smoldering, soul-baring, Abelard-to-Heloise-sans-castration solicitations you rightfully deserve, you're getting stupefying lines like: "I'm listening to NPR. Do you want to come over and make out?"
That would be a direct quote.

---

Maybe love was like Godot. You spent the whole play talking about it, but it never actually made it onstage. You waited anyway. Of course you did.

---

"May you find joy, even in the darkest places," I said, and then felt like an ass. "Not that this is the darkest place," I clarified. "Not that I wish you dark places. Not that I think only bad things happen in the dark. Not that I'm an advocate of bright lights. I like lampshades. I like dimmer switches."

---

Despite my vows regarding actors, I'd fallen for him. And, despite what I'd thought the night before, despite the long and profound conversation we'd had in the bar, it seemed that he was so far from falling for me that the possibility hadn't even occurred to him. For him, this was casual. For me, this was my previously state-of-the-art heart hissing and smoking, sending off emergency alarums, and finally, wretchedly, breaking down entirely.

---

"I'm wrapped with guilt. I have to stop thinking about it."
"Wracked."
"That's what I said."
I thought sadly about the predicament of the modern man, wrapped in a silky shroud of guilt, comfortably wallowing across guilty sheets.

---

On paper, it was so easy to search through your old drafts and find that darling you'd killed. You could reinstate the passage, as though you'd never even thought about murder. In life, not so. You'd change a part of yourself – a flawed part, maybe, but a flawed part you might have, secretly, been a little bit in love with. You'd know if was for the best, that you'd only manage to proceed if you revised whatever thing was messing up the overall structure of your existence. But inevitably, at some point, you'd want to go back on the changes. It would be easier to stay the same old rumpled version, the same typos and blotches, the same old severe climactic flaws.

Labels: literary

posted by Jennifer at 1/09/2007 01:18:00 PM | 0 comments

Friday, December 29, 2006

without any fear

Yesterday, I awoke with stabbing pain in my lower right abdomen. I told myself if it persisted for over an hour, I'd call the doctor. An hour and a half later, I made the call.

I went in for the exam and listed off all my symptoms: the aforementioned stabbing pain, my period had started that morning almost a week late, and the lack of fever or nausea. They ran a pregnancy test just to be sure (despite my surgery last year), and they took a blood test, just to be extra sure. The doctor did an examination. They determined that I have an ovarian cyst. Not the scary kind, though... it should be gone by tomorrow morning.

So, yesterday, I rested. All day, I rested. And I read Go Ask Alice front to back. It's a short read (obviously). It was pretty good, aside from the Epilogue. Here are three excerpts:

This morning I looked out the window and saw new green popping through the soil and I started crying uncontrollably again. I don't really understand the resurrection. I can't even conceive how Gramps' body which will decay and sour and mold and mildew and fall into crumbling little bits can ever come back together again. But I can't understand how a brown dried-up, shriveled little gladiola bulb can reblossom either. I guess that God can put atoms and molecules and bodies together again if a gladiola bulb without even a brain can do it.

I truly must have lost my mind or at least control of it, for I have just tried to pray. I wanted to ask God to help me but I could utter only words, dark, useless words which fell on the floor beside me and rolled off into the corners and underneath the bed.

Everybody smokes here and the halls are filled with fumes and gray circling smoke, there isn't even anywhere for it to go. It seems as trapped and confused as the patients.

And since I couldn't manage to do much else yesterday, I took an online quiz thingy. This one was to determine my primary Love Language (based on the studies of Dr. Gary Chapman). Turns out, I've changed since I last read the book... I was never much of a Physical Touch kind of person until lately. Now, my usual Acts of Service is on par with Physical Touch. I'm getting more lovey and less cynical. It's a welcomed change.

My primary love languages are probably
Acts of Service and Physical Touch.

Complete set of results
Acts of Service: 8
Physical Touch: 8
Quality Time: 6
Receiving Gifts: 6
Words of Affirmation: 2

Information: Unhappiness in relationships, according to Dr. Gary Chapman, is often due to the fact that we speak different love languages. Sometimes we don't understand our partner's requirements, or even our own. We all have a "love tank" that needs to be filled in order for us to express love to others, but there are different means by which our tank can be filled, and there are different ways that we can express love to others. Take the quiz

Today, I'm still resting and doped up. I'm so stir-crazy. But, hopefully, I'll be back to myself soon.

Labels: general, literary, quizzes, whining

posted by Jennifer at 12/29/2006 11:52:00 AM | 3 comments

Monday, December 11, 2006

like you and me

The trip to NYC was lots of fun and lots of exercise. I'm currently decompressing.

I will tell you all about it once I finish decompressing.

If I ever finish.

*sigh*

In the meantime, here's a run-down of the last book I finished, While I Was Gone by Sue Miller. I don't think this book was incredibly well written. The plot didn't move me. The characters weren't dear friends to me by the ending. But, due to my circumstances, parts of it spoke to me. Parts sang out and said, "These feelings you have had in the past are not your own; they are shared by many." And that was reassuring. It stirred up some feelings for me. When you read these parts I chose, you will probably understand what I mean.

It wasn't that I had been conscious of falsifying myself when I was living my other life. I'm sure I hadn't. I think, in fact, that I was barely conscious of having a self in that world. My mother tells me that I was a willful little girl, but I don't remember that. What I remember is later, when I wasn't willful anymore: the inner calm of knowing I was satisfying expectations, I was pleasing. The self isn't important in such a feeling. It was only as I began to startle and disappoint others that I was aware of myself at all – that I came to understand, slowly, that I wasn't who I pretended to be.

---

I started to move away from the car when Daniel called over to me, "Lock it."
He was right, of course, it was a rough neighborhood, but somehow I felt annoyed with him for thinking of it and for his peremptory tone – one in a series of what I knew very well were petty grievances I could have been said to be collecting against him over the last few days: He stood up one evening in the middle of something I was saying to him and began to pick up the bits of wet leaf one of the dogs had tracked into the living room. I overheard him on the phone passing judgment on a movie we'd seen in exactly my words, without crediting me. Even the blood-speckled tissue stuck on a shaving cut one morning got on the list, and the familiar, theatrical groan as he rose from a living room chair. I knew these were absurdly small-minded; I knew they weren't, in some sense, real. I knew anyone could have made a similar list about anyone else. About me, for instance. I knew, but somehow once I started, I couldn't stop myself.

---

Once, in the night, Daniel stumbled into the kitchen when I was there and, turning on the light, started at seeing me. There we stood, blinking at each other in the sudden harsh light. Each of us had raised a hand toward the other. I wanted, more than anything, to go to him, to touch him. I wanted his touch. When I thought of this moment later, I saw us as actors depicting yearning across a stage set, the black windows painted into the backdrop, the strewn table and angled chairs the props, the main characters stage left and stage right, stopped in the act of moving toward each other. It seemed for an instant he might make some gesture to come toward me or that gave me permission to go to him. It seemed so, but he didn't. His body slackened, his hand fell. He smiled, an ironic smile, a sad smile. "It's no fun at all, is it?" he said.

---

Perhaps it's best to live with the possibility that around any corner, at any time, may come the person who reminds you of your own capacity to surprise yourself, to put at risk everything that's dear to you. Who reminds you of the distances we have to bridge to begin to know anything about one another. Who reminds you that what seems to be – even about yourself – may not be.

Labels: literary

posted by Jennifer at 12/11/2006 11:27:00 AM | 0 comments

Saturday, November 25, 2006

come out of the rain

I just finished Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein last night. I liked it a lot, but have not yet grokked the ending in fullness...

Some excerpts I marked along the way:

"Do-gooding is like treating hemophilia – the real cure is to let hemophiliacs bleed to death... before they breed more hemophiliacs."

"Big money isn't hard to come by. All it costs is a lifetime of devotion. But no ballerina ever works harder. Captain, that's not your style; you don't want to make money, you simply want to spend money.... great wealth is a curse – unless you enjoy money-making for its own sake. Even then it has serious drawbacks."

"Anybody can see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl she used to be. A great artist can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is... and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be... more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo see that this lovely young girl is still alive, prisoned inside her ruined body. He can make you feel the quiet, endless tragedy that there was never a girl born who ever grew older than eighteen in her heart... no matter what the merciless hours have done."

Labels: literary

posted by Jennifer at 11/25/2006 02:26:00 PM | 1 comments

Friday, October 20, 2006

found my world in you

Have you read The Bridges of Madison County? If not, you won't get what I'm talking about. I don't want to include any spoilers, though, in case you do decide to read it. If so, read on, and please share your thoughts.

I read this book, because when I told my father about the reasons I was moving back to Tennessee, most of his response was a statement about the movie version of the book. He said something to the effect of, "Now you know why I cry when I saw The Bridges of Madison County."

So, I read it.

I made it through the final pages waiting on the community orchestra concert to start up (Darrell plays the viola with them). While reading those last pages, though surrounded by other audience members, I shed a few tears also. If I was in a more quiet setting at home, I probably would have bawled.

If you have read the book or seen the movie, please share your thoughts about Francesca. Was she a stronger or a weaker person for the final decision she made that Friday morning?

I like to think she was neither stronger nor weaker, but more of a human. More aware of life. More awake, more sensitive, more exposed. She was stronger for the responsibility she felt toward her family. But she was weaker also for her responsibilities that she let guide her through life. In a way, you admire her; in a way, you pity her.

This was a short book – 170 pages with larger print than I'm used to. So, I only ended up marking one quote to come back to. That quote was this:

The old dreams were good dreams; they didn't work out, but I'm glad I had them.

[Here's the part where you share your thoughts.]

Labels: literary

posted by Jennifer at 10/20/2006 09:42:00 AM | 1 comments

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

sailed off to history

Selections from Pastwatch by Orson Scott Card:

"History is not prelude," she said once. "We don't justify the suffering of people in the past because everything turned out well enough by the time we came along. Their suffering counts just as much as our peace and happiness. We look out of our golden windows and feel pity for the scenes of blood and blades, of plagues and famines that are played out in the surrounding country. When we believed that we could not go back in time and make changes, then we could be excused for shedding a tear for them and then going on about our happy lives. But once we know that it is in our power to help them, then, if we turn away and let their suffering go on, it is no golden age we live in, and we poison our own happiness. Good people do not let others suffer needlessly."

"To reach into the past and prevent the disease is better than to take the patient at the point of death and slowly, slowly bring her back to health."

Do I want to become rich and influential in order to serve God? Or do I serve God in hopes that it will make me rich and influential?

How did Columbus manage it, boldly creating a future? Only because he knew so little of how futures could go wrong, Hunahpu decided, only because of ignorance could he shape the world so fearlessly.

"Because to you I'm not a human being, I'm a dog, less than a dog, because you would not beat a dog, would you? ... you can teach them the gospel of Christ and baptize them, but that doesn't stop you from wanting to make slaves of them and steal their gold from them."
"You can teach a dog to walk on its hind legs, but that doesn't make it a man."

Labels: literary

posted by Jennifer at 10/17/2006 03:27:00 PM | 0 comments

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

make you so proud of me

My first full-length book (272 pages) I have ever laid out will be going to the printer tomorrow. I'm very excited about it, and have been working hard the last couple of days to get it wrapped up. I will post a link to it once it's done. It will be available in early November.

::beams with pride::

Labels: literary

posted by Jennifer at 9/26/2006 01:50:00 PM | 4 comments

Saturday, September 09, 2006

traces of hope in the night

From The Worthing Saga by Orson Scott Card:

---

"It doesn't depend on whether you'll live or die. It depends on what's right. And what's right or wrong doesn't come down to your personal preference. It never does. If it comes to what you personally prefer, then there's no right or wrong at all."

Lared was ashamed and angry. Angry because he didn't think it was right that Jason should make him feel ashamed. "What's wrong with wanting to live?"

"Any dog can do that. Are you a dog? You're not a human being until you value something more than the life of your body. And the greater the thing you live and die for, the greater you are."

---

"Almost every nation does that to themselves, given enough time. They make their great minds so secure, they bog them down so much with being honored and famous, that they never accomplish anything in their lives. I was not a genius. I was merely clever and awake."

---

...she took Wix into her bed like a thirsty man takes water. Once, when Stipock came to the house and found them together, she looked at him with eyes that begged him to forgive. That surprised him – he had seen so many adulteries on Capitol that it did not strike him as a sin anymore. Yet she wanted absolution. Forgiveness without repentance. Stipock could hear his father give the sermon: the coin of sin is pleasure, but the pay that comes is death. Watch out for death, Dilna. If you keep on with this, you'll surely die. Of course, you'll die if you live a chaste life, too. The beauty of chastity is that when death comes, you'll regard it as a blessed relief.

---

He thought of Hoom, loving his children and tolerating the intolerable between his wife and his friend. That is civilization, to bear pain for the sake of joy. Hoom grew up before I did, Stipock realized. He found out that if you try to eliminate the pain from your life, you destroy all hope of pleasure, too. They come from the same place. Kill one, you've killed all. Someone should have mentioned that to me when I was younger. I would have acted differently when Jason put me in his world. I was the devil, when I might have been an angel if I tried.

---

The instructor was smart enough to know that when one hopes to make a living teaching the children of the rich, one learns when to be honest and when to lie. Thus, the words the child has talent has often passed his lips before. But this time he meant them, and it was difficult to find a way to make the lying words now express the truth.

"The boy has talent!" he declared. "The boy has talent!"

"No one supposed that he hadn't," the boy's mother said, a bit surprised at how effusive the teacher waws. The father said nothing, just wondered if the instructor thought he'd get a bonus for declaring it with such fervor.

"That boy has talent. Potential. Great potential," the teacher said (again), and Bergen's mother, finally grown weary of his effusion of praise, said, "My dear fellow, we don't mind a bit if he has talent. He may keep it. Now come again next Tuesday. Thank you."

Labels: literary

posted by Jennifer at 9/09/2006 08:42:00 PM | 2 comments