Object Wisdom

What an Odd Thing, the Safety Pin

noreply@blogger.com (Frankie Anon) — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 18:47:00 +0000

In my last post, I wrote about my antique tobacco box, which I use to store safety pins. Hundreds and hundreds of safety pins. My dry cleaners uses three for every article of clothing -- two to attach it to the hanger, and one to attach the tag. I don't like to waste perfectly good things, so I dutifully keep all of them.

Maybe I could return them every few months, like the wire hangers? Or maybe I could donate them somewhere. A colleague from a former job used to make cool bracelets out of pins. Like this one I found on the internet:

Thinking about pins made me realize how much we take for granted these seemingly simple, everyday objects. I got to wondering about the history of this handy little tool, so I did some research.

A New Yorker named Walter Hunt is credited with the invention of the safety pin, which he apparently invented in a couple of hours in 1849 to pay off a $15 debt. He sold the patent, #6281, for $400. Just in case you are dying to see it, here is his original patent, courtesy of the U.S. Patent Office:

But safety pins date back at least to ancient Greece. According to The Big Site of Amazing Facts, "Homer tells us that a dozen safety pins were presented to Penelope, the wife of Odysseus by her suitors, suggesting that the Greeks considered pins fitting gifts, even for royalty. Presumably, almost all early Greeks used safety pins to fasten their tunics, since the button wasn’t to arrive from Asia Minor until considerably later."

This site which also explains the history of the term "pin money":

"But for centuries, metal pins remained rare and costly items reserved for the rich....When the term originated in the fourteenth century, “pin money” was just that, for at the time, pins were expensive enough to be real items in the budget. By custom, a husband would present his wife on the first or second of January with enough money to buy her pins for the year. “Pin money” went by the boards in the nineteenth century, when mass-production made pins the inexpensive purchase they are today."

So there you have it. Everything you never wanted to know about saftey pins!

Antique Tobacco Tin

noreply@blogger.com (Frankie Anon) — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 02:36:00 +0000

Once, when I was in my late teens or early twenties, quite out of the blue, my Aunt sent me this charming little Russian tobacco tin. I have no idea why. I didn't know my aunt well. She was my father's older sister and lived in another state. We saw her a few times during my childhood, when we took family road trips to visit my grandmother in Texas. She came with her kids to visit us a few times in Colorado.

My aunt always seemed like a breed apart. Her husband and sons were spectacularly handsome. They had the easy-going, debonair manner of the wealthy, like Cary Grant in a 1950s romantic comedy. Uncle B. was one of the principal citizens of their mid-sized city, where he owned several thriving businesses. To my childish eyes, they were like royalty. Their homes -- they moved whenever my aunt wanted a new place to decorate --seemed so enormous, so sophisticated and modern. I had never known people who had professional decorators choose their furniture and knickknacks. Everything in my aunt's homes matched -- even the antique books on the shelves, which were purchased not for their contents, but their covers. Recently, I saw one of the houses that had so impressed me. It was a nice mid-century ranch, decently sized, but, as I can now see, nothing special.

My aunt was fun and funny, with a big laugh just like her mother. But as I got older, I began to dislike her. I understand now that I was shaped by my mother's own dislike for her sister-in-law. Maybe it was jealousy -- Aunt G. was beautiful, thin, and rich. But more importantly, mom resented that dad's family always treated her as an outsider, never as one of the family.

Aunt G. passed away a few years ago. Her husband of 65 years, who had lived in the same town his entire life, remarried less than a year later and moved to the coast with his new wife. Oddly, the new wife shared my aunt's first name.

In the years since she died, I've learned more about my aunt's early life. Like my father, she was raised by a mother who, in the vein of Edna Pontellier in The Awakening, was not "a mother woman." She was old enough to be aware that her father was a drunk and drug addict, to feel the sting when he abandoned the family, to know the scandal of having a divorced mother.

I had known this part of the story, in the abstract sort way you come to piece things together in a family that doesn't talk about its secrets and shames.

But I recently learned there was much more to Aunt G's life. In the early 1940s, when she was just 20 or so, she fell and love and married. Like most men of his generation, her husband joined the service in World War II. Trained as a pilot, he was sent to Europe when Aunt G. was pregnant with their first child. Her husband was shot down, captured by the Germans and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp. But Aunt G. didn't know that for months. The records reported him as MIA. Newly married and pregnant with her first child, Aunt G. lived alone in a tiny apartment over a garage, pining away for her lost husband. Their baby was a year and a half old when he finally came home.

So, this little box holds more than just safety pins. Now, about the box itself, or where my aunt got it, I know next to nothing. It is Russian. I can't read most of the words on it, but I do recognize the word tobacco. And the year 1842. It's a pretty little object, a good receptacle for safety pins. And a nice reminder of an aunt I hardly knew.

Sunday Book Notes--Pillars of the Earth

noreply@blogger.com (Frankie Anon) — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 14:10:00 +0000

I've always known Ken Follett as the author of suspense thrillers -- not my favorite genre -- so when I was casting about for a comfortable read, I was dubious when a friend recommended Pillars of the Earth. But, I was looking for a good yarn to while away a wintry weekend by the fire, so I decided to give it a try.

The setting intrigued me. The novel spans several decades in 12th century England. It follows the stories of peasants, monks, masons, knights, bishops and kings whose lives intersect in one way or another as a great cathedral is built in the fictional village of Kingsbridge.

The novel draws a rich, detailed portrait of a time when life was nasty, brutish, and short. Powerful men rape, massacre and plunder with impunity; starving children are left in the forest to die by parents who cannot feed them; and grossly disfigured outlaws kill for a pair of leather boots or a bag of turnips.

Spoiler alert: Below there be plot points!

The first half centers on Tom Builder, a down-on-his-luck stone mason struggling to feed his starving family. In the forest, he meets three people who will shape his life: Ellen, the bewitching and fierce woman of the forest; Philip, the new Prior of Kingsbridge who will one day hire Tom as the Master Builder of the new cathedral; and William Hamleigh, who will become Earl, terrorizing all who are unfortunate enough to find themselves in his path.

We meet Tom and his family on the road, as they tramp from town to town, seeking work and bread. This stolid but intelligent man is a compelling character, especially after he meets Ellen, a rumored witch who lives in a cave and becomes Tom's common-law wife after his first wife dies in childbirth. Tom works his way, literally, into the job of building the cathedral, impressing Father Philip with his knowledge of stone and his patient, unflappable manner.

Philip is the core of the novel, touching the lives of everyone, even Thomas Becket, whose murder he witnesses in the final chapters of the book. Philip is pious and proud, ambitious and humble. His compassion and intelligence enable him to expand Kingsbridge from a village to a thriving city, and along the way, to help other characters achieve their destinies.

When the story centers on the lives of ordinary people -- even ordinary people who go on to do extraordinary things -- it is at its best. But hovering on the periphery are tales of royal intrigue, which at times threaten to take over the book. In these episodes, I found my attention waning. I preferred the company of Tom and Ellen, struggling to hold their odd family together, or of Philip as he frets about how to fend off the machinations of the slimy Bishop Waleran. I like characters who jump off the page and become alive in my mind. When the book diverged from their stories, especially in the end, with the murder of Beckett, I found myself skipping pages -- something I very rarely do.

I was also less enthralled by the story of Aliena and Richard, a brother and sister who are forced from their castle by the evil, sadistic William Hamleigh. William glories in rape and pillage. The first such scene, when William rapes 14-year-old Aliena in front of her brother, is graphic but probably necessarily so. This scene establishes William's character and Aliena's motives for becoming so fiercely independent. But by the second, third, or fourth graphic rape scene, in which one tunic after another is ripped, revealing yet another pair of large, heaving, usually teenaged breasts, and after we're told over and over that William can't get it up without the thrill of violence, it all starts to get tiresome and exploitative.

I also found my attention waning in the latter half of the book, which focuses more on Aliena and Jack, Tom Builder's son. Their romance is interesting enough at first, but it soon becomes repetitive. So too do the pages and pages explaining medieval construction techniques.

Clearly, Follett did a great deal of research about how cathedrals were built -- including the transition from the romanesque half-circle arches to the pointed, gothic ones, and the development of flying buttresses, which Jack virtually invents. There's little I love more than visiting medieval cathedrals, standing in their cool, vast interiors, marveling at their size and grandeur, wondering how they could have been built all those centuries ago. So, while reading this book, I enjoyed learning more about how it was done. To a point. But the book would be stronger if some of the scenes describing the building process had been edited out.

In the end, Pillars of the Earth is longer than it needs to be. The novel impressively manages a long span of time, and a wide range of characters and points of view. But I wonder if its wide scope saps some of its emotional strength. When Tom died, I was surprised at how little I felt the loss. As I thought about it, I realized that we had long since left his story behind. While at first felt his emotions as he lived through travails and triumphs, later it seemed like we were being TOLD about his experiences rather than living them along with him. One truism we hold as writers is "Show Don't Tell." I wonder if the wide scope of a book like this makes that goal more difficult?

At any rate, I did get my pleasant weekend of reading in, and while these characters don't live for me as some of my favorites do (such as Gus in Lonesome Dove), I'm looking forward to the mini-series, which has apparently just finished filming and will be released later this year.

After reading the book, I did a little research. It seems that Salisbury Cathedral was one of Follett's inspirations. So, I award Pillars of the Earth 3.5 (out of 5) Salisbury Cathedrals

My Favorite Gift -- An Empty Box

noreply@blogger.com (Frankie Anon) — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 02:52:00 +0000

Tomorrow we're taking down the Christmas tree and putting all the ornaments away for another year. Among the gifts I will pack up is a tiny empty box that gets a prominent spot under the tree or on the mantel every year. It's a three-inch red and white polka dotted cube, with a tag that reads "To Frankie, Love Mother" in my mother's hand. I don't remember what small gift it once held -- probably something mom picked up at a yard sale or an antique mall, or maybe a little jar of jam or something similar. I don't even know why I originally kept it. It probably just got packed up at some point with all of the gift bags and bows. But after mom died almost a decade ago, this bit of emphemera suddently became important. Each year, I have a gift from my mom under my tree. It makes me smile and it makes me sad, the blend of emotions we all have to get used to after we lose someone we loved.

Japanese Screens

noreply@blogger.com (Frankie Anon) — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 20:53:00 +0000

We recently attended an exhibit of Japanese screens that was jointly presented by the St. Louis Art Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago. There is something so ethereal and delicate about these screens, which were meant to be both utilitarian and works of fine art. The fragile paper, the subtle colors, the brush calligraphy that freezes words as if they were birds hanging on air -- it evokes a peaceful feeling in me that I can't quite name or define.

I don't know much about Japanese screens, but I'm eager to learn more. The image below, a detail from a six-panel screen called Pheasant and Pine by Kano Koi, adorns the cover of the catalog, which is available at both museums. We bought it because it not only has all of the screens in the exhibit, but seems thorough in its discussion of this art form.

On the surface, my two favorite works in the show are quite different from one another. The first is by Tosa Mitsuoki (Japanese, 1617-1691) and is called Flowering Cherry and Autumn Maple with Poem Slips. The poems appear to be painted on little strips of paper that seem to flutter in the breeze. This picture, from the Art Institute, hardly does it justice. But if you go to their website, there is a better copy, one that you can zoom in on to see details. Both trees are simply gorgeous.

This screen has another image on the back, which was not visible in the display. I wish it had been reflected in a mirror or something, since it is a grove of bamboo, one of my favorite plants.

My second favorite work was a twentieth-century take on the centuries-old screen tradition. These two screens are part of 1990 work called Mountain Lake Screen Tachi by Okura Jiro.
The original work spanned more than 120 feet on 16 screens, creating a wall or mountain effect, or possibly a golden city. The gold leaf is applied on rough-hewn walnut boards, sometimes quite loosely, so that pieces of it sparkle and blow in the air. It's really quite lovely and impressive, both for its size and beauty, and for showing that this ancient art still lives and continues to grow.

I found this picture of the screens in their outdoor setting, but even this photo does not capture the impressive size of the screens, which seem to tower over you like golden mountains.

The Mountain Lake website says, "The focus of Okura’s workshops developed out of his own deep respect for natural materials, especially wood. This respect is based on an understanding of the relationship between nature as an environment of material substance with physical location, and as a concept of pure space. For Okura, substance and space acquire a sense of plenitude when the self grasps this relationship, which wood (or any other natural material) can symbolize if treated properly. Okura’s ideas, which are expressed by his treatment of wood, are manifested in Eastern belief systems through ritual practices that allow for chance and indeterminacy in the processing of materials."

The exhibit also made note of my architectural hero, Frank Lloyd Wright, crediting him with shaping "Americans’ visions of the screen format." The show had a large-scale photograph of his bedroom in his home and studio, Taliesin, circa 1909, with a Japanese screen embedded in the wall. This room no longer exists in this form, having been destroyed in one of the two fires that consumed much of Taliesin earlier in the century. So, it was fun and surprising to come across this image in the exhibit.

Addams Family Musical -- A Review (Plus Tee Shirts)

noreply@blogger.com (Frankie Anon) — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 15:09:00 +0000

UPDATE 12/30/09: The Producers must have read my review! The Addams Family Musical is undergoing substantial revisions. Here's a link to the story in the New York Times:

They're creepy and they're kooky
Mysterious and spooky
They're all together ooky
The Addams Family

Frink and I went to Chicago last weekend. On Saturday night, we saw The Addams Family Musical,a new show in pre-Broadway tryouts. Before even seeing the play, I went straight to the goodie counter where a cadre of busy clerks were selling over-priced souvenirs, from posters to mugs to note pads to tee-shirts, all branded with the show's logo and catch phrases, or with reproductions of the original Charles Addams cartoons.

I wasn't shopping for myself: My niece is wild about theater and was Elphaba-green with envy that I got to see this show. So, I bought her this shirt for Christmas. Now, you can't buy one kid a souvenir and not get anything for her siblings. So I also got shirts for her brother and sister. The theater had a HUGE array of merchandise. If only they had put as much thought into the musical!

The Addams Family has some of the most inspired casting imaginable. Bebe Neuwirth as Morticia. Nathan Lane as Gomez. It should have been a hoot. Unfortunately, it was dreadful. And not in the mysterious and spooky sense of the word. Now, I’m the first to admit that what I want from a Broadway musical may differ from the average theater-goer’s expectations. I’m not a big fan of huge, razzle-dazzle sets and million-dollar spectacles (I may be the only person in America who didn’t like Wicked.)

What I do expect is at least one of the following: an involving story, characters I care about (or at least enjoy watching), some memorable tunes, or some zippy dance numbers that are fun to watch. The Addams Family didn't live up on any front. The story was trite, the songs so-so, and the characters flatter than their images on the tee shirts. The sets, however, were very nice.

In interviews, the producers have said that they ignored the television series and movies, drawing their inspiration from the original New Yorker cartoons. They didn't quite follow through on that approach, but even if they had, I’m not sure it was a wise choice. According to Wikipedia, "Addams' original cartoons were one-panel gags, and he never developed any of the characters or even gave them names until the sitcom was being developed.”

If Pixar has taught me anything, it’s that the story has to come first. With a good story, everything else is gravy. But this story had no main course. It was simplistic and sit-commish, without the sly sophistication of the original cartoons or the winking humor of the TV show. In the play, Wednesday has been aged from 7 to 18. She has met a “normal” boy, and guess whose family is coming to dinner? The Normals (aka Beinecke's) are just what you would expect – staid, uptight, needing to be shaken up. On cue, Pugsley inadvertently gives one of Grandmama's potions to Mrs. Normal and chaos ensues. Or at least it's supposed to.

A good story also needs memorable characters. I don’t care how you get me involved in the characters—make me identify or empathize with them, envy them, hate them, laugh at the them, or fear them. Just make me care enough to spend two hours in their company. Wednesday is written as any stock rebellious teen (although she keeps stridently reminding us that she is wild and crazy.) Fester, who sounds and acts just like the TV actor, serves the unenviable role of a Greek chorus explaining the all-too-obvious plot, although he does have a few inspired moments. (His love song to the moon was a high point.) The actress playing Mrs. Normal/Beineke was affecting, even in a clichéd part, and her voice was terrific. Terrance Mann as Mr. Normal/Beineke was also memorabe. But the principals are given such a poor story line that a few strong performances aren’t enough to salvage the evening.

Bebe Neuwirth is one of my favorite actresses. Best known for the deadpan monotone of Lilith on Fraser she is a terrifically talented and renowned Broadway star. I've always wanted to see her in a musical. I was thrilled when I heard that she was cast as Morticia. She has the figure, the dancing chops, and the dry wit to suit the part. But she is constrained, literally and figuratively, in this show. For most of the play she is strait-jacketed by the tight gown she has to wear to carry off Morticia’s nipping walk. When the gown does come off, in a tango with Gomez, I was momentarily aroused, thinking that finally we would get to see Neuwirth do her stuff. But even the tango was a let-down. It should have been the climax of the show, the sizzling, passionate reunion of lovers temporarily parted by misunderstanding. Instead, the choreography was woefully clichéd, with Morticia at one point even playing the bull goring Gomez’s red cape. It also doesn't help that her character's big story line is a mid-life fear that she has lost her mojo.

Lane’s Gomez has a bit more to work with, including a few zingy one-liners. But the story is so slight and the music and lyrics so lackluster that even this talented star goes to waste.

The lack of story or characters wouldn't matter if the songs had been memorable. Many successful muscials have thin stories. Spamalot doesn’t have much of a plot or characters, but the music is fabulously hum-worthy. And hilarious. The Addams Family had a few okay numbers--Act One's "Full Disclosure" was memorable, and Morticia's "Second Banana" was ok, but several verged on being tedious, and at least one made me wince.

One reason Spamalot is successful is that it smacks you across the face like a wet perch with reminders of the movie. By deliberately avoiding callbacks to a beloved show, The Addams Family loses much of its appeal. (And in fact, despite the producer’s stated intentions, the musical did refer to the TV series and movies. Lane’s Spanish accent is patterned on the movies’ Raul Julia. Lurch grunts just like the original actor. Gomez and Morticia duel with swords and he swoons when she speaks French. And so on.)

At one point a snippet of the TV theme song plays as the cast gathers around a Victorian sofa in a tableau patterned on the TV show’s opening montage. It was telling that this was one of the most well-received bits in the show. When those few bars of music started playing,the audience broke into applause, and the energy in the theater soared. Unfortunately, it soon died down again.

The Addams Family is in previews in Chicago before heading to New York. I hope they will find a way to retool the show before moving it to Broadway.

And I hope the kids like the tee shirts!

A Tiny Christmas Miracle

noreply@blogger.com (Frankie Anon) — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 01:02:00 +0000

About three weeks or so ago, Frink's mom lost her wedding ring, along with her engagement ring, to which it was connected. Frink's mom is very thin, and it's been cold out. She thought she lost it while Christmas shopping. She had been trying on gloves at J.C. Penney, so she thought maybe it had come off in one of the gloves. She went back to the store and looked in all of the gloves, not once but twice, and called them a couple of times. She tore her house apart, and her purse, and the car. All to no avail. The ring was gone. Her husband, Frink's dad, made funny "jokes" about how much it was going to cost to replace it. Repeatedly.

Anyway, on Christmas morning, after the breakfast had been eaten, the stockings unpacked, and all the gifts unwrapped, a couple of us were cleaning up all the gift wrap. I saw something sparkling on the carpet. I thought someone had lost an earring. I picked it up. And miracle of miracles, it was the ring! Frink's mom had vacuumed that rug many times since she had lost the ring, including just the day before. So we surmised that it must have come off when she was wrapping presents.

She burst into tears when I gave it to her, and she had to sit down because we were afraid she was going to pass out, she was shaking so hard.

It was the best Christmas present ever!

Christmas Ornaments -- Share your favorites

noreply@blogger.com (Frankie Anon) — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 02:15:00 +0000

Most families who celebrate Christmas have a veritable smorgasbord of ornaments. Mine is no exception. Heirloom ornaments handed down for generations. Ornaments given to me when I was a child. Ornaments that are wacky and fun. Ornaments bought to match a particular decor. Almost all of them have a story. I thought I'd share a few of my favorite this Christmas season.

And, I'd like to invite you to do the same! Share a story (and a link, if you'd like) about one of your favorite holiday ornaments... whatever holiday you celebrate and cherish.

These two ornaments are years apart in time, distance, and style, but they do share a certain kitsch factor.

The little tree made of wrapped boxes stands about a foot high. It's from the 1950s and belonged to my Great Aunt Fern. It reminds me of photos of her from that era, when she favored cat's eye glasses with rhinestones, and dresses with nipped waists and swingy skirts.

The other ornament is so deliberately bizarre it makes me laugh. An alligator (or crocodile?) in red high heels is charming enough, but the Christmas trees on his back put him quite over the top.

A couple of years ago, when I was in Vienna for a semester, I bought several of these weird little designs at one of the Christmas markets. The irony is that these ornaments are made in America, so I traveled all the way to Vienna only to bring them back to the U.S. (I wish I could remember the name of the company that makes them. If anyone recognizes them, let me know!)

I spent a few months alone in Vienna. At Christmas, Frink was going to join me. It's a rather lonely feeling wandering by yourself around a city festively decorated for Christmas, especially Vienna, which must have the most beautiful Christmas in the world. The markets are thronged with people standing under sparkling lights in the streets or at outdoor stalls, laughing, eating delicious cookies, hot potatoes, sausages, and mulled wines.

After Frink joined me for Christmas, we planned to stay in Vienna only a few days, before doing some traveling, so I didn't want to get a tree. But my little apartment seemed so bare and sad. So, I bought some pine boughs at a flower shop, stuck them in a large vase on a table, draped it with a "skirt" and hung 10 or 12 ornaments from it. I got most of the ornaments at Christmas Markets to give as gifts when I returned home, but I didn't think my friends and family would mind if I hung them for a few days on my makeshift tree.

This well-heeled alligator had a prominent spot, and I grew so attached to him that I had to keep him.

Tomorrow: More on Vienna's Christmas markets, and some ornaments acquired there.

More on Mrs. Dr. Seuss

noreply@blogger.com (Frankie Anon) — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 21:47:00 +0000

After I discovered who the author of one of my favorite children's books was, I did a little research on her.

Here's her Wikipedia entry "Helen Palmer Geisel was born in 1899 and died in 1967, 24 years before her husband died." They met at Oxford, and apparently she persuaded him not to become a professor, but to be an artist instead.
She published several other books in addition to A Fish Out of Water, and worked as an actress. And, she committed suicide. Wikipedia attributes her suicide to “a series of illnesses (including cancer) spanning 13 years.”

But a story in The New York Times offers a different, somewhat seedier version. Geisel, it seems, remarried. His second wife was a woman named Audrey Diamond.

To let the Times pick up the tale:

Were you thinking the widow of the country's most beloved children's writer must have been a sentimental and devoted mom, admitting only the most traditional family values?

Sorry.

Audrey Dimond was married with two children when she fell in love with Ted Geisel. Mr. Geisel, 18 years her senior, was also married. In the wake of their affair, Mr. Geisel's wife, Helen, committed suicide, causing, as Mrs. Geisel puts it, ''a rather large ripple in the community of La Jolla.'' Mrs. Dimond divorced her husband to marry Mr. Geisel, 64, and when she did, her daughters, 9 and 14, were sent away to school.

''They wouldn't have been happy with Ted, and Ted wouldn't have been happy with them. He's the man who said of children, 'You have 'em and I'll entertain 'em.' ''

''Ted's a hard man to break down, but this is who he was. He lived his whole life without children and he was very happy without children. I've never been very maternal. There were too many other things I wanted to do. My life with him was what I wanted my life to be.'' ….

Oh, ok.

Might be nice to have some of Helen Palmer's words as well. Here's the first Mrs. Geisel's suicide note to her husband:

As one Dear Ted, What has happened to us? I don't know. I feel myself in a spiral, going down down down, into a black hole from which there is no escape, no brightness. And loud in my ears from every side I hear, 'failure, failure, failure... I love you so much ... I am too old and enmeshed in everything you do and are, that I cannot conceive of life without you ... My going will leave quite a rumor but you can say I was overworked and overwrought. Your reputation with your friends and fans will not be harmed ... Sometimes think of the fun we had all thru the years ..." Source: Judith and Neil Morgan. Dr. Seuss & Mr. Geisel: A Biography. pg. 195.

I wonder if I will ever be able to look at that picture book -- or any book by Dr. Seuss -- the same way?

I suppose that's a straw man of a question, though. Can we ever look at things we knew as children in the same way, once we've grown up and our innocence is lost? Adult lives are complicated and often messy. It appears that Seuss's life was just messier than average.

It is possible to be both charmed by the work and disturbed by the life. No different from Tiger Woods, really. Have to love the man's inimitable ability as an athlete. His personal life, not so much.

A Fish Out of Water -- A Beloved Children's Book

noreply@blogger.com (Frankie Anon) — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 20:17:00 +0000

One of my favorite books when I was a child was “A Fish Out of Water.” It’s one of the few books I kept, and it’s obvious from looking at the tattered spine that it was much read. (The photo is of a nice new copy.) It was published in 1961, when I was 4 or 5.

I loved everything about the book: The shiny hard cover, the size, the illustrations, and the story itself.

It tells the tale of a little boy who gets a new goldfish. Mr. Carp, the pet store owner, cautions him not to feed the fish too much:

When you feed a fish, never feed him a lot.
So much and no more! Never more than a spot,
or something may happen. You never know what.

Of course, the boy disobeys these instructions, and his tiny fish, named Otto, begins to grow and grow. He grows so large that the boy has to put him in a vase. But Otto soon outgrows the vase, too! The boy rushes around putting Otto in a series of larger and larger pans, the bathtub, and finally the neighborhood swimming pool.

My younger self found this endlessly amusing, and the many times that I have culled my books over the years, I simply haven’t been able to get rid of this battered old book. I ran across it the other day, and for some reason I got curious about the author, Helen Palmer, whose name I had really never noticed before. (Isn’t that the way of children? They can read a book a hundred times, but not even consider the idea that the book had a real live author, and an illustrator to boot!)

So, I looked her up on online. I was floored by what I learned. First, it turns out that Helen Palmer was married to Theodor Geisel, otherwise known as Dr. Seuss.

What’s more, she was not the original author. She revised and adapted the story from one Dr. Seuss had published in Redbook in 1950. In fact, it was his first poem published in Redbook.

I learned this on Collecting Children’s Picturebo oks which shows the two stories side-by-side. Here’s a sample:

I like the Seuss drawings even better than the ones in my book. The fish and boy both have that wild, wacky, messy-hair look Seuss was so good at. And even though he’s wearing a tie, the little boy looks a bit demented. In the Palmer version, they both have a more sanitized, we-live-in-a-tract-home,1950’s Dick and Jane appearance. The Seuss version is also better at conveying the frenzied pace as the boy races around trying to keep his growing fish in water.

Collecting Children’s Picturebooks goes into some detail about how the new version came about: “There is little question that Helen Palmer wrote A Fish Out Of Water. In 1950, it is very likely she helped Geisel with the story and composition of Gustav The Goldfish, just as she helped him with many of his stories....Palmer was more an advisor, reviewer, or contributor than a collaborator.”

For some reason, he gave her permission to revise the poem for a new easy reader book, designed for readers just like me. Here's the jacket copy:

“Like all BEGINNER BOOKS, this one will prove helpful in developing reading skill. It is written with ONLY 175 DIFFERENT WORDS – the majority of which a child learns in first grade. The theme is skillfully evolved to ensure the word repetition necessary in building a “sight” vocabulary. Yet these word repetitions never become drills – they are basic to the plot so that a child will feel he is reading only for fun."

Well, that certainly worked for me!

The Picturebook website quotes from the dustjacket: “Helen Palmer, graduate of Wellesley College and Oxford University, was a teacher of English before she became involved in the creation of books for children. She has since edited literally dozens of successful juveniles and written an even dozen of her own. Married to an eccentric writer, Theo LeSeig (himself a Beginner Book author), Miss Palmer lives in California […].”

"The 'eccentric writer' LeSeig, Geisel spelled backwards, of course is Dr. Seuss. A bit odd, this concerted effort to distance Palmer’s connection to the leading best selling author/illustrator of children’s books....The result, for some forty years, is the public’s perception that A Fish Out Of Water was an original story authored solely by Helen Palmer. The cleverness of the story, the ‘preposterous-ness’, obviously, is due to Dr. Seuss." (Collecting Children's Picturebooks)

Well! The things you learn when you start to do a little research. I decided to delve into the story a bit more. Alas, what I found was a lot more disturbing.

Tune in this weekend for more…

Applauding at Auctions

noreply@blogger.com (Frankie Anon) — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 17:41:00 +0000

As much as I dislike shopping, I love browsing at garage sales and junky "antique malls," and going to auctions. We have quite a few auction companies in town, including one "high end" house that alternates between really expensive stuff and regular monthly auctions featuring things that normal people might buy. A month or so ago, we went one of the chi-chi auctions.

We observed a ritual that never ceases to baffle me: applauding when something goes for a high price. There was a cool mid-century coffee table by some designer I have never heard of that inspired a sedate bidding frenzy, both from people in the audience and bidders on the phone. The table started at something like $10,000 and by the time it was all over, it went for an amazing $40,000. As soon as the final gavel fell, the crowd broke out in spontaneous applause. Now, this wasn't some sophisticated Paris or New York audience dressed in haute couture. There wasn't a lovely spy lurking in the background, like in the movies. It was a rather frumpy looking mid-western crowd, with lots of jeans, sweat shirts, and baseball caps. Few of them looked like they could spend $40,000 on a table (although looks can be deceiving, I know.) Nonetheless, they all applauded.

Exactly what, I wonder, are people applauding in such a situation? The object itself, which has achieved such a high value? The designer or artist, probably long dead, whose work has inspired such a frenzy of desire? The auction house, for its foresight in attracting the right crowd? Or are they applauding Mr. or Ms. Deep Pockets, that wealthy person who can afford to spend $40,000 on a table, as if to say "Bravo! Way to go for earning so much money that you can afford to spend so much! We admire you! We envy you!"

Maybe its a combination of all of these things. I don't know.

But I do know that we didn't get any applause for our little purchases, which totaled $150. Even so, I was pretty happy with them.

First, we bought four mid-century dining chairs that look great with our 50's dining table. I found the table and original chairs about 15 years ago at a garage sale for $90. The chairs, never the sturdiest, have gotten rickety, and one broke when a 300-pound friend sat in it. (I felt so bad for her! She wasn't hurt, but it must have been humiliating.) The new chairs more or less match the table and are very heavy and sturdy. I love the interesting lines they have ... you can't tell from this photo, but the wood on the sides creates a little triangle shape, and the back is all wood. At $12.50 apiece, I think they were a steal, even though I'll need to recover them.

And, I could not resist buying a set of Russel Wright Modern American dinnerware. My mother had these dishes in this exact color when I was growing up. They are sleek, cool, and incredibly mod. Plus, they remind me of mom. She never had much money to spend on herself or home decor, but she managed to decorate our tiny house with style. These dishes will remind me of her every time we use them. I plan to use them as our every day dishes. I was pleased to get the set for an amazing $100. It's not a full set-- there are 8 dinner and bread plates, and 12 cups and saucers. To have a complete set, I'll need to find the serving bowls and a few other pieces. But that will be a fun endeavor -- something to look for at junk sales!

After a Long Hiatus, I'm Back

noreply@blogger.com (Frankie Anon) — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 20:51:00 +0000

I am surprised to see that I still have any followers at all, after taking a long, unannounced and unplanned hiatus from the world of blogs. I didn't really plan to stop blogging, or to stop reading blogs, and no great trauma or drama has occurred in my life. It seems that I went a week without writing, and then that stretched into two, and before I knew it, I was out of the habit altogether. Because I wasn't visiting my blog, I got behind on reading all the blogs I followed. But I miss reading everyone's blogs, so now I'm back. I'm going to read as much as I can, and resume posting as well. I'm looking forward to catching up!

Sunday Book Notes -- The Sinister Pig, by Tony Hillerman

noreply@blogger.com (Frankie Anon) — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 00:11:00 +0000

The desert southwest is a primary character in many of Tony Hillerman's mysteries, which is one reason I generally enjoy them. I grew up on the Western slope of Colorado, where the red soil is dotted with scrubby green trees, and snow peaks tower all around. It was truly a paradise. And yet the country that speaks to my soul is a little further west and south: Canyon country, the area around the Navajo and Hopi reservations, and south, on into the Sonoran desert. This area, the Four Corners region, where Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico meet, is the locale for most of Hillerman's novels, including The Sinister Pig.

Like Hillerman's other mysteries, this novel features Navajo Tribal Police detective Jim Chee and his now retired boss, Joe Leaphorn. The plot involves old, abandoned oil and gas lines in the New Mexico desert, which are being used for sinister purposes. The story also continues the developing relationship between Chee and Border Patrol agent Bernie Manuelito.

This was one of my least favorite Hillerman mysteries. I'm not going to give away the plot here, even though it is quite obvious from the beginning who the bad guys are and what their game is. Revealing the evil characters early is a deliberate tactic on Hillerman's part, but it makes the plot seem a little too rote and obvious as the events play out.

But that isn't the biggest problem with the book. Hillerman seems to have an ax to grind, which gets in the way of the novel. As he writes on the acknowledgments page, billions of dollars owed to the Tribal Trust Funds are unaccounted for. Chee, Leaphorn, and half a dozen other characters dutifully recite the fact that this money has been mismanaged or stolen by the Federal government. And yet, despite Hillerman's efforts to make this part of the story, the missing funds do not really play a role in the novel. Thus, all the references to the missing money seem more like a diatribe than an intrinsic and fluid part of a novel. More effective are Hillerman's underlying arguments about the futility and injustice of a drug war that targets small -time drug users rather than the big money smugglers, and his characterization of illegal aliens as hard-working people simply searching for a better life.

Even the landscape failed to move me as much as it usually does in a Chee/Leaphorn novel. Although Chee's travels take him from Window Rock to Gallup, Lordsburg, Deming and on down to the Mexican border -- drives I've made many times myself -- I suspect that I visualized the shimmering landscape more from my own experience than from the power of his description.

I also wasn't terribly thrilled that the female characters in the book are so darned stupid. Bernie the Border Patrol agent seems naive and incapable, blundering around like the girl who goes in the closet in the stereotypical horror movie. A woman like this wouldn't last a month on the border. And she is one of two young women who need rescuing in the book.

For me, the most successful part of The Sinister Pig was Hillerman's handling of multiple viewpoints. The most memorable and chilling scenes involve the murder of a young woman that takes place early in the book, seen first through the eyes of the assassin and then by the man who ordered her death. Unfortunately, the rest of the book doesn't live up to those chapters.

I'm the first to admit that I'm not a die-hard Hillerman fan. This is the sixteenth book in this series, and I've probably read only four or five of them. Someone who has followed the series from the beginning and has grown accustomed to the characters, landscape, and Navajo customs may be more enamored of this book than I was.

It was a quick, generally enjoyable read, great for the beach or poolside, but not my favorite Hillerman work.

Rating: 2 Kachinas.

Frank Lloyd Wright at the Guggenheim Museum

noreply@blogger.com (Frankie Anon) — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 15:56:00 +0000

The main reason we went to New York a couple of weeks ago was to see the first exhibition ever held at the Guggenheim museum featuring its architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. The exhibit commemorated the 50th anniversary of the building, which was completed 6 months after Wright died in 1959, at age 91. Original drawings, models (too few of these) and documents spiraled up the museum’s ramps.

A New Yorker article about the exhibit notes that "staff at the Guggenheim like to refer to the building as the most important object in the museum’s collection...." That is so true. We certainly go there to enjoy the building itself as much as the artwork it contains.

And if you believe the story told by the tour guides at Talesin, Wright's home in Wisconsin, the building was inspired by another object, this conch shell, which to this day sits on a shelf in his home. (I photographed it a few weeks ago through a window, since you're not allowed to take interior photos.)

It was strange and exciting to see Wright’s own drawings of the Guggenheim displayed in that very building itself. It was like walking into an M.C. Escher drawing. (Frink always says he wants to put an LCD TV with a video of a crackling fire in a fireplace over the real fireplace. Or one of those videos of fish swimming next to the fishtank. He's a clever lad, that Frink.)

It was also interesting to compare how the design evolved and changed – how the site selection, the other projects Wright was working on, and the negotiations with the client (who in the case of the Guggenheim, had a mind of her own) changed the artistic vision. Wright, for example, wanted the building’s exterior to be red. In another version, the widest part of the spiral was at ground level.

For architecture buffs and FLW groupies, the actual drawings, often larger than those in books, provided a lot more detail about the plans for buildings, both those that were built, those that were outrageously and brutally demolished (like Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel), and those that were never built (like a huge, spacey Jetsons-mod theater complex and park Wright designed for Bagdad.) Some of the drawings had never been reproduced or displayed before.

Speaking of the Imperial Hotel, here's a photo (from Wikipedia Commons.)

(My Aunt Fern and Uncle Edmond actually stayed there in the 60s, and when I get a scanner, I'll upload Uncle E's slides of this magnificent building.) Ahead of its time (built 1923), it was designed to withstand an earthquake. In a weird twist of fate, at the opening ceremony, one of the worst earthquakes in Tokyo's history struck. While buildings throughout the city crumbled and burned, Wright's hotel was unscathed.

I bet the Japanese are kicking themselves for their short-sightedness in tearing it down. Today, a single plate from the cafe sells for hundreds of dollars and chairs for thousands apiece. People would pay a premium to stay in one of the world's greatest structures. Tourists flock to the bit that remains in a museum. Until we can afford to fly to Japan, the closest Frink and I will ever come is this urn from the hotel, now in the Metropolitan Museum. It stands more than 5 feet tall. And our reproduction Cabaret china from the hotel's less formal cafe. But I digress.

The exhibit also included some computer animations, walking you visually through building. There was a cool "exploded" modle hung on wires of the Jacobs I, one of the most important Usonian houses. (Basically Usonian houses were built for regular folks, whom Wright felt deserved art and beauty as much as the wealthy. They featured a lot of wood and windows, great open spaces (Wright invented the "great room" concept), space-saving built-in furniture, and heated Cherokee red concrete floors.)

I'm getting a little better at looking at blueprints and such, but I am the kind of person who can't imagine spaces very well. (When some people want to rearrange the furniture, they can map it out or even imagine how it will look in their heads. I have to actually move the furniture and see it to decide if it looks good. Usually it doesn't. So then I have to move it back.) More models and animations would have made the exhibit even more enjoyable. Also, I wish they had included more photos of the finished buildings. Because FLW is our hobby, I've seen many of the actual buildings, but a lot of the visitors to the exhibit may not have.

In terms of collecting more objects to clutter our home, we were really restrained. We bought only two books, including the exhibit catalog. And of course I saved the free exhibit pamphlet. It featured this curtain, from the Hillside Theater at Taliesen, Wright’s home in Spring Green, Wisconsin. Seeing the curtain out of context, hung web.

Exit the King

noreply@blogger.com (Frankie Anon) — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 01:50:00 +0000

The third play we saw on our recent weekend in New York has now closed: Exit the King, starring Susan Sarandon and Geoffrey Rush (who won a Tony for Best Actor.) In fact, we saw it on the last day. I've never been to a closing performance, and I sort of wondered if we would get the full effort. But, aside from Sarandon discreetly cracking up once when the actor who played the guard had some fun repeating a line, nothing seemed amiss.

I have never read this play, by Eugene Ionesco, but it offered an interesting counter-point to Waiting for Godot. The central dilemma in Godot is trying to find some meaning in life, some reason to keep on going in the face of a futile, often brutal existence. The central dilemma in Exit the King is coming to terms with the loss of that life, however meaningless and painful it might be.

Rush gave a stunning, clownish, scenery chewing performance, one full of bluster and pathos. His King clung to life with every ounce of his rapidly diminishing strength. The world is literally dying along with this solipcistic king -- the kingdom itself torn apart by volcanoes and earthquakes, the population rendered helpless and infertile as he dies.This is one man who refuses to go gently into that good night. The king is the walking embodiment of the id. The world and everyone in it exists for his pleasure. When he ceases to exist, the world will, too.

And isn't this, really, what all of us believe in our heart of hearts, in the secret hidey holes of our souls? I am the center of the universe. I cannot imagine a world without me. Death is the great void. The death of everything. I fear it. This incredible performance gave me the chance to recognize and give voice to those feelings. Actually, it rather insisted upon it.

The script and the play's direction forced us to recognize ourselves in the King, constantly breaking the 4th wall by making direct references to how many minutes his life (and the play) had left, placing the palace's Doritos-munching trumpeter in a balcony box, even sending Rush at one point up and down the aisles of the theater, where he stood right next to us, looking us in the eye as he railed against his inevitable end. (Incidentally, Rush is one skinny dude.)

Sarandon was good as the put-upon first wife, whose eye-rolling, cynical exterior masks a gentle side. In a long soliloquy at the end of the play, her almost maternal love shines as she tries to persuade the king to loosen his clenched fist and let go. Lauren Ambrose could have devolved into caricature as the king's beautiful second wife, Queen Marie. Like Rush, she's over-the-top in her arm-flinging, mascara-running distress. But her palpable love for the king and her blissfully youthful naivitee are compelling and real.

All-in-all, a memorable play and a great weekend on Broadway.

God of Carnage

noreply@blogger.com (Frankie Anon) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 21:46:00 +0000

In our weekend Broadway splurge, we saw three plays. The second was God of Carnage. I'll be honest -- I don't quite get the 3 Tonys this play won (Best Play, Best Direction, Best Actress.) The play was laugh-out-loud funny, but after it was over, we found that there just wasn't that much to chew over or digest or argue about. And isn't arguing over a play half the fun?

God of Carnage is about two couples who meet in one couple's ultra chic living room to discuss a bullying incident between their children. They begin with polite niceties, but it isn't long before the shoes and jackets come off and the invective and vomit flies.

There's a certain pleasure in seeing actors you know only from the screen up close and personal on the stage. But I feel like I have seen these characters before: the self-important lawyer glued to his cell-phone (Jeff Daniels), the raging-within blue-collar type made good (James Gandolfini--aka Tony Soprano), the mousy, dutiful wife who loosens up after a little alcohol (Hope Davis), and the barely-keeping it together alcoholic who doesn't so much loosen up as fall apart after a few drinks (Marcia Gay Harden, who took home the Best Actress Tony.)

Not being a theater critic, and not having seen Harden's competition for the Tony (except for Davis, who was also nominated), I can't really comment on how well deserved the award was. Harden, though, was fantastic -- brittle, acerbic, and very funny. She was one of the best things about the play.

The set was also wonderful, evoking a tony apartment with a sleek mid-century modern aesthetic -- deep red walls and carpets, a huge rock-lined room divider and an enormous coffee table covered with art books, which play a role in one of the most amusing and shocking bits of action in the play.

But when it was over, it all felt a bit like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf light or like a stagy and shrill sit-com. The central metaphor -- we're all animals at heart -- is rather obvious. And I didn't find any of the characters sympathetic. Unlike Waiting for Godot, I can't imagine reading this play over and over or breathlessly awaiting new productions to see how a different director or cast interpret the play. It was, to paraphrase Godot, a good way to pass the time.

Here's a link to the theater and more information.

Next up: Exit the King, starring Susan Sarandon and Geoffrey Rush.

Playbills from Broadway--Waiting for Godot

noreply@blogger.com (Frankie Anon) — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 19:40:00 +0000

A lot of people collect the Playbills from the theater, so much so that there are even special bindings you can buy to preserve them. And opening night Playbills come with a little sticker attesting to that.

I totally understand the urge to keep the program; I always bring mine home, especially from plays I've enjoyed. But mine are never crisp, neat, and well-preserved. Somehow they end up all rumpled and bent from being rolled up, dropped on the floor, stuffed in a bag. But I keep them nonetheless. They are free souvenirs, easy to pack, and a good way to spark my notoriously bad memory for details long after I think I've forgotten the play.

On our recent trip to New York, we saw three plays, all coincidentally featuring well-known screen celebrities and all featuring a rather bleak outlook on life, although that's not necessarily why we chose the plays. The most memorable was Waiting for Godot, starring Bill Irwin, John Glover, Nathan Lane, and John Goodman.

I've seen Godot before and have read the play several times. Waiting for Godot can seem quite despairing, especially on the written page. Full of existential angst and brutality, it's an odd choice for someone like me who trends toward depression. But this production was a revelation -- I had never realized how funny Godot is, in the right hands. Comedy truly is in the timing.The actors in this production hit every note. It was by turns hilarious, profoundly moving, and -- again somewhat unexpectedly-- optimistic. We may not know why we are on this earth or what our lives mean. There may be nothing to do. But we are alive and that is reason enough to keep on living. Or so this production implied.

Lane (Estragon) and Irwin (Vladimir) are excellent, two satellites that circle each other at safe removes, seemingly independent, and yet tethered by the gravity of companionship and need. Glover's Lucky, literally tethered to his master Pozzo by a thick rope around his neck, was an interesting blend of Tim Burton's Jack Skellington from The Nightmare Before Christmas and the loose-limbed, pontificating Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz (although certainly less cheerful than the latter.)

All the actors were superb, but John Goodman's performance just blew me away. I've often been impressed and surprised by the depths Goodman reveals in some of his films. It's a mistake to consider him only as the funny fat man he played in Roseanne or movies like the Flintstones. He can tap into something very dark, as evidenced in his scary performances in Barton Fink and O Brother Where Art Thou. Here, he plays Pozzo, a cruel, selfish, aristocrat with a vaguely British, uppercrust accent and an imperious, threatening demeanor. Goodman's immense size and power contributes to his threatening posture and makes the scene when Pozzo falls to the ground and can't get up all the more moving. His Pozzo is at once full of aggrandizing self-assurance, unquestioned privilege, barely contained rage, pathetic neediness, and, at the end, wisdom and insight, if only for a brief moment. It's a stunning performance.

We lucked into a brief after-show discussion featuring Irwin, Glover, and Goodman. They talked about the choice of pronunciation (GOD-oh rather than Go-doh), which I at first found disconcerting. Apparently, it's closer to Beckett's original French, and it resonates better with Pozzo. But the most amusing and interesting exchange was John Goodman's answer to the inevitable question about whether Godot is God and what in the heck it all means. "I don't know or care," said Goodman. "I just try to tell a good story." In this, he seems to be echoing Beckett, who once said, "all I knew about Pozzo was in the text...if I had known more I would have put it in the text, and that was true also of the other characters.” Beckett also once said that "if by Godot I had meant God I would have said God, and not Godot.”

When asked, "how do you handle the humor in such an incessantly pessimistic play," Goodman deadpanned, "with a trowel." He paused, then went on, "What are you going to do? It's an inherently funny play. Samuel Beckett wrote it for Sid Caesar."

I wish I had thought to ask about the obvious blood and bruises on Lane's face. My recollection, reinforced by a quick look at the very interesting Wikipedia entry on the play, is that there was never any evidence to support Estragon's claim that he is beaten every night. This production erases that ambiguity. It might thus also subtly erase the ambiguity about whether the child who purports to be a messenger from Godot actually has met and talked to the never-seen title character, although, as Frink points out, the child is not exactly a reliable witness, as he cannot remember having met Didi and Gogo the day before. This production also encourages a more hopeful ending by having E and V grasp the other's hand in the final scene.

Here's a link to the theatre, where Godot is playing through July 12.

I'll post thoughts on the other two plays, God of Carnage and Exit the King, in the next few days.

Exposing Art to Our Selves

noreply@blogger.com (Frankie Anon) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 03:00:00 +0000

Human nature baffles and amuses me. This past weekend, we were in New York for a quick vacation. During our visit to the Metropolitan Museum, we noticed signs leading to "Michelangelo's First Work." We followed them, only to find a huge crowd gathered in front of this tiny painting like the monsters clinging to poor Saint Anthony. Now, don't get me wrong: The Tormenting of St. Anthony, attributed to a 12 or 13-year-old Michelangelo, is intriguing and historically significant. But it was interesting that the Renoirs, Vermeers, Monets, and Van Goghs were, in comparison, almost ignored by tourists intent on crowding around this small canvas.

Was it the "first"--that drew in the crowds? The novelty? The sense of seeing something that others haven't seen (despite the fact that the painting is owned by another American museum)? I've experienced the same thing myself -- I had to see the REAL David in Florence, the actual object, not a copy, despite the fact the the cast outside the Palazzo Vecchio is almost identical and is in the exact location where the original once stood. There's something incredibly moving and transformative about seeing the real thing.

And, like the typical American tourist, I, too, bought the souvenir mug. (Mine is of a work I didn't even get to see -- Hokusai's "Great Wave." The Japanese wing was closed the day we were at the Met. Nevertheless, I love this print and will enjoy drinking my coffee out of the mug.)

I also observed another phenomenon that was equally baffling but less amusing than the desire to see the real thing: Drive-by art snapping. At least half the people in the museum seemed to be trotting through the galleries with cameras glued to their faces. They raced up to paintings, especially those by famous artists, snapped a quick photo, checked the photo in the screen of the camera, then quickly moved on, spending virtually no time looking at, much less seeing the actual work of art in front of their eyes.

The drive-by photographers reminded me of a man I once saw at Cape Canaveral videotaping his wife as she bought souvenirs in the gift shop. At what point do these tourists stop framing everything through the lens of their camera and start living the actual experience? Do they need the photo to confirm they were there? Isn't the t-shirt (or mug--mea culpa) confirmation enough? That couple at Cape Canaveral actually led me to stop carrying a camera on my trips, a vow I kept until I visited Iceland and couldn't resist taking pictures of that glorious landscape. Now, too often, I find myself lapsing back into the mindset of seeing something beautiful or remarkable and instantly framing it as a photo, in my mind or in my viewfinder. I do take photos when I travel, but far fewer than I used to.

Watching and thinking about the drive-by art snappers reminded of "The Loss of the Creature," an essay by Walker Percy in which he writes about the difficulty of living an authentic experience in modern society. As summarized on Wikipedia:

"The more or less objective reality of the individual is obscured in and ultimately lost to systems of education and classification. Percy begins by discussing the Grand Canyon--he says that, whereas Garcia Lopez de Cardenas, who discovered the canyon, was amazed and awed by it, the modern-day sightseer can see it only through the lens of "the symbolic complex which has already been formed in the sightseer's mind" (47). Because of this, the sightseer does not appreciate the Grand Canyon on its own merits; he appreciates it based on how well or poorly it conforms to his preexisting image of the Grand Canyon, formed by the mythology surrounding it. What is more, instead of approaching the site directly, he approaches it by taking photographs, which, Percy says, is not approaching it at all. By these two processes--judging the site on postcards and taking his own pictures of it instead of confronting it himself--the tourist subjugates the present to the past and to the future, respectively."

That describes the drive-by art snappers to a T. And me, with my mug. If I ever do see an original print of the Great Wave, I wonder, will it live up to the expectations formed by the reproductions I've seen on calendars and coffee mugs?

(Here's an article about the Michelangelo painting.)

Sunday Book Notes -- Beowulf, trans. Seamus Heaney

noreply@blogger.com (Frankie Anon) — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 02:21:00 +0000

Note to my readers (if you are still there!): I have not blogged in a while. I've been sick with an infection that sapped all my energy. Then we took two short trips, which I'll blog on this week. But first, a day late, is an entry in my new "Sunday Book Notes" feature.

As the oldest poem in English, and as a ripping good yarn, Beowulf has been translated dozens of times. My favorite by far is Seamus Heaney's translation. Although some literature snobs complain that he sacrifices accuracy in the service of poetry, I love his version. It is lyrical, exotic, and gripping.

I first read Beowulf in high school, and again as an English major in college. I enjoyed it but didn't fully appreciate it until I was much older. Or maybe I just appreciated it on different levels than before. (I've certainly lived the truth of that old saying that you never read the same book twice.)

I rediscovered the poem when I was traveling in Scandinavia. The Viking ships and treasure hoards I saw in museums sparked my curiosity about the cultures depicted in Norse sagas. Then I went to Iceland, where I visited the actual sites of some of the sagas, standing on the very ground where Burnt Njal was set on fire and touring other sites that have remained virtually unchanged since the year 1200. These journeys, in turn, led me back to the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, which I had devoured in high school and college. I didn't know then that Tolkien was a scholar of Anglo-Saxon literature, or that he was profoundly influenced by the sagas and Beowulf in creating his mythology. And thus, my circuitous reading saga led me back to Beowulf.

One of Tolkien's most influential essays, "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," argued that Beowulf is too often dismissed as "serious" literature because of its monsters and dragons. Tolkien argued that it is a profoundly significant work, not in spite of its monsters, but because of them. They speak to something deep, even cthonic, that springs from the ground into the very marrow of human experience. He also lamented that the poem was seen only as a repository to be mined for historic facts about 6th century Scandinavia, where it is set, or about the 8th to 11th century period in which it was first written down. (On reflection, I guess there's a bit of irony in my coming back to the book through artifacts and burial mounds.)

Tolkien drew heavily on Beowulf in creating his tales. For me, part of the fun in reading the poem is finding the correspondences to Tolkien's work -- the Riders of Rohan, Sam killing the spider Shelob, the kin-slayer Gollum, Bilbo's theft of the golden cup from Smaug's hoard, the sword that was broken -- all have origins in Beowulf.

But of course, even if you're not a Tolkien fan, Beowulf is a stunning work, a peek into a world of blood oaths and violence, of heroism and faltering humanity.

The action takes place in a Christian world still heavily influenced by Pagan belief and ritual. The poem begins with the aging king Hrothgar, impotent in the face of the murderous Grendel, who night after bloody night wreaks havoc, killing Hrothgar's men. The dashing and boastful Geat prince, Beowulf, comes to the rescue, killing first Grendel and then his distraught and vengeful mother. In seeking vengeance, Grendel's mother is in fact participating in the same moral code that defines the human society. The poem seems almost modern in its shifts in perspective, in its erasure at times of the line between "man" and "monster." We are allowed to feel the mother's loss of her son from her perspective. We sympathize with her for a moment, much as Tolkien encourages our empathy for warped and pitiful Gollum. Later, we see the world through the eyes of the dragon that ultimately kills Beowulf, just as we see through the eyes of the spider Shelob in LOTR.

The battle scenes are what get stressed in the various movie versions of Beowulf. (Probably the most laughable film is the one featuring a nude CGI avatar of Angelina Jolie as Grendel's mother. It's been larded with the full Hollywood treatment, losing the essence of story in a morass of overblown action, gratuitous nudity, and technological razzle dazzle. The epic failings of this movie can be summed up by the words of the director,Robert Zemeckis: “Frankly, nothing about the original poem appealed to me....I remember being assigned to read it in junior high school and not being able to understand it because it was in Old English.")

The battles are certainly memorable, but I prefer other sections of the tale. The action is often interrupted with extended scenes in which a singer/poet "unlocks his word-hoard" and recounts the feats of other heroes, like the legendary dragon-slayer Sigemund. The most harrowing story-in-a-story tells of a queen who loses her entire family-- father, husband, sons, -- to the violent imperative of the blood oath. This tale foreshadows what will happen to Hrothgar's sons, who will be killed by their uncle who covets the throne.

Beowulf's end is particularly moving. An aging king himself, Beowulf is beset on all sides by invading tribes. When a rampaging dragon, angered by the theft of a golden cup from his hoard, begins to pick off his people, Beowulf faces a choice. He can battle the dragon alone, risking not only his own life, but also the future of his people, who will be over-run when his enemies learn that the renowned warrior king is dead. Or, he can forego glory and take his men with him to battle the dragon.

Beowulf chooses the path of glory. Perhaps he is recalling the words of Hrothgar, who tells him early in the poem:

It is always better
To avenge dear ones
than to indulge in mourning.
For every one of us,
living in this world waiting for our end.
Let whoever can
Win glory before death.
When a warrior is gone,
That will be his best and only bulwark.

Beowulf dies, thus guaranteeing the extinction of his race.

On a height they kindled the hugest of all
Funeral fires; fumes of woodsmoke
Billowed darkly up, the blaze roared
And drowned out their weeping, wind died down
And flames wrought havoc in the hot bone-house,
Burning it to the core. They were disconsolate
And wailed aloud for their lord’s decease.
A Geat woman too sang out in grief;
With hair bound up, she unburdened herself
Of her worst fears, a wild litany
Of nightmare and lament: her nation invaded,
Enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles,
Slavery and abasement. Heaven swallowed the smoke.

It is a breathtaking, melancholy end-- to the hero and to his people, to the poem and to an age.

Both Beowulf and The Lord of the Rings are, in the end, profoundly melancholy works, lamentations for lost, idealized worlds of heroic men and deeds. As Tolkien says in his essay, "It is a poem by a learned man writing of old times, who looking back on the heroism and sorrow feels in them something permanent and something symbolical." The poet, writing of an earlier, lost time, knows that "those days were heathen--heathen, noble, and hopeless." He may as well be speaking of The Lord of the Rings, where Aragorn, the last of the heroic peoples of Numenor, ultimately dies and the elves sail into the East and diminish. Or of Tolkien's lost boyhood friends, who all died on the fields of Somme in WWI.

If you're interested in some of the background on Beowulf, I recommend the fabulous Norton Critical Edition. It includes critical commentary, genealogy charts and maps, Tolkien's essay, and loads of pictures from archelogoical sites, like the fantastic buckle from Sutton Hoo pictured below, and the helmet, which has a boar on the crest just like the one described in the poem.

I also highly recommend the CD with Heaney himself reading the poem...or at least most of it. (The copy on the back refers to "unabridged excerpts," which is not the same thing as unabridged.) Hearing Heaney read the poem in his Irish brogue is a delicious experience. Here are some snippets to whet your appetite.

Here's an informative and fun site on all things Beowulf.

And here's a link to some reproductions of Lynd Ward's woodcut illustrations for an edition of Beowulf. (For a previous post of Lynd Ward, click here.)

Rating: Five buckles (out of five).

Great Frank Lloyd Wright Find at Auction

noreply@blogger.com (Frankie Anon) — Thu, 28 May 2009 20:32:00 +0000

A few weeks ago, we went to a local auction house. We coveted this pretty pair of Arts and Crafts candlesticks. We had agreed on an upper limit of $200, so we stopped bidding when it reached that price. The other buyer got them for....$200. Which is probably just as well. Who knows how high they would have been willing to go? Plus, we have too much stuff as it is. But they sure would have looked nice on our dining table.

Theyalso had a lot of books, including a bunch on Frank Lloyd Wright. We (especially Frink) have lusted after the the collectible Selected Drawings Portfolio, issued in 3 volumes in a limited edition of 700 copies by Horizon Press. These are huge 17 x 21 books with loose leaf, colored reproductions of the presentation drawings Wright gave to prospective clients. Some are for buildings that were never realized. The books are listed online for $1500 or more apiece. The auction house estimate was $600-800. Even that was way more than we could afford. But after losing the candlesticks, we stuck around to see what would happen.

We bid on several other FLW books, usually competing with the same two buyers. One guy, a stocky, long-haired fellow in a white t-shirt, was very determined. We were sitting in the back of the room, he was in front. When the FLW books came up, he just held his paddle steadily aloft, not raising and lowering it like everyone else, not looking around to see who else was bidding. If this was meant to intimidate, it did. We had set our upper limit on everything, generally $60, and when the bids reached that point, we stopped. (Thanks to Frink: I tend to get overly competitive and excited in auction situations, but Frink has a very steady and cautious approach.) So, White Shirt Guy got several lots of books for $60. We did win one book that sells online for $150-200 (a steal at $50.)

Then the 3 volumes of portfolios came up. Now, we had no delusions that we would be able to afford one, but had discussed what our upper limit would be if, by a fluke, they went for less than the estimate. We settled on $300. In the pitch of excitement and confusion, we dropped out and the first volume went for $275 to White Shirt Guy. Then volume two came up, and we bid. Amazingly, we got it for under $275!! Volume 3, which is usually the most expensive of the three, went to the other person who was bidding for the great price of $400. But we left very happy. And determined not to eat out or otherwise spend money for the next couple of months.

The Neon Blue Laser of Death

noreply@blogger.com (Frankie Anon) — Tue, 26 May 2009 22:09:00 +0000

I have two questions for the universe: When did red lights on electronics become blue? And why do our TVs, CD players, clock radios, and laptops have little glowing laser beams anyway? Are they all going to come to life some night when they get a secret signal from the Technology Overlords and steal our firstborn children?

At some point in the last couple of years, things that once glowed red started to glow blue. This just seemed to happen one day when I wasn't paying attention, like the sudden change of Peking to Beijing, or Bombay to Mumbai, or B.C. to B.C.E.

A couple of years ago we splurged and bought an LCD TV for the bedroom. The TV has been great--there's nothing so decadent as crawling under the down comforter on a snowy night and watching a chick flick or M1-5 with your sweetie -- except for one little thing: a neon blue laser beam that seeks out the unwary retina like a searchlight or the evil eyeball in The Tell Tale Heart. If the TV is off, that blue light is on. Always. Glowing much brighter than a nightlight. So bright that we have to put a candle in front of it so we can sleep.

And when we bought a replacement for a defunct digital clock, the new one came complete with neon blue light. Now, I don't know about you, but I find the blue lights much more difficult to read than red. My eyes are bleary enough when I wake up without having to try to decipher that blurry blue glow. Granted, this isn't global warming or swine flu or anything. But it is one of life's little annoyances. And one of life's little curiosities. What are these lights for? And what happened to good old-fashioned red? Come to think of it, didn't digital clocks used to have a sickly green glow? Now, those were the days.

Sunday Book Notes -- Fried Green Tomatoes at The Whistle Stop Cafe

noreply@blogger.com (Frankie Anon) — Sat, 23 May 2009 23:52:00 +0000

I'm inaugurating a new weekly feature -- Sunday Book Notes. If I counted all the objects I own, the vast majority would be books. I've lived a lot of my life in worlds spun of words, so much so that when I was a kid, I often couldn't remember if I had read something, dreamed it, or lived it. Plus, I am lying in bed sick (on Memorial Day weekend! No Fair!), so I've had a lot of time to read this week.

Fittingly enough, I picked this book up at a cafe. Like the one in the book, the cafe is old-fashioned and a little disheveled, serving up unmatched tables and delicious apple pie in a sunny corner building that once was a hardware store. One wall is covered with bookcases. You are welcome to borrow or donate a book. So, when I saw Fried Green Tomatoes on the shelf, I took it home.

I've wanted to read Fried Green Tomatoes since the movie came out in 1991. I loved this quiet little film, which alternates between the story of Eleanor, a fat, unfulfilled, middle-aged housewife in the late 1980s and the tale of lesbian couple Idgie Threadgoode and Ruth Jamison in Depression-era Alabama, which Eleanor hears from an old woman she visits in a nursing home every Sunday.

Now, a strange thing happens when you've seen (and liked) a movie before you've read the book: It is almost impossible not to imagine the actors -- their voices, expressions, hair and clothes -- when you read the book. This is not necessarily a bad thing, especially when the actors capture the characters as beautifully as they did in Fried Green Tomatoes. Kathy Bates is perfect as the frumpy housewife who discovers her spine, and Mary Stuart Masterson and Mary Louise Parker are just as good as tomboy Idgie and the gentle, doe-eyed Ruth who steals her heart. So, as I've been reading the book, I've been seeing and hearing these actresses in my head. (That said, I always try to read the book first. I pity kids whose first exposure to The Lord of the Rings or other treasures is through the movie, no matter how wonderful the movie may be. But I digress.)

While the film captures the essence of the novel, it does gloss rather daintily over the lesbian relationship at its core. The book's matter-of-fact depiction of this life-long love affair is one of its charms. When 16-year-old Idgie, the fierce "bee charmer" who hunts and fishes instead of going to school, falls for "sweet to the bones" Ruth, it doesn't seem to faze anyone. Years later, after Idgie rescues a pregnant Ruth from her abusive husband, Idgie's father gives her $250 and tells her to start a business so she can feed her growing family. There's no sense that they must explain or justify themselves. It is just the way it is. Whistle Stop accepts them into the fold, just as they accept and expect segregation.

Flagg portrays the violence and racisim of the South as matter-of-factly as she does the love affair between Idgie and Ruth. Idgie and Mary are quietly subversive, selling barbeque out the back door of their cafe to blacks in spite of threats from the Ku Klux Klan, among other details I won't give away in case you plan to read the book.

The fictional world of Whistle Stop, Alabama feels real. You have the sense of observing lived lives. The book captures, in a way the film cannot, the full fabric of this little town, through vignettes of people, black and white, most of whom live on the wrong side of the tracks. It's not just Idgie and Ruth's story, but the story of their son Stump, of hobo Smokey Lonesome, Eva the town whore, Buddy, Sipsey, Big George, Onzel and Naughty Bird, with all their joys and human failings. When the trains stop coming through Whistle Stop and people start to move away, when the decades roll on by until the cafe is replaced by a McDonald's, I feel a pang of loss as strong as that when a beloved character dies.

Despite its often rather grim subject matter, this book is full of its laugh-out-loud humor. But, whenever I'm tempted to lapse into an idealized vision of a simpler time of practical jokes and tales tales and scenes of big extended families laughing over Easter egg hunts, Flagg brings me up short with a young man being beaten to death in a tar-paper Hooverville or an ominous visit from men in white sheets.

Perhaps I'm also drawn to the book because it sheds light on my grandparents and parents. Mom and dad spent their childhoods in hardscrabble Oklahoma during the Depression, and Whistle Stop, Alabama reminds me of pictures of my grandmothers standing in their faded cotton dresses in front of sagging frame houses, babies draped casually over their arms.

I also enjoy the disjointed nature of the book, which shifts time periods and narrative perspective from one short chapter to another. We may hear about an episode first from a brief item in the chatty local newspaper, then observe that same event from an omniscent perspective in the next chapter. As I a writer struggling with structure in my memoir, I'm fascinated by Flagg's deft handling of this technique. I wonder if she wrote the book chronologically, then moved the chapters around afterward?

I suppose I ought to give the some stars or thumbs up or something. I'm tempted to use tomatoes, in honor of the book inaugurating this weekly feature, but that's already been done. So how about pies? Every time Evelyn visits Ninny in the nursing home, she takes her pie or cake or biscuits or some kind of tasty treat, and reading this book made me hungry.

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe: 4 slices (out of a possible 5).

The Naminator and the Furminator--Another Cat Post

noreply@blogger.com (Frankie Anon) — Sun, 17 May 2009 15:41:00 +0000

Sam-I-Am the cat loves life more than any creature I’ve ever known. He’s a dark-toned, bow-legged Siamese mutt, with piercing blue eyes, stubby legs that barely keep his belly off the floor, and a head too small for his chunky 18-pound body. Sammy is a dog cat. Like any puppy, he loves brisk belly rubs, and he comes trotting and mewing when he is called. When you pick him up, he wraps his short chunky arms around you in a kitty bear hug and nips your nose. He goes by many nicknames: Sammy, Green Eggs and Ham, Penguin, The Doings Kitty, The Naminator. He drinks by dipping a paw in his water bowl (or a glass when he can get away with it), slurping the water off his paw. He winters on the heat grate in the kitchen and summers on the printer in my office window.

The Naminator loves to play, despite a chronic breathing condition that makes him snort, wheeze, and occasionally sneeze ribbons of brown snot. Sam-I-Am was found on the street when he was barely a week old, suffering from a respiratory disease that left his sinus cavities in tatters. The consensus among the half dozen vets we've consulted is that there is nothing we can do to stop his sniffles (except the one vet who tried to sell us a $2600 surgery that might or might not work and might or might not kill him), so we toss him on the floor whenever he gets ready to erupt, wipe off his little nose when he’s done, and make do.

Sam-I-Am enjoys tearing up paper and batting paper balls we throw at him. But his favorite treat of all is being brushed with his Furminator. I bought the Furminator at the vet’s office. This was a new vet for us, and I was annoyed that they had a tv in their small waiting room running a looping infomercial for a pet brush. I resent being a captive audience for advertising, but this time they got me. I sat watching the tufts of fur fly off the cats and dogs, and by the time I left the vet, I had succumbed.

The Furminator was the only good thing that came of that vet visit. The doctor was sure he could cure Sammy’s sneezing and prescribed some antibiotics that nearly killed our cat. The pills made SamIAm so nauseated that he stopped eating. He lost 6 or 7 pounds in 3 days and had to be hospitalized. The (new) vet told us that some cats who become anorexic never start eating again, refusing food until they starve to death. When we brought him home, we spent days spoon-feeding SamIAm soft food, rubbing it on his mouth until he finally remembered how to eat. We never returned to the vet who nearly killed our Sam, but at least one good thing came out of it: The Furminator.

Every morning, the Naminator races to the bathroom and leaps up to the edge of the tub with a little cry, demanding to be brushed. His Furminator throws him into paroxysms of bliss. He rubs his nose and cheeks on the shower glass and writhes as the fur comes off in fluffy bunches. And I am happy to report that he can spare it: Our one-time anorexic kitty is back to his fighting weight, plus a few extra pounds to spare.

Piles of Pillowcases

noreply@blogger.com (Frankie Anon) — Fri, 15 May 2009 01:34:00 +0000

I used the line “from pill bottles to pillowcases” in my bio blurb because I liked the alliteration and rhythm. I never considered what would be involved in actually finding something interesting to say about pillowcases. But regular readers know I am rarely at a loss for words. So here, as promised is a post on pillowcases. (Yes, I am literally airing my linen in public.)

We have 3 kinds: The ones we inherited or held onto from our childhoods, college days, and first marriages; the ones that go with “bed in a bag” sets; and an enormous quantity of orphans that don’t match anything and seem to reproduce with abandon in the dark privacy of the linen closet. We put most of them to good use. We have 6 or 7 pillows on our bed and never have enough matching pillowcases. We compete over who gets the 4 down pillows, which we call "numphies." (Embarrassing detail of the day. Like most couples, we have a private language.) There's nothing as satisfying as sinking your weary head into a numphy, especially one stolen on the sly from a sleeping partner.

We have two bedspreads (with matching shams and pillowcases) that we rotate. The purple and maroon one is the most glam. I’m usually not much for frou-frou, but purple is my favorite color, and when I saw this set on sale, I had to have it. With its mix of rich velvet and gauzy chenille it looks like something you would find in Cinderella’s castle after she marries the prince. If she was ever the victim of an economic downturn, she could even turn it into an elegant gown a la Scarlett O'Hara. I got an incredible bargain on it…you might even say it was a steal. The department store (Macy’s) was having a half-off sale, along with a coupon for another 20% off. When I took the bed-in-a-bag set to the register, it rang up for about $120 less than it should have. I don't remember exactly what the problem was, but I pointed the mistake out to the clerk. Her response was of the huffy “we don’t make mistakes, this is the right price, don’t make me do any extra work” variety. I tried again,and her attitude became even ruder. So I smiled and accepted the price, getting my $400 bed set for around $70.

Frink has been most gracious in tolerating its frou-frou-osity, but recently he found this Frank Lloyd Wright inspired duvet cover and pillowcases online. The only problem is that the cats like to sleep on it, and their hair shows up quite starkly against the white. Thank goodness it’s washable.

My favorites pillowcases are ones we don’t use often: the 100% cotton cases that were decorated with cross-stitching, embroidery, rick-rack, and ribbons by my mother and grandmother. They are to linens what tuna casserole is to comfort food. Laying my head down on one of these old-fashioned pillowcases softened by decades of wear is a delicious feeling, like being tucked in on a cool summer night or wearing my feet-pajamas to the drive-in movies.

Vitamin P (Prozac) and the Big D (Depression)

noreply@blogger.com (Frankie Anon) — Fri, 08 May 2009 04:12:00 +0000

My bio blurb says I will be writing about every object from "pill bottles to pillow cases, from death notices to DVDs." It's time to make good on part of that promise.

Like most Americans, I have all sorts of bottles full of all sorts of pills: Advil, Tylenol and Excedrin for the occasional muscle or headache; Zyrtec for allergies; and a daily dose of Doxycycline to keep my rosacea in check. But the most significant pill bottle contains my Vitamin P, my "happy pills," AKA Prozac, which my insurance covers only in the generic version, called fluoxetine.

Depression runs in my family. My mother had undiagosed depression for much of her life. My younger sister took her own life at 17. My grandfather was an alcoholic, which might have been his way of numbing the despair that comes with depression. To name just a few.

I have not been immune. When I was a child, I had wild mood swings and temper tantrums. As a teen and young adult, I had periods of the blahs (or, more formally, anhedonia). But I didn't suffer my first full-blown depression until I was around thirty.

It's a long story, so I'll try to tell the short-hand version. Not long before my ex-husband finished medical school, I found him on the bathroom floor in a drooling stupor. He had smoked an experimental drug he was researching in his lab. He spent 10 touch-and-go days in the hospital, during which I didn't know if he would survive or regain his mind.

Matt did recover and I learned that he had been secretly using drugs for years. (Full disclosure: We both experimented with drugs in high school, but I outgrew it in college. He didn't. Instead, he just went underground.) After Matt's overdose, we thought his career was over. Amazingly, he was offered an internship in his first-choice program, which was in Los Angeles. We were living in the Mid-West, and I was loath to move. I had a good job, I was in grad school, and we had already moved 8 times in pursuit of Matt's ever-changing career goals. What's more, we would have to go to yet another city for Matt's residency. So, we agreed that I would stay in the Mid-West and visit LA when I could.

After Matt left, I learned I was pregnant. With Matt both geographically and emotionally distant, I went through the pregnancy alone. I queried friends, found an OB, shared the news by phone with my sister and mom. Then one afternoon around the third month, I noticed some spotting. Matt and my doctor both said not to worry, that spotting was common. But that evening, the bleeding began in earnest. On the phone, Matt sounded concerned and worried, but he didn’t have much time to talk. That long, lonely night, I lay in bed, cramping and sobbing, as my baby bled out of me. The next morning, when it was over, I asked Matt to come home. He refused, saying that asking for time off would jeopardize his standing in the internship program.

A day or so later, a friend drove me to the hospital, where I had a post-miscarriage surgery. I never felt so alone, sitting in a blue recliner in the tiny private waiting room, wearing my hospital gown and nubby-bottomed slipper socks, or in the recovery room, where the nurses made soothing noises and wrapped me in heated blankets. Shortly after I lost the baby, I put our furniture in storage and went to California while Matt finished his internship.

He was living in a tiny converted garage. It was in this dark, wood-paneled room that I spent most of my time, sleeping, watching TV, and perseverating. I remember little about those months except that most days I counted it a victory if, after hours of thinking about it, I managed to get up and walk to the mailbox by the front door. Matt worked 36-hour shifts, but when he was due home, I would rouse myself, take a shower, and fix something to eat. This was in the spring of 1992, and toward the end of our California sojourn, the cops who had been taped beating Rodney King were acquitted. I watched the riots on television, venturing out in the smoke-filled city for groceries, shocked at the eerie sight of military tanks and armed soldiers on the streets. It seemed a fitting backdrop to my own mental siege.

After Matt's internship, we moved again. But the geographical change didn't lessen the grip of my depression. Finally, I went to a psychiatrist, who recommended an anti-depressant.

I was skeptical and reluctant. Prozac felt like a failure. Why couldn't I just buck up and cope? And too, as a writer, I was worried that it would turn me into an emotionless automaton, that it would sap my imagination. (Name five of your favorite authors, and I'll bet three of them were depressed, alcoholics, or depressed alcoholics.) I was as surprised when the drug actually worked. Within a few weeks, the shadows lifted and I felt that life had a purpose, that I had a future. It didn't solve all of my problems--it didn't bring back my baby or improve my marriage -- but it also didn't flatten my moods and stifle my creativity as I had feared. It simply lifted me out of that trough of depression and set me back on level ground. I stayed on Prozac for about two years, then tapered off. And for a long time, I was fine without it.

My second full-blown depression came several years later, again sparked by trauma. For brevity's sake, I will simply say that while I was again pregnant, Matt had an affair and got the woman pregnant. I lost my baby (my fifth and final miscarriage); she had hers.

One thing about depression is that you don't feel like you deserve to be treated well. But even I had reached my limit. I asked Matt to leave and began divorce proceedings. But I also sank back into a debilitating depression.

By this time, I had been attending Al-Anon for seven years. People in AA and Al-Anon share one thing in common with Scientologists: their disdain for anti-depressants. There is an outspoken contingent of amateur psychiatrists in AA/Al-Anon who insist that people who take these drugs are failing to truly "work the program." My Al-Anon sponsor and her husband, who was in AA, shared this view. To them, Prozac is a crutch. It masks underlying problems that can only be dealt with by rigorous honesty and by "letting go and letting God." So, I resisted going back on Vitamin P. I convinced myself that my depression was only situational and would recede as I got more used to my new reality and kept trusting in a higher power. But after a year went by, I knew I had no choice.

It was the semi-hallucinations that did it. Usually these involved various sharp objects slitting my throat. I call them "semi-hallucinations" for want of a better word. I knew these flashing images of butcher knives, scissors, saws, or guillotines slashing my throat were not real. I didn't "see" them like one sees an actual object or a photograph. And they weren't like the few hallucinations I had in my wayward, drug-using youth. Nor were they ideations: I had no conscious intention of actually hurting myself. (I have lived under the protective knowledge that I could never do that to my parents, who already lost a child to suicide, or to my sister. And besides, if I ever did kill myself, I would never choose such a messy, painful method.) These semi-hallucinations were just fleeting images that flitted across my mind in a nano-second and then were gone. But they were happening more and more often -- dozens of times a day -- and they were scary. I needed help.

I went to a psychiatrist, who put me back on Prozac. Once again I got better. Day after day I had struggled through low moods and energy levels, a sense of worthlessness, racing thoughts that looped all night like hamsters in a wheel, preventing me from sleeping, and all those slashing, hacking knives. The Prozac took most of it away. I still had to do the hard work of the 12 steps, still had to practice rigorous honesty, still had to learn how to let go of resentment and bitterness and my need for control. I am certain that the insight and skills I learned in Al-Anon are essential to my happiness and perhaps to my very survival. But so too is the decision to treat my depression.

Although my depression was kick-started by trauma, I know it is a physical disease, an imbalance in brain chemistry. I have read the scientific literature on depression, but that's not how I know it's true. I know this from the inside out. I have experienced it.

I've also learned that people who have suffered more than one serious episode of clinical depression often have to stay on anti-depressants for the rest of their lives. Always a bit of a rebel, I've tested this theory. From time-to-time, I've gone off of Prozac for a few months, but eventually, my depression always creeps back...not the full-blown, knock me off my feet variety where I can't even get out of bed, but the low-level, droning depression, where life is sucked of all energy, where my mind is filled with negative self-talk and racing thoughts . Frink can always tell when I have gone off my medication. I have learned that I am simply healthier and happier when I take it.

So, while I may be a member of the derided and criticized "Prozac Nation" and considered a backslider by the Al-Anon crowd, at least I am alive and, for the most part, happily so.

And that's the story of my pill bottles. Now, about those pillowcases.....

Update 5.12.09 -- Here's an article I just found about the efficacy of anti-depressants. I guess I am in the subset for whom they work; I don't have a substance abuse or personality disorder (that I know of).