Blue Gal's Quaker Blog

Announcement

2009-09-20T12:13:00.001-07:00

I've decided to publish my knitting posts over at my main blog, Blue Gal, which also includes posts primarily about left-wing politics and occasionally about religion and faith. I've decided there is no point segmenting my life online any more than it already is. Thanks.

For friends and family

2008-12-24T12:26:00.001-08:00

Send your own ElfYourself eCards

A friend, who's also a Friend, writes....

2008-12-24T06:36:00.000-08:00

Are you still attending Quaker Meeting? Just curious.

I hope that you are well. Merry Christmas!

I've found a working out on that. I got in touch with the local Quaker group through Quaker finder and they do not currently have a First Day School, plus they are at the point where they are meeting in people's homes. That's all fine, but I really prayed about whether to walk into that vacuum at this point in my life and the way seemed closed to that...I am just not available spiritually and physically to do the amount of church building that I used to do in my 20's.

My children and I are attending United Methodist services. Their Sunday School program is absolutely awesome, especially for my 10 year old son. You may know he has high functioning autism. Anyway, his class has two GUY teachers who are cool and inspiring and call him "Dude."

The best thing about this church, though, is they have services all morning long, people coming and going, and they have a lovely quiet chapel off the main greeting room where I can walk right in and sit and be quiet for an hour after I drop off my kids. It's my own unprogrammed meeting, but it's what I need and doesn't offend anyone. I really see all of that as an example of God meeting the needs of everyone.

Anyway, I definitely still consider myself a Friend. I'm going to read A Holy Silence in January and write some about it, if so led...

The Mayfly Project

2008-12-16T09:18:00.000-08:00

One of my readers kicked me to begin posting here again.

Yoga pointed me to The Mayfly Project, where you sum up your personal story for the past year in 24 words only. I made it into an art project:

Blog Against Theocracy 2008 - Details

2008-03-12T10:55:00.001-07:00

The Blog Against Theocracy blogswarm is coming Easter Weekend, March 21-23. If you wish to participate, write a post to your blog in favor of the Constitutional guarantee of the separation of Church and State, and submit the URL via this online form. More details are available at the Blog Against Theocracy website.

A safe place?

2007-09-26T10:24:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking a lot this morning about this post from Sheffield Quakers, which dismantles the canard that "the Quaker Space is accepting because it is largely content-free - you can bring anything you like to it, but it has little to offer in itself." (Again the writer at Sheffield Quakers isn't saying this, but rebuffing it just as I am.)

Quaker meeting is not content-free. God is there. Silence and the trusting willingness to listen is present and required of us.

What is safety anyway? If being accepted for your humanity makes you feel safer, welcome to Quaker meeting. Now get ready for real danger. The battle is not out there, and it is not in the seat next to you. The battle, like the light, is within, and it is as painful and un-safe as anything you may have experienced outside your own thought. Those of us who have already been to hell, thank you very much, are not comforted by the "safety" of knowing that it "doesn't matter" to the person sitting next to us if we are gay, divorced, orphaned, in recovery, or unemployed. It doesn't matter anyway.

We've got listening to do, and the fight that requires the most strength is surrender. Surrendering any definition of human self in order to let God in, to let God define who we are and what we do. It is the hardest battle any of us will ever wage.

Looking for a safe place? Heh. Psalms 46.

(image from here)

Death and silence.

2007-09-09T12:29:00.000-07:00

Today meeting was very very quiet. We've lost another Friend this week, a 91 year old woman in an advanced stage of Alzheimer's. She was a hard-working contributor to the Quaker Meeting where ever she lived for most of her life, and many at Meeting today clearly felt a sense of quiet sadness over the loss, not just due to her death, but the loss of her mental presence when this horrible disease took her self-awareness away from her.

It was quiet. For the entire hour.

I thought about death and how we are tempted to think it's goodbye forever when someone passes away. I don't hypothesize about what happens after we die. But I do try to listen to God and the God I listen to is present and real to me. And I don't believe that omnipresent Love is absent or dissolves because we go through some physical change we call death.

So I won't write about what I think is true about human "life after death" but I can write unswervingly about what I believe to be true about God. And in the end I think that is what matters.

A fellow Friend wrote me just yesterday about the passing of his parents several years ago, that there were "still a whole list of "should have's" written on my heart. But they are fading."

I don't think they fade. I think those "might have beens and should have dones" are healed as we get closer to God and recognize our one-ness with Life and Love and Truth. We can connect to everyone else on this planet, and yes, those who have passed from it, by recognizing that one-ness. I love the term Namaste, which the blog by the same name points out:

As defined by Mahatma Gandhi: In India when people meet and part they often say, Namaste' which means:

"I honor the place within you where the entire Universe resides;
I honor the place within you of love, of light, of truth, of peace;
I honor the place within you, where,
when you are in that place in you,
and I am in that place in me,
there is only one of us."

That place within that is holy? It outlives death. I am convinced.

You are probably too busy to read this post.

2007-09-07T20:56:00.000-07:00

Did you read this post?

I had two comments about it.

One is I loved this comment:

Quakerism just barely organized? Not my experience. I belonged to a meeting where active members had to be on 3-4 committees each in order to staff the cumbersome organization. I don't think that is very atypical. Quakerism today, particularly liberal unprogrammed Quakerism, tends to represent organization gone crazy, almost like a spreading cancer.

Secondly, I sat there wondering what would happen if all this turmoil about what it means to be Quaker were spent in silence with God... I have a LOT of work to do in that regard but I hope I'm awake to it part of the time, at least.

I remember when I worked for The Christian Science Mother Church during a time of great public turmoil. We had gone into TV and radio and were losing tons of money and it was about to fold and ultimately TV and radio did fold. I long time woman member in the church called and got me on the phone called me in TEARS. Sobbing and she wanted to talk to my boss it was sooo important. I took a deep breath and asked her if I could speak to her church member to church member, that I was NOT speaking officially for "The Church". She said yes I could. I told her very frankly that I thought the devil (CSer's call it Animal Magnetism but it's the same thing) was trying to get her so upset and busy that she would forget to pray. She got it right away. She took a breath herself and said she no longer needed to talk to my boss and she thanked me, she was going to go pray for church. My boss was grateful to hear about the call, natch, one less thing.

I think Quakers like Christian Scientists tend to be self-motivated thinkers, but that can getcha into trouble. Lack of humility, spinning wheels when it comes to what is going on in the church and in the world, and a sense of human busyness. Keeping the main thing the main thing is what matters. And for me the main thing about being a Quaker is putting a finger to the lips and listening.

Just saying.

2007-09-02T05:58:00.001-07:00

I printed this out to work with it.

comment

2007-08-26T10:21:00.000-07:00

one of my dad's new cards. I'll have more info later on how to purchase, etc.

A comment over at A Friend in Need (I'm LOVING that so many Quaker women are knitters but it figures.) She was suggesting that the early Quakers had a different way of expressing their faith than we do, and she wondered how big a leading had to be in order to be of substance.

I think it's important for me to remember that it is the same God speaking to us now as it was at any time in so-called human history. I also think I tend to discount small leadings just as I discount stockinette stitch. Too small, too plain, not enough "bang for the buck." Yet even the most intricate sweater imaginable is made up of only knits and purls.

daily ? video aug 24

2007-08-24T17:03:00.000-07:00

just a moment

2007-08-23T10:49:00.001-07:00

Keeping in the Light 8/23

2007-08-23T06:21:00.000-07:00

Junior Dude. We doubled his ADHD medication today per doctor's orders (keeping his teacher in the light, too!). He has grown a lot and the current dose is not helping. This may take a week or so of adjustment, particularly with his appetite. I may be serving Pizza Hut 24/7 to get him to eat. He'll love that.

J. (BAC's sister) who had surgery to remove some skin cancer cells. Surgery went well, she says...keeping her in the light for a quick painless recovery.

My house, which needs some major attention. Focusing today on simplifying my life by having less stuff and keeping that which has meaning and function. Will find the thrift store drop off this morning, too.

morning from hell?

2007-08-21T16:55:00.000-07:00

and a chat about it with a very trusted girlfriend (VTG):

me: do you have a second for some moaning?

VTG: Sure…

VTG: all yours

VTG: what's up, dear?

me: okay. I was caught in a real life nightmare this morning
very surreal experience

VTG: ::hug::

me: I could not find my psychiatrists office
The name the other doc had given me on the phone was wrong or I heard it wrong
then the guy I made the appointment with was quick with the directions
then 3yo was up for two hours last night
(that actually made EVERYTHING worse).

VTG: This must be more common than it sounds - I had the same thing happen to me a couple of years back.
oh yeah. Lack of sleep totally gets you.
so the directions you finally got - they were good?

me: Yup

VTG: they got you there?

me: well what happened before that
it was in a complex
big marble and glass buildings
ugly and impersonal

VTG: and few navigational clues?

me: NO signs on the outside of them

VTG: corrected: no navigational clues.
that's so frightening, isn't it?

me: 8:50 in the morning and it's 88 degrees

VTG: you end up feeling like you're totally lost.

me: not only are the buildings similar
yes lost
and dehumanized
VTG: yup.

me: the CARS in the parking lot
silver and white sedans
DOZENS of them
I felt like I was in some dystopian movie.

VTG: it sounds like a valuable experience.

me: for writing!

VTG: PAINFUL. but valuable for what you saw.
exactly.

me: but not for living
yes

VTG: for knowing. For differentiating yourself from the dystopian hordes.

me: So I walked into the lobbies of THREE buildings
where there were people

VTG: ow

me: receptionists/guards etc
who had NO idea who was in the other buildings
and I'm standing there falling apart on the inside
asking
"is there a psychiatrist practice in this complex?"
"Oh no, we only have a directory for this building at this desk."

VTG: how frustrating. and humiliating. and someday, terribly terribly funny and ironic and symptomatic of this whole period and place in your life.

me: finally at the third one I realized this woman behind the desk who had NO clue and NO desire really to help me....
had something I didn't have...A FULL TIME JOB.
ha
and she got to sit on her butt and say "I'm sorry I can't help you"
FOR A LIVING.

VTG: ::nods::
sounds like a pretty low low-point

me: Anyway. After the third one I went home. I was screaming and swearing in the car. Confession? Part of me wondered if I had hallucinated the appointment. Not that I've ever hallucinated anything before, ever.

BTW I had stopped at a hotel in the complex to look at the yellow pages.

VTG: so did you eventually find the practice?
or?

me: There is no psychiatrist listed in that complex in the yellow pages
so I went home a googled it
they've got a lovely website

VTG: may I ask a question? why a psychiatrist?

me: twenty doctors
insurance will cover four sessions
then I'm on my own
willing to give it four

VTG: but... why?

me: I am on antidepressants from my ob/gyn

VTG: psychiatrists tend to handle things that require medication, clear body-caused dysfunction

me: …and I don't like this specific drug, how it affects me.

VTG: does that describe you in any way?

me: yeah depression, clinical depression runs in my family.
and yes I have those very very low moments

me: they don't last long
but they are clinical/body/chemical.
I can feel them.

VTG: it's always good to know: "this? it's a low point"

me: yeah that's what 5yo's birth taught me.

VTG: OK; so it's not like a certain someone is telling you that you're crazy or anything like that.

me: the post-partum was a very clear signal
NO

VTG: (which is what I was worried about)

me: not at all

VTG: good.

me: no this is me feeling something is wrong
when I'm sitting in church and want to die?
and then ten minutes later I'm okay?

VTG: yeah, that's a definite clue
and it's physical, indeed.

me: yeah.

VTG: it is what they call "not situational"

me: wanting to die, by the way, is very different from suicidal.
yes.

VTG: yes.

me: anyway my post-partum experience taught me the trigger feelings
and I KNOW to CALL someone when I'm feeling that.
Just about anyone will do.

VTG: That's the right thing to do.

me: Yes.

VTG: Anyone who'll really listen.

me: I think I could call the Avon lady and if she said "I'm sorry you're feeling that way" it would snap me out of it.
just having someone REFLECT what I'm feeling

VTG: When I was slogging through post partum [I had a] source-of-support.
yup.

me: so I'm not alone.

VTG: it helps usher you into reality.

me: exactly.
SO

VTG: out of the scared place.

me: OMG
you've got to hear about the office

VTG: ok!

me: I finally called from home
and negotiated
that I would rush in and do the paperwork and reschedule
because I had a hospital appt at 11
so I couldn't stay
Hospital appt went great
my EKG is stellar!
so I walk in

VTG: yay! so your heart is in the right place!

me: and they've got rows of "Veranda" magazine

VTG: (what is Veranda?)

me: Southern decorate your McMansion ideas.

VTG: ah

me: Not that you would EVER put them together yourself
this is the magazine you SHOW to your decorator
and say, I waaaant that.

VTG: *snicker*

me: yeah Southern Living is more do-it-yourself.
but Veranda?
no way.
and they for some unknown reason
had copies of "Palm Beach" magazine too.

VTG: so the office demographic is "rich white women in despair"?

me: I guess one of the docs
WOW
you're quick and sharp.
And why should they have their number in the yellow pages?
that would invite people who need psychiatric help to call them!
What a bother!

VTG: yeah; that's a referral-sort of business
yup.
for-profit healthcare

me: Better to get the number from your manicurist.

me: and they have a long list of doctors
but the list of insurance they DON'T take is longer.
They like blue cross so much they demanded my policy number when I made the APPOINTMENT.

VTG: that's such a fab detail; I love the way you notice these quirky details and tell them.

me: I'll bet they checked to make sure I hadn't used up my four appointments.
OH the strangest detail of all

VTG: yeah, that would make sense.

me: I was upset needless to say.
filling out the paperwork
a few tears.
the Kleenex in this office is behind the sliding glass window with the receptionist.
in plain sight

VTG: !!!

me: but you have to ask, apparently.

VTG: something of a control mechanism?

me: keep it neat?
I have no idea.

VTG: neat would be control
make 'em ask would be control
it's sort of stingy.

me: Anyway I'm going to post this chat changing the names to protect the helpers over at bluegalsotherblog.

VTG: somehow, it doesn't sound like it's a spare-the-trees, use your hanky touch.

me: no.
I don't think that's it.

Love more for every hate and fear no ill...

2007-08-19T20:16:00.001-07:00

since God is good, and loss is gain.

One thing I've been praying about is the line "do one thing and do it well."

I was very good at something, very good, I thought, and my ability to do it was taken away overnight.

I don't know what to do with myself during those times when I would have been doing that. Except pray.

Sometimes I do get to that. Yeah.

______________________

Spiritual question: Are we always God's representative on earth? That seems egotistical. There have been times I've sensed strongly that Mother God is pushing me on to say something. Be the wisdom, so to speak. And sometimes, like now, where she stands in front of me her back to me but her arms behind her holding me in with a great deal of love and I'm getting her back all wet with my tears and the person I would love to talk to most...are they facing us or not? But she she leans her head back and whispers shhhh don't you dare be my surrogate.

BTW more about "mother God in the kitchen" at the video posted earlier but I realize I had big privacy settings on it which I removed today.

OMG I love this post...

2007-08-17T07:00:00.000-07:00

...go read it. P.T. simplifies his life (yes I'm gonna try making that the goal rather than "clean the whole stinking house") and in the end makes a major change. Major.

Oh I can't tell you go read it your own self. Still laughing here.

Oh nevermind.

2007-08-11T21:12:00.000-07:00

Sat and knit a sock tonight and then opened Faith and Practice (which I keep in my knitting bag) and came upon this:

Be still and cool in thy own mind and spirit from thy own thoughts, and then thou wilt feel the principle of God to turn thy mind to the Lord God, whereby thou wilt receive his strength and power from whence life comes, to allay all tempests, against blusterings and storms. That is it which moulds up into patience, into innocency, into soberness, into stillness, into stayedness, into quietness, up to God, with his power.

George Fox, 1658

You'd think my crazy brain would learn...

Stop and smell the rose of the month...

2007-08-03T20:58:00.001-07:00

Oh shoot this ain't smell-o-vision.

"Although Crown Princess Margareta is usually thought of as a beautiful shrub rose, with a little encouragement this variety can be trained into a beautiful English Climbing Rose of up to 10ft. ...When growing against an arch, plant one rose at the foot of each side of the arch. As the roses grow, tie them in so that they eventually meet in the middle."

Draft post ignore it.

2007-08-03T16:07:00.000-07:00

I went on a search for a golden shovel for a photoshop I'm doing of Camilla Parker Bowles (don't ask now) and this one came up.

There's still this much space left I'm just saying:

This is the book I'm supposed to buy Mr. BG

2007-08-03T00:21:00.000-07:00

because I married the old goat.

Take the quiz your own self here.

Personal. Religious.

2007-07-31T18:47:00.000-07:00

I'm using this blog as a kind of spiritual diary these days. If that's not your thing it's okay to skip it.

Longsuffering is my middle name.

2007-07-31T14:05:00.000-07:00

Or maybe it's martyr.

I’m learning that being a saint isn’t good enough, not by a long shot: that the higher calling is to be human.

Because being human is what we’ve really been called here to do.

We distract ourselves with thinking we have to we have to suffer or sacrifice in order to be perfect, because we don’t want to do the really hard work of being imperfect.

That requires more humility than we are willing to practice.

It’s so much irony, because those of us who get muddled by this sainthood thing are tricked by the devil at our weakest point, aren’t we?

Once we’re willing to be human, then the way is opened for us to do God’s work. God says, ah, you’re here. Now we can begin.

So I look up "Saint" on youtube thinking I'll find some deeply inspirational Bach cantata and I find this pop music "Saint Etienne" instead. Heh.

Motherhood leadings.

2007-07-28T20:18:00.000-07:00

Thinking about motherhood because this morning I went upstairs to the playroom, one part of the house where there is semi-reliable wifi, and it was a disaster area full of toys. Toys scattered everywhere. And there in the middle of this huge mess, one of the girls, I strongly suspect the 3 yo, had turned a box upside down and put down a doll pillow and placed two baby dolls down, heads on the pillow, and covered them with a brand new dishcloth, flat and neat and the baby dolls were tucked in so carefully and lovingly amidst the mess. I thought, she gets that from me.
I remember when my firstborn was two days old. My teenage stepdaughter and a friend visited us in the hospital (I’m a c-section mom so I get three whole days) . The friend held my two day old son and he started to fuss. I said, well, if he’s going to cry I will hold him, no point in your putting up with that, I’m his mother, it’s my job. The instant I held him he stopped fussing. All he wanted was Mom.

One thing that astonished me about new motherhood was how instantly and intensely all of us moms know our baby’s individual cry. At day care or the church nursery there can be five babies and five moms outside the door and if one baby starts to cry one of the five moms instantly knows “that’s mine” and the other four know that it’s not theirs.

I wish I had an elegant way to tie all of this to the Motherhood of God. I like to think of God as a mother in her kitchen, wearing a big apron with pockets full of blessings, but not taking any guff and always ready with a correcting look or even a quick spank to get our attention when we’re really pushing it. Our angry older brother, Richard Dawkins, writes a whole book about how Mother doesn’t really exist and is a delusion and Mother looks over his shoulder and says, that’s very nice dear now eat your breakfast. And when one of us cries she is right on the other side of the door and her ears perk up and she says, that’s mine, I might as well hold her, no point in anyone else putting up with that, I’m the mother, it’s my job. And when life is a complete mess and there seems no order to anything, in the midst of all that, love is there. That’s easy for me to type on a laptop in the middle of a nice park….I’m not lying naked and cold in some Iraqi orphanage. I try, though, to see that awful suffering as a lesson for US rather than for God. A sermon once told me that Jesus’ statement “the poor you always have with you” is an accusation, rather than a resignation.

one for Petey

2007-06-16T15:13:00.001-07:00

A short-short story I wrote in November 2001 at 4:52 pm.

2007-06-09T15:18:00.000-07:00

Breakfast.

Joanna looked at her dining room and decided they would eat there this morning. Not at either end of the table the way she and her late husband did, always formal. They would sit across the middle, close yet individual.

The breakfast would be a little plain, english muffins and coffee and the Sunday paper. She was so glad she had splurged for home delivery of The Sunday New York Times. She would have a tussle with him over the Arts section. Hm. That never had happened with John. He was a front page junkie. Editorials came second and the rest of the paper could rot.

She was toasting english muffins for someone else, another wonderful man, and using John's table informally. She had thought, a whimsy after John died, to copy an idea she'd seen in a decorating magazine, have the top of her dining room wall painted with the Alice in Wonderland quote about believing six impossible things before breakfast. But she aborted that idea as a product of grief and anger, getting back at John for dying on her.

But here she was. He had spent the night, they did it last night and they did it this morning again. Did it for fun, for the hell of it. She offered to make the coffee while he showered. He would like to shave. There is a new disposable razor, but it's pink. He smiled, it'll do. No one could question his manhood this morning, she teased.

And now she was setting the table across, the short way. Impossible things? Was that six? She would call the painters tomorrow.

.

How to design a sweater or maybe steal a design or whatever. It's what I do sometimes.

2007-06-03T16:08:00.000-07:00

So last night (and this morning 'cause it got late) I watched "Stranger than Fiction" which is a good movie and BG recommended. Pop culture trivia Will Ferrell and Blue Gal have the same birthday, which we share with BG's mom as well.

So at the end of this movie, Emma Thompson (goddess), who has pretty much looked like shit for the whole movie because she is a depressed blocked creative, pulls herself together and puts on a really nice sweater.

Yeah I think it probably is Eileen Fisher and you know I've dissed that line before but this one inspired me to get a little knit design mojo going. I'll probably never knit it but it's fun to play.

Hokay so here's my little doodle I did my own self to think about how the sweater is constructed. Like most sweaters it's a series of modified rectangles. One big rectangle gets wrapped around the shoulders. Another smaller rectangle goes around the lower back under the arms and connects to the lower outside of the "shawl" portion. Then the sleeves are attached (I would just knit down from the hole created to save some sewing and give me lots of control over sleeve length.)

The downside of a sweater like this is the yarn and how stretchy it has to be to make the sweater work and how easily it can stretch out of shape all together. Let the knitter beware.

The yarn is clearly some sort of rayon tape or ribbon. I might want to use a yarn with just a touch of color or texture, but nothing too distracting from the ribbing and nothing that will take away from the comfort level of pulling this on.

The stitch may be k3 p3 though I think it may even be wider than that. 2nd Nature Design uses that rib very effectively in the Three Season Poncho (scroll down on this page for the blue one, it's really nice.)

Testing

2007-05-05T10:24:00.000-07:00

wds.mp3

Yeah, his blog is still under (re)construction, but he's been kinda busy.

Of course, like JFK before him, now that

Blue Gal.
has sung.
happy birthday.
to him.

he can just retire from public life.

SO...the rest of you (believe me, it's gonna take Birthday Boy a day or two to recover)...

Do you think a Blue Gal Podcast would work as well as a vlog? I'm considering that, too. Particularly since it works today, rather than waiting for my Model-T laptop to be brought up to 2007 standards. Plus, I wouldn't have to change out of my bathrobe or put on eyeliner to blog--something that was kinda worrying me.

The annual Christmas letter, 2006

2006-12-21T08:15:00.000-08:00

Christmastime, 2006

Dear Friends and Family:

From David, Sr.:

The year 2006 marked my first full year of retirement, and I found myself busier than I have ever been. How can that be? Part of the reason is I spend more time with my wife and children, which is a delight. [sentence in italics added by my wife] The busyness could also be viewed as merely the chance confluence of many projects fortuitously ending this year but begun years earlier. Or it could be viewed as a desperate effort on my part to slow the long slide into the abyss, retirement seeming to mark the beginning of that journey. On whichever level, 2006 has seen the termination of many projects and the beginnings of others.

In May 2006, my biography of my great-great grandfather, Antonio de Mattos, and his religious refugees in ante-bellum Illinois from Madeira, Portugal, finally came out. I have been working on this book, in research and writing, for seven years, too long really, and I now think those filial duties have been satisfied.

In October, Los Californianos issued a second edition of my first book, Law and Community on the Mexican California Frontier. This has been out of print for many years, and I'm excited that it will be available again.

Commissioned book reviews ranged from books on the white slavery hysteria to Mexican Los Angeles. Cardozo Law School asked me to contribute a paper on the religious sensibilities of Bill Kunstler and Arthur Kinoy for its New York City conference on "Jews and the Legal Profession."

The Langum Charitable Trust and Northwestern University settled the latter's will contest. Now the generous bequest of good friend Adele R. Malott can be used to fund a new prize on books (or other media) depicting community activism. It is briefly described on the news page of our website, www.langumtrust.org, and we hope to have a fuller description up shortly. Meanwhile, I have dozens of books to read for the current cycle of book prizes in legal history and historical fiction.

Of course, I have continued to sort out, arrange, and transport to the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, Springfield, Illinois, the personal and professional papers of my mother and father, grandfathers, and myself. We are up to more than 60 archival boxes, with no definite end yet in sight.

From Fran:

Compared to David, I have been relatively less busy? Or less accomplished? Three children. That is what I have to say.

The blog is going well. Blue Gal recently received the Weblog Award for best blog in its audience-size category. More importantly, it is a daily opportunity to write and publish. I love my readers and the community we've put together. I continue to knit when I can, and I’ve even read a few books this year. Highly recommended: Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety (1987). David Sr. read it this year and handed it to me. A wonderful read.

The kids are doing fine.

David Jr. is in second grade and is a voracious reader.

Audrey is in 4K and loves writing the letters of the alphabet and playing dress-up.

Anna is perhaps the most accomplished Langum this year: she is going to school in big girl underpants. I no longer have children in diapers. The time and money saved will be absorbed into the vortex.

I hope you are all well and happy. May your holidays, whether they be Christmas or something else, be full of meaning and gladness.

Much love,

Fran

(Many thanks to Daniel Bugel-Shunra for the terrific photographs of me and the family.)

Book Review: Douglas Coupland's Eleanor Rigby

2006-08-08T14:31:00.000-07:00

Due to a little overbooking incident, Southwest Airlines is putting up Camp Blue Gal in Chicago this evening, in a motel which has...gasp...high speed DSL! The flight here from Seattle was looong. I finished a book and wrote a review for the blog on the plane today, so here ya go.

I only wish I'd known ahead of time I was gonna be in The Windy City. I would have invited Paul the Spud and Franklin to have a beer on me. Do the gay bars in Chicago have a "bring a plump straight housewife" night? It's getting to the point where I might pass as yer Mom. Gawd.

Say what you like about just how Bad Things Are, one of the tender mercies of our time is that we live in a great age for fiction (not talking causes for war here). Many of us discovered wunderkind author Douglas Coupland with his stellar debut Generation X (1991), in which he defined and decryed the economic and social second-class citizenship of those of us born just after the baby boom. We Gen Xers have always had one distinct advantage over the boomers--hey, we're younger than you! Bwa ha ha! But a now older (and aren't we all) Douglas Coupland reveals in his latest novel those universals that no generation can escape: loneliness, mortality, and those constant "what ifs" that keep us revisiting our past.

The plot of Eleanor Rigby is very similar to another bittersweet production of 2005, the film Transamerica. Both of these works play with the idea of "mothers discovering long lost sons." There is also in these works a transformative action. In the movie it is both the cross-country journey and Bree's sex change. In the book there are different journeys and different transformations. Both works are equally terrific and Blue Gal recommended.

Back to the book. Liz Dunn is a cubicle office worker at a faceless company. She has lived alone her whole life and has very little to show us except a drab condo and a bland commute.

"I feel like that one Scrabble tile that has no letter on it. I'm a Styrofoam puff used in packaging. I'm a napkin at McDonald's. I'm invisible tape."

When the Hale Bopp Comet appears in the sky, she resolves to change her life. Almost instantly, she meets her long lost son Jeremy, a 20 something she conceived on a high school trip to Italy. Jeremy, a victim of both MS and a party-drug habit, contacts her from a hospital bed, and Liz takes him on more from a sense of desperation with her own life than from maternal instinct.

Much of Eleanor Rigby is classic Coupland: the meaningless office work and even more meaningless office relationships, real and imagined things falling from the sky, and sharp humor in odd situations. Only Coupland could find both grace and humor in a German prison cell where the prisoner only knows what time it is by how much sugar is in the current meal--breakfast is sweet.

Coupland sets himself to the huge task of saying Something about Big Things: life, death, family, loneliness, God and the Universe, in the confines of a sweet little book with a heroine we're not sure we like on page one. That we love her at the end, and have also learned unexpected lessons about the Big Somethings, is testament to Copeland's mature, lean prose, and remarkable talent.

Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace (1996)

2006-07-21T21:16:00.000-07:00

I've often said that if I were ever to consider suicide, I would pause and remember that Margaret Atwood is writing another novel right now, and to end my life would likely mean I'd miss it. Nevertheless, I can hardly imagine an afterlife where her books were not on the shelves: I consider The Blind Assassin (2001, and winner of the Booker prize) one of the greatest novels ever written. I'd promised myself that this summer I was only going to read trashy romance or 19th century high trash, but Atwood's Alias Grace has a little of both, and gives me the added panache of reading literary historical fiction as well.

Grace Marks, the center of Atwood's novel, was a real person. She was convicted of the murder of her master and his housekeeper/mistress in 1843, when she was sixteen years old. The murders took place near Kingston, Ontario, and Atwood came across her story as a child in the Canadian school system. Grace's accomplice, James McDermott, was a manservant in the household, and their flight to the United States and subsequent arrest story was quickly taken up by the sensational press of the day: the class warfare angle, the sex angle, and the psychological angle (Grace claimed to have no memory of the murders) brought page after page of newspaper coverage, not all of it true or even verifiable.

Atwood weaves this story with her customary brilliance. We meet Grace Marks eight years after her arrest, and are told in detail the story of her life through interviews with a young psychiatrist, Simon Jordan, who is attempting to establish his career with some celebrated solution to Grace's amnesia. She has no idea, she claims, of the violent events that led to her arrest and conviction. As Simon becomes ensnared in Grace's story, he becomes ensnared in other, more pernicious ways, both inside and outside of the penitentiary.

In this review, I will talk about three aspects of Atwood's novel: Atwood is writing historical fiction and but at the same time delivering a sharp and excellent commentary on 19th century women's fiction. She is also making a clear and biting commentary, as she usually does in her writing, about gender politics in general. These three aspects make Alias Grace a fascinating work of art.

As historical fiction this is good stuff. Atwood, as one might expect, gets it right, from the changes in fashion as the novel progresses, to the story of Grace as celebrity defendant. Atwood was aware of her responsibility in this regard, and claims to have taken it almost too seriously. In a letter accompanying the "Readers Companion" to the novel, Atwood writes:

...the novel itself at times almost seemed too much for me; I found myself wondering where the parsnips would have been stored, wrestling through the details of Victorian domestic and prison life. But I finally made it to the end. And so now it's your turn. I invite you to meet ALIAS GRACE. May she stop wandering around in my head, and perhaps wander around in yours for a while.

Thanks, Margaret. While any novelist reaches a point where they are eager to let go of their characters and plots, Atwood seems particularly so. One of the reasons is no doubt that this is not only a novel, but a conscious and detailed meditation on what is known in Lit Crit circles as "the woman novel" of the nineteenth century. It came as no surprise to me whatever that Atwood lists Elaine Showalter among the source material for this book. Showalter is an expert in the woman novel, and Alias Grace is a woman novel looked at through the sharp-angled lense of Margaret Atwood.

Woman novels were the Harlequin romances of the nineteenth century: popular fiction, read primarily if not exclusively by women, and known for sentimentality, romantic visions, and primarily happy endings. These novels often shared a common overplot, where a young woman would lose her mother (and sometimes gain a Bible), be thrown out into "The Wide, Wide World" (one of the most popular titles of the genre), where she would meet up with two distinct female archetypes. The first, usually an aunt or older cousin, would be a gruff woman who would nevertheless take our young heroine into her house for some serious domestic tutelage. The heroine learns the proper way to sew, cook, preserve, and clean an agrarian house. The second woman in heroine's life would be usually a neighbor or daughter of the local Reverend (let's be obvious and call her Faith), who would teach the heroine Christianity and ladyhood, the two qualities intertwined beyond all separate recognition. The time at which our heroine stops weeping over her dead mother, finishes her quilt and prays for calm amidst life's storms, is when Faith's brother Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, walks in from finishing college just in time to marry her and live happily ever after.

There are a great many ways in which Alias Grace is a brilliantly distorted version of this story. Grace does lose her mother in their trans-Atlantic crossing from Ireland, leaving her bereft. She enters domestic service and learns the proper ways of domesticity, to a fault. Indeed, the fetish-ization of housework in Alias Grace is the most telling reflection of the woman novel Atwood provides. Sections of this novel are named after quilt blocks. We know from Grace where the parsnips are kept, how the chives are cut, when the beds are made, how a floor is scrubbed, when the kitchen is cleaned, how the tea is served, etc. etc. A reader of nineteenth century woman fiction would feel right at home.

Except, of course, that Grace is telling all of this from prison.

Imprisonment is the major theme of this novel, and its detailed presence here stamps Margaret Atwood's distinct feminism on Grace's story. But here the author becomes servant to her character, and it is easy to see why Atwood wanted Grace to stop "wandering around in her head." Atwood can show how domestic servitude trapped women, but she cannot deny Grace the power of who she is. She is a prisoner, and yet she continues to assert and celebrate her expertise in housekeeping through telling the minute domestic details of her life history.

This novel parts ways with the nineteenth century woman novel in its treatment of Christianity. Christian faith is an essential part of the ideal womanhood of the nineteenth century version of this story, but Atwood leaves that element firmly in the margins of her narrative. When we meet Grace she is twenty-four and knows her Bible quite well, tellingly not from a kind neighbor but, one assumes, from the daily readings-aloud at the prison. The only time Grace mentions communing with God is around the time of the murder, particularly during her escape with McDermott:

...I thought, I am riding through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, as it says in the Psalm; and I attempted to fear no evil, but it was very hard, for there was evil in the wagon with me [McDermott]...and I looked up at the sky...behind it was a cold blackness; and it was not Heaven or even Hell that I was looking at, but only emptiness. This was more frightening than anything I could think of, and I prayed silently to God to forgive my sins; but what if there was no God to forgive me?

No nineteenth century heroine would even think such an existential thing. Atwood may be avoiding the complex workings of nineteenth century piety, or making a strong statement about the absence of God's lovingkindness in Grace's life. It's hard to tell, because religion, apart from the over-pious minister who pleads for her clemency and the spiritualists who attempt to divine Grace's amnesia from her, is largely absent from this work. Grace goes to church only once in this novel, and it is with the housekeeper/mistress she later is accused of murdering. The church scene seems primarily to show the community as in judgment of the housekeeper's low morals, as they are stared at and speak to no one during or after the service.

spoiler alert

Atwood is loyal to the woman novel, however, in its happy ending, and again in her fetishizing of the domestic details of Grace's life. Rather than telling us in detail how Grace feels about her pardon and release from prison at age 45, we are instead treated to over four pages of detail about her new home: the bedrooms, the curtains, the rugs, the cross-stitch pictures (which of course Grace has done herself) and the quilts. Grace is working on a quilt in the end with literal scraps of fabric that are cut from garments in her past life. A little over-literary, but small complaint in a novel that both defines and transcends both the story of a real-life celebrity and an entire literary genre.

Your local library should have a copy of Alias Grace, if not, Abebooks has lots of used copies for sale cheap.

The Inside Man (2006)

2006-04-17T09:20:00.000-07:00

What other reviewers have written about Spike Lee's The Inside Man is all true. It's entertaining, a good heist movie, keeps you guessing, well-cast, etc. Some have said this film is a departure for Spike Lee, in that he is not over-dwelling on race issues and is more interested in telling a good story. A good story it is, but the themes of The Inside Man are still pure Spike, and they're as well done as ever.

What I love about this movie is New York City. This is not the city of Woody Allen or God forbid, "You've Got Mail": brownstones, booklined three-bedroom wood-floored havens of intellectuals who write and hold cocktail parties and tinkle the keys on their baby grand in their spare time. "Home" in this movie is a dark two-room flat with a passed out drunk brother-in-law in the front room. The difference between Woody Allen and Spike Lee is more than just the difference between Manhattan and Brooklyn, however. Lee's New York is grittier, true, but it is also deeper. Race brings tension to this city, but also brings to it a rich resource. When Detective Frazier (Denzel Washington) needs to know what lesser-known Eastern European language the bankrobbers are using to communicate, there is no point waiting for embassies and State Departments to provide translation. Frazier throws the audio on the big speakers and goes out to the crowd in the street, and in less than a minute he knows what language they're speaking.

Spike Lee fans will probably hate me for this, but the man has grown up. I think I've seen all his films, and this one is by far the most human and forgiving. Spike Lee knows that NYC has racial problems, but they are not insurmountable, and what they occasionally require of us is to, gasp, turn the other cheek. We are outraged when a Sikh hostage is abused by the cops as an "Arab!" as he is released, but when we meet him again during debriefing we move on just as he does, with the bemused recognition that at least, hey, he can get a cab in this city anytime he wants. When this film's beat cop says "I'd rather be a live bigot than a politically correct corpse," we see exactly where he is coming from and Spike Lee elegantly leads us to forgive him his racial slurs even as he recognizes they are wrong.

This film has a lot of humor, too, my favorite nice touch being that the secret bad guy is associated with Bush Senior and Margaret Thatcher. But there are problems, too. A bad guy has a secret paper he could have hidden forever with one lit match, so why store it in a safe deposit box? And how do the other bad guys know about the secret and the safe deposit box? Finally, I for one can't figure out what Jodie Foster is doing in this movie besides showing off her bitchin' legs. A go-between, yeah, but for what? And why would anyone trust her, she being outside, and above, everyone's sphere of influence?

This is small complaint, especially when this reviewer gets to look at Clive Owen, the best and sexiest British villain since Alan Rickman (Blue Gal thinks Willem Dafoe is a hottie, too). Go see it. Blue Gal gives it four stars.

Movie Review: Meet John Doe & Secretary

2006-04-03T18:09:00.000-07:00

When I recently watched Stephen Shainberg’s Secretary (2002) I was abruptly reminded of a movie of the early 1940’s, Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe. I was completely taken aback by the connection: Meet John Doe is the only other movie I can remember seeing which confronts the issue of an adult male spanking an adult female. But there are other connections as well, involving Christian iconography, issues of ‘punishment’, and definitions of love, worthiness, and womanhood. The two films are worthy of a comparison.

Granted, the 1941 version of spanking in Meet John Doe is given artistic distance both by being presented in the context of a dream and being described rather than dramatized. Secretary includes spanking too. Secretary was marketed as a comedy, and I suppose it is in the sense that it has a happy ending for our sadomasochistic lovebirds. But the giggles this movie produces are probably from discomfort or embarrassment, rather than humor. Secretary is not funny, it is romantic: like Meet John Doe, it is first and foremost a love story.

Maggie Gyllenhaal stars as Lee Holloway, a girl who has just been released from a mental institution because of her self-injury practices. She is a girl who cuts herself, and this self-immolation seems most directly triggered by the alcoholism of her father. When Lee’s father is drunk, Lee is most likely to cut herself. Most poignant is the implement kit Lee uses for her practice: a pre-teen’s jewelry box, covered with butterflies and ballerinas, it belies both her youthful innocence and her long endurance of self-wounding.

She goes to secretarial school, getting top-marks in typing, and goes to work for E. Edward Grey, an attorney. Grey is clearly a control freak with more than a personnel problem. His “secretary wanted” vacancy sign lights up like cheap motel neon. He raises orchids and safe-traps mice; he is impeccably dressed and has perfect posture. It ultimately comes as no surprise that he is a spanker and a dominator.

But all the reviews I have read of this film leave out Grey’s most important quality. Before he becomes Lee’s dominator, he becomes her Father confessor. He sees the Band-Aids covering her legs and very gently broaches the subject. Lee, very embarrassed, acknowledges her practice but says she does not know why she does it. “Is it,” Grey says, “that sometimes the pain inside has to come to the surface and when you evidence of the pain inside you finally know you’re really here? Then when you watch the wound heal, it’s comforting, isn’t it?” He gives her hot chocolate, the perfect drink for sensual absolution, and then he concludes her confessional with this paraphrase of a priest‘s admonition, “go, and sin no more.”

I’m going to tell you something, Lee. Are you ready to listen? Are you listening? You will never, ever, cut yourself again. Do you understand? Have I made that perfectly clear? It’s over now. It’s in the past. Never again.

Grey’s analysis of Lee’s motives may be pop-Freudianism, but within the context of this film his absolution is critical. It is essential to this story that Lee’s sub/dom relationship with Edward is not the cure for Lee’s self-injury. Soon to follow is Lee’s epiphany, which points directly to this issue. Mr. Gray sends Lee on a walk, free from her mother’s oppressive daily car ride home, free from self-abuse, free from sin. Her words show directly that not only is she healed but also that the relationship to follow is not the cause of the healing.

…it was as if I had never taken a walk by myself…but because he had given me permission to do this, because he’d insisted I do it, I felt held by him as I walked along…The next day I didn’t even bring my cuticle scissors and my iodine, but I did make another typing mistake…

And only then do the “games” begin. Lee’s pleasure in punishment from Grey is not the same as her self-injury, and Grey “insists” that this is in the past before he begins domination games with her.

Meet John Doe gives us a different kind of Christian iconography, but one that also grows directly out of the love relationship within the picture. Long John Willoughby, played by Gary Cooper, has been shown in numerous reviews to be a Christ-figure.# He rises from obscure humble beginnings to speak the truth, is betrayed by everyone, and expects in the end to sacrifice his life for his message. (One very nice touch I uncovered in researching this paper is that John’s betrayal, when he is denounced as a fake at the John Doe Convention, takes place in Chicago’s Wrigley Field. John Willoughby, on a constructed stage, is of course in the center of the structure, directly on top of the pitcher’s mound, where he has said throughout the movie he wants to be. #) But if John is a Christ figure, what does that make Ann Mitchell, John’s love interest played by Barbara Stanwyck? After all, it is her talent for story writing that creates the John Doe myth in the first place. (The images of her typing the John Doe letter: fast, powerful, and determined, are in stark contrast to Secretary’s typing, which is a regressive anti-technology imposed by Grey for subversive purposes.) Ann picks Willoughby out of the mass of hobos who “apply” for the job, and she creates his message based on the precious (and I mean that in both senses of the word, valuable and affected) writings of her own dead father.

She admits that she has “fallen in love” with the idealized John Doe she has created, without connecting that man to Willoughby, at least not yet. So who is Ann? A casual observer might see her as a Judas Iscariot, the one who betrays Christ for thirty pieces of silver (she says money is her primary motivation), but actually in every single facet of the story she is the Apostle Peter. It will come as no surprise to a theologian watching this film that Ann “denies” Willoughby, overlooks and rejects the idea of a love relationship with him, three times: first immediately after the ‘spanking’ dream, second on the airplane ride during John Doe’s speaking tour, and finally in DB Norton’s mansion, where she reluctantly accepts a fur coat and diamond bracelet before realizing the evil that Norton intends. Ann’s epiphany is brought about then, as John Doe crashes the meeting and tells Norton off. Like Peter with Christ, Ann learns after the betrayal that she loves this man and that his mission is her mission, too. “The cock crows,” and she is devastated by her betrayal of her Christ figure.

The mission that ultimately unites Ann and John is for Frank Capra a religious mission, a combination of Capra’s Catholicism and Americanism. In order to understand this mission, it is necessary to understand the evil that Norton represents and that Ann and John ultimately must fight together. Unlike many of Capra’s comedies of the thirties, Meet John Doe has as the enemy not the wealthy, as in It Happened One Night or Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, or the politicians as in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, but the anti-democratic thugs who represent the secretive, evil, and ultimately fascist D.B. Norton. In Meet John Doe there is no dividing-line between Christianity and populist democracy. “The people” are the power, and that power is fed by and derived from distinctly Christian themes and constructs. Contrariwise, evil is represented by the desire for ultimate power that consciously does not derive from “the people.” D.B. Norton’s fascism is unadorned: “We are coming to a new order of things… What the American people need is an iron hand.” One particularly insightful review# points out that Norton represents a trilogy of evil in Capraville: big business, big media, and big government. Capra’s purpose in making this film was to counteract the currents of fascism beginning to infect American public discourse in 1940, and Capra goes so far as to use Nazi-like motorcycle storm troopers and thugs to do Norton’s bidding, haunting reminders that the dangers which engulfed Germany reside in America, too.

Ironically, church and religion itself are not portrayed in this film. Because Capra is seeking to unite the “little guys,“ he has no use for individual denominations. Instead, “John Doe Clubs” are formed, and Christmas, the most secularized and universal of Christian holidays, is held up as the ideal of these clubs at both at the beginning and at the apparent end of John Doe’s career. Willoughby’s opening speech on the radio provides this secular instruction:

Your neighbor - he's a terribly important guy, that guy next door… If he's sick, call on him. If he's hungry, feed him. If he's out of a job, find him one… I know a lot of you are saying to yourselves: 'He's askin' for a miracle to happen…' Well, you're wrong. It's no miracle. It's no miracle because I see it happen once every year and so do you at Christmastime. There's something swell about the spirit of Christmas, to see what it does to people, all kinds of people. Now why can't that spirit, that same warm Christmas spirit last the whole year round? Gosh, if it ever did, if each and every John Doe would make that spirit last 365 days out of the year - we'd develop such a strength, we'd create such a tidal wave of good will that no human force could stand against it.

The end of Meet John Doe not only reinforces the Christian/Christmas iconography of the film, it brings us back to Secretary and the common and contrasting qualities of Ann Mitchell and Lee Holloway. It is remarkable that at the end of these very different films these two very different women are saying essentially the same thing to their male love object: I love you, we can start over, and here is the way our world will look, here is how we can make it work. Ann Mitchell’s impassioned words as John contemplates jumping off the top of City Hall, promise John that his suicide is not only wrong, it is unnecessary. Her speech is the culmination of the secularized Christian values of the film, as well as a profession of love and true devotion both to John Willoughby and the John Doe ideal she created:

We'll start all over again. Just you and I. It isn't too late. The John Doe movement isn't dead yet. You see, John, it isn't dead or they [Norton's group] wouldn't be here. It's alive in them. They kept it alive by being afraid. That's why they came up here. Oh, darling!...We can start clean now. Just you and I. It'll grow John, and it'll grow big because it'll be honest this time. Oh, John, if it's worth dying for, it's worth living for. Oh please, John...You wanna be honest, don't ya? Well, you don't have to die to keep the John Doe ideal alive. Someone already died for that once. The first John Doe. And he's kept that ideal alive for nearly 2,000 years. It was He who kept it alive in them. And He'll go on keeping it alive for ever and always - for every John Doe movement these men kill, a new one will be born. That's why those [Christmas eve] bells are ringing, John. They're calling to us, not to give up but to keep on fighting, to keep on pitching. Oh, don't you see darling? This is no time to give up. You and I, John, we...Oh, no, no, John. If you die, I want to die too. Oh, oh, I love you. [She passes out from sickness and grief.]

Lee, in a moment reminiscent of The Graduate, runs away from a bridal dress fitting and marriage to her dull boyfriend, into Grey’s office. “I love you,” she says in her wedding dress. Grey does not believe her, cannot believe that someone would want to be treated the way he wants to treat her, as a dominant. “We can’t do this 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” he says. “Why not?” she says. And then she issues a physical and verbal challenge to him: she sits at his desk, looks him in the eye and says, “I want to make love.” Needless to say, this is not a submissive act. She has taught herself the rules of the game (she listens to sub/dom self-help tapes and uses “time-out” as her safe word) and now she insists to Grey (who true to his name has been ambivalent about his feelings and actions) that he play for real.

He takes up the gauntlet in yet another brilliant example of Christian iconography. She is to keep her hands on his desk and her feet on the floor until he comes back. Grey’s office, which has been a church, a dungeon, and a Garden of Eden, now becomes a tomb. Three days in the tomb is where Christ was, and it is where Lee will stay, faithful and loving, until her savior and master returns. He returns after three days with more chocolate drink, this time a milkshake, his cup of vinegar, cold and reviving. He carries her up to the second floor of his building, which we have not seen before, and after baptizing her body in a cleansing bath, gives her redemption: they make love.

We learn in her voiceover that she describes all of her scars in chronological order to Grey, and that for the first time she feels beautiful. Her suffering is not for naught. Her thin body, lying on a bed of grass, with overtly symbolic symmetrical scars across her ribcage, recalls completely Renaissance portraits of the Passion. Without irony, her passion is completed.
A wonderful thing about this movie is its unpredictability. As he kisses her body, she asks him personal questions about his childhood. “What was your mother like? What did it say under your high school yearbook photo?” I found this a very tense moment. Would her post-coital attempt at gentle intimate pillow talk be punished? Is Grey a lover and playmate or a monster? He answers her last question: “Where were you born?” “Des Moines, Iowa.” Ah, she is safe. He is from Capraville. The man who will not harm a mouse in his office will not ever harm her.

Let’s end this post with ruminations about spanking. The contrast between these two women and the way spanking is used in these films says a great deal about womanhood and sexuality. As I said in the beginning of this paper, the spanking in Meet John Doe is rendered safe by being in a humorous and described rather than enacted dream sequence. The description is also given in a rather hayseed fashion by Gary Cooper:

“I dreamt I was your father. There was something that I was trying to stop you from doing…you were getting married [Ann looks up and freezes] …And then I knew what it was that I was trying to stop you from doing. Dreams are sure crazy, aren't they? Well, would you like to know who it was you were marrying? ...It was that fellow who sends you flowers every day. What's his name - Mr. Norton's nephew? ... Well, I took you across my knee and I started spanking you. That is, I didn't do it. I mean, I did do it. But it wasn't me, you see. I was your father then. [John acts out her spanking] Well, I laid you across my knee and I said, 'Annie, I won't allow you to marry a man that's just rich [whacks his knee] or that has his secretary send you flowers [whack]. The man you marry has got to swim rivers [whack] for you, he's got to climb high mountains for you. Whack] He's got to slay dragons for you.[whack] He's got to perform wonderful deeds for you.' Yes sir, and all the time the guy up there, [the minister conducting her ‘marriage’] you know, with the book - me - stood there nodding his head. And he said, 'Go to it, Pop. Whack her one for me, because that's just the way I feel about it, too.' So he said, 'Come on down here and whack her yourself.' So I came down and I whacked you a good one...”

John’s dream of “spanking” Ann is a cloaked marriage proposal, the first time John actually reveals himself to her. I suppose a radical feminist would interpret it as threatening punishment for not adopting a traditional role of womanhood. But looking deeper we see that in John’s dream Ann is actually being spanked for running toward marriage, just to the wrong man. John takes on the authority of church (the only church in the film) and spanks Ann as well in order to get her to see reason. She must marry John because money alone is not worthy of her. In declaring a public spanking of Ann to be his dream, he is attempting to declare his frustration at his lack of control over her. Her complete, religious submission (she is willing to die if John does) at the film’s end is confirmation of the film’s values for both women and citizens of God’s country.

The spanking in Secretary is altogether different: it is role-playing, sensual, punishing, real. It is not a dream. Throughout this movie we see the graphic result of Grey’s actions: Lee’s red buttocks, Grey’s sperm on her blouse, etc. This is really happening, and she likes it. She accepts this lifestyle before Grey does, and she leads him to the life they will have together: they are married in a June wedding, and she’s a homemaker. Well, she’s a homemaker with a dead roach in her pocket, to place on their perfectly made bed so that she may be “punished” later: the submissive invites and thus controls the situation. They are happy, and since we have seen the suffering both these kind people have suffered, we celebrate with them their liberation. Their liberation is this: a marriage both domestic and traditional on the outside (his goodbye and off to work at the end of the movie is a conscious reflection of Pleasantville, The Truman Show, and other post-modern “idealized” domestic scenes which of course, lean heavily on Capra) and as she declares when Lee stares at the camera with a beautiful half-smile in the film’s last scene, the inside of their marriage is their own happy business.

Doo Wah Didion

2006-03-07T18:11:00.000-08:00

I remember writing a short story, never finished, which began:

Her immediate thought upon hearing that her husband was dead: "I think I have a book about that."

I've been reading that book this week.

Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking is a memoir of bereavement: Didion lost both her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, and her daughter, Quintana, within the same awful year. Her daughter’s death occurred after the book was finished, but her hospitalization and severe illness is covered here with all the anguish and worry any parent would feel, especially in light of the sudden unexpected death of the other parent.

This is not exactly monthly book club stuff, though I suppose there will be group sales to bereavement support groups the world over. For Didion is writing here not a mere catalog of her own grief, but the universality of her experience as documented by observers from the medical community to Emily Post. (Emily seems the most aware and astute of the observers; her advice on how to deal with bereavement the most practical and correct.)

It is clear that Didion is devastated by the loss of her husband, and far be it from me to argue with her grief or her extremely lucid and frank account of it. But Joan Didion is more than a grieving widow, she is Joan Didion, a New York erudite somebody, and how that somebody-ness permeates this book is truly distracting.

Her literary agent (who is her husband’s agent too) comes over the night of the death to help. This agent’s help is to call the New York Times obituary writer personally to let him know what has happened. Joan then has the presence of mind to realize that, of course, the LA Times should be called, too: God forbid they should find out Dunne has died from reading it in the NYT.

Memories fill this book: house hunting in Honolulu and deciding that owning would not be the same as hoteling...posing on the back deck of the house in Malibu with John and Quintana for People Magazine...thinking back on poems they both liked, including one composed by Earl McGrath on the occasion of their fifth anniversary.

It occurs to me that this writerly glamour may be just what a book like this needs in order to be palatable. Any reader could hardly stand a book on this subject poorly written and by a person unable to afford the casket. Perhaps these distractions allow us to be a part of Didion's experience, even as she feels nothing but loss and misery. Yet our sympathy for Didion is hampered by the cushion of her physically and intellectually plush surroundings. She seems to take for granted not only her economic privilege, but more importantly the companionship of her own fine mind.

Nevertheless, when this awful day happens for me, when I lose my husband (and as he his 23 years my senior the likelihood that he will go first is great) I hope I will remember that “I have a good book about this.” Didion’s memoir is as intelligent and honest a guide to my own sorrow and healing as I can hope to have.