The Obama Memos

The thing about injuries is that they give you time to read New Yorkers cover to cover. I just read “The Obama Memos” by Ryan Lizza. I think I know what it is like to be president from watching West Wing — a ridiculous delusion, but one I hold onto. And so I was not surprised to read the memos from “Ax” and others detailing the pressures from opponents and allies alike. Martin Sheen had the same problems. But there was still something thrilling about reading the president’s responses, getting a glimpse of the Oval Office, the team in action, or in-action, as some of my friends complain. And yet Lizza ends the article by saying “his first two years stand as one of the most successful legislative periods in modern history.”

It is astonishing how little we know about what is actually happening in Washington, and yet how much we think we know.

Injury Stories

I have experienced the first practical benefit of Facebook. I was determined to get off this couch and see if I could drive, so I staggered to the car, drove around the corner to our local health food store, parked, staggered in, and realized that I had been overly ambitious. The aisles stretched in front of me, long and filled with people. It was at this juncture, one of despair, that my friend Kate who co-owns the store, swooped in. “How are you? How is that hamstring?” Somehow, she already knew. How? Facebook.

Kate ran around and got me my things, but the best part was that she told me her injury stories, of which she has plenty, as she is a fellow aging athlete. I listened with fascination. In fact, I am now fascinated by all such stories, as long as they have happy endings: the storyteller was injured, but now is all better. All better. It’s kind of like being lost and then being found.

Donald Hall and a pulled hamstring

Today is the first day of classes at the college where I teach and it feels strange not to be there. The house is stunningly quiet. I am alone with the orange cat. I can hardly walk, let alone drive (thanks to my pulled hamstring). Yesterday, I read an essay by the poet Donald Hall in The New Yorker about being old. He sits by the window and looks at the birds and the weather and the flowers. He can’t drive. He can hardly walk. When he does go out, he must rely on rides from his friends.

I am not in my eighties, yet, but I felt twinges of recognition. Like Donald Hall, I can hardly walk, can’t drive, can really only sit and look out the window and, thankfully, read and write. According to the orthopedist, this will be my condition for a while. My old self, the one that whizzed around in her car, talking on her cell phone, overbooked, either late or early to something, fitting her son’s schedule around her own, seems remote, and now, the silence, the inabilities, the many limitations, the dependence on others for basics like groceries, seem more real, realer than the other life, and a prediction of what lies ahead when I reach Hall’s age, if I do, that is. As he says, he would rather be alive, housebound, than not alive at all. I do know that I will be back in the world soon enough, whizzing around in my gray car. But I also have learned, having been through this once before with my back, that this world of silence and stillness, of physical incapacity is always there, on the other side of the daily schedule.

The Dangers of A Dangerous Method

I saw the movie, A Dangerous Method, a few weeks ago and was annoyed at the depiction of Sabina Speilrein, a notable psychoanalyst. In the movie, we first meet Speilrein as a crazy inmate of the asylum where Jung is a doctor; she becomes Jung’s lover and disrupts his collegial relationship with Freud. She seems passionate, “disturbed” — as the movie description says — the embodiment of all unpleasant “feminine” stereotypes.

To begin with, to single Speilrein out as the only “disturbed” one in this triangle is as absurd as it is unfair. Whatever else one might say about Freud and Jung, they were far from being entirely “rational” beings. And, far from being an emblem of passionate and irrational femininity, in fact, Speilrein was a highly trained medical doctor and analyst. She published important analytical papers and influenced many of the important analysts of the next generation. It is true that she began her career as a patient in the asylum where Jung worked, but she was far from being “crazy” in the sense the movie suggests. She was a “hysteric,” and as John Kerr points out in the book upon which the movie is ostensibly based, Speilrein’s “hysteria” was actually a run of the mill ailment of the period. No one thought of her as “crazy.” It is true that she and Jung became lovers (of a sort). But this is not all they were to each other. They were passionately entwined as thinkers and analytic colleagues; he was the lover/teacher that betrayed her. In addition, she was not simply the woman who came between the great analysts, she was an intellectual force in her own right and is actually yet another example of a woman whose ideas were ignored and overlooked simply because she was a woman. Both Freud and Jung are to blame for this.

The real danger of this movie is the danger of the cliches it reinforces, a danger that was brought home to me when a friend of mine told me he liked the movie because of how it depicts the complicated relationship between Freud and Jung. Oh, and that woman. “The woman?” I asked. “Yeah,” he said, “I can’t remember her name.”

Pinned to sofa and a blog about Wollstonecraft

A long hiatus. I had Not finished the book on the Marys (Wollstonecraft and Shelley) after all. I had to do a quick last minute revision of the first 75 pages which altered all the subsequent chapters. Fortunately, my niece came up to help. She drove my son around to his lessons, helped copy-edit, made dinner, and, in general, lived my life on my behalf. I ended up turning the manuscript in on the day it was due, but barely. How can this be? — that one has years to write a book and it still comes down to the wire like this.
Then, we had a sudden death in the family. And now I have ripped my hamstring and am on the couch, complaining. However, this does give me the opportunity to flex my blog muscles again. I was excited to see that there is a blog devoted to the 250th anniversary of Wollstonecraft’s birth, inspired in part by the celebrations planned this spring in the UK: Mary on the Green.

nostalgia, cocoons, finishing books

In Venice, on the trail of the Marys

It is possible that I finished the book today. The last words are “ruthlessly herself.” One can never be sure, though. I don’t know what I will think tomorrow. Or what my editor will think.

This picture is from my last trip to Italy, when the book stretched out and out and out. I feel nostalgic for that time, which now seems like an innocent, happier time, which it was not. I spent all of my time worrying that I would never finish.

But for now, tonight, I think it might be over, because I have a strange feeling of being adrift, let out of my shell. It is not a relief. It’s more like being homeless or exposed, like coming up from underwater and the air is cold. I can’t imagine what one does with one’s time, when one is not always thinking through a book. I guess one goes to meetings and goes out to dinner with friends and picks up children at school, all with a clear, open mind, as opposed to a mind wrapped in a cocoon.

I don’t really like it out here. I can’t wait to tuck myself into a new book.

Health food stores, writers, and electricians

Yesterday, someone I hardly know bumped into me at the health food store and said, “You know, I used to think I would be a writer, like you.”
“Really?” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, “But then I realized I could do it for fun. And so I got a real job.”

I suppose lots of different professionals hear this kind of thing. But do they? I mean, do people say to electricians, “You know, I was almost an electrician, but then I realized I needed to get a real job.”

My first editor used to refer to first time writers, as in writers of their first books, with an eye roll. A kind eye roll, but an eye roll all the same. And now that I am on book 3, I know why. I don’t think my editor can solve all my book’s problems. I don’t think my agent can, either. I know that it takes a long time to write a book and that it takes daily, steady work. I do not think that I could re-wire a house. I wonder why people think they can write books.

After that exchange, I bought 5, yes 5, large chocolate bars (organic chocolate caramel crunch) from the startled health food store lady, just to cope.

Droughts, Diet coke, Kenya, and Cluelessness

When I went to Kenya, I was twenty-one years old. I had just graduated from college and I didn’t want to go to graduate school. I didn’t want to get a job and so I went to Africa with my boyfriend on a fellowship to interview African writers. I took Africa on a Shoestring, my running shoes, a skirt, two t shirts, a bathing suit, a sweatshirt and an entire set of Lancome skincare products that I had bought right before departure. By the end of the first week I had thrown them all out because they were way too heavy to carry around and there was not all that much opportunity to use my eye cream when I was camping at Lake Turkana, listening to the lions howl.

There was a drought and everyone, lions included, were starving. And yet, I was stupid enough to ask a man at a party why there was no diet coke. He gave me one of those, are-you-crazy-looks, and said, “Charlotte, we don’t have that much need for diet soda.”

I thought of this today when the students in my genocide seminar told me their friends had never heard of the Cambodian genocide and that some of them even thought Cambodia was in Africa. I was never that clueless, but I was close. This is why I am a good teacher. I have empathy for the clueless.

After December 1st

After December 1st, which is when I turn in the manuscript, then I will _____________ — you fill in the blank. I have made many wild promises to people, including myself, about this post book existence. After December 1st. After December 1st, I will clean my study, see the 5 million friends I have not seen for the last four years while I have been writing this book, travel around the world, make cookies, have a dinner party, make phone calls, write syllabi for next semester, organize my books, and START MY NEW BOOK. Oh, and do the end-notes for this book. That will not be fun. However, as a veteran of this sort of thing, I have noticed that the post book universe is never as fun as I think it will be. Perversely, I will miss the world I have been living in. True, it will be nice to get the pages off the dining room table. But I like living with the Marys. And I have been with them for a long time. Thankfully, this is not it, of course. The editing process will begin and though I have no idea what this will be like, I do know that it means that I will no longer be alone in this world I have created. Enter my editor.

Things I can’t say

Mary Wollstonecraft

Today, I realized that Mary Wollstonecraft really did launch a revolution. I realized this in the middle of my day after I had gone for a run, made pancakes, got my son to school early, taught Creative Writing, registered students for classes, and attended an English Department meeting, and before I picked up my son and took him to an orthodontist appointment and then to Hebrew School, and before I bought salad greens and bread at the market and other things that I can’t remember.

I know that for those of you who are not all that sure who Wollstonecraft is, it is hard to be excited. And, actually I can’t really tell you what the revolution is that she did launch, or get you all excited about it, because it is a New Insight, and it will have to wait until the book comes out. But it is exciting — I promise. And I can’t believe I did not figure this out until now, when I only have four weeks left. But I did. And now I am on even more of a mission to tell the story of these two women. And, even as I write this, I realize that nowhere on my website does it tell you what this new book is about. Or when it will appear or what publisher is publishing it. Probably I should do that, but I am too superstitious. It feels like buying a crib before the baby is done.