Well.

Well well well well well. A very enjoyable date.

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Bed, Rest

My great-grandmother (or maybe my grandmother, since my mother inherited them from her) used to have these lovely little bed jackets. A bed jacket is an item you don't see much anymore, given that the time when women used to spend their mornings lounging around in bed, even receiving visitors there, is past. Today, however, I wish for a bed jacket, as I am self-confined to bed for the second day in a row.

I love bed. I used to spend hours in bed. At night I would get in bed and do my grading there, assisted by my handy bed desk. In the morning I would wake up and do my reading there, assisted by my handy knees (incidentally, best way to create a secure prop for your book with your knees: get yourself into position and then pigeon-toe your toes. For some reason, the grip

is much stronger, so your knees don't slide down). After I finished a paper or a chapter I would climb in there to revise it. But now I don't spend so much time in bed, and I don't know why (although I do still spend a lot of time on the floor reading. Don't knock the floor, baby! Sitting on the floor against some sort of perpendicular solid, preferably slightly scrunched up, is to me the most pleasant and comforting of reading positions). I've opted to spend a second day in bed because I'm trying to recover quickly, but so far the only result is that when I get out of bed, or when I sit up, my head swims and I get the sensation of sort of being stoned. I feel like the woman who wrote Seabiscuit! And it's so boring. And I have no visitors. Although I could have visitors if I wanted, but I don't really want because, although there's almost no more delightful vision than that of sitting up in bed talking to a visitor (more delightful might be the visitor getting on the bed with me), if someone came to visit I'd have to put on my pyjama bottoms, and that's a drag.

Anyway, confined to bed as I am, I discover that suddenly all the stuff I hate doing seems like the most desirable activity in the world. I want to go to the gym! I want to work on my book! I want to write student recommendations! Instead, I am experiencing forced leisure - except it isn't really leisure, because I can't really concentrate, so I can't read, for example.

A couple of days ago I was talking to someone who said, "I don't really think about work when I'm not working." I found that a most extraordinary fact. But...but...who doesn't think about work when they're not working? Well, this person, apparently. But I think about work all the time. But then, I'm working all the time.

Or so I thought.

I started to think about how often I work, and in my rudimentary calculations it's not a lot. If you add up the time I spend on facebook, or doing tango, or watching stuff on youtube or iTunes, I don't work much more than most people - in fact, I probably work less (although God bless O., who said, "Well, as a writer you're working all the time." I love it that someone thinks creative writer is my real job). The difference is that work is always hanging over my head. In fact it's been that way ever since I was in grad school: when I was working on my Ph.D. I used to feel guilty every time I went to the movies, feeling that I ought to be at home waiting for an idea to come, or working, although ideas rarely came, and I rarely worked, when I was at home for those otherwise-movie-wasted hours. Also, I intersperse my work with so much play that I frequently have work "left to do." So perhaps what I ought to do is just do my work, and get it over with, and then have my fun. This is not a new idea, but it's one I'm going to try again in earnest.

When I first went to Otherhome, in the first semester I was there, on the days I didn't have to teach I would do my own work from 9-5, with an hour or so for lunch, and then at 5 I would start my preparation for the next day's classes. And it worked a treat! As did the working earlier this term, where I read all morning and afternoon without checking e-mail. But I'm thinking of something even firmer. I'm thinking of just working until the work is done, then stopping, rather than filling in the time with more work.

Once or twice over the last few years I've tried imagining what I'll do when the book is finished: not what I'll do next, but what it will be like to have nothing to do for a bit, what I'll do with all that leisure. And always, not so very far beneath the surface, is a feeling of confusion and cold dread. I really have no idea who I'll be without some ongoing work. And that's not good.

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Encounters

A good deal of "meeting" people on the internet involves evaluating the likes and dislikes they list, or list for you. This has always struck me as a somewhat odd way to evaluate someone - as if everyone who loved, say, Everything is Illuminated is exactly the same sort of person - but for some reason when I was puttering around the kitchen yesterday it struck me particularly forcefully as bizarre. Perhaps because I was thinking about something math-y, and that made me think of Dr. Higher, and that made me think of how we change, or might change, or should change.

There's something about this way of considering someone that seems to me to imagine them as eternally going to be the person they are at the present moment: "Ah, you do not dance tango. Thus, you never will dance tango. Thus, you are out." But before I met Dr. Higher I had no idea what an algebraic geometer was, or a sheaf, or a bundle. And now I miss having someone to talk to me about those things, and although I wouldn't say I remain actively interested in them, I do perk up when I hear about them. And before I met Irishboyfriend I couldn't have cared less about George Whitfield or Father Ted, but now Ted, at least, is intrinsic to my life (also, I know how to give a pill to a cow). And look at tango, or iPhone apps, or the hundreds of other things I've started to pay attention to that I never even knew existed to be paid attention to before.

So it's odd to learn about someone based on their interests, and perhaps even on their likes and dislikes. There ought to be some way to get a sense of their personalities: are they thoughtful? Do they remember things you say? (this one should come very high) What do they laugh at? Because it seems me that although your interests change, your approach to those interests is probably unlikely to change radically by the time you're, say, in your thirties.

Although there, too, I think I might be wrong. I've known people to undergo radical changes in their personalities or approaches to life or understanding of the world quite late in the game. So who can say?

I was thinking about that the other day, too, because I was thinking about the fact that it looks as if my VTTT might be single again. Although I'm not really attracted to my VTTT, and I certainly don't think we have enough to support a relationship, he is objectively an attractive man, and on hearing this news I did think, Hmm... But my VTTT is 13 years older than I, which I've always considered too large an age difference, and I was slightly surprised to discover this change in myself.

I always thought that adulthood was a monolithic state: that at some point you arrived at a stage where you were certain - of what you knew, of what you believed, of how your world would go, of how you felt - and that was adulthood. But I surely must be an adult by now, and that's not how it is at all. There are just as many surprises, and reconsiderations, and adjustments and changes, as there were when I was 20 - more, in fact. Which I suppose is healthy - better than being set in your ways, better than having the conservativism that comes from certainty - but is also rather wearying. Or perhaps it's better to say, rather surprising.

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Sickness and Health

I'm home sick in bed. Well, under normal circumstances I'd be home, but I wouldn't be sick and in bed. This development is very annoying, because I was supposed to start writing today, and although I'm not running a fever or rendered incompetent, I'm just sick enough that I have no attention span, and thus can't produce. Grr.

Also, my sickness is interfering with...my date! That's right: I have a date. I know it's a date, because I made it -- and I made it in date-y language, so unless the other person is mentally deficient, they must recognise that it's a date. So if it turns out not to be a date as far as they're concerned, that's no fault of mine. Unfortunately, my sickness means I've had to postpone: my date was for tomorrow, but even though I'm on the sickness mend, I won't be mended by tomorrow. So I've had to put it off, hopefully only until Thursday. Reader, I will keep you, as it were, updated. Hahahahahaha.

But neither sickness nor dates is what I wanted to write about today.

My parents, I often think to myself these days, did a remarkably good job of raising me. They gave me a reasonable set of moral standards, and a hell of a lot of good sense: I recognise that I'm likely to be happiest with an age-appropriate mate; I accept that there are different stages of life and different experiences and behaviours appropriate to them; I think carefully about my decisions. And when I think about how my parents managed to shape and influence me in lasting ways, what immediately springs to mind is things they've said to me. Of course, a lot of the influence parents and other role models have is silent and subtle, absorbed by unconscious observation, but in my case - perhaps because I'm so word-oriented - a good deal of the way my parents continue to influence me is via actual verbal advice and observations they've given. Especially my mother. She's a difficult woman, my mother, but she's certainly had some very wise things to say. So I thought I'd use this post to ruminate on the best pieces of advice I've received, from my parents and elsewhere.

"When you're married to someone, you have to see them every way. You see them healthy; you see them sick. You see them happy; you see them irritated. You see them good; you see them bad." My mother told this to me years ago, just as part of a discussion we were having (weirdly, I remember exactly where we were: she was wiping a kitchen counter, and I was getting something off the back stairs). I remember it not just because it sometimes seems to me a useful way to evaluate a partner (would I want to stick with this person when they're being crabby?), but also because it reminds me, and has reminded me when I've been in relationships, that you're in it for the long haul, and that you can't just quit because the person turns out not to be quite as nice as you'd like.

"Always wear a bra, or else your breasts will sag." My mother told me this when I was about 19 or 20 and succeeded, frankly, in scaring the crap out of me. Years later she revealed to me that her breasts had always sagged, so the advice was based on no experience and thus was largely worthless, but it was too late! The damage had been done. And now when I get up in the morning the second thing I do (after turning on the computer: before e-mail, it was the first thing I did) is put on my bra. I have been mammarily traumatised. Thanks, Mom. Still, as she and a number of other people pointed out to me, it can't hurt, and to be honest it probably has helped me in the breast department.

"The first time, you don't have to get it right; you just have to get it down." My father said this to me when I started writing my dissertation and was finding it so hard to get onto paper what I wanted to say. I remember this observation (or warning) not because I've come to accept it as true, but because I still get upset when I can't say what I mean in my first draft: every time that happens, I reassure myself by saying this.

"I had a very difficult relationship with your aunt. But now it's worked out, and although it's still problematic it's a very valuable relationship to me." This is another one I remember because it forces me to question myself. When I think about my own lack of relationship with my sister, I think of my mother saying this, and I wonder if someday it might still all work out. I wonder if I should hold on, just in case it one day turns into something valuable.

"I don't think cross-cultural relationships can work." This is a strange one. When my mother first said it to me, my blood ran cold (I've only ever fancied people from other cultures!), while at the same time I was aware of its strangeness (my mother is an immigrant from a family of cultured upper-class German Jews; my father is a member of a working-class Protestant family: when he told his mother my mother was Jewish, she said, "Don't say such a thing!"). As it happens, I don't agree with this statement, but I do think it has a truth in it, in that I don't believe a relationship can work if the two people have nothing in common (studies have shown that opposites do not attract), and in particular if they don't have language in common. Which is to say, I think both partners in a relationship must share fluency in a language. I also think that it's incredibly important for the partners at least to try to know each other's native tongues - maybe things didn't work out with Dr. Higher, but they wouldn't have worked out a lot sooner if I hadn't had some sense of German. That helped me to understand him a little better.

"Remember, it is a job." Not from a parent, but from my advisor. This definitely counts as one of the top most useful pieces of advice I've ever got, although it's also almost totally opaque. In fact, it work so well precisely because it is almost totally opaque. You know how you often wish that things came wrapped in drama or an announcement of their own importance? Well, this actually did. When my advisor took me out for tea after I passed my defence, she said to me, "This is the last thing I'm going to say to you as your advisor: Remember, it is a job." Dun dun DAH. At the time it was so rhetorically effective that I didn't ask for clarification, but I think that's just as well, because it's meant that I have been able to give it many meanings. I think of it at the end of every semester, and now every term, when you have to do all the little draggy stuff like recording grades or marking late papers: these are the parts of my job that are a job, and I have to accept that they're part of it. I think of it when I have colleagues I don't like: they're not my family; it's a job (actually, my advisor told me this is what she meant). I think of it when I have to do committee work, or check my Works Cited for typos, or when I don't get my way about something, or when I'm writing all those boring recommendation letters. Remember, it is a job.

"Either you're in or you're out, but if you're in, you're in." Yeah, can you believe it, my sister said this to me. She said it about someone else, but I nonetheless often hear it ringing in my ears. This is another one that comes up when I have to check the Works Cited for typos, but also when I'm having trouble writing and decide to "give myself a break" by checking e-mail every five minutes. It's actually quite useful.

"They always star Bruno Ganz." You have to say this to yourself in a worldweary voice, which is how my mother first said it to me,

although the tone was for no particular reason. I'm afraid this one offers no larger life lesson; it's just something I remember. I was telling my mother the plot of Knife in the Head, a quite good but also quite odd German film, and in introducing it I said, "It stars Bruno Ganz." This was her reply. What I think she meant was that for a long period it seems as if every German film had Bruno Ganz in it - although what she may have meant was that a certain kind of German film - thoughtful, slow, Important - always seems to star Bruno Ganz (both are true). In any case, even now Bruno Ganz shows up in a surprisingly large number of German films, and whenever I see him I think of this line.

"If a man doesn't know what he wants after three weeks, he knows but he's too scared to tell you." This came from MCLSJB, less than a year ago, but it's proven very handy. It's not just that when I've taken this as a rule of thumb about men it's turned out to be true, but also that it's a good way of separating the sheep from the goats: when I look back I discover that male wafflers I have known have also proven to be less-than-brave or less-than-frank in more important ways, too. But it's also turned out to be a useful tool about myself. Before I would waffle potentially endlessly about difficult decisions, but now I remember this utterance, and after whatever constitutes three weeks in the given circumstances (30 seconds, if I'm deciding on lunch; 3 weeks, if I'm deciding to go home for Christmas), I just ask myself what I really want, then go with the immediate answer. Well done, MCLSJB!

And now I find myself fading away with illness. I need a nap...

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Leafing Though

Reading is a curious thing. It takes much more time than, say, watching a TV programme. It also offers much less immediacy, since when watching TV you see the characters that in reading you have to make up in your head. It's an isolated and isolating activity.

And yet we do it. You're reading this right now, for example. And if you are, you chose to, rather than doing something like talking to a friend, which would

seem a much more enriching activity. And not only do we do it, but we talk about it, and not only do we talk about it, but sometimes we are interested to hear about it even if we haven't done it. O.M. was telling me last night that she'd been reading Catherine Millet's new book, and even though I haven't read it and she didn't tell me the plot (which I already knew, from reading articles about it), I wanted to know what she thought of it. B. wrote to me from Russia telling me he'd enjoyed Our Man in Havana: I haven't read it, but I quite like Graham Greene and, although I have no plans to read Our Man in the near future, I was interested to hear that someone I liked had read a book by someone I'd liked. In that case, it was partially because I now will make a mental note to read it, but it was also because just generally I like to know if you're enjoying the book you're reading or not.

What is it that makes reading so enjoyable, I wonder? And what is it that makes it for some people, in a world where there are many other options besides reading books, a thing they still do as a matter of course? You get drawn into other worlds, certainly. And you have to do some of the drawing yourself, which I really think is part of the attraction: you envision the characters and the situations, and so you're more interested and invested in them. But at the same time there's the fact that the author is doing a good deal of the work - most people have favourite fictional characters, for example (the man who appears in Markheim, for me, or Henry Tilney, whom my friend K and I decided in college would be the perfect husband, and for whom I've always maintained a residual fondness), which suggests some authors do especially good jobs of creating characters, or at least that character - and the fact that that work is being done, and an experience offered to you, is very soothing. Certainly this passive reception is a large part of the attraction of reading, but so is the active reception. And then there's the thinking. I don't just mean the thinking about larger issues that a novel might raise - I mean even just the simple act of going back over the plot in your mind, thinking about what the characters have done and what you've particularly liked.

Following on from that, as I've said I'm currently reading Tender is the Night. It's certainly depressing, yet...I like it ("I like it; I like it"). Essentially, I like

Fitzgerald's writing very much. I sometimes think that I pay a lot of attention to the way in which literature is written - the use and placement of words and the effect those have on tone or weight - because I'm a writer myself, but really it's probably just something that's happened as I've got older. In any case, Fitzgerald is very good in this way in Tender: he deploys words to effect extraordinarily well. Also, he's a very keen observer of human emotion, and a very good comprehender of it. For example, the main character, Dick Diver, is deeply attracted to the young Rosemary Hoyt, but even as he embarks on an affair with her - or wavers toward doing so - he retains his belief that his wife is the most beautiful woman he knows, and that they are deeply and necessarily bound to each other. His desire for Rosemary is fresh, but his love for his wife is deep, and seems (at the stage I've reached, anyway) to outweigh his desire. Yet his desire pulls and haunts him. Fitzgerald clearly comprehends that and how that this might be the case, and not only does he comprehend it, but he portrays the feelings vividly enough that the reader accepts them (understanding them is a different story).

There's a really marvellous portion of a chapter, in which Diver is haunted by a description of an at least sensual encounter Rosemary may have had in a train compartment: he imagines a request to pull down the curtain, eagerly granted, and the question, "Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?", becomes a refrain he can't get out of his head. It comes to him in several different situations, and with several different metaphorical meanings, in the next couple of chapters, and one gradually comes to see the way in which lust - or at least an utterance that inspires lust - can become a kind of warning against itself: "the curtain" gradually, metaphorically, becomes the veil that Diver draws in front of his desire for Rosemary, or his tendency to imagine her in this arousing situation, so the words that indicate arousal themselves become a warning against further arousal. Very well done on Fitzgerald's part.

Yet the book has very little apparent style, or perhaps it might be better to say very little apparent idiosyncratic style. All that Fitzgerald deploys stylistically seems designed first and foremost to give reader clear access to the situation and the characters' experience of it (not that this always works, I hasten to add, and some plot developments seem very odd. There are some bits I don't get at all). And thinking about this in the kitchen tonight while I was making my milk, I thought that perhaps that's the sign of a great prose writer: a great prose writer makes style secondary to the desire to communicate his or her world. Which is not to say the style need not be apparent, or even foregrounded. But the goal is always to make it do service to the communication, so that even overt style is used for a purpose, a purpose of clarity.

In any case, as the woman in the play does not say, You've a way with you, F. I'm sure I like it.

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Let Me Be Brief

O. and I have a kind of ongoing game or joke in which we identify very short sentences, spoken by the other, that contain whole sad stories: so far O. is the winner, having once uttered the sentence, "I used to have that watch, but it broke." What a story of tragedy that sentence seems to hide! Today at lunch, however, I discovered that exactly the opposite can happen: "I lost my room key," my FTT said, "but then I found it again." What a narrative of joy that sentence contains! First the fear that the key is gone forever, with the attendant irritation at the hassle and fee incurred, then the happy discovery that none of that will be incurred at all, for the key has been found! All that joy in eleven words.

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Lord Farrow Never Wore a Bag over His Head

When I was in Marks and Spencer today, I suddenly remembered as I was going up the escalator (and staring at a really nice bag [that's it there]. Actually, as I noticed it I was surprised that I noticed it while I was remembering what I was remembering, but then I realised it was a very nice bag, after all) something S. said when I told him about my meeting with Mr. Fallen this summer, and how I had said, "I'm sure they didn't notice," when Mr. Fallen remarked that he'd managed to fool people into believing he knew more than he did. S. said that he believes that people only say that kind of thing because they want you to contradict them: it's a kind of cheap way of getting a compliment.

I didn't think he was correct at the time. Then, I thought it was actually a way of pre-empting other people's similar remarks: if you get in first, they can't hurt you. And I still believe that. But these days I also believe (as I think I've believed before, because I have a vague memory of doing so), that it's a way of getting yourself used to the facts. I think Mr. Fallen's life had shown him he couldn't be that smart or knowledgeable - after all, everyone around him was getting jobs and having success, but he wasn't, so what conclusion could he draw from that? - and he was reminding himself of this truth in order to come to accept it, and thus not be hurt by demonstrations of it. I thought of this because as I was wandering through M&S I was reflecting on the large amount of clothing that I own, and that my salary has enabled me to buy. It enables me to do this because, as a single person, I don't have the expenses of someone with a family, or even with just a partner. And I was reflecting to myself that my future would hold an equally large amount of clothing, because as an undesirable over-the-hill woman I would continue

to be single. And then I thought that S. would say I was saying that to be contradicted, but that I wasn't: I was saying it, as I say it to myself at least once every day, and often say it aloud to other people, because I think it's wise to get used to the truth.

Incidentally, however nice that black velvet bag is, it isn't as nice as this bag, which has the added attribute of wit. So if I don't have to go back and rot away the rest of my life in Otherhome, maybe I'll actually be able to buy this bag, thus spending some of my lavish single cash. If you must be unwanted, at least you can be unwanted and well-accessorised!

My friend L would say we should put that on a pillow.

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