Writing a Woman's Life

I'm starting to read a new book today, Writing a Woman's Life by Carolyn G. Heilbrun. She writes that "Feminist ideology is another word for trying to understand in the life of a woman, the life of the mind [emphasis mine]" (p. 16).

Reading that sentence reminded me of a scene in A. S. Byatt's novel Still Life. Stephanie, Frederica's older sister who gave up a promising academic career to get married to an unconventional vicar, goes to the library to try to write. She spends the first half hour or so just trying to still the chaos in her head. She has to turn away from thoughts of chores, grocery lists, her children, etc. so that she may analyze a poem she was writing about before her life changed so drastically. She's just reached the point where she can begin to work when she realizes that her time is up. She only booked a babysitter for a couple of hours.

School's out for the summer

There are just a few students left in the library this evening, studying for that last final or finishing up that last paper. The medical students have one day of testing left.

As I walked around the campus during my dinner break, kids were loading up their cars for the trip back home. Saturday will be graduation day for all the seniors and graduate students.

Next week the campus will be a ghost town. The sidewalks will be empty. The local restaurants and coffee houses will be deserted.

Ahhh, summer! The time to recuperate from the frantic busyness of the school year. The time to slow down and savor the world.

Until the whirligig of time swings us back to a new school year.

Avoiding the pain of failure

I just had to check in two books that I’ve had for over a year and still haven’t finished reading! (or even tried reading for over a year!) I do this thing where I check out books on subjects that I’m interested in and I think that’s all I have to do. I don’t have to actually read them…Oh, no…I can get to the books' contents just by being near them—ha!

Anyway, one of the books is called Impro: Improvisation and the theater by Keith Johnstone (London: Faber and Faber, 1979). I read about it on one of the finance blogs I read, either Grow Rich Slowly or The Simple Dollar. The blog writer suggested the book for those of us who are socially inept through fear, self-consciousness, or by living too much inside our heads.

As I started reading it again this week an “aha!” moment hit me when I read Johnstone’s description of trying to get improv students to stop trying to control their own experience. He says that students who are afraid to fail have a tendency to try to get around having to do something instead of finding a way to do the thing they’re afraid to do. Johnstone calls this “avoiding the pain of failure” (p.31). He's observed two ways students try to avoid the pain: doing something half-heartedly in an attempt to gain sympathy in advance for failure, and ignoring what’s happening at the moment to try to anticipate and control their performance in the future.

I do both of these things all the time. I never realized that what I was doing was a kind of backwards coping strategy. I’ve written in my journal recently about how I tried to cope with working full time, going to library school and dealing with family problems by vegging out and watching movies all the time instead of doing my work. I really need to work out some better strategies for dealing with the challenges in my life.

Johnstone writes that he tells students that he, the teacher, is responsible for their success.

“In exchange for accepting the blame for failure, I ask the students to set themselves up in such a way that they’ll learn as quickly as possible. I’m teaching spontaneity, and therefore I tell them that they mustn’t try to control the future, or to ‘win’; and that they’re to have an empty head and just watch. When it’s their turn to take part they’re to come out and just do what they’re asked to, and see what happens. It’s this decision not to try and control the future which allows the students to be spontaneous. (p. 32).

Our Bodies, Ourselves

It's taken me about a year but I'm finally on the last chapter of the book Our Bodies, Ourselves and the Work of Writing by Susan Wells. I enjoyed reading how the women of the Boston Women's Health Collective researched, wrote, illustrated and published the book on women's health in 1970. At the time it was a revolutionary act.



Wells' book talks about how the women even wrote collectively, taking care to create a unique voice that would not intimidate readers but instead encourage them to take charge of their own bodies and health.



But I kept stumbling over the word "metaleptic" in the text. I had to look it up every time I ran across it in my reading. I still don't think I understand what it means! Wells writes that

Traditionally, metalepsis was a figure in which a writer refers to something by naming an object only remotely related to it. For example, a lead-footed driver is one whose foot is heavy, or leaden, on the accelerator

. But she uses the term in its rhetorical sense, i.e.

the figure of excess, of breaking frames (p.100).

Wells is saying that by inserting themselves into the text of the book by way of personal stories and drawings, the writers of Our Bodies, Ourselves invite the reader into the book on a personal level as well. The desired result of this frame-breaking is the realization that

every woman [is] a potential writer, and that her body [is] a potential source of both medical knowledge and political enlightenment.

Decalogue

Well I'm about to finish watching the last three installments of Krzysztof Kieslowski's Decalogue. The film series was written and directed by Kieslowski and his frequent collaborator, Krzysztof Piesiewicz. The series was filmed in Poland during the eighties and is loosely organized around the theme of the Ten Commandments.

I first became interested in Kieslowski's work after seeing Three Colors: Blue, White, and Red. I remember the haunting music of Blue. It followed me on my trip to Paris later that year. I heard the music as I walked along the Rue Mouffetard, the street where Juliette Binoche's character lived in the film. I thought of the film White every time I rode on the Metro, and I couldn't help but think of the model in Red whenever I saw a large billboard or huge window display.

But what keeps me interested in Kieslowski films are the questions.

Why do we love? Why do we continue to love when our loved ones disappoint or hurt us? Do moral acts preserve us? Are we punished for immoral acts? (Or, in other words, does what goes around, come around?)

Hmmmm....

Time to start writing again

Well it's been a long time since I last wrote. I've been catching up on all my mystery series reading: V is for Vengeance by Sue Grafton, Believing the Lie by Elizabeth George, and Breakdown by Sara Paretsky. In between I read the Hunger Games series, re-read some early Monk books by Anne Perry, and dipped into a few non-fiction books.

You'd think I'd have some profound insights to share. Or, at the very least, some comments or criticisms about the books. But I find that if I don't write about what I read, while I'm reading it, I don't know what I think about what I've read.

Perhaps that's why I've started reading Writing to Learn by William Zinsser. He says that the process of writing forces you to think. If your thinking is muddy, your writing will be unclear. You will need to revise and rewrite until your writing (and thinking) make sense!

Authentic Happiness

I've been reading a lot about strengths and talents lately. I read StrengthsQuest by Donald O. Clifton and Edward "Chip" Anderson. I'm reading Authentic Happiness by Martin E. P. Seligman. What I've learned so far is that everyone of us has certain talents or predispositions, such as a love of learning new things or physical ability, that we may develop into strengths. Most folks intuitively know this but some of us seem unable or unwilling to do the work it takes to move from potential to mastery(Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours anyone?).

For example, I've always loved to read and learn new things. I am able to organize information so that it may be more easily used. But I've never worked at reading, writing, and organizing so that I can work as a librarian instead of as a library assistant. I've always explained my failure to do so as fear of success, lack of social and study skills, laziness, etc. But I was struck by this passage in Authentic Happiness:

It is not just positive feelings we want, we want to be entitled to our positive feelings. Yet we have invented myriad shortcuts to feeling good; drugs, chocolate, loveless sex, shopping, masturbation, and television are all examples...The belief that we can rely on shortcuts to happiness, joy, rapture, comfort, and ecstasy, rather than be entitled to these feelings by the exercise of personal strengths and virtues, leads to legions of people who in the middle of great wealth are starving spiritually. Positive emotion alienated from the exercise of character leads to emptiness, to inauthenticity, to depression, and, as we age, to the gnawing realization that we are fidgeting until we die.

So I guess for me it is about laziness, i.e. wanting to take a shortcut to professionalism so that I don't have to do the hard work!