I’ve been bothered for a while how acknowledgment pages have gotten out of hand, and written about Melissa Bank’s The Wonder Spot’s curious lack of one.
Here, Emily G. does a much better, funnier job of critiquing these pages. I especially like her idea of having a film-credit like list at the end. Link via Bookslut.
#50 in my 50 book challenge for the year was Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld, about a midwestern girl who attends an exclusive east-coast prep school on scholarship. Sittenfeld recently wrote a mean-spirited review of Melissa Bank’s The Wonder Spot, which I thought was a sweet, well-written book. When a friend gave me her copy of Prep, I decided to judge for myself whether Sittenfeld had written a good book, and whether it was better than Bank’s.
The answer was no, on both counts. Prep reminded me in tone of Alexander Payne’s film About Schmidt. It dwelt on the awkward, the ugly and the embarrassing in human nature with scarce redemption to balance the pain. My friend had noted, “the main character is a little self-involved. Sometimes I wanted to slap her upside the head and tell her to get over herself.” My friend is much kinder than I am. I found the main character, Lee Fiora, so self-involved that she was almost completely unsympathetic, and I spent most of the book’s 400+ pages wanting to shake some sense into her. Lee was an uncomfortable mix–hyper-observant of others, yet uninsightful about herself. Her actions consistently hurt those around her. Four hundred pages lacking in self-awareness, growth, and plot did not make for an enjoyable or rewarding reading experience. Prep read like an uncomfortably realistic high-school girl’s journal, with the boring, overwrought and turgid bits left in.
Prep, though, is not without merit. Sittenfeld’s prose was overall good, and she had some excellent insights into issues of class, as cwhen Lee notes how she sometimes wears her non-scholarship roommates clothes: “And I could have offered her something of mine, but she didn’t wear my clothes, which was not a fact we discussed.” (P. 252)
A weird thing that bothered me was that Sittenfeld used semi-colons so liberally that I suspect many of them had to be edited out. Most pages had a semi-colon and frequent em-dashes, and as a former copyeditor I found these punctuation marks to be distractingly frequent.
A weird thing I liked, though, was the cover, which has a pink and green grosgrain belt that is realistically crinkly to the touch.
The exterminator came today after I sighted what turned out to be an earwig yesterday, a roach a week ago, and far too many centipedes last month. He agreed with me that the lone roach was probably a fluke. He did not seem nearly impressed enough that I’d had to presence of mind to save the corpse. Yet that’s what ALL exterminators ask for, and they often doubt that it was a roach, and I could prove it!
Sadly, I have had a fair number of roach outbreaks, all of which have proved to either be flukes, i.e., they came in from a box or paper bag, or overflows from somebody else’s roach nest. Even I’m beginning to be suspicious. Maybe it is me. I’m not the most sluttish housekeeper in the world, but the place isn’t sparkling, either.
As for the centipedes, he said the bad news about them and about spiders is that they’re the top of the insect food chain, so if we’ve got ‘em, it means we have other insects as well that they’re feeding off. So he sprayed inside and will come back to spray outside, and said that our dehumidifier, as well as the recent drier weather, should help a lot. Also, he noted that spiders don’t respond to spray because they just tiptoe over it, and don’t groom themselves like insects do.
Lovely image, don’t you think?
I did see one small centipede carcass already, so I’m feeling good about calling in the cavalry.
One is that the book has almost identical elements to All This Heavenly Glory by Elizabeth Crane. Both followed a female protagonist from girlhood to adulthood and centered on family, friends, boyfriends and jobs. Both books had the protagonist in a decent job with a younger boyfriend at the end.
What was unique about The Wonder Spot, though, was that Bank did not have a page or pages for acknowledgements. I usually enjoy reading these, because they often name the author’s teachers and members of their writing group. They can be straightforward, long and self-indulgent (the most painful I have read was in The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger), and funny. But it is singular not to have one, so I found this lack in The Wonder Spot to be curious. I’m choosing to interpret it as modest and self-effacing, in line with Bank’s writing style.
Was anyone else struck by how many references there were to over-the-counter, brand-name medicines in Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories? I seemed like once a chapter a character was taking this or that. Was I sensitive to this because the brand names were English and thus not what Americans would use? Or was there some significance to all the “drug” use in the book?
From Bookslut:
There’s coverage of Lionel Shriver, the US-born author who won the Orange Prize yesterday for We Need to Talk About Kevin, at The Scotsman, The Independent, the BBC, The Times, the CBC, Reuters, and This Is London. Much is made of her traditionally masculine first name and her decision not to have children. (Quick, how many male authors have you seen get quizzed incessantly about their lack of offspring? I think it’s about…let me do the math here…yeah, about zero. Ah, vive le double standard.)
Well, yes, but the male authors who don’t get quizzed haven’t written a book with a main character of a mother who doesn’t form a bond with the child that goes on to commit mass murder.
If Ms. Shriver doesn’t want to have kids, I applaud her decision to buck convention. The premise of this book smacks of an extreme apologia, one which, however well-written, doesn’t compel me to read it. A simple “no, not for me” would suffice.
1. Hidden Cd tracks (Kings of Leon Youth and Young Manhood)
2. Not printing the song list on the Cd case (Bright Eyes Fever and Mirrors, Lua, Lifted)
3. Not printing the title and artist on the Cd itself
Things that make me lunge for the Forward or Off button:
1. Tracks that feature, in whole or in part, conversations or clips from radio, television or answering machines. (Bright Eyes Fever and Mirrors and Letting Off the Happiness, some Guster EP that I have). Get over yourself and sing, already.
2. “Fade Into You” by Mazzy Star
3. Garrison Keillor’s voice
A few years ago when I worked at a used book store, I was excited to come across omnibus editions of some of my favorite books from childhood, such as Curious George by Margret and H.A. Rey, Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne, and George and Martha by the late, great James Marshall. All the good books in one nice volume; what a great idea!
Except, of course, that it’s not. Omnibus editions, for both kids and adults, have the same problem. They are too much of a good thing. Bigger books are harder to handle than smaller ones. Smaller books are more likely to be taken hither and yon and actually read. Yes, there is the problem of smaller print, but most of us bookworms have corrective lenses already.
My husband G. Grod recently read an omnibus edition of Le Carré. That was an ideal omnibus situation–he was going to read a bunch of short, related books very quickly. Our 21-month-old son Drake struggles mightily to haul the Curious George and George and Martha omnibuses (omnibi?) off the shelf and to the reading chair. A commendable effort, but, oh, the poor parent who is now faced with reading the entire omnibus aloud!
Eschew the siren call of the omnibus edition, that Costco version of literature. Instead, spend a little more on individual, human-sized books that can be read one at a time.
(NB Comic books vs. graphic novels are a related, but different, discussion.)
Lots of folks were picking what I thought of as smarty-pants, hyperliterate stuff. I kinda shook my head. I mean, what’s the point of trying to write a short story based on a Dylan song? (I always thought Dylan songs were short stories, only better.) Anyway, for me, “Rio” came up right away. For one, I fucking love the song, it usually makes people smile, even if they’re shaking their heads in the process. I sort of think you can divide the world into people who appreciate Duran Duran, and people who don’t, and I’d rather vacation with the people who do. To me, Duran Duran in general, and “Rio” in particular, shimmer with the absolute brain-freeze purity of pop-rock’s trascendent ridiculousness, whatever that means. And I like the drums and guitar. And, good Lord, the lyrics, to “Rio” especially, are an L.A. sunset, a hot breath of everything and nothing all at once. I love shit like that.
Duff sent me a copy of Lit Riffs, a collection of short stories based on songs. This is exactly the kind of book you want to be lent; it’s got some great things, but it’s wildly uneven. The above quote is by Zev Borow. I think it encapsulates a lot of what’s wrong with most of the stories in the collection, but also with short stories in general, and perhaps even with pretentious people at large.
First, about Lit Riffs. It opens with a “lost” story by Lester Bangs. We’re all less fortunate for its having been found. As with many collections, reading the more famous name authors isn’t the best strategy. I was disappointed by Jonathan Lethem’s piece, and didn’t even bother to finish Aimee Bender’s. I did, however, enjoy Neal Pollack’s “Death in the Alt Country,” which reminded me of Robbie Fulks’s “Roots Rock Weirdos”, Heidi Julavits’s “The Eternal Helen”, Judy Budnitz’s “The System, and Borow’s “Rio”. While I’d heard of all the artists whose songs were chosen as inspiration, and even own CDs by most of them, I found most of the chosen lyrics to be obscure, and the stories based on them to be even more tenuously connected. Borow’s was the refreshing exception to this.
I once had a friend who was a fierce champion of short stories. I could never echo his appetite for them. Too often, I felt short story authors were trying to out-creepify each other. Thom Jones’s “I Want to Live!” exemplified this for me, and I found some of this tendency in Julavits’s story, though it had a self-aware humor that transcended the creep factor.
This creepification implies that art should be separate from enjoyment. I attended a class with the film director Peter Greenaway once, and he made an interesting distinction between enjoyment and pleasure. Enjoyment, he said, was simple fun. Pleasure, though, was more complicated, even didactic. Too often, I think, short story writers and other people of so-called taste valorize works of art that are complex over those that are fun. But either extreme would be unhealthy. Too much enjoyment produces vapidity, yet too much complicated pleasure leads to pretension. A balance of both, however, allows for learning and humor. I think Borow’s story and endnote capture this perfectly.
As an example of a non-pretentious, highly enjoyable collection of pop music, I highly recommend Music from The O.C. Mix 1, especially track 9, “We Used to Be Friends” by the Dandy Warhols. Brain-freeze purity, indeed.
Or, in my case, green. I spent several years of my young life wishing for green eyes. The heroines in the trashy romances I read never had red hair and brown eyes, as I did. If they had red hair they always had green eyes, which were, of course, usually flashing. (Have you ever seen anyone with flashing green eyes? I haven’t.) Finally, though, in the mid-eighties came contact lenses that could change brown eyes to green. I was so excited to get them, only to be disappointed. They sat slightly askew on my iris, leaving a lopsided brown ring around my pupil. They were not the magical transformation for which I had hoped.
My experience with these contact lenses left me highly sensitized to other brown-eyed folk wearing them, like Naomi Judd, L’i'l Kim, Paris Hilton, and most recently Edward James Olmos in Battlestar Galactica. I found this last so curious that I didn’t hold out much hope of having it confirmed. Oh me of little faith. Olmos is wearing blue lenses so he has similar coloring to Jamie Bamber, the actor who plays his son, Lee. Bamber, in turn, is dyeing his normally blonde hair brown, as well as Americanizing his English accent. Interestingly, this is not the first time Olmos has worn blue lenses. He did so in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, to signify “the fusion of cultures and peoples”.
I’m reading a manuscript a week for the novel class I’m taking, and I keep seeing two spaces after a period rather than one. This issue cropped up regularly at my last job, which was copyediting.
Two spaces after a period is a practice left over from the days of manual typewriters. Nearly all fonts in word-processing programs are able to ensure that one space after the period is sufficient for visual separation. Those people who continue to use two spaces end up with a document that looks off kilter.
Every time I bring this up, someone argues with me. When in doubt, I always consult The Chicago Manual of Style. Here is the answer from their website to the question of one space or two:
But introducing two spaces after the period causes problems: (1) it is inefficient, requiring an extra keystroke for every sentence; (2) even if a program is set to automatically put an extra space after a period, such automation is never foolproof; (3) there is no proof that an extra space actually improves readability…it’s probably just a matter of familiarity (Who knows? perhaps it’s actually more efficient to read with less regard for sentences as individual units of thought–many centuries ago, for example in ancient Greece, there were no spaces even between words, and no punctuation); (4) two spaces are harder to control for than one in electronic documents (I find that the earmark of a document that imposes a two-space rule is a smattering of instances of both three spaces and one space after a period, and two spaces in the middle of sentences); and (5) two spaces can cause problems with line breaks in certain programs.
So, in our efficient, modern world, I think there is no room for two spaces after a period. In the opinion of this particular copyeditor, this is a good thing.
I like coming up with theories. The good thing about them is that I feel no obligation to scientifically test them. The bad thing is that I occasionally get egg on my face if I expound on one of them to someone learned enough to call my bluff. One of my current theories is that some books and movies with religious themes are better reviewed or liked than their overall quality deserves because while many people have quit institutional religion, they still crave religious engagement of some sort.
The most famous current example is Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code, a hugely popular best seller, but widely acknowledged to be poorly written and sensational. Other books that I think fall into this category are The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, and Life of Pi by Yann Martel, both of which I thought held little merit other than perhaps some religious ideas that might be interesting to those who didn’t know about cults of Mary (Bees) or how many similarities there are in different religious traditions (Pi). I had to strenuously avoid The Red Tent a few years back; many women recommended it and tried to lend it to me. I was constantly told, “The writing’s not good, but the ideas are.” Thanks, but I avoid bad writing if I can.
I was reminded of this theory most recently after reading a few glowing reviews of the movie “Constantine”. And they weren’t by blurb hacks, either, they were at The Flick Filosopher and BOTH the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Thank goodness the City Pages panned it or I would’ve thought something seriously strange was going on. I’m not going to see “Constantine” because I’m certain that it’s bad. My guess is that the good reviews are a result of some people’s hunger for religious stimulation.
I found it interesting that Roger Ebert dismissed “Constantine” as merely silly. I suspect that Ebert, who often discloses his Catholic background and its influence on how he views certain movies, is actually pretty sorted vis a vis his religious views.
In the interest of similar disclosure, I think I’m immune to the pull of works like these because I’ve spent a lot of time studying religion. I minored in religious studies as an undergrad and went on to get a master’s degree in it. I don’t think it’s impossible to write well about religion or religious history. I just think that one needs to write well to do so.
Here are a few books that I feel pull that off.
A Letter of Mary by Laurie R. King
Possession by A.S. Byatt
The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald
What do you think of this theory? Am I full of it? What other books or movies do you feel are provocative about religion AND well done? Or what other examples come to mind of bad books and movies that were inexplicably well reviewed? I’d love for this entry to spur a heated discussion, even if I end up with the aforementioned egg on my face.
I read several parenting books before and after my son Drake was born. Almost without exception, they would make me feel anxious, incompetent, or both. I got rid of the What to Expect… books because they aggravated me so much. I kept one or two others, but over time I hardly refer to them at all. There was only one baby book that I liked, Baby 411 by Ari Brown and Denise Fields. It was a reference book, not meant to be read cover to cover. It was practical and often funny. Best of all, I never felt anxious or incompetent after reading it. Just better informed.
One of the problems I had with the baby books were the lists of developmental milestones. Reading these usually led to me feeling anxious if Drake hadn’t yet achieved a milestone by such and such an age. One of the great things about ignoring the books, though, is that I can now appreciate new skills of Drake’s that don’t get mentioned.
Recently, for example, he is experimenting with walking backwards, on level ground, and up and down stairs. When he does go forward down the stairs holding my hands, he alternates his feet, clearly wanting to do it like we do. Periodically, I see him in a yoga pose, like Bridge, Hero, Downward Dog or Locust. The other night he did Upward Dog in the bathtub. I have never done yoga in front of him; I have not taught him these poses.
Yes, he’s not talking as much as other kids his age. Our doctor told us not to worry and to keep an eye on it, so we are. Not worrying lets me keep an eye on the cool stuff, like baby yoga. I ignore the parenting books and instead try to nurture the small voice of my own parenting instinct. I’m much happier that way. I’m pretty sure that Drake is, too.
I’ve seen a handful of cooking shows over the years but only America’s Test Kitchen has warranted my ongoing time. In the past, at least, the show has featured practical recipes that are reasonable to make at home. It also has good segments on product tastings and gadget testings.
A recent episode included pan-roasted lobster, though, and it left me rather disturbed. It was not a recipe I was interested in watching being made, or ever making myself, and I found the repeated twitching of the lobster, in spite of cook Julia Collin’s assertions that it was “perfectly normal,” perfectly awful.
I’m not a vegetarian, but I limit my consumption of fish and meat, and seek out organic and kosher meats and fish because the animals are raised and killed more humanely. Blogenheimer recently linked to David Foster Wallace’s article for Gourmet magazine, in which he queries �Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?� After watching that episode of America’s Test Kitchen, I feel pretty certain the answer is no.
On a more positive note, I was surprised during the episode by an animated segment on flambe, and highly entertained by it. The old science segments from the show were quite dull. The new animated one was not only interesting, but clever and informative. The animation was by Odd Todd. I hope that the show moves away from obscure recipes and on-air lobster butchering, and includes more animated cooking techniques. Otherwise my tv roster may get just a little bit shorter.
Claire Danes is the most likely reason for the demise of what perhaps was my favorite show ever, My So-Called Life. MSCL ran ten years ago for nineteen episodes, over every one of which cancellation loomed, until ABC finally pulled the plug. The scuttlebutt, then and still, is that Danes and her parents met with the folks from ABC and said that she wasn’t committed to the show any more and wanted to focus on movies.
Nowadays, Danes cries foul and says that she hardly thinks it’s fair that her fifteen-year-old self has to shoulder the blame for the show’s cancellation. It’s understandable that a young star getting rave reviews would want out of a show that was on such shaky ground when the movies beckoned. Ten years later, though, MSCL is still fondly remembered by many, and widely regarded as one of the best teen shows of all time, with strong writing and a stronger cast.
My So-Called Life got a bit precious at times; it wasn’t perfect. But I can’t help but wish that both ABC and Danes could have had to foresight to see what a gem it was and give it the support it deserved. Several shows since have mimiced it, almost always for the worse: Relativity, Cupid, Once and Again, Roswell. The latest homage is ABC’s life as we know it. It is also receiving bad ratings, though it has recovered from a shaky critical start to its present state, which I think gives MSCL the strongest run for the money yet. I think ABC is giving life as we know it a longer time to develop because they learned from the MSCL mistake.
It’s interesting to see how Claire Danes’ career has gone, and ironic that perhaps she should have stayed with a great TV show instead of going on to mediocre movies, the best of which were almost a decade ago–Little Women and Baz Lurhman’s Romeo + Juliet–and even they weren’t great films. More recently she’s done Stage Beauty, an art house film with boyfriend Billy Crudup, that met with mixed reviews. Both Danes and Crudup were voice talent on the quite good but financially unsuccessful Princess Mononoke. According to sources like US magazine, Danes and Crudup became a public item just as Crudup’s ex, Mary Louise Parker, gave birth to his child.
Ten years ago, I loved Danes’ show, thought she had great talent and hoped that she’d have a successful career. At about the same time, David Caruso was pulling the same kind of move over at NYPD Blue. He’s received phenomenal reviews for his first season. Instead of sticking with the show that made him a star, he left immediately for the movies. He tanked in duds like Jade and now growls his predictable schtick on one of the CSI spin offs. I don’t blame Danes and Caruso for wanting to move on, but I do wonder if their potential would have fizzled so spectacularly if they’d stayed put and given their respective shows the respect they both merited.
There are some linguistic lost causes that I mourn nonetheless. One is the chronic misuse of hopefully, which means full of hope. Another is the use of “whom”. Most people avoid the issue by avoiding the word. More and more I think this is what the end result will be. It saddens me, though. I like “whom” and wish it would be used more and used correctly.
I’m not necessarily one to talk, though. I knew that whom should be used an an indirect object after a preposition, e.g., Ask not for whom the bell tolls…. Who is to replace subjects and direct objects, e.g., Who’s on first? I was writing a letter recently, though, to someone whose intellect impresses me. I was trying to make a point, and didn’t want my point to be obscured by bad usage. I had a few sentences that were demanding that I choose between who and whom and I had to make my best guess because I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what part of speech they were. I was tired and I couldn’t lay hands on my copy of Chicago Manual of Style. It wasn’t near the other writing books like it should have been. Instead, after our move and in the absence of a formal filing system, I found it later wedged between The Mad Scientist’s Club and The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. (But of course. What was I thinking, not looking there?)
It wouldn’t have helped me, though. It has no entry on who/m. Instead I had to turn to little Strunk and White, (which, as I write this, I can no longer find. GRRRR.) Even if I could quote it, it wouldn’t help. It had a slight entry that did not illuminate. Instead it forced me to come up with my own rule. If you can substitute s/he then use who, if you would use her/him, use whom. Sometimes you need to flip the words around. For example, Who is the actor whom you despise?
Sadly, I think, it may be easier to leave out whom than to wrestle so with its use.
I find all the girl muppets on Sesame Street annoying. There’s Rosita, the aqua, Hispanic monster whose voice has a grating whine. Then there’s Zoe, the female counterpart to Elmo. Elmo annoys because he refers to himself only in third person, but in general he’s a pretty nice, friendly monster. Zoe, on the other hand, can exhibit quite a mean streak, especially when she’s defending her pet rock, Rocco. She also sometimes exhibits behavior that is so flaky that she seems almost stoned. There’s one other recurring female muppet, Prairie Dawn, who is bossy and impatient.
I don’t have the same problem with the female humans on the show: Susan, Maria, Gina, and Gabrielle. These are all fine characters who are kind and interesting. I find the boy monsters–Grover, Cookie Monster, Telly, Elmo, even grouchy Oscar–cute and engaging. All these monsters were there when I was a child, though.
Sesame Street is a show that I like and respect. I hope that it will inspire the same feelings one day in my son Drake. Is it me? Do I dislike the girl monsters because they’re new and different? I didn’t grow up knowing the characters of Gabrielle or Gina, though, and I still like them. Do I dislike the girl monsters for the same reason that teachers favor boy students over girls? Or have the creators of Sesame Street, in their efforts to round out their cast of monsters, created girl monsters who are less likeable than the boys?
In a comment on my dictionary entry, Zen Viking called me on my rant about free content and challenged me to elaborate.
I am sure that given a lot of time, I could write a lengthy and well-reasoned treatise on this. I don’t want to spend time on this, though, which is part of why I think content should be free. If I have to pay, or enter a whole lot of personal information, or own a computer to access information, then information is slow to get, it’s unjust in distribution and makes doing what I’m doing (in this case, writing) more difficult.
Copyright laws were invented to encourage creators to create. Over the years, they have been warped by many, including Disney, to protect profit. I don’t believe that every book, magazine, movie, newspaper or DVD should be free. I do believe there should be a free form of it, though. I also believe that restrictive copyright laws do more harm than good.
If you are interested in delving into this issue more deeply, then my husband G. Grod recommends the work of Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford University, and author of Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. Lessig was also tapped as an artist of the year by the Minneapolis City Pages, but so were Kevin Smith and Garrison Keillor, so there is some dubiety to the distinction.
As my grandmother does not hesitate to remind me, I am overeducated. I minored in religion in college, then later went back to school to get my master’s degree in religious studies. I learned many things, among them that I did not want to convert to Judaism after all. I am abashed to admit that after all the classes and studying and pondering and soul searching, the biggest take-away I had was this: organized religion bugs me.
To all of you who realized this without grad school, I say, “Well done.”
As this realization crystallized, I stopped attending religious services, except when there was a good reason to do so, like visiting family for the holidays. While there are many people who like to attend church only on Christmas and Easter, I find the holiday services even harder to sit through than that of an average Sunday. The sermons have a more sunny, populist bent as the celebrant plays to the crowd. While the liturgy and the hymns are familiar and soothe my need for repetitious ritual, the telling of the Christmas story grated more on me each time I heard it. Here is a good sample of words from the Christmas story: He, he, he, father, son, virgin, he, he, he. Nowhere in the Christmas story was there a place for me; hearing it alienated me even further. I remained annoyed until this year, when I recalled a few other words from the Christmas story: mother and child.
I am now able to very physically relate to the story. Mary, great with child, had to ride a donkey to Bethlehem for the census, then gave birth in a stable. I wouldn’t wish those things on anyone, much less a woman near her due date. The thought of giving birth in a stable, with only her husband for company, who certainly had not attended any birthing classes, is a sobering one. Was her labor long? How did she handle the pain? Was she afraid that she might die? Was Joseph helpful, or did he go outside and smoke till it was over?
This year, I chose to attend a church service because I wanted to. I did not, though, attend a conventional one. Instead, I chose one with a labyrinth walk, during which the celebrant read passages from The Message, a paraphrased version of the Bible, and a small group of musician’s played a selection of Christmas music. It had been over a year since I last walked a labyrinth, and I had missed it a lot. I found the paraphrase of the Christmas story mostly unoffensive, but aggravating in a few parts. I am aware that listening to a familiar story in unfamiliar words can allow listeners to really engage with it once again, but this technique in this instance did not work for me. My fingers twitched as I longed to shout out, “No, it’s ‘Be not afraid!’ you idiot!” Instead, I held my tongue. I did laugh aloud, though, during “Away in a Manger,” at this line: “The cattle are lowing, the poor baby wakes; But little lord Jesus, no crying he makes.” That, I thought, is how you know the story is mythologized.
It is mythologized. Jesus wasn’t born in December near the winter solstice. His birth, which can be established through historical records based on both when that census actually took place and the position of the star, probably happened in April, closer to Easter. But setting up religions and myths is hard work. Jesus’ birthday was grafted onto that of Mithras, another sun god. Likewise, his death probably did not take place in the spring–its memorial was merged into the spring equinox of birth, fertility and renewal; those bunnies and eggs are not just cute icons from Hallmark.
The Christmas story, then, is not completely “true”. But lots of stories aren’t technically true, yet they still have value. A novel isn’t true. Neither is the book of Esther, and everyone knew it and included it in the bible anyway–the “proper” bible, too, not even the apocrypha! I found something new in the Christmas story this year. I still got aggravated at points during the service I attended. But I also found things of worth–the meditation of the walk, the rhythms of the music, even the story, though I didn’t like the words with which it was told. I continue to wrestle with what I believe, but the struggle and its details have shifted over time.
1. When I put Drake down in the play area so I can go to the bathroom, he screams the entire time.
2. He screams when he’s done being outside, but then keeps screaming when I bring him inside.
3. He fights me when I care for him in basic ways: dressing him, putting a coat on him before going outside into the cold, getting him out of the house so he can visit his girlfriends at the coffee shop, changing his diaper, putting cream on diaper rash, etc.
The lack of sleep and constant self doubt are killers too, but the above three really seem like new circles of hell.