Quadrennial Love Affair

On evening, in 1992, during the Albertville Olympics, I discovered my then 4-year old son attempting to recreate his own Olympic endeavor.   Having stacked his Playskol table and two chairs atop a sofa, then placing a cardboard box over the stack, covering it with a a white blanket and climbing to the top of his makeshift mountain, he yelled "Look, Mommy!" just before he attempted his first -- and last -- indoor luge run.  While his ingenuity and swiftness in engineering his sliding track amazed me, I should not have been surprised that he would have thought of it.  After all, my television had been set to non-stop Olympic broadcasts for the duration of the Games, as it has been for every Winter Olympics since I first fell in love with Jean-Claude Kielly in the 1968 Grenoble Games. 

I'm not much of a sports fan, by every four years, I learn the names of the sliders, the skiers, and the skaters.   I brush up on the subtle differences between a triple lutz and and triple toe loop, learn the number of medals in each discipline, follow the made-for-TV rivalries,  listen intently to the melodramatic stories of Olympian lives.  During the day, I can now feed my addiction with the internet -- pictures, videos, commentary -- and when I'm near a TV, NBC, MSNBC, CNBC are on heavy clicker rotation.  

Why do I like the Winter Games so much?  Perhaps because I watch athletes do feats that I know I could never attempt.  For example: 

Skiing - My sharpest memory of my one attempt at skiing is that I went the weekend after Michigan changed its drinking age from 19 to 21. My friends abandoned me on the beginners' slope, and I abandoned the slope after two attempts and bruises that didn't fade for a few weeks.  How anyone can remain standing on long strands of fiberglass confounds me. 

Skating - I can skate forward.  I can skate backwards.  But, having honed my best technical skills on the neighborhood Overbee's Pond when I was eight, I'm best at the triple ass spin, a technique frowned upon by the Skating Federation. 

Sliding - I mostly do this in my car in the winter.  At speeds far slower than 90 miles an hour.  Without cowbells.  Sometimes I think I deserve style points, though. 

Freestyle & Snowboarding - I have never been that hip. 

Curling - Until last weekend, when my husband had the curling matches on for most of the day, I would have said that brooms on ice scare me.  But, having realized that CNBC stands for Curling.  Nothing But Curling, I realize that this may have been a sport that I could have aspired to.  The strategy of the game intrigues me.  Still, trying to sweep stones over "pebbles" into the "house" seems a bit odd.  I do like the tradition of the winners buying the losers a drink.   Quite sporting. 

I never had any dreams about being an Olympian, though for years I would tell people that the 'J' in my surname was pronounced as in "Jean-Claude", and I had my hair cut in a Dorothy Hamel Wedge.  Two weeks of races on fast sleds, jumping over obstacles of snow, jumping into the air, flipping head over heels on purpose, or racing downhill in roller-derby fashion:  watching people trying to go fast and defy gravity while on slick surfaces will always grab my attention. Good thing that the Winter Olympics are only held once every four years; it would be too much excitement for me if it were more frequent.    

Photo: Afternoon, Heron

Photo: Afternoon (Ice)

What they are saying about me?

Who is revealing something about me?   My bookshelves, of course.   Although I didn't realize it until I saw this at Dorothy's site.  Originally from Ella at Box of Books.  My shelves are screaming the following things:

1.  "We want more room!"  The top shelve of one is bowed, due to the double- and triple-stacked books placed on top of it.  Subtext:  I hate to shop and continue to put off buying another bookcase. And really, do I need that stack of New Yorker guilt staring at me every day?   I really should pitch some of those old magazines.   I can get it on line! 

2.  "Lots of new books here!"  There are lots of new acquisitions in my library, although not all are recently published.    Untold story:  I had to send most of my library to the dump about seven years ago due to a flood.  Although I think my buying has slowed a bit, I think there for awhile I was trying to build, in quantity at least, the same sized library I had previously.  While I could buy new copies of the books, I couldn't replace the well-worn, cracked bindings of my favorite books, or replicate the notes I wrote in some of them.   Some of the books I miss most frequently are the anthologies that I used in school -- often I think of a passage of an essay, or poem and I can visualize exactly where it was in the book.  How I would love to walk into the other room, search for a few minutes, until I found the book I was thinking of, then flip to some dog-earred, fingerprinted page to read the passage.  While I may be able to find a copy of most of those works, I can't go back and revisit the notes I might have written when I first encountered it, the words I might have highlighted, the definitions I wrote in the margins.   I miss visiting that old reader and her thoughts.

3.  "Disorganized!"   There is little reason as to where my books sit on the shelves.  Generally, of the two bookcases in living room, one is works that I have read, and the other is works that I haven't read yet.  Both need to be weeded and organized and many of the books should go to Book Mooch.  Why?  So I can get more books, of course! 

4. "Someone in this house likes...."

...."Art!"   I have several art exhibit catalogs.   When I travel, I like to visit art museums and I have acquired several books on art as a result.  The oldest exhibit catalog I have is from the first special art exhibit I remember seeing -- an exhibit at the Royal Academy in London on Post-Impressionism in 1979.  The most recent is the book of photos and critical essays that accompanied the exhibit  "The Americans" by Robert Franks, at the Metropolitan Museum last fall.   I've looked through this book numerous times in the last three months; I am in awe of these photographs.   Franks said of his photographs:  "When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice." Robert Frank, LIFE (26 November 1951), p. 21.  He was right about the quality of his photos, but it isn't just reading a line twice - it is reading the poem over and over again. 

..."Poltical History!"   I have a special table top shelf that features several presidential biographies.  My husband started on a project to read a biography of each American president.  I keep thinking that maybe I'll start reading them too, but somehow that reading project never gets off the ground. 

..."Theology".  I used to belong to a monthly book club that met at a church and usually read something related to faith and spirituality.   If this says anything about me it is that a) I'll read anything, and b) I'm a seeker.  

..."Reads 2 -3 crappy novels a year".   Most of the junk stuff was acquired due to my other monthly book club.  Two or three times a year someone picks a real dog, again proving that I'll read anything -- at least for a few pages.   I could say that I keep these to protect against me becoming a complete literary snob.   So far, it isn't working.  I often wonder why I even bothered to buy them.  Most embarrassing:  Dan Brown's Angels and Demons.  A close second:  anything by Jodi Piccoult or Barbara Delinski.  I refused on principle to buy or bring into my house Glen Beck's The Christmas Sweater.  

... "Likes to cook".   I do like to cook, but I like to eat more.   I have a huge bookcase in my kitchen with over 100 cookbooks, and lots of miscellaneous recipe cards, notebooks, magazine pages.   Besides art-related books, the other souvenir I would ever consider buying when I travel is a cookbook.   Most are in English; some aren't, which has lead to some interesting culinary recreations in my kitchen.   

6.  "Needs more bookcases!".    I have piles of books in nearly every room.  The Shelves cry out for more; the books cry out:  "Shelve us!"    My spouse and I once had a discussion if 52 books on the nightstand, beside the bed, under the quilt rack, etc. was too many.  Can you guess my answer? 

What are my bookshelves saying about me?  That I am a reader!

Friday Bullets, because all the cool kids do it

Since others have been doing bullets weekly, I thought I'd jump on the bandwagon. 

*  It stinks to work late on the last day of the month, especially when it falls on a Friday.  Even stinkier: to inadvertently do something to take the entire computer system down at 5:45pm when everyone is busy trying to get things finished for the day.  When the crashing culprit and the computer fixer are one and the same, things don't get any better.  

* You can call me a loser.  Recently lost:  a glove, a set of keys, my favorite hat (oh really cool NYC hat, please come back to me!  Please!), lens cap to my telephoto lens, and my Rx sunglasses.   Probably a lot of other things that I don't even realize yet that I have misplaced.  In addition to the thousand of thoughts that I meant to say, do, or write down before they slipped through the gray matter. 

* Including the thought I was going to write here....

* The month goes really fast at work when you've been on vacation for most of it.   Easy task when weekly status and monthly status reports covered the same time span.   Having to add that you were the root cause of the only downtime this month because of  something stupid:  priceless.  See first bullet point. 

*  Funniest thing I've seen this week:  Tracy Ullman as Rachel Maddow & Ariana Huffington, w/ Meghan McCain and Barney Frank.  Can't decide which character Ullman is best at impersonating.  It's hard not to think that it is Huffington, but the other characters are nearly perfect as well.  Makes me want to subscribe to Showtime so that I could watch all of Ullman's shows.

 

* Have made progress on Emily's TBR challenge.  At least on the reading part.  Not so much for the posting part. 

* Even if you think you hate opera, you should make an attempt to see the Met HD rebroadcast of Carmen at a theater near you this Wednesday, 2/3 @ 6:30.  I saw it when it aired live a few weeks ago.  It was wonderful.  Elana Garanca & Roberta Alagna spark and sparkle in this production.   Olivier Award-winning director Richard Eyre about his new production of Bizet's drama says: "It is one of the inalienably great works of art. It's sexy, in every sense. And I think it should be shocking."  I have a friend whose Indian-born husband says he will go to the opera because it reminds him of Bollywood.  Productions like this one of Carmen make me understand that comparison -- song, dance, passion, humor, tragedy; it has it all.   This video is from the London production last year.  

*  At the beginning of December, I thought it was silly that the neighbors decorated a very tall tree with lights in the shape of a palm tree.  Now that it is 8 degrees, I see it differently.   I hope they leave it up until warm weather has arrived.  

* I made up a new cocktail this evening.  I didn't have the ingredients for what I wanted, so it was a little of this, a little of that, from the licquer cabinet.   Hmmm...if I can recreate it, perhaps I'll think of a name and publish the receipe.  Unfortunately, too much whiskey tends to make one forget the details. 

* This is pretty cool.  The history of the world told through 100 objects from the British Museum, produced by BBC 4.   10 episodes have been produced thus far.   So interesting that if all 100 were currently available, I'd have a hard time tearing my weary body away from the computer for a 25 hr period until I had watched them all.

Raymond Carver: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

I was intrigued by the choice for this month's selection of my book club, Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk about Love. My book club has been meeting for eight years, but in recent months we've had some major changes in the makeup of the group, which have changed the dynamic. Not necessarily as a result of that change, but recently, our book choices have been pretty rotten. When my good friend, and trusted bookgroup member, S. sends me an email to informing me that I don't want to be bothered with picking up a copy, I know to take that advice.  At one point a few months ago, I decided that if we didn't start reading "decent things" --which I defined vaguely as "not crap"--, I would consider dropping out. Every once in a while, reading something light and irrelevant can be good escapist reading, but when it is a constant diet of pap, well, I just don't have time.

So, when A. suggested Carver's first book of stories, I was intrigued and looked forward to interesting reading in the month ahead. This is an especially interesting choice since short story collections historically have not been very good discussions for this particular group. But, since the dynamic has changed, I'm glad that we are trying a collection again. I was also looking forward to this because I had not read Carver, which has seemed like a deficit in my reading. The only work that I know of his is the poem What The Doctor Said, which is a poem that has stuck with me since I first read it five years ago. Such persistence is surely a sign, if not of a good writer, at least of a good poem, and is certainly enough to merit reading more of his work, even if I had never heard any thing else about him (which, of course, I have).

When I went to the bookstore over the weekend to pick up the book, I was disappointed that they did not have this particular volume of short stories. But, they did have The Collected Stories of Raymond Carver. Since this included all of the stories from What We Talk About, I decided it was a good choice. What I realized later was that this volume also included all of the original, unedited, versions of the stories in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.  Knowing that Carver's editor, Gordon Lish, had done extensive edits, I couldn't wait to begin to read these works side by side.

Thus far, I've read the first three stories in the collection. I had intended to read all of them, as published in the original 1981 volume, before reading the earlier drafts. But, after reading "Mr Coffee and Mr Fixit", I couldn't wait to read the original.  Because the original was so much longer there had to be a big difference in the versions and I couldn't wait to see what that was. 

I found "Mr Coffee and Mr Fixit" to be a bit sparse, too sparse to be much of a story.  It sets a mood of regret, resignation about the realities of one's life, dissatisfaction with one's spouse and children. But, the original story "Where is Everyone", while it addresses the same situations and circumstances,  has so much more detail. I realized that I knew the characters from the first story, but found that I liked learning more about them in the second one. Did I need to know that his wife relapsed into alcoholism for the story to work? The narrator tells of his battle with alcoholism, but does it make a difference to know that his wife is struggling to remain sober too -- something that isn't obvious in the first story.  Do I need to know that his mother knows about his wife's affair? How does it change the story that the last lines in the published version are spoken by his wife and not his mother? Is this really the same story?  Can I go back to the published version and read it again without feeling that my perspective has been tampered with?

It is an interesting exercise to look at the stories side by side, but I have to wonder - which really represents the author? Does it really matter that they were edited so extensively?  Does the extensiveness of the edits suggest more than editing, perhaps a co-authorship.  Do the edits make the stories by Carver and Lish, rather than just Carver?  Are they somehow different to the extent that they deserve an asterisk beside them -- something to denote that they aren't "real" Carver stories?   Just reading one of the stories in both versions raised these questions.  

Perhaps I need to read more of the works as originally published before I go back to reading those earlier drafts.   What does one even call those -- early drafts? unedited manuscripts? I'm not sure what would be appropriate if they are all as different as these two stories.  These stories don't seem like similar beings but completely different species. I don't know if I can compare them. Or that I want to. I do, however, want to read more of Carver's stories and will later read more of the earlier, unedited versions for comparison.  I may though only have more questions, not answers.