Sandra Gail Lambert

The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory

Last December I posted about Kenny Fries' memoir Body, Remember.  I've had another of his books at my beside since, but I put it off until now. 

Well.  At least The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory doesn't make me relive childhood loneliness and hospitalizations (except for the sawing off the cast part - I could smell the plaster dust).  No, this one just delves into the feeling I've always had that if things got tough in the world, I'd be an early choice for the ice flow. 

But instead of shutting his eyes to all that and carrying on, Fries looks right into the history, theory, and applications of "survival of the fittest."  He mixes it all up in with his own life, shakes, and pours out words that honor Darwin and himself (and me) and our place in the world.  Read this book. 

 

Middlemarch by George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans)

It's seven hundred and ninety five pages of teen-antsy type.  It has sentences whose clauses wander off in all sorts of directions.  The religious and literary references are beyond me.  It has words and phrases like "mawworm of bachelors," "nullifidian," "hustings," "custos rotulorum," and "family quartering are scuttle-fish sable and commentator rampant." (Huh?) 

It's only because of Moonrat's Middlemay Middlemarch reading project that I've reading it.  We're doing about a hundred page section every week and commenting online every Monday.   

I've been hooked ever since the first time Mrs. Cadwallader made me laugh.  I mean how does Eliot get me to feel like I know her characters through and through with just a few words?  And how perfect is this comparison - "... about as important as the surplus stock of false antiquities kept in a vendor's back chamber."?

We're only two weeks in.  Ya'll could still join us.   

One Hundred Years of Solitude

All those lists people put out of "important" books and people pass them around on places like Facebook, and you say how many of them that you've read - well, every single one of them has Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude listed. I never have, but I've always wanted to lie and say that I had read it.  Or when if came up in a discussion, I would nod knowingly and murmur things like "oh yes, so many people love that book."   

Friday was his birthday.  I started reading it.  So far the second sentence is my favorite - the words are like water tumbling down a stream.  Soon, my life of Marquez obfuscation will be over.

But not tonight.  Tonight is the season premier of "Dancing With the Stars!" 

     

 

This wondrous new online world

This morning/last night, anyway, it was about 3am, I woke up in a too permanent way.  I adjusted the heat on my heated mattress pad.  I untangled the covers.  I tried a variety of positions.  I read, fell asleep mid-sentence, let the book drop, and was awake again.  I repeated this.  I repeated this.  Then I remembered my discovery of Academic Earth.  It has on-line lectures from all sorts of classes. 

So now I'm still tired and not sleeping, but I've listened to Amy Hungerford, a professor at Yale, lecture about "The American Novel Since 1945."  I cherry picked the session about Edward P. Jones' The Known World . (I read it last year.) It was so much fun.

The camera is set up right in the middle of things so it's as if I'm sitting there, half way up the auditorium, in the middle of an aisle staring at the cowlicks and uneven parts of the little student heads in front of me (which would never happen for me in real life.  I'd be on a far side, either right up front or all the way in the back).  Hungerford talked about theories of history and narrators and layers of knowledge.  It made me able to have names for things I aspire to do in the novel I'm working on - "walking into a memory," "replacing lost history," "language's power to make history."   

And when I fell asleep in class, there was no rapping of my fingers with a ruler. Here's a bit of it.  

An Elizabeth Strout Kick

 

My first book read in 2009 was my second book by Elizabeth Strout in the past month.  At ACA my fellow novelist, Katherine Davis, ordered me (she used to be a teacher) to read Olive Kitteridge.  She said it would help with my novel-in-progress.  I did and it did. 

Now I've read Amy and Isabelle.  I could say loads of stuff about the writing and plot and all that, but just take my word for the loveliness and skill of every page.  What you have to add to all that is the relief of reading, in both these books, about women who aren't all young, who, for better or worse, are their own agents, and who are written real all the way through.  

I have Strout's Abide With Me on the bedside table.  And I've heard rumors of a new novel.    

Lavinia by Ursula K. LeGuin

Okay. Why is this novel on my "2008 books that have changed my life" list?  First of all, I've sunk happily into LeGuin's novels for almost forty years.  Second, I'm working on a book that tells the stories of women and girl children who, like Lavinia, history would never have remembered.  Third of all, Lavinia is a novel written with such exquisite power that I think about it all the time even these many months after reading it. 

How does she make-up a story and it reads like an ancient myth passed down to you by ancestors and makes you also laugh out loud in parts?  How did she put so much strength into her characters?  How much owl imagery can I have in my novel and not be considered a plagiarizer?  I want to make readers feel the way Ursula K. LeGuin makes me feel - as if I've touched something ancient and deep and tender.  

  

Body, Remember by Kenny Fries

At this end of year time, everyone has their "best books of 2008" list.  I think what I want to do instead is talk about the "read in 2008" books that stirred the emotions underneath my writing.  

First, and in no particular order as they say on "Dancing With the Stars," is the memoir Body, Remember by Kenny Fries.  He writes about growing up disabled with enough effect that it sort of sent me into a week of PTSD. (But in a good way?)  I wrote out this quote from the book and have it posted by my writing bed.

"From the car my parents wave.  As they pull away, I feel as if I am once again their child in the hospital, and even though they left my bedside only moments before, I am already anxiously waiting for the next day when they will return.  And although I am standing with Kevin under the vast expanse of the New Mexico sky, when I can no longer see their car, somewhere I hear the hospital elevator close, the sound that begins to stir the distinct loneliness I still carry with me after all these years." 

I have his latest book, The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory, at my bedside, but I'm picking my moment to read it.  Just the title makes me remember the shoes that had a bar between them that I had to wear at night, the one style (but I could choose black or brown) of shoe available to fit on my braces, how, once I was financially responsible for my own self, I would get them resoled over and over and over because they cost so much, and how when I started using a wheelchair and could get any shoes I wanted, I vowed to (but never did) become the next Imelda Marcos.   

 

 

The New York Times and Dykes to Watch Out For

The NYT has a glowing, intelligent review of Alison Bechdel's The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For.  Which means, sort of, that they did a glowing, intelligent review of my life. Which means that they said "dyke" in the NYT.  Which means that Alison Bechdel's talent and devotion to her own and our lesbian selves has, among so many other things, opened a bit more space for lesbian writers. 

P.S.  Me, I'm a combination of Mo and Clea who in the past years has relaxed enough to add a good bit of Harriet.  How about you? 

Cynthia Barnett and Florida's Vanishing Water

Flamingo Campground, the Everglades, over a decade ago - I was perched beside the wooden benches overlooking the Florida Bay and waiting for the evening naturalist program to begin.  A tall ranger strode up through the crowd, tapped the microphone, and said his talk was going to be on Florida's water.  The first slide was a map of mish mashed lines, and I thought "this is going to be boring."  But I already had a nice layer of mosquito repellent applied, so I stayed.  Well.  Even his government-issued, try-not-to-piss-off-too-many-people version was like an espionage novel.  It had intrigue at the highest political levels, evil corporations, unrelenting natural forces, violence , and all sorts of Byzantine machinations.  

Tonight Florida's Eden hosted an event to "Celebrate our Springs, Floridan Aquifer, and the Water Which Defines Us."  They brought together forty artists, a jazz band, good food, and Cynthia Barnett, the author of Mirage: Florida and the Vanishing Water of the Eastern US.  I've only just started on it (sinkholes!) and, like that long-ago ranger lecture, it is the opposite of boring.

P.S.  Also, there was a painting of the view looking up from under the spring water to the sky that is exactly a scene I was trying to write earlier today.  Is it plagiarism if I take that image and put it in my character's eyes? 

People of the Book

"Of course, a book is more than the sum of its materials.  It is an artifact of the human mind and hand. The gold beaters, the stone grinders, the scribes, the binders..." 

I'm just part way through Geraldine Brook's novel People of the Book, and segments like the one above have been making me tear up.  

I love books.  When I had a bookstore, I'd slice open the top of a box fresh from the publisher and lean close to breath in the acetate smell.  The first time I finished all the many, many steps of hand sewing and hand binding a journal and there was, it seemed suddenly, a book in my palm, I sobbed that I could have made such a thing.  It pisses me off when I check out a book from the library and it smells of someone's perfume so strongly that I can't keep reading.  But all the while, I'm making up a story about this woman and seeing her long fingernail, painted an orangy-red maybe, slip under the page to turn it.

I imagine my own novel someday published.  I hope for deckle edged paper, a peach silk headband, an embossed or perhaps inlayed image on the cover, and in my wildest imagination, the satin ribbon of a bookmark sewn into the binding. Or to go another way, a trade paperback with french flaps and wrap around cover art.   

One Story - more admiration

A while back I signed up for One Story.  I've blogged before about how they're a lovely fit in your hand, such excellent writing, the way a story should be read - on it's own rather than part of an anthology. 

Yesterday I sat in the waiting room while my mother had her back fixed up and read "How to Know Each Other" by Nell Casey.  It has a perfect first paragraph.  I think I'm going to write it out longhand in order to figure out how it's done.  And the subject matter of an adult daughter caring for an addled parent was not lost on me.  By the time I finished reading and sat with the story a bit, my mother was tottering out from the procedure room.  I closed the chapbook, tucked it in a pocket, and took my mother to lunch.  We had a good time. 

Anyway, I encourage you to subscribe to this non profit literary magazine.

One Story

I've always thought of chapbooks as little treasures.  On trips I'll look in small bookstores or gift shops in State Parks to find an oral history or local field guide or a retelling of the regions fables and myths.  Chapbooks are just the right size in my hands and the right length for a before sleep or waiting at the doctor's office read. 

My latest treasure find is One Story.  Everything about it is perfect.  You subscribe for a reasonable price and every three weeks you receive a chapbook containing a jewel of a short story.  And then you can go on-line and read what the author has to say about the writing of it, and, if you want, blog with others about it all.  And, unlike many journals, there is a way decent percentage of woman writers included.   

My first two deliveries were just so good - Harriet Elliot by Robin Black and Wilderness by Jean Thompson.  I can't wait until I have a stack of them.   

  

An IPPY

A yippee and way to go for Arsenal Pulp Press.   Their anthology First Person Queer, in which I have an essay, just won a gold medal.  The IPPY's are awarded annually to "reward those who exhibit the courage, innovation, and creativity to bring about change in the world of publishing. Independent spirit and expertise comes from publishers of all sizes and budgets, and books are judged with that in mind."

Such a disappointment

I've had Meg Rosoff's new novel on hold at the library from since before it was published.  You might remember that I fell in writer love with her after reading Just in Case and especially How I Live Now.

This new novel, What I Was, it is riddled through with homophobia.  I tried to make it not be true.  I ignored the early slurs and then devised convoluted excuses, but it got worse and worse.   This is such a disappointment.  And it makes me mad - children are reading this stuff.

The love affair is over.   

The unfolding of a hint - Ursula K. LeGuin

Sometimes, when I'm still in the spell of a novel, I think "this is the best thing I've ever read."  Then the enchantment wisps away and the book takes its place with all the other beloved writing in my life of reading. 

Earlier this week I finished Lavinia.  It is the story of a minor character in Virgil's Aeneid - "the unfolding of a hint" as LeGuin calls it. Ohmygod, the book, and there's no way out of using this cliche, took my breath away. 

The best thing a novel can do, I think, is connect you to the intimate heart of the world.  It always makes me cry.  It's what I want to accomplish in my own writing. And now, days after closing the book, waiting for the enchantment to lessen, Lavinia still holds me to her world.

I wanted the book to never end. I wish I hadn't read it so I could be reading it for the first time.  I want everyone I know to read it.  I want to read the book again -  I must study the sentence structure more thoroughly.  I might have to actually buy it so it can live in my house, always.  (I traded the library copy to my poet friend for her copy of Virgil's Georgics.)  It made me wish I had learned Latin. 

What can I say?  Read this novel.   

Joan Larkin

Friday night in Gainesville, and I was at Wild Iris Books to hear Joan Larkin read from My Body: New and Selected poems.  She finished with a narrative told in sonnets, some so fresh that they were still handwritten in a palm-fitting notebook.  The audience was filled with us "OL's," as a friend of mine's child calls us old lesbians.  (As in, "sure Mom, we'll be at your party.  We like hanging with the OL's.")

Us gray-headed ones (with a few proudly clinging to bottled red and blond) hummed along with Joan as she read, as the swirl of past decades rose up among us and connected us, and I clutched my faded, 1975 copy of Amazon Poetry edited by Joan and Elly Bulkin. 

Joan lives here now, beside our spring-fed lakes and tannic rivers, where stories and poems, like cottonmouths looking for sun, wrap themselves around branches that bend over the water.   

Rough Cut: Vincent Diamond Collected

"Set in the Florida tourists don’t see, from the cheap motels of Tampa to the steamy small towns of central Florida , these stories take us into the kind of lives not usually documented in fiction. These are men who know what it’s like to betray a lover—and to trust one. Full of emotional insight as well as hot, steamy sex, these are the best kind of stories, the ones that draw us in and show us a slice of life—and in the process tell us something about our own lives as well." - Neil Plakcy

I know.  Another half-naked man on my weblog.  But the above blurb is from the back cover of the just released today Rough Cut: Vincent Diamond Collected. 

Yes, a dear writer friend, writing as Vincent Diamond, has a long overdue gathering of the wildly popular and widely anthologized Vincent Diamond stories (plus new ones).  In a today only offer - leave a comment on the Vincent Diamond live journal and you may win a copy. "Mushy butt romantic smut" is the author's own fond term for for these stories.

My own fond terms for the author and her work and her generosity to other writers is "fabulous" and "thank you." 

Ursula K. Leguin

Here's a link to an interview with Ursula Leguin. She talks about war and learning to write as a woman and the stupidity (my word, her's are much more elegant) of genre labels. 

Either you're a fan of Leguin's or you should be.  I've been reading her for - ohmygod, I have just added it up - forty years.  My first was Rocannon's World.  I can't quite remember it all, but just writing the title brings enough plot memory that I have a remnant grip of sadness.  Now, that's a writer.

More recently, I've been rereading her book on writing -  Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew. I wish I knew her for real rather than just feeling like I do.   

Loren Cameron

In the early seventies, in Georgia, at my college, in a basement room, I and other just-barely-women listened to a lecture about our bodies.  At the end of it, these radical women from California pulled down their pants and underwear, hopped onto a study table, spread their legs, slipped in specula, and invited us all to file by and see what a cervix looked like.

Yesterday, I sat in a student center ballroom, in the dark, and watched Loren Cameron's photographs of transsexual people project onto the screen.  Dramatic, complex, shy, set through with happiness, lonely, sensual, and mostly naked - these men and women offered their bodies, of so many variations, in order for me to look closely. 

Loren, using his red laser pointer to circle chests and genitals, gave me permission to stare and learn. For every portrait, Loren told us something about the person, and he included his body and story no less than theirs.   

It was just one of those moments.

Barbara A. Purdy

It was another Sunday afternoon reading at Goerings Bookstore - this one with an author whose books I've actually used for research on the current novel.  I'm so lucky to live here in Gainesville. 

Barbara Purdy is a professor emerita of Anthropology at the University of Florida.  She says at her, as she put it, "advanced age," she only wants to study what she wants to.  Which, besides bog bodies (of course), is the question of when humans first came to the Americas. 

It was a packed room, full of knowledge of all types, and I handled the cast of an atlatl hook and learned about the difference in durability between bone and ivory - which means it is possible that my 1528 character might still have an ivory pin from 10,000 years ago.  Whew. 

Monsters of Templeton

Yesterday, at Goerings Bookstore, I felt that sense of being in "writer home." Lauren Goff, author of The Monsters of Templeton, read to us and answered questions and told us about the two and a half failed novels and four drafts of this one that happened before it "happened."  This woman knows how to hunker down.  She also knows how to make an audience feel part of something.

Here's where it would be great to say I went home and wrote.  However, instead, I took another piece of Lauren's advice - she believes in the importance of naps. 

The Ice Cave by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

The subtitle is "A Woman's Adventures from the Mojave to the Antarctic."  Now, I haven't been more than four hundred miles from my home in over a decade, and my last plane flight was in the early nineties, but, nevertheless, Lucy Jane Bledsoe and I are fellow travelers.

Whether it's her listening for the breath of seals in the Antarctic or me, five miles from home, listening for the spring growling of alligators, we are both "greedy in my desire for this wilderness, this beauty, this ease between me and other species."

She also does so well what I try to do in my writing.  It's hard to explain.  It's about the reader, the audience for my work.  Sometimes, when I read a piece by, for instance, a disabled person, they clearly are writing to an able-bodied audience.  I am left out, discarded, as their reader. 

When I write about my life, being disabled or being a lesbian should just be.  I don't want to write those parts to anyone.  I don't want to be explaining anything.   

When Lucy Jane Bledsoe writes about her life, lesbians are not discarded.     

Sudye Cauthen - after reading the book

"The one cricket that chirped all night hushes, and a tree's limb takes shape against a black sky turning silver.  Like a reflection on water, the tree's foliage quivers against the coming light." 

This is from Sudye Cauthen's book Southern Comforts: Rooted in a Florida Place.  My thinking is that being open about how much I love this sentence will thwart my impulse to steal. 

I bought this book at Sudye's Goerings Bookstore reading and have now read it all the way through.  That this book repeatedly spoke to my heart, a heart that resides inside a military brat who moved continuously and had infrequent, tenuous connections to any relatives outside of the nuclear family, is, well, interesting. 

Did you know that Sudye offers memoir writing classes?

P.S. For inquiring minds... Yes, I am progressing on the chapter.  My deadline panic smacks me around from time to time, but mostly I am just doing the work.  This morning I yellow-padded a scene that I hope is fraught with menace.   

       

Falling in writer love with Meg Rosoff

First, I read How I Live Now.  Two pages in and I knew I'd found another of "my" authors - the ones where I hunt for everything they've ever written, put their upcoming books on hold at the library, and google their names in order to know everything possible about them.  (Meg Rosoff lives in England.  She quit her job and wrote a book when her sister died of breast cancer.  She has a little-bit-evil sense of humor - but I knew that from her books.)

Next, I read Just in Case.  Often, when I fall into writer love, the  second book can be a let down.  This one was not.  My oh my, what a disturbing, brilliant imagination this woman has.  Her books are categorized as Young Adult, but I don't remember anything like this when I was a young adult.   

This is what these books make me hope for my own writing - that I'll be more daring with my characters and their voices and that, some day, I'll handle writing in first person almost this well.

I know, I haven't told about the plots or main characters or settings or anything like that.  Personally, I don't like to know stuff beforehand.  I just want someone to tell me it's worth my time.  Meg Rosoff is worth your time.    

The Fortune Teller's Kiss - Brenda Serotte

I met Brenda at Writer's in Paradise.  People mistook me for her since we were the only two using wheelchairs.  It annoyed me.  It still does, but much less so since I met her.  We liked each other right away.  We had lunch.  We checked out each other's set ups.  (Ohhh... a bag hanging from the front.  Where do you get repairs done?)  We both had polio.  We both are writers.  We both wrote read-late-into-the-night memoirs that are beautiful and hard and read smooth like a novel - oops, no, that's just her.

The Fortune Teller's Kiss starts "Aunt Kadun had been kidnapped at age thirteen by a Turkish sultan and placed in his harem."  The book traces family traditions and myths and stories from Turkey to a Sephardic community in the Bronx to an isolation ward in a polio hospital. I finished the book last night.  I am still filled with Ladino incantations, northern lights, belly dancing, cruel nurses, pecan nut cakes, and the pinch of braces.     

Southern Comforts: Rooted in a Florida Place by Sudye Cauthen

Sometimes you just know you have to be someplace.  For me, today, it was at Goerings Bookstore to hear Sudye Cauthen read from her memoir, Southern Comforts: Rooted in a Florida Place.  It was like origami or weaving or juggling.  The lost mission of Santa Fe de Toloca, her Aunt Tomye, oak trees, men made from silicon, and kneeling over a 400 year old skeleton - they were all pieces of a story, a whoosh of words, that came together with enough tenderness that it had me surreptitiously blotting an eye.   It reminded me of when I read that last, transcendent chapter in Janisse Ray's Ecology of a Cracker Childhood.   

And when it was my turn in the long book signing line, and I mumbled nervously about my own writing and how hers had already helped me, she was gracious and kind.

P.S.  Just for future reference, when you go to an author's book signing, if you can possibly swing it, buy the book. 

Sex Wars by Marge Piercy

This is not news, but internet surfing is just like how my brain works.  The other day I was hunting down places to submit, found an interesting journal - Earth's Daughters - saw that Marge Piercy was a contributor, flashbacked to when I read and had great success in selling a new Marge Piercy book every year, yearned for her, clicked over to my local library site, saw they had a new novel of hers, Sex Wars, put it on hold, and now am halfway through.

I was reading the part about an immigrant woman of the 1800's in her kitchen "cooking" rubber for condoms when I realized my current novel-in-progress owes a lot to my reading of both Piercy's historical and science fiction novels. Look around - all the people you know, all the things we do, all the types of relationships we form, all our desires, all our accomplishments - we have always existed and we have been erased over and over again. Good historians go searching for the hidden facts, but us fiction writers can just believe.  (Not that we don't research our brains into a quivering mass of TMI.) 

Indestructible?

Here's the scene.  I'm at the hospital bedside of my coughing, steroid-addled to the point of paranoia, and begging to go home 81 year old mother.  I freshen ice.  I reassure.  I keep friends and family in the loop.  And I read the savage memoir of ages eleven through seventeen as a punk, a Latina, a sexually questioning, everything questioning Miami teen of the early nineties. It's the graphic novel Indestructible by Christy C. Road

The swirl of drugs and drink, the trying to just figure things out, and especially the odd tangle of despairing self disgust with those gossamer strands of body joy -  I remember.  My teens were in the 1960's, but as I read, I remember, and the hospital room is crowded with the generations.  From the title on, Indestructible is the perfect book for me to be reading. 

P.S.  Two of my favorite lines - "That shits so far fetched from anything that makes sense to me" and "Growing up happens within each heartbeat." 

The Natural Law of Water - by Kathleen Culver

More on the theme of how lucky I am to live in Gainesville - Corky Culver will be reading from her new book of poetry, The Natural Law of Water. (I've bought three copies.  One was for me, the other for a poet friend, and the last, so far, will be sent to Venezuela where an old girlfriend of Corky's is waiting on it.)

The event will be at Wild Iris Books on Saturday, December 8th at 2pm.  Corky is one of those fabulous southern storytellers.  Don't miss it.   

P.S.  I'm also lucky to live in Gainesville because of the bald eagles that sit on telephone poles near my house. 

The Natural Law of Water

This is the lovely title to Kathleen (Corky to many friends) Culver's new book of poetry.  We Gainesvillians have been waiting and nagging and cheerleading for this collection, and I'll tell you that the poems are as fine as the title suggests. 

Annie Dillard - The Maytrees

I almost put this book down.  I started it, ohhed and ahhed about the writing, and then became a bit bored.  When I turned fifty, I suddenly found that I didn't have to read every book through to the end, but this was Annie Dillard. 

I persevered, and the plot twisted, and I was compelled to the end.  During the last pages and after, when I closed the book and started the rice for dinner, I was left in a teary mixture of belief in love,sadness about loss, appreciation of friends, and tenderness towards my mother. 

A side benefit was learning (by looking it up in the dictionary) what the word "scumble" means.