I've just returned from spending the day at the Utah Book Festival at the City Library downtown. I thought I'd write the insights that struck me as I sat in several lectures, workshops, and discussion groups today among a throng of other booklovers.
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, "A Woman and a Cow" Lecture delivered Thursday on campus at the University of Utah:
Ms. Ulrich is a Pulitzer prize-winning professor of history at Harvard. She is also an amazing LDS woman and a feminist in the most complimentary sense of the word. She said that she enjoys the detective work of being a historian. (I could relate to that - I enjoy detective work, too...maybe I should dabble in history...still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up.)
Karen Chamberlain, "Solitude and Community on a Utah Desert Ranch":
Author of the memoir 'Desert of the Heart' and a poet and screenwriter as well, Ms. Chamberlain struck me as a very sincere wordsmith. The book is about the largely solitary time she spent at the Horsethief Ranch in Southeastern Utah, a homestead built in 1928 that is 20 miles from the nearest building. She lived alone and worked the ranch because it gave her an opportunity to write and to experience life as a pioneer without telehone, technology, crowds of people, or even electricity. She said that she had enjoyed solitude even as a child, and solitude on the ranch became her teacher. She differentiated solitude from loneliness, which she said is a void, a yearning to be somewhere else or with someone else. She said that before going to the ranch her identity was tied up in what she did, but at the ranch she discovered that her core identity was much deeper and simpler.
Carol Lynn Pearson, Panel "Mormon Writing: Promised Land or No Man's Land?":
I first read Carol Lynn Pearson in the 1980s when Goodbye, I Love You was published, a memoir about caring for her gay husband as he died from AIDS. It was a powerful, beautiful book that made me proud of my faith. She's recently come out with a follow up book called No More Goodbyes, a book that tells the stories of LDS young men who commit suicide because they are homosexuals. She sees herself as a bridge between the LDS and the non-LDS, and she feels called to this work of impacting the lives and arousing the consciences of LDS people.
Christopher Kimball Bigelow, Panel "Mormon Writing: Promised Land or No Man's Land?":
This author uses humor as a bridge between the LDS and the non-LDS. He said that good literature of any genre portrays what it's like to be a human being. Mormon lit misses the mark when it is agenda-driven.
Emma Lou Thayne, Panel "Mormon Writing: Promised Land or No Man's Land?":
Ms. Thayne is an 83-year-old poet and the author of several hymns. She is a real treasure! Everyone knows who she is and she seems to know everyone else connected to words in the state. She said that good writing is all about sifting, sifting, sifting until you are left with the essentials only. Good writing is always a product of what is thought, felt, and believed. She facilitated the discussion and interjected periodically with very insightful comments and observations. What a delight to see her in action!
Book Club Panel:
I decided to go to this panel discussion because for some time now I've considered forming my own book club. The one I've been attending for several years now (and thoroughly enjoy as a women's discussion group) rarely selects quality books to read. I'd like a more serious book club for booklovers. Maybe we just need to modify the one we have and make it into what it could be...
Jane Hamilton, "Literary Confessions: The Worst Thing I Ever Did":
I can't say enough good things about this session! She was FANTASTIC! Ms. Hamilton is the writer of several bestsellers, including two Oprah Winfrey selections: The Book of Ruth and A Map of the World. I have never read any of her books, but I bought two tonight and will soon get started. She was hilariously funny and obviously brilliant...As a writer she said she starts with character, voice, trouble, and a setting and usually knows the last line of the book before she begins. She says she wrote initially out of rage because she had no time or space to write, no babysitter, and no money. Her first book was rejected about 30 times.
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, "Well-behaved Women Seldom Make History":
The historian (see above) spoke about what history is: 1) what happened, 2) based upon surviving sources, 3) reconstructed by later generations who have some interest in it. She has explored how history was made by women, common, ordinary women for the most part, women who talked back or misbehaved, nudging world events along. She recounted another historian's observation that if women's libbers had been burning girdles instead of bras everyone would have been on board. (Huge laughter and applause!)
Now my head is aching from hanging on so many words. My face is tired from smiling. I have laundry to do, as always. They really should come up with a 4-letter word for laundry. As the great equalizer it deserves one.
Saturday, October 27, 2007
Friday, September 14, 2007
Home Alone Watching "Old Joy"
It's Firday night and the entire family is gone to watch the local high school football game. I stayed behind to watch an 'art film', Old Joy - I haven't decided yet whether or ot to recommend it in a general way. (I would recommend it to a very particular audience.) But it has me thinking...
The most thought-provoking concept in the film for me was the statement: 'Sorrow is just warn-out joy.' If that is true, and I would say that in many cases it is, then it makes sorrow more bearable and even a bit beautiful. Maybe human beings can learn to see through sorrow to the joy that makes sorrow more exquisite.
The film is about old friends, both male, who have moved on with their lives but get back together for an overnight camping trip to a place called Bagby Hot Springs in Oregon. They seem to have little in common, except that they were roommates at one time in the past. The man who appears to have his life in order, with a job, a wife, and a baby on the way, is riddled with internalized questions, while the Rip-Van-Winkle, 21st century hippie beleves he understands everything at a metaphysical level. (He may understand reality, but he avoids it at the same time, using drugs and alcohol in virtually every scene.)
The movie poses the following questions: What is friendship? Why do we care about old friends who really have little place in our current lives? Can two people of the same gender touch without sexual meaning? Why is nature therapeutic, even healing?
I only stopped watching the movie an hour ago, and already it is growing on me. It's the kind of movie that feels like real time, like actual experience. I think that I would recommend it to people who like art films or people who are trying to figure out the nature of friendship and its role in our lives.
The most thought-provoking concept in the film for me was the statement: 'Sorrow is just warn-out joy.' If that is true, and I would say that in many cases it is, then it makes sorrow more bearable and even a bit beautiful. Maybe human beings can learn to see through sorrow to the joy that makes sorrow more exquisite.
The film is about old friends, both male, who have moved on with their lives but get back together for an overnight camping trip to a place called Bagby Hot Springs in Oregon. They seem to have little in common, except that they were roommates at one time in the past. The man who appears to have his life in order, with a job, a wife, and a baby on the way, is riddled with internalized questions, while the Rip-Van-Winkle, 21st century hippie beleves he understands everything at a metaphysical level. (He may understand reality, but he avoids it at the same time, using drugs and alcohol in virtually every scene.)
The movie poses the following questions: What is friendship? Why do we care about old friends who really have little place in our current lives? Can two people of the same gender touch without sexual meaning? Why is nature therapeutic, even healing?
I only stopped watching the movie an hour ago, and already it is growing on me. It's the kind of movie that feels like real time, like actual experience. I think that I would recommend it to people who like art films or people who are trying to figure out the nature of friendship and its role in our lives.
Monday, July 30, 2007
"Love in the Time of Cholera" from My Library
A few years ago, my husband and I decided to finish our home and added a library in an unfinished corner of the ground floor. It's a small room, a nook really, with a glass door, a large window, and floor to ceiling built-in maple bookcases. I am sitting in this room now and I have just finished re-organizing it. Our books primarily deal with the following topics: religion, home improvement, children's chapter books, children's picture books, health, science, history, academic review course materials, travel, arts and crafts, accounting and business, foreign language, atlases, coffee table books, yearbooks/scrapbooks, and literature, which is the largest collection by far.
Most likely because of my background as an English major, I always mark passages in the books I read. I started doing this originally so that I could recall significant events for tests and essays. Today I do it so that I can thumb through books I read and recall exactly why I liked them so much, how they affected me and why.
For this entry I will share some significant passages from "Love in the Time of Cholera," the first book I read by the author Gabriel Garcia-Marquez:
...she had never imagined that curiosity was one of the many masks of love. p.66
He was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past....He had been an easy victim to the charitable deceptions of nostalgia. p. 106
...he allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves. p.165
The only convincing document he could write was a love letter. p.171
She discovered with great delight that one does not love one's children just because they are one's children, but because of the friendship formed while raising them. p.207
She would visit with new friends or some old ones from school or the painting classes: an innocent substitute for infidelity. p.212
She had barely turned the corner into maturity, free at last of illusions, when she began to detect the disillusionment of never having been what she had dreamed of being when she was young....Instead, she was something she never dared admit even to herself: a deluxe servant. p.221
Men blossomed in a kind of autumnal youth, they seemed more dignified with their first gray hairs, they became witty and seductive, above all in the eyes of young women, while their withered wives had to clutch at their arms so as not to trip over their own shadows. A few years later, however, the husbands fell without warning down the precipice of a humiliating aging in body and soul, and then it was their wives who recovered and had to lead them by the arm as if they were blind men, whispering in their ear, as if not to wound their masculine pride, that they should be careful, that there were three steps, not two, that there was a puddle in the middle of the street...p.257
For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death. p.345
Most likely because of my background as an English major, I always mark passages in the books I read. I started doing this originally so that I could recall significant events for tests and essays. Today I do it so that I can thumb through books I read and recall exactly why I liked them so much, how they affected me and why.
For this entry I will share some significant passages from "Love in the Time of Cholera," the first book I read by the author Gabriel Garcia-Marquez:
...she had never imagined that curiosity was one of the many masks of love. p.66
He was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past....He had been an easy victim to the charitable deceptions of nostalgia. p. 106
...he allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves. p.165
The only convincing document he could write was a love letter. p.171
She discovered with great delight that one does not love one's children just because they are one's children, but because of the friendship formed while raising them. p.207
She would visit with new friends or some old ones from school or the painting classes: an innocent substitute for infidelity. p.212
She had barely turned the corner into maturity, free at last of illusions, when she began to detect the disillusionment of never having been what she had dreamed of being when she was young....Instead, she was something she never dared admit even to herself: a deluxe servant. p.221
Men blossomed in a kind of autumnal youth, they seemed more dignified with their first gray hairs, they became witty and seductive, above all in the eyes of young women, while their withered wives had to clutch at their arms so as not to trip over their own shadows. A few years later, however, the husbands fell without warning down the precipice of a humiliating aging in body and soul, and then it was their wives who recovered and had to lead them by the arm as if they were blind men, whispering in their ear, as if not to wound their masculine pride, that they should be careful, that there were three steps, not two, that there was a puddle in the middle of the street...p.257
For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death. p.345
Saturday, July 21, 2007
Movie Review: License to Wed
While most of my family members sat reading "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" this afternoon, I went to the movies to see License to Wed. Some of the comic elements were juvenile, yes, but I went in knowing that this was not going to be great cinema. It was exactly what it purported to be: an entertaining diversion and a chic flick.
John Krasinski and Mandy Moore play an engaged couple who are very much in love. This requires a chemistry that is difficult to project, but they made a convincingly adoreable couple. I was familiar with Krasinski's ability as an actor, but Mandy Moore was a pleasant surprise. Robin Williams, in his role as Father Frank, was typically over-the-top in his performance. He was somewhat unpredictable, nonetheless, which is always welcome in chic flicks. He looked older in this film than I had seen him before, and I liked his more mature appearance. He reminded me of an older Mickey Rooney.
Call me old-fashioned, but the only truly offensive aspect of the film to me was its repeated assumption that all couples engage in premarital sex. While the vast majority of couples may sleep together before marriage, there are thousands of couples who observe more traditional standards, and their numbers are on the rise again after decades of decline. I suppose in Hollywood it would have been considered grossly unrealistic to expect the couple to be in love without having sex -- they are probably not even aware that anyone in the real world ever waits. I was pleased that the film did at least point out that statistically couples who live together before marriage are much more likely to divorce. The film's oddly averse attitude toward divorce (one character's divorce was treated as a great moral failing) seemed at odds with its anti-abstinence position.
So if you are a) female, b) not expecting high drama, and c) not severely offended by the assumption that there is no such thing as wedding night consummation anymore, I can recommend this movie to you. *** (out of 5)
John Krasinski and Mandy Moore play an engaged couple who are very much in love. This requires a chemistry that is difficult to project, but they made a convincingly adoreable couple. I was familiar with Krasinski's ability as an actor, but Mandy Moore was a pleasant surprise. Robin Williams, in his role as Father Frank, was typically over-the-top in his performance. He was somewhat unpredictable, nonetheless, which is always welcome in chic flicks. He looked older in this film than I had seen him before, and I liked his more mature appearance. He reminded me of an older Mickey Rooney.
Call me old-fashioned, but the only truly offensive aspect of the film to me was its repeated assumption that all couples engage in premarital sex. While the vast majority of couples may sleep together before marriage, there are thousands of couples who observe more traditional standards, and their numbers are on the rise again after decades of decline. I suppose in Hollywood it would have been considered grossly unrealistic to expect the couple to be in love without having sex -- they are probably not even aware that anyone in the real world ever waits. I was pleased that the film did at least point out that statistically couples who live together before marriage are much more likely to divorce. The film's oddly averse attitude toward divorce (one character's divorce was treated as a great moral failing) seemed at odds with its anti-abstinence position.
So if you are a) female, b) not expecting high drama, and c) not severely offended by the assumption that there is no such thing as wedding night consummation anymore, I can recommend this movie to you. *** (out of 5)
Starting Over at Hello
I am starting over at hello with this blog, because I just accidentally deleted it -- and I already had two whole entries. Oh, well. I am still learning. At least I was able to recoup my title before someone else claimed it.
I am titling this blog "Writer @ Home" because that is what I am or, rather, what I aspire to be: a productive, publishing writer working from home. I am currently blogging from my kitchen table, where I am staring into the screen of my laptop as words appear magically on a synthetic page. (A real page would not have deleted itself, so technology is not always preferable - that may become a recurring theme if I do not learn quickly how to avoid such mishaps.)
Now, why I am blogging?
a) to express myself. I may be an intellectual exhibitionist, though I had never thought of it in those terms before. (The intellectual part is also open for debate. I welcome your comments.) -
b) to have daily practice writing on a variety of topics.
c) to analyze myself, though in my case self-analysis often leads to paralysis.
d) to provide a forum for posting photographs, book reviews, etc.
e) to serve as a journal.
No one knows about this blog, its address, etc. but if you have stumbled upon it, or if I have invited you to read it, please know that you are welcome here. I must consider you a friend, so imagine yourself stopping by for a chat and make yourself at home. I'll make the cocoa.
I am titling this blog "Writer @ Home" because that is what I am or, rather, what I aspire to be: a productive, publishing writer working from home. I am currently blogging from my kitchen table, where I am staring into the screen of my laptop as words appear magically on a synthetic page. (A real page would not have deleted itself, so technology is not always preferable - that may become a recurring theme if I do not learn quickly how to avoid such mishaps.)
Now, why I am blogging?
a) to express myself. I may be an intellectual exhibitionist, though I had never thought of it in those terms before. (The intellectual part is also open for debate. I welcome your comments.) -
b) to have daily practice writing on a variety of topics.
c) to analyze myself, though in my case self-analysis often leads to paralysis.
d) to provide a forum for posting photographs, book reviews, etc.
e) to serve as a journal.
No one knows about this blog, its address, etc. but if you have stumbled upon it, or if I have invited you to read it, please know that you are welcome here. I must consider you a friend, so imagine yourself stopping by for a chat and make yourself at home. I'll make the cocoa.
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