Author: Monda

An Imperfect Book Review

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I’m trying to finish A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder by Abrahamson and Freedman. I really am. I started off great-guns. The first couple of chapters were insightful, funny, and inspiring for a gal like me. I’m not a mess, just make a lot of piles and have two too many junk drawers. Well okay, three. The peppy beginning makes a connection with folks like me who can’t stand filth, but don’t see the inherent comfort in ritual cleaning/organization for its own sake. Such things, according to the book, take more time than they save, and if the object of organization is time-saving, well…there’s really no point. Not to mention the armies of organization specialists eager to pick your pockets and hand the cash over to The Container Store.

An entire generation of women brought up on those “How to Catch a Fella and Throw the Perfect Dinner Party” books are gasping for air right now. It’s okay, ladies. Loosen your pearls a notch and take a deep breath, because some things were forever altered when women jumped into the workforce for careers instead of jobs. A great many Women Of a Certain Age figured out – quickly – that they’d rather be judged by their resumes than by the spots on their glasses. And we’re all wearing bras now, thank you.
Any younger gals reading this are perplexed. I love those Gen-X and Gen-Y girls because they have no idea what I’m talking about and that, my friends, is a delightful sign of progress.
Back to the book I can’t finish. After the charming introduction and first couple of chapters, the whole thing begins to read like someone else – a historian with a cramped windowless office, perhaps – took over the helm. I’ll admit my lit degrees have given me low tolerance for nonfiction. I’ve devoured 18th century epistolary novels that weighed in like bibles, but it takes a special writer to carry off 310 pages of information without losing me entirely. I’m trying, though, because here and there are sparkling bits of usable information. Einstein, for example, was a daily disaster and look how proud he made his mama. I get it, there’s just no poetry in it whatsoever. Give me a sentence I can cling to, gentlemen.
It’s like handing a starving woman a Ding Dong when what she really needs is veal piccata.
Don’t worry, Abrahamson and Freedman. I’m going to finish your book because although I was advised to skim it, my Inner Reader won’t let me do it. I might miss something good and I’d never forgive myself. Besides, whoever wrote the first couple of chapters might just reappear in the end to finish up what they started and resuscitate the whole thing. It could happen.

Weather Report

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It’s sleeting outside this very minute. I’m serious.
Please understand that yesterday afternoon as I cruised into the typewriter shop, it was 75 wind-whipping degrees. It was January 29th and I had to turn on my AC both in the car and at my house. The wind galloped so frantically that power went out all over town and two people out in the county died from wind-related deaths. If the sky hadn’t been so clear we all would have listened for tornado sirens and stood on our front porches. I know that’s not proper Severe Weather Protocol, but that’s how we do it here in Arkansas. A tornado watch means nothing here because we’re always under one. We have to see that bad-boy touch the ground before we take cover.
That was yesterday. This morning it was an icy 26 degrees and now it’s sleeting. No one’s had a chance to run to Kroger for bread and milk, and that’s bad news. While we don’t generally panic during tornadoes, we go full-tilt when it snows or ices. All over town it’s Quick honey! Run to Wal-Mart before we’re snowed in. We get a little frantic because this is the land of 110 degree summers. There’s not a snowplow in the whole state and no one – NO ONE – knows how to drive on snow or ice.
Bread or no bread, I’m done for the night. As long as the plunkety-plunk I hear on the roof is sleet instead of hail, we’re golden. The Weather Channel says it’s supposed to be in the 60’s by the weekend. That figures.

The Miss America Pageant ..oh my

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Donna Axum, Miss America 1964 and an Arkansas beauty even now, must be weeping uncontrollably.

If you watched the Miss America pageant you know it’s the end of an era. Pageants are serious business here in the south, and no matter how many of us raised our perfectly manicured collective fists in the air for women’s rights over the past few decades, we still hang on. We’re not afraid to call them beauty pageants instead of “scholarship contests” because that’s exactly what they are. Ugly girls don’t become Miss America. Never will.

I’m not one of those crazy pageant moms, and I have strong feelings about those who doll their four-year-olds up like pole-dancers to win trophies. Let’s be clear about that. I also know that all those pageants a gal must win in order to slick Vaseline on her teeth at the Miss American showdown can be, well, less than a perfect feminist learning experience.

I recall with fondness attending the Faulkner County Fair Parade a few years ago, watching all the local first-tier pageant winners load up in their daddies’ mid-life crisis convertibles. All those sequins. Except for one gal sitting in the back of a torn-down Mustang. The Conway High FFA Queen was cut from another bolt. In a sea of pastel spangles, Miss FFA wore black – fingernails, hair, and all. She had a nose ring and bruise-red lipstick and a smirk. When it began to rain and widespread hairspray-panic began, Miss FFA just lifted her face to the sky and let her dark eyeliner run. I couldn’t help but admire her.

I’m certain, though, that if I’d paid closer attention I’d have noticed her mother scampering out of the rain with something over her head. It’s generational.

Look – I read The Women’s Roomand The Feminine Mystiqueand all versions of both that came after, as did every other girl who lived in Conway Hall at the University of Central Arkansas back in 1970-mumble. Southern women of a certain age have a feminist history, but it doesn’t include failing to shave under our arms or leaving the house without applying lipstick. The New and Improved Miss America pageant, understandably, leaves us gasping for that very reason.

The sudden casual air seemed to take a few of those contestants completely by surprise. And the “makeover”? I’m trying to imagine looking Miss Texas in the eye and telling her she needs to tone down that hair. Or worse, cut it. Those contest folks just told The Southern Woman that she’s not northern enough to win a beauty contest, and some will take that personally. Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas could actually secede from the union.

I guess I’m too old. I still want to watch a Miss America pageant complete with ballgowns, taped butts, and someone twirling fiery batons while singing Amazing Grace. Sorry, Donna. I guess those days are over.

The Alchemical Socialite

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There she is, ladies and gentlemen. How can I possibly describe the feeling of having my fingers on the keys of a real machine again, slamming out the clicketys of a pouncing metallic onto the permanent page? My 1967 Olympia Socialite: she advances, she dings seductively at the end of a line, she reminds me of the first writings I ever made sitting at my father’s desk in front of the old Corona Sterling – only more meticulous, less athletic, sexier.

I’d forgotten about the sweet bell and the zing of a finished line. It took me about ten minutes, but the exquisite rhythm came back. Forget all those aching, ridiculous typing classes I took in high school. Those had a secretarial aura that insisted the point of using the machines was to type up someone else’s words. Quickly. No wonder I dreaded those drilling hours. If Mrs. W had put a woman’s typewriter in front of me and told me to have at it, I might have actually done it without rolling my eyes.

It’s typewriter abracadabra. I know it sounds crazy, but the entire world slows down and attends when I’m at the keys. The computer is a ravenous time-eater and feeds my embarrasingly short attention span. I swat web pages like gnats. Not so on the Socialite. On her the words are heavy and sentences have a sound. I can actually hear myself think. And that pesky “rewrite while you write” problem? Forget it. Each keystroke is an unregetted decision. Even when I pause or find myself a little stuck, my nails rest on the home-keys and restlessly tap until the words come.

And the words do come.

The pearls what were her eyes

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Who doesn’t know the brevity of a sparkling thing?
The dustmotes at the window turn stained-glass cracklings
and we breathe them, unfiltered. No apologies.
Who has time to put the post-apocalyptical spin on fleeting prettiness?

Tattoo the Brazilian runway girls with their BMIs,
deny the sylphs access to the dream.
A woman is a thirsty opal glaring from an igneous fist,
an uncut stone, a fallow shard of sea-glass accidental lightning-skip,
a novelty.

The stubby cacti growing misplaced on Petit Jean Mountain are women.
There are warning signs:
Don’t pick native wildflowers.
Wear hard shoes against their low, unexpected prickle.

The mountain is a little woman and the story of a dying woman,
and a ledge women throw their hearts from.
Sometimes the rest follows.
Sometimes in the morning papers there are
stories of wildflower women illegally picked and
left like breadcrumbs on the Seven Hollows Trail for sleepy bears.

Don’t get lost.

(Still working on this one. I think I’m watching too much CNN.)

I whined, but I wrote

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The two suitors offering to light my cigarette are Frustration and Distraction. You know those boys, and they’re not gentlemen at all. It’s bad enough when one of them comes calling, but I’m being double-teamed.

My personal, sacred scribbling time suffers, and it makes me difficult. Frustration and Distraction are wild-eyed bad-boys and they’ve both simply got to shoo.

I used to have this delightful hour every day when I sat outside – rain, shine, or tornado – and did a little hand-scribbling in a chemistry notebook. I’m one of those fidgety extroverts who can’t write in a closed room alone, so I always wrote outside the student center or at the local coffee shop. Just enough solitude, just enough background murmur, and the perfection of a good notebook.

It wasn’t that I was stoically productive or especially brilliant at those times, that wasn’t really the point. It was a languid, trusted hour without rules and “no smoking within 25 feet of door” signs. It was my hand gripping a perfect pen and gliding over the page with so much to say, to cram into that little hour. It was bad coffee and too many Virginia Slims in places where I never had to create a character because they were sitting all around me. Makes me a little misty just thinking about it.

I’m going to whine now, so pay close attention.

The problem began with the outdoor smoking ban at the coffee shop and student center renovations that cordoned off my Very Perfect Place To Write. These two events happened concurrently, leaving me no choice but to write in my office or at home. Both places lack ever-changing crowds and weather. Both places have a computer, and I suspect the computer is killing me. I really do.

In the time it took to write this far I already checked Ebay, my office email, my personal email, my students’ group blog, the weather for tomorrow, and CNN for the latest on the Michigan primary. Hillary won a one-man (person) race and Huckabee finished third. I’m serious. You know I am because you do this, too.

Frustration and Distraction. There they are. It’s enough to age me beyond my 36 years (thanks for the suggestion, Tim).

I’ve decided that the computer also makes me rewrite as I’m creating – something that doesn’t happen when I’m handwriting. It also makes me all parenthetical and dashy – a terrible, computer-invoked symptom reflecting an inability to concentrate for more than, say, three running seconds. Multitasking is good if you’re trying to clean the house or get ahead at your factory job, but it’s literary murder for those of us who need to write for extended periods just to feel balance.

I ran across a blog the other day that blew me away – Strikethru. Typecasting or papercasting is so delightful that I won’t attempt explanation. I’ll just show you. And then I’ll check my mail and Ebay and go to bed. You really should stop by this site.

Loose Ends

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I’m really awfully busy, what with the spring semester starting and reading Jack Cafferty’s It’s Getting Ugly Out There and Ebay and scribbling terrible drafts of Chesaleen and all. It takes more effort than you think to write badly and then go back at it again.

As soon as I get my instructional land-legs back, finish Jack’s book, win that typewriter on Ebay, and do a little more justice to poor Chesaleen, I’ll write about every last bit of it. Especially Jack (note the familiarity), who I’m now a little in love with.

I also have something to say about birthdays and my new decision to lie about them. If you recognized the picture above, then you should probably be lying about your age, too. Those who don’t get it will probably be seeing me in class on Monday.

Miss Dolly

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I did not bring a casserole. Unable to concoct to exacting specification the ooze and string of cheese gluing warm egg noodles to bits of ham, bell pepper, I chose instead to come to her empty handed. Two days earlier, catching shallow life through a mask she told me about casseroles. Don’t ever make a good one, she steamed into the plastic, it will be the only thing they remember of you.

I took her walk. I stepped her route, wanting my feet to roll and plant precisely as hers did each afternoon. I memorized each uprooted sidewalk slab, noting the angle, the lift of the foot required to navigate, where to slow, to speed, noting fragment odors she used to find her way. She began and ended here where the ginkgo drops its slippery yellows and, later, the rocky seeds that smell like five-day garbage when crushed. Half blind, she ached for strong odors.

Who was it pinched the stray hairs tight into final finger waves? Would she have cared? So many times I saw her bent hard at the middle toward some too-thick patch of irises, pausing only to remove a paperclip from an apron pocket, stuffing clip and dirt and sweat into that hair. The object was not hair, but irises. She only wanted a clearer field of vision.

Dolly liked order, but only as neatly as she could control it in the yard and kitchen. She had an eye for symmetry, pruning her life and privet hedges closely. Personally, she was discreetly unkempt, as old women with faulty eyes become when they can no longer fasten their own pearls on Sunday morning. She did her best work outside, guarding always between those flattened breasts a rag, reached for delicately, used to wipe neck sweat– or child sweat, if a loose neighbor child wandered into the yard. The small and curious and were soon put to work, paid each time with one unsquandered nickel. Those empty breasts never suckled anything except one husband, Baptist, 36 years dead. He was a man who knew how to wear a hat, she said, but still a man.

The afternoon he was put to ground they said she gave away all his suits to the young music teacher who lived alone and sang unchristian arias like a woman. Afterwards Dolly ambled – then more briskly, steadily – the two miles to the Plymouth dealership. Still dressed in unchanged mourning, graveside dust settled into the woolen bend of her arm, she told the owner, Teach me how to drive. Two hours later she placed a roll of old bills in the man’s upturned hands and eased the black-finned Plymouth home, headlights off in the dark. The following morning she became a Methodist and never went to church again.

Dolly left an expanse of small things old women leave behind. Chipped china of irreplaceable pattern, forgotten blankets, a hundred clear Kerr jars lined up like armageddon on failing pantry shelves, a pale blue initialed vanity case, locked forever and certainly never used which bounced against my leg as I opened the gate from her backyard to mine.

Back home, I found a straw hat to guard against freckles. I slipped out behind the mourners to weed her dill and took note of the crabapples beginning to fall like rose-star bombs ready for the steam and smash of the jelly pot, stretched a newspaper rubber band from my wrist and knotted my hair behind me careless as Saturday morning. When I fell to my knees, it was for work.

(I’ve been pulling out old first-draft pieces to mess with, and this is one rough one. It’s all over the place. I’ll pull it to the forefront for a bit and see if I can’t make it do what I want it to do.)

Resolutions, the Jetsons, and the Marlboro Man

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Weren’t we all supposed to be flying our cars around multilevel air highways like the Jetsons by now? And what about those space-needle apartments with robot maids? It’s 2008 and I’m still making my own coffee.

Never mind. It’s time to make resolutions I won’t keep.

Number 1: Go to the gym every day for three hours until I have abs like that gal on The Firm video.

Number 2: Finish every novel I’ve ever started and publish them all. Wear sunglasses to Kroger to escape adoring public.

Number 3: Serve champagne to the Publisher’s Clearinghouse Sweepstakes Prize Patrol when they come calling.

Number 4: Meet Mr. Right, the poet/cowboy/handsome/no crazy ex-wives/millionaire, live happily ever after, and such.

Number 5: Clean out the garage.

Done. If I’m going to disappoint myself it’s best to go all the way.

Just don’t say "moniker." It’s pretentious.

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I’m an unapologetic name collector. Usually I find them in phonebooks, but I’ve been known to eavesdrop on conversations at Wal-Mart and a few other places, wander off an aisle or two, and quickly scribble down stolen names from snippets of conversation. Sometimes I thieve entire conversations, but that’s a story for another day.
When I travel, which isn’t terribly often, I’ve been known to snag entire phonebooks so I may, once safely home, flip hungrily through foreign books and update my list. It’s a long list, but you can bet I’ve never been stuck for a character’s name. Not once. For me, nothing makes the writing go faster. There are actors who can’t get into character until they find the right pillbox hat or slip on the perfect pair of wingtips. When I’m writing fiction, it’s the name.
There’s a lot of mojo in the perfect name. That’s why all these uptight new parents now spend an extravagance on naming services for their bouncing baby whatevers. It makes me laugh, especially since a generation or so ago people were having too many kids to even care. There was a formula: name the first boy after his dad, and all ensuing boys after various uncles or near-relations. John. Robert. William. Girls were named after grandmothers and aunts , or flowers, as long as the name wasn’t too ugly or the female relative too morally loose. My ex-father-in-law’s name is LD. No periods. It’s not short for anything nor does it represent his initials. Granny Fason just had too many damn kids and very little creativity. He has a brother named JD. You see what I mean.
Not many couples have seven or eight kids anymore unless they’re a Duggar. At least they have a whole Bible full of names to choose from. Now there’s research into meanings, hidden, obvious, and historic in a name. It has to stand out, give the child a head start in an ugly, competitive, eat-‘em-alive world. Forget the fat books full of baby names, over-pay some opportunist to name your kid Apple.
Actually, that’s good advice when naming characters – forget the baby name books. Otherwise everyone in your stories will sound like soap stars. Chance. Trace. Skye. Unless you’re actually writing soaps…or those bodice-rippers I used to read in junior high with Fabio (there’s another one) on the cover.
I like the phonebooks because those names are real and they cross several generations of naming trends. A good small-town, southern phonebook can take you to naming places you never thought possible. Twanette. Loyce. Crescentia. Eulid. Vernadean. Eightha. Thurl. And those are my throw-aways. I have hundreds of others I’d use in second. Names like Portia, Sulie, Ever, Warfield, and Rueben just write their own stories.
Some are just too unbelievable to use. For example, I went to school with a girl named Listerine Piggee, bless her heart. Another gal who sweated on the first day of school was Vagina (pronounced va-geena) Sumpter. Luckily, calling roll on the first day of school the teachers always lilted, “Miss Sumpter?” giving poor Va-geena the benefit of the pause. I’ve used this roll-calling trick myself when face-to-rollbook with an unfortunately named student. I do appreciate an unusual name, but not when it victimizes. No character – living or created – should have to answer to Listerine.