Fiat Lux: the Light Show

Yesterday was the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, which is an important Marian feast day, so I thought I should go to Mass. It was at 6:15 PM, so naturally it was very dark outside. (The sun set on Edinburgh at 3:39 PM.)  The well-lit wooden church was a beacon in the night. It was also nice to see extra candles around the statue of Our Lady.

December 8 also marked the beginning of the Year of Mercy. Our archbishop wrote a splendid pastoral letter about the Year of Mercy, encouraging the faithful to go to confession often this year, returning to the practice of frequent confession. It was not at all a license for license, as some people fear the Year of Mercy may be. It was very much a message to seek actively the mercy of God.

But both the Feast day and the inauguration of the Year of Mercy were overshadowed by some strange lights. St. Peter's Basilica was plunged into darkness and a show was projected onto it. I am of two minds about this.

First of all, worse things have happened to Christian churches. Any frank history of the Spanish Civil War will reveal unspeakable horrors. But even Christians have done awful things to Christian churches: sold them to developers, sold them for non-Christian worship, opened them to non-Christian worship, hosted profane concerts, hosted frankly indecent liturgical dances, destroyed their interiors, introduced new decorations expressing theological dodginess... A few gigantic photos of monkeys, lions and tigers projected onto the front seem pretty mild in comparison.

However, this was the front of St. Peter's Basilica, the most widely recognized Christian church on earth.

But then it could be argued that "the world is charged with the grandeur of God" and that the beauty of the creation reflects the beauty of God. Why not on the front of St. Peter's Basilica? Many old churches have ornate carvings of animals, ordinary people--and even demons!

However, among the images, I understand, were photos of overcrowded city centres, suggesting that you can have too much of a good thing when the good thing is people. There was also a photo of a woman, on her knees, in suffocating, servile bondage gear, e.g. a burka. Why? As part of a celebration of the world's cultures?* Part of contemporary British culture is binge drinking; I hope there was no photo of that.

But then it could be argued that these were not advertisements for Coca-Cola and Pizza-Pizza. The spectacle was far a good cause--helping to inspire delight in and care for the health of the planet we live on. It was, one almost imagines, the illustrated version of Laudato Si'.

However, one of the show's primary financial backers was the World Bank, which funds pro-abortion and contraception schemes in developing countries, acting under the belief that you can have too many people. (How well that belief worked out for China.) Also, the artist was not a Christian artist; the art was not Christian art.

St Peter's was built to give glory to God, not to give glory to creation. Like all churches, it thus has a certain dignity, but it can lose dignity, too. When I first walked into St Peter's--in 1998--I was impressed by its size but disappointed by its atmosphere. All around me tourists were talking and taking photos, and it felt as though the cameras had sucked the holiness right out of the building. I saw a tourist paddle his hand in a holy water font and flick the water at his giggling friend. It wasn't until I saw a team of paramedics hurrying to the aid of a woman who had fainted that I could feel Christ's presence in the building.

Since then I have become rather fond of St. Peter's and more tuned in to its holiness. Any ire has shifted from tourists who don't know better to security guards who should know better, e.g. the one who requested that I take my hat off before I approached the tomb of  then-Bl. John Paul 2 ("Ma sono una DONNA!" was answered only with a smug smile, shake of the head and a gesture indicating the removal of a hat. As far as I can tell, mantillas and headscarves still pass muster.)

After thinking out all the potential arguments, I am sorry that St. Peter's was used as a film screen and wish it hadn't been. Nobody goes into a cinema to look at a film screen, and rarely does anyone go into a cinema to worship God. St. Peter's is supposed to show the light of Christ to the world, not dim the steady light of Christ so that the flickering lights of the world may be seen more clearly.

The image of the film screen is very important to me, for I know that men and women often use each other as film screens on which to project their own fond imaginings, getting upset when the reality of the supposed film screen interferes with the film. No man or woman should be reduced to a film screen, and neither should a Christian church. The only truly appropriate show I can imagine projected onto St. Peter's would be live news footage of  the Second Coming.

One last thing. My friend Hilary used to work late in Rome, and no matter how late she worked, she could walk through St. Peter's Square and look up at the Papal Apartments. A light within would almost always be on, and she imagined Pope Benedict working away at his desk for all our benefit ; the light betokened a father caring for his children. And before the abdication, I too had a chance to cross the Piazza after dark and look up at the Papal Apartments. A light was on; Papa Ratzi was working.

***
*BA says they could make her a cardinal, and then she would be Cardinal Burka

Update: It may be that the woman is begging in the photo. If so, her misery is certainly not due to climate change, nor to capitalism, but to cultural horrors that Christians resolutely oppose.

Dusting Off the Shoes

Today is Artistic Wednesday, and I must praise the committee of the Edinburgh swing-dance society I fled earlier this autumn. Depressed by the snobbishness of the society, particularly the evil LEADS, I decided not to spend another penny of household income in lessons and workshops. As regular readers will recall, I was late in dropping out of the last workshop, so I got a nasty phone call from a male stranger.

Now, this next part is genius. This is how you win friends and influence people.

Feeling irate, I emailed the committee to tell them that I had had an angry phone call from a member of their team and please take me off their list.

The committee emailed back to say they were really sorry and the individual responsible would no longer be on the team. They hoped I would come back as I was a valued member of the society. I recognized two of the three names signed to the bottom of this email, and I remembered that they are friendly women, one particularly cheerful and kind.

I was a bit taken aback that the chap was leaving the team (surely not because of my email?), and I giggled at the idea that I was a valued member of the society. Although if I have learned anything from the Leads, it is that I am not a valued member of the society, I felt flattered all the same.

So I wrote back to thank the committee for their email and to explain why I was not coming back. I had met many great women, and a few nice men, but the power imbalance between the Leads and the Followers, exacerbated by the local habit of women asking men to dance, was just too much. Also nothing marginalizes Beginners more than group dances like the Shim Sham, which are never taught, for we have to stand back looking on wistfully while the Advanced folk take to the floor.

(I learned all the power imbalance and marginalization lingo at theology school, and it is very useful for talking to university students.)

I expected nothing but a cold silence, for who was I to tell them how to run their society, eh? But to my amazement, I received ANOTHER email from the society telling me that I was right about the power imbalance, and how they had come up with a Code of Etiquette in which to train up new Leads, and as there would be a workshop on the group dances this coming week, they were inviting me to attend for free.

At this point I thought, Holy guacamole. Maybe I am a valued member of the society! 

So I wrote back to tell them that  I would take them up on their invitation and, what's more, throw in the £3 for the social dance. There are, after all, two or three chaps there that I enjoy dancing with, and sometimes a fellow Canadian turns up who is happy to talk to anyone.

Of course, I am not convinced that I want to go back to spending my Wednesday nights smiling away and saying "Oh, good job" to a pack of male dance snobs. However, I must admit that the committee really care about winning and keeping new members in their society. And that you really do catch more disgruntled flies with honey than with vinegar.

Chocolate Covered Orange Peel

This is not the answer to life but my only project this week that could be at all considered artistic. It is based on the recipe for sugared orange peel I found in Sugared Orange by Beata Zatorska.  Basically I made the recipe and thought, Hey, what if I dipped some of these in chocolate? Would they be as good as the chocolate covered orange peel in Krakowski Kredens? And lo, they were better.

(In case you are wondering, Krakowski Kredens is a boutique grocery store that sells old-fashioned Polish edibles. It's where Poles with a bit of money buy gifts for their friends back in the UK. I am cross with Krakowski Kredens because they do not sell my favourite flavoured vodkas in 100 mL bottles, and thus I cannot bring them back in my carry-on luggage.)

So with no further ado, here is my recipe for chocolate covered orange peel, based on the recipe in Sugared Orange.

Seraphic's Culturally Appropriated Chocolate Orange Peels

You need:

2 orange
330 g/1.75 cups/three-quarter pound fine sugar (e.g. caster)
2.5 cups of cold water
100 g/bar good quality dark chocolate
small sharp knife
2 saucepans (or saucepan and a double boiler)
wooden spoon
tongs/slotted spoon
wire rack
baking paper/wax paper
tin/plastic storage container with lid
stove

Directions:

1. Wash oranges to remove any wax.

2. Carefully cut through the oranges so that you cut only the skins and not the fruit. Make four cuts lengthwise on each and then gently peel off the four pieces from each orange. Put skinned oranges aside.

3. Laying each peel flat, carefully cut or scrape off as much of the white pith as possible with the knife.

4. Cut each quarter lengthwise into four strips. You should have 32 equal pieces, but don't sweat it if you tore the quarters while scraping them and so this turns out to be impossible. It's all good.

5. Put the sugar in a saucepan, pour in the water, and stir the sugar constantly over low heat until it is completely dissolved. You'll know this has happened when miraculously the water is clear again. Turn up the heat and keep stirring until the sugar-water starts to boil. Put the strips of orange peel into the sugar-water and turn the heat to low.

6. Leave peels simmering there for two hours. Come back after an hour and half to check up on them. Obviously you do not want the pot to boil dry, but really that shouldn't happen within two hours on low.

7. Turn off the heat. Lift each strip of sweet orangey goodness out of the pot with the tongs or slotted spoon and carefully drop it on the wire rack to cool. (Put something under the wire rack to catch the drips.) Pour what is now orange-flavoured simple syrup into a jug to use or discard when it cools and wash the pot, utensils, counter, stove top at ONCE with hot water. If you don't you will have a very sad time trying to get the sugar off later. (I rinse them with boiling water from the kettle.)

8. With double boiler or one pot on top of another, bring water to boil. Break up 100 g/bar of dark chocolate and put into the top pot. Watch like hawk.

9. Holding onto the end of each now cool but sticky orange peel strip, dip into the melted chocolate until it is covered.  Place on wax/baking paper to set.

10. If there is melted chocolate left over, section the orange and chuck pieces into the chocolate pot. Poke them around until they are covered. Put them on the wax paper to set.

11. When set, put the chocolate orange peels in a wax/baking paper lined tin or plastic container and hide it. Eat the chocolate covered orange sections as a reward for your hard work.

12. Serve the orange peels with coffee or tea (e.g. after a dinner party) as an elegant treat for the deserving.

Art, Sex and Humility

Today is Artistic Wednesday, but I have been thinking about humility in connection with language studies, not to mention relations between the sexes. Perhaps there's a way to link all these themes.

As I made apparent last week, I have been reading about the career of the Polish artist Stanisław Wyspiański (1869-1907). I am impressed by how very focused he was on his creativity--he excelled in drama, design, illustration and painting--from a very young age. As a child, he was introduced to leading Polish artists and thinkers. As a high school student he studied his brains out. When he graduated he enrolled in both university AND art college and was chosen to help the director of the art college renovate one of his city's most prominent churches. Then he went abroad to immerse himself in the art scenes of France, Germany and Italy. He wasted no time--which was fortunate for the world as he died at the age of 38.

Any kind of artistic work takes humility, by which I mean an objective view of one's own abilities and knowledge. "True objectivity is authentic subjectivity," said the Canadian philosopher Father Bernard Lonergan, S.J. You have to somehow divorce your own self-love (or "ego") from your ability or knowledge or virtue to get a true sense of it and, especially, to improve it.

Humility, properly understood, is not self-abnegation. The humble person doesn't belittle her talents or knowledge. Neither, of course, does she puff them up or talk about them all the time. The humble artist isn't interested in herself at all but in the subject at hand and wants to express that subject as well as she possibly can.

This often takes correction, which can be very, very difficult to receive, judge and accept or reject as one's artistic sense deems necessary. When it comes to learning a second language, correction may feel embarrassing, but it is generally trustworthy when it comes from a native speaker. Not only that,  the sharp emotion of embarrassment helps sew the correction into the memory. However, when it comes to one's own invention, the wrong intervention, especially a malicious intervention, can seriously hurt an artist's ability to create.

What drives me craziest as an artist, by the way, are moral judgments on my writing. "This sounds flat to my ear" is useful. "You spelled 'loquacious' wrong," is also useful. "You should not have written/publish this, for it is immoral," is not useful. In fact, it drives me into a frenzy of rage.

I am a person who writes and spends quite a lot of time writing. I write for money. I write for love. I write to learn. I write to counsel and comfort and help. It is so much a part of me that it is difficult for me to separate it from my sense of self. (How I hate getting rejection letters.) However, to improve my art, that is what I must do.

At the same time, though, we are called to be objective not only about our art but about ourselves. Fortunately this gets easier as you get older. Confidence improves with age, experience and success. Confidence leads to humility, for confidence makes it easier to accept  constructive criticism--even if rudely or clumsily offered--with gratitude. It also makes it easy to reject destructive criticism with grace--even if that means only thinking "You're clearly an idiot" instead of saying (or writing) "You're an idiot." Naturally, confidence prevents the poor artist from thinking "I'm an idiot."

Remember, self-depreciation is not humility, unless you mean it only as a comparison with some admired person in your field, or a saint, or God. "I am little, Thou art Great, O my God. Do Thou assist me, O my Redeemer" is a far cry from, "I'm an idiot."

What can be very, very hard for women these days is admitting to a man--especially one she doesn't much like--that she is wrong, and he is right. This can be harder for women then it can be for some men. I wonder why this is, and I suspect it is because of the high expectations of women of my (and the subsequent) generation to meet and even surpass men in fields hitherto dominated by men, with special honours for anyone who becomes the "First Woman [fill in the blank]".  To admit intellectual defeat by a man just hurts so bad--unless you are married to him, of course. "Oh, I'm sorry, my dear. You are quite right. Wikipedia is on your side" is easier in a loving relationship--especially one in which there is a shared commitment to truth.

That said, yesterday's post suggests that it is very, very hard for men to admit to a woman that he is wrong in some intellectual matter, and she is right. Frankly, I think it has always been this way, and if I had to hazard a guess it is because men associate being corrected with their early childhood of mothers, grandmothers, babysitters, nannies, older sisters and kindergarten teachers all telling them off. However, hopefully modern man will join modern woman in the joint project of accepting correction/constructive criticism while rejecting destructive criticism with grace. Personally, I can think of no laudably humble and edifying sight than a man turning to a woman--or a woman turning to a man--to say, "I did some research, and I must admit you were quite right."

What I Did Today

Because obviously I am completely insane. 

Stanisław Wyspiański

Przez Dorothy McL 

21 X 2015

Moim ulubionym muzeum w Krakowie jest Kamienica Szołayskich (1). Mają zawsze wystawy sztuki młodopolskiej tam. „Młoda Polska” jest szkołą albo ruchem artystycznym polskim; kwitnął w Polsce przełomu XIX i XX wieków. To sztuka „Art Nouveau” Polski: bardzo romantyczna.

Jednym moich ulubionych artystów z  skoły Młoda Polska jest Stanisław Wyspiański (2). Wyspiański to malarz, dramaturg, poeta, grafik, architekt oraz projektant mebli. Jego najsłynnym dziełem jest spektakł „Wesele”, ale jeszcze nie rozumiem słów, a więc moim ulubionym utworem Wyspiańskiego jest ten obraz (3) „Planty z widokiem na Wawel.”

Wyspiański urodził się 15 stycznia 1869 roku w Krakowie, przy ulicy Krupniczej 14. Jego rodzicami byli Franciszek, który był rzeżbiarzą i fotografikiem, i Maria z Rogowskich. Kiedy Wyspiański miał cztery lata, Wyspiańscy  przeprowadzili się do Domu Długosza przy ulicy Kanoniczej 25.  Mieszkanie miało wspaniały widok z Wawelu, i wiele lat później Wyspiański napisał ten werset:

„U stóp Wawelu miał ojciec pracownię

wielką izbę biała wzsklepiona

żyjącą figur zmarłych wielkim tłumem

tam chłopiec mały chodziłem, co czułem,

to później w kształty mej sztuki zakłułem.”

Niestety w 1876 roku umarła matka chłopca, i młody Stanisław miał wyjechać tej sielanki. Franciszek, jego ojciec, był pijakiem, a więc opiękę nad nim przejęli wujostwo Stankiewiczowie. Ale Stankiewiczowie byli ludżmi wysokiej kultury, i w ich domu Wyspiański poznał słynnego polskiego malarza Jana Matejka (4) oraz innych ważnych polskich intelektualistów i artystów.

W 1879 roku, kiedy miał 10 lat, chłopiec rozpoczał naukę w słynnym Gimnazjum św. Anny w Krakowie. Ta szkoła była jedynym gimnazjum w miejsce gdzie wykłady odbywały się w języku polskim. (Musimy pamiętać, że Kraków i całe południu-zachód Polska w tym czasie zależał od Austrii.) Wyspiański był bardzo dobrym studentem, i miał wiele interesów artystycznych i patriotycznych: teatr, malarstwo, literatura piękna, historia, legendy polskie.

W 1887 roku, kiedy miał 18 lat, Wyspiański zapisał się na wydział filozoficzny Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, i jednocześnie rozpoczał studia malarskie w Szkole Sztuk Pięknych w Krakowie, której Jan Matejko był dyrektorem w tym czasie. Utalentowany student pomagał Matejka w pracy w renowacjach koscióła Mariackiego (5). 

And so on.  I'm not even being graded.  Don't steal this, small Polish schoolchildren! It probably has a hundred errors, and one of my two principal sources wasWikipedia.

***
Update: Polish readers will be relieved to discover that I sent my essay to my Polish friend "Hipsterka", and she has made many suggestions for improvements.  

Update 2: KONIEC!

A Mustering of Storks

Stork (Polish: Bocian)

Today is Artistic Wednesday, and I am cudgeling my brain for something artistic to write about.

Since I came home from Poland, my thoughts have all been about the Synod and hoovering the flat. Hoover, hoover, hoover. Fortunately, the moths who munch seem to have one favourite snack, and it is the carpet directly under my office chair. Why they pick the place I am all morning is beyond me. They seem to leave our other rooms alone.

Downstairs is another story, alas, but I am not responsible for it. Thank heavens! I am not sure how many rooms there are downstairs--I have not even been in them all--but if it were my job to dust and hoover them I would not have time for anything else. In its hey-day, the Historical House must have had at least a dozen women dusting and carpet-sweeping away.

But I do not want to think about those horrible, bloodless little creatures--when I squish them, they feel like straw--but about storks, or rather, Malecki's "Gathering of Storks".

I wish there was a better photo online of this painting. It went straight to my heart when I saw it in Krakow's National Gallery this year because it reminded me of a Polish class reading about storks (bociani). The importance of storks in Poland was underscored at the bottom of my teacher's essay by a quote from the Polish poet Norwid:

Do kraju tego, gdzie winą jest dużą 

Popsować gniazdo na gruszy bocianie, 

Bo wszystkim służą… 

Tęskno mi, Panie…

Hmm, I think I posted on that before. When I get excited about, or interested in,something or someone I tend to get repetitive. Well, to recap, this verse means, "For that country, where it is a big sin/to destroy the nests in the pear trees of the storks/because they serve everyone/I long, o Lord."

As acknowledging the Christian faith in such polite Edinburgh circles as a university night school class as something culturally important is so rare, I almost burst into tears of joy reading this verse. Yes, I realize it is about a pre-Christian Polish superstition about storks, but the poet is obviously talking to the Lord God.  Among the Poles, Christianity and nationalism and family and food and art and everything has all been mixed up in such a way that I am sure it gave and continues to give the Frankfurt School (boo, hiss!) a serious case of indigestion.

I wonder if Norwid wrote that when he was in self-imposed exile in the United States. I am in self-imposed exile from Canada, but I very rarely miss it--although I miss my family and friends, of course. However, I live in the age of internet and cheap travel, so it is entirely possible to use the country you live in as nothing more than a bedroom if you choose to. (I don't, and as evidence I did not bother celebrating Canadian Thanksgiving on Monday. All that cooking and baking, for what?Forget it.)

When I feel longing for some Canadian landscape, it is usually for brunch at Kilgore's Bar Meets Grill. For that plate/of Eggs Benedict/with fried potatoes/and red caviar sprinkled over/served with a bottomless cup of coffee/I long, o Lord. That said, I am very pleased indeed that my brother and his family have moved to the countryside in Quebec, for it is terribly pretty. Perhaps my nephew and niece, surrounded by such a beautiful landscape, will feel for Estrie what Norwid felt for Poland. And maybe, just maybe, there are storks!

Stephen King's First Novel

Stephen King believes in God but is not  a fan of organized religion. He grew up as a mainstream American Protestant--a Methodist, if I remember correctly--and married a lapsed Catholic. I wonder if he considers himself an actual--as opposed to a cultural--Christian. Heaven knows, he has certainly received hate mail from Christian preachers.

I am very interested in Stephen King right now because I was so impressed by his book On Writing, particularly his account of his near-death by a habitually careless driver. He said it was as if he had been "almost killed" by one of his own characters, and certainly I feel like I know from Stephen King what Maine is like.

This frightens me a bit, since I have moved from my own city to Edinburgh, and although I have written many, many more stories about Edinburgh than about Toronto, I gravely doubt my ability to capture Edinburgh in words. On the one hand, outsiders see things others can't. On the other, foreign languages don't come easily to my ear, and on the Rough Bus it takes me a moment to determine if the noisy people behind me are speaking Polish or Scots English.

Yeah.

Last night B.A. and I actually quarrelled over whether or not the giggling girl behind us on the Rough Bus had threatened to "mill" her noisy lover. The lover had decided to repeat everything she said, so I heard it twice: "Ah'll f----in' mill ye." "Ah'll f--in' mill ye." Their pal's threat into his mobile phone that he would "f--in' batter" his interlocutor was much more in keeping with the diction of the Rough Bus. And now in the light of day, I wonder if Scotland's Future wasn't saying "melt" not "mill", for "Ah'll f---in' melt ye" is indeed something I have clearly heard. My grandmother, whose mother hailed from Edinburgh, and who probably never used the F-word in her life, preferred "skelp."

The amusing thing, of  course, is that a fair number of Poles (albeit always male) on Edinburgh busses also lard their conversations with expletives. Their F-word is simply the crudest Polish word for "whore." It begins with K and ends with A, and if I spelled it out, my Polish readers would object. Interestingly, it serves as noun, adjective and adverb, without any variation that I have heard so far. I hear only "k***a", never "k***ej" or "k***ę" or "k***ą" or even "k***ami". Funny that.

But I digress.

Yesterday I sat down to read Carrie from cover to cover, and it is even better than the Sissy Spacek film which so terrified me on Hallowe'en 1984. The film gives the impression that the real villain is  Carrie's crazy mother, but the novel makes it crystal clear that--as awful as Carrie's mother is--the real culprit is the scapegoating mechanism of Carrie's peer group. They treat Carrie like a worm from her first day at school, and after 13 years or so, the worm turns.

You would not know from the film that what sets Carrie's ruin in motion was her getting on her knees to say grace on her first day at school. And when I read that, I remembered the impassioned fighting between the evangelicals and the Catholics in my teenage pro-life club over whether or not we should be kneeling in prayer in public. The evangelical girls were all for it, despite the shrieks of mirth and hatred from Rent-a-mob whenever any of us did that. Meanwhile, you can see that King's heart aches for poor Carrie.

Poor Carrie. It is quite clear that her mother's church encompasses exactly two people: her and Carrie. King, who is clearly on the side of the scapegoat, doesn't mock Christianity. He merely takes the more frightening aspects of American Christianity--some Protestant-inspired, some Catholic--and makes up Margaret White's bizarre heresy. Part of the horror for a devoutly Christian reader will be how Margaret warps and shrinks Christian teaching in a way that trembles on blasphemy.

That said, Christians can frighten each other into fits with descriptions of hell. Recently I was terribly spooked by Ann Barnhardt's assertion that the physical torments of hell are merciful distractions from the psychological horror of knowing one could have and should have seen God but now can't.  Meanwhile, I find it funny that atheists think believers are cowards because we hope for heaven. Hello, there is that hell option, too, not to mention the rather more thinkable (but not all that much fun) Purgatory to look forward to. The Lenten homilies of James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man scared the dickens out of me, but I am not the whit worse for it.

King begins his tale with a news article about a reported "Rain of Stones", and I was surprised and cheered by that. As starting any big work is frightening, pretending you haven't by penning a fake news report is an excellent idea. There is a lot of foreshadowing in Carrie, thanks to snippets from news articles, government hearings into the Maine disaster, surviving witnesses' magazine articles or biographies, letters. Those work quite nicely, too.

Meanwhile, Carrie is certainly a page-turner. Even though I knew the story, I couldn't wait to see what happened next. I was actually excited to see the extra pages after I thought the story had to be over now. I read so quickly, I forgot the whole point to this exercise was "To See How King Does It." That will have to wait until tomorrow when I can get back to the library.

Dissecting Heyer's "Cotillion"

WARNING:  Spoilers galore. Do not read if you have not yet read Georgette Heyer's Cotillion, aka the one in which Kitty has to marry one of her cousins in order to inherit great-uncle Matthew's loot. 

Really, I mean it. Spoilers. Go away to read the book and only then come back.

My favourite of all Georgette Heyer's novels is Cotillion, and that is saying something, as a Heyer novel is to my adult life as a chocolate Easter egg was to my childhood. My mother's collection of Heyer novels had Easter-egg-coloured covers, and I was delighted to find a copy of her edition of  Cotillion, in perfect nick, in a used book shop last week.

Cotillion is my darling because of the Honourable Frederick Standen, aka Freddy. Much of Freddy's charm stems from the fact that Freddy is an early 19th century Bertie Wooster, only with his own unerring instincts about social life taking the place of Jeeves.  Freddy is funny, kind-hearted, reliable and easily imposed upon by a clever young woman. You can also take him out in public because he is perfectly dressed for any occasion:

The young gentleman who alighted from the chaise must have been recognized at first sight by the discerning as a Pink of the Ton for ... none but a regular Dash, patronizing the most exclusive of tailors, could have presented himself in so exquisitely molded a riding-coat, such peerless breeches, or such effulgent top-boots. [...] When he strolled into the inn, and shed the somewhat deceptive driving-coat, he was seen to be a slender young gentleman, of average height and graceful carriage. His countenance was unarresting but amiable; and a certain vagueness characterized his demeanour. When he relinquished his coat, his hat, his cane, and his gloves into the landlord's hands, a slight look of anxiety was in his face, but as soon as a penetrating glance at the mirror had satisfied him that the high points of his shirt-collar were uncrumpled, and the intricacies of a virgin cravat no more disarranged then a touch would set to rights, the anxious look disappeared, and he was able to turn his attention to other matters.  

Freddy appears to be an airhead, but the reader does not notice this quite as much as she might, for she has already been introduced to Freddy's cousin Lord Dolphington. Lord Dolphington's conversation and behaviour are so strange that one might be tempted to think he has a form of autism were he not a figment of Georgette Heyer's rich imagination. (Meanwhile, the only man I ever met who was as silly as Dolph had enormous aptitude for his studies.) Cotillion was written in 1953, and to use the parlance of 1953, Dolph is a moron.

But Freddy and Dolph are not the only contrasts in the book, and I think it is the contrasts, as well as the plot, that make Cotillion so enjoyable. All the characters are played against each other. Let us examine the principals:

First there is Great-uncle Matthew, an aged and bad-tempered, very wealthy miser, contrasted with his 20-something year old nephews.

Then each nephew is played off against the other, which is easy, as they don't really like each other and most are rivals for Uncle Matthew's fortune.

George, Lord Biddendon: the eldest, ugly and bad-tempered, but the head of his own family and fortune, strongly family-minded, and so not caring personally about the loot. He wants it for his brother Hugh.

The Honourable and Reverend Hugh Biddendon: handsome, athletic, preachy and cold.

Lord Foster Dolphington: a silly-billy only-child who is terrified of his own mother and yet is socially a cut above everyone else, for he is an Earl. (George is only a Baron, as Dolph points out.)

The Honourable Frederick Stanton: well-dressed, highly respectable, and does not (very unusual for a Heyer hero) employ or hire prostitutes (of any class) or conduct affairs with naughty married women. (He is the heir apparent to a title, albeit not as grand a title as Dolph's.)

 John (aka Jack) Westruther: handsome, flirtatious and absent.

Claud Westruther: absent, notable only for the fact he once chopped the head off Kitty's doll.

And naturally all these men are contrasted against an intelligent, mostly uneducated, plainly dressed, but cheerful and high-spirited teenage girl named Kitty Charing, Uncle Matthew's ward.

As an amusing contrast to both bad-tempered Matthew and young Kitty, there is Kitty's rather silly, romantic, poetry-quoting, forty-something governess Miss Fishguard aka Fish.

Jack's absence, plus Uncle Matthew's ridiculous demand that all his nephews offer to marry his adopted daughter Kitty, is the engine of the plot. Kitty has a crush on Jack and is seriously miffed that he didn't turn up with the other cousins to claim her hand in marriage. She is less than thrilled when her other cousins attempt it, especially when the Hon. and Rev. Hugh claims he's not doing it for the money but to save her from a Miss Fishguard-like fate.  So it is not surprising that Kitty A) runs away and B) embroils the kind-hearted but slow-witted Freddy in a plot to make Jack jealous, telling Freddy that she just wants a month's holiday in London.

It's a fantastic plot, really. So much can go wrong, and there is so much scope for character revelation and--even more important--character development. Naturally there is the lovely restrictive structure of early 19th century London high society which makes it almost impossible for unmarried society women to do anything they want to do, while affording men of the same class almost unlimited license. Boundaries are important in fiction. And, as in high school, everyone interesting in Heyer's world enjoys pushing the boundaries as far as they can without getting caught.

Thus we have Freddy's sister Meg, i.e. Lady Buckhaven, as a lovely contrast to Kitty, for she is blonde, married, her husband is away, and men can have all the fun of flirting with her without the risk of having to marry her or public censure for their beautiful lies about dying of love. Life was rather more fun for married women in Historical Houses then that it is now, except for all the dying in childbirth, but never mind that. It's not like my husband is going to China without me for a year. Where was I?

Oh yes, contrasts. Meg is also a contrast to her brother, for he has perfect dress sense, which he imparts to Kitty, and to her mother, Lady Legerwood, who is much older and also has perfect dress sense. Meg's terrible dress sense is also useful for getting Kitty believably dressed in finery on the cheap because rich Meg keeps buying clothes that don't suit her but on second thought will suit Kitty. The problem of dress is extremely important in a Georgette Heyer novel, and something all we girly girls can identify with, or could in 1953.

Lord Legerwood, Freddy's father, is incredibly intelligent (apparently) with real intellectual interests, and so he makes both a nice contrast to Freddy and a reliable witness to Freddy's character development over the course of the novel.

Naturally all the revelations about Jack's character, e.g. that he is quite a rake, put him in greater contrast to the sexually pure Freddy. ("Oh, I say, Seraphic. Dash it.")

Really, I am all about Freddy. I am fonder of Freddy than I am of Kitty although I imagine Georgette tried to even things up by comparing Freddy's kindness to Kitty to Kitty's own kindness to the bird-witted if beautiful Olivia, whom wicked Jack wishes to make his mistress. But I think to really win my heart, Kitty would have to make some sacrifice to save Freddy's life. Merely deciding that Jack isn't half the man Freddy is, isn't enough for me. I'm glad for her, of course, but ... she's not Léonie or even Frederica, is she? (Don't talk to me about Mary Challoner. Ugh. Shudder.)

Meanwhile, Georgette does something absolutely brilliant by restaging the opening scene in Uncle Matthew's neighbourhood at the end of the book. The nephews and Kitty are together again, and the climax is just fantastic. Naturally my favourite part is when Jack gets what is coming from him from Kitty, he insults Kitty and Freddy knocks him down. And then the Reverend Hugh, whom I sudden realize I must rather fancy, drops his prosy clerical persona:

"Good God!' said the Rector, forgetting his cloth. "Well done, Freddy! A nice, flush hit!"

It may be odd to think this, not the heart-warming scene between Freddy and Kitty that follows, the most satisfying moment in the whole book. However, it was certainly nice to see Jack get his comeuppance, and to see Freddy assert himself, and for the Rector to reveal that he is actually a human being and a boxer. (I have a high regard for amateur boxers.)

Could it be that the Honourable and Reverend Hugh is one of the progenitors of my own beloved Honourable and Reverend Hewbert? I have never considered this before, but it seems likely. The Problem of the Reverend Hugh Biddendon is that he is both a man and a clergyman, and sometimes one is at odds with the other. And the brilliance of Georgette's creation of him is that this one line, delivered at so violent and thus memorable a moment, tells this story.

Incidentally, there should be no such thing as a "throw-away character"when you are writing--a lesson Georgette teaches us very well. But meanwhile, in terms of writing character-based fiction, contrasts, contrasts, CONTRASTS.

Audience

Why dating writers is not a great idea.

Yesterday I went to an Open Mic event in a grungy Edinburgh café. My young friend Hipsterka (her style, not her name) met me at that café once, and the coffee was so terrible, I never set food again. The prices are very cheap,  the clientele very young, the business philosophy very community-centered--free art classes, etc--but that coffee. People, that coffee.

It had been many years since I put my name down for a five minute slot at an Open Mic (pronounced Mike, by the way). Now if I read in public, I read as a scheduled speaker. That sounds rather grand, so I will hasten to say that I am not invited to read that often: only when I am promoting a book. Fiction is not very well suited to the five minute Open Mic format, as the most one can read aloud intelligibly in five (or five-ish) minutes is 1250 words.

Still, I used to write five-minute stories for my friend Clara Blackwood's Syntactic Sunday, and I dug some of them out their box other day. They are tough-talking, swaggering little things, which shouldn't come as a surprise, considering my then audience: intense, ambitious, Bukowski-worshippers in denim and black leather jackets, or fishnet stockings with army boots. I have here a story that distressed my dearest buddy Trish, as it was inspired by one of her ghastlier friends:

 So will this café of yours take American dollars or do I have to get play money out of the bank machine? Look at all the pretty colours. I think it's so cute how you still have a Queen. Who's this guy? Her dad? Sir John MacWho? Never heard of him.

Socking it to the Yanks was a tried, tested and true crowd-pleaser in 1990s Toronto Bohemia. Socking it to the Catholic Church was too, unfortunately but inevitably. And so I am pleasantly surprised to discover I took a big risk and sent up the "New Yorker's" fashionable anti-Catholicism.

But may I say it's been a pleasure to meet you? Sally's told me so much about you. I must say, though, that I was surprised to hear that you're a Catholic. You seem so cultured. 

There follows a paragraph of anti-Catholic bluster that could have blown from the mouths of half the audience before I--or the 28 year old I was--move to the safer ground of New York snobbery about bread. (What's good here? Is there brown bread? What do you mean by brown bread? In New York brown bread means pumpernickel. Sixty-percent-whole-wheat? Hmm. Not what I call brown.) So go me. On a stage where the F-word was king, that was bad-ass.

The idea of going back into such a milieu as a foreign 40-something terrified the swagger out of me. It roiled my stomach, and I made sad faces at my husband, who seemed grumpy that he was outdoors on a work night. The sight of the café patrons, one a young drifter in actual rags, tempted me to run away. Fortunately, B.A. spotted the tell-tale "clipboard" of the unknown organizer, and the possessor was so young, thin, enthusiastic and apologetic that my heart was rung. Running away might hurt his feelings.

So I didn't. When a grand total of four people volunteered to read, the youth decided he had quorum, and his small band retreated to the back of the café. He read one of his own stories from his smartphone--a storm at the beach featured--and then I opened Ceremony. I estimated that three pages of Ceremony would take five minutes.

The light wasn't great. My reading wasn't great. An inner critic started editing as I read, which distracted me from such stagecraft as adding "he said", "she said" to make it clear who was speaking. All my life, I have been writing "by ear", which means my writing is peppered with "he announced," and "she replied." But most people do not hear short stories and novels aloud: mostly they read them silently. They don't need words to see who is speaking: they can follow the punctuation instead. And thus "he announced" and "she replied" get chopped out for easier reading.

The audience, half male, half female, listened attentively and politely. The readers among them had a variety of offerings: free verse, rhymed verse (!), machine-gun fire lefty ranting, and then, thanks to newcomers, very polished Spoken Word rapping. Astonishing. It was the first Open Mic I had ever attended that was bilge-free. It was also the smallest.

Why am I going? I asked myself on the bus. It was a long journey, and B.A. looked grumpy. Going out at night is really not his thing, a lack I believe he shares with the vast majority of husbands in the Global North. I'm going to meet other writers, I decided. I'm looking for the Edinburgh "Scene". It never occurred to me that there might not be one, or that it might be extremely small. Mostly what I hoped was that it was not entirely dominated by noisy sneering atheists and lunatics who write ludicrous fantasies about evil nuns: this is what my over-long experience of a writing-group had suggested.

Writing stories can be a miserable business. Well, no. Not the writing. The writing can be great fun. It is not unalloyed joy, though; sometimes you have to really work at something, like at a math problem, you have to think and erase and sometimes just leave it temporarily to get on with the next part. The editing can be fun, too, although you usually need some time to elapse after finishing the first draft to truly see/hear what must change. Hearing someone else (ideally) read it aloud is useful, too.

The miserable part is the rejection. And I should know: I got another rejection email today. Big sigh. Rejection goes with the territory. It's like learning a skill or language: you feel incredibly stupid for the first six months or year or years, but as you plod through, things improve. You feel less stupid--but there's a catch: change audience, genre or medium, and you have all that work to do over again. I can get a great idea, or just write the 800 - 1000 words, on some interesting Catholic subject and write to an Catholic editor, and say "Hey Ol' Buddy, what do you think?' Chances are, if the subject is topical enough ("SSPX and confession: what are "faculties", anyway?), he (it's usually he) will take it. But having changed course for another river, I must expect a very bumpy ride.

Update: Tune in tomorrow when I discuss the amazing, possibly inconvenient, fact that men and women are different when it comes to falling in love.

The Healing Calm of the New Town

Embra! Ancestral city!

You are like wealth.

Only she who has found you late

(as if by stealth)

in life can your charms rate

most adequately.

 That is my  homage to Adam Mickiewicz's "Inwokacja" in his epic poem Pan Tadeusz. I think it is quite funny, but then I spent a hour every morning one Christmas holiday in the countryside memorizing the "Inwokacja." Why ask way?

"Embra" is one local pronunciation of the great capital of Scotland, but I don't suggest you use it yourselves. Canadians with Scottish grandparents and/or great-grandparents tend to call it "Edinbura" or "Edinbra." Only Americans tourists or Canadians without Scottish great-grandparents call it "Edin-borrow." I know a German who calls it "Edynbayrg," and it is officially "Edynburg" in Polish. 

Edinburgh is one of the most beautiful cities in the English-speaking world. It may actually BE the most beautiful city in the English-speaking world. I couldn't say myself, but I would not be surprised. It is certainly the most beautiful city in the English-speaking world I have been to, and I have been to Bath, Oxford and Cambridge (and Cambridge, MA). 

As a tiny child I lived in Cambridge (England), and the year created a little Cambridge-Eden in my memory. This had almost nowt to do with the glorious university architecture. As a tiny child, I took all that sort of thing in my stride. My family lived in student housing near the Botanical Gardens, and I believe where we lived used to be part of the Botanical Gardens. At any rate, it had woods and meadows and, if no real pond, then certainly a raised duck pond.  But I was not blind to all architecture, for one day when leaving some house with my parents I looked up at the door and saw either in it or above it a window of this shape: 

That window made such an impression on me that I have loved the top-half of a circle passionately all my life. Being the eldest of five, I got to play with wooden blocks for many, many years, and my favourite was the one, the only, the unique half moon shape cut out of one of the rectangles. (The resultant arch was my second-favourite block.) As the block box didn't have much in the way of architectural trimmings, our grand designs were either Georgian or strictly postmodern. 

Alas, there is not much Georgian architecture left in my native Toronto. The Americans invaded and burned it down in  1813, and then there were various Great Fires, and since the Great Fire of 1904, Torontonians haven't given two ticks for preserving their historical architecture.  If there is a really loud outcry, a  giant truck comes along and takes the building away to land deemed less valuable than the land it is sitting on. Toronto self-cannibalizes to this day. 

So imagine my joy to live now in beautiful Edinburgh, where old buildings are cherished and loved and preserved and miraculously spared by German bombers in World Wars both I and II. Edinburgh's "New Town" (with the partial exception of Princes Street, which was almost destroyed by the Spirit of Vat--I mean, by the rage for Brutalism) is a beautifully preserved Georgian masterpiece with half-moon "fan lights" topping doors up and down the cobbled streets. 

I live not in the New Town, but on one of Edinburgh's very edges. There is no fan light over the door of the Historical House, alas. (Not that I'm complaining, exactly. The House is pre-Georgian, after all.) However, I have many opportunities to go to the New Town, and do. And if I am alone and have time to walk through the streets--especially any time between 9 and 5 on a weekday--the straight lines and curved half-moons fill me with calm and optimism. 

Submission

Then throw yourself out the window, loser.

Sending stories to magazines and newspapers is hard. Sending stories to competitions is not just hard, it's often expensive. I sent two stories to a famous British competition one year, and it was simply agonizing. When I put down £2 for a lottery ticket, that's a bit of fun. When my dearly beloved story, plus £10, is the lottery ticket, that's something else.

I entered my first competitions in high school. The topic of one was multiculturalism, and being a contrarian, I sent in a story about trying to assert my Canadian identity over an ersatz loyalty to the Ireland and Scotland my ancestors wouldn't have recognized. Unfortunately, the villain of the story was too recognizably one of the teachers--a nun, to boot--and so the publication of this story was greeted with a studied silence by my school, save for the teacher  (not the villain) who gleefully informed me that I had annoyed everyone but her. 

But even worse--for I was sad that I had annoyed my teachers--I entered a competition with a long short story about Roman Britain and waited and waited and waited and waited for a response until the teacher into whose care I had placed it confessed that she had forgotten to send it. I am not sure a rejection letter would have hurt more, but you never know. 

Then I joined the pro-life movement, and that was it for my literary career until university, when I tentatively sent two poems to the most literate college newspaper, and they actually printed one. I was delighted, but then something I sent to a university annual didn't make it in, and I lost heart. No doubt it didn't help that I was suffering from full-blown (if undiagnosed) depression and failing half my courses. Meditating day and night on the dismemberment of unborn babies was not good for my mental health.  

 I had some vague notion that, having been so good at stories in elementary school, writing as a grown-up was either going to be a cake-walk or completely impossible. My teenage diaries are full of despair on this point. Was I always going to write "rubbish" (which I now know was a very credible beginning), or would I ever attain the heights achieved by Real Writers? Bizarrely, it did not occur to me to apply to the university creative writing program, and clashes with a whiny creative writing teacher ("Now... girrrrrrls!") convinced me that writing could not be taught. I would write nothing but rubbish until by some magic I wrote Hemingway.  Goodness, if mental anguish were all it took to be a writer, I would be Hemingway. 

Meanwhile I thought I would be discovered by some helpful mentor--this would also happen by magic--and be encouraged and fostered along. This did not happen. Does this ever happen? Yes, I imagine it might--in creative writing programs. One thing I have discovered about mentors, having found some in my thirties, is that they respond with joy to talent. All professors hate marking essays, and so when they find a good essay--a well-written essay--they almost cry with joy.  Something similar applies to newspaper editors--possibly particularly Catholic newspaper editors--coping with the slush pile. However, all a professor owes you is a grade, and all the editor owes you--if he takes your unsolicited piece--is the fee. If your professor or editor calls you into his office to tell you that you have talent, but you have to quit with the adverbs, that's supererogatory. That's a gift. 

So where should you expect encouragement to come from? Well, if you are lucky, it comes from your friends and family--although don't demand too much from your friends and family as they may inadvertently discourage you instead.  Also, you can drive them nuts by asking them for their honest opinion and then seething like a blowtorch after they give it. (I wonder if musicians have this problem. Actually, DO other craftsmen ask their family's opinion on anything? "Hey, Mum, what do you think of this plumbing job?" "Well, I'm glad you used copper piping, but I can see the joins." "What do you MEAN!?")  Writers are like cats. Purr, purr, purr, scratch, chomp.

If you are supremely lucky, you marry someone so supportive he has more faith in your writing than you do, and thinks you should do nothing from 9 to 5 but write, and he blames anyone but you when this garners very little income. 

However, the best thing you can do is to decide you don't need anyone else's encouragement and just speed ahead.  You have to reach into that place in your brain which, despite all evidence to the contrary, remains smugly certain that you are a literary genius. For me this is, naturally, the Inner Child, whose supreme confidence and abject selfishness (wat do yoo meen owter adult i am shokked yoo now yoo owe me a treet) are invaluable in the writing of fiction, for otherwise I wouldn't do it. I would just blog all day. Any encouragement you get from others is jam, and very nice of them indeed.  

Naturally a very useful form of encouragement is buying your favourite authors' books, so if you haven't already, be a love and order a copy of Ceremony of Innocence (by ME, don't buy the wrong one by accident) or, if Polish, Anielskie Single. Meanwhile, I will get back to working on the new stuff, so those who have already read C of I will have something else of mine to read. Should any of the magazines to which I am submitting accept any of my stories, I shall certainly tell you. 

Update: Regarding Facebook. Occasionally readers invite me to become their Facebook friend. This is flattering, and eventually I get around to replying. I have begun use Facebook to write notes to writers and artists whose work I admire, too. However, it is my policy not to accept anyone as a Facebook friend whom I have not met in person, unless I have corresponded with him or her elsewhere on Facebook, she or he being a friend of friends (e.g. the Polish-American Rabelais, Artur Sebastian Rosman). This puts me in the strange position of being a Facebook friend of a certain Anthony of Warsaw, whom I met this spring, and not his cousin Urszula of Buffalo, who has been reading my blog for years. (Hello!) However, as a handful of readers can attest, I always do my best to meet any readers who drop by Edinburgh. 

The Best Book About Writing

The best book about writing I have yet read is On Writing by Stephen King. I finished it yesterday, and I hope to begin it again today. No other book has boosted my morale so much. Sitting down to it was like chatting with a friend, a friend who is a bestselling novelist and wants to help you become one, too. That's a good friend. And that's a novelist without jealousy.

To be writer is to fight back jealousy and envy of other writers. Hopefully the writer wins once in a while, for otherwise he will find friendship with other writers rather shallow, and he will write one too many obscene poems about Margaret Atwood. Obscene poems about successful Canadian poets were rather a feature of Toronto Spoken Word nights in the 1990s. I survived the scene as long as I did by writing comical short stories instead of poems. I offered no chapbooks for sale. I didn't bother competing.

Except for the Open Mic sign-up sheet. Few writers actually came to Spoken Word night to hear each other's poems. Are you nuts? They were there to read their own stuff. Okay, I admit that this may be overly cynical, and that some were there to support their friends and maybe even learn something. However, the dark energy swirling around the sign-up sheet suggested that something rather more self-interested was going on. The sign-up sheet did not appear at once, but when it did, there was a shift in the room like iron filings feeling the pull of a magnet. Whoosh! Anxious, sweating, eager bodies--mostly male--all jostling around the ticketseller's table, all waiting for the chance to write their names down.

Then, name written down, the writer could relax and sit down. Maybe even order a beer, if he had that kind of (i.e. any) money. If he suddenly didn't feel his work was "right", he might start writing a riff, right there and then, during the featured performance. In hindsight, I should have been learning from the featured performers, not just passively listening to them. But at least I never said, when I got to the microphone, "Okay, so I wrote this while I was listening to Martin there." It's amazing how many people said this with pride, as if we would all admire them for the freshness of the piece, the total possession of their concentration by the Muse, the newness and nowness of it all, ya dig?

The lust for the sign-up sheet was something I understood, even as I resented the jostle and crush. Reading my stories and hearing the silence and then the laughs and then the palpable expectation of more laughs was addictive. It was awesome. It was the best. Twice I was a featured writer myself (thank you, Clara Blackwood), and being asked to feature felt better than being published. (When I sold my first freelance piece, I felt really weird. When I sold the second, I got stomach pains so bad, I thought I had appendicitis.) I didn't want the money--I had a well-paying day job--as much as I wanted the audience.

So one day I found myself just as jostling, anxious, sweaty,and eager as the most self-deluded Charles Bukowski wannabe, totally consumed by lust for the sign-in sheet. I forget if I got to write my name down in time or not, but I felt awful either way: icky, dirty, carnal. I didn't want to be that kind of writer. So I quit going to Spoken Word. As far as I could tell, 45% of what I heard there was okay, 50% was total crap ("Okay, so I wrote this while I was listening to Meagan there..."), and only 5% was worth the hour-long bus ride from Hamilton. And 1% of that 5% was the sound of my own voice.

Now I'm sorry I quit. What I didn't understand then was that the audience was giving me something much more than a rush: they were giving me feedback. And in return I was giving them value for the entry fee. Lusting after the sign-in sheet didn't make a writer a jerk. What made a writer a jerk was boring the leg hair off the audience with ill-prepared stuff he had tossed off while ignoring somebody else.

What I also didn't understand then was that the guys all wanted to be Charles Bukowski for a reason, and so I should have been reading Charles Bukowski to find out why. I am talking fifteen years ago, and I STILL haven't read a Charles Bukowski poem.

So here is a link to a Charles Bukowski poem I found after I was listening to myself there, and interrupted to ask why on God's green earth I never bothered to ask any of the poets what poems they recommended. And, as luck would have it, Bukowski's "So You Want to Be a Writer" is pertinent to this discussion. For one thing, it is about being a writer, and for another it explains why I had to listen to so much crap.

What Bukowski counsels sounds reasonable to me, but he forgot to mention editing. Just because it comes roaring out of you doesn't mean that it's wonderful and everyone will love it. Sometimes you have to go back, put in the commas, correct the spelling and take out half the words.

But otherwise, yeah. Sort of. A girl in Poland asked me how to become a writer.  I asked her if she was writing already. She said no. I told her either to write or not to write and forget about becoming a writer. A writer is someone who writes as long as he has something to write with and on. He does it because he would go nuts if he didn't, or because he really wants to. Because it's fun. Because not doing it is weird and uncomfortable, like skipping Mass on Sunday.

Sometimes I write to kill pain. If that girl with the voice that could cut lead pipe and never stops talking gets on, I search my bag in agony for a pen or a pencil. Heck, I'd use an eyeliner if I could get it sharp enough to write easily. Then I search again for a notebook, a novel, a supermarket receipt. And then I start writing. Anything to get in the zone and block out that girl. Jings crivens, she tears the will to live out of you. And she's an actress, she lives at the community college at the end of the route.

The Unbearable Humiliation of Writing

On Monday I took a seat at the back of the bus and took a new book out of my (B.A.'s, really, but I stole it) tweed bag. The lady who sat next to me stole covert glances at the title which was, embarrassingly enough, How to be a Writer.

"Two of my books have been published," I silently informed her, in case she read minds, too. "One of them was published in three countries."

It shouldn't be embarrassing to read a book called How to be a Writer. After all, it wouldn't be embarrassing to be caught reading a book called Be Your Own Plumber. In fact, I bet the woman beside me on the bus would have been impressed had she caught me reading such a book. Angling for Dummies might have sent her mind off on an amusing train of thought having nothing to do with me. Step-by-Step Guide to Dressmaking--now that would be a worthy book, and one I almost bought in a charity shop during last Saturday's excursion to North Berwick. However, I was embarrassed by How to be a Writer. That said, I was less embarrassed about reading such a book than I had ever been before in my life, for there I was actually reading it. 

Now I wish someone had given it to me, along with the typewriter, as my combination Confirmation/Elementary School Graduation present. Of course, even then it might have been too late, and I would have rolled my eyes and repeated that old half-lie, "Nobody can teach you how to write." 

And that probably seemed true at the time, for I thought nobody had taught me how to write--beyond the alphabet, phonics, basic grammar, punctuation and spelling. As a matter of fact, I had taught myself how to write, mostly by reading for hours and hours a day. I read so much, my parents actually discouraged me from reading, and when I stopped reading novels--except for university classes, and I rather despised myself for having to fall back on them to get a degree--I accounted it as an acquired virtue.  

Yes, I know: sad. 

I taught myself to write also by keeping a diary for thirty years and by writing stories. In Grade 5, possibly as a PR stunt on my behalf, the teacher asked me to read my latest story--horror, complete with falling into hell by accident--to the entire class. Although I was convinced that they all hated my guts, they fell silent and listened with rapt attention. Sadly, it did not improve my attitude towards them, but it did give me that first heady rush of the storyteller's power over others. 

My great ambition was to write my first book by age 14, as Gordon Korman had with This Can't Be Happening at Macdonald Hall!, but I was utterly daunted by the prospect and remained so for decades. Finally I wrote a novel by filling three thick blank books outside Dooney's Café in Toronto in longhand while buying cappuccino and little meals I could barely afford. I have never read the damn thing, but by then I had guessed that the only way to write a novel was to put one word in front of another until I had more than 60,000 words. To do this, I had to sit in one place for hours at a time, returning to it daily, and block out the demonic voice that said "This sucks." 

It wasn't until I started to teach writing skills at a community college that I realized the demonic voice that had prevented me from writing a novel before age 14, age 24 and age 31, possessed other people, too. In fact, this demon seemed to possess all my writing students. When, clearing my throat, I mentioned his existence, they all laughed and nodded. He sat in their heads, telling them their writing sucked. I don't know why they were laughing, unless it was from the relief that he wasn't picking on just them.

I advised them that the only way to finish their homework assignments was to block out the Writing Demon's voice until they had finished their first draft. Write up to their minimum or maximum without a single cross-out, I said, and only then go back and change things. 

"How long can you do that for?" asked a student.

I said I didn't know, but I would find out.

I found out. But I can't remember how long it did take. (Two months, maybe?) Indeed, I have never returned to that manuscript. I have never sat down and read it. I may never sit down and read it, for I am not sure I could take the pain of the humiliation of having written complete rubbish.

Writing the rubbish, I can do. Editing the rubbish....

The difference between an amateur and a professional, claims How to Be a Writer, is not in the writing but in the rewriting. Amateurs write. Professionals rewrite.  In fact, the author recommends the writer complete not one or two or three drafts before allowing his work to be exposed to the glance of another, but eleven. ELEVEN! I haven't written eleven drafts in my life. I have written--at maximum--three, but generally I have had one master draft and erased and corrected, first with a pencil and then with a computer. In between, when I typed, I typed one copy. Sometimes I might write and then type, but when it came to stories, my friends just had to put up with white-out.

Eleven drafts! ELEVEN!

I would think that by eleven drafts,  I would be so sick of second-guessing myself, I would throw up every morning before facing the computer. However, I would probably be spared the sick horror of discovering a really stupid mistake in a draft AFTER I had sent it to an editor, famous agent or publisher. And, as a matter of fact, I am a lot more careful in my paid assignments than I am in anything else. Of course, such assignments are usually no more than 800 words, and I edit, cut, spell-check, read and reread like crazy to make sure they are actually under 800 words. Over 800 words, and someone else starts cutting for me. 

Another good reason to write eleven (honestly, though, eleven?) drafts is so that you can de-friend your characters. Until I was 19 and quit writing fiction for years--a sad story, let's not go there--I just blatantly wrote stories about people I knew. My friends. Our enemies. Teachers. Star Trek characters. These started as scripts. Come to think of it, I  think they also ended as scripts. I wanted to be a playwright but almost never saw any plays. (Personal revelation: no wonder I thought theatre began and ended with Marlowe, Shakespeare and Shaw: I was taken to see only Marlowe, Shakespeare and Shaw. And the two occasions I branched out--on my own--I was vapourized by the sight of full frontal nudity.) Anyway, scripts. Scripts meant dialogue, and I had a good ear for dialogue. Dialogue and plot were the be-all and end-all, as far as I was concerned, and being able to reproduce my friends' verbal quirks was--I believed--my greatest skill. 

It was fun, and it was funny, and the lightning pace of written conversaton never gave me enough time to think "This sucks"--which I never ever did until the Great Shock. And, meanwhile, I assumed that other writers, REAL writers, made up THEIR characters from absolutely nothing.

Since then I have understood that only God can make something out of nothing. Nancy Mitford, Evelyn Waugh--all the 20th century authors I most admired--made up characters out of bits of their friends and family. "Linda" of The Pursuit of Love is part Nancy, part her sister Diana, part her sister Deborah and part of whatever alchemy goes into making characters unique beings you remember forever as if they were real people. "Fabrice Sauveterre" was a Nancy-eye view of her lover Gaston Palewski, who in real life had such appalling body odour, it is a mystery how he managed to have as many lovers as he did.  "Catriona McClelland" of Ceremony of Innocence is a number of women, mostly older and smarter than me, who have scared me rather a lot. "Denis Erlichmann" is a highly romanticized portrait of a German seminarian whom I very much doubt his friends (who are also in the novel) would recognize. "Suzy" is both me at 19 and all my writing students under 23 combined, but particularly the baby-faced one I worked so hard to help and dissed me so much in the Teacher Evaluation form. 

However, the good thing about all these models is that I hadn't seen them in years or they were away in Germany, completely innocent of the liberties I was taking with my memories of them. The tricky task now--I hope 11 drafts can solve it--is to refine and change my current cast of characters so much that my circle of acquaintances doesn't assume that I am taking revenge on some helpless friend by making him or her the villain. If he's blond, he must be Piotr (and how cruel to make him a spotty coalminer!). If she's dark-haired, she must be Anita (and how bitchy to suggest she might ever use a ouija board--well, women all hate each other, you know). Being chastised for cruelty is like sugar to the yeast of the Writing Demon, who roars up whenever given a chance, because if there is anything he hates, it's creation. 

On the other hand, such accusations can be a spur to indignation because it is an insult to one's ability to capture the people around us perfectly. "If I ever write a character entirely based on you," I have said more than once, "you will be left in no doubt." And indignation is great--it gives you someone to be mad at other than yourself. And as we know, women have a big problem with blame: the female creed seems to be "If at first you can't succeed, tell yourself you are a disgusting human being and develop an eating disorder." Really, we should be more like men and say things like, "You know, the editor of Blood & Aphorisms is clearly brain-dead, and I'll show him!"

And meanwhile, I say it again, I wish I had read "How to Be a Writer" when I was twelve. Indignation with an unappreciative public should be balanced by humility, and if even fantastic swing-dancers keep on taking lessons, well, then, heck, maybe I could still learn a thing or six million.

Lessons about Singles at Swing

Yes, it's another post about swing-dancing. But I'm fascinated by swing-dancing, now that I think of swing-dancing as an art and not as a way to meet "the One." The emotional stakes are not so high. I can sit like a cushion on a chair all night, ignored by all, and then go home to my doting husband. I mention this not to rub it in, but to remind myself that I am in a much different situation from that of my Single readers.

Nevertheless, I do not like sitting like a cushion on a chair all night, ignored by all, so I practice as much as possible and take all the lessons my conscience says we can afford, because the number one way to get oneself asked to dance is to be a good dancer. Therefore last weekend I went to an all-day swing dance class, taught by two visiting Americans. Naturally, I learned about more than dancing.

First, I learned that there are TWO overlapping swing dancing communities in Edinburgh, including a host of people who can't make it out to my community's Wednesday nights. Second, I learned that there were a number of people from my own community who are so committed to improving their swing-dancing that they will dedicate a whole Saturday (and £35) to it. Third, I learned that the travelling Canadian who had come to Wednesday night had signed on for the Saturday, too--which must have taken advance planning, now that I think about it, as enrollment was limited. Fourth,  I learned that swing-dancing can be taught in a really sexist way.

Oh Edinburgh, Edinburgh. I appreciate the gentleness of your swing-dancing culture, and your constant emphasis on Leader and Follower and quiet assertion that man or woman can choose to be either. I praise you for this not because I think men and women are the same, but because Saturday reminded me of the strong disadvantages involved in being a Follower, especially when the Lead is a man.

I don't want to beat up on the poor American instructor, who is a really great dancer and no doubt a legend in the worldwide swing community, etc., so I will not get into the nitty-gritty of why I felt uncomfortable with his sexualization of swing-dancing, his nudge-nudge cries to the men to "use" their partners, etc. Instead I will coolly observe that the number one sin of male Leads is to blame their Followers for their own mistakes. And this is very much worth observing, if you are at swing-dancing to make friends.

Meanwhile, the two lessons about Singles I want to talk about today are 1. the brilliance of getting involved in a social-dancing community and 2. learning about men from the way they dance.

The travelling Canadian, in whom I took a patriotic interest, loves to travel and wherever he travels, he tries to go to swing-dancing. This is not unusual in swing-dancers, but it is brilliant.   I love to travel alone, but I hate staying in a foreign place alone, and  I always scurry back to my lodging before dark. During a long, ill-thought-out week in Florence, I went to daily Mass every day, so as to see the same people. They were mostly old ladies in surgical socks, but I was heartened when I saw on the third day that they were all watching to see if I would turn up again.

Well, I had the right idea, but social dancers take it even further: instead of merely being with like-minded people, they interact with them in a mutually agreeable activity. When next I am in Krakow, I will see if I can find a swing-dance night, for whatever my linguistic skills, I can certainly dance in Polish. It would give me something fun to do in the evening, and get me past that whole fear-of-foreign-darkness problem.

This leaping into a foreign dance scene is, once again, easier for Leaders than for Followers, for Leads always do the asking, whereas Followers are merely driven to it.  Because I ask Leaders to dance when nobody has asked me to dance for a bit, I know perfectly well that it must be intimidating to ask a Follower to dance. However, all Followers want to dance and most women are at a social dance because they want to dance. So Followers almost never say no, whereas Leads occasionally just moan and groan and say "It's too fast" or "I'm tired." I'm not sure, but I think sometimes Leads take revenge on not-so-skilled-yet Followers for daring to ask them to dance by flinging us wildly about the room. At any rate, I think very carefully before I ask one of the Lords of Creation to dance. "Is he a nice guy?" is uppermost on my mind.

But do not let me put you off the whole idea. If you can think of another worldwide, weekly social activity in which people share a skill that you think you might enjoy developing, then I recommend taking it up. The Canadian chap made at least three Facebook friends from the local swing-dance community, chatted a lot, danced a lot, and went to lunch with little me. (I invited, he paid--which was very handsome of him.) He is a good dancer--probably advanced-beginner, like me--and not at all egotistical about it.

This brings me to Lesson 2, which is that you can learn a lot about men from the way they dance--or rather, what they act like when they're dancing with you. I am tempted to lump them into groups:

1. The Blamer. The Blamer tells you whenever you have done something wrong, or even when you haven't. The Blamer says "Can I give you some tips?" and then gives you the tips before you have had a chance to say "No." This behaviour is banned in our Code of Conduct, but The Blamer needs no stinking Codes of Conducts.

As annoying as The Blamer is, he fascinates me because blaming women (and others) is the Ur sin of men. Adam did it. Even if it turns out the story of Adam-and-Eve wasn't exactly like it says in Genesis, it sure has the ring of authenticity when Adam says "The woman You gave me tempted me." It was HER fault. It was YOUR fault.  Happily for me, at the end of the evening, I get to go home to B.A. who is patience incarnate and generally passes over my multiple faults with no more than a sigh. He never blames me for his own faults, whatever they may be. (He must have some; maybe he saves them for work.)

2. The Diplomat. The Diplomat is a very good dancer, and he takes his role as a Lead extremely seriously, as if he belongs to the Lead-Knights of  Our Lady of Swing-Dancing. The Diplomat believes that a Lead's primary purpose in life is to make his Follower feel happy and confident on the dance floor. He gives strong and clear cues, he smiles at his partner, and he gauges whether or not his Follower is up to such advanced tricks as the Texas Tommy. He apologizes if he tries it, and she is not. "My fault!" says the Diplomat cheerily.  The Diplomat is, in fact, a self-appointed ambassador for the Nation of Swing, and so he continues to ask beginning Followers to dance, so that they too may become citizens of that happy country one day.

Naturally I love The Diplomat, and if he teaches classes, I take every single one. I also say, "Would you mind if I asked you for for some feedback?" and "Do you take private students?" and "Have you met my pretty friend Betsy?" Just kidding--so far--on that final statement. The best Diplomat I know already has a girlfriend.

3. The Nervous Recruit. The Nervous Recruit is sometimes also a Blamer, but happily he usually isn't. In fact, he is often a better dancer than he gives himself credit for. The Nervous Recruit is the most likely to wail "It's too fast" and "Maybe the next one." If he isn't a Blamer, all this nervousness suggests an attractive masculine humility. Meanwhile, the Follower has to make a difficult decision: does she start to lead a tiny bit? With a Nervous Recruit who suddenly forgetten all he has ever been taught, I think this can be a good idea. It's best to do it verbally. I think this is called "making suggestions"--not what he can do to become a better dancer--not your job--but what you can do together for the next two bars.

If the night is wearing on and nobody has asked me to dance for awhile, I will scan the chairs for a Nervous Recruit. Some of them would probably make strong-minded girls excellent boyfriends, ready to compromise on what film to see after the requisite face-saving bout of argumentation.

4. The Swing Obsessive. The Swing Obsessive has been dancing two nights a week every week for the past four hundred years, with or without a Follower: it obviously doesn't matter to him. If he wants to do the most complex routine at the fastest speeds, he's going to do it, dragging his poor Follower around with him as her eyes rattle in her head.

Avoid. Avoid. Avoid. Avoid. Avoid. Still, if you can get such a man to notice you for you, your evenings for the next fifty years are all planned out.

5. The Absent Beloved. The Absent Beloved is all the boyfriends and husbands who can't or won't dance and refuse to go to dance class. This is such a phenomenon that there is a popular swing-dance T-shirt featuring the motto "Why Can't My Boyfriend Dance?" This T-shirt, now that I think about it, could be a subtle way to inform all the men around that you are there only to dance. At any rate, The Absent Beloved is the man you really want to dance with, but you probably never shall. Weep weep.

Meanwhile, your chances of meeting your Future Beloved at Swing Dance may be small if your number one criteria is that he be Catholic and you live in a Protestant-majority country. Go to get out of your Catholic bubble and make friends. Meanwhile, I may start a league of Catholic swing-dancers. I am not sure how yet, but I will give the idea some thought. Perhaps we should start with some secret symbol. Hey! How about a gold crucifix on a gold chain?

6. The Perve.  I have never come across the Perve, but the longer you are in the swing community, the more you hear or--more likely, read--about him. The Perve can either be some lump who takes advantage of the close position of dancing to grope you, or he can be some charismatic teacher who grooms star-struck students for sex. The basic kind of Perve gets thrown out on his ear at once; all you have to do is tell the teachers or the dance organizers (e.g. the ticket-seller), and he is gone. The advanced kind can be avoided if you follow the simple maximum: "Never sleep with your teacher unless you have married him."

I suspect the basic Perve exists at all only because of the inequalities that seem to exist between Leads (usually men) and Followers (usually women), which should be minimized as much as possible. If you feel that you are being led around like a horse or a donkey or some other brute beast, you are doing it wrong. There are all sorts of things a Follower must do, and one is to keep one's shoulders back and upper arms strong, holding one's forearms in the same  position and clamping down gently but firmly on the Lead's arm. A Follower must also have the guts to say cheerfully "It would be easier if you put your hand higher on my back" if there is any doubt about where that hand is going. In my case, 100% of the time, the guy has just been a Nervous Recruit.

7. The Amusingly Elderly. One of the nice things about swing-dancing is that adults of all ages take it up. Therefore, no-one, no matter how young, should view it as a dire insult if an old man asks her to dance. The King of Swing, Frankie Manning, danced until he died in his nineties. The old guys may be great dancers; one of my favourite dance partners is a tiny Polish man who says, "This is how I learned it in Warsaw!" before doing whatever it was they were dancing in Warsaw in, like, 1955. He does it well, and it works with what I know, so it's all good, and I really hope he was not in the SB.

That said, there are men in their 60s (not their 70s and 80s, who giggle when they dance like they are cheating Father Time and getting away with it), who are bossy and boring and ask women 30 years younger than themselves for coffee and get humph-y when the women say "No." However, I have come across only one man like that, and I haven't seen him for a long time. Men who come to swing dance only to meet women either become interested in the dance for itself or disappear.

***
Goodness. It's past NOON! Alas, I feel I am on my way to becoming a different kind of Swing Obsessive.