Kids These Days

I hardly know where to begin. Maybe my first stop should be a caveat about how the public institution where I spend a small part of my working life attracts patrons of all ages, from 1 to 101. Rarely does a day pass when some child does not throw a temper tantrum, an embarrassed caregiver desperately shushes said child, and some third person, usually someone over 50, remarks under his breath that in his day, children weren't allowed to behave so abominably.

The third person—or rather, people, because they are legion—drive me bats. I know perfectly well that in their day things were not so wonderful as they misremember. In their day, children threw just as many temper tantrums as they do now, and caregivers tried just as desperately to shush them. In their day the child was probably more likely to get smacked for misbehaving, but I'd rather listen to a kid scream until light bulbs shatter than see one get hit, so I'm glad I live in my day, not theirs.

So I have no patience for people who start their conversations with, "In my day. . . ."

And yet. In my day. . . . 

I wore my John today. John is the last in a long line of college tee shirts. I'm not sure why he's held up so well, maybe because the plastic or whatever it is his giant head is made of reinforces the fabric. For whatever reason, John is still with me. I love him dearly and will wear him until he's in tatters, when he will be placed lovingly into the storage tub with all my other favorite tee shirts that have become little more than fragments. I'm sure the Billie Holiday tee shirt will welcome him home as a long-lost friend.

Now you may not have noticed it—I know I certainly didn't at first—but this photo of John bears a superficial resemblance to another contemporary pop culture icon, a certain orphaned wizard we all know and many of us love. The first time I was in a grocery store and a 6-year-old pointed at my shirt and yelled "Harry Potter!" I was surprised, but not for long. It's the round glasses, you see.

So even though I hadn't been planning a pop culture lesson, I was a little more prepared when I wore John to after-school tutoring and five kids simultaneously pointed and screamed "Harry Potter!" (Seriously, they all scream. Harry Potter apparently engenders the kind of emotion in children not seen since teen girls fell in love with the Beatles themselves.) "No," I said, "This is a musician named John Lennon. When you get home tonight, ask your parents if you can listen to some music by the Beatles. No, not like the bugs. Seriously, just ask them. I'm not kidding." If even one child got to hear "I Want to Hold Your Hand" that night, I feel that I've made the world a better place.

This evening, though, when a 20-something clerk, a young woman with dyed black hair and a nose ring, a young woman who is clearly working so hard to be hip and alternative, looked at my tee shirt, my John, and felt compelled to comment on a recent Harry Potter marathon on TV, I was not prepared.

When did our culture get into this state? When did our young adults forget about the "long-haired hippies" who paved the way for their nose rings? When did the youth of today forget about the original "alternative" music? Where are their parents?! 

In my day, any teenage rebel worth her salt could recite the entire White Album. In my day, even when we were listening to Pearl Jam and the Chili Peppers, we still remembered who our rock and roll ancestors were. In my day. . . . 

Well.

Something has to be done. I'm proposing that we all celebrate Beatles Day. July 10, the anniversary of the day the Fab Four returned to Liverpool after they "conquered" the United States in 1964, is the official Beatles Day, but I don't think we can wait until July. We need the Beatles now!

So find your Abbey Road CD, or dig through that old box of cassette tapes if you have to. If you have kids, please, please, for the sake of our future as a nation, as a culture, as a world, please sit them down and explain the British Invasion. Explain to them that the Harry Potter stories are great fun, but what John, Paul, George, and Ringo did was nothing short of revolution.  

Me, I'm going to start celebrating immediately. "Rocky" was always one of my favorites.

Reading Journal: The Good, the Bad, and the . . . let's just stop there.

Earlier this week I returned The Night Circus to store even though I was only about halfway through it. I was so disappointed. Everyone seemed to love it so, and I thought I would love it, but given that it took me two months to read 214 pages and there were still 170-some pages to go, love does not seem like the thing that was happening.

Morgenstern tried so hard to make the story elegant that it became nothing but caricature. It's supposed to be a battle between magicians, which sounds a lot more interesting than Morgenstern manages to make it—at least as far as I read. The illusions are too perfect, too intricate, the characters too exactly what you would expect of them. After a while the detailed descriptions of the magic contained in the circus become downright wearisome, and in the meantime I was longing to learn more about the characters outside their roles as performers. The only action I found compelling was Celia's refusal to let her father change her name. That happened on p. 11. I read 203 more pages waiting for someone to do something admirable and/or interesting. Yes, there's lots of magic and illusion, and it's all "Interesting," but none of it is actually interesting.

Sometimes I have to remind myself that I get paid to read textbooks and student essays. No one is paying me to read novels, so when I'm reading "off the clock," as it were, I have the right to enjoy it. So I gave myself a little mental shake, retrieved my favorite bookmark, and back to the library it went.

Turns out I dropped Circus at exactly the right time because Where'd You Go, Bernadette, by Maria Semple, happened to show up in my holds queue the very same day. (If you've already read it, visit the link just for the doll. I am going to need a Bernadette doll.)

Bernadette is everything Circus is not. Primarily that consists of being believably unbelievable, with characters who are loveable because they are interchangeably flawed and redeemable, sometimes one or the other moment to moment, usually both at the same time. The story of a misanthropic, semi-agoraphobic* famous architect and her family is constructed through a series of e-mails, memos, transcripts, articles, and other electronic ephemera. It looks like the stack of research someone getting ready to write a book would compile, not the book itself, and at first I thought that conceit would drive me batty, but I wound up sinking right in. It's an excellent way to execute sudden shifts in point of view. In fact, when Semple switched to traditional first-person narration at the end, it was a little disconcerting. It was the only off-note in what I am unashamedly calling a symphony of awesome.

Okay, I'll admit the ending of Bernadette is maybe not the most believable denouement in all of literature, but it works because you want it so, so badly. I was prepared for the story to end in the predictable, practical way. I would've understood. But when it took that one final twist, I was so pleased and excited that I literally gasped aloud. Bertie Sue, who is offended by all unexpected noises, even relatively quiet ones, woke up and gave me the glare of death. I'm seriously thinking of proposing her as the library mascot. Having been suitably chastised, I finished the rest of the book wearing a huge (silent) grin.

So, to conclude, The Night Circus: Skillful writing, really boring plot—or more probably an interesting plot poorly executed. If you're really into magic, read it just for the descriptions of the circus; otherwise, skip it and reread Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell instead. Where'd You Go, Bernadette: Read it. Do you hear me? Read it!

*Yes, yes, I know.  

P.S. I had forgotten that Bernadette was one of the contenders in the 2013 Tournament of Books. That's how it made it onto my reading list in the first place. It lost its round to The Orphan Master's Son, which ultimately won the tournament. I suppose I'll have to it read now, though it doesn't sound like near as much fun.

The Point

A week or two ago I read Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore. It's a generally pleasing if somewhat meandering story set mostly in a mysterious vertical bookstore. But for about two pages, it became more than pleasing; it became magic.

When the story finally wound its way toward its focus, a secret society that appears at first glance to be devoted to books, I almost dropped Penumbra in the bathwater (the bath being where I do all my best reading). Suddenly I was not just interested, but entranced. It was no longer enough just to live the characters' lives along with them for as long as I could stand the hot water. I was now so engaged in the story that I was momentarily convinced that I, too, must found a secret society dedicated to the glory of the book! I found myself inspired to become part of the story in a way I have not been inspired since I was a kid. Of course turning the page brought disappointment. It turns out the society wasn't so much dedicated to books as to gaining immortality, with books simply the tool. Why would anyone want to be immortal? Blech.

But for that two-page moment, I was thrilled, plotting my own society. For a moment, my life seemed different. That's a feeling I remember from so long ago. The stories I read as a kid could capture me, and the fact that I couldn't pull the characters and their experiences off the page—or dive in with them—was almost anguish.

So when I read that bit in Penumbra, it struck me almost like a scent-memory, the same way that walking into my house in the winter and smelling the gas space heater in the basement invariably makes me think of my grandparents' house, or how the scent of rubbing alcohol gives me the shivers even though the nearest nurse brandishing a hypodermic is miles away, and I'm not scheduled to pay her a visit for months.

The first book that sprang to mind was From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, by E.L. Konigsburg. I have never wanted to live inside any story quite so much as I wanted to live with Claudia and Jamie in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. When I heard yesterday that Mrs. Konigsburg had died, I started thinking about that feeling, and wondering when I would experience it again. Penumbra is the first time I can remember feeling it, however briefly, as an adult. But as a child it was almost commonplace.

I wanted to journey toward Digitopolis with Milo, live in a boxcar with the Boxcar Children, get a group of friends to start our own business like the girls in the Babysitters Club, hang out with Turtle Wexler while we solved the mystery of Sam Westing's death, and rescue and raise a runty piglet just like when Fern saved Wilbur, among other adventures.  

For me the highest purpose of reading, beyond edification or self-improvement, is to simply become someone else for a little while. Occasionally one runs across folks who sneer that they don't read fiction because it isn't real. What, they ask, is the point? Poet John Ciardi answered that question so much more eloquently than I ever could: 

For a great book is necessarily a gift: it offers you a life you have not time to live yourself; and it takes you into a world you have not time to travel in literal time. A civilized human mind is, in essence, one that contains many such minds and many such worlds. If you are in too much of a hurry, or too arrogantly proud of your own limitations, to accept a gift to your humanity some pieces of the minds of Sophocles, of Aristotle, of Chaucer—and right down the scale and down the ages to Yeats, Einstein, E.B. White, and Ogden Nash—then you may be protected by the laws governing manslaughter, and you may be a voting entity, but you are neither a developed human being nor a useful citizen of democracy.

That's the point.

What characters would you bring to life if you could? All recommendations welcome!

B-Doodles is All About the Love

LOOKIT! LOOKIT! LOOKIT! Dog a Day is a site by an artist who posts, well, a dog a day. Normally she does pit bulls, but right now she's doing a series of "Gotcha!" stories, so I sent her Brewster's story. That she picked him for yesterday's post, as an antidote to the the bombing at the Boston Marathon, is particularly wonderful. 

The post, which is a lovely introduction by the artist, and then my story about how I adopted Brewster, is here: Gotcha! Brewster.

B-Doodles in all his fuzzy glory by Laurelin Sitterly of Dog a Day Art.

 

Dissertation Season

It's dissertation season again, and the panicked e-mails demanding and/or begging for editorial help are in full swing. If you are a graduate student looking for editorial help, or if you are a thesis or dissertation advisor recommending that a student get editorial help, keep the following information in mind.

1. I do this for a living (in other words, momma's gotta pay the bills), so:

a. To ensure I have a steady flow of income, I keep my schedule full for 4 to 6 weeks ahead of time. You may get lucky and catch me at a slow time when I can start work on your project immediately, but that's rare. Please contact me at least two weeks before I should begin work and at least six weeks before you want the project finished. Unfortunately, if you're supposed to submit at the end of this month (April 2013), it's too late for me to help you. 

Advisors: Don't wait until the last minute to inform your student that you won't accept the thesis or dissertation without a professional edit. Presumably you've seen multiple samples of your student's writing before the later drafts and have known for a while that he or she will need help. Waiting until 2 weeks before the submission date to tell the student that he or she needs editorial help is unfair. Ideally, all students should be made aware of the potential need for an editor very early in the dissertation process so they can both schedule and budget appropriately. 

b. If we've agreed on a schedule and a price, and then I don't hear from you again for several days or weeks, I will take other projects in the meantime and may no longer be available. If you have a delay, please keep me in the loop so I can keep a spot for you in my schedule. I have to keep working and can't sit idly while I wait for a project that may or may not show up.  

c. My services are dirt cheap in the context of what other professional editors charge, but cheap is a relative term. Right now, spring 2013, I'm charging between $4 and $4.50 a page depending on the level of edit. If your thesis is 100 pages (determined by word count), you can expect to pay at least $400. A budget of $50 will get you a slap-dash proofread from one of your friends. It will not buy a full edit from a professional copyeditor.

d. A slap-dash proofread is better than nothing, though, so if $50 is all you have, enlist your English major friend. (Everyone should have an English major friend.)

2. I am a professional, so:

a. This is not McDonald's, and you cannot simply order up an instant copyedit. Sending an e-mail with manuscript attached informing me of how much you'll pay and that you need it back by the end of the week is a waste of your time and mine. 

b. Please address me in a professional manner. Don't demand that I do your bidding; ask if I'm available for a new project. Remember that I am not your employee or an employee of your university.

c. When you e-mail me, tell me (1) when the project must be completed, allowing time for you to review my copyedit to accept or reject changes before your submission date; and (2) the expected word count for the full project. It's also helpful to attach a sample, a minimum of five pages. With this information, I can determine immediately if I can fit you into my schedule, and I can complete a sample edit for you to review so you can decide if you want to hire me. 

3. I love my job. If I can take your project, I will. If I turn you down, it's because my schedule is already full, not because I take your needs lightly. Know that I've done grad school myself. I do understand the poverty and the frustrations and the poverty. And did I mention the poverty? (I just now had to stop writing to take a call from the student loan people. They never call just to chat.) Even if I can't take your project, I wish you the very best of luck. 

Reading Journal: Quiet: The Power of Introverts

I celebrated St. Patrick's Day by shooting a lot of green stuff out of my nose. In the midst of being unfit for anything else, I had time to finish the second half of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, by Susan Cain (Crown, 2012).

It's no surprise to me or anyone who has known me for more than a minute that I'm an introvert. After all, in the face of student loans and a mortgage I voluntarily quit an office job, which had me sitting almost directly in a traffic pattern and being interrupted every few minutes, to start the rather risky enterprise of freelance copyediting from my home office, where I could go weeks without ever talking to anyone besides my family and the clerk at the grocery store if I wanted to.

So enjoying a book that celebrates the introvert is obviously well within my wheelhouse, but I wasn't quite expecting to read a book that explained me to myself so clearly. Amid the discussion of brain chemistry and magnetic resonance imaging scans, the takeaway is that one-third to one-half of the population is like me. We enjoy parties as much as the next person, but we're likely to get tired and go home sooner. Public speaking may or may not cause abject terror, but regardless of whether we feel stage fright (I usually don't), we are more likely than our extrovert counterparts to plan our remarks ahead of time--which explains why I type out a full script every time I have to make a 30-second announcement in church. If we have jobs that require lots of interaction with co-workers and the public, even if we love and are passionate about what we do, we're likely to want nothing more at the end of the day than to be left alone to hibernate.

And whoever said planning ahead and a little judicious hibernation are bad things? I didn't pick up Quiet expecting a self-help book, but I did find validation for the way I prefer to approach the world as well as suggestions for how to make my, um, quiet approach more efficient and effective. In addition to the positive introvert attributes like the tendency to plan ahead and to work longer to solve problems before giving up (can you say stubborn?), Cain discusses the value of developing extrovert-style skills for particular, limited situations--and somehow that's easier to take when you're given permission to come home at the end of the day and be as quiet as you like. But she also emphasizes that extroversion as a personality type is in no way superior to introversion. Extroverts need to learn to channel their inner introverts as well, she argues. Enron and the 2008 Wall Street meltdown? You can thank the extroverts, with their tendency to accept the ideas of the person who speaks persuasively rather than intelligently, for that.

As for me, it was when I started working from home that I began to genuinely enjoy socializing. When I worked by myself all day, I found that rather than being drained by the end of the day, I was energized. The idea of facing a group of human beings didn't, for maybe the first time ever, make me feel slightly nauseated. Almost without noticing, I was suddenly a member of a knitting group, a church, a book group, a committee. And what's more, I enjoyed it! I had more commitments than I've ever had in my life, and instead of feeling overwhelmed and put-upon, I loved it.

In the last few months, my work situation has changed again. I've taught more on-campus classes recently (and I've never "performed" more energetically than when trying to keep a roomful of eighteen-year-olds engaged in grammar and composition), and that has drained a lot of energy and affected my social life. I've pretty much stopped participating in anything I'm not obligated to do partially because my work schedule has been so full, but also largely because the idea of sitting in a group of people and being expected to make conversation seems so exhausting. Now I've started a part-time job that has a good mix of time spent working with the public and time working behind the scenes on my own, plus a staff that genuinely values each others' need for a little quiet time on break. The unique thing about this crowd is that they respect the power of the book--if you're reading, they don't interrupt! I hope this job will complement my freelance work and teaching (online for the next two semesters), and make it possible for me to rejoin the world.

A friend recently asked me if I'm ever going back to knit night, and I gave her a flip answer that I don't remember now. The real answer is, I hope so. That part of my life is valuable. But I have to find a good work-life balance with plenty of down time to both work and play on my own. Being "in the world" is worth the energy it uses, but introverts like me can't do it without a reserve of energy to use in the first place. The beauty of Quiet is Cain's validation that, even in the midst of a culture that values the extrovert ideal above all else, my approach has been right for me all along.

My Name is Bertie SueBell

Insert snackies here.

Hey, you guys! It is Me! Bertie SueBell! Guess what, you guys! It has been a WHOLE YEAR since I got my Forever Home! My MamaLady said I could use the clicky things to tell you all what I was thinking about, and what I am thinking about is snackies all my names. Most people only get one name, but I'm a special kind of person, so I've had a bunch. I used to have a name that nobody knows, and I'm not telling because it's not very important anymore. When I got lost and got sent to dog jail, things were going pretty bad. The HumanPeople at the jail weren't mean to me or anything, but I didn't like them very much, and they didn't have the resources to help a pregnant, scared, sick DogPerson like me. So some bad stuff was about to go down,* but then Mama Janet from Pals Animal Rescue got me sprung from the slammer! Mama Janet said I was beautiful (which is true) and she thought I would like HumanPeople better when I wasn't in jail anymore (which was also true), so she took me to her house and she said my name was Cricket. And sure enough, I wasn't scared anymore, and pretty soon I wasn't pregnant anymore either! Mama Janet took good care of me while I took good care of my puppy, and then when I got him all finished up, I moved to Mama Jean's house. Mama Jean called me Cricket Sue, and I liked that a lot, mainly because Mama Jean loved me a bunch, just like I was one of her own dogs.

I heard a rumor that some cats live here, too, but I haven't seen any.

But then I came to live with my Forever MamaLady, and she says my name is Bertie SueBell. She says I am named after Albert Einstein because of my crazy furs, but I think it's because I have all the smartnesses and lots of relativities like my Brother Brewster and my Aunt Maddie, who are Pals Dogs, too, and my Cousin Miles, who is not in our Pals Club, but is a good guy anyway. So I think Bertie SueBell is my best name so far, and I think I will keep it, even though sometimes the MamaLady yells, "Alberta!" in that screechy tone that means I'm supposed to quit eating cat poop in the yard. I mean, really, what does she think it's there for?

Here are me and Brewie not barking. Much.

But most of the time my name means good things. After all, I have important Bertie SueBell jobs to do now that no one else could do as well as me. Mainly I have to take good care of Brewie and the MamaLady. Brewie is a DINOS, which really just means he's a big ol' scaredy-dog, and it's my job to show him that it's okay to be brave and meet new people. Brewie watches what I do, so when I decide not to bark at someone, he knows he doesn't have to bark, either. When we go visiting somewhere, I always walk in first to show Brewie there's nothing to be afraid of. And when we go on walks together, I show him how to be brave when we walk past fences with dogs yelling at us, and we never yell back. Almost never. Mostly.

You can play Snuzzles in the grass, too.

And would you believe I even had to teach that Brewie how to play chase? When I first moved in, I kept running away and he would just sit there and stare at me. What a dork. But he figured it out eventually, and now we take turns chasing each other around the house. The MamaLady says it's a good thing the floors are already all scratched up, but I heard her tell someone that she'd rather have happy dogs and scratched-up floors than fancy floors and no dogs, so I run a lot to help her out. And Brewie even taught me something, even though I have much more smartnesses than him. He likes to play a game called Snuzzles, which is just rolling around in blankets and stuff, and I don't really get it, but Brewie likes it, so I roll around with him so he won't feel dumb for playing such a silly game all by himself, kind of like when you have to play Uno with your little brother, even though you'd rather be playing poker.

My most very important job.

I also take good care of the MamaLady by hanging out with her all the time in case she needs me to sit on her lap so she can give me good pets. It's a big responsibility, but I am up for the challenge. Sometimes she doesn't even know she needs me on her lap and I have to noodge my way on, but all my hard work is worth it. MamaLady says she feels better when she pets me, and I can see why because my furs are beautiful and soft now. She also says I help her by making her laugh all the time, even though I am very serious about all my important jobs. MamaLady says I should be the star of my own cartoon show, which I think is probably a very serious, important kind of show on the noisy box about how to be good at important DogPerson-type jobs.

I have all the beautifulnesses, too.

So I think that of all my names, I like the one I have now the most and I will keep it. MamaLady says that of all the Bertie SueBells in the whole entire world, I am the Very Best, and since I have all the smartnesses, I know she is right about that.

*A note from the MamaLady: Sometimes people are indignant or angry that the staff at the Wichita Animal Shelter was going to euthanize a beautiful, friendly dog like Bertie Sue. I think that's kind of silly. The staff at the Animal Shelter and the Kansas Humane Society work so hard to save as many animals as they can, and they have extremely limited resources. They simply cannot save every animal who crosses their threshold, and I have no doubt that Bertie Sue appeared to them to be aggressive. (Even in the best of times, Bert doesn't like to be bothered when she's resting and isn't shy about telling HumanPeople to Back Off.) It would've been too much to ask the WAS and KHS to invest the time and money into an aggressive mother dog who would have to nurse for six weeks and who might never be adoptable. So instead of being angry, I choose to be grateful that the WAS was able to get Bert off the street in the first place, and that here in Wichita we have an organization like Pals Animal Rescue that can step in and rescue at least a few of the dogs who can't do well in a shelter environment but can be rehabilitated in a home. Everyone worked together to get my Bertie SueBell to me and Brewster, and we're so glad they did. We need her!