#amreading

Novelist as Voyeur

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Among many, I’m reading Gay Talese’s intensely bizarre The Voyeur’s Motel, and I squelched an impetus to conceal the unmistakable cover at the lake with my kids this afternoon. There’s an underlying subtext of, well, porn, which is something I never read.

Perhaps the other subtextual issue is that I realize, like all novelists, I’m a tenor of voyeur, too, always looking at other people and parsing their lives, wondering at the mechanics not only of their material lives, but their souls, too. Talese’s book reminds me of the far classier Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, and the four horsemen in relationships. Over and over, I’ve thought of that Contempt horseman rearing its head. (How much I wish I’d heeded Gladwell’s words, many years ago.)

A third of the way through the motel book, I’m already longing for Talese to toss me some kind of bone of human decency, and perhaps one reason I keep reading is I want that decency to rear up at some point.

You can never really determine during their appearance (of couples) in public that their private life is full of hell and unhappiness. I have pondered why it is absolutely mandatory for people to guard with all secrecy and never let it be known that their personal lives are unhappy and miserable.

– Gay Talese, The Voyeur’s Motel

Such a grim view. Then there’s this: swimming, we could see a bank of clouds rushing across the lake today. In this humid day, with no sign of lightening, only the rain rushing in and rushing out, the girls kept swimming in the downpour, just the two of them in all that cool water. Voyeur that I may be – beneath a cedar tree in a shower storm – I hope to catch a more joyous slice of human life.

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Greensboro, Vermont

Mother’s Work

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

Maybe I’m just incredibly narrowly read, but it seems far too infrequent that I read a male writer exclaiming, “Thank god. The kids played Monopoly all afternoon and left me alone at my desk. For two whole hours.” Perhaps what I need isn’t so much a room of mine own (which I now have, after many years) but a nanny of my own.

Rain is rumored, but long in arriving. We’re now settled into a summer routine of kids swimming at the lake while I spread out my laptop and a bag of work on a stained towel. By the dinner, it’s been a full day of work sandwiched with swimming and snacks. This is the high point of the summer – the crickets at full throttle, the lakes endless, the garden escaping its fence and long past the dire point of must-weeding. What will grow, will indeed grow. Blackberry tart rears its maplely head this evening.

Here’s a brief bit of beach reading from Mary Norris’s Between You and Me, one more womanly skill among many mothering others:

Used well, the semicolon makes a powerful impression; misused, it betrays your ignorance.

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Blackberries in All Their Heavenly Glory

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

I naturally think of the world in terms of metaphors, and blackberry season is a thread that’s wound all through my adult life. Twenty years ago, we moved into our house – essentially a hunting camp then – on a clay-soil Vermont hillside with little else of human life around. On a woods road behind the house, I discovered a blackberry thicket. I see my younger self, picking alone in those brambles, wearing an old red t-shirt and darted at by hummingbirds, afraid of the bears who had clearly enjoyed their share of the wild harvest.

My daughters and I easily picked a quart last evening of exceptionally sweet and juicy berries. Some years, the berries are seedy and hard; some years, the vines are nearly absent of fruit; others, like this one, go on and on for weeks, delicious, wild, there for the gathering.

One year, I pulled a long thorn from my young daughter’s sandal. Her tiny heel released a single drop of crimson blood. Through all these seasons, here’s been the berries, various as our own family dynamics – generous or bitter, depending on the season – but invariably returning. Isn’t that metaphor enough?

Here’s a Galway Kinnell one-liner:

I love to go out in late September among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries to eat blackberries for breakfast, the stalks very prickly, a penalty they earn for knowing the black art of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries fall almost unbidden to my tongue, as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words like strengths or squinched, many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps, which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well in the silent, startled, icy, black language of blackberry – eating in late September.

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Photo by Molly S.

A Mouse Passing

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

This will likely reveal the sad state of housekeeping around here, but the other morning I found a dead mouse in the living room. The little creature must have folded itself against the chimney in the night and passed along into the next realm for small rodents, leaving behind a gray and a very long-tailed body. I swept it into the dustpan and laid it outside beneath a maple tree. Still early in the morning, the grass was cool beneath my bare feet, and the children were sleeping, wreathed in their world of dreams.

Ill, injured, or simply old? I don’t know. The leaves flipped up their undersides, preparing for rain. I knew the little body wouldn’t remain there long. These shells of creatures never do, scavenged up by some other animal, turned into someone else.

Oddly, as I walked back into the house and picked up my laptop on the couch again, I thought of an Issa haiku I first read when I was a teenager, more resonant, stronger, than ever. Ah, little mouse…

Don’t kill that fly!
Look–it’s wringing its hands,
wringing its feet.

– Kobayashi Issa

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One Life Instruction, via Mary Oliver

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Last summer, we were eating dinner with friends who have young children, and two couples compared notes about their toddlers drinking dirty bath water. I laughed and assured them, yes, someday their kids would brush their own teeth. The real challenge, I claimed, was when the teenagers take off in the Toyota.

As I often am, I was wrong. What about when a child decides to disappear into a remote mountain wilderness? Or head down her own path of parenthood?

In my forties, now, I’ve reached the point where life is no longer that amorphous, endlessly murky terrain, but indeed life stretches out, far more winding than I ever would have imagined when I was twenty. Perhaps it’s the decade of my life, but now separations, cancers, loss and loss again, is no longer uncommon – which perhaps is why good news is so much sweeter. Every one of these babies born well, a new house, a book published, a journey completed in good humor.

Or this: my girls with their long legs sprawled on the couch, laughing about silly things, nothing more, just silliness. Long life is made of little tiny moments: soak up the sweeter ones.

Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

– Mary Oliver

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The Jungle Between Us

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Although in Vermont it’s a beautiful August right now, in winter the snow piles awfully darn high, and when I had little kids, we were often snow-bound for days. When I was pregnant with my second child, I read every bit of many New Yorker issues, all the way down to the ads. It was one long winter. In an essay years ago by James Wood, he wrote wondering who read his book reviews, and I wanted to answer: me! They’re my personal literature course.

It’s such a pleasure to get reading material in the mail. This issue of The New Yorker has an article about an isolated Amazonian tribe. It’s a story of two tribes with a shared history, and the two different paths they chose. One came nearly out of the forest, the other retreated more deeply within. It’s fascinating journalism, and a perfect metaphor for how profoundly we don’t understand those nearest to us. 

This word compassion comes up over and over this summer in my life. What does a quality of heart mean? Perhaps compassion demands a measure of acceptance that we’ll never truly know another, that the immensity of jungle permeates much of human life.

It is easy enough to be friendly to one’s friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.

– Mahatma Gandhi

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Greensboro, Vermont