Mardi's Link

Springtime: The Season I Most Want to be Wendell Berry

Where's my wife? Where in blazes has that little lady gotten herself to now?

There are tomato seedlings to plant, an acre-plus of lawn to mow, downed trees from spring storms to cut up into firewood, garden paths to mulch with sawdust, grubs to contemplate the demise of, asparagus to pick, and a manuscript to proofread.

It is this last task that makes me long for a wife and makes me long to be Mr. Berry. If only for a season.

To whit, a quote from his 1987 essay, Why I'm NOT Going to Buy a Computer:

"My wife types my work on a Royal standard typewriter bought new in 1956 and as good now as it was then. As she types, she sees things that are wrong and marks them with small checks in the margins. She is my best critic because she is the one most familiar with my habitual errors and weaknesses. She also understands, sometimes better than I do, what ought to be said. We have, I think, a literary cottage industry that works well and pleasantly. I do not see anything wrong with it."

I aspire to live an approximation of Mr. Berry's seasonal life. Gardening in the spring and summer, writing in the fall and winter.

Obviously, I have no wife; my handsome husband, for all his many charms, is a poor typist. Mine is a literary cottage industry of one. One plus a damn fine iMac. It works well and pleasantly. I do not see anything wrong with it.

What's So Bad About Happy Endings?

Maybe it's those impossibly beautiful images from the Royal Wedding lingering in my head. After all, I'm officially still a newlywed myself. Or, maybe it's that all of the armageddon-laced predictions of late turned out to be wrong. Hell, maybe it's simply that spring has finally arrived in Northern Michigan. Whatever it is, I'm feeling decidedly cheerful these days.

Which is why I was so taken aback to read this in The New Yorker: "Marriage is an anachronism."

Having just turned in a memoir containing the two literary sins of marriage and a happen ending, this caught my attention. I've been using my newly aimless days to plow through my reading pile like a hired hand. The above pronouncement is part of a review of Elizabeth Gilbert's book, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage that the magazine published a ways back. The review goes on to say this about Ms. Gilbert's happy ending: 

"The 'peace and contentment' at which Gilbert abruptly arrives in the final chapter of the book is a little suspicious . . . As in all romantic comedies, from the novels of Jane Austen to the 'Sex and the City' movie, 'Committed' ends with a wedding that brings with it the cessation of doubt and strife."

From there, my reading veered off to an anthology, My Mistress Sparrow is Dead edited by Jeffrey Eugenides. In the introduction, I found this: "The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims -- these are lucky eventualities but they aren't love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart."

Well, I like a cold heart just as much as the next person but only if it's earned. Same with warm and happy endings. They have to be earned. But to criticize a happy ending only because it dares to be happy? Now that's cold.

In my stack of reading it is beginning to seem like a happy ending is, well, stranger than fiction.

 

 

A Chicken in Every Book

 

Has anyone else noticed that chickens have become ubiquitous?

This thought occured to me only after reading a feature story in The New York Times about the writer Susan Orlean. Many writers, it seems, have a yen for the hen.

This is not a trivial matter and chickens are not to be trifled with. To paraphase Anton Chekov, if you put a chicken in chapter one, you'd better be serving your hungry reader up a platter of fried chicken, or at least a few scrambled eggs, by chapter three or four.

A few examples from the poultry genre: Still Life With Chickens by Catherine Goldhammer, When Did I Get Like This? by Amy Wilson (Disclaimer: this book discusses chicken nuggets, not live chickens.), and The Chicken Shack by Henry W. Jenkins. Most notably, the extraordinary writer and Pulitzer Prize winner  Alice Walker's The Chicken Chronicles is out just this month, and a new hardover edition of P. G. Wodehouse's Love Among the Chickens is forthcoming.

Why, I wondered, all the Chicken Lit? I include myself among those writers who have flocked to chickens - the rotund birds make an appearance in my own forthcoming memoir.

Still, I knew I was onto something when a search revealed that even academia has a fascination with literary chickens. Yale University devoted an entire conference to the topic: "The Chicken. It's biological, social, cultural and industrial history from neolithic middens to McNuggets."

What is it about the chicken that attracts the writer's eye? And keyboard? Ms. Walker says this on her blog: "I sat with them expecting nothing and over the months they pecked open places I hadn’t been able to enter by myself."

Plucky on the Inside

So I turned in this book a week ago. A memoir.

And I can't stop thinking about it. All the best writer's advice says the only balm for that raw feeling of waiting to hear feedback on your finished work is to start writing something new.

But how do you begin that "something new" when you're  still living inside something else?