Hump Day Hmmm

1976 is the Hump Day Hmm


I was twelve and in the 7th grade. The spring before one of the fifth/sixth grade teachers at my Catholic school had decided to run a mock election to educate us about the democratic process and our effed-up vetting system as it was a Presidential election year. It was one of those hands on interdisciplinary units that has been going in and out of educational vogue since the early 70’s.

We were all assigned party affiliation and a job. Some of us were tapped to represent the actual candidates and make speeches. My friend Lisa J. was Mo Udall, I think*. I don’t remember what state I represented as a delegate. Someplace small and insignificant and ironically good practice for all the years I voted Democratic during the endless Republican regimes.

The thing I remember most was that the whole thing was a lot of fun. Infinitely more fun than the Colonial experience we were subjected to as 7th graders when some of us got to be privileged Tories and the rest of us Yanks**.

So much fun was had and so jazzed we were about Jimmy Carter that a bunch of us went and volunteered at the Democratic headquarters in our little town. The staffers there didn’t really know what to do with us. I think they might have thought they were getting high schoolers and didn’t quite know how to utilize pre-teens. We ended up stuffing envelopes. It was very exciting. Really, it was. 

I went out and bought a Jimmy Carter t-shirt*** and quizzed my parents and other adults I knew about who they were going to vote for, making sure to re-educate them when they foolishly admitted their Ford leaning ways.

Fast forward to 1984. Orwell couldn’t have written a more horrifying story. Four more years of Ronald Reagan.

Seriously, that Reagan still garners so much praise and admiration puzzles me to no end. The man let his unelected advisors run our country. Trillions of dollars evaporated on his watch. Social systems were dismantled. Education suffered huge setbacks from which it still hasn’t recovered. And we opened the doors to theocratic governing that has taken incalcuable chunks out of our personal freedoms. What a guy.

And on top of it, the guy was suffering from dementia to varying degrees for most of that term and this was kept from us.****

Jump ahead with me, if you will, to 1992. I am second in line at my polling station to cast my vote for Bill Clinton. I practically bounce with glee at the prospect of finally electing the POTUS. I Snoopy-dance all day, much to the annoyance of the few Republicans I teach with. If I did nothing else that day by way of teaching, I taught my students the joy of participation in our political system – for the winner anyway.

You might wonder if I believed that Clinton was a morally upright guy who hadn’t cheated on his wife or engaged in nefarious dealings as the govenor of Arkansas.

I course I didn’t.

Years of family valued, moral right-wing evangelical rule had only reinforced the lesson I learned the summer I was ten*****, politicians are power seekers by nature and put their own ambitions and needs first and do their job second. What I cared most about was that the first didn’t negate the second. In other words, whatever they did out of sight in the confines of their personal lives didn’t matter so long as they did as an elected official what they said they were going to do. 

Clinton is as morally relative as they come, but I never doubted – still don’t – his love for his country and his passion about governing. The man loves the job and what’s more – he did it as much as he was able given the checks and balance system we live under.

My participatory joy has tempered quite a bit since the summer of ’76. Thirty plus years and a too intimate encounter with several government agencies during my late husband’s illness have jaded me even more than Nixon did in 1974. 

The United States is my homeland, but it is just a place – not a democratic Nirvana and Buddha reincarnates the Dali Lama, not the POTUS.

Okay, so Julie’s Hump Day instructions:

Next week…several people asked that the topic be related to my last post, about 1984. It doesn’t have to be political, it doesn’t have to be 1984 (keeping in mind that not everyone was born or much aware at that point). But choose a time that was an awakening for you, select a year or an event that year, that you invested in, although you might now have been quite old enough to understand it fully, and that affected you down the line. Or write about 1984, the election or your life then.

The following week…build on the idea in this post, and the concept of awakening. What shift in thinking have you experienced that caused you to view others differently, and created a new way of thinking in yourself?

 

*Lisa J, correct me if I am wrong.

**Tories could use the restroom at will while we Yanks only got potty breaks at lunch and before gym in the afternoon. Catholic school teachers could give lessons to the non-torturers at GITMO.

***I still have that shirt in a cedar chest in my parents’ basement in Iowa.

****This is why McCain frightens me. Senility descends by fractions until it reaches a certain point and the dam bursts. 

*****Like the TV baby and geek I was, I watched the hearings proceeding Nixon’s resignation every day. It was fascinating. Partly because it was grown-ups punishing other grown-ups for behavior that most of them regularly engaged in – as far as I could see – which was lying and then lying about lying. If I learned anything growing up in my working class neighborhood and going to Catholic school is that moral relativism rules and that getting caught is what makes something wrong. Once found out, you stood up and took your punishment for being stupid – not for being bad.

The Jane Austen Book Club is My Lame Hump Day Hmmm


During the enforced downtime during my bout with illness a couple of weeks ago, I actually watched one of the dvd’s I checked out from the bookmobile.

Rob and I were watching quite a few flicks over the colder months thanks to our public library, but warmer weather equals much daylight up here and so we aren’t as inclined to while away hours simply watching. As a result, we are still checking out dvd’s that catch our fancy but often returning them unwatched.

I happened to run across an adaption of Karen Joy Fowler’s The Jane Austen Book Club and since I was too tired, light-headed and otherwise shitty feeling to even write a blog post (that is as low as it gets for me) I decided to watch it.

And let’s just generously say that hours of my life are just gone forever now.

The frustrating thing about books that become Hollywood movies is that more often than not the entire book is seen as merely a guideline for film rather than the basis for the movie’s existence. Throughout my viewing I was acutely aware that I was being shortchanged. Characters appeared and vanished. Main characters behaved in ways that the other characters seemed to understand without question but left me with nothing but questions.

My main question was this: what was the real version of this story. I knew there had to be a better one. One that was rich and full of real detail.

So, as I often do in these situations, I sought out the book.

Did the page and paper thing.

Actually read.

Reading just the prologue – not even five full pages – I realized that the film was even less a guideline than I had suspected. Four and a quarter pages of the author’s original intent told me the following:

  • the character’s ages had been altered in favor of younger people. Everyone was at least 5 to a dozen years older in the book. I guess a novel can have women of a “certain age” but the big screen mustn’t show women over 50 if they can help it (and then they must be “quirky” because that will explain the “old looking thing”.)
  • it was supposed to be told from just a single character’s perspective and that the filmmaker had dropped the idea to avoid voice over – I’m guessing – but a narrator certainly would have helped the movie because it jumped all over without much explanation save the passing of the months.
  • although the author had the women “typed” ie: flamboyant woman of a certain age, best friend, perfect friend, younger woman friend in need of mentoring, Lesbian, the simple paragraphish introductions seemed more flexible and fluid than their rigid and wooden screen counterparts. I credit the imagination. The mind is a far better screen.
  • I knew the book was going to be way better.

I hate film versions of novels by and large even if I haven’t read the book first because it is often so obvious that the story was diluted to make it “fit” the screen and running time.

When I was a kid I loved movies. Almost as much as I loved books. But anymore I find them slow and easy to out-think and insulting. The last because the filmmaker doesn’t view my time as valuable or my attention worth working for. Better to try and dazzle me with visuals and distract me with soundtracks.

My question for you is book or movie?

Organic Writing is My Hump Day Hmm


Damyanti wrote recently about the difficulty of tapping that deep well of creativity that supposedly flows like a well-stocked lake inside all writers. Simply cast a line and reel in the idea and the words to express them will follow along behind like obedient children.

Anyone who has ever fished, or had children, knows that submission of this sort is a fantasy. Fish fight and children have minds of their own. And so it is with writing.

Sometimes the ideas are not as plain as the nose on our faces. Though for me, my nose is only plainly apparent when I search out my image in a mirror.

Words and phrases do not also flow out my fingertips either. Just in case you were wondering.

Writing is something that I do. Have done. Ever since I was a child, the ability to spin a tale or bring life to an idea or simply arouse emotional response via words on the page has been mine. But I can’t say that it came any more easily to me than the ability to hit, catch and throw. Some of the aptitude was gifted but the rest was practice.

There is a quote cited from Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert ( a book I find trite and a cheat, given the privileged circumstances surrounding its writing) that exhorts us to:

“let go and sit still and allow contentment to come to you”

The parallel to writing is clear. There are times in the creative process a writer, or any other type of artist, can’t force or hurry up. But I am beginning to realize that this doesn’t mean one quits working all together while the muse goes wool gathering.

I am not a big fan of free writing. That stream of consciousness crap of which those who buy into the Artist’s Way nonsense are so fond. Meandering is just that and though occasionally a writer will stumble out of the maze and back onto the path this way, it isn’t a productive way to achieve much except by accident which is apparently okay with a lot of writers.

Blocks are agonizing. Knowing you are sitting on a great story while it refuses to hatch is frustrating. But who ever said that writing wasn’t work?

Okay, people who don’t write reference the idea a lot.

It reminds me of the Dire Straits song, Money for Nothing. The attitude that art is somehow a cheat and artists are cleverly dodging “real” work.

Thing about writing, being a real writer, is that it isn’t glamourous. It’s not living in Italy. Or traveling to an ashram to find the enlightenment that has always eluded you.

Enlightenment, like the muse, is within and it’s only through hard work that both are revealed.