ThomasLitchford

Blogging is likely to be quiet for a few days as I visit with my family and friends and try to come to grips with turning 30.

Sometimes, fiction writers take themselves a little too seriously. I’m guilty of it, no doubt. The result is adjective- and adverb-laden prose that sounds pretty to the inner ear (i.e. in your head, not your actual inner ear) but has no concrete meaning.

Good journalists (and some fiction writers!) are really good at writing accurate, concrete prose. Today I stumbled on Jimmy Breslin’s column about JFK’s funeral, and it’s full of great writing:

Yesterday morning, at 11:15, Jacqueline Kennedy started toward the grave. She came out from under the north portico of the White House and slowly followed the body of her husband, which was in a flag-covered coffin that was strapped with two black leather belts to a black caisson that had polished brass axles. She walked straight and her head was high. She walked down the bluestone and blacktop driveway and through shadows thrown by the branches of seven leafless oak trees. She walked slowly past the sailors who held up flags of the states of this country. She walked past silent people who strained to see her and then, seeing her, dropped their heads and put their hands over their eyes. She walked out the northwest gate and into the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue. She walked with tight steps and her head was high and she followed the body of her murdered husband through the streets of Washington.

Everybody watched her while she walked. She is the mother of two fatherless children and she was walking into the history of this country because she was showing everybody who felt old and helpless and without hope that she had this terrible strength that everybody needed so badly. Even though they had killed her husband and his blood ran onto her lap while he died, she could walk through the streets and to his grave and help us all while she walked.

It’s not all concrete, but he earns the phrase ‘terrible strength,’ and you know exactly what he means by it. He knows what things are called, and the only adjectives he uses are the ones necessary to portray the scene (’leafless’).

But Breslin’s writing is not without style. In fact (and maybe this was the going style in the Sixties), his writing reminds me of Kerouac’s.

I defy you to read this New York Times piece and not ask yourself why this woman wanted children in the first place. Be sure to read the original Craigslist post.

I understand we are biologically driven to procreate, but why do we have kids so other people can raise them? Is this some stubborn holdout of aristocratic society? The all-devouring necessity to produce an heir?

Danielle found the story for me and said she thought it would be perfect for my Decline of Western Civilization category.

When we were in New York, we saw a lot of nannies out with their charges as we walked around Manhattan. The most striking scene involved a mother in a business suit descending to the subway and waving to her daughter through the balusters. The daughter, of course, sat in a trendy stroller pushed by a nanny.

The Atlantic published a piece by Sandra Tsing Loh in their ‘Ideas Issue’ on working moms that nails the basic irony of the drive for both parents to work.

The debate about mothers and work: it always ends—doesn’t it?—with Sweden. Oh, if America could only be like Sweden—such a humane society, with its free day care for working mothers and its government subsidies of up to $11,900 per child per year. The problem? One hates to be Mrs. Red-State Republican Bringdown, but yes … the taxes. Currently, the top marginal income-tax rate in Sweden is nearly 60 percent (down from its peak in 1979 of 87 percent). Government spending amounts to more than half of Sweden’s GDP. (And it doesn’t all go to children, given Sweden’s low fertility rate.) On the upside, government spending creates jobs: from 1970 to 1990, a whopping 75 percent of Swedish jobs created were in the public sector … providing social welfare services … almost all of which were filled by women. Uh-oh. In short, as Gilbert points out, because of the 40 percent tax rate on her husband’s job, a new mother may be forced to take that second, highly taxed job to supplement the family’s finances; in other words, she leaves her toddlers behind from eight to five (in that convenient universal day care) so she can go take care of other people’s toddlers or empty the bedpans of elderly strangers.

The only entity that benefits from the employment of both parents of an upper-middle-class family (the kind of family who can afford to hire a nanny) is the GDP.

Friday morning, I was working on the computer when Danielle said she thought it would be a good idea to drive out to Waverly, New York, to see her grandparents. I hummed and hawed and said, Sure, call them and ask if it’s OK.

Of course it was OK. They hadn’t seen Sean since March. So we packed up the car, packed up the baby, and hit the road by about noon.

These are the kinds of things you do during the Year of Bliss.

We spent a quiet two days 6.5 hours west of the craziness that is Newport on Labor Day weekend. We sat around and told stories about the baby and listened to Danielle’s grandfather Walt spin his yarns. Walt is a truly great storyteller. He’s the kind of guy who always has a joke (it’s likely to be off-color) or a story about some distant kin.

The best story this visit was about Quentin, the 10-year-old son of Walt’s nephew Brian (I think; this is Danielle’s side of the family, so the tree branches get a little tangled up in my memory). Anyway, Quentin is ‘just like an old man,’ says Walt. He’s always thinking things over and responding with something like, ‘Yeah, that’ll work,’ or complaining about needing to get something to eat.

For example, Quentin, his brother Grant, and their dad brought a truckload of firewood over to Walt’s house and unloaded and stacked it. When it was all done, Walt said, ‘Well, I guess you guys probably want to get paid for all that hard work.’ ‘Yep,’ said Quentin. ‘How much would you say I owe you?’ asked Walt. ‘Well, whatever you think is right,’ said Quentin. ‘How’s about $80 sound?’ asked Walt. ‘That’ll work,’ said Quentin.

Remember, he’s 10.

We’ve been making jam like pioneers laying in stores for a frontier winter. We made strawberry jam in June, raspberry and blueberry jam in July, and, yesterday, we made blackberry jam. Once the local apple season arrives, we’ll do apple butter. Maybe pumpkin butter in October. We’re crazy, I know.

The trouble is, once you’ve figured out how to make a reliable jar of jam from locally-grown fruit, Smucker’s just doesn’t cut it anymore.

We also experimented with a jar of pickles, which won’t be ready until September 9th. If they’re good, we’ll do a full batch. We had every intention of canning some tomatoes, but we’ve basically been eating them as soon as they’re ripe. We step out onto the deck to go for a walk, pick any ripe ones, and eat them on the spot. It’s the best part of summer.

I stumbled on this really excellent article in Travel and Leisure about Newport, the city in which I live. It’s a few years old, but still rings true in its assessment of the place:

Now downtown works as a model of New Urbanism, obeying all the pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use laws of that development movement without the unsettling perfection of its brand spanking new neighborhoods. A short walk from the harbor is the Point, a time-warp section of town with absolutely no tourist-driven establishments. Many of the simple houses and perfect little gardens are named after their builders—the Elliott Boss House, 1820; Hunter House, 1748—and feature carved pineapples, a seaport symbol of hospitality. The more lavish waterfront properties on Washington Street yield to the slightly funkier ones on Second Street, and on the weathered front porch of an old house converted into apartments, a group of neighbors have gathered for a barbecue. Theresa Wosencroft is enjoying the soft dusk as the host, Artie Jenkins, laughs and hands me a beer: “You’re in the ghettoized section of Newport,” he tells me. “We don’t have yards, just porches. Stay awhile and have some dinner.” Earlier in the day, I spent an hour at the Bellevue Avenue house of an acquaintance from Miami and wasn’t even offered a glass of water, despite the presence of a hovering butler. Newport is always good for a social lesson or two.

Then I found this New York Times article about a famous house that sits on a rock out in the bay. Oh, Newport, what a crazy place.

Sunday’s New York Times ran a great Frank Rich Op-Ed about the presidential race.

It’s finally looking like there will be some intelligent analysis of the two candidates. For the first time in my life I am seriously reconsidering my political stance. I’ve always voted Republican. Danielle has always voted Republican. Our parents vote Republican. Siblings, grandparents, etc., etc. We grew up Lutheran, for crying out loud. After 8 years of W (and, yes, I voted for him twice), I’ve been convinced that the terms ‘Republican’ and ‘Conservative’ don’t go together very well anymore. The main difference between the Dems and the Repubs seems to be ‘tax-and-spend’ vs. ‘borrow-and-spend.’

Anyway, I’m just glad to see some intelligent writing about the campaigns. The current issue of The Atlantic has some interesting stuff, too.

Thank goodness we’re finally getting beyond the simplistic rhetoric of the fictional ‘Maverick’ vs. the overly vague ‘Hope’ candidate.

What is it about August? Is it the heat, the humidity, that just saps away motivation and ambition?

Newport is incredibly full of end-of-summer vacationers trying frantically to relax before the kids are back in school. I can see it in their faces: an urgent need to maintain the schedule of fun, to Fit It All In.

Danielle and I have been on a vacation of our own. Danielle’s mom (’Hi Cheryl!’) was in town last weekend, and our friend Nancy (’Hi Nancy!’) celebrated her birthday with us yesterday. We’ve been spending our weekdays with Hulu and Netflix. In the evenings, more often than not, we gave up on trying to work because we couldn’t focus (so we watched more TV).

We’re instituting a new regimen starting tomorrow: work during the day during Sean’s naps and watch TV at night. Genius, isn’t it?

I mentioned in an earlier post that I would be ordering James Wood’s new book, How Fiction Works, immediately. Thanks to our Amazon Prime membership, I had the book in my self-consciously sweaty hands a mere two days later, and I have now finished reading it.

The title of this book should perhaps be amended, thusly: How 19th Century Fiction Works. Wood is brilliant, but he’s brilliant about a certain kind of fiction, the kind written by Gustave Flaubert and his followers. He doesn’t have time for the ‘maximalists’ (Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, Don Delillo, et al., a group he refers to as ‘hysterical realists,’ a term he coined in an earlier essay) and therefore dismisses most postwar fiction, with a handful of exceptions. He quite likes Cormac McCarthy and Norman Rush. I couldn’t tell if likes John Updike (he certainly didn’t like Terrorist), but I think he likes Philip Roth. He likes Ian McEwan’s Atonement.

My point is, his taste in literature is pretty different from mine (I love big postmodern novels by Pynchon and the like). Given that, I became suspicious early on as to whether I could learn anything from his book.

But I can learn from his book. He spends a great deal of time discussing what he calls the ‘free indirect style,’ which, for those who remember high school lit class, was once known as 3rd person limited narration. The narration follows one character’s perspective and is privy to one character’s thoughts. This is opposed to 3rd person omniscient, whose narrator can supposedly ’see all.’

This discussion is useful because of Wood’s guidelines concerning character and detail (and dialogue). These must all be appropriate to the character. ‘Apprentice’ fiction writers have a tendency to be too authorial, to let their writerly voice take the narrative over, so that the character is lost in too much detail, too much style. Apprentice writers tend to want to show off. These were all good things for me to read.

Part of the reason Wood doesn’t like the maximalists is their lack of restraint when it comes to detail. They write big, funny, shaggy books full of superfluous detail and stylistic flourishes that clearly belong to the author, and not to the character(s).

Wood writes that his book is meant for writers and readers, alike, but I would place the emphasis on writers. There are not too many casual readers who would benefit from Wood’s book. If, however, you’re interested in writing, or just interested in narrative structures (who isn’t?), you’d enjoy the book.

I finished reading Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco a while back, but I’m torn about my review.

The book is basically a thinking man’s The Da Vinci Code, but it came out in the 1980s. It follows a group of three editors (well, two editors and one philologist who fancies himself ‘a kind of private eye of learning’; this is the narrator) who cook up an explanation for all the world’s secrets and conspiracies. They do this as a joke, until the joke takes on a life of its own.

It’s fascinating to read Eco because of his intelligence and raw knowledge. The book gets a little slow at some points because of all the obscure history he has to relate, but it’s a good story with good characters. If you like reading about secret societies, this is your book.