Helen Boyd Kramer's journal on gender and stuff
A very happy birthday to my pops, who turns 80 today! 80! & Do you know, at his last checkup, the doctor informed him that 50% of men are dead by their 79th birthday? What kind of nutty thing is that to tell a person?
The secret to his longevity: he doesn’t stress much. & Hot dogs.
I recently read two books that took place in PA, one fiction, the other non-fiction. Baker Towers is the story of a Polish-Italian PA family, which was intriguing since I’m from a Polish-Italian family (except in my family the husband was the Italian, not the wife, & they met in Brooklyn, not PA). I found it lacking because there were historical inaccuracies – there were no Magic Markers during WWII, women used eyeliner to draw their stockings’ seams, – and because the writing was competent, but not interesting, and the characters were so arm’s-distanced that it was hard to feel for them.
The other, called The Day the Earth Caved In, was about the Centralia mine fire, & while it was good, it was – also kind of dully told.
You’d think a mine fire – and a mine disaster – would be easy to make interesting. Maybe there’s something about writing about PA that people feel they can’t be a little flash when they write.
& I say all that because I’ve written two novels (as yet unpublished) that deal, to a large or small degree, with PA, and with coal towns, and even with WWII. Jennifer Finney Boylan tells me there is a whole literature surrounding the Centralia mine fire these days, and that Harper’s Magazine even did an article about it. (Ms. Boylan has also written two books, The Planets, and The Constellations, that take place in PA, & involve mine fires).
I feel sometimes like a reverse snob; I don’t care for literary writers much, except when they’re very very good (like Tolstoy, like Calvino). I’d like to be a writer who sells books. Honestly, trying to be literary probably set my writing back quite a few years. I look back at some of the stories I wrote before college & they have clearer voices than some later stories (but, like most juvenilia, they have almost no authority to them.)
Anyway. I think Twain said once, never let literature get in the way of your writing. Or something similar.
Academia in a nutshell, or why I didn’t go get my Ph.D.
(thanks to Donna for the link)
There is a “10 Things About Yourself” Thing going around, like the spring flu, and while I previously answered “Five Things You Don’t Know About Me,” I feel like I owe everyone another five now. So here goes:
6. I played flute from age 10 – 20. I probably still can, though I haven’t tried in a long time.
7. I am very very very fond of elephants. I think perhaps I was one in a previous life (if you believe in that sort of thing, which i don’t, except that it’s a handy explanation for why I have such a thing for elephants).
8. I have lived in only 4 apts in the entire 20 years I have lived in NYC, & three of them were in upper Manhattan. (The fourth is the apt I live in now, in Brooklyn.)
9. I have 20/15 vision.
and finally
10. the first short story I wrote, aged 9, was a bad knockoff of A Wrinkle in Time.
I am sick of being asked the interview question, “So why are you looking for part-time work? Why not full-time?†and answering, “I’m a writer. I work part-time so I have time to write†and having the interviewer look at me like a dog that’s been shown a card trick.
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Thanks.
Thank you so much, everyone, for the lovely birthday wishes and the lovely (de facto) birthday party. We had a wonderful time seeing a lot of old friends, new friends — fantastic people all.
It’s still hard to believe we’re 39. I really don’t think I ever expected to live this long. But now that I have, I suppose I should have a plan.
& For those who are wondering, no, we didn’t win the lottery. ha.
A very very happy mother’s day to all the moms out there – including our own.
(& Please don’t wish me a happy mother’s day. I’m very proud of not being a mother.)
I’ve discovered that I do indeed sleep better – as does Betty – if I use a Breathe Right strip on my nose. I breathe better, so I sleep better, just like it’s supposed to work.
But using them has added some time to my morning ritual, as invariably the strip unsticks itself from my nose and re-applies itself elsewhere. Like under my chin, or on the back of my neck, or on my forearm. So now when I wake up I have to play “find the Breathe Right strip” before I go outside looking like a crazy person. Although I do foresee a day when I won’t really care, either, if there is a Breathe Right strip stuck to my forehead. Thank God Betty will be there to see me along when I full abandon myself to absent-minded professor.