Our Man In America

These two collections over at mental floss made my morning.

Japanese sources on the US:

Non-smokers are more important than smokers in the US. Smokers capture the concept that they are not able to control themselves, and are the owners of weak character.

And Russian sources on the US:

However, it would be wrong to believe that the Americans with their smiles only create the illusion of well-being and that their smiles are stretched with false joy. This is not so. Americans: they are a nation that truly feels happy. These people get used to smiling from the cradle onwards, so they do not pretend to be cheerful. The desire for a successful happy life is inculcated from childhood.

Loyalty: Gloria Steinem

There are few things I pull out more often lately than this quote, both for myself and my peers. I don't know that I would have found it had I not been unemployed in May, when this story ran in New York Magazine, since no one in the event lineup is anyone I tend to follow (excepting, of course, Amy Poehler). But I'm glad I did, and entirely for the Gloria Steinem quote in the final paragraph:

“In my generation, it was difficult to know that you could take control of your own life,” she said. “You thought your husband and children were supposed to dictate your life. Now I see young women who feel they have to be a total success by 30, which is very different. And both things are equally wrong.”

She wasn't talking about writing, at least not exactly. But she was talking about writing, and about how a particular subset of women in my generation--well educated, high-achieving, either middle class now or from that sphere in childhood, and tending towards social justice, or at least socially postive, professions--tends to think about ambition. I personally find it simultaneously an excellent reality check and effective motivator.

The Loyalty of Water: Living with the Scratches

Guest post by Allison Landa 

First off, thanks to Emily for inviting me to be part of this experiment. And it is an experiment, isn’t it? Everything is. The only time an experiment is no longer an experiment is when it’s dead, when it’s still and quiet and can finally, ultimately, be judged.

And speaking of judging, let’s look at the Mary Oliver quote from which this experiment takes its name: creative work requires a loyalty as complete as the loyalty of water to the force of gravity. I don’t have that loyalty. My loyalty is to other things: lying on the couch, for one. Buttered popcorn, for another. The Food Network, and I can go on and on – but these are easy loyalties, cheap and simply won.

The loyalty of which Oliver speaks is different. It is, I suspect, a matter of the creative process as willing entrapment. There are layers of entrapment: one must be committed to the project, the process and the present. Sometimes the layers feel like a favorite flannel shirt, slightly worn, completely comfortable. Other times they are that sweater you mistakenly wore on what turned out to be a ninety-degree day, defeating in their heavy insistence.

And what of my own loyalty to the process? It’s a fickle one to be sure. I write in spurts, without any sort of rhyme or reason or schedule. I write when I feel like it and occasionally when I don’t, but it’s typically at my whim, not because I have a cast-iron will. Sometimes it all feels great. Sometimes it feels like a burr in my ass, a prickly one.

It would be far too easy to say I happily choose to embrace it all. It would also be a bunch of crap. Of course challenge is harder to embrace than peaceful progress. Challenge is a bitch to wrap your arms around. It’s spiky, wriggly. But you hug it nonetheless, and you live with the scratches.

Allison Landa is a Berkeley, CA-based writer who earned her MFA in creative writing at St. Mary’s College of California. She has held residencies at The MacDowell Colony, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Playa Summer Lake and The Julia and David White Artists’ Colony. Her memoir BEARDED LADY is represented by Naomi Davis at Inklings Literary Agency, and an early excerpt was featured in Salon. Stalk her at www.allisonlanda.com.

Loyalty: Carole Maso

Thanks to Melissa Sipin for drawing my attention to this.

"For a long time I had wanted a child, but the desire, attenuated, had passed, and other feelings had taken its place. I had become so entranced by the utterly hypnotic path I found myself on, so bleary, so consumed by my work, that I had lost track of whatever else I may have once wanted. I had wandered away into a kind of otherworldly bliss, a joy like no other, and the child further and further off on some remote horizon had become a shadow—like almost everything else in my world. From those weird, windy, solitary heights from which I worked now I watched the child wave, wave, and then finally vanish. Disappeared on a beautiful, curving planet—utterly out of reach. A distant, infinitesimal music.

"The Bay of Angels, a book I had just begun composing after ten years of note-taking, was to be the project for the rest of my life; I was quite certain of it—and the prospect of a life of such possibility and pleasure and challenge was more than I had ever dared ask or hope for. Over the years it had slowly grown in me—each book I had written was preparation for it. Time was passing and the urgency, as Stein said, "to write something down someday in my own handwriting" was pressing. The chance to get closer to the eternity in myself. I was ready at last. It was clear to me that in order to even attempt such an endeavor more sacrifices would have to be made. But they were well worth it—had always been worth it. The accompanying melancholy was just part of the bargain, the demands such work makes, the tolls it takes, simply part of the deal. I thought of Beckett's "sadness after song." Sadness because it was so imperfect and inadequate and fleeting, because it demanded absolutely everything. I watched the child recede.

"With every major decision there is regret, for the very act involves choosing one thing over another. I have always experienced a certain sorrow when any project I am working on begins to take a shape and becomes a stable, definitive text—because it excludes the thousand books it might have been. No matter how spacious, no matter how suggestive or fluid, I cannot help but feel the death of possibility all over again—the books that now would never be. I have never felt completely reconciled to that fact. This and not that.

"The sadness after song. I would not mind. If song it was I got to sing.

"How then to account for the wave of clarity that passed through me, propelling me into an utterly charmed and charged night to retrieve that little waving figure who was mine? The child I had spent years writing about in my Bay of Angels notebooks. When I look back I see that she is there in one way or another in many, many guises. My writing life, as always, so much further ahead of my conscious, rational mind. How had I been so blind? There she was at the periphery of every page, waiting, begging at the edge of language, calling my name. But I did not, could not recognize her—until it was very nearly too late."

From The Room Lit by Roses, 2000

Remember thou too art mortal

We were watching the toy group of the Westminster Dog Show last night, and I discovered my new favorite: the show Pekinese. Maybe it's just because he's clearly an incredible specimen of his breed, maybe it's because his fancy dog name involves the phrase Easily Persuaded, but mostly it's because when he did his lap around the ring, he looked like an animated couch cushion, out for a walk. Or an Ewok. The majority of his movement was a kind of sideways walking, and yet he still propelled himself forward.

Then, I discovered this on Wikipedia, ostensibly written about these dogs by the Dowager Emperess Cixi. And the day was over. Wasn't getting any better after that.

Let the Lion Dog be small; let it wear the swelling cape of dignity around its neck; let it display the billowing standard of pomp above its back.

Let its face be black; let its forefront be shaggy; let its forehead be straight and low.

Let its eyes be large and luminous; let its ears be set like the sails of war junk; let its nose be like that of the monkey god of the Hindus.

Let its forelegs be bent; so that it shall not desire to wander far, or leave the Imperial precincts.

Let its body be shaped like that of a hunting lion spying for its prey.

Let its feet be tufted with plentiful hair that its footfall may be soundless and for its standard of pomp let it rival the whick of the Tibetans' yak, which is flourished to protect the imperial litter from flying insects.

Let it be lively that it may afford entertainment by its gambols; let it be timid that it may not involve itself in danger; let it be domestic in its habits that it may live in amity with the other beasts, fishes or birds that find protection in the Imperial Palace.

And for its color, let it be that of the lion - a golden sable, to be carried in the sleeve of a yellow robe; or the colour of a red bear, or a black and white bear, or striped like a dragon, so that there may be dogs appropriate to every costume in the Imperial wardrobe.

Let it venerate its ancestors and deposit offerings in the canine cemetery of the Forbidden City on each new moon.

Let it comport itself with dignity; let it learn to bite the foreign devils instantly.

Let it be dainty in its food so that it shall be known as an Imperial dog by its fastidiousness; sharks fins and curlew livers and the breasts of quails, on these may it be fed; and for drink give it the tea that is brewed from the spring buds of the shrub that groweth in the province of Hankow, or the milk of the antelopes that pasture in the Imperial parks.

Thus shall it preserve its integrity and self-respect; and for the day of sickness let it be anointed with the clarified fat of the legs of a sacred leopard, and give it to drink a throstle's eggshell full of the juice of the custard apple in which has been dissolved three pinches of shredded rhinoceros horn, and apply it to piebald leeches.

So shall it remain - but if it dies, remember thou too art mortal.