New Year's Greeting

Wordplay is taking time out from its extremely hectic New Year's Eve festivities (consisting of dinner and TV) to wish our readers a bright and happy New Year in 2018. I don't so much mind staying in as I mind not getting to be with people I miss. The best New Year's Eve I ever spent was with a couple of friends years ago at a low-key revel at a local bar--food, libations, light jazz, and--mostly--conversation. It was neither wild and crazy nor boring and anti-climactic but just right, proving that it's not the hype or the brand-name entertainment or the fancy dress but the people you're with that make the occasion. If you're not lucky enough to be with the people who mean the most to you, may the fates bring you together without any undue delay and may 2018 be your best year ever.

Christmas Movie Extravaganza

Over the last week, I saw several different "Top Christmas Movies" lists, all of which included some films I don't really think of as holiday movies. Most of these lists had the criterion that as long as a film had a Christmas setting, it counted, whether or not the story really had a holiday theme. Since I spent several evenings watching Christmas movies this year, I came up with my own list, which is based on nothing more solid than my liking the films. I also adhere to the standard that the film should really be about Christmas.

If a child were making this list, it would, I'm sure, be different from mine. I caught bits and pieces of several movies like The Santa Clause and Elf that I thought were fine for kids, but I was going more for an "all ages" kind of appeal. I came up with a Top Five and an honorable mention category, and in trying to understand what I liked about each of them, I realized that, besides having a strong Christmas "presence," each one of them has an additional, overarching theme that gives it a depth some of the frothier holiday movies don't have.

Here's the Wordplay list, and it actually is in no particular order.

1. It's a Wonderful Life. I missed seeing it this year, but it's hard to imagine any list that wouldn't have it. Of course, it actually encapsulates a retrospective of George Bailey's entire life, but because of its Christmas Eve setting and the central role the holiday plays in the film, it's definitely a Christmas movie. The theme of decency and integrity and the difference they make in the lives of all those who know this otherwise ordinary man makes this a film for all seasons. You could watch it any time of year without it seeming out of place, but it definitely captures the holiday spirit.

2. Miracle on 34th Street. It had been a while since I'd seen this one (I'm reviewing the 1947 version, the only one I've seen). With the plot revolving around the real identity of a Mr. Kris Kringle, drafted at the last minute to play Santa Claus in the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade, it's about as Christmasy as they come. What elevates this movie is the fact that while it's ostensibly about whether or not Santa Claus is real (and if he is real, whether or not the jolly Mr. Kringle is the Santa Claus), it's also about saying yes to a number of things--imagination, trust, and new beginnings--that take a little faith but make life infinitely richer.

3. A Christmas Story. I had been meaning to watch this film for years but somehow kept missing it until this year. It has a quirky tone that I found I had to adjust to, since the characters in Ralphie's family are all a bit eccentric, but it hits its stride when Ralphie's quest to get the Christmas present of his dreams, a Red Ryder BB gun, starts to take on the quality of a mission. I liked the way the characters became more three-dimensional as the film went on; both of Ralphie's parents have their faults, but between the two of them they manage to give Ralphie and his brother just what they need. Above and beyond the Christmas theme, this is a nascent coming-of-age story.

4. A Christmas Carol. I've seen several versions of this story on film, including a musical one, and I don't think I've seen a bad one yet. I'm not singling out a particular version, because they all have their virtues, but I think at least one of them has to be on any top Christmas movies list. Dickens's story starts at the opposite end from It's a Wonderful Life, telling the tale of a man whom scarcely anyone loves who comes to realize how different life can be if he overcomes his own disappointments and opens his heart to others. Flashbacks, ghostly visitations, astral journeys, and a Christmas goose--what more can you ask for?

5. The Polar Express. Like A Christmas Carol, this movie is a little bit spooky; like A Christmas Story, it's a coming-of-age tale; and like Miracle on 34th Street, it's a movie that asks you to take certain things on faith. It may seem strange to call this a coming-of-age story when the plot takes a boy who is almost beyond believing in Santa on a magical journey to the North Pole with the purpose of re-awakening his belief. But is that really what's going on? While the movie insists on the importance of belief, Santa Claus is really only the vehicle, the catalyst on a voyage of self-discovery. It is, as the train conductor tells the children, their "crucial year," the one in which they are simultaneously looking backward at the children they have been and forward to the adults they will become.

And finally, in the Honorable Mention category: White Christmas. I saw this movie years ago and liked it, and although it seemed cornier this time than I remembered it, it's hard to find fault with a story that includes romance, a train trip from Florida to New England, comedy, Christmas at a Vermont inn, good deeds that almost backfire, and a number of elaborate musical numbers. It's light-hearted and sentimental and incorporates all that song and dance effortlessly into the plot, as long as you don't mind the schmaltz.

So that's my Top Five, plus one. If anyone was expecting a very quirky and unconventional list, I'm sure they're disappointed, as this list strikes even me as being very traditional. But after all, that's what we like about Christmas: the traditions.

Thoroughly Modern Thor

Well, another day, another non-dollar here at Wordplay, but it's Christmas, and we don't have a tree or presents, but we have been watching holiday movies and getting a kick out of that. Most of them I have seen before, and some grow brighter with time, and some fade a little, but then, I've written many times about the phenomenon of changing perspective, and you probably don't want to hear about that again.

"Why don't you tell us something we don't know?" I can hear somebody saying. Funny, but I was about to say the same thing to you. Why don't you tell me something I don't know? I guess now we're at an impasse and will have to resort to talking about the weather in lieu of anything else. Come to think of it, they do seem awfully excited about catastrophic events over at The Weather Channel these days, so maybe they are on to something. And here was me thinking the lot of them had just fallen into the holiday punchbowl.

There was a scene in a holiday movie the other night in which two people got into a sled, and right on cue, snow began to fall on them, and them alone. It was a column of snow that moved with them, their own personal weather system. I sort of know how they feel. There have been a few times this year when I felt like there was a cloud following me around, though none of it was anything unexpected or out of the way for the time of year and the location, not like the recent freak snowstorm in the southern U.S. (which didn't reach us here).

I certainly had my share of storms, though, from the Big Wind that walloped Oklahoma when I was driving to California in June, to the Big Black Wall of rain that soaked me in Texas as I was driving to a friend's house (looking, I swear, like something out of The Day After Tomorrow--never have I seen a cloud like that outside of a special effects movie), to the big bolt of lightning that struck close by just as I stepped outside after returning to Lexington in September. Then there was the downpour that started in the early morning just as I was going out to my car recently to leave for the airport, a trip that began with pouring rain and ended in fire in California. That was a bit uncanny for a single trip.

Now, of course, I suffered no physical effects from any of these events, though I could have. It wasn't like I suffered through the hurricanes in the Caribbean or lost a home to fire like many others have--but I definitely feel I've had my share of near misses with weather. I was reading an article recently about an organization sponsored by our government that has been studying UFOs--which some officials, including former senator Harry Reid, who championed this group--apparently take very seriously. The thought crossed my mind, based on my own rash of experiences with extreme weather, that some of these unidentified objects might be aircraft carrying out some kind of high-altitude weather experiments. Of course, I'm merely being fanciful here--if someone had that type of technology, they would be using it to make rain over Southern California, not dropping thunderbolts on random citizens.

And if the U.S. government doesn't know anything about such a project, I'm sure I don't. Of course, the government is kind of a compartmentalized place, and one hand doesn't always know what the other is doing, by all accounts. Just because Harry Reid didn't know anything about making rain doesn't mean somebody else doesn't.

This seems to me the makings of a plot for a science fiction movie. Just imagine it, a world in which someone controls weather and other natural phenomena for purposes of war, lightning bolts instead of bullets, earthquakes instead of tanks, as if the old gods, Thor and Poseidon, were astride Olympus once more. And even worse than that, think of the possibility of holding a place siege by keeping the rains away, letting homesteads burn and crops wither, attempting to beat your enemies into submission by means of a merciless sky. Though I admit I have trouble thinking of that as warfare--it seems more like a criminal act. Of course, if you had the means to do things like that, it might not be something you'd want to admit. You could do a lot of sneaky mischief and no one would be the wiser.

The old science fiction movies in which the threats to civilization come from the outside represent a different paradigm than this one. Even the movies in which science unleashes unintended consequences, giant insects resulting from radiation mutations and so on, are in a different category, because what I'm envisioning is a world in which the consequences are not unintended but purposeful. This would be a Matrix-like existence indeed, one in which one is never sure of the extent to which a natural event is "natural" or manipulated--how could you tell the difference? In the old dispensation, people were generally remorseful about the havoc they unleashed (except for the guy that thinks the way to solve the problem is by using even more technology, and there's always one of those). In the new dispensation, the technology is the calculated means to an end.

I guess I'm old-fashioned, but I find all of this too scary to contemplate, even if it is just a movie I'm writing in my head. Though one can think of good uses to which weather control might be put, the bad uses are pretty alarming. So where does that leave us? Why, in a brave new world, where else?

I guess you can see why I'd rather be watching Christmas movies, and I'm sure you would be, too. It's not really the season for these apocalyptic imaginings, so I'm just going to blame it on The Weather Channel for all the shouting they're doing over there. That and the thunderbolt that almost got me.

"This Living Hand"

A week or two ago, I was browsing in the Mystery shelves of the public library when I came across a trove of Robert B. Parker's books. At one time, I read quite a few of his Spenser novels (and was also a fan of the TV series based on the books). It had been years since I'd read any, and I don't remember why I stopped, but in any case I was pleasantly surprised to see so many titles that seemed new to me. Mr. Parker was always an entertaining writer and one that I thought I would enjoy getting reacquainted with.

The book I selected had an interesting premise involving a woman swindled out of a large sum by a romantic partner who had ties to arms dealers, espionage, and a number of other hazy entities. She hired Spenser to find him and get her money back. The story started off strongly and brought in the regular cast of characters I remembered from the earlier books, including Spenser's girlfriend, Dr. Susan Silverman, and his associate, the formidable Hawk. I really enjoyed the first couple of chapters, which I read in the library, and I was considering checking the book out when I happened to glance at the inside back cover, curious to see what Mr. Parker looks like now.

That was when I discovered what I might already have known but somehow forgot, that Mr. Parker is actually deceased. The author of the book I was holding was another writer who has been given the job, by Mr. Parker's estate, of continuing the Spenser series. I was taken aback to discover this, both saddened to understand I wasn't reading Mr. Parker's own words and put off to realize that even though his name was on the cover, someone else had taken over. Although I had already become interested in the story, I put the book back. I'm not sure I would have done the same if I had realized immediately that another author had taken over the franchise, but under the circumstances, with Mr. Parker's name on the cover, I felt kind of cheated.

This is not a commentary on the quality of the writing. It's been so long since I read anything of Mr. Parker's that I'm not sure whether or not I would have recognized anything different in the authorial voice if I had continued to read. Maybe, maybe not. The book seemed firmly in familiar territory, and the case seemed very much like one that Spenser would have taken on. I'm sure that most of Mr. Parker's fans are delighted that someone has been able to pick up the torch and keep the series alive, but I was bothered by the fact that I started the book thinking it was the genuine article only to find out by chance that it wasn't. There's a big part of me that feels that if someone dies, people are being a little greedy to want more after that. An author has a distinctive voice that should be appreciated while the person is alive and revered after he or she is gone, but the business of "cloning" bothers me. Of course, that's not how publishers sell books.

I hope that I have many years of life ahead; at the same time, I have no immediate prospects for profiting greatly from any of my writing, good, bad or indifferent. But I don't like to think that, if I were to become a famous writer, someone else would try to become me after I was gone, to try to imitate my style and to take over what I had created. This seems altogether different to me than the writers who take characters made famous by someone else and put their own spin on them, using their own names so that everyone understands what they're doing.

There are some authors, including Jane Austen and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who stand up beautifully to this type of treatment. Variations on a theme can be vastly enjoyable as long as they are labeled as such and the reader knows he is reading the work of a different mind. Paying tribute to the original author's genius with a fresh interpretation and not merely imitating his or her style falls into the category of what I would consider "dreaming the myth forward."

So consider this a pre-directive should I ever become famous: there is only one of me, and when I'm gone, there isn't any more. Appreciate me now, if you like, but don't go creating a Wordplay franchise once I'm gone. I like to think that each person is unique, meaning that each artist is, too. If people think that a mere death is no impediment to stopping the flow of creative output, then that, to me, cheapens the value of both the individual's life and work. Maybe people would value things more if they acknowledged more readily that life is temporary and that people can't be brought back once they're gone.

Oh, by the way, if someone decides to ignore me, be assured I will come back and haunt you. Not quite sure how that works, but I have a feeling I would find a way.

Where's the Fire?

Last week, I wrote about watching "The Wizard of Oz" during a windstorm (life imitating art, right?). This week, I'm writing about traveling to a job interview during a Southern California firestorm. There was a wildfire in So Cal back in the summer, but it broke out after I left, and I was glad to escape it. I'm sure everyone was hoping the wildfire danger was passing this late in the year, but obviously it wasn't.

Most of these fires broke out either the day before or the day of my scheduled interview in L.A., and there was at least one burning as my plane was approaching the airport. I saw what looked like smoke from my window and wondered if there was indeed a fire; I couldn't smell anything downtown, though, and didn't realize how bad things were until later. Even in Santa Monica, I couldn't smell smoke that evening, and I didn't make the connection between fires and the couple of people I saw wearing masks; one was a child near a hospital and the other a woman inside a business who had one around her neck. I wondered if the flu was going around.

In fact, my interview was cancelled because of the Skirball Fire, which broke out, as I understand it, early in the morning on the day of my interview. Since I had only flown in for the interview and had only two days in town, I was unable to reschedule for the next day. That fire, in Bel Air, was the closest to where I was, but I still couldn't smell any smoke and kept looking at the sky near my hotel, which remained clear, adding to the surreal nature of the entire episode. I started to worry about smoke coming in through the heating/air conditioning unit, but it never did.

People at the hotel were almost preternaturally calm, so it was little like being in a bubble, especially when I looked at what was happening elsewhere on television. When the mayor of Los Angeles told people to be prepared to move quickly, I wondered if it was possible Santa Monica would be affected and I'd have to leave my hotel. It seemed unlikely that a wildfire would make it that far, but I don't have much experience with them.

With all the suffering and harm these fires have caused, it doesn't seem right for me to focus on how seriously inconvenienced I was, financially and time-wise, by what happened, but the truth is that I was. Once it was clear that I couldn't reschedule the interview, I was told by the person who had scheduled me that she was surprised I'd been willing to fly in from out of town for an opening that only entailed a few hours a week. That was the first I'd heard of that; I couldn't believe what I was hearing, as the email I'd gotten initially suggested that multiple shifts were available, including one that was 30 hours a week.

I went back and read the email again and wondered how I could have misunderstood so badly. I blamed myself for not asking more questions, but the truth is that the email I got said nothing about offering only three to six hours (rather, it gave the opposite impression). In my experience, part-time position announcements usually make a low number of hours clear at the outset. There are many people, even if they lived in the same town, who wouldn't bother to interview for a three-hour job. I had flown two-thirds of the way across the country for one.

Although the institution I was supposed to interview with allegedly has a good reputation, I have to wonder about the quality of library service a student gets if the librarians helping them only work a few hours a week. It takes a lot of on-the-job time to become familiar with the resources a particular institution has, and this is especially true in a generalized collection such as an academic library. When I worked as a graduate assistant in my university's library, I often wondered how effective I was at helping people because the number of resources was so vast. A patron could come in at any time and need help with a database I had zero familiarity with, and this actually happened a lot.

Fifteen hours a week of on-the-job training allowed me to scratch the surface, but that was all. If you're dealing with someone who only works three hours a week, you might as well be working with a trained monkey. Literally, if they took you in off the street and asked you to be a librarian, you would probably be nearly as effective as someone working so few hours; he would have no time to become familiar with the collection and the patrons by experiencing a lot of varied requests and repetitive database searches.

So not only was I out of pocket for expenses I couldn't really afford, I was left to feel I was silly for having bothered to come out in the first place. It seemed to me, though, that the institution was remiss for not having stated the requirements more clearly (and also for being willing to hire multiple trained monkeys to attempt to serve their patrons). None of it made any sense; I almost had the impression they were being dishonest with me in some way. As I told them, it seemed bad form to complain too much in the face of the fire situation, but having been inconvenienced in a pretty major way, I felt I should point out the desirability of their being clearer in their job descriptions in the future.

So that was how I spent two days in L.A. I can tell you it's possible to get from the airport to Santa Monica via the Metro, though it's a wearying journey, and I can tell you this isn't the first time I've felt jerked around in my job search process--far from it. If I derived any other benefit from this experience, I have no idea what it is, but I do know that I deserve far better and would likely not have enjoyed the experience of working for this college even if I had gotten the job. Initial impressions can be quite revealing.

Watching 'The Wizard of Oz' in a Gale

A couple of weeks ago, on a wild and windy Saturday night, I happened to catch The Wizard of Oz on television. It seems to me that it used to be traditional to televise this movie in the spring, but everything else is different now, so I guess seasonal viewing has gone the way of the dodo, too. Here's a memory for you: I can remember huddling in my child-sized rocking chair, age 7, in front of the TV, in fear of the Wicked Witch but determined to peek through my fingers if I had to so as not to miss anything. I believe I was snacking on a bowl of ice cream.

I don't even remember the last time I saw this movie, but I think it was sometime in the '80s. I came across it by accident that recent Saturday night, but when you stumble on The Wizard of Oz, it's hard to think anything else that might be on is going to be more worthwhile. This was the first time I remember watching it when weather conditions outside approximated those in the film (though those were probably straight-line winds and not a cyclone I heard ripping around). It was quite cozy to curl up in front of the TV under a dry roof and watch while the November storm roared through the trees outside. My only regret was not having any popcorn.

You come to this movie as an adult perhaps slightly less intimidated by the Wicked Witch, more inclined to be amused than frightened by certain things, and less able to recapture the sense of wonder you once felt that a cyclone could take you to such a fantastical place as Oz. But maybe there are other things that strike you much more forcibly than they used to. The movie includes a charming dedication to viewers who are "young at heart." I don't think they were just saying that. I think the makers of the film knew and expected that viewers of different ages would experience this movie with varying levels of sophistication but would all embrace the film's underlying sweetness and optimism.

What struck me the most, something I only half-understood as a child, was the fact that all three of Dorothy's companions feel they are lacking some essential quality that in truth they already possess. The Scarecrow is quite wise in his way, the Tin Man is most tender-hearted, and the Cowardly Lion, while lacking in fierceness, is more than valiant when it really comes to it. They are full of self-doubt, but traveling with Dorothy and helping her to defeat the Wicked Witch helps them to realize what they really are. The Wizard only points out to them what has already become clear.

Dorothy's conflict, an uncertainty as to whether there is a better place than the familiar family farm where she feels a bit in the way and unappreciated, was a little harder to unravel. Was she wrong to dream of a place "Over the Rainbow"? One hardly thinks so--doesn't everyone dream of someplace better at least now and then? What she learns from her sojourn in Oz is not so much that leaving home is wrong but that if one is true to herself she carries home inside of her wherever she goes. Dorothy's new friends in Oz are remarkably similar to her old friends in Kansas (in fact, they are the same). Only Auntie Em and Uncle Henry do not appear there, as if to emphasize that leaving home represents growing up and standing on one's own, starting to figure things out for oneself. The crisis that precipitates Dorothy's running away, the wish to save her dog, Toto, is completely understandable but something Auntie Em and Uncle Henry are unable to do for her. She must act on her own for that to happen.

I wrestled with Dorothy's conclusion that she would no longer look any farther than her own backyard for her heart's desire, but I think I know now what that means. Dorothy is really saying that everything she needs, and everything she will ever need, is what she already has, her own sense of self and the love of those closest to her. It's easy to make life more complicated than that, but the wisdom of owning your own power and worth is what it all comes down to, no matter where you are. I don't think the conclusion is that one shouldn't travel and reach out for better things but rather that in doing so you should understand that the purpose of every journey is to bring you closer to yourself.

The easy affection and simple loyalty Dorothy and her friends have for each other had me a little teary-eyed at the end (sniff, sniff). It's much easier to take those things for granted as a child; the true value of these qualities only becomes apparent when you're older. As a little girl, I always felt content at the end of the movie, satisfied with the conclusion of a story well told, but I don't know that I ever felt like crying, so that was new to this viewing. There are some who would likely say that a world of such uncomplicated affection as Dorothy's is just as much a fantasy as any place "Over the Rainbow," but I think The Wizard of Oz is meant to be an antidote to such cynicism.

Ask yourself: Is there nobody you would risk your life for in battling the Wicked Witch of the West? Really? But why? Why would you do such a thing, why put yourself out like that, with the world being such a dreary place and all? What? What was that? Love? Love? What kind of a silly idea is that?

You really are getting sentimental in your old age, and Wordplay commends you.

No Country for Home Chefs

How do you celebrate Thanksgiving when you're living in temporary quarters and separated from all of your kitchen gadgets? I usually try to make an occasion of Thanksgiving, and this year isn't any different, though I'm limited in what I can do. I'm having a circumscribed dinner, but there will be pie; I had to give up cranberry sauce, though, since I'm not in a position to make any and rejected the idea of buying it in a can. I'm pretty sure it's the ginger that makes my homemade version successful, and I didn't think the store-bought kind would measure up, so I saved the $2 the canned variety would have cost.

With little to do in the way of cooking (other than taking the pie out of the freezer), I spent part of the morning watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. The last time I watched it (a few years ago), it was a little trippy, as if maybe the organizers had gotten into the eggnog and hot buttered rum a little ahead of time. It almost seemed to me that part of someone's Halloween parade had sneaked in there by accident, as some of the dancing skulls and whatnot were a little macabre; perhaps the theme that year was "Nightmare Before Christmas" and I just didn't hear about it. This year I approached with caution and didn't watch the whole parade, but I got to see Smokey Robinson, there were some great balloons and floats, and someone sang "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" in suitably spirited fashion. I enjoyed it.

Earlier this afternoon, I read a New York Times article on the Internet that enumerated the various ways in which the original "Thanksgiving" was different from the way we have been taught it was. The article actually didn't have any major reveals (unless you've always thought the Pilgrims ate the same things you do on Thanksgiving), but it got me started on a little research into religious freedom in the American Colonies. Like many other Americans, I was taught that most people (not counting those who were forced to come) arrived in America seeking freedom and opportunity. Is it really true that the principle of religious freedom in colonial America was a myth with little basis in fact, as the article seemed to suggest?

We know, of course, that there was much intolerance in the Colonies, as the dominant groups frequently tried to force everyone else to believe as they believed and to worship as they did. I don't think that comes as a shock to anyone, since the Salem witch trials are as familiar to most of us as the arrival of the Mayflower. Many of those who arrived in the colonies were pursuing religious freedom, but what this often amounted to in practice was their freedom to impose their religious ideas on others, as the Times article points out. It's also true that some of the colonists did believe in freedom of religion for everyone, and though they were frequently persecuted, they persisted, and their ideas did, too. Many of the most influential founding fathers of the United States derived from this latter group.

Among the things we celebrate on holidays like Thanksgiving and Independence Day are the freedoms enshrined in our Constitution--freedom of religion and freedom of speech chief among them. I think most of us know that the reality sometimes falls far short of the ideal. There's what our Constitution guarantees us, and then there's human nature, as well as the fact that our democratic experiment always was and always will be a work in progress.

If there's one thing I've learned it's not to take anything for granted. So while I'm thankful for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and the other things that most of us hold dear, I'm not sure we always appreciate that upholding these principles is never a job you can safely leave up to someone else. The myth of the "Land of the Free" is very pervasive and easy to celebrate with fireworks and flags; the task of making it a reality requires determination and courage, sometimes far beyond the common measure. I think most of us assume a certain amount of safety just by virtue of being American citizens that I'm not sure is really justified by the facts in all cases.

So now you know the answer to the question of what happens when Wordplay is separated from its kitchen appliances on Thanksgiving: we wax philosophical. Separate a home cook from her pie pans and clay roasting pot, and this is what happens. Your natural reaction is probably, "Reunite this woman with her kitchen implements as fast as possible! Any chance that next year you'll give us your recipe for cranberry sauce instead of a column on the Bill of Rights?" And my answer is, "I'm with you." The sooner I get back in a kitchen of my own, the happier I'll be. And I'll consider your request for the cranberry sauce.

Happy Thanksgiving to all.

Vitamin D Deficiency: What Not to Do

Holy moly! It's Vitamin D deficiency time here in Kentucky, with sunshine in short supply and cold rain in plenty. I feel suspended in time and space, as if I'm lingering in C.S. Lewis's "Wood Between the Worlds," a sort of twilight place in one of the Narnia books in which nothing much happens unless you jump into one of its numerous ponds. Each one of these is a portal that might lead just about anywhere, and you have no way of knowing in advance where that might be.

I haven't been jumping into many ponds, unless you count library books and job applications as portals to other worlds, which in a sense, they are, of course. In the Narnia book (I believe it was The Magician's Nephew), two children begin to explore the ponds in the Wood Between the Worlds out of curiosity, unleashing some rather powerful consequences. One would hope that the innocent choice of a library book or a job opening wouldn't have such dire implications, though you might be wrong in that hope, from what I've seen.

I try to be responsible in the books I choose to review, but suspended here as I am, living without a permanent address, not sure where I'll be or what I'll be doing a month from now, hoping something better awaits me than public assistance, I do end up reading a lot to pass the time. I will admit to being a more suspicious and skeptical reader than I once was (as you may have noticed), and this especially pertains to recent books, which I sometimes suspect of having a political subtext buried within whatever plots or themes the author has chosen to explore. This happens even with writers I respect, and it annoys me.

Let me be clear on what I'm talking about. I would expect that political themes and ideas could play a legitimate role in any work should an author wish to pursue them. Politics is a part of life. What bothers me is when I start to read something and get distracted by what seem to be coy, half-hidden, half-revealed references to things outside the scope of the fictional world itself. Yes, I know Dante's Inferno is full of topical references to events and people that he didn't even bother to disguise--and I know it's a great work of literature--but that is the thing I dislike most about it.

I think a work of art is powerful to the extent that it takes a particular instance and makes it universal (or you could say it happens the other way around). Literary conceits like taking potshots at people or sending hidden messages make me question the author's motives. I come to a book assuming the author's integrity and desire to tell a good story, maybe even to create a great work of art. If I start to feel that he/she is dropping names, manipulating me, or trying to send messages that will only be recognized by Abyssinian eunuchs or Macedonian spies, I start to feel that the contract between reader and writer, based on trust, has been violated. It makes me much less likely to bother with that author in the future.

Of course, I have reviewed some books recently that seemed to me to be referring to things slightly out of my ken, and I said so. One of them was Gregory's Maguire's After Alice, but I have to say that Mr. Maguire's book, while it startled me at times, did not offend me. Why not? It was simply a feeling I got that while parts of Mr. Maguire's novel were a little opaque to me, he was not trying to hit me over the head or sell me anything. It was a delight, rather than otherwise, to realize that some of his allusions were beyond me and not amenable to instant unraveling. His book wasn't reductive, in other words; it was more poem than mathematical equation. It raised questions without necessarily answering all of them, and I wanted to recommend it to other people to see what they would find in it.

This past week, I read a book about a World War II pilot who returns to France years later to reconnect with people he knew during the war. It was a good story and well written, but somehow I felt rather empty at the end of it. So why can I not recommend this book to you? Let me state that I know nothing of the author's intentions, so my reactions are strictly to the book itself. While it explored such laudable themes as memory, responsibility, humanity, and inhumanity, I just felt beaten down at the end of it. I kept getting distracted by names and references rather than feeling they were a seamless part of the story. I kept wondering why certain choices were made. And for a novel whose themes seem to be worthy and life affirming, it had a curiously deflating ending.

The pilot, who had succeeded in sneaking out of France during the war, reprises his escape decades later with the woman who assisted him years before but had never done the crossing herself. He hadn't wanted to relive the experience, for reasons that become clear, but the woman, with whom he has become romantically involved, insists on it, almost (it seemed to me) bullying him into it. Her motives somehow seem impure, though she is presented to the reader as a remarkable and courageous freedom fighter. Right about here, the author lost me completely. Why would this character, with so many painful memories of her own, insist that her lover relive one of his most painful war episodes? It all seemed a little sadistic.

I admired the author's skill in bringing the war vividly to life, but at some point, the plot and I parted company. Why did the pilot's life after the war suddenly seem to count for nothing until he returned to France? Perhaps that did not quite ring true to me. Why did he end up traipsing across the mountains after a vertigo-inducing journey by car that he hadn't wanted to make? I felt I had been left hanging. OK, so maybe this book wasn't the best choice for a cloudy week in November (though I don't think reading it on the beach in Cancun would have improved matters much). Something about it bothered me, making me wish I had chosen something more straightforward, or at least more straightforwardly opaque.

Picking library books is more of a crapshoot than it seems sometimes. I have no way of knowing how often anyone who reads my column seeks out books and films I've written about--maybe it never happens. But just in case you decide to track this book down, I recommend reading it by a sunny window or underneath a sunlamp, at the very least. I wouldn't want to be responsible for inadvertently adding to anyone's Seasonal Affective Disorder, and though it's quite possible you would respond to it differently, I can only tell you that I heard a giant whooshing sound as half the Vitamin D in my body seemed to escape when I turned the last page. It takes a lot of Ben & Jerry's to replace that much Vitamin D.

Turning of the Year

I'm pretty sure we reached the tipping point this week weather-wise, the point at which early fall slips into late autumn and those glorious October days morph into the gloomier part of November. When I came back here at the end of the summer, I was happy to at least be far away from the wildfire then burning in Southern California and the hurricanes down in the Caribbean. Late summer was still in the air, so it was hot at first, the humid, Kentucky kind of heat I'm used to. Then a period of rain set in, and I enjoyed watching it, as I had seen very little of that all summer in L.A.

I watched The Weather Channel as one hurricane after another headed toward the United States, but the weather here was generally calm. I'm not in the greatest area for taking walks, but I took them anyway, occasionally combining an errand in another part of town with the chance to park the car and walk through a leafier neighborhood. Those occasions were special treats. I have been reluctant to go back to my old neighborhood for walks, though--I have too many bad memories of an area that has changed radically from the way it used to be. Revisiting those streets would make it seem too much as if I had never left.

Last Sunday, I decided to walk near Ashland, the historic home of Henry Clay, knowing that the mild, sunny days of autumn were probably drawing to a close and wanting to make the most of those that remained. Obviously, a lot of other people had the same idea, and unlike on previous occasions, there were just too many other people out and about to make a solitary walk possible. Some of the foliage was breathtaking, and the sun was warm, but I was practically tripping over other people, so I finally called it a day.

We have had a good bit of rain off and on lately, and one or two very windy nights that seemed to mark the turn toward winter. In the last week, I've been reminded of what I dislike most about the weather in Kentucky: the cold, gray days that are so frequent from November to March. While the sameness of the weather throughout my summer in California didn't compare favorably in my mind with summer in Kentucky, just a little bit of winter in Kentucky goes a long way. Of course, with climate change, it could be a while before we see true winter (although I did see sleet and flurries one morning last week, nothing stuck). What we'll probably get is a protracted autumn.

You know it's starting to get cold when a sunny day of 54 degrees feels warm to you. We'll probably have more of those here and there, but I'm always surprised at how early November can fool you into thinking that the mild days and colorful foliage will just go on and on only to yield, almost overnight sometimes, to leafless branches and a pervasive, damp, end-of-the-year gloom. It never ceases to amaze me how different a rainy day in June is from a rainy day in December.

Insolidity

A number of years ago, I stayed in an extended stay hotel while renovations were being done on my apartment building after a fire. While there, I had cable TV, something I did not have at home, and I often watched it. Other than movies, my favorites were The Weather Channel and Animal Planet, both of which I could watch for two or three hours at a time.

This year, while staying in extended stays and motels, I've also had access to cable TV, but I find that overall the viewing experience is a lot less fun. Almost everyone seems to be selling something. I don't know exactly when this trend started, but it's frequently the case that, despite having dozens of channels to choose from, I'm not interested in any of them. In some cases, I enjoy the commercials much more than the actual programs; they often have more style and charm, which doesn't say much for the overall state of television land, but it's true.

One channel I do enjoy overall is HGTV, and if I were going to psychologize the reasons for this, I might say that it's the archetype of home drawing me in at a time when I don't have one of my own. There's probably some truth in this, but it's also true that I've always been interested in looking at houses and the different ways people go about using space in their homes. If I had access to HGTV back in the summer of the fire, I don't remember watching it much, but many of the programs they have today, which feature people making decisions about buying, selling, and renovating houses, fascinate me.

The big question with "reality TV" is how "real" or how "scripted" the programs are, and I think about that when I'm watching. Most of the series I watch are presented as if the people and situations are genuine, and even though I question that sometimes, I'm usually willing to accept that they are. My favorite is Property Brothers, though I also enjoy Fixer Upper and House Hunters (which apparently is heavily staged, or has been in the past). I was watching House Hunters one night when I suddenly became convinced that one of the people was an actor, and whether or not I was right in that instance, I often get the feeling that, just as elsewhere on the TV dial, there is some sleight-of-hand taking place. Nevertheless, I still enjoy watching.

The process of "demo," a prominent feature of many of these programs, has been a particular revelation to me. I always assumed that houses, floors, and walls are all more solid than they actually are, that is until I saw the gusto with which the Property Brothers and their clients rip down cabinets, tear out toilets, and knock down walls. (I still think it would be harder for me to take out a kitchen cabinet than it would be for Jonathan or Drew, who do it all the time, but some of their clients seem to have quite a knack for it.) I've also learned that what sells today is a much sleeker style than I would probably go for in a home of my own. The houses always look beautiful after they're renovated, but I sometimes prefer the pre-renovation, lived-in decor of homes that bear the imprint of the people living in them, even if the post-demo reconfiguration is usually a great improvement.

I enjoyed the Property Brothers segment in New Orleans in which the brothers competed against one another in renovating the two halves of a shotgun house. I would have had a hard time picking a winner; I liked Drew's kitchen and dining area better but preferred Jonathan's bedrooms. There was another program featuring historical renovation that I also liked, hosted by two women who fixed up a Montana farm house for a young married couple. I liked the way they were sensitive to the rugged, traditional style of rural Montana while completely updating the house and managing to make it both practical and cozy.

What else? Well, I've learned the term "shiplap," even if I'm not sure what it is. I've learned that my taste in bathrooms, far from being extravagant, is pretty much the norm in reno land. I have yet to see a kitchen that quite matches one I would pick for myself if I could, but I'm inclining much more to the open-concept floor plan than I used to. I was thoroughly charmed by an upstairs porch with a fireplace in a Knoxville home and have decided that, despite several years of fascination with the mid-century modern style, I am probably more a Craftsman person myself.

The irony of being further away financially than I have ever been from home ownership while digesting all of these HGTV shows isn't lost on me, and I'm occasionally offended by the demands and expectations some of the TV clients have when I think of the homes other people make do with (or don't make do with). On the other hand, I suppose it's a mark of optimism that I still enjoy watching these programs and seeing what's possible, despite my own circumstances. I still hope to have a home of my own some day, and while I have only a general idea right now of what it might look like, there is one thing on the top of my wish list besides a rainfall showerhead: no shared walls. Especially after seeing what flimsy things they can be.

Mythology for the Literal-Minded

It came to my attention this week, quite by accident, that author Mark Haddon included a piece in his collection The Pier Falls and Other Stories that retells the myth of Ariadne and Theseus. Neither is named, but the plot parallels the events of the myth closely enough (on a literal level, at least) that anyone familiar with the story will recognize what is meant. I'll be honest in saying that I didn't like the story, nor the one that preceded it, which was not myth-based, though it seemed to bear an odd kind of kinship to "The Island," the story I'm writing about. Both deal with horrific loss of life near the sea.

I sometimes feel that it's worth staying with an unpleasant book or sitting through an unpleasant movie, depending on what I perceive the artist's intent to be. I watched Munich, for instance, even though I found it difficult, because the theme was compelling. The question of just where the dividing line is between terrorists and anti-terrorists is a very real and important one, and it was brought home to me in a way I'll never forget in that film. It was worth sticking it out for the lesson it taught me.

Likewise, Mr. Haddon may well have a purpose in mind with his book, and if so, I may have gleaned it from the first two stories, though it's probably unfair to characterize the whole book without having read it all the way through. I guess what I'm saying is that if Mr. Haddon's purpose is to reveal the coarser side of human nature and the unfortunate tendency many people have of being drawn to the grisly and horrific events that befall others simply for the thrill of it, then I get what he's saying and thank him for his efforts, but I won't be reading any further. It may be that the rest of the book deals with other themes, but when I started on the third story and still found myself in carnival sideshow territory, I felt it was time to call it a day and go on to something else.

It's probably obvious to anyone who's read my book that I look at the story of Ariadne, Theseus, and the labyrinth as very symbolic and, underneath it all, life-affirming. My way of looking at it is not the only way, of course. Mr. Haddon's version is a horror story that nevertheless stays pretty close to the actual outline of the myth; the devil is in the details. His story even begins as quasi-realistic, as if Ariadne and Theseus might have been actual people--Ariadne a spoiled but sheltered princess who makes a fatal error in betraying her people for a man she's besotted with and Theseus a calculating and manipulative brute.

Mr. Haddon's way of dealing with the Dionysus part of the myth is not one I had seen before and conjures up the destructive aspect of the god. This side of Dionysus certainly appears elsewhere in mythology but not in the context of this myth, at least not to my knowledge, so it seemed to me a bit like mixing bad apples and worse oranges, though of course one has the creative license to do just that in a story of one's own telling. Ariadne's marriage to Dionysus in the classical version of the myth is a much more benign event than Mr. Haddon makes of it and supports the idea that Ariadne herself was viewed, at an earlier period of Greek history, as a powerful goddess. In some versions of the myth she, a goddess, was already married to Dionysus when she decided to help Theseus, so that perhaps the marriage on Naxos in later versions is a way of linking Ariadne, now a mortal, back to her original husband.

I discussed in my book some of the thinking about Ariadne's role in the myth, which centers on the idea that the labyrinth may originally have had a powerful religious meaning. I tend to see Ariadne as a positive figure guarding the secrets of life itself, the labyrinth in this sense becoming a symbol for birth, and even more than that, for becoming human. In that regard, her pairing with Dionysus makes sense, because he, too, is deeply connected with life in his associations with wine and the life cycle of the grape.

Whereas Demeter oversees agriculture in general, Dionysus's connection with the vine speaks of something that, paradoxical as it seems, is in some ways even more nuanced and refined. I'm talking about the life cycle of the grape and of how many things have to go just right in order for the winemaker to produce a fine wine. Dionysus presides over all of this, not just the growing of the grapes. The wine distills some of the essence of everything that goes into its making, the soil, the water, the sunlight, the container it's placed in, and, in no small amount, the soul of the winemaker, whose care of the vines has a great deal to do with how the wine turns out. Every vintage is unique, just as every person is.

By the way, I'm indebted to the movie Sideways for revealing to me so evocatively this nurturing aspect of Dionysus. That the main character, Miles, has a difficult relationship with wine, the very thing he loves and appreciates so well, is both a sad irony and a reminder that Dionysus does indeed have two sides, though bookish Miles is in some ways really more an Apollo kind of guy. Miles's boorish friend Jack, who has no appreciation for the subtle beauties of wine, embodies the dark side of Dionysus much better than Miles does. Miles's love interest, Maya, combines characteristics of both Demeter and Aphrodite, which really makes her the Ariadne to Miles's Dionysus.

All of this is just to say that in my reading of the labyrinth myth, Ariadne and Dionysus are both nurturing figures, and there is some support for this in scholarship. I was honestly rather shocked by Mr. Haddon's story, and even though I think most people realize there are many ways to read a myth, I want to point out, in this era of sensationalism and over-emoting that takes place everywhere from The Weather Channel to the nightly news, that the most shocking interpretation of a story isn't necessarily the best one and definitely isn't the only one. You can look at life through the eyes of love as a rich adventure filled with beauty and interest (despite its many serious problems) or you can look at it as a carnival sideshow, with one freakish event screaming for your attention until another one even worse comes along to take its place. I recommend that you not be that guy. (You know the one I mean.)

I don't know whether to thank Mr. Haddon for a lesson in the dangers of literal-minded mythology or to wash his mouth out with soap, but I rather suspect he had a reason for telling the story the way he did. As an example of literature as shock therapy, I'm not sure I've ever seen its equal. It's like a literary hairshirt. A tiny dab of that may be edifying, but more than that is going overboard. Whether he even expects you to finish the book or not is a question I'm not sure I can answer.

Getting Down With Alice

Author Gregory Maguire can usually be relied upon to spin entertaining novels with his clever, offbeat versions of fairy tales and children's stories written for grown-up children.  He has outdone himself with his novel After Alice, which I cached in a recent visit to the public library (yes, we're still in literary form this week at Wordplay). Mr. Maguire leaps fearlessly into Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, managing not only to land in the right "neck of the woods" (located near the tops of the trees, as one particularly harried bird in the story is careful to explain) but also bringing some wry modern humor with him.

I had a sense, while reading this story, that I was almost as perplexed as Ada, Alice's friend, who, in this telling, has stumbled down the rabbit hole after her, losing a jar of marmalade in the process (so that's where it came from). The novel is full of what appear to be in-jokes, allusions to things that you feel you ought to be able to figure out if you only think about them hard enough. However, like the mysterious key that remains stubbornly out of Ada's reach, this strange and surreal underworld doesn't give up its secrets easily. That you are having an underworld experience is the one thing that is clear; even Ada, who compares Wonderland to a Doré illustration she has seen of Dante's Inferno, soon realizes that.

Of course, you know that Wordplay always has your best interests at heart--and that is why we read After Alice twice in our resolution to be responsible and give you an accurate account of it. My assessment at this point is that while I got the gist of it, it has more in it than any one person can fully unravel, so I invite you to read it for yourself and see what you make of it. I feel sure you'll be entertained. If parts of it seem oddly familiar to you, I won't question that, because I had a similar experience. It wasn't merely the fact that I had read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland previously but also a feeling that, yes, something like that happened to me one time, too, and yes, that character reminds me of someone--even though the characters in this novel have the fluid identities of people in a dream, seeming to shift and reappear in multiple guises. Even the Jabberwock has a hidden identity.

While the geography of After Alice is firmly in Lewis Carroll territory, with many characters from both Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass making an appearance, Mr. Maguire brings a number of tangential characters fully into the story and introduces new ones. Ada, not Alice, is the focus of this story, and Alice's sister Lydia becomes a flesh-and-blood character in the upper world, carrying on a somewhat less-than-thorough search, along with Ada's governess, the highly strung Miss Armstrong, for the missing children. A visiting American has brought with him a freed slave boy, Siam, who makes his own way into Wonderland through the looking-glass in a closed-off parlor.

By turns, this underworld journey is topical, surreal, disturbing, amusing, and sometimes touching. Siam's worldly-wise outlook and American dialect introduce a New World rawness into the somewhat grim rectitude of Victorian Oxford, and some of the denizens of Wonderland express themselves in surprisingly modern though not always fully straightforward quips. "I stole a glance at her," says the March Hare. "So shoot me." And how about this from Humpty Dumpty: "I adore salt. Salt completes me." Ada is repeatedly admonished, "Don't look up," and, while frequently the recipient of advice, is also warned not to take it.

Crippled by a back brace and socially awkward, Ada is perhaps the only character who seems to gain by her underworld experience, which becomes somewhat of a hero's journey (though unacknowledged by anyone else). In Wonderland, she loses her brace and becomes surprisingly sure-footed amongst all the hucksters and dangerous characters she meets, though at the outset she would seem to be no match for them. By the end of the story, I was eager to find out what would happen when Ada returned to the upper world and was sorry when the novel ended, as I would have loved to follow her subsequent career. The final page definitely came too soon in this case.

Kings, queens, duchesses, knights, and other courtiers abound here, including Queen Victoria herself, who somehow makes her way to Wonderland in a bathing machine. Charles Darwin is a guest of Alice's father, Mr. Clowd, a failed scholar, and they discuss evolution and theology over light refreshments, oblivious to the three children who have gone missing in the neighborhood. The book Lydia was reading, "with no pictures or conversation," is revealed to be an essay on A Midsummer Night's Dream. Miss Armstrong has the hots for her employer but transfers her affections rather easily to the interesting American, Mr. Winter. The story begins and ends by a river.

That may seem like a disjointed way to summarize the novel, but the story itself flies about with great flapping wings, changing direction unexpectedly, which is only natural in a story in which the "surreal" and the "real" are tangled up so closely. Mr. Darwin poses a scientific question to Mr. Winter that you will have to answer for yourself, which may or may not sufficiently explain the reason for this novel but will in any case leave you feeling quite thoughtful.

True story: I once had dinner in a chocolate bar in St. Louis. Yes, there is such a thing--they even had chocolate martinis. When I visited the ladies' room, I had to descend a stairwell that was decorated with an Alice in Wonderland theme. On another occasion, while attending a conference in Southern California, I stayed at an Alice in Wonderland themed inn in which my room was named after the Queen of Hearts. It was a bit more room than I needed, but the inn's atmosphere was suitably whimsical and certainly carried out the theme. While either or both experience may have some bearing on why I related so much to Mr. Maguire's story, they don't explain it entirely. At least, I don't think they do.

What I Found on the Shelves

Lately, I've had pretty good luck finding interesting books at the library, so this week's post will be a literary one. Popular culture is a bit of a minefield these days, in my opinion, and the simple wish to be entertained can result in being subjected to all kinds of schlock. The trick, of course, is to try and be discerning, as we have all been taught since we were little children--though I don't recall discernment being nearly so difficult an art when I was small. The reason is simple: the age of innocence has flown the coop on us.

It's been a few years since I reviewed anything by author Tracy Chevalier, but some of you may remember my review of her book The Last Runaway, the story of a young Quaker woman starting a new life in the wilds of rural Ohio in 1850. That book painted a vivid picture of the dangers of everyday life on the frontier, when a simple wagon trip through the woods--at a distance that would be as nothing in the age of interstate highways--was a frankly hazardous undertaking. Ms. Chevalier returns to 19th-century Ohio for At the Edge of the Orchard, a novel about a family working the land in the perilous Black Swamp of the state's northwest region. In actual fact, this book provides an even more harrowing portrait of frontier life than the author's previous book.

The Goodenough family is dysfunctional, which adds another layer to the nearly insurmountable difficulties they already face in making a living from the land. A dark tragedy leads to the breakup of the family and to the beginning of years of wandering for youngest son Robert. Although Robert travels widely and sees many wonders, even ending up in California in time for the Gold Rush, the story is not so much Mark Twain adventure as it is Aeschylus Greek tragedy. 

The Fates do indeed seem to pursue the members of this family; rarely, while reading the book, do you shake off a sense of being haunted. Although there are humorous episodes and characters (Robert's cigar-smoking landlady, Mrs. Bienenstock, is everything a Barbary Coast landlady should be), the novel imparts a feeling almost of claustrophobia. Rather than Manifest Destiny and a feeling of endless possibility, the horizons have shrunk; you get the sense that no matter how far Robert roams, he will never escape the events he is running from. The novel offers a darker view of this period of western expansion than you get from many tales of Western adventure, darker in plot as well as in tone. While it looks like 19th-century America, it feels like Greece in the Bronze Age, as if the House of Atreus had somehow crossed the sea and fetched up on foreign shores. America does not seem so much exceptional as it seems doomed to repeat the cycle of the past.

As it happens, I followed this book up with another one with a California setting, María Dueñas's The Heart Has Its Reasons. I greatly enjoyed Ms. Dueñas's The Time In Between, a novel about a Spanish dressmaker who gets involved in the resistance during World War II, and I was curious to see what she would do with a strong female character in a contemporary setting. The Heart Has Its Reasons is the story of a woman who, after the breakup of her marriage, flees her university job in Spain for a stint as a visiting professor at a Northern California college. The ingredients for a great story--a woman making a new start, a picturesque setting, and an academic mystery entangled with personal tragedy--are all there, but I was thrown off by something in the storytelling itself, an awkwardness that was absent from Ms. Dueñas's previous book.

I at first wondered if something had been lost in the translation, since the style seemed little like what I remembered from the previous novel, not that every book by an author needs to sound exactly the same--though you don't expect one to be assured in tone and the next to be a little off-center. While I enjoyed the story and was intrigued enough to keep reading, I was distracted by a certain roughness in the prose. There is a scene early on in which the main character is looking at photos of the long-dead professor whose papers she is organizing when, for unexplained reasons, lickety-split, she is suddenly outside in need of fresh air. Wait . . . how did that happen?

It is as if some bridge between the two scenes, a connection supplying the reasons for Professor Perea's sudden exodus, is missing. I found it surprising that a writer as accomplished as Ms. Dueñas would write a scene that way, but whether the explanation is typographical, translational, or purposeful I cannot say. Did the character undergo a fugue state? Did she step into a wormhole? Later in the novel, there is a confrontation between Professor Perea and another academic in which she seems to overreact to the revelation that he's behind the fellowship that brought her to America. I didn't think the news quite warranted throwing him out of her apartment, much less her life, and it also seems inconsistent with her previous behavior--yet another example of something that doesn't quite fit in the story.

Overall, I did enjoy the book, though, and was reminded occasionally of my own experiences in California, both as a visitor and as a student. Ms. Dueñas certainly has the setting down to a T, and she knows the world of academia to boot. It's just that the storytelling itself seemed to raise mysteries, almost in the manner of a poem whose letters and lines are placed in an unexpected way on the page, pointing to something beyond what's in the words themselves, if I am not imagining it.

This is the beauty of browsing: I had been looking for some time for a book set in the Gold Rush era of California history, which seems to me a fascinating time, and I found one by luck just by poking around in the shelves. I'm also interested in the history of California missions, which plays such a critical role in Ms. Dueñas's book, and I came across that one by accident as well. Serendipitous finds like that are always fun, even if you don't quite get what you're expecting. NoveList is a wondrous thing . . . but there's nothing like finding a book yourself.

The Death of Tom Petty

While I wish I had the ability to say something useful in the wake of this week's violence in Las Vegas, I don't know what it would be. Sometimes it's better to let more information emerge before jumping into the fray, beyond condemning the bloodshed, as any rational person must. I'm turned off by commentators who start putting forward theories about an event before all the facts are known, and rather than be one, I prefer to let the investigators do their work.

I found my attention drawn to a different event, the death of rocker Tom Petty, the day after the attack, possibly because it was less overwhelming (except to his family and friends, of course) but nonetheless unexpected. I read reports that he thought his recently completed tour would probably be his last, and though I might be reading too much into it, I wonder if he had had any presentiment of what was going to happen. It wouldn't be the first time someone had succumbed right after completing an exhausting task; I'm remembering my own father, whose health seemed to fall apart not long after he retired. Still, I admit to finding the timing of Mr. Petty's death to be a little strange.

I listened to Mr. Petty's records a lot in the early '80s but never saw him live. I followed his career loosely, at a distance, and one or two of his songs pass the Wordplay "Turn Up the Volume" test (it's a very select group). In recent years, I've noticed that his song "I Won't Back Down" (from the Full Moon Fever album, which I don't have) seemed to be getting a fair amount of airplay--or perhaps it's more accurate to say that, out of a multitude of songs that I hear on the radio and elsewhere, this one seemed to rise above many others and stamp itself on my consciousness in a rather insistent way. It's the right song at the right time, I guess you might say.

I will admit to occasionally having a mildly transgressive thought, and I have a recurring fantasy involving this very song. I imagine myself somehow getting access to the public address system on Capitol Hill long enough to play a song that could be heard from one end of the building to the other. This would be the song I would play, on behalf of, well, let's see, the oppressed, the unchampioned, the forgotten, the ill-used, and the otherwise everyday people everywhere trying to keep going while the politicians play their Washington games. (I've also had similar fantasies about the B-52s' "Love Shack"--don't ask me why. It just feels like it would be a fun thing to do.)

On a personal note, I was at a blues festival several years ago in Southern California, walking through a crowd after hearing John Fogerty perform, when I thought I spotted Mr. Petty. He stopped in the crowd a short distance ahead of me and gave me a sweet smile. I'm almost certain it was Tom, and although he didn't say or do anything else, in my memory I can almost see him putting his finger to his lips, as if to say, "Ssshhh, you've spotted me--but don't say anything!" I wondered about it afterward, as I almost had the impression that it wasn't quite a chance encounter, though I can't really say why I think that. It was just something in his face, though it was dark, and I could be mistaken, of course. I had certainly never met him before.

So I think it was really that incident, along with the fact that he was one of my favorite rockers in my college years, that has had me feeling sad and thoughtful over the last few days. Though I'm often shocked to hear about someone's untimely passing, this death touched me in a way that many others haven't. I felt an almost personal sense of loss that surprised me at first but doesn't now that I've thought about it. When someone has touched you with his or her artistry and has been part of the soundtrack of your life for decades, as Mr. Petty has been in mine, it means something when he goes.

I looked at the videos of two of my favorite Tom Petty songs and was impressed with a sort of mythic sense that permeates both of them, especially "Runnin' Down a Dream" (also from Full Moon Fever). Students of Native American mythology may notice sequences reminiscent of Navajo and Lakota folklore; King Kong is in there, too. I was also reminded of such disparate elements as Madeleine L'Engle, a story I once wrote about children who fly into outer space by means of their bed, and an episode in the film Black Orpheus involving a spiral staircase. There is a feeling of magic, mystery, and something slightly out of reach in this video, a vision that, though I never would have imagined it just from hearing the song by itself, matches it perfectly. I especially like the part where the cartoon Tom scratches his head. (The animation in the video was reportedly inspired by Winsor McCay's comic strip Little Nemo.)

The persona Mr. Petty adopts in this video for "Runnin' Down a Dream" and in the video for "I Won't Back Down" (which features some familiar faces) is one and the same. He appears at the beginning and end as a type of storyteller/magician who has something he really wants to show you but won't explain. The blending of mythic/imaginative elements and a certain sly "world as we know it" allusive quality is priceless. Both songs (co-written by Mr. Petty) are definitely enshrined in the "Turn Up the Volume" pantheon of the Great American Songbook; in fact, be careful--either or both could cause you to drive too fast.

I guess it's mean to say it, but I particularly hope, if you don't like either or both of them, that you have trouble avoiding them in the coming weeks. Take it as a sign. And by the way, I never said I wasn't mean.

The Mystery of the Mockingbird

Last week, I wrote about my recent experience of reading Go Set a Watchman a full two years after its publication. I didn't re-read any of the reviews that accompanied its debut before writing my own because I didn't want to be influenced by what anyone else had said about it. The fact that this book even came out was controversial in some quarters; I, personally, have no objection to the publication of variations of an author's work, but in this case I was reluctant to read Watchman because of my affection for To Kill a Mockingbird, which dates back to the sixth grade. In a world in which hardly anything (OK, let's just be honest and say nothing) seems sacred any more, I was reluctant to have my Harper Lee bubble burst. Let some things remain as they are.

I realize that some critics don't even think Mockingbird is all that great a book--despite the Pulitzer Prize--but when I first read it I was positively floored by Ms. Lee's ability to capture the essence of small-town life and render it on the page. I felt that surely I knew all of those people, had walked down those streets, and had maybe even dressed up as a ham, as Scout did, for the Maycomb pageant--the story was that vivid and realistic. From that hour to this, I am still in awe of the verisimilitude Ms. Lee achieved in those pages.

I'm also aware that some commentators have been dismissive of Ms. Lee's treatment of race relations and her portrayal of Atticus as a champion of blacks in Mockingbird. While the trial of Tom Robinson is obviously at the center of the novel, for me, as for many others, it's the characters, the setting, and the details of everyday life that make this novel such a triumph, above and beyond its message about tolerance. While Maycomb, Alabama, is very distinctly a specific place at a specific time, it also has a universality that raises it to an almost mythic status: it's an Everytown--and we have all been there.

Besides reacting to Watchman as a reader, I also have a reaction as a writer--which I was not when I first read Mockingbird all those years ago (well, I guess I was a baby writer then but not a professional one). While the reader was not at all anxious to be let down, the writer was curious to see what an alternative vision of Maycomb's characters might look like, and the writer won out. Having read the book, and read or re-read some of the reviews of Watchman from two years ago, I've come to realize that my original objections--based on a personal reaction to its premise as well as reports that Ms. Lee may not have fully participated in the decision to publish--don't even go as far as those of some other people. Some reviewers (notably Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker and Maureen Corrigan of National Public Radio) have questioned the official publisher's version of events, wondering if in fact the book as published could even be simply an early draft of To Kill a Mockingbird.

That there have reportedly been inconsistencies in the stories of those who are said to have found the Watchman manuscript certainly adds fuel to the fire of any supposition that there is some mystery behind the novel. However, Mr. Gopnik, in particular, has gone further, saying that Watchman seems to require of the reader a prior familiarity with the people and events of Mockingbird even to succeed as a novel. He points out that the revelation that Atticus is a white supremacist seems to depend for its shock value on a prior acquaintance with him as something very different and that the book's nostalgic flashbacks into Scout's childhood don't make sense unless you already know Scout, Jem, and Dill. Mr. Gopnik and Ms. Corrigan have speculated that Watchman, as written, must have come after Mockingbird, making it a sequel rather than an earlier version.

I don't know the true story behind this manuscript. My experience of reading the novel was that it does seem to assume knowledge of some pre-existing version of Maycomb and its characters, but not having seen the unpublished manuscript or being privy to what was in Ms. Lee's mind when she first began writing, I can't say that Watchman would have to have been written later. It's possible that at some point Ms. Lee (or someone else) went back and reworked parts of the original Watchman manuscript that was rejected in favor of the Mockingbird version.

However, I'm also aware of what I might call the "inevitability syndrome," in which the finished version of a beloved work is so familiar to everyone that it's hard to imagine it could ever have turned out any other way. I'm thinking of the many Hollywood films in which actors who have come to be identified with signature roles weren't originally scheduled to do them . . . and yet after the fact, their participation seems almost to have been preordained. So Atticus could never have been racist--"he just couldn't, that's all"--even if perhaps that's the way Ms. Lee first envisioned him.

Could something similar be affecting the way we read Go Set a Watchman, or did some reworking of the material take place after To Kill a Mockingbird had already been published? Letters between Ms. Lee and her agents reportedly documented much of the revision process that occurred while the author was turning Watchman into To Kill a Mockingbird, so presumably these questions could be answered by comparing an early draft with the manuscript that came to light in 2014, assuming they are different. If this has been done, I'm not aware of it. So the mystery of Go Set a Watchman continues, at least for now.

In Which I Revisit Maycomb and Have My Mind Blown

Here's an admission: I wasn't falling over myself to get my hands on Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman when it first came out. I guess I loved To Kill a Mockingbird so much that I found it hard to get my head around the idea of a latter-day Atticus Finch as a white supremacist. (Having finished the book, I don't know what other term to use. Atticus asks Scout whether she cares to deny that Negroes are "backward." Even though he seems to believe this is a temporary and conditional state due to circumstances, the argument, falling from his lips, is chilling indeed.)

Two years ago, I argued with myself over whether or not it was cowardly to forgo reading the book simply because I didn't like the premise. After all, it was quite a literary event to have anything at all from Ms. Lee, not to mention another novel featuring Scout, Atticus, and the other more or less immortal residents of Maycomb County. I felt I would be missing out on something, even though I was sure I'd be disappointed in the book. By the time it came out, I had pretty much decided to give it a pass, and I put it in the back of my mind until I saw a copy at a friend's house a few weeks ago. I picked it up, read the first two pages, and was hooked. The opening scene, which describes Scout's homecoming on a train from New York, was almost perfect, if slightly cooler and more aloof in tone than its predecessor. (Well, hang it all, how do you expect a narrator describing an adult Scout's point of view to sound? She's no longer a child, after all--but still.)

When I got back to civilization (i.e., a place where I have a functioning library card), I came across Go Set a Watchman on the shelf and checked it out. While the experience of revisiting the characters from To Kill a Mockingbird a couple of decades down the line (in their universe) was mind-blowing, I also think Go Set a Watchman is a less assured novel than the former. Where Mockingbird incised its characters on your brain with the sharpness of a chisel and few words to spare, Watchman reads more like a draft in places. In particular, the portrayal of Scout's Uncle Jack, especially in the climactic scenes in which he tries to explain her father to her, is weak. With his pedantry, he's almost too eccentric to be taken seriously, and that's saying something in the universe of Maycomb County.

Scout discovers that her father and her oldest friend (and sometime boyfriend) Henry both belong to a citizen's group that has arisen in opposition to the activities of the NAACP and opposes equal rights for blacks. That Scout herself is angry about the Supreme Court's ruling against segregated schools and its perceived interference in what she perceives as a state's rights issue is one thing; what she can't condone is Atticus's feet of clay on the issue of basic human equality. I agree with her on that point.

While all of us have inconsistencies and changes of heart, the turnaround displayed by Atticus, erstwhile epitome of fair-mindedness, is almost too extreme to be believed. If he sided with his fellow Alabamians on grounds more similar to Scout's, it wouldn't be so shocking, but to hear him ask Scout if she really wants Negro children to attend the local school along with whites somehow doesn't ring true. The Atticus of yore was too decent a man to put forth such a question; you would expect him to be the first to say that the fastest way to equality is through education. Scout is made to feel that she is being unfair to her father and would do better to think about moving back to Maycomb permanently (where presumably she would come to understand why folks are the way they are faster than she would in New York).

Scout makes a sort of peace with her father, though it's a fraught one. In the end, she comes to realize what has been implied since the beginning of the novel, that she is in the unenviable position of being neither here nor there. She's too much a Southerner to be a New Yorker, and too much a New Yorker to ever live in Maycomb. This novel could have been subtitled, No, You Really Can't Go Home Again. I felt sorry for Scout, who seems somewhat adrift at the end of the novel, though her position is not an unusual one.

Certainly many Southerners had these very arguments in the 1950s, but I can't help but feel that the Atticus in this novel is not the same as the one in the earlier book: he's a variant. It actually seems that Ms. Lee may have been trying out slightly alternate versions of her Maycomb universe, and that this accounts for the awkward gap between the two books; I think I remember reading something to that effect. It's not uncommon for stories from ancient mythology to have inconsistencies, but time and distance make this almost inevitable. It's much more jarring when it happens to characters that many of us grew up to consider near-contemporaries because they seem much closer to flesh-and-blood people.

It's strange to think of the Maycomb, Alabama, of Scout's, Jem's, and Dill's childhood as a kind of paradise to which there is no re-admittance after a certain point. It was full of so many examples of the ugliness of human nature that there is nothing remotely paradisiacal about it, except in the way that a childhood home, filled with security and love, comes to seem Edenic when one looks back. In fact, the most enjoyable parts of Watchman are the flashback scenes in which Scout revisits youthful adventures that were not a part of the original book but that seem to have been lifted seamlessly from its pages: an escapade in which she, Jem, and Dill are caught red-handed re-enacting a revival by Atticus, the visiting minister, and the minister's wife; and the story of Scout's attendance at the high school prom, accompanied by a major wardrobe malfunction. Both episodes have the humor characteristic of To Kill a Mockingbird and were some compensation for the darker tone of Go Set a Watchman.

Childe Roland and the Dark Tower even make an appearance as a symbol for Scout's (sorry, I mean Jean Louise's) position in Maycomb, which pretty much lets you know you're in existential territory. Everybody has to grow up some time, I guess--but still.

Jane Austen in Scotland

This week I finished Val McDermid's retelling of Northanger Abbey while watching a gray September rain and nursing an upset stomach. It actually wasn't a bad way to spend time (other than the upset stomach) because Ms. McDermid's Northanger, with its Scottish setting and teenage girls enthralled by supernatural lore, was made for just such an occasion. As you've realized by now, I'm a big fan of Jane Austen, and while you might think that would make me leery of any latter-day attempts to spin her, I've found that in general her material holds up quite well in a number of different hands.

I understand that this book was a bit of a departure for the author, who specializes in crime fiction and suspense. In Ms. McDermid's hands, Northanger Abbey becomes much more like what I would call a young adult novel than Austen's ever was. To some degree this may speak of the difference in maturity between a teenager in Austen's time and a teenager today, notwithstanding the fact that Ms. McDermid's Cat Morland is in many ways a levelheaded and exemplary girl. I felt that the story took the viewpoint of its young protagonist sympathetically and without irony--if I hadn't read the original, I would have thought I had picked up a teen novel by mistake.

Cat is a young woman of 17 with all the typical concerns of a teenager on the brink of adulthood, although she does share with many of her peers a fixation on vampires that borders on obsession. I certainly had my own preoccupations as a teenager, though vampires and werewolves weren't among them, and I tried to view Cat and her vampire-crazed friends through the lens of an adult looking back at the rich fantasy life of my own teen years--but I still had trouble finding Cat's difficulty in distinguishing between reality and fantasy believable. It may be that I'm missing the gene that lets people appreciate the supernatural, because I understand that the Twilight series, for example, counts many adult women among its devoted fans--I'm just not among them.

It would be too simplistic to assume that people are attracted to bloodcurdling tales in equal measure to the tranquility and perceived safety of their own lives (though this is very much the case with Cat, a vicar's daughter with a remarkably happy home life). Be that as it may, I usually make my apologies for my own lack of interest in the genre by stating the truth, that I find real life quite scary enough without throwing the supernatural into the mix. I do remember a pre-teen interest in Hitchcockian suspense, the tales of Edgar Allen Poe, séances, and slumber party ghost-telling sessions, but again, I would say none of that is unusual for the age group. In my case, those interests had mostly disappeared by the time I was Cat's age, which is not to say that I was more advanced than other people, but merely that I had left behind any tendency to find romance in horror, if in fact I ever had it.

What I could sympathize with is Cat's proclivity to let her imagination run away with her (just as her predecessor Catherine Morland did in Austen's original) when introduced into a wildly romantic setting with a new group of people quite different from her own work-a-day family. You can see the budding writer at work, using the materials in her new circumstances--an atmospheric, castle-like dwelling, an aristocratic family, a tyrannical father, a romantic attraction--as the building blocks for a story she is trying out in her head. That she woefully misinterprets the circumstances surrounding the death of her new friends' mother years before is not surprising, as her limited knowledge of the world and matters of the heart make this line of thought predictable for someone with an active imagination.

What was less understandable was how Cat could seriously view her new boyfriend and his father as potential vampires and still be willing to go off on her own to visit them in their remote Scottish lair--but I guess this is just me being difficult. Apparently, there are those who would jump at just such an opportunity, and Cat and her friends are among them. If I found Henry Tilney's ability to overlook Cat's silly meddling and tendency to poke into matters beyond her knowing to be remarkably forgiving, I also found Cat's contrition and embarrassment to be convincing. She is sensible underneath it all and probably in need of just such a comedown to begin leaving some of her more girlish preoccupations behind. Her imagination is so full that it sometimes spills over awkwardly into real life; it takes a growing maturity to distinguish fact from fiction.

I enjoyed the updated setting that brought Cat and her friends to Edinburgh for the arts festival (instead of Bath, as in the original). I thought Edinburgh the perfect setting for a budding writer with a love for the Gothic to get both her first taste of a writer's life and to take her first steps toward adulthood. I found myself thinking, "This would make a good series!"--though Cat has grown up enough by the end of the story that the possibility is actually closed off before it can gain traction. It's too bad in a way--Cat poking around in other castles and abbeys of old England could have provided entertainment enough for several more sessions of rainy days.

Dresses and Queens

Last week, I sort of promised that this week I would venture into pop culture territory if nothing intervened. It's true that there are at least three hurricanes veering more or less in our direction, but since I'm not in the actual vicinity of landfall, no matter where they hit (unless it's in the middle of the continental U.S.), I can't beg off pop culture duty due to emergency weather-related status. So there's no putting off this jaunt into television land.

Therefore, I will go ahead and tell you that after hearing about Game of Thrones for years, I finally caught a few episodes on TV over the last few weeks. One minute I was innocently flipping channels and the next I was immersed in a battle involving some rather large dragons, what appeared to be an army of the undead, and a fellow with a blue face. Such was my introduction, with little knowledge of the back story, to the world of Westeros and all the rest of it. My initial thought was that it was a rather grim place, but on the whole, no worse than some other places we've all seen.

My other discovery was Say Yes to the Dress, a program I find almost compulsively watchable, in almost the same way that a box of assorted chocolates is compulsively eatable. You might think that after watching a few brides try on gowns, share stories about how they met their grooms, argue with their mothers about what's appropriate in a neckline, solicit advice, shed tears, and go for a happy ending (or not), you'd have your fill and never need to watch again. Don't all these dress tales have basically the same plot, anyway? Well, yes and no. The story of a bride-to-be and her dress turns out to have archetypal resonance: like any fairy tale, it has endless variants and an ever-evolving cast of characters, who, while filling a finite number of roles (counselor, sidekick, mother, court jester, fairy godmother), manage to make the story new and different every time.

Has anyone else managed to mention Game of Thrones and Say Yes to the Dress in the same breath? I hope not. My apologies to fans of both shows if anyone thinks I'm denigrating either one by bringing them together in this way. If Yes to the Dress seems too frothy a confection to stand up against the epic grandeur of Thrones, and if girls just wanting to have fun resent any implication that their nuptial preparations bear any resemblance to the maneuvering of scheming queens and warring kingdoms, all I can say is, in my opinion, "It isn't, and they do."

Characters on Game of Thrones are always talking about someone else wanting them to "bend the knee," to pledge their allegiance to one ruler or another, often someone they deeply distrust, have a conflict of interest with, or despise to the bottom of their boots, and the most common way out of this appears to be talking endlessly without ever coming to terms or giving one's word without meaning to keep it. Those who stick to their principles have a hard time of it with this hard-bitten crew. In fact, the choice to "bend the knee" or not actually seems to have quite a bit in common with the decision to say "yes to the dress"--or not. In both cases, there is power in delay and approval withheld, even for someone in a vulnerable position. Saying "yes"--whether one is a courtier or a bride--amounts to a life-changing decision that sets an entire process in motion whose ends cannot be entirely foreseen by anyone. It makes little difference whether the "yes" is enthusiastic or grudging, freely given or coerced. Larger forces are at work in love and war.

Now that everyone is thrown off-guard by this metaphor-juxtaposition-conceit-or-what-have-you, I might as well deliver the coup de grace, which is: I suspect that Game of Thrones and Say Yes to the Dress are actually the same program. Queens, dresses, what's the difference? The characters are being asked to commit to a choice that in itself is only the prelude to whatever follows, the joining of two people or the joining of two kingdoms (two or more: in Game of Thrones, the relationships may be polygamous--though none of the brides I saw on Dress seemed interested in more than one groom, which points to the limitations of this otherwise spot-on comparison).

If someone out there is complaining, "Well, there's just no end to this folderol, if Game of Thrones and Say Yes to the Dress are the same program, next you'll be telling me that Property Brothers is the same thing as the CBS Evening News"--and I'll be forced to say, "No, it isn't." Property Brothers is an enjoyable fantasy that indulges the belief that people have power because they can knock down walls and install expensive bathroom fixtures in their homes. The CBS Evening News is, I assume, a journalistic venture, and thus in a different category altogether.

Is everybody clear?

Eventful Week, Unvarnished Telling

Never a dull moment here at Wordplay. I'm speaking to you this week from my former home city of Lexington, Kentucky, to which I was forced to repatriate by financial concerns. My plan to do temp jobs while searching for a regular job in California should have worked but didn't; if those employment agencies are placing anyone anywhere, it certainly wasn't me, unless you count nearly ending up in the poorhouse as a placement.

In a city the size of Los Angeles, in the summer, that is certainly surprising, if not shocking. And then there was the agency that actually lost all of my application materials clean out of their database, or so they said. I was told by another agency, when I questioned the lack of opportunities, that a temp agency was a free service, as if to imply that my actually expecting to get a temp job after spending hours filling out multiple forms was unreasonable and ungrateful. What I do know is that the agencies profit greatly from the labor of their workers, who are their single asset, but I guess the woman at that agency somehow thought I was born yesterday.

After several surreal days of contacting and re-contacting employment agencies, potential employers, YWCAs, and other agencies about jobs and possible housing options (including shelters, which aren't even that easy to get into, even if you wanted to be there), I realized that unless I wanted to sleep in my car, I was going to have to leave L.A., at least temporarily, and try something else. Since my plan consisted of returning to the very place I'd worked so hard to leave, it wasn't ideal but was really the only thing I could think to do; I do, after all, have more of a history and a network here than I do in Los Angeles, not that it has done me much good in recent years in terms of job-hunting. It really shouldn't be this difficult for a flexible, well-qualified person, but somehow it is. Someone asked me if I thought I'd been blackballed for some reason. Who, moi? If I find out that that is the case, I'm definitely suing. And it's definitely not true that I'm working undercover for the FBI or anyone else, though I don't suppose anyone is really gullible enough to believe that.

I was contacted yesterday about a temp job in Lexington that I had only applied for yesterday morning, and I had to scramble to find some suitable writing samples on hand to send in, but I did so. I still don't know whether it will lead to anything, and I haven't received the link to the writing test I was asked to take, so although it sounded yesterday as if they were rather interested in me, it may come to nothing, as many of these things do. I don't mind whether I work here or in L.A., as long as I'm working, but I hope to get back to California as soon as possible, as that is where I had planned to stay.

The trip back wasn't easy, though I did get to break it up by visiting a friend in Texas. I wasn't in the hurricane--that was one thing I did manage to avoid, except for a downpour or two in North Texas, which may or may not have been Harvey-related. It was disheartening to see the very sights I'd whizzed by only three months ago coming at me in reverse, but I tried to make the best of it. I continue to be amazed at the beauty of our country, and even if I myself am not a desert person, I enjoyed looking at the often stunning scenery of the Southwest. (Even if the Mojave Desert isn't the most inviting place to pass through when you're driving by yourself, I realize it has its own beauty and would probably be better appreciated under different circumstances.) I enjoyed the clear night sky over Flagstaff, Arizona, the rock formations, mesas, and canyons of New Mexico, and the rolling range lands and big, open sky of Texas, not that I was that thrilled to be seeing them again so soon.

I am now sitting in a hotel room in Lexington watching the rain fall and enjoying even that, since I have always enjoyed summers in Lexington--with their varied but generally warm and humid days and long, drawn-out evenings--more than any other season. I like a lot of things about Lexington and Kentucky, despite having found life here limiting in so many ways for so long. One question I have answered for myself concerns my ability to go somewhere else alone and establish a new life: I can do it just fine, and that was something I was never sure of until I tried it. I like California and think it realistic to suppose I could be happy there with a job and a permanent home. It was the obstacles to achieving those modest and reasonable goals that were the real problem.

I can hear my readers now complaining, "Oh, Mary, won't you ever get back to writing about anything besides your job search and your struggle to get established in California? I used to love your (insert the option of your choice) book reviews, film reviews, dream interpretations, random observations, advice to the lovelorn, household hints, groundbreaking journalism, dissertation previews . . . soooooo much. This summer it's been one long travelogue, when it hasn't been you complaining about not having a job. It's just no fun any more."

Well, here's an idea. Taking a page from the temp agencies, I must remind you that this, too, is a free service, and if you're reading it, you're benefiting from my talents without giving me anything in return. If just one person on your block bought a copy of my book, you could all pitch in together, and it would likely cost each person only a few pennies to have a brand-new copy of a tasteful item that you could all share (you could read it aloud on long winter evenings or set it on your coffee table if you want to show people how smart you are). Think about what a difference that would make to my bank account! Incidentally, though it may not matter to you, my blog appears to have many more readers now than it used to have, so I'm not so sure that people don't prefer the unvarnished truth, whatever form it takes.

I can't offer you any sky miles, travel points, or gift cards as an incentive to support a writer, but I can offer my sincere thanks to those who do. And if you can't afford to buy the book, no problem. I don't so much expect people to support my career as to avoid hindering it. If you do that, you're asking for trouble, and people who ask for trouble rarely avoid finding it, like whoever is responsible for the magically disappearing text, opening and closing applications, and randomly appearing highlighting that have plagued me the entire time I've been writing this blog today. I should be paid handsomely just for persevering through this nonsense. My feeling is that somebody out there needs to get his own blog.

To fans of Jungian interpretation and Hillmanian seeing through, I say (along with Shiva), "Fear not!" I have been watching television! It could be that next week, I'll want to address Yes to the Dress, Game of Thrones, or both, if something more interesting doesn't happen before then. But don't expect a long, tedious, respectful study of either one--it's likely to be something vastly more playful, if I do indeed get around to it. I never take anything I see on television very seriously--and I don't recommend that you do either.

Goodbye until next week--and consider supporting a writer today!