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!