ShudWeNaNoWriMo?

October 13, 2009 by 1 Comment

Dear CF and beloved commenters and lurkers,

National Novel-Writing Month. I’m gonna do it, or a variant of it that might start a little earlier. Wanna join me?

Below are the official rules, which we could tweak. For example, I like the starting from scratch idea that doesn’t let me use any previous drafts or notes. I don’t know that I feel compelled to upload the final product to verify the word count, but that may be an irrational reluctance to commit anything with my name attached to it to the internet (I know, I know).

On the other hand, while I resent the cheerleading angle, I could put up with it and sort of like the institutional flavor of the thing that permits crapola to exist. I’m interested in the NaNoWriMo gatherings in different cities where strangers gather to write.

We could post nonthreatening updates, like statistical analyses of our most frequently used words, here.

The Rules as articulated on the site:

  • Write a 50,000-word (or longer!) novel, between November 1 and November 30.
  • Start from scratch. None of your own previously written prose can be included in your NaNoWriMo draft (though outlines, character sketches, and research are all fine, as are citations from other people’s works).
  • Write a novel. We define a novel as a lengthy work of fiction. If you consider the book you’re writing a novel, we consider it a novel too!
  • Be the sole author of your novel. Apart from those citations mentioned two bullet-points up.
  • Write more than one word repeated 50,000 times.
  • Upload your novel for word-count validation to our site between November 25 and November 30.

What say you, CF? Louise? Mrs. B. U-S? RachelB? Zunguzungu? Others?

Filed under Experiments, Homework, Uncategorized

Facebook Statustics

October 6, 2009 by 2 Comments

There’s a Facebook tool that goes through your archive of status updates and analyzes them for frequency of word usage. My friend Andrea’s most frequent word was “party.” Fun! I thought. I write funny status updates! I will try! My results:

Status Statistics on Facebook

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Respect the Cock

June 21, 2009 by 2 Comments

Dear CF,

I learned yesterday that in my city one can legally own no more than 12 chickens. This puzzled me. Why 12? At first I thought it might have to do with egg packaging—grocery stores do tend to sell chicken thighs and breasts in packages of six or twelve. Maybe we’ve just internalized the base-12 principle when it comes to birds.

Wrong. Today I discovered why. It has to do with chicken family values, which consist—according to William Harvey, my scientist du jour—of exactly one rooster and, ideally, ten hens. (I know that’s only 11. I imagine city planning officials saw fit to permit a spare.)

William Harvey is justly famous for accurately describing the double circulation of the blood in his “Anatomical Disquisition on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals.” It’s a rousing story of perseverance and smarts overcoming ignorance and odds. We can rejoice that after a lifetime of bitter struggle (and friendship with Hobbes, which amount to the same thing), he watched his discovery gain public acceptance.

He’s less known for his treatise on animal reproduction, a tome called “On Generation” that offers a detailed and sometimes lyrical examination of the sex lives of (mainly) chickens.

Why chickens? you ask. Harvey thought you might:

Among male animals there is none that is more active or more haughty and erect, or that has stronger powers of digestion than the cock, which turns the larger portion of his food into semen; hence it is that he requires many wives—ten or even a dozen [you see? The city officials compromised.] … Now those males that are so vigorously constituted as to serve several females are larger and handsomer, and in the matter of spirit and arms excel their females in a far greater degree than the males of those that live attached to a single female.

In case you aren’t convinced (warning, graphic imagery ahead):

The cock, therefore, as he is gayer in his plumage, better armed, more courageous and pugnacious, so is he replete with semen, and so apt for repeated intercourse, that unless he have a number of wives he distresses them by his frequent assaults; he not only invites but compels them to his pleasure, and leaping upon them at inconvenient and improper seasons, (even when they are engaged in the business of incubation) and wearing off the feathers from their backs, he truly does them an injury.

If you can get past the ick of that bit, I ask you to imagine the methodology involved in investigating the following in his capacity as natural philosopher-cum-poultry pornographer:

It is certain that the cock in coition emits his “geniture,” commonly called semen, from his sexual parts, although he has no penis, as I maintain; because his testes and long and ample vas deferentia are full of this fluid. But whether it issues in jets, with a kind of spiritous briskness and repeatedly as in the hotter viviparous animals, or not, I have not been able to ascertain.

Not having perfected the art of chicken-pleasing, Harvey nonetheless movingly describes the hen’s sexual experience: Read more of this post

Filed under Booooks, Experiments, Odd Saints, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

A Very Great Company of Radiating Pencils

June 17, 2009 by Leave a comment

Dear CF,

It has always been a great fantasy of mine to draw well.  It has also been a great fantasy of mine to work in a messy and unhygienic laboratory where Kimwipes and agar have not yet been invented, where there aren’t Biohazard containers or sharps disposal boxes, and where one could (not that one would) potentially conduct evilish experiments . In my youth I occasionally turned my bathroom into this kind of lab. The inspiration was George’s Marvelous Medicine. The occasion was a skin allergy I developed to my favorite hangout tree. (A fig, in case you were wondering.) After spying on the neighbors next door from the tree for a few hours I’d come back and try different mixtures on the rash.

In that spirit, I give you one of my favorite quiet mad scientists, Robert Hooke, whose Micrographia was published in 1665, when he was 30 years old. He experimented with optics, wrestled with various kinds of microscopy, which was in its infancy, and peppered the book with amazing illustrations, including the famous portrait of the flea.

I love him, though, for the insanity of his process, a sample of which I give you here:

The Microscope, which for the most part I made use of … was contriv’d with three Glasses; a small Object Glass at A, a thinner Eye Glass about B, and a very deep one about C: this I made use of only when I had occasion to see much of an Object at once; the middle Glass conveying a very great company of radiating Pencils, which would go another way, and throwing them upon the deep Eye Glass.

But when ever I had occasion to examine the small parts of a Body more accurately, I took out the middle Glass, and only made use of one Eye Glass with the Object Glass, for always the fewer the Refractions are, the more bright and clear the Object appears. And therefore ’tis not to be doubted, but could we make a Microscope to have one only refraction, it would, cæteris paribus, far excel any other that had a greater number.

Okay, so this might not strike you as all that wild and crazy. Pedantic, even pedestrian. But then we get this:

And hence it is, that if you take a very clear piece of a broken Venice Glass, and in a Lamp draw it out into very small hairs or threads, then holding the ends of these threads in the flame, till they melt and run into a small round Globul, or drop, which will hang at the end of the thread; and if further you stick several of these upon the end of a stick with a little sealing Wax, so as that the threads stand upwards, and then on a Whetstone first grind off a good part of them, and afterward on a smooth Metal plate, with a little Tripoly, rub them till they come to be very smooth; if one of these be fixt with a little soft Wax against a small needle hole, prick’d through a thin Plate of Brass, Lead, Pewter, or any other Metal, and an Object, plac’d very near, be look’d at through it, it will both magnifie and make some Objects more distinct then any of the great Microscopes.

WHO DOES THIS? How on earth did he generate that particular series of “ifs”? In what universe do you decide that the way to better magnify an object is to make a Venetian-glass-and-wax equivalent of a Sonicare toothbrush head, suitably polished?

In Robert Hooke’s awesome universe, that’s where.

Here is his drawing of a fly’s compound eye:

fly

Here is his drawing of a nettle:

nettles

And here is his account of how he poked himself repeatedly with the nettle to figure out how it worked:

This I found by this experiment, I had a very convenient microscope with a single Glass which drew about half an Inch, this I had fastned into a little frame, almost like a pair of Spectacles, which I placed before mine eyes, and so holding the leaf of a Nettle at a convenient distance from my eye, I did first, with the thrusting of several of these bristles into my skin, perceive that presently after I had thrust them in I felt the burning pain begin; next I observ’d in divers of them, that upon thrusting my finger against their tops, the Bodkin (if I may so call it) did not in the least bend, but I could perceive moving up and down within it a certain liquor, which upon thrusting the Bodkin against its bafis, or bagg B, I could perceive to rise towards the top, and upon taking away my hand, I could see it again subside, and shrink into the bagg; this I did very often, and saw this Phaenomenon as plain as I could ever see a parcel of water ascend and descend in a pipe of Glass. But the basis underneath these Bodkins on which they were fast, were made of a more pliable substance, and looked almost like a little bagg of green Leather, or rather resembled the shape and surface of a wilde Cucumber, or cucumeris asinini, and I could plainly perceive them to be certain little baggs, bladders, or receptacles full of water, or as I ghess, the liquor of the Plant, which was poisonous, and those small Bodkins were but the Syringe-pipes, or Glyster-pipes, which first made way into the skin, and then served to convey that poisonous juice, upon the pressing of those little baggs, into the interior and sensible parts of the skin, which being so discharg’d, does corrode, or, as it were, burn that part of the skin it touches; and this pain will sometimes last very long, according as the impression is made deeper or stronger.

I want that little pair of Spectacles.

Fondly,

M

Filed under Experiments, Odd Saints Tagged with , , ,

Today in Millicent’s Garbage

June 5, 2009 by 1 Comment

Dear CF,

It’s moving time round these here parts, so people are leaving all their broken things by the dumpster. I’ve been passing this set of drawers (one drawer missing) for three days. Today I remembered I’d bought some yellow gingham vinyl on a whim. Behold the fruits of my labor:

P6050169

The card is from our beloved mutual friend. And look, a sighting!

P6050170

It’s Sus scrofa, the domestic pig.

Fondly,

Millicent

Filed under Experiments, Uncategorized Tagged with ,

Mother’s Day

May 13, 2009 by 3 Comments

Chum o’mine,

I thought of you on Mother’s Day. I hope it has cooled off in your city. While it was hot for you, the air here was sodden and unraining, the kind of day where you wear a cardigan and sweat through it after walking a block.

I spent Mother’s Day with mine. It was her first without her mother, and the weekend felt a little like one of those blown-glass figurines they used to sell at malls before there was Swarovski crystal. Birds with blue trim, hot air balloons, tiny grand pianos. glassblown pianoIt was lovely and delicate and so brittle you could almost hear the pieces tinkling musically as they broke on the floor.

My grandmother’s sister, age 92, spent it with my mother and me, along with her daughter, who recently left her husband and is living with her. For a day we were a colony of mothers and overgrown daughters in nested roofs. I made lunch, they brought salads. A family friend brought a cake. We sat outside with the potted tulips I’d bought my aunt and great-aunt. My father was there, a benign presence. Nothing noteworthy was said. It was the sort of afternoon where what matters is that the bell peppers were slightly overcooked, but there were Russian pastries and teacups and the gentle hilarity of a little old lady, hunched and bird-boned, speaking aghast into a computer and hearing her son’s voice answer from overseas.

They left. I updated my mother’s and father’s computers. I taught my father how to use Facebook.

Sunday night, while my mother was ironing her hair in the bathroom, I brought my computer in and clicked it open on the vanity, wondering for a moment, as I opened my web browser, whether what I was about to do was the right thing.

I went to Meghan O’Rourke’s nine-part series on grieving over the loss of her mother on Slate, and asked my mother if she wanted me to read her the second-to-last one. I had glanced at it and it seemed more hopeful than despairing and dealt, curiously enough, with Easter.

My mom had been really moved by a couple of Megan’s essays; she identified, months ago, with her experience of feeling her mother’s presence like a blanket, as something tangible. She had since, she told me, lost that sense of presence. She didn’t feel her anymore.

I started to read.

My dad came in halfway through. My dad has unpredictable taste. He felt, for instance, that Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking was irredeemably self-indulgent and selfish. I didn’t want him to pronounce on Megan’s essay; didn’t want him to import his critical self—which doesn’t always sense context; didn’t want him to turn this moment into anything other than what it was. I felt him judging every word. My blown-glass piano was crumbling.

I read on, trying to keep my voice from being melodramatic or monotone, trying to toe the line between sappy and abstract. Was it too literary? Too high-brow? Too self-indulgent? Too American? Was this really an experience that meant anything to anyone who’d suffered so great a loss? Was it the worst kind of presumption to read this account to my mother, who perhaps hadn’t gotten beyond it, wasn’t ready to look forward to the next step?

I finished the article, my mind calculating a billion reactions and ways of minimizing damage. I barely understood what I read. The end has to do with traditions, a father who’s a Classicist and advises Meghan to make apple pie next year—to understand that her making pie was a way of calling her mother, whose presence (like my mother’s mother’s) had left her.

The article ended. My mom and dad both said, very simply, that they loved it. My dad went to lie down. My mom picked up her flatiron, looked at me, and told me I was having a massive allergic reaction. I glanced in the mirror: sure enough, my shoulders and chest were blazing red, red as a really bad sunburn. Everything itched.

She called my dad. He said, eyes still closed, that it was probably an allergy to ibuprofen (he dislikes the fact that I take it for migraines). I snapped that I’d taken the medicine at 8:00 that morning.

My mom touched my shoulder. It was blazing hot. “This just started now,” she said. “You weren’t like this before you started reading.” “Huh,” I said.

“It was the essay,” she said, in a sudden moment of clarity, and I knew she was right. She bent down and hugged me—she guessed the itchy tangles I’d waded through in the last few minutes, wanting it to be okay.

I mumbled something about that not being it. “You poor thing,” she said, and grinned. “That’s what it is. Here, read another one and let’s see if you get redder.”

Fondly,

Millicent

(More on mothers and death here.)

Filed under BEST OF Millicent and Carla Fran, Experiments, Uncategorized Tagged with , ,

American Idle: How Fear and Anger Drive Us To Our Fallen Work

April 30, 2009 by 2 Comments

Dear CF,

[Opening insult framed in sexual terms that broadcasts author’s failure to properly express anger:] Those radio guests can suck my boob.

[Agreement plus fake announcement of topic]: I’m with you: anger and fear, weirdly understood as alienating or paralyzing emotions, are no such thing—if anything, they’re over-activating. Without anger, fear and their cousins discomfort and desire, nothing would ever get done.

[Facile examination of social objectives:] ‘Course, this is a militantly capitalist take on what exactly it is that a society is supposed to do. Conquer nations? Propagate the species? Provide decent transportation? Eastern philosophy interests me in its determinedly unworldly focus: if nirvana is the elimination of desire (o happy goal!), why would anyone build anything?

[Acknowledgment of bias that effectively neuters all that precedes and follows:] (Full disclosure: I’m writing you from my time-share in the Unmotivated, Unfearing and Unangry Doldrums, so I know whereof I speak. But I confess to also vacationing in Unenlightenedland.)

Idleness [a.k.a. Jerry-rigged Transition to Give You a Break and Create a Pleasing If Deceptive Sense of Progress]

Slate has been running a series called “The Idle Parent” celebrating the delights of leisure, especially spontaneous and unforced interactions, for parents and children alike.

[Don’t Be Fooled–Marriage and Kids Will Suck Out Your Soul:] Seems like a sensible approach to child-rearing—one that might soften the apocalyptic overtones of pregnancy and marriage by suggesting that people needn’t subordinate their entire intellectual and emotional selves to the needs of a mewling infant. Which might, in turn, counteract the fear of commitment that plagues the unmarried Mongol hordes who suspect (rightly, insofar as the culture defines these things) that both marriage and parenthood irrevocably castrate the self.

Idleness has a place. An important place. Even—as I’ll get to in a minute—an Edenic place. Milton’s Adam might be the very first Idle Parent.

[The Autobiographical Problem That Motivated This Whole Faux-Philosophical Post:] Read more of this post

Filed under BEST OF Millicent and Carla Fran, Booooks, Experiments Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

Is Susan Boyle a Fake?

April 22, 2009 by 1 Comment

After all our gab about her here, here and here, brace yourself:

SUSAN BOYLE HAS BEEN KISSED.

Read more of this post

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Negligees, Nighties and Naughties, Oh My!

February 8, 2009 by 2 Comments

Dear Carla F,

Once, my beloved aunt called me and her daughter into her room. “Yoo-HOOOOO!” she said, “I brought you something!” B. and I were nineteen or so, greasy and a little smelly from an entire day spent playing Nintendo. “What? What?” we said. My Tia—who dresses in pantsuits and sensible shoes–reached into her plastic bag and pulled out two black lacy entirely translucent teddies. The sheer cups were absurdly small for my breasts. The back was a thong. Here and there, stray threads stuck out, stiff as the bristles of a fake Christmas tree. “PAJAMAS!!!!” she said, beaming. “Aren’t they adorable?”

My cousin to this day describes that as one of the worst days of her life. This is my Aunt of choice—the one to whom I address the sorts of letters you describe. I still have the funny thing, which I have never ever worn, not once.

So delighted with your enumeration of the niggles that plague us when buying lingerie. Really it does come down to whether you’re wearing the thing or it’s wearing you. This becomes much harder to control with underwear, particularly if one has to any degree incorporated irony into one’s dress. It’s very hard to be ironic about being naked. Possible—your tats plus red lipstick plus 50s housewife kitsch is an example—but think for a moment about the effort our hypothetical girl had to go to achieve that image! Absurd, I say. Exhausting. It should be easier than this.

I tend to fall on the other side of the spectrum from you in one regard (which is why I found your breakdown so fascinating): I don’t really see the gradations in lingerie. Barring crotchless panties (and I do), I’m essentially blind to the distinctions you notice. I find it all faintly hilarious and also REALLY REALLY exciting in that five-year-old “We get to wear shiny ooh-la-la things!” kind of way. I wonder if this is because to a certain extent I had the kind of feminine coaching you didn’t: while my mother relentlessly brainwashed me about the evils of sex and forced me to carry “reminder” letters in my purse with strictures on the importance of a woman’s virtue, she regularly bought me very cute satiny pajama short sets. Never scandalous, but definitely silky in that Blanche Devereaux sort of way. Also little spaghetti-strap nighties with plunging V-necks.

In retrospect, I think she was trying to get me to throw away the faded cotton Beauty and the Beast and Little Mermaid nightshirts I’d had since the age of 8 and which, to be fair, had developed a smell.

In other respects, I think our upbringings were alike. The sex talk? Seeds Are Planted. The End. Shaving was discussed but strictly forbidden. It would grow back in thickets. Tampons? Out of the question. It took me awhile to even figure out what they did. Makeup was limited to experiments in foundation to try to disguise the raspberry yoghurt my complexion had become. Generally, however, my mother did tend to try to make me skew feminine.

My relationship to lingerie started out fun. I begged my parents for a bra in fourth grade and, after laughing uproariously (I made the request in purple flannel footie pajamas) they agreed.

My first bra was two tiny triangles of white fabric with a delicate starred pattern that was barely visible, kind of like mattelasse, with a small blue flower in the middle. It was a lovely delicate little thing, and might have shaped my lingerie aesthetic forever.

Then things took a turn. My breasts gazongaed right at the braces/zits/awkward-hair-but-haven’t-hit-vertical-growth-spurt stage of the proceedings. As you know, dear CF, I am a small person. They were all out of proportion to my size. I was warned by bra-ladies the world over that without proper support they would fall to the ground before my thirtieth birthday. Here’s the thing: pretty bras didn’t come in my measurements. All my bras from this period (and the decade after) are industrial garments—marvels of engineering rendered in subdued hues and grandmotherly fabrics.

Maybe this explains my lack of discrimination. At any store they MIGHT have four items in my size: three full-coverage monstrosities in shades of oatmeal and one shiny fuchsia demi-cup with straps the width and texture of duct-tape. To use a highly offensive metaphor, my relationship to bras was like a refugee’s relationship to food. I couldn’t be overly picky.

The first line to really experiment with lingerie for larger-breasted women was Felina. I loved Felina. Yes, there was a lot going on…frills and netting and two-tones and padding to support and drum up that cleavage. But it was FUN and OH I needed that.

It’s probably apparent that most of my lingerie-focus gravitated toward bras. This is still where my interest lies. I’m with you on the sheer underwear and thong issue. It’s hard to make them look good, they require extensive grooming (which I’ve taken to doing these days, and admit to liking largely because I DON’T fret as much about this underwear issue), and in any case I get uncomfortable having my hoo-ha stared at, whatever the context. It is shy and prefers to remain demurely Under Wraps.

(Incidentally, I recently read a Dear Abby in which she’d polled readers about thongs. Several men wrote in saying they liked them (on themselves), and bemoaned the fact that they don’t get to wear pretty or exciting underwear. Lucky us?)

I now have a sizeable collection of truly lingerie-ish things, many of them bridal shower gifts. What’s interesting about the bridal shower is that you really get a menagerie of other people’s sexual personas or—which is equally interesting—their guesses about yours. I have tried several of them out. To wit:

  • A lovely sea-green silky set of pajamas–tank top and pants, with delicate pink lattice-work at the bodice. Tasteful and lots of coverage, but soft and elegant. I LOVE this.
  • An astonishing hot-pink polyester creation with no shape at all, but string straps and lots of orange splotches. To wear it properly I’d need curlers and a cigarette. Not a contender.
  • Black baby-doll with matching thong (bow on the butt!) and hot pink lacing. Good in theory, actually makes me look pregnant and stumpy. In addition to which, I feel a bit artificial in a thong—a garment that my bottom will never find comfortable.
  • White leopard-print boy-short set with spaghetti-strap tank and turquoise lace at the sides and top. Little silver cat charms hang off both. (I try not to think about this.) While I’m not a fan of animal-print, this is, in shape, anyway, the sort of thing I might wear anyway.
  • Long white silky nightgown with corset-lacing down the back, which dips dramatically to the butt-crack. Fits well—could actually be an awesome dress in different circumstances—but really does scream Virgin Being Deflowered.
  • Baggier long white sheer nightgown with sheer sheath on top, understated butterfly embroidery. VBD.
  • Lovely long-sleeved white men’s-style pajama set—thin cotton, nearly translucent—with embroidery and lapels. I love this, but don’t think it quite counts as lingerie. I might be wrong. Verdict TBA.
  • Pale pink short shiny silky sheath (say THAT three times fast!) with big Georgia O’Keefey flowers and soft sheer straps. In this look I like (as you brilliantly put it) shrimp-like. And odd.

My biggest issue with the whole question, as I’ve mentioned to you, is the theatrical part of it. It’s not the clothes themselves, it’s the attitude the clothes seem to be demanding of us (and of our men). Bras and panties may be fun and also inconvenient, but above all they are Bossy. “React To Me!” they scream, while we—the mere humans—try, usually unsuccessfully, to live up to all they promise.

However, this is something we can figure out. Now that the boobs have gone down a bit I can experiment more, and I intend to. Let’s figure this lingerie thing out! Let’s find your fantasy negligee! And mine! And make them fit into our flawed but affable lives! To Oz!!!!

Fondly,

Millicent

(Carla Fran’s original post, “Panties and Bras,” is here.)

Filed under Experiments, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

Beowulf and Marriage, Gifts and Work

February 1, 2009 by 2 Comments

Dear heart,

I have indeed been at sea, but miss you and am sipping Tippy Assam tea and staring in befuddlement at a lovely bouquet of flowers much like the one you left me last time you visited. I’ve been thinking about gifts, you see, and am feeling a little seasick as a result.

I did read the articles on American Mothers, the bitch/nag problem, and have been pondering the complications you mention because a guest in my home is thinking of cohabiting with her boyfriend. We’ve had some frank discussions about the Unexpected Tensions that arise and arrest the pleasures of a shared life, sort of how a shoelace catches on a nail while racing into your backyard kills the spontaneous onrush of childlike whimsy.

This guest has a tendency, even now, to occupy the Nag niche, which arises in response to a partner who does respond to some prodding. An example: he proposed that they move together to another country so that he could study something for two years. She had a fit because in making the proposal he failed to think out a single step of the plan—not how they would pay for plane tickets, or what she would do there, or how they would live  (she doesn’t speak the language), or how the gap might affect her own very successful career trajectory.

The fight that ensued seems fairly typical of the NYTimes article dynamic: he was startled and hurt by her outrage. He claimed he was merely floating the idea, wanted her input, was very much considering their life together: he was asking her what she thought, wasn’t he? To him, the conversation itself was a gesture of inclusion, a move toward some sort of togetherness. She felt oppressed by the practical dimensions of the situation which he clearly hadn’t considered, and which by default she assumed. So while he intended the gesture to be inclusive, she ended up feeling not only alone, but also weighed down by work, the demands of two lives instead of one.

I bring up the backyard-run because the concept to me encapsulates one of the sweeter red herrings in the myth of domestic life. It seems like marriage  should aspire to that kind of ease: both parties are eager. There’s momentum, there’s desire and there’s that slightly embarrassing sentimentality or fresh-faced optimism that forces couples to hide their pet names and schlocky-but-tender rituals.

How does this all fit into your work, dear CF, and marriage generally? I suppose, like the reality (vs. the romance) of being a Writer, the real thing ends up being quite a lot of determinedly schlubby Work. So much bending is actually required on both sides in order to lay down peacefully and rest at the end of the night.

I drag gifts into this because I’ve been thinking about them a great deal in relation to the problem of work in my own life. I still haven’t read Hyde’s The Gift. I want to, because (thanks to you) it crosses my mind more than any unread book really ought to.

I have, as you know, recently been given some rather large gifts by someone very kind and quite lovely. However, my idea in pursuing this particular relationship was to experience something informal, light, and casual. The gifts were ostensibly given in that spirit, and yet they’ve done quite a lot of work weighing the whole enterprise down with the Ghost of Girlfriendhood Future.

Now, Beowulf. (I promise there’s a point buried in here. Bear with me.) The poem is about many things: kingship, the problems of aging, arbitrating between the competing value systems of Christianity and warrior culture; it’s about civilization vs. barbarism, truces and revenge.  To be cast out of the mead-hall, in B’s world, is to be condemned to death or to become monstrous. Not unnatural—nature, in this poem is monstrous, lethal, and hostile to human habitation. So any creature that can survive it (like Grendel and his mother) is by definition inhuman but also natural. What’s valued here is artifice, work. The work of building something solid and beautiful and absolutely unnatural together against the wilderness.

Most importantly, it’s about the bonds that hold a civilization together—a civilization structured (literally—the architecture of the mead-hall is hugely important) around male companionship. And the male bond between a king and his thanes (or other tribes) is cemented through a) the exchange of women through marriage, which always fails, and b) the exchange of gifts.

The gifts in question are incredibly worked. They are gold. They are beautiful and heavy. They come in sets. They are earned—and this is problematic—in battle. (They are in fact plunder.) But despite the emphasis on work, artifice, and the beauty of the object, the point is never the gift itself—rather, it’s the gift’s ritual function in cementing  a relationship.

A good king in the poem, Hrothgar, starts out a warrior (in other words a plunder-collector) and ends up a “ring-giver,” a giver of gifts. Beowulf dies in the end because he fails at this transition as he ages. No longer the warrior he was, he nonetheless decides to confront the dragon alone—a dragon who incidentally only turned on B’s kingdom because a banished man stole a gold object from his hoard to win back Beowulf’s favor.

The point is, he fails, and his mead-hall—which, like Heorot, is called the “best of houses”—fails too, because of misdirected effort. Work gone awry.

This illustrates something important, I think, between gifts and work. You know how the universe is created out of matter and energy? Relationships, I think, and houses, and families, and civilizations, are created out of gifts and work. Just as matter and energy are finally the same thing, gifts and work are interconvertible.

The key is, the gifts must matter to the recipient, and must be recognized as gifts. There must be a moment of ritual reckoning, a presentation, even, when both giver and receiver understand what is being transacted and why. What happens, I think, to these American moms (and it certainly happened to me in my marriage, and has happened to my own parents, and to my guest too) is that women often eagerly participate in this gift-giving economy with an idea of selflessness or modesty. They give “freely” of their time, their effort, their energy, sure that the results—a clean bathroom, Valentines for the kid’s classmates, space for the spouse to work—are noticed and appreciated.

This “free” giving makes sense for children, but not for spouses. It’s not really free, and the minute the giver realizes that the recipient didn’t even NOTICE the gift, much less appreciate it, a conversion happens: the gift retroactively turns into work. It’s a debit, not a credit. The result? Instead of achieving the exalted status of giver, the offering party becomes merely a worker. And the recipient incurred a debt when he didn’t even know he was shopping.

There’s a reason gift-giving in Beowulf works (and marriage doesn’t): it only happens between men. I think men are better at making a song-and-dance about gifts than women are. The culture raises them that way: the gesture, the bouquet, the ring. The new car for the kid. Women are NEVER taught to give in this way. Somehow women tend to opt out of the gesture-thing, the meadhall presentation of gifts. So we tend to offer smaller gifts without a lot of pomp, which (from the men’s point of view) pretty much invalidates the function of the gift since it’s the ritual meaning, not the gift itself, that matters.

The result is a weird disparity where everybody’s giving what they themselves would like to receive. The small thoughtful embroidered scarf vs. the anonymous Ferrari. It’s the absurdity of the Golden Rule. (Quick digression: A recent study found that men’s necks are approximately 10x less sensitive than women’s. Therefore, when a man kisses your neck, he’s unwittingly delivering 10x more pleasure than he himself feels when you kiss his. Because he doesn’t know that, he might not kiss your neck that often, or quite believe you when you tell him how good it feels.)

I can’t believe how rambly this has gotten. Sorry.

Back to my situation: the gifts I received from this kind person have turned out (for me) to be quite a lot of work because I SIMPLY REFUSE TO BELIEVE that he’s not participating in this Beowulfy gift economy where the point of the gift is the ritual and not the gift itself. He’s a warrior of sorts, and I just can’t convince myself that he’s really truly opting out of an economy that’s so firmly rooted in ritual. (You can’t get more Beowulfy than the military.) I refuse to believe that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, a television is just a television, a bouquet is just a bouquet, because it flies in the face of everything I know to be true about men and their gifting ways.

Is it possible, I wonder, that he’s really truly transcended his own model and is participating quite insightfully in mine? It’s all very confusing, because while there was no ritual, no grand presentation, the object itself does amount to quite a large gesture that doesn’t quite compare to the quiet gifts of vacuuming every day or (in your very difficult case) putting off your work to accommodate his plans.

In your case, dear CF, I wonder if a small part of the solution is not to view your choices as Gifts, because they so often get converted in your head to Work. Relationships are work—they’re gold-roofed mead-halls that protect us from the wilds of nature—and it’s the work that invests them with value. But the work they demand is enough. There’s really no need to overachieve. I’ve already—just by agonizing about my own situation as much as I have—put in way more work than was warranted or appropriate or necessary or right, and am sucking all the fun out of it.

So: as far as the things that invite one to nag, I guess I’m suggesting an Experiment: If they are Gifts, proclaim them, celebrate them, build a fire and present them in full diamond-hand regalia. If they aren’t, don’t make them. For awhile, maybe try to stop yourself from making those invisible offerings, because they’re costing you too much and Mr CF is—through no fault of his own—maxing out his line of credit.

For what it’s worth, I think you’re both working hard, I think your meadhall is glorious, and I think you’re both fabulous ring-givers. How this work relates to your own work is, of course, an entirely different question, and God knows this has gotten long enough.

Fondly, and at sea (or, to use a kenning, on the whale-road),
Millicent

(This post responds to “Le Marriage et Le Travaille,” available here.)

Filed under BEST OF Millicent and Carla Fran, Booooks, Experiments, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

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