The moment of betrayal

But at some point I had to wonder: where is the moment of betrayal? When the words hit the page? When that page is published, or produced? Or earlier, when it's in the mind of the writer? In the moment the writer thinks, regarding her brother's fury at vivid childhood slights, a sister's anguish over losing weight, a friend's dysfunctional relationship with the boyfriend who hits on everyone in sight, Hey, I can use that? Is it the moment when the fabric of another person's life, at the seam where it meets the writer's own, becomes material?

You can't participate in a relationship you're mining; you're observing from the shoreline, crouched, watching for the bits of gold, careful not to let your feet get too wet. You test dialogue by inserting provocative bits into real conversation, you transcribe real conversation back into a fictitious character's rambles--either way, honest communication between people ceases to exist.

~~
Perhaps writers who draw from their lives simply pay the price of an emotional distance in their relationships. Because we're too busy taking notes.

--Tara Ison, "The Names Have Been Changed to Protect the Innocent," Kenyon Review, Fall 2001

Coming Monday--an interview with Tara Ison. In the meantime, read her review of Jane Smiley's latest, Ten Days in the Hills.

They were like seeds in the beak of a bird

Before she became ill, David's mother would often tell him that stories were alive. They weren't alive in the way that people were alive, or even dogs or cats. People were alive whether you chose to notice them or not, while dogs tended to make you notice them if they decided that you weren't paying them enough attention. Cats, meanwhile, were every good at pretending people didn't exist at all when it suited them, but that was another matter entirely.

Stories were different, though: they came alive in the telling. Without a human voice to read them aloud, or a pair of wide eyes following them by flashlight beneath a blanket, they had no real existence in our world. They were like seeds in the beak of a bird, waiting to fall to earth, or the notes of a song laid out on a sheet, yearning for an instrument to bring their music into being. They lay dormant, hoping for the chance to emerge. Once someone started to read them, they could begin to change. They could take root in the imagination, and transform the reader. Stories wanted to be read, David's mother would whisper. They needed it. It was the reason they forced themselves from their world into ours. They wanted us to give them life.

~~

The stories in books hate the stories contained in newspapers, David's mother would say. Newspaper stories were like newly caught fish, worthy of attention only for as long as they remained fresh, which was not very long at all. They were like the street urchins hawking the evening editions, all shouty and insistent, while stories--real stories, proper made-up stories--were like stern but helpful librarians in a well-stocked library. Newspaper stories were as insubstantial as smoke, as long-lived as mayflies. They did not take root but were instead like weeds that crawled along the ground, stealing the sunlight from more deserving tales. David's father's mind was always occupied by shrill, competing voices, each one silenced as soon as he gave it his attention, only for its clamor to be instantly replaced by another. That was what David's mother would whisper to him with a smile, while his father scowled and bit his pipe, aware that they were talking about him but unwilling to give them the pleasure of knowing they were irritating him.

--John Connolly, The Book of Lost Things

Permafrost

"It's very difficult to look at trends in air temperature, because it's so variable," Romanovsky explained after we were back in the truck, bouncing along toward Deadhorse. It turned out that he had brought the Tostitos to stave off not hunger but fatigue--the crunching, he said, kept him awake--and by now the enormous bag was more than half empty. "So one year you have around Fairbanks a mean annual temperature of zero"--thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit--"and you say, 'Oh yeah, it's warming,' and other years you have mean annual temperature of minus six"--twenty-one degrees Fahrenheit--"and everybody says, "Where? Where is your global warming?' In the air temperature, the signal is very small compared to noise. What permafrost does is it works as low-pass filter. That's why we can see trends much easier in permafrost temperatures than we can see them in atmosphere." In most parts of Alaska, the permafrost has warmed by three degrees since the early 1980s. In some parts of the state, it has warmed by nearly six degrees.

--Elizabeth Kolbert, Field Notes from a Catastrophe

And the winner is. . .

Isabella.

Is it Thursday already? I'll be drawing a name this evening to give away a copy of J. Pedar Zane's The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books. If you'd like the chance to win this book and you haven't already submitted your name (and your own top ten list, if you're feeling listy), please do so by 9 pm. I'll be compiling a list of all the favorites mentioned in comments in a few days--lots of great stuff I'm grateful to know about.

Until then, here are a couple lists from the book:

Margaret Drabble's Top Ten
1. Antony and Cleopatra. William Shakespeare
2. Emma. Jane Austen
3. Madame Bovary. Gustave Flaubert
4. The Three Sisters. Anton Chekhov
5. The Aeneid. Virgil
6. The Divine Comedy. Dante Alighieri
7. Germinal. Emile Zola
8. The Golden Notebook. Doris Lessing
9. To the Lighthouse. Virginia Woolf
10. The Old Wives' Tale. Arnold Bennett

Kate Atkinson's Top Ten
1. Persuasion. Jane Austen
2. Alice's Adentures in Wonderland. Lewis Carroll
3. Pride and Prejudice. Jane Austen
4. Middlemarch. George Eliot
5. The Portrait of a Lady. Henry James
6. Slaughterhouse-Five. Kurt Vonnegut
7. Pricksongs & Descants. Robert Coover
8. Revolutionary Road. Richard Yates
9. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Mark Twain
10. The Railway Children. E. Nesbit

How could he forget the bonfires?

Last year I had a cold every few weeks and none of them amounted to much. This year I've had only the one, but it wiped me out for days. Sorry for the lack of activity here.

I have been reading, however. My son and I have jumped on the David Copperfield bandwagon, although he's much further along than I am. I'm very pleased he's engrossed by this one since he disliked Great Expectations so much that he never finished it.

I'm also reading Field Notes from a Catastrophe by Elizabeth Kolbert, due to a recommendation at Readerville. I'll be posting some excerpts from it in a day or so.

Finished Tara Ison's The List over the weekend. More on that later--Ison's currently answering several questions I sent her way and I'm looking forward to sharing her responses.

Spent most of my reading time last week with Hardy's The Return of the Native. Oh, there are a ton of quotes from this that I'd like to post! And I was so pleased with myself for reading it since L. read it ten or 12 years back, and I'd been jealous hearing him talk of the bonfires and Eustacia and the heath. (I have no idea why I didn't read it immediately after he finished it.) But now he's totally forgotten it, and when I insisted he had, he managed to pull up a few memories from Jude the Obscure, which he read just a few years back.

*Cough, cough.* May I have your attention, please?

I have an extra copy of The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books by J. Peder Zane, sent to me courtesy of J. Peder Zane himself, who pointed out that The Street of Crocodiles made Judy Budnitz's top ten list.

I'm going to give it to one of you list-crazed book lovers. I am going to draw a name out of, of something yet to be determined, and I will mail the book to the winner on Friday, Feb. 9, which means you will need to get your name in by 9 p.m. next Thursday evening at which time I will draw a winner.

Leave your name in comments if you want a chance to win the book. And if you leave your own list of favorite books in comments, I'd really appreciate it.

You can drop by and post your lists on Zane's The Top Ten website, too.