With the publication of this entry, I’ll have completed my first year of blogging. It takes at least twelve months to build any credibility with these things and this is what I’ve learned so far: First, blogging requires steady work and commitment and I can’t predict who will stick to it. I knew about the commitment going in and I wasn’t sure if I could keep up with that. More than 150 columns later I’m still not sure, but in that time I’ve watched some would-be bloggers give up and others stick it out. To create the possibility of eventually succeeding, the writer has to consistently post coherent, interesting work even when no one is reading it. Hey, that’s the deal: blogs are or should be a pleasure to read and since people equate this pleasure with leisure time, bloggers get read at leisure, a division of time that gets steadily smaller. If there are times when your best beloveds skip reading your post, it’s because they have lives of their own. In the end, I don’t think bloggers do this for praise or the money; we do it to put ideas into the universe. Second, it’s impossible to tell…
My sis and I fought over everything when we were kids. Books, records, pizza, you name it, both of us wanted the better, bigger share. We thought we’d grown out of most of that habit until we started discussing books to talk about on this blog. Barb insisted she wanted to write on Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book. I wasn’t willing to give that one to her. Mom & Dad, wherever you are, this is our attempt to share… BG: First, I think you have to discuss how this is related to The Jungle Book. How this says maybe the dead are nothing to fear. LG: Well, it is an homage to the Kipling classic. In Kipling’s book, Mowgli is raised by wild beasts of the Jungle, which was surely a strange, fearful place for Victorian Europeans. In The Graveyard Book, Nobody (Bod) Owens is protected and nurtured by the ghosts in an English Cemetery and death is a fearful unknown state for us. In both books, the child learns valuable information from beings he would normally be taught to fear. It could be both authors are trying to say the “unknown” doesn’t always mean “bad.” BG: It’s more than…
My mother tried to raise kids who didn’t know fear. I think she must have experienced some very bad moments in her own childhood because she understood the nature of childhood terrors and did her best to keep me and my sister from everything scary. Our TV shows were monitored, our movie choices screened and Mom made sure that the books we read could never frighten or intimidate us. All of this careful planning had a funny result: we grew up scared of a lot of things and although my sis recovered fairly quickly, (she’s far braver than I am) it takes me some extra work to get past the terror on the screen and in fiction. I work at this because I don’t want to miss something good, just because it is disturbing but sometimes I have to ask (as my Mom must have before every Halloween and roller-coaster), “Why do we like to be scared?” The wish to be frightened is part of Halloween tradition but this goes back a lot further than a “Haunted-House-for-Charity” (think about this: these days, we get startled out of our wits in order to give money to a worthy cause. Must we…
It’s Halloween Season again and TV channels, movies, radio and much of the internet are paying tribute to this time by retelling the stories that entertain and scare us. The traditional cast of characters are all on display: witches, werewolves, vampires, ghosts, zombies and other deadundead players that make things go bump in the night. I like most of these but they don’t terrify me. Haunted homes come closer to the mark since the atavistic part of my brain gives credence to these tales. It’s easy to believe homes absorb the emotions of the residents they protect and impressions of the events they witnessed. Still, because this type of haunting make sense, in the end they really don’t really frighten me either. These are traumatized buildings with PTSD and it’s obvious they need therapy. However, there is a sub-group of the haunted house that doesn’t follow this pattern. These are the houses that go bad without reason or rhyme. These sentient, “born bad” buildings prey on inhabitants for their own malevolent reasons. There aren’t many novels that fit in this category but one of the greatest is The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. It can make you distrust your…
There’s nothing like cleaning up a seldom-used room for turning up forgotten photographs. A small pile of candid shots were dislodged as I was re-shelving some books and drifted toward the rug. My husband picked up this one and handed it back to me with a smile saying, “Is there a reason I never see you read while you’re sitting in a chair? No, there probably isn’t except that after thirty years of marriage, he should know that reading isn’t a chair-limited activity to me. In fact, some of my best reading is in unlikely places. I am grateful no photos exist of me reading in the tub but that’s not from lack of opportunity. Tub-reading has always seemed like the height of luxury to me, since it combines words with relaxing in water. Of course it requires skill to keep the water-soluble print from the H2O (especially if shampoo is involved) but this is one I hone with regular practice. Outside of this, the only difficulty with tub-reading depends on the hot water supply. In a good scene, there is never enough. I have been known to read in the car although never as a driver while the vehicle was in motion. (That’s my story, Officer, and I’m…