Such different writers, yet all (and so many others) have much informed me and will through these next few journalism/sociology/economics seasons of my so-postponed (life happens) own writing.
I was reading Ehrenreich back in the old days, riding in car with my husband-to-be through breathtaking Hudson River valley. When Nickle and Dimed, her truthful, real, take on (“not getting by in America”) came out, as a professor I taught it. She surely would have chosen Labor Day weekend to die and darn if she didn’t have the last word on that. What a clarity will be so missed.
I have been through many transitions last couple of years. Lots has happened, not all by my choice which I no like-y. Mary Karr’s honest laugh-out-loud cyncical, (sometimes even a little mean) humor is my tonic. I so want to be mean towards a few, but mostly can’t pull it off. Lit her latest (that I know of, reading before sleep). I’m no poet (as is Karr) but her memoirs are of a genre I have been taken with since my small-town kid-hood library, and which has been a part of my own published work.
Over summer finished the enormous Sylvia Plath biography Red Comet. Figured out she was a far better poet than her husband Ted Hughes, yet he got the awards (being a dude) and she got housework and cooking and childcare (being the gal). Author Heather Clark surmises that Plath did kill not herself over adulterous Hughes…why in the world the assumption that women do suicide because and only because of faithless men…but because she could not bear again the brutal mental health treatments available (through mostly male practitioners, who probably didn’t know, nor care, about women) of her time. Some of that stuff is gruesome yet today.
Andrew Solomon’s Noonday Demon, on the human disorder of psychological depression…cultural, historical, religous, scientific…is a few years old now but has informed my own vision of a fusion of all my varied ways of writing on the hows-and-whys we people figure out economic fairness through many types of discourse…far different topic from his, but for my writing, fitting method.
Now I see today that Michelle Obama’s new book The Light We Carry will be out later this year. I’ve been gifted both Obamas’ books, all of them so far. What balm when I am feeling a little down. Some I read in hospital. Balm there for sure, for me, though the nurse assistants gave a little stink eye and weird questions about Becoming. Probably not what they read…if even they do read. (There’s my mean.)
So much content to weave through at my desk here. Scribbled notes, some of them, of mine, got organized in Austin. Some electronic references got sorted. Another boxful or two or three of legal pads and post-its, some not even right now legible but ready to work through. All the reading-catching-up, Times, Post, Guardian, Atlantic, New Yorker, Mother Jones, more and more and more. NPR. Oh, Inbox. More references.
Fantastic public and academic libraries both in Austin and here, either works.
Way, way more work to do in my cute little space at my spacious desk on a lovely street.
Fired up, ready to go.
Then whatever is next. Back Austin, or Asheville, Outer Banks, Hudson valley, Lewes East Sussex, Sweden, Greece, or whatever is next. Meanwhile as it gets darker and colder outside here, me indoors with soon-to-arrive chaise and the constant laptop, cute little cat Oliver in his pod next to the desk. Knee boots and gorgeous grey hooded winter coat out of storage, soon.
Dayna Finet 