Tonight we'll light the second candle! And replace the first one: this is why most years I don't splash out for actual Advent candles. I've never found a set that stood up to the amount of candle-burning I like, and nice ones (which still burn down too fast for my taste) are generally expensive. Cheap white votives it is. But goodness –– the time goes as fast as the candles. I'll be launching my Annual Christmas Gift Panic any minute now . . .
Luckily for me, my friend John Wilson has published his "2021 Year of Reading" list at First Things. I like and admire John no end, as a literary and cultural critic and as a human being, and his reading lists always provide me with excellent last-ditch gift ideas. Feeling the last-ditch pinch earlier this year, of course, though I am actively trying to avoid supply-chain issues by buying local and secondhand, and ordering my books early from either Bookshop (for which I have an affiliate storefront and account) or direct from the publisher.
A quiet Saturday here. My husband is upstairs grading exams. Dora and I have been for one walk, plus some play in the yard. We slept in a little this morning, and she was FULL OF IT when she came bursting out of her crate. We had a nice walk, even given the constant taunting of squirrels, then I unleashed her in the backyard to let her run, which she seemed to need to do. Her speed is unbelievable –– I've got to video her running flat out sometime, but suffice it to say that I'm a believer in the "part-greyhound" hypothesis we've been floating, with regard to her mix of breeds. Meanwhile, the sky's clouded over some, and I'm not sure what the weather plans to do, but I hope we can get a longer walk in this afternoon.
Still working on my "Author's Note" for the novel, and I need to look over submissions for a sonnet competition I'm helping to judge. Then maybe some more revision, of something. By happy coincidence, maybe, I ran across this latest installment in a video series by Dana Gioia, on balancing writing with other demands in your life. He bills the series as focused on writing when you have a full-time job, but really: all of this would be relevant to a mother at home with children, or anybody whose life involves other contingencies besides sitting at the sacred desk channeling the deathless words. People like to pretend otherwise (a lot of women writers of my first mentor's generation, who said, "Don't have kids, or maybe have one"), but there is no such thing as a life in which you do nothing but write.
I don't know anyone who does that, at any rate. "Full-time writer" has usually meant, in America, from the mid-20th century forward, "writer who also teaches writing at a university." Of course, at this stage, it generally means "writer who is doing whatever, like literally what the hell EVER, to make enough money to live on while also writing," because the job market for teaching writing at a university is, at this point, vanishingly small. But even for those supposedly lucky people who do have university jobs teaching writing, and even for the small pool of luckier people for whom "teaching writing" does not mean "teaching basic literacy to college freshmen who should be literate but aren't" –– well, let's just say that even in the luckiest of those situations, what you do with the bulk of your day is not your own writing. In so many ways, except of course the earning-an-income aspect of things, I feel like the luckiest person in the world, in having been a housewife and homeschooling mother.
Housewife is great cover for an artist, actually, as long as you can put up with people assuming that you're probably not that interesting. I can remember multiple social occasions –– I mean, not that many, but enough that I do remember them –– where academic people of my casual acquaintance would ask me politely about my children, then turn to each other and have a literary conversation as if I weren't there. Mind you, I'm happy to talk about my children. I'd rather talk about my children than lots of other things. But these were encounters that left me with two choices: 1) insert myself obnoxiously into the conversation in a "Well, uh-HACTUALLY" kind of way, or 2) sit there. I usually did #2, unless some natural opening occurred, which often did not happen, particularly as the person next to me at dinner would have his or her back turned, in order to talk to his or her neighbor on the other side. And what are you gonna do? Consider that you've been given an opportunity to cultivate humility, I guess, which I have certainly tried to do, with scattershot success.
Of course, I'm also compelled to remember a man I met at a cocktail party not long after my fourth child (who turns eighteen tomorrow) was born. He was the husband of a woman I knew casually through a book club my mother had gotten me into, and somehow at this party we'd wound up standing next to each other, fiddling our drinks and making smalltalk.
I guess he asked me what I did, as people do, and I guess I said that I homeschooled my children, or otherwise indicated that what I did, as in all day every day, with no cash-money incentive involved, was spend time with the people I had given birth to.
So I told him this, and he said, "You're crazy."
I can still hear the incredulity in his voice. What was crazy, he went on to tell me earnestly, as if he were explaining why the sky is blue, was the idea of being with your children all the time. That was just –– really, in the end, words failed him. Who did that kind of thing?
And I thought: Ah. You're telling me you don't like your children all that much. But I'm crazy. Thanks for clarifying.
Anyway, all that to say: I don't consider that there's anybody out there –– well, with maybe one or two exceptions that I can think of, rare people who really do lead kind of eremitic lives –– who isn't balancing a writing life against a host of other roles and demands. Ergo, say I, Dana Gioia's video series is for anybody, and offers a continual dose of both realism and hope, for which I admire him. He should know from having a full-time job, having had an entire career as an executive at General Mills. And these tutorials thus far have been full of practical wisdom and encouragment, from one whose business career has, at this point, been far outshone by his life in letters.
And: yes, revision is part of the creative process. It is writing. It's maybe the most grueling part of writing, but it's also where, in my experience, the real epiphanies occur, the flashes of insight into what it is you're actually doing. It's not glamorous, usually doesn't take the top of your head off, doesn't crank out tons of publication credits for you. But it is the work, not the stop-gap while you're waiting for some more real thing to occur to you. It's not treading water.
Meanwhile, wearing today:
My dearly-beloved wool Camellia challenge dress with secondhand marbled bamboo leggings, thrifted Talbots cotton-ramie cardigan, and my new purple Xero Oswegos. Hair still drying, but it dries a lot faster when I don't load it down with a ton of conditioner. Last time I washed it (Monday, I think) I only used SheaMoisture African Black Soap for my scalp, and no conditioner at all. My hair had enough slip for the comb to glide through it easily, so I left it off. Today I just used conditioner bar on the ends. No styling product at all. I really cannot be bothered.
Naturally Dora was helping me take these photos, though she didn't bomb them as much as she usually does. She is wearing, again, a classic brown-and-white ensemble, with a reddish collar for a subtle accent. Later, to go out, Dora will be accessorizing with a turquoise-blue harness and purple leash, because the well-dressed dog is never matchy.
UPDATE:
And then it turned out to be hot.
What the questionably well-dressed human is wearing to walk the greenway on Saturday of Advent One, in this Year of Our Lord Twenty-Twenty-One. Stripped off the leggings (now wearing bike shorts), replaced the heavier cotton-ramie cardigan with this old thrifted periwinkle crocheted Pierre Cardin number, which is much cooler. Still the purple shoes, because I like them.
EVEN LATER:
Going out for the evening, wearing old ponte-knit charcoal-gray skinny jeans with thrifted duck-egg-blue shirt and 50-cent thrifted dark periwinkle blazer, with my same purple Oswegos on my feet:
Funny how sometimes trousers feel more dressed-up than a dress! I guess I was jonesing after that feeling of mixing masculine and feminine elements, the pin-tucked shirt with the tailored blazer.
I wanted to be casual, but to feel sharp and sleeker than usual. Too much tailored menswear and you start to feel like Donna Tartt, but this combination, with the untucked shirt, seemed to hit the right note. Hard to see the colors clearly in this poor bathroom lighting, but I was quite happy with how they went together.
So, essentially a three-outfit day, but what with temperatures going up and down, and not knowing that I was going out to dinner until right before we went . . . you do what you gotta do. I, in any event, did what I gotta did.