I love Victoria Holt -- love her! I am reading Menfreya in the Morning now and for a lesser star I would feel ill of encroaching envy, but not for her, never her. She is the light to which I aspire -- hers is the perfect vehicle for fantasy, and I am not ashamed of my adoration.

I was so, so right to bring this book to work. It has brightened my spirits considerably. Her style is neatly honed yet descriptive -- with a few words she captures a moment, and I am there -- yet does not dwell tiresomely on any one thing. And her writing, unusual for such an intellectual style, focuses almost entirely on atmosphere and emotions. It is all I could ask.

It is hard to have courage to write A Raven for a Lark next month, but I must try, and it is better to have this idol to whom I may aspire, than not the slightest idea of greatness.

--
Sent from my Treo

I have settled in and taken the first leisurely shower in ages and weirdly feel like writing not an angsty journal entry, but a genial daily report such as I was won't to do before college.

I looked at the clock and it was eight. Then I looked at it again, expecting it to be eleven ... And it was nine, just nine. Time has slowed here -- everything is slower and somehow my evening feels more meaningful. I feel so focused.

I wonder if this means I am one of those city people now, looking to the country for zen-like refreshment for a day or so and then scooting off back to my fast-paced life. But no -- it is too much for me to dismiss my feelings so casually. This is more than peace and quiet, this is my crucible and having been wrought into being here I fit back into my old shape naturally --

-- which isn't entirely a good thing. I've come too far to retreat and I fear I am too sharp when I feel threatened.

But all of a sudden everything around me seems important. I have very few books here but I find myself perusing them with long-lost interest, something I almost never do at home. And suddenly I even know more about the way I want our home to look -- I want to do little chores and housekeeping. If I stayed in this wilderness time would slow and I would have endless hours each day to accomplish my tasks. I already feel the desire to write strengthen within me, the old stirrings that fade with distance and are replaced with stark emptiness.

The thing is not to return to my cradle. The thing is to learn what I can about wherever I go and whatever I do and use it to make my life better where I am.

Quiet, quiet -- I never knew before.

Sent from Amanda's Treo @-'-,--

I wonder why I saw the two most important movies in my life so close to each other, when I was sixteen or seventeen, and why I have never seen another movie so great as those, and likely never will. I saw "Immortal Beloved" first -- which I could appreciate all the more playing the piano, and I fell in love with every aspect of that movie: it will never fade from my mind. The other movie "La Belle et le Bete" came later, introducing a shadowy world that has affected me forever -- it is excruciating to watch the commentaries today and see the actors, and the sets, and to know that it was all real, just as it is excruciating to think that Mary and Percy Shelley existed somewhere, and John William Waterhouse existed somewhere -- somewhere I wasn't.

The castle sequences were filmed in a dilapidated park in France that still seems obscure and un-noteworthy to anyone -- that it is festering in seclusion even now with those same lichen-covered statues is unthinkable to me -- and why I should not be there, even more so. Jean Marais did a lot of interviews about it and as always seems to be the case, the beastly characters are played by friendly, charming people -- he reminded me so much in his manner of David Selby or Lara Parker -- I guess it is the complacency that rests in past greatness. I do not know if I'll ever know the feeling because I don't think I will ever be great.

Reading this Women of Influence book is causing me to remember another of my great childhood loves -- "The Miracle Worker," the story of Anne Sullivan and Helen Keller. It was Anne Sullivan I really loved, and still love -- it always made me heartsick to think of her sacrifice, devoting every waking minute to another human being, with almost no life left to herself, until she died in old age, and Helen Keller required another translator. But God -- she must have known it -- that's the best way to live -- it is to have every moment of your life swallowed in supreme goodness and satisfaction. No wonder I loved her, and no longer do I feel sorry for her -- I envy her. I thought of her today perhaps because when I was around eight or nine I grew aware that she and I shared the same initials "AS." Today is the first day that I am Amanda Monteleone at work, and I have written my initials "AM" dozens of times already. It's strange, but the satisfaction of it supersedes all sentimental regret.

It's the culmination of everything wrong with me right now, a physical presentation of my self-perpetuating emotional mess. The more I scratch the worse it itches, and it even spreads. Just like everything I think is wrong -- I try to perfect it, and its flaws become even more apparent to me, and I notice even more that's wrong. When will this end? When will I find peace?

I realized tonight what a coward I'm being. I must stop thinking, perfecting, scrutinizing -- and just do -- do things that really matter. This is just another trap, a false paradise, where many remain. But there is something more, and I will have it.

--
Sent from my Treo

"...the goal of which is to seem richer than we are, and make "smartness" (American smartness) cover the want of capital. Having created false standards of respectability, we crowd insane asylums and cemeteries in trying to live up to them."

from Marion Harland's Victorian housekeeping manual, taken from Gutenberg.org (I'm reading it on my Treo tonight)

I wonder if we all rebel when we know something we are doing is wrong -- and briefly it flares up before the flame goes out forever -- in defiance and remembrance and stubbornness. I was thinking of this on contemplation of Women's Dress Reform in the 1860's, followed two decades later with the most unnatural and terrifying corsetry that I know in fashion, with the additional use of ether, arnsenic and other poisons as beauty enhancements. Then almost immediately women stopped wearing corsets forever, and they show no sign of taking them up again.

Fur and other animal corpse byproducts was loudly disclaimed in fashion two decades ago with periodic resurgence, but with the last two years it has become a staple not only in women's fashion but home decor, and it comes cheaply as any will testify who seek a substitute for fur or leather products. Last year in JC Penney I saw a sweater with a rabbit fur collar that was only $20: I can't believe how little it costs or how prevalently it is worn, but I wonder if it will die out completely after these fur celebrations in every current fashion magazine.

I will not touch the stuff -- that animals would be used in such a way seems a grievous error to me.

Sent from Amanda's Treo @-'-,--

"If women want any rights more than they's got, why don't they just take them, and not be talking about it?" Sojourner Truth

I think this principle should be applied universally.

Internet manners. Real-life manners. Who do manners impact the most? The person enacting them, or not. Having manners instills a sense of pride in oneself. Having restraint, tact and decorum are necessary when presenting oneself. The problem with the internet is that one has no means of gauging other reactions and little initiative to care what people will think since with all probability they will never know who is reading their stuff.

So I think about this a lot. Should I invest my time in participating in web forums? are my journals right? Is the content suitable for the internet? What a laugh. Anything is suitable for the internet. There are no rules here. My words are going from this tiny keypad through aether to who knows where. The only feedback I get is penile enlargement spam and letters from Al Kharat of Saudi Arabia asking me to donate money in lieu of his assassinated son. I am talking to no one here. There is nothing here. And yet everyone is here now. Everyone's paying attention to the imaginary world that we make ourselves, devoid of tact and manners and restraint. I think of the things I say on the Internet and I know I couldn't in real life -- though I have to defend this journal: it is right for me and I have no problem with people reading it -- and I wonder where we should draw the line. Everything is so amateurish and there's too much information, too much to see and do. I try to do it all and I feel my life's getting sucked up in a vacuum cleaner. Wait a minute! How did all this happen? I wish I could go back to the beginning when we were all on 486's with dial-up and I did email rpg's and my website. That was super cool. But now there's weblogs and podcasts and hell I can take a picture with my phone and post it instantly to the internet but for heaven's sake why do I want to do that? Who wants to see a grainy blurry picture of whatever i'm looking at or my cat or my vacation photos? I can podcast over this phone too but who wants to hear me stammer inanely and anyway wouldn't I just die if someone I knew heard? Oh well I mean there's so much to do. There's no limit to it.

It forces me to draw back sharply and focus on what matters. There's so much that's there and it's free but when it comes to it my time's not free and I must decide on one thing and do it well. For now that's my weblogs. I don't really have time to read other people's weblogs unfortunately -- though I get an unbelievable amount of attention on MySpace considering I don't have any pictures of myself on there wearing nothing but duct tape.

We need to have manners and decorum. It will make us feel better about ourselves. For now I'm focusing on the basics and slimming down to merely what interests me and nothing more. Like with everything else, the Internet isn't what I would have chosen, like riding in airplanes or cars, or eating meat. Maybe some day I'll get over the fact that I wasn't born as Eve on the isle of the Blue Lagoon and can't make the world. Trying to make my microcosm in all of this seems nigh on impossible sometimes and that goes for everything.

Sent from Amanda's Treo @-'-,--

I reflected on Gabriel as I crouched on the rooftop and observed the stars. The wind whipped my tattered dress around my ankles as I looked over the faintly illuminated wreck of the city below me.

I had not seen him for days now: he would not see me, I knew, even if I wandered in the high wind from empty street to street. He had a way of hiding himself from me when he didn't want me near him. Or perhaps he would catch me fiercely in the wind and reprimand me and not cease until I was home, and then he would leave me again as dissatisfied as before.

(Has it come to this, then, in a lonely city, writing airy things, grasping for that which would elude me, fanning a light with too little fuel in a vain hope of rapture? I know you are there but you are so far away I can no longer feel the must for the forest around me or rest my head without feeling close, too close to traffic and rustling human life, and so I will write what has replaced you in my soul, this stark place which terrifies me but to which I have surrendered because there is no other home now.)

She remembered the terrible look on his face and his words, "Stay away from me." As though she pursued him and it was not he who trembled as he held her, who sought her out. It was he who long ago had wanted to marry her. But that was before he had disappeared without a trace and returned, changed, without explanation.

His look said he did not want her to stay away from him. Josette rose, disturbed, and exited the rooftop, descended the stairs to street level, and went out cloaked into the night.

The chapel was dark and still with no light save that she bore. She moved in the darkness to the altar and immediately felt suffused with warmth -- she knew that they were here again. She closed her eyes. "Tell me what I must do. I am alone now. Should I follow those who went before me to where they've gone? I know not where, but I will follow."

She felt watched and opened her eyes to see Stephen looking at her gravely. "You should not think of them anymore. They have not gone on -- they have been lost."

His statement was punctuated by the howling of a wolf.

"Then take me with you," Josette whispered, "if I may not go with them. I cannot be alone in an empty city. "

"In time, perhaps."

Sent from Amanda's Treo @-'-,--

Comfort with, or at least, tolerance of, the status quo. Letting things stay as they are, usually implying that they are on a downhill slope. Living each day the same as the last, letting life and love slip away. I was thinking today that this is how everyone's life is ruined. Because they become complacent with inadequacy, their own, or wrongdoings.

I wish that I could become a great writer. Always I have found that when I fix my sights on a desire, somehow my writing catches up, without my realizing it. It just becomes second nature. Always now my stories fall short of what I would express. I don't dislike what I have written in the past, but when I think of what I would write now, I am overwhelmed by the disparity between my choices. On the one hand, I can keep writing about the things I have been writing about for years, reworking the same themes, perfecting my formulas. But the thought of that now is stifling. Somehow it doesn't seem good enough.

And on the other hand, there is the idea that I might write something greater than myself, outside of my problems, touching something that I might never touch otherwise, other societies, problems, ideas, that I have never experienced. Lately I have had this ever-increasing interest in the world and what is happening in it. I don't know how it can co-exist peacefully in my writing with the other things I love to write about. My dreams exceed my abilities and I don't know how to bridge the gap.

Reading seems the best way. But what to read? I have found no newspaper or magazine to my satisfaction. News is so brief and perfunctory. It tells me the facts while omitting everything I really want to know-- how people are thinking and feeling, their ideas, their daily lives. News doesn't allow me to be there. I want to read something that will let me be there. And also I want to write to let others be there. But where?

To hell with formulas! And happy endings! And complacency.

I got caught up in re-reading A Question of Honor this afternoon while beginning the task of my story journals and I am not entirely displeased with it. As it is, it is a story only I can enjoy and it occurs to me that I might revise it so that I enjoy it more. It is all for me, after all, and I am casting aside all consideration for the crippling rules that text violates.

As I work I develop a better idea of what I want with my journals. My plan at present is to organize all writing chronologically, except for placing relevant texts together. I have two or more versions of some stories, and for the sake of continuing their revision it would be better to put all versions together.

I miss emailing fragments to my blog, oddly, for all its trouble, and I'm still working on a system that will allow me to view my stories online from anywhere while maintaining automatic backups of them on my computer. The simplest solution seems to me to be to use Dreamweaver as my text editor but there are a myriad of problems, not the least of which is that it cannot handle large amounts of text.

Sent from Amanda's Treo @-'-,--

We went to church today. There were no Wallace Stevens parrots on the rug while I drank tea in a kimono and wondered if God existed, there was no appalling void as we went to Whole Foods for a pizza and I saw everyone dressed up and knew where they had gone, because I was dressed up too. But during the service, I quite literally thought my brain was coming out of my ears. Maybe it was Satan coming out of me.

This was my second Unitarian experience. To read about an idea is one thing, I guess, but to worship with it is another. It is tiresome to say that I am tired of being uncomfortable, but I yearn for a church where I am not constantly stumbling over unfamiliar words and practices. Is it routine I crave? Horrible thought, and horrible too to crave comfort I guess. But I feel desolate worshipping in a church that makes no mention of Jesus, and glancing up at the altar to see a quilt hanging behind. It's not even heretic or pagan, it's just nothing. I long essentially not merely for the faith of my adolescence for, if I were ever to regain it, I swear I would improve on it as I never did. Equipped with greater intelligence I might make it so much more, and I have a debt to pay to it, to the church, for tempering me just within the bounds of decency when I would spill out everywhere like quavering jell-o, I owe it that much, just one worship, just one hymn, one backache, one stomach cramp, one moment of comatose boredom.

(And one more thing: I refuse to worship in any place that calls itself liberal. I am tired of politics and religion mingling so.)

I still love the Transcendentalists, but it's not spiritual to worship nature. Nature just is, and nothing more. I am not the blades of grass, nor the clouds, I am just myself and I am more complicated than them and I need more.

Then after church we went to the Guitar Center and I played on an electric guitar for the first time. I liked the frustrating pain of holding down several strings at once that were obviously meant for hands stronger than mine, I liked the heavy thing, the sound it produced and the satisfying idea that I might sing and play it at once and, if I could master the chords, play whatever I liked. But for a true love, which it may well be, I may ruin it by striking in so soon. I want to finish my many distractions at present.

Last night Nathan screwed my scrapbook together after I almost wept with frustration over it and the damned thing is done now. I am printing out pictures for the front of each book, then I will throw them on the shelf and forget about them for a long while or, at least, forget about doing further work on them. I almost made my deadline for completing them, though not quite.

Now is the time for fixing together my stories. Next month? Write my novel. December? Recover? January? Electric guitar? In all of this, find a LBW priced less than $40 and a Lutheran church that does not offend either of us, so that I may satisfy my self-punishing faith?