Daily rituals: when you create a ritual you are a poet in your own life.

• Manicuring, painting nails. This should be fun, but I can't stand doing it. I need to buy some more exciting nail accessories, like sparkling top coat, or top coat with decals.
• Bathing. I dislike the harsh overhead lighting. I'm still seeking an ambient lighting solution.
• Cleaning house. Today I put the cleaning solutions in an old gift bag, and I'm not going to keep the solutions and rags under the sink any more, because they get cruddy, and they're already gross anyway. I have some pretty purple cleaning gloves, an apron, and I need to tie my hair up for that.
• Cleaning kitchen. This would happen ideally every day, after dinner, when I don't feel like doing anything else. I would like to program in a time around 8 p.m. to get the home in order before I start getting ready for bed so that clutter doesn't accumulate every week.
• Cooking. Spending some time preparing, like putting my hair up and putting on an apron. Also lighting a food-scented candle.
• Watering plants. My method of using rusted-out tea kettles is inelegant, as is fitting them under the faucet to fill them. Water sloshing on the carpet on the way to the porch is annoying. Buying a fancy watering can right now isn't a good fit for me though.
• Sewing. How to keep my back from aching? How to do it for less than seven hours at a stretch? It sucks me in, and then I get burned out and won't finish a project.
• Syncing Treo and PSP to the computer every day. This would be a relaxing thing to come home and do after work each day. Looking over the notes I took on my Treo each day would jog my memory and creativity and help me link my daily ideas with daily production. I would like to have a pot of tea, candle, and one of my playlists handy.

Grace Notes - Chapter 1

• When you feel overwhelmed, attend to necessary task that will please you.
• Rejuvenate yourself with an art book. I.E. My Pre-Raphaelite and fairy tale books. I have put them on the bureau shelf to have them handy.
• Spray cologne in a box of stationary. I.E. Angelfire.
• Buy a small, distinctive item from a specialty store. I.E. Beautiful-colored threads or yarns.
• Line inside of closet door with art postcards. I.E. I would do this on the bathroom door, and I wouldn't limit myself to art postcards since I can scan and print whatever I want from books.
• Mark new seasons with childhood reminiscences. I.E. Spring - Easter baskets. Summer - Snow cones. Fall - Campfires. Winter - Walks in the woods.
• Hang a favorite quilt behind a sofa or love seat (I don't know about that).
• Be three minutes early for next appt. and wait calmly.
• Lift your mood with a new fragrance.
• Pinon incense from Santa Fe.
• Burn calories as you tidy up.
• Do yoga or sit ups on my mat when I'm tense.
• Take a few min to be alone every day. Take some time from work on break to recollect and take notes on creative work.
• Daydreaming helps the brain.
• Walk to appts. Exercise esp. before being confined to a conference room.
• Plan wardrobe around 2-3 colors.
• Buy a set of colored pencils, display on writing desk. I have some really good ones. I could do that.
• Make your own quotation book. I have a lovely free one on my Treo, but I don't add anything to it. I will try to make a point to to do that. It will make my reading more interactive too.
• Make a personal source guide. Order by phone or mail if possible. Computer shopping guide with links and item #s would be better, especially if I made one especially for clothes and accessories, and one for home decor.
• Keep a careful datebook, weed it out each month.
• Have a special basket for the mail.
• Insert perfume extract on phone (not sure how to do this with my Treo)

Sensuous-
Foods, corn on the cob
Sewing basket, wonderfully decorated
Life is too short for you to be caretaker of the wrong details.

Labels: reading notes

I do believe there are some human beings so born, so reared, so guided from a soft cradle to a calm and late grave, that no excessive suffering penetrates their lot, and no tempestuous blackness overcasts their journey.

There are times when I feel these words to my very soul. I think I was inspired by Villette a little in Red Rose. Bronte does not hold back on throwing every torture possible upon Lucy from the beginning of the story to the end, so that this passage, in itself cradled amidst her inner torments is wrought with great feeling. I am a dark soul like Lucy, and I feel these words to my very soul sometimes during the day as I listen to others in what is perhaps a bout of self-indulgent self-tragedy.

Labels: reading notes

Not written after 1922, can't find the exact copyright date at this time.

I think one thing this story needed was a good editor. The same kinds of things I find and quickly delete in my own work.

To me, this passage would have been far more effective if the dramatic voice had been toned down:

He dropped into a chair, burying his face in his hands, and the utter despair in his voice tore at Ann's heart. What had happened--what could have happened that Tony should seek to take his own life? Mechanically she stooped to replace the revolver in the opened drawer from which he had evidently taken it. A few loose cartridges still lay there, together with some torn scraps of paper and a blank cheque. Almost unconsciously her glance took in the contents of the drawer. Then suddenly it checked--concentrated. She caught her breath sharply and looked at Tony, a horrified, incredulous question in her eyes. But he was still sitting with his head buried in his hands, silent and motionless.

Very slowly, as though she approached her hand to something nauseous and abhorrent, Ann reached out and withdrew one of the torn sheets of paper and stared at it. It was covered with repeated copyings of a single name--sometimes the whole name, sometimes only one or other of the initial letters to it. And the name which some one was taking such pains to learn to write was that of her godfather, Philip Brabazon... Philip Brabazon... the sheet was covered with it, and some of the signatures were a very fair imitation of the old man's handwriting.

Ann snatched up the blank cheque. It was one that had been torn from Sir Philip's cheque-book. She could see that at a glance--remembered so clearly noticing the same heading on the cheque which he had given her towards her trousseau--the Watchester and Loamshire Bank. She held out to Tony the two pieces of paper--the sheet of scribbled signatures and the blank cheque.

"Tony," she said, her voice cracking a little. "What--what are these?"

The tense, vibrating horror in her tones roused him. He looked up wearily. Then, as he saw what she held, a dull red flush mounted slowly to his face. For a moment he did not speak. When he did, his voice sounded dead--flat and toneless.

"Those," he said, "are attempts on my part to forge my uncle's signature."

There are many moments like this in the story. The characters ask obvious questions or parrot back what someone just said. It makes them seem stupid. I know when I write I don't even notice myself doing it, and I do it a lot, but when I edit, I find those lines and delete them.

I disliked many things about this story, but the lesson I learned is that no matter how much the reader may dislike the characters, situations or even prose style, when the plot drives, the reader will still read. I think this story had a very good plot. The beginning introduces the problem which reaches throughout the whole story, and the problem is solved unexpectedly at the end. I was actually very surprised and pleased by the ending. I didn't think it would be very satisfying. There were many characters and tangled relationships, and they were all tied into the ending.

I had so little sympathy for one of the reaching dilemmas. The character quoted above, Tony, has a terrible gambling addiction which is certainly not solved at the end of the story, unless you consider having a friend pay his enormous debt a solution. Ann risks her love relationship to pay Tony's debt. The unexpected part is that her fiance finds out what she does and proves that he trusts her faithfulness, so if she had not endeavored to help Tony she might not ever have learned this. I mean, this story is not like real life, but if you think they way the story does, you can appreciate the ending.

I really cringed when Tony's debts were paid. The author doesn't mention what happened to him, probably for the best, since she seemed aware that reforming him was far beyond the scope of her novel.

Something else kind of off is that Eliot, Ann's fiance, was hurt by a woman who left him because he was poor. She broke off their engagement and married a rich man. However the perilous situations that Ann gets herself into put her fidelity into question, not her greed, so I don't understand why it touches his nerve so badly. It seems like a stretch, but I guess I don't know. Maybe the author knew someone like that.

Labels: reading notes

Well, this morning I began the anti-gothic. The main reason I did was so that I can watch my Masterpiece Theatre DVD after I read it. I have felt a great reluctance because I really do not like it when Jane Austen is satirical.

So far I find it amusing. Every jibe she gives to the forlorn, tormented heroes and heroines makes me want to close out and start on something else in my list, but the story itself actually moves and generates curiosity, and there is some of her own moralism and criticism of shallow people, which I like to hear at times.

The heroine has met her hero Henry Tilney. And-- can it be possible that subsequent authors were inspired by this anti-gothic in their gothics, because I have read of some heroes like Henry, entirely opposite of the dark, brooding?

I question as I read. I wonder how much I am missing, if each sentence is making fun or if I dare relax and enjoy the story without being made sport of. That's what I hate parodies.

So far though Catherine bears a strong resemblance to Austen's other characters in her fortitude, decorousness and deep kindness to others. Austen's other heroes for a large part have been intimidating and aloof, so I don't know what possesses her to make fun. With Henry's good nature, gentlemanliness, and provoking humor he seems ideal for Catherine. Perhaps what irked Austen was not the dark or tormented but the self-absorbed and vain.

Labels: reading notes

I completed Caleb Williams early Thanksgiving morning. I did not expect the ending, but it was very interesting. Falkland as villain is the character about whom Caleb's feelings are profound and enduring. Destroying Falkland is necessary in the preservation of his own life, but due to the great love he bears for his persecutor he is destroyed to vanquish him. That is very gothic in a different way than the usual to me in that the story is so action-oriented and short on description, atmosphere.

Godwin's style was not what I expected. It was plain. There were few characters and no tender feelings, except those which Caleb bore his master and destroyer. I guess that relationship would be a truly gothic element, but no romance.

It deepened my understanding of plot and character-driven work, maintaining suspense and focusing a story to a single character.

Labels: reading notes

Just when I thought I would not learn the truth of Falkland till the very end of the book he declared it himself in just the next paragraph.

To tell the truth, I felt an unexplainable hurt and discord when I reflected upon his character, the setting and the events in the story. I guess that would be called verisimilitude. To experience something so brutally ugly in a human being and recognize it instantly as very possible. That what seems to be true, is true, and as in the story we must trust to what seems right or not right to guide us to the truth about a person.

The story has told me so much of what I already know, it hurts sometimes. I understand it is not about myself or my problems, but a good story is like a faceted crystal one can turn around in the sunlight. Interactive, reflective, many-faced.

Labels: reading notes

The character of Falkland suggests a kind of Confederate hero in nearly every sense, though as reader I cannot confirm his hypocrisy or if he has taken his pride to a truly psychotic level.

However there are so many clues as to compel me to read, and keep me in perfect sympathy with Caleb.

Falkland was a man of high honor and virtue who interested himself in the well-being of others so as to go above and beyond himself in their protection, to the wrath of the man tormenting them, a man who hated him and it cannot be denied that Falkland hated in return.

Even when Falkland attempted to make peace there was more show than sincerity. His high-handedness was even more instigation for Tyrrell's wrath, and of course Falkland knew this. After the fact of Tyrrell's death and Falkland's acquittal of his murder, it is easy to see how little clues of his showiness and high-handedness revealed themselves in the narrative.

Another complication in the story is that the narrative was given by Collins, and without knowing Collins' true opinion of Falkland we cannot determine if the story was biased against him. This long narrative was an interesting feature and device of the novels from this time, and many novels exist entirely within the span of one long-winded story.

I have met people who seem capable of talking for hours at a time, but not one who would reproduce a narrative with such attention to dialogue and detail on the spur of the moment, in a chance encounter. I wonder if this was considered unrealistic in the time. Certainly it is thrown out of popular fiction, like so many scientific theories debunked from text, but like spontaneous generation and the like, I find myself wanting to play with the theory.

Labels: reading notes

I completed Villette the day before last. I was intrigued and immersed, but I left off with a dissatisfied feeling. I concluded that mid-century novels are not to my taste right now. They are too much about a suffering creature, her tormentors, and her triumph through perfect virtue. I can really see the religious influence at work as well as the general woman culture. Spaniels were popular dogs at the time. There was one in Villette, actually, that was practically a woman, and the woman's popular hairstyle mimicked the spaniel. I complain about modern culture, but I shouldn't.

Caleb Williams is more interesting to me, written in the voice of the early century, preoccupied with ideas as were other Romantics. This is written by William Godwin, father of Mary Shelley. It is occupied by the idea of a fame-seeker and a popular curiosity. This is interesting as it relates to modern media.

Labels: reading notes