The Reader

One night a week, I shelve books at our local library. It’s hard work, standing on a stool to lift things up to the top shelf and then bending down to the lowest one. Books can be heavy! But they are wonderful, a technology which has allowed us to share thoughts with people who lived as long as two thousand years ago. More if you count cuneiform tablets. (Glad I don’t have to shelve those!)

As I shelve, I am always thinking about the readers who have read the books now being returned to the shelves. It stretches my understanding to know what people are reading. In many ways, readers drive book publishing. Readers seem to wait for thick new books by James Patterson, Catherine Cookson, Stephen King, Robert Ludlum, Debbie Macomber, David Baldacchi, Danielle Steel and many others. These romance and thriller writers, like the mystery and science fiction writers, churn out one book after another. These are the writers who give readers puzzles to solve or predictable stories to while away time. The writers who come up with the right formula, use it again and again. And the publishing world bows to this best-selling readers’ market.

Outside genre fiction, it isn’t so easy for writers. Nevertheless, despite the competition, recent times have been the era of the writer. Poets and Writers magazine publishes page after page of ads for writing workshops, MFA programs, fellowships, and writing contests of all kinds. Workshops explain how wonderful it is to write for all kinds of reasons, to feel more human, to find out what you think, to share your experiences and what you learned from them. Anyone who wants to can keep a blog or publish a book, and books are certainly not the only media where writers are found. Everyone writes!

But all writers must consider their readers. In a New York Public Library discussion, Jeffrey Eugenides earnestly told Salman Rushdie that in his writing process he progressed from focusing on the sentence, to working with the plot, and that now his main interest was the character. The masterful Rushdie rejoined that in his work, his point of view had moved from that of the writer to that of the reader. “There may be a perfect way to tell a story. In that case you must ask yourself, what does the reader need to know? You must become the reader.”

My cousin Helen Frost [http://www.helenfrost.net/], who has been writing books long enough to see her readers criss-cross the globe with recommendations of her work, also recently said, “Sometimes I think writers get too much credit for what happens in the experience of a book.” Just yesterday at lunch, someone who says she doesn’t read very much, told me how moved she had been by Hemingway’s Garden of Eden, how every sentence got down to reality. I’ve never read it, and I find there is some controversy about whether Hemingway would have published it, had he been alive. But I wanted to run right out and get it! And when I do read it, you may be sure I will think of Mary, readership in common being one of the many pleasures of reading.

Norwegian America

I count myself lucky to know quite a lot about my heritage, with three American-born Norwegian grandparents, and one grandparent an immigrant from Denmark. One of my Norwegian great grandparents took the name Kronlokken (the name of the farm he lived on, belonging to the Crown) to distinguish himself from all the other Pedersons nearby. I am often asked if it is a Finnish name, but no, pure Norwegian.

Norwegian Americans were among the first ethnic groups to preserve their pioneer history by beginning to collect the artifacts related to their journey soon after Norwegian immigration peaked in the 1870’s. Many of these are now preserved in a wonderful museum, Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum [http://vesterheim.org/index.php] located in the northeast corner of Iowa, at Decorah. “When Norwegian immigrants wrote back to Norway about Vesterheim, their western home, they spoke for countless others from many cultures who helped build a nation in the New World,” according to the museum website.

Norsvin Mill

Among the items available for viewing (during the summer months) is a group of twelve historic buildings. During the mid-1960’s, three of these buildings were located on a grassy, wooded hillside just behind the dorms at Luther College. Two of the small cabins had been a school and a home. They were locked and we could only look through the windows. But one was a mill, with huge millstones which had been brought from Norway. During summer school, the mill was my favorite place to bring books and notebooks and read and write, hidden on a bench just inside the door opening. When it rained, I remember sitting inside, dry and happy, listening to the mild summer rain drumming on the roof. (I don’t think it had grass on it at the time.)

Phyllis and her Sweater

I haven’t been able to visit Vesterheim in a long time, however a friend had a delightful experience of it recently. Phyllis, who is not Norwegian but lives in St. Paul, wanted a genuine Norwegian sweater. She joined the museum and was totally surprised when, in the middle of December last year, a cookie elf visited her! Phyllis wrote, “Turns out they had a cookie raffle last week and I won. A wonderful sweet woman and her sister made me dozens of Norwegian cookies (they are so good -- no nuts or chocolate or anything except butter and sugar) and they drove all the way up and hand delivered them. So sweet.” The cookies were a memorable part of Christmas for Phyllis and her housemates.

When Marya, from Cleckheaton, England, read The Pastor’s Kids this year, she told me she wished a map of the places it describes had accompanied the book. Over tea and biscuits, she suggested that I emphasize the sociology of this interesting time and place, the Eisenhower years as experienced by third and fourth generation Norwegian Americans in the Midwest. My sister and I looked at each other. We knew there was quite enough ethnography in the book already! But it did remind me that, though most European immigrants in the U.S. get lumped together, they have many different cultural backgrounds.

The New Rebels

It is impossible to read literary critique today without running into the ghost of David Foster Wallace, acknowledged as the most energizing, polarizing and influential voice of his generation. While I cannot read his work, as I managed to escape the zeitgeist from which he writes by being a bit older, avoiding television and not going to graduate school in English, I have begun to think he is onto something and points the way out of a slough in which many people, not just writers, have bogged down.

In his 1993 essay “E Unibus Pluram,” Wallace says: “The next real literary ‘rebels’ in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels … who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. … The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘Oh how banal.’”

The corner which Wallace was trying to turn can be understood as the difference between sincerity and authenticity, as described by Lionel Trilling [Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press. 1972]. Ensuring the truth of oneself to others was a salient characteristic of Western culture for 400 years, suggests Trilling. But in the 20th century, the ideal became one of authenticity. Though Trilling goes into great detail, roughly, in his terms, sincerity places emphasis on communication with others, whereas authenticity sees truth as something inward, personal and hidden, with a goal of self-expression rather than other-directed communication.

For most of my life, assessment of inner truth, or authenticity, has been the criterion by which literature, politics and people have been judged. But Orlando Patterson, a respected Jamaican-born sociologist, describes what happens to public discourse when individual insistence on inner truth trumps tolerance and civility. Divisive identity politics and prejudices are upheld, among other things. [http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/26/opinion/26patterson.html]

Several critics have pointed out that Wallace may have wanted to “eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue,” but that he could not overcome his own ironic ambivalence. In his novels, he tries to be “at once unassailably sophisticated and doggedly down to earth.” [A.O. Scott] David Foster Wallace did not want to lose what had been gained by our relentless focus on authenticity. I think of him when I run into the young hipster culture. As some have told me, “hipster” can be defined, but the person defining it is never referring to himself. Wallace would be pleased to find, as he believed, that “cynicism and naïveté need not be mutually exclusive”.

Both sincerity and authenticity reflect wholeness to the inner self. But I don’t think this is just a semantic tempest in a teapot. In public life, we must begin to behave with civility and tolerance while negotiating the authentic beliefs each of us hold dear. We must trust each other’s cordial gestures to have been offered sincerely and find common ground upon which we can all stand as humans.

In art, I would love to see work which opens to the world validated. Works which value the senses and allow the spirit present in things to emerge. Works of observation celebrating and exploring life itself. I think we’ve seen enough of the dark interiors of various people’s minds! We know now that the observer affects what he sees and thus, we must triangulate through many works to get a clear picture of truth. But why not? It is the work of being human.

David Foster Wallace was demonstrably trying to step back from pure self expression toward an ethos which valued the other, the reader, in his work. At present, I do not see widespread movement to what has been called “the new sincerity.” But I do identify with his idea of the new rebels. I quite expect yawns and rolled eyes where my writing is concerned, and I am more interested in what the reader needs than in self-expression. My characters are offered sincerely, in a spirit of civility and tolerance, finding common cause with the 90% of humanity that we all share, rather than in the narrow, hidden aspects in which we differ.

An Uncarved Block

Despite the expense and my gratefulness at being able to go to college at all, I look back on the years I spent at Luther as rather painful. A more empty and open 17-year-old you could seldom hope to find. I was being asked to give up my place in a close family and become an individual, the particular person I was meant to become. The process was long, slow, not without rewards, but not easy either.

To begin with, I got a major in Latin, simply because my mother had! Three years were spent desperately trying to intuit vocabulary, declensions, tenses and masculine and feminine endings, in the bright and expectant face of Dr. Orlando Qualley. A master teacher who had taught both my mother and father and had been with the school almost fifty years, his intensity, but also his kindness, inspired us to learn. Nevertheless, the tension, occasionally the terror, of sitting directly below him as he tried to pull the answers out of our blank faces was a memorable feature of college. My attempts at translation fared not much better.

My real love was, and still is, literature and the deep culture, history and philosophy which lie beneath it. Many fine literature, history and philosophy professors intrigued my mind at college. But several things made study difficult. One was the pressure to finish quickly. I had seven younger brothers and sisters, all of whom wanted higher education as well. I completed my B.A. in three years, graduating by the time I was 20, only a bit less callow than I had been when I entered! I would love to have taken more time to read thoroughly and enjoy what I read, but that didn’t begin to happen until after I got out of school.

The times were tumultuous, though in our northeastern Iowa milieu we mostly heard it in the distance. I entered school a couple of months before John F. Kennedy was killed. No matter how you cut it, the processes of desegregation, of American imperialism in other countries and of questioning most of our institutions were divisive and anguished in the Sixties. Despite this ferment, I wanted nothing more than to become a typical well-educated Luther lass, a helpmate to some worthy man whom I would presumably meet at college, as my mother had.

Though I remained near the top of my classes, I learned pretty quickly I was no scholar. In classes with students who would go on to graduate school in English and philosophy, I watched their faces and how they interacted, without being able to pay any attention to the bright play of their analytic minds. I was selected for the only creative writing class, taught by a man who published under the name of Brad Steiger. I enjoyed it but I didn’t see how it would help with the pressing problem of making a living. I got a teaching credential, which might.

It could have worked out, except that I was not to become what my background led me to expect. In no other way can I explain how my subsequent adventures took me to Europe, to the West Coast, where I have resided since 1969, and into Asia as far as Chengdu, a three-day’s train journey into southwest China.

The last summer I studied at Luther College, I roomed with the widow of a remarkable Chinese missionary, N. Astrup Larsen. The Larsens had spent the years 1913 through 1927 in China, a time of famine and political turmoil. According to Peter Scholl in “The Conversion of Missionaries in China: The Case of N. Astrup Larsen,” ASIANetwork Exchange, Vol. XV, No. 3, Spring 2008, after Larsen’s years in China, he “became a prominent advocate for ecumenism and the greater involvement of his church in social and economic issues.”

I am sorry to say I had no ability at the time to ask the lively Mrs. Larsen useful questions about the life in China which must have made her, as it did her husband, an “internationalist.” But it was during this final summer, for various reasons, that I began to feel I was getting my bearings. My own bearings, that is.

My personal journey to the West was, strangely, a stabilizing factor. The experiential knowledge favored by Asian philosophers over analysis turned out to be the Way I was seeking. According to Deng Ming Dao, “different schools have different methods, but all of them agree that the body and mind are part of a continuous whole … the body is the gateway to the profound.” Since first enthralled by Arthur Waley’s translations of Chinese poetry in high school, I have read a great deal of world literature. In English translation, I admit. I am still no scholar.

The Liberating Arts

When Line and Marty went off to college in the mid-Sixties, work towards the Bachelor of Arts degree was very general, without much in the way of specific professional courses. At college, in-depth history, literature and philosophy courses would widen their horizons. They also had a chance to explore the arts and sciences. They did not expect to learn anything beyond the realm of Western civilization, but hoped to deepen their understanding of their own origins and traditions.

Information was much less thickly distributed at the time. In order to use reference material deeper than a dictionary or an encyclopedia, one must go to a college or university library. Television had bonded people together pretty well by this time. Almost everyone knew what each other was talking about because they all watched one of three networks, which fought to cover national news like the space race or presidential campaigns. In addition, the post-war egalitarian climate extended toward making everyone’s work and ideas valuable.

But, those with hankerings to become citizens of the world wanted the broad intellectual background of the liberal arts. Line and Marty’s mother had a B.A. degree, which made her unusual. Often the only people with degrees of any kind in small towns were teachers and pastors. Knowledge was valued and so was being able to go to college. Like Line and Marty, those at the fictional Wittenberg College were already a privileged bunch. Still very monocultural, Caucasian, Lutheran and mostly of northern European ancestry, students distinguished themselves by their interests, in music, art or science, rather than by economics or class.

Core courses had been laid out which coordinated history, literature and religion into time periods so that one could get an overview and see how one affected the other. St. Augustine, who had a huge influence on the early church, studied the Greeks. Thomas Acquinas synthesized the Greek rationalism of Aristotle and Judaeo-Christian doctrines into what came to define the Catholic (universal) church. Later Renaissance scholars again went back to Greek culture to find a new emphasis on humanism, searching for realism and human emotion particularly in art. At the same time, reformers including Martin Luther questioned church doctrine and practice, in a period called the Reformation. In terms of the Modern, Wittenberg College dealt with Nietzsche’s statement that “God is dead.” The Death of God by Gabriel Vahanian, stating that our secular culture had lost any sense of the sacred, was published in 1961.

Line and Marty discover they are not scholars. Line is much more interested in people and action. Marty, though she loves books, cannot follow critique and analysis of them and doesn’t want to. Learning these things takes a long time. But no one wonders if they have gotten their money’s worth from their studies. At the very least, they received:

• An understanding of the philosophical place upon which they stand.
• A brief look into the cyclical nature of history.
• The ability to distinguish the figurative from the literal.
• The ability to weigh opinions and not believe everything they hear.
• Some assurance of excellence in written and verbal expression.
• The chance to test themselves in various disciplines to see where they might fit.
• A belief that physical and mental health balance each other in a well-rounded person.
• A general background in the arts and sciences so as to see how they fertilize each other.
• An ability to take themselves seriously, to know how to use and enjoy their precious lives.

The word “education” comes from the Latin meaning “to lead or draw forth.” An education in the liberating arts is just the beginning, and it is certainly true in Line and Marty’s lives, as we shall see.

Moving Forward

The second book in my series, “Fit Company for Oneself,” has 28 chapters. This week I put the eighth chapter up as a Google document where my “early readers” can get at it, teasing it out of many half-formed ideas onto the page. Once again, it doesn’t feel like writing. It feels like I’m sitting with the work, listening, opening myself to what it can tell me. When I begin, I know what I need from a chapter, what I want to work with, but I leave it wide open, inviting in what comes. “Writing,” working with sentences one at a time, comes later.

This openness happens whether I’m in front of a blank page or not. While I’m doing the dishes or on my way to the market, things that are important to a chapter surface. It means that nothing is ever finished, that it can always be made better, of course. But somewhere along the line, it takes form. Last year’s work on “The Pastor’s Kids” is currently gestating. It will get another vigorous edit in August and September this year, based on the comments its readers give me, before I finally try to find an agent to assist in its publication.

My sister Solveig said to me, in a recent phone call, “I didn’t feel little when I was little, and now I don’t feel old.” I certainly have that feeling as well. The nub of our selves which we are given to work with doesn’t change much. That bit of consciousness of our selves gets more comfortable, adapts to situations and makes itself a home somewhere, interpenetrating the consciousness of “others” around us as we grow older.

But as kids we know a lot more than we can express. We watch things happening around us and wonder about them, often having only part of a picture that will sharpen later. Our understanding of the reality around us must ripen, in some cases become fruit. The questions and wonderings raised by the times we live in, the experiences we go through, the culture that surrounds us become the work of our lives. Doing this work, finding the meaning in our lives makes us into grownups.

Line, Marty and Paul Mikkelson must leave what Auden called the “closed society of tradition and inheritance” for “the open society of fashion and choice,” one hundred years after Poe and Baudelaire, in whom Auden first discerned the Modern Age. It took that long for it to penetrate the pocket of Scandinavia in the Midwest, wrapped in cotton wool like an old-fashioned Christmas ornament, where the Mikkelsons grow up. The material elements of their lives are shared with post-WWII Americans everywhere, but the culture, tradition and inherited values came direct from an earlier century.

The transition for my characters happens in about 1966, in this book, “Fit Company for Oneself”. Line, Marty and Paul make the leap each in their own way, though it is many years before the painful change is assimilated. Born close in age, in 1944 thru 1948, they are dragged into the Twentieth century in the turbulent wake of their peers. It is not insignificant to their development, however, that they come from whole cloth. An intact nuclear family, a large extended family, a religious and intellectual culture which, though torn and much patched, retains its value and usability. Throughout their lives, the Mikkelsons can reach back and feel its sustenance as they move steadily forward.

Tea

“I thought this was a blog about writing,” you say. “What’s all this about tea?”

But does anything really get done without tea? Or, in your case perhaps, coffee? I have a simple tea ritual, which goes on throughout the day, using oolong tea during the week and a smoky lapsang souchong on weekends. I pour boiling water into two teapots, dump it out and then put the day’s tealeaves into one of the pots. Then pouring just boiling water over the leaves, I quickly strain the brewed tea into the second pot, allowing the water to sit on the leaves less than 30 seconds for oolong and less than a minute for lapsang souchong. Stewed tea very quickly gets bitter, and we have found this quick brewing gives us the flavors we like.

We drink tea out of tiny Chinese porcelain cups, pouring more as we drink it so the tea is always hot. Don likes cooled tea and we save anything that we don’t drink for him to drink later. But I only like it hot.

The weekday tea is an oolong, fermented under the sun. I’m not sure of its exact provenance, but we buy it in bulk from Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco and it bears the responsibility for the health benefits I expect from green tea. Our first brewing is for breakfast, but the same tealeaves with the water poured off them, sit all day in a teapot. During the day I heat more water and pour it over these same leaves, having understood from my sister Naomi’s naturopath partner, Priscilla Skerry, that as you re-use tea leaves, caffeine lessens and the polyphenols necessary to health increase.

On weekends, we use a black lapsang souchong tea. Norwegians like smoky tasting things, fish, cheese, toast and tea! The leaves of lapsang souchong are smoke-dried over a fire. I’ve been drinking lapsang souchong for many years, purchasing it in Chinatown, or again, at Rainbow Grocery. The caffeine is a bit strong, so I only use it on weekends. Thankfully, Don likes everything and never insists on one or other. He drinks whatever is in front of him with gratefulness, letting me be the tea mistress.

Tea is perhaps best shared, but it goes well with everything! Friends, cookies, a good book, your journal. Few things are not enhanced by the addition of a good cup of tea!

The literature regarding tea is vast and I cannot hope to add to it. But one of the questions for my work is where, precisely, do body, mind and heart meet? To many philosophical questions in the Buddhist tradition, the reply is “Have a cup of tea”! As John Blofeld, a renowned writer on Eastern traditions says, this means “There is no possible way of dealing with your question in words, but the Way is all around and within you, for you to experience by direct perception.” It may be that to my question too, there is no better answer than a cup of tea.