Alas, dear readers. If any of you are still around.
I am neglecting you.
Yet I made no 2007 resolution to cease and desist with the plausible storytelling. If anything, I am more resolved to solve the story of this blog and come up with a reasonable justification for its existence. No, my silence has been of the passive, weary, forgetful kind: out of sight and out of mind. Instead, I have been writing other things; and even in these writings I have been stymied at beginnings, attempting to write a chapter one that will lead ever-so-naturally into chapter two and beyond. Progress is being made, but it looks like a Penelopean progress. (You remember Penelope, don't you, who wove a shroud by day and unwove it by night to put off those pushy suitors coming to claim Odysseus's place?) It keeps unraveling as fast as I ravel it. And yet, it grows.
Also, I have been reading. Currently on the docket: the afformentioned Born to Kvetch, by Michael Wex, on Yiddish and its kvetchers. "Kvetch que c'est?" is the title of the first chapter, and the author makes no apologies for other puns of equal ilk. Highly entertaining, and recommended.
I'm also reading Grimm's fairy tales, in various translations, including one annoyingly annotated edition that likes to point out how the evil stepmothers (and sometimes the biological mothers) get the bad rap even when the fathers are wholly or passively complicit in their evil-doing. There's something about the matter-of-factness of these old stories, though—their complete lack of embarrassment at greed or brutality or sentimentality, their total confidence in identifying good and bad, the dreamlike certainty with which their heroes act—that is strangely inspiring. Especially since I find myself in an unfortunate phase in my writing, tending to wax lyrical when just the facts would do and vice versa. The antisemitic stories are particularly bracing in conjunction with the general misogyny: they remind me that the storyteller's perspective trumps all. The misogynist and the antisemite tell stories that make villains of heroes and heroes of bullies, and they tell these stories like revealed truth and they never wonder what their presumed "villain" might think. That's why it's fun to retell these old fairy tales from the vantage of the more maligned characters: wicked witches, ugly trolls, disinherited sons.
Philip Pullman retold Cinderella once from the point of view of a rat who had become a coachman and had a little trouble changing back. He called it I Was a Rat! Of course. (I've also been reading, or rereading Pullman's His Dark Materials series. They're making a movie of it, did you know? The first one due out by the end of the year, I think. I'm going to keep my expectations low, so I can enjoy it.)
That's all I can conjure this evening. More soon.
