Dragon be gone

I finished the first book in Swedish author Stieg Larsson’s thriller series, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, during my family’s annual beach week. I won’t be reading any more.

And it’s not that he doesn’t write a well-constructed, well-plotted thriller. I was even drawn to his odd main character, Lisbeth Salander, the girl with the tattoo. She wasn’t always believable, but she was intriguing and kept me wanting to know about her history.

But I’m sick and tired of books that depend on cruelty and depravity to women for their plots. This book was no exception, and it gravely disappointed me. Too much of what I see on TV and in the movies and in some books depends way too much on depicting women being raped, murdered, dismembered, humiliated, and tortured. And the people who produce these shows, movies, and books believe that we, their viewers and readers, find it entertaining, possibly titillating. More disturbing is that too many of us do, based on the reviews of Mr. Larsson’s books and the ratings for those TV shows and movies.

Really?

I don’t happen to think a good thriller needs to have psychopathic men killing and otherwise hurting women to succeed. And I’m not going to buy or watch anything that uses cruelty to women as its central plot element. What really gets me is that much of what incorporates this cruelty is written/created by people who also claim that they are giving us strong women characters. Yeah, strong women characters like Lisbeth Salander who is sexually humiliated by her legal guardian and turns to graphic sexual violence to retaliate. I don’t think I’ll be holding her up as a role model to my nieces.

Now that I’ve read his first book, I can’t believe how much critical acclaim Mr. Larsson’s books have received. Hoping it would be different, I read the first few pages of his second book only to find it started out with a thirteen-year-old girl locked into some contraption and held prisoner by a man.

Keep it. I’ll go back to Henning Mankell if I want to read Swedish mysteries.

What's in your reading wallet?

This is a confession.

Right now, I'd rather read than write, rather bury my nose than let my fingers do the walking over the keyboard. It's summer and to me, that's always meant books. Books, the smell of coconut suntan lotion (yes, I'm so old I used lotion to get a tan), and the ice-cold inside of a Dairy Queen are the very essences of summer to me. Mountains of books and mountains of hours in which to read. So lazy, so decadent, so perfectly right.

I didn't even realize what was tugging at my metaphorical apron until I read a blog post by my aspiring novelist friend, Eman, and she talked about getting distracted from her work by a book of short stories. Then I realized it was the wish to lie about somewhere, anywhere comfortable and cool and lose myself in a ripping good read for hours and hours on end.

It's June, after all, and I'd like nothing better than to trade the to-do list for the new mystery by Elizabeth George. I don't want anything too heavy or hard to read in June, July, or August when even the beverage glasses sweat. I don't necessarily want to be a better person, or know more facts, or understand literature of any sort better when the summer is over.

Although, I fall crazy in love with anyone who can both write a good story and make me better for it at the end. Marilynne Robinson, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Phillip Roth, Wallace Stegner, Toni Morrison, Virginia Woolf, J.D. Salinger, Tim O'Brien, Susan Minot, J.R.R. Tolkien, Raymond Carver, and Jane Smiley are just a few writers who have done that for me. They are the ones whose books I go back to over and over, sometimes just to look at, sometimes to read a bit, sometimes to re-read.

What I want my summer reading to do is transport me, take me away to some other place, where I can inhabit another world, get lost in it, meet and get to know people I might never meet in my real life. To get to the last page and sigh, "Ah, that was SO good!" These books are also on my summer list:

Little Bee
Netherland
Let the Great World Spin
The Private Patient (by P.D. James who always writes a perfect mystery and has been doing so for years.)
Anything and everything by George Pelecanos
Mysteries by Laura Lippman because we both live in Baltimore and that's where she sets her books.

What's in your reading wallet? I would so love to know!

Living the small life

A friend of mine is struggling with what she wants to do the rest of her life. She is 60 and, having been a successful lawyer and a successful consultant, she wonders what is next. She gardens, she takes in stray dogs, she nurtures a family that includes her husband, a daughter, and stepchildren and much-loved grandchildren. She volunteers at a number of different places. I know how much she has done for a young woman in South Africa.

But somehow that is not enough. She needs a career.

My question is why? What has become of the small life? I know for many earning money is a necessity, not an option. But even for those of us who still need to be earners, why do so many of us seem to be reaching always for more, like a little kid trying to cram as many M&Ms as her mouth can hold, until chocolate dribbles down her chin?

I have come to believe in the small life and its many joys. As someone who has known since about the age of 10 that I would be a writer, I haven’t struggled as others have to define my vocation, my call, my profession.

When I was a teenager and young adult, I did dream of writing the great American novel. That hasn’t happened. Then I dreamed of publishing beautiful poems. And I wrote some lovely ones and made it into a workshop with a well-known poet. The truth, though, is that I am not driven to write poetry. I haven’t made the space for it that such work requires. See, I feel guilty even writing that. But if it had been my call, it would have happened. And goodness knows there are plenty of beautiful published poems out there to love.

The truth is I like my life. Okay, I love my life. I do. I love freelancing. I love having this blog. I love having time to take a walk in the middle of the day. I’m glad to have one dog and two cats to care for and hang out with. I’m really glad for my husband and for our great travels. I’m happy to have a 7th grader to mentor and a church to go to and a tiny little garden and a slightly bigger house in a gritty city.

Does this add up to a big life? No, but it adds up to a fine small one. I’m not going to save the world. I’m not going to walk down any red carpets or sign any autographs.

I am here to praise the small life, the opportunities it brings me to learn exactly how to love my neighbor (by which I mean, friends and family, those pesky people who I take for granted and who know me well enough to call me on what I need to be called on. Loving my neighbors and strangers is a breeze by comparison!). The chance I have to learn to feel compassion for those whose lives bear little resemblance to mine. The opportunity to not resort to road rage, to irritation, to constant complaining, as just a few examples of lessons I am still learning.

I enjoy my daily routine and I love my work, from writing a magazine article about how a staffing association won a legal battle that was cast as a thriller to writing profiles of students who manage to graduate from high school despite having obstacles as big as mountains in their way. It’s call with a small c but it’s mine.

Give me my green with happiness acres and keep your red carpet. I like this side of the fence.

Divin' In

My significant other and I love dives. One of my very favorite evenings in the three years I’ve lived in Baltimore was when we went to hear Arty Hill and Caleb Stine (look them up. Fabulous musicians!!!) at 1919 Fleet Street, a shoebox-sized bar that was last cleaned out in maybe 1970. Somehow, I feel at home in these places, as if I got the honky-tonkin’ gene from my parents’ Texas DNA, despite not owning one single pair of cowboy boots. There are lots of places like this in Baltimore, which also recalls my much-loved Pittsburgh, where, it is said, you can find a church and a bar on every block. Sometimes, the ratio is one church to two bars. Or more.

Every year, I look forward to a friend’s Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer party, which takes place at the Canton Liquor House, another shoebox bar where the owners call you hon and you can get as much Natty Boh or krupnik as you want. For J.’s party, you drink every time Rudolph’s nose blinks and you drink shots along the way too. It’s one of my favorite Christmas parties.

All through my young adult and adult years, my dad loved taking us to dive breakfast places. Mom, not so much, so the tradition evolved so that the kids and dad (and assorted in-laws and grandchildren) would go out to Waffle House or some local place for a good high-fat, lowbrow breakfast every Christmas when we were all home. The Christmas before he died of cancer, we spent a bittersweet hour with him out for breakfast after his doctor’s appointment. My favorite picture of Dad is in front of Rube’s, a now-gone diner in Columbus, Ohio, where my sisters and their families live. He’s got on shorts and a baseball cap and he’s carrying his Father’s Day gifts. He’s also wearing a smile a mile wide because he just had a good breakfast and spent some time ribbing his family. It didn’t get better than that for my dad.

Now, every time B. and I walk into one of our favorite Baltimore diners, I think of my dad and how much he would have loved it. Topping my list of favorites is New Wyman Park, at the corner of Howard Street and 25th. It’s not because the food is better or the place is cleaner or the décor is kitschier, it’s all because of the staff. Though the place has about eight booths, B. and I always sit at the bar if it’s just the two of us so we don’t miss the constant chatter. Owned, as near as we can tell, by a Greek family, several members of which work there as cook, wait staff, and buspeople, the New Wyman Park practically screams “Neighborhood!” The two cooks, one Greek-American and one African-American, are constantly talking to each other, to the waitresses, to the patrons, at least ¾ of whom are well-known, practically family.

We watch and listen as we eat up our scrambled eggs, home fries, toast, and, for B., thin planks of ham. They argue, laugh, yell, reminisce, and kid around, this the most constant form of communication. The banter is what can’t be beat and it keeps me coming back for more. One morning, as we sat somewhat lazy and very fully happy, the then-incoming mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, walked in. And got treated just like everyone else—with a smile and a hi. But no fawning, no running over. Of course, B. and I couldn’t help but introduce ourselves and wish her luck. We did our best to keep it low key.

New Wyman Park and its inhabitants are the finest of Baltimore, as far as I’m concerned. They are its heart and soul, what keeps me from despairing over the city’s ridiculous crime and murder rate, its swathes of abandoned housing, and its deeply entrenched poverty.

New Wyman Park reminds me that the heart of the city still beats when people black and white, rich and poor, can still gather at places like this, eat some really good food and enjoy each other’s company. Someone said home is the place you go and they have to take you in. That’s what New Wyman Park is to me and they welcome us all, prodigal and otherwise, with a smile and cup full of hot coffee.

Fog free

Returning from a lovely European honeymoon, my husband and I recently took a connecting flight out of Chicago to Baltimore. Once we arrived at O’Hare, we checked the monitors along our way to the gate, and they told us the flight was scheduled to depart on time. When we got to the gate, the sign said the same. We settled into the waiting area chairs and watched the minutes tick by.

It soon became clear that our flight would not depart on time, despite the sign that still told us it would. Several people went up to talk to the customer service representative at the desk. Soon after, she got on the microphone and said, “Attention, passengers on Flight XXXX, we don’t know where your plane is and we don’t know where the crew is so we can’t tell you when the flight will leave.”

Really.

I know you all have been in this waiting area. A low rumble of grumbling ensued. One woman near us declared to her husband that she was going to go get a beer. And she did.

My husband and I just looked at each other. Was the plane delayed in Timbuktu? Having mechanical difficulties? Would it ever arrive? And what about that crew? Were they all sick? Lost? Sitting out in their own small strike? Anything could have been going on and none of us had any idea if we should start diving for alternative flights, sit tight, or burst into tears.

B. went to talk to the customer service representative, who had been making “woe is me” faces while talking to other puzzled passengers. When he came back, he was smiling but it wasn’t a “problems all solved” kind of a smile, more of a “what the heck?!” kind of a smile. It turns out that the plane was coming from a hangar and the crew was in the airport just not to the gate yet.

Next thing we know, she comes on to tell us that exact information and then that there will be “decision time” at the orginal time of take-off. Decision time? What did that mean? The flight had a plane and a crew. And a whole bunch of passengers who were all decided. What more did we need?

The upshot was that the plane arrived, the crew arrived, and we took off about 45 minutes later than scheduled.

Why am I writing about this? Because it is a textbook example of a lesson all writers (and other communicators) need to learn from the time they write their first sentences. Be specific. Do not lose your readers (or passengers) in a big dense cloud of ambiguity and uncertainty.

Readers want to know even more than we passengers did that day. They want you to paint a picture with words that allows them to see what you are writing about, to understand it clearly, to take it in. And for the sake of your client, if you are being paid to write something, you want your readers to clearly understand what your client wants to communicate.

It’s also a great public relations lesson. When the news isn’t good, it may be better to lay it out than to give out information that only results in shaking heads and a room full of frustration. It was far better for us to hear the plane and crew were there but delayed than to hear that seemingly no one knew where the heck either was.

Take a lesson from our hapless customer service representative. Don’t fog up your words when you have specific information at hand and a means to communicate it. Make your communication fog-free. Your readers and your clients will thank you.

Ripoff report

The Wall Street Journal recently published an article about freelancers fighting to get paid. A consultant recommended this site to check on potential employers:

http://www.ripoffreport.com/

I'm happy to report that I've only had one problem client in 13 years of freelancing but have heard plenty of sad stories from other freelancers. And a big thanks to all those prompt-paying clients of mine!

Gone honeymoonin’

My new husband (hmm, I could get used to saying that) and I are off on our honeymoon after a fabulously fun wedding. AlmsInk is taking a break to enjoy her new marital status in a lovely place. She’ll be back to the clients, the keyboard, the bills, and this blog in a couple of weeks.