private life
The patter of rain as I awoke this morning, having slept quite well after the 7-mile walk yesterday.
Morning notes today: Alexander the Great and A History of Private Life I: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium, edited by Paul Veyne. This is a good book; I remember buying it at the original Duthie Books on Robson Street in May 1998, not long before Duthie's disappeared. Hardly daring to believe that I was contemplating writing a work requiring such a massive investment in research, I would pick up likely-looking books here and there as I found them. It focuses on material that is of special interest to the novelist: social and household practices and structures that don't get much mention in histories or official documents.
Today I was keying from the section titled "The Household and Its Freed Slaves". To give an idea of the material, here are the subsection headings I keyed from this morning:
- Widows, Virgins, and Concubines
- Unrecognized Bastards
- The Tribulations of the Freed Slave
- Further Tribulations of the Freed Slave
- Clientage
Interesting, no?
Robin was up early to get off to day 1 of her new job. I saw her out the door at 7:09 a.m. She hustled in her new blue scrubs up St. Georges Ave. to get to the bus stop on 15th Street. We're expecting her home soon, and are keen to hear how it went.
I spent the day at Mom's, keying data into Quicken. She made us lunch--lovely ham and Swiss sandwiches with mustard, and I got a bowl of Jackie's vegetable soup: excellent. We ate in the living-room, looking across the placid cove at low tide. As often happens, we got talking about writing. Mom's afraid that she's not a writer by nature.
"When I read in your blog about how you sat here on Friday and wrote about what you saw, I thought, That's a writer. Me--I'm not a writer."
I didn't want her to give up so easily.
"I like to think of my prose sketchbook as my own neat idea," I said, "not one necessarily used by other writers."
And it turns out that Mom has indeed done similar things--used to write down, on the sly, what was going on around her in her office, for example. The instincts are there, the expressive desire. It comes down to how to work through the fear that is the universal experience of writers. I'm not sure how one does that. I'm kind of flunking at it right now, as far as returning to my own opus is concerned.
Morning notes today: Alexander the Great and A History of Private Life I: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium, edited by Paul Veyne. This is a good book; I remember buying it at the original Duthie Books on Robson Street in May 1998, not long before Duthie's disappeared. Hardly daring to believe that I was contemplating writing a work requiring such a massive investment in research, I would pick up likely-looking books here and there as I found them. It focuses on material that is of special interest to the novelist: social and household practices and structures that don't get much mention in histories or official documents.
Today I was keying from the section titled "The Household and Its Freed Slaves". To give an idea of the material, here are the subsection headings I keyed from this morning:
- Widows, Virgins, and Concubines
- Unrecognized Bastards
- The Tribulations of the Freed Slave
- Further Tribulations of the Freed Slave
- Clientage
Interesting, no?
Robin was up early to get off to day 1 of her new job. I saw her out the door at 7:09 a.m. She hustled in her new blue scrubs up St. Georges Ave. to get to the bus stop on 15th Street. We're expecting her home soon, and are keen to hear how it went.
I spent the day at Mom's, keying data into Quicken. She made us lunch--lovely ham and Swiss sandwiches with mustard, and I got a bowl of Jackie's vegetable soup: excellent. We ate in the living-room, looking across the placid cove at low tide. As often happens, we got talking about writing. Mom's afraid that she's not a writer by nature.
"When I read in your blog about how you sat here on Friday and wrote about what you saw, I thought, That's a writer. Me--I'm not a writer."
I didn't want her to give up so easily.
"I like to think of my prose sketchbook as my own neat idea," I said, "not one necessarily used by other writers."
And it turns out that Mom has indeed done similar things--used to write down, on the sly, what was going on around her in her office, for example. The instincts are there, the expressive desire. It comes down to how to work through the fear that is the universal experience of writers. I'm not sure how one does that. I'm kind of flunking at it right now, as far as returning to my own opus is concerned.
posted by paulv at
4:21 PM
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