Late Nights

It is a universal truth that children really, really want to stay up past their bedtime. The BFF's boys have a longstanding 8 pm bedtime, and they will try any half-assed reason to stay up. The same excuses they have trotted out for oh, six to eight years. Sporting events are a guaranteed tussle, with promises about brushing their teeth during the commercials if they can please, please, please watch one more inning. Tonight, it was all about the Charlie Brown Halloween Special. Which was a clear no-go, because it started at 8:00 and lasted a full hour.

Truth be told, my heart goes out to them with every round of begging. I haven't told them yet that one of the best things about being a grown-up is you get to decide when you go to bed. And you can put yourself to bed, but still keep the light on while you read, or do the crossword puzzle, or eat bon-bons. I figure there's no use in sharing that information now, because there will be many more years of bedtime tussles and then a whole lot of curfew debates. Why tell them about something that they won't get to enjoy for another eight years?

The local niecelet, on the other hand, has become quite the night owl. She's been known to call me after 10 pm on a school night, which I judge as rather permissive. Sometimes she stays up and reads, but I suspect she's mostly on her laptop or listening to her iPod, and on those nights she's probably up until midnight. I think she is one of those cases that was born a late night lover, and the pre-adolescent changes in chemistry have just unleashed a characteristic she came in with. I speak with some authority on this matter, as a longtime late night lover myself. I don't know why everything seems so much better or more interesting when it takes place at night. And I don't necessarily mean late night parties or special events -- I mean Charlie Rose and his guests, or the latest issue of the New Yorker, or the way a book really gets to me after 1 AM. For years, (okay in my 20's) when I sporadically kept a journal, I wouldn't start writing before 10:30. And now that there are DVD's with multiple episodes on them, I usually finish watching between 1:30 and 2. (Tonight was Disk 1, Season 6, Part 2 of the Sopranos, but I was done by 11. Only two episodes.)

All of this is by way of explaining why this Sunday is my favorite day of the year. The day when the clock falls back an hour, and you get an extra hour of sleep or gardening or reading or whatever you want to do. The BFF makes fun of me every year by telling me that the whole daylight savings thing is make-believe, but I don't care. I like gaining an hour every fall and hate losing it in the spring.

Last year at this time, I had a great late night routine that revolved around a radio show called Open Source. It's the only good thing that's come out of Boston in a long, long time, according to my rigorous standards. It was broadcast on KQED-FM at 1 AM, so I could read for awhile and then tune in, or listen to News and Notes which came on at midnight. Open Source was (and still is) a fantastic show that focuses on one topic for the whole hour, and always has intelligent, eclectic and savvy guests. Their funding looked secure in the late spring when they received a grant from the MacArthur Foundation. But in one of those moves that shows just how tenuous producing any intellectual or artistic project is, another one of their funders dropped out and they went "on hiatus" in July. Still, you must, must, must check out their website and see what they've been programming. They really are a treasure, and challenge you to think, a quality that's all too rare in many of today's "news" sources. And they have podcasts -- sample the one with Edwidge Danticat, and you'll see why I'm raving...

Off to bed now, but not to sleep. I have a very good shot at completing the NY Times crossword puzzle since it's only Tuesday!

Birthday wishes

Well the Red Sox just won the World Series, so that one didn't come true either. Hate the Red Sox. Hate the Celtics. Not that crazy about Boston in general. Hope they don't take up the mantle of "team of the decade" or "America's team." That would be just.too.much.

Yes, I had a birthday this week, and I'm of an age where that isn't necessarily good news. Even though everyone quips, "Well, consider the alternative!" Ha freaking ha. For instance, I have only one year left in an age bracket (designed by media consultants and insurance companies) that I never felt applied to me. Now I'm headed into an even more improbable one. By your late 40's, birthdays become slightly taunting -- another year when I didn't publish a novel, swim laps every day, or read all the books I've checked out from the library. And you aren't as likely get the great, extravagant gifts either. Though I am looking forward to my upcoming visit to the Caviar Bar at the Ferry Building. And I did love my birthday cake from Satura, and celebrating with the dear friends that make up my book group.

Also, on the up side, there are still things to learn, new areas of expertise to develop. The ever-expanding world of the Internet for one. Just when you start to become a little bored with it and think you've discovered all it has to offer, you stumble across a new site that captures your fancy. Or changes your life. I found the latter, and I'm not exaggerating. Some one(s) have created a comprehensive knitting site that anticipates and fulfills your every knitting need. It's called ravelry.com and it's still in beta form, so you add your name to the list and in a few weeks (or several; okay, somewhere between 4-10) they contact you and give you access to the site. Which is so incredibly amazing. I have been a knitter for a long time, decades even, and I have yet to find or create a system to track all my knitting paraphernalia and projects. Which, it turns out, has been a good thing that's allowed me to live in denial about all the knitting stuff I have accumulated over said decades. But, the geniuses at ravelry have created a flexible, interactive system to catalog all my current projects, my unfinished projects, my projects that have yet to come to fruition, and all of the yarn I have purchased here and there over the years. And let me tell you, that is a shocking, shocking amount of yarn. I haven't even entered it all yet, and I am convinced (in this one discrete area) my mother is right -- I really do have too much yarn. It's a common joke among knitters that whoever dies with the most yarn wins, but I now have to face the fact that I actually possess more yarn than I can knit in this lifetime. And take steps to decrease that stash. Because ravelry has a category called the queue (so British, so adorable) where you list your fantasy future projects. (Do they know knitters or what?) And despite all the yarn I already own, I confess I've made entries in my queue. Therefore, I have to get rid of some old yarn and abandoned projects to let in the new. Which is having a very relieving (and revealing) effect. There are abandoned baby sweaters that will either be frogged or finished and donated, whichever option is most conducive to shrinking the stash. And yes, they have a category for frogged projects! and hibernating projects! They're geniuses, I tell you, geniuses. I'm inspired to tackle my other primary weakness -- too many books. And maybe, CD's that I don't listen to so much. You can see where I'm going with this.

Here's an example of another area of expertise I'm developing. I have a riddle for all you fans of The Wire. Two actors from Seasons One and Two attended Harvard. Who are they? The great news about the Wire is that the fifth (I refuse to believe final, even though that's what the creators say) season is set to air in January 2008. And, the Season Four DVD set will be available in early December, according to Amazon and Netflix. Let me just mention how disappointed I was not to have received a pre-order on this magnificent show as a birthday present. Ahem, ahem, I guess I'll just have to put it at the top of my Christmas list. Local niecelet, spread the word.

As a lead-in to the delivery date, I will be sharing with you some of the classic, memorable lines from Seasons 1-3 of the Wire, sayings that I frequently apply to appropriate moments in my own daily life. Expect some of the wisdom of Omar, Bunk Moreland and Bodie from the Barksdale crew. Just a little touch of BalMer reaching out to the Bay Area.

I know a bunch of people -- friends and relations -- that have October and November birthdays. Since we are roughly in the same age bracket, I'm assuming that Valentine's Day used to be celebrated in style... And a happy happy to you all!

Inert and inept

Do you remember the movie, Private Benjamin? It came out in 1980 and starred Goldie Hawn. There's a lame joke in it that still makes me laugh. The ragtag group of women soldiers are about to participate in war games, and are being given instructions by an intimidating, higher-ranking officer. Sgt. Ross, played by Hal Williams, is describing the terrain and says "Some of these landmines are inert. Those that aren't are (beat, beat) ert."

I want to be ept.

I am having a crisis of confidence. Can't read, can't write, can't make my computer do what it's supposed to, and I seem to have lost my knitting mojo. Which, given the amount of yarn I have stashed at my house, my BFF's house, and my mother's house, could be a big damned problem.

I just returned from a jaunt with lots of other knitters and at first, I thought it was a result of being around so many talented craftswomen. At best, I'm a knitting technician rather than a creative force or an expert, so it's easy to be intimidated by the skills of my confreres. But when I got home, I noticed unfinished projects that I'd given up on because I was stuck. And the project I'd planned to start on the trip had frustrated me completely, because I couldn't get the gauge swatch to work and the pattern I knitted looked nothing like the stitch on the sweater in the picture. And my latest obsession, socks, did nothing to soothe me. I couldn't increase to the correct number of stitches on a new pattern I'd been looking forward to trying, and I'd turned the heel way too early on my second sock in the beautiful Kaffe Fassett yarn. Which meant I had to rip it out and do it again. Wouldn't that make you question your mojo?

So, how to snap out of the funk? By starting a new project, of course. An achievable project for the shop, made out of one ball of yarn. One ball of yarn that knits up like buttah (Rowan Cashsoft Baby DK), especially on the ebony needles I'm using. I plan to use the whole ball on one stitch pattern, creating a long gauge swatch so customers can see how much yarn 142 yards really is.

Oh, and Sheridan Hay's, The Secret of Lost Things, seems to have broken my reading slump. I had a very satisfying reading session, snuggled up in bed late last night. The light went off around 1:30 and I didn't fall asleep over the book!

In retrospect, I wonder how much of my slump was due to coffee deprivation. The house blends I sampled in New Mexico sucked, and a latte from the Linden St. outpost of blue bottle coffee co. straightened me right up. To find out more about this nectar, check out their website bluebottlecoffee.net. This elixir makes me purr with pleasure. Every morning. Really.

But I still need a Mac guru...

Okay, okay and a shout out to IMDb (imdb.com) for that Private Benjamin info. My memory's not that good!

Doris Lessing

I love it when the Nobel Committee gets it right. And I love that Doris Lessing remains her usual blunt self, calmly pointing out that time was a wasting if the Committee wanted to get her the prize before she pops off.

I was introduced to Lessing through the character of Martha Quest, rather than the better known Anna Wulf. Diane Middlebrook was teaching The Four-Gated City in a class my sophomore year and I still have a commercial paperback copy of that novel rattling around my house somewhere. The following fall, I went overseas to Cliveden and that is where I first saw The Golden Notebook. It was a house copy, and had been lying around and passed around for God knows how long. But I can still tell you what the cover of the paperback looked like. Black background, the title in gold type, followed by the author's name. Very simple, but it drew you in. You could tell lots of students had curled up in the drawing room and lost themselves in it. That it had made plenty of train rides, but never been left behind. I thought of my friends Liat and Jolene who had been at Cliveden the previous winter. I could see them reading it.

Lessing was one of the earliest writers I heard speak via Stanford's Lane Lecture Series. It was in the mid-80's and she read a short story about London that left no doubt she had a voice. An amazing, powerful voice. These readings are usually held at Kresge Auditorium, but this one was held in Mem Aud which was packed to the rafters, overflowing like it was an especially tempting Sunday Night Flicks offering.

The mid-eighties was also when Lessing decided to pull a trick on the publishing world, to see if they would publish the work of an unknown woman writer and give it a proper, critical look. So she submitted the The Diaries of Jane Somers to her publisher under a pseudonym. They published it without much fanfare, until Lessing went public with what she'd done. This is what I think of when there's all this back and forth about whether she should be classified as a feminist, whether she identifies herself as a feminist. She may not want the label, but she damned sure walks the walk. And has her entire career.

Her output has not lessened over the past two decades. I've loved (and recommended to friends) some of her most recent novels: Love, Again, The Sweetest Gift, The Grandmothers. Loved them enough to own them in hardback!

Lessing was self-educated, a voracious reader who wrote what she wanted to write. In both cases, she held no truck with literary fashion. It's for that and her amazing body of work, covering five decades, that she earned and deserves the Nobel. Do we still produce writers like that today? Can a writer have that kind of career today? I don't know the answer, or if it really matters. I'm just grateful that Doris Lessing achieved that kind of career and I get to read her work for the rest of my lifetime.

As for Harold Bloom's response that the award smacked of "political correctness," is this anything other than an indication of decades of emasculation anxiety? Teeny peeny, that's all I'm saying.