Shipping a Grant Proposal

My own acts of courage are so minor that they're not even recognizable as such. I think the same is true for a lot of us who aren't living in poverty or war zones or currently raising kids.

Still the small daily triumphs do matter.

Take for, example, the hell I went through yesterday sending off a grant proposal to the proper government agency, using no stamps at all and no paper, using nothing but my computer.

Notices of Error, Notices of Corrupted Files flew at me. Hours passed. Hours! Still, I fought on. Clicking and clicking and calling 800 numbers and clicking.

My office partner congratulated me late in the afternoon for holding back on shouted obscenities during the half an hour that our upstairs neighbor Sarah had a small child in her office.

I kept thinking of Winston Churchill's phlegm-y voice saying, "Never give up. Never give up." And then at a little after 7 p.m. It went through! Received! Verified! And I dragged on home from the battlefield, weary but triumphant.

Now, transcending computing difficulties may not be like carrying people out of burning buildings. However, it's major in my world. Or was yesterday. (I was in a meditation group some time ago, and the leader asked others what their major current stresses were. One woman said, "This group and my computer.") So I'm celebrating--soon as I figure out how I want to do that.

Four Women on Horseback

If you haven't seen this video, please have a look. Dozens of horses are trapped on a small patch of island, have been there for three days. Eighteen have already drowned. Efforts of soldiers and firefighters to save them have failed, then four women climbed into their saddles and rode to the rescue.... Be sure to watch through to the end. The impact grows.

The Lowly--and Lofty--Scarab

Did you ever wear a scarab bracelet? They were a must-have item when I was an eighth-grader. I later heard that they had some sacred symbolism, but never investigated further.

This afternoon, doing some research on my E. Chant biography, I turned up a detail about a close friend of Chant's. Her name was Margarethe Heisser and the two of them shared a studio that was an arts center in Minneapolis around the turn of the previous century. Heisser, I learned from an online profile, always wore scarabs.

A scarab is a dung beetle (or representation thereof), revered in ancient Egypt, all the way back to prehistorical Egypt, as a symbol of the sun god, and of creation and transformation.

Here's the part that I seized upon: the Egyptian word for this insect was hprr, which meant: "rising from, come into being itself."

That concept is exciting to me--of continuing to come into being, in this life. Growing into the largest possibilities of oneself.

And a dung-beetle that becomes the sacred emblem of the sun god is a pretty good example of a positive transformation.

My Cheeky Relatives

Monday morning I opened my local paper, turned to the page where my sister-in-law Ruth Sheehan's column runs and saw the headline above her picture: HARRY IS THE BABY'S DADDY.

Well, the Harry she refers to is my brother, her husband; and their youngest child, to my knowledge, is age four. I went to reading really quickly.

Harry had confessed, Ruth wrote, to being the real father of Anna Nicole Smith's baby.

"He blubbered. I forgave.

He'll be flying to the Bahamas today to collect the bank account numbers, the keys to her mansion there and, oh yeah, his daughter, whom I have graciously agreed to raise as one of my own -- in exchange for a nominal $50,000 a month."

The point was the media overcoverage of this story, and the possible motivation one might have for wanting to claim the baby.

However, what this reader delightedly noticed was the pure brass of the story, which I found hilariously funny. Though, reading between the lines, I came to understand that I don't after all have a new niece.

Illustrious Writer Guests

Yesterday, I enjoyed another one of the perks of teaching at Duke this semester. Novelists Bharati Mukherjee and Clark Blaise came to talk to one of my classes meeting jointly with another class.

This was a special pleasure because a book they wrote together (they're married as well) is a long-time favorite of mine: Days and Nights in Calcutta. I read it at the suggestion of the editor of one of my books, just before I went to Varanasi to do my research for Sister India.

I'll never forget it. The book is divided in half, each of them giving an account of spending a season together in her hometown, formerly called Calcutta. It's astonishing how different two exceptionally well-written pieces on the same experience can be, in both style and content.

Her tone was full of concern and upset, awareness of pain. Her style, as I told the students in introducing them, was vivid and tightly woven, a dense dramatic fabric that then meandered like a river.

Clark's stance was amazement at the beauty and mystery he saw there, his tone had a spacious, light-filled feel. The image that came to mind: a glass pavilion.

The two of them talked with the students for almost two hours--he kept going while she left to prepare for her formal presentation in the Rare Book Room.

Wow, what a day! And I sort-a had a day off from spouting my own views. It was refreshing and inspiring. I heard some good reviews from my students too, two of whom asked if I could get them copies of her formal lecture. (Now that kind of student is a teacher's dream.)

Writers Workshop in the South of France

I had a request to tell you about write-in-France opportunity, which looks pretty delicious to me. VCCA-- The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts--has a recently acquired studio in the medieval village of Auvillars in Gascony. I've been to the Virginia campus, for a workshop led by feminist writer Naomi Wolf, and discovered that VCCA tends to do things well.

So have a look at this site if you're interested in your petit dejeuner in the courtyard of Moulin a Nef before starting the morning's classes.

Thoughts on Aging with Flair?

Sunday my beloved husband Bob turned 65. He can pass for 50, but still.... It's one of those significant numbers. Also, this weekend the obits in my paper were full of lads and lasses in their 50s and 60s. One I knew a bit, have been acquainted with for thirty years at least--I never thought he was the type to die. He was too much an extrovert to get that quiet. The same with Molly Ivins, subject of yesterday's post. And as for me, I buy ever more moisturizer. Do you suppose dying can be done with individuality and pizazz? As I write that, I think of Art Buchwald, dying a week ago on his own terms and, as a good newsman, being first with the story: announcing on a pre-recorded message that he'd just died. That's undeniably flair.

Molly Ivins: Who Did Her Best to "Let Freedom Ring"

Quoted from The Nation about the wonderfully gutsy political columnist Molly Ivins, who died last week:

Speaking truth to power is the best job in any democracy, she explained. It took her to towns across this great yet battered land to say: "So keep fightin' for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't you forget to have fun doin' it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin' ass and celebratin'the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was."

TOADS in Writing Classes

I sprung a little surprise in my classes this week--plopped a live European Green Toad on the seminar table. He's a sweet little creature that I've become a bit attached to.

Here's the reason: when I teach characterization in first person I sum up the methods as: the character's Thoughts, the character's choices of what to notice or Observe, Action, Dialogue, and Sensations.

These add up to the acronym: TOADS. Very handy, I think.

The weather has been cold here, though, and I've only seen a few tiny frogs on one warmer day recently and they moved far too fast for me to catch. So I bought Toadsie at Pet Smart. And he, like me, is now guest faculty.

After I'd put him on the table--followed by a wide range of reactions from class members--I asked the students to write about a character surprised by a toad and show the response through the character's bodily sensations, actions, etc.

The idea is to help people to monitor what bodies actually do in response to emotion. So that they have a vocabulary for such moments in their writing and don't have to resort to cliches, like "my heart was in my throat."

I was pleased with the way the classes went. In the group today, several students read their reactions, which were all strikingly different in both language and content, which makes for distinct characters. Plus, the class was kinda fun. At least nobody was phobic or allergic.