And the winners are...

~ Lily, from Montreal, Quebec

~ Pretty, from Fountain Valley, California

~ Linda, from North Bay, Ontario

~ and Lynn, from Augusta, Georgia...

...all of whom knew that in Safe Word, by Molly Weatherfield, the learned lady of the fourteenth century who engaged Carrie's imagination is Laure de Noves, wife of Hugues de Sade and ancestor of the infamous Marquis -- who had eleven children, was a part of a court of ladies who wrote Provençal verse, and was possibly the Laura of Petrarch's sonnets.

All of my winners will receive autographed copies of Jane Lockwood's erotic historical novel Forbidden Shores.

And Lily will also receive a scrumptious bar of lavender-scented Dagoba Chocolate, for also knowing that I used the name Laure for Marie-Laure Vernet, heroine of The Bookseller's Daughter.

Congratulations to all my winners, and please come back to enter my next contest, beginning February 26.

Best,

You might want to check them out:

Urban Mysteries is at HistoryHoydens.blogspot.com, and A New Novel From Pam (and how Molly W. discovered Romance is at TheSpicedTeaParty.blogspot.com.

And do come back to this page this Tuesday, February 26, to see if you won my latest contest (which you can still enter by midnight tonight, February 24).

Till then,

Sorry, I can't help it. Though I haven't indulged myself thusly in every book, it should be clear by now that I'm a pushover for brainy guys, and if you find that a weird sort of taste, I won't mind in the least if you mouse yourself over to some home for hunkier heroes. Though as some of you know, my brainy guys, equipped as they are with passionate yearnings, lively erotic imaginations, limitless appreciation for female strength and intelligence (not to speak of terrific hands, it's a thing with me) do quite well in bed as well.

And I'm also a fan of brainy women, which is why, this Valentine's Day, I'm happy to introduce you to Mary Beard's blog, a Don's Life.

Beard is a renowned Cambridge classical scholar, whose brilliant, irreverent, wildly entertaining little book, The Parthenon was a source of infinite help and pleasure for me while I was writing (and rewriting) my hero and heroine's meetings among the Elgin (or Parthenon) Marbles at the British Museum.

Oh, and the title of my new novel is The Edge of Impropriety, and I'll soon be telling you more about it on my In-The-Works page.

But for now, back to Mary Beard (who I've been told makes strong men shake in their boots when she questions their research) and who gives us some wonderfully entertaining and ascerbic remarks about the origins of Hallmark's favorite saint and his holiday in her blog post for today... Follow the links for more info about 'the weird festival of the Lupercalia... in which naked young men raced round the city, beating with thongs any woman lucky enough to get in their way' and other fun stuff.

And come on back here soon for more about The Edge of Impropriety and other items of note,

Helena Bonham Carter broke my heart in Sweeny Todd, even if she and Johnny Depp did look a little too much like beautiful goth twins in their dead-white facepaint. Amy Ryan was scary-good as the neglectful mom in Gone, Baby Gone. And while Tommy Lee Jones was just fine in No Country for Old Men, Kelly McDonald was the true moral center of that dark, dark movie. (And I sure didn't know -- did you? -- at least until until I checked her out on the International Movie Data Base, that she's the same Scottish acress who was so memorable as Mary Macreachan, Maggie Smith's beleaguered chambermaid in Gosford Park. Acting! as they used to call it on that Saturday Night Live skit.)

We're saving glorious Amy Adams in Enchanted for an emotional rainy day, I think.

And while I've heard that Julie Christie is wonderful as a woman with Alzheimer's in Away From Her -- well, as my mother-in-law's Alzheimer's advances, it seems that Michael and I have wordlessly passed on that one.

As we passed on all those movies about girls who get pregnant, don't have abortions, but do manage, as Susie Bright said in a typically bracing blog post, to have one or more of these things happen to them:

Best Sex of your Entire Life with your Gynecologist (Waitress)

Billionaire mentor leaves you all his money on his deathbed (Waitress)

Your first high school lover ends up being the most perfect love you will ever know (Juno)

You really ARE a virgin... the sperm only seeped through your jeans (Quinceañera)

Parents who rejected you take you back into their loving arms at the last moment because they realized they were all wrong (Quinceañera)

Closed adoption, another last minute decision, works out for the best for everybody (Juno)

Raising a child-like boyfriend is a darling substitute for an infant (Juno, Knocked Up)

Your professional entertainment career finally takes off (Knocked Up)

International soccer star and his loving relatives become your surrogate family (Bella)

Guys quit their jobs and give up their best buddy's approval just to be with you (Knocked Up, Bella)

You see the light and cancel your abortion seconds before the procedure begins (Sex and the City, Juno)

Keeping the baby gets you your boyfriend back and makes you realize you really do want to get married to him, after rejecting him for years (Sex and the City)

Abortion is fine for someone else, but not for someone heroic and plucky like YOU! (ALL)

But read the whole post here. It's smart, serious, complex writing, about a situation that I've thought about too, with some disquiet -- which is that it's almost impossible to mention the word 'abortion' out loud in a piece of entertainment fiction (or, in my neck of the woods, to give a romance heroine the power to terminate a pregnancy).

Vis-a-vis movies, Susie talks about this conundrum with the brilliant culture critic Laura Miller (who once upon a time edited a few of my essays on Salon.com, and by whose fine hand I would pay to be edited, rather than vice versa). As Laura points out, it's hard to end a pregnancy in a narrative that wants to move forward by means of generating a positive story. 'Generating' is my paraphrase (apt enough, I think). But as I've already said, do read the whole post, including Laura's comments -- and as always, Katha Pollitt's take on life on and off-screen is well worth reading.

Sometimes I really love the web, for make it so easy to share what's important to me -- just a link, just a click... Even if I don't have the time or the smarts to go to these movies and try to think my way through these important issues about women and the stories that are closest to us, I'm glad of what opportunity I have to keep the discussion bouncing. Because, as I said, I've wrestled with the sex-babies-and-narrative problem myself, and not completely successfully. At least in my next novel there will be no baby, 'miracle' or otherwise.

Stay tuned.

But meanwhile, if the issue of narrative and pregnancy in the movies continues to haunt you, rent the DVD of the thought-provoking 2005 Happy Endings, with Lisa Kudrow and Maggie Gyllenhaal (if you need any more reason to see it). You can check out the trailer here. And Michael and I are very much looking forward to the Rumanian movie, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and Two Days.

And if in general, you're as likely to lose it at the movies as I am, you should know about the International Movie Data Base, source of hours and days of glazed-eyed websurfing madness (and trailers! and finding out every TV movies a bright new actor was ever in). And Metacritic.com, an awesome portal of info from a wide range of movie critics, about what's playing now and what's on DVD.

And/or -- just to bring it all back home, please do click on this link to my friend Jeff Weinstein's wonderful blog post today about the war, the movies, and Joan Blondell.

Later,

My favorite, I think, was The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Adapted from a true story of a stroke victim who was almost completely locked up in physical paralysis, in the words of New Yorker film critic David Denby, the movie's 'a gloriously unlocked experience, with some of the freest and most creative uses of the camera and some of the most daring, cruel, and heartbreaking emotional explorations that have appeared in recent movies.' I do want to caution you against expecting it to be 'inspirational.' But here, read Denby’s excellent and accurate review, and decide for yourself.

My next favorite was There Will Be Blood, followed quickly by Sweeny Todd and the fascinating Chinese movie Summer Palace (ok, released in China in 2006, but briefly, preciously available to US audiences in 2007; it's been banned in China. I blogged about it last March.)

Zodiac was terrific, even if we only saw it on DVD (in truth, the movie is so long and runs counter to so many narrative expectations that – call us wimps – we needed to take breaks for to rest, recoup, and reconsider.) I still haven’t seen director David Fincher’s Fight Club, but on DVD this year I found myself preferring Fincher’s Alien 3 to Joss Whedon’s Alien 4 and blogged about it at The Spiced Tea Party.

I still think, as I did last August that The Bourne Ultimatum was pretty excellent (and highly instructive as an example of telling its story through the eye of a surveillance camera – I thought hard about that when it came time to tell parts of my forthcoming fall 2008 romance novel in the voice of the Regency gossip columns, a little differently than Julia Quinn has done in the Bridgerton books).

I haven’t seen the movie that seems particularly popular on the romance reader and writer blogs, Atonement – and won’t until I read the novel. So I’m particularly struck by how few 'romantic,' period costume, girlie-type movies I saw this year, or even especially wanted to see. And how few female performances stood out, compared to Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano in There Will be Blood all the guys in Zodiac and No Country for Old Men, and Philip Seymour Hoffman in (it felt like) just about everything else.

But I’ll have more to say about that next time I post here. Because it was a pretty strange year for gender in film, I think, all of which deserves more thought.

Come back soon and let's do it.

Which turned out to be a good plan, to fly to New York on Christmas day and head back home out of JFK early January 1 (our plane took off - on time - at 8:45; I think the airports crowded up later in the day). Both flights were full - I don’t know if there are any flights that aren’t these days, except maybe on Thanksgiving Day - but both our trips were pretty mellow.

As were we, after a lovely east coast week, of family, friends, food, art and theater. I’ll write more about the specifics, but right now I’m still basking in the feeling that I couldn’t have asked for anything more - the icing on the cake being, of course, the prospect of a fresh new year, and perhaps a better one than the last few we’ve been having.

We spent early New Year’s Eve with a cousin, watching the candidates do their thing in Iowa. And even if it is corny and perhaps ridiculous they way they do that caucus thing, it made us hopeful. And the New Years wishes we exchanged with Manhattan passers-by made us feel joyful.

So Happy New Year to you and yours - with my deepest hopes for a better one for all of us.

All my best,

Anyhow, I sent the draft to my editor yesterday! And although tomorrow I'll probably start quaking in my boots about what she thinks of what I sent her, I'm sure enjoying today.

Of course, being me, what I'm mostly enjoying is planning what I'm going to read now that I'm free to to do so. Or what I'm going to finish reading (because I've started stuff even when I shouldn't have). And then there are books I want to write about (especially the few I didn't need for my research which I didn't have time to read but did read top to bottom and in one case two times through, because the books simply just wouldn't take no for an answer).

One of the books I've started is Charlotte Bronte's Villette. I read it years ago and frankly didn't realize what a marvel it is, though I should have, because it's one of my friend Janet Mullany's most loved and recommended books, which I should have learned by now are always absolute must-read-no-question-about-its -- not to speak of the fact that My Son the Victorianist was privately and tactfully scandalized that I didn't show much enthusiasm for Villette a few months ago. Wrong, wrong, I was so, so wrong. I'm delighted to have been proven so and overflowing with gratitude to my book group buddy Arthur Manzi for suggesting Villette after we did Wuthering Heights -- my pick. (Of course Wuthering Heights is also weird, wonderful, and astonishing, but you already knew that, right?)

I hope to be writing something illuminating on Villette sometime soon, but right now the most intense thing I have to say about it is that it's a Victorian novel that has so much seething passion in it that characters act like, well, total assholes, in the plain speech of another book group co-member Mitch Altman, also known as the inventor of TV B-Gone. Which may not sound like much of a recommendation, but which in reading practice is absolutely fascinating. This is a book about a woman and a man of the mid-nineteenth century trying to communicate the deep fascination they feel for each other, and not always succeeding. More later.

And I'm planning to travel. To the east coast (New York and Philadelphia) over the holiday week to see family and also to Mexico (check out my expat friend Barbara Schaffer's web page, especially if you want to retire to Mexico and build a house). I'll probably go in the spring (yeah, when the weather's nice and hot, but when I'll be finished with edits, rewrites, etc), and then to Europe -- maybe Sicily, definitely Berlin next year. More about that later.

And I'm going to clean up my desk and spiff up my web page (I'm looking forward to working with the good witches at Wax Creative Designs so that sometime next year this thing should become more than almost a blog). Hoping to do something like Lisa Dale's delightful and enlightening Book Anatomy 101 -- check it out too.

And I'm also going to be thinking seriously about erotic fiction -- partly because I'll be speaking at the Popular Culture Association Conference in San Francisco next March. The name of my talk (or talk-let; I'll be part of a panel) will be 'From BDSM to Erotic Romance: Observations of a Shy Pornographer' (yes, it's supposed to be provocative; but it'll only be that if I think some wicked serious thoughts about it between now and then. And if I have some fun -- same difference?). No doubt I'll be writing more about this, here and at The Spiced Tea Party blog.

And yes, there is another idea for a novel -- actually a novella. Very erotic, very angry, historical, literary. I'm gonna be playing with it.

But since yesterday was the first day of the rest of my life, today I've gotta go live it.

But I'll be back again. Promise.

It's always nice to see a hypocrite get his (and especially a dangerous one). But the Palfrey interview goes beyond that, Palfrey being the opposite of a hypocrite -- a smart, decent, gutsy woman who's been persecuted for knowing too much at a time when we're all being encouraged to know too little. Susie does a wonderful job of interviewing her.

And -- speaking of what we know and what we don't -- I also quite loved The Bourne Ultimatum, especially the first third -- a fast, brilliantly entertaining exercise in the new subgenre that I'd call 'surveillance thriller.' Wonderful roller coaster that keeps you gasping and smiling and holding onto your seat (and managed to teach me a whole lot of technical about writing point of view).

Let me know what you think.

Later,

And I have been working really hard on The Next Novel -- yes, there really is one, scheduled for fall of next year and it's almost half done.

And I do have a Nerd City entry, but you know what, I don't really like the name Nerd City so well... maybe if I wore Tina Fey black plastic glasses... but I don't. So I'm renaming this monthly feature and will try to get it in on time next month.

And what I'm naming it is after me, in one of the incarnations I like -- Theorygirl. You can see a picture of Theorygirl here, at a recent post at the Spiced Tea Party Blog. It's at (surprise!) a tea party we crumpet strumpets and friends had at RWA National last month, after the workshop Janet Mullany (aka Jane Lockwood), I, and our agents Lucienne Diver and Helen Breitwieser gave on writing sexy historical novels. The workshop went great -- you can check out a bit of what Janet said here, and I'm going to post a little of what I said too. Soon. Really.

Anyway, I usually take an awful picture, but I like this one, because in it I'm obviously making some very important point or at least a point that is very important to me. And looking at it I can feel the kind of intellectual excitement that does, no joke, make me feel tough and alive.

So once again -- a little jumpy, but that's appropriate too: Pam. In Theorygirl mode.

Making it only appropriate that this month's not-Nerd-City-But-Theorygirl quote will be found if you follow the link to the extraordinarily tough, alive, and wonderful Susie Bright's blog, a recorded conversation between Susie and one of Susie and my heroes, the likewise, likewise, and likewise Katha Pollitt.

Enjoy.

Best,

Later,

Because I'm at the keyboard for hours everyday, making sentences. And making sentences is hard if you want your sentences to work and play well together, to join together to tell a story but also to have their own little arcs and rhythms; I'm not so fond of the word 'utopia,' but looked at from the point of view of a very large number of sentences joined together, a novel is a very utopian project when it's done and a world of pain until then -- I suppose like any utopian project, duh.

Anyway, so here I am stuck in this little world of pain while just a few keystrokes away is the whole wide world of the internet, with its easy rewards and even, occasionally, its wonders.

When I first got this almost-blog, I thought I'd share some of these wonders with you. But I haven't. Partly because they're not romance-related, and I figure you come here to read Pam the Romance Writer. And partly because I was once advised that the whole point of having this web site is to sell my books -- romance writers being diligent in the ways of self-promotion as one of our literary godmothers, Richardson's Pamela.

But how often can I promote my books when there aren't really that many of them -- especially in comparison to the many days at the keyboard spent producing them. Because we all know by now that I'm slow -- there are simply going to be these long stretches where all you'll be getting is a blog entry.

I hope you will read my books and the books of my pals in the romance biz. But meanwhile, why shouldn't I share (and even promote) what I find out there on the web? Because those signs and wonders go into creating Pam the Romance Writer too -- we're all bigger than we think we are.

Today's signs and wonders are first of all my friend Susie Bright's bracing firecracker of a post about what 'safety' has come to mean and what it should.

And then there's the wonderful news that the brilliant Katha Pollitt has her own blog, called And Another Thing, though I think she's still unclear on the concept of how often you're supposed to post. That's ok, so am I. She's brilliant, she's funny, she makes you think. I'd be in awe of her (I am in awe of her), but I have to tell you that I once met her when she spoke at Michael's bookstore and she was cuddly and smiley and huggy too.

Oh, and speaking of awe, do check out this wonderful, brilliant speech by Joss Whedon to a group called Equality Now, which you might also want to know about -- yes, it's Joss, making my heart sing describing strong women and men who 'prize wit and resolve' in women, even though it starts with an intro by Meryl Streep, which ain't bad either. Enjoy.

OK, gotta make sentences now. Happy Fourth of July. Happy Independence Day.

Later,

Best,

But since I couldn't use it there, here it is below.

Lovers, of course, are notoriously frantic epistemologists, second only to paranoiacs (and analysts) as readers of signs and wonders.

Cool, huh? Phillips is so smart, and such a good writer. And I figure that since I'm using it on a blog page, and linking to Amazon, I'm probably okay, from a legal point of view -- since it's more like a free ad for Phillips' wonderful book of essays than (lord knows) a money-making schtick for me.

But wait, there's more, because Michael brought back another Phillips book from a trip to the library a few weeks ago, one I didn't know about (the book jacket says he's written ten).

This one's called Going Sane: Maps of Happiness, and it's the smartest book about conducting one's life that I've read in a long, long time. Not a self-help book, but a wonderful, clearheaded meditation, and one that I'm trying to get my current hero and heroine to take to heart, as I try to get a little saner along with them. Check it out:

For the more deeply sane, whatever else sanity might be, it is a container of madness, not a denier of it. This sanity... often bears the wisdom that accrues from hardships endured and conflicts forborne. This sane person has felt and acknowledged but not ultimately been overwhelmed by the rigors of his nature. His sanity, such as it is, is both the cause and the consequences of not having conformed, of discovering his true nature through a refusal to comply. For the superficially sane, adaptation is their religion; for the deeply sane, adaptation is what corrupts them, and is experienced as a form of submission. The deeply sane must not betray their desire; the superficially sane accommodate their desire to the needs of others.

Well, that's it for now, more later.

Best,

If I or (more likely) the folks at Wax figure out what caused it, I'll sure let you know, but for now I just want to express my apologies, tell you it's working again, and urge you to write to me again -- and I'll definitely reply.

I definitely should have noticed that I was getting less email, but I really have been working hard on the next book, which I'm finding fun, fascinating, and somewhat maddening.

So again, all my apologies. Really, I do love hearing from you. And really, I always do write back (when I receive the email, that it).

Later,

Best,

But here it is, from Love In the Western World, a venerable piece of literary and intellectual history whose author, Denis de Rougement, asks why it is that unhappy love is such a ubiquitous theme in Western culture.

His answer goes back to the Albigensian Heresy in the south of France in the late middle ages. Whether it really makes sense I can't say, but I love this quote, and used it as the epigraph to Carrie's Story:

Passion and expression are not really separable. Passion comes to birth in that powerful impetus of the mind which also brings language into existence. So soon as passion goes beyond instinct and becomes truly itself, it tends to self-description, either in order to justify or intensify its being, or else simply in order to keep going.

It's one for us talky Geminis and happy birthday to us, too.

But because we talky Geminis can (must!) also see the other side of everything, you should also go catch my post at The Spiced Tea Party about orgasms, semi-colons, and smart girls shutting up for a change.

Later,

Best,

You're faced with a life-threatening illness, you sign into the hospital a cancer screening test. Not only are you scared for yourself, but you want every possible protection and support for your partner and your children.

Marital status? the person behind the desk asks.

You don't bother recounting that 11 years ago you and your partner had a commitment ceremony in front of clergy and 100 friends and family in which you promised to live and love together for the rest of your life. Nor do you mention that you've brought two terrific, demanding kids into the world, you've worked and saved and bought a house, you've lived and loved and supported each other.

But you do say tell her that you've gone down to the state building and signed the forms that give you what Connecticut calls a 'civil union.'

The hospital clerk looks down at the forms in front of her and informs you that 'civil union' isn't one of the choices listed. You're part of a same-sex couple, and so, she tells you, you're single.

Next?

As with many romance narratives, let's provide a little flashback, and let's let Pam be a moderately omniscient narrator.

We'll start in 1992, when Robin, my youngest sibling, fell in love with a slim, dark, well-spoken computer consultant -- a Yale graduate from a large, close Jewish family very much like the one we grew up in.

But in this romance you already know what the conflict was. Robin fell in love with Barb -- and these two women wanted to spend the rest of their lives together.

Not only that, but they wanted to have their commitment to each other recognized by their families, their friends, and their religion. They wanted to celebrate themselves and their love. They wanted to do what people do to formalize a major life transition. They wanted to party.

Word got around. I don't know what transpired in Barb's family but my near and dear burned up a lot of phone wires.

Who was going and who just felt it was too weird?

Well of course we love Robin, some voices said, and Barb's great don't get me wrong. But do they have to be so -- blatant?

OK, some others replied, I'll go, but I'm not bringing my kids. Well, how could I explain it to them? Might be traumatic.

For a while it looked like it was the Old Testament religious proscriptions that would keep my dad from going. Sadly, my mom resigned herself to going without him.

But Dad did go. Everybody went. Everybody ate and danced and hugged and kvelled. No trauma alerts -- the kids were fine and remain so. Barb's Yalie friends sang some kind of preppy glee club music; a klezmer band played a beloved traditional Yiddish folk song about a parent's joy, and relief, at having married off a youngest daughter. My dad made a wry, touching little speech -- I grabbed onto the person who was next to me at the moment (it was Barb's mom) and we sobbed for joy in each other's arms, about how love is stronger than fear or prejudice or habit.

And when a year later, my dad died suddenly, and we came together to bury him, we had the great comfort of remembering that moment, and that speech, and how we'd all been brought closer together by expanding our sense of what love was -- and of commitment, family, and marriage.

But that was just us, and not the state of Connecticut. Because it was only a commitment ceremony -- with no legal standing whatsoever. Neither a ceremony nor the undeniable fact of their commitment nor a set of civil union papers makes Robin and Barb married in the eyes of the law. In the eyes of the hospital where Barb went for her cancer screening 11 years later, she was single.

Which is why, for Robin and Barb, for their beautiful children Maya and Joshua, and for everyone who wept and danced that day, and everyone who watched and waited and helped support them through Barb's successful bout with breast cancer, the story isn't over.

And which is why, with 7 other same-sex couples, Robin and Barb are part of a lawsuit against the state of Connecticut for the right to marry. And why I'm glad to have a place to tell the story, proud to tell it, and eager to write a happy ending to it.

But meanwhile, you can read more about Robin and Barb here and here -- there's also a great picture; Robin's the little one on the right and here. And hear an extensive discussion of the lawsuit (including a few words from Robin and Barb) here.

But I suppose it was to be expected, since I had to post three times on The Spice Tea Party, and once on History Hoydens in April. And for my next trick, I'm supposed to be posting at both blogs this Friday. That's after I read at Good Vibrations Thursday night with erotic author Dahlia Schweitzer (click here for more details, but also note the excellent, latebreaking news that the splendiferous Carol Queen will be introducing us).

But what's this, I hear you legions of Nerd City stalwarts protesting. This is supposed to be Nerd City day -- not self-promotion day -- at Pam Rosenthal Dot Com.

Though this being the web, one could make a case that it's always self-promotion day. Just saying that one could, of course. Here, have a smiley: ;-} S'alright? S'alright.

Well, this month I was going to try to pick out a quote from Eve Sedgewick, because I'm fascinated by her ideas about what she calls 'homosexual panic' -- which is what the rest of us usually call male heterosexuality. I was going to try to find something to quote that would shed some light on the current rage for m/m or m/f/m scenes in romance-inflected erotica.

But Sedgewick writes difficult, tricky sentences. And I'm not completely sure what I think about this yet, how to negotiate the scylla and charybdis of preference and prejudice, or how many smilies I might find myself in need of while I try to work it all out.

So instead I'm going to link to a series of nerdish pronouncements by no one but... myself. Or Molly Weatherfield, to be more precise. Because Kate Pearce interviewed Molly yesterday, at Lust Bites, where they were so nice to me that I felt quite comfortable being my Theory Girl self.

Do check it out. I enjoyed it a lot, so might you, and so did romance scholar Eric Selinger, who quoted me enthusiastically at Teach Me Tonight, even exclaiming, along with Dracula's Dr. Van Helsing, that 'There is work, wild work, to be done!' and even -- I love this -- linking to Bram Stoker's text (though I'm constrainted to point out that the exclamation point isn't in the original).

Which quote, sans exclamation point, is now adorning the rim of my computer monitor, along with several less good but still-inspirational messages from fortune cookies. With all my thanks to Eric Selinger, and to Kate Pearce and her bloggies too.

Later,

Best,

And so I took comfort by disappearing into Lisa Kelypas's Someone to Watch Over Me. Which got me thinking about mistaken identity, a theme that figures prominantly in that book and has appeared in popular entertainment for centuries - and about the theme's implications for the age-old human problem of knowing oneself...

Leading me back to what Quentin Tarantino has to say about true identity and social roles in a movie I like a whole lot, Kill Bill 2.

Though if you're curious about my initial stunned reaction to the nomination call, you can check it out at The Spiced Tea Party.

Bringing me (rather clumsily, but hey it's only almost a blog) to this riotous video about the movie 300, the link having been sent to me by crumpet strumpet (as we call ourself at the Tea Party), Jane Lockwood.

The other weak connecting thread here being that as I recently posted at my other home in the blogosphere, History Hoydens, I've recently become hooked on Classics (because the hero of the book I'm currently writing is a Regency-era classicist/archeologist).

But I think the YouTube video has probably given me all I need of 300 and its particular exercises in subtext. And anyhow, I haven't even finished Season I of Rome on DVD yet.

And then there is (as I keep mentioning, don't I?) the business of getting back to work on my own next book.

So bye for now, and thanks for all the RITA-nod congrats.

Halfway through, we're batting 1000. Or perhaps 1010, if you count the Festival Trailer, which can get by clicking here (I love the restrained hilarity and the giddy Chinese dragons).

It was Michael who taught me to love film festivals, for their wonderful serendipity and surprises. It's great to open your eyes to entirely new ways of looking at the world, and to discover these visions before they've been pre-digested by the publicity machine.

Of course, you always get some clinkers, but this time -- at least this far -- we haven't.

All three movies we've seen have been delights, but the one I particularly recommend, if you're ever lucky enough to get a chance to see it, is the stunning Summer Palace.

It's about youth and passion at the time of the 1989 democracy demonstrations (and subsequent repression) at Tienanmen Square. But that pallid description doesn't begin to capture this kalaidescopic portrayal of what it must have been like to be 18, coming from a small provincial town to Beijing University at a time when the world was splitting open to reveal daunting, dizzying (and sometimes destructive) vistas of intellectual and erotic freedom.

Or as the Festival's description describes it:

Certainly the most erotic and sexually explicit film to come from mainland China, SUMMER PALACE is ground-breaking in its scope, ambition and poeticism, brilliantly capturing the euphoria of liberation and the dissolution of idealism that marked this period of time.

At the film's core is the stormy, passionate relationship between Yu Hong (Hao Lei) and Zhou Wei (Guo Xiaodong), students at Beijing University. Narrated by Yu, the film begins with her arrival in Beijing in 1987 and meeting with Zhou. Their sexual connection, charged by the developing political landscape just outside of their dorms, ignites as the two struggle to find a place in a world where the consequences of actions are momentarily suspended. Still young when the tumultuous events of Tiananmen Square transpire, the crackdown's haunting aftermath tears their lives apart. Over the next decade, lovers and time intervene against a relationship which will linger and fade, but never disappear.

Lou's films are unlike any of those of his fellow Sixth-Generation Chinese filmmakers. Restless, dynamic and sensual, they are indebted more to his French contemporaries in sensibility and style, showcasing a singular humanism, potent sexuality and blunt political force. Hao Lei and Guo Xiaodong give magnetic performances, both possessing a beauty and intensity that is impossible not to stare wide-eyed at. SUMMER PALACE is an astonishing and unforgettable masterpiece.

Though I will add the caveat that the story is epic and lifelike enough sometimes to lack coherence. And no, it's not a movie for the HEA fetishists among you.

But the emotions rang shockingly, touchingly true for me and Michael both, and the the life-changing rush of openness and vulnerability will be with us for a very long time.

The Chinese government, by the way, has withdrawn permission from the director, Lou Ye, to make films for the next five years, though it's not clear whether they were objecting to the democracy moviement politics or the full frontal nudity -- or perhaps the dazzling combination of freedoms.

We are awed and grateful to this splendidly youthful and energetic film festival -- and hey, let's play that trailer again.

Hope I find the time to write more about the wonders we're seeing.

Till then,

Best,

But the inner nerd needs her place in the sun too. So here, today, some excellent, relevent, and provocative commentary from Against Love: A Polemic, by the brilliant Laura Kipnis, pp. 61-62:

Fond as we are of projecting our own emotional quandaries backward through history, construing vivid costume dramas featuring medieval peasants of biblical courtesans tormented by our own longings and convoluted desires, sharing their feelings and dissecting their motives with the post-Freudian savvy of lifelong analysands, at least consider the fundamental social differences that provided the texture of premodern personal life: for instance the near total absence of privacy prior to the eighteenth century...

But it may be that other things have changed less than we like to imagine. However much the decline of arranged marriages is held up in the part of the globe as a sign of progress and enlightenment... this story starts to unravel if you look too closely. Economic rationality was hardly eliminated when individuals began choosing their own mates instead of leaving the job to parents; it plays as much of a role as ever. Despite all the putative freedom, the majority of us select partners remarkably similar to ourselves -- economically, and in social standing, education, and race....(Exchange value includes your looks, of course. Look closely at newspaper engagement announcement photos... and you will note that virtually every couple is quite precisely matched for degree of physical attractiveness.) Scratch the romantic veneer, and we're hard-hosed realists armed with pocket calculators, calipers, and magnifying glasses.

Damn she's smart. I've always rather worried about the emotional anachronisms in my romances, but I never thought about that self-imposed hard-nosed Jane Austen realism with which we love and marry nowadays. Interesting, no?

More Later.

Best,

But as to Carol's wide-ranging and bracing speculations... hint (remember my nerd corner post a few weeks ago) ... might it be because our contemporary culture has created a new kind of orthodoxy of women's sexuality? And might we in the Happy Ever After story business be a wee bit culpable here? And might some of us be trying to think and write our ways through these quiddities ourselves? (hint: you're invited to The Spiced Tea Party for laughter, confidences, and some sexy, bracing thinking on these and related issues).

Stay Tuned. Much more later,

But having said all that, I must now unsay it. Because Valentine's Day must be pretty good after all, if it occasions such wonders as Robert Pinsky's post on Slate.com today of these Great Poems About Sex. May your clicking fingers run, not walk, through cyberspace to them right now.

And happy Valentine's Day.

Love,

But, as ever, we can also laugh with her, as she appeared in this hilarious video, even if it means (the horror, the horror) that you’ll need to also find out how (or not) to buy a dildo in Texas where it’s illegal to do so. (Hugs and thanks to the indispensable Susie Bright for posting the link on her blog.)

May the universe bless Molly Ivins and inspire more of us to fight the good fight.

And may I and my pals have some wicked fun this summer in Dallas, at the Romance Writers of America Convention, doing a little video-inspired shopping of our own. Readers from Dallas, please tell me where I can go, to not buy a dildo in your fair city.

And while we’re talking about movies – are any of you out there as gaga as I am about movies of the 'Diane Keaton gets older, looks even more fabulous' genre? No matter how cutesy, midcult, or just plain horribly written they are, I love these movies, for the opportunity to fantasize looking that great when I get to be her age. Oh wait… I am her age. Ne-e-e-ever mind... Just read this far more articulate take on Keaton and her recent movies from Slate.com.

And that’s all, folks, at least for now.

Come back soon.

Best,

Every first of the month, I'm going to put up a quote or a few thoughts that no one but my inner nerd and perhaps a few other nerds out there will find fascinating.

This month, it's a quote from p. 71 of Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, a book of the brilliant everything-you-thought-you-knew-is-wrong variety that I'm a little more skeptical of now than I was when I first read it ten years ago.

Except that... the following is so absolutely germane to Carrie's Story and Safe Word that I have to take it seriously:

...all the stories told to oneself and to others, so much curiosity, so many confidences offered in the face of scandal, sustained -- but not without trembling a little -- by the obligation of truth; the profusion of secret fantasies and the dearly paid right to whisper them to whoever is able to hear them; in short, the formidable 'pleasure of analysis' (in the widest sense of the latter term) which the West has cleverly been fostering for seveal centuries: all this constitutes something like the errant fragments of an erotic art that is secretly transmitted by confession and the science of sex.

And if it seems weird. Well, it's only once a month. There will be friendlier posts, I promise. Like one about dancing. Soon.

Best,

The great short story writer Tillie Olsen died on January 1, and at 5:00 AM a week later, I woke myself out of sleep with words of hers that I didn’t know I remembered.

A few short, simple words, I hasten to add, rather than one of the aching, chiseled phrases from Tell Me a Riddle, her story collection. What came back to me in sleep was baby talk, from a lesser, fragmentary work – Yonnondio: From the Thirties, the novel begun when Olsen, then Tillie Lerner, was nineteen years old.

What I heard was I can do! I!

No doubt I heard these words in response to my own anxieties about what I can do, next, as a writer. Which is fitting, because over the years Tillie Olsen’s life and words have been a constant source or inspiration to writers, particularly female writers, under duress.

But these days I can’t even be sure you’ve heard of her: lifelong socialist activist; mother of four; in the early 1970s a beacon to a generation of feminist scholars and writers. And first and foremost, author of four luminous short stories that, as one of the cover blurbs of Tell Me a Riddle says, 'will be read as long as the American language lasts.' I can only hope so. Right now, I don’t think all four stories are in print. Luckily, the best two – the first and the last, 'I Stand Here Ironing' and 'Tell Me a Riddle' are easily available in collections.

Her published output was small, fragmentary, idiosyncratic: Yonnondio, the reconstructed unfinished novel novel; Silences, a collage of quotes and commentary about the writing process and its vicissitudes; and, once again, the stories that constitute Tell Me a Riddle.

To find out more about her life, you can click on this link to the obituary Tillie Olsen’s four daughters wrote for her last week. If you want something more analytical, try Constance Coiner’s searching, clear-eyed investigation of Olsen’s take on the demands and joys of marriage, motherhood, and family; of passionate political involvement; and no less passionate literary aspiration, achievement, frustration.

An early chapter from Yonnondio was published in a 1934 Partisan Review and hailed as 'an unmistakable work of early genius.' But – for many reasons and through many exigencies – the author abandoned the work and believed she’d lost the manuscript until many years later. Piecing together the rediscovered drafts and notes, Olsen appended a note to the reclaimed text, published in 1973: 'In this sense — the choices and omissions, the combinings and reconstruction — the book ceased to be solely the work of that long ago young writer and, in arduous partnership, became this older one’s as well.'

I find myself pausing as I type the words arduous partnership – the sonorous slant rhyme of it so unmistakably Tillie Olsen - before returning to her younger words (the ones that woke me up). The final scene of the extant manuscript: a view of a mother and baby, a desperately poor Chicago working family, some of the older children taken sick, on a nightmarishly hot summer evening after a near-hallucinatory day of jelly-making:

Flies bumble and fry in the lamp; peach and amber jars of jelly and fruit cover every surface.Anna sits at last, holding Bess at the kitchen table, singing with heat-cracked lips 'I Saw a Ship a-Sailing,' waiting for Will to come home so that the lights can go out and the trying-to-sleep time can begin again. I Saw a Ship… It is all heat delirium and near suffocation now.

Bang!

Bess has been fingering a fruit-jar lid – absently, heedlessly dropped it – aimlessly groping across the table, reclaimed it again. Lightning in her brain. She releases, grabs, releases, grabs. I can do. Bang! I can do. I! A Neanderthal look of concentration is on her face. That noise! In triumphant, astounded joy she clashes the lid down. Bang, slam, whack. Release, grab, slam, bang, bang. Centuries of human drive work in her; human ecstasy of achievement, satisfaction deep and fundamental as sex: I achieve, I use my powers; I! I! Wilder, madder, happier the bangs. The fetid fevered air rings with Anna’s, Mazie’s, Ben’s laughter; Bess’s toothless, triumphant crow. Heat misery, rash misery transcended

Typing out the passage, I wondered whether I really needed to send you to the biography to find the life – or to find life. Olsen’s fiction teems with it. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny: recurring concerns writ large and small nestle within each other like fractals, setting their rhythmic stamp on the phrases and sentences. Themes and obsessions exist in embryo, in the writing’s infancy, in baby Bess crashing down the jar lid.

Human potentiality was Tillie Olsen’s overarching story – aspiration and frustration, memory, rediscovery, and recapitulation – human potentiality crushed or resurgent but never sentimentalized (at least in the stories themselves, if not always in the discussion that surrounded them).

I remember the shock to my own uneducated sensibilities, upon first encountering the penultimate sentences of 'I Stand Here Ironing.' I was in my twenties, grown up in the vitamin-enriched sunshine of post-war, mid-century, suburban upward mobility. Olsen’s narrative is a mother’s meditation on an oldest child, born during the great depression, a child of anxious, not proud love, her gifts not always encouraged. The child is almost a young woman now (You do not guess how new and uneasy her tenancy in her now-loveliness). Thought slow and ordinary in her early years, she now shows a rare talent for performance; a teacher (the you of the sentence I cited) wants to help her.

Of course, I thought, it’ll all come out okay now, my unformed younger self the like a deer caught in the headlights of Olsen’s prose, naively unprepared for the elegiac wisdom of what comes next: Let her be. So all that is in her will not bloom – but in how many does it? There is still enough left to live by.

A final sentence follows, turning on a harsh, touching metaphor so inevitable as to be almost but not quite redemptive. But you should read it for yourself, in the living metrics of the entire story. As for me, I’m still catching my breath, still trying to make sense of the paradoxes of waste and fulfillment, time and generation, that articulate this writing.

Time and generation. Writerlike (and not, I suspect, in a good way), I find myself seeking out novel words of praise. 'Timeless' hovers into view; I bat it away like a mosquito. These stories are suffused with time, their sentences moving to its rhythms, their protagonists simultaneously ravaged by it, starved for it. And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total? Trapped in the inadequate scale of human separation and limitation, that’s exactly what these characters, these narrators and their author try to do – to find a story true and yet commonplace enough to account for the passing of damaged, flawed people through inexorable time, resonant enough to account for their stray glimpses of lost, better possibility, just hopeful enough to keep faith with the generations to come.

In the years since the stunning moment of education I was afforded by 'I Stand Here Ironing,' I’ve tried to learn how a novel, a story, a sentence can (must!) account for the passing of time. I’ve navigated Proust’s big sentences, their collusion of senses and tenses in the service of the mysteries of involuntary memory, the impossible necessity of living your life and having it too. I’ve written a romance novel that didn’t honor the rules of fast-moving genre narrative (some readers liked it, some didn’t). I’ve gotten older myself (aging more quickly as I read the comments from those who didn’t like that book).

Returning to Olsen’s stories after these voyages, I find myself more awed and astonished than when I first set out. 'Tell Me a Riddle,' the title story of the collection, is the narrative of a death: what's sensed, known, and remembered coalescing into shapes of breathtaking complexity and originality, as though encoded into the long-chained molecules that build life.

Sick and angry, the dying old woman reluctantly attends a community sing, in the shabby old people’s community near Santa Monica Pier.

So it is that she sits in the wind of the singing, among the thousand various faces that become age.

She feels rather than hears the wind of the singing because she’s turned off her hearing aid (as she would have wished to turn off sight). But it also seems to me that she feels the storm that blows behind Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, piling up the refuse of human suffering. And within the macrocosm of history curls the microcosm of the unique self: for this old woman, it’s the wind blown through flutes, the memory of the day she first heard music.

While from floor to balcony to dome a bare-footed sore-covered little girl threaded the sound-thronged tumult, danced an ecstasy of grimace to flutes that scratched at a cross-roads village wedding

The long chain of synaesthetic metaphor takes yet another turn. The little girl of memory floats from floor to balcony to dome, but history, experience, and life have weight, irrevocability.

Yes, faces became sound and the sound became faces; and faces and sound became weight – pushed, pressed

Pushed, pressed…Yes I know, it’s weighty stuff – particularly to find on the almost-blog of a writer of lighter-than-air fiction, of happy-ever-after endings (for better or worse, and armored now with doubt and irony, my younger sensibility will be with me to the end).

But my task, my responsibility right now is to remember, to thank, and to share the pleasure, the pain, the beauty of these stories.

Tillie Olsen’s family has requested that on January 14, which would have been her 95th birthday, 'people whose lives have been touched by Tillie gather with friends in their homes and public libraries to celebrate her life and to read her work together.' As it happens, I’m not at home today, or in a public library. But from cyberspace, in the gathering space of the web, I want to say what I can, in awe, in mourning and in celebration, and in gratitude once again for the words she gave us for our endings: death deepens the wonder.

This year it was only a little flu, for which we count ourselves lucky, because we were in Jamaica for the last week of 2006, and a few cases of malaria were reported in Kingston.

But no, it wasn't not malaria, it was just a touch of flu and the aftereffects of a vacation that was more than a vacation -- in fact, it was a FAMILY REUNION.

42 of us, to be exact, between the ages 85 to 3, in a big, eccentrically-run, almost luxurious hotel in Port Antonio, Jamaica, a lush, green backwater a three and a quarter mile drive on startlingly bad roads from Kingston airport.

Better, perhaps, to see it like being in a reality TV show, only (it being family) you couldn’t throw anybody off the island no matter how much you wanted to. Still, it was great to see my near and dear amidst a hubbub of dialog that might have been written by Larry David of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm.

While as for Jamaica (it was my first time) – it turns out to be gorgeous, under later-afternoon winter clouds shading from lavender to pearl to lead. Do go sometime if you can. My recommendations include Great Huts, where we didn’t stay, but where I would stay if I ever went back, Dickie’s Restaurant in Port Antonio, and just wandering around Port Antonio, in the markets, and up through the hills (where Michael and I finally peeled ourselves away from the other 40 family members and got a feel for the colors and rhythms of the island).

After which, as I said, the flu took over for a few days.

During which time, sadly, I heard about the death of the brilliant writer Tillie Olsen, whose great short stories you may not have read, but which you owe it to yourself to find, though, sadly, it seems as though only 'Tell Me a Riddle' is currently in print. And about whom I hope to write more soon.

But in any case Michael and I are healed from the flu -- and quite macho and strong, so today we helped Carol Queen and Robert Lawrence shlep bookshelves and such so that the indispensible Center for Sex and Culture can move to new digs. More about the Center and the amazing Dr. Queen soon too.

Best,

~ Picture 1 (no text) a barechested hunky guy, embracing a bosomy black-haired woman dressed in period gown.

~ Next seven pix: cute little pig reading a piece of paper, as he/she(?) wanders from breakfast table to outdoors to someone's house and in the front door:

~ ~ ~ Text of pic 2 (evidently what the cute little pig is reading, as will be the text of the next 6 pix): Gladys sat alone on a grassy hill, her jet black hair waving gently in the breeze.

~ ~ ~ Text of pic 3: A tall, manly stranger approached. 'I am Bob,' he said, in a tall manly way.

~ ~ ~ Text of pic 4: Their eyes met. Her heart raced. Her goose pimples got goose pimply.

~ ~ ~ Text of pic 5: Bob took her in his muscular arms. They kissed. They did more than kiss.

~ ~ ~ Text of pic 6: It was love. Passionate. Fierce. White hot.

~ ~ ~ Text of pic 7: And on a glorious moonlit night, they were wed.

~ ~ ~ Text of pic 8: And spent the next 41 years watching TV in separate recliners.

~ Picture 8: cute little pig confronts mouse (evidently a friend) at his/her computer screen. (text: cute little pig says YOU REALLY SHOULDN'T BE WRITING ROMANCE NOVELS, as mouse types He grabbed for the remote. She slapped his face.)

I hope you were able to get all that in my translation: I felt a little like Fiorello La Guardia, the legendary New York mayor who read the Sunday comics to New York's kids over the radio during a newspaper strike.

But you do get the idea, right? A little joke, une petite plaisanterie about romance fiction but not really at romance fiction's expense -- poor little mouse isn't really sure where to put the conflicts. If it's a send-up of our genre, it's a gentle and sympathetic one by an artist who understands that dying is easy, structure is hard.

Because it is difficult to put so much conflict before the final clinch and then ask the reader to accept the prospect of a lifetime of unconflicted happiness after turning the final page. I have gone so far as to imagine certain passive aggressive murmurings from Mr. Darcy's side of the breakfast table. 'And so your father intends a visit to us?' (pause) 'Another visit. So soon. After his last. Ah yes. Quite.'

Romance writing is much better at beginnings than at the ever-after endings that are supposed to be our stock in trade. For some brilliant musings on this, I strongly recommend you check out the 'Why We Read' post in a current discussion on the All About Romance Reviews Discussion Board. 'Why we Read' begins:

I suspect romance readers have a lot in common with rakes.... They both have a taste for beginnings...

But this is merely one of the many extraordinarily smart assertions and speculations in a the AAR discussion, which does center on The Slightest Provocation. (The comments about me are not entirely laudatory, I hasten to add -- the discussion participants are pretty well agreed that my technical reach sometimes exceeds my grasp -- but I found it thrilling to be discussed with so much intelligence and elan, and to feel that I've helped push the boundaries of the romance discussion. Thanks, ladies).

Perhaps at this moment I'm particularly taken by the striking and original comment about the affininty of romance readers and rakes, because it resonated with my December 8 post at History Hoydens. That post was about the Silver Fork Novels of the 1820s and 30s, which were always about bored, elegant gentlemen -- and which, I suspect, were as much a part of Georgette Heyer's arsenal as Pierce Egan, and which suggests a long lineage for the Regency hero as we know him (which gets really interesting if it turns out that he's the real standin for the Regency reader -- thanks again to the brilliant AAR discussion poster for that thought).

Anyway, I'll be returning to these thoughts, I hope, in future posts on this AlmostBlog (I've been away due to some health issues in my family -- but I hope to be back because I've got lots of romance and meta-romance issues to work through).

So please come back. I'm also (and perhaps simultaneously) going to be writing about Laura Kipnis's amazing polemical book, Against Love. Engaging with which, imo, is an offer that no envelope-pushing romance writer ought to refuse. Because it seems to me that maintaining a passion for the mythology of romance by taking on the genre's limitations and conventions might not be so different maintaining a longterm marriage these days.

Anyway, stay tuned. I promise to be back soon.

And do check out the AAR discussion. As well as Pearls Before Swine.

Best,