The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Jason Bennion speaks about a subject near and dear to my heart: my book!
He was/is one of my beta-readers, and he provided a lot of useful comment regarding various matters within the book’s pages. In fact, I was on the fence about one entire scene until he commented favorably upon it, so that scene stayed. Anyway, hopefully that whets the appetite a whee bit!
Linkage!
:: Overalls should be large enough to wear a cable knit sweater UNDER them. Overalls should have wide enough legs to go OVER boots, not tuck into boots. (Agreed! Oh, and scarves go perfectly with overalls. I love my scarf collection and am planning to add to it.)
:: One of the shows I used to watch religiously was MASH. Indeed, I liked it so much, I’d often watch the summer reruns. But somewhere about season 8, I stopped watching the reruns. This article by Ken Levine, who wrote for the show in the later years, touches on why; they started, generally inadvertently, recycling plotlines. Why would I need to watch the rerun when the story itself was being replicated? (We don’t rewatch stuff a whole lot here, and I always get a bit antsy when binge watching. There’s always something new to find, but we do rewatch things once in a while. As for M*A*S*H, that show’s a bit fuzzy for me. I literally grew up with it; it was on the air my entire childhood until, I think, fifth or sixth grade. By the time I knew what it was about, I think it had gone on too long, and I never felt a great deal of fondness for it. Later on, though, in high school, I discovered through syndicated reruns that the early seasons really were all kinds of brilliant. Oddly, apparently there was a huge M*A*S*H craze at my college the year before I got there, and everybody was watching the reruns at 6:30 or something like that. Weird. This was over by the time I got there. Oh, and this seems as good a time as any to bring up a usual complaint: Where the hell is Season Three of Once and Again?! It has never been released in any format. I do worry that some worthy items will slip through various cracks and never be seen again.)
:: It deeply bothers me that we’ve basically erased all of the cultural gains made by The Cosby Show and a well-off suburban black family is suddenly a big mystery again, and too many white critics can’t relate to it if Dre isn’t trying to get the family to out-black themselves every week. (Speaking of teevee…I hadn’t even heard of Black-ish until this post. Shows how much attention I pay to teevee seasons at the outset; we only attend to returning shows we already watch, and then we wait to see what’s highly-regarded and/or becomes a hit. This was we avoid the “Hey, this is good! Annnnd…it’s canceled!” thing. I’m hearing good things about this show all of a sudden, though, and if it survives, we may check it out.)
:: What a tawdry, mean, ugly, unhappy time that was.
And it’s not just the reminders of what it was like back then.
It’s learning there was even more tawdriness, meanness, ugliness, and unhappiness than I remembered.
Or ever knew.
Like the sudden, sharp rise in the price of meat.
:: I watch HOUSE and believe I have whatever mystery ailment the patient of the week has. My doctor then assures me that bleeding out of my eyes is normal, just drink a glass of water. (This is funny because, in light of Roger’s quote above, we’ve been watching/rewatching HOUSE on and off for the last few months. We didn’t watch the show regularly until its seventh season; before that it was something we occasionally watched and enjoyed but never paid much attention to. Now we are picking up on some of the standard story beats, and of course, House’s lack of social skill is quite legendary and the dialog is whip-smart. Of course, there is a danger with HOUSE that sometimes we watch it expecting a fun medical mystery…and then it’s one of the sad ones where the patient dies. It’s good to have a comedy or two in the back pocket.)
:: From a storytelling standpoint, I’ll take The Mummy every time. (Michael May is blogging about horror movies all month long. Check it out!)
:: I am interested in the story possibilities of such a moment as this.
More next week!
Recent photographic dispatches from my little crazy corner of the world….
Dog shadow.
Yeah, we really need to find a natural predator for these little bastards.
I’m on vacation now, so I won’t be posting until Sunday at the earliest and Monday at the likeliest! Anyhow, a couple of things:
:: Hecklers can ruin comedy shows — but sometimes comedians get the last laugh. (Salty language alert!)
:: Inside Steven Spielberg’s JAWS vault. A look at ephemera from the making of the movie. Awesome!
:: Interesting video about hot sauce and hot sauce labels:
:: All 32 NFL team helmets imagined as Star Wars-themed. I, for one, would proudly root for the Buffalo Banthas!
:: Interesting article about near-death-experiences and what they tell us about dying. I’m not sure I totally buy into everything here, but I don’t know nearly enough to say one way or the other. I’d like to believe that something endures after death, but…well, there’s only one way to know and no way to report back, thus far.
:: The Baltimore Orioles are pretty cool in that when they do a post-game pie-in-the-face for the game’s hero, they don’t put shaving cream on a towel. A local bakery makes their splatting pies for them, out of real edible stuff. I respect that and partially root for the Orioles on that basis alone! (Although I think I’m rooting for the Royals now, since the Pirates got bounced by the Giants in the wildcard game. Get ’em next year, Buccos!)
:: Finally, speaking of pies in faces, you may recall from when I did the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge that I expressed hope that a pie-in-the-face challenge would come around next. Well, a bunch of them have been going on, pertaining to a number of ailments: depression and suicide awareness, Huntington’s Disease, Parkinson’s, Childhood cancer, and even cerebral palsy. (Obviously that last would hit too close to home for me.) Well, seeing as how a lot of the good in these “viral” fundraising bits of goofery lies in the idea of “raising awareness”, I was fascinated to see a pie challenge for a syndrome I’d never heard of before: Porphyria. This thing is both nasty and rare, so I decided that’s what I was going to do. Yesterday morning I launched my vacation by taking the Porphyria Pie Challenge.
:: Oh wait! Really finally: check out my Official Author Site, if you haven’t done so already! The ACTUAL TITLE is revealed!
That’s really it. See you all in a few days!
This book is a collection of stories and essays by Shirley Jackson, the great writer of often dark fiction, if not outright horror, from the middle of the last century. Jackson’s life seems to have been generally free of drama, which surely disappoints anyone looking for demons and skeletons in her personal closet to account for the apparent darkness her imagination often generated.
Jackson’s most famous works are likely the novel The Haunting of Hill House, one of the definitive horror novels of all time (particularly in the “haunted house” subgenre), and the short story “The Lottery”. This particular tale may not be as shocking today as it was when it first appeared in the pages of The New Yorker in 1948, but even so, I remember when I first read it, the mounting sense of dread in the brief tale, the disbelief of what it looked like the people in this little town were about to do. “They’re not going through with it,” I remember thinking. “Surely they’re not. They’ll turn back. They’ll stop before it gets to that.”
Reaction to the story was stunning and, often, angry: angry that someone out there might write such a thing, angry that so august a magazine as The New Yorker would print it. The reaction made its way to Jackson’s own mailbox, and she describes those reactions in an essay that is, in its way, maybe as disturbing as the original story itself. Here is part of “Biography of a Story”.
On the morning of June 28, 1948, I walked down to the post office in our little Vermont town to pick up the mail. I was quite casual about it, as I recall – I opened the box, took out a couple of bills and a letter or two, talked to the postmaster for a few minutes, and left, never supposing that it was the last time for months that I was able to pick up the mail with an active feeling of panic. By the next week I had had to change my mailbox to the largest one in the post office, and casual conversation with the postmaster was out of the question, because he wasn’t speaking to me. June 28, 1948 was the day The New Yorker came out with a story of mine in it. It was not my first published story, nor my last, but I have been assured over and over that if it had been the only story I ever wrote or published, there would be people who would not forget my name.
I had written the story three weeks before, on a bright June morning when summer seemed to have come at last, with blue skies and warm sun and no heavenly signs to warn me that my morning’s work was anything but just another story. The idea had come to me while I was pushing my daughter up the hill in her stroller – it was, as I say, a warm morning, and the hill was steep, and beside my daughter the stroller held the day’s groceries – and perhaps the effort of that last fifty yards up the hill put an edge to the story; at any rate, I had the idea fairly clearly in my mind when I put my daughter in her playpen and the frozen vegetables in the refrigerator, and, writing the story, I found that it went quickly and easily, moving from beginning to end without pause. As a matter of fact, when I read it over later I decided that except for one or two minor corrections, it needed no changes, and the story I finally typed up and sent off to my agent the next day was almost word for word the original draft. This, as any writer of stories can tell you, is not a usual thing. All I know is that when I came to read the story over I felt strongly that I didn’t want to fuss with it. I didn’t think it was perfect, but I didn’t want to fuss with it. It was, I thought, a serious, straightforward story, and I was pleased and a little surprised at the ease with which it had been written; I was reasonably proud of it, and hoped that my agent would sell it to some magazine and I would have the gratification of seeing it in print.
My agent did not care for the story, but – as she said in her note at the time – her job was to sell it, not to like it. She sent it at once to The New Yorker, and about a week after the story had been written I received a telephone call from the fiction editor of The New Yorker; it was quite clear that he did not really care for the story, either, but The New Yorker was going to buy it. He asked for one change – that the date mentioned in the story be changed to coincide with the date of the issue of the magazine in which the story would appear, and I said of course. He then asked, hesitantly, if I had any particular interpretation of my own for the story; Mr. Harold Ross, then the editor of The New Yorker, was not altogether sure he understood the story, and wondered if I cared to enlarge upon its meaning. I said no. Mr. Ross, he said, thought that the story might be puzzling to some people, and in case anyone telephoned the magazine, as sometimes happened, or wrote in asking about the story, was there anything in particular I wanted them to say? No, I said, nothing in particular; it was just a story I wrote.
I had no more preparation than that. I went on picking up the mail every morning, pushing my daughter up and down the hill in her stroller, anticipating pleasurably the check from The New Yorker, and shopping for groceries. The weather stayed nice and it looked as though it was going to be a good summer. Then, on June 28, The New Yorker came out with my story.
The letters, as Jackson reports, are almost entirely full of either confusion, distaste, or outright vitriol. Jackson rather drolly notes that one of the most terrifying aspects of writing is “the realization that they [stories] are going to be read, and read by strangers.” The people most moved to comment, in that day by mail, are almost always those most incensed by the tale, and Jackson also notes her relief that the volumes of mail she received, though large, likely did not constitute a reasonable survey of the opinion of the reading public. Small consolation, I suppose, when you’re the one whose mail is overflowing and whose own mailman isn’t speaking to you. But at least Shirley Jackson kept on writing. Her best work was likely still to come.
Oh, and if you haven’t read “The Lottery”, please do. If nothing else, it shows how effective a horror tale you can craft without one single hint of the supernatural. That’s quite a statement about human behavior and human nature – and maybe that’s what Jackson intended all along, when she tossed off this little tale which occurred to her while pushing her kid in the stroller.
Oops. In my defense, I’m on vacation now. Yes, that’s lame, but I’m sticking with it.
When in doubt, it’s best to go with something nicely, easily familiar. Like the “Light Cavalry Overture” by Franz von Suppe, whose overtures have long been a staple of concert repertoire even if the operas themselves likely haven’t been performed in many, many moons.
It’s time to start unveiling things about the book as we run up toward the release date, so we’ll start with my new Official Author Site:
There’s not a lot there yet, but what’s there is interesting…for instance, the book trailer containing the ACTUAL TITLE….
A friend posted this image on Facebook yesterday, prompting several interesting responses, mainly from folks who disagree with this notion. “Life isn’t a test,” the refrain goes, which naturally leads to the suggestion that it’s all a matter not of how you look at life, but rather, how you choose to look at life.
This sounds to me an awful lot like the idea that you can choose to be happy, that you can choose to react positively to any situation. Stiff upper lip and all that, lads! Buck up, it ain’t that bad! Cheer up! Look on the bright side! Life is so beautiful, how can you not be positive! How can you possibly feel that life is a test!
To which I say, Bollocks.
My argument with such thinking isn’t so much with the notion that life is often beautiful, because it often is. There really is wonderment to be found in this Universe, and life offers many amazing, fantastical moments that I would hate to miss. But life also tests us, sometimes unforgivably, often cruelly. My mother-in-law only got sixty years on this planet. My son got fifteen months.
Life gives one test after another, and eventually, we all fail. There’s a popular saying out there that “God never gives us more than we can handle.” I’ve never believed this, because it seems to me that there comes a moment for each and every one of us when God most certainly does give us more than we can handle. We call that moment death.
But all that is tangential to my main point, the annoyingly pervasive notion that we can simply choose our way to happiness. I had a boss once who liked saying “You can’t choose what happens to you, but you can choose how you respond.” And sometimes, many times even, that’s likely true. But it’s not nearly as true as a lot of positive thinkers like to portray. Choosing happiness over sadness isn’t like choosing steak instead of chicken, and I’m uncomfortable with the idea of putting the responsibility for sadness on the shoulders of those who are sad. It isn’t that simple, and implying that it is seems highly disrespectful to me — disrespectful of other people, their lives, their struggles, and yes, their choices, inasmuch as they have power to make any.
Life is a test, sometimes. And if you don’t see it that way, I wonder if it’s not because you’ve chosen to be happy, but because maybe you haven’t really been tested yet.
Odd and amazing stuff!
:: This is really cool. I wanted to embed the video, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it without also embedding the entire post, which I didn’t want to do. Anyway, it’s a performing artist whose medium is…bubbles. Seriously.
:: The CIA has its very own Starbucks. Working there is weird.
:: Good piece by Emily Gould on the act of quitting your job on the spot. Salty language alert, because Ms. Gould’s jumping-off point is an Alaskan teevee news person who decided that it was time to quit, so during her segment, she literally said: “F*** it, I quit.”
Editorializing a bit: What a self-centered jerk (the teevee lady, not Ms. Gould). I’m sympathetic, really, to the fact that lots of times, people are in jobs that push them to a breaking point, but it’s my view that quitting on the spot is rarely justified (as opposed to giving respectful notice). Quitting on the spot only screws your coworkers, and it’s an indulgence of self-pity that’s almost narcissistic. Plus, by saying f*** on the air, this woman put her station in a very troubling spot, through no fault of its own, as regards the FCC coming knocking on the door with a couple of buckets and saying “Fill these with money, please.” It was a jerk thing to do.
Working in restaurants and retail, I’ve seen my share of people quit on the spot, or simply stop showing up for jobs. It’s not hard to give two weeks, people. One boss of mine once told someone who announced that he was quitting that night, “You know, we’re closing tonight at the same time as always and we’re opening tomorrow at the same time as always. Same thing the day after, and the day after that. You’re not hurting the company at all, you’re only hurting the people you work with, and you’re only hurting them temporarily.” Another boss of mine responded to a guy who announced he was quitting because he wasn’t getting enough hours, “Well, if you’ve convinced yourself that working zero hours is better than working twenty-five, be my guest.”
Anyway, I’m not thrilled that this lady has become something of a folk hero. It’s kind of like a video that went viral of some high school student getting up and walking out of his class after lecturing his teacher on how she should be doing her job. That video got a lot of praise too, but I always wondered, What kind of student was that kid, anyway? Because he struck me not as a guy standing up for himself, but as more of an attention-whore.
More next week!
