Category Archives: Stories and Writing

Addicted to Story

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I am addicted to story.
Poetic and dreamy as that sounds, the reality is not so rosy.
My first thought was actually “I am addicted to Netflix.” It was only after I’d given the matter more thought that I realized the problem goes much deeper.
This past year I spent a lot of time watching mysteries and detective shows via Netflix. This was partly due to having first one shoulder, then the other, freeze. Frozen shoulder meant that there were some months when my shoulder ached a lot and carrying out everyday tasks, like moving laundry out of the machine or putting away dishes, could get quite painful (especially if I knocked something over and tried to catch it with the wrong arm!). So I spent a significant amount of time distracting myself with Netflix. Sometimes I checked out audiobooks from our library. It would have been nice to spend the time catching up on reading, but repetitively turning or flicking pages seemed to result in worse pain later.
As I improved and could do more, I kept watching shows on Netflix. Sometimes it was sociable—I watched with my daughter. She knit or drew; I cooked or put dishes away. Or at least, I tried to.
Because that’s the point, the reason for this post. I cannot watch a mystery and follow a recipe without missing parts of the plot and, too often, missing parts of the recipe as well. It isn’t just the problem of turning away from the television either, though obviously that makes it easy to miss a crucial clue or facial expression. I’ve tried to clean while listening to audiobooks. There isn’t anything to look at while listening to an audiobook, but my cleaning still suffers noticeably.
The problem is that my mind cannot successfully follow a story and make decisions at the same time. If I am listening to find out whether the body in the coffin really belongs to the missing lawyer, I am not simultaneously deciding whether I ought to degrease the stovetop, or whether it would be more productive to clear the papers off the table. To decide that, I have to tear my mind away from the story—and while I do so, I miss part of the story. The story experience is weakened, and the cleaning takes much longer than it should.
The same applies to any task that requires attention. I had started a simple sweater that required nothing but knitting around and around for ages. That I could knit while watching a show.  Then I started a shawl in its place, because it was clear that I wasn’t going to be able to pull a sweater over my head for months, but I could still drape a shawl over my shoulders. (Eventually I had to stop work on the shawl, too, because the repetitive motion of knitting resulted in increased pain.)
But even though the shawl pattern was very simple and repeated only four rows, most of which were either straight knitting or straight purling, the shawl suffered from being worked on while watching Netflix. I kept having to rip back stitches because I’d missed the occasional yarn-over, or because I’d mistakenly been purling in a knit row.
So I know, from repeated and varied experience, that I cannot watch a movie (or listen to an audiobook) and simultaneously follow any but the simplest recipe or knitting pattern, or do any but the most straightforward cleaning (drying dishes, e.g.). I know this.
And yet, as I start wiping counters or pull out a soup recipe, I find I am filled with the urge to turn on the television and see if there is anything good on Netflix that I haven’t watched yet. Or maybe just watch a Poirot episode for the umpteenth time—after all, I can’t miss as much if I already know who did it. I really, really, really want to watch something! The idea of just cleaning or cooking, without the accompaniment of story, seems so… bland.
It wasn’t always this way.
Still, why am I calling this an addiction? It isn’t really, and the term gets thrown around much too casually already. I won’t suffer physiological withdrawal from leaving the television off. The urge to watch Netflix isn’t alienating me from my family—they like watching it, too. It isn’t interfering in my daily life… well, not much. Not unless you consider the number of hours I spent watching Midsomer Murders, all 116 episodes, even though it isn’t nearly as good as  Death In Paradise.
I’m saying “I’m addicted” because even though I know I can’t successfully combine watching shows with other tasks, I’m having a hard time keeping myself from trying to do so—over and over again. The lure is just too great.
Further, I’m saying I’m addicted to story because it doesn’t actually matter if the story comes in the form of video, audiobook, or paperback. Books tend to be less of a problem because I really can’t do anything else while reading a book, so I don’t try. (If it is an ebook, I can walk on the treadmill while reading it, but walking is automatic enough that I can do both successfully.)
Having said that, there are some situations where my absorption in a book does pose a problem.  If I start a book in the evening, I often don’t want to stop reading to go to bed. I stay up too late and don’t get enough sleep. That has happened many times.
Also, I tend not to be very responsive to my family when I am in the midst of a good book. My daughter will not let me forget one evening when she was young and I wouldn’t put down my book long enough to read her a bedtime story. I suspect I asked my husband to take over that one night so I could keep reading—I almost always did read to her—but that isn’t the way she saw it. That night, she and the book were in competition for my attention—and the book won.
Now we’ve reached the part of the post where, having outlined the problem, I propose a solution.
Umm, willpower?
Disconnecting the router?
A resolution not to watch/read/listen to any story that isn’t truly worthwhile, and to give my undivided attention to those that are?
Well, I’m still working on it. I would be pleased to hear from anyone else with a similar problem, especially if they have found a solution that works for them.
Till next post.
The much-abused pink shawl in progress.
P.S. In case you were wondering, that total is 174 hours of Midsomer Mysteries, or about a month’s worth of forty-hour work-weeks. And it wasn’t the only thing I watched.

Whodunits and the Untidiness of Real Life

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I like mysteries, both novels and television shows. I am particularly fond of mysteries with a strong “whodunit” element. This isn’t surprising. I love all sorts of puzzles. So naturally when I read a mystery, I want a chance to figure out what happened before the detective does.
Some fictional detectives are particularly good at deducing facts from the crime scene or from the way that suspects present themselves. Sherlock Holmes is famous for his deductions. Even detectives less sharp than Sherlock often draw clever conclusions from little clues–the unfinished cup of tea, the jar of pens on the left side of the desk, the two dirty glasses in the sink.
It’s particularly fun when the fictional detective suddenly realizes the importance of a clue seen earlier, and the reader sees what triggered his realization, without being told what he has finally figured out. In one episode of “Death In Paradise,” for example, Detective Richard Poole opens the blinds onto a sunny Caribbean day and … Aha! It’s time to gather the suspects. And time for the audience to figure out what the detective has just realized.
But there is something that troubles me slightly when it comes to making deductions from the scene of the crime. In real life, there are all sorts of reasons why objects may be left or arranged the way they are—reasons that no outsider could possibly guess.
Consider this photo.
 

Desk, partially tidied up.

What might a detective make of it? The computer mouse is on the left, but the pencil jar is on the right, as are most of the loose pens. Here are a few possibilities:
  1. The victim is right-handed, but the left-handed murderer stopped to check a file on the victim’s computer, moving the mouse to the left side for convenience.
  2. The victim is left-handed, and the murderer has moved the pencil jar—though it’s harder to explain this answer. Was he searching all the items on the desk for something? Or just trying to find a pen that works?
  3. The victim is right-handed but uses her mouse with her left.
  4. The victim is left-handed but rarely uses pens, so pushed them all out of the way (but then why aren’t they all neatly in the jar?)
The answer is (3). I started mousing with my left when I was having problems with my right wrist. By the time my wrist was better, I had gotten good at it. When I tried putting the mouse back on the right, I discovered something interesting. Since the number pad is on the right of the keyboard, if I put the mouse on the right while centering the letters in front of me, I am forced to extend my arm further out to the side to use the mouse than if I give the job to my left hand. So most of the time, I mouse left-handed.
(What else can you deduce from this photo? I’m curious.)
When detectives make their clever deductions from the scene, they do so against a background of expectations. They assume the victim would not carry around someone else’s lost earring in her pocket and accidentally drop it on the rug. They assume a person doesn’t make herself a pot of tea and then leave it undrunk simply because she had a sudden (but otherwise meaningless) attack of heartburn. If medicine is on the bathroom counter, they would assume the victim had used or planned to use it, rather than that she was making a half-hearted attempt to clean out the medicine cabinet. (People in mysteries are much tidier than I am.)
I love to read mysteries with clever deductions, and I love to guess at what the clues mean, just as the detective in the novel does. But I must admit that when we do so, we are both assuming a world without people’s quirks and particular histories. I wonder if someone has written a mystery that acknowledges this fact?
(On an unrelated note, it is annoying when an author gets his facts wrong. Ellery Queen mysteries are great at letting the reader try to puzzle things out, but in one, there is a colorblind valet. The valet’s master knows this, so he writes “red tie” on the list of what he is wearing that week when he wants the valet to pick out a green one, and vice versa. This not only misunderstands colorblindness—red and green would both have looked vaguely beige-y, I think—but it doesn’t even make sense. If the valet could reliably distinguish red from green–no matter how his subjective experience of them differed from other people’s–he would have learned to label “red” those things that other people called “red” and so on. Fortunately, the solution did not turn out to depend on this.)
Till next post.

"A Little Princess"–self-discipline, kindness, and imagination…and a bit of moral luck

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Even if you have already read the book A Little Princess, by Frances Hodgson Burnett, it is well worth re-reading. I picked it up again this past week to check a quotation and kept finding more and more to like in it.

 For starters, the book is full of lively descriptions. Sara’s wardrobe is enviable, with dancing frocks of rose gauze, petticoats with lace frills, and “velvet dresses trimmed with costly furs.” (14) There are comfortable rooms, with pleasant fires in the grate and soft chairs in which to sit, furnished with books and pictures and “curious things from India”. Later, we find ourselves in rooms in the bare and unwelcoming attic, with hard beds and whitewash flaking off the walls–but such a view of the sky and roofs! Sara herself provides lavishly imagined scenes through her story-telling–laughing merbabies with stars in their hair, fields full of fragrant lilies in heaven, and a sumptuous (though imaginary) feast.

But a story needs more than description, and A Little Princess has more. It has its heroine, Sara Crewe. When the story begins, Sara has just arrived in London from India, the only child of a doting and very rich father. But she is very far from the stereotype of a spoiled rich brat. She is well-mannered, kind-hearted, and very much in control of herself.

Frances Hodgson Burnett makes a particular point of the importance of self-control, and we see how Sara manages to restrain herself from unkind or ill-mannered responses, even when she has been much provoked. We admire her for it, and are delighted at how infuriated Lavinia or Miss Minchin is at being faced with such composure and steadfast good manners.

The restraint is not some magical innate goodness, but an effort that Sara makes–sometimes quite a difficult effort.

“Never did she find anything so difficult as to keep herself from losing her temper when she was suddenly disturbed while absorbed in a book. People who are fond of books know the feeling of irritation which sweeps over them at such a moment. The temptation to be unreasonable and snappish is one not easy to manage […] It must be remembered that she had been very deeply absorbed in the book about the Bastille, and she had had to recall several things very rapidly when she realized that she must go and take care of her adopted child. She was not an angel, and she was not fond of Lavinia.” (59-61)

Sara reminds herself that she is pretending to be a princess.

“If you were a princess, you did not fly into rages.” (62) 

Her imagination helps her with the difficult work of self-control.

Sara’s imagination makes her an appealing heroine because she uses it to tell stories to herself and to others. It draws the other children to her (in a world without videos or internet, a storyteller is much valued). Her imagination also helps her through hardships, as she can imagine more pleasant surroundings for herself–or if that is just too hard, she can pretend she is part of some dramatic and romantic story. Rather than living in a dreary attic, she is a prisoner in the Bastille, with Becky as the prisoner in the next cell.

Because Sara is so good at imagining how things might be different, she is also struck by the role of luck in her life. As she speaks with Becky the scullery-maid, she says,

“Why… we are just the same–I am only a little girl like you. It’s just an accident that I am not you, and you are not me!” (53)

At another point, she tells her friend Ermengarde,

“Things happen to people by accident.[…] A lot of nice accidents have happened to me. It just happened that I always liked lessons and books, and could remember things when I learned them. it just happened that I was born with a father who was beautiful and nice and clever, and could give me everything I liked. Perhaps I have not really a good temper at all, but if you have everything you want and everyone is kind to you, how can you help but be good-tempered? […] Perhaps I’m a hideous child, and no one will ever know, just because I never have any trials.” (36)

Of course, when her trials do come, she acquits herself admirably, but we can still puzzle over the role of luck (especially moral luck) in nature and in nurture, and wonder how one person comes to be so patient and determined, while another is self-centered and spiteful.

Sara’s strength and imagination would not make her nearly so appealing if they were not accompanied by great kindness. Sara is kind to the younger children and sympathetic to anyone who is suffering, whether they are suffering from hunger or from humiliation. We want Sara to flourish and be happy–she so deserves it.

I have two last remarks about this book. First, the movie they made of it some while back (set in America) makes a complete mess of it. It mistakes the crucial point. It is not the case that “all little girls are princesses”, as I believe Sara is made to say in the movie. It is true that being a princess is not a matter of wealth or birth or beauty, but Lavinia, for example, is clearly not a princess because she does not behave like a princess. She is neither kind nor well-mannered when things don’t go her way.

The second remark is that this is an old book, and while Sara’s kindness extends to all beings, the book still reflects to some extent some of the attitudes of its time and place. It is worth keeping in mind, but should not stop anyone from reading it.