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I wasn’t going to answer this particular blog prompt because I don’t think I complain all that much. I suppose it’s possible I do complain at times to other people, and it might seem to them that I complain a lot, but since I spend most of my time alone, to me, those complaints seem few and far between. I do, however, tend to mention how fast time is passing, which could be construed a complaint.
January especially seems to skim by me with barely a nod to the passing days. By the middle of the month, I’m usually bemoaning the speed which the year is passing, and by the end of the month, I figure the year is all but done.
But not this year. This January seems interminably long. It feels as if the month should be over, and yet there’s still most of a week remaining. I don’t suppose it matters how fast the month seems to be passing except that it screws up with my internal clock. Also, I am trying to do a “dry January,” and having to be extra cognizant of what I eat is wearing on me.
[I learned of Dry January (a program started in the UK in 2013) from my sister who follows this program, and since I don’t drink, I decided to show my solidarity by eschewing sugar and wheat, with of course, the goal of trying to reset my metabolism and eating habits. (I always try to eat as healthy as I can, but I find as the year progresses, I slip more and more from my goal, and I wanted to give myself a good start to the new year.)]
I suppose my starting Dry January early (the day after Christmas) could be making the month seem longer, but the Christmas treats were gone, and so was the tree. (I wrapped the fully decorated fake tree in cushioning packing materials, stuck in in a heavy trash bag and took it down into the basement, ready to pull out for next year. It makes it so much easier to put up a tree when it’s already decorated!) So there was no reason to wait to start that particular resolution. But even given that I started the “dry” month early, there’s no reason for January to seem so long.
Oh, well. It will eventually be over, February will fly by, and I will soon be complaining again about fast time is passing.
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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.
]]>In an effort to find an alternative to posting here, I looked for book discussions, thinking it would be fun to talk about the story, characters, and implications of the various events with other students of the work, but the discussions fell into a few distinct categories:
Discussions during the long years while fans waited for a new book to be published, most centering on where they thought the story was going, and which are now defunct because the series of books is finished and the ending, or at least an ending, is known.
Discussions centered on who loved what character, and how foolish were those who didn’t like said character. That sort of non-discussion gets old, especially if you hold a minority opinion and don’t want to be lambasted.
Discussions about the end of the book, and how wonderful the ending was, or if not how wonderful the ending was, how wonderful the substitute writer was for writing it (ignoring the fact that he got paid, and even more importantly, that the project catapulted him into fantasy superstardom).
None of those discussions fit with anything I wanted to discuss, and anyway, most were many years old. Any newer discussions revolved around the now cancelled television series, and how terrible/wonderful the show was. (Terrible because it turned the story into something completely different from the books, wonderful because . . . well, because it was the Wheel of Time.)
I tried starting my own discussion, but only got the usual fan-type comments such as “I liked character A, I hated character B.”
I considered resurrecting one of my dormant blogs and doing a chapter-by-chapter discussion, but that didn’t appeal to me. I like the puzzle the books present, and I like that in some ways it is (was?) a cultural phenomenon, with many more millions of words written about the books than were actually in the books (the first book was published right around the time the internet, discussion boards, and social sites were just beginning, and the story happened to be geared to the age group that first embraced the online world). To be honest, I didn’t want to spend that much effort on what is really just a way for me to pass mental time. (Physical time, too, but I like having something to occupy my mind, more than the issues of the day or . . . whatever.) Besides, however much I determine that upon this rereading, for sure, I will read every word, I never do. I find myself skimming or even skipping the characters I find annoying and the parts that include too much torture, both mental and physical.
I make sure, however, that I never skim or skip some of the most lyrical of Jordan’s writing. At one point, a character got lost in thoughts of the past, remembering that “They danced beneath the great crystal dome at the court of Shaemal, when all the world envied Coremanda’s splendor and might.” That’s pretty much all we ever find out about the lost nation of Coremanda, but that one sentence is haunting, conjuring in just a few words a long-forgotten time.
And then there’s a song that the same character remembers from long ago, a song that seems to be a theme of the books (NB: the Aes Sedai are the women power wielders):
Give me your trust, said the Aes Sedai.
On my shoulders I support the sky.
Trust me to know and to do what is best,
And I will take care of the rest.
But trust is the color of a dark seed growing.
Trust is the color of a heart’s blood flowing.
Trust is the color of a soul’s last breath.
Trust is the color of death.
Anyway, that lyricism is beside the point . . . actually, no — it’s not beside the point, it is the point of my rereading the books. It’s just not the point of this blog post and my feeling I should apologize for dumping my thoughts on the books here.
So, if you want an apology, you got it, but it’s not truly an apology because a sincere apology connotes a promise of not repeating the offense, and perhaps unfortunately for you, I will continue posting my thoughts until I’ve finished this reread or until I’ve given up blogging again.
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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.
]]>All through numerous rereads, I never could understand what the bad guy did because except for the beginning and very end, he’s practically invisible throughout the book.
But then, I never paid attention to the reason things happened in the book but the obvious since they seemed to be isolated actions taken by various characters. This time, I’m looking at the things that happen, thinking perhaps they are the result of the dark side’s behind-the-word machinations. And now it’s obvious.
The “lord of chaos” comes from the real Medieval and Renaissance New Year’s tradition of upsetting the class system, where the peasants become the rulers and rulers pretend to be peasants. The person chosen to be the “lord” of this celebration was called the Lord of Misrule or the Lord of Chaos, and was often the least competent person around, adding to the hilarity. (Perhaps that’s why the Dark One laughed at the end of the book? Finding the chaos his edict created hilarious?)
During the book, a shepherd (the hero who is meant to fight the dark force during the last battle) leads nations. (He doesn’t become king for another 500,000 words or so.) A blacksmith and a gambler command vast armies, a juggler becomes a wise mentor, queens become maids, an untried girl is chosen to lead the women wielders of power. (She was chosen as a puppet, and the only reason this particular chaotic bit doesn’t have the desired effect is that the dark minions completely underestimated her lust for power. Once she gets it, she grabs hold, and never lets go until it finally kills her.)
Often the bad guys play both sides. For example, it’s minions of the dark that have the hero kidnapped and tortured, but also, minions of the dark that save him. Chaos, indeed! (Create chaos, but in the end be sure to let the Lord of Chaos live so he can rule!) We don’t find out until later that some of the people that are supposed to be on the side of the light are actually on the other side, which adds to the chaos. These people might have their own orders, or they might be victims of compulsion, or they could simply be incompetent, all of which adds to the chaos.
Besides, no one knows the truth, though all characters, all factions, believe they do know what is true. The hero is the devil. The hero will destroy them. The hero needs to be killed. The hero needs to be controlled. The hero needs to be protected until he is delivered up to the Dark One at the Last Battle. The hero needs to be put in prison. Very few people ever stop to realize that the hero is doing what he must, that if he’s imprisoned, he will never grow into what he needs to become in order to win (which could be what the dark side wants, but the light also wants the imprisonment because they don’t believe he will voluntarily do his duty), and despite the very large disparities of belief, they all act with utter conviction.
Do you see where I am going with this post? (Minus the hero bit, that is.) Although the book was written thirty years ago, it seems (spookily) as if I am reading an allegory of our times. In a world of short-form content and edited video clips, it seem as if very few people take the time to delve deeper into the background (or foreground) of events to try to find out the truth. Everyone sees what they believe is true and they act on it because for them, it is the truth. It’s as if we’re living in two distinct worlds where there is no overlapping, so while both sides can be saying the same thing (“the opposition is ignorant,” for example) and both can be acting according to their honest beliefs, they both mean completely different things and have completely different results.
Let the lord of chaos rule, indeed.
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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.
]]>This is especially true for the Wheel of Time books. I read an interview with Robert Jordan where someone asked if one of his themes was about women looking down their noses on men, and he said, “I’m not certain that I have a women-looking-down-their-nose at men theme; I simply have women that consider themselves competent in and of themselves.” They might be competent, but the truth is, whatever his intentions, almost all his women look down their noses on men, thinking men are nothing but wool-headed pieces of fluff who “think with the hair on their chests.” At best, the women seem indulgent or frustrated; at worst, contemptuous or even hateful.
In another interview, he said, “Egwene has had to give up the life that she’d assumed that she was going to live, and to adopt this other life in the name of the greater good.”
Some people do see Egwene as a heroic character, one who does give herself to the greater good, as Jordan apparently intended, but others see her as the embodiment of the dark triad of personality traits: narcissism (entitlement), Machiavellianism (manipulation), and psychopathy (lack of empathy). She pretends otherwise, of course, and sees herself as better than everyone else, especially better than the men heroes of the story. The men are all reluctant heroes, and they did have to leave the bucolic lives they led to save their village and ultimately the world. She didn’t have to leave. She just couldn’t stand that they were going to have adventures that she wouldn’t have, so she forced herself onto the expedition. All through the series, she lusts for power, seeks knowledge for the power it will eventually get her, and envies anyone having power she can’t have. Her ending is one of the few that actually makes sense in that senseless ending: She takes on more and more power (the power of the universe) until she destroys herself because she can’t let go of the one thing she wants. (Like the Gollum and his “precious” in The Lord of the Rings.)
Any good she does is purely accidental, a side effect of her power grab. Since she so often opposed the main hero, the one who was actually going to fight the last battle, once she gathered her forces, those who also opposed him, all he had to do was convince her of the rightness of his path, and then he held both sides (those who opposed him and those who were for him) in the palm of his hand. So in that case, she fulfilled her destiny, and died for the greater good, no matter what she was truly after.
And who knows, perhaps that was Jordan’s intention after all. To show that the reluctant hero ends up purposely choosing to do the right thing, and the gung-ho hero ends up only accidentally doing the right thing.
It’s funny that I think about these books so much. Most books are out of my mind as soon as the covers are closed, and rightly so. With too many novels, what you see is what you get. There is nothing beneath the thin veneer of the story, nothing to puzzle out, nothing to gain by ever thinking of them again. I’m still not sure if I like The Wheel of Time. There is so much that I don’t enjoy reading at all, such as anything about Egwene, not just her own point of view chapters, but also the chapters where other characters extol her (non-existent) virtues. Still, there are many, many layers in these books and I find it interesting to try to peel them all away to find the truth.
Assuming there is any truth.
Actually, that’s just specious. One particular truth shines all the way through the books, a truth that seems to fit our world as it exists right now. As Jordan said in an interview: “What you know as truth is not the whole truth. Sometimes it’s hardly the truth at all.”
Or as one of the hero’s mentors tell him: “You can never know everything, and part of what you know is always wrong. Perhaps even the most important part. A portion of wisdom lies in knowing that. A portion of courage lies in going on anyway.”
Or, as Bernie LaPlante says to his son at the end of the movie Hero, “You remember when I said how I was gonna explain about life, buddy? Well the thing about life is, it gets weird. People are always telling ya about truth. Everybody always knows what the truth is, like it was toilet paper or somethin’, and they got a supply in the closet. But what you learn, as you get older, is there ain’t no truth. All there is is bullshit, pardon my vulgarity here. Layers of it. One layer of bullshit on top of another. And what you do in life like when you get older is, you pick the layer of bullshit that you prefer and that’s your bullshit, so to speak.”
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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.
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Five things I do for fun:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Yep, that’s right — I don’t do anything for fun, don’t even know how to have fun. Even as a kid, I didn’t know how to play let alone have fun. I used to like paper dolls, but after I did the work to cut out the clothes and tried them on the dolls, that was it. I never knew what to do with them afterward. I remember once I spent hours building a small town out of paper, complete with houses and streets, but since I didn’t know what to do with it, I let my younger siblings play with my creation while I sat and watched.
(Apparently, I was born with that trait. My mother often told the tale of baby me and how my eleven-month older brother would play with my toys, and as long as he stayed by my playpen so I could watch, I was content.)
To be honest, I don’t even know what fun is, so I had to look it up. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, fun is “light-hearted pleasure, enjoyment, or amusement; boisterous joviality or merrymaking; entertainment”.
Boisterous joviality and merrymaking are not part of my makeup. I am quiet, the one sitting back and letting other people get rowdy or drink too much or “party” (whatever that is). On my twenty-first birthday, I went to a bar in Central City with a friend for my first drink, but she dragged a friend of hers along. I sat and watched the two of them get raucously drunk. Finally, I went up to the bar and started talking to the owner. Even though he didn’t know it was my birthday, he seemed to feel sorry for me, especially as all I did was order a soft drink. At one point he asked me if I wanted to see his new icemaking machine and I said yes. I know what you think: “Hey, want to come up and see my etchings?” But no. He was thrilled with his new machine, and wanted to show it off. So typical of me! (Typical, too, that I had to drive those two drunks home, stopping periodically so they wouldn’t mess up by new car with their retching.)
I read a lot, but for me, reading is not a “light-hearted pleasure or enjoyment.” I’m not sure it’s even enjoyment. It’s more of a thing I do the in the same way I breathe — as a necessity, a mechanical act that keeps me alive, something that supports calm, and keeps me centered. It’s just what I do. Sometimes, if the book is not particularly stimulating, I let my conscious mind follow the story while my subconscious deals with whatever problems I might have, or even deconstructs the story to see what the author did.
I also like to learn, but that fits in with the whole “reading” thing.
As for entertainment: the last time I had a television (until I moved here to my permanent home, I rented a room in a house that came with a television), I decided to watch Hallmark movies. I figured I’d never spring for television programming, so it would be the last time I had a chance to watch those movies. So I did. But for me, it wasn’t entertaining so much as a study in how to put together a Hallmark movie. So much time for an introduction. So much time until the meeting. So much time for the characters to get to know each other. At exactly what time the big breakup/misunderstanding occurs. And finally how long for the happily ever after ending.
Despite being a rather quiet and serious person who spends most of her time alone, I still do like to laugh and chat with friends, but sometimes days pass without my seeing anyone, especially in winter. (Sometimes it takes more mental energy than I have to make the effort. Luckily, my friends make the effort for me.) In the summer, when I am out working in my yard (again, not really fun for me, though I do like seeing the results of my work) I often visit with neighbors across the fence, in the alley, or in the middle of the street depending on where those neighbors live.
A friend posted on her blog that instead of making New Year’s resolutions or intentions, she’d heard of a different way to start the year: pick a word to be a theme for that year. Sounds nice. Maybe I should choose “fun”?
But no, if resolutions tend to set us up for failure, then trying to live up to a word that is not in my nature would set me up for even more failure.
I suppose not being “fun-loving” is something I should worry about, but I’ve lived this long without being able to list five things I do for fun, so I suppose I can live my remaining years the same way. And anyway, I’m contented, which should count for something.
***
Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.
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The books I want to read are novels with a new story (which is hard to find since it seems so many novels repeat the same old stories with minor variations) or a truly different twist on an old story. The characters in these new — or old — stories are loyal and kind, nice until it’s time not to be nice, have integrity, do their best and when they don’t succeed, try to do a better best in some way. Often these characters have a talent or skill, but the story challenges them in ways that those abilities don’t help, and in fact force them try to find ways to use their lesser abilities. (For a simplistic example, a person with great eyesight would be at a disadvantage in a lightless cave and would need to rely on their perhaps diminished hearing.)
These books are also all written with clarity and grace using words and phrases that are sometimes lyrical or out of the ordinary, but always clear and understandable.
The books are of various genres, but at their core they are all great stories with relatability and depth, a sense of wonder and perhaps a touch of strange. No category romance! And not much science fiction or fantasy, either. (A lot of fantasy starts out very confusing and quite frankly, I have enough trouble sorting out the confusion in the real world. I don’t need to bring more confusion into my life.) Some speculative fiction would be on the list of books I want to read, especially if the stories are rooted in an everyday world and only after the story is established does it branch off into extrapolated plausibility (or implausibility).
The books also keep me absorbed without nail-biting tension. Curiosity about what is happening is better for me since tension, like confusion, is something best left to the real world. In fact, if a book makes me too tense, I read the ending, and if the ending fulfills the author’s contract with the reader, giving a satisfying and fulfilling resolution (another thing that’s in all the books I want to read), I’ll go back and finish reading the book with a deeper understanding of the situation.
I’m sure there are other characteristics I’m looking for in the books I want to read, but for now, this will do.
Oh, you want the titles? If I knew the titles of such paragons of the written word, I’d have already read the books!
The truth is, although the books I want to read have all the elements I’ve just described, I read just about anything as long as it engages my attention enough to get through the first chapter. Besides, somewhere in all the sludge are gems just waiting to be found.
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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.
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A patrician during the Roman Empire was a person of noble birth, an aristocrat who had high social standing and owned a significant portion of wealth and land.
A plebian was everyone else — the ninety-five percent who did the work: farmers, merchants, laborers, crafts people, who had no rights and could not own land.
Eventually, the plebians managed to attain equal rights through protests and walkouts because a city could not survive, nor could a non-working aristocratic class survive when there were no workers to do the necessary tasks of keeping the armies marching, the cities clean, and the citizenry fed.
Still, throughout the centuries, those two words have held some sort of power. Although I was named after the patricians, I never felt “patrician.” I always considered myself to be plebian and my name ironic, though I am glad of the name “Pat.” I would not like being called “Plebe.”
Actually, I never really liked the name “Pat,” though I took that version of my name as an author name since it seemed to have a nice strong sound and connotation. I also used the name to introduce myself to new acquaintances, partly to help them find me online but mostly because I didn’t like giving my real name to strangers. (It felt as if I were giving too much of myself to people I didn’t know and perhaps would never see again.) When I was mostly nomadic, this pseudo-name didn’t matter. It only became a problem when strangers became friends, or when online connections became offline friends, and by then it was too late to change names.
My writing career, such as it was, has all but disappeared, so what I call myself doesn’t really matter, but it was the name I’d used for so long, that it seems convenient to keep it. The truth is, I no longer know what my real name is. Or if I have one. I spend so much time by myself, that there’s no need of a name. I just . . . am. (I once wanted to learn the names of birds; then it dawned on me that the names of birds were names we gave them, not the names they gave themselves, so it seemed rather a silly project. If you can’t learn the truth from the inside out, then looking from the outside in didn’t seem to gain much.)
A week or so ago, when I had just loaded groceries in my car, I heard someone call out, “Pat!” Since I didn’t associate the name with myself, it took me a moment to realize that a good friend was calling me from across the parking lot. (I recognized her voice before I realized who she was talking to.)
So, until I discover my real name, “Pat” is fine. Besides, to distinguish me from all the other Pats in this town — at least a half dozen of us — people identify me as “Pat in the Hat,” which is kind of cute. And accurate.
***
Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.
]]>When the quarantine hit, and the library was closed, I quickly used up my emergency stash, and ended up rereading The Wheel of Time series. I found I liked living in Jordan’s world, one that purported to be both our distant past and our even more distant future. Well, I liked the parts when they were traveling, not so much the parts when they were manipulating each other, torturing each other, bending each other to their will. When the reread seemed to work out, I started searching for other books or series I could keep on hand to reread. Although I tried, I was never able to get into any other fantasy series, could not relate to any of them. There were too many ridiculous unpronounceable names and even more ridiculous situations in never-were-could-never-be worlds, to say nothing of the often-execrable writing. I did enjoy Ender’s Game and some other of Orson Scott Card’s science fiction books, but none I wanted to re-reread.
Recently, I went through series I’d previously read, but this time, instead of picking up books haphazardly, I read them in the order they were written to get a better idea of the character’s story. Most were mysteries, most I’d read so long ago I didn’t remember the story, but none caught my imagination enough to want to ever reread again. Others were stories I once loved, such as the Mrs. Pollifax books, Dune, and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, but although I liked the first book in all three of those series, the rest didn’t hold up to my adult scrutiny.
I did order the Noel Barber novels — I couldn’t get Tanamera, Sakkara, and Farewell to France from the library and I thought a friend would like to read Tanamera since she’d grown up in the Cameron Highlands in Malaysia. I ordered the others because at one time I’d liked them, and as it turned out, I still do.
So that’s the extent of my emergency library — Robert Jordan and Noel Barber. It turns out that no matter how much I once liked a book, few of them have the depth or sink-into-ability that I need to enjoy rereading a familiar story. It’s just as well. I don’t like having a lot of clutter, and books I don’t want to reread seem clutterish to me. I do have a stack of books about alchemy that I inherited from my brother and haven’t yet read, but I’m saving them for . . . actually, I don’t know what I’m saving them for. A time when I have the mental effort to expend on them, perhaps, but at least they are there as an emergency stash for my emergency stash.
Come to think of it, I also have the books I’ve written, but I’m afraid to read them in case I’m no longer proud of them. But someday I might read them. Or not.
Are there any books you enjoy rereading? Any you love? Any you’ve read multiple times?
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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.
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I spent a lot of time thinking about this question because it seems as if there should be things in our lives that need uninventing, but I can’t think of any. There are a lot of things that have far reaching ramifications that I don’t like, such as generative artificial intelligence, but since it’s a direct result of computers and the internet, if it was un-invented, it would simply be reinvented.
There are things I don’t like, of course, but I try to stay away from them. It’s easy enough to do, most of the time. Keep the computer off, put the phone on airplane mode (as I do at night since no one is depending on me, and even if there were, there is nothing I could do about it that late anyway), don’t read books published after 2022 unless I’m familiar with the author.
Even though in some form, artificial intelligence has been around since the 1960s, models for the public like ChatGPT weren’t released until late 2022, and it seems as if the writing world has gobbled up the technology. People like that they can write a book in a day! Yay! Well, yay for them, not for me. I read to connect with the author’s view of the world, to find perhaps more depth to my own world. Connecting with artificial intelligence would not be the same thing at all. I’m sure, with time, generative AI will master even the complexity of human thought and emotions, developing novels that have layers to them, but I’m not interested.
Actually, I’m not interested in most authors who were first published in the past ten or fifteen years. There seems to be an underlying nastiness to so many of them, with unreliable characters lying in their own POV about what they did and about other characters, so the reader doesn’t know and can’t guess how appalling the unreliable character is until the end when you find out they were the bad guy all along. Eek. I don’t know if this is the sort of story new writers prefer or if it’s what editors are looking for, but either way, I don’t like being left with a feeling of squalor, as if there’s a thin film of filth on my soul.
But I am getting away from the point of what I would uninvent — nothing. On the other hand, if I could get rid of some policies, that I would gladly do.
***
Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.
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