Oh dear, leaving that suicide post up there is starting to seem morbid. So I will write a normal blog post, in which I say what I have been doing lately.

So. What have I been doing? I have been:

* removing ivy from my backyard. While we removed the ivy trees last year, there were still all these vines in the soil that I have been attacking on these lovely spring days. I never quite know what I’m going to find in that ivy. I have pulled out a half dozen balls, a plastic plane, a plastic boat, four baby snakes, beer bottles, rocks, bricks, and a big glass cube. I guess the previous owners looked at the ivy as a toy chest/garbage can.

* reading David Copperfield. Still! This is a long book. I love the characterizations. Also, Charles Dickens was really funny. I was laughing out loud yesterday. As a writer, I find this whole serial novel thing amazing to contemplate, even though Dickens’ coincidences are a little hard to swallow. One coincidence is okay in a novel, but by the fourth or fifth I start to get a little skeptical.

* working. I’ve been writing a lot of fiction lately. I’m focusing on a few key projects and not doing much journalism right now–I am only allowing myself to write about writing or books on that front. It’s weird and nice to focus on the artistic side of writing.

* watching Kyle work. He is currently finishing the edits on his book and then he is going to a conference and then he is going to start a whole new project where he teaches Linux online to students. He is very busy.

* getting ready for Puerto Rico. Things I plan to do: taste coffee, snorkel, look at turtles, see a bioluminescent beach, zip line, samba, and see old Spanish ruins. As you can probably tell, I am excited. I am also obsessed with biolumiscence right now. Because look:

Nick Hughes hanged himself last week. That’s sad! He was the son of poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. As most people know, Plath killed herself when Nick and his sister Frieda were babies. Sylvia Plath wrote the poem Nick and the Candlestick about him. I find it fascinating how family legacies, for lack of a better word, seem to go on even when someone is too young to remember what happened.

ETA: Geez, the British press is so irresponsible! Some headlines I’ve been seeing: “Sylvia Plath’s son Nicholas Hughes hangs himself, like his mother.” (Um, Sylvia Plath didn’t hang herself.) “His father drove his mother to kill herself. So what does the suicide of Ted Hughes’ son tell us about his poisonous legacy?” (Wow. Say what you really mean, why don’t you?) “Sylvia Plath and the child she killed.” (Yikes!) I’m glad that our press, whatever its faults, is more sensitive than that.

ETA 2: This is more like it: Why the Plath Legacy Lives, with commentary by Joyce Carol Oates, Peter D. Kramer, Erica Jong, Andrew Solomon and Elaine Showalter. Oates seems somewhat appalled by the media’s response too:

Ernest Hemingway, who would himself committed suicide at the age of 62, has the father in his short story “Indian Camp” offer an explanation of an Indian’s suicide — “Maybe he just couldn’t take it any longer.” A young person associated with both Plath and Hughes would have had to contend with the literary-journalist’s equivalent of Tabloid Hell; maybe he couldn’t take it any longer. (The kindest response would be a sympathetic silence on the part of the media.)

I watched the Twilight movie out of curiosity. At first I thought it was boring, and then I realized it was hilarious. I was laughing my head off throughout the entire thing. After all, it is little more than an adaptation of a sexless romance novel, and romance novels are funny. I still plan to read the books because I like to keep up on literary trends–I can only hope they make me laugh the way the movie did. For example:

* Her name is Bella Swan. HA HA HA HA really??? That’s really the character’s name? Beautiful swan????

* The part where he starts to make out with her and then he throws himself across the room and yells “NO!”

* The way the camera pans away every time they kiss and dramatic music swells.

* His skin sparkles in the sunlight like diamonds. Faaaab-u-lous!

* Even though this girl has the personality of a rock and is really not as pretty as her name would suggest, every boy in this town asks her out.

* The vampire plays sexy piano music while she looks on in amazement.

* Brooding looks. Seriously, they should design a drinking game around the brooding looks in this movie.

* “Cool. Let’s go fly in some trees.”

Mustard in a vineyard

This weekend, Kyle and I took some friends wine tasting in Healdsburg. We didn’t realize that there was this was the barrel tasting weekend, which means that a bunch of people had paid advanced tickets to go around to the wineries and taste the half-finished wine from the barrels. At first that seemed like it was going to make wine tasting more difficult and crowded. And while that was kind of true, it also meant that we got to unofficially hone in on the event and try some wine from the barrels for the first time.

Strangers have a picnic at Foppiano Vineyards

Tasting half-finished wine is interesting–it is basically sweeter than it tastes after it is aged in the barrel. Some of it had a flavor that I associate with bad wine, that kind of bruised fruit, unfinished flavor you get in some bottles of $2 red wine. Other wine from the barrel didn’t taste half bad, although the nose (smell of the wine) was kind of funky. Anyway, it was educational in that it showed me what the barrel does to the flavor, but I honestly don’t know how anyone can tell from barrel tasting whether wine is going to be good or not. I guess that’s a level of knowledge I don’t have.

Diane Wilson, winemaker at the awesome Wilson Winery, siphons wine out of a barrel for people to taste.

We went to three places, Foppiano, Wilson, and Arista Winery. I was pleasantly surprised by Arista, which had lovely grounds and a friendly staff. They were also the only place that wasn’t doing the barrel tasting, so it was kind of a relief to get away from the drunken crowds. We spent quite awhile at a picnic bench at Arista, enjoying the pre-storm light and talking. It was a fun day.

Chairs at Arista. Inviting, no?

Last month, we transplanted the nectarine tree that had grown up behind the garage. It was a lot of work and we had to cut the roots down to get it to fit in the hole. I wasn’t sure it was going to live, but now it is busting out in pink flowers, like so:

It keeps reminding my of that part in The Secret Garden when Mary discovers that all the plants in the garden are still alive. This part, to be exact:

“There’s lots o’ dead wood as ought to be cut out,” he said. “An’ there’s a lot o’ old wood, but it made some new last year. This here’s a new bit,” and he touched a shoot which looked brownish green instead of hard, dry gray. Mary touched it herself in an eager, reverent way.

“That one?” she said. “Is that one quite alive quite?”

Dickon curved his wide smiling mouth.

“It’s as wick as you or me,” he said; and Mary remembered that Martha had told her that “wick” meant “alive” or “lively.”

“I’m glad it’s wick!” she cried out in her whisper. “I want them all to be wick. Let us go round the garden and count how many wick ones there are.”

She quite panted with eagerness, and Dickon was as eager as she was. They went from tree to tree and from bush to bush.
Dickon carried his knife in his hand and showed her things which she thought wonderful.

“They’ve run wild,” he said, “but th’ strongest ones has fair thrived on it. The delicatest ones has died out, but th’ others has growed an’ growed, an’ spread an’ spread, till they’s a wonder. See here!” and he pulled down a thick gray, dry-looking branch. “A body might think this was dead wood, but I don’t believe it is–down to th’ root. I’ll cut it low down an’ see.”

He knelt and with his knife cut the lifeless-looking branch through, not far above the earth.

“There!” he said exultantly. “I told thee so. There’s green in that wood yet. Look at it.”

The New Yorker has an amazingly sad article about David Foster Wallace, who hanged himself last September. Apparently, Wallace was working on a book about boredom, which left him creatively blocked, and he went off his medications:

Wallace was trying to write differently, but the path was not evident to him. “I think he didn’t want to do the old tricks people expected of him,” Karen Green, his wife, says. “But he had no idea what the new tricks would be.” The problem went beyond technique. The central issue for Wallace remained, as he told McCaffery, how to give “CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness.” He added, “Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.”

In the late eighties, doctors had prescribed Nardil for Wallace’s depression. Nardil, an antidepressant developed in the late fifties, is a monoamine oxidase inhibitor that is rarely given for long periods of time, because of its side effects, which include low blood pressure and bloating. Nardil can also interact badly with many foods. One day in the spring of 2007, when Wallace was feeling stymied by the Long Thing, he ate at a Persian restaurant in Claremont, and afterward he went home ill. A doctor thought that Nardil might be responsible. For some time, Wallace had come to suspect that the drug was also interfering with his creative evolution. He worried that it muted his emotions, blocking the leap he was trying to make as a writer. He thought that removing the scrim of Nardil might help him see a way out of his creative impasse. Of course, as he recognized even then, maybe the drug wasn’t the problem; maybe he simply was distant, or maybe boredom was too hard a subject. He wondered if the novel was the right medium for what he was trying to say, and worried that he had lost the passion necessary to complete it.

That summer, Wallace went off the antidepressant. He hoped to be as drug free as Don Gately, and as calm. Wallace would finish the Long Thing with a clean brain. He entered this new period of life with what Franzen calls “a sense of optimism and a sense of terrible fear.” He hoped to be a different person and a different writer. “That’s what created the tension,” Franzen recalls. “And he didn’t make it.”

This is a long read, but well worth it. It effectively balances Wallace’s whole life, looks at his work, and gives some idea of what happened at the end. Very sad overall, and masterfully written.

Wallace’s unfinished book, by the way, will be released in 2010.