The History of the (Whole) World

A brief note: The audio for the talk I gave at the RSA in London is now online, and you can listen to it here.

I’m getting ready to head into the final push of getting this medieval history manuscript finished up–due date December 19–which means that I needed to polish off a bunch of random tasks this week so that I can concentrate.

Let’s see…I’ve gotten the galleys for The Well-Trained Mind, third edition, out the door; taught a class on sonnet-writing; caught most of the way up with my grading; done four day’s worth of “Mom’s school subjects” with the kids (which is to say, my part of the home schooling load–we normally do five days of school a week, but one of the days was a complete educational meltdown–it happens); ferried teenage boys to two different social events; mucked out the pasture twice; researched the events in Mesoamerica and South America between 900 and 1200 AD; and…wait, there was something else.

Thank goodness my mother LIKES cooking Thanksgiving dinner.

Anyway, my focus has been narrowing over the past week, which means my usual multitasking abilities, already diminished by AGE, are declining EXPONENTIALLY.

So I’ve been collecting signs that my brain is shedding side-tasks which it deems unnecessary. You know you’re about to pop a mental valve when…

1. You walk back and forth to the garden several times, collecting vegetables for dinner, without realizing that the large brown creature snacking in the Swiss chard is NOT a dog, but rather an escaped pony.

2. While making bolognese sauce, you toss the ground beef into the trashcan and the styrofoam supermarket tray into the frying pan.

3. You carefully set the coffeemaker to go off at 5:30 AM so that you can get in some writing time before the kids get up, but you forget to put in either water or coffee.

4 You carefully put your Blackberry in the refrigerator and drop the cheddar cheese into the outside pocket of your computer bag.

5. You let all the library books get five weeks overdue and write the grateful librarian a check for $145.20.

6. After writing the check, you make three circuits back through the library looking for a missing child before you realize that they’re all in the van, so you must be searching for the imaginary child you never had.

7. You try to balance the checkbook the next day and notice that you haven’t recorded the last five checks you wrote, including the amount to the library you’ve now forgotten, so that paying the bills becomes an exciting roulette-type activity.

8. You say to your seventeen-year-old son, “Mommy’s getting ready to have a nap, so let’s all be very quiet,” and he looks at you as though you’ve suddenly dropped twenty IQ points.

9. Around 10 AM, you think to yourself, “Time for a hot bath and a glass of wine.” (No, I didn’t. I just THOUGHT it.)

10. You don’t just call all the kids by the wrong names–you end up throwing the dog and horse into the mix too. (”Hey, Ben–I mean Dan–no, I mean Fluffles–”)

My number-one hope for the next month is that I can get through to December 19 without accidentally setting the house on fire.

I opened the box.

Guess that takes care of next week’s free time…

Why I haven’t blogged for two weeks…let’s see…

1. We got Emily a pony for her birthday because the horses have turned out to be JUST TOO BIG for her to learn on.

So we’ve spent a lot of time working with the pony. Also Max, my Belgian draft horse, did not adjust well to the pony. He wanted to EAT it. Simultaneously we were having the fence replaced, so keeping them apart was an ongoing labor. Now, at last, they seem to have made their peace.

(Everyone eating hay, with Ben in the foreground.)

2. The election sent the message boards at the Well-Trained Mind website into an amazing tizzy, meaning that the moderators needed HELP. What a circus.

My personal summary of the styles involved: Troublemakers who are Republicans post nasty offensive messages on the board. Troublemakers who are Democrats send nasty offensive messages to the moderators. I finally got on the boards myself and banned all political conversations until the election was over. We’ve tried to lift the restrictions since Tuesday, but whenever we do, chaos sweeps over us. Unhappy Republicans post apocalyptic messages about how their children’s future has been ruined and they’re going to have to move to Canada (I’m unsure how this is better, but never mind), while offended Democrats post in return that they’re SHOCKED and HORRIFIED by the incivility on the message boards.

If you think I’m going to reveal my own political leanings here, you’re nuts.

Word to the wise on both ends of the spectrum: The world didn’t end (HELLO), and it’s easy to be civil and gracious when your candidate won.

ADDENDUM to word to the wise on both ends of the spectrum, after reading today’s batch of emails: Do you realise that you ALL think you’re outnumbered on the boards and made to feel unwelcome because the boards are so clearly dominated by the other faction? Think about that one for a little while…

3. Had to do significant work on the third level of the Writing With Ease workbook series to keep it on track for publication.

4. My sister-in-law/business partner and I had to figure out how to deal with a slew of irate customers who wanted to use First Language Lessons 4 this fall. This book has been a NIGHTMARE. I ended up doing a huge amount of unexpected work on the manuscript myself, due to circumstances beyond our control, and it’s way late. They’re right to be irate, but we’ve done everything we can…

5. I ended up writing several different pieces to follow up on the publication of the Art of the Public Grovel. One was for the Richmond Times Dispatch, which asked me to write about home education after this piece ran. Two more were for the History News Network and the Wall Street Journal…I’ll let you know when the WSJ piece runs.

6. I’m leaving for New York tonight to present the Peace Hill Press titles at W. W. Norton’s fall sales conference. More on this shortly.

7. The first-pass galleys for the third edition of The Well-Trained Mind appeared, courtesy of Norton.

Yeah, the box looks unopened. It is. It’s due back in a couple of weeks but I haven’t actually had time to open it up yet.

8. There are over a hundred unanswered emails in my email box. So far I’m coping by ignoring them, but this is a strategy bound to come back and smack me in the head at some point.

9. Oh, yes, history. In the middle of all that I wrote a pretty good chapter about the rise of the Fujiwara in tenth-century Japan. Must…write…faster…

I’m back from the U.K., sitting in the Continental lounge at Newark, desperately hoping that my connecting flight to Richmond will indeed TAKE OFF at some point. I meant to post again while I was in England, but what with one thing and another (”another” being spotty internet connections–”Oh,” says the charming young receptionist at the Cotswold Lodge in Oxford, “I’m afraid our broadband doesn’t work with American computers. We’re not really sure why”), I didn’t get to it.

So, to sum up: Did two interviews on the BBC (see below) and one with an Irish radio station that called me at our London hotel. Then, on Thursday, I lectured at the RSA, which is a sort of public think-tank–it has a roster of members who gather at lunchtime to hear a lecture and discuss the topic. They’ve had some very distinguished speakers, so it was an honor to be invited. (Also, they taped it for a webcast, which will eventually be up here–I’ll try to let you know when/if it makes it to the website.)

The hosts had decided to get in a U.K. speaker as well to do a response, since the phenomenon I describe in The Art of the Public Grovel is peculiarly American. The speaker they convinced to come in was Jonathan Aitken, a former Member of Parliament who went to jail for perjury in 1999 and has since gotten a seminary degree and now works with Prison Fellowship International.

Jonathan Aitken was very British and immaculately turned out and very polite and scrupulously kind and absolutely hated my book (I think that British men of a certain age display loathing and hatred by being very polite and scrupulously kind). He was charming and gallant and it was a little bit like being excoriated by James Cromwell in a very plummy accent.

He called the book “deeply cynical and judgmental”; as a man who has himself gone through the cycle of confession and redemption, he obviously took my thesis very personally.

I actually don’t have any trouble with the first part of the charge. The book is cynical, in that I think the confessions were carefully planned and scripted. I don’t think they were spontaneous. So I plead guilty. My sense is that in most cases, the initial reaction of any of these men was the genuine one, and that reaction was inevitably, “It wasn’t me! I didn’t do it!” Not until the spin doctors, lawyers, and speechwriters had had a crack at them do they come out with the beautifully scripted confession.

But I do object to the second accusation. I make no judgment as to whether or not, in the long run, any of these men sincerely repented. Jonathan Aitken accused me, essentially, of trying to “open a window into men’s souls” and evaluate the motivations of their hearts. In fact I tried very hard not to do this. I made no judgments as to sincerity in the book; it is a study of the content of their speeches and the effect on the audience, which is an objective evaluation.

In any case, I am sorry he thought so badly of me. He is clearly a man of Christian conviction, and I think he probably chalked me up as the enemy.

After the RSA, the rest of the trip was all fun. Thursday night, we went to see Kenneth Branagh in Ivanov–an absolutely devastating portrayal of depression (OK, that may not sound like “fun,” but it was Kenneth Branagh and he was thirty feet away).

Friday through Sunday morning we spent in Oxford, where I worked at the Bodleian while Mel toured, and where we spent every night eating good food with one of my favorite people.

So I’ve been to Broadcast House twice today to do live interviews on BBC programs.

Tonight I did Night Waves; you can listen to the program here for the next seven days…endure through the few seconds of dead air, as there were some technical difficulties right at the beginning of the program (and I’m not on until the last fifteen minutes, although the rest is fascinating too).

This was a live studio interview, with all four of us around the table…host Anne McElvoy, me, London South Bank University president Deian Hopkin (a charming man with much patience, and a native Welsh speaker), and A. S. Byatt.

OH MY GOSH, A. S. BYATT. She just walked in and said “I’ve had the most hellish taxi ride!” and I practically fell down at her feet. I had no idea that she was the other guest. A. S. Byatt has got to be one of my favorite novelists of all time, and absolutely the most faithful, insightful chronicler of women’s lives EVER….EVER….

AHEM.

So on the way to the studio I said to her, “I’ll probably never have the chance to say this again, but I loved A Whistling Woman.” And then after the program was over she talked to me! And told me that she would like to read my book! And waved goodbye and said, “Have a lovely evening!”

I am TOTALLY STARSTRUCK.

More tomorrow….

I’m sitting in the Richmond area, getting ready to fly to London for a handful of publicity engagements: a Wednesday radio interview at 10 AM on BBC 4, a Wednesday night interview on Night Waves, the BBC 3 radio program, and a Thursday lunchtime lecture at the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts. You can listen to the BBC broadcasts on the Web if you’re so inclined–just remember that the times above are U.K.

Updates as time permits. Got to get on the plane (and turn off my wireless).

Oh, and check out today’s Barnes & Noble Review!

Well, folks…I had hoped to finish the History of the Medieval World by the end of the summer, but I’m still writing away–which means that I’m feelingly particularly miserly with my time just now, since I scheduled teaching at William & Mary for this fall and also agreed to a certain amount of travelling for The Art of the Public Grovel. Just now every minute is devoted to 1) medieval history and 2) meeting my other commitments, one at a time. It feels a little bit like a video game. Not one of the ones where you’re travelling through a landscape, meeting and surmounting obstacles one at a time on your journey.

More like one where you’re standing in one place, fending off enormous objects that threaten to hit you.

Also I’m getting ready for a week in which I’ll throw two birthday parties (Em is turning eight, Dan is turning twelve) AND go to London to do publicity for the U.K. edition of the Art of the Public Grovel. Yeah, I know, it’s a tough life.

One of my goals for the next year is to move from “fending off obstacles” mode into “making journey through difficult landscape” mode. I’m not quite there yet. Anyway, you’ll have to forgive me if this week’s blog post is mostly links. Here’s the Page 99 Test, the Financial Times review, and a thoughtful Salon.com essay/review by Laura Miller.

If you feel like settling in for a fascinating long read…here’s a review-essay that just ran in The Chronicle of Higher Education, academia’s professional journal. It may not convince you to run out and buy The Art of the Public Grovel, but it certainly points out just what a difficult election season we’re in for.

(Clockwise, from top left: John Edwards, Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Swaggart. Photographs by Eric Thayer, Getty Images; Hulton Archive, Getty Images; Rob Nelson, Time Life Pictures, Getty Images; and Joyce Naltchayan, AFP, Getty Images)

School for Scandal

The truth and consequences of public figures’ libidinal lapses

By SUSAN BORDO

To some, our fascination with the sexual transgressions of the powerful doesn’t need academic theory for explanation. “There’s not much interest in foreign news,” says Mark Feldstein, an associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University, but “sex scandals are timeless. They go back to Alexander Hamilton’s day. And everybody loves it.”

Apparently I missed that particular history lesson. I am old enough, however, to have lived through both the conspiracy of silence surrounding John F. Kennedy’s sexual affairs and the semen-stained exhibits produced by the Starr inquisition. A television junkie from early childhood, I have a brain overflowing with pop-culture images like family photos in an overstuffed album: Donna Rice on Gary Hart’s knee, Ted Kennedy rambling on about the “various inexplicably inconsistent and inconclusive things” he said and did while Mary Jo Kopechne was dragged to the bottom of a channel off Chappaquiddick Island, Monica-in-beret on that meet-and-greet line twinkling at Bill. I have seen news programming bloat from 10 minutes long — barely time to ignore important foreign and domestic affairs in favor of sexual ones — to 24/7 broadcasting in which desperate commentators will do virtually anything to fill their overallotment of media time. I’ve seen good men get brought down by blow jobs and sociopaths get away with homicide. And I don’t think Professor Feldstein’s “timeless” quite captures the historical and individual range of scandal mongering and consuming.

Consider a tale of two politicians:

One, married to the same woman for 31 years, has a brief affair, which he confesses to his wife, a cancer survivor. She is furious, then forgives him, and together they try their best to keep the affair private. Two years later, after losing his campaign for the presidency of the United States, he is outed by The National Enquirer and is forced to fully admit his guilt. He is decried as a “scumbag” and a traitor to his wife, whose disease has by then recurred. He remains with his wife and family, but is exiled from public life. Although he was once a likely candidate for a cabinet position or possibly even vice president, commentators generally acknowledge that his public career is over.

The other, on his return from military service, finds that the wife he left behind, a former swimsuit model, has been in a horrendous auto accident, requiring 23 operations and leaving her limping and disfigured, a full five inches shorter than she had been when he left. After five years of casual affairs, he meets a beautiful young heiress, whom he secretly pursues for six months and eventually obtains a license to marry while still legally married to and living with his first wife. He remarries five weeks after his divorce is granted. Thirty years later, he becomes his party’s candidate for president. During his campaign, few articles or media reports mention the first wife or the circumstances of his remarriage. It’s as though she never existed.

You know who these guys are. I bet, however, that at least some of you didn’t know about Carol McCain, wife No. 1, and with good reason. It’s as though there is some anachronistic collusion — or mass delusion — sustaining the myth that the perfectly coiffed blonde, as primly glamorous as a Hitchcock heroine, is all there is and ever was. But you only have to count up the children, whose numbers rival Brad and Angelina’s, to see how unlikely that is. Yet most journalists, while they frothed in indignation over John Edwards’s dalliance with self-described party-girl Rielle Hunter, seem to have reverted in dutiful obedience to the JFK playbook in dealing with John McCain’s truly shabby treatment of his ex-wife. The September 8 issue of Time, in 17 reverential pages devoted to Mr. and “Mrs. Maverick,” mention the break-up, in a sidebar on “The Clan McCain,” in one euphemistically constructed sentence: “After John returned from the war their marriage ended because of his infidelity.” Oh, and it was “the marriage” that filed for divorce? (McCain exploited the same passive construction when describing his “greatest moral failure” — to evangelist Rick Warren, during his televised Saddlebrook faith forum — as “the failure of my first marriage.”)

Perhaps Elizabeth Edwards’s life-threatening cancer elicits more sympathetic outrage than Carol McCain’s physical ordeal, now long over (although, from the few photos I’ve seen, the ravages clearly remain). Maybe, as is suggested by the career of Ted Kennedy, who was declared “finished” after Chappaquiddick but is now revered as the conscience of the U.S. Senate, there is simply a statute of limitations on public condemnation. Or maybe McCain’s horrific years as a POW have given him a “get out of jail free” card that seems never to expire. (Maureen Dowd’s mother explained it to her daughter matter-of-factly: “A man who lives in a box for five years can do whatever he wants.”) On the other hand, there are those who are never allowed to get out of jail. Bill Clinton was stalked by scandal-hungry journalists on a campaign trail that wasn’t even his own, but his wife’s.

Two fascinating, recently published books offer more theoretically driven explanations as to why scandal sticks to some while sliding off others. Ari Adut’s On Scandal: Moral Disturbance in Society, Politics, and Art, which covers the gamut from Oscar Wilde to Bill Clinton, does not offer one theory so much as a reminder of the importance of historical and cultural context. In exploring “Sex and the American Public Sphere,” for example, Adut, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, eschews the tired notion that America suffers from a “timeless” lingering Puritanism to argue that the post-60s loosening of sexual mores (which, among other things, brought the word “penis” out of the closet) and the rise of “sexual politics” (read: feminists obsessed with men abusing women) are the cause of the “high frequency of sex scandals in American public and political life.” In virtually direct contrast, Susan Wise Bauer’s wonderfully titled The Art of the Public Grovel puts the blame on the growing influence — on the American psyche, if not yet manifest politically (her book is pre-Palin) — of evangelicalism.

I usually prefer complex, multidetermined explanations of events, like the ones Adut proposes, but Bauer’s argument is elegant in its simplicity — and surprisingly persuasive. The key that determines whether a sinner will be forgiven or flayed alive, she argues, is public confession of his sins. So, according to Bauer, the 1980 presidential hopeful Ted Kennedy’s big mistake was having tried to explain his state of confusion, panic, and shock when he abandoned the car he had driven off a bridge, leaving Kopechne to die, rather than simply admitting that his actions that night were morally reprehensible, and begging us, his congregation, to forgive him. As a result, a second Kennedy presidency became unthinkable. Jimmy Swaggart, in contrast, offered a “model confession” of his infidelities, virtually wallowing in multiple admissions of sin, and abjectly begging forgiveness — from his wife, his children, his church, his ministry, his Bible school, his fellow television evangelists, and his savior. It was like Academy Awards night, but with no one playing the “wrap it up and get off the stage” music.

You don’t have to be an evangelical to know how to grovel as effectively as Swaggart (Clinton, after some initial evasion, did pretty well, too), but it helps. For underlying the demand for public confession, Bauer argues, is the “kinship” between American democracy and American evangelicalism. By this she means not that American democracy is essentially evangelical, but that the antihierarchical, optimistic, “anyone can be saved” spirit of evangelicalism — expressed, among other ways, in the “handing over of power” to the group that the public confession enacts — “translates seamlessly into rituals of American public life.” In other words, Americans respond most warmly, our self-righteousness notwithstanding, not to moral purity (and unfortunately, not to competence), but to gestures that erase hierarchy — like public admissions of fallibility, like John McCain’s “my friends” mantra, and like Sarah Palin’s insistence that she is “just your average hockey mom.”

John Edwards, of course, did confess — very publicly, on ABC’s “Nightline,” on August 8. He begged Elizabeth for forgiveness, asked God for forgiveness, admitted his own “self focus,” “egotism,” and “narcissism.” So why was he disappeared, while Swaggart and Clinton — and, let us not forget, McCain — went on to have full and highly visible public lives? Neither Bauer nor Adut discusses Edwards (whose affair hadn’t yet been made public when their books were written) or McCain (even though his post-Vietnam philandering and the circumstances of his divorce came out during his 2000 run at the Republican nomination). Happily, this gives me the opportunity to test their theories against currently unfolding events.

In a nutshell, Bauer’s theory stands up (with a bit of tweaking) and Adut’s falters. While Edwards did confess, mere confession alone, Bauer points out, is sometimes not enough to show that you are on the right side of the evangelical ledger. Her prime example is Jimmy Carter, himself a neo-evangelical, who lost 15 percent in public-approval polls and was denounced by conservative Protestants of all stripes after he confessed that he had “looked on a lot of women with lust” and “committed adultery in my heart many times.” Carter was going for just what Bauer claims is the essence of American evangelicalism: admission that one is not immunized by power or morally above the fray, but a sinner among sinners. Unfortunately, he did it in the pages of Playboy, and his choice of words was not the wisest. “Christ says, Don’t consider yourself better than someone else because one guy screws a whole bunch of women while the other guy is loyal to his wife,” he cautioned readers. Christ said “screw”? And what was with this “whole bunch” of women? Carter, in going for the common touch, had identified himself more with the wife-swapping, leisure-suited playboy of the mid-70s than with the morally conscientious, scrupulously honest man he actually was.

Edwards, despite his strong antipoverty politics, arguably never had the common touch, which was supplied to him by his wife and family. Take them out of the picture, and he seemed to many a slick-lawyer type, with an unfortunate patent-leather patina to his looks. His wife, Elizabeth, a warm, spontaneous, perfectly attractive but not Barbie-like woman, humanized him, made him appear less like a Ken doll, but when he appeared to have abandoned her for a New Age bimbette, in many people’s eyes he reverted to type. Once that public-relations alchemy had taken place, his confessions were simply not seen as redemptive. They proved not that he was contrite but that he was a hypocrite, and an arrogant one to boot. The pronouncement by Time columnist Ramesh Ponnuru about Edwards was one of the more moderate: “To think that you can build a campaign around your strong family life and standing by your sick wife and still not get caught, that is an astonishing level of arrogance.”

Applying Adut’s post-60s-rise-of-sexual-politics theory to current events, we find that it was not feminists but self-righteous (and possibly self-exonerating) male journalists who came most fiercely to Elizabeth Edwards’s defense, and that neither feminists nor Barack Obama have tried to resuscitate the circumstances of McCain’s divorce. Indeed, the “liberals” have been extremely delicate in their treatment of their opponents’ private lives. When the pregnancy of Sarah Palin’s teenage daughter Bristol came to light, Obama told the media to “back off.” “This shouldn’t be part of our politics,” he said. “It has no relevance to Governor Palin’s performance as governor or her potential performance as a vice president.” And contrary to what Rush Limbaugh or Lou Dobbs would have you believe, I have heard no feminist sermons about Sarah Palin’s poor parenting of her wayward daughter. To the extent that feminists have invoked the plight of the pregnant teen, it’s been to point out the by now well-documented flaws in the abstinence-only education that Palin advocates as public policy.

Despite a surplus of jargon on Adut’s part and a tendency to reductionism on Bauer’s, both books have information and insight to offer. Neither, however, gives due credit to what in my opinion remains the single most important factor in determining who gets skewered and who doesn’t, particularly in our current “postmodern” political climate, in which facts matter little and compelling narratives win the day: chutzpah. Those who believe that they have God on their side are loaded with it, while those who recognize that there are always several sides to a story tend to be — unfortunately for their political campaigns — more judicious.

Those with God on their side don’t worry about contradicting themselves, either. When McCain was on the evangelicals’ black list in 2000, the evangelical Christian James Dobson, chairman of the board of Focus on the Family, harshly condemned McCain’s involvement with “other women while married to his first wife,” and compared him to Bill Clinton (not a compliment in conservative circles). In 2006, Carrie Gordon Earll, a spokeswoman for Focus on the Family, indicated that adultery was still intolerable to evangelicals. “If you have a politician, an elected official, and they can’t be trusted in their own marriage, how can I trust them with the budget? How can I trust them with national security?” she told a reporter, reserving special condemnation for the man who leaves his wife as a result of an affair.

But that was before the Republican presidential candidate McCain chose Sarah Palin for his running mate and became the evangelicals’ darling. Now silence about McCain’s former life prevails — except, of course, when political expedience dictates otherwise, as it did on September 16, when McCain, speaking to a crowd in Jacksonville, Fla., warmly thanked the people of Orange Park, Fla., for “taking care of my wife and family” while he was in Vietnam. “My children had about 50,000 parents while I was gone, and I’m very grateful,” he told the crowd. His children’s actual parent, Carol, was not at the event. It was Cindy McCain who introduced him to the crowd.

Susan Bordo is a professor of humanities at the University of Kentucky. She is currently writing a book about Anne Boleyn.

UNDER REVIEW

The Art of the Public Grovel, by Susan Wise Bauer (Princeton University Press, 2008)

On Scandal: Moral Disturbance in Society, Politics, and Art, by Ari Adut (Cambridge University Press, 2008)

Back from New York now…and still laughing about my presentation at the Princeton Club. It went just fine. In fact, my audience got so involved that they started arguing with each other about my thesis and I had to wave them down several times and say, “Hey, can I get to my next point here?” It was far more PARTICIPATORY than I had expected. My publicity person at Princeton has promised me that the crowd at the Princeton Public Library will actually let me finish my sentences.

I did have an odd experience at the Princeton Club, though. I mentioned, as part of my presentation, that my husband is the minister of our local church. Afterwards, a whole handful of people came up to me and said, “So your husband’s a minister? That must create some interesting tensions between you. How do you deal with that? What kind of argument do you have with each other? How do you manage to have a life together?”

I answered as well as I could. And then said to the friend who went with me, “Um…did I say anything that suggested I’m not in sympathy with my husband? Anything that implies I don’t agree with him?”

“No,” she said. “It’s just that you have a Ph.D. and a university job and wrote a book for a university press and you’re obviously articulate and smart, so they figure you can’t possibly be in agreement with him.”

And she’s right. It was one of those eye-opening moments where I suddenly got a glimpse of my world through the eyes of someone who doesn’t understand it at all.

The entire day was an exercise in stepping into different worlds, as it happens. I did an in-studio interview on The Gist, hosted by Michelangelo Signorile, a sharp intelligent host who seemed to have READ the BOOK (they don’t always) and had insightful questions for me. Then I had a phone interview with the Washington Post, which also sent a wonderful photographer to do a shoot. She said, “Let’s go find an interesting wall to shoot against.” We ended up standing outside a white-brick garage wall, where she took scores of pictures while saying things like, “Shake your finger like you’re scolding someone! Now hands on your hips, chin up, tilt your head to the right! Let’s try hands in the air! Turn sidewards to me and look thoughtful!” She didn’t ever say, “Work it! Work it!” but otherwise I felt quite model-like. And quite silly, doing this out on the street in the middle of Manhattan. In fact a little circle of people gathered to watch us. My friend, who was entertained by all this, said, “Do you want me to tell them you’re not really a model?” “No,” I said, “we’ll just let them assume.”

The Post interview was long and interesting (the reporter was very well-informed and asked great questions), but seems to have gotten carved down to the absolute minimum. That’s how it goes. Anyway, the photo and abbreviated interview will run in the Post on Sunday and can be seen online right here.

I’m sitting in the Richmond airport, getting ready to fly JetBlue to New York, where tomorrow evening I’ll be speaking at the Princeton Club. I’ve got several other interviews scheduled for today and tomorrow, and then I’m flying back early on Thursday (I’m teaching Thursday afternoon). Then I’m heading back out to Princeton next Monday, speaking at the Princeton Public Library. (Incidentally, I’ll be getting together with some readers for dinner beforehand…so if you plan on coming, let me know.)

Travelling is part of writing; if you publish a book, you’re going to have to spend some time promoting it. It can even be fun. This particular trip is STRESSING me, though, for four reason.

First, the flight just got delayed two and half hours. I have better things to do than sit in the airport. (Don’t we all.)

Second, this is my first talk based on the Art of the Public Grovel (not counting my dissertation defense, at which I was under no pressure to be entertaining). The more often I speak on a subject, the more fun I have. A completely new talk is no fun at all.

Third, the Princeton Club is one of those places designed to intimidate the uninitiated. I’ve been there for coffee with my editor a couple of times. The building isn’t marked; you have to be a Princeton alumnus/a to belong, so the place is run on the assumption that if you need to know where it is, you already will. When you do find it and (cautiously) let yourself in, doormen descend on you to ask you why you’re there. If you’re a guest, they escort you into a little side room (very pleasant, of course) where you sit and wait for your Princeton alumnus/a friend to come and get you. I could wish that my first talk on grovelling came in a slightly more relaxed atmosphere.

Fourth, business travelling–for mothers, anyway–is always fraught with guilt. It doesn’t matter how much time I spend with the kids beforehand, or how long it’s been since I’ve travelled; when I get ready to leave they look at me with huge Bambi eyes and say, “You’re leaving AGAIN?” Do men sit in airports and feel guilty, or is it just women?

And then last night, Emily (aged seven) came up to kiss me goodnight and gave me a huge hug and said, “Mommy, I just want you to know that I will never forget you.”

Er…

I’m not even a nervous flier, and that creeped me out a little. Probably watching the pilot episode of Lost (I’d never seen a single episode, but Pete just bought the DVDs) afterwards was not the best strategy.

I’ve got four radio interviews about the Art of the Public Grovel scheduled this week. If you happen to be able to tune in to any of them, please do…and a couple of them are call-in shows, so you could always phone up and chat.

Anyway, here they are (all times are Virginia times…)

Wednesday, September 23, 4:30 PM on Sirius XM Radio, Channel 109
Thursday, September 24, 9:05 AM, also on Sirius XM Radio, Channel 109
Thursday, September 24, 9:35 AM, Hudson Valley Radio Network (WGHO 920 AM, WBNR 1260 AM, WLNA 1420 AM)
Sunday, September 28, 3:15 PM, AKTINA-FM (WNYE 91.5, tri-state area of New York)

ADDENDUM on WEDNESDAY:
The 4:30 PM interview got bumped, thanks to ongoing coverage of John McCain’s announcement. The guy’s in my limelight. If it’s rescheduled I’ll post here…

Today’s National Talk Like a Pirate Day.

Avast!!! I be writin’ a history o’ the world! It be driving me to me grog! Arrr!!!!

Not sure why that feels so good.

Highly insightful and positive, that is. (Is there any other kind?) Thanks, kind reviewers at the Richmond Times Dispatch and at Books & Culture (which made The Art of the Public Grovel its Book of the Week).

Three or four months ago, my patient husband and I made reservations at the Harraseeket Inn in Maine, so that we could celebrate the completion of the History of the Medieval World.

Well, the History of the Medieval World is still incomplete. I finally forced myself to admit that I wasn’t going to finish it by the end of the summer, no matter how hard I worked; the book has a sort of rhythm of its own, and it isn’t drawing to a close. I’ve got some more thinking to do. I HATE admitting that I can’t meet a deadline (and I already didn’t meet this one once; it was supposed to be finished in the spring), but admitting that I can’t muscle my way through to the end is preferable to turning in a bad book.

Or losing my mind.

How do you decide how long is an adequate time to write the history of the entire middle ages?

Anyway, we decided to go to Maine. I was in desperate need of a break, the reservations were made, our friends Mel and Justin were willing to babysit, and we had both cleared our schedules, which is not so easy when you either work or parent for 98% of your waking hours.

So here we are, in Maine; and although it would be lovely if the book were also done (more on this later), I’m already feeling the creative sections of my cerebral cortex–practically bashed into insensibility by the club-wielding thug in my brain who responds to each finished page by shouting, “Write faster!”–are beginning to struggle back to consciousness. It is (literally) twenty degrees cooler in southern Maine than in Virginia. We went for a long walk wearing SWEATERS. And then we had lobster (Pete) and clams (me) for dinner.

Seriously, clams in New England are like a DIFFERENT FOOD than clams at, say, Red Lobster in Williamsburg, Virginia. It’s like the difference between home grown and store tomatoes, or between Fuji apples shipped from Japan to the U.S. and Fuji apples grown in your own backyard.

Although I was born in New England (Massachusetts, thanks to my father’s time as a Navy doctor), I’m essentially a Virginian, and I don’t get lobster. Or crab, really. Lots of effort and mess, a little bit of fairly pleasant meat. But clams are something else. Once you’ve tasted the real thing, you can never go back to the Long John Silver version.

As of this week, you can buy the Art of the Public Grovel here and here and here and in a number of other places, including bookstores in Canada and England and Japan. You can read an excerpt here, courtesy of Princeton University Press. It’s popped up on an occasional blog. I found it on the shelves of the Barnes & Noble on Broad Street in Richmond yesterday, and a library or two has even catalogued and shelved it.

But the book hasn’t been published yet. In fact, it won’t be published until October 4.

This is one of the many weird ways in which book publishing is still at least a decade behind the rest of the business world. Once upon a time, you couldn’t buy a book until its publication date, which was usually at least four weeks AFTER the books had rolled off the presses. The books had to be shipped from the printer to the publisher, then from the publisher to the distributor; the distributor had to catalogue the book and ship it to bookstores; then the bookstores had to put it into inventory and place it on the shelves. In the days when all of this was done manually, instead of electronically, it took a month for books to get from the printer to the bookstore shelves. So: by tradition, pub date is about four weeks after the book actually comes into existence.

Now, of course, this is mostly not true. Online retailers have the book in stock about three days after it leaves the printer (which is why many online stores have the availability date, not the publication date, listed on the book’s web page). Quite a few brick-and-mortar stores, particularly chain stores, do as well. The issue is no longer: Can I get the book? Of course you can. The issue is: If a reader hears about the book on the radio, or sees a review, and then walks into a bookstore, will she find it at the front of the store on the New Nonfiction table? It’s rare that a reader is so fascinated by a new book that she’ll jot down the title and then go and ask for it. But if she hears about it, and then happens to see it when she strolls into Barnes & Noble, the chances that she’ll buy it multiply. “Publication date” now means: That window of opportunity during which the book is at the front of the store and also featured on as many media outlets as possible.

For this book, that window is the first two weeks of October, and that’s when most of my events are scheduled. I’m speaking at the Princeton Club of New York on October 1 (I think you have to be a member to view the events calendar, although this link may work), and then at the Princeton Public Library on October 5. I’ve got various other events on the calendar which I’ll post closer to the time; and in the middle of October I’m going to London to do some publicity for Princeton’s U.K. office. (More on that soon.) Media outlets which plan to run pieces about the book have been asked to wait until closer to the “pub date” in order to do so.

You can probably find the book at your local Barnes & Noble now, but there will be a single copy on the Current Affairs shelf, buried among a host of other titles. In early October, with any luck, there will be a stack of them much closer to the front of the store, and readers might actually pick them up and KEEP them.

In the meantime, I would never tell you to move that single copy up to the front of the store. No, indeed, that would defeat the whole purpose of Publication Day.

Not for the kids (they’ve been at it, on and off, all summer)–for me. I’m back to teaching at William & Mary this fall. Only one class (that’s about all I can manage and still parent/write/sleep), and today’s the first class meeting.

I’m teaching the introductory creative writing seminar, which I’ve done four or five times before. I’ve discovered two all-important principles for teaching freshmen: first, give them a model to use for their own work; second, make sure that all critiques are anonymous. Without a model, 95% of the stories that get submitted in a beginning class are…amorphous. And one-themed. John Updike (I think…although I could be wrong) once said that most short stories are about God or sex. Only one of those topics ranks high for freshmen.

So each week we have a model to follow: we read a short story and pull it apart, figure out what the basic plot structure is, what techniques the writer has used, what the central idea of the story is, and the students have to use one or more of those elements in their own assignment.

Each week I’ll also be taking the names off the papers that I photocopy for the class to critique. The problem isn’t that students are savaged by their peers if everyone knows who wrote the story in question; the problem is that they’re all so NICE about each other’s writing that nothing useful gets said. When there’s no name on the paper, the comments are much more honest.

If you’re interested in what we’ll be doing this semester, my syllabus is posted below.

English 212-07 (15374)
Intro to Creative Writing

COURSE DETAILS
1. Attendance. You may skip one class without penalty. Further absences may result in a deduction of 5 points per absence from your final grade. If you weren’t here for the first class, you’ve already used your absence.
2. Grades. 50% weekly papers (each completed paper weighs equally), 30% final project, 20% participation. There is no final exam.
A, 95-100; A-, 91-94
B+, 88-90; B, 85-87; B-, 81-84
C+, 78-80; C, 75-77; C-, 71-74
D+, 68-70; D, 65-67; C-, 61-64
F, 60 and below.
3. Weekly papers. The class will be divided into two groups. Story assignments will alternate between the two groups. Poetry assignments will be completed by all students. All assignments are due to the instructor, by email, by midnight on the Wednesday before class. Selected assignments will be distributed to the class for anonymous critique; instructor will comment on other assignments. There is no minimum word count for these papers (longer is NOT always better), but I may require you to redo assignments which strike me as unfinished.
4. Preparation. I expect you to have read the model before class and will require you to sign an honor statement that you’ve done so. (Also I may put you on the spot, so be ready). You can get one free “preparation skip” for the semester. Bring a copy of the model to class with you; I will ask to see it.
5. Participation. 3 comments per class = A, 2 comments per class = B, 1 comment per class = C, silence = F.
6. Final project. Your final project will be a portfolio made up of your revised stories and poems (please submit original drafts along with revisions), along with an original final composition. This may be a single short story of 2,000 to 4,000 words, two short stories of 1,000-2,000 words, or a series of 5-8 poems related in either theme or style. The poems must follow an accepted form (no free verse). Although I will not enforce a word count for poetry, I expect to see significant effort. (You can run a rough draft by me for approval.) Your final project is due no later than 1:30 PM on December 18.

August 28 Introduction, discussion of story model
The Nine Billion Names of God, Arthur C. Clarke
http://lucis.net/stuff/clarke/9billion_clarke.html

Sept. 4 Group A story due; discussion of story model
The Last Question, Isaac Asimov
http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

Sept. 11 Group B story due; discussion of poem model
Rondeau
“In Flanders Field,” John McCrae
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19464
“We Wear the Mask,” Paul Laurence Dunbar
http://www.potw.org/archive/potw8.html
“Death of a Vermont Farm Woman,” Barbara Howe
http://www.everypoet.org/pffa/showthread.php?s=&threadid=9914

Sept. 18 Rondeau due; discussion of story model
The Lottery, Shirley Jackson
http://www.americanliterature.com/Jackson/SS/TheLottery.html

Sept. 25 Group A story due; discussion of story model
The Ransom of Red Chief, O. Henry
http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/redchief.html

Oct. 2 Group B story due; discussion of poem model
The villanelle
“Villanelle After a Burial,” Steven Cramer
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/poetry/antholog/cramer/burial.htm
“Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” Dylan Thomas
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15377
“The House on the Hill,” Edwin Arlington Robinson
http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/robinson/12637

Oct. 9 Villanelle due; discussion of story model
Lamb to the Slaughter, Roald Dahl
http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/lamb.html

Oct. 16 Group A story due; discussion of story model
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Washington Irving
http://members.lycos.co.uk/shortstories/irvingsleepyhollow.html

Oct. 23 NO CLASS

Oct. 30 Group B story due; discussion of poem model
The sestina
“The Concord Art Association Regrets,” Pam White
http://www.baymoon.com/~ariadne/form/sestina.htm
“Sestina,” Eli=abeth Bishop
http://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/03/ahead/sestina.html
“Paysage Moralise,” W. H. Auden
http://escottjones.typepad.com/myquest/2006/08/paysage_moralis.html

Nov. 6 Sestina due; discussion of story model
The Minister’s Black Veil, Nathaniel Hawthorne
http://members.lycos.co.uk/shortstories/hawthorneblackveil.html

Nov. 13 Group A story due; discussion of story model
The Story of the Bad Boy, by Mark Twain
http://members.lycos.co.uk/shortstories/twainbadboy.html

Nov. 20 Group B story due; discussion of poem model
The sonnet
“Death, be not proud,” John Donne
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=173363
“Batter my heart, three-person’d God,” John Donne
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?
id=173362
Sonnet 116, William Shakespeare
“Let me not to the marriage of true minds”
http://www.shakespeare-online.com/sonnets/116.html
Sonnet 29, William Shakespeare
“When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes”
http://www.shakespeare-online.com/sonnets/29.html

Nov. 27 THANKSGIVING BREAK

Dec. 4 Sonnet due

Just a quick note: you can read a few of my thoughts on the Edwards Affair here.

More soon.

Yesterday, two boxes of new books arrived in the same mail delivery. The smaller package was my hot-off-the-press copy of The Art of the Public Grovel, which is now shipping from the Princeton University Press warehouse to booksellers (so it will be a little longer before it actually can be BOUGHT).

I guess it’s wrong to feel satisfied when current events continue to make the book relevant, huh?

The bigger box was from my Spanish publisher, Paidos, by way of the Norton office. The History of the Ancient World has been sold into Korea, Spain, Bulgaria, and Russia (so far–I’m hoping that other foreign publishers will take an interest in the series as it progresses), and the Spanish translations have just come off the press.

Beautiful books.