I’ve never completely liked the term “Janeite” as a descriptor for a Jane Austen fan.  It sounds…prim.  Sycophantic.  Clubby.  As both Lindsay Doran and Karen Joy Fowler point out, there’s something a bit obnoxiously intimate about people who call Jane Austen “Jane”.  (”Jane’s entire point is…”  or  “Jane is really saying…”  One always wants to ask, “How do you know?”)  Technically, the term Janeite was coined by Rudyard Kipling a century ago, which hardly adds to its caché now.  So I’m casting about for a better way to describe that warm, and often instant, camaraderie that exists between people who know they all enjoy Austen.  Yes, there are different species of Austenuators…there are the purists who disdain the movies, or the people who are astoundingly unaware that they actually ARE Lady Catherine de Bourgh, or the people who dreamily think the 18th century was actually a nicer time to be alive*.  But if you don’t slip and fall into any of those more boring categories, most Austen devotées tend to be friendly, intelligent sorts.  What might we call us?

The question arises this afternoon because we spent a very fine morning with some family members we rarely see, and of course with whom there is that automatic family warmth, but there is the added attraction of mutual Austen appreciation.  And that quotation about how pleasant it is when good people get together (”and they always do”) just rings even more true.  Of course, Karen Joy Fowler’s novel has brought into the public spotlight the questions that literary critics have been arguing about for decades, forcing us to ask whether we can make any assumptions about who reads Austen, or why, or what they take away from their reading.  After all, one of Austen’s gifts is that a remarkably wide spread of humanity read her work and like it.  (Even blues legend B.B. King, as we hilariously learned at the 2004 Los Angeles Austen conference.)  We might not be able to construct a very specific shared worldview for Austen’s fans after all.  Maybe it is the illusion that we could — the feeling, upon meeting a fellow JA-reader, that “ah! This person probably thinks and feels about like me, we probably share core values”.  But what exactly those values are may be harder to pinpoint with Austen than with any other author.

*See Fay Weldon on why it wasn’t in Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen.

One thing I like about a mocha is its ability to make the possibilities seem endless.  Those tasks which were insurmountable half an hour ago (like, oh, organizing my desk) now seem a cinch.  Even though my desk remains unorganized because mochas also make me want to focus on big ideas and more creative things than piling and filing.  (Meanwhile, my iTunes “shuffle” function apparently has a nice sense of irony, programming the Beatles’ “Think For Yourself” right before Yann Tiersen’s “Peer Pressure.”  Ha. Ha.)  Anyway.  It’s been a good week here, with lots of music that seems tailormade for our activities.  Tootling along the Palouse on Tuesday, we were treated to Rachmaninoff’s second symphony and his third piano concerto.  Both pieces’ sweeping melodies were a perfect expression of the rolling hills and mesmeric shadows of the southeast Washington prairie.  If Rachmaninoff didn’t write movie music, he sure should have.

I have a feeling I put this picture up every year.  Oh, wait.  I’ve only been blogging for one past 4th of July, so I guess I just put it up the once.  It’s been a whopper of a year since then.  But the pic was taken rather amazingly by ApplePi, so it’s the only choice for the discriminating wordpresser.

We’re spending the weekend in Seattle.  (This morning’s header narrowly beat the pictures from last night’s trip up the Space Needle.)  Yesterday included a trip to Uwajimaya for some fantastic Vietnamese salad rolls, Thai curry, and sushi.  The salad rolls were the standout—a blissful combination of soft rice wrapper, succulent shrimp, fresh cilantro, and chewy vermicelli.  I’ve never had salad rolls anywhere but Seattle, and they’re a bit metonymic for what I tend to miss about the Northwest from England:  a feeling of freshness, crispness, vibrant greenery and rushing water—an invigorating energy where things can move fast if you like…or drive to the lake or the prairie or the forest for some restorative solitude.  Flexibility of mind.  Willingness to give new ideas a try.  Excitement.  Even if it’s just about a few jumbo prawns rolled in a rice pancake.  Somehow, I just don’t pick up this vibe much in England, and it’s part of what makes America America.

Our history has plenty of majestic and murky moments, but perhaps there just aren’t enough centuries of it for us to be bound and chained to it the way the Brits can be.  Our history is not our chief selling-point.  Opportunity, innovation, and ingenuity are the ideals for which we are known, though we’ve been known to fall far short of those ideals plenty of the time.  According to the Brits, America is “a nation of goal-setters”.  Yes, we are.  As a rule, we are hardworking and industrious.  We believe that we can accomplish anything as long as we put our minds to it.  Politically, we quarrel fiercely because we care.  We don’t tend to accept our circumstances with resignation; we try to change them, and this is true for both ends of the political spectrum.  It’s still cool over here to be proud and patriotic, to be sincerely invested in the issues that shape our lives.  Cynicism hasn’t won yet.  (Though greed has come close.)  We declared (to England, who still don’t quite understand this) that the pursuit of happiness is a priority.  We encourage our kids to dream big and work hard, no matter what their social background.  This wasn’t something I saw in my UK school; none of my students aspired to a college education or to a career they were very excited about.

There’s plenty of bad press about how Americans take our freedoms for granted.  I’m sure we do.  But one freedom that goes unmentioned, and yet which I think is the making of us, is the freedom of mind I have so missed in my time abroad.  It’s so good to be here, in what is still the land of opportunity, imagination, and aspiration, on this Independence Day.

Lately, I’ve been learning a fair amount about a fascinating neurological disorder and how it affects someone I know (and those around this person).  In fact, this whole process has steered me in a very different professional direction than I would have guessed for myself even two weeks ago.  (More details to follow as possibilities take more concrete shape.)  But this specific condition includes some very particular needs that differ from those of the majority of the population—a high need for lots of solitude, for one thing, and a startlingly different mode of thinking about and processing the external world, for another.  (These are connected, actually.  Because the disorder makes it very strenuous for a person to take in his surroundings, it relieves that stress to take away unfamiliar stimuli and return to a known, ordered, and quiet environment.)

But one remarkable thing I’ve learned about this condition is that it’s possible/probable for partners and families to take on or imbibe the needs and characteristics of the spouse/relative who actually has the neurological disorder—but that it’s almost impossible for the person with the disorder to learn his/her way toward neurotypicality.  (Which simply means, for this post, a more typical frame of mind that has no cognitive impairment in interpreting aspects of the world around one.)  So the case often goes that a neurotypical wife will begin to display some of the behaviors and attitudes of her neurodiverse husband, but the husband rarely expands or changes his behaviors and attitudes to be more like his wife’s.  This apparently isn’t much of a choice on the husband’s part, or at least it’s a very murky thing to assess.  (So in other words, this isn’t just the husband being a willfully inconsiderate jerk, though it may sure look like it.)  In fact, one of the fundamental characteristics of this disorder is that growth and learning in the area of world-relation, or relation to others, is almost nonexistent.  At best, new behaviours may be a series of rote, learned mechanisms, but without much internal understanding of why.  It’s very, very interesting to watch, describe, and study, but in a close personal relationship, this condition can wreak havoc on both parties, and in drastically different ways.

One of my questions for the moment, however, is about the neurotypical partners and spouses.  If exposure to the disorder diminishes, will the learned needs and attitudes diminish too?  This would stand to reason.  And I’m not talking about ‘contagion’ in the sense that one could ‘catch’ an actual brain disorder from someone else via some cognitive germ.  But is there any point at which a habit becomes too ingrained to change–and thus begins to change the brain itself?  Researchers are just beginning to learn how changeable the brain can be; we are understanding more and more (and yet still so very little) about its tremendous plasticity.  But how long might it take to rewrite habits of mind?  Does conscious activity do the trick (simply willing yourself not to think a certain way), or are there subconscious dimensions at work, too?  And if it is indeed possible to unlearn or relearn these habits for neurotypicals, then why doesn’t it seem possible to simply ‘fix’ or retrain or rewire the brains of those born with this disorder?

My best guess is that cognitive therapy or concious cognitive efforts on the part of a neurotypical person will seek to rewrite behaviours because they impact emotional or social well-being, focusing on changing the part of the brain that recognizes the problem and deals with interpersonal relations.  But could it be that for the neurodiverse person, the cognitive target needs to be the part of the brain that spends so much energy on concrete sensory perception that it neglects or overlooks proper social output?  If we could decrease this deep focus on, say, the fact that there are 19 tables in the room (2 of which are grey and 17 of which are brown), and channel some of that input towards noticing that the person next to me is in tears, and knowing how to respond appropriately, would that help?  Where does the knowledge of appropriate social response reside in the mind, and why are some people missing it?  This is getting too complicated to continue this post, but one bottom line here is simply that the human brain is a remarkable and endlessly intriguing subject.

It’s so easy to dwell in possibility at Starbucks.

The caffeinated aroma, the buzz of people who are essentially happy—they’re taking a break, they’re picking up a boost, they’re about to consume 16 ounces of their favorite blend of coffee and sugar, they must be happy—and the general feeling of Friday…possibility is hardly a fairer place than this scene right here.  When I walked in, the song that had been in my head all morning was playing over the shop’s speakers.  Now that is service.

It’s not just this morning, of course.  Most Starbuckses I’ve been in convey a similarly and surprisingly inspiring atmosphere.  I will leap at any chance to spend an hour or two there, mocha in one hand, laptop in the other; the luxury of this feeling will probably never go away.  During my two years of grad school, the idea of sitting in a coffeeshop to work—ever—seemed unthinkably lavish, as well as mildly impractical.  It’s hard to consult primary medieval texts from a little wooden table in a crowded café, and as a humanities grad student, I was painfully aware that my training wasn’t putting me on the fast track for incredible wealth anyway.  When I undertook the Great Teaching Experiment in England’s West Midlands, coffee was a survival tool for getting out the door each morning and eschewing the impulse to pull the covers over my head and hope that that insane school and everyone in it would just go away.

During the past year, coffee was often a part of my housemate’s and my morning conversations, and I learned about the elegance and mystique of a good French press.  (I inadvertently offended my housemate by habitually adding cocoa powder to my mug until I was able to convey delicately that, unfortunately, I don’t exactly like coffee by itself.  The genius of Starbucks is that they’ve come up with all of these great ways to, ah, complement, or at least disguise, the basic flavor.)  But I developed the delicious habit of taking my half-finished cup of brew up to my desk and settling in for my morning’s reading and writing—a habit I will be lucky enough to continue in the immediate future, and one which adds a surprising amount of pleasure to the first half of every day.  But an interlude at Starbucks recreates this same feeling of caffeinated possibility with the added delights of being in the company of people who seem happy to be there, and the irreplaceable taste of whipped cream on a tall mocha.  Perhaps these have become the new ‘room of one’s own’ for writers, because there is an unbeatable mixture of privacy—nobody can read what’s on my laptop screen, and I don’t know any of them anyway—and community.  (And caramel frappucinos.)  Maybe even Emily Dickinson would have been willing to leave her house for that.

After a trip to the ocean and a week of near literary retreat at home (punctuated by some excellent time for running and watching the river), I’m back on the blogosphere.  (My…one remaining reader will be so pleased.)  What I have loved about the past week is its unusually high concentration of Exciting and Intriguing Insights.  All right, I’ve also loved sleeping in a bit, reading too many books at once, returning to some cooking tasks, and sunning my toes and my books on the deck.  The ocean was beautiful last week, too, and Haystack Rock was exactly where we’d left it.

The week’s reading yielded a pairing as delicious as pecorino cheese with pasta:  Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Chandler Burr’s brand-new You or Someone Like You.  Chandler Burr is the “scent critic” for the New York Times.  (Imagine being a scent critic??!)  I don’t think I’ve ever owned a book so new as this one—it was released just a week before I bought it at my favorite bookstore in the world, the Cannon Beach Bookstore.  (Seriously.  This bookstore even beats Blackwell’s.  That’s probably a future post.)  But about half an hour into each book, I realized that they’re both asking some similar questions:  can literature help us deal with life’s uncertainties and disappointments?  More specifically for each book, can we turn to literature for help in the face of injustice and discrimination?  Is it that consoling, in other words, to repeat Shakespeare or intone Keats when we’ve just been totally betrayed and kicked in the face without cause?  The answer for both books is still to come; I’m only about halfway through.  But I’m so tickled to have stumbled onto a pair of books, penned two centuries apart, both framing the English major’s most nagging questions.  What place does/ought/must reading have in our lives?  Do we learn as much from what we read as we do from experience?  No matter what, though, I have a feeling that both books are ultimately going to raise a toast to learning and growing in all forms.  Hear, hear!

I started the morning at the piano with Mozart’s K. 331 Sonata in A.  It’s so pleasant to find one’s fingers slipping smoothly into the familiar patterns of a beloved piece, even after such a long time.  The piece makes me think of my senior year in college, especially the late spring.  Of course, it’s late spring now, too, and things look reassuringly similar here at home.  There have been small changes in the last five years:  our front beds are now full of red geraniums, which we’ve never had before; the piano has been moved; my bedroom has a wonderful new coat of cheery peachy color; and, if this is possible, there are even more books lining the shelves and tables of nearly every room in the house.  The bigger changes are almost too obvious to list (so I won’t), but the cumulative result is one of variegated and lifechanging experience, staggering learning opportunities (in many senses of the word), and overwhelming grace.  And indeed, what better way to savor this kind of grace—especially the mercy of some new understandings—than through K. 331’s gentleness and hopefulness, its comforting beginning, its poignant center, its fiery and irrepressible end?

Most readers will know that in the past few weeks, perhaps months, my life has gradually fallen to pieces.  Unfortunately, I’m not exaggerating.  This afternoon, only the barest fragments and foundations are here.  Never before this week have I had such a distinct sense of being wrought, being worked-upon, being hammered by these unbearably heavy blows into something closer to the shape I’m supposed to be.

And these blows do feel unbearable.  Grief and pain come in giant waves.

But apparently it has taken these to ‘rouse my deaf world’ over the last near-fortnight.  How much I have learned, even in the past 24 hours.  Ancora Imparo. Please don’t give up on me.

The view this morning is down onto Cornmarket street, where a man in a top hat is setting up a tightrope.  Later today, when the street fills with tourists and shoppers, he’ll play wheezy melodies on an ancient fiddle while balancing with one foot on his miniature highwire.  I’m writing from Café Pret, short for Pret-a-Manger (’ready to eat’), and the café is nicely quiet on this gray Saturday morning.  Upstairs, the entire room leans markedly to the left because its ancient beams are so warped and weathered with age.  (The room looks roughly 16th/17th century—it would be very believable to picture Shakespeare and Marlowe sitting up here with a tankard or two, or a young John Donne staying the night, no doubt scribbling some witty comparison between these warped walls and the winding trajectory of love, or something.)  And on a street which is otherwise depressingly interchangeable with the High Streets and Cornmarkets of Worcester, Stratford, Edinburgh, Belfast, and American strip malls, this nifty and restorative little spot is an artistic and sensitive blend of old and new.

I come here quite a bit, perhaps more often than I should.  Especially in the last few weeks, which have been very hard.  But this is my favorite place in town to write and read, surpassing even the Bodleian for sheer companionship and atmosphere (partly because in the Bodleian, I should be getting Serious Work Done).  It is also easier, in the company of strangers, to be simply myself.

…the Muppets are coming to Seattle.