有些話我選擇保持沉默
別把實話說破　隱藏我的寂寞
妳的情緒依然把我牽動
躲在妳心中　角落的心事我能懂

就算妳的愛　屬於他了
就算妳的手　他還牽著
就算妳累了　我會在這

一人留　兩人疚　三人遊
悄悄的　遠遠的　或許捨不得
默默的　靜靜的　或許很值得
我還在某處守候著　說不定這也是一種　幸福的資格
至少我們中還有人能快樂　這樣就已足夠了

不知道　不知道　不知道
為什麼　為什麼　我的愛
我的愛還留不住妳的離開　卻總在　等待著妳回來 :. )

五年前的我說：”我係一個好懶既人，不過我會好努力去記住所有開心既嘢。” 來到今天，我記得到底有幾多? 

P.S. I really HATE washing clothes on Sundays, it ruins my mood for the coming week.

其實有時覺得，我才是最虛偽的那一個。

機會率是多麼令人頹喪，但我不想相信決定論。

上天沒有所謂註定不註定，”偶然”是我們一個個編出來的爛透謊話，僅此而已。

Good heavens, I’ve just learned that the people at WordPress expect us all to choose avatars, or else they’re going to start putting a big fat question mark next to our names every time we leave a comment. I don’t know about you, but of the many things I am not, a question mark is at the top of my list. I feel I’m more of an exclamation mark, actually, or a lovely curvy comma. But I can’t digress into a discussion of which piece of punctuation best suits me, I’ve got bigger problems.

At first, I thought an avatar was a musical instrument played by an ex-Beatle, but I did some looking last night and learned that they actually were Hindi god-representatives (and yes, I am aware that’s probably terribly, embarrassingly inaccurate, but I’m going with it, not having time to do better — I’ve got to make myself an avatar after all.)

The avatar recently morphed into an internet term for a picture that’s going to go up along with every little comment you leave anywhere in the ether world. It was bad enough having to choose a name, but I have no idea how I’m going to choose a picture that acts like a kind of name.

Last night, I spent three hours — hours I should have been spending doing the work of justice for my job, in which the People of the Great State of California pay me to handle legal appeals — three hours, trying to find a picture that sums me up.

And I failed. How hard can it be? Well, it turns out it’s really, really hard if you, like me, have minimal computer skills, very little graphic sense, and a dislike for color pictures of lilies. That was my idea, a simple one really — I’d find a nice drawing of a lily to be my avatar. Trouble is, all the lilies out there that you can get for free are florid, sentimental, icky lilies, and that’s not me. And even if they were, they have to be the right size, or capable of being cropped to the right size. The closest I came was a very nice black and white botanical drawing of a lily of the valley from some university biology department in Florida, but when I tried to use it, it came out looking like a scary spidery creature. Not the sort of public persona I’d like to project.

And that’s the trouble — you don’t want to have to pick just one image to represent you. Some days, an elegant botanical drawing might be fine. Other days, you might want to go with something a little wilder.

I haven’t resolved this problem. Perhaps it will take several glasses of wine to restore my perspective. It’s not like I’m naming a child, after all. Not exactly. (I’m thinking, to tell you the truth, it’s a lot harder. You don’t have to find a picture to represent your child. And you can choose a name plenty of other people have chosen. In fact, I found it very simple to give my three children the names of English kings. You can’t go wrong there, since they’re common enough names, will never embarrass them, and when they ask you why you chose them you can say, oh, we just figured if it was good enough for a king, it’d be fine for you.)

It’ll have to be a work in progress, this whole avatar business. For now, I’ve gone with a bowl of cherries, which life really isn’t, at least not all the time.

The Madeleine Project is the name for my effort to go back and see if that which gave pleasure in the past still resonates when it’s revisited. The only rule is that it can’t be expensive to relive the past. For me that means you have to be able to check the past out from the library, rent the DVD, or get the ingredients for it at Safeway.

So far, I’ve looked at poetry (Donne’s St. Lucy’s Day). I’ve been meaning to re-experience my favorite green pasta with fake Parmesan, but haven’t gotten around to it.

Trollope is the next installment in the Madeleine series. About twenty years ago, while I was studying for the California bar exam, I spent the summer reading Trollope. I loved Barchester Towers, in part because it was so good at skewering an institution that takes itself so seriously. In the case of Barchester Towers, that institution is organized religion. Twenty years ago, I was worried about entering an institution sort of like the church, an institution that seemed to take itself awfully seriously, the law. In fact, the law and the church were two professions often chosen by sons who weren’t first in line for the family title. As the fourth child, and with no family title for anybody, it seemed like a good choice. Back then, I suspected I wasn’t going to be very good at my new job, the one I was due to start after the bar exam. I hadn’t liked law school. There weren’t enough stories. The interesting ones were buried in the case books and nobody ever wanted to really talk about them.

What Trollope did was demonstrate that people in power, the people I was a little afraid of, can be utterly ridiculous. I went on to read the Palliser novels, a series that took on politics. And then individual great novels like Can You Forgive Her? and the Eustace Diamonds. The last two are well worth reading again. I’ve never forgotten that thing about people in power often behaving in utterly ridiculous ways. The Palliser novels were a bit of a slog. Other people like them very much, so you might want to check them out too.

In case you’re curious, here are the things I know about Trollope. His mother made much needed money by writing. She was pretty good and pretty popular. Trollope didn’t have a patron, unless you count the postal service, which is where he worked, as an administrator for a good part of his life. Money was a worry for him. He is credited with inventing the post box, that wonderful British icon.

He is also one of the great 19th century novelists and Barchester Towers is probably his most well known novel. It’s the story of a lovely, leafy town in England and the shenanigans that happen among the clerical set when a new bishop and his odious wife and assistant come to town. The novel is full of men and women whose business it is to bring the Church of England to the world. (I say women because, although women obviously weren’t preaching from pulpits, one of the novel’s greatest characters, Mrs. Proudie, does her utmost to run things from behind the scenes.)

There are wonderful things here, very funny looks at how foolishly people behave. For that alone, this novel should be read more than once. It will cure you of pomposity and stubborness — at least while you’re reading it. Afterwards, well, that’s up to you.

The thing I kept noticing this time around, though, is something I don’t remember from reading it before. It’s the narrative voice. It’s a third person narrative, but the narrator (who is never named and not a character) has a personality. He’s a chatty guy. And every once in a while, he breaks in and tells you what’s really going on. It’s a little like the moment in film when a character turns and addresses the camera, except in this case the narrator isn’t a character. That moment, by the way, has seldom worked for me (too self-conscious, too hip, too meta). But this narrator really does. And he proves that Trollope had a light hand with the meta-stuff. (I’m just guessing, and I hope you Dear Reader will correct me if I’m wrong, but a meta-something is just a comment on the way that something works. A meta-novel draws attention to itself as a novel, for example.)

Here’s an example. One of the subplots in the novel concerns a woman named Eleanor Bold. She is that most wonderful of characters in English fiction: the rich, beautiful widow. Naturally, a lot of people are interested in whom she’ll marry next. (There’s no question she’ll marry again. The funny thing is that she’s the only one who’s utterly unaware of the speculation around what she’ll do. She’s too busy spoiling her young son to see much of this.) The worst thing that could happen, in the eyes of many (including her father, sister and brother in law) is that she’ll marry the horrible greasy curate, Snope, and bring the odious Mrs. Proudie into their circle and basically ruin their lives. And then there’s Bertie Stanhope, a ne’er do well fortune hunter who’s also trying to worm his way into her affections. Nobody really cares that these two men would be bad for Eleanor, they just don’t want her to chose someone they don’t like. I admire Trollope for recognizing how deeply self-involved we all are. And although he laughs about it, he sees this as a universal weakness rather than an individual character flaw — and that’s because he’s a generous novelist.

So how does he handle the suspense about Eleanor’s future? He tells you not to worry about it:

“But let the gentle-hearted reader be under no apprehension whatsoever. It is not destined that Eleanor shall marry Mr. Slope or Bertie Stanhope.”

He goes on to explain that this kind of suspense isn’t to his taste as a novelist:

“And here, perhaps it may be allowed to the novelist to explain his view on a very important point in the art of telling tales. He ventures to reprobate that system which goes too far to violate all proper confidence between the author and his readers, by maintaining nearly to the end of the third volume a mystery as to the fate of their favourite personage.”

Not for him, these kinds of mysteries. He points out that your friends are likely to tell you what happened anyway, or you can just turn to the last page to find out what happens. And then he says something I just love, which is, essentially, that a good story isn’t held together by keeping a reader in suspense:

“…take the last chapter if you please — learn from its pages all the results of our troubled story, and the story shall have lost none of its interest, if indeed there by any interest in it to lose.

“Our doctrine is, that the author and the reader should move along together in full confidence with each other. Let the personages of the drama undergo ever so complete a comedy of errors among themselves, but let the spectator never mistake the Syracusan for the Ephesian; otherwise he is one of the dupes, and the part of a dupe is never dignified.”

I do so like that idea: A writer’s job is to make the reader feel like she’s been taken into his confidence. And what that means is that the writer will never deceive the reader as he tells his story. At its most basic, that simply means that the writer’s job is to be honest with the reader, to convey as carefully and accurately as he can the truth of the story he is telling. That doesn’t preclude humor or wit or even the occasional surprise — it means that the writer’s essential promise to the reader is that the writer will tell the best story he knows how to tell.

Twenty years later, that’s a wonderful thing to hear. I give Barchester Towers ten madeleines, ten being the highest on the madeleine scale.

There’s an interesting conversation going on at WordPress, the hosting site for many of our blogs. It’s a conversation about how to handle porn blogs.

Here’s a little bit of background: As some of you might know, a few months ago, I volunteered to write a weekly post on a site called Best Blog, which is dedicated to promoting the diversity of writing on WordPress. It’s run by a courteous, thoughtful man named Ken. The reason he sought out volunteers to help with his site is because he lives in China and the Chinese government blocks access to WordPress. There are ways to get through the “great firewall” but they’re not perfect and they don’t always work. Hence, the delegation of this fun job to volunteers, of whom I am the newest. This blog is on the WordPress front page along with a few other links that direct people to sites that might interest them. Its audience is wide and broad: pretty much anybody with a WordPress blog might stumble into it at one time or another.

Which brings me to porn. A few days ago, someone brought up on the WordPress comments board the issue of what to do about the many sites on WordPress that contain “adult content.” This writer was offended by these sites — as I am. I hate clicking on the next blog button and hoping I’ll see something interesting and then seeing instead someone’s breasts. Another writer suggested that maybe the links on the wordpress front page, the ones that catalog blogs, including the most hit on blogs and posts, and Ken’s Best Blog effort, be shut down because they link to porn. Thinking that maybe Ken’s Best Blog might have mistakenly offended someone in that comment forum, I went over and checked it out. (Turns out, the woman who began this discussion was concerned about the automatic listing of “top blogs” and “top posts” which is not a subjective listing, but just a tally of the number of hits a site receives. She didn’t care in the least about Best Blog; but it did offend her greatly to keep seeing porn sites and posts listed as “top ten” most beloved blogs or posts — something that bugs me too. If you’d like to see what she has to say about this issue, it can be found here.)

My answer is at the end of the link. It’s kind of rambling. I hadn’t really thought it through. But this is the executive summary, Dear Reader: I don’t like porn. But I like speech, and craziness and experimentation. And I don’t think private parties, like the great people at WordPress who just want to write code and think up cool new widgets, should have to go into the business of spotting adult sites and tagging them with a warning label. We’re adults. If we don’t like something, we’re capable of clicking right on by. And when private entities, who are unsupervised, get into the business of censorship they make regrettable mistakes. And those mistakes can’t be rectified. At least when the government tries to censor someone, they can be sued and a first amendment loving judge (there are still quite a few of those in America) will make them stop because this debate has pretty much been resolved in America: the answer to offensive speech is more speech not less.

Still, I don’t like porn and I wish it didn’t exist. I also wish loud shouting about politics didn’t exist. I wish kids didn’t eat lunchables and Big Macs. I wish there weren’t violent video games. I wish people praised each other rather than condemned.

Tell me, if you have a moment, what you think about tagging sites for adult content. And tell me what you wish didn’t have a place in our world and what you wish there was more of. It’s a meme of sorts. Or a meta something.

Best, BL

(Oh, and P.S. I forgot to mention, because it hardly needs to be said, but all discussions here obviously have to be civil. One of the most basic rules of effective advocacy, not to mention one of the best ways to proceed in life, is to be civil to those with whom you disagree. For that reason, ad hominum attacks and accusations are just not a good idea and I’ll delete them when they show up. If you want to convince someone to respect your position, you have to behave in a way that will encourage people to respect you.  If you’re not nice, people won’t respect you and there’s a good chance they’ll write off your opinion.  And for all readers who’d rather talk about books and food and stationery items, the channel on this blog has been re-set to exactly that.)