One of my cats is called Freud because I like to give weighty names to my cats and because I am completely enamored of psychoanalysis.  I have travelled all over the world, but the five years I spent in analysis was the most fascinating journey of all.

I put Freud, along with Darwin, Nietzsche and a few others, in the category of great minds whose ideas have so permeated western thinking that we don’t even realize much of what we call conventional wisdom began with their ideas.  They are like those prolific songwriters we’ve barely heard of who have written our favorite songs.

Sigmund Freud was a courageous thinker and the originator of theories and methods that were just a starting point for where we are today with everyone and the gate post being in one of hundreds of therapy modalities at one time or another.  I happen to love looking at the world psychoanalytically.

That’s my gratuitous rave about psychoanalysis when what I started to write about is my cat.

Freud, the cat, lives up to his name in many ways.  The word Freude means “joy” and this bright orange tabby is one sunny, relentlessly optimistic cat.  He nearly died of a blocked urethra when he was a year old; though I was a complete wreck, Freud purred and charmed his way through five nights at the animal hospital.

Freud, the cat, actually has an analytic practice in the neighborhood.  When it’s time for him to go to work, I let him out the side door.  He trots across the yard and disappears under the raspberry bushes and through the fence.  Shortly thereafter I start hearing primal screams.   The times I have gone to investigate, I have seen Freud sitting quietly on the edge of the neighbor’s yard, calmly watching BooBoo, the cat with the eating disorder, in the throes of transference.  She hisses and spits, her back fur grows three inches; she twists herself into a parenthesis and walks sideways, never coming any closer than three feet—just about the right boundary for a consulting room.  Freud sits motionless, watching and listening with great attention and curiosity.  Once I interrupted the session but after the repressive look I got from Herr Doktor, I never tried that again.

Cats in a multiple cat household are rather good at group therapy.   When one of mine comes in with an enormous rat hanging out of his mouth, the other two are right there, full of attention and support.  Together they work through their rivalry and competition while losing the rat behind the refrigerator and finding him a week later.  When one of the cats is hurt or frightened, the others rally round with alert concern.  When one goes on a binge, eats too fast and subsequently tosses his breakfast, the others clean it up.

Cats are masters of the dream work.  Or at any rate, one can make that supposition, seeing that they sleep the better part of every 24 hours.  Freud sleeps alone at night while my other two cats, Winston and Artemis, wedge up against me in bed, pinning me in place for the duration.  In the morning, when Winston is having his post prandial gin and cigar and Artemis is outside on the hunt, Freud curls up on me, purring, and interprets his dreams from the night before.

I was in the middle of a project when I ran out of those little tab thingys for hanging files so I buzzed over to Office Depot for supplies.  The place looked like a storm had blown through it.  Of course. Tomorrow is the first day of school for kids in the Seattle School district.  I am a teacher but my work life isn’t organized around the school year.  I am one of that I hope not dying breed, the neighborhood piano/voice teacher.  My teaching studio is in the tax deductible part of my home.

I love teaching because I am fascinated with Learning.  We are always learning something; it’s a question of what.  I did well in school because I was bright but this is what I learned: to survive and do well in school.  That’s not the kind of learning I want to promote.  I want my students to find some thread of interest and excitement in music that captures them in such a way they can’t get enough of it. A piano student gets excited about Latin rhythms or jazz and this (finally) provides him with a compelling reason to learn to count.   Or somehow a voice student stumbles onto the richness available in one single tone, and comes into an awareness of the mystery of the human voice; and the warm up becomes magical, not just something you get through so you can sing a song.

It has been my experience and my observation that learning begins with desire.  A lot of what passes for Teaching is what I call Interfering.  Interfering with Desire. Desire is the engine that fuels learning.  People’s natural desires get folded away in a closet because the desire to please or to survive supplants it.   We memorize a bunch of stuff in order to pass a test, to get a grade, to graduate, to get a job, to get a promotion, to make more money, to have more prestige.  Each step removes us further from the little kernel of desire that defines us as persons.

I am not suggesting that if we pay attention to the little kernel of desire that we might not take a similar route as outlined above.  My point is that we won’t lose track of ourselves along the way.  We won’t be like that guy in the Talking Heads song, looking at his life and asking, “How do I work this? How did I get here?”

I pay attention to my students’ desires.  I think of their minds as maps showing me places I haven’t been.  But I have been down a lot of roads and I have an idea about the terrain of the tentative new roads we will travel together.  I am fascinated by the many different ways there are to conceptualize something, and by the many ways that we all express what we want and who we are.  None of those ways are Right, but any of them are worth thinking about, worth exploring and experiencing.

I start most voice lessons by saying, “Sing a note that’s comfortable and easy, any pitch, and any vowel.”  That note, that kernel, becomes the launch pad for the rest of the lesson.  One effortless note that starts with who you are, where you are, and what you want.  I start my own practicing that way and I never found singing this rapturous when I was a student trying to please a teacher.

Where’s your note right now?

I am an Anglophile.  It started early in my life and was enhanced by finding an address for my Cornish relations in my great Aunt Ann’s address book after she died in the 1970’s.  I wrote to my distant cousin Hazel, then 68 years old, and we began to correspond.  Since then I have made half a dozen trips to England, met Hazel, and the next two generations of family, and have been personally escorted all over Cornwall and Devon.

My most recent trip to England was made the old fashioned way: by transatlantic crossing.  I sailed on the Queen Mary 2 from Brooklyn to Southampton.  Hazel died many years ago and the next generation, Pamela and Mervyn, had recently left not just Cornwall, but the village my family has lived in since before anyone can remember; and moved to England, settling in Somerset.  (When the Cornish cross the River Tamar into Devon, they say they are going to England.) So I went to visit them in Burnham on Sea.  For two weeks they ran me all over Somerset and environs.

I have longed to see Hay-On-Wye, The Town of Books, ever since I first read about their annual literary festival.   Pamela planned a two day excursion into Wales and Herefordshire to accommodate my desire.  It was raining when we arrived and every book in the town smelled damp.  The literary festival had ended a month earlier and the town was still exhausted.  The shop keepers in the 30 some bookshops looked like they hated the sight of tourists.

“Do you see a lot of famous people at the festival?” I asked in one shop.

“Yeah, some.” She paused. “A lot who think they are famous.”

When I travel with Pamela and Mervyn, I generally go off on my own and buzz around according to my peculiar interests while they amble about at a much slower pace and generally end up in a Marks and Spencers.  Then we meet for tea.  But on this rainy, dismal day in Hay, they were nowhere to be found when I decided I needed cake.

Hay is full of little passageways that have been promoted to streets.  I followed one of these to The Old Stables Tea Room (Hay’s Best Kept Secret, Award Winning Everything.) It was a low-ceilinged, damp little place with one side taken up by a fireplace.  Old photos, paintings, railroad timetables, telegrams, and kitchen and farm equipment hung on the walls.  Visually it was overwhelming.  Physically it was a bit challenging.  I didn’t want to drop all my damp possessions on someone’s tea while trying to read an attribution.  Only an American would want to know what absolutely everything in the place was.  I sat in an old  chair at a white clothed table, smelled the fresh flowers, and ordered a pot of muddy Welsh tea and a piece of coffee walnut cake.

The slice of cake was both overwhelming and challenging.  It came, festooned, on a charger.  Someone had gone nuts with the chocolate and walnut syrup and had done curls and swoops all over the plate, followed by a thick dusting of powdered sugar, and fancy cuts of orange and strawberries along the edges.  In the center of the plate were two thick slabs of frosting with an inch of cake in between.  A large flowering pod of some kind –a walnut?—perched atop the entire presentation.

At first I could only stare.  I would have been happy with a piece of cake on a small plate.  Maybe a paper doily.  In any case, the frosting was worth it all.  And I dried off.  They thanked me for my custom; I went away smiling, trying to work out what that meant.  I brought the pod home to Seattle and still don’t know what it is.

The surprise of the day was the Grafton Travel Lodge.  Pamela had merely been trying to find something inexpensive and she found something delightful: an exquisitely clean, minimalist hostelry with charming pub next door.  My room had a bed, with duvet and sheet, one chair, one desk, a clotheshorse, two dustbins, and a flat screen TV with seven channels.  There were three pillows, two towels, one bathmat, one tiny bar of soap, two plastic glasses, a hot water heater, two porcelain mugs, two spoons, tea and coffee bags, and a two little tubs of  Moo juice—that non-dairy stuff that, ominously, does not need to be refrigerated.

The sheets were crisp, the kettle worked superbly, and the chair was more comfortable than the ones at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City.   I thought, well, what more do I really need?  It turns out that I had forgotten to pack shampoo and as horrid as the Moo juice was, there still wasn’t enough of it for my tea.

The fellow at Reception did not look like, but sounded exactly like, Hugh Grant.  I manufactured reasons to engage him in conversation just to hear his voice.  Our first conversation went like this:

“Do you happen to have any little shampoos?”

“No, so sorry, it’s how we keep costs down, you see.”

“Oh, that’s fine, I’ll manage.”

“I can give you as many of those little soaps as you could possibly want.”   They do so want to please, the British.

“Thanks, I’ll be just fine.  But do you suppose I could possibly have a couple more of those milk thingys?”  I get very polite around the British.

He brightened. “Now that I can do!”

He disappeared into a side room but came out on the back swing of the door. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to sound patronizing, but when you said ‘a couple,’ did you mean just two or were you wanting a whole handful?”

Busted. I laughed, “Yes, actually, I was hoping for a whole handful!”

He grinned, “Yes, I thought so.  When I say ‘a couple,’ it means ‘all I can possibly get!’”

He disappeared and came back with cupped hands full.

This story involves two rodents if you count opossums as rodents which they aren’t; they’re marsupials.   That they are related to kangaroos doesn’t make me love them.  They still look like giant rats.

I found the aforementioned opossum, dead, under my apple tree on the morning I was leaving for a long weekend at a friend’s ranch in Montana.   My friend Joan was coming to cat sit.  All I wanted was to get out of town.  I decided to pretend that Joan wouldn’t be bothered by a dead marsupial in plain view out the big picture window of my front room.  I went to Montana, and didn’t think about home for four days.   But in the Billings airport, I started to have conscience nibbles.   Joan is my friend with Theological Chops; she could have told me that I was nibbling a sin of omission.

Back home, Seattle was sweating out a string of days in the 90’s.   There’s a joke that when the sun shines in Seattle, we all wonder what we’ve done to be punished like this.  It’s an old, stupid joke but it has some relevance to my story.  Joan had left a note saying that she had disposed of a dead opossum she had found under the apple tree.  She had scooped it into a plastic bag and put it in the garbage in time for that same day’s collection.  I smiled.  Good old Joan, what a great friend.

Then Freud came in with a welcome home gift for me. With such heat, it was unusual for one of my cats to have found the energy to bring a rat into the house; unusual for him to have found a rat at all at high noon.  Freud was still a young cat and up til then he had only brought in moles which he also manages to find in broad daylight.  I don’t mind the moles because they don’t have icky long tails.  Plus they are singers: little vocalists with jazz hands.  In any case, this was Freud’s first rat and he wasn’t quite sure what to do with it so he let it loose to crawl under the LazyBoy chair while I was sitting in it. I jumped up, flipped the chair over and watched the rat scurry into the kitchen and wriggle behind the oven.  Freud was delighted.  His little friend was entertaining.  What would he do next?

Here’s what his little friend did next: he spent the next five days eluding me and my three cats.  The evidence suggests that he scuttled back and forth from behind the oven to behind the bathroom sink, helping himself to the bits of peanut butter in the traps I had set, but without springing the traps.

On the fifth night as I was getting ready for bed, I saw Artemis agitating in the bathroom, frantically trying to get under the sink.   Artemis lives up to her name, the goddess of the hunt.  When she’s on the hunt, she’s relentless, and she always gets her man.  I went to sleep that night with confidence that the rat would be dead in the morning.

So I knew instantly what my bare feet had stepped on when I got up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night.  There was the obligatory shriek, but truly, I was mostly relieved that the rat was no longer operative.  I picked it up with double plastic bags, and took it to the outdoor cans.

There was a breathtakingly foul odor by the cans.  I thought it might have to do with the evolution of normal garbage in the abnormal heat, but a bit of exploration revealed a decomposing opossum in the yard waste container.

My thoughts came in no particular order:  Oh my god.  She put it in the wrong can. The garbage isn’t collected again for three days.  Oh god.  It’s 4 in the morning.  We’re having a heat wave. I’ll have to tip it into the right can.  Ah geez.

In reviewing all these events and thinking about my sin of omission, I came up with a penance:  Do ten “Hail Marys” with jazz hands and write 100 times: “When I leave my home to house-sitters,  I will label my garbage cans.”

During the warm weather, my cats come and go as they please.  They prefer doorman services, but they have cat doors: one from the house into the sun room and another from the sunroom to the outdoors.  I sometimes prop a house door open to spare them the onerous inconvenience of pushing through two flaps.  In any case, they have a lot of freedom during the summer.

In the autumn, however, the house goes into lockdown and the cats have to go through security in order to come inside.  This usually goes into effect after the first rodent incident.  I won’t tell you how I developed what might just reach the level of a rat phobia; I want money for that story.  But I have several junior stories.

I had been asleep for several hours one night when a growl from the hall woke me.  I fumbled for the light.  There in the door were the three cats.  Artemis and Freud were dancing with interest around Winston, the 18 lb tabby, who had an enormous rat dangling from his mouth.  He had it by its middle so it was drooping on either side of his mouth, a surreal moustache.   I recognized the peculiar quality of his Proprietary Growl.  Every cat owner knows it.  It’s the one that says, “I caught this; it’s mine. Back off Whisker Boy!”

I slowly and tentatively put my feet on the floor.  Winston and entourage moved out of sight, heading toward the living room where there’s a piano to crawl into, a closet with a file cabinet to hide behind, a couch to gnaw into the heart of, and a Lazy Boy chair from whose mechanical workings I have expelled any number of mice by nudging them along with a chopstick.  I put on shoes and bravely advanced to the edge of the living room.  The posse was crowded around the Lazy Boy.

I thought, “I hate this. I really do.  I need my sleep.”  I backed up, went into the bathroom, found a half a Xanax, and went back to bed, closing the bedroom door firmly behind me.  At 4:00, Freud and Winston were keeping watch at the opening between the refrigerator and the wall.  I took the rest of the Xanax and went back to bed.

When I finally got up at 7, the house was quiet; the cats were snoozing in their various approved sleeping quarters.  I woke them up and made them walk around with me while I tried to get a reading on where they might have left last night’s reluctant guest.  They were completely uncooperative and in addition, did not seem hungry.  I tentatively went about my morning routine, thinking that I should be on the lookout for uneaten body parts rather than an entire animal.

My house has a circular floor plan and what’s called a Pullman bathroom.  There are two doors on either end– like on a train car.  I end up using the bathroom as a thoroughfare for just about any journey I take in the house.  So by 10:30 that morning, I had gone in and out of the bathroom dozens of time.  It was around then that I started thinking something smelled a little ripe.  Then I noticed blood on the shower curtain.

I slowly pulled back the curtain to reveal the rat lying in fetal position in the middle of the tub.   I froze.  My heart was the first body part to move again and it started to race.

“You can do this,” I told myself in between deep breaths.

I dragged a garbage can into the bathroom.   I put on a pair of latex gloves.  I put a pair of leather workman gloves over the latex ones.   I covered my right hand with two plastic grocery bags.  My plan was to rip open the shower curtain as fast as I could, reach down, grab the rodent, and wrap the bags over him, chuck him in the garbage and haul the garbage out to the curb all without thinking about it too much.

I ripped open the shower curtain.  The rat leapt up!  It scuttled frantically down the length of the tub.  My scream caused the shower curtain hooks to rattle.  I pulled one door closed, exited the bathroom and slammed the other door shut and groped my way to the telephone.

I called my neighbors who have rescued me from any number of rat invasions over the years.  Usually David comes over.  It’s like a scene from Rear Window:  I dial the number.  Through my front window I see David answer the phone, then he looks across the street and waves at me.  We converse, hang up.  I stand by the phone, wringing my hands, hardly breathing, and watch him walk through his house, and go out his back door, all the while putting on gloves.  He comes across the street and picks up the offenders.  I never see them again.   He’s a one man Rat Mafia.

On this particular occasion Grace came over with a bucket.  She went into the bathroom as calm as a surgeon and emerged 20 seconds later.

“Wasn’t it there?” I asked wildly.

“No, it was there,” she said.

“Did you get it?”

“Oh yes, it’s right here.  It’s a little worse for wear.  But there’s some blood and a few tracks in the tub,” she sounded almost apologetic for leaving me with such a mess.

“Oh, Grace, thank you.  It’s okay; I can clean it up as long as I don’t actually look at it.”

She laughed kindly.  She’s a saint.

I threw out the tub rug.  I laundered the shower curtain, the liner, the floor rug.  I wiped down not only the tub and shower, but every inch of the bathroom, floor to ceiling; first with bleach, then hot water and soap and did a final finish of rubbing alcohol.

And I closed the cat doors for the season.

In our culture we hear a lot about performance.  Sexual performance, teacher performance, athletic performance, dramatic performance.  The word sets my teeth on edge because I think it’s misappropriated.   I used to get up to sing, swim through all the perspiration, let my eyes glaze over so as to avoid seeing the audience, and quaver through whatever I had prepared.  I was always well rehearsed and I knew I had a beautiful singing voice.  Sometimes I pulled it off, sometimes I didn’t, but I was always terrified.  When I stood up to sing in front of people, I would hand myself over to them and say:  Here, you decide if I have any worth, not just as a singer but as a human being.  Psychically, I left my own body, sat in the audience and judged myself.

I waded through all the common advice like Visualize Yourself Succeeding.  Visualization—as I understand it– involves creating an image outside of ourselves.  But getting outside of myself was causing me problems.  The me I would visualize didn’t necessarily correlate with the feeling state that showed up at the point I opened my mouth to sing.   There’s a lot more going on in me than I can be conscious of, let alone predict ahead of time.

My students often report feeling confident up to the point their introduction begins.  Suddenly their knees buckle.  Or if their knees buckled the last time they sang, this time they forget how to breathe.  Or when they start to sing, they don’t recognize the sounds they are making and it spooks them.  With pianists, the fingers sometimes take on a life of their own while you sit there, feeling superfluous, and watching them humiliate you.

Visualization does not acknowledge vulnerability.   When I stood up to sing, all I had was myself and whatever I did with my voice in those few minutes.  It was different every time; and it was unknowable ahead of time.  Can one ever be prepared for vulnerability?  It seems to show up whenever and however it wants to.  It is best met with one’s own ordinariness.   The trouble with us singers is we think we are so very extraordinary.  Understanding that I was an ordinary human being who happened to like to sing ended the debilitating performance anxiety.

The performances I find most compelling are the ones where the singer’s vulnerability is exposed but lightly contained; and with no apologies for being human.  I want to feel their heartbreak because it helps me to bear my own.  Or I want to be invited into a joy that isn’t trying to manipulate.  The joy is there on the face and in the voice, held lightly, as though to say, “Come as close as you’d like or stay far away, it’s not going to change what I am offering.”

What I have learned, and what I tell my students about performing is this:  Do what you do when you are home alone washing the dishes; when you are inside yourself, inside your voice, having an internal experience that is only for that moment, not for prosperity, and not something you are visualizing for use at some future date.   Take a private, internal sensibility on stage with you.  In performance, do what you do when no one is listening or watching.

The best way to prepare for a performance is to practice being present with yourself all the time.  So when you get onstage, nothing has changed, you just go on being.

I had a long time student with the prescient name of Deborah Singer.   When she first started lessons she told me she had always wanted to sing, but she didn’t have a lot of confidence —not at all an unusual occurrence, particularly with singers who have actual ability.  She didn’t want to sing classical music and I didn’t particularly want to do pop or country but we met halfway: Deborah learned to sing “Caro Mio Ben” and I came to appreciate the Dixie Chicks.

Deborah came in one day with a song called “Why They Call it Falling.”  I liked it right away.  I like “list songs” like “The Waters of March.”   She sang it several times while I listened.  I asked her, “Ok who sings this?”  What I wanted to know was, “Who are you imitating?”

This is what we all do in the beginning: we imitate.  A lot of us started out in front of the full length mirror in our parents’ bedroom with a flashlight for a microphone.  My first voice teacher once said to me, “Stop trying to be Julie Andrews.”  I thought, “Why would I want to do that?”

There’s nothing wrong with imitating your favorite singer if that’s what you want to.  But that isn’t singing.  That’s imitating.  Singing begins with your sound.  You get inside the sound of your own voice on single tones, then on phrases, finally in songs.  You fall in love with your own voice so that you are unashamed and unafraid to light up every inch of it and let every color in it shine.   Otherwise, you might just as well get a cellist or oboist or pianist or guitarist who loves his instrument to accompany you while you recite the words.

I once spent nine months singing nothing but sounds.  No words, no songs.   It was one of the most productive periods of time I’ve ever spent in voice training.   Most singers don’t want to do anything that extreme.  We all want to get to the songs.

Deborah had learned her song from listening to Lee Ann Womack so that’s who she was imitating.  I slowly tried to insert little options and new ideas as we went through it, working on the rough spots, figuring out where to breathe, how to approach the higher notes.

Occasionally Deborah would say, “That’s not how it goes.”

I would say, “It can go anyway you want it to go.  There’s no way that it’s supposed to go.”

Sometimes students say, “Do you want me to bring in the CD so you can hear how it goes?”

Actually sometimes I do want to hear what it is they are wanting me to hear but most of the time I want to say, “Hello!  I read music.  I teach singing.  This is what you are paying me for.”

Deborah said, “But I want to sing it the way she does because at least I know that’s a way to sing it.”

That’s like saying, “I want to live someone else’s life because I can see that person is alive.”  It’s understandable.  It’s human to feel that way.  But it can’t be done. You can’t live someone else’s life—without destroying both of you– and you can’t sing a song like someone else sings it.  I love the way Jane Monheit sings “Embraceable You” and I love the way Arleen Auger sings “Weichet nur betrübte Schatten,” but when I sing those songs, I need to do my own work of getting inside the sound and the words.  What makes the singing of those songs compelling is not the way the singers phrase this bit or the little swoop on that bit or the crescendo here and the fading away there.  What makes a singer compelling is not imitable.  A singer is compelling when she sings from the inside out, when we hear and feel her vulnerability.  She sings from her heart.

Deborah and I worked on “Why They Call It Falling” for months.  One day she came in and said she had listened to her recording and thought, “She’s not singing it right.”   I can’t tell you exciting it was to hear that.  Deborah had gotten the song inside her and she was bringing it out her way.

Being in front of an audience can be un-nerving, even if that audience is the voice teacher.  We imitate because it feel safe.  But there’s no real vulnerability when we try to sing a song like someone else sings it.   Afterwards, even if hoards of people rush to tell us how much they enjoyed our singing, we know deep inside, whether we are fully aware of it or not, that what we did was not genuine.  If we don’t want to imitate, we can take a deep breath, sing our own lives and live our own songs.

My Vanity Fair came the other day, looking more bloated than usual.  The articles are exceptionally well written.  There’s usually one really juicy one that’s worth the price of the subscription.  But I really hate the inserts, the thick advertisement pages, the fold out pages and the way the table of contents is 25 pages into the magazine.

So here’s what I do:  First I hold it up and shake out all the loose inserts, and then I flip through the pages, stopping at the most obvious of the thick pages.  These I cut out with scissors or a utility knife or tear out with my bare hands.  I do a second sweep and take out any I missed the first time.  I do this until the whole magazine can be easily rolled up like a newspaper.

Then I open the cover to the first page and: r-r-r-ip.

Second page: r-r-rip.

Look at these models, my God, they don’t even look real:  r-r-r-rip

What in God’s name is wrong with that one’s eyes?: r-r-rip.

Oh, that’s how you spell Jimmy Choo: r-r-rip. . .rip. . .rip.

Is that Julianne Moore?  Why is she always everywhere?: rip. . .rip.

What’s wrong with her eyes? r-r-rip. . . rip.

How can she walk in those things? r-r-r-rip

What’s wrong with her eyes? r-r-ip, rip, rip rip

Rip. Rip. Rip. Damn it, that’s the Table of Contents.

By now the Vanity Fair that came in the door as thick as a paperback book has the depth of Time magazine—spatially speaking.  But now I can read it.

My neighbor Gwen, who knows something about everything, loves the advertisements.  She used to design clothes at Opus 204 near the Pike Place Market.  When she looks at those emaciated models, she sees design.  I see people who if they tried to rip out a magazine page would break themselves in half.

I used to get a magazine called Real Simple.  When I finished my ripping routine and was left with 30 pages to read, I noticed that those 30 pages were advertisements, too.  Every simple suggestion had half a dozen expensive things you had to buy in order to make your life that much simpler.

They had a section where you could share your tips on how you were simplifying your life.  Every month there was a winner who got something: a free magazine subscription or a trip to New York to meet the advertisers.  Or maybe it was $30 off a gift wrapping station that needed a second wing on your house to accommodate it.  I thought about sending in my ripping routine as a suggestion and dare them to print it.  Instead I cancelled the subscription.

I am going to take those Vanity Fair pages over to Gwen.  Real simple.

Every year I have a yard sale where I attempt to get rid of the year’s accumulation of capitalist effluvia.  Since I have lots of storage space, I have merchandise still in stock from years’ past as well as much of the stuff that didn’t sell in my mother’s estate sale 3 years ago. One of my yard sale rituals is to go through all my books and decide which ones I have read for the last time and no longer need to keep.   Here are some of what made this year’s cut:

A stack of books for my morning read when I can manage complex sentences and ideas.  This is when I read Freud or Shakespeare, most recently Civilization and Its Discontents and King Lear. I have just come off a 6 month orgy of literary theory; for some reason I could not get enough of it.  (I came out of Lit Crit at Whitman College and couldn’t have told you what it was; same with high school algebra.)  I read three literary theory texts; I downloaded all the transcripts from Paul Fry’s Intro to Literary Theory at Yale Open Courses, and read them.  (I had listened to the lectures but had missed a lot because I kept playing Free Cell solitaire at the same time.)

In the morning, I also read books with those titles like “I Be Where I am Now.”   Currently my favorite writers in this genre are Pema Chodron and Mark Epstein.

As the day progresses, the sentences need to get shorter and the ideas less complex.  But that is not to cast nasturtiums at authors like Anne Morrow Lindbergh (her diaries and letters) who I have re-read since I was 18.  I am drawn to British women authors; I re-read books by Angela Thirkell (Before Lunch is my favorite) Margery Sharpe (the 3 Martha books), E.M. Delafield (the Provincial lady books), Joanna Trollope, Susan Howatch, and Elizabeth Jane Howard.  Every few years, I re-read the Lucia books by E.F. Benson, A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens), A Passage to India (Forster), The Raj Quartet (Paul Scott), and To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee).

My favorite books in the past several years amongst current writers are Gods Behaving Badly (Marie Phillips), Three Bags Full (Leonie Swann), Eat, Pray Love (Elizabeth Gilbert), and The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)

Poetry I can read any time of the day or night.  I had forgotten all about poetry and its power until Billy Collins was the Poet Laureate.  Through him, I was re-born.  My favorites among his output are Sailing Alone Around the Room and Nine Horses. Other poets I love are Stephen Dunn, Mary Oliver, Jack Gilbert, W.S. Merwin, Robert Frost, and an interesting guy—or maybe I should say 4 interesting guys—called Fernando Pessoa.

Another author I can read any time of day, even though his sentences and ideas are complicated, is Adam Phillips.  He’s the enfant terrible among the psycho-analytic set.  His provocative ideas are just what I need to open up new states of mind, to remind me there are many different ways of constructing my experience.  Here’s a sentence from Promises Promises: ‘To presume something is an error is simply to look at it from a point of view that makes it one.”  And another: “What we call a culture or a tradition becomes the way we go on running imaginary errands for the dead.”

By evening humor is about all I can take in but that can be rather like swimming at a beach where there’s no lifeguard.  I read at my own risk; it can be too entertaining when I need to be thinking about sleep.  I am partial to the Blandings Castle series by P.G. Wodehouse and I love Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods, I’m a Stranger Here Myself, Notes from a Small Island). With Wodehouse, if I have anything liquid in my mouth, I generally have time to swallow before I burst out laughing, but with Bill Bryson, it doesn’t matter if I am drinking something or not;  One of his asides will– without warning — provoke laughter accompanied by spontaneous discharges from any or all bodily orifices.

Murder mysteries are doubled edged nighttime reading, too.  I like Dorothy Sayers, Robert Barnard, Conan Doyle, Minette Walters, and Elizabeth George.  If it’s really late, M.M. Kaye, Nancy Baker Jacobs, and Alexander McCall Smith have good plots and short sentences.  For something like a Lifetime Movie Network experience, there’s always Mary Higgins Clark. These books are easy on a tired brain but can also give a second wind.  I’ve never stayed up til 2:00 AM reading literary theory just to see what happens next.

I always knew that one day one of my cats would pee on the Great Books: that ponderous, pretentiously leather –bound set from Encyclopedia Britannica which my parents bought in the 1960’s.    The exclusively male writers, chosen by Mortimer J Adler, include Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Dante, Plutarch, Aquinas, Newton, Kant, James, Darwin.  There are 52 volumes in all.

My father read them.  His note-filled bookmarks still stick out of them.  When he died, I brought the set to my house in Seattle.  I knew my mother didn’t want them: she only read Jerry Falwell approved books.  I thought I would keep them around to see if I would read them.  If not, I would sell them and become fabulously wealthy.

I haven’t read them and it turns out that nobody else wants to either.  For one thing, they aren’t reader friendly:  the books are heavy, the pages thin and the print tiny.  I am at an age where these things matter.  I sat for a minute in the cat-pee scented air to see which Great Books I have read in Penguin or Riverside editions.  Hmmm.  I went to a private liberal arts college so I have read quite a few of them.  So as not to sound pretentious, I won’t list them.  The only of these guys I have continued to read throughout my life are Shakespeare and Sigmund Freud.  In Book Chi Part Two, I am going to ramble on about what else I like to read and I guarantee it won’t sound pretentious.  At least some of it won’t.

I don’t know what got into the culprit who peed on the books last night.  I don’t even know which cat it was.  It’s the 5^th hot day in a row and we are all a little ragged and drained; but Freudy was the cat who seemed most distressed about something.  He appears to be taking exception to my trying to put him on a diet. There’s a certain poetic justice in Freud peeing on the Great Books, I suppose.

I have tried to sell my set of Great Books to book stores, on Craigslist, on Amazon, and in yard sales, and no one wants them.  Now that they smell like cat pee and I can’t conscientiously pass that off as the scent of old leather, I expect they’ll end up on my parking strip with a free sign on them. How the mighty have fallen.