Mary Gordon: (she’s) Pee Chee

January 13, 2009

Here’s one of the reasons I love the writer, and a beloved former writing instructor of mine, Mary Gordon:

**The following is from the NYTimes blog: PaperCuts

January 13, 2009

The Writer’s Notebook: Mary Gordon

Mary Gordon (photo: Emma Dodge Hanson, from NYTimes.com)

Writers’ journals are like musicians’ scales: practice, but also play — a chance to keep limber and test new ideas. They offer a place for personal reflections, fictional sketches, observed anecdotes and flights of language. They’re also particularly well suited to the blog format. As an occasional feature, then, Paper Cuts will ask authors to share a journal entry with our readers.

This week: Mary Gordon, the author most recently of the novel Pearl and the memoir Circling My Mother.

The Morandi show at the Met. My eyes fill with tears, and why? Why these renderings of ordinary household objects, the same few done over and over again … why should they be so intensely moving? It is, I think, the quality of the attention, the attentiveness. I feel, considering him, my failures of attentiveness and patience. The tenderness of the paint. The dimness, dimness seen as entirely valuable, the color of dream, of memory, of that which is already receding or has already receded, seen through — what — the fog of a past so thick definiteness is lost, colors of resignation, of humility, of tentativeness. We have learned to find humility a synonym for weakness: he forces us to rethink this. In many ways, he is the anti-Picasso … Picasso always trying something new, becoming someone different, seeing the world in different terms.

The different meanings of white.

The shadows that are not real … impossible shadows.

On his deathbed: “I have new ideas that I wish to develop.”

***

This year I’ve kept a journal, a moleskin, though somewhat sporadically. I decided to call it 39, and started it shortly after my 39th birthday last April. Hoping to capture my thoughts, ideas, observations in the this ‘crucial’ (read: devastating) last year/farewell to my thirties. I’ve never been a regimented journal writer–I’ve never been much for regimen in general, I suppose–though i’ve had a few over my lifetime.

I do love this idea of publishing a page from well known writers’ journals– another reason why PaperCuts is such a great read.

Oh, non sequitur (sort of), but yesterday at the campus bookstore of one of the colleges where I teach I  noticed they were selling Pee-Chee folders! The original! Or maybe it’s been slightly updated?–this one (I scanned the one I bought) has some blue color in it; did they have some color like that?  I can’t remember. But I can tell you how excited I was to see them. I had to buy one. Pee-Chees were a huge part of my high school/growing up years. I remember drawing all over them, putting a big wig on the tennis player and cartoon word bubbles like “I love you, man” next to the football players.

Good times. Good times.