New Year’s Eve and Day
Dave and I spent our weekend off doing more or less nothing, except having fun and storing up energy for 2009. We spent New Year’s Eve with Andrew and Maggie, Andrew’s parents and sister, and assorted friends. It was a really nice evening—plenty of good drinks and several great conversations, including one about authorly integrity that I particularly enjoyed. Andrew’s mom, Cheryl, is a journalist in Amarillo, and two of the assorted friends were also journalists. We got to talking about A Million Little Pieces, a subject about which I feel strongly, especially after a drink or two. The journalists tended to think that authors should be honest about their writing—either it’s a memoir, and therefore all true, or it’s a novel. I pointed out that five people watching an accident will tell five stories about what happened. So what’s true? And I pointed out “New Journalism.” Hard to tell if the feelings described in In Cold Blood were really experienced by the characters, but the book is clearly intended to be “true.” I read The Executioner’s Song not too long ago, and while I was enamored of it for many reasons, one of the things that impressed me was that Mailer built an extremely complex character out of various writings and interviews—a character who was real. Yet I had the sense that Mailer could’ve described Gary as a monster with equal veracity. I really disliked journalism in college, mainly because I was far too shy about interviewing people and I hated to edit my precious words down at all. (After writing 599-word book reviews for a year, I’ve come to see the value in starting longer and editing down, but it’s still painful!) But I’m also annoyed by the failure of imagination that causes us to feel cheated and lied to if events are portrayed as true and then turn out not to have happened. What about Truth?
Oy. I meant to tell you that we had a nice time on New Year’s Eve. The next day, we woke up to a gorgeous sunrise. I slept in and Dave made scrambled eggs and bacon for breakfast. We watched some bowl football, sat at the coffee shop, and headed into Boulder to go to REI and Bed, Bath, and Beyond. We ate a wonderful, traditional New Year’s Day dinner of pork roast, potatoes, onions, carrots, and sauerkraut with apples.
We drank some of our favorite wine and Dave broke off some oplatky for each of us. The candle flickered straight up, not choosing either one of us to be absent next year. (We’re likely to be out east visiting family, actually.) All in all, a very nice start to the new year, complete with rest, continued traditions, and the two of us enjoying each other’s company.