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Issue 50 / December 2012

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“Everything I’m devoting my life to is incremental. Writing a novel. Raising children. Sustaining friendships. These are the projects of given wellbeing and peace.”

Mona Simpson

Mona Simpson's latest novel My Hollywood - her first in a decade - is a tender and witty exploration of the ties of parenthood and of finding a place in the world, told from the viewpoint of an anxious new mother and her pragmatic Filipina nanny. She muses on her half-Syrian identity and plunges into a French language class as her adopted homeland celebrates Independence Day.

MONDAY

spacer Up at seven. Made coffee, oatmeal. Dashed to French intensive class at UCLA. Several attempts at French have been made: not only high school, but also a tutor a few years ago who kept insisting, "Je suis une femme, mais je ne suis pas une féministe!" This summer I'm going stick with it, no matter what.

I've bagged Arabic. Or rather, our Arabic tutor quit. He moved for a better job at the language institute in Monterey. We had one tutor for an eighteen-year-old, a twelve-year-old and me, and between the four of us there were too many cancellations to gain traction. We'd wanted to learn Arabic to talk to relatives in Syria. French will work.

I walk into what has to be one of the ugliest buildings on the generally gorgeous campus. Worse even than the architecture are the grimed windows, cobwebs grown opaque like drifts of snow slanted on the panes, and shaggy untrimmed palm trees breaking through the louvred courtyard roof. This seems the snapshot of the public university in hard economic times. No one would mistake this building for an Ivy League classroom.

I went to a public university: to Berkeley, as an undergraduate. I loved it and still do, for its greatness and frequent reminders that it was a state institution. But there is nothing romantic about this classroom, at this time of the morning.

The students all look nineteen and unpretty. In our halting American accents trying to form around the rudimentary French words, not a one of us sounds very smart.

No matter. I'm here to learn. Seven weeks, 8:30 to noon.


TUESDAY

Though the students look incredibly young, the French class seems to be moving at a fast clip. It reminds me of complex dance steps one has to remember and can't quite. The genders, the tenses, which adjectives go devant and après le nom.

I check email during class.

Sent from my iPad

Dear Mona

It is about time to have some words written by you to exemplify to humanity the outrage. And express the feelings of the American of these unprecedented massacres!

Love, Imad

Imad is a paediatrician in Florida and my cousin. He's been fundraising for humanitarian aid and medical supplies for Syria.

I'm half-Syrian, but I grew up with the other half. I saw Syria for the first time in 2008, when I took my children, with two families of cousins. We met hundreds of relatives. In Homs, I met my only living aunt, who was in her eighties. She found pictures of my parents when they lived in Damascus in her dim apartment and gave them to me. It's painful to think of that old woman now. She didn't seem to have the strength to endure a relocation. Another of my cousins is a pianist, living in the States. Since he'd been giving benefit concerts to raise money for humanitarian aid, his parents (a doctor who ran a hospital in Homs and a chemist) were beaten up in their home. They managed to get out through the Turkish border.

The diaspora Syrian cousins imagine the power of a pretty obscure fiction writer and imagine that I should be writing op-ed pieces. But what would I say? And why would they think anyone would listen? I add "try to write op-ed about Syria" on a yellow sticky file.

From 8:30 to10:30, there's one teacher. Then a break. From 11 to12 there's a section led by Mina. Mina is only a graduate student but a gifted teacher, clowny in her gestures. She stretches the sounds. She makes jokes about money and the time spins.


WEDNESDAY

It's the 4th of July and there's no class, so I work all day and go running. While making dinner, I try to think about an op-ed piece about Syria. Assad's civilian massacres are awful, but everyone reading my piece would of course already know that. What exactly is my opinion there? And no matter what I think, I know it's not even remotely fathomable that Americans would support another intervention, after Iraq and Afganistan. "Why are the Russians supporting Assad?" I wonder, and know I'll never really know. I remember noticing on our trip, when we travelled to small towns - to see an ancient monastery, to visit the town where Sumerian is still spoken, on the way to a restaurant at the sea - in every tiny restaurant a framed picture of Assad hung on the wall. It seemed a detail from a novel. I tried to imagine the person whose job it was to travel to all those small businesses to give the picture and to see that it was put up.

Friends come over to watch fireworks from our front lawn, but there's beach fog and the booms are muffled and the lights faint. My daughter and her friends practise round-offs on the lawns. "It's Independence Day," I say. "What country did we get independence from?" My children attend a hippie school. All three girls are twelve years old. "France?" one asks. "Israel?" another guesses.


THURSDAY

Mina breaks us into groups. I angle to get the girl in front of me, who's wearing a cool grey dress and matching flats. We converse in stilted sentences. She turns out to be a medievalist, just returned from two years in England, who lives in Ocean Park with her boyfriend and who bakes. We're joined by a boy who wears thick glasses. The son of two doctors, every sentence he's stumbled through in French concerns his animals. I started this class four days ago. After three mornings, people have begun to be particular. They're even better looking. It snuck up on me while I'd been working on the French. This is the problem with dating.

Returning from class at 12:30, I find an official-looking letter in the mail addressed to my son. The return address is UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT: Selective Service System.

"Dear Mr JandaliAppel," it begins (not including the hyphen in his name.) "Our records indentify you as a man who may be required to register with Selective Service, but has not done so. Refusal to register is a Federal crime punishable by a fine of up to $250,000 and up to 5 years imprisonment, or both." The letter then goes on to detail how one can register online, by telephone or mail.

I wake up my eighteen-year-old son, who is still asleep in his room.

This is why I can't say anything meaningful about Syria, I think. I have more reason to care about Syria than most Americans, and even I don't want my son to be drafted to a war there. He's going to college in September. And unless we're willing to send our sons and daughters to fight, we have no right to enter another war.


FRIDAY

Our first examen. It's hard, but the romance of learning has returned. A quiet room. The sound of pencils and pens on paper. Heads bent down over the kidney-shaped institutional desks. The window open. Mina sitting at the front desk looking outside, thinking of her day. Even though I'm just auditing, it's exhilarating to turn the thing in and leave, to drive west towards the beach and home. It's summer and I love white nectarines.


SATURDAY

I run and work in the morning, before anyone else is up. I'm writing a novel. My cousin, the Syrian pianist, will perform here in a few weeks. I write to people about his concert.

It's inconceivable that my novel or his concert will do anything for people in Syria now. Everything I'm devoting my life to is gradual, incremental. Writing a novel. Raising children. Sustaining friendships. These are the projects of given wellbeing and peace.

At the time we were in Syria, there was cautious talk about Bashar Assad. Everyone mentioned the hope his London training as ophthalmologist had inspired in the beginning. When we saw Hama, the place of his father's direst massacre, we drove through the town at night and stopped in the darkness to see its ancient watermill moving over the black Orontes River.


SUNDAY

On my to-do list today:

Two blurbs for books
Read up to page 127 of my novel
Call Imad
Write to a young novelist about her draft that I've read
Buy new clothes for my mother
Read chapter 5 in French
Finish "My Week"

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Mona Simpson's latest novel My Hollywood is published by Corsair.
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Monday, 16 July, 2012

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