Nancy Rommelmann

A gorgeous interview with my dearest, Deborah Reed. The photos (including one with, ahem, yours truly, and what she says about the apple-and-Mounds Bar lunches is absolutely true) are dynamite, including this one of Deborah shooting like the seasoned frontierswoman she figuratively and sort of literally is.

And then there's this, when asked if she has any advice for up-and-coming writers:

Write through the crap. And I mean the daily crap, not just the crap you think you’re up against when you first start out. Don’t be so hard on yourself. It’s all crap in those first drafts. But if you don’t write it because you don’t want to see crap on the page, because seeing it there makes you feel like you’re not “good enough” then you will eventually become a self-fulfilling prophecy of not good enough because you will never get to the good stuff. Shut up and trust me on this. It’s like any art—sculpture, painting, music, it’s all the same. It doesn’t arrive fully formed. You have to shape and reshape and throw out and start over again and again before the finished piece appears. Work hard. Talent and putting in the hours are two different things, though putting in the hours hones the talent so they work hand in hand. Now get to work and stop reading interviews about other writers writing.

Love her xx

I've fallen in love with the Wall Street Journal Off Duty section, which appears on Saturday. (Full disclosure: I contribute to the paper's Review section.) Reporting on multimillion-dollar mansions and luxury travel, $6000 dresses and Jay McInerney on wine is a lovely way to wend a vicarious weekend hour.

Sometimes, one can partake, as I did in December with the At My Vanity section, when the Journal asks beauty experts about their routines and products. Ten days ago, Victoria Tsai, founder of Tatcha, was featured. Six days later, I was using her products, via a $49 sampler set the skincare company smartly offers. 

It arrived in two days--and during Christmas week; with instructions and a handwritten note with a discount code for a future purchase. I was impressed by the pretty packaging; the ease with which one might toss the items into a travel bag, something I have need of every six weeks.

Ms. Tsai, like Micha Anderson before her, revealed to the Journal her "beauty secrets." At  39-, 52-, 40-something, I find myself fascinated by such advice. I may wear skater slip-ons 300+ days a year, but I'd like to keep my face from falling apart as I can.

While I am in a steady relationship with Shiseido (more on that in a future post), my interest was piqued by Ms. Tsai's claim she developed the Tatcha line after meeting a geisha who credited her porcelain-smooth complexion to a regime of "powders and waxes." As a hook, it's a good one: tactile, tantalizing, exotic enough (to me) that it might prove true. 

The regime is simple: rub your face with camellia cleansing oil or, if you are wearing make-up, a deep-rice enzyme polish. The oil is fun: you massage it onto a dry face, which feels good and is good for circulation. The polish is very light (three types are included, gentle, normal and deep), and the skin does look and feel very smooth afterwards. The radiant syrun is thinner than the Shiseido serum I normally use; ditto, the rich silk cream. I have no idea whether weight = efficacy, but my skin looks bright and smooth, no redness or dullness. 

Another nice Tatcha benefit: the sampler set is generous. While the instructions say to use 15 pumps of the oil, using three or four is plenty. The teaspoon of rice powder can easily be quartered, meaning that a set that might have lasted you ten days will last three or four times that, giving you a good idea of whether the products work for you. www.tatcha.com

Up next: A MAC mascara haiku.

New book review in this weekend's Wall Street Journal, Chas Smith on Oahu's North Shore surf culture. The lede:

What to make of Chas Smith, author of this ripping profile of the surf culture on Oahu's North Shore, where the gargantuan waves are, in one of Mr. Smith's choicer observations, both "the poison, the cure."

Before we are mesmerized and terrified by those waves and by those who ride them, we must gaze upon Mr. Smith, something he calls upon us to do from his opening sentence:

There is a gun pressed to my temple. And I have a horrible haircut. I don't know which is worse, having my head shattered by a bullet or living another moment with this truly awful coiffure en dégradé. 

Does he have your attention? Do you want to punch him in the mouth? A self-proclaimed "star of Trash Prose," Mr. Smith is an unapologetic troublemaker-slash-dandy, a Big Bird of a dude with a shock of yellow hair and a broken beak. Yet he has enough years as a surfer behind him to get the story.

Someone over on Twitter -- where you will find me, @nancyromm, in 2014 -- asked, "Did we read the same book?" I get this. I was the one who initially wanted to punch Mr. Smith in the mouth, so much bluster, such crassness for the sake of it, e.g., talk of how much he hates his (first) wife because "she steadfastly refused to live famous." Also, an editor-friend who spends time on the North Shore questions Mr. Smith's contentions that the waves regularly reach 60-feet. If the reader feels queasy about certain general principles, do we doubt the rest, fruit from the poison tree and all that? 

For me, the answer was no. I saw Mr. Smith's posturing as a flag he waved, borne of needing attention, perhaps, but ultimately signaling us to the story. I became increasing fond of him as a character, and of the book. 

My husband is the subject of a great profile, by the Oregonian's Michael Russell. It's in the paper on Sunday, but online now. Check it out; bonus video below xx

In the morning, in the bathroom, washing my face, I sometimes think about what people want, who they love, how you explain what is going down now, with the family.

I had dinner tonight with Din and a good friend of his. This friend's wife loved my book of stories, Transportation. She's a naturopathic doctor and might help with some superficial stuff that's arisen from [see above paragraph]. I told him, I'll bring her The Bad Mother, though this book, this one is tough. People love it or hate it.

"Like Requiem for a Dream?" Din's friend asked. Yeah. A book of which one reviewer wrote, "This is a bad book," making me want to take the kids in the book under my cloak and hide.

The Bad Mother from Dymaxicon on Vimeo.

My review of Dave Egger's new novel THE CIRCLE runs in print today in the Sunday Oregonian. Several graphs were cut due to space considerations. Here it is in full. Your comments welcome here and on the O site.

It's been an exceptionally good season for soapbox manufacturers. First we had Ann Patchett expounding in an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal that Amazon's algorithm is the enemy of authors and bookstores (while acknowledging that the site "is responsible for a lot of my sales"). Then came Jonathan Franzen's dyspepsia over our present "technology-crazed, apocalypse-haunted historical moment," citing for especial villainy Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who "may not be the antichrist, but he sure looks like one of the four horsemen."

Now we have Dave Eggers' "The Circle," an indictment in the form of a novel, about what he sees as humanity's enslavement to social media. The book's message — that we are one keystroke away from a world where people lose their desire for and hold on an inner life — is evidently terrifying to some in the chattering class, including an editor at The New York Times who found the book "scary" and "bracing" and "all too real," for which I might suggest a cold shower and, as evidence of true terror regarding the future of the human condition, Terrence Holt's "In the Valley of the Kings."

Or we can just wait for the movie version of "The Circle," which the novel essentially is; it's a screenplay-in-waiting, with the pacing of a thriller, and offering superb opportunity for visual/techno super-saturation, the Circle being the world's most successful Internet company, with a campus to match: a glass dining complex that soars nine stories high, "a stone amphitheater built into a high grassy berm," an aquarium holding sea creatures from the Mariana Trench. I'd like to see this movie.

Perhaps the on-screen characters will have personality beyond stating the various — well, two — platforms Eggers puts in their mouths. Let's meet them here: there's Mae, our blank paper of a protagonist, thrilled to have gotten a job at "the only company that really mattered at all." There's her friend Annie, a platinum blonde higher-up in the Circle. There are the Circle's founders, known as the Three Wise Men, "a strange bouquet of mismatched flowers" drawn so broadly as to be caricatures, and there is Mercer, a former boyfriend of Mae's, whose assignment here is essentially to yell, "Abandon hope all ye who enter the Circle!" and be considered first a rube and then a threat for doing so.

The threat is to the Circle's online hegemony, which starts with the convenient-seeming TruYou account, which harnesses all of a person's online identities, offers more connectivity, more ways to shop, more ways to feel as though your opinion matters. The Circle's market share grows to most of the world's population, participation becomes mandatory, as do bio-readers and surveillance cameras, the kind people wear on their wrists and chests, a bondage presented as the ultimate freedom, the opportunity for total "transparency" and "to go clear." The allusions to Scientology are many. We await the references to totalitarian regimes, and are not disappointed.

Descriptions tend toward the thick and hammy. Mae on Annie's ascension in the Circle: "If she'd grown up in the Siberian tundra, born blind to shepherds, she still would have arrived here, now." Of the Wise Man under whose sway Mae falls: "His eyebrows were Roman arches, his nose like some small sea creature's delicate snout." Of a doctor at the Circle: "With her extravagant curves, her sultry eyes and harmonica voice, she was a volcano onscreen."

Alas, no ripped bodice on the book's cover, but a circular maze whose circumference is almost closed, and once closed, seals our enslavement.

Can Mae save the world? Mae, who is often relegated to interjections like, "So I'm —" and "I think so. But —" in order to offer a little white space during others' speechifying for/against the Circle. Mae, whose engages in the most undercooked sex in recent literary memory, and when asked by her partner to rate the encounter, scores him 100. Mae, whose impressionability makes her the perfect acolyte, and whose true believer status becomes so annoying, and then dangerous, that one of the book's characters puts itself in a coma just to get away.

Eggers has a convenient screen against criticism, in that "The Circle" is meant as satire, so that the book's obvious ironies (that 100) and robotic characterizations may be seen as deliberate and thus illuminating. Black is white and white is black, just like the indoctrination of the Circlers, get it?

Yeah, we get it. And Eggers gets some things right, the echo chamber that can be social media, the addiction to our feeds, our scores, the satisfaction a response brings, the anxiety produced by no response, the self-deprecating status updates, the self-satisfaction that we create change simply by hitting a "like" button. But with the exception of the visuals (irony alert: the most exciting scene in the book involves drones), must the adventure be so predictable? We see everything that is coming, albeit having us see the action is not, in this book, Eggers forte: Annie "arched her eyebrows mischievously"; words go "rattling in [Mae's] head" and "tumbled out" of her mouth. Considering the hullabaloo the book has received (an excerpt ran on the cover of the Times magazine last month), and Eggers stature, one expects more precision.

The Circle's master plan is to make sure "no earthly question would remain unanswered," thus leading to a world where people love and defend and kill for the chains with which they bind themselves. Eggers conceit, that once the circle is closed it cannot be breached, does not take into account teenagers, punk rockers, the Buckminster Fullers of the world, and the fact that all totalitarian regimes end, always badly.

The conceit likewise leaves no room for the grace that social media can give us, for instance, earlier this month, when a young friend died, and Facebook offered several hundred of her friends (flesh friends, myself included) a place to gather, to mourn, to send photos and poetry (a gathering someone called "the digital equivalent of the casserole"), to know where the memorial was, an Irish wake with drinking and dancing and crying and laughing. The Internet did this, too.