one of my first entries in this book journal was about Carolyn Heilbrun's suicide and my sense of loss over it.  via a newly discovered delicious bookblog, Redwing, here is an essay by Katha Pollitt on the same subject.  it's from the NYT magazine, so you need a name and password.  but, surely, you have them?

House of Sand and Fog, II

Okaay, all finished. time now to read something that picks me up a little bit. chances are, i won't see the film made from this book.  it's just too outrageously feelbad, although i was curiously detached from any personal feeling about most of the characters.  i knew from the beginning, partly from reviews of the film, that there would be no Happy Ending, and i was simply following the train wreck from bad to much worse.

the story:  an Iranian immigrant, former officer in the Shah's Royal Air Force, now struggling to keep up the appearances of a rich expat life in the Bay Area, buys a bungalow at a tax auction with the intention of flipping it for a large profit.  the sale was a mistake on the county's part, a bureaucratic error in street addresses, but the sale is legal and final.  the former owner is a young woman who moved to California from Masssachusetts, newly married to a husband she met in rehab (booze and coke). the guy by now has left her, friendless and alone, cleaning houses for a meager living.  she and the cop who supervised her eviction are soon united in a mad effort to get the house back, as well as a sexual relationship leading down an alcoholic rabbithole. the deputy is probably the most interesting character in the book, complicated, conflicted about everything, looking for love in a very wrong place.  i'm sorry to say that we also have to add Col. Behrani's family, a married daughter, teenage son, and wife, to the characters dragged into the nightmare resulting from the ownership battle.

this is a long book and at the end the stage is as littered with bodies as a Greek or Shakespearean tragedy. i think this may in fact be a contemporary version of a classical tragedy, and i may have to go away now and think about that.  take a look at Col. Massoud Behrani as a tragic hero, a man so dedicated to his vision of pride and honor that he is blind to everything else, and so loses all that truly most matters to him.  and, if i can think of it in those terms it might be interesting to see just what Ben Kingsley does with this character.  or, maybe not.

House of Sand and Fog

well, bethellsigns, it's so interesting that you mention "House of Sand and Fog," the movie, in your comment on my previous entry.  having finished all my library books, except for Brick Lane, which G is currently reading, i picked up an old reader's copy of House of Sand and Fog which has been lying around for a couple of years.  it is a totally compelling read, a terrible thing to have started while the DC group was visiting and i had to be social and auntly and fun and active.  when all i wanted to do was curl up in a nest of quilts and read this ghastly story of spiraling awfulness. our company has just departed, and we really had a ton of fun, but now i can devote myself to seeing who falls apart first and worst in this book.  i reserve judgment yet on seeing it as a movie.  love that Ben Kinglsey, however.

sad note over the weekend, another of my favorite actors, Alan Bates, died of cancer at the far too young age of 69.  a fine and literate actor, often appearing in fine literate films.  i will miss him quite a lot.

This is what a real reindeer looks like!

If you read my other journal, the windmills of my mind, you know that i've done a few entries on the subject of the Solstice.  here is the first one, there are two more here and here. the others should all be on the front page of most recent entries.  if you have the stamina.  but, i really didn't do the job i wanted to, owing to the technical problems the journals have been having, and to the fact that this is a busy season, with lots of other things to do besides sitting at  the computer.

so, for anyone who might be interested in reading more, i give these references to real books, not internet links.  John Matthews, The Winter Solstice: the Sacred Traditions of Christmas.  Quest Books, 1998.  this one's full of wonderful illustrations, recipes, suggestions for celebration.  here's a fun one: Royale, Duncan, The History of Santa: from 2000 BC to the 20th Century. M.E. Duncan, 1987.  and, for those not afraid of the magical life, here's one to take you through the entire cycle of celebration:  Campanelli, Pauline & Dan, Wheel of the Year:  Living the Magical Life. Llewellyn, 1989. 

and if you do your reading you'll know why a reindeer illustrates this entry!

from books to blockbusters

here's an amusing little list, from "the Hollywood Madam,"  of movies recently opened or opening soon, the "holiday season" Biggies.  these are twelve films based on books, to whatever degree.  the categories the Hollywood Madam chooses to use for how closely the adaptation follows the book are:  "adapted from"  "based on"  "inspired by" or "loosely inspired by."  it's a fun read, and might help in our holiday cinema-going choices.

I asked for it, didn't I?

yes, i ask what you're reading and what do i get?  Libraries in the Ancient World!  Salman Rushdie!  okay, that's enough showing off now, isn't anybody reading The Murder Room?  or, i don't know, the latest John Grisham?  just kidding, of course.  i am impressed at the answers to the who's reading and what? question i posed in the previous post.  more, more! let's hear what's going on out there.  don't be afraid to be elitist!  don't be afraid to be hoi polloi, either. nobody reads Libraries of the Ancient World all the time.

now, i know it's been a long time since A.S. Byatt's Possession was the novel on everyone's night table, but i have just become aware that at some point in the recent past a film was made of the book.  i can't find it in my local Blockbuster, but i'm going to forage further afield and find it somewhere.  has anyone seen it?  i just found a lengthy review of the film on chicklit.com, which is not exactly complimentary.  here's the closing lines:  "Overall, Possession surprised me by seeming barely connected to Byatt's novel; it felt like a Cliffs Notes version with all the British terms Americanized.  Those who like the book can see the film without it ruining their reading experience, and if nothing else they'll appreciate the lovely English scenery.  Those who are unfamiliar with the book, however, won't come away with an accurate sense of it; reading the novel would be far more enjoyable and less confusing."  but is that not almost always the case?

Oh to think of all those books!

piles of swag carried home from the library, hoped-for holiday surprises.....books galore, and time to enjoy them.  i finished Jhumpa Lahiri's story collection, The Interpreter of Maladies, last week, and am now in the final pages of The House in Paris, by Elizabeth Bowen.  the Lahiri stories were very good indeed, though i thought the last one in the collection the best, and wondered why it was not the title story.  The Last and Final Continent, a good title for a collection, don't you think?  this Elizabeth Bowen is gripping in its own way, but it's somewhat like reading a book in a foreign language.  i feel that i am constantly translating.  i'm not sure how to define what i mean by that, but perhaps you know?  any Bowen readers out there? 

any readers out there?  is perhaps the better question.  because of the problem some of us have been having using the various buttons on the journal, notably the "save" button for entries, i haven't been posting with the regularity i'd prefer.  but this journal is a little lonely.  i want to hear what other people are reading, and how they feel about it.  want some suggestions, some feedback.  hmmmm, how to thump up some business?

oh BLOODY journal buttons!

so, i've been messing and messing and messing with things.  is it fixed?  can i save an entry?  this is a test, this is only a test. 

well, it would appear to be semi-fixed.  for the moment.  but i can only edit through a linked entry, not thru the main page.  i don't trust this enough to really do an entry.  i'll pop a vein if it won't save.  this has been going on for two days now, ever since i've come back from DC.    I have been gagged!  and mighty frustrating it is. 

silent snow, secret snow

i always think of that story by saki (h.h. munro)  when it starts to snow.  i loved his stories when i was a kid.  maybe i still would.  anyway, it's snowing here right now.  i should be home curled in a down comforter with a good book.  i am instead in the college library giving chapter retests to students in danger of failing beginning grammar class.  student, actually, singular.  the others didn't show up.  well, okay, it is snowing.  we're facing one more week before our much-needed winter break.  a week of final exams and grades, of exhausted sick students, lagging will-power.  final exams are an invention of the devil.  we are required to give them. if we don't know what our students have learned, actually learned and now know, by this point, there's something wrong with us as teachers. 

i've been reading book reviews and blogs, getting lots of ideas for things to read during the long-awaited break.  the C.S. Monitor turns out to have a wealth of information in its book section online. good lists of the past year's worthwhile books. i have Shirley Hazzard's NBC awardwinner, The Great Fire, David Guterson's Our Lady of the Forest, and Toni Morrison's new novel, Love, at the head of the list.  great book energy coming from spending time in a library.  i love libraries.  clean, quiet, well-lighted places full of books, magazines, newspapers, rolls of microfilm.  libraries and museums, places where i feel safely in the bosom of civilization and order.  yes, i know it's an illusion.  but i like it anyway.

 

pet envy

yes, i envy my pets.  because they spend all day lolling around the house.  if only they could read.  i've always thought it would be so good if dogs and cats could read.  their lives would be vastly improved.  so, molly curls up in the middle of the down comforter, without a book to keep her company, honey spends the day barking at anyone/anything (mail carriers, squirrels, bluejays, meter readers) that moves in the neighborhood.  in the meantime my TBR pile grows ever higher. 

yesterday morning i finished up the last pages of Lunch at the Picadilly, by Clyde Edgerton.  he has many previous novels, delightful small works of loving attention to southern characters and life.  he is particularly good with old women and young men/boys.  and that's what Lunch is all about.  an aging aunt in a nursing home, and her young(ish) caretaking nephew.  it's a small book, full of quirky personalities, humorous dialogue, a "preacher" whose sermons deserve some time and thought.  this book made me laugh out loud several times.  because i spent quite a few years caretaking an elderly aunt who was the world to me, it also made me extremely sad.  i'm a total fan of Edgerton's, so i'm hardly an objective reader.  he lives just down the coast from me, in Wilmington, NC, where he teaches creative writing.  if i were younger, i'd go enroll.

who gets to say? or, you're not the boss of me, elitist judges!

over at her excellent journal Amused has an entry on the subject of reading, followed by a string of comments from her devoted fandom.  altogether a fascinating entry.  did the Muse base this entry on the events at last week's National Book Awards ceremony? (certainly the cartoon accompanying the entry was a takeoff on the NBA controversy-in-a-teapot.) where Stephen King was given an honorary award, and Shirley Hazzard won the award for fiction?  there were comments on what is/is not fit reading material for a Serious Reader in this day and age.  polar oppostites King and Hazzard both had something to say.  here are a couple of stories highlighting the authors' remarks, one from the CS Monitor, the other from Yahoo News, oddly enough.  delicious to see that AOL bookers are following in such illustrious footsteps!

The Namesake

Yesterday morning i finished The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri.  Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize in the year 2000 for her first book, a short story collection called The Interpreter of Maladies.  This woman is an amazing writer and, as you can see in the above photo, a raving beauty too.  how fair is that? G took the short stories to Denver with her for the holiday, or i'd be reading them right now.  she says they're fantastic.  i don't have time to devote to writing a review of this novel, the next two weeks are going to be singularly busy ones.  so, i refer you to Amy Reiter's review of it on Salon.com.  she doesn't really mention the heartbreak i felt several times in this book, so perhaps she didn't feel it.  the title character's  (Gogol Gangulis, named for the russian writer of stories) relationship with his father was the cause of my pain.  the immigrant parents, the first-generation children growing up torn between two cultures....Amy Tan has explored this great divide so beautifully in her books about chinese mothers and daughters...but here we have a look at it from an indian father and son's perspective. 

so many books, so little time.  therefore i try to read books i'm pretty sure i'll at least like, hopefully love.  it's a luxury, but it leads to boringly glowing reviews.  i loved this book.  i hope you do too.

He springs eternal

so now i have just read (in the NY Review of Books) Margaret Atwood's review of the Studs Terkel book i was talking about in the previous post and i heartily recommend that you do the same.  it gives another view of the book, and it's a nice piece of the kind of writing that only Atwood can pull off.  she manages wry, adulatory, and critical, all in one review.  she loves the book, she loves Terkel, (in fact, she says "If Studs Terkel were Japanese, he'd be a National Treasure.") but she manages to root out some flaws.  not fatal ones, not even close.  the fact that she makes me want to go right out and buy this book is the bottom line.

re Studs Terkel interview

I just posted an entry on my main, or other, or whatever, journal about a book.  well, about an interview with Studs Terkel about his new book.  so, should this be a post here as well?  here's the link to read my post on the windmills of my mind, and that's easy enough.  isn't it?  the lines blur....yes, it's a book post, but it's also a fairly political post.  or, w/o going to an intermediate site, here's the link to the interview itself!

"American Woman" by Susan Choi - Part 1

     This is a beautifully realized work,  writing that at times takes my breath away.  I have reread many parts of it, something I almost never do.  I am a gluttonous reader, racing through books, finishing one, starting another, with barely a moment's thought in between.  Though I have started, indeed almost finished, another novel in the past week, I keep coming back to this one.

     It is, in part, a fictional retelling of a story familiar to most Americans anywhere near my age.  It came to be known as "the Patty Hearst story," though Patty was only part of it.  The larger story was about young radicals in the Viet Nam war era, so full of idealism, ego, nameless fury and rebellion, that their actions often polarized feeling against them and against the very real ideals they championed (racial and economic justice, an end to the brutal war in VN, to name a couple).  In her review on Salon.com Laura Miller says of this novel that it "isn't merely a fictional retelling of the Hearst case.  Instead, it's that rarest of creations, a political novel that gives equal weight to its characters' inner and outer lives." 

     If you are very young or if you spent the 70's in a cloister, here is one site I found where an obsessional geek has assembled a massive amount of info on the case, including pictures. In American Woman we have the story of the "lost year" when Hearst and two members of the SLA, Bill and Emily Harris, went missing, into the radical underground of the time.  The point of view is that of Jenny Shimada, a young Japanese-American (based on the real-life Wendy Yoshimura), herself living underground in upstate New York.  She is a peripheral member of the radical network that delivers the three escapees from California into her safekeeping and it becomes her job to hide and care for these three very damaged, not to say deranged, young people in a lonely farmhouse near the Hudson.  

(Part 2 continues)

"American Woman" - Part 2

Her further impossible job is to persuade , encourage, them to write a book detailing their experiences.  They cannot focus on this project.  They sleep, smoke, drink vast quantities of wine, are delusional, amok, "undisciplined, and terrified, and aflame with self-pity."    

      A gentle artist conflicted about her own past as a bomber, missing William, her jailed lover/mentor/teacher, outcast and lonely to the bone, Jenny finds herself chatting with people, doing things she knows to be dangerous, "introducing herself to the hardware-store owner, the train conductor, the librarian.  Compensating, she knew, for her strangeness - not just her strangeness to this town, but her lone Asian face...Sometimes she longed for a companion...A confidante, to make sure that she didn't break down and confide in the plumber."

     The Patty Hearst character is called Pauline, and ultimately this is the story of how she becomes that longed-for companion and confidante,  of the friendship that develops between the lonely philosophical Jenny and the confused and frightened Pauline.  During the difficult months of isolation, the two women live a slow dance of growing trust, painted in exquisite brush strokes:  small moments of daily life, absurd moments of revolutionary posturing, bloodsoaked moments of terror.  After a robbery planned by the outlaws goes awry and results in a murder, Jenny and Pauline go on the lam  in an ill-planned journey with no clear destination.  

     During this odyssey of backroads Americana Jenny and Pauline form a bond of sisterhood, which strengthens in the months they live together in what turns out to be the journey's end:  home, the Bay area, the place they both fled, the place they go to earth.  That after their  track-down and arrest Pauline betrays Jenny and their avowed sisterhood is not really a surprise, but it is a betrayal that hurts on many levels.

(Part 3 - the last one, really - continues)    

"American Woman" - Part 3

     My question when I finished the book was:  Who is the "American Woman" of the title?  Pauline?  or Jenny?  I feel it refers to them both, but that it is far more a reference to Jenny.  So, I was pleased to discover, in a Publishers' Weekly interview with Choi, that I am right.  She says:  "I don't think there's a single answer.  I guess the obvious 'American Woman' is Pauline, with her towering American pedigree, but I actually think of Jenny as being more truly that person.  People seem to view her as such a weird, foreign element, yet she was a California native."  An important part of Jenny's California pedigree is her father, detained in Manzanar with his parents as a young man, a fighter in his youth, now a bitter disillusioned old man who cannot condone her radicalism, but who loves her and wants her to survive and find a life for herself.  In the last section of the book we hear Jim Shimada's story, one that needs retelling in this new age of fear, this new era of distrust and distancing from those who don't look like "us."  The story of the Japanese internment camps is a shameful one, that has affected both Jim and Jenny, and is, I think, an integral part of Jenny's search for identity, place, peace.

     I keep wanting to quote long passages from the book.  Originally I did quote several.  And then I took them out.  Alone, torn from its integral place in the book, the quote loses its power.  These are not epigrams or aphorisms, they are organic parts of the whole.  Having read Miller's conclusion in the Salon.com review I must end with it, because I realize there is no way I could say it better.

"American Woman feels organic, not constructed;  it's a mature, fully realized work that does everything a novel should do and seldom does in this day and age.  It shows us the ways that character can be destiny, the big and the little forces that control our lives, the possibility that our worst choices will ultimately seem worth it, and the strange and circuitous paths by which a soul as lost as Jenny Shimada's can find its way home."

the bookstores of my youth

bitch magazine (after the site opens click on the link and you'll be there) has an article on the history of the feminist bookstore, which is kind of the history of the second wave of feminism, in a way.  in my lost youth the women's bookstore was the heart of the community, the place you went when you hit town to scope out the scene, meet people, make connections.  every good town had one of these, and i visited many of them.  i came to know the women who owned or ran them, so that when i got to Albuquerque my first stop would be Full Circle Books;  when i was in Austin it was Book Woman first, then Whole Foods, and then it felt like home.  when we lived outside of Boston we spent our mad money at New Words, in P'town it was Now Voyager.  i even worked at Now Voyager for a summer....talk about having your finger on the pulse!  of these stores only Book Woman is still alive and functioning as a place you can find books you won't find anywhere else.  when i was in Austin in august i dropped over $80 (on mostly paperbacks, so it was some books!) at Book Woman on things i knew i wouldn't see in Barnes and Noble.  visit this store's website, and when you're looking for that elusive book:  women's history, poetry, fiction, photography, philosophy, mystery by and about women, consider ordering from them instead of Amazon.com.

REASONS TO GO ON LIVING

forthcoming books: 

Anne Tyler,  The Amateur Marriage  (january)

Robert Crais, The Forgotten Man  (i'm an elvis cole/joe pike addict)

P.D. James,  The Murder Room

Amy Tan,  The Opposite of Fate  (not a novel, a collection of pieces. her novel was interrupted by a bad bout with lyme disease, from which she is still suffering)

 

books are not life, but then...what is?

perhaps you are thinking of me as the world's slowest reader.  what about American Woman ? you say.  will i ever finish?  will i ever say anything about the book?  and so on.  no, actually i am a fairly fast reader, way above average.  i'm just overburdened with reading things like grammar tests, essays from intermediate ESL writing class, inept summaries of texts from the beginning ESL reading class, memos from the department heads, newsletters from the department of adult education.  stuff like that.  eccchhhhhh. 

however, i did finish American Woman,  several days ago.  i'm into Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake  now.  not very far into it, and not likely to get there any time soon.  i'm doing an extra writing class tomorrow.  it's a four-hours-once-a-week class, friday mornings.  they've already lost one week's worth thanks to hurricane isabel and they'll lose another one next week for the thanksgiving holiday.  i feel that this leaves them at a disadvantage - so, we're going to meet to do some catch-up work in the library tomorrow. that, with yard work, grocery shopping and laundry, will take care of the weekend.  i also insanely picked up three movies after i left school today.  when do i think we'll watch three movies?  sleep is about abandoned during the week, maybe i'll give it up on the weekend too. 

American Woman   was a book to think about for a long time.  and i am.  thoughts will eventually be typed in this space after some gestation. 

what i've been reading

to procrastinate making up a test for my Beginning Grammar class, i thought it would be fun to put up a list here of the books i have particularly enjoyed during the past year or so.  this list sounds better than i am...my actual reading also consists of a lot of dreck,  mainly in the form of mindless murder mysteries. 

 so, in no particular order:

Changing Planes    -   Ursula K. LeGuin
Crescent      -       Diana Abu-Jaber
Bangkok 8    -   John Burdett
Child of my Heart    -   Alice McDermott
The Lost Garden   -   Helen Humphreys
Middlesex    -   Jeffrey Eugenides
The Master Butchers' Singing Club    -   Louise Erdrich
#1Ladies Detective Agency    -   Alexander McCall Smith
The Secret Life of Bees   -   Sue Monk Kidd
Summerland   -   Michael Chabon
Unless, a Novel    -   Carol Shields
The Frederica Quartet:   Virgin in the Garden,  Still Life,  Babel Tower,  A Whistling Woman    -   A.S. Byatt
Ten Little Indians    -   Sherman Alexie

                                   

hope? or destruction?

oh no.  browsing through blog of a bookslut just now, i discovered that Girl with the Pearl Earring   is being made into a movie.  this was one of my favorite books of the past several years, and i have given it to everyone whom i know  would appreciate it.  such a quiet perfect still-life of a book, such a self-contained-universe dutch-master kind of book....can it become the same kind of movie?  or will it be one i will have to avoid in terror?  this is the first mention of this i have seen.  anyone know anything more about this?  who's directing, has it been cast yet, and with whom if so?   

more on joan didion

ah, the freedom and release of friday afternoon.  friday evening now, dark and chilly.  the wild winds have died down at last, leaving the yard strewn with oak branches, deep drifts of oak and maple leaves.  we are lucky to have had no power outage, no serious problems from this storm of wind.

just wanted to put a note in here to those who might be interested in diane johnson's review of Where I Was From  in the New York Review of Books.  unfettered by 2500 character restraint, ms. johnson can far more fully expound on the themes of didion's book. she does a very thorough and eloquent job too, i have to say.  she ends up calling it a "heartbreaking essay," a judgment with which i must agree.

and i can't wait to have that limit removed.  yes, it's tightened up my writing.  okay, thanks.  now, i can't wait to be unbound.

Losing Carolyn

via a visit to sappho's breathing i have just found out that Carolyn Heilbrun died last month.  i feel a personal sense of loss at this.  she was one of the first feminist writers i discovered when i began my search for a new vision of a woman's universe.  her Writing a Woman's Life  is a feminist classic, which i will go find on my bookshelves and begin a memorial reading.  i'll miss the Kate Fansler mysteries, which Heilbrun wrote under the pseudonym of Amanda Cross.  I've read most of them and passed them on to sisters and friends.  according to the NYT obituary, and her son, she committed suicide.  not because of illness, but because she felt her life had reached its conclusion and wanted to maintain control over her final destiny.  i entirely understand this decision, but don't know that i could have the courage to implement it.  she was a strong woman, to the end.

a RIF on Scalzi's Project

i just paid a visit to john scalzi's internet weblog, Whatever, to check out what he's up to over there. and he's up to some good things.  the major one of which i think deserves a mention and a plug here in my new book journal.  becuz he's raising money over there for literacy.  specifically money to support a great outfit called "Reading is Fundamental."  my partner and i have been working with these people for several years now in various literacy programs we're involved in, and i can't toot their horn loudly enough.  we've seen kids as eager to choose books from a table of colorful picture and story books as any kid ever is to play a video game or eat strangely-colored cereal.  we've seen the pride and joy with which they curl up with their own new book, trace the pictures with their fingers, read the words if they're able, come ask to be read to if they're not yet.  most of the families we work with don't have much extra money, but once they see the effects of a book donated by RIF they start spending their own hard-earned dollars to buy their kids more books, and reading to them, and so more and more readers and book-lovers are created, and we can all rejoice in the continued life of literature. scalzi's offering some reading material for your donation, three original holiday pieces he's working on.  you only get to read them if you're on his list of donors.  so, get thee to Whatever and contribute the princely sum of $3.  it's a very good deal.

From the launch pad

musenla's ex libris  inspired my beginning this book journal. in it she mentions recently finishing jeffrey eugenides' Middlesex ,  a book i loved.  it's been too long since i read it to presume to write a review, but no one else i know has read it.  a little journal-to-journal book chat would be fun.  

the book i just finished is joan didion's Where I Was From,  a meditation on her deep California roots, CA "native" mythology in general, the myth of the crossing, the passage, the abandonment of so much in order to arrive on the golden shores.  and then the destruction of much of what was golden about those shores. ultimately, abandonment is what it's about.  the last section deals mainly with her mother's death, a rite of passage for most women, a crossing into ultimate adulthood, a mutual abandonment.  although my mother died over 20 years ago, didion's words about what we feel when our parents die resonate strongly:  "who will look out for me now, who will remember me as I was, who will know what happens to me now, where will I be from."  i think didion's mother's death has unmoored her from her own personal mythology, and led her to investigate the idiosyncratic CA ideals of individuality and freedom, coupled with the state's extreme reliance on the largesse of such institutions as the Southern Pacific Railroad and the federal government.  she sees "who will remember me as i was?"  as a major question for the long-vanished idealized CA, a golden dream that no longer is sure who will look out for it,  looking for the answer to "who will know what happens to me now?"   Californians may hope to have found an answer in the election of their new governor, but i think the only truth to be realized, for each of us, lies in this poignant sentence ending a passage of didion's trying to cope with a box of her mother's small possessions:  "There is no real way to deal with everything we lose."