We’ve all been through it. Break-ups and infidelity.

At first it’s hard to take in.  You’ve got the job, you’re winning awards, you’re happy.  You had no idea your husband or boyfriend would ever cheat on you.  He loves you so much.   He never looks at another woman, ever.

Then it happens.  It’s sometimes a midlife thing.  It starts in one’s thirties, a doctor once told me.  You can read some statistics about infidelity at The Huffington Post.  According to data in The Normal Bar, a study of romantic relationships by Chrisanna Northrup, Pepper Schwartz, and James Witte, 33% of men and 19% of women said they were unfaithful.

I know the scenarios.  He sleeps with that woman in the office.  Or maybe he has an affair with that very good friend of yours who kept bringing food to the house while you were ill.

Someone always tells you, and you deal with it in different ways at different times of life.  When you’re young  you lose your looks because you cry all the time, sometimes for months.  And then you get divorced and all the single guys are either 20 or 80.  All the married men suddenly want to go out with you.  No, no, and no.

My cousin was in love with a man who cheated on her.  Now she’s alone.

Booze no longer allows her to sleep.

I tell her to go to a doctor and get antidepressants or Ambien, anything to help her sleep.  When she sleeps, she’ll feel better.  Sleep can be her new lover.

I tell her my stories.

I threw a bagel at him. He ducked.  It was a lot like the time Bush ducked the shoe.

I double-locked the door and told him to go to a motel.

I flew to Veracruz.

Twice divorced, and of course I’m MARRIED.  These experiences are a part of life.

She pulls out an adult education schedule.  She wants me to take a “Knitting for Couples” class with her.

It’s a class where you work on a knitting project with another person.  You decide what you want to knit, maybe a big blanket or an ottoman, and you have eight weeks to knit it.  It’s supposed to be therapeutic.  You learn how to work together, and you talk about it in class.

I will do anything I can to get out of a knitting class, so I tell her, “We’re not a couple.”

“I checked on that.  She said I could bring a friend.”

I only like adult ed when I’m the teacher.  I took a knitting class and learned nothing because I couldn’t see the teacher.  (I needed new glasses). I taught an adult ed Latin class for a while, and it was fun, a nice group, and  most of them obviously wanted to meet people, so I tried to structure things accordingly.

I know that this Knitting for Couples isn’t a good idea for her.  She needs to take something with people who aren’t in couples.

Maybe a cooking class.  Didn’t I see that in Hereafter?  (But it didn’t work out for Matt Damon.)

My cousin is used to getting her way, but she doesn’t seem too surprised when I say no.

“Maybe I’ll get him back,” she says.

I’m so glad I didn’t trash him, because maybe she will.

Anyway, I don’t have to take the knitting class.

Blogger gets off her bicycle.

Critics and journalists often suggest that blogs are not worth reading.

So let me pose a similar question.

The Guardian book page:  is it worth reading?

The reviews are fast and sloppy, barely more than plot summaries.

Don’t get me started on the reader reviews.

Then there are the staff writers.

Alison Flood, who used to write amusing articles about her middlebrow reading taste, now does cut-and-pastes from other journalists’ writing.

And Robert McCrum cannot be quiet about blogs.

What is it about him and online writing?  He was editor in chief at Faber and Faber, is an associate editor of The Observer, and the author of a biography of P. G. Wodehouse.  In a recent article, he aligned himself with Orwell and Jonathan Swift (and I can only say, “Really?”) and wrote about the “abuse and impoverishment of English in blogs and emails.”  He writes:

Some while ago, with reference to Orwell’s essay on “Politics and the English language”, I addressed the language of the internet, an issue that stubbornly refuses to go away. Perhaps now, more than ever, we need to consider afresh what’s happening to English prose in cyberspace.

To paraphrase Orwell, the English of the world wide web – loose, informal, and distressingly dyspeptic – is not really the kind people want to read in a book, a magazine, or even a newspaper. But there’s an assumption that, because it’s part of the all-conquering internet, we cannot do a thing about it.

Doesn’t he understand that hundreds of thousands of people love to write? If you have ever gone to a writers’ conference–I did in 1984; does that make me George Orwell?–you will discover that doctors, waitresses, counselors, professors, lawyers, salespeople, plumbers, housewives, and painters are writing books in their free time.  And they pay $300 to $1,000 to spend a week or two writing and attending workshops where their writing is analyzed (usually constructively).

The blogosphere is like a huge writers’ conference: one or two people are very good, but the others all love to write, too.  Bloggers are writing for themselves, a few readers, and the bots.  Oh, and our husbands.

No matter the quality, our blogs are not going to be praised by conventional journalists.

My friend Ellen suggested that the FBI is reading our blogs.  God forbid!

And now for Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s “borrowing”

In her not very good new novel, Two-Part Inventions, a novel about musical plagiarism, Lynne Sharon Schwartz includes a scene that is surprisingly similar to something I wrote at my old blog.

In an essay about trying to get ice for my mother’s iced tea at the nursing home (I went to the nurses’ station, and was told to go back and push the call button), I said that you could push but not  too hard because you didn’t want anyone to hold it against the the patients.  I added a few lines about my  mother’s former pushiness when I was in fourth grade:

It’s like the time in fourth grade when she complained to my teacher when I got a B instead of an A in geography.  For the rest of the year, the teacher humiliated me by asking,  “Are your grades good enough for your mother?”

In Schwartz’s novel:

Her quarterly report card gave him nothing to reproach her with.  Until, in the fourth grade, she presented a report card to him as usual for his signature…  He gave the report card a cursory glance, a small folded four-sided document on stiff paper that attempted to look official.  He was searching for his fountain pen, when he noticed the B+ in geography.

Schwartz’s scene is better-developed, and the  father makes his daughter confront the teacher herself.  But it is similar.

What are the odds?  I mean, B’s in  fourth-grade geography?  A parent displeased?  Why not change the subject and grade?

At my old blog I highly praised Schwartz’s novel, The Writing on the Wal, and she probably continued to read my blog.

Is this kind of borrowing “plagiarism?”  Or is it something else?

She thanks a lot of people in the Author’s Note, but my name isn’t mentioned.

I would really like to say to her, “Get out!” like Elaine in Seinfeld or “Get the f___ out!!” like Susie Essman in Curb Your Enthusiasm.

I don’t want writers “borrowing” from my blog.

I absolutely loved Laura Lee Smith’s Heart of Palm, a “high middlebrow”  Southern novel about a “redneck” family:  the father’s a redneck, the mother’s more or less an “aristocrat,”  the boys are wild, and the daughter has OCD.  The novel is a comedy, but the family is bound by tragedy,  and it follows Arla and Frank and their children through 40-odd years.   (I wrote about it here.)

We have 5,000 double-shelved books and are running out of room.

Leave a comment if you’d like this book.

I truly recommend it.

The winners are:

Tony —  Doris Lessing

Kaggy —  Hugh Walpole

Jen — Colette

Rhonda — Dear Cary

Send your address to mirabiledictu.org@gmail.com and I’ll mail them!