It is a short lecture that I give during the fourth week of the semester each autumn, entitled “What Apologies Are For, and What They Aren’t For, and To What They May Occasionally, and In A Properly Modified Fashion, Also Be Applied.”

Apologies, my dear Plumplings, are a matter of no small import to decorum.  To be capable of an apology shows humility and generosity of spirit.  To be forthcoming with apology when it is appropriate, without having to be prompted in any way, is a beautiful show of one’s sense of honor and fair play.  To display awareness, through one’s actions, of what constitutes a proper apology gives substance to one’s reputation for acuity and sensitivity, as well as one’s sense of propriety.  And, of course, to be capable of making apologies gracefully and without unduly rumpling the counterpane atop the well-made bed of pleasant sociable intercourse is a certain sign of sophistication and grace.

That said, apologies are a common source of vexation for those who would live a pleasant and well-mannered life.  We of the fairer sex particularly are prone to making apologies where none are required, an insidious practice undermining not only ourselves but the practice of apology itself.

To understand this we must first understand that apology may be overt and direct, a verbal (spoken or written) admission of wrongdoing and expression of the desire to soothe any irritation caused thereby, or it may be nonverbal, usually performed in the mode of retreat or disengagement from any offended party and the performance of propitiating gestures intended to smooth raised hackles.  These methods are most often used in conjunction, and rightly so: a verbal apology that issues from a mouth set in a face that does not appear contrite is unlikely to be taken seriously, after all.

These methods may also be used separately.  One must occasionally, of course, apologize by letter when one cannot be present in person.  This is only to be expected and is a perfectly adequate solution to the unfortunately persistent problem of a lack of affordable teleportation.

The nonverbal approach may also be used alone.  It is somewhat less defensible, however, than a solely verbal apology.  Yet there are times when one does not wish to risk further contretemps by offering a conversational opening to an offended person, and so does one’s best to simply appear apologetic and inoffensive in the hopes that it will be sufficient.

This is less optimal than the verbal approach in that it is often indistinguishable from the unwholesome act of silencing and belittling one’s self solely for another’s comfort, and yet we cannot condemn it wholesale as it is sometimes by such unhappily desparate acts that self-possession must be retained and self-protection managed.  Thus I caution you to use the nonverbal approach only very carefully, and only with deliberate forethought.  And for all apologies, verbal or nonverbal, I urge you most fervently to make them only after evaluating them according to these simple principles:

It is just and proper to apologize for actions, deeds, and words.  Even if inadvertently so, if our acts have harmed or offended, an apology is virtually always appropriate.

It is neither just nor proper to apologize for what one ineluctably and inevitably is.  Even if what one is — fat, for instance, or homely, or an atrociously bad player of crokinole — offends others, if it is merely something you are and not something you have done, you are under no obligation to tender an apology.  If others’ offense is due to their inability to be tolerant, kind, or gracious and not due to your having acted or spoken offensively, then honi soit qui mal y pense.

Some examples of the former category, that is, the Acceptable and Warranted Apology given for Things That Apologies Are For:

• “Jessamyn, I’m so sorry.  You must let me pay to have the upholstery cleaned, I can’t think how I managed to get lobster Thermidor all over your recamier, but I do seem to have done, don’t I?”
• “Do forgive me, Vincent, I know your time is precious and I do apologize for being late.”
• “Oh, Mildred, I am so sorry I forgot your birthday.  I hope you enjoy this nosegay, tardy though its arrival may be.”
• “My goodness, how thoughtless I am, I must learn to think before I speak.  I am so, so sorry I said that.”

Some examples of the latter category, that is, the Unacceptable and Inappropriately Proffered Apology given for Things That  Need No Apology:

• “Oh Philip, I’m sorry, if I only weren’t so fat your coat wouldn’t have gotten wrinkled in the taxi-cab.”
• “I wouldn’t blame you a bit if you just left me behind, the crutches really do make me slower and I’m sorry I’m bogging the rest of you down, you’re awfully sweet to put up with me.”
• “I do apologize, Aunt Lottie, I did try to be charming but I guess I’m just too homely for it to do any good.  The vicar’s son didn’t even want to stay to tea.”

Now, I must warn you now that there are, in addition to these two categories, some occasions on which one must strew about things that appear rather like apologies but are in fact not.

For instance it is polite to provide a warning with regard to what one is, but only if one is being mistaken for something quite different.  If one’s hostess is convinced you will be her savior at the games table and you know full well that as inevitably as an antimacassar will not be an andiron, you will not, then you ought to tell her so.  A simple “Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, Mabel, but I should warn you I am absolutely pants at whist” should suffice.  Should she insist that you play on her side anyhow, and she loses as a result, it is not your fault and you owe her no apology, since she was warned.

It is also appropriate, at times, to soften the hard leading edge of a firmly-stated preference or boundary by use of the phrase “I’m terribly sorry, but,” as in “I’m terribly sorry, Edith, but I cannot abide a public altercation between a lady’s posterior and one of those wobbly plastic garden chairs, I must insist upon putting you to the trouble of finding proper seats for the lot of us.”  In this case you are not apologizing for the size of anyone’s posterior — ample of rump is a thing one is – but, having clearly and firmly stated your boundary, for the inconvenience of causing your hostess to comply with it — a thing you’re doing.

 (Never mind that Edith, in a perfect world, would not put me to the trouble.  She knows perfectly well how fat my rear end is and that I’d rather sit on a fence-rail than one of those terrible white molded-plastic patio chairs she insists on putting out at her garden parties.  But Edith, though she is ever so darling in other ways, has a memory as short as a snake’s inseam.  What is one to do but to put her to the trouble?)

Finally, if someone expresses offense in regard to something that one is rather than something that one has done or said, it is acceptable in the name of comity to pull out the otherwise wholly impermissible Insincere Apology For Another’s Reaction for which the basic formula is some variant  ”I’m so sorry that you feel that way.”  As in “Oh dear, Mr. Lagerfeld, I’m terribly sorry that the sight of my world-crushing posterior offends you so.”

To sum up:

• Apology may be verbal, nonverbal, or both.  Consider carefully what version you intend to use on each occasion.
• Apologies are warranted and due for things you have said and done.
• Apologies are neither warranted nor due in regard to what you are.
• It is sometimes useful to employ something that looks like an apology, yet is not an apology, in order to grease the creaky cogs of civility’s enduring engines.

[Pupils will now be divided up into groups in order to practice their apology-making skills, both written and oral, while the Lecturer in Deportment retires to the teachers' lounge for a small glass of brandy.]

Mrs. Clarence L. Avoirdupois is the Very Senior Lecturer in Deportment at Miss Hanne’s Academy for Wayward Girls.  She answers your etiquette questions regarding all matters corpulent each Tuesday the Eenth.  Queries may be directed to Mrs. Avoirdupois via the comments section in this blog or at her Twitter page.

                          

I do not cotton to this whole idea that the product you use makes or breaks your beauty ritual.  There are a few cases in which I have a moderate amount of brand loyalty, to be sure, but what brands I am attached to I like simply because they do exactly what I need them to with a minimum of doing things I don’t need them to.  For example, I do not need a moisturizer that makes me smell like a teenaged girl after a session at the perfume counter at Macy’s.  I merely need a moisturizer that moisturizes.  I do not require a razor blade that leaves a slathering of what I can only assume is meant to be protective mucus all over my legs.  All my razor blades need to do for me is shave the hair off.

This results in a certain catholicity in product use.  Many of the things I use are drugstore products, many of which work quite well and are available in formats that do not have unwanted bells, whistles, and cheap nasty perfumes.

Now that I am north of 40, taking care of my face means washing with Cetaphil and following it up with what used to be called Oil of Olay and is now apparently called just “Olay,” except that everyone I know still calls it Oil of Olay.  You can get Olay stuff in unscented, hypoallergenic versions, which I recommend unless you want to smell faintly of grandma.

Once or twice a week, I scrub my face with Queen Helene’s Cocoa Butter scrub.  It’s an exfoliating scrub but it’s not too harsh.  If I run out, I just use some oatmeal mixed with warm milk or an egg yolk, which is kind of goopy but gets the job done and leaves your skin feeling nice.  In general I believe that nothing that lathers really belongs on your face.  Most soaps are too drying and many are too harsh.  Clean oil will take dirty oil off just as well, and a little friction can’t be beat.

I am a big Queen Helene fan, incidentally.  I do know a few people who look down their noses at this brand because it’s cheap and tends, at least around here, to be sold in downmarket beauty supply stores.  These people are fools.  Queen Helene products have been around for 80 years for the very good reason that they do what they say they will, and they do it without selling anyone a bill of goods.  (Try the Cucumber Massage Cream.  It’s fantastic as a cold cream. Or schmear on a thick coat, wait a few minutes, wipe it off with a warm wet washcloth.  Babies’ bottoms wish they felt as smooth and soft as you.)

I am also an enormous fan, speaking of economical beauty secrets, of the Salux exfoliating washcloths from Japan.  You can get these at Asian markets for about $3, and they hold up very well to regular use in my experience.  What this is: about a yard of a foot-wide strip of loosely-woven scrubby fabric made of nylon.  They are long enough that you can grab both ends and scrub your back easily, they generate tons of lather from a small amount of soap or shower gel.  Every week or so I try to spend some quality time with my Salux cloth and give my whole epidermis a general resurfacing: this, kittens, is DIY dermabrasion of the kind you’ve experienced if you’ve ever gone to an old-school bath house where the attendants scrub you into a whole new skin.  You need not be quite so aggressive unless you choose.  I feel that If you tingle a little as you step out of the tub/shower, you’re doing it right.  (Masculine people, incidentally, tend to adore these things.  I encourage this because nice soft exfoliated masculine people are a treat to smooch on.)

Less bargain-oriented, but still on the exfoliation tip, I cannot recommend highly enough the scrubs by Villainess called “Smooches” — they’re oil-based scrubs with phenomenal scents.  The balance of scrubby to unguent is nice, and although they do, as all oil-based scrubs do, leave a film of oil on the tub/shower that leaves you with the need to scour out the shower/tub afterward, they also leave a film of oil on your freshly-exfoliated hide which obviates the need to lotion yourself down afterward.  Timewise it’s six of one, half dozen of the other, but maybe you can talk someone else into scrubbing the tub.

These are particularly good on feet and knees and elbows, I find, though I also enjoy them as whole-body scrubs now and then.  The fact that you can get scent-coordinated body creams (called “Whipped“) with a great texture is a plus.  In some cases you can get the perfume oils by themselves, too.  I am partial to “Scintillating,” “Chloroform,” and “Jai Mahal” of their regular scents, but they do a lot of special seasonal scents that I have also enjoyed.  ”Pipevine Swallowtail” was one of their summer scents, and it’s fantastic.  Smells like tomato plants and cut grass.

What else has been fueling my Urban Femme Renewal?  Butter London nail polishes.  Argan oil, which is great for your hair and helps keep summer frizziness down.  Bumble & Bumble Sumotech, which I mix with a few drops of argan oil for the perfect summer blend of de-frizzification and a little bit of control.  Oh, and the gorgeous handmade spritzes made by my herbalist friend Jenny, who brews them up from scratch — I currently alternate between a Green Tea/Jasmine/Rose/Orangeflower one and a Spearmint/Sage.  A few spritzes in the face feel fantastic, smell blissful, and do nice things for my complexion.

So there you go.  Product recs out the wazoo.  Not the usual sort of thing for this blog, but then again, the weather’s been a little out of the ordinary too.  And in closing, I note that all of these things may be used with pleasure and benefit by non-femmes, too.  Enjoy!

                          

I do hope you’re all staying cool.

I’m in heatwave bunker aestivation mode.  Just me, a lot of iced tea, BC powders for the inevitable heat-related headachiness, and research reading.  Not much to talk about, not much to see.

                          

It may be a few days before things get back to normal around here. Thanks for your patience.

                          

Bred in 1918, "Mermaid" is a tremendously thorny, ridiculously vigorous rose that rapidly makes itself into a first-class high-security fence if you grow it along an existing fenceline, as I am along our back alley.

The Mermaid Fence.

Baby white peaches, var. "Peregrine," bred 1906. It is said to be to white peaches what Cox's Orange Pippin is to dessert apples -- the gold standard. It's in its second year in my garden, so I should soon get to find out!

My blueberries are starting to look like they might eventually be edible.

HRH Fez, our bronze Egyptian Mau, busily claiming the new daybed for catkind and challenging us to do something about it.

A sentiment Fez wholeheartedly endorses, and I do also. Spotted on a lamppost across the street from the hardware store.

A nearby house sports this fine, subtle piece of ironwork. I walked past it a number of times before I realized what the "spindles" below the handrail were made of.

                          

Technically I’m not so between as all that.  The book process happens in stages.  You write a proposal, you shop the proposal, you get a contract, and that’s often all prior to your actually writing the book.  Then you write the book.  Then you do the editorial back-and-forth, and then the book finally goes to production and you do the production back-and-forth, and then the book finally comes out and you do the PR/marketing hoo-hah.

Somewhere in there you start the cycle over again, with the proposal and the contract and the whatnot.

I’ve got a book in production, coming out in September.  And I’ve got a book that’s just finished editorial, coming out in January.  And I have a book that’s about to be formally under contract — the contract’s being written more or less as I type, my agent having reached a handshake agreement with the publisher — and that I should, for a whole bunch of good reasons, already be writing.

I am, however, not.  I am in bardo, doing the tiresome flopping about that I tend to do between books, being generally aimless and unfocused and more than a little whiny.

I’m not writing the next book for one very specific reason.  It’s not because I’m plumb out of words, or just so drained from the last two that I don’t yet have the wherewithal.  I have words.  (I always have words.)

What I don’t have is a contract.

I am particularly terrible about this.  Writers who are the kind of writers who tell other writers how to write (a frequently noble profession in which I generally do not participate) are forever telling people to write for themselves, and that if you are writing a book and it’s not the book you’re writing for yourself, on your own cognizance and for your own reasons, you are, in the parlance of my people, doin it rong.

I myself find nothing so literarily inspiring as a contract and a deadline.  If I just want to think about or know about things for my own sake, or tell myself stories, I certainly need not go to all the trouble of writing them out and indeed, why should I? Writing is a communicative act.  It’s for when you’re fairly sure someone else is interested.  Or at least for when you have something you feel a need to say to someone else.

Me, I have a lot of things I like to think about, and stories I like to tell myself, that do not require anyone else’s participation in any way.  Nor do I think many — or, more likely, any — other people would be interested.  For better or worse I do not suffer from the conceit that all the contents of my brain are so scintillating as to deserve a regular airing in full view of the public (she typed into a blogging software text window, being a hypocrite of the first water).

Perhaps that’s because I’ve never written the book first, then tried to sell it.  I’ve never written (or edited) a book that wasn’t looked-for prior to its being written.  People sometimes ask me how they should go about selling their first books and I have to say that I have no idea, because I ended up writing my first book while I was doing something else altogether with my life and had no intention of ever writing a book, period, except that then a publisher called me up and asked me if I had thought about writing one on a particular subject and I figured that as the great British composer Arnold Bax said, “You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk-dancing.”

So as far as I’m concerned, you sell a book by having someone ask if they can buy one from you.  Which is an effective solution.  But not, perhaps, a solution for everyone.

I deeply admire people who write books on their own cognizance, who can find that kind of discipline and dedication and passion and consistent effort without any kind of promise that it’ll ever see the light of day or that anyone aside from them and maybe their four closest friends will read it.  Even if I never read their books — even if they are books so atrocious they should be burnt immediately on completion and their tormented ashes buried in an unmarked grave at a deserted crossroads at midnight on a moonless night — I admire the act of creation.

I similarly admire, at least in principle, the hubris that prods so many people to roll out of bed in the morning and assume, for the sake of argument, that other people will want to read the stories they want to read, that other people have the same questions they have, that other people want to see their visions and listen to the music that plays in their heads.   I think we can all admit that sometimes in practice this turns out not to be quite so true: any trip to any bookstore, with all the books on the shelves you aren’t going to read and you don’t care that you aren’t going to read, is enough to tell you that.  (And those are just the ones that get published!)

Although sometimes it is true.  Sometimes in very big ways.  Sometimes you thank God for the hubris that got someone to create something and to put it out there and, sometimes, put it out there repeatedly in spite of initial rejection.

I often wish I had a bit more of that hubris, that arrogance.  I did have more when I was younger, I think, but with age has come the realization that a vigorous engagement of the filter between brain and mouth — or fingers — is perhaps the chief reason that no one has recently felt the need to beat me over the head with a stick.

Another feature of age is that I have become less impressed by the contents of my own head.  I’m just another smart monkey.  I have very little to offer that other smart monkeys don’t also have to offer.  There is no real reason to assume mine is better.  There are a great many things I feel a mild urge to write but don’t write because I can’t bring myself to feel that anyone would find them worth the bother of reading.

It does tie me in knots, yes.  Well observed.

This is precisely where the contract comes in.  Getting the marching orders to write this thing or that thing is liberating.  I no longer have to decide whether something belongs in the pile of “things that are best kept inside your own head where no one else need be bothered by them” or in the vastly smaller pile of “things in which other people may fairly be expected to show an interest.”  I have a clear sign.  I don’t have to guess at whether other people will be interested; someone else has made a carefully-calculated bet that indeed, they will.

That’s the bardo.  Flopping around waiting for the next person to show an interest, in a way that is meaningful in a publishing context, in one of the things I did manage to find the chutzpah to shove under other people’s noses.  Waiting for the next incarnation.

Fortunately the next contract is on the way.  Hopefully I will refrain from being too tedious in the interim.

                          

Just FYI, what I do mostly isn’t pitting cherries with a hairpin.

It’s writing books about things like the history of virginity.  And other things having to do with sex and bodies.

Sometimes I’m also a lecturer and/or public speaker.

You can find out more about me here or here, or if you like, find me on Twitter as @hanneblank.

Thanks for visiting!

                          

Should be a good time.  There’s an Eddie Izzard reference.  And a Carl Sagan one. And if you bring books I’ll sign ‘em after the gig.

                          

It’s not available quite yet.

But you need this.

Atomic Books’s very own e-reader.  The Neutron.

Totally awesome indie bookstore.  (I’m lucky enough to live within walking distance. )

Totally awesome indie e-reader.  (So you won’t be missing out if you don’t.)

Get you some.