All the Better to Read Books

It's TV Turn-off week. I've got to say that I somewhat object to the slogan at left, only because I think TV is part of culture, and culture is part of life, and it's all worthy of intelligent, reasoned (well, usually) criticism and analysis. People who watch inordinate amounts of TV aren't dead or absent; they're extraordinarily present, in that what they like and don't like directs all kinds of things that get made and used and thought about, by TV-watchers and non-TV watchers alike. No amount of preaching to the choir is going to change that. And also I think that some TV is actually pretty interesting. Does that mean I objected when OlderKid wanted to turn off the movie we were watching last night and go upstairs and read books, though? Certainly not. (Though I was a little sad since it was the glorious Muppet Movie, shockingly (by today's standards) full of guns, violence, and a funny Steve Martin.)

Placeholder

For posts that other members of the book club might be making. Right? Because people don't want to read about me and bats when important things are happening. Like...

The death of Jane Jacobs. I'm sorry it took this to prompt me to pick up her masterwork, The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

The continuing events in Durham, and the reaction in the blogosphere. (See, or try to forget, the comments thread of these posts especially.)

Or, you know, you could just discuss this world-shattering news for a while.

Thanks to the guest posters at Bitch PhD for all (well, except the last one) of this. You'll also have to look there for the links to people defending the Duke players. I'm not going there.

Bats in my...

Okay, for those of you who think I'm crazy, here's a repudiation. (Or maybe a further confirmation?) While working away in my lovely office earlier today, I heard a scritchy scratchy sound scurrying through the air duct that runs right over my desk. (An attempt to peer into that duct through the vent that's also right above my desk was deemed unwise by my eye.) One phone call to maintenance later, Kenny and Rob had come by, made fun of me for a while, unscrewed the vent cover, and left--leaving me to sit at my desk nervously, feigning busy-ness but really just waiting for whatever it was to pop out and drop on my head. Various colleagues came by to also make fun of me, all, "What are you afraid of? That it's going to bite you on the face if you look up there?" Well, yes, actually, that's exactly what I'm afraid of, and I don't see one thing wrong with that. More scritchy scratchy sounds, and another, more panicked phone call to maintenance later, the scratching was revealed to be a trapped bat, Rob came by and waved a big net around, and Kenny caught it with his hands and left, though not before exhorting me to read Call of the Wild. Which just goes to show: there's no situation in which a little book club-ish discussion is not appropriate.

Wasting Time

Or improving my brain-power, whichever you prefer. I think on a venn diagram of people who love books, people who love cats and people who blog, you'd find a significant middle section of people who love word games. For me, it started with a little innocent New York Times crossword puzzle in college. I'm still working on mastering the evil Saturday version of that addiction, but I've also branched out. Peter introduced me to Boggle, and then there are the special editorial page puzzles that the New York Times puts together once in a while, and the NPR Sunday puzzler, led by this oddball, and crossword puzzles in other newspapers...and now Babble, which is bascially Boggle on a galactically slow pace. The one puzzle I cannot figure out how to master and would love to? The Atlantic's cryptic crossword, or British crosswords in general. I haven't had the brain flash, and maybe never will. The one puzzle I will never be interested in? Sudoku. What's with the love, people? It's just numbers, no words at all! And we need words, so we can make books out of them, and then our cats can sit on us while we read those books, whereas numbers...totally useless for cats!

Revelations

1. The Vet School's Open House, (unfortunately) themed "Kickin' It Up a Notch." In an orgy of animal related activities, we managed to take in the Budweiser Clydesdales, the Missouri Mule Team, the Purina Amazing Dogs, the House Rabbit Society, the Missouri Herpetological Society, the Equine Breed Show, the Bovine Breed Show and of course the petting zoo featuring an albino hedgehog, plus calves, lambs, kids, and llamas. Everything was awesome, except the Clydesdales, which were horrifyingly awesome.* It was like someone had designed a day just for me, but for some reason forgot to put cats in. The kids liked it too, especially the part where the mule team driver let us ride in the cart all the way back to the mule barn with him so we wouldn't have to walk so far to our car.

2. M.F.K. Fisher. Why were you all letting me read Julie and Julia when this wonder existed? I've only gotten to the part where her childhood family cook made them wonderful tarts shaped like stars and then [spoiler alert] killed herself and her mother with the same knife she cooked with, but already I can tell it is amazing.

* In case you've never experienced the wonder of these horses, they are a miracle (or terror) of branding. The horses themselves are magnificent, huge and beautifully groomed and done up with ribbons and shiny harnesses and all. But the cart they pull! Oh lord, it's filled with fake oldtimey boxes of Budweiser beer, and as they drive an oompah-polka type song plays with lyrics something like "Drink lots of beer, Budweiser beer, drink it a lot, kids too," (just kidding about that last part--or am I?) And then behind the cart comes a little electric car with two lucky employees waiting for any droppings to appear so they can jump up and whisk them into a big bucket. Still and all, I'd rather have the Clydesdales and the Busch family as my local brewers than this guy, I guess.

Another Dispatch from Obvious Land

Because I'm trying very, very hard not to be the crazy person raging about the poor performance of various A's on some blog right now, (AHEM, Dan Johnson), I'm going so far to the opposite extreme as to record some long-dormant observations on a sparkling Victorian classic, Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters. Vigilant readers may recall me making some reference to this book many months ago. Well, (and this is the titular dispatch), Victorian novels are long, and therefore, they take a long time to read. I just finished the novel. In fact, Wives and Daughters is actually so long that while I was reading it, I forgot that it is an unfinished novel, and was kind of peeved to find that 600+ pages of attention didn't even get me to the final wedding bells. Slogging through all those pages of "will she reveal her hidden semi-engagement and or won't she?," I was reminded of that horrible worm-based tropical disease that causes certain parts of the body to swell way beyond normal size. This book had a similar condition in its middle portion; there is simply only so much description of a goody-two-shoes like Molly Gibson that any reader can take before things start to look grotesque.

I'll say this for Gaskell, though: she's got claustrophobic small town existence down cold. (And that's a topic I happen to know a little something about.) And in her examination of the comprised conditions of family relations, both contractual and biological, she starts to get at what a struggle it is to be either a wife or a daughter (or for that matter, a husband or a son). In her emphasis on the difficulty of ever speaking clearly or openly, especially to those whom you love the most, Gaskell gets a central theme of modern fiction. Only in a very, very, very long-winded (and sporadically pleasing) way.

Urban Decay, Picture Book Style

In lieu of a full round-up, which will take a little more time since our last library visit netted quite a haul, I thought I'd comment on two books which both tackle the eroding urban core.

The first is Mutt Dog!, by Stephen Michael King. This book follows the nighttime progress of the titular dog from rainy back alley to homeless shelter, where he is given food and comfort by a sympathetic shelter worker. After forcing the dog to return to the streets in the morning, the worker thinks better of it, plucks him out of his dumpster-scavenging world, and carries him off to her suburban home where her family is waiting to clean, feed, and spoil him in all manner of classic suburban ways. (Think pretend pirate play, rolling in flower beds, and walks along manicured lawns.) When he returns to the shelter, it is as a well-groomed visitor, where he politely allows himself to be petted by an odd twosome of tattoed skinhead and eccentric bag lady knowing he'll be rewarded with a bath later. As you probably already figured out, I thought this book was, shall we say, thematically suspect. The pen and watercolor drawings are delicately pretty, and the depiction of urban poverty is certainly a rarity in picture book land, but honestly, what are we supposed to think about all the people at the shelter who I'm sure would also like a trip into the countryside and a good round of "Arrr, Matey"? Sure, this is an easy critique, but the book invites it a little too much, I'd say.

The second, Carousel Cat by Robert J. Blake, has some downsides as well. I thought the setting--a nearly abandoned oceanside amusement park like Asbury Park or Coney Island--was cool, and the plot was satisfying, but the writing is a little dull, and the main character Dan, an out-of-work carousel operator, looks to have recently escaped from Margaritaville. Yet the artwork is inventive: the boardwalk appears in colored detail in the framed center portion of each illustration while, outside the frame, the illustration continues in sketchy sepia, thus symbolically conveying the boardwalk's decay and disappearance. Further, Dan and his friends, Madame Fortune and The World's Strongest Tattooed Man, handle their loss of livelihood realistically and with a minimum of fuss. Also, it's about a cat. What's not to love?

(Just writing this has brought back fond memories of the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, and the time I forced Peter and Asalad and Nadia to ride on the mini-rollercoaster with me even though Peter had just gotten his wisdom teeth out. Sigh. Somehow I don't think I'll ever have a similar experience at Worlds of Fun.)

WorldChanging Post

I put up a guest post for WorldChanging, one of my favorite group blogs -- other than this one, of course -- because they cover the environment, sustainability and the world really well. I promise I'll get back to books soon!

Media Satire and Me

As the site's resident celebrity media whore AND formerly pregnant person, I find it to be my duty to bring you this link, to a magazine that is not real but might as well be. And if it were, I'd totally read it. In between my sessions with the NYRB, of course.

From Blogging Baby

Prairie Dog Cam in New Mexico

OK, you might have books and stuff, but ecologists have prairie dog cams (here). Or, Zil, you could just look out the front window (kidding, just kidding!).

Fibonacci poems

Now
I
Can't
Stop Blogging
Everything I Read

An article on Fibonacci poems on the New York Times today, here. In case you want to try this at home, or at home here, then the sequence of syllables is 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, and 144.

Two Things that Go Great Together

The NBA and Jane Austen! I can't say anything more than the Wall Street Journal did today:

If the Knicks are some kind of cross between Mrs. Bennet and Mr. Collins, which team is Mr. Darcy?

If you polled NBA players on that question, odds are you'd get a lot of blank looks. Except in the Miami Heat's locker room: Dwyane Wade is apparently a big fan of "Pride of Prejudice."

Yes, really. Last night Mr. Wade spoke at a Miami college about Jane Austen's classic novel, part of a celebration of Penguin Classics and an NBA literacy initiative. Mr. Wade says he's read the book a couple of times, and has a pretty wise quote about it on Penguin's Web site: "Class struggle, overcoming stereotypes and humble beginnings, getting out of your own way and letting love take over: these are things I can relate to, definitely. Reading the Classics is like opening a door to a world that at first looks so different from mine, but when I look closer, is filled with people who struggle with the same things I do."

The news sent AustenBlog into paroxysms of delight; as for the Fixers, we refuse to be cynical about the role the hand of marketing might be playing in this one: "Pride and Prejudice" is a pretty great book. And we dare you to tell us this poster isn't cool.

And, in case you were wondering, Mr. Wade is averaging 27.5 ppg, 5.8 rpg, and 6.8 apg, and headed for the playoffs. All because of Jane Austen.

Eclectiana

Hey, sorry to be so absent, and absent-minded. I have been doing everything in a rather relaxed and random fashion this quarter, so it doesn't feel like I have been greatly focused on any one thing in particular. Also, somehow, it seems more respectable to proclaim your (and my) love for Chiwetel Ejiofor, since I don't have any new, bookish, objects of my affection. (And, as far as I know, Laura Cantrell is still married -- you'll have to click -- one of the things that I must learn to do is how to post pictures here.)

Anyway, what I've been reading, besides economics papers that I don't understand:

1. Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West, by Timothy Garton Ash. I know this sounds like another dorky foreign policy book, but it was lucid, commonsensical, and lucid about foreign policy, relations between countries and people, perception of countries and competition, and the folly of all that depending upon "stubborn, middle-aged men".

2. The Years of Rice and Salt, by Kim Stanley Robinson, but I just can't get into it.

3. Martin Heidegger, by Timothy Clark, and What is Called Thinking? by MH himself. I'm in a new Heidegger reading group in my department, which I really like, but I am struggling to understand his work. I read the first five pages of his first essay five times last night -- what I need to do is just to push beyond the beginning and go on.

4. The Vanity Fair Green Issue, which sucked. Julia Roberts and George Clooney have a weird green cast to their pictures on the cover, Robert Kennedy is a hypocrite, and Al Gore's essay was too dull to get into. I just hope that the new Al Gore documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth" is as funny and rehabilitating for as his reputation as reported. I'm not sure if global warming is either just big in Seattle, or a hot topic (pun intended), or both, but there are two global warming talks on tonight, and today, even I'm over-loaded by global warming information.

5. And I have been buying a lot more books, but I'm not reading them. Sigh.

When Nerds Own Books

Let the internet tremble, for lo, I have discovered LibraryThing. My username is quietdomino, if you want to see the (few) books I've put in so far. As someone who frequently forgets whether or not she owns a book, and who also likes to procrastinate, this could be very, very dangerous. Or useful. I meant useful.

More Calendar Related Excuses to Talk about Books

Today is Drop Everything And Read day, the first ever, and it's being celebrated on Beverly Cleary's birthday, because she invented the holiday in Ramona Quimby Age 8. If you are interested, you can read Ramona's own suggestions for how to spend the day here. It's been a long time since I've picked up any of these books, but hey, I'm always looking for an excuse to drop everything...

Link via ParentHacks.

Hey, It's National Poetry Month

Here, a copyright-free great from the great Thomas Hardy. I think the James Cameron version could have benefitted from a few more dumb, indifferent seaworms. (In addition to Leo, that is. Ba-dum-bump.)

The Convergence of the Twain

(Lines on the loss of the "Titanic")

I

In a solitude of the sea

Deep from human vanity,

And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.

II

Steel chambers, late the pyres

Of her salamandrine fires,

Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.

III

Over the mirrors meant

To glass the opulent

The sea-worm crawls -- grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

IV

Jewels in joy designed

To ravish the sensuous mind

Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.

V

Dim moon-eyed fishes near

Gaze at the gilded gear

And query: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?" ...

VI

Well: while was fashioning

This creature of cleaving wing,

The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything

VII

Prepared a sinister mate

For her -- so gaily great --

A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.

VIII

And as the smart ship grew

In stature, grace, and hue,

In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

IX

Alien they seemed to be;

No mortal eye could see

The intimate welding of their later history,

X

Or sign that they were bent

By paths coincident

On being anon twin halves of one august event,

XI

Till the Spinner of the Years

Said "Now!" And each one hears,

And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

Warning, not book related

Just something funny that I want to remember.
Scene: I am helping OlderKid with a puzzle as YoungerKid struggles to climb on to a chair, getting increasingly fussier about the endeavor moment by moment. As I walk over to help YoungerKid, OlderKid lets out an aggrieved, older-brother-esque sigh and says, "[YoungerKid], hold on to your horse." Heh.

Mars Attacks!

So, I am working my way, very slowly, through Kim Stanley Robinson's triology of Martian novels. I read Red Mars last summer, and just finished Green Mars during the trip to California. (I said it was slowly!) In my head I worked up an interesting post about landscape tourism and the allure of space travel, but then I did a lot of exciting things like take 4 kids here and here and here and 2 kids here, twice, all the while stuffing all of our faces with as much Asian and Mexican food and fancy gourmet pizza and brioche knots as would possibly fit. So most of my brilliant Robinson insights got a little dislodged.

Being back in the Bay Area gave me a strange sense of dislocation, which I tried to explain as a kind of a geographical phantom limb syndrome. I always had this kind of idea that our old house was still there waiting for us, with all the things we used to have in it waiting too. Without knowing it, I kept finding myself driving back to it at night or routing myself to any destination along the path I would have taken if I had been traveling from what once was my home. Confusing to write about, confusing to experience, and maybe stranger still to feel like the two years of my life post-California, which have been full of many good things, could so easily vanish as if they never existed. Some days back in Missouri, in my real current life with my real responsibilities, have helped me see that reading Robinson was at least partly responsible for this. Green Mars is the tipping point in the triology where space settlers and new immigrants turn into honest-to-goodness Martians of several generations standing; "You Can Never Go Back" (to Earth, that is) becomes the catch-phrase of the planet's independence movement and inevitable revolution. And the debate shifts from "Should we live on Mars?" which was the focus in the first one, to "What is our life on Mars going to be like?" Bound up in the transition from traveler to resident is a host of other questions of course; most centrally, what does and what should the land of Mars do for us? Provide valuable minerals, extra prison space, room to pursue marginalized cultural traditions or form new kinds of societies, or material for scientific inquiry? What about give us shelter, food, breathable air? As might be expected, the characters run the gamut in their answers to these questions, and Robinson's greatest weakness is probably that there are so many characters that he can't quite get beyond the mouthpiece method of character development. (And it's apparently impossible for him to create female characters that are not either shrewish sex-fiends or silent earth mothers--two sides of the same coin, basically).

Yet there's so much here that's fascinating. Even if Robinson doesn't quite make clear what a new, Martian society founded on a ecopoetic environmentalism and alternative economic system might look like, the steps of thinking through the practical and theoretical processes of getting there are immensely compelling to me. (Yes, I was the geek in junior high social studies who loved the extra credit project of designing a utopia.) As Firefly has most recently shown us, space fiction is frontier fiction, but Robinson takes more time than most to write about the hard parts of making the unknown into the known.

In keeping with my standard rhetorical model of blog posting, it ought to be time now for my turn back to the personal. But Missouri is not Mars, by any stretch of the imagination, and no matter how hostile the terrain might seem, it supports a lot more than bioengineered lichen. There are some comparisons, though. I saw the Bay Area real estate prices, and the preschool prices, and the gas prices, and the food prices, and the traffic. (Did I mention the traffic?). I know, I can never go back. Tell that to my phantom limb, though.

Remember Me?

Hey, I'm back! And I have lots of thoughts on, among other things, rain, flying with two children under 3 1/2, rain, the superiority of Californian fruits and vegetables, the correct number of children's books needed for a trip of two weeks involving at least 6 family members, rain, the correct number of adult books needed for same period, the wierdness of Berkeley bookstores, the inferiority of Californian central heating, rain, and also, rain. However, it's 70 degrees outside, another set of family members is arriving in a few days, and we suddenly noticed that our house is no longer visible due to the mountains of leaves and branches that we let build up on the lawn all winter. So, my dissertation on Green Mars and tourism will have to wait a little bit.