It's a Book (and Culture) Club!

Remember when Oprah shut down her book club?

2007-08-15T05:59:00.000-07:00

Well, it's not nearly as tragic as that for anyone concerned, but yes, "It's a Book Club" is on indefinite hiatus. Never fear, however. Zil continues to exist electronically on her new blog chronicling her on-going "Read-Aloud Project," so those you interested in children's books and other tangentially related topics may follow her there. Till then, enjoy "Flight of the Conchords."

Stuck in the Middle, Without You

2007-05-23T09:22:00.000-07:00

Some people enjoy serials (print, tee-vee, or otherwise) precisely because of all the waiting around they contain. They actually relish the long periods of wondering what could possibly happen next, thrill at enduring seemingly-endless gaps between carefully-measured doses of story, cheer for plot twists that are made on purpose to make no sense... It's like they're down at the docks again, waiting for random boats from England to drop anchor and yelling "Little Nell...Does she yet live?" at the befuddled crew.

Obviously I am not one of these people. I'm a much bigger fan of total uncontrolled gluttonous wallowing. When I'm in, I'm in, and I'm not happy to come out again until the absolute, definitive, the villain has exploded and been set on fire and buried and exorcised and his parents-erased-in-a-complex-time-travel-scheme-leaving-no-possibility-of-ever-even-
conceiving-him end. Which is why I'm not happy to find myself in the following unresolved states.

1. Me vs. Netflix vs. Battlestar Galactica. Sure, it's great that those cute little red envelopes come in the mail, cutting down on potentially hazardous surly video-store clerk interaction and wallet-depleting late fees. But then they start slowing down, ON PURPOSE, and the BSG disk ends with a cliff-hanger where Starbuck is crash-landing on the planet, and it's not like I don't know that she's going to survive, but I'd really like to see it for myself, and the DVD still hasn't come, and it STILL hasn't come, and now I understand why Netflix has that crazy 8-DVDs at a time plan which might otherwise seem to be for insane people who can't wait 2 days to watch a tv show that aired four years ago and instead must have all DVDs that they ever might want to watch ever in their possession at all times. Insane people totally unlike me, that is.

2. Me vs. Keith Hernandez. This one is actually a place where I'm realizing what looks like the middle is, actually, for me, the end. Not that I am not loving his Pure Baseball: Pitch by Pitch for the Advanced Fan, (not so much am I loving the reality of his public persona), and I'm seriously trying to work my way through all of Sars's baseball recs, but this book is too dense for me, dense-book lover extraordinaire. The conceit is, Keith explains the rationale behind every pitch of two games, one NL and one AL, and goes into some further discussion of specific strategies to boot. I think one night I may have actually fallen asleep simultaneously drooling and muttering fiercely about the difference between cut fastballs and tailing fastballs. And surely that difference is important. But not important enough for me to keep reading this book right now.

3. Me vs. Hepatitis A vaccinations. Did you know you were supposed to have two of these? Yep, I didn't either. Did you know travel clinics charge you $100 just to walk in the door and then $50 more to laugh at you when they find out you didn't know you were supposed to have 2 hepatitis A shots and that your 1 shot from back in '99 won't do squat against "street food", the CDC's most dreaded foe? Well, that second part isn't really true. But damn, Michael Moore is right. It's hecka hard for a girl to resist typhoid these days.

4. Me vs. Expert Reviewers. Actually, this one's probably better stuck. Because, when it comes unstuck, there might be tears.

One more, sad, thing. I'd like to add a "5. Me vs. Veronica Mars." But I can't. Because the stupid CW has canceled it. For some show that's too stupid to make fun of--possibly Supernatural. And also Kristin Bell could totally beat me up, even if she is only about 1/4 of my height.

For Frack's Sake

2007-05-21T08:36:00.000-07:00

Yep, it's still me over here, unapologetically enjoying Supernatural. Did I mention it was a shitty semester? But even I have some limits, some upper capacity for cheese and thinly-veiled erotic banter, and must occasionally turn my attention elsewhere.

Er, or not. Battlestar Galactica is all that the many people who recommended it to me promised it would be: nerdalicious, addictive, philosophical, and occasionally painfully embarrassing. (Sweet jeebus, please tell me that they're going to ease up on the Dr. Baltar hallucinations as the show proceeds?) And maybe you'd expect me to be complaining about the fact that the one Asian character is not just metaphorically but actually a robot, but you know what? At least she's getting some action on at least two fronts--not like that neuter Harry Kim. Oh, you know you know who he is.

And while we're talking of Jared Padalecki....

2007-05-18T05:29:00.000-07:00

I would like to say a few words in praise of the recently greatly improved CW series (and new Padalecki home) Supernatural. It's still a mix of Buffy with Boys and a non-governmental X-Files, but it's certainly come a long way from its first season's horrible "Native American spirits send angry swarms of wasps after suburban sprawl" plotlines. The just-concluded second season has set into motion not one but two "I was dead! Why did you bring me back to this world of suffering?" plotlines, with, dare I say it, less pointless angst and Spike-boinking than Buffy ever could in a similar situation. What I've come to appreciate most about the show, though, is its willingness to address the cold truth of the Midwest: there are many demons here. Destroy them all!

Okay, I'm kind of joking. But I do think the show's version of the red/blue, fly-over/fly-into divide is interesting. Take, for example, the excellent episode of a few weeks back: "What Is and What Never Should Be." This is Supernatural's entry into the science fiction series' apparently narratologically mandatory category: episodes where we get to see what would have happened if the central event that defines the show's entire story arc did not occur. It's so mandatory that Buffy did it twice at least: once awesomely when Anya appeared and got Cordelia to wish that Buffy had never come to Sunnydale, and once much less awesomely when Buffy was temporarily convinced that she wasn't the chosen one, just gravely insane. In Supernatural, Dean, the rugged older brother and demon hunter 4 life gets ambushed by a djinn and finds himself in a world where 1) his mother was not pinned to the ceiling and set aflame by a demon with yellow eyes, and 2) his pretty-boy younger brother Sam, (the aforementioned Padalecki), got to go to Stanford law school like he planned and didn't have to join Dean in his quest to rid the Midwest of creepy girls in white nightgowns. The separation there is crucial--Sam (somewhat improbably for Gilmore Girls fans) is the smart one of the two Winchester brothers, and much of Dean's anguish throughout the show has revolved around bringing his brother down from the cultural and class elite to which he rightfully belongs into the world of Metallica-blasting ghostbusters who stock the trunk of their Impala with salt-loaded shotguns. And the show kind of agrees: it's not the kind of Republican-approved fantasy where everything would be great if all the white people would stop thinking about things and just go back to growing sod, waving flags, baking pies, and kissing babies.

And this is what I find interesting about the show. Episodes are set (nearly) exclusively in heartiest heart of the heartland--Arkansas, Iowa, Wyoming, and every other stretch of corn country in between--and the show's not especially sorry about that, nor, (when it's on its game at least), does it collapse into heartland cliche. People can go a long way without necessarily getting anywhere, and smart, capable people continue to exist more than 500 miles from any ocean. Sure, this is often not true: the show can be clunky in 10 different ways without trying; there's no Whedon-patented sidekick to bring the funny; the CW could lay off with the promos reminding us that Padalecki and Jensen Ackles are smokin' hot examples of manhood; but for all that, I'll take it. Missourians, unite! We're more than Matt Blunt, and Kit Bond, and all the rest. We have demons too! And we're not afraid to salt and burn their bones!

Now Leaving Stars Hollow...

2007-05-17T10:50:00.000-07:00

So, out of a sense of obligation to a set of fictional characters whose existence I had nearly forgotten, I watched the Gilmore Girls series finale on Tuesday. Obligation turned to nostalgia turned to shamelessly sentimental wallowing, and the next thing I knew, it was late Wednesday night and I had re-watched most of the Girls' first season, eaten a strange amount of chocolate, and painted my toenails red just like the bad private school girls do.

There are many tributes and critiques to GG bouncing around right about now, and they all have the same basic point: it was a great show that, sadly, became, especially in its final season, a much-less-great show that has inspired a lot of hand-wringing about how why it stopped being great. (Ginia Bellafante's, in the Times, is one of the weirdest.) And it's true: I regret the staying up late, and to a lesser extent the chocolate, but not the re-watching: many of the first season's episodes still seem to me to be practically perfect examples of their kind, in a way that the series finale could only gesture to but not itself capture. I don't mean this post to be explanatory in any way like that, though. It is what it is: it's nearly summer, a shitty semester is over, I'm about to head back east to a different tiny New England town filled with wackos, I mean, endearingly quirky people, and instead of packing or writing something intelligent or washing the dishes, I'm watching the scene at the end of "Love, Daisies, and Troubadours" where CuteDean kisses Rory in the front courtyard of Chilton over and over again.

I'm not proud, and I'm not ashamed (though I probably should be); I'm just saying that what I like best about the show isn't the way it captures the trend of mothers being their daughter's coolest best friends, or typifies Yankee elitism, or gives one Asian person a television career (actually, a little bit of that last part). It's simpler than that: I like to see bookish girls find love. If there's a little witty banter along the way, then so much the better.

What do you want me to say? I'm Sorry. I'm Back.

2007-05-14T11:29:00.000-07:00

For the purposes of, well, my not being any more annoying than I already am, we're going to pretend the last five months did not happen, and, well, leave it at that. It's all about looking forward now, and not about falling down a rabbit-hole of recrimination and despair. Right.

So, what are we looking at? A new site design! A semi-new title! A summer full of reading that is only partially compulsory! What else? Actually, that's it for now. But look for my next post to appear in fewer than 200 days.

Poetry for the new year.

2007-01-01T18:59:00.000-08:00

Say, friends. Have you been wishing to read more poetry from independent feminist presses yet not knowing where to start? Look no further than Sandra Lim's Loveliest Grotesque, a book both beautiful and brand-new from Kore Press. I'd observe that it's the kind of poetry Frank O'Hara would write if he could afford to be less protective of his delight, but apparently that's been said, so I'll simply add:
HUZZAH!

Phonemes are Phunny

2006-12-07T10:22:00.000-08:00

Did I ever tell you about the time I took Chinese in college? That is to say, the 8 long semesters I spent poring over literature ancient and modern, the countless gridded notebooks I filled with character drills, the millions of tiny index cards I created to review radicals and stroke counts, the hours of language cassettes I listened to (for yea, I truly went to college in ye olde darke ages) reviewing tonal shifts? And did I mention my then-roommate's one comment on this activity: "When you speak Chinese, it sounds like "Ching, chong, ching"? No?

Well, never fear. Rosie O'Donnell is ready to remind you of the hilarity of "talky Chinesey."

Obviously, thanks to Gawker for the link.

Corporate Conglomeration vs. Jack Black

2006-12-04T09:24:00.000-08:00

Look, the other day I was online ordering desk copies (that's free books to you) for the courses I'm teaching next term. Who doesn't love doing this -- until they realize that the superfantastic, wild and wide-ranging list they've come up with: The Plot Against America, Oryx and Crake, Things Fall Apart, Into the Forest, etc., etc. Black Satire for one class and The Apocalypse for the other are all published by Random House under 1,000 different names. The unsettling thing about this is that you don't know this until you do a couple of searches. So it feels like a hidden fact, like the discovery of Random House's true names. Then it feels like a Buffy episode where you have to say the true name of the beast to kill it.

I promise to stop writing about television after this, but in a completely useless (I know already) rhetorical move, I would like to propose Jack Black as the antidote to some of our corporate conglomeration blues. Of course Jack Black is a consumer product. But that bizarre thing Tenacious D did on the otherwise unwatchable Saturday Night Live the other night where they staged the way in which Heavy Metal Music smite down Punk, New Wave, Techno and Grunge--that was-- it just--well I guess GE (which owns NBC) is not a complete serial killer if they could run that.

Asalad's Favorite Things

2006-11-27T07:55:00.000-08:00

It's that special time of year when the little engine that could from Kosciusko, MS showers her faithful in cashmere jumpsuits and gold-plated chocolate. Alas, It's a Book Club! has no corporate sponsors and no MySpace friends. But we do have taste.

Of course you've already prepared for Kwahanamas-dan by purchasing the only short story collection released in 2006 featuring the word "jawn" for your loved ones. (Today hilariously featured on Amazon as "better with Justin Timberlake's Futuresex/Lovesounds" which frankly is true.) Now let's take the focus off of frivolous consumerism with some other ways of celebrating the season:

1. Start a Mindy Kaling fan club. Why, you ask. Why the hell not?! This Boston-born-Indian- Queen of everything is not only on The Office, but she consistently writes and produces the best episodes. Also, her character Kelly is awesome for two reasons. One: she's hilarious. Two: only a person of color would have written her. Mindy Kaling is the 21st century and I love it and I wish she would call me up and make movies out of the only short story collection released . . .

2. Read The Best of Simple by Langston Hughes. We all know that the Negro is deep like rivers and life ain't been no crystal stair, but do you know, really know the comic genius of this American institution? The kind of comic genius that has you laughing until the laugh catches in your throat and you're like, oh damn, life is a bowl of sh**? No, you don't know. So get up on Jesse B. Semple, a collection of weekly columns Hughes wrote through the years for the Chicago Defender. In these essays, a strait-laced first person narrator chats with Simple, mostly on bar stools, seemingly about foolishness, like Simple's love of beer and his inability to stop cheating on his good woman Joyce with his good-time girl, Zarita, but actually about the inhumanity of racism, the capitalist grind and the transcendence of love. Every essay ends with a ZING, and every character disguised as a buffoon is a truthteller (See sloppy drunk Cousin Minnie's sermon on what to do the first time a man beats you). One ongoing argument between the hoity-toity narrator and Simple is Simple' s "obsession" with the race problem. At the end of "Sometimes I Wonder," the fed-up narrator says, "Sometimes I wonder what makes you so race-conscious," to which Simple replies, "Sometimes I wonder what made me so black." (Incidentally, the first person who ever introduced me to Simple was Uncle Cynical, who at a recent family gathering compared procreation to crack-smoking, so what's up to him).

3. Go see Fast Food Nation. I'm one of those poseurs who have retold anecdotes from this book without ever reading it, but I knew enough to be confused about how they were going to wring a plot out of it. How they did it is the new easy way: the Syriana-Crash-Amores Perros-21 Grams-Traffic-20 plots touching way. So as is the case with those films, some subplots are better than others and some high-octane cameos win the day. But nothing in those Heavy Subject Ripped From the Headlines movies (especially not that stupid Crash) can prepare you for the penultimate scene in FFN. If you eat meat, you'll be horrified, but you really should be able to keep your eyes open the whole time. Who knew that a scene could be so disgusting and so moving at the same time? Of course, you should not take your patsy of a little vegetarian sister and her little cute loudmouth vegetarian friend to see it, say, after Thanksgiving dinner. Those ingrates won't thank you for it. Not even if you tell them what Gwendolyn Brooks said, which is Art Hurts.

4. With so much digital media saturation, Ipod this and Netflix that, and HBO on Demand blahdy-blahdy, if you're not watching the best show ever on DVD or somewhere already, you lost, my brothers and sisters. Lost. Save yourself!

Better reading through Google.

2006-11-21T13:47:00.000-08:00

Since Donna's been talking about how Google changes the way we make arguments, I thought I'd mention the way that Google might potentially change the way we read books--that is, if you're not already convinced that authors are dead. Slate opines that a "major" literary figure will soon be unmasked as a plagiarist by Google book search, which allows you to search untold billions of books (perhaps an exaggeration) sentence by sentence for suspicious similarities. Who will this author be? Emily Dickinson? Benjamin Franklin? I've got to say, this is like the least interesting blind item ever.

And, while I'm talking about Slate, which I do not often do, what about this review of Day Break? I'm watching this show because a) I have a misguided affection for Taye Diggs from his buppie comedy days, and also b) for the same reason I watch Bones: Hapa power! But since Slate calls the show "a Twilight Zone take on race and law enforcement in America," now I can say that instead.

To conclude this strangely disjointed post: Please read Gene Yang's American Born Chinese. It is excellent. Also, enjoy your dinner tomorrow. But don't try and claim any historical precedent for it.

The Five Ugliest Words

2006-11-17T13:06:00.000-08:00

Silicon Valley Athletics of Fremont.

Runner-up? How about, oh, Ex-sports star records hypothetical confession? Special thanks to Judith Regan and her daily embetterment of American letters. (And yes, I realize that by talking about it I'm making it worse.)

Pop Your (turtleneck) Collar

2006-11-15T09:56:00.000-08:00

As the fall winds blow and corporate America dons its Santa costume and starts harrassing the sh** out of us, we turn our thoughts to Coolness.

1. A literary embodiment of coolness can be found in a slender cream-colored volume called The Mystery Guest: an Account. This is an English translation of a French novel by Gregoire Bouillier. What's cool about this? Well, let's say you were having an overpriced dainty breakfast buffet at one of those SRO-turned-jewel boxes of a hotel in midtown Manhattan and the table next to you was filled with laughing, slender, dark-eyed French people. Laughing in French. Are you going to to read the Times like the slob you are? Hell, no! You are going to put half of what you want on your plate, secret away a chocolate croissant in your bag for later, sip ice water and flash The Mystery Guest around with your free hand until your one-handed attempt at eating leads to egg on your shirt. So the other cool thing about this book is that it contains:

-- an antihero who avenges himself on the woman who rejected him, and all women, by wearing turtlenecks as undershirts

--a scene in which he finally changes an old light bulb in his little dusty bathroom and now it is "lit up like Versailles"

--a reference to the line in Mrs. Dalloway that goes "what she liked was simply life" which makes me think that the first line of my very favorite book is a rewriting of that line.

--and the line, quoted from Michael Leiris, (who apparently exists I just learned): "literary activity, in its specific aspect as a mental discipline, cannot have any other justification than to illuminate certain matters for oneself at the same time one makes them communicable to others." Yes, yes, yes!

2. A completely obvious embodiment of cool is the person and works of Jay-Z. And I just need, once again, to express my feeling that Jay-Z is like that mint chocolate ice cream they used to have at Haagen Dazs back in the early nineties that was actually chocolate-colored instead of green. Many people have tried to come between me and my feverish anticipation of his albums. Some have tried to claim that his recent single, with which I am completely obsessed, is smug. Others have made me feel like Jay and I are the protagonists of West Side Story. Many have implied that his popularity is bullying and passe at this point. But in his words, what do you want me to do? I'm sorry! There's a little girl in me who still remembers swooning when somebody even said the words Duran Duran; a little girl who would gaze up prayerfully at a poster of Prince in a ruffled lace collar making that mopy face he always makes; a little girl who wished to stroke the stubble of George Michael's five o'clock shadow in the "Everything She Wants" video. That little girl was last seen switching lanes in the 03 Corolla and openly jamming (take that VA troopers) to the beautifully over-orchestrated, off-beat, PE sampling Show Me What You Got down 81 South yesterday and she will not be stopped. It's Hovember, haters. Fall back and get down.

"Little did he know" is the new "Meanwhile"

2006-11-13T18:40:00.000-08:00

Note: The following post, on the subject of narrative theory and the movie Stranger than Fiction, is contractually obligated for all English professors and members of book clubs. Baseball-related posts resume in March.

So, on a long-awaited, and belated, birthday outing, Peter and I went to the local coffee shop where a woman who appeared to be constructed out of the remnants of Natalie Merchant, the woman who sings that song "Kiss Me," and a long fuzzy scarf, sang a song. Then, we went to the movie theater where we saw the new blockbuster about narratology. (And, since this evening of entertainment was deemed not quite thrilling enough, we watched 2 episodes of Veronica Mars Season One when we got home. Yes, twenty-seven does seem awfully old for a high-school junior, but who cares! She's spunky!)

I don't exactly understand the general criticism of this movie, which was mostly along the lines of, well, it was sweet, but it really wasn't strange enough. It seems to me that there's nothing much stranger than being asked to care deeply in a Hollywood movie about an explicitly fictional character who not only openly accepts his fictionality, but musters up the strength to question, and then [YES, THIS IS A SPOILER] acquiesce to his own fictional death? Surely the logical gaps in the story mute this a little bit, but still. We are thumbing our nose at realism here; instead of the intimation that this could be happening right now, or might have happened in the past, or maybe would be happening to us if things had just gone differently, we understand from the get-go that this is could never have happened to us or anyone we know, because it's not about people at all, just the idea of people and, more than that, these idea-people's ideas.

I liked the movie fine--who wouldn't like a movie where Dustin Hoffman plays a lit professor who doubles as a faculty lifeguard--but I would've liked it more if the central idea person had been one we were a little more familiar with: James Bond, say, or Wolverine. Or, what the heck, the ultimate American idea person, Superman. If Stranger than Fiction has a blankness at its core, other than the empty spot where the chemistry between Maggie Gyllenhaal and Will Ferrell is supposed to go, this is because the fictional character it deconstructs isn't very cool. Intentionally so, of course, but it makes the pool of cultural mythology that the movie draws from rather shallow indeed. (Especially after Richard Ford drank up, like, 3/4 of it for that endless sportswriter series.) It's possible I feel this way because a) I continue to be obsessed with superheroes despite all self-admonition to the contrary and b) I am reading a lot of Alan Moore these days. (Or maybe c) I go to the movies so rarely that when I do I crankily demand lots of explosions and Dolby Digital sound). But if we're going to do narratology in a popular context, let's use the gosh-darnest most popular narratives we can find. Bang! Boom! Zowie!

Let's DO this thing!

2006-11-02T08:14:00.000-08:00

As OlderKid would say.

If you know me, and odds are that you do, you know that I have a certain book I'm yearning to write. (And it does NOT have a subtitle ending with "In Nineteenth-Century Literature.") It's a book about a girl, and a dog and cat, and a pet-sitting business, and a mystery. Usually this project works as a kind of low-class Proust--it's the kind of thing I idly plan on getting around to some day, not quite yet of course--but I think it's time to change all that. I'm already writing one book; why not write another? If anything, it will help defend me from a day in which the ONLY sentences I write include the words "occlude," "capital," "aesthetics," and "vision," in various combinations.

Two needs: first, a title. What should a snarky and non-serious, yet intermittently thrilling, book about a pet-sitter who solves crime be called? Second, a stick to prompt to me to write a certain amount every day...like a national program...for writing amateurs...who value length over content...if only such a program existed right now, in November! What's that you say? It does? Well, then, super!

In Remembrance of Oaxaca Past

2006-10-31T17:16:00.000-08:00

I'm back.

Duffy and I spent the summer eating grasshoppers and watching the world cup and drinking distilled cactus (that's mezcal to you) and swinging in hammocks and meeting freaky people who had been to Oaxaca 30 times (that's true) scratching mosquito bites and trying not to spend too much time holding each other's hair back while we leaned over Mexican toilets. (By the way, public toilets in the developing world get a bad rap. The key is go to fancy restaurants. Outstanding toilets). We mostly succeeded in not getting sick. Let me just say this about the owner of the Spanish restaurant facing Parque Juarez in Barrio Jalatlaco. Don't take his recommendation and eat a stringy steak swimming in blood. Even if he serves it to you himself with a huge smile, especially then, because that smile says I eat people.

Now of course we've been back for two uneven months of America but I feel that the recent news of a an American journalist getting fatally shot in downtown Oaxaca by shadowy state government police may not mark the end of our trip exactly, but the end of an era. Even with the simmering troubles all summer (which I won't go into here; there are about 100 blogs about it) the streets were teeming with willowy white Americans in natural fibers trying to get lost in the real Mexico (and also Duffy who insists on wearing heavy black dress shoes in the summer and me being neither white nor willowy). Now, probably not so much. On the bright side, the citizens won't have to put up with so many flying hacky sacks.

Anyway, I don't mean to just be glib. The fatalities happening (not just the American) are tragic. And a lot are probably being covered up. But I think the struggle to oust the corrupt smiling governor has a righteous goal. Some of the hippies who go to Oaxaca too much were complaining and saying that the teachers occupying the streets had gone too far and that they liked Oaxaca because it wasn't all unresty like Chiapas. Me? I wish all of the alienated and disgruntled Americans I know (including the one sitting at the computer right now) had a fraction of the hardcore spirit of people who will sleep in the Mexican street in the summer with their families to face down shadowy paramilitary groups in the name of democracy.

So the reading report. This summer, the team set out with Vol 1-4 of Proust's In Remembrance of Things Past, Vilette, Gravity's Rainbow, Madame Bovary and Bleak House. Toward the end I cheated and put aside the final volume of Proust and read Elizabeth Costello. Everything was mostly read, except here's a riddle. A (heterosexual) couple goes on a trip. One reads Vilette. The other reads Gravity's Rainbow. Can you guess which was read by the woman and which by the man? Can you?

Considering how long most of these books are, this post could go on for a lifetime of sitting in a cork-lined room. (I, like Proust, am also a sensitive asthmatic). But an awesome thing about this reading list is I could now laugh at the Proust jokes in "Little Miss Sunshine." That license plate! Hilarious! Also, last week I was reading an old New Yorker at the gym, which contained a Milan Kundera essay that discussed Flaubert and Proust. Well, when I first scanned the synopsis, I was like, "Oh yeah, that stuff I haven't read" -- but then I had! I'm educated, you fools.

Now the advice section. Okay, I'll admit it was me, the girl, who read Vilette. And I'm not sorry I wasn't the egg head reading Gravity's Rainbow by the pool. I mean, how does that look? But I'm a little sorry that Charlotte Bronte didn't get to have a full-on proper affair with the grumpy old dark haired man she spent her career writing about. Because then Vilette might have been a lot more interesting. I did however enjoy the crazy rants about Catholicism and the superiority of the English church. They made a pleasant frisson with feverish obsession with various gold-plated Oaxaca-area churches. I can't bring myself to say don't read Vilette. But, you know, somewhere in the Kundera piece is the phrase, life is short and books are long.

Bleak House is awesome and Madame Bovary is hilarious. Elizabeth Costello is somewhat inscrutable, but works like a palate cleanser if you've read two volumes of Proust in a row and it's 90 degrees.

That brings me to Proust. Well. There are only a handful of writers whose names become adjectives. I have read almost four volumes of Proust and I'm not totally sure what his adjective means. I knew nothing about Proust except that there was a cookie and he was an adjective. So I was suprised by:

--the incredibly detailed and often tedious renderings of 19th century French society

--the incredible anti-Semitism and pettiness of 19th century French society (I know, I'm a fool)

--the lengthy theories about "inverts" (and it turns out Proust was an "invert")

--the revelation that using so, so many words to describe every interaction can have the effect of sensitizing the reader as well as numbing her . . . which is to say that moments of high emotion in these books are unbelievably compelling, particularly when it comes to young aristocrats' obsessions with shady ladies.

Maybe the last one is the definition of Proustian? I don't know. My advice, however is to at least read the first volume, titled in the newer translation In Remembrance of Things Past. Then it gets a little hard. The second half of the third volume, now titled The Guermantes Way, is stunning. But you better be prepared to go to a lot of incredibly boring and anti-Semitic parties to get there.

Of course there is one joy you will miss if you peter out before volumes 3-4. That is reading about "Madame Putbus' lady's maid" over and over again. Tee-hee.

Putbus.

Brief Attention Span Library

2006-10-25T07:34:00.000-07:00

From Wired, a collection of 6-word science fiction stories by some of our favorites. None, perhaps, as good (and by that I mean as sad) as the famous Hemingway example ("For sale: baby shoes, never worn") which inspired the piece, but enjoyable nonetheless, and the reading goes quickly. Via metafilter.

The World Series is Almost Over

2006-10-24T14:00:00.000-07:00

And then you won't have to listen to me talk about baseball anymore. But until then, and in lieu of writing about Kenny Rogers's suspiciously dirty hands, can we just discuss this? Major League Baseball and Holiday Inn's efforts to honor the overlooked player of the year. Or, as they put it:

Behind every great team on the diamond, lurking in the shadow of baseball superstars, live the role players who sacrifice for their team in often unrecognized effort. Which of these role players' best deserves recognition for their contributions as the Holiday Inn Look Again Player of the Year?

Let's pause to notice that only two, out of thirty nominees, are not white. I guess for "baseball superstars," we can read "black and Latin players who are good" and, for "role players," we can read, "white players who might be kinda good or might be completely washed up but nevertheless deserve a pointless and not at all pity-motivated award." I'd say more, but Fire Joe Morgan did it better (if you don't mind some totally appropriate David Eckstein hate.)

Updated to add: Deadspin also has a good take on this. If he still cares, this must be making William Rhoden really angry.

And the agony of defeat.

2006-10-20T12:48:00.000-07:00

(In a statement that is no way related to anything, it strikes me that I have been a little tightly wound lately. This is in no way related to being angry about a certain baseball team failing to get it together for even ONE GAME in a certain American League Championship Series. Or, you know, feeling pressured about finally finishing a project I have been working on for nigh on ten years now. Tendency to fly off the handle in no way related to either of those things. Yes.)

Anyhoo, this post is about sports. But it's also about a book! William C. Rhoden's Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete. This book, within the terms it sets out for itself, seems unassailable. There is something profoundly awry in a system where many black men (and women) work for the profit and at the behest of a few white men (and no women), even if those men are themselves well-renumerated for their efforts. It is all the more profoundly awry when viewed through the long lens of America's slave-holding history. (See also, Brown University.) So far, so good. In fact, maybe I should stop the post right there, because it seems that the far more common reaction to this book is: how can there be a problem when the salary check says $40 million? This is kind of like the time my co-worker told me that Hollywood couldn't be racist because Oprah went to the Oscars. (Not to be confused with the time my other co-worker told me to avoid Chinatown because the women there were all carrying puppies and kittens in plastic bags home for dinner. What a pleasant workplace!)

Still, I have to say that Rhoden's parameters left me frustrated sometimes. Yes, all of American sports is a big topic, and yes, all of the twentieth-century and then some is a long time. But given the big talk of the title, how can the book cover the Negro Leagues in detail and yet decline to investigate baseball's current conditions? The dynamics of racial identity on display when you put together, say, African-American Gary Sheffield, Panamanian Mariano Rivera, biracial "sweetheart" Derek Jeter, and biracial "villan" Alex Rodriguez (now there's a quartet that's not getting as much press as it oughta!) is simply more complicated than Bud Selig versus Barry Bonds. If baseball is a sport that black and Latin men play and white men watch, why is that so? There's more at work, I think, than the loss of the Negro Leagues here. Also, I often wished Rhoden take a larger view. Surely the problems with the NCAA and its policies are legion (see also, Reggie Bush), and it doesn't appear that Michael Lewis is planning to cover them. Yet where is the perspective from outside that system? What alternatives might there be to the general linking of a college education with a national athletic organization--that might work for both HBCs and the land-grant universities?

Maybe my strongest question for the book was one directed at Rhoden himself. He's a self-concious author surely, and one concerned with the perception of athletes as unfit representatives of the race (see, for example, Michael Jordan), but he soft-pedals the biggest question of them all: why should we keep trying to make this broken car go? Why should we, as inviduals and as a society, keep letting a system that has devastated so many lives (see Maurice Clarett and other cases too numerous to mention) go on? Why should we wait until next year? I guess I don't have any good answers for that either. I root for the A's for many reasons, but none that are part of my essential self. It's fun, and funny, to play the aggrieved or elated sports fan, and so I do and I will, and it's also fun to watch a well-played game, and to discuss it afterwards, again, and again, and again. I get mad when they lose, and feel entitled to stomp about, because, after all, it's not the fate of the nation here. But, and I suppose Rhoden would agree, maybe it is.

Sweets before Halloween

2006-10-19T08:51:00.000-07:00

Look who's gotten hold of Daily Candy Philadephia! I ask you, why is this not on Daily Candy Everywhere? And DC Travel? And DC Kids? Let it be known to the whole empire and beyond! Shopaholics, take pause, and consider the miseries of youth. Then go back to shopping, to dull all the pain of that remembering.

Yes, We're On a Break

2006-10-18T09:13:00.000-07:00

It has recently come to my attention that my transcripts of conversations with my children and records of Amazon orders may come across as nonsensical. (And, indeed, they certainly are.) To eliminate excessive nonsensicality, I am moving such writings (if they can be dignified with that term) to a new blog: sapandpablum.blogspot.com, something I really should have done a while ago for the mental health of my co-bloggers. Please join, or avoid, me there.

In book-related news, It's A Book Club will continue to record book-related comments by whoever cares to make them. Though the writing and publishing of books appears, ironically, to be greatly inhibiting the process. We'll see you when we see you, then.

Yeeee-Hawwww

2006-10-17T07:58:00.000-07:00

Greetings from Amazon.com.

We thought you'd like to know that we shipped your items, and that this
completes your order.
.....
The following items have been shipped to you by Amazon.com:
------------------------------

---------------------------------------
Qty Item Price Shipped Subtotal
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Amazon.com items (Sold by Amazon.com, LLC):
1 Get Down : Stories $13.65 1 $13.65

Shipped via Airborne Home (estimated arrival date: 21-October-2006).

On Good Intentions.

2006-10-13T07:24:00.000-07:00

With our governor offering the enchanting proposal to arm classroom teachers as an attempt to combat school shootings, the following conversation this morning takes on particular, if surreal, weight.

Me: OlderKid, it's time to go to school. Put away your Legos.
OK: Wait, Mama, I am finishing my shooter!
Me: You're making a shooter? Are you playing with shooters at school?
OK: No. Me and [redacted] just played shooters at school after nap.
Me: Is there a rule at school about shooters?
OK: Yes. We don't play with shooters.
Me: Do you know why there is that rule?
OK: The rule is we don't play with shooters.
Me: Because shooters might hurt people.
OK: Well, I'm just going to use the shooter to get the bad guy.
Me: But how do you know who the bad guy is?
OK: If I don't get the bad guy with my shooter, the batteries might run out.
Me: What? Okay...um, what's going to happen when you get the bad guy?
OK: He's going to rush very quickly into this part of my shooter. Then we will play together.
Me: [at a loss for words.]

Yes, that blanket rule about no gun-play seems to be working perfectly.

P.S. Does there seem to be an eerie blankness about this post? As if something were going on, something significant for some kind of competitive sports team? Something like horrible humiliation on a national stage? But it's so unbearable to watch or talk about that it's been completely repressed? Hmmm, okay. I guess it'll come to me, then.

Things that are happy. (Even if some of them are sad.)

2006-10-07T22:48:00.000-07:00

Fun Home, A Family Tragicomic. Despite being deeply suspicious of English teachers, this is a book that's in love with reading almost more than anything else, and that's excellent by me.
District B13. The characters and plot are mostly (entirely) ridiculous, but the fighting is swell and how often do you get to see a French action movie about urban planning anyway?

A's WIN! A's WIN! A's WIN! Remember, you can't spell ALCS without "A-t-h-l-e-t-i-c-s"!!

P.S. Why is someone named Joe Croker emailing me lyrics of his song about the evils of the British Empire? No, really, why?

Glimmery

2006-10-03T07:17:00.000-07:00

On Sunday OlderKid and I went to the playground while YoungerKid and Peter slept in the car. (They were exhausted from a full morning of orienteering--more on that in a minute). While we were playing--okay, while OK was playing and I was slumped on a park bench--a chatty little girl about OK's age and her dad showed up. The girl was talking non-stop to someone named Kristin, and after an embarassingly long time I finally realized that this Kristin was not, you know, real. The dad was clearly long familiar with Kristin and her imaginary-ness as he was happily serving Kristin and the girl custard, cheering them as they went down the slide, etc. OK, like me, was initially clueless. After a fascinating session of cross-play, in which OK dangled daringly from the monkey bars yelling things like "Hey, look at me! Do this with me!" and the little girl yelled back things like "Wait for Kristin! Kristin wants more custard!" OK had finally had enough. From the top of the climbing gym he looked over his shoulder at the little girl, who was struggling to persuade Kristin to climb up the rungs with her and said down in a voice of cutting scorn: "Hey--YOU'RE JUST ONE PERSON!"

Zing.

On Friday afternoon I saw only part of a Pam Houston lecture (sorry, Pam, but the 5 pm daycare pickup deadline is pretty much written in blood) in which she discussed her writing process and described the feeling of experiencing a moment she wanted to write about as a "glimmer." I don't know that I really like this term, and apparently she doesn't either, but she's absolutely correct about certain moments just having that feeling about them--that they ought to be written down and put in a story or retold somehow. It's partly intellectual--even as I was apologizing to that poor imaginative girl's father, I was already thinking about how symbolically apt OK's comment was on so many levels. But it's emotional too; the put-down made my heart hurt, and not just because of its blunt pragmatism.

And maybe it was because of Pam's lecture, or maybe it was because of the turn from September to October (thanks, Green Day), or maybe I'm just always like this, but this weekend seemed to have a lot of these glimmer moments. Like Sunday morning, when we decided on the spur of the moment to go to the park to check out the collapsed rock cave and found ourselves being hustled into participation in an Orienteering Race. Four waivers of liability later, we had numbers pinned to our shirts, a compass and a contour map in hand, and we were off into the woods. Everyone handled the excursion characteristically. YoungerKid took the entire course at an all-out run and fell frequently but without complaint. OlderKid shuffled dreamily down the path and also stopped frequently, not to fall, but to draw pictures all over our map. I spent a long time turning the compass around trying to make North line up with the directions on the map before I remembered that I'm not very good with compasses. And Peter brought up the rear and solved everyone's problems, including pointing out that we had been walking/running all this time in the completely wrong direction and were now off the map entirely. Like I said, symbolically apt.

We weren't the only people reading the race on different metaphorical levels; a "Pathfinder" youth group from a local church was there, and I'm pretty sure Jesus didn't literally expect people to use compasses to find their way to him. Still, looking at my family there, wandering around in the autumn woods with the leaves changing but the air still heavy and warm like summer, laden down with equipment we either didn't know or didn't care to use, I felt especially full with the significance of it all. Make a note of this, I thought to myself. And so here it is.

Whoa.

2006-09-27T07:43:00.000-07:00

And I'm still trying to wrap my head around PowerPoint.

From Reuters:

The University of California at Berkeley said on Tuesday that it is using Google Video to deliver college courses, including lectures and symposia, free of charge, the first university to have its own featured page on Google Video.

These courses will include ""Physics for Future Presidents," "Integrative Biology," and "Search Engines: Technology, Society and Business," featuring a lecture by Google co-founder Sergey Brin." What, no Victorian Poetry?

To learn exactly what kind of physics future presidents need, check out the site. Based on a perusal of the screen shots and absolutely nothing else, I can safely say I will neither be a physicist nor a future president.

Huzzah!

2006-09-27T07:29:00.000-07:00

A's win! A's win! A's win!

Now, please don't choke.

Tidbits.

2006-09-26T07:09:00.000-07:00

Huzzah! I finally finished Blue Mars. At last I'm free of the burden of a long and acclaimed science fiction triology tangentially related to my interest areas...at least until I start up The Baroque Cycle. Look, I recognize it's not Proust, but apparently no one's going to be posting on that.

In terms of a review, I think you probably already know whether you're the kind of person who will read a 1000-page trilogy about the terraforming of Mars or not. I liked this book because it handled narrative problems in a fairly interesting way--the "longevity treatment" that extends character's lifespans into the hundreds of years initally seemed like a too-easy end-run around the time span issues involved in colonizing Mars, but ended up being a chance to ask some interesting questions about memory. Also, I liked it because it is clearly the forerunner of other science fiction that I like, (and some that I laughed at); and because I am always a sucker for a novel of ideas, even if it does mean half of the book takes place at a talkfest like a constitutional convention (or a trial, or what have you.) Yet, and this is a big yet, the character development was really something that KSR was apparently only intermittently interested in. Especially in the case of the not one but two enigmatic yet forever silent genius Asian women characters that haunt the margins. (And perhaps we should not even mention the interlude in which the Dalai Lama is reincarnated into a community of tiny Mars men.) This is the kind of book that's more interesting to talk about having read than to actually read, I think, and I don't exactly mean that to be as snarky as it sounds. Obviously Mars' place in the Terran imagination remains powerful. I'm sure I'll read about it again. But for my next book I'd like a little more real in my realism.

Last night's read-alouds: Just Teenie, A Pirate's Alphabet, Bored Bill

Flow

2006-09-20T18:41:00.000-07:00

So it seems that lots of people in my building (and in my virtual building) are thinking about writing books too. I think that's somehow gotten me going and I'm happy to say that I've been doing a lot of book-writing lately, which means I haven't been doing too much blog writing unfortunately. But given how much I've read about the importance of maintaining flow (and please don't point out that reading about flow is a way to destroy flow) I am superstitious of anything that might disrupt this rare feeling of being in a groove.

Currently not in a groove: my reading for fun. The following books have been picked up and abandoned by me:
The Botany of Desire. This book has been recommended many times because I write about plant hunters and gardeners and such. And I did enjoy parts of it very much, but a great and growing dislike of Michael Pollan's writing style, plus a feeling that I could see where it was going from a long way off, meant it got returned to the library half-done.
The Long Tail: Ditto, and then some. Why do I persist in reading popular economics? All it inspires is a vast and engulfing sense of rage at the mindless consumption I usually so enjoy.
Among Friends: I was warned on this one, but tried to go ahead anyway, because a) M.F.K. Fisher is really a great writer and b) my mom grew up in the same Los Angeles suburb some years later. But this actually might be the meanest book I've ever read, and yet it's about a community of Quakers.
Home Cooking: This doesn't really count, because I read most of the pages, and I really enjoyed some of the most that I read. (Huh?) Laurie Colwin remains a favorite comfort read, but maybe there's a reason why I only look at her stuff when I have a head cold. It's a little too cozy, even when it's aiming for nasty; maybe M.F.K. Fisher should show up with one of her crazy murderous cook anecdotes.

Currently not being abandoned: Blue Mars. I'll finish this trilogy if it's the last thing I do. But damn, Kim Stanley Robinson--could you have seen your way to a single female character who's not either asexual or an emasculating whore?

Soon enough I'm sure normal order will return and reading will have flow while writing will remain a tortured mess. Until then...go A's!

Let the Anglicisms Roll.

2006-09-12T18:41:00.000-07:00

Scene: the kitchen floor.
Players: Mama, OlderKid, YoungerKid

Mama: YoungerKid, do you want to play with your stacking blocks?
OlderKid: Yes, I would like to play! I am rather fond of stacking blocks, Mama.

Argh.

2006-09-11T09:47:00.000-07:00

Hello
I'm the guy who sits next to you
And reads the newspaper over your shoulder
Wait
Don't turn the page
I'm not finished
Life is so uncertain

This is how it feels to read Habermas' "Theory of Communicative Action"

I am struggling this morning, and Zil's universally acknowledged truth has driven me to post. Anyway, I can't wait until I, too, am driven to distraction by writing a book. I, however, am in the early stages of graduate school, where I make list of books that I think that I will write in the future, without the actual experience to know that my list is already hopelessly over-full.

Hope all is well at the onset of a new school year: I am simultaneously feeling lethargic, lazy, lively, and hopeful. Above all, I dread the return of the 30,000 or so undergraduates.

Meow.

2006-09-11T09:03:00.001-07:00

Some days, it's a bit gray outside. You drop your kid off at preschool and he screams loudly enough to actually rip your heart out of your chest and leave it pulsing on the sand next to the tire swing. You walk to your office and you see the campus Young Republicans have put up a huge 9-11 on the grass using tiny American flags. You decide that it seems like a good day to listen to the great Warren Zevon's album The Wind, recorded as he was in the last stages of cancer. You are nearly crushed by a five-foot stack of Victorian gardening periodicals balanced precariously on your desk. On those days, it's a good idea to stop before things get any worse and look at pictures of cats with stuff on them.

As Warren would say, Enjoy Every Sandwich. Or cheeseburger, as the case may be.

It is a Truth Universally Acknowledged

2006-09-05T12:55:00.000-07:00

...that a person trying to write a book, who knows that she has run out of excuses for why she has not yet finished the book, will try to fill the time by coming up with other ideas for other, more popular, books. Of these, 100% will be utterly terrible ideas, and yet, she will feel incredibly compelled to mull over possible plots, character names, crucial scenes, quippy lines of dialogue, etc., at all moments, and most of all when she should be writing the actual book she is actually writing (which sadly contains no quippy dialogue, or plot, for that matter.) She may also write of herself in the third person and spend inordinate amounts of time reading over the archives of Ask Metafilter, looking up random terms in Wikipedia, submitting mix-tape requests, reviewing advice columns, and generally being fascinated by the huge amount of information available on all topics other than the one she is supposedly making a book on. She may, in her darkest moments, contemplate meta-fiction. It is at that moment that she will hear the sweet voice of her child, offering the following pearl of youthful wisdom: "Oh Mama. You're just a fussbucket George."

How to be Literary

2006-08-23T10:06:00.000-07:00

I've followed the hubbub over Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics with vague interest; here is a book whose heroine is the "daughter of an itinerant academic," whose setting is "a series of picturesque college towns," and whose construction, according to Publisher's Weekly, is "modeled after the syllabus of a college literature course—36 chapters are named after everything from Othello to Paradise Lost to The Big Sleep—that culminates with a final exam." Despite the fact that this appears to be a campus novel--a genre I personally feel should be eliminated from the earth with extreme force--the meta-narrative-loving nerd in me found herself dialing up the local library to add it to my hold list.

Then I read the article in the New York Times about, among other things, whether or not Pessl's hotness was a factor in book sales/reviews/buzz/blahblahfishcakes. Then I saw this post at Gawker deeming Pessl only "book hot", (okay, it's kind of old, but who can keep up with reading Gawker regularly? That thing is like a full time job, in an industry I don't even work in), and then the followup, announcing her upgrade to "TV hot" (but only in black and white,) and then Gawker's link to New York/New Zealand's great new parlor game of "How Much Can You Doctor Your Author Photo."

Result? I'm thoroughly exhausted by both the existence of Marisha Pessl and her novel. Yet the original NY Times review gives me some hope. "[Pessl's] talent and originality would draw wolf whistles if she were an 86-year-old hunchback troll,” Liesl Schillinger wrote. As an 87-year-old clubfoot ogre, with a nearly-finished campus novel in hand, I'm thinking things are really looking up.

Reading Selections for the Sedate

2006-08-16T08:06:00.000-07:00

It seems a lot of my recent book choices have been rather feverish, and I didn't help matters by going to see the late show of A Scanner Darkly. (At least I wasn't one of the shrieking girls who had to leave during the first five minutes after getting freaked out by the bugs-crawling-all-over-the-skin scene.) It was time for something cool, refreshing, expected yet not boring, tightly plotted yet never overly suspenseful--in short, an Arturo Perez-Reverte mystery.

This time it was The Nautical Chart--I've already read The Seville Communion and the one about chess--and it didn't disappoint. As usual, the hero was a Spanish man, thoughtful yet not particularly intellectual, sexually lustful but not lascivious, and the (anti?)heroine was collected, tanned, and given to emotional distance and (possibly) betrayal, but never conventional romantic love. Along the way, there was something valuable that was vaguely discussed as worthy of finding, though the actual act of finding it was apparently not worthy of narration, and some murders got tacked on as kind of an after-thought in the last five pages, though their inevitability was apparent for most of the book. And there was a brief attempt at an odd outside narrator as minor character device, which, whatever, narratology.

Maybe it's partly because of the translation that I feel a sense of remove from Perez-Reverte's writing--I appreciate its quality even though it never exactly bowls me over--but sometimes that's just the ticket. I tend to read only a very few authors in the mystery genre, mainly because I like to keep that form of writing as a soothing retreat from either boring but important stuff I have to read for work, or emotionally wrenching stuff I have to read in general, or, you know, books about sentient trash-heaps that I obviously don't have to read but still end up reading and getting scared by anyway. Historical mysteries work especially well for this purpose, and probably that's where I'll go next in the Perez-Reverte oeuvre.

Right after I finish my current selection, P. D. James's The Children of Men, which depicts the near-future in which the human race can no longer reproduce. (This is causing some cognitive dissonance, since James's Adam Dalgliesh mysteries are currently some of the most boringly uneventful yet well-written books on the market; the perfect soothing bedtime reading for any misanthropic Anglophile like me.) I read this book, I must note, solely out of duty to Clive Owen, who will soon be starring in the (judging from the trailer at least) highly dubious movie adaptation. Oh Clive, is there anything I wouldn't do for you? Besides watch Sin City all the way through?

Girls, Unpowered

2006-08-12T07:00:00.000-07:00

Say you're a parent. What wouldn't you do to protect your children? If you're a parent like Maurice Clarett, you load your car with a semi-automatic, various other guns, a hatchet, a bulletproof vest, and a bottle of Grey Goose, and call up a bunch of sportswriters to tell them about how you're going to defend your baby daughter. But that's a whole different tragedy.

If you're a parent like me, however, it's more a matter of deleting the Sesame Street season pass from the Tivo. (The Grey Goose comes later.) Okay, maybe I'm overreacting, but I'm having a hard time getting past the initial nails-on-a-chalkboard level disgust I feel at the triumphant introduction of a new Sesame Street character: Abby Cadabby. According to various news releases, including a New York Times report, executive producer Liz Nealon explains the need felt for more of a "girly-girl" character.

We have our wacky, and we have our gentle,” Ms. Nealon said in a recent interview. “But we wanted a lead female character. If you think about ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show,’ some girls relate to Rhoda, who’s our Zoe, and some girls really relate to Mary, who’s a girly girl. And we didn’t have that girl.

In the rest of the article, it's explained that, in addition to her modeling makeup and glitter-wearing behavior, having Abby be a fairy will help thematize immigrant issues without actually having a character from "Indonesia or India," (because, you know, a brown-skinned puppet would totally clash with Elmo.) Implicit to this entire endeavor is a feeling of competition with a certain big-headed, monkey-befriending girl who has a talking backpack and lives in a computer (that's Dora the Explorer, for those of you who are toddler-deprived). I'm not going to hold up Dora as a model of self-possessed feminism, but you know, she does go on an awful lot of adventures all by herself. And as a catch-phrase, I'll take "Vamanos" over "That's so magic!" any day.

Edited to add: It has been revealed that Elmo is a brother. That doesn't make me any happier about Abby.

My Insect Brain

2006-08-10T09:49:00.000-07:00

In the department of processing events through the narrow lens of my own experience: I read the news of the latest terrorist threat and couldn't help being overwhelmed by the horror...of making a transatlantic flight with small children and absolutely no carry-on luggage. Sure, they're saying that on most flights formula and juice are allowed, if the parents take a sip first, but what about those flights where you can only carry on a passport and cash in a plastic bag? Please tell me that there's room for a diaper or two in that bag as well.

Of course, given that I both read Perdido Street Station and watched V for Vendetta yesterday, I may be suffering from an inordinately high level of paranoia already, and my brain is just focusing on these practical indignities as a kind of self-preservation. Neither work can I especially recommend or condemn; both suffer from a surfeit of aesthetic sophistication and a generally weakened plot. This is especially true of PSS, which has perhaps the greatest differential of interesting set-up to profoundly boring and skimmable pay-off of any book I remember reading. At its best it only appeals to a certain narrow sphere of horror/fantasy/alternative history connoisseurs: the plot follows the travails of a maverick scientist and his lover (who just happens to be of a race called khepri, with a female body and an insect head, causing much icky sex scene description involving the words "carapace" and "head-legs"), who accidentally release a giant moth that destroys human consciousness using its psychotically attractive wing-patterns and can only be stopped by a combined assault from bio-engineered humans with their heads on backwards, frog-like water people, cactus people, a disgraced and de-winged bird person, a trans-dimensional spider, and a sentient rubbish-heap, and....did I mention the perpetual motion machine that gets invented along the way? The setting has been identified by critics as a "Dickensian London," which, given the previous plot summary, should be understood in only an extremely general sense: a lot of people are poor and beleaguered, some people are rich and corrupt, and a very few are mad as hell and not going to take it any more.

Right now, for various reasons, I'm interested in what happens when people take Victorian fiction and sprinkle it with crazy juice, but PSS was a bit over-marinated, I'd say. According to the book jacket the author was a grad student at LSE when he wrote this, and a lot about the book feels kind of grad-studentish--bizarre for the sake of it, not for any reason of social or narrative interest. Which is not to say that I find sentient rubbish heaps inherently uninteresting, just that, if a book is going to give me (or anyone) the strength to live through a time when mothers are forced to drink a sample of the breast milk they're carrying to prove it's not a liquid explosive, my fantasy literature needs to give me a little more to go on than the relentlessly odd. The nightmares I can conjure all on my own now; it's the way out of them that I need more help with.

I'm Back?

2006-08-01T11:30:00.000-07:00

Well, not really. Having already attended one week-long camp on a single novel, I am still enough of a glutton for punishment that I am ready to go to another one--though this time I'm just showing up at the tail end of things, and not really joining in the real fun of dancing around in Victorian dress and such. But for right now I'm really supposed to be working, not dallying in the blogsphere.

Still, being interested both personally and professionally in words and their origins, I couldn't resist re-posting the following Mel Gibson quote, issued as a second apology for his alleged anti-Semitic tirade after his weekend arrest for drunk driving:

"I am in the process of understanding where those vicious words came from during that drunken display," he said.

Wait, wait, don't tell me, I know this one! They came from the alien messages that are being beamed to your brain via the fillings in your teeth! No? Well, where then?

Full story at BBC Online.

I'm Gone

2006-06-12T15:38:00.000-07:00

Well tomorrow I am. For the summer. And I don't know how many pesos I'll have to spend on blogging at the local internet cafe after buying each week's supply of potable water, so adios for now, dear book club, que vaya con dios. Something to look forward to when I return is a report on the books Duffy and I have packed. We agreed on a list of books that 1) were in English 2)that neither one of us had read 3)were long. So expect to hear about:

Bleak House
That Whole Proust Series
Gravity's Rainbow
Vilette
Madame Bovary (not that long, but I wanted it)

. . .I think that's it. Yes, we need a burro for our luggage.

Seacrest, out!

Ain't That a Kick in the Balls?

2006-06-06T08:40:00.000-07:00

Perhaps in the past, some Americans of what my friend RR calls the "educated class" have used the adjective"European" to mean sophisticated, urbane and richly smelly, as in the Spanish cheese that Duffy and I had to huddle between train cars to eat between Barcelona and Granada. For contrast, perhaps in the past, these same Americans have used "American" to mean narrow-minded, gluttonous and provincial.

From now on, I'm going to use the adjective "European" when I mean violent, drunk, proud racists who throw banana peels at black athletes. From now on, I expect to see Roman skinheads in those global party Nike commercials about the international brotherhood of futbol. I mean, I was alerted to the problems with racism at European soccer matches by an awesome episode of Real Sports several months ago (Bryant Gumbel really won me over with his poker-faced interview with some inarticulate British Grand Dragon who was basically calling him a monkey). But I guess I somehow thought Europe would see the episode and get their sh** together. Alas, the New York Times warns us in time for the World Cup, that they did not.

Oh, but Fifa, the governing body of soccer, has some great ideas, like a ""Say No to Racism" stadium banners, television commercials, and team captains making pregame speeches during the quarterfinals of the 32-team tournament." I mean I want to throw beer on a banner like that. And the words of the German Chancellor: "anybody who threatens, attacks or, worse, kills anybody because of the color of his skin or because he comes from another country will face the full force of the law" -- are seared on my brain with the heat of a German winter. Meanwhile, it's not as if Fifa doesn't know what to do. They have said "it would not be practical to use the harshest penalties available to punish misbehaving fans — halting matches, holding games in empty stadiums and deducting points that teams receive for victories and ties." Yes, of course, the practicality of letting this abuse go on is so much clearer.

Look, whatever we say about America (and I try to say a million bad things each day), at least Barry Bonds can be his unlikeable roided-out self in relative peace on the field. This is a glorious land where Sprewell was free to choke his coach and still get paid a knot. So was my thinking as I was mulling over this article driving back down to VA from my ancestral home in Philadelphia. So I was thinking as I relished in a Europe vs America moral high ground moment that doesn't happen much. Until I saw a truck flying an American flag and a Confederate flag, with a SKIN1 plate. Sigh.

Nevertheless, it seems like the response of the black players, except the one who did an ill-considered ironic Hitler salute, has been to be all sportsmanlike and determined. Brothers, might I offer one or two suggestions, from the land of Terell Owens? For one thing, until Fifa gets serious about racial terror, you should all demand to be paid double whatever everybody else makes . For another thing, use the rage to inspire you to kick some serious a** this World Cup season. Yes, on the field too.

Asalad vs. I-81

2006-06-03T19:02:00.000-07:00

To those of you who depend on good audio books to keep you from swerving to your death on the road:

1) Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake is just the best. Sure, you can read it. But hey, why don't you read Maud Martha instead, since you were never going to read that, and it's my favorite book in the world, and listen to the Atwood.

2) If you find yourself wondering if it's Oryx and/or Crake you love, or if it's actually Campbell Scott (and who knew Campbell Scott had such a soothing-yet-stimulating voice and who knew his girl-voice was so impressionistically effective) stop wondering. Just give in to it all.

3) As you listen, cast the film version of Oryx and Crake. So far, Duffy and I have cast that Sin City Hobbit as Crake and Eric Blanda as Glen/Snowman. The Oryx problem is that it can't be one of the 99.9% percent of working actresses in Hollywood -- blonde.

4) Fahrenheit 451 might be a great book. It's certainly a book one should read when one is planning an Apocalypse and Dystopia class. But two minutes of Ray Bradbury's sternly sleepy voice annnnnndgkllekthlelelghws WHAT? No, I'm totally awake.

Drive safe, homey.

David made me post this

2006-06-01T18:01:00.000-07:00

Bill Simmons on the National Spelling Bee:

Before I forget, now that "Two-Minute Drill" has been canceled, can't
ESPN launch a series of spelling bees with professional athletes?
Could you put a price on seeing Rickey Henderson trying to spell
"badigeon?" Or Brett Favre asking for a definition for "ceraunograph"?
They could even have Cynthia Cooper be the pronouncer. This couldn't
lose.

[This is Zil speaking. Thank you for reminding me that this is on tonight! Spellbound haunts my dreams, in a mostly good way. Freakishly good spellers are the real superheroes!]

Watching Movies at Zil's House

2006-06-01T09:25:00.000-07:00

9:06 pm. Put in DVD of King Kong.
9:10 pm. Zil: "Is one of us going to hit play?"
9:23 pm. Peter: "I think I hear something on the baby monitor. Pause the movie."
Both: [hold finger alongside nose in universal gesture of "Not my turn to do it." Minutes pass.]
9:38 pm Zil: "I think he went back to sleep. Turn it back on."
9:45 pm Zil: "Uh-oh."
Peter: "Is he downstairs?"
OlderKid: "I need to pee! But I don't want to use my bathroom. I want to use this bathroom. Also, I want to turn on the whale light. Also, I want my toy box on the floor, not on the bed. I need a drink of water. Can I watch the movie with you guys?"
Zil: "I'll be right back. Pause the movie."
[Many minutes pass. Peter watches part of a Cardinals game.]
9:59 pm Zil [grimly]: "Turn the movie back on."
OlderKid [over baby monitor]: "I want to WATCH the MOVIE."
Both [muttered]: "Go BACK to SLEEP!"
10:14 pm [Natives appear.]
Peter: "Is this movie going to be scary?"
10:35 pm [Kong makes his first appearance.]
Zil: "So, that seems like a good stopping point."
Peter: "Yeah, I think I got the gist."

It's like being at Rosario Dawson's birthday party!

Goodbye, Fortress of Solitude

2006-05-31T13:31:00.000-07:00

When I was growing up, one of my secret favorite books was Children of the Atom, a 1953 think-piece of a novel about a group of children born exceptionally intelligent after their parents are involved in a nuclear plant accident. The children must pass for normal as best they can until a caring psychiatrist intervenes and establishes a special, separate school where these boys and girls can be just as mad-brilliant as they want to be. As you might guess, it ends in tears, and though I don't remember the details, I'm pretty sure an angry torch-wielding mob is involved.

Looking back on it, my childish identifactory love of this book--"But that's me! I'm misunderstood and do better on tests than my peers too!"-- now prompts two uneasy realizations. One, I was vain as all hell as a preteen; participation in my elementary school Junior Great Books Club does not a mutant genius make. Two, I don't think I can love superheroes any more.

Of the many reasons that Alias crapped out in its final season, Sydney Bristow's pregnancy probably isn't the worst of it, nor can we really blame Angel's fall on the appearance of Connor, as much as we might like to. But there's no getting around the fact that, for the CIA super-spy and soulful vampire alike, progeny is a problem. If both shows depend on the conceit that the protagonist is singled out from millions by destiny, the Powers that Be, or Project Christmas, the question of how to handle the abilities of their genetic offspring starts to get creepy. Case in point: The Incredibles. Sure, it's Pixar and it's quippy, but it's also a logical first step on the path to eugenics and fascism. The "If everyone is special, then no one is" catchphrase, not to mention the entire plot of the movie, seems like Brad Bird's lengthy attack on the culture of child-affirmation via Barney singalong. And that's fine, I guess, if you enjoy pointing out to children how they're not really as great as they think they are, but where does that leave us?

If you're me, at a 8:30 Saturday showing of X-Men: The Last Stand (thanks, Peter!). X-3 concerns the transformation of various characters from one state to another--mutant to human, child to woman, regular psychic to psycho psychic--and in so doing tries to say things about the ways that people choose to conceal or reveal their true natures (or what they understand to be their true natures.) Thus, even more overtly than many other superhero narratives, X-Men works the race-passing metaphor until poor old Nella Larsen is limp as a noodle. Some of the mutants, by virtue of being blue or winged, can be visually identified as Other, while others just periodically pop in black contacts and move things with their minds but otherwise look "normal." (As an aside, I couldn't shake the feeling, perhaps enhanced by the San Francisco setting, that at least half of the "evil" mutants appeared to be former Berkeley grad students). In mentoring the flock of confused mutants that gravitate to either the ivied halls of Xavier's School for the Gifted or the redwood forest of Magneto's Tent City of the Pierced, the two surrogate fathers take different positions on how their "children" should integrate themselves into the world at large. But they both agree, and the movie does too, that their charges are superiorly special. That may be true--who wouldn't prefer self-healing skin--but the thing is, the real-world conditions that mutancy is a metaphor for are neither superior, nor special, nor necessarily genetically coded. Describing social difference in the science lab, as Children of the Atom also tried to do, tends to make a dangerous leap from constructivism to essentialism.

The movie's central conceit is the invention of a "cure" that polarizes the mutant community/race/species/what-have-you, with some characters defiantly reveling in their difference and others desperately eager to erase that genetic distinction. So the well-known philosopher Brett Ratner's question is: Is the ability to conjure mist at will, say, a way of expressing who you really are? Does your biology, or the way your biology is perceived, determine what you are for yourself inside of your own head? Or is there some essential part of your identity that transcends both societal category and DNA coding (as Something New would have it)?

But actually, my abandonment of superheroes has less to do with any possible answers to these questions than it does with the questions themselves. The notion that there is this kind of hidden best self, ready to be revealed only when greatly needed (unless you're Faith or something) isn't the way I want my children to understand identity. Do I want to tell them that any difference, real or imagined, between themselves and their peers is something to be gnawed over in private, pent up in a closet until they start classes at Metropolis University? Or do I want to make them start kindergarten with their capes and tights on?

This where I realize that being a parent changes things, lots of things, in ways I never would have understood before. Sure, my kids have the right to fantasize that they are disgruntled children of the atom, and probably will. But I don't get to think that way any more. I'm trying my damndest to raise citizens of the world, and step one of that endeavour as I understand it is to rewrite the narrative of exceptionalism that governs superhero fantasies and Bush foreign policy alike. That's why the argument that "parents are the real superheroes" is as flawed as "we don't condone torture, because we're Americans." The condition of being a parent, or of being an American, is terrifyingly important, powerful, weighty and more. And in that, it is utterly ordinary, because that is also the conditions of being human in general.

I'm really going to miss you, Buffy.

Portrait of a Fool

2006-05-31T07:00:00.000-07:00

So the smooth, petite, hard body of Henry James's Washington Square seduced me away from Deborah Eisenberg's latest collection (which I was supposed to review), Italo Calvino (no, you MFA fascists, I have not read If On a Winter's Night a Traveler). I was intrigued by Duffy's periodic complaints about Mrs. Penniman, which continued long after he'd finished the book. Anyway, WS is Portrait of a Lady 2.0 -- with a pleasing difference.

In my Caribbean lit. class, I had been teaching a number of books and films with narrators who were sympathetic because although young, they were extraordinarily intelligent and exceptional. This gave me occasion to ponder what seems to be a human tendency to disavow and discriminate against the dumb. So I was compelled, and felt deeply for the young dim-wit Catherine in WS, who establishes herself as the tragic heroine, even after the narrator points her out as unimaginative, tasteless of attire and single-celled in her motives. Unlike Portrait's Isabel Archer of the "remarkably active" imagination, Catherine's folly is the source of WS's biggest laughs (the "why not 3 times a day?" scene is worth the price of the book), and yet it is she, not Isabel, who manages to (SPOILER AHEAD) avoid a Jamesian character's worst fear: marriage to a smarmy, charming male goldigger (go head boy, go head get down). And because they are bound in a loyalty that might look, if it were an animal, like a majestic collie, Catherine's dumb decisions have a grace that render shameful the machinations not only of her suitor, but also her father, a brilliant jerk, who would pause to say "I told you so," to a person bleeding to death from a knife in their back before pulling it out, and of course the vulgar-to-death Mrs. Penniman.

Now, women in the works of many 19th (and 20th and 21st) century writers of both genders have been disproportionately maligned as stupid, and perhaps like other marginalized groups, their supposed stupidity has even sometimes been fantasized about as noble for spurious purposes, like keeping them out of classrooms. It is arguable that James punishes Isabel for her worldliness and praises Catherine -- obviously I'm not down with that. But I am down with a gender-neutral postmodern celebration of the dumb hero in novels. Go head y'all, go head, get down.

NOW NOT TEACHING: but entranced by the creepy and awesome plays of Adrienne Kennedy.

The original nerd

2006-05-30T13:59:00.000-07:00

The original nerd
Originally uploaded by quietdomino.

Looking nervous and shifty-eyed, as usual.

That'll teach you to mention cats in the comments!

P.S. Can you believe that I took that picture with my camera-phone, then posted it to the blog via Flickr automatically? Zil McZillerson: Using amazing technology for remarkably trivial ends since 2006.

Meow.

2006-05-30T13:47:00.000-07:00

FW: IMG_0532.JPG
Originally uploaded by quietdomino.

It has further occured to me that I have been a bit disparaging about our new cat. This is entirely (well, mostly) unwarranted. She is sweet as can be and polydactyl to boot. I had at one point planned a long blog post about the ins and outs of cat names, and how I wanted to name this cat "Willow" so that she would pair well with our other cat Milhouse in the category of "Lovable Television Nerds," but I was overruled, and instead she is named Annie Rose, after the little sister in the excellent series of "Alfie" picture books by Shirley Hughes, and then I was going to talk about how bibliophiles love to name cats after book characters and authors, and then I got busy and forgot about it and Annie Rose snuggled her way into everyone's hearts and also threw up a lot in the process because it turns out she can't handle dry food. So, consider this that post.

Apologia

2006-05-26T08:49:00.000-07:00

It occurred to me, after I turned a simple email exchange with David into a scorched earth polemic on disciplinary boundaries, that my online persona has gotten a little belligerent. So I offer this return to basics, using the "nice words" I insist on for OlderKid. (Careful readers will note this is a straight copy of Asalad'sSisterGirl's blog, with different terms. I can only hope that my weak imitation encourages AsSG to start things back up again.)

Yes, Please

Kiki's Delivery Service: Miyazaki, a 13-year-old witch, and a talking black cat for a sidekick. What's not to love?
Threadless T-Shirts, especially the (sadly sold out) "Nothing Rhymes with Orange" design.
Ask Metafilter, which has allowed me to spend countless minutes pondering the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge and the tragedy's sole fatality, a dog named Tubby.
Jill Scott, and the Columbia Public Library for sharing her with me so kindly.
The local Memorial Day Parade. Bring on the jingoism, as long as it involves marching bands and parachuters.
The Man Who Wore All His Clothes. Though it's ridiculously long (who chooses an 11 chapter book for a three year old? Me, I guess), it's from the hilarious brain of Allan Ahlberg and involves a frequently confused car radio, a foiled bank robbery, a substitute teacher fond of impossible commands, and (no surprise here) a talking orange cat for a sidekick.

No, Thank You

feverish babies and cats who don't talk but do puke in hidden spots.
Sin City. Yes, I know I brought it on myself. But did I really deserve to have the image of Carla Gugino brandishing her just-cannibalized arm stump and screaming "He made me watch [him eat it]!" imprinted on my mind for the rest of my life?
The A's 6 game losing streak.
90+ degree days in May and
Raking leaves at noon on a 90+ degree day in May because some kind of fungal spores messed with our sycamore's head and made it drop all its leaves 5 months ahead of time.

Excuse Me?

The Bus Uncle phenomenon.

Errata

2006-05-25T08:55:00.000-07:00

1) This is from the Ring-Tum Phi, the student newspaper at a certain university with which I have a certain affiliation:

"Due to a copy editing error, last week's Opinion's column, "The lessons of Duke," called Al Sharpton a "race mongrel." The article should have said "race-monger."

2) Now on a less slur-filled note. Regarding "People Who Led to This Blog," Sandra Lim, poet, (Loveliest Grotesque coming this fall) Iowa class of '04 apparently did make it into Judi's blog as a personal mention and a citation.

And Suzanne Keen loaned me the Kennedy book.

That is all.

Tune in Next Week

2006-05-25T07:32:00.000-07:00

I can't explain why I stopped watching Lost. At first I was really excited about the show, happy that Daniel Dae Kim had graduated from lame parts on Angel and Voyager to a series regular, and glad to see Harold Perrineau out of the wheelchair. Then, as I recall, a baby appeared in my house and seemed to require a lot of attention, as did the toddler who was already there. And Lost somehow never made it back into my consciousness.

Which is why I was shocked to open the New York Times and discover that Our Mutual Friend was a plot point in last night's season finale. I was even more shocked to find out what kind of plot point: apparently one character is saving the book as the last one to read before he dies. To which I say, huh? That's the Dickens novel you're treasuring? But I guess that's another post.

The article goes on to quote Lost producers Damon Lindelof and Carleton Cuse declaring their affinity for Dickens as someone else who knew the pressure of a deadline and the challenges of keeping up interest in a serialized narrative. (And poor Dickens ended up choosing to die rather than figure out who actually did kill Edwin Drood, or, you know, something like that.) Which gave another stir to the soup of ideas sloshing about in my brain-pot having to do with serial fiction, narrative, Victorian Futures, time, the universe and everything.

Tara Ariano, (along with others) the brains behind Television without Pity and Fametracker, wrote this article for the CBC about shows that "become too popular" and so go on too long, observing:

In some cases, producers prolong the natural run of a series by adding new plots or characters, without considering that a narrative structure can only support so much story before collapsing in on itself.

To which I say, tell that to Dickens. Or, for those of us not in a Doctor Who episode, I ask: is the problem the nature of narrative itself? Or is the problem the contemporary conversion of the art-form into a commodity? Put another way, is it that it's not possible to create a truly great piece of fiction that is both conceived of and distributed periodically? (Here I mean to exclude works that the author finishes beforehand and then just publishes in sections. I'm thinking about times when production, distribution, and reception are all mixed up together.) Or is that it's just not possible for such great serial fiction to be created in a period in which the creative product is for sale in so many forms? That is, given that we know that the installments of the story will be repeated on various channels, sold over the internet and in DVD sets, and otherwise kept in constant circulation, how can we maintain faith in the integrity of linear story progression? Even before one episode has even aired, don't we already know how it's going to fall apart, with hybridized bees, and immortal Italians, and men with blue hands, and demonic law agencies, and sons in the basement, and assasinated Presidents, and eye-gouging Preachers, and the list goes on?

A lot depends here, of course, on what I mean by "great piece of fiction," and I'm not sure I have the room or the audience inclination to get into that. If you poked me, I might say I'm interested in how serial fictions, in their production and reception, reflect a contemporary understanding of the passing of time, and, by the extension, the structure of personal and national history. And you might say "Shfngngrghs[drool on keyboard]djkl;sp." Then I might say, "Okay, let me rephrase. If circumstances--the internet, global empire, the iTunes music store--conspire to undermine the functions of linear narrative, does this mean that the question 'What happened next' no longer has meaning? And if it does, what meaning does it have?"

And then I'd also say, hey, look at the National Review's list of the top 50 conservative songs. Those guys sure are crazy!

People Who Led to This Blog

2006-05-24T08:54:00.000-07:00

It's true that I'm the site's resident complainer. But no complaints today. The sun is shining, I got my mojo working, the rattlesnakes are in the woods (though several copperheads have been sighted by the Montessori school) and I've been rocking the hottest new slow jam for the 00-08 era, the Coup's "Baby, Let's Have a Baby Before Bush Do Somethin' Crazy" Drive to Lookout Point in the Prius and listen with your honey tonight.

Yesterday I read a book in one sitting (well if you don't count a very satisfying and drooly nap, making tostadas, watching number #2 of The Decalogue and two miserable espisodes of "The New Adventures of Old Christine," oh why does watching CBS comedy make me feel like I'm wearing a diaper and someone is pulling the sides of my mouth down so I can't laugh?). The book was the wonderful People Who Led to My Plays, an illustrated autobiographical encyclopedia by playwright Adrienne Kennedy. Besides making my synapses fire about how one develops a consciousness, a personality, and how our childhood obsessions never leave us, I couldn't stop thinking about the possibilities of the form. For Kennedy, in a Tender Buttons-type way, the definition of, say "The Bible" is singular and personal: "Life was old." Another favorite:

Frankenstein:
He killed people, yet he had a kind heart.

Most of the entries are brief. Many of them repeat. The "people" mentioned are family and movie stars, writers, Hitler, neighbors, strangers, activists, philosophers, musicians and divinities. Though written in 1987, before the rise of US magazine and IMDB, this book understands, without regret, that imaginative people may perhaps be as influenced by Elizabeth Taylor's still photos in magazines, as by visiting relatives in the summer. Also, there's some juice in these pages. Adrienne's mother excuses herself to cry; her brother is sad; her father, a prominent community leader, winds up alone living at the Y. Adrienne feels unfulfilled and deeply depressed as a young mother. (The book ends without a mention of the divorce that eventually took place). And there's charm: despite the segregated train ride down from Cleveland, I longed to visit Kennedy's relatives in Montezuma, GA, and her black/Italian childhood neighborhood sounds like a friendly place.

Aside from filling up my evening, this book did something that few books really do -- it inspired me. Here follows my tribute to Adrienne: People Who Led to this Blog

My Mother:
She taught me how to spell Philadelphia at age 4.

Jessica Carville:
We met at computer camp. We wrote letters for years. I don't think we actually had much in common. She lived in the wilderness of Pennsylvania. I lived in Philadelphia. Her dad was in a band called The Flaming Caucasians. So I can only conclude that we wrote for the joy of corresponding.

Al Gore:
I don't think he really invented the Internet, but I like seeing his name there. Anyway, the Internet killed letters, so in 1995-96, I wrote copious emails to Claire, to Chris first-boyfriend Geisel and some to Zil, who I'd just met.

Sistergirl and Zil:
Wrote the best emails of anyone.

Judi at Iowa:
Judi, poet, class of 04. Now is the time to tell you that some of us were reading your "secret" blog. We know whose sweat you wanted to lick, we knew when you felt slighted. We knew that despite your placid (like black ice) exterior, you were a whirlwind of irritable and hungry passion. We all tried to get mentioned in there. Only Michelle made it. Judi, you were the best thing since Who Shot Jr.

Sistergirl:
blogged for a minute. Brilliantly.

Boredom:
Is not a person, but what happens between finishing one project, starting another and thinking that grading essays is enough.

Dave Hsu:
My second publisher.

Zil (again):
Invited my rants.

You:
Try this at home!

NOW TEACHING: Not a goddamn thing!

Ravens are like Writing Desks

2006-05-24T08:10:00.000-07:00

OlderKid has recently discovered the joy of titles. Until a few months ago, he regarded titles of books and songs as functional utterances to be pronounced phonetically until the desired object appeared. But now he's realized that oftentimes the words that are in the title also crop up in the text or lyrics, sometimes repeatedly, and figuring that out has made every piece of music a delightful treasure hunt. The conversation in our car on the way to daycare, multiplied by a million, goes something like this: OK: Mama, what's this song called? Me: Down by the Riverside. [Music continues...] OK: [with extreme delight] Mama, he said Down by the Riverside! He said it again!

All of this is just to say that the book I'm reading right now has a singularly unappealing title and one which by all right should not appear anywhere in the text. It's everyone's favorite work of rogue economics, Freakonomics. Let it be known that I am a ginormous fan of popularized science--I'm perfectly content to learn about linguistics from The Language Instinct, evolution from Darwin's Dangerous Idea, and quantum physics from The Elegant Universe. So I approached Freakonomics with great hopes. But, after making my way through the incredibly off-putting and self-congratulatory "Explanatory Note" which begins the book, I began to wonder. Shouldn't this book really be called "Patterns of Social Practice Which Should Be Obvious to Everyone Except You Guys Are Such Dumbasses You Need Me to Explain It"? Could we take a break from hearing about the Harvard Society of Fellows and how much cooler the author was than all of those coneheads and instead, you know, consider some of the social contexts? Take the chapter on "Why Drug Dealers Live with Their Mothers." I got the basic point, that rank and file gang members don't actually make much money; but couldn't stop thinking how much more interesting that point was in The Wire, or Random Family; big, hefty works that respect the huge, unwieldy complex of issues at hand. Freakonomics loves to pose the wowee-matchup--the Klan is like real-estate agents! Gangs are like fast-food franchises! Doodlebugs are like smarty-pants! (okay, I made that one up)--and then immediately walk away whistling, all "I'm just the freaky economist! All of life's contours are just number patterns to me, you guys take it from here--" I hate to be old-school humanist about it, but I just think that's kind of immoral.

The book smacked of the same things that bug me about Gladwell's writing, though I think this book was much worse; a tendency towards smugness and a willingness to play fast and loose with the reliability of the academic sources it draws on. It doesn't work to say, as I think Blink does, that standard research doesn't understand how to interpret these problems, while right at the same time drawing on standard research to support your conclusions. Maybe my problem is that I don't have any inherent interest in understanding cultural relations as data-sets, but isn't the bridge that the popularizer is supposed to build? I don't have any inherent interest in quantum physics either, but I like hearing arguments about how and why I should. All Freakonomics has really done for me is given me a lot of cocktail party anecdotes (which, given my current rate of cocktail party attendance, are going to last for a long time) and remind me that a lot of academics are blowhards.

On that note, and returning to the theme of problematic titles: I wonder why no one has wanted to be hired for this job?

21st Century Blake

2006-05-23T10:43:00.000-07:00

Because "The Tyger" is one of my favorite Blake poems, trite as that might be, I especially appreciated this short film based on the poem (though not in any literal way) and also titled "Tyger." It's set in Sao Paulo and directed by Guilherme Marcondes and is the kind of combination of creepy and lyrical that I like best. Download and enjoy!

Thank you, Sam, for sending me the link.

Yeah, It Happened.

2006-05-22T07:27:00.000-07:00

Barry's even with the Babe, and the A's are the ones that dealt it. (Yes, this is a baseball-related post. Hey, where are you going?) And apparently some people are kind of angry about it! Why? Well, go read this book. Are you back? Okay.

I have no pretensions that I'm going to be adding anything substantive to the discussion here, but I maybe want to make a case for why people of all kinds, even baseball-haters (you know who you are) should care about this. Sports are the most racially-integrated national institution we possess, but that integration doesn't come easy. Sars points out, in her essay on the Bonds kerfluffle, that the way people talk and feel about baseball is often related to how they talk and feel about America.

To me, that means race comes into it in a big way, even though everyone wants to pretend that it doesn't. That, they can, without cognitive dissonance, love the brothers HernÃ¡ndez, defectors who throw a ball really fast, but as for other, slower-throwing immigrants? Not so much with the love. And while everyone agrees Pierzynski needs anger management lessons, they also agree that Milton Bradley needs them more. (How dare he disrespect Jeff Kent?) And most of all, while everybody loves Ken Griffey Jr.--so respectful, so talented, so much potential to break records, yet so injury-prone and therefore so safely unlikely to ever play a full season--everybody feels just fine, gleefully fine, about hating Barry. But it's all about sportsmanship! Barry doesn't run out flies! Barry doesn't properly respect the past! Barry wears padding so a ball thrown at 90 miles an hour won't hit his elbow quite as hard! Barry has a weirdly high voice and a leather recliner in front of his locker!

Truth is, I don't like him either, and at this point I don't know if it's because he's really a jerk or because I've been conditioned into it. But I know that none of the things I mentioned above really gets at what the problem is for most people. Sure, the reluctance to "hustle" to first is annoying, when it's part of his million-dollar job description, but there's a little bit more cultural depth to the accusation that a black man is acting lazy. Barry, right now, is in a dangerous place: he is black, and he is getting something that we, the beer-guzzling sports fan public have decided that he doesn't "deserve." This gives people a chance to talk angrily about how America isn't like that--we earn our privilege and our place in the record books with our own bootstraps! Any similarity to barely suppressed white outrage about affirmative action, welfare reforms, or slavery reparations is, of course, surely just a coincidence.

Scenes from a Early Morning Car Ride

2006-05-18T07:12:00.000-07:00

Me: Did you guys know we're going to be going on a big adventure in June?
OlderKid: Yes.
Me: We're going to Canada, and we're going to look for icebergs.
OK: Yes, and then I will chase them, and they will fly away up into the sky.
Me: Hmm. I think you might be thinking of pigeons. Icebergs are made out of ice and snow.
OK: Oh.
Me: And they are really big, bigger than our house.
OK: Oh, and we cannot play with them. Because that is against the rules.
Me: Ummm, yes. It is against the rules of gravity.
OK: Oh.
YoungerKid: Yaahhhhhh!

Not Amazing in the Least

2006-05-17T20:29:00.000-07:00

Ray and Yolanda, why have you deserted me?

An Alternate Meaning for "Book Club"

2006-05-17T07:59:00.000-07:00

If we all have predominant emotions, say anxiety, insecurity, blissful ignorance, then mine, since I can remember, has been feeling left out. It started in kindergarten when my two minions (the last time I had minions) tried to mutiny me (damn you Melanie and Rita, especially Rita who always got to be Princess Leia). In first grade I had a best friend who specialized in making me feel left out of our duo. In second grade Kimberly and the Napoleonic Tanisha huddled and had some secrets that made me feel left out; sometimes in therapy I still wonder what they were. At private school I felt left out of being rich and suburban. I always felt left out of Christmas. In a mixed public high school I identified the popular black kids and the popular white kids and devoted a little time each day to feeling left out of both crews. When they mingled, as they did very rarely, I was beside myself. These days I have occasional dreams about the parts of Philadelphia I avoided where I was young because they were notoriously racist. In my dreams they are paradises serving Italian pastry that I am left out of. At a high school journalism program on Temple's campus, I felt left out when this little fast a** girl started messing with college students and telling everyone but me about it, one night I literally begged; I might have cried for her to tell me her business. She didn't. At arts camp, I felt excluded from the punks (they were called "alternative" then), the drama kids and even the junior counselors. At Bible camp I felt left out of the saved. Now I feel left out of my sister and friends' lives in New York even though I have sworn off living in New York, and one day when I heard two colleagues in the office discussing a blackberry cobbler they were going to make together, I actually reprimanded them about how it was rude to talk about such things and not share. They thought I was joking.

This past week I have been having problems with feeling left out of 1)my friends having babies and 2)Oprah's Legends Ball. I think Oprah's Legends Ball, an event where some very rich women receive expensive food and gifts, is kind of sick. I know Oprah does a lot for the worse-off black women in the world, but it still don't feel right. Nevertheless: still jealous. So I admit that I was glad when the Presidential Address on Enforcing Xenophobia with the Military pre-empted it. (Of course now I have to try not to watch it on May 22nd).

Point is, a time when I never feel left out is reading a book. Even if I'm reading about rich people sunning themselves on a Greek isle, I'm right there with them (unlike when I'm reading about this in say, InStyle magazine, oddly enough). The characters in books can never shut me out because I can always find out all there is to know about them. I know your secret, Dew Breaker! And then sometimes, thank you Watership Down, the books clearly want me along for the trip. And even when they don't, Uncle Naipaul, they still need me.

Incidentally I did finally find out some of you stingy people's secrets. And they're all here. Now try leaving me out of that.

In a Nutshell

2006-05-17T06:12:00.000-07:00

Lots of picture books have come home from the library in recent days, filled with lots of glossy illustrations, lots of photographs of cute young authors who live in Brooklyn, lots of squiggly line drawings of mischievous cats or lonely dodos or curious polar bears, and reading them OlderKid and I have felt...well, frankly, lots of boredom. The stories are all fine, and they urge pleasant, respectable behavior; sharing with siblings, eating food neatly, showing respect to Mother Earth. I wouldn't quarrel a bit with them, but I just might be asleep before the final page gets turned. Which is why, after trying the fourth such glossy innocuous yawner (at my insistence, I'm sorry to say, OlderKid recognized the way things were going long before), we rushed back with relief to Maurice Sendak's Nutshell Library.

If you haven't read these before, well, you're missing something, as I hope I'll make clear. The books are tiny and come in their own protective box; there are four of them; they are modeled on primers of the nineteenth-century and, in theory at least, review letters, numbers, the months of the year, and the importance of caring. But what makes them great (aside from the fact that Carole King set them to music perfectly for Really Rosie, her collaboration with Sendak), is their willingness, like every Sendak production, to delve into the terrifying and absurdist depths of a child's fears.

Picture books, like poetry, show their hand almost immediately: you can tell from the first few words usually if it's going to be "Tyger, tyger burning bright" or more "How doth the little busy bee..." And any good picture book, like any poem that's worth learning and remembering, leaves a mark. Sometimes the mark is funny, sometimes touching, but surprisingly (at least to me) most of of the time it's incredibly terrifying. Fear is probably the most powerful emotion that a 3 year old feels, and so he wants to feel it a lot, in a controlled environment where the turn of a page can bring back or banish the terrible feeling at will. If the book won't acknowledge this, or worse, passes off an adult's fear (that two siblings won't love each other instantly, say) as a child's, that book is worse than useless. (A fear that a sibling will replace a child, well, that's another matter.)

So this is what's great about Sendak. Pierre actually gets eaten by a lion because he is such a little snot. Johnny has to stand up to a robber, a tiger, and a nose-pecking blackbird, among many others. Alligators throw tantrums. These things are all scary, and fascinating, and worthy of constant repetition--and along the way there is also some talk of May follows April follows March, and so on. I think some modern parents are unsettled by this, and so reluctant to read Sendak to their children. Maybe they are afraid of the blood-thirsty enjoyment they see in their child's eyes. But the terror will inevitably out, if not via the Nutshell Library, than via Bionicles, or Power Rangers, or Batman, or what have you. And Carole King wrote no music for those.

For the Love of Frith

2006-05-16T09:26:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you've recently read Just Above My Head, a dazzling opus of gospel music, the terror of the Civil Rights-era South, child abuse, New York, gay sex, straight sex and the kind of alarmingly prescient insight that only somebody like James Baldwin could come up with at the end of his life

and

Blindness by Jose Sarramago, with its horrifying images of people wading and sleeping and wallowing in their own crap and suddenly realizing that our essential uselessness is just a blink away

and

Here is Where We Meet by that delightful genius John Berger, which takes you to Lisbon and England and Poland, etc., via Hades, where you hang out with dead people like John's mother and a girl he basically took wonderful naps with and you eat this great soup that with a boiled egg at the bottom

and then you realize it's time to clear your head with a book about some rabbits. Which is when you pull out that long-neglected copy of Watership Down, with its faux-deep made-up rabbit language and rabbit legends and the hilarious image of the Rabbit god dancing and mating his days away. And you remember how chilled you were by the cartoon. And you sigh, content with the comforting sound of a slightly amused British accent whispering the tale in your head. Until Duffy starts talking about how great Washington Square was (that evil Miss Penniman!) , and somebody tells you about a book about the siege of Leningrad called The Siege and then you wonder if you're ever going to make it to the ends of rabbit earth.

NOW TEACHING: Life and Debt and It Begins with Tears

Back to normal?

2006-05-16T05:47:00.000-07:00

That is, we're back from a lovely graduation weekend in the Bay Area. The cat is back from the vet's, without her giant blue Elizabethan collar and 14 metal stomach staples and with a gargantuan appetite for anything YoungerKid drops on the floor. The car is back in the same city as us, after an elaborate practical joke (I can only assume, at least) played by the airline changed both the city of departure and of arrival for our flight home one hour before take-off; which meant I spent Monday taking the shuttle back across to the other side of the state to retrieve the car from the original airport parking lot. And the kids are back to all their familiar toys and books, of which they were apparently horribly deprived over the four days that we were gone.

Why the question mark in the title, then? The news that Cody's on Telegraph will be closing its doors on July 10. For those who love Berkeley and love books, this is undoubtedly shocking news, even if you admit, as you know you have to, that you probably did more buying at the 4th Street store or on Amazon of late anyway. Like every other graduate of Berkeley though, I have spent countless hours browsing the shelves (perhaps not every Cal grad shared my fondness for the pet care and mystery aisles in particular), enduring the strange sticky sweet smell of the floor, and carrying on feuds with various employees (actually, that one might also be just me.) Even now, when I pull out an old book and find that familiar black and white bookmark shoved inside, I remember settling myself down in some little corner of the store to read and eavesdrop on fellow shoppers intent on their own bizarre purchases, then tromping around Wheeler with my crinkly plastic sack full of fresh books, waiting for some professor to gaze distractedly at my burden and mutter tweedily: "Cody's, hmmmm? You'll make a fine academic some day." Academics and book-lovers have their status brands as surely as suburban teenagers and Park avenue matrons, and Cody's, the quirkiest, biggest bookstore serving the most chaotically brilliant U.S. public university--you bet them's fighting words--ranks right at the top. If people are now too frightened by the clumps of teenagers begging for beer money on the corner outside to make it in to the store, well, that's everybody's loss. I'm not sure I have time before the kids wake up to spin this out into a dissertation on how Barnes and Noble and poor urban planning are ruining American life, so I'll just say this. Maybe, as the Sunday New York Times Magazine reminds me, printed books don't matter anymore, even if the words inside matter more than ever. But, as a shopper, a reader, a collector, and a person increasingly nostalgic for her youth, I'm going to miss them when they go.

Last Night's Read-alouds: Lost and Found, Curious George, Blueberries for Sal ("I will be the Mama Bear, Mama"), Lottie's New Beach Towel, This Little Pirate, So What's it Like to be a Cat, Martha Blah Blah, and, for YoungerKid, Polar Bear Polar Bear What Do You Hear? one MILLION times.

Short Cuts

2006-05-16T00:10:00.000-07:00

OK, now for a short, low-brow interlude. Lately I've been reading:

Carl Hiaasen's Skinny Dip: It's entertaining with cartoonish characters. Or else people are really like that in Florida.

Barry Eisler's spy thrillers, Hard Rain, Rain Fall, and Rain Storm: As you might guess from the style of the titles, all of these novels feature a brooding hero named John Rain, exotic foreign locations, gadgets, and much sex and violence. The interactions of the characters, male and female, usually occur in various judo holds. Nonetheless, entertaining, and I am both pleasantly and annoyingly addicted to them.

Robert Gibbons' Game Theory for Applied Economists: now I should add here that this has been relatively entertaining, at least for a economics book. All of the examples involve excitingly named concepts like 'sequential rationality' and 'the Revelation Principle', which you might think might promise some science-fiction mayhem, or spiritual epiphanies -- but unfortunately, then you'd be sadly mistaken. Economists apply these exciting names to boring things like insurance and looking for a job. I'm considering writing something in between game theory, a spy novel, and a romance novel, where all of the machinations of the various characters are set up, but then left as exercises for the reader. Only economists will be able to read the ending.

A particularly bad influence in my life lately has been.... the Seattle Public Library! It is a terrifically wired library, and so now I am able to check out junky books and jazz CDs to my heart's desire. Unfortunately, right now all my heart desires is fluff, in between schoolwork.

You Know Who Writes Awesome Books?

2006-05-11T13:04:00.000-07:00

Old white men.

Does the New York Times think that just because Toni Morrison's Beloved was named the best novel written in the past twenty five years that I wouldn't notice that there are only 2 women on the long list of also-rans? And only one other black person (Edward P. Jones, The Known World, of course children And by the way, is there any black experience worth reading about other than slavery)? Yes Beloved won, and Invisible Man was at the top of this same list in 1965. But if you really want to know who writes good books aside from the freak performance of one or two black writers, click on the link and look at the picture of Toni squeezed between every decrepit white man who turned on a computer in the past 10 years. Just look at that!

And not to mention, and not to mention that Chinese Americans write books and Chicanos write books and Jhumpa Lahiri wrote some books and Colson Whitehead wrote The Intuitionist which cries out Great American Novel, and to have one white woman and one black man on the runner-up list is illiterate. Now the list of runner-ups and the winner was the result of a survey of writers and prominent literary types, so you'll say blame them. I do! And I say to them: Stop reading the 5 books that came out by your five friends about the alienation of being privileged and the tragedy of erectile dysfunction in the autumn years! And AO Scott, couldn't you have have noticed what was missing from that list while you were writing that essay about what it means to be American? I mean is every pamphlet and grocery list written by Updike better than Elizabeth McCracken's short stories or Jamaica Kincaid's Mr. Potter?

What I love about things like this is how they show what did and did not happen during the PC reign of terror that people (including say, Phillip Roth) were so worried about. One thing that happened is that a lot of people read Beloved who would have blown it off before the 90s. But the other thing that happened is that just about everything else stayed the same. Except Rabbit. He went through so much.

I'm serious, though. Look at this picture.

It's like looking at Stephin Merritt's record collection . . .

Now Teaching: A Small Place

Random

2006-05-10T12:14:00.000-07:00

A recent furniture rearrangement, a recent hard-drive failure, plus a recent email exchange with Asalad reminded me of several things. One, I am gosh darn easy to distract when I'm on a deadline. Two, I have a lot of mp3s of many kinds, and a lot of bookshelves stuffed in random corners. Three, I am a librarian's daughter.

Not making sense to you? Yeah, me neither. Let me try again. I had to move all the bookcases out of the guest room and into the hall because LittleCat had to go in the guest room after her stomach surgery and she wasn't allowed to have anything in there with her that she might jump on and pop her staples out. Now I'm thinking the bookcases look good in the hall, and I should keep them there permanently. But that raises the question, what kinds of books are appropriate for upstairs hallway bookcases? I mean, it's obvious I put my work books in my office. And my fanciest non-work books in the living room, where visitors can see them and be suitably impressed (Hello, James Joyce's Ulysses! My, your spine is looking mighty fresh and uncracked!) and my embarassing cat mysteries in the bedroom, where only my nearest and dearest can mock them (Oh, it's you, Rita Mae Brown. Put some damn soap in your cat's mouth, she curses like a sailor!) But what kind of book is a hallway book? Fiction? Biography? Foreign language?

In a related train of thought, while slowly re-copying all my lost music files back to the hard drive, and simultaneously reading this post on the Stephin Merrit controversy and the playlist meme more generally, I recognized myself with some sheepishness. Not that I'm always posting my random playlists from my iPod as proof of my musical taste,* but that the bookcase placement question which so concerned me is just a grand version of that, in which I try to stack the deck in favor of my self-image as an important intellectual. How much squirmier would I feel all the time if I had to meet with students and colleagues in an office filled with a truly random selection of the books that I own? But maybe it would be good for me. Then I'd have to face up to the fact, that despite having spent many years in pursuit of a doctoral degree in literature, I still like to read books in which animals can both talk and do detective work.

Moral? I need to check more books out of the library, and hope Homeland Security doesn't reveal library records for the purposes of petty humilation.

*To prove I am serious about not having musical taste, here is an unedited take from my iPod. Begin the mockery now:

Like The Weather 10,000 Maniacs MTV Unplugged
The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, Op. 34 (Variations and Fugue On a Theme of Purcell) Variation VI: Violas (Meno Mosso) Arthur Fiedler and The Boston Pops Classics for Children
King Harvest (Has Surely Come) The Band Greatest Hits
Dooinit Common Like Water For Chocolate
Tonight the Heartache's On Me Dixie Chicks Wide Open Spaces
I'm Left, You're Right, She's Gone Elvis Presley
Everyone's a Little Bit Racist Original Broadway Cast Avenue Q
New York, New York Ryan Adams
Kiss the Girl Samuel E. Wright The Little Mermaid Disney
Box Full of Letters Wilco A.M.

Adaptation

2006-05-08T08:04:00.000-07:00

So the Guardian list of best 50 book-to-movie adaptations (as well as the subsequent blogosphere parsing of the list) has finally filtered through my brain, helped along by a viewing of The Chronicles of Narnia this weekend. Let me start by saying that I'm going to have to give the movie a thumbs-down, seeing how it's getting sourer and sourer in my memory as time goes on. It's not that it was bad, exactly, and I'm certainly not one to turn up my nose at CGI-heavy fantasy epics. Actually, for me (and is this blasphemy?) I think the problem lies in the source material. Y'all, those books just aren't that good! And it's not even having a problem with the whole Christian allegory thing, or the whole "always winter and never Christmas thing," which I had actually forgotten about. It's that those kids are such a bunch of boring prigs, except for Edmund, who experiences a brief period of de-prigification when betraying them to the White Witch and then quickly re-prigifies. (And they all forgive him so quickly--yet when Susan wants to wear pantyhose in a later volume, she's dead to them?) The movie doesn't help matters, certainly, by tightening up the progress of the plot; as a viewer, I simply did not care if Narnia was destroyed because nobody took the time to set up what was interesting or good or valuable about it. This supposed country is inside a wardrobe, and we're supposed to believe that within seconds the Pevensies would be all "We must give our lives to rescue the creepy talking animals that we've met five seconds ago with the help of an even creepier lion that talks like Liam Neeson?" Maybe it's because I coupled the Narnia movie with an episode of the Wire, but I'm inclined to believe even six-year-olds have more self-preservation instinct than that.
Obviously, I won't be including this movie on my list of great adaptations. In fact I started thinking about what my list would be like, and intially only came up with Howl's Moving Castle, which I partly think is great because it is nothing at all like the source material, and partly because it's Miyazaki, who currently can do no wrong for me. Then I got sidetracked thinking about a possible course on film adaptions that wildly diverged from their original nineteenth-century novel source. This yielded up the now-somewhat tired pairing of Emma and Clueless, and the possibly inappropriate for a Midwest campus duo of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Fight Club. (Yes, I know that Fight Club is really adapted from Fight Club.) Then I remembered the odd Western The Claim that I saw riding on a bus from Caracas to Barquisimeto, which I really didn't understand because it might have been dubbed in Spanish, I might have been hungover and the country might have been in the throes of a failed coup attempt at the time (I guess that's another story), but isn't that based on the Mayor of Casterbridge? And there my ideas ran out.

Which means, I guess all this post ends up saying is, I'm not very good at coming up with best-of lists. But I sure do love to watch movies. Also, I'd like to qualify my dislike of C.S. Lewis by saying that The Voyage of the Dawn Treader's creepiness still haunts my memory twenty years after my last reading of it, and I guess that's a good thing.

Collapsing

2006-05-05T09:13:00.000-07:00

Last night I had a dream that a fish flew by outside my window. After I watched it perch on a tree, thought police came to my house and erased my brain because the flying fish was a sign of the imminent environmental apocalypse that the government was trying to cover up. I had to spend the rest of the dream trapped in an existence where my only thoughts could be childhood memories, half of which weren't even mine, accessed through a colorfully hand-drawn DVD menu.

I blame Jared Diamond. (Except for the DVD part. That is definitely related to the Dan Zanes video we checked out of the library.)

David has already expressed his surprise that I am still reading Collapse. And I'm a little surpised as well; I mean, I love me some apocalyptic fiction, but to read, in incredible detail, the ways that the Anasazi, the Easter Islanders, the Maya, the Vikings in Greenland, the Vikings in North America (you get the idea) all failed miserably in their environmental and societal policies and ended up starving to death? A little much, I think. I'm not even half-way through the book and I've already resigned myself to the eradication of all life as we know it within the next 10 years. Even though it goes against all my better instincts, I'm considering just stopping, because, I get it already, Diamond! They gluttonously consumed all available resources! They refused to consider the long-term consequences of their actions! There are some present-day parallels! Shelley got the same task done in fourteen lines, for goodness sakes.

But still, I'm reading. Where else would I learn about the dynamic field of packrat midden analysis?

New Media

2006-05-04T08:41:00.000-07:00

All right, so maybe it's because I'm trying to finish up a book chapter about nineteenth-century photography, (or because I just discovered the amazing scariness of video-conferencing via iSight?), but I'm kind of consumed with thinking about photographic illustration these days. This has coincided nicely with OlderKid's and my discovery of Nina Crews' excellent (and brand new) picture book Below. It's easily compared with Traction Man is Here!, which I have previously praised, but they're actually pretty different (or as different as two books told from the point of view of a boy and his inanimate plaything could be).

I'm not automatically drawn to books that mix media like this; for example, Mo Willem's Knuffle Bunny seemed cute to me but not necessarily earth-shaking. Plus OlderKid showed no interest in it, for whatever reason. But he loves Below, and YoungerKid has also granted it the highly coveted drool-covered fingertip seal of approval. Part of it is surely that it's interesting to look at photographs of a boy about OlderKid's age doing exactly the same things that OlderKid likes to do: playing with trucks and little toy people and dropping them in various inaccesible places, such as, in this case, into a hole in the staircase. But Crews manages to make the book tap into the metaphorical terrors inherent in the space beneath the stairs, and without ever being heavy-handed about it, capture real fears of abandonment and loss more effectively than Willem's Trixie and her lost blanket. Plus, it's a biracial family! Not engaged in some kind of folkloric myth activity!

Photographs don't always make the best illustrations, but I've found that a lot of times their aura of realism and visual truth speaks especially to Older and YoungerKid, who is also a devotee of the DK board books. Ironically this is exactly what I'm railing against in the book chapter I'm writing, but maybe it's a little early to introduce Sontag into the mix.

Dear Authors

2006-05-02T10:38:00.000-07:00

...of "multicultural" children's books. Is it possible that you could take a short break from writing up every single myth, tall tale, magical biography, fantasy, olde-timey story, and other folk tale that you can possibly find? Because, and I know this is going to be quite a shocker to you, apparently people of color still exist in the present day, like, right now, this minute, the second of May 2006! And these people do things--everyday things! Like going to the grocery store and whatnot! And books about those everyday things are actually kind of interesting to read aloud!
Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Unsettling

2006-05-01T07:27:00.000-07:00

On Friday, I
1) gave an introduction to department faculty and graduate students to a talk on Middlesex, which I had no business doing since, as this blog reveals, American contemporary fiction remains my undiscovered country,
2) rushed my cat to the vet for emergency bowel surgery, and
3) finished Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans.
Of these, I'd said the Ishiguro was the most unsettling. (Okay, of course that's a lie. The cat was the most unsettling, but such is my faith in and adoration for the vet school that I was/am probably less worried than I should have been.)
I gave this book to my father as a present when it first came out, based on the similarities between my dad's life and the plot synoposes I read. My father grew up in Shanghai around the time of the Chinese civil war, and left behind a close friend who he has always sought to reconnect with. When We Were Orphans is narrated by Christopher Banks, a British boy who grows up in Shanghai in the 20s and returns during the period of Japanese occupation to search for his "kidnapped" parents and his boyhood friend--a Japanese boy named Akira. My father read the book, I think, but never said anything to me about it. Later my mother told me that it "confused" him. Now I know why.
The book takes apart, slowly and with devastating effectivity, any faith in the reliability of memory or of narration. Christopher, though supposedly a renowed detective, blunders so badly and so horribly through the corrupt and brutal expatriate and Chinese communities, both as a child and as an adult, that even when the wrapping-up of the plot questions occurs, we have no way of recognizing whether or not the answers are correct. It's a meditation on the blindness of imperial Britain, surely, but also on the inability of humans in general to acknowledge painful truths. A fellow Victorianist recommended this book as one to teach in conjunction with Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, which I think I might do, but it would also pair well with James's What Maisie Knew, as a study in the devasting ignorance of childhood. Christopher, in the end, loses his parents both in reality and in memory--nothing that he has remembered about them ends up being true--and is left anchorless and alone at novel's end, in a way that is great to read about but less than wonderful to actually experience. I keep cringing now, wondering what questions and insecurities about my father's own boyhood the novel raised that made him describe it as confusing; if nothing else, let this be a warning to everyone not to give gifts of books that you yourself have not read. Especially when they concern traumatic personal histories.

All the Better to Read Books

2006-04-27T09:24:00.000-07:00

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.)

Sympathy 1, Schadenfreude (for once) 0

2006-04-26T09:08:00.000-07:00

I totally believe that poor Kaavya Viswanathan did not remember what she'd read. In fact, rather than angry-making, I find this story frightening. Words that we read (and re-read) become a part of us -- they go in the memory factory with everything else.

But I think the creative process can get especially confusing and anxiety provoking when you are under twenty and somebody is giving you $500,00 for something you haven't even written. And you go to Harvard. I'd remember somebody else's book too. Goddamn. Everybody just needs to slow the f**** down.

Placeholder

2006-04-26T07:13:00.000-07:00

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...

2006-04-24T13:00:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-24T07:51:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-23T18:37:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-21T19:40:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-20T07:37:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-19T19:46:00.000-07:00

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!

A Non-Book Digression re: Current Events in Durham

2006-04-18T09:25:00.000-07:00

I hate it when sexual assault cases play out in the media. But let me just say this on behalf of common sense. What young black single mother in her right or wrong mind, who was working as a stripper would accuse white athlete college students at a super rich university in North Carolina, of rape unless something f****ed up happened?

Media Satire and Me

2006-04-18T08:31:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-16T23:03:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-14T12:04:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-14T11:45:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-13T18:42:00.000-07:00

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.

Missing In Action

2006-04-13T14:42:00.000-07:00

1. A Cuba novel on my Caribbean Lit syllabus.
Why?

Because the popular tranlslated ones that get down with the politics and the culture, as good as Before Night Falls and View of Dawn in the Tropics may be, will turn my already conservative students way against the project of socialism and non-American Western Hemisphere self-determination forever (though I'm sure very few of them care about things like the repression of gays by this government). Is this wrong? Am I censoring? Oh well. Sorry, Andy Garcia.

2. Dave Hsu.
Where are yoooooooooooo?

When Nerds Own Books

2006-04-13T08:37:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-12T09:28:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-11T11:23:00.000-07:00

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")

In a solitude of the sea

Deep from human vanity,

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

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.

Jewels in joy designed

To ravish the sensuous mind

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

Dim moon-eyed fishes near

Gaze at the gilded gear

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

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.

Alien they seemed to be;

No mortal eye could see

The intimate welding of their later history,

Or sign that they were bent

By paths coincident

On being anon twin halves of one august event,

Till the Spinner of the Years

Said "Now!" And each one hears,

And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

Warning, not book related

2006-04-10T19:06:00.000-07:00

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!

2006-04-10T13:09:00.000-07:00

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?

2006-04-08T14:51:00.000-07:00

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.

I Love Chiwetel Ejiofor

2006-03-29T09:39:00.000-08:00

Just had to get that off my chest. Check him out. And if you happen to be a little bored in Corvallis, definitely see Inside Man.

Sometimes I put down my book, gaze at my navel and wonder about my bubbling over love of Miguel Street (1959), the first novel by that hateful literary version of Uncle Ruckus, VS Naipaul, and my even greater love of The Lonely Londoners (1956) by Samuel Selvon. Excuse my lateness to this party, but I was so sad to read that Selvon passed on in 1994. (Naipaul, I'm sure, will live until 120, then die choking on bile only to be reassembled by an international crew of misogynist colonial apologists). Both of these slim volumes chronicle the episodic wanderings of Trindidadian men: Miguel Street takes place in Trinidad, Selvon's book (obviously) is about recent immigrants to the UK. What stirs me about these books is how deeply funny they are.

Exhibit A from Miguel Street: a woman brags to a local man about her wifely duties to her mechanic husband:

She looked at Hat and said, 'He doesn't eat when he working on the car unless I remind he.'
Hat said, 'What do you want me to do with that? Write it down with a pencil on a piece of paper and send it to the papers?'

Exhibit B from The Lonely Londoners: the narrator is giving us the low down on his friend's slack girlfriend.

If you see Bart girl sitting on the tube with she legs crossed, reading the Evening Standard through rimless glasses, you wouldn't think she uses to hang out at the Paramount by Tottenham Court Road in the old days before the law clean up the joint.

Oh God, there's so much more where that comes from. But back to the wondering. The problem is that along with being amused by what's clearly meant to amuse, I find myself charmed by the spoken language in these books; the Selvon text is that much more appealing to me because the entire book is written in a conversational Trinidadian English that is distinct from London English. And so I'm laughing and laughing and I wonder if I'm laughing at the way these people talk, and if I'm just a provincially literate American idiot.

Naipaul has made the point that the mostly poor, marginally employed and deeply disenfranchised denizens of Miguel Street spend so much time wisecracking because otherwise they'd slit their own throats. The Lonely Londoners is, above all, about how to find a home in a vast, cold, white city that someone told you was your ancestral home, but of course is the home of your oppressors. I know all of this, but I'm worried about the fact that I mostly think of these works as comic.

I wonder if somewhere in Trinidad, someone is reading Their Eyes Were Watching God -- perhaps the scene after Joe Starks sets Matt Bonner's underfed mule free, and the town is consumed with making up stories about the Mule's doings, such as when he "ran Mrs. Tully off to the croquet ground for having such an ugly shape" -- and if they think that book is a comedy. Is it the same thing?

Don't answer unless you are Chiwetel Eijiofor and you are outside in a limo.

NOW RESEARCHING: Owen Dodson

Who's Lucky?

2006-03-23T09:44:00.000-08:00

All right, so I just gave my guest lecture on Asian-American literature to a semi-rapt (okay, mostly asleep) class of students. I'm concerned that I may have inadvertantly given the impression that people only dislike Amy Tan because she plays in a rock band with Stephen King. There are MANY more reasons than that to dislike her, people. (Yes, I know I hit one twice, but that's because it's twice as bad.)

I'm also concerned because in my rush to finish at the end, I segued directly from lavish praise for Dictee to lavish praise for Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. The students were left wondering what exactly is going on inside my head. But really, do you want to live in a world where we're not free to love both multigenre postmodernist autobiographies and stoner comedies? I didn't think so.

Last night's read-alouds: Moses goes to the Circus, Terrific!, Elsina's Clouds, Redwoods are the Tallest Trees in the World, and My First Guide to the Seashore. (Can't wait to get to California next week! Am forcing my child to listen to dull nonfiction books of the 70s in anticipation!)

The Satire Chromosome

2006-03-21T12:08:00.000-08:00

Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain, Langston Hughes, Ishmael Reed and Dave Chappelle?

What do these men have in common?

I've been reading Black No More, a 1931 novel by George Schuyler, which savages the klan, WEB DuBois, Marcus Garvey, Booker T, dudes on the corner, blondes, white southerners, corrupt politicians and everyone else, in the process of speculating about what would happen if someone invented a procedure that could turn blacks white. I've been meaning to read this book for quite some time and have to admit, I'm not finding it that funny. I am finding it a little uncomfortable. One of the running jokes is that given the ability to turn white, blacks would abandon racial equality movements, which would put render folk like DuBois and Garvey (the completely crooked Santop Licorice in the novel) s.o.l. The joke is that these movements and their coffers actually thrive on oppression; that these leaders are happy "when a negro is burned to a crisp," for example. Ouch.

This novel and the arguably deteriorating debut season of The Boondocks led Sistergirl and I to a spirited debate about racial satire. What is good satire? Is it funny? Does it have, in spite of its irreverence, moral integrity? This was Sistergirl's point; she laughs at Dave Chappelle, because she feels he loves black people. She's convinced that whoever's been writing The Boondocks, white or black, seriously hates them. My point was that satire isn't worth much if somebody doesn't feel uncomfortable and skeptical towards the motives of the satirist.

The primary motive of Black No More seems to be mocking the fetishization of race -- the irrational love and irrational hatred. By the way, the book is very aware and hard on black self-hatred as well as white racism. It also seeks to redirect national focus from racial to economic inequality. One of the book's repeated assertions is that black equality movements are fighting for a standard of living for blacks that most whites do not enjoy. Yeah, I guess so (muttered). I suppose this book was probably liberating for some disgruntled black intellectual types in 1931, especially considering how many white writers seemed to think that just being a black human being was hilarious back then. Incidentally, a wonderful relative of satire is Sterling Brown's hilarious 1933 critical essay, "The Negro Character As Seen By White Authors," which begins by citing white author's assertion that "there are three types of Negroes."

Anyway, I have been reading Schuyler in anticipation of class that I am designing on black satire. I've been reading Schuyler and brainstorming the syllabus, which will also include Percival Everett, Ishmael Reed and Trey Ellis -- all of whose motives I have questioned at one time or another (Reed because he clearly hates women). But the big void on this imaginary syllabus is a woman writer. Why can't I think of a satirical novel (or even just a short story) by a black woman writer. I don't mean comic, though those are hard to find as well, but a straight-up 100plus page mockery. I come to the conclusion that there is socially conditioned link between maleness and the kind of know-it-all irreverence needed to think one's social commentary is funny. Which is too damned bad. Because black women have a lot of sweet, sweet mockery to give.

NOW TEACHING: "Geese" by ZZ Packer and "Advancing Luna--and Ida B. Wells"

Books to Read Places In

2006-03-20T07:17:00.000-08:00

So I've been planning a summer trip lately (I'll spare you the book report on Fodor's Gold Guide to Atlantic Canada), and, after slogging through an avalanche of references to locations where Annie Proulx wrote or did anything else remotely related to The Shipping News, I'm thinking about how to travel "It's A Book Club Style."

Before I acquired so many demanding traveling companions, I used to have a complex formula for working out how many books I needed to bring on a trip--something like (miles traveled) X (need to avoid chatty seatmates) / (monotony of mode of travel) + (distance I'll have to carry my book bag)--but now that's shot all to hell, and I just try to bring whatever book will best avoid a screaming, seat-kicking meltdown with 3 hours left in flight. And ten times out of ten, that book is not The Shipping News.

I guess I've always been suspicious of tailoring my reading material to my geographical destination. (Though I am exceedingly proud of myself for reading Don Quixote during last year's trip to Spain, but that has more to do with overcoming my fears that I might never crack a non-board book again). For one, I think it tips the scales a little farther over onto the "earnest and engaged tourist" side of things, and I prefer more the "I'm just here riding this bus and reading a book like any other local" side, clearly untrue though it may be. For another, I like the feeling of looking back later and realizing my memory of reading a certain book is inextricably linked with an improbable locale--Two Girls Fat and Thin and the London Underground, maybe, or Crime and Punishment and the ferry to Martha's Vineyard. (Before I start to sound show-offy, let me add that I never finished either of those books. Maybe's there's a flaw in this reasoning.)

So, that leaves me with two questions. One, what do you read when you travel, and why? And two, what is there to read about Newfoundland that is not The Shipping News?

Periodical Deathmatch

2006-03-18T04:59:00.000-08:00

Two men (er, bound volumes of printed matter) enter, one man leaves.
Round One: W versus Mojo.

[A note on technique: people usually make these comparisons about related magazines, like, say, Bitch versus Bust or Readymade versus Make. I thought I'd let fate, or the mailman, set the terms, so I'm comparing the two most recent magazines that arrived in my mailbox. And in a way they're related--they both seek to relay a individual sensory experience--touch for W, hearing for Mojo--through words and pictures. But, in another, more accurate way, they're not at all alike. All the more challenge for me then.]

OPENING IMPRESSIONS: Mojo comes with a CD, which is nice. Imagine if W tried to ship out a Marc Jacobs shoe as a ridealong. Unfortunately, that CD is "Psych Out!: 15 Nuggets from the scene that spawned Pink Floyd." Hmm. And there's a photo of David Gilmour on the cover too. At least it's not a current photo. W has Jessica Simpson attempting to be Jerry Hall, with a greater degree of success than I would have thought.

FIRST PAGES: Mojo starts strong. There are many funny quotes from British musicians that I have not heard of, a tribute to Wilson Pickett, Carlos Santana on how A Love Supreme changed his life, and a spread called "Time Machine:1956" in which I learn that Nat King Cole was attacked on stage by the KKK at a whites only show in Birmingham, AL, and had the following comment about it: "I just came here to entertain you. That's what I thought you wanted. I was born here in Alabama. But those folks hurt my back. I cannot continue because I have to go to a doctor."
W: Gee, there are a lot of ads here. I think I also see a runway report and a few shorts on film and television personalities, but it's hard to tell amid all the heavy lidded partially undressed women. Hey, that Prada ad has kittens!

MIDDLE PAGES: Mojo features a transcribed interview with Van Morrison. And then one with Morrissey. And then, a little later, one with coverboy David Gilmour. In between are histories of Wire and Billy Bragg. All right, Mojo, we get that you're a niche publication, but could you mix it up a little? Also, the type size is miniscule. I have to resort to reading only every third paragraph out of eyestrain. As a result, I have a very confused idea of just what happened to poor old Syd Barrett.
W: Oh my god I had no idea so many fashion brands existed. And those "secret" beauty treatments women won't admit to described on the cover? Toe-waxing, and crotch facials. Yecch.

CLOSING PAGES: Putting in a P-Funk review doesn't change the fact that the only non-white musicians you seem to be interested flourished prior to 1980, Mojo. And lovingly reviewing a RECENT Rolling Stones concert doesn't help.
W: Oh, here are the articles! And incredibly disturbing photographs of Shalom Harlow playing dead! As for the Jessica Simpson piece, well, I give you this: "Since age 11, she's been keeping a diary and feels that the time is right to publish her innermost thoughts, favorite quotes, and musings on life." The world has been warned.

BACK PAGE: Mojo's gimmick is "Hello Goodbye," which tells the story of how something began and ended. This week it's on Chaz Jankel and Ian Dury, which, okay, I have no idea who those two are. W features a supposedly-hilariously-scathing commentary by a faux European countess of a certain age. This is always lame, though this month it does remind us that Marie Antoinette's dressmaker said her role was to "give protection against the cold, the dirt, and the hardships." Tell that to Shalom Harlow.

LOOKS: The Mojo graphics department clearly needs a shot in the arm. They've done the paint-splatter "graffiti" headline so many times it's not funny, not to mention the signature Sex Pistols typography. As for W, well, design is basically their all in all, so of course they do it well. But does the magazine have to be so frackin' heavy?

OVERALL: Mojo on content by a nose, subject to the approval of my opthamologist.

NEXT UP: Special all-Victorian edition--The Girl's Own Paper versus Godey's Lady's Book. Kidding!

Help a Library

2006-03-17T09:26:00.000-08:00

The YALSA (Young Adult Library Services Association), a division of the American Library Association, posts the following plea on their website:

Donate Books Now: The New Orleans Public Library needs help in rebuilding the African American, Vietnamese and GLBT collections at Alvar. She is especially seeking new or "like new" books that have been Stonewall, Coretta Scott King, BCALA Literary or other appropriate award winners, as well as canonical and popular titles in these collection areas. Send book donations to: New Orleans Public Library 219 Loyola, New Orleans, LA 70112, Attention Rica Trigs. Geraldine states: DO NOT SEND anything by US mail unless it is first-class. NOPL does not receive anything that is not first class. We can receive packages via FedEx, UPS, and DHL.

Caveat: the New Orleans Public Library general FAQ on donations basically asks, please send cash not books (especially used ones).

Let your charitable impulse and common sense be your guide.

Take that, white nationalism!

2006-03-16T11:34:00.000-08:00

Though I was appalled by her treatment at the hands of the Peekskill, NY School District, I was tickled to learn about 7-year-old sensation Autum Ashante, whose recent poetry reading at a Westchester middle school had parents, teachers and administrators up in arms. After hearing "White Nationalism Put U in Bondage," the school district left hundreds of phone messages apologizing for the reading of lines such as "Black lands taken from your hands, by vampires with no remorse" and my favorite, "Made to watch as they changed the paradigm of our village." Does it bear saying that what district officials needed to apologize for was the damn bondage? I think it does.

But what warmed my soul (aside from how ridiculously cute Autum is) was that I know this girl! Perhaps many people don't know where a 7-year-old (in the US anyhow) is learning about things like colonialism and imperialism, but that's because they never met my parents. For me and Sistergirl, it was slavery with breakfast cereal, colonialism with pb&j, institutionalized racism with dinner, and a big helping of Kwanzaa for Christmas. Yum-yum. Yeah, we were brainwashed. (But so were you, up there waiting for presents to come down your chimney and thinking that immigrants were welcome here. ) Unlike Autum, our problem wasn't getting banned from the white man's school district -- it was our Africa-hating, Santa-loving black classmates. Autum, who is homeschooled, ostensibly doesn't have to worry about that. However, I feel keenly for the day when she finds herself a stranger among less revolutionary age mates. But may school officials and cool kids never be bully her into changing the paradigm of her village! I just have seven words to say in closing. Sing along if you know the words.

Harambe
Harambe
Harambe
Harambe
Harambe
Harambe
Harambeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

NOW TEACHING: PARABLE OF THE SOWER AND "BLOODCHILD"

Another dispatch from the land of the obvious

2006-03-16T08:23:00.000-08:00

Going out to all of you profoundly uninterested in comic books and their troll-like creators.

Hayao Miyazaki doesn't need any help from me; Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke are two of Japan's highest grossing films ever. But if you haven't seen his earlier work My Neighbor Totoro (Tonari no Totoro) with a child that you love, well, then, you know what to do. The film concerns a friendly troll (as you can see, Miyazaki has a very different understanding of what trolls look like) who helps two young sisters adjust to a new house in the country and cope with their longing for their invalid mother, who's confined to a hospital with an unnamed illness. Containing one of the most beautiful of Miyazaki's signature night-flying scenes, the film also features a cat that's also a bus. I need not say more; except this: the great-looking 2-disc version just released by Disney is dubbed by Dakota and Elle Fanning. (There's also a Japanese-language audio track, for those of you with families capable of reading subtitles or fluent in Japanese). And I still loved it. 'Nuff said.

Oh wait, one more thing, while we're speaking of trolls. Uglydolls now come in vinyl. Perfect for Lord Droolypants, otherwise known as YoungerKid. Who's going to be one very soon. Hint. Hint.

Who Owns Fu Manchu?

2006-03-16T06:48:00.000-08:00

So, apparently in America we celebrate Guy Fawkes Night on March 17 now? (Actually, I'm not going to comment on the movie version of V for Vendetta, since a) I haven't seen it yet and b) I seem to be the only person in America not breathlessly interested in the status of Natalie Portman's shaved head and really, what else is there to say about the movie other than that?)

But I am interested in the comic book that it is based on, and in the complications behind Alan Moore's recent disavowals of the whole endeavor. As the New York Times reports, the noted author and crank wants nothing more to do with some of his greatest works. This includes V for Vendetta, which tells the story of an anarchist clad in a Guy Fawkes mask who works to overthrow a fascist government with the help of a 16-year-old girl. As he puts it, "...[the works] were stolen from me...knowingly stolen from me."

Now the obvious response here, of course, is "Cram it, Alan Moore," since by "stolen," he really means something more like, "given up by signing a lucrative contract transferring the film rights of this work to a known peddler of Hollywood pablum." (Yes, yes, the process was more complicated than that. My point stands). Yet what makes this brouhaha interesting to me at least, and what the New York Times didn't mention, is Moore's own interest in the status of literary property. His ongoing series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (itself subject to a rather horrifying cinematic interpretation) rests on the conceit that a group of characters from late-Victorian genre fiction--Mina Harker from Dracula, Alan Quatermain, the Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll, and Captain Nemo--band together to fight against a mysterious "Oriental" enemy. In the comic this enemy is never named, though it's clear from references and illustrations that he's meant to be the the devil doctor himself, Fu Manchu. Moore has acknowledged this in interviews and confirmed that the reason Fu Manchu cannot be named is because the character is still under copyright. Can we imagine Sax Rohmer, or H. Rider Haggard for that matter, rolling around in their graves grumping about their stolen property?

So how does V for Vendetta fit here? After all, Guy Fawkes isn't a literary character, he was a real, if possibly misguided, person. (And as an aside, I guess it's because I'm in the U.S., but I don't get the big deal about commemorating a failed act of domestic terrorism. No one's trying to celebrate the guys who got on board the Dartmouth but forgot their crowbar and couldn't open the crates of tea.) And the ultimate message of the comic is that, when governments oppress their people excessively, the people ought to respond by completely dismantling the structure of the society that created that government. I get that V sees himself as a facilitator of this destruction who must himself be destroyed for peace to continue (kind of like Chiwitel Ejiofor's character in Serenity, though on the other side), but why then would the "character" of Guy Fawkes continue into the new, post-fascist world, as it clearly seems to? It's because Moore can't really imagine a future which must invent its own cultural icons out of whole cloth--they need continuity in the form of Guy Fawkes, whose historical "reality" is now less important than the significance of his character.

Thus the reason Alan Moore is so cheesed off about Hollywood misappropriations of his creations, I suppose, is not just because they suck but also because of his inordinate faith in the power of literary/historical characters to act as self-contained beings that can continue to exist above and beyond their original narratives. If the characters act stupidly and, more importantly, uncharacteristically, as they frequently do in Warner Brothers releases, that's not only bad product, but a betrayal of creative responsiblity. It's a rent in the curtain that shows how vulnerable creative work is to the vagaries of the marketplace and the system of law.

In general literary fiction, doesn't play that way; the text is a specifically situated entity and the characters don't get to come out of that text and walk around doing new things (pace, Jean Rhys). But this is genre fiction, I guess, and maybe that kind of textual anarchy within a tightly controlled form is part of the reason I like genre fiction, and get hives around Michael Cunningham. I wish the text of V for Vendetta was a little better (David Lloyd's images are superb, I think) so that it could offer a stronger rebuttal to this historically-restrictive notion of art. As it is the comic just seems angry at the fascist government for killing off black people and their jolly music, and gay people and their beautiful art. But I applaud Alan Moore for trying, at least. It's much more common to hear old stories with new people in them, and I like that, but I also like to hear new stories with old people in them too. Just as long as they don't involve Natalie Portman's head.

It's a Book (and Culture) Club!

Remember when Oprah shut down her book club?

Stuck in the Middle, Without You

For Frack's Sake

And while we're talking of Jared Padalecki....

Now Leaving Stars Hollow...

What do you want me to say? I'm Sorry. I'm Back.

Poetry for the new year.

Phonemes are Phunny

Corporate Conglomeration vs. Jack Black

Asalad's Favorite Things

Better reading through Google.

The Five Ugliest Words

Pop Your (turtleneck) Collar

"Little did he know" is the new "Meanwhile"

Let's DO this thing!

In Remembrance of Oaxaca Past

Brief Attention Span Library

The World Series is Almost Over

And the agony of defeat.

Sweets before Halloween

Yes, We're On a Break

Yeeee-Hawwww

On Good Intentions.

Things that are happy. (Even if some of them are sad.)

Glimmery

Whoa.

Huzzah!

Tidbits.

Flow

Let the Anglicisms Roll.

Argh.

Meow.

It is a Truth Universally Acknowledged

How to be Literary

Reading Selections for the Sedate

Girls, Unpowered

My Insect Brain

I'm Back?

I'm Gone

Ain't That a Kick in the Balls?

Asalad vs. I-81

David made me post this

Watching Movies at Zil's House

Goodbye, Fortress of Solitude

Portrait of a Fool

The original nerd

Meow.

Apologia

Errata

Tune in Next Week

People Who Led to This Blog

Ravens are like Writing Desks

21st Century Blake

More Reasons to Read -- Indoors

Yeah, It Happened.

Scenes from a Early Morning Car Ride

Not Amazing in the Least

An Alternate Meaning for "Book Club"

In a Nutshell

For the Love of Frith

Back to normal?

Short Cuts

You Know Who Writes Awesome Books?

Random

Adaptation

Collapsing

New Media

Dear Authors

Unsettling

All the Better to Read Books

Sympathy 1, Schadenfreude (for once) 0

Placeholder

Bats in my...

Wasting Time

Revelations

Another Dispatch from Obvious Land

Urban Decay, Picture Book Style

WorldChanging Post

A Non-Book Digression re: Current Events in Durham