Bask, dude

Posted on March 17, 2011 by bloglily

If those boards weren't so hard, I'd totally be out there basking with archie

While Archie’s out there acting like there’s nothing to do (and there’s not. not really. He’s a DOG), I thought I’d record what’s happening here in the bloglily house at 2:58 p.m. today.

First, though, I thought I’d mention that I have, in fact, been reading. A book called The Information Officer. It’s set in Malta during WW2. Pretty good. Every once in a while you get a couple of pages written from the point of view of the murderer, who’s very creepy. I don’t think I’ve seen that ever.

Speaking of narrators, the novel I’m writing has a first person narrator so I’ve been thinking of who’s written a book that has a worthwhile (as opposed to creepy or, worse, boring) narrator. Which means I read some of Huck Finn. I love this, from the last paragraph of Huck Finn: ”there ain’t nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I’d knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn’t a tackled it and ain’t agoing to no more.”

Me, I’ve got to tackle it. It’s too late to do anything else. I’ve written 30,000 words or so and there’s no going back. This is all part of my goal this year which is to earn some money from writing, and I’ve got to SELL SOMETHING to do that. Stay tuned. My agent is going to be sending me some notes one of these days (like soon, he says), and I’m going to make every change he wants (even sooner, I say), and then …. hold your breath here …. maybe he will SELL IT!

when they lit out for the territories, did they already know how nice it is here? Well, it is. It is spring, baby.

And at 2:58 I was listening to Shakira who is, in addition to being an ambassador of good will around the globe, wakes up 2:58 like nothing else. Particularly, after Matt Nathanson who is so sad, so very, very sad.

2:58. Shakira. And right after that, the f* you song, which I love and will not apologize for loving.

Let’s see. In addition to dogs, literature and music, we also have ART in the bloglily household. Okay, not exactly art. Decorative art. (Isn’t that what they call rugs?) So, my current big project involves making our house look relatively normal, a place where we can actually be comfortable, which, I will admit, we often have not been. Presently, I am tackling the room formerly known as the-storage-closet-where-mom-and-dad sleep, a room I have now taken to calling “my bedroom.” We have lived in this house for almost 15 years and I finally put curtains up. Also, I ordered a rug. And it came today. And it is going in my bedroom. Yup. The same place where the stuff on a stick lives.

curtains on right; and yes, the stuff on a stick has so weighed down the stick that it looks like a safety patrol captain telling everybody to stop right there so the earrings can cross without getting hit by a truck

It’s now 3:16. The river that is life continues to flow. Only Archie knows how to stop it, because he lives in the timeless place where all dogs live on sunny days.

Carnival

Posted on March 11, 2011 by bloglily

someday we'll wrap something with those ribbons

First of all, I’m aware we’re supposed to be in the ashes-on-the-forehead part of the Lenten season, if you’re one of the people who participates in that particular religious season. But I don’t have any ash pictures to festoon this post, and also I believe in festooning, and ashes just don’t do that. Ever. But there is the bowl full of Christmas ribbons and the masks a kid brought home from a trip, so what better festoon-ish thing than THAT, I ask?

Second of all, I’d also like to say that I’m not very fond of the ashes-on-the-forehead anyway. Probably this is because my mother never took us to the Wednesday mass where they rubbed the ashes into your forehead. This wasn’t because Wednesdays were inconvenient either. After all, she took us to everything else, being a woman who totally touched all the bases as she hit the grand slam homer that is the Catholic mother who gets five children to church ever single Sunday of their childhood. Plus, a couple of us were confirmed, even though I’m pretty sure we weren’t really feeling it. My small act of confirmation rebellion was to give myself a boy’s name (I believe I chose Nathan), just so I could bug the bishop who was there to confirm us. My friend, Margaret Daheim was, I believe, Nicholas.

I’m pretty sure my mom didn’t like the ashes because they were a downer. Lent’s enough of a downer, what with all the fish and the giving up of chocolate. This Lent, I figure it’s enough to plunk the bowl of ribbons and the mask right in the middle of the living room, so we can all remember that life’s a silly enough affair, and we should never take anything too seriously, and never so seriously that we smudge burnt up things on our foreheads.

Which brings me to Montaigne (a book! yes! a book! It’s like I’m sneaking ground up carrots into your jello or something.) I recently read Sarah Bakewell’s really terrific biography of Montaigne (Michel, de). And one thing I wrote down, because I liked it so much (and I ended up liking HIM so much) was this thing he said, which is directly applicable to not taking oneself too seriously:

“If others examined themselves attentively, as I do, they would find themselves, as I do, full of inanity and nonsense. Get rid of it, I cannot without getting rid of myself. We are all steeped in it, one as much as another, but those who are aware of it are a little better off — though I don’t know.” -Montaigne

So: Don’t take yourself too seriously. Change your mind every once in a while (“though I don’t know”). And eat some chocolate.

Have a fabulous weekend.

Cheating on Paper

Posted on February 15, 2011 by bloglily

i luv u

Your affair with the Kindle begins innocently, the way many affairs do: you wonder why so many of your friends dislike it so much, why they treat it like it’s a handsome guy who can’t stop glancing at them lasciviously and appraising their interest and availability. Your friends tell you — “he’s interesting, but he’ll never be as good as what I have at home.” You feel sorry for this stranger, and think it needs a friend. You.

You edge a little closer. You do the equivalent of a coffee date. You buy one. It’s dirt cheap, and you feel a little dirty asking it out. $139. How can you resist finding out what’s under that rock-hard exterior?

Little by little, you get to know it. Okay. Lie. You gulp it down when it shows up at your door looking handsome in its gift box. Turns out you’re an electronics slut. If it plugs in and moves, you’re all over it.

You find out it’s way better than the paper you have at home. It’s always ready to go when you are. You can have some while you’re waiting for the orthodontist to tell you your kid’s teeth are going to make it impossible to ever go to London again. No more theater for you. You seek consolation in it. You discover Shakespeare’s Collected Works are free. That makes you feel a little better about the ortho. Dickens is free. Joyce, Gaskell, Hardy, Austen, Trollope, George Eliot, early Virginia Woolf, Twain, the Brontes — all free. Alice in Wonderland, the Moonstone, the Woman in White, Vanity Fair. Yeats! (You can look up An Irish Airman when someone mentions it on NPR.) * OMG. It can give you anything and everything. Soon, you carry all of Western literature in your purse. Free. Translations are not free. But by then you throw caution to the winds and load up on the Pevear and Volokhonsky translations of War and Peace and the Three Musketeers. You dabble in the hard-core that is The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. But you only sample it, because you don’t know if you want to go down that kinky looking road. Although you can — with one click — if you change your mind.

You cheat on paper so many times and in so many places you lose track. You feel like you’re in your thirties again, reading books people are actually talking about, books that just came out: The Warmth of a Thousand Suns, the Imperfectionists, that new Cleopatra biography, the one of Montaigne. You read the Room, and Pictures of You, half of Freedom (because it is not as good as you’d hoped), Brooklyn, Keith Richards’ Life, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, half of The Finkler Question half of Cutting for Stone (there will be time for it later, and while it sits around waiting for your return, it does not wrinkle, the way the book would, the way Tinkers, just for example, which you bought pre-Kindle, read half of, set aside, and spilled tea on, would.) Your friend Thaisa Frank’s new, really wonderful book, Heidegger’s Glasses is FREE on Kindle for a very short time. (How could that be — you already own it in paper because it’s so beautiful, just like you own Antonya Nelson’s Bound in paper because you can’t bear not to have paper every once in a while.) But you get Heidegger’s Glasses for free too because you are greedy. You stop blogging because you are so enamored with it. Also, you do not have time to blog because you’ve also downloaded the Iliad, the Odyssey and the Autobiography of Mark Twain. You can’t write anymore. Good thing you sent your revised novel to your agent before the affair (BTA to you). All you want to do is be with your new toy.

You get a nice cover for it so it doesn’t look quite so hard and inhumane. So your friends will not edge away from it when they see you with it. The cover is orange and a thing of beauty. It makes you want the Kindle more.

You try to introduce your friends to it, thinking that if you love it, they will too. They don’t. They sigh and talk about their books, their loyalty to paper and ink, their feeling that the institution of the book is under attack from that thing in the orange cover you’re stroking in such a very weird way. They look away, embarrassed for you.

After a few months, you begin to realize that your new toy has its limitations. You never really know when you’re approaching the end of a great night with it — all of a sudden, the story ends. There’s no warning, no slowing down, no physical sign that the toy is getting smaller and you will soon be finished with it. You try not to think of wham bam thank you ma’am because that reminds you too much of your college years. But it is true and you can’t hide from the fact that the kindle does not have page numbers. It has percentages. You cannot get used to being 80% through with a book.

Your bank account is dwindling. The ease with which you can buy books — one click ordering on Amazon — is beginning to exhaust your funds. You find one month that you don’t have any money left to buy meat. Your family, which is decidedly not vegetarian, has to make do on pinto beans and brown rice. They are not happy. You begin to buy things you really won’t ever read, just for the thrill of buying them. Books about fashion. Presumed Innocent, which you think you should re-read because your second book (if you can ever get around to writing it) is about lawyers, and doesn’t Scott Turow know about them? But you forgot — you’ve already read it and you know you can do better. You buy a book set in the 16th century that is way more full of sex than you ever thought they had in the 16th century, or at least in the books you read in the 9th grade about that century. It also describes in a really icky graphic way how people were drawn and quartered. You begin to feel hollow eyed and worried about your standards. Others notice and express concern about how trashy you’re getting.

You tentatively go back to buying a book or two. You start with a hot new cookbook with great pictures. You can’t get the thrill of that on a Kindle! You tentatively try out Poetry. Slow, meditative, lovely, not-so-popular, poetry. The Kindle can’t do that either — the words don’t look so good on the screen. It will never be able to tell you the jokes that you get from Maira Kalman’s books, of which you now own two, with amazing, quirky, genius illustrations.

You discover that the Kindle is not very flexible. It doesn’t really like to flip back six pages and start again. Once it gets started, the do-over does not appeal to it.

Your friends decide you’re ripe for an intervention. They hide your Kindle’s power cord. Sure, it can last three months without a charge, but eventually it will wear out. And when it does, you discover that the book has been waiting for you all along, sure you’ll get over your infatuation. The book is sexier than it used to be. It doesn’t ever run out of power. It’s willing to go slow or fast depending on your mood. You begin to remember why you fell in love with it in the first place. It doesn’t bore you as much as it once did. And it makes an effort. Maybe it’s gotten a little lazy too. It gets better pages and nicer pictures and starts to look more attractive. When you find the Kindle’s power cord, you’re more careful about your assignations with it. You only turn it on once in a while. You’re more careful about what you do with it. And you stop bragging about it with your friends. You decide it will be your dirty little secret from now on, the one you keep for vacations and commuting only, when no one will find out and, if they do, well they will forgive you for wanting portability and ease. Because it turns out that there is room for both, that you can love two book forms at once, that they each have their place, and their role in your reading pleasure.

Turns out, Yeats looks way better on an actual paper page, with all the other poems right there, easily available.  But here it is, e-version:
 *I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public man, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

David Mitchell’s Thousand Autumns of the Dutch Accountant Whose Name I Can’t Remember

Posted on July 12, 2010 by bloglily

Here follows a demonstration of what happens when you write a book review after you’ve both finished the book and managed to misplace it, which is what has happened to me in the last 48 hours with David Mitchell’s Thousand Autumns of Jacob Somebody or Other. Also, this is what happens when you write a book review without even once using the internets to verify your facts. (Why am I not using the internets? I don’t know. I thought it would be fun is the closest I could come to an answer.)

But most likely you, dear reader, have been hearing about this book and don’t need me for facts. It’s certainly easy enough to find the book — just google the phrase “thousand autumns” and bob’s your uncle. (I just now realized that I have no uncles left. It is the one year anniversary of my Uncle Martin’s death. My Uncle Marin was a classic: a basque from Susanville. I have his thermos, the heavy duty one he took to the many construction jobs he worked on, and it reminds me that it’s good to have caffeine when you labor. But goodness, how I digress.)

Anyway, back to David Mitchell. First, I’ll say that without question the most tedious (both to write and to read) part of a book review is the plot summary. For years, I’ve been trying to get away with not doing these in the reviews I write on this blog. I know, I hardly ever write reviews. And the ones I do write are so slim on plot details as to be maybe useless. Which is why it is a constant source of amusement to me that publicists send me emails every week or so asking me to review what look to me like very, very good books. Every once in a while I ask for them to send me one, but then I don’t review it because, well, there’s the plot summary hurdle. I can’t get over it. That’s why I’ve been yammering on about my uncle and the people who want to send me free books. I’m procrastinating. (I would like to add, however, that I would review those books, except I’ve never received one I really loved.)

In a few words, David Mitchell’s book is about a red haired Dutch accountant who finds himself in a Dutch trading outpost, a little no man’s land of an outpost, outside of Nagasaki, which the Dutch aren’t allowed to enter. Not much anyway. It is set in the 18th century. Naturally, the red haired Dutch accountant falls in love with a Japanese woman. In a Shogun-like plot development, he woos her, and in a further Shogun-like plot development, this wooing leads him to a greater understanding of Asian culture. Also, things go wrong, as they do in novels. Is that enough plot description? I hope so because it’s all I have the strength for.

Did I like it? I did indeed. I wasn’t so crazy about the bad guy, whose badness credibility is established by (a) his ability to kill people with mysterious hand waving and (b) his leadership of a weird (shinto, it is said) cult, which spirits women away to be brood mares, and worse. Really, I could have gone all summer without weird sexual rituals popping up in the books I read.

Other than that, and the occasional overwrought writing you kind of expect in books about Europeans going to Japan in the 18th century and falling in love with women who’re midwives, and scarred but still beautiful, it’s a totally captivating book. I will not go on and on about how Mitchell is an up and coming literary writer, because I did not read Cloud Atlas (not liking to have to handle six different narrative voices at once) and because I don’t think it’s necessary. Worse than plot summary is too much yammering on about the author’s (a) age, (b) book jacket picture, and (c) fights with Oprah, which, I’m fairly certain, Mitchell has never had, being English, and looking quite young and sort of sweet in his book jacket picture.

It’s a good summer book.

And that’s what a review that skimps on plot summary and is written without internet assistance looks like.

Summer Reading

Posted on June 20, 2010 by bloglily

charlie + skating + summer = happiness

Summer’s arrived here at the bloglily household. There is general happiness, and a movement spearheaded by the non-parents to suspend all routines, including the one that gets everyone into bed before the sun rises. So far the adolescents and the ten year old who’s actually 40 are winning that one.

If you’re surly enough, and I’ll admit that this describes my general demeanor about half the time, you might trudge through summer without acknowledging its wonderfulness because you, after all, don’t get to suspend all routines. But at least you get to read summer books, which is way, way better than going to see summer movies. Summer books, at their best, leave you satisfied. Summer movies, even at their best, make you feel like you’ve eaten at McDonalds, and although maybe it was okay at the time, you really wish you hadn’t.

So. Summer books — for me — mean spy books. I love spy books. I like the whole noirish atmosphere of a good spy book. I love the lone operative, the hero who behaves well, but somehow all the odds are against him. (Why can’t I think of any spy books where there’s a decent woman spy?) A couple of days ago I spent the whole day reading, which meant that we had frozen costco lasagne for dinner (here in Berkeley, that’s when they send the child protective services to your house). What kept me from whipping up an organic, vegetable-filled dinner was Alan Furst.

I really like Alan Furst’s books. They’re all set in dark, rainy corners of Europe, on the eve of the second world war. There aren’t any Americans in these books, or hardly any. The most recent one is called Spies of the Balkans. I will not tell you what happens in it because you could probably guess. Okay, I’ll tell you some things. Is there a spy who’s a Greek police officer, who’s ethical, but not above trickery when it’s necessary to protect the innocent? Check. The occasional furling and unfurling of an umbrella because it’s always raining in the countries Hitler’s about to invade? Check. Sex? Check. Daring rescues? Check. A general atmosphere of a world going to hell, during which tremendous acts of courage occur? Check.

Like I said, I read the whole thing in one day. I never do that. Happy Summer!

The Poor Fictionist

Posted on June 14, 2010 by bloglily

Trollope invented the pillar box when he was not busy fictioning

This, from Trollope (Phineas Finn, to be exact)

The poor fictionist very frequently finds himself to have been wrong in his description of things in general, and is told so, roughly by the critics, and tenderly by the friends of his bosom. He is moved to tell of things of which he omits to learn the nature before he tells of them — as should be done by a strictly honest fictionist. He catches salmon in October; or shoots his partridges in March. His dahlias bloom in June, and his birds sing in the autumn. He opens the opera-houses before Easter, and makes Parliament sit on a Wednesday evening. And then those terrible meshes of the Law!

There’s no hope for me. I’ll never be a “perfectly honest fictionist.” But what a relief to discover that Trollope wasn’t either.

Ill Fares the Land

Posted on June 12, 2010 by bloglily

Today’s post has no picture, because I couldn’t bear to look again at the images of the oil spill in the Gulf. Today’s post is also a book review — of sorts — because, although it might appear my interests are confined to bicycles and lighting, I am actually still interested in words and books.

The best thing I’ve read this year (well, I did love Parrot and Olivier too)was a book by the historian Tony Judt called Ill Fares the Land.

One of Judt’s significant points – that we’re in a bad way because we have abandoned our belief in the idea that the government can actually perform functions that private enterprise cannot — is tragically and aptly illustrated by the BP oil spill. Every answer to the question how did this happen? leads to this answer: because we thought a private company like BP, acting with little public oversight, would keep our coastline safe. Paul Krugman is good on this subject too. (“We need politicians who believe in good government, because there are some jobs only the government can do.”)

It’s a short book, one that reviewers have pointed out reads like a great commencement speech. That’s not a criticism though. The book is rousing, intelligent, and uses the past to illuminate the present, which happens all too seldom. And, for me, it turned out to be just what was needed to fend off the despair that comes with tragedies like this oil spill.

BlogLily

\”it must give pleasure\” — Wallace Stevens

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