Bizarre Book Observation of the Day

At the library: The new Ray Carver bio has arrived (Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life) per my order -- but I had to wipe the cover off! It had unidentified yucky stuff all over it, and a distinct plate-ring. Shocking! To think that the same person who would read such a book would also defile it. I mean, come on, it's brand new and expensive. How inconsiderate can someone be? I'm going to start it asap, altho I am a little afraid now to look inside at the pages. *I hate when there is gross stuff in library books* So much for tax dollars at work -- I, personally, would never lend my books to a slob. I guess I feel that library books are communal property, so in some sense "my" book *was* lent to a slob.

I am going to try to read The Elegance of the Hedgehog first -- it's not renewable because someone has requested it, and even tho I have no idea who -- the same slob? -- I feel conscience-bound to hurry up. This volume has also been defiled -- now I remember why I buy so many books. This one has water damage. Is nothing sacred?

I love my library and I am not the only one in my house who does. Sachi enjoys our visits very much and goes directly to where the dog biscuits are kept, sitting patiently until someone can attend to him. He has so favorably impressed one of the librarians that she brought him a bag of rib bones. They were delicious, according to all evidence. (They disappeared.) If he were a human child, I'm sure that a treat of that magnitude would be a great strategy for getting him to love books. As he is a young canine, I am not sure where the karma will lead. Maybe he'll cease the occasional ear-splitting yip of protest while I am browsing the shelves and the $.25 bin.

Reaching through the Web

I found this blog post about an author defending her work, anonymously, against a critical review. It escalated quite a bit, even after the author was identified. Although she eventually deleted all her posts, they were archived elsewhere by interested parties. You can read them if you want, or just read the comments in the article, such as this, from author Neil Gaiman:

And yes, it's a horrible car crash, and I post it here not because it's funny in an Oh God Make It Stop kind of way, but because, if any of you are ever tempted to respond to bad reviews or internet trolls etc, it's a salutary reminder of why some things are better written in anger and deleted in the morning.

I had an experience something like this not long ago, when I compared two products in an online review. I thought the review was unoffensive, but the seller of the losing product contacted me at my home email repeatedly, and had many unpleasant things to say in print on the website, as well. Rather than politely ask me to reconsider, she went ballistic, even accusing me of working for the competitor. I'm not even in the same state. So I know a bit about this tendency to feel like 1) we are writing for ourselves, although the internet is very public; and 2) we can reach through the internet to directly contact a person with whom we disagree. The internet gives us a false sense of intimacy with strangers. How far we take that is something that not everyone agrees on. Even famous authors (Anne Rice, Alice Hoffman, Alain de Botton) have reacted in this way.

I think that doing so breaks an unspoken agreement about how far we may go and in what venue. While in my case, the seller's comments on my review were nasty and her comments about the competitor even actionable, the thing that really bothered me was that she looked up my personal information and contacted me directly and angrily. She also has my home address, since I had the product shipped by ground delivery, something you might consider not doing with with individual sellers on sites like Amazon or ebay, and something I will never do again. From now on, everything goes to the PO box.

Why Do They Think Teens Read?

This article from Nashua, NH, about four stories being pulled from the high school curriculum because cocaine use, cannibalism, homosexuality and abortion are not "age-appropriate" subjects for teens. Imagine that. Are these kids allowed to watch the news?

Recently, I was going through some old poetry books, cleaning out my shelf, and I came across an anthology with Anne Sexton's For My Lover Returning to His Wife. I mean, how could poetry not be thrilling for a teenager? All that taboo stuff! I love poetry to this day!

Books -- poetry, novels, stories -- were how I found out about life, and how to think about morals and ethics. Because my parents were tolerant, I was able to read whatever I wanted, including, in college, I think, Hills Like White Elephants, the famous Hemingway story in which abortion, the subject, is never mentioned.

Shaken, Not Stirred

Not only do martinis contain antioxidants in much greater concentration than you'd find in gin or vermouth alone, they also contain proof that James Bond, creation of writer Ian Fleming, has a genetic preference for beautiful women. It's because he can't taste how bitter the olives are. Or something.

Anyway, this article describes Bond cocktails, visual cues, muzak's effect on drinking, supertasters and more.

The concept of supertasters, the 1/4 of the population who are very sensitive to bitter tastes, gives me an idea why there are some foods I thoroughly *hate* that others seem to find inoffensive, like those bright green Florida avocados. Give me a nice brown Hass avocado any day.

Any supertasters out there want to weigh in? Speaking of weighing in, there is a lot of press lately about Oolong (Wu long) tea being good for losing weight. I am partial to Oolong tea, myself, for the flavor, so was happy to hear the good news. Green tea is too bitter (aha!) for me, and black tea in large quantities just doesn't agree with me.

The Depressed Guy in the Basement

Who also does standup comedy, and writes novels like The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Sherman Alexie interview at the Guardian.

I've always liked Sherman Alexie. Maybe it's identifying with the outsider perspective -- I also grew up in a house where there weren't that many books. It gave them that subversive cachet that was probably enough to get me hooked. Not that my house was anti-book, just indifferent, although trips to the library were a big treat in my childhood.

What Is It You Plan To Do

With your one wild and precious life?

Poet Mary Oliver's appearance Monday at Benaroya Hall is the fastest sellout in the 20-year history of Seattle Arts & Lectures. It is sparking ticket action on the local Craigslist, where tickets to rock concerts and sports playoffs are regularly bought and sold, but rarely to poetry readings.

Take that, Minneapolis. The Twin City may have supplanted Seattle as the country's "most literate city" in an annual survey but the Oliver sellout demonstrates that Seattle still has its zealous literary enthusiasts. (At Seattlepi.com)

As if that didn't give us hope for mankind, as poet and friend GC Smith so kindly put it, farther on in the article, we came to this:

Oliver's "New and Selected Poems, Volume One" has been one of the all-time best-selling volumes at Open Books, the poetry-only bookstore in Wallingford.

There is a poetry-only bookstore somewhere in the world.

My favorite book of Mary Oliver's is still House of Light, and one of my favorite poems is The Kingfisher:

The kingfisher rises out of the black wave
like a blue flower, in his beak
he carries a silver leaf. I think this is
the prettiest world--so long as you don't mind
a little dying, how could there be a day in your whole life
that doesn't have its splash of happiness?
There are more fish than there are leaves
on a thousand trees, and anyway the kingfisher
wasn't born to think about it, or anything else.
When the wave snaps shut over his blue head, the water
remains water--hunger is the only story
he has ever heard in his life that he could believe.
I don't say he's right. Neither
do I say he's wrong. Religiously he swallows the silver leaf
with its broken red river, and with a rough and easy cry
I couldn't rouse out of my thoughtful body
if my life depended on it, he swings back
over the bright sea to do the same thing, to do it
(as I long to do something, anything) perfectly.

The poem mentioned in the article, The Summer Day, from which the title of this post comes, is also in House of Light.

The article goes on to say that there are three poets who can be expected to sell out like this, the other two being Billy Collins and Seamus Heaney. I just saw Collins read with Frank McCourt at the AWP conference in New York City, and they were funny, Collins with Bob Newhart-esque delivery and McCourt, the former NYC schoolteacher, giving dead on imitations of his vocational high school students and their forged excuse notes. Now I will be adding Oliver to the to-see list. I have been reading her work for 20 years, but haven't seen her read yet.

On the subject of McCourt, he said he'd read something about cows at a reading and then been chastised that the father of one of the attendees had just been trampled to death by cows. He thought couldn't he have had a heads up, for that? It made me think, in his brogue, that "trampled to death by cows" must be the Irish euphemism for, "He was drunk in the barn and fell asleep and the cow tripped over him. Fell on him. He suffocated. And such nice handwriting he had, he's with God now." There is the proof of the power of McCourt's voice, that it got right into my head and I had to write that down, with a reference to his memory of the nuns' love of fine handwriting. Which brings me to another memory, of receiving a letter from my father in my teens in reply to one I'd written, in which his writing reflected what I knew was my own voice, which evidently had power, at least over him.

Tattooed Writers

From the AbeBooks blog.

Friends of mine are tattoo aficionados. For me, it's too much like committing to wearing the same shirt or necklace for the next twenty years (until the tattoo fades and is redone). Good article, though.

Read A Book Without Opening It

Historic parchment manuscripts that are too fragile to be unfolded, such as parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls, could soon be read without being opened using a scanning technique that relies on the world’s brightest light.

British scientists have already used the Diamond Light Source, a £370 million facility near Didcot in Oxfordshire that shines 10 billion times more brilliantly than the Sun, to decipher the contents of several parchment documents without unfolding them.

Go to article.

When I was a kid, I used to put a book under my pillow at night, in the hope of absorbing the information inside, without having to read it. It wasn't that I disliked reading, but that I already felt there were so many books I wanted to read, and so little time to read them.

One of my favorite kid books was The Velveteen Rabbit. When I was a little older, it was The Velvet Room.

Amazing Tulips

I had to post these -- never saw tulips like these although admittedly I am no gardening expert. Click on them to see a bigger photo. I love seeing what pops up in the yard the first spring in a new place.


That's ground ivy on the left, a member of the mint family, not to be confused with heal-all, right. You can make a throat-soothing tea from heal-all, if you wish. I wouldn't recommend it with ground ivy, mint or not. The best peppermint tea is from peppermint itself, which grows easily in local gardens, although I don't seem to have any.

Forsythia against a backdrop of pachysandra, which is ubiquitous because deer don't eat it.

Rejection is an Empty Boat

There is a Zen story of a man rowing home from a fishing trip in heavy fog. Suddenly he sees the bow of another rowboat heading for him. He starts yelling, to warn the other fisherman, but the boats collide nonetheless. Angry, he stands up to fight, then realizes the other boat is empty, adrift.

Feeling attacked or rejected, we react with anger or depression or some kind of upset. We try to figure out the other person's motivations, when the other has so many issues that have nothing at all to do with us that our interpretation can have nothing to do with them. Rather, we should act as if the other is an empty boat, banging against ours in the middle of a lake. Then our response would come entirely from our intuitive understanding of what to do next, which would not involve cursing the boat, or analyzing why it doesn't like us, and why us.

A writer friend sent out a story almost 100 times before it was accepted. He just kept trying. Another example of the saying, "Seven times fall down. Eight times get up." It's not always so bleak, however. I just received an acceptance for a story from the first place I sent it. I'll try not to get attached to that, as we say in Zen.

"I, Rowboat" at The Onion.

The Savage Beasts: Not To Be Soothed

Violinist Joshua Bell participated in an experiment for the Washington Post. He agreed to play at a subway station during the morning rush hour to see how many people would stop to listen. Predictions varied, but Bell, who is one of the world's greatest violinists, did not expect to be all but ignored. Only a few people stopped to listen at all, and two of those had played the violin themselves. He made approximately $50.

Comments ranged from, he would have made more money playing in the park on nice day, to, the Washington Post illustrated its own point by speeding up the video so that you can't listen to the music, to, nobody notices much, anyway.

Here is my story: One evening, as I was walking uptown from a job in the Wall Street area, I saw a rainbow that stretched across the East River, framing the Brooklyn Bridge. It was dazzling. Of the thousand or so people streaming around me on the pavement, going home, only one other person stopped to look, and it turned out to be someone I knew.

I do think however, that if Bell played on the green in Woodstock, NY, near where I now live, not only would much of the town shut down to listen, but the local hand drummers would probably join in, as well as whoever else was hanging on the green that day and had their guitars.

Dog to the Rescue

From the BBC: Debbie Parkhurst of Maryland was choking on an apple, and her dog jumped on her chest to dislodge it. They will be making the rounds of talk shows. I wonder what the dog will have to say. The same page on the BBC has links to stories about a lifesaving rabbit, cat, and beagle (who dialed for help from a mobile phone).

I love stories like this. My dog has so far saved my life in more subtle ways, earlier getting me to go outside on a beautiful spring day, rather than pretzel up at my desk and drink chai.

View from the Yard Update: Snowman Beheaded

This is the view from the yard as of Saturday.
Two of the local snowmen:I'm sorry to report that the snowman with the evergreen mohawk was beheaded before I got a photo. Must have been his attitude.

The View from the Yard, and, How to Be Good

Here's the view (looking down).

Nick Hornby's How to Be Good is on the turntable, er, page flipper. I thought it would be a fun read, as it is the story of a passive-aggressive man's conversion to utter goodness -- and there are so many utterly good, spiritual seekers in this area, that well, I thought I'd get a few laughs. And I'm not disappointed.

Views from Woodstock

1. Who said, "I could shit a better president"? Answer.


2. Which is real?
-OR-


Answer: They are both real. The first one is a project of the Woodstock Guild. If I find the artist's name, I'll post it. There are a couple of these signs around, one references a woman who died because she couldn't pay for her prescription meds.

Milan Kundera au Jardin des Tuileries

Sometime ago, I was in Paris, and I saw Milan Kundera in the Tuileries, feeding the birds. His eyes were mesmeric, and the sparrows sat on his fingertips, eating seeds from his palm. I did not recognize him until I returned home, and checked the photo on the back of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. How fitting that the man to write that title communed with the beings most attuned to lightness. If I ever meet him, I will dredge up this line of French, "Je vous ai vu au Jardin des Tuileries, il y a dix/quinze/vingt ans." If I have the nerve, I will add, "avec des oiseaux." At the time, he gave me a small nod of acknowledgment, not to disturb his small friends. I smiled, and went on my way. Probably to the Eiffel Tower.

Meanwhile, I read this. From the Guardian.

And this, in the NY Times, where Russell Banks points out that "he’s not inclusive enough. He does not discuss a single female novelist, even in passing. It’s as if no Western woman has ever tried writing a serious novel in 400 years. And, in his appreciation of non-European novelists like Fuentes, García Márquez and Chamoiseau, he colonizes them, as if culturally they gazed longingly toward their European mother- and fatherlands instead of their homelands. But then, he’s not writing literary criticism; he’s writing the secret history of the novels of Milan Kundera and teaching us how to read them."

What can you expect when the NY Times also features this lineup of the Best American Fiction of the past 25 years -- the winner, center and four runners-up.

At Least You Know They Read

My local Barnes & Noble is turning out to have a singles scene. In addition to two late teen girls having an evening out together, and some couples having Starbucks coffee, there were a couple of single guys apparently in search of female companionship. We discussed, briefly, tonight's lunar eclipse, which seemed like a crescent moon with a dark orange disk when I left the house around 7, but was down to a black nibble in the one-two o'clock area of the full moon by 8.

About the teen girls: they reminded me of a favorite line from Sula: "We was girls together." Sitting there with my friend, both of us with histories of broken relationships and friendships that ran aground, & seeing the two teenagers, well, it was kind of nice, I thought, to look back. It also reminded me of dragging a friend to one of the revival theaters in NYC to see Grand Illusion, then discussing it afterward, along with boys, makeup, homework and whatever else.

About meeting people there: At least you know they read, as opposed to meeting them in bars, where all you know is that they drink.

Tonight's list of purchases: Hocus Pocus, The Wall of the Sky, The Wall of the Eye, The Sorrows of Young Werther (couldn't resist at $5.95) and Women of the World Acoustic.

Best Friends; or, Kids are a Dog Substitute

It's pretty much the accepted wisdom among one's friends that if one is childless and has animals, the animals are child-substitutes. Actually, although there were parallels when he was a pup, since he was more dependent and needed training, my adult dog is more like a friend -- albeit one I have to feed daily and let outside to poop. We've been hiking, mountain biking, to the beach, the city, the pizzeria, etc. He's up for anything, even if it means sitting in the car waiting while I'm in the bookstore.

He does like to sniff books. I imagine he thinks I am into flat, rectangular sticks, while he prefers the conventional, long, round ones. Now that he's well past lap-size, he no longer inserts himself between my eyes and the page.

Click here for fun dog book. According to NPR, more U.S. households include dogs than kids.

Red Devils

It has now been conclusively proven that the tenants in the attic of our house are red squirrels, as we suspected from the speed of their movements (at 6:30 am) and the fact that the outdoor areas around the house are full of chewed up hemlock cones. The proof consisted of temporarily catching one in a Havahart trap, which jammed, allowing the prisoner to escape.

Oh, and they prefer cashews to either Brazil nuts or almonds, a fact you can test for yourself by using Gorilla glue to fasten one nut of each type to the bait plate of the trap.

Update: Jan 8. We caught a red squirrel in the trap and released it in the park nearby, with a complimentary slice of bread as a consolation prize. She (you look underneath them) was attacking the bars of the cage with scary-looking teeth, and lost no time at all in pushing the trap flap open once the bar was lifted. Even better news: online sources tell me these little guys are solitary, so there might actually be a full night's sleep in my near future.

Zen of Looking

He is very good at looking.