Read - Think - Live

Miami Book Fair 2011

2011-12-10T11:49:00.000-05:00

First, the good news: The National Book Foundation presented Mitchell Kaplan its “Literarian” lifetime achievement award this year. He definitely deserves it.

Now, the stream of consciousness recollection of the Book Fair Experience, 2011:

I got to downtown Miami about 11:00 a.m. on Friday, welcomed by a moderate warm rain and wall-to-wall school buses. The sidewalk was swarming with kids, big and little. I browsed the booksellers, checked into the hotel, educated myself about the overnight parking situation, and then left for the airport about 2:30. I had plenty of time to explore the airport parking lot and terminal, watch the people and read my book—I was carrying around Andy Borowitz’s Fifty Funniest, so I was adequately amused.

Toni arrived a few minutes early and we were out of there, back to downtown via the scenic route. We took a quick tour of the Miami Dade College campus which hosts the fair and a more leisurely stroll through Bayside Marketplace—which is right across Biscayne Boulevard—and then had dinner at Bubba Gump Shrimp. Good food, topped off by a movie trivia quiz inflicted on us by the waitress. Toni knew most of the answers, but she wasn’t given any prizes. I failed to see the point.

Next we were off to Midtown Miami, a new area to me and in fact pretty newly developed—I don’t know the history but I wouldn’t be surprised if it used to be a slum. The Friday night event we chose to attend was the Literary Death Match, held at a bar called Bardot—it’s like a secret club, no markings on the street side, you have to go around back and come in through the parking lot entrance. I didn’t know there was a parking lot, so I used the parking garage across the street. Turns out, that was a good move because it only cost $3 instead of the $15 the bar was charging.

Jennifer Hayden was the victor in the Literary Death Match. Terry Shine was eliminated in the first round. The other contestants, alas, I have no record or memory of their names, and only a sketchy recollection of their performances.

Terry’s defeat was probably a victory in disguise because that kind of Charlie Brown experience is what he is best at making into funny-in-a-pathetic-way anecdotes. Besides, none of his competitors were given a Florida Book Award this year -- so he can be comforted in that knowledge. (More about the FBA later)

Back to the hotel for the slumber party/gabfest—we didn’t get to sleep until pretty late, but hey, we had a lot of catching up to do.

Up by seven and off in search of coffee. It’s Miami; we didn’t have to go far. We sat in the street corner café and plotted out our strategy which didn’t include any autographing lines, because Tonionly had a few hours and we had not a moment to lose. We started with

Senator Bob Graham

Senator Graham and I have a history, although he may not remember it. Back in the early 80s I was doing my community activist thing in Key West, fighting an imminent cruiseport that the city and Chamber of Commerce types proposed to build with Community Development Block Grant funds. Using those funds requires community input but the powers that be in Margaritaville had ignored that. We wrote numerous letters to then-governor Graham in protest of the steamroller tactics of our local officials and tycoons—and he wrote back, too. In the end we carved out a compromise that allowed our native culture to co-exist with the cruise ships, but that’s another story. Graham was a good governor, as far as I could see—his administration was instrumental in requiring communities to create long-term development plans, and that was urgently needed in the Keys—too little, too late, perhaps, but also, better than nothing.

So, fast forward: Graham was quite the mover/shaker in the Senate, chairman of the intelligence committee, and co-chair of the 9/11 commission and later of the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling. What I didn’t know until very recently is that he was the brother of Phil Graham, longtime publisher of the Washington Post.

From his work with the intelligence committee and the 9/11 commission, Graham knows a lot more than the government will let him tell us, but at least he did oppose the occupation of Iraq and hasn’t changed his mind about that. His novel, Keys to the Kingdom, is a way around his frustration of not being able to inform the public. He says it’s a mixture of historical fact and “informed conjecture” – the reader can work out which is which.

It was a real pleasure to see Graham talk. It is evidence of how well he spoke that I didn’t take many notes, so I don’t have many specific quotes. Someone asked about the role of third parties in presidential elections and he said he didn’t think they were very significant. He cited Teddy Roosevelt and Ross Perot. Someone shouted out, “What about Eugene Debs?” And Graham said, “Did he run for president?” So he lost some points there, but the audience members were quick to enlighten him; in fact Debs ran for president four times, receiving nearly a million votes in two elections, 1912 and 1920, the last time running his campaign from a prison cell.

At the intersection of the Miami book fair, Bob Graham, Dave Barry, and Tropic magazine is this interview, published in 1983:

http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/08/01/1737608_p4/interview-with-bob-graham.html

P.S. The blockbuster event we missed while watching Senator Graham: Jeffrey Eugenides and his book The Marriage Plot. Oh well.

11:00 A.m. James Gleick and Dava Sobel. Gleick’s book is Information; Sobel’s is Copernicus. Here’s Gleick’s soundbite: “History is the story of information becoming aware of itself.” Very poetic. Copernicus fact: on February 19, 2011, the 537th anniversary of Copernicus’s birth, atomic element number 112 was named Copernium (symbol Cn) by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry. Still adding to his legacy, after more than half of a millennium! You go, Nic! On the other hand, we are still saying that the sun rises in the morning and sets at night…

We left the nerd fest and immediately got in line for Dave Barry/Ridley Pearson. I held our place in line while Toni went foraging for some breakfast. She found an arepa—again, it’s Miami, you don’t have to go far before you run into an arepa vendor. Meanwhile, I chatted up the person in line next to me, which is just a no-brainer at the book fair. You know you’re going to have a lot in common with the person waiting with you to see one of your favorite authors. The person in question turned out to be a former postal employee named Terry who lives in Oregon but owns a house in Coral Gables. Terry had an extra ticket for the Dave Barry happening, which was good because Toni and I didn’t have any tickets. (To clarify: the tickets are free, and the worst-case scenario is that without one you have to go to the end of the line, but you still get in, eventually.) So, when Toni returned, she used the proferred ticket and I just went along and handed the volunteer at the door a ticket for a different event—they all looked alike, and as I said, they were free tickets.

Dave and Ridley had a very smooth presentation, scripted and choreographed and accompanied by slides. I’ve heard the weinermobile story many times (Dave was delighted to be offered a chance to drive the Oscar Meyer promotional vehicle because his son was in middle school at the time. He drove it up to the line of parents waiting to pick up their kids and used the loudspeaker to announce: “Rob Barry, report to the weinermobile”)—but this was the first time I had seen an actual photo of the vehicle in question and Rob, grinning, beside it. “He had recovered by the time the picture was taken,” said Dave, but if a 12-year-old could have a heart attack, believe me, he would have.”

Dave and Ridley discussed their latest Peter Pan book, The Bridge to Neverland. This book is a companion volume to their Peter Pan trilogy, which, just to be different, is four books. So that’s five books altogether, and apparently they are having fun and making money so they’ll probably keep going. According to the Amazon reviews the books are great. I own The Secret of Rundoon, in hardback, double-autographed, but I haven’t read it.

After the Barry/Pearson session, we sallied forth to browse the booths—neither of us was eager to load up on three dimensional objects that would take up space in our respective homes, but it was fun to shop. I scored a $1.00 copy of Silas Marner—I want to have it at my house but I keep giving it away so I needed that. Otherwise, the one book I was looking for, The Lost Memory of Skin (more on that later), was not to be found at the Books and Books booth, so I decided to get it from the library instead. The street fair is an exciting part of the fair—McSweeney’s is there, and the ACLU, and people promoting Kabala and the Green Party, as well as newspaper publishers, “Muslims for Peace,” my local used book store (“Bookwise”), lots of authors selling their own books, and so on. We visited the food court where Toni bought Greek food and I queued at the “Crepe Express”—as Toni pointed out, the name wasn’t particularly apt—she walked to the other end of the food court, bought her food and came back, to find me at approximately the same position in line as when she left. I don’t care. It’s the only time I get authentic French crepes and it’s a highlight of the book fair for me. I had chicken, spinach, mushrooms and cheese in my crepe. YUMMMMMM!

We still had time to visit the Chinese pavilion, but there was no entertainment going on at the time we were there so it wasn’t particularly interesting. Chinese products on display? Really? What is the point of that? Virtually everything in America is a Chinese product. We don’t really need a table full of fans and plastic jewelry to represent Chinese manufacturing. Anyway, let me take this opportunity to mention that, in case you aren’t aware, China is on its way to being in charge of everything. It’s just a matter of time. I’m not worried about it because I believe they will do a good job of running the world. And they respect old people, which is what I’ll be if I’m even still alive when my prophecy comes to pass.

The end of the fair for Toni. We went back to the hotel, got her stuff, and picked up the car from the parking lot (It has a car elevator! I think it’s the first time my car has been on an elevator—I hope she enjoyed it.) We had a smooth trip to the airport and Toni was there in plenty of time to go through security and relax before her flight.

When I left the airport I avoided the mistake I made the day before. That mistake was, following the directional signs showing the way out of the airport. I know NOW that there is a sharp right turn that is NOT marked that you have to take if you want to get on the expressway. I made the turn and so avoided the scenic route and got back to the book fair in time to be early for the Rock Bottom Remainders show. Also, I got my car in the FREE parking lot. That’s another highlight of the book fair, and another thing that I only do once a year, parking for free in downtown Miami.

So—I got to the RBR concert, an hour early, but the seats were mostly all taken already. I spotted my line-buddy Terry and sat in the same row—after I scrounged a chair from behind the stage.

The concert was great, but I missed Kathy Kamen Goldmark. The only female contribution was Dave’s wife, Michelle, and daughter, Sophie, doing their traditional tune “La Bamba”—Dave always mentions that Michelle is Cuban and Jewish; I think he should also say she is a sportswriter, just to make the Venn Diagram even more interesting. Andy Borowitz contributed his signature “political” song, the Monkee’s “(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone”. He rocked. I have a special fondness for the one gospel-tinged number the band did, “Nobody’s Fault But Mine,” led by brother Sam Barry. I like thinking of Sam and Dave growing up as Preacher’s Kids. I have a lot of sympathy for Dave’s Sunday School teachers.

After the concert I went back to Bayside and shopped the boutiques for a while, had vegetables and rice at the food court, and then came back to the hotel to REST. I fell asleep at a reasonable hour, and got up early to go jogging—I was out the door by 6 a.m., inspired by Toni’s scheduled half-marathon in St. Pete. But before I got far it started raining and I wimped out—only jogged about 3 miles but it was nice, anyway.

SUNDAY

10:00 a.m.

Russell Banks, Michael Ondaatje, William Kennedy

I am not familiar with any of these writers’ works but I’m aware that they are famous and have won lots of awards. I showed up in passive mode, ready to absorb whatever they had to offer. I was really surprised at how deep the discussion got, right away—all of them read passages from their books that dealt with the nature of reality, the meaning of “truth” and so on. Russell Banks spoke for the panel when he said, “The most interesting thing about life is that you can’t really know anything about it.”

I was most interested in Banks’s novel, “The Lost Memory of Skin,” because I’ve been hearing about it for a while. It is set in a fictional version of Miami, and deals with the phenomenon that occurred here when a law was passed that dictated where a convicted sex offender could live; the law was so restrictive that there was only one place in the city that qualified, and sex offenders gathered there, under a bridge, to live. If it was a literary invention, it would not be entirely believable but it is a historical fact in Miami, this really happened.

I didn’t buy this book at the fair but later ordered it from Amazon, along with Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot—I look forward to reading both of them during Christmas break.

William Kennedy’s book is something about Cuba and/or Ernest Hemingway, but it’s really about the nature of reality, you get the idea.

Michael Ondaatje’s book, Cat’s Table, I didn’t really get a feel for it. I was distracted by his unidentifiable accent—British English is his second language, apparently.

I had planned to stay in the main auditorium and hear George McGovern speak on “What it Means to be a Democrat,” but he canceled, so instead I went to a double header on Florida history: Beth Brickell on William and Mary Brickell: Founders of Fort Lauderdale and Miami, and then Les Standiford and John Blades on The Last Train to Paradise.

The first thing you need to know about Beth Brickell is that she is not related to the power couple who founded our fair cities. She doesn’t even pronounce her name the same; she says Bri-CKELL—we say BRICK-ell. Her parents’ interest in geneology encouraged her to pursue the story, however, after she heard about the Brickells during a stay in Florida (she’s originally from Camden, Arkansas). She was in Florida to film a television series. She played the wife on the show Gentle Ben. What list celebrity would that make her? D? E? Anyway, it was interesting trivia.

The history of South Florida—they always emphasize how recent it is and how when the founders arrived here there were essentially no American inhabitants—there were Indians, but that is pretty much glossed over. The amount of chicanery that was involved in luring people to buy land and / or move south is also rarely mentioned. Nevertheless, William and Mary Brickell were interesting folks. William got rich in the 1852 Australian gold rush—probably not by finding gold, but by selling things to the prospectors. He met Mary in Australia and they moved to the U.S. William had an interest in the oil industry when it was just beginning, and that interest led him to make the acquaintance of Henry Flagler and John D. Rockefeller. Mary missed the mild climate that she had known in Australia and so the adventurous couple bought 2500 acres in South Florida and moved there to establish a trading post. At the time they arrived the region had an official population of 12.

If you want to know the rest, you can read the book.

I have read the Standiford book; it’s about the building of the Overseas Railway. It’s really amazing and I recommend it to anyone with an interest in history or technology. The railroad from Miami to Key West was the largest privately financed project ever undertaken, Standiford says, and they were doing something that had not been done before. They used steam-powered machinery to create the pilings and bridges and causeways. It was a massive operation and a logistical challenge because they were so far from civilization and they needed so many workers. The new edition of the book has added a large number of photographs from the Flagler Museum in Palm Beach (John Blades was there representing the museum.)

After the Florida history session, I headed off for my final event of the fair, the Florida Book Awards. I am happy to report that T.M. (Terry) Shine’s book, Nothing Happens Until it Happens to You, won the award for fiction this year—not just the award for “best title” that I have repeatedly (if unofficially) nominated it for. Terry dramatized a passage from the book with the help of his charming teenage daughter. Two other authors also read, and the presenter boosted the Florida Book Awards, saying it is the “most comprehensive” state book award program in the U.S.

Henry Cole presented his book, A Nest for Celeste, with slides because it’s a children’s picture book. Really cute: it’s about a field mouse who hitches along with J.J. Audubon on one of his expeditions.

Christina Diaz Gonzalez’s young adult novel, The Red Umbrella, is set against the background of Operacion Pedro Pan—that’s the program whereby parents in Cuba sent their children to the U.S. to escape from growing up under the Castro regime.

Jose Alvarez won in the Spanish language category. He didn’t read from his book because most of us in the audience wouldn’t have been able to understand it. He described it, though, and it sounded interesting; it is the story of his remembered childhood home in pre-Castro Cuba. Nostalgia or cultural anthropology, either way it is a record of a lost time and place.

I left the book fair about 5 p.m. and consequently did not see Michael Moore. I expect he was a dynamic speaker but then again I pretty much know what he thinks about everything. He’s fairly predictable and I already know that I agree with the substance of what he says 99% of the time but am still capable of feeling offended by his presentation. I wasn’t offended by his Oscar speech, though—I thought it was excellent. “We live in fictional times.”

But this isn’t fictional: The Miami Book Fair, 2011. I was there.

Due to being disconnected from the internet for the entire first half of December (thanks a lot, AT&T), I am very limited in being able to enhance this narrative with links and photos'. (I’m in a Panera right now and have been notified that the internet connection is limited to 30 minutes because it's the lunch hour) I'm posting it anyway and planning to come back to it when I have an actual internet connection.

Miami Book Fair 2010

2010-12-06T21:08:00.001-05:00

This is the highlight of my year and I have been actively planning for weeks. The book fair website has a feature that creates a personalized schedule and that has been very helpful. There are so many events happening simultaneously, and I can only attend one at a time so about 95% of the published schedule is irrelevant to me and frankly I don’t want to think about all the stuff I am not able to see; that is just a blot on the perfect happiness of the book fair experience.

So as I start out, here’s my schedule:

Saturday

10:00 a.m. Dave Barry and Willie Geist
11:30 a.m. Dave Eggers
12:30 p.m. Greil Marcus and Alex Ross
2:30 p.m. Sam Barry, Kathi Kamen Goldberg, and John Dufresne
4:00 p.m. Heidi Cullen, Gwynne Dyer, and Peter Maass
6:00 p.m. Rock Bottom Remainders

Sunday

10:00 a.m. Carl Hiaasen
11:30 a.m. Ron Chernow
12:30 p.m. Simon Winchester
3:30 Skip Horack, T.M. Shine
5:00 p.m. Jonathan Franzen

November 20, 2010
On the road by 8:15. This time last year, the express lane on I-95 was only completed on the northbound side but now it’s southbound as well, and that makes the trip much more pleasant. At one point in North Miami there was construction on the interstate and the poor slobs over in the non-express lanes were slowed to a crawl. But in the express lane, we whooshed by them, thinking, “I bet you wish you had paid that twenty-five cents now!” I made it to downtown Miami in about 35 minutes, which is ridiculously fast. I was definitely breaking the law but wasn’t going any faster than the other express commuters.

First objective reached: to get to the fair in time to grab one of the limited number of free parking spaces. I figured this out last year after too many years of paying Miami prices for parking. I park in the free garage and then I don’t move the car until Í leave on Sunday night. Part of this strategy is getting a nearby hotel room rather than as I previously have done, staying on Miami Beach. The Beach has its advantages, but the book fair takes up enough of my energy that I’m not looking for nightlife when it’s done for the day. The closest hotel to the book fair is actually a Holiday Inn, but I opted to go two more blocks and pay less for the Continental hotel—not to be confused with the Inter-Continental, a five-star property across the boulevard. The Continental is what might be called a commercial hotel, someplace you picture a traveling salesman might stay if he’s not making his quotas this month. It has terrible reviews on the internet sites but I haven’t had a bad experience. The rooms are small and the furniture is old but the sheets are clean and there’s plenty of hot water. (And, no bedbugs: I checked.) Last year the internet connection worked. This year it didn’t, but I don’t need it.

The first and definitely not least event:

Dave Barry

By the time I joined the line at 9:20 there were already more than a hundred people queued in separate lines. Over on my side, the book nerds, and across the corridor, the wealthy book nerds who shelled out $175.00 or more to be designated “Friends of the Book Fair.” The two populations are similar in appearance; the only difference I can see is that the few young people in attendance are all on our side. The book fair demographic is largely in the “geezer” range. I’m sure that will become more true as time goes on, until when I’m 105 years old I’ll be one of the last people on Earth to remember what a book was. The woman ahead of me in line was reading from a Kindle, which reminded me of what Barbara Kingsolver said at this venue last year: “I’m in favor of forms of entertainment which don’t electrocute you if you drop them in the bathtub.”

At 9:50 the Friends started in but the volunteers only let in ten at a time, as though crowd control were a big concern, like they needed to prevent these wealthy, elderly book nerds from stampeding or rioting or breaking into fisticuffs over who sits where. Honestly, I think they could have let them all file in and sit down. As it was, the process took way too long and the event didn’t start until 10:20. The MC said, “We never have an introducer for Dave Barry because if I got up here and started to introduce somebody who wasn’t Dave, people might throw tomatoes at me. We want to be sure he has as much time as possible.” But she did need to introduce Willie Geist, who was unknown to me and also to the people around me in line. It turns out he has an early morning show (“Morning Joe” ) on CNBC. He is good-looking and witty, but he’s no Dave Barry. Geist got a laugh with his opening remark: ”I’m pleased to see such a big crowd. I’m well aware of why you are here.”

Willie Geist is the son of Bill Geist. I’d never heard of either of them; Google leads me to the information that the father is a correspondent for CBS. The book Willie is promoting, American Freak Show: The Completely Fabricated Stories of Our New National Treasures, is an exploration of the absurdity of celebrity culture. It begins with a transcript of Sarah Palin’s 2012 inaugural address: she’s giving the speech at the Ice Palace in Tampa, before a professional wrestling event. Keepin’ it real for real America. Other subjects of the book include the Kardashian’s (“Who ARE these people?”) and the “balloon boy,” Geist noted, to the amusement of the local crowd, that the balloon boy’s family has now relocated to Florida. Dave chortled. Willie exclaimed, “This is where they come! This is where it all ends!”

Willie shared the experience he had with one of the characters in his book, Rod Blagojavich. He related that when “Blago” arrived in the CNBC studio for his interview, he burst into the room yelling, “Gentlemen! Good morning! I am innocent of all charges!” Then he proceeded to shake hands with everyone in the room and after that he signed autographs, unsolicited-- just walked up to people, signed a piece of paper and handed it to them. Apparently, nobody has ever enjoyed celebrity more than Blago does, and his experience is unmarred by embarrassment, shame, or apprehension of any kind.

Dave Barry took the podium to enthusiastic applause and immediately related his story du jour which involves an incident at the “Miami International Airport and Construction Zone” in which he was detained and patted down because the X-ray scanner showed he had a “blurred groin.” Here’s his version of that story.

Among his other topics was his colonoscopy essay, which is the only part of his latest book that is previously published material. That piece has probably changed the world more than anything he’s ever done. If it’s really true that colonoscopies save lives, then he is responsible for some of the planet’s population being alive instead of dead right now.

He also talked about how crazy Miami is, and noted that he is a booster of Miami tourism, having designed a bumper sticker that reads, “Come back to Miami—we weren’t shooting at you.”

During Q&A, someone asked what is the funniest story you know. Dave told this classic story about how the Oregon Highway Patrol attempted to solve the problem of a dead whale on the beach. Geist‘s tale was a less-told story but also funny. When he was in college, he rented an RV with some friends and drove to a football game. They parked for the night in a field. Some of the partiers sacked out on the roof of the vehicle. Some other members of the group arrived late and, experiencing an attack of munchies, decided to drive the RV to a convenience store several miles away. Somehow they drove all the way without fully awakening the passed-out passengers up top, and didn’t realize until they had arrived at their destination that they were there. Months or years later, when Geist was nominated for homecoming king, he was asked to relate to the alumni committee the most memorable event of his college career. He drew a blank, and all he could remember was the infamous RV incident. As the story unfolded, he could see the horror growing on his audience’s faces, and he realized very quickly that there was no chance he was going to be elected to be homecoming king.

Geist looks like a midwestern homecoming king, though; he definitely has the face for television. I had never heard of him before and I wasn’t especially bowled over, but he was genial and entertaining. Dave was brilliant. How we love him! Here’s a riff on Florida drivers: "Of course, everyone in Florida follows the traffic laws to the letter—it’s just that each person drives according to the traffic laws of his native country." Someone asked whether he had a funny story about the Department of Motor Vehicles. Dave replied that in Florida they give out driver’s licenses in Happy Meals. And he added, “I’m convinced that if alien beings ever land on Earth, they will already have Florida driver’s licenses.”

Dave was asked to comment on Florida’s newly elected governor, Rick Scott, and he said, “Why can’t we elect someone who looks like a human being? Charlie Crist looks like a traffic cone, and now we have Skeletor…”

I stood in line so Dave could sign a book for me. I told him as always that I was representing the Joel Achenbach fan club (and emphasized that all of Joel’s fans are his fans as well). He likes to say, “Ah, yes, the Boodle!” to show that he is in the know. So he did say that. I told him that Joel has a book coming out in the spring. He was somewhat skeptical. Just because he writes two or three books a year, he thinks anybody who takes longer than six months to produce a published volume is some kind of slacker. I told him I was sure the book would be out and I hoped Joel would be at the book fair in 2011. Dave’s not holding his breath, but I know he’d be happy if that occurred, because in past years when I mentioned Joel’s name he always looked around and said hopefully, “Is he here?”

+++++++++++++

Dave Eggers

Dave Eggers is the coolest person I have encountered in a long time. He is cute, yes, and smart. But he’s also very good-hearted and sincere without being corny.

Eggers has a book out and also runs a publishing house and edits a magazine. He has a web site, as well, and masterminds a video distribution service. So I assume he is rich, and has to spend a lot of time marketing his products to keep the machine going. But he mostly wanted to talk about 826 Valencia, which is his nonprofit reading and tutoring center in the Mission District of San Francisco. At the publishing company, all the employees stop what they are doing when the neighborhood kids get out of school for the day, and everybody spends two hours working with the kids. First the students finish their homework, and then they read and write books. Because it’s a publishing house, all the tools are there to create real books from the kids’ work, and that is what they do. They publish the students’ work and they host author nights where the students talk about their books and sign copies.

There was an issue with zoning because the space is zoned for retail. So it was necessary to sell something in the storefront. They did market research and had meetings and arrived at the conclusion that there was a pressing need in the Mission District that was not being met, so they opened a pirate supply store. They sell eyepatches and planks, pirate flags and peg legs. They thought it was humorous and creative but were surprised to find that there really is great demand for pirate paraphernalia, (“It’s a very passionate subculture,” says Dave.) The store turned out to be phenomenally successful. It makes enough money to pay the rent for the entire enterprise. Consequently, when a McSweeney's branch opened in Brooklyn, they decided to follow the same model: publishing/tutoring center/retail. In Brooklyn, they sell superhero supplies. If you buy a cape there, you can test it using a large industrial fan, to make sure it will flow out behind you gracefully as you fly. Meanwhile, the customers at the store discover the tutoring center, and often return as volunteers. The model is successful in San Francisco and New York and in numerous other locations.(Echo Park sells time traveler equipment.) Nick Hornby has started an organization in the UK called the Ministry of Stories, inspired by 826 Valencia.

Eggers’s current book is called Zaitoun. It’s the awful, true story of one man’s experiences in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Zaitoun is a good guy, a regular guy, but he gets caught up in a tangled web of misguided law enforcement and anti-terrorism efforts. Eggers says Zaitoun has received letters and emails from across the country, all saying essentially “On behalf of America, I apologize.” That’s the closest thing to a happy ending that this terrible story can have, I guess.

Proceeds from the book go to the Zaitoun Foundation, which promotes intercultural dialog and understanding.

++++++++++++++++

I stood in line to get Eggers to sign my book bag and also, one of his art prints. I am in possession of a number of pieces of his art work because I'm a member of the McSweeney's book club, and we all received a shipment of the prints a couple of months ago. Here's the one he signed:

The book bag is a true collector's item at this point although it's not in mint condition because I sometimes use it (!) to carry books in. And it's been schlepped around downtown Miami for three or four years now. But here are the signatures I have so far: (1) Joel Achenbach (first in alphabetical order; first in our hearts). (2) Frank McCourt (may his soul rest in peace) (3) Mitchell Kaplan (the owner of Books & Books in Coral Gables, he's the godfather of the Miami Book Fair.) (4) Leonard Pitts (5) Barbara Kingsolver (6) Sherman Alexie (7) Dave Barry (8) Ridley Pearson (9) Andy Borowitz (10) Dave Eggers and (11) T.M. Shine.

Now that's a book bag.

= = = = = = = = = =
Because I was standing in Dave Eggers's very long line, I missed the 12:30 p.m. Greil Marcus and Alex Ross session. Marcus has a book out about Bob Dylan, and I don't even know what Ross had to offer. I tried not to think about it, and moved on to

Sam Barry, Kathi Kamen Goldmark, and John Dufresne

I attended this session, which is dedicated to helping aspiring writers, thinking I would buy one of the books for my daughter, who is a talented writer but is not especially inspired to produce finished products suitable for publication.

Sam and Kathi, who in addition to being literary collaborators, are also married to each other, performed a skit demonstrating how books are chosen for publication. Sam’s big brother Dave was an appreciative member of the audience, with a front row seat.

Dufresne talked about the work of writing a novel. He quoted Somerset Maugham, “There are three secrets to writing a novel; and nobody knows what they are.” Then he added his own words of wisdom: “Everything in your life is incompatible with writing, and always will be.”

Dufresne’s most recent book is entitled How to Write Your First Novel in Six Months. He said, “I wrote the book but I haven’t read it yet.” (He’s in his third year of working on his current novel.)

Here’s a tip for aspiring writers: if you have a manuscript and you’re looking for an agent, look at books that are somewhat similar to yours, and check the acknowledgments. Usually the writer will thank his agent. You need an agent to be published by the big New York houses. But for the smaller university presses, you can submit the manuscript yourself.

Approaching the end of the day, good time to contemplate the end of the world as we know it. Three authors who have written books about climate change:

Heidi Cullen, The Weather of the Future
Gwynne Dyer, Climate Wars: the Fight for Survival
Peter Maass, Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil.

This was a depressing session. I can’t even bear to summarize it.

Relief from the somber realities was upcoming on the 5th floor terrace of Building 3:

The Rock Bottom Remainders

. . . in concert. Featuring local Florida author Tim Dorsey on cowbell. Also local radio personality, (not an author, he himself emphasized) Paul Castronovo, of the “Paul and Young Ron Show”. Kathi Goldmark, Sam Barry, Scott Turow, Les Standiford, Ridley Pearson, various other people—oh, yeah, Michelle Kaufman and Sophie Barry, (Dave’s wife and daughter, respectively) and, I think, one of Sophie’s random friends. Not a large group this year, which initially seemed to improve the odds of everybody’s finishing the song at the same time. But early optimism on that score was later dashed. Also, remembering how many verses the song has seemed to be a problem. Come to think of it, those two problems are related. Anyway, they did most of the RBR classics, including “Proof-reading Woman,” “The Slut Song,” “If the House is Rockin’,” and “Hurricane Blues.” Other numbers on the set list included "Wild Thing," “Wait Till the Midnight Hour,” and “Margaritaville.”

At one point, Dave introduced “The greatest writer of legal fiction in the universe” (Turow) and someone near me said, “Oh, I didn’t know John Grisham was here.” (literary rimshot…)

Really fun, and the weather was great, just about 75 degrees and a slight breeze. It sprinkled a little bit but not enough to interfere with anything. I chatted with Suzie and Mike—Mike used to work for the Miami News and he knew Dave from the old days, also had recently visited with him at a Miami News reunion. When they ran into each other later the same week, he said, “Hi, Dave, remember me, we were talking the other day at the Miami News Reunion.” Dave replied, “Oh, hey! Hi! So you finally sobered up, eh?”

After the concert, I grabbed a sandwich from Subway and headed for the hotel. I thought I would write up some of my notes but I was soooo tired! I fell asleep before I got anything done.

November 21
Got up early Sunday morning and went jogging along Biscayne Bay. I wasn’t able to cross the bridge because the sidewalk was closed for construction, but downtown Miami at sunrise is still very charming. I was running and gawking, sightseeing as I went. It occurred to me that it was something like the experience people have when they tour on Segways, just with a little more effort.

I had a pretty leisurely morning, didn’t have to rush, but got packed and checked out, took my stuff to the car and was in the Carl Hiaasen line by 9:30. The line was even longer than the Dave Barry line on Saturday. Possibly because the Hiaasen fans were joined by a bunch of Scott Turow readers—I don’t think those two groups have a huge amount of overlap.

Carl Hiaasen

Hiaasen was charming, as usual, maybe a little more downcast than he was the last time I saw him. His latest book is Star Island, a tale of celebrity culture and intrigue set in South Beach. He said South Beach is difficult to satirize because anything you make up will likely be surpassed by a real event before you get your book published.

South Florida does seem to attract the weirdos. Hiaasen was about the third speaker I heard mention that the “balloon boy’s” family was moving to Florida. Carl’s comment: “That was inevitable, wasn’t it?” Another example: Rush Limbaugh could have lived anywhere. Carl says he understands why Limbaugh chose to live in Florida—it’s because we have the friendliest pharmacists anywhere. "If you want to back a dump truck up to the pharmacy and fill it with Oxycontin: 'Okay!'”

Carl said he had to read a lot of tabloid newspapers and watch a lot of celebrity tv reports as research for the book. He kept hearing about the “Kardashians” so he asked Dave Barry, who tends to be more up on current culture, “How many of them are there?” Dave said he thought there were “15 or 16”…

But Carl is satirizing the culture; he does not think it is funny. The story he told indicates very well what his viewpoint is: On a day when eight American soldiers died in Afghanistan, in the most severe fighting of the war to date, Lindsay Lohan was arrested for something and it was her story that was the lead—it was difficult to find information about what happened in Afghanistan.

The main character in Star Island is a kind of Britney Spears/Lindsay Lohan type celebrity. Carl is mildly disgusted with the position this type of celebrity holds in our culture. He said, "5,000 years ago, they would have been culled from the herd. You know? They shouldn’t be allowed to poison the gene pool."

Scott Turow

Scott Turow talked about but did not read from his new book, Innocent. It is a sequel to Presumed Innocent. He was careful not to give away the surprise ending from the original book so that people could read the books in any order. He and the audience also observed the taboo at the book fair although it’s a good bet that the overwhelming majority of people there were aware of the plot of Presumed Innocent. That was nice, though.

Turow said the germ of an idea for this latest book may have come from an Edward Hopper painting, “An Excursion into Philosophy.”

In the Q&A, Hiaasen was asked about the election of Rick Scott as Governor, and he said, “As a columnist I have to be glad because there will be plenty of material, but as a citizen, as a father, as a grandfather…I could have hoped for a better outcome.”

He noted that Scott spent $73 million of his own money to be elected, and said Scott has “the worst resume in the history of politics.”

Then someone asked, are you at all optimistic about the environment? And he replied, “No. I’m not.”

After a pause, he continued, “For a while, during the Clinton administration, when the Everglades restoration project was on the front burner, I thought there might be a chance to make some progress. But with the recession . . .

“We all want clean air to breath and clean water to drink—Democrat or Republican—it’s not a radical idea. But if you show up in Tallahassee talking about environmental issues now, you get treated like you’re crazy.”

= = = = = = = = =

I didn’t have time to stand in Carl’s autographing line if I was going to hear Ron Chernow. It was at this point, giving up standing in one line so that I could stand in a different line, after the long day on Saturday and with six hours of more or less continuous activity ahead of me, that I kind of hit the wall, as they say in long distance running. I had my doubts about whether I had the energy to get through to the end of the day. I guess my blood sugar level was dipping, and maybe Hiaasen hadn’t helped with his Eeyoresque presentation. I briefly considered packing it in and heading for home. But then I turned to the person next to me in line, a nice young woman who was also on her own. I struck up a little conversation with her, compared schedules—she had also been there all day on Saturday and was planning to spend the day on Sunday too—and I decided I could do it. As it turned out, I only had to stand in line for Chernow, and then got to stay in my seat for Simon Winchester. After that I had a two hour break for lunch and shopping, and the rest of the day unfolded very smoothly. That brief moment of fatigue was the only time in the whole weekend that I felt less than perfectly happy.

Ron Chernow

Washington, a Life

About George Washington:

He didn’t chop down a cherry tree and then admit it to his father saying, “I cannot tell a lie.”

He didn’t have wooden teeth. His teeth were carved ivory and maybe some of them were human teeth purchased from slaves (a common practice at the time.) He only had one natural tooth of his own at the time he became president.

And so on. Chernow says he “needed a machete” to cut through the dense forest of myths and misconceptions about the Father of Our Country. Chief among these is the perception that Washington was stiff and expressionless—this idea is fed by the famous portraits of him done by Gilbert Stuart and other contemporary artists. But revolutionaries are not boring individuals. Washington’s laconic and stoic façade covered a strong personality. Chernow, with this book, tries “to recreate the charisma that seems to have gotten lost to posterity.”

Washington was a prodigy—at age 23 he was in charge of all the military forces of Virginia. He is legendary for his perseverance and bravery. He was unanimously elected to leadership positions.

His revolutionary ideas flowed naturally from his personal interests: the British denied him a commission and outlawed western settlement just at the time when Washington was acquiring properties. So he joined in with the founders and made important contributions. When the constitutional convention was held, the delegates met behind closed doors. Washington’s presence was important to the public, reassuring them that the congress was a legitimate proceeding.

Washington created the first presidential “cabinet.” His had three members, Alexander Hamilton at Treasury, Henry Knox as Secretary of War, and Thomas Jefferson as Secretary of State. That’s if you don’t count Edmund Randolph, the Attorney General.

Washington hoped for a non-partisan government but the mudslinging started right away. He was accused of having been a spy for the British throughout the revolutionary war. The divide between Hamilton and Jefferson led to a split in the country and the formation of political parties.

Washington was opposed to slavery, but knew it was a divisive question so he avoided the issue. He freed his slaves in his will, but wasn’t able to free the slaves who were controlled by Martha. It was arranged that her slaves would be freed upon her death but she was made uneasy by this arrangement, since it meant all her slaves were waiting and even hoping for her to die so they could be free. She freed her slaves about a year after George died, and about a year before her own death.

Simon Winchester

Winchester’s book about the Atlantic Ocean is a big tale but also a collection of interesting stories.

Here’s one: In the Faroe Islands, halfway between Norway and Iceland, the residents are descended from Vikings. Winchester says they have too much testosterone and not enough to keep them busy; that’s how he explains this strange activity that they have developed. The western sides of the islands form high, sheer cliffs—as high as 2000 feet in places. On the sides of these cliffs there are small areas, very steep, where patches of grass grow. This grass is fertilized by puffin guano, which is exceptionally rich in nutrients, so the vegetation is very lush. In the spring, the strapping lads of the Faroe Islands take boats to the foot of the cliffs. They each hoist a lamb onto their shoulders and they climb up ropes until they come to one of the patches of steep grass, and they put the lamb there. Winchester says they have to hold the lamb until it gets its footing because the pitch makes it nearly impossible to stand. Once the lamb is stabilized, they go away and leave it there. A few months later they return, and the lamb has grown into a sheep. They climb up the ropes again. When they reach the sheep they give it a shove and it falls into the water below. If the fall doesn’t kill it, they finish the job and then take it back to town. The meat thus harvested has a reputation for being exceptionally tasty. This is a typical Winchester story: weird and wonderful, if slightly cringe-inducing. That is how I remember The Professor and the Madman. I haven’t read Atlantic, but I’m sure it is entertaining and educational.

T.M. Shine and Skip Horack

This Sunday afternoon event was not well attended. T.M. Shine continues to be one of literature’s hidden treasures.

Skip Horack wrote a novel called The Eden Hunter. It’s about a pygmy who is captured and brought to America as a slave, then escapes and lives in the wilds of Florida in the early 19th century. The book is inspired by true historical events and has received favorable reviews.

I was there to see T. M. Shine and was happy to finally meet him in person after being an admirer for over twenty years. He has a dark sense of humor and a quick wit. Here’s an archetypal Shine aphorism: “Desperate is the new cool.” His newest book is called Nothing Happens Until it Happens to You. He pitched it to his publisher as a memoir but they wanted a novel so he punched it up with some fictional characters. But it’s still very much what he would have written if they had let him write a memoir. Because with Shine, what’s going on inside his head always gets as much attention as what’s happening “out there” in the real world. When he writes humor, his narrative follows the knife edge of credulity. You want to believe it really happened but it feels like he’s pulling your leg most of the time. When he does journalism, it’s believable but you know that if you had been in the situation he’s describing you wouldn’t have had the experience he had. Shine has a unique worldview and an uncanny ability to put it into words.

The audiobook: what a thrill to find that someone has taken the time and spent the money to make the novel you worked hard to write into an audiobook. That would make you feel special, wouldn’t it? Until you get the CD, and listen to it, and find out that they apparently hired the actor who voiced C-3PO to read it for the audiobook. This is not a voice that is conducive to humor. Shine brought the CD and played some of it for us so we could share his pain.

Terry Shine embodies the new reality in journalism and literature. He was laid off from his job at the free weekly paper that is a subsidiary of the big daily newspaper, not because he wasn’t good but just because the paper is on the verge of going out of business and had to cut its staff to the bare minimum. He has written features for the Washington Post magazine but that was mostly because of the close connection between the Miami Herald, where he debuted as a feature writer, and the Post; and since Tom Shroder is no longer at the Post it makes it much more problematic for him to publish there. Shine is not a big networker or self-promoter, I gather. What he is, is an artist. He says he’s looking for work and that he has accepted that writing might just be a hobby for him. I can only hope for his sake that he finds happiness, and, for my sake, that he keeps finding a way to get his work published. Here’s his blog, PinkSlipMyAss. If you sign up, you can be notified when he posts; it’s not a regular occurrence.

= = = = = = =

Jonathan Franzen

I’m an avid fan of this best-selling author. I had a sort of mystical experience reading his book of essays How to be Alone. You know the way schizophrenics think the television is speaking to them, personally? That’s how that book was for me. I kept getting the feeling that Franzen was slipping personal messages into the text, and they were about me and they were about him. Not about the two of us together. About each of us, alone.

I wish the book fair schedule had not put Franzen at the very end of the program. By the time Sunday evening came around, I was very tired and looking forward to getting home. Still, he did not disappoint. He read passages from his new book, and then took questions from the audience.

Quotes:

“I’m writing extreme stories, based on my own personal experience of the world.”

“Is it possible to be irritated with yourself? The other day I was irritable and everything everybody said or did was getting on my nerves. But I noticed that nothing I thought or said irritated me.”

“It’s doubtful whether anyone who has an internet connection at the workplace is writing decent fiction.”

= = = = = = = = =

The drive home was actually uneventful but I was tired and it was a dark and rainy night, so I was a little stressed. All ended well, however, and I was back at my house by 8:00 p.m. A nearly perfect Miami Book Fair International weekend—the only thing that would have improved it is if one or more of my literary friends could have joined me for the experience. I will note that people do go to the book fair alone, it’s much more common to see single people there than at a concert or a movie or the county fair or an art show. And any time I felt like chatting, I had no problem turning to the person next to me and striking up a conversation. Everyone is friendly and intelligent, so it’s not a lonely experience. But I got spoiled the three years I had an enthusiastic companion. A bunch of people have told me they will try to come next year, and since my very favorite author is publishing a book in 2011, next year might just be a regular Achen-festival. If you are an organized person who already has a 2011 calendar, it’s not too early to mark the date: November 19-20 should be the big weekend, but you can keep an eye on the official website for news and updates.

Mothers United for World Peace

2010-05-09T13:35:00.000-05:00

There's nothing wrong with having a day set aside for the especial appreciation of mothers. However, the original concept of Mothers Day was something quite different. Julia Ward Howe of "Battle Hymn of the Republic" fame conceived the idea of a day for mothers around the world to band together for peace. I'd like to sign up for that. Here's her manifesto:

Arise then...women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
"We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

From the bosom of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: "Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."
Blood does not wipe out dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil
At the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace...
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God -

In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

--Julia Ward Howe

Happy Mother's Day to everybody, with best wishes for universal love and world peace!

Weekend on Florida's Gulf Coast

2010-04-11T13:27:00.002-05:00

We took a little sojourn over to the other coast of Florida this weekend. Our home away from home was the Two Fish Inn, which I recommend highly, should you ever be inclined to visit Pine Island, Florida. The island itself has limited charm, but if you like boating, it has the advantage of being surrounded on all sides by navigable water; apparently that's the main attraction there. We went for the peace and quiet, and we were satisfied in our quest.

On arrival, 4 p.m. Friday, the inn was deserted. We called the number on the office door and Charlie told us, "You're in Suite 3. Your name is on the door, the door is unlocked, the key is inside. Make yourself at home." We did as instructed. I made use of the canal-side lounge chair to read my book* while Richard went swimming in the solar-heated pool. Charlie turned up a couple hours later, checked us in and directed us to a nearby restaurant for a lovely Italian dinner. We drove to the north end of the island and back, then I took a walk around the neighborhood, such as it was. There's one main road on the island, not very pedestrian-friendly at the south end. I explored some side streets but there were dogs and dead ends and I made sure I returned before dark.

Saturday morning, Richard and I went for a swampy hike down a nearby nature trail where a sign indicated we would find an eagle's nest. For whatever reason, we didn't find any eagles or nests, but it was a pleasant walk, and we were only slightly harrassed by mosquitoes. We've lived in Florida so long, we're mostly immune to the irritation of mosquito bites. They have to really swarm and attack before we feel any discomfort. Those Pine Island mosquitoes were too shy to interfere with our hike.

After the hike, Richard went back into lounging mode. The inn provides free bicycles and kayaks so I checked out the bike inventory and found one that seemed to have most of its parts. The seat was too low and Charlie said he didn't have a wrench to adjust it, so I gamely set out down the road in spite of the inadequacy of the vehicle. My thinking was, it's just a leisurely ride, I don't need to go fast. However, it wasn't a lot of fun with the seat so low. I think it was the slowest bike ride I've ever taken. I knew there was a shopping plaza down the road and thought I could ride to it and buy a wrench and adjust the seat. I knew the plaza was 8 miles away, because the restaurant where we'd had dinner was right next to it. But "eight miles" didn't really register on my consciousness. I just set out and pedaled and enjoyed the view. Before I knew it I was five miles down the road and then I figured, that's more than halfway, and I kept going. It was a long eight miles, with my knees complaining about the awkward angle of pedaling. Sometimes I tried pedaling standing up, but, you know, that used to be a lot easier when I was ten years old.

I made it to the plaza, went into CVS and bought pliers, which is the closest thing to a wrench that they had. I returned to the bike and looked at the nut that needed to be loosened, then I remembered, this is an island bike. I spent enough time in Key West to appreciate what that means in terms of rust and how difficult it can be to loosen a nut. But I was determined, and between the pliers and the determination, I got that seat adjusted. The ride back home was much more fun and about twice as fast, though I certainly didn't set any speed records in either direction.

The weather was wonderful, sunny and about 80 degrees by 11 a.m. We checked out and went looking for the ferry that goes to the nearby islands. We did find the marina but the schedule wasn't convenient, so we just had a look around and headed for the mainland.

We made a delightful stop on the way in Matlacha (pronounced, against all logic, "matt la SHAY") a tiny art colony with more quality artwork per square foot than I believe I've ever seen anywhere. We only stayed a brief time but could have spent days there going though the shops and galleries. I had a thought that is rare to me, "If I had money, this is the kind of thing I would like to have in my house." The works were extremely original and well-crafted.

After Matlacha we drove across the bridge to the mainland and took an immediate left turn to find the Ford-Edison museum and estates. The quick tour there was very pleasant and educational. But the main thing you need to learn there I already knew: Genius=1% inspiration + 99% perspiration.

The drive back across Alligator Alley was uneventful, and we were home by dinnertime. More photos here.

++++++++

*The Big Short, by Michael Lewis. I finished it on Saturday. An important book. Everybody should read it, including the Goldman Sachs executives who are in the current issue of Business Week saying "It wasn't our fault. Really."

I'm grateful to Mr. Lewis and others who have tried so hard to report the facts and clarify this perplexing situation.

Achenblog FAQ

2010-01-12T20:58:00.000-05:00

Achenblog FAQ

Copied from Mo's Den of Darkness blog

The Achendictionary - a quick reference guide to the Achenspeak on the Achenblog

AABB - (Always A Boodle Behind) (not to be confused with ABBA) - not keeping up with the boodle. We are a loquacious bunch!

Achenaddict - one who is addicted to the Achenblog.

Achenara, Achenlater, Achenawhile, bachenawhile - farewell to the boodle.

Achenblog - a blog run by Joel Achenbach on washingpost.com.

Achenbloghogging - posting an inordinate number of comments.

Achenbook - a book authored by Joel himself, can be hard to find because they’re out of print.

Achenbro - Joel’s brother, Kevin, who is in a band called Rox Diamond.

Achenembarrassing - an embarrassing comment made in connection with the Achenblog.

Achenhead - headache.

Achenphotographer - the official photographer of the BPH - currently mo.

Achensecret - secrets said at the BPH not to be repeated at the Achenblog.

Achenshy - shy, especially with regard to attending the Porching Hour or boodling.

AHRRP - Achenblog Handle Reharvesting/Reallocation Program, a phenomenon

whereby an individual (possibly the ‘loper) would go back to old Boodles to find apparently abandoned handles that would later be adopted as his/her own. Handles acquired in this manner include “Observer” and “sweetiefur.”

Bcfauxlettres - the fake letters bc advised we send to various members of the

government.

Blorph - 1. Jim Beam; popular with omnibad. 2. The sound made whilst in the vicinity of Jim Beam. 3. a general “feh” statement.

Boddle - boodling gone wrong.

Boodle - (short for Kaboodle) the comments section of the Achenblog.

Boodle Porching Hour (or BPH) - Happy Hour for Boodlers, where imaginary friends become real. Most commonly in D.C., but BPHs have been held in a number of U.S. states and in Canada. (See also IBPH.)

Boodler - a person who posts comments in the Boodle.

Boodle Killer - the last person to boodle before a significant lag time in others boodling is sometimes accused of being a Boodle Killer. Joel likes to think his appearance in the Boodle has a tendency to kill the Boodle. He is wrong.

Boodling - the act of posting a comment on the Achenblog.

Boodling Out Of Order (or BOOO) - When someone posts a comment in response to a

previous comment, but another comment is posted in between the two comments, making the comment look inappropriate or irrelevant.

Boodleville, Boodleborough, Porchville - names of places used by boodlers posting in other venues.

Bunker - Where the boodle hunkers down when the crazies appear through a front-page link (see "Front-page alert"). The bunker apparently houses several rooms, a bathroom, a kitchen, many comfortable chairs and is decorated with doilies, antler-themed decor and artwork featuring jet fighters. No Thomas Kinkade paintings allowed.

Burnt umber - color to be worn on National Umbrage Day; also a Crayola crayon color.

Dawn Patrol - The Boodlers that post comments before normal people have had a cup of coffee.

Dork - nerd; often used to describe frequent boodlers by those that are less than loquacious.

Error in '08 - Planned presidential campaign of Error Flynn, whose premature death at age 47 in 2007 proved that imaginary friends are very real.

*Faxing ....[X] to [Y]* - The method of transferring items from boodler to boodler, across time and space. Use of asterisks denotes action.

FBBI - Federal Bureau of Boodle Investigations, established in response to the Interloper

Problem. Currently Achenfan is the official investigator as well as the Queen of the Boodle.

Feats of Strength - Under the Seinfeld orthodoxy, Festivus is not over until the

head of the household is wrestled to the floor and pinned. This typically follows “the airing of grievances.”

Feh - an exclamation similar to “darn”, generally follows an scc statement.

Festivus - a “Seinfeld” term; an alternative to Christmas that includes “the airing

of grievances” and a “Festivus pole”; Boodlers received Festivus gifts from bc at the 3rd Official Boodle Porching Hour on December 6, 2005.

Front-page alert - Notice that it's time to head into the bunker.

FSM - Flying Spaghetti Monster or the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster;

an alternative explanation for how the world came into being, in the context of evolution vs. intelligent design discussions. According to the official site “The Flying Spaghetti Monster: An invisible and undetectable being made of spaghetti and meatballs, the Flying Spaghetti Monster claims to be the true creator of the universe and life on Earth; all evidence of evolution or other origins of life, his followers, the Pastafarians, say, are tricks to throw off the unbeliever. The FSM’s hobbies include flying through the universe, touching things with his noodly appendage and pissing off proponents of intelligent design creation theories. He could be defeated by common sense or acceptance of basic scientific principles, if only either of those things existed.”

Glaucoma Test Pilot: One who partakes of a particularly magical herb by smoking it or making it a secret ingredient in yummy brownies (bet ya can't eat just one). GTPs are easily amused and are often found in dark basements observing how lint glows on their concert t-shirts under a black light to the accompaniment of Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon". They are also known to congregate at Phish concerts.

GTP Motto: "Dude... I am sooooooo high. Like where's my car?"

Hal the Schemer - creator of the Achenblog and sometimes technical advisor - always trying to find a way to take over the blog.

Handle - Name by which a poster is known on the Achenblog.

Higgs Ocean - a metaphorical twist on the theoretical Higgs Field, which permeates the universe and gives mass to particles. The Ocean is treated as the fabric of the universe, where everything - matter, mass, energy, thought, etc. - propagates waves of one sort or another in the Ocean.

IBPH - International Boodle Porching Hour -- a BPH attended by boodlers from multiple countries. Most notably, the big inaugural IBPH held in D.C. whenever it was with lots and lots of boodlers from all over.

Interloper (’loper) - Person who posts under other people’s handles, changes a handle to insult a boodler and/or makes rude comments.

It's dead, Jim - Comment made after the boodle has been quiet for a long period of time. Based on the words uttered often by Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy on Star Trek.

Kit - Joel’s blog entries.

Kit and Kaboodle - the whole Blog — both Joel’s contribution and the comments.

Kaboodle - the comments section of the blog (shortened to boodle).

LindaLoo’s Family Tree - simply put, Linda Loomis is related to everyone. Period.

Manfood- Food to which masculine men restrict their diets. Must be artery clogging and

have walked on at least two legs. One exception to this rule is quiche. Quiche is not manfood. Salad may only be considered manfood if it contains red meat.

Mianus - The center of the Boodleverse

National Speak Like a Pirate Day - September 19 (ARGH!)

National Umbrage Day - a day on which many Boodlers took umbrage at various

comments of other Boodlers (this year is was October 31, yes, Halloween) possibly because of a strong ‘loper presence that day.

New Kit! - Alert that there is a new blog post. It is considered bad Boodle etiquette to post on the new Boodle before alerting the others that it exists.

Observer, Observerism - (the O must always be capital) a concept based on quantum mechanics and special relativity that all sentient beings in the universe have equally valid perceptions of reality. Individual perceptions do not have to agree; in fact, most of the time, they don’t. Observerism does not rule out the possibility of an Ultimate Objective Observer. If anyone Observes It, please post to the ‘boodle immediately and notify your local Homeland Security Office.

Onanism - ummm… let’s just say self-gratification.

Ouroboros, Ouroborosian - An Observation that the the Web/’net/blogosphere is like the classical Ouroboros symbols of a serpent eating it’s own tail. Cyclical, self-referential, self-propagating and self-consuming. Any references to Alchemy or Egyptian, Greek, Norse, Christian, Far Eastern, Native American, or Satanist cultures, myths or gnosticisms is purely intentional.

Permalink - a devious otherwordly Hal the Schemer invention. Purpose is not yet known, though it is thought that the purpose may be to take over the world. The appearance of permalinks may indicate the end of times is approaching, as they appeared December 15, 2005 and the blog broke December 16, 2005 thus leaving many an achenaddict fiending.

Porching - sitting on a porch, OR, attending the Porching Hour, i.e., drinking.

Raj - Alternative name for the Boodle, proposed by Joel when the term “Boodle” was

starting to sound a bit old; short for Garage, the idea being that the Kit would be called the Garret; lends itself well to the term “Raj Rage.” um… notsomuch - didn’t really catch on.

SAO 15 - (now defunct) Select Audience Of 15, the number of participants Joel

initially envisioned his blog would attract. According to Joel, “Ideally the blog will have only about 15 readers, but very intellectual, refined, sensitive readers between the ages of 18 and 35 and with large amounts of disposable income.”

SCC - Self-Castigation Club, a means by which Boodlers correct their own typos

and grammatical errors, but no-one else’s, except Joel’s.

Snarky - 1. a characteristic of squirrels; one of the Boodlers is in fact called Snarky

Squirrel 2. v. being snippy or crabby; “Don’t be snarky with me!”

Tai Shan - THE Panda cub at the National Zoo and possible boodle mascot - that’s still

up in the air.

Tempel 1 - A comet attacked by NASA and the Bush Administration last July 4th in Operation Deep Impact. Some ‘boodlers are considering setting up a summer homes and a good bar (to be called the Hellbar) there with the pending settlement from a lawsuit against the US Government for their unwarranted bombing. The remaining funds will be handed over to the evolving Ashton Kutcher/Britney Spears-based Sea Monkeys who were put there by unscrupulous genetic scientists from an unnamed Far Eastern country. These creatures are not currently known to be al Quaida members or Insurgents.

THE Porch - Joel’s porch, also known as the Achenporch.

THE Tom - Tom Shroder, editor of the Magazine.

Tom the Butcher - Weingarten’s name for Tom Shroder.

Tom the Surgeon - Tom Shroder’s preferred nickname.

Umbrage - Offense, issue; umbrage is usually taken in a lighthearted way on the Achenblog.

Widdershins - technically it means counterclockwise; the wrong way; however in certain circumstances it can be used to refer to a direction which is against the light, i.e. where you are unable to see your shadow ie. “I am up to my widdershins in xyz” - it doesn’t really matter what it means - it just sounds good.

Worlds Colliding- The occasional visit of a Significant Other to the Achenblog for mild harassment purposes. Also known as breaching the boodle.

Barbara Kingsolver

2009-11-10T09:32:00.004-05:00

Barbara Kingsolver was in Miami last night, kicking off the 2009 Miami Book Fair. I drove down in the afternoon, avoiding traffic, and had a nice stroll around downtown and the Bayside shopping area before heading to the venue. As it happened, my copy of Kingsolver's latest book arrived in my mailbox just hours before I set out on my expedition (thank you, Amazon!) so I just found a quiet corner and read until time to go into the auditorium. I got through about the first hundred pages. In one scene, the narrator discovers an underwater tunnel leading to an opening in the land. The word "lacuna" can refer to such a cave, or it can have various other literal or metaphorical meanings. Thus, the title is evocative and somewhat mysterious, giving us a clue that this is going to be a story with layers, that we can plunge into and use all our powers to explore.

The description of the lacuna lets us know, too, that we are dealing with an author whose mastery of language is indisputable:

At the end of the tunnel the cave opens up to light, a small salt-water pool in the jungle. Almost perfectly round, as big across as this bedchamber, with sky straight up, dappled and bright through the branches. Amate trees stood in a circle around the water hole like curious men, gaping because a boy from another world had suddenly arrived in their pool. The pombo trees squatted for a close look with their knobbly wooden knees poking up out of the water. A tiger heron stood one-legged on a rock, cocking an unfriendly eye at the intruder. San Juan Pescadero the kingfisher zipped back and forth between two perches, crying, "Kill him kill him kill him!...

It was like coming up in a storybook...

Kingsolver says that she wrote this book as part of an exploration of the relationship between art and politics. The three main historical characters are Diego Rivera, Frida Khalo, and Leon Trotsky. The geographical characters are Mexico and the United States.

Here are some other observations from Kingsolver:

"I was in Washington DC recently, and while traveling between bookstores I got stuck in traffic--held up behind the president's motorcade as he was going to deliver a speech about health care reform. I thought to myself, 'here I am, in the beating heart of democracy!'

"And then I came to Miami. And I realized that the real, true, beating heart of democracy is the place where people love books!"

* * *

"I consider myself an evangelist for literature. I am promoting forms of entertainment that wouldn't electrocute you if you dropped them in the bathtub."

* * *

"Literature is invented, but it's not fake. I won't waste your time with anything that is not authentic."

* * *

There's no test after you read a book. You can't do it wrong. Read it just for the plot. Read it for the characters. Read it for the deeper meaning. Read it just for the pleasure of being in that place.

The New York Times calls The Lacuna "dazzling." It's the latest in a body of work that is amazingly diverse--poetry, short stories, novels, essays, journalism--from a woman who is highly intelligent and imaginative, erudite and emotionally connected. The fact that she is one of the few American writers who is willing to be overtly political in her work is a bonus, especially since I happen to agree wholeheartedly with her political positions.

Armegeddon in Retrospect, by Kurt Vonnegut

2009-10-26T16:53:00.007-05:00

I thought I'd never say this again, but I just read a new Kurt Vonnegut book. Not only that, but I'm starting another one now.

Armageddon in Retrospect is a collection of writings about war and peace, some of which are previously unpublished. It starts out, after a great introduction by Mark Vonnegut, with a letter written by Pfc. K. Vonnegut, Jr. on April 29, 1945. The letter is probably his earliest attempt to put into writing the horrific experiences he had as a P.O.W. in Germany. Slaughterhouse-Five would be its culmination, years later.

If people were reasonable creatures, every veteran would be an antiwar activist, but alas, we aren't and they aren't. For that matter, if people were reasonable, we wouldn't need antiwar activists, would we. Here's what Vonnegut says about the movement to stop the Vietnam War: "We might as well have been throwing cream pies."

More later.

Why Good People Do Bad Things, by James Hollis, Ph.D.

2009-10-12T13:42:00.004-05:00

I have to blog about this book because there is so much important information in it. But it's difficult to know what to say because there is so much important information.

Nice connection I never made before: There's a children's poem called "My Shadow" -- "I have a little shadow / That goes in and out with me / ..." I've known that by heart since early childhood. I knew Robert Louis Stevenson wrote it, and in a separate part of my brain I knew Stevenson wrote Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. But I never connected the two facts. Now they are filed away in the same folder. That Robert Louis Stevenson, he was really concerned about this issue of The Shadow.

According to James Hollis, who wrote this book, Why Good People Do Bad Things, the subconscious mind is the part of you that you don't know about; the Shadow is the part of you that you don't want to know about. And it's the answer to the question of why you don't always do what you know you should do, and you sometimes do what you know you shouldn't do.

Not only people have Shadows; institutions have them too, and even God can be perceived to have a dark side (for the full exposition on this idea, read Answer to Job, by Carl Jung.)

The solution to the problem of The Shadow is to confront it, to explore it, to accept its existence and pay attention to its influence in our lives.

As an old Eastern European story has it a village took pity on an elderly pensioner and, to give him a reason to live, appointed him to serve as sentinel at the entrance to the shtetl and wait for the arrival of the Messiah. After many hash seasons at his solitary post, he returned to the council and expressed a certain frustation over this project, whereupon he was told, 'But consider, it's steady work!' So, or ongong effort to know the right thing, if it exists, and to do the right thing if we can,is steady work...-- p. 37

This is not some pop culture "self-help" book--but it certainly may be helpful, if it's read in that spirit. It's a good summary of Jungian theory and a well-organized exposition of the thoughts of an intelligent person who has been thinking about this subject for several decades.

Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby

2009-10-05T08:09:00.003-05:00

I just read this book yesterday. It's a lovely mixture of romance and realism, which explores communication and celebrity in the 21st century.

I've enjoyed all of Hornby's work. High Fidelity is on my "favorite movies" list. A Long Way Down was clever and touching.

Besides providing amusement, the book fueled my anglophilia with the very English vernacular spoken by several of the characters. Here are some phrases:

--winding me up
--taking the piss
--having me on
--nutter
--cheers
--a one-off
--fair enough
--talking rubbish

...and so on.

Reactivating Blog

2009-10-05T08:03:00.002-05:00

I must say, this appears to be an extreme example of procrastination. I haven't added anything to this blog for nearly a year. Amazing. I will reactivate it by jettisoning all ambition, becoming entirely humble and creating short entries, once a week or more. That's the plan. Today's project, changing the quote at the top of the page. Where is that, again? I'm off to search for it.

Miami Book Fair 2008

2008-11-17T15:31:00.021-05:00

Here's my account of the weekend I just spent at the Miami Book Fair with Achenblog friend Seasea. Some of it is in paragraph form, some of it is sentence fragments. Sometimes it deteriorates into a list format. I make no claims for it as literature. But I wanted to share with interested parties who were unable to attend. The book fair was interesting, entertaining and educational in balanced measure. Starting with Saturday morning (although the chronology isn't strictly followed throughout)

Saturday, November 15, 2008

Martha Weinman Lear - Where Did I Leave My Glasses: The What When and Why of Normal Memory Loss

Sue Halpern - Can't Remember What I Forgot: The Good News From the Font Lines of Memory Research

Martha Weinman Lear began by saying that "age-related memory loss" is a misnomer because the memories are not lost. The information is still in there, but as we get older it takes longer to retrieve. The three characteristics of memory-related issues in older people are (1) difficulty remembering names [I agree with Dave Barry's assertion that it's not just names, but all nouns] (2) difficulty multi-tasking and (3) slower processing of new information. Lear says it's not just American Baby Boomers who are obsessed with this subject, but people all over the world; it's a very hot topic right now and much research is going on.

One of the chapters in her book is about the things you never forget, and why--that relates to the three kinds of memory: (1) episodic (things that happened to you) (2) semantic (facts, expressed in words) and (3) procedural (how to do things). The third is the most important and you will not lose those memories. For example, you might forget the name of the restaurant where you ate last week. But you probably won't forget what a restaurant is, and you surely won't forget how to eat. So her conclusion is that the brain is constructed in the best way it can be, and you should stop worrying and be happy.

Sue Halpern's book is more research-intensive; she spent a number of years hanging around a specific research facility and she has summarized the recent advances and hopes for the near future in the field of memory. She distinguishes between "normal age-related memory loss" and diseases like Alzheimers, but says anything that aids in memory retention for "normal" people will also help Alzheimers patients because they are also subject to the normal aging process in addition to the disease process.

Halpern, who incidentally is married to author Bill McKibben, made a dramatic presentation of her main point. She said, "What if I told you there is a pill that will enable your brain to grow new brain cells--would you want it? What if I told you it has no side effects, would you want it even more? And would you pay me a lot of money? " (laughter) And she revealed that this miraculous --and free -- remedy is EXERCISE. Numerous studies with animal and human subjects have shown that 45 minutes of aerobic exercise a day has a significant effect on the subjects' performance on memory tests and also the number of new brain cells and synapses that are produced. So, hit the road, people!

As for magic foods, the research on chocolate and red wine is ongoing, but blueberries and walnuts have shown good results already. Halpern stressed that large doses of vitamins and herbal supplements can be dangerous and have not been proven to help. She recommends that you stick to eating healthy food--nobody ever overdosed on walnuts and blueberries.

= = = = = = =

We went to the next session in hopes of seeing Joyce Carol Oates, along with two other authors, but Oates was a no-show, much to the general chagrin of the attendees. We stayed, out of courtesy to the other two authors, and heard them read:

Francine Prose - Goldengrove, A Novel

Patrick McGrath (pronounced like "McGraw") - Trauma: A Novel

= = = = = =

"Words Matter"

Mim Harrison - Smart Words

Ammon Shea - Reading the OED

Paul Yaeger - Literally, the Best Language Book Ever

(Check out Harrison's blog)

Mim Harrison thinks that Americans are smarter than they sound. She loves words (here's one: epeolatry, the worship of words) and believes that we should endeavor to use more variety in our vocabulary. She's not advocating sesquipedalianism, not altogether anyway. Some shorter words meet her criteria as interesting words that she'd like to hear more of; two examples she gave were "pelf" and "screed." Her book is a collection of 500 words which, if we all learn them and use them, will make us sound smarter.

= = =

A riveting speaker, Ammon Shea spoke "in defense of non-narrative prose," pointing out that Jean Cocteau once said, "The greatest masterpiece in literature is just a dictionary out of order."

Shea did indeed read the entire Oxford English Dictionary (21,730 pages). He warmed up for the task by reading Webster's 2nd Edition, a book which he liked so much that he proceeded immediately to read Webster's 3rd edition. He was fascinated by the discovery that those two works were so dissimilar. In 27 years, the number of words went from 625,000 to 450,000, and the definitions, he says, also underwent a significant renovation. I'll take his word for it, for now.

On to the joys of the OED. This work contains about 2.5 million quotations to illustrate the meaning and usage of various words, so that "opens it up" as film directors like to say when they make a play into a movie. Shea testified to the emotional content of the dictionary, inviting us to contemplate the idea that a word can create a feeling, can call up a memory, and the memory of the word can affect the way you view the world. Good example: "petrochlor - the smell of rain when it first hits the earth." That is bound to get an emotional response from you and you will think of it next time you are in a position to smell your freshly-rained-upon lawn. Since you probably didn't know that word before, it also illustrates another point, that if you only go to the dictionary to look up the spelling or definition of a word you already know, you are missing out on a world of possibilities--great words you might never know. Here are some:

bouffage - a good meal

bayard - (a person with) the self-confidence of the ignorant

scrouge - to stand uncomfortably close to a person

Shea said that he was not allowed to watch television as a child and his parents explained to him that reading was a more active pastime which would use and develop his imagination. He found that to be true, and says now that if reading a novel, play or essay uses your imagination, fires up the neurons and activates your brain, reading the dictionary does it even more, because you have to bring more of yourself to the task. As he travels around, people often jokingly ask what will he read next, the telephone book? the railroad schedules? and he said he used to be somewhat offended by that sort of inquiry; after all, the Oxford English Dictionary is hardly to be compared to the telephone book. But as time went on, he met people who did read, for example, railroad schedules, and he came to see that there is value in that as well--if you picture the places you are reading about, imagine yourself going there, making the connections, and so on. He says he has respect for people who derive enjoyment from that.

I have always liked "reading" through the Atlas, and I suppose that is an extreme example of "non-narrative prose."

I'm pretty sure, from listening to him and observing his behavior, that Shea has some mild form of autism, like Asbergers Syndrome or something, that puts him out of the normal range of human psychology (ditto for his readers who sit by the fire with the railroad schedules night after night). I'm very glad that he is able to share his experiences by writing this book and speaking at the book fair. Hooray for (us) abnormals, I say! I loved one particular thing he said about reading the dictionary, which really applies to any reading experience. He said that it "makes us avoid the actual world while at the same time feeling more a part of it than ever."

= = =

The person who introduced Paul Yaeger said, "As a child, he was annoyed by the term 'the three R's' to refer to Reading, Writing and Arithmetic."

Yaeger continues to be annoyed by the misuse of the English language. A meterologist by education, he is irritated in the extreme by the overuse of prepositions on the part of television weathercasters (A cold front is moving "up into the region," or even, absurdly, "on over into the state").

"It goes without saying" that he really hates THAT phrase.

He is on a crusade against the trendy and its flip side, the trite.

Yaeger has a blog, too. He also recommends this group effort language blog whose contributors include Geoffrey Nunberg, one of my favorite linguistics experts.

Saturday night: Ladies and Gentlemen: The Rock Bottom Remainders:

I've never seen so many band members on stage at the same time. I didn't get an absolutely complete list, but here is the general lineup:

Mitch Albom
Dave Barry
Sam Barry
Richard Belzer
Roy Blount, Jr.
Kathy Goldmark
Matt Groening
Vicki Hendricks
Carl Hiaasen
Frank McCourt
Ridley Pearson
Jenine Sabino
Amy Tan
Scott Turow
Steve Watts

The Remainders kicked off with their classic opening song: "If the House is a-Rockin' Don't Come Knockin'."

Mitch Albom did an Elvis imitation. I'll say no more about that.

Amy Tan performed lead vocals on "My Boyfriend's Back" while the backup vocals and instrumentals accompanied in a variety of keys. Most of the time Dave did tell everybody what key the number would be in, but for that one song, apparently the information wasn't entirely disseminated. Oops. Amy apologized and said they hadn't had time to rehearse it. Dave just laughed at her (and himself, and the rest of them--and maybe at us, too, for listening to it.)

Frank McCourt played harmonica and performed vocals on a rousing version of "Don't Fence Me In" and then later did an encore with the Beatles' "I Should Have Known Better."

The band didn't leave out their standards, "I'm in Love With a Proofreading Woman" and Kathy Goldmark's composition, "The Slut Song."

Sam Barry's rendition of the gospel tune "It's Nobody's Fault but Mine" is a favorite of mine and a reminder that the Barry brothers share the burden of having grown up as "preacher's kids." They have my sympathy on that score.

Joining the band at various times were Dave's wife, Michelle Kaufman, and their daughter Sophie (singing "La Bamba" with mucho gusto) and the fiancee of Rob Barry, Laura Schweitzer. Laura's sparkly diamond ring was visible to the back rows as she belted out "I Love Rock and Roll" -- she's gonna fit right in at the Barry house.

Sunday, November 16, 2008

Any friend of Cesar Chavez is a friend of mine.

Peter Matthiessen: his new novel is called Shadow Country. It has been criticized as a rehash of a trio of novels previously published, but he said he spent seven years completely reworking the story, which was originally written as a single book. The problem was that the original book was 1,300 pages long and it frightened the publisher, who insisted on breaking it up into three separate novels. Matthiessen wasn't satisfied with the result and now he thinks the final project (at 900 pages) is much better. The committee for the National Book Award agrees; it's on their short list for the soon-to-be-announced 2008 prize.

I was not familiar with Matthiessen's work before but he has been an activist and envionmentalist for a very long time. He's working on global warming issues relating to native people and polar bears. He also advocates for other native American issues, and would like us to join him in pressing for the release from prison of Leonard Peltier. Peltier has been locked up for 32 years; everyone else who was convicted in the 1975 Pine Ridge Reservation incident has been released. It wouldn't be far-fetched to consider Peltier a political prisoner. Even the judge who sentenced him is in favor of releasing him at this point.

When asked during Q&A what can we do about global warming, Matthiessen replied, "I like to think we can all do something. Cesar Chavez, who was the greatest man I ever met, used to say that instead of sitting back and saying 'what can one person do' if everybody did something, no matter how small it might be, we could turn any situation around, eliminate injustice, poverty, pollution, whatever."

After expressing his admiration for Chavez, Matthiessen declared that his "prime enemy in life" is Exxon-Mobil, noting among other things that "they have never paid a cent" in damages relating to the Exxon Valdez disaster.

Then someone asked what his next project would be and Matthiessen said, "Well, it's been 30 years since I cleaned my office, I'm starting on that now." He is also "taking notes" for a new novel but says that at 81 years old he isn't planning any more heavily researched nonfiction projects, because "time is not on my side."

* * * * *

Roy Blount, Jr. -- another word lover: "My mother didn't breastfeed me. I forgive her. Instead of mother's milk, she gave me words."

Blount's book, Alphabet Juice, the Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words, and Combinations Thereof, is a different approach to language. He emphasizes the relation between the way we say a word, and its meaning, for example the word "through" -- your tongue starts at the front of your mouth and travels towards the back, while your lips form a kind of tunnel opening shape. "Piss" - just the opposite, your lips start tightly closed and then they part and out streams air, at first quickly and then more slowly and then it stops. The book is filled with observations of a similarly off-beat type; it's a celebration of Blount's delight in language.

Roy Blount story: Barack Obama was a guest on "Wait, Wait, Don't tell Me" before he was a candidate. He talked about being a senator and how he was surprised to find that each senator has his own desk on the Senate floor--also that previous senators had carved their initials into the wood of the desks the way school children sometimes do. Asked whether he would follow the tradition, Obama replied that in view of the fact that he was the only African American senator, he was thinking of using spray paint, instead.

We later ran into Blount in line for crepes, and I took the opportunity to express my appreciation for his performance with the Rock Bottom Remainders. In point of fact, his rendition of "Oh, Boy" was one of the best numbers they did and the one that stuck in my head the next day. He was rather sheepish and said he thought the band had more fun than the audience did, and that he appreciated "being indulged." He agreed with my expressed opinion that the crepes were the best food available at the book fair. (Most of the other choices involved deep frying or sausage, or both.)

One of the fun parts of Roy Blount's presentation was seeing Carl Hiaasen, who shared the stage with him, crack up listening to Roy's stories. The same was true of the Frank McCourt/Dave Barry pairing. Dave was about to fall off his chair at several points. I did not take notes at that event. Dave discussed his book The History of the Millennium (So Far) and later he autographed my copy of it--this is the first personalized Dave Barry book I've ever had, after all these years. Frank McCourt signed my Achenblog Bookbag so now it has four signatures -- quality, not quantity, is what I'm going for.

Carl talked about his golf book, The Downhill Lie, a Hacker's Return to a Ruinous Sport which I have discussed elsewhere. He told all the goriest stories from the book and someone got up afterward and said, "I just want to thank you for your presentation. I've been trying to lose weight, and after those stories (the rats, the toads) I'm going to find it easy to skip lunch today."

* * * * *

What we didn't see:

Salmon Rushdie
George Hamilton
Michael Cunningham
Wally Lamb
The International Pavilion
The Comix Gallery
Art Spiegelman
Jim Morin
Linda Gassenheimer
Sister Souljah
Senator Mel Martinez
Scott McClellan
Russell Banks
The Write Out Loud Cafe
Alan Cheuse

and hundreds of other people and events...

...and, believe it or not, I didn't buy as many books as I had planned. Because I didn't really have time to shop. But we did have a great time.

Aside from the book fair itself, we did a little sightseeing around Miami. Saturday night we sauntered around Bayside Mall and ended up having dinner at the same Cuban restaurant we patronized last year. It's authentic Cuban food at a reasonable price; why go elsewhere?

We stayed in Miami Beach, at a very funky hotel called The Whitelaw. On Sunday afternoon we hopped on the local shuttle bus - for 25 cents you can tour South Beach. We debarked at Lincoln Road and walked up and down the pedestrian mall there.

I went for a run on the beach both mornings we were there. Miami Beach has a great boardwalk, mostly well away from the street traffic. The weather was hot on Saturday but cooler on Sunday--clear blue skies and gentle breezes, nothing at all to complain about.

I meant to take more pictures, but this is all I ended up with--and at least one of these is Seasea's; on Sunday night I commandeered her camera and downloaded everything she had onto my laptop. Did not even give her a chance to refuse. (Thank you, Seasea--and thanks also for coming all the way to the other corner of the country to share the Miami Book Fair with me.)

Link to photos

Sanibel Island

2008-09-14T19:58:00.005-05:00

We have just returned from a weeklong vacation on Sanibel Island, a small island off the west coast of Florida, near Fort Myers. Sanibel is a good example of how development can coexist with nature. The island is a protected habitat area and building is strictly regulated. We rode bikes, walked the beach, swam, and relaxed (I had time to work a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle! I was very happy.) I have uploaded some of our photos to my Photobucket site; unfortunately I haven't figured out how to put them in order, and my time has run out for figuring out this computer stuff tonight. So here is a link to the random photos--if I have a chance, I'll reorganize them later. (This sounds just like the way I always used to handle printed photos...)

Some of the pictures are from Everglades City/Chokoloskee Island; we stopped by there on the way to Sanibel. Everglades City is legendary as a smuggler's haven. In the 1980's, illegal drugs were the backbone of the town's economy. In 1983, the DEA staged a massive raid on the little town, arresting nearly every adult male they found (200 people went to jail.) We didn't find any evidence of that history when we drove through; instead we toured a historic general store and enjoyed placid scenic vistas of Florida Bay.

On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan

2008-07-13T16:38:00.006-05:00

Ian McEwan, in this compact novel, has taken a microscopic look at one evening in the life of two young people, their wedding night. It's impressive how he can maintain the concentration necessary to enumerate the minute emotional details of each of his characters.

McEwan's genius is the ability to define a pivotal event, a moment in time when everything changes. If one person had said one word differently or turned to the right instead of to the left, the rest of time would be altered for everybody forever. He is able to make the reader think that his characters' fates are important, and to let us see the crisis looming ever closer and keep hoping it will turn out for the best--but in McEwan's books, it rarely does.

The suspense in On Chesil Beach is what will transpire when the two protagonists, both virgins, share the experience of their initial sexual encounter. They have very different points of view. The novel is exquisitely detailed in exploring their two viewpoints and making it clear to the reader that the two of them have no insight into each other's thoughts. Their culture discourages them from frank discussions so instead of telling each other about their hopes and fears, they just think to themselves, and the tension builds.

I won't reveal how the story unfolds, but it's not too much of a spoiler to say there's no happy ending--it is pretty obvious from the beginning that unless some miracle occurs these two hopelessly unprepared people with their ridiculous expectations and paralyzing anxieties are bound to misunderstand each other, and destined to hurt each other. A sense of humor might save them, but there is no evidence either has one.

This subject has been treated before but I've never seen it done so explicitly and with such literary skill. The main literary device is the beach as a metaphor. This particular beach where they are planning to spend their honeymoon has the peculiar quality of having pebbles of graduated size--"...thousands of years of pounding storms had sifted and graded the size of pebbles along the eighteen miles of beach, with the bigger stones at the eastern end. The legend was that local fishermen landing at night knew exactly where they were by the grade of shingle." (p.23) The newlyweds picture themselves walking along the beach, observing scientifically, testing the truth of the guidebook that tells the story of the pebbles. That could be their life together, a shared progress through the years, steadily becoming older and more comfortable, growing in wisdom and prosperity, having children, weathering the inevitable storms and becoming stronger for it. That would be the natural outcome of their wedding. Because they are not comfortable with nature, their fate is something else.

Downhill Lie: A Hacker's Return to a Ruinous Sport, by Carl Hiaasen

2008-06-24T20:31:00.005-05:00

You might think that the only thing more boring than golf is a book about golf. Especially a book about golf written by a person who isn't good at golf and doesn't even like the game that much. But if the author of the book is Carl Hiaasen, that creates a glimmer of hope that the book just might be somewhat entertaining.

Even though much of the book is a stroke by stroke account of one depressing golf game after another, documenting his lack of progress and his frustration therewith, Hiassen does intersperse some amusing anecdotes and even manages to wedge in some political commentary:

"It's sobering to contemplate how many bribes have been negotiated in this country during casual rounds of golf. there ought to be a law that anytime a politician and a lobbyist tee off together, the foursome must be rounded out by two FBI agents." (p.119)

What really makes this book worthwhile is its personal tone. Parts of it are presented as actual journal entries, and the overall tone is confessional, full of dramatized self-loathing and Eeyore-like pessimism, made funny with literary skill. Hiaasen's attempts at improving his golf game are also a source of humor--he'll try anything, from a magical pendant to attention-focusing pills (which he keeps misplacing and forgetting to take). He also spends big bucks on books, equipment and lessons, but mostly what he learns is, "when you suck, you suck."

Though he is no big threat on the golf course, scoring-wise, Hiaasen is something of a hazard to wildlife, ironically so, considering his reputation as a nature-lover. He uses his nine-iron to loft bufo toads out of his friend's yard into the neighbor's yard. When rats chew the wiring in his car, he clobbers the whole rat family in its nest with a specially weighted training club. The turtles he beans with errant balls are more in the category of collateral damage, but I still was surprised at his lack of remorse, in light of the venom he has unleashed in his books about habitat destroyers of all kinds.

I've read most of Hiaasen's books and newspaper columns. I have wondered what he is like in real life. This book partly answers the question. Apparently, he is a loner who loves his family. A perfectionist who accepts his limitations. He would be more of a curmudgeon if not for his wife and young son, who keep reminding him that there is fun to be had, and his mother, who keeps him emotionally honest. I predict that he will continue to play golf, even if it continues to make him suffer.

God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible, by Adam Nicolson

2008-06-23T19:36:00.002-05:00

I have used the Revised Standard Version of the Bible all my life and memorized my Bible verses out of it when I was a child. My only experience with the King James Bible was that we had a big "family Bible" that sat on our coffee table, and occasionally I would leaf through it. It was pretty, but hard to read, both because of the typeface and because of the vocabulary. I was taught that the KJV was an inferior translation because it was derived from earlier translations instead of the Latin and Greek texts. This is the prejudice I held when I picked up God's Secretaries to read the tale of how the King James Bible came to be.

Needless to say, I am less ignorant now that I have read Nicolson's book. The King James Bible did draw on previous versions, but it was put together by a large group of eminent scholars, and they did have the Greek and Hebrew texts as well as the earlier English Bibles. The author does an adequate job of listing and describing many of the people who were involved in the translation that King James commissioned, but there were so many of them that they didn't really have a chance to emerge as individuals in the course of the narrative. I will try to remember that William Tyndale, who produced one of the earlier versions of the Bible upon which the King James version was based, was executed as a heretic before he even finished his translation. I always want to remain cognizant of the blood on the pages of religious history because I believe it is one of our main tasks to be vigilant and steer away from any tendency towards persecution or judgment.

What I like best about God's Secretaries is Nicolson's characterization of the King James Bible itself. He obviously holds it in reverence, and he is not reticent about singing its praises. I came away with a new appreciation for theliterary value of this Bible. Numerous examples show passages where the KJV has words carefully chosen for effect, for the rhythm and the majesty of the language. The aim was not just to convey meaning, but to set a tone of authority and grandeur. One of the methods the committee used was that they chose words that carried more than one meaning. This is the Bible as literature, which is appropriate because themessage it seeks to convey is not a simplistic one.Here is Nicolson extolling the virtues of the King James Bible, in contrast to a more recent translation:

"...The modern world had lost the thing which informs every act and gesture of...the King James Bible...: a sense of encompassing richness which stretches unbroken from the divine to the sculptural, from thology to cushions, from a sense of the beautyof the created world to the extraordinary capabilities of language to embody it.

"This is about more than mere sonority or the beeswaxed heritage-appeal of antique vocabulary and grammar. The flattening of language is a flattening of meaning. Language which is not taut with a sense of its own significance, which is apologetic in its desire to be acceptable to a modern consciousness, language in other words which submits to its audience, rather than instructing, informing, moving, challenging and even entertaining them, is no longer a language which can carry the freight the Bible requires. It has, in short, lost all authority. The language of the King James Bible is the language...of patriarchy, of an instructed order, of richness as a form of beauty, of authority as a form of good; the New English Bible is motivated by the opposite, an anxiety not to bore or intimidate. It is driven, in other words, by the desire to please and, in that way, is a formof language which has died." (p. 154)

I would have preferred that Nicolson include more specific examples of the translation process, discussing the reasons why the specific words were chosen, including the discussions and arguments. He does have some documentation for that level of detail. Instead he spent more time on the general history of England in the early 17th century, which was too complex to be adequately covered in this limited book. Still, it's a good beginning and I look forward to learning more about the period,when the opportunity arises.

Adventures in Transportation

2008-06-14T18:51:00.003-05:00

With my daughter (D) home from college, we have three adults, a van, a car and a bicycle. We all got to where we needed to go this week and here's how it went:

Monday morning, my bike developed a flat tire en route to work. I rode it the last mile on just the tire, no air—this is possible because I have heavy duty tubes and fat tires. Possible, but not recommended. I got to work on time, though. In the afternoon, D picked me and the bicycle up with the van and drove me home. I went to Walmart to buy a tube for the flat tire, but they didn't have any so I drove to the bike shop and bought a premium, puncture-proof tube. Came home and fixed the flat.

On Tuesday, I got on the bike to ride to work, but the wheel was not adjusted correctly and I didn't have time to fix it. My husband (R) gave me a ride to work, I got there on time. I planned to take the bus – actually, two buses -- home. I went to catch the first bus at the end of the day and found that my regular bus stop has been eliminated. I walked a mile and a half (in the rain) to where the second bus could pick me up. When I put my dollar in, driver said the fare is $1.25 now. So it's a good thing I missed that first bus because I only had $2.00. I got home, dried off and changed my clothes. Then I got a phone call from D to tell me the car she had driven to work was not running right, something about the transmission, apparently. I took the van to where the car was, added transmission fluid, and tried to drive it, but it was really bad. I drove in second gear to the garage, left it there and walked home. D drove the van home. That evening, I fixed the bike so it would be sure to be ready to go next day.

Wednesday morning, I called the garage. They said the car needed a new transmission. After discussion we agreed they would install a rebuilt transmission and a new clutch. I bicycled to work; D used the van to get to her job; R worked at home. Wednesday afternoon, I bicycled to the garage, put the bike in the trunk, and drove home.

Thursday, I rode the bike to and from work without incident. D used the car to get to her job. R used the van for his purposes; all systems were normal.

Friday: TGIF! D called me at work at 1 p.m. - R was at the pool and had locked his keys in the van. D was at the house and didn't have a key to the van. I described where my copy of the key was hidden at the house, and explained that the key is a copy and might not work right away (R couldn't make it work last time but I used it to start the van after he gave up on it). D drove the car to the pool, R unlocked the van and drove home.

On Saturday morning, I drove R to the airport so he could catch a plane to visit his older daughter.

We are all hoping that our transportation situation is a little less eventful in the immediate future.

Some Sights from my Commute

2008-06-01T08:27:00.012-05:00

Here's a tree I pass every day on my commute--it's a great example of an interesting species. It used to be a palm tree, but a fig seed germinated in the top of the palm tree, grew roots and tendrils that surrounded the palm tree, then proceeded to grow branches and take over, but the palm tree is still alive in there; you can see the fronds reaching up for their needed sunlight, out of the middle of the strangler fig.

After I pass the strangler fig, I am in an upscale neighborhood, home to rich people who keep their lawns nice and live in old, overpriced homes, not McMansions. This one house sticks out like a sore thumb, not because the inhabitants are Republicans--I'm sure that's common in these parts--but because they are radical and tacky about it. Their yard is surrounded by a high wall with a locked iron gate. Their flagpole flies the American flag, the Republican Party flag, the Confederate flag, and a pirate flag. Their vehicles are covered in bumper stickers, which leave no doubt about their ideological leanings:

Fairness Doctrine (circle/slash) IT'S NOT FAIR - IT'S COMMUNISM
Picture of Hillary Clinton (circle/slash)
HRC (circle/slash)
ANNOY A LIBERAL: WORK HARD AND SMILE
I'LL GIVE UP MY SUV...WHEN AL GORE GIVES UP HIS PRIVATE JET
(Peace Sign) : FOOTPRINT OF THE AMERICAN CHICKEN
NEWT 2008
NEWT 08
I (HEART) HALLIBURTON
SAVE THE SEALS--CLUB A LIBERAL
(PICTURE OF AN ELEPHANT PEEING ON THE WORD "LIBERALS")
USA LIBERAL HUNTING LICENSE

I've never met these people, but if I ever do, I have something to tell them: It doesn't annoy me if you work hard and smile. Your bumper stickers amuse me. However, I do find it somewhat irritating that you are BLOCKING THE BICYCLE LANE with your big ol' truck:

People Do Want To Fly

2008-05-15T10:10:00.010-05:00

Everybody thinks about it; most people dream about it; some people make it happen for themselves.

Gennai Yanagisawa, 75, of Japan, developed the world's smallest helicopter in the 1990's, and he's planning to fly one over Leonardo da Vinci's hometown.

Meanwhile, Mubarak Muhammed Abdullahi, a Nigerian physics student, built himself a helicopter out of scrap metal and the engine from a Honda Civic.

Helicopters are too tame for fighter pilot Yves Rossy; he has a personal jetpack, like Buck Rogers.

I wish these people well. I understand they are expressing a human trait--three men from three different continents, driven by a desire to defy gravity and soar through the sky. I don't envy them; I'm happy to observe from down below, with my feet on the ground.

What is the What, by Dave Eggers

2008-04-26T16:34:00.003-05:00

I'm really late reading this book. I meant to read it when it first came out, but partly because I had been disappointed by Eggers's book You Shall Will Know Our Velocity!, I hesitated to invest in What is the What. I have a great deal of admiration for Dave Eggers, however. His first book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, really was. So when I saw this book on sale on the used book table for fifty cents, I grabbed it and I'm glad I did.

What is the What is the story of one of the Lost Boys of Sudan, Valentino Achak Deng. He's not a hero or a superstar, but he is a survivor and that makes him a riveting subject of this book. Eggers writes the story but it is Deng's life. The honesty comes through and the raw nature of the input, but Eggers adds literary value, the flow of the story and a graceful vocabulary. The Scotland Sunday Herald calls it "a stunning act of symbiotic literary ventriloquism."

The life in question should make any citizen of the industrialized west grateful for our blessings. Violence, deprivation, and displacement add up to a kind of poverty that is hard for us to imagine. Here's an example: After walking all the way across Sudan, a group of boys nears the refugee camp in Ethiopia. At the last village before they cross the river to Ethiopia, some of them, thinking they will be provided for in the refugee camp, trade their clothes for food. As a result, there are boys who remain naked for six months, until a shipment of clothing makes it to the camp. That's a level of poverty I rarely contemplate.

Deng eventually makes it to America but it isn't paradise and he needs all his resourcefulness and persistence to survive here as well.

Here's the story of the title:

"My father stood and began, telling the story the way he always told it.
"--When God created the earth, he first made us, the monyjang. Yes, first he made the monyjang, the first man, and he made him the tallest and strongest of the people under the sky...
"Yes, God made the monyjang tall and strong, and he made their women beautiful, more beautiful than any of the creatures on the land...
"...and whan God was done, and the monyjang were standing on the earth waiting for insturction, God asked the man, 'Now that you are here, on the most sacred and fertile land I have, I can give you one more thing. I can give you this creature, which is called the cow...'
"...God showed man the idea of the cattle, and the cattle were magnificent. They were in every way exactly what the monyjang would want. the man and woman thanked God for such a gift, because they knew that the cattle would bring them milk and meat and prosperity of every king. But God was not finished.
"...God said, 'You can either have these cattle, as my gift to you, or you can have the What.'
"But...Sadiq said, helping out, --What is the What? he said, with an air of theatrical inquisitiveness.
"...Yes, yes. That was the question. So the first man lifted his head to God and asked what this was, this What. 'What is the What?' the first man asked. And God said to the man, 'I cannot tell you. Still, you have to choose. You have to choose between the cattle and the What.' Well then. the man and the woman could see the cattle right there in front of them, and they knew that wth cattle they would eat and live with great contentment. They could see the cattle were God's most perfect creation, and that the cattle carried somethng godlike within themselves. They knew that they would live in peace with the cattle, and that if they helped the cattle eat and drink, the cattle would give man their milk, would multiply every year and keep the monyjang happy and healthy. So the first man and woman knew they would be fools to pass up the cattle for this idea of the What. So the man chose cattle. And God has proven that this was the correct decision. God was testing the man. He was testing the man, to see if he could appreciate what he had been given, if he could take pleasure in the bounty before him, rather than trade it for the unknown. And because the first man was able to see this, God has allowed us to prosper. The Dinka live and grow as the cattle live and grow.
"The grinning man tilted his head.
"--Yes, but uncle Deng, may I ask something?
"My father, noting the man's good manners, sat down and nodded.
"--You didn't tell us the answer: What is the What?
"My father shrugged. --We don't know. No one knows."

Read more about the real-life Valentino and his projects to promote education in Africa at his website.

Shenandoah Hike

2008-03-14T10:34:00.014-05:00

The wilderness phase of my mid-life crisis adventure is concluded, and I think it's fair to say it went entirely according to plan. Not Plan A or Plan B or even Plan C, but nothing was completely unforeseen; everything that happened had been prepared for in advance.

My original plan was to backpack the entire length of Shenandoah National Park, following the Appalachian Trail--115 miles--in seven days. I have no excuse for the insane optimism reflected in that estimation of my abilities. Just take into consideration that I have lived in Florida since 1980, and "mountain" has become a rather abstract concept to me. (Although I have actual memories of hiking up mountains in the Rockies and other places.) Somehow I thought the fact that I could walk 20 miles in 6.5 hours in Florida would translate into being able to cover 20 miles a day on the Shenandoah trip. "I'll have nothing to do all day but hike! In twelve hours, surely I can do that." It was obvious from the morning of the second day that it was completely out of the question, so I readjusted my plan, completely stopped worrying about mileage at all, and just hiked every day as far as I felt like going. In the end, I covered about 50 miles in 5 days, had a great time and made memories to keep for a lifetime.

But I'm getting ahead of the story--day one of the trip deserves attention, as it was the most dramatic of all.

I left Fort Lauderdale early in the morning, March 8, hoping to land in Charlottesville at 10:30 a.m. Weather-delayed flights resulted in my not arriving there until 1:45. Rodney from Mountain and Valley Shuttle Service was there to meet me and had brought the fuel for my stove that I wasn't able to bring on the plane. He whisked me off to the park and dropped me off at Rockfish Gap at 3:00. As we pulled up to the parking area, it was raining lightly and there was some snow mixed in, just occasional flurries. I put on my rain jacket but didn't take the time to put on rain pants, as that would require taking off my boots and I was eager to get going. Here's the beginning of the trail:

As I crossed the pedestrian walkway over the highway I looked at the horizon and saw a rainbow--the original good omen, and to say I was in good spirits at that point would be a gross understatement. In fact, I was euphoric, and I set off down the trail determined to go as far as I could before darkness forced me to set up camp.

It was cold--in the 30s--but I was comfortable hiking. I passed several small streams and considered stopping for water but didn't--at that point they seemed to be occurring frequently. About 6:00, circumstances started to converge in a dramatic way. The temperature dropped into the 20s, the wind picked up sharply, and it started to get dark. I had to cross Skyline Drive at Beagle Gap, where there are open areas on both sides of the road. In those unprotected areas the wind was blowing so hard that it literally stopped me in my tracks at times (with the pack on, I resembled a sail more than my normal profile would), and other times I turned sideways to present a smaller cross section, otherwise I would have been blown over. It was so cold my whole face was numb, and my euphoria was replaced with real, justified concern. This was a situation where good judgment was necessary, and nobody was going to help me--nobody knew I was there. I headed for the trees and stopped as soon as I found a marginally acceptable spot. I regretted not having water but that was a secondary consideration. I put up the tent, got all the necessities inside, secured my pack and crawled in for the night. It was dark, 7:00, and it was 23 degrees F. I stayed pretty warm all night, but didn't sleep much. The campsite was on a slope so I was sliding downhill all night, but this was Camp Desperation and I was glad to have met my first challenge so successfully.

Oh, did I mention, I climbed a mountain that day?

Day two, I woke up at first light - 6 a.m., Eastern Standard Time. That's right: even though the U.S. officially started Daylight Savings Time, I opted out. For the duration of my trip I had my own personal time zone. Now that is power.

I was packed and on the trail by 6:40--enthusiastic about reaching Calf Mountain Shelter, where there would be water, a shelter and a picnic table. Just had to climb one mountain to get to it--no, sorry, two mountains, Scott and Calf Mountain. I am going to stop naming every mountain after this, and just tell you now that the trip took me to or near the top of about a dozen mountains and that does not represent the amount of up and down--there are a lot of big uphills that aren't mountains.

The hike to Calf Mountain shelter convinced me thoroughly that I did not have the speed necessary to make the big mileage. And my night with no water convinced me that it was worth the weight to carry a day's supply--after that I always filled up my two one-liter bottles whenever I came to a spring.

I left the shelter determined to "hike until dark" but--

Journal Entry:

...Well, here it is 2:00 p.m. and I have changed my mind, am reevaluating this whole forced-march expedition. Factors: warm sunny weather makes hanging around in camp more attractive (2) mucho pain in shoulders and back from carrying the backpack is making hiking less fun. (3) Found a really nice campsite among the rhododendrons--it's LEVEL unlike last night's hillside bivouac.

So I'm stopped for the night, about to eat some Mountain House scrambled eggs and then read my book for a while.

My shoulders are saying "THANK YOU, THANK YOU"

The next four days went about the same. I enjoyed the hiking and scenery, while dealing with the shoulder pain, which sometimes seemed to be getting better, but never went away. I saw very few people--about seven altogether, all of whom appeared to be spring breakers (guys) except one guy with two dogs who seemed to be local.

On my way down from Hightop Mountain, I met two guys and asked one of them to take my picture--this is not a portrait, just photojournalism, documenting the facts. No primping, no posing.

On Wednesday, my 50th birthday and the main inspiration for the trip, I stood out on a ridge and watched the sun go down, stood there in the silence of the woods until the red gradually faded from the sky and the stars came out one by one. The moon was a little more than a quarter, very bright. I felt perfectly calm and happy.

When I went to bed that night, though, my right calf cramped up with the mother of all charley horses--I've had muscle cramps before but this was in a whole new league. I spent the entire night lying there talking to my leg. I knew it wasn't broken or damaged, just tensed. Some nerve had been overstimulated and reacted by contracting the muscle; it was like the hiccups, only continual.

I had planned to hike one more day and then catch a ride out, but this new development required another plan revision. So I got up Thursday morning, limped down to the highway, and got a ride into town with a nice French Canadian couple. The scenery was gorgeous.

Front Royal is a great town. I got dropped off at the town limits and hiked over to the post office, where my civilization luggage was in General Delivery waiting for me. I made the transition, using the same box to mail my camping gear home. Then took a taxi to a motel, and I was officially back in the world. Time to spring forward.

Two final observations in general about backpacking in Shenandoah National Park:

(1)This was my second time hiking the AT in the park but my first time experiencing Skyline Drive by car and I was surprised to find that the views from the road are about a hundred times better than the views from the trail. So scenery shouldn't be a motivating factor.

(2) The best reason to backpack to a place is that there is no other way to get to it. Our Colorado backpacking trips were always like that. When we got out there, the only people we would meet were other backpackers. In Shenandoah, you can hike 50 miles, arrive at a destination, and meet up with people who walked 100 yards from the highway to get there. That opens up a much wider demographic. This is why I did both my Shenandoah hikes in the off-season--my first one started on Christmas Day 1977.

Postscript:

As you read this narrative, there is one burning question you should have been asking yourself: "What book did you take?" And I have a great answer for you. I took Proust. Swann's Way, the classic translation by C.K. Scott Moncrieff. The reason I took it was that the first section totally captivated me, made me a Proust convert, had me saying that from now on, I'm only reading Remembrance of Things Past, I don't need any other books. That was the section about his early childhood. Unfortunately, the whole middle part of the book is an endless, tedious, repetitious account of friend-of-the-family Charles Swann's obsession with his fickle and heartless mistress. It has its merits but is by no means equal to the promise of the opening pages. By page 50 the narrative opens up more and has some amusing character descriptions. I will certainly continue reading Proust's great work, which is, I believe, seven volumes long.

Interesting that I was reading Proust all week and then the first conversation I had upon reentry into civilization was in French. A surreal touch.

This entry was drafted at Computer Medical Center in Front Royal. The people here are very nice and the use of the computer terminal with internet access is FREE. Did I mention that I love Front Royal?!?!

Falling Man, by Don DeLillo

2008-02-21T22:09:00.003-05:00

This is the second book in a row that I read because of its cover. Falling Man, by Don DeLillo has an exquisitely designed jacket. The front of the book is a view of clouds from above, with a blue but nonetheless ominous horizon in the distance. Between the two words of the title, two thin vertical lines reach from the clouds up to near the top of the book. Extended above the lines, the words "A Novel" are printed vertically, in white. The words read top to bottom, so they appear to be falling from the sky towards the cloud floor. All this is interesting, but the clincher is not visible until you turn the book over. On the back, the cloudscape continues but in the midst of it, the tops of the twin towers are emerging. No other buildings are visible, just clouds all around, to the horizon. It's a great picture and very evocative. All kinds of emotional states can come out of it: tranquility, suspense, wonder, dread.

The book itself is less perfect than its cover, inevitably. It represents, presumably, an attempt to summarize or sample the effects of the September 11 terrorist attacks on selected individuals in New York City. It's very jumpy and sketchy, so I didn't have much emotional connection with any of the characters. The best character isn't given any emotional life at all: the performance artist known as "The Falling Man" who throws himself off of buildings and hangs from cables, in the attitude of the man in the famous 9/11 photograph, falling headfirst, wearing a suit, representing all our worst fears, free fall, total loss of control, the terror of impending violent death. The artist takes control of the uncontrollable, defines the indefinable. But he dies, in the end, of heart failure, unrelated to his vocation. He wasn't in control, after all. Nobody is. I don't need a novel to tell me that.

People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks

2008-02-17T21:34:00.004-05:00

Last week I found myself at the bookstore, in spite of my resolution to read more library books in 2008. I was just killing time while waiting for someone, not planning to buy anything. But then I saw this book. The cover is very beautiful, a metalic gold and lapiz lazuli butterfly wing on a black background. The title is catchy--it's the phrase that the Qur'an uses to refer to people who are neither Muslims nor apostates; i.e., practicing Jews and faithful Christians. The subject matter includes many of my favorite topics: books, history, the interactions among different cultures. The author just won the Pulitzer Prize for her previous book.

All right, all right, I surrender. But I grabbed the book, took it to the checkout, bought it and fled the store, before I could come across any other irresistible finds.

Without going into a lot of detail, I will just say that the book lived up to expectations. The best thing I can say about it is that it went a long way towards healing the wounds inflicted on my soul by my reading of The Da Vinci Code. It's a kind of antidote for that terrible book--rational where Da Vinci is hysterical, historical where Da Vinci is fanciful, factual where DaVinci is, frankly, full of baloney.

People of the Book has some of the same tone and techniques as Dan Brown's opus, I have to admit: mystery and speculation, sex and violence, feminism and glimpses of cultures sure to seem barbaric to modern readers. But it's all pretty tastefully executed, exquisitely researched and detailed.

. . .

I read to the end, as is my custom. The Afterword supplies all the actual facts that the imaginative novel was based on or inspired by. I had to read the dust jacket to find out that Geraldine Brooks is married to Tony Horwitz, who is the author of one of my most-often recommended books, Blue Latitudes. That's just literary trivia, I guess, no real significance but fun to know.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

2008-02-03T20:30:00.000-05:00

The library had a whole display of books by and about Dr. King in honor of his holiday last week. I picked up one called A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. I've read some biographies before but never sat down to read extensively King's message in his own words. There's no more powerful way to experience his life, other than to see and hear him delivering the message in person or on film. Having 700 pages of his writings, though, it's more dense, you can see the repetition of the key themes, and the way he phrased the same idea differently over time.

Here's just a sample of how Dr. King thought:

". . . there is within human nature an amazing potential for goodness. There is within human nature somethin that can respond to goodness. I know somebody's liable to say that this is an unrealistic movement if it goes on believing that all people are good. Well, I didn't say that. I think the students are realistic enough to believe that there is a strange dichotomy of disturbing dualism within human nature. Many of the great philosophers and thinkers through the ages have seen this. It caused Ovid the Latin poet to say, "I see and approve the better things of life, but the evil things I do." It caused even Saint Augustine to say, "Lord, make me pure, but not yet." So that that is in human nature. Plato, centuries ago said that the human personality is like a charioteer with two headstrong horses, each wanting to go in different directions, so that within our own individual lives we see this conflict and certainly when we come to the collective life of man, we see a strange badness. But in spite of this there is something in human nature that can respond to goodness. So that man is neither innately good nor is he innately bad; he has potentialities for both. . . .

"And so the nonviolent resister never lets this idea go, that there is something within human nature that can respond to goodness."

========
Those are your reasonable words for today.
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Adventures in HTML

2008-01-23T21:39:00.000-05:00

On New Years Day I took a bunch of photos and wanted to create a little narrative with them--but Blogger isn't that good with pictures and captions. So I tried to make a slideshow to post on line. I have been working on it for almost three weeks and it still looks extremely amateurish, but I have learned a lot about sizing pictures and linking one file to another. I'm tired of working on it, frankly, ready to move on to the next project. So, here it is.

Weekend in Key West

2007-12-23T19:21:00.001-05:00

Friday morning, we were up before dawn for our drive to Key West. Richard drove his van with artwork to sell. Alice (Danielle) and I took my car. We had collaborated to create cd's for the trip so we had an interesting audio background while we watched the scenery and talked. Alice has been away at college since August, so we had no shortage of conversation topics.

As the sun was coming up, we were driving the Overseas Highway, which hops, skips and jumps the islands that make up the Florida Keys, until it reaches the End of the Road, Key West.

We made the trip with only a couple of short stops, to take pictures and buy sandals. We arrived at the Casa Marina Hotel before noon. Now, "The Casa" is arguably the finest hotel on the island. It was built in 1926 by Henry Flagler, and has been completely renovated in the past year. The property includes the most extensive private beach in Key West, two swimming pools, and all the amenities you would expect from a luxury resort. In short, it is not at all the type of place I would expect to find the Bertocci family. It is only because I happen to work for the company that owns this hotel, and they have an unbelievably low employee rate, that we can afford to stay in Key West at all. At regular prices, we can't even afford to stay at the youth hostel.

When we lived in Key West we used to make fun of the tourists who we saw looking out of the windows of the hotel--we thought they were stupid because they were in their rooms instead of out in the town, seeing the sights, soaking up the ambience. But now I have more sympathy for them. It is very seductive, the room, the balcony, the private beach, and so on. It's easy to let the time slip by and miss out on the chance to tour around the island.

We called a friend and went to lunch and then spent some time at the beach. By late afternoon we were ready to head to the Sunset Celebration. The week before Christmas is not an especially busy time for the Mallory Square artists and performers, and in fact many of the regulars were not working. We saw our old friend Jimmy Brogdon. He designs and makes glass jewelry that he sells at Mallory Square and at some shows around the country. This is something he began just a few years ago. His main career was as a professional photographer. He was the photographer at our wedding, and for several decades he took all the school pictures for the students at public schools in Key West.

Alice ran into some pirates at Sunset, and they invited her to be their date at the annual Cultural Preservation Society Christmas party later in the evening. We had already made plans to attend the party--in fact, I went to it last year, too. It's a great way to socialize with the sunset folks when they are not working and are all in the same place at the same time. We had a great time and came home at a reasonable hour.

Here's a romantic shot...

...and it's still pretty after the sun goes down, too.

Saturday, it was more of the same--visiting, sunning, touring around on our rental bikes. Saturday night the whole family had dinner at the New York Pizza Cafe--outside in the courtyard, with the parrots and the roosters. After dinner, Alice decided to see what the nightlife was like, so she set out at about 9:00 and wasn't heard from again until 3:30 a.m. Because she is not 21 yet, she had to use her diplomatic skills to gain admittance to the clubs downtown--working within strict constraints that preclude her from lying or using a fake ID. She was pretty successful. At the 801 Bar, she found her way to one of the owners of the bar, told him her story ("I'm 20, I don't drink, I just want to dance and see the show") and he escorted her to the upstairs room where the drag show was happening, introduced her to the bartender and waitresses: "She can't drink, don't sell her any alcohol." Alice also made friends with some of the performers and one of them drew a big martini glass on her upper arm with the circle and line through it:

After the drag show, she talked he way into a techno dance scene at Aqua and then...well, let's just say, she had a very good time, didn't do anything she couldn't tell her mom about, and got back safe. The 'rents, meanwhile, stayed in the room and watched The Wizard of Oz on television. We cried when Mrs. Gulch took Toto.

Sunday morning we got a late start, had brunch at Camille's, and drove back home with only two pit stops. Richard worked Saturday and Sunday mornings at Big Pine Flea Market and arrived home about an hour after we did.

Hope for the Future

2007-12-02T20:06:00.000-05:00

Today was a good day for feeling hopeful about the younger generation.

This morning, Fred Grimm had a story about how students rallied to help farm workers protest Burger King policies. (For some reason it's not uploaded to the Herald website, so I have reproduced it below.)

Then on NPR's Sunday morning show "Speaking of Faith," evangelical social activist Jim Wallis was talking about how he is well-received by students when he visits college campuses. He recently got a standing ovation at Wheaton College, where he was banned from appearing back in the Vietnam war era. He takes the long view, pointing out that Wheaton was founded by Jonathan Blanchard, a politically active abolitionist pastor. In that light, the swing to the political right that has characterized the American evangelical movement in recent years could be seen just as a temporary aberration, and Wallis is working to get it back on the right track. He said that he tells his young audiences about Jesus's "mission statement"--His first presentation in Nazareth, when He said, "I have come to preach good news to the poor," and Wallis says whatever gospel you are preaching, if it isn't good news for the poor, then you aren't in line with the Jesus of the Bible. Wallis is putting out an "email altar call"--which is to say, a call for a commitment, and he wants people to commit not just to a personal vision of salvation, but to a struggle for social justice. He is getting support from young people, if not from their parents.

The older I get, the more important it becomes to believe that young people have redeeming qualities. I appreciate the evidence I read and heard today.

Here is the article about student activists in Miami:

Good cause gives activism a new life
by Fred Grimm

(p. 1B Miami Herald 12/2/07)

The cacophonous throng of protesting farm workers weren't, most of them, farm workers.

Their faces betrayed them. Five miles into their march, they looked sweaty,sun burnt, affected by a long walk on a warm day through city streets. Clearly,these weren't folks who could spend 10 hours a day in Florida's tomato fields.

"Down with the king! Down with the king!" they chanted. They beat drums. They wore cardboard crowns. They held signs disparaging Burger King and marchedon the corporate headquarters to demand another penny-a-pound pay for Florida's tomato pickers.

But the Coalition of Immokalee Workers that marched through Miami-Dade Friday was, in fact, a coalition of a different kind.

The unsympathetic comments a number of readers attached to The Miami Herald's online version of the march story Friday demanded federal immigration cops scoop up the congregation and send them back en masse to whence they came.

The xenophobes would have been disappointed.

Thirteen kids had driven across the Everglades from Edison College in Naples. Fifteen down from Central Florida University in Orlando. Six more kids from Belen Jesuit Prep School in Sweetwater. Sarah Piper, 17, was among 13 students from Lely High School in Naples who defied their principal "and a few of our parents," skipped school and absconded to Miami. "We thought it was worth it," she said.

Four students drove down from Eckerd College St. Petersburg. Students from Florida International University and the University of Miami arrived by the busload. Youngsters from the United Church of Christ in Winter Park and Coral Gables Congregational Church joined up.

They were an unexpected sight for someone who had assumed that the term "student activist" had become an anachronism 30 years ago.

I had given up on the notion of student idealism after covering an anti-Iraq War rally at Florida Atlantic University in 2003. It was a gathering of gray heads. Hardly a student in sight.

But on a day when I expected so many farm workers of uncertain national origins, American students were out in force, full of determined talk about justice for immigrant workers at a time when immigrant workers have been reduced to political fodder.

I asked Edward Kring and Fabio Fina, both 23, both from Edison College: Weren't they supposed to be holed up in their dorm rooms embellishing their Facebook sites, playing online poker, blogging on the lyrics of Arctic Monkeys? Instead they marched nine miles. In person. Not an avatar in sight.

"We're supposed to be Generation Q, for quiet," said Fina. but he talked about a student activist revival "like in the 1960s."

So many idealistic fast-food consumers marching on Burger King must have looked a good deal more disconcerting to corporate execs than a bunch of hapless, Spanish-speaking, quite deportable farm workers.

Hundreds of energetic students had come to Miami-Dade in search of a righteous cause. And Burger King, determined to save a penny a pound, had given them just that.

The marchers headed down Northwest 20th Street, past a forbidding stretch of concertina-trimmed buildings and the custom motorcycle shop where Fabian Balbia was engrossed in a tangle of chrome pipes and gears.

"I didn't think much about this stuff until all those kids came by," Balbia said. "When I saw them, I knew it had to be a good cause."

Miami Book Fair III

2007-11-14T20:03:00.001-05:00

The sightseeing component of the event...

I was looking forward to this weekend for a long time. I welcomed the opportunity to extend it to three days. ML arrived Thursday night which meant that we had all day Friday to relax and poke around close to home, before heading to Miami on Saturday and Sunday.

We planned a leisurely day and didn't try to leave the house early.

Mr. Bertocci has been working on some paintings for the Fort Lauderdale Beach Resort and he wanted me to photograph them so we started there. The paintings are whimsical, colorful atmosphere creators for the pool area--parrots, manatees, monkeys and a Florida panther.

We walked over to the beach from there, passing Primanti Brothers' restaurant--ML was happy to see this familiar landmark that reminded her of her hometown--not Seattle, where she lives now, but Pittsburgh, where she grew up.

We walked along the shore for a while and then headed to Las Olas Riverfront.

No boat ride for ML and me--we are landlubbers. We strolled the riverside, then visited the library, including the art gallery on the 6th floor, and had fish sandwiches for lunch at the Ugly Tuna Cafe. Inside the cafe, a mural depicts anthropomorphic fish catching, cooking and eating people in a convivial fish restaurant. I was glad we chose to eat outside.

We went across the street, past the Performing Arts Center to the Museum of Science to meditate on the giant gravity clock. It's fun and somewhat mesmerizing to watch the balls travel along their tracks, stacking up at intersections until they reach a critical mass, then dumping to the next section.

=+++++++++++++++++++++++=

We had some sightseeing opportunities after the book fair, too.

We walked through downtown Miami, which is mostly closed up on Sunday afternoon. Miami's historic business section is really struggling, in marked contrast to Bayside, the thriving shopping/dining/entertainment complex on the other side of Biscayne Boulevard.

"This store isn't empty. It's filled with OPPORTUNITY!"
Nice try, marketing geniuses.

After our walking tour we drove across the causeway to Miami Beach and embarked on a quest for the illusive South Beach Parking Space. Found one(!) and strolled over to the beach, dodging tourists and supermodels and eavesdropping on the beautiful people as they tried to hook up with each other.

South Beach is pretty cool, very art deco and cute--the public restroom on the beach is designed to look like a ship.

After dinner at a sidewalk cafe across from the beach, and one last look at the waves, we headed back to the hotel.

Here's the sunrise view from the hotel window, eleventh floor.

Miami Book Fair II

2007-11-13T20:11:00.000-05:00

After a day of politely listening to authors, pundits, commentators, and literary mavens, a small percentage of the hundreds of thousands of book fair attendees feel the urge to gather for some heartfelt rock 'n' roll, and so they show up at the Student Life Pavilion to listen to the Rock Bottom Remainders.

Stephen King, who joins the band whenever his schedule permits, characterizes the RBR's sound as "hard listening music." They do have a good time, and it is contagious. The playlist ranges from 60s and 70s classics to novelty tunes like "The Tupperware Blues" and perennial book fair favorite, "I'm in Love With a Proofreading Woman." Kathi Goldmark, the band's founder, also has a great song; I think they call it "The Slut Song" and the essential lyrics are "I wonder if he'd care / if he knew I had underwear / older than him" -- of course Dave mentions that it really should be "older than he."

The band's roster is extremely fluid. This year's book fair edition included--in addition to Dave Barry and Kathi Goldmark--Scott Turow, Greg Iles, Roy Blount, Jr. , Ridley Pearson, Tananarive Due, and assorted vocalists such as Dave's son's girlfriend. (I'm sorry but I didn't get her name. ) Dave's brother, Sam ("the one who got all the musical talent in the Barry family") delighted the audience with a gospel number, "Nobody's Fault But Mine."

The most incredible addition to the band was real life musician Monte Montgomery, from Austin, Texas. Guitar Player magazine named him one of the fifty best guitar players of all time. This guy does not belong on the stage with the group whose recording contract is literally(!) with "Don't Quit Your Day Job Records, Inc." I'll tell you what it was like. If you make lemonade from powdered mix, it doesn't taste anything like fresh-squeezed lemonade. But if you mix the powdered lemonade with water and then squeeze one fresh lemon into it, you might be very surprised at how much it tastes like the real thing. Monte was the band's fresh lemon and his talent and professionalism turned a fun evening into a fun musical evening.

I was there with my new digital camera, not a fancy piece of equipment by any means. The photos I took didn't come out well. I borrowed this one from Dave's blog:

That's Brother Sam to Dave's right and Kathi Goldmark leading the clapping.

I more or less accidentally took some video of the opening act, a supremely talented juggler named John Nations, or as he says in Miami, "Juan Países." I don't know how to edit the video, and that is obvious. But you can get an idea of how good he is. Check it out.

Miami Book Fair 2007

2007-11-12T21:04:00.000-05:00

The 24th annual Miami Book Fair concluded yesterday. I'm still recovering. The fun of the book fair was greatly enhanced by the companionship of my blogfriend, the Imaginary Friend Known As Mostlylurking. She came in from Seattle, and that was very special. She'll be referred to as ML hereafter in this account.

Compared to last year's book fair, the weekend was more political, more educational, and less star-studded. All the events we attended were good, but all the high points somehow came back to Dave Barry.

Looking back on the weekend, trying to sort everything out, I got quite nostalgic about the role Dave Barry has played in my life since I came to south Florida in 1980. In Key West in the 80s, it was a regular ritual for my husband and me to take the Sunday paper to the beach, and for me to read Dave's column out loud to him. The couple who laughs together, as they say, might just still be married 26 years later.

The year our daughter was born, Dave's son Rob started kindergarten. The column he wrote on that occasion was not just funny, but could move a new parent from laughter to tears in the space of 15 seconds. I don't have a copy of it but I remember it very well.

When our baby was about six weeks old, we took her to the 4th annual Miami Book Fair. We walked the aisles of books and browsed the children's section, dreaming of the books we would read to our daughter as she grew older. We attended one author event: Dave Barry. The only specific thing I remember was he was making jokes about Robert Bork, who had been nominated for the Supreme Court. Dave was funny. I laughed, the audience laughed, it went on and on. The next day, our baby laughed for the very first time. I don't think it was a coincidence.

After all these years, all the humor, the Tropic Hunts and the book fairs, Dave seems like a member of our family or an old friend. Seeing his presentation this weekend was a priority. He did not disappoint.

He was presenting the book he wrote with Ridley Pearson, a prequel to Peter Pan--a children's book. But he knew who was there and why. "Are there any actual children in the room?" he asked, peering around the auditorium. There were--about four of them. So he obliged the rest of us with some classic humor. "I'm sixty!" he announced, and then dropped to the floor for a pushup demonstration. I couldn't see if they were real pushups, or one-handed or what. But it got a laugh. Then he talked about how when you get older you lose your nouns, which makes it difficult to speak coherently. The names of things and especially people, you know, you can think of the verbs and adjectives and even prepositions, but the nouns are elusive. He got his biggest laugh from the South Florida audience talking about hurricanes. He experienced Hurricane Andrew personally. He said after Andrew, the screen enclosure that had been at the back of his house was "orbiting the earth"--and he said, "you need screens in Florida, to keep the mosquitoes from stealing your patio furniture."

After the presentation, we lined up in the booksigning area. When we reached the head of the line, I said, "I bought the pre-autographed version of your book, so would you sign my book bag?"

Dave caught on right away, and there was a hint of envy in his voice when he said, "I didn't know Joel had..." (his voice trailed away, but the noun that was escaping him in his confusion was "merchandise.") [Reading his mind: I didn't know Joel had merchandise, hey what is up with this?] I told him, "Oh, he doesn't. These are Bootleg Boodle Bookbags™." He liked it.

Here we all are, kb, Ridley, Dave and ml:

Check back late tomorrow night: our next installment will be about the Rock Bottom Remainders, with VIDEO of the warmup act (really bad video of a very talented opening act.)

The Book I'm In

2007-10-21T14:59:00.000-05:00

Here's a cute cartoon from xkcd.com:

I guess I'm carrying a lot of books around inside my head--although I don't remember all the details. But that's the reverse of what this is about; it's not about the books in me, it's about the book I'm in: Callahan's Key, by Spider Robinson.

If he hadn't mentioned me in the book, I would not have read it, but it's a fun book and I respect the obvious fact that Robinson loves Key West as much as I do. I don't think he really succeeds in capturing its ambience but I'm on record as believing that the essence of Key West cannot be captured in prose. Poetry might come closer, but the island is such a multi-sensory experience that in the end, you really have to experience it first hand.

Before I get to the point, I will just mention that Robinson is a fan of the John D. MacDonald Travis McGee novels, which are set in Florida. In Callahan's Key the main character and his entourage visit the Fort Lauderdale marina where the fictional McGee keeps his boat:

It was there. The place we'd all spent countless happy hours in, and had never laid eyes on before.

Not a lot to see, really. A parking space for a boat, like hundreds of others here. An empty one, at that: no vessel was moored there now. But there was something to see. Someone had placed a ceremonial brass plaque there on the dock, just in front of one of the shoulder-high wooden pilings...We stood around like pilgrims and read it silently together.

SLIP F18 BAHIA MAR MARINA
DEDICATED TO THE "BUSTED FLUSH"
HOME OF TRAVIS MCGEE
FICTIONAL HERO AND SALVAGE CONSULTANT

CREATED BY JOHN D. MACDONALD, AUTHOR
1916-1986
DESIGNATED A LITERARY LANDMARK
FEBRUARY 21, 1987

For the second time that day, I found myself grinning and leaking tears at the same time. (P.144)

So we know Spider is sentimental. And so is our fellow-blogger, yellojkt, who blogged about the McGee landmark last year.

But this isn't a story about Fort Lauderdale; it's about Key West, and it's about how I'm in a book. When Callahan's group arrives at the End of the Road, they are amazed and delighted by what they find in Cayo Hueso. He describes some local characters, and the nightly Sunset Celebration. Then Will Soto, a real person who becomes a character in the book, describes briefly the history of Sunset and how it changed from a free-form happening into a slightly more organized (but still sufficiently chaotic) nightly event. That's where I come in. I was the person who wrote the Articles of Incorporation for the Key West Cultural Preservation Society, the non-profit corporation that took responsibility for the nightly festival in the mid-80's. So, Will mentions me along with my husband--we're on page 177.

[After sunset] we stayed long enough to introduce ourselves to Will Soto, and found the conversation illuminating.

"In the late Seventies, early Eighties," he told us, "vendors and buskers were setting up here illegally, and the tourists loved us, and the merchants loved us too, but the city had eyes to put a cruise-ship dock here, so they started hassling us. Recognizing the levity of the situation, we got organized about five years ago. Karen and Richard Tocci and Featherman Louie and Marylyn the Cookie Lady and Love22 and Sister and me and a bunch of others formed the Key West Cultural Preservation Society in '84, and managed to cool the clem. We got a great show of supoprt from the nearby merchants, and that helped a lot. We finally cut a deal with the city, where the Society leases this dock for four hours every night, and then turns around and rents space to the various artisans and performers. We clean up after ourselves, we keep out the drunks and dealers and dips, everybody's happy."

I shook my head. "Jesus. A town that makes a fair deal with its buskers, and then keeps it. I'm gonna like it here."

Will grinned like a pirate. "Don't get too starry-eyed, Jake. They got idiots here like everywhere else. No place is perfect." Then he blinked. "No, I take that back: this place is perfect." He sighed faintly. "But no place can stay perfect.

[Please note: "cool the clem" was, when last I checked, a googlenope, meaning that (1) this is the first it has appeared anywhere on the internet and (2) probably I'm not the only one who has no idea what it means, other than just guessing from the context here. It's SpiderSlang, I guess. ]

The Beatles in the 21st Century

2007-10-14T17:46:00.001-05:00

Yesterday afternoon, I was painting the second bedroom, listening to Middlemarch courtesy of audible.com, when my husband decided we needed to go to a movie. I got to a stopping place, cleaned up and we went to the nearby cinema to see Across the Universe.

Wow.

A simple love story, set to the music of the Beatles, against the background of the sixties. I kept trying to compare it to other films--Grease, Moulin Rouge, Chicago, Hair. But every time it reminded me of something, it immediately took off in another direction. I finally stopped with the comparisons and just sat back and enjoyed a very fresh, very original, work of cinematic art.

Lots of fun Beatles allusions and 33 original interpretations of songs written by John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison. My feeling coming out of the movie was that, although the Beatles wrote amazing songs and their performances of those songs were definitive, two of the Beatles have died. It's a new century, and their performances are history. But the songs have passed into popular culture; they are like folk songs now. This movie seems to be claiming the songs for America, despite the spirit of Paul McCartney which permeates the film in the character of Jude (Jim Sturgess). The gospel choir belting out "Let it Be," the Janis Joplin wannabe singing "Why Don't We Do it in the Road" and then joining the Jimi Hendrix-like character to perform "Don't Let Me Down"--this is cultural imperialism at its best. Poor Jude even tries to return to the dreary coal-smudged life that was his in Liverpool, but he has been bewitched by the rich blonde girl with the perfect New World teeth, and he is going to have to accept his birthright after all, even if he has spent his life "trying to hate" his American father.

Across the Universe is close to being the perfect Hollywood movie. The production is flawless, and there are enough happy endings to go around for everybody.

Remember: "All you need is love!"

P.S. Julie Taymor has the most impressive resume I've ever seen for a director.

P.P.S. By 9:00 p.m., I had finished painting the bedroom, and today it is all reassembled. Mission accomplished. Next weekend: the living room!

H. John Deutschendorf, Jr. AKA John Denver

2007-10-07T19:10:00.000-05:00

Ten years ago this week, John Denver died in a plane crash. Coincidentally, I've been thinking about him and his music recently. It was an internet thing. I was thinking about Steve Martin and that reminded me of David Steinberg. When I googled David Steinberg, believe it or not, I ended up on YouTube watching Three Dog Night. And Three Dog Night led, somehow, to John Denver. Then I realized that the anniversary of his death was coming up so I thought it might be nice to spend some time watching and listening to him. So I did.

When I was in high school, I was one miserable, depressed little honor student. I had never heard of Seasonal Affective Disorder, but I did suffer from it, among other things. Mostly I just hated my school, was terminally alienated and perpetually bummed out.

When "Sunshine on My Shoulders" hit the top-40, it grabbed my attention in a big way. That song was an anthem for me, like a hymn to the happiness that was there, just out of reach. I started buying all Denver's albums and listening to them compulsively. It was an era when I was going to Colorado every summer with my family, and towards the end of high school I took up backpacking and did some high country hikes. It seemed to me that Denver's songs really captured the feeling of the Rocky Mountains, the way that "City of New Orleans" sounds like a train, or Jackson Browne's road songs sound like a bus.

I am aware, of course, that John Denver is not considered "cool." As Rolling Stone magazine put it, the critics were never won over. Still I do like his music, and I can't find it in myself to complain that there is no irony in the lyrics, no dark side.

Denver had a nice voice, in addition to being a decent songwriter. He appeared with Frank Sinatra in Las Vegas for a season. Tonight when I was listening to some song samples, I remembered a song Denver did not write but it was on his live album "An Evening With...": "Today" by Randy Sparks. That is a classic song that John's voice is very well suited for.

Here's a YouTube video of "Today" and "The Eagle and the Hawk" from a 1973 concert at the Red Rocks Amphitheater in Colorado. The video quality isn't great but the setting is just perfect.

I picked this photo to illustrate because it shows John in a bookstore. That's not me with him, it's some other fan. I did meet him once, but that's another story.

ShineTime

2007-09-30T15:44:00.000-05:00

The Miami Herald Tropic Magazine did a lot to promote literary culture in south Florida. Its editorial staff actively attempted to discover new talent, and provided an outlet for fresh voices that might otherwise have gone unheard. In 1985 then-editor Gene Weingarten put out a call for guest editorials, and received a submission from one Terrence Michael Shine. He was not a professional writer. He was, as Weingarten described him, "a guy who worked in a drugstore." According to Shine himself, he had little formal education and had read fewer than a dozen books in his life. Nevertheless, his writing was remarkable. Weingarten published that first essay and then a few other short pieces. Then he commissioned Shine to write about "Why I Work at the Drugstore", and that story really broke through. It has remained one of the most-remembered stories ever published in Tropic, and it won awards for Shine and the Herald.

Eventually Shine stopped fighting his destiny and quit his job at the drugstore. He wrote an account of that momentous decision, as well, which was also published in Tropic. The magazine didn't put him on staff, but he wrote occasional feature stories for them. When he wrote a feature based on his experiences delivering pizzas, Tom Shroder, who had taken over as editor by that time, attempted to describe what was special about Shine's writing. "...whatever Shine is writing about," Shroder writes, "the subject is always intimacy -- that personal space where we live, hidden behind all the faces we present to the world. We pretend that what is important in our lives are the great issues of war and peace and politics, the intensely fought battles of the work place, the courtroom and the market. But Shine has the gift of seeing through all the suits, all the armor of status and convention, to the naked human truth that underlies it all."

Tropic magazine is no more. Shroder and Weingarten left for the Washington Post long ago, along with a lot of other talented Miami Herald writers. Terry Shine remains in south Florida. For many years he has been on the staff of a local weekly paper, the City Link. He writes features for them and also a column called "Timeline," which gives a minute-by-minute account of life as seen through his eyes and filtered through his brain. It's always interesting, often hilarious. Shine has recently begun a blog called ShineTime, where you can read the unedited version of "Timeline" every week.

Also recommended, Fathers Aren't Supposed to Die, an account of how Shine's family came together when his father was dying. This book made me laugh out loud and made me cry in public. It's devoid of any excess sentimentality and full of humanity and insight.

So who is this guy? He does a good job of staying private at the same time as he is writing about his innermost thoughts. All I know is, he's a very talented writer, and I'm not going to pass up any opportunity to read his work.

Ramadan celebrations

2007-09-23T20:51:00.000-05:00

Tonight we went to the Coral Springs masjid with our Bosnian friends--a family of seven, with children ranging from age 2 to 12. It was enjoyable and educational. I got all dressed for the occasion: long sleeves, long, loose fitting jumper, and a traditional hijab. I don't really like the way I look in hijab, but in the past when I wore a headscarf I had trouble keeping it from slipping out of place, and especially if I am joining in the prayers I'm already self-conscious enough without worrying about that.

We arrived at our friends' house at 7:00, chatted a bit and then went with two vans to the mosque. Everyone was breaking fast with a light snack of chick peas and figs and water before the sunset prayers. We separated by gender when we arrived, which meant the oldest child, a boy, went with the two men, leaving us two women with the four girls, age 2 - 11. All the women and girls went upstairs for prayers and then came back down for dinner. I don't know what the men did; they were behind a curtain.

The food was good: chicken curry and rice, some vegetables, and a kind of fruit pudding for dessert. Conversation was enlightening. Our friends are very strict Muslims and are always glad to share their beliefs and practices and the rationale behind them. They feel alienated in American culture but think their way of life is better. I'm sure they are right, as far as they are concerned. But I was ready to ditch the head covering as soon as we were in the car coming home.

Earlier in the day I had felt out of sorts and really not in the mood to attend someone else's worship service. But in the actual event, it was very nice to spend time with our friends and see their beautiful children. It was also fun to surprise a couple of other Muslims whom I know from my interfaith group--they were impressed by the hijab and got a good laugh because they have never seen me wear it before.

Rambling on About Classic Literature and Modern Life

2007-09-16T19:37:00.000-05:00

I've been working my way through Middlemarch for the last three weeks. I love the way George Eliot writes and this book is considered to be her masterpiece. I personally have a preference for Silas Marner, as being a focused, perfection of a short novel, as opposed to the sprawling, cover-the-waterfront type of novel that Middlemarch is. Still, there's a lot to be said for a big novel that you can kind of climb inside and inhabit, and I have to admire Eliot's ability to create a world between the covers of a book.

This is the kind of book I used to read all the time, but in the past five years or so I have drifted away from books that require so many hours of reading. I blame the internet for this, and I'm not especially happy about it.

I'm sure that reading Eliot lowers my blood pressure and creates new connections in my brain; in short, it makes me a better person. The sentences and paragraphs are individual works of art, not just for choice of words, but for their stunning combination of entertainment value and moral content.

Look at this:

"...other points in Mr. Farebrother...were exceptionally fine, and made his character resemble those southern landscapes which seem divided between natural grandeur and social slovenliness. Very few men would have been as filial and chivalrous as he was to the mother, aunt, and sister, whose dependence on him had in many ways shaped his life rather uneasily for himself; few men who feel the pressure of small needs are so nobly resolute not to dress up their inevitably self-interested desires in a pretext of better motives. In these matters he was conscious that his life would bear the closest scrutiny; and perhaps the consciousness encouraged a little defiance towards the critical strictness of persons whose celestial intimacies seemed not to improve their domestic manners, and whose lofty aims were not needed to account for their actions." (p.177)

That's not a passage to "skim"--sentences like that demand that I slow down and read them, and then they reward me with a special kind of happiness. I miss the days when I had the time to read long, complicated novels, but I can't say I would trade the fast pace and endless possibilities of the internet for the quiet enjoyment, the totally private enjoyment I have always associated with reading books.

I'm afraid that as rare as Eliot's readers were twenty years ago, there must be even fewer people reading her now. Of course I mean for her to represent a whole class of authors, that would include Dickens and Hugo and even Thomas Hardy and Henry James--people who wrote for readers who had lots of time to read. I'm afraid that our minds, collectively, will become less able to contain complex concepts, less willing to grapple with issues that take more than a few minutes to describe. That will not bode well for us. Issues are more complex than ever, not less.

I refuse to put the pleasures of reading books behind me.

I will find time to finish Middlemarch.

Haves vs. Have-Nots

2007-09-08T08:28:00.000-05:00

I was on my way to the downtown library, just geting off I-95 on Broward Boulevard. A woman was standing on the side of the road, holding a sign. I couldn't read the sign, but I know what it said, something like, I'm homeless, need food, or please help--that is a popular corner for that sort of thing, although I have never seen more than one person at a time there. I often see people selling the Homeless Voice newspaper at that location. The woman was middle-aged, and pretty healthy-looking, but had the unmistakable appearance of someone who has spent a lot of time outside. In Florida, in the summer, you get a special kind of burned and sweated-out look; I know it well. She didn't look like any kind of a hopeless case, though, and I wanted to help her. I didn't have any change, all I had was three twenty-dollar bills. There wasn't much time to think about it because the light was about to change, so I called her over and gave her one of the twenties. Well, you know what the Bible says, "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." And I learned the truth of that because ever since I gave her that money, I've been thinking about that woman.

Why do we have beggars in America, the richest country in the world? I don't know it for a fact, but I have a feeling that there are no beggars in Switzerland, or in New Zealand. Other wealthy countries have unemployment and drug addiction and mental illness but manage to take care of their most vulnerable citizens much better than we do in the United States. I think what bothers me the most is not that the homeless people exist but that the more fortunate among us seem to hate and resent them, to blame them for their misfortunes. At church, where I would expect people to remember what Jesus said about "the least of these my brethren" instead I find a lot of people who are adamant in their righteousness vis-a-vis the less fortunate. "If you give them money," these people say, "they will only use it to buy drugs or alcohol, so you're not helping them. Besides," they always continue, "some of those homeless people have more money than we do--they don't work but they make hundreds of dollars every day." I'm not making this up. I've heard it over and over. As I type it now I can't believe people can actually say it with a straight face. But they have convinced themselves and it is convenient to believe it because it keeps them from having to confront their conscience on the subject of haves and have-nots.

One more thing cemented that Saturday library trip in my memory. When the light turned green and I drove on to Broward Boulevard, I immediately came up behind an SUV. The owner apparently had a message for the world and had bought a license plate frame to broadcast it. "Prosperity," it said on the back of the vehicle, "is my birthright."

Gardening Philosophy

2007-09-02T10:48:00.000-05:00

I've been working on the garden this weekend--preparing the bed for planting in a few weeks. This whole process of preparation has been putting me in touch with my ancestors. As my fingers grub in the sandy dirt for the roots, and sift out the rocks, and haul out the boulders, as I shovel the compost into the wheelbarrow and transport it to the garden plot, my whole body responds: this feels like what it was made to do. This is what my people do. We dig out the rocks and the stumps. (We use the big rocks to make walls between the fields.) We haul in compost and manure, and then rake it smooth, create the rows and hills and plant the seeds. Then comes the hoeing and the weeding, the daily attention. And then, our crops fail. Locusts, drought, tornados, hurricanes, bad seed, blight. That just seems like the logical next event.

When I first read Garrison Keillor*, I was struck by how much those Minnesotans he describes were like My People. I looked for common roots, but there's no Scandinavian ancestry in my family. Then I realized that what we had in common was the farming culture. If you're a farmer, you're probably not going to be an optimist. You may be a true pessimist, but it will be a pessimism that can turn inside out and become happiness, because when you always expect the worst, you are often pleasantly surprised, and you never experience disappointment. You may be a fatalist, but fatalism is the purest path to happiness, because if you are prepared to accept whatever comes, you have lost the attachment that Buddha teaches is the source of all unhappiness.

Farmers show how a person can be happy without necessarily being cheerful.

Another view of this is that if the world is bleak, your best chance at happiness is to create it inside your own mind. And that is valid because even if the world is wonderful and your life is great, that's where your happiness is anyway, inside your mind. T.M. Shine illustrates this concept extremely well in this week's Timeline. (Warning: Shine uses gratuitous vulgar language to appeal to the demographics of the weekly paper he writes for--I think he has an f-word quota, to make up for the fact that he is over 35.)

==========

*Garrison Keillor has a new book coming out this fall; I recommend it sight unseen and will probably review it here sometime in October. Here is a passage that illustrates pretty well the philosophy I attribute to him:

"Being Lutheran, Mother believed that self-pity is a deadly sin and so is nostalgia, and she had no time for either. She had sat at the bedside of her beloved sister, Dotty, dying of scarlet fever in the summer of 1934; she held Dotty's hand as the sky turned dark from their father's fields blowing away in the drought, she cleaned Dotty, wiped her, told her stories, changed the sheets, and out of that nightmare summer she emerged stronger, confident that life would be wondrous, or at least bearable."--Lake Wobegon Boy, p. 2

Part I: Successful Launch - Part II: Letters

2007-08-21T06:24:00.001-05:00

Part I

Today is my daughter's twentieth birthday, and it seems to me that this is about the point where the anniversary of her birth becomes as much about me as it is about her. We're both adults now, so we're just equal participants in the world; I'm no longer responsible for orchestrating her experiences.

I'm sure that this is true because she is now established in her own apartment, a thousand miles away, and I can't even get her on the phone to wish her a happy birthday, so she must be independent and able to take care of herself. [Note to daughter, who will be one of the few people reading this: "Hi, Sweetie! Happy Birthday!"]

Twenty years ago, that was one hot, pregnant summer, in Hallandale, Florida. I was working at the post office, riding my bike about two miles each way. I usually went in pretty early, 6 a.m. or so, which meant I would be getting home in the hottest part of the day. Thank goodness for the small manmade lake behind our house: I would come home, throw on my bathing suit, jump in, and swim to the end and back--thereby getting my exercise and cooling off at the same time. Towards the end of the pregnancy, I could definitely sense that the baby was enjoying the swims. And after she was born, she did turn out to be a water-loving kid.

I quit work two weeks before my official due date, and then the baby was two weeks late so I had a whole month to sit around and eat nectarines--that's what I remember, and we went to the beach a lot, too. All that sitting around and eating probably had something to do with our dainty little girl coming into the world at 9 pounds 2 ounces.

Labor was long and hard -- 40 hours -- and then they kept us in the hospital for longer than normal because of some nonsense about blood sugar levels. I enjoyed the opportunity to rest, though, and the food was good. Every morning they would bring around the sheet to order the day's meals and you could check portion size--small, medium or large. I requested large portions on everything, three meals a day, and I still went home weighing 45 pounds less than I did when I went in. That's what I call a good week. Also, I spent a lot of time reading: I read Lady Chatterley's Lover, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Almost a whole week of leisure. And then, on duty 24/7 for the next two years. That was fun, too, though.

* * * *

Part II

This article about paper had me meditating about the value and meaning of handwritten letters.
My letter-writing history goes way back. I have letters that came back to me when my grandmother died, thank you letters I wrote to her from age 5 onward. In elementary school my friends and I wrote notes to each other constantly. I still have a whole pile of notes from my friend June, at my parents' house. They are an interesting window into a time long ago.

My mom recently sent me all the letters I wrote to her during my first year away at college. Hillary Clinton's college letters illustrate her journey from Republican to Democrat. Mine clearly document that I subscribed to The Militant newspaper on my very first trip to Harvard Square, and joined the Young Socialist Alliance soon after. They also record my voting record, however: straight ticket Democrat.

Here's an excerpt from a first semester letter home, looking back at a glimpse of the future:
October 30, 1976

Last night I ate dinner with Kurt Hackenburg--he's one of our R.A.'s -- maybe you remember that his letters to the freshmen were typed and Xeroxed--anyway, he had something to do at the computer center and he talked me into going there to see it. They have a deal where you can "talk" to other people who are using the system. There was a kid using a teletype terminal at his house. Kurt has "talked" to him before--he's 12 years old and is the son of one of the psychology profs here. Anyway, this may not be too clear, but we had a 3-way conversation going through the computer. It was very interesting. The way it works is that you type the message and it appears on the other 2 screens. Kurt is trying to talk me into taking a computer course. Maybe I will, but not next semester. I really want to take math, and kind of need to take biology and physics, and all these courses just don't fit into a double-major schedule. I might end up dropping the French major, but I don't know. I'll discuss it with my advisor next semester.
Aside from their historical value, I think handwritten letters are very important, now more than ever. All kinds of information comes through in a letter that you can't convey in email. The choice of paper and pen, the handwriting, the format, the pheromones--there's even DNA being transferred, and there's a heck of a lot of information in that. You might think that message doesn't get through, but who knows? As time goes on and letters become more rare, they will become more valuable. I predict I'll be writing letters until the end of my life.

South Florida Boodlefest*

2007-08-05T10:55:00.000-05:00

*Boodlefest, from "boodle," an Achenblog term, see definitions here.

Yesterday was a fun vacation day with two of my (formerly) imaginary friends, people I would not have known if not for the comments section of Achenblog, which we call the "boodle." Since it's an on-line forum, most people don't use their real names. Since this is also a public blog, I will just use our boodle names; the out of town visitors were "mo" and "mo's mom," they live in the DC area. The rest of the party consisted of my daughter, "Artist Alice" and myself, "kbertocci."

Mo is famous for wearing only black. Her mom doesn't thoroughly approve of the blackness, and she dressed all in white to balance it. Alice likes to dress creatively; her outfit was kind of pirate wench/biker/goth. Me, I generally dress to blend, so I wore beige pants and in deference to the prevailing gothic theme, a black t-shirt. The clothing is all terribly significant.

We met at Las Olas Riverfront, in downtown Fort Lauderdale, arriving simultaneously despite having started at points 40 miles apart and in opposite directions from there. The weather was sunny and hot. Alice headed directly for the frozen lemonade stand while the rest of us took refuge in whatever shade we could find and later in an air-conditioned gift shop.

We took an hour-long narrated water taxi ride to Beach Place. The scenery along the river is pretty much limited to mansions and yachts, although we did see some iguanas and a few birds. We dined on "authentic cajun cuisine" at Lulu's Bait Shack, passing up the alligator appetizers in favor of crawfish etouffée and shrimp and lobster--a good meal that we finished just after the live music started, so the timing was excellent. We got to talk all through lunch and then hear two songs and then it was time to go.

We walked along the world-famous Fort Lauderdale beach, which was teeming with scantily clad people. We crossed the street for a closer view of the waves, but it seemed that even fully clothed we were man-magnets (it's a good thing we weren't wearing our bikinis) and so we had to leave after a short visit.

Escaping our admirers on the beach, we checked out some more souvenir stores (embalmed baby shark, anyone? Or maybe you'd rather pay $3 for a tablespoon of sand enclosed in a plastic keychain?) found a pirate store that mo and Alice were thrilled to explore, and then headed back to the boat.

The water taxi delivered us back to our starting point in time for mo and mom to head off for the rental car return. It was a great day--just like being on vacation for me, except without having to take off my shoes and put my belongings through an x-ray machine. Thank you very much, mo and mo's mom, for sharing your Florida vacation!

-----

*And fellow-boodlers, don't worry, we only said nice things about you, in case your collective ears were burning yesterday.

Random things that made me laugh this week

2007-08-04T07:04:00.000-05:00

Rhymes With Orange by 8-4-07

Mike Peters 8-4-07

The Best and the Wittiest by Jimmy Margulies 8-4-07

Onion Headlines:

HEROIC MAN RUSHES INTO MOVIE THEATER, SAVES 4 SEATS

DEMOTED COP UNSURE WHY DESK JOB CONSIDERED PUNISHMENT

INSURANCE EXECUTIVE FAKES OWN LIFE

Going North to "The Real Florida"

2007-05-21T18:28:00.001-05:00

To celebrate 25 years of legal matrimony, we took a week's vacation in our home state. Living in south Florida and loving the Keys so much, we usually go south if we have a couple of days off, or we fly off to visit relatives. We had wanted to see St. Augustine for a long time so that was our primary destination. We took our trusty tent (design approved by Sir Edmund Hillary; $49.00 on sale at Sears 8 years ago). This is a scene from along the way; we stopped for gas and I walked around the back of the gas station and took this photo.

First campsite was in the Ocala National Forest--

Then we moved on to Anastasia Island, which is just across the bridge from St. Augustine. There's a great campground there with trees, in walking distance from this beautiful beach. Not a condominium in sight!

We spent two days walking around St. Augustine--it is a very charming place. I was surprised to learn that it is smaller than Key West. The people are very friendly and the shops and attractions are low-key.

We saw lots of beautiful homes, many with great porches, shady and peaceful.

From St. Augustine we went to Payne's Prairie Preserve State Park, just south of Gainesville. Here I finally got to spend some time hiking, while Richard drove up north to Ichetucknee Springs to do a river-raft trip.

We had planned to stay overnight at Sebastian Inlet State Park on the way home but the park was full so we stayed at the Vero Beach Inn Resort Hotel. A lovely end to a great vacation.

Kurt Vonnegut 1922 - 2007

2007-04-12T18:49:00.000-05:00

L.A. Times
New York Times
Boston Globe

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

"We are human only to the extent that our ideas remain humane."

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Vonnegut was no more political than he was religious. He transcended both political rhetoric and theology by taking reality down to its essence. We are lonely and miserable and perplexed, he said. We might as well laugh about this impossibly complicated and cruel world, because we're not going to fix it; we're not up to the task. We might as well enjoy the pleasant moments that come to us. And we must, we simply must, be kind to each other. He thought up schemes to institutionalize kindness, taking human nature into account. Extended families for everybody, assigned by the government, would mean that you would always have someone to call on in times of need. It would also mean that if someone was not a member of one of your extended families, when they applied to you for assistance, you could tell them to "go take a flying fuck at a rolling donut..." That dark side of utopia was a typical Vonnegut flourish.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Tiger got to hunt,
Bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder why, why, why?

Tiger got to sleep,
Bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Many of the writers who summarize Vonnegut's writing talk about the appeal it has for adolescents. I think it pleases people to patronize Vonnegut by calling his worldview simplistic or childish. He has a way of boiling everything down to basic components. I knew I had found a kindred spirit when I read this quote about his schooldays: "I was taught in the sixth grade that we had a standing army of just over a hundred thousand men and that the generals had nothing to say about what was done in Washington. I was taught to be proud of that and to pity Europe for having more than a million men under arms and spending all their money on airplanes and tanks. I simply never unlearned junior civics. I still believe in it. I got a very good grade."

I had a similar eperience although I went to school in a much different era. I was taught that the U.S. Constitution is a great document, worthy of being defended. I was taught that "with freedom goes responsibility." I learned the teachings of Jesus, very simple precepts: love your neighbor, turn the other cheek, walk the second mile. Then, I grew up. As I got older, I often encountered people who had learned the same lessons, attended the same schools but somehow seemed to have forgotten. Or their attitude was that the lessons were somehow an idealized version of reality, but that in the real world those ideas were not practical. But I never unlearned the simple, basic truths I was taught as a child. So now, I'm, what, a pacifist? an extremist? an idealist? a utopian? a communist? I don't know how that happened. But Vonnegut understood. The same thing happened to him. He saw the truth and he didn't outgrow it. In a harsh world, he found hope based on the mere existence of the Sermon on the Mount. He shouldered the responsibility of being human. He did God's work here on Earth.

When I was pondering this today, it came to me, a partial answer to a mystery I've been working on for many years. The truths are actually passed along mostly by people who don't really believe them. The famous "lip service" is good enough to keep the ideas alive. In every generation there will be some true believers, but they will necessarily be perplexed when they look around and see the disconnect between the ideas and the reality.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

"A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved. "

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

"Busy, busy, busy, is what we Bokononists whisper whenever we think of how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is. "

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Vonnegut insisted that the trauma of Dresden was not the definitive experience of his life. I believe him. His mother committed suicide on Mother's Day while he was home on leave, May 1944. The Dresden incident occurred the following February.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
"The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. "

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I am very thankful that Kurt Vonnegut survived World War II and spent his life writing down his view of the world.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

"I don't know about you, but I practice a disorganized religion. I belong to an unholy disorder. We call ourselves "Our Lady of Perpetual Astonishment."

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut.

Hi ho.

Peace.

Women Who Write; Women Who Read

2007-03-25T08:24:00.000-05:00

Clockwise from left margin: Yasmin Shiraz, Linda Francis Lee, Jennifer Crusie

Saturday, March 24, I spent the day at the Broward Library Literary Feast at Nova University.

The morning was dominated by female authors. I have much respect for these women and their readers. It's not their fault that they don't happen to write the kind of books I most enjoy reading. The panel discussions were wide-ranging and thought-provoking. An especially heated exchange ensued when the moderator of one panel asked the women to discuss the concept of "Chick Lit." All the authors agreed that there's no such thing, it's just a label that people who don't read made up to organize shelves in book stores or something. Jennifer Crusie made the point very strongly: "80% of all novel readers are women. I object to the idea that there is such a thing as 'women's fiction.' Since women are the vast majority, if someone is going to be ghetto-ized, it should be the men: 'men's fiction' for that 20% of readers who are male."

The women on the panels discussed literary trends, differences between men and women, recipes, family, balancing career and kids, traditions, culture, and love. In contrast, the afternoon session I attended that consisted of two men, moderated by a man: they simply presented facts and discussed their books. Some of the difference may be attributable to the contrast between fiction and non-fiction, but it seemed to me that I was witnessing a fundamental difference in communication styles.

One of the authors really made an impression: Adriana Trigiani. In addition to writing books, she also directs and produces movies and television shows. She was a writer for the Cosby Show and she is also an actress. She is from Virginia, and her books are about rural southern culture, but I'm sure she has no problems fitting in where she lives now: New York. Adriana has a fun website where she connects with her readers. She really loves her fans and they love her back. Her latest book is Home to Big Stone Gap--it's part of a series and the first book in the series is currently in the process of casting for the movie version, which Adriana will direct.

Heyday, by Kurt Andersen

2007-03-19T20:03:00.000-05:00

heyday n. The period of greatest popularity, success,
fashion, power, or the like; prime.
interjection Archaic. (used as an exclamation of
cheerfulness, surprise, wonder, etc.)

Kurt Andersen's first book The Real Thing, was a collection of humorous essays, published in 1980. It's still funny, I still read it, I still quote it. If it wouldn't interrupt the flow of this narrative too extremely, I would whip out one of the essays and quote it in its entirety, right here. (*Pause while I peruse the book, debate which essay is the "real thing" of Real Thing essays, and talk myself out of quoting it here.*) You would laugh. But the world has moved on since 1980 and many of the cultural references are now defunct.

Andersen's second book was published in 1999: Turn of the Century. It was a novel about the future--the immediate future--as in: look out, this is what your world is about to become. It was clever and engaging, but somewhat doomed to be quaint as soon as the time period came and went.

And now, the third book has arrived, a large, ambitious historical novel. This one will not be dated anytime soon. Heyday is an enthusiastic, meticulously researched story set against the backdrop of two amazing years in a remarkable country: 1848-49, the United States of America. The reader gets a front row seat and is offered various viewpoints: English, American, French, male, female, upper class, working class, conservative, revolutionary. Andersen lets the tide of history sweep his fictional characters along, and they periodically bump up against actual historical personnages: Frederick Engels, Abraham Lincoln, Charles Dickens, Allan Pinkerton. The big events that shape the history of America also have an immediate impact on these individual people; e.g., last week the telegraph line from New York to Chicago wasn't completed, but this week it is. That changes everything.

Because the research was done so well, the reader is breathless to see what happens next even though it is history, since many of the events and characteristics of the 19th century have faded into oblivion for those of us living in the fast-paced 21st. Who knew, for instance, that early busses in New York City, pulled by horses, had a primitive version of the system used today to signal the driver--a leather strap that the passenger was threaded along the side of the bus, up to the driver where it was fastened around his ankle, so that when the passenger pulled it, he felt it and knew to stop the vehicle.

America is a character in this novel, and so is the American language. A new word crops up at every turn. It's always surprising. Either it is a word that we use every day and take for granted that it has always existed--sidewalk, OK, metropolis--or it's phraseology that we never use because it came into existence and then vanished from the collective vocabulary before we were born--picky wicky, black house, aspirationalism. Either way, the interjection of the words lights up the narrative like sequins on a dress--they are almost distracting, but in the end I can't imagine the book without them. One of the characters keeps a word journal, just in case you are in danger of missing the importance of language to the story.

A novel that tackles the big themes--war, human rights, guilt, sex, revenge, insanity, utopia--with enthusiasm and wit, Heyday illustrates ideas whose relevance is extreme even today:

At the next pier upriver from Polly and Priscilla, a cattle boat was docking, and the animals were skittish, pawing at the deck and lowing. They were frighted by the July Fourth ruckus, but unaware of the slaughterhouse knives that would actually kill them before sunset. We're right to be scared, Polly thought, but in our ignorance, we're scared of the wrong things.
p. 327

In fact, the overarching theme of the book might arguably be that if we don't learn from history we are doomed to repeat it. The parallels between the Mexican War and our present conflict in Iraq are heartbreaking. Lincoln is quoted as as a freshman Congressman, "[daring] to call President Polk's prophylactic invasion unnecessary and unconstitutional and 'half insane.'" But this is not a political novel with an axe to grind. Essentially it is a portrait of a young nation full of energy, vision, and possibility, plunging heedlessly into an unknowable future, and glorying in--yes--its heyday.

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Don't take my word for it. The New York Times has an effusive review by Geoffrey Wolff. This is my version of "distributed journalism." After you've slogged through my amateur review, I help you find the professional version. You're welcome.

On the Boundary Where Art and Science Meet

2007-01-15T17:36:00.000-05:00

You have a body –- a stunningly complex and ingenious combination of systems -- but you take it for granted. While you walk around with your "consciousness" and your "free will," you are largely oblivious to most of the activity that is going on within you. While you are driving to work or deciding what to have for dinner, or arguing with your kids about their homework, the real activity that makes your existence possible stays mostly beneath your radar. The work your body is doing probably deserves more attention than you are giving it.

This weekend my daughter and I went to Miami to see “Bodies: the Exhibition” and we will never return to the level of obliviousness we formerly enjoyed.

Through an amazing process that starts where ordinary embalming leaves off, the team behind the exhibition has preserved and dissected and displayed twenty human cadavers and various components thereof, making it possible to see, for example, all the muscles standing next to all the bones. The circulatory system, the liver, the spleen, the reproductive system -– it’s all there to see, not a model, not a photograph, but the actual item.

We walked among the displays and toured our inner mechanisms. Other visitors were an inadvertent bonus. Here is a skeleton. Here are the muscles. Over there, a living person, with a skeleton inside, and muscles, walking. See how it works?

My daughter brought an art student’s perspective to the displays. Her comment for the guest book: “Never before have the internal workings of my own body seemed so particularly individual, and never would I have thought organs could seem so much like carefully planned sculptures. Like fine art, this exhibition borrows from life, and presents its observations in a surprising, original, and ingenious way, making reality shift into a shape you might never have imagined without artistic intervention.”

After methodically demonstrating how the human body works, a final section is devoted to what can go wrong: disease, misuse, deformity, injury.

One of the exhibits contrasts the sooty-black lungs of a smoker with the relatively undamaged organs of a non-smoker. Another shows the effects of emphysema while the accompanying audio discusses what it feels like when that disease deprives the victim of the ability to metabolize the oxygen he breathes into his lungs. A little further along in the exhibit hall, the visitor comes upon a large lucite box with a slot in the top. A sign says, “Deposit your cigarettes here and stop smoking today!” Inside the box, dozens of half-empty cigarette packages, along with messages and money: the box has become an altar where people sacrifice their smoking pleasure on behalf of a hope for a better future. This exhibition is powerful enough to have that kind of effect.

A good time to call it quits

2006-12-31T10:19:00.000-05:00

I started this blog in September 2005. It was mostly a reaction to the reality of my daughter's first semester in college. After so many years of having her uppermost in my thoughts and thinking of every experience in terms of how she might benefit from it, I realized that she was going to be away, having her own experiences that didn't have much to do with me, and that whatever wisdom I might be able to impart to her, in the future it would be better to just make it available and let her take it or leave it. The blog was perfect for that. It became something slightly different after a while, and I felt that it was helping me improve my writing skills--at least the practice couldn't hurt.

After a year and a half, I have adjusted pretty well to the college thing. When "the baby" comes home during summer/winter vacations we enjoy each other's company, and when she's away she does an excellent job of taking care of herself.

One of my resolutions for 2007 is to use the internet more as a means of keeping up with my real life friends and relations, and less as a way to cultivate imaginary friends or communicate with strangers.

This year, if I have a book to recommend I will recommend it directly to the people I think would be interested. Or post it to the Achenblog, where no comment is ever really "off-topic." I know you didn't think I was planning to quit the Achenblog!

In the end, I think I have discovered that I don't really crave international readership or public access at all. Being chosen as Time Magazine's Person of the Year only made me feel creepy, not honored. It's a huge part of my self-image to believe that I'm not like other people, that I'm a mutant, a freak, a pretender (with only a sneaking suspicion, well-suppressed, that other people also believe that about themselves). I prefer not to be part of any herd movement, and if everybody has a blog now, it's time for me to sign off.

Note: the movement for world peace, that is a herd that I will always run with, no matter how large it might get. So far it's still a minority position so I haven't had to make any exceptions for it. But I'm ready to be part of the majority, when most people decide that they'd like to stop killing each other.

I won't delete Read-Think-Live but it will be mostly dormant until further notice.

Happy New Year to all!!

Feel free to email me anytime: kbertocci(at)hotmail.com

The "Very Short List" -- Sign up today!

2006-12-18T14:29:00.000-05:00

There's too much stuff out there, on the internet and in the culturosphere--what if you miss something really great because you were looking at something else? You know this is causing you anxiety. Well, now you can put your mind at ease. All you have to do is sign up for Kurt Andersen's daily newsletter. Andersen is, how shall we say, ahem, a discriminating observer of the cultural scene. (Here's his c.v. if you're still considering such things in this new level-playing-field information age.) He and his colleagues at The Very Short List are willing to share with you just one gem each day, short and sweet, something that has met their rigorous quality standards.

I only signed up today, so I'm not in a position to testify to the lasting value of this newsletter. But, check this out: the site is giving away a set of Everyman's Library Classics to one lucky subscriber, and as VSL says, "It might as well be you."

This paragraph from The Very Short List (December 15) feels right at home here at Read-Think-Live:

If you fetishize books as much as we do, you probably already own some Everyman’s Library titles — those elegant volumes of literary classics that are all about bookmaking as an art form. Though we’re purveyors of little bits of light that pass fleetingly across computer screens, nothing makes us quite as happy as holding in our hands a great book printed with old-school finesse: on acid-free paper with full-cloth sewn bindings, beautiful endpapers, and ribbon markers.

Well, as a matter of fact if I were sitting at my home computer instead of in my office cubicle, I'd be able to look up and see my EL copy of Brideshead Revisited--and yes, I do love that cloth binding and especially that satin ribbon bookmark.

If the possibility of owning a hundred Everyman's Library Classics is not enough of a reason to sign up, how about this: The Very Short List defines itself with a Venn Diagram:

So what are you waiting for??

Christmas Season Meditations

2006-12-14T06:08:00.000-05:00

I blame the retail community for making us all feel like freaks. How many times have you heard someone say, "I just don't feel like I have the holiday spirit..." as if they think there's something wrong with them! The end of year "holiday season" exists for a reason. It's because of the pattern of the days getting shorter and shorter and the weather getting colder and colder and--back in the days when people lived in isolated agricultural communities--the food stores diminishing day by day, spring seeming so far away, let alone the fall harvest. Just because KMart has the Christmas decorations on the shelves on November 1, that doesn't mean it's time to feel festive. Here's the actual, natural way you should feel:

Up until Thanksgiving: normal

Thanksgiving - December 1: guilty for eating too much, slightly fearful that the Thanksgiving feast was the starter pistol for an entire month of gluttony and sloth.

December 1 - 5: mild malaise, puzzlement about why (it's because the days are getting shorter)

December 6 - 10: deepening gloom, partly as a reaction to the (inappropriate) holiday decorations that are springing up everywhere

December 11 - 15: hysterical despair, arriving with the realization that you will never live up to your own or anyone else's expectations of what you're supposed to get done over the holidays: in addition to all your normal activities, which were keeping you sufficiently busy the rest of the year, there's shopping, wrapping, mailing and delivering presents; decorating the house; putting up the tree; holiday baking; additional social activities; the school program; the special church services; the company party; travel to visit family, hosting guests, and on and on. It is natural to panic at this point, because in fact you can never live up to the ideal in your mind.

December 16 - 21: Resignation and vacillation between moments of enjoyment (the lights are so pretty, the tree reminds you of happy childhood memories) and realism (the days are still getting shorter; will spring ever come?)

December 22 - January 1: frenetic attempts to revive the will to live--Party! Pray! Eat, drink, be merry!

January 2 - 5: Relief that the season is over, resolve to do better in the new year (the days are getting longer again! Whew!)

January 6 - 15: Return to normal routine

January 31: Exhausted happiness

So today is, what, December 14? Let me check my calendar. Yep, hysterical despair, I'm right on schedule.

Seriously, folks, let's not take this all to heart: do what you can, do what you feel like doing. For the rest, as a former co-worker liked to say, "Don't torture yourself."

I wish you a very

Merry Christmas

Happy Chanukah

Happy New Year

Blessed Kwanzaa

a Winter Solstice to Remember.

And most of all:

PEACE ON EARTH,

GOODWILL TO MEN!!!

Friendship, Life, Death, Bob Greene

2006-12-10T16:28:00.000-05:00

Here's another book I just stumbled on, without a conscious decision, just picked it up and then got caught up in it: And You Know You Should Be Glad, by Bob Greene.

I have been reading and enjoying Bob Greene's work for many years. He developed his folksy style as a columnist for the Chicago Tribune, but I knew him mainly from Esquire--I've been a pretty faithful Esquire reader since I outgrew Rolling Stone back in the early 80's. I remember a time in 1994 when I came across Greene's novel, All Summer Long, in the Key West library. I was so happy to see his name because it reminded me of many pleasant reading experiences. I was not disappointed; the book was light but memorable, a page-turner but not quite in the category of guilty pleasure. I guess it was like a very long magazine article.

Greene was always more Kinkade than Rembrandt, and had plenty of detractors. But I would have been one of his defenders, up to the point where his personal moral failings eclipsed his professional skills--in 1999 he resigned from the Tribune in disgrace amid allegations and revelations of sexual misconduct.

Here's what his Esquire colleague, Bill Zehme, said about Greene's professional demise:

"Here is who we all are, more or less: We are, each one of us, the sum of many conflicting truths. In our most secret souls, we know—although we'd rather not—that certain of our personal truths might well be seen as dark and shameful truths. When a man falls, without exception, it is only these dark truths that emerge and resonate and expand, eclipsing all other truths that should matter as well but no longer do. We feast on the disgrace of the fallen, feel better about ourselves while doing so, and then await the next fallen one to turn up so as to feast once more. It is, alas, the blood sport of human nature."

Here's Howard Kurtz, of the Washington Post, reacting to Zehme's account: "It's hard to feel sorry for Bob Greene, since he behaved abominably and repeatedly used his column to cruise for chicks. But after reading this story, it's hard not to."

I suppose this latest book--a memoir--represents a comeback of sorts, although it isn't advertised as such. It is very much in the style of Greene's earlier work and the subject matter makes it difficult to criticize. It is the story of how one of his oldest friends--a man he had known since kindergarten--spends the last months of his life, after being diagnosed with cancer. The group of friends who were so close they called themselves ABCDJ (for Allen, Bob, Chuck, Dan and Jack) come together to see their buddy, Jack, through the last part of his life and in the process they relive old memories and explore their own feelings about mortality. The critics didn't like it much. (Publisher's Weekly: "Unfortunately, the author's dusty attic of lost Americana is cluttered with clichés, nostalgia and overly sentimental yearnings.")

I am really interested in the concept of popular art versus fine art. I have read a lot of Stephen King's books and without fail, when I finish one I am sorry that I spent my time reading it. They keep me interested but fail to improve my mind, they leave me feeling diminished, the opposite of what good literature does. I do not like the aforementioned Kinkade, the self-styled "Master of Light"--although he sells trillions of prints and figurines and Christmas ornaments. He's tremendously popular but I think he makes bad art. I think The DaVinci Code is bad art. I can't define it but I know it when I see it. But I acknowledge that other people don't agree with me.

Bob Greene, his peccadilloes notwithstanding, gets by my bad art detector. I'm aware that he's very close to the line, though. And I am not recommending this book. If you want to read a true story about watching someone you love die, I recommend Fathers Aren't Supposed to Die, by T.M. Shine. That is a book that will make you laugh out loud, make you cry real tears, and make you think, really think, about a subject you'd rather ignore.

Miami Book Fair 2006

2006-11-23T19:55:00.000-05:00

Authors I met:

* Kurt Andersen
* George Kalogerakis
* Jonathan Franzen
* Dave Barry
* Ridley Pearson
* Carl Hiaasen

Books I either bought in advance specifically for the fair, bought at the fair, or had signed at the fair:

* The Discomfort Zone, by Jonathan Franzen
* How to Be Alone, by Jonathan Franzen
* Nature Girl, by Carl Hiaasen
* Spy: The Funny Years, by Kurt Andersen, Graydon Carter, and George Kalogerakis
* The Partly Cloudy Patriot, by Sarah Vowell
* The Real Thing, by Kurt Andersen
* Surviving Justice, compiled by Lola Vollen & Dave Eggers
* Turn of the Century, by Kurt Andersen
* The Republican Playbook, by Andy Borowitz

Free merchandise from the fair:

* CD: Attaining the Worlds Beyond (ref. www.kabbalah.info)
* Orange kazoo from Don't Quit Your Day Job Records

Pre-fair activities: Meeting my imaginary friend!

Tina (aka "TBG") and I met some months ago on Achenblog and became email-pals. Despite the cynicism of her children ("Stranger Danger, Mom!!") she took the risk of flying to Florida to meet me and go to the book fair. She turned out to be just as nice in person as she was in her emails, and we got along perfectly. Tina is very smart (and brought plenty of electronic gadgetry), and we navigated various challenges (finding parking! renting beach chairs with no cash or credit card! negotiating the hopelessly mismarked streets of Miami!) with panache. At one point I remarked, "The two of us together make one extremely intelligent person." It was an unmitigated pleasure to share the book fair experience with my new friend.

Tina arrived at the Fort Lauderdale airport at 1:00 Friday. After a quick lunch we continued to Fern Forest Nature Center for some acclimation. Welcome to Florida, Tina!

Saturday, 11/17/06: Book Fair, Day One

11:00 a.m. Kurt Andersen and George Kalogerakis
Introduced as the "Lennon and McCartney of magazine publishing," Kurt and George were appropriately witty and humble--actually, I believe the introduction implied that Andersen and Graydon Carter were like John and Paul, so George, ironically, claimed, "I'm Ringo." Utilizing the latest in electronic audio-visual technology, they showed covers from Spy magazine and talked about some of their adventures producing same. Spy never shrank from a story because it might offend; on the contrary, the editors delighted in skewering sacred cows (e.g. The New York Times), socialites, moguls and so on. They were regularly threatened, harangued, and despised. The staff at The Times denied that they ever read the magazine (harumph!) Maybe the best lawsuit-threatening letter came from Gore Vidal, who took umbrage at having been characterized as "litigious," closed his letter, "See you in Federal Court," and according to Andersen, "completely missed the irony." Donald Trump was a favorite target and also a frequent correspondent; they would post his letters on a centrally located bulletin board for the enjoyment of all the staff at Spy.

At the end of their presentation, I followed them down the hall and around a few corners to the signing location. However, most (well, virtually all) of the other audience members, including Tina, stayed behind to hear Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson. I had expected to have some time standing in line to compose my remarks but that didn't happen, and I'm afraid I blurted out some less than intelligible explanation of my experience with Andersen's first book, The Real Thing. But I did produce the artifacts: the ancient, yellowed and battered copy of the book and the letter Kurt wrote me back in 1980. I got all my books signed, and there was a huge opportunity to just hang out and chat that I basically just squandered. However, this is where the cyberevent happened. Me: "This letter is evidence that I am your 'first fan.'" Kurt: "You blogged about this, didn't you? Somebody sent it to me." That rearranged my world in a half-second.

Kurt was very nice. He said he has a new book--a novel--coming out in March. It's called Heyday; I have pre-ordered it from Amazon and hope it will arrive by my birthday.

[Aside to Kurt Andersen, in case you're reading this: Hi, it was amazingly wonderful to meet you! I'm looking forward to reading the new novel.]

I went up to the second floor and I was looking out into space, still smiling from my encounter with Andersen. I looked over to the escalator; I caught the eye of someone coming up the escalator, and he smiled back at me, then I focussed, and did a double-take, like in the movies: it was Andy Borowitz. Hi, Andy.

1:00 p.m. Jonathan Franzen

The line for Franzen was long, but I was near the front. I had about a half hour to wait, and I watched the other people, looking for clues as to what sort of person is a Franzen enthusiast. I turned to a young man near me and said, "which do you read, the novels or the essays?" His face lit up and he said, "Oh, both! I'm a fan!" We talked about the books and about how we imagined the author would be in person. A few minutes later, he turned to his friend and said, indicating an older woman who had just walked by, "Look who that is!" and then he went up to the woman and said, "Ms. ----- You were my fifth grade teacher! and his too! You were great, I remember that class so well. I am a teacher now, and (friend's name) is a middle school counselor!" The woman was so happy to see her former students--she called over her friend and told her all about it, and we were just having a total love-fest there in the line. The guys continued to talk about how important fifth grade is, and I was tempted to tell them: my fifth grade teacher was the most inspirational teacher I ever had, too, to the point that my first career goal was to be a fifth grade teacher, and I actually achieved it in a very short-term way. So maybe, in a strange way, this explains what a characteristic Franzen fan is like. Or maybe I was just caught up in a coincidence eddy.

Franzen was great, not at all nervous; although he seemed to be trying to come across as neurotic and tortured, really it was clear that he was glad to be there and he was an excellent reader and speaker. He said that he worked on The Corrections from 1993 until 2000, but did most of the writing in the last year. So during the six years of chronic writer's block, he said he "took small breaks from the punishing failure of that endeavor" to write short pieces about his life, and those pieces are part of his latest publication, The Discomfort Zone. He said he had learned from that writer's block experience that it is better to not write a novel for five or six years and then actually write the novel in that last productive year.

After he read the opening passages from his book, we had Q&A; the questions were incisive and thoughtful. Someone asked about his portrayal of his family, and he said he hates the term "dysfunctional." "If you saw the movie Little Miss Sunshine," he said, "that family is not dysfunctional. That family is very functional. They may be strange, but..." He then characterized his role in his own family as being analogous to a U.N. special envoy who arrives late on the scene in a bloody war zone--his parents being "two strong and mutually hostile personalities."

The line for the book signing was pretty long, too, but Franzen was perfectly nice and friendly. I told him that How to Be Alone is "my favorite book" and he smiled and said he appreciated my saying so. I gave him my copy of the Believer magazine because it has an article in it by a woman from his home town who has a lot in common with him and has felt beleagered because he keeps writing all her best stories before she can get to them--and writing them better than she ever could. It's a witty story; I hope he enjoys reading it.

As we were walking back from Franzen's signing area, Tina spotted Dave Barry's guitar on the other side of a glass wall. We went downstairs, and as we were crossing the plaza I saw the man himself, walking towards us with his co-author, Ridley Pearson. I alerted Tina; she was the one who said, "Hey, Dave!" and stopped him in his tracks. He was as gracious as he could possibly be, and we chatted him up, explained about the Achengirls Gone Wild weekend, and Ridley took our picture. Big thrill. If we'd had any regrets about missing Barack Obama's talk they were gone now; no question we were going to be sitting up front for the Rock Bottom Remainders concert Saturday night.

========

Book Fair, Day Two: 11/19/06

10:00 a.m. Carl Hiaasen

Carl's presentation was excellent. He didn't read from his book, but instead gave a verbal "treatment" of it that amounted to a great advertisement; I don't think anyone could listen to him describe the characters and outline the plot and not want to read this book. Nature Girl. I whole-heartedly recommend it, even though I haven't read it yet.

I won't try to describe the book other than to say it is vintage Hiaasen and will no doubt be a movie eventually.

Tina and I both stood in line to get our books signed, and it was a long line. Carl was very charming. We spread the Achenblog word there too and even presented him with a souvenir A-blog business card. I'm sure he'll treasure it. I took a bunch of them to the fair but that was the only time I remembered to give one away.

After one last swoop through the booksellers' stalls, we left downtown Miami and headed for the beach, where we (yes...) read our books for a couple of hours and decompressed (yes, later in the evening we did hang out at the hotel bar; no, we did not pick up any stray conventioneers.)

Too soon, the weekend was over, but the memories are still making me smile. Tina's account was much more timely (it was posted over a week ago...) She's quicker and more technologically up to date than I am.

Hey, it's only about 11 1/2 months until the 2007 Miami Book Fair. Mark your calendar, come on down.

Robert Wright

2006-11-05T14:19:00.000-05:00

Robert Wright was brought into focus for me when he invited Joel Achenbach to participate in his "diavlog" at Bloggingheads.tv (check him out this week: he's interviewing Arianna Huffington.) Soon after the diavlog aired, I came across a reference to Wright in one of the Why Things Are books; Joel refers to him as an "auxiliary Why staffer" and then adds that he is "one of the best science writers around." I had seen references to The Moral Animal and meant to read it years ago, but hadn't gotten around to it.

Finally, a few weeks ago, I gathered up Wright's three books and read them. I was very impressed and enjoyed learning some new ways to look at the world and putting together some old concepts in new ways.

The first book Wright wrote was called Three Scientists and Their Gods; the subtitle is Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information." Before the book starts, Wright inserts the following:

A NOTE TO READERS

I don't want to alarm you, but this book is about--

1. the concept of information;

2. the concepts of meaning and purpose, in both their mundane and cosmic senses;

3.the function of information at various levels of organic organization (in bacteria, ant colonies, human brains, and supermarket chains, for example), with particular emphasis on its role in reconciling life with the second law of thermodynamics;

4. the meaning of the information age, viewed in light of the role information has played throughout evolution;

5. the meaning of life; and

6. a couple of other issues at the intersection of religion and science.

Now for the good news: this book is also about three living, breathing, and, I think, unusually interesting human beings. In fact, they are what the book is mainly about. So, for the most part, all you have to do is read about them--about their personal histories, their ways of living, and their very ambitious ways of thinking about the universe and our place in it--and let the above subjects emerge in the process. It will be fairly painless, as these things go.²

Wright uses the same mitigation method in The Moral Animal, to very good effect: in that book, he uses the life of Charles Darwin to illustrate the principles of evolutionary psychology. In early chapters, he uses examples of various primates and their social structures to show how genes and environment interact to influence the development of culture. Later, when he is discussing Charles Darwin's marriage, he says, "The Darwins lived, gibbon-like, on an eighteen-acre parcel, two hours by coach from London..."³

Throughout the book the details of Darwin's life are analyzed in light of the ideas that are being explored. It humanizes the concepts and illuminates Darwin's biography at the same time.

Nonzero returns to an idea that was introduced in the first book, that is "the logic of human destiny." The essential concept is that ever more sophisticated methods of communication are facilitating more and more complex social structures. One possible conclusion, which is explored in both books, is that the next step in human cultural development will be an all-encompassing network of communication that essentially becomes a super-organism in itself. A version of this certainly exists already, made up of humans interacting with the internet and phone lines and television and other mass media. But the more mystical thinkers that Wright cites envision a time when the network becomes aware of itself in a way that we would define as consciousness.

Speaking about Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who wrote about this idea in a book called The Phenomenon of Man which was published in 1955, Wright emphasizes that Teilhard is not just talking about individual people having "sympathy" for each other:

If this were all Teilhard meant by universal consciousness, his mystic vision would be, if not exactly convincing, at least conceivable. Maybe middle-class Americans will come to empathize with the refugees and earthquake victims whose images they see on the evening news. Maybe millions of copies of the album We are the World will forge lasting international bonds. Maybe the Russians will be able to muster some sympathy for Americans once they've seen twenty or thirty episodes of Gilligan's Island.

But Teilhard had something more than this in mind. At times he spoke more expansively about the meaning of universal consciousness, and made it clear that he wasn't referring to the sort of sympathy conveyed by Hallmark cards. He was really talking about love, the kind of altruistic diffusion of identity tradionally reserved for kin. Indeed, he was talking about even more than that. Love was not, in Teilhard's scheme of things, a mere by-product of human evolution, an emotion programmed into the brain to ensure the survival of the DNA. Rather, it was a manifestation, the most importatnt manifestation, of the "spiritual energy" that had been growing in the "within" of ever-more-complex matter since before the creation of life, and that continued to grow not just through genetic evolution but through cultural, or noogenetic, evolution and the "complexification" of human society.⁴

As he notes here, Wright is skeptical about this notion, but he is obviously fascinated by it and believes it is an important idea. His approach makes me look forward to his next book, which reportedly is "about God"--I've seen enough of Wright's work to believe he won't be writing a theology text; more likely it will be, as these three books are, enlightened, open-minded science.

1. Joel Achenbach, Why Things Are & Why Things Aren't (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996), 93.

2. Robert Wright, Three Scientists and Their Gods (New York: Times Books, 1988), xi.

3. Robert Wright, The Moral Animal (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), 129.

4. Robert Wright, Three Scientists and Their Gods, 270.

[*These footnotes are dedicated to The Achenblogger Known as College Parkian.]

Captured by Aliens

2006-10-28T08:48:00.000-05:00

In this book, Joel Achenbach goes looking for aliens. Captured by Aliens is a survey of the science of space exploration and an earnest attempt to uncover any evidence (a clue, a hint, a sliver, a slim hope!) of extraterrestrial life. The attempt is vain, but Achenbach leaves no stone unturned. Eventually he even reaches the point of exploring (briefly) the concept of God. There's your extraterrestrial life.

From a scientific point of view, the search for life in outer space comes up empty. What Achenbach does find is a bunch of human beings who are strongly invested in the idea of alien life forms. Very likely, these people are banding together and creating mythologies about space creatures because they are human, and because they are alienated from the larger culture.

Humans are social animals. We are hard-wired to form kin groups and affinity groups, age-based groups and mutual benefit societies. We can't help ourselves. At the same time, we have an awareness of our individual existence, and for some of us that individuality is so fragile, or so satisfying, that we avoid the group experience, or it avoids us. Sometimes our modern post-industrial society makes it difficult for people to create meaningful communities. Kurt Vonnegut, in his novel Slapstick, refers to people who "have had to believe all their lives that they were perhaps sent to the wrong Universe..." That goes a long way towards explaining the alien-o-philes. Captured by Aliens quotes a member of the Heaven's Gate suicide cult: "Maybe they're crazy for all I know. But I don't have any choice but to go for it, because I've been on this planet for thirty-one years and there's nothing here for me." (p. 211) Hi ho. (as Vonnegut would say...)

What's a little ironic is that, although Achenbach makes it clear that he is humoring the pseudo-scientific folks without being tempted to their point of view, he is very sympathetic to them, acknowledging that they are engaged in the same sort of search that he is, just with different rules. And they recognize him, too. It's really not surprising to find that some of the UFO-believers become convinced that the author is one of them, that he is an alien himself. In effect, he is "captured" by "aliens" in the course of writing the book. (But he escapes and lives to tell the tale, luckily for us.)

Fast forward a few years, to the birth of the Achenblog. The blog has collected, nay, captured a seemingly diverse accumulation of individuals. Looking for the common thread is tricky. People describe themselves as gnomes, geeks, nerds, mutants. Apparently the group contains a disproportionate number of high school valedictorians, and a relative dearth of prom queens and football team captains. If you want to fit in there, a sense of humor is essential--but it can be warped, or dark, or goofy. It's all right if you have memorized Monty Python and the Holy Grail or The Princess Bride. A community has formed, albeit a fluid one with ever-changing participants. It's an artificial extended family, very much in the spirit of the ones Vonnegut imagined in Slapstick ("Lonesome No More!" is that book's subtitle) This time it's Achenbach who has captured the aliens, or at least the alienated.

===========================================
Test your alienation level here:

Here are my scores:
Meaninglessness = 5
Cultural Estrangement = 23
Powerlessness = 10
Normlessness = 13
Estrangement from Work = 12
Social Isolation = 16

Scores from 5 to 11 could be considered "low,"
from 12 to 18 "moderate,"
and from 19 to 25 "high."

===========================================
===========================================

...and another thing:

Jonathan Franzen says being a nerd/geek/mutant is not the only path to alienation; there's also the literary route. Here he quotes Stanford professor Shirley Brice Heath:

"...the social isolate--the child who from an early age felt very different from everyone around him. This is very, very difficult to uncover in an interview. People don't like to admit that they were social isolates as children. What happens is you take that sense of being different into an imaginary world. But that world, then is a world you can't share with the people around you--because it's imaginary. And so the important dialogue in your life is with the authors of the books you read. Though they aren't present, they become your community."

Franzen expands on this idea: "...simply being a 'social isolate' as a child does not...doom you to bad breath and poor party skills as an adult. In fact, it can make you hypersocial. It's just that at some point you'll begin to feel a gnawing, almost remorseful need to be alone and do some reading--to reconnect to that community.

"...readers of the social-isolate variety are much more likely to become writers than those of the modeled-habit variety. If writing was the medium of communication within the community of childhood, it makes sense that when writers grow up they continue to find writing vital to their sense of connectedness. What's perceived as the antisocial nature of 'substantive' authors, whether it's James Joyce's exile or J.D. Salinger's reclusion, derives in large part from the social isolation that's necessary for inhabiting an imagined world."

How to be Alone, pp.77-78

(Wo)Man vs. Nature

2006-10-23T07:22:00.000-05:00

I was sleeping soundly, about 2:00 this morning, when I was gradually awakened by a scrabbling sort of noise on the corrugated plastic roof of the sunporch. Assuming it was the neighbor’s cat, with whom we have a running battle of wits, I went over to the porch and rattled the roof to scare him away. Returning to bed, I looked out the window in time to see what looked like a gigantic rat crawling down the side of the house. Not a cat. I repaired to the backyard to investigate. Yep, a big ol’ raccoon, that’s what it was, and I confronted him coming around the corner of the house. Waved my arms. Hissed at him. Stomped my foot. He was completely unfazed. I returned to the house for the flashlight. Raccoons are nocturnal. Light freaks them out, right? No. I shined the flashlight in his eyes and he had no reaction whatsoever. Meanwhile, more rustling in the bushes, now there are two of them. I looked around for rocks to throw; the only one I found was pretty big. I heaved it over in the direction of one of the critters, it landed right next to him with a thud. He nonchalantly turned his head and sniffed it to see if it might be food. So there we were. I wasn’t afraid of these animals. But they weren’t afraid of me, either! They weren’t likely to attack, but I had no urge to attack them, either. I was in my backyard in my nightshirt at 2:00 in the morning, and I felt pretty stupid. Finally I got fed up and ran towards one of them. That had some effect, and with repeated charging rhino tactics I was able to convince them to leave my yard. Belatedly, I thought of the garden hose which had been available to me as a weapon. Next time.

My brave he-man husband slept through the entire drama. He had had a hard weekend, two days of 8 hours working and 5 hours driving. Our feisty little cat woke up when I first went outside, and watched the whole show, with great interest. This morning it was evident that when I came back to bed and went to sleep until the alarm woke me, the kitty must have stayed awake the rest of the night to keep watch—she was completely exhausted this morning, didn’t wake up even when I put food in her dish, and was still sleeping when I left for work.

Kurt Andersen & Co. -- Spy Magazine

2006-10-19T20:31:00.000-05:00

Kurt Andersen is from Nebraska. He attended Harvard University, where he was an editor of the Harvard Lampoon. In my mind, this combination means something, although I am still struggling to complete the picture. Johnny Carson was from Nebraska. I always thought that was important.

Back in 1980, Andersen wrote a book called The Real Thing. It's a smart-aleck book, a know-it-all book. He names a category, for instance, Breakfast Cereals, and then tells which is "The Real Thing" of breakfast cereals, the one that most fully exhibits the quintessential qualities of Breakfast Cereal (the answer is: Kellogg's Corn Flakes). Here's a footnote from that chapter: "*Mr. Graham, of cracker fame, was also a fin de siècle resident of Battle Creek and health-food fanatic. Battle Creek was to cereal what Paris, at the same moment, was to modern art. They get Cezanne, we get Sugar Smacks." But quoting out of context doesn't do Andersen justice. His wonderfully even tone is sustained throughout: he is just on the edge of insufferable but delightfully balances there and never goes over. His photo on the back of the book shows an unsmiling prepster posing, I was certain at the time, outside Boston's Quincy Market. He seemed very familiar and I loved the book, so I sat down and wrote him a letter.

A few weeks later, I received a letter from him. He said he was impressed to get mail from Key West. He said, "Yours was the first appreciative correspondence I received, and it warms me still." And at the end of the letter, he said (apparently in answer to a question I had asked, though I don't remember anything about the letter I wrote) "...And yes, I am writing fiction."

Well, we both went on with our lives, but that book and his letter have traveled with me through all my domiciles and lifestyle changes. I waited 20 years for the promised novel; it was finally published in 1999: Turn of the Century. Bought it. Read it. Not a bad book, nicely futuristic in a moderate way.

One of the projects Andersen did while he was not writing the novel was Spy magazine; his partner in the venture was Graydon Carter, whom I know from Vanity Fair. And now they've written a book about the experience of creating Spy. I started reading the book last night and just got sucked into it and almost never came up for air. It's a fun read--that is, as long as I can forget how irritating these people seem--they are all so clever and so superior; the world exists so they can mock it. But they are, in fact, extremely intelligent and most of their targets are pretty much fair game. The first article that is reproduced in the book is called "Too Thin AND Too Rich" and features hideous photos of skinny socialites and celebrities. What's not to like.

Here's the punchline that I've been making you wait so long for: on page 28, the book discusses how they put together the staff of the magazine. "There were freelance copy editors, headed up by the peerless Joanne Gruber, who got her job by sending a fan letter to Kurt several years earlier, and whose career at Spy would outlast everyone else's; within a year she was managing editor and even before that was the unofficial moral compass of the magazine."

So THAT'S who has been living my REAL LIFE all these years. Joanne Gruber. I won't forget that name.

Seriously, I would have to have more than one life in order to spend one in New York. But publishing...that would be a career I would enjoy. Hey, here I am on the internet--now in the 21st Century, everybody is a publisher, everyone is an author, and unfortunately, I have only myself to look to for copy editing.

This has been a supremely self-indulgent post and I hereby dedicate it to Mr. Kurt Andersen and all his fabulous friends.

The USA versus International Law

2006-10-18T19:30:00.000-05:00

I was going through some papers last weekend and came across this historical document: a news release from the Pentagon dated May 6, 2002. The remarks in blue italics are my reactions, which I had scribbled in the margins when I first read it.

SECRETARY RUMSFELD STATEMENT ON THE ICC TREATY

Earlier today, this administration announced the president's decision to formally notify the United Nations that the United States will not become a party to International Criminal Court treaty. The U.S. declaration, which was delivered to the secretary general this morning, effectively reverses the previous U.S. government decision to become a signatory.

The ICC's entry into force on July 1st means that our men and women in uniform--as well as current and future U.S. officials--could be at risk of prosecution by the ICC. [Secretary Rumsfeld, along with every other U.S. resident/citizen, is subject to prosecution by U.S. law enforcement, but he doesn't advocate disbanding police/highway patrol/FBI/criminal justice system of the U.S.] We intend to make clear, in several ways, that the United States rejects the jurisdictional claims of the ICC. The United States will regard as illegitimate any attempt by the court or state parties to the treaty to assert the ICC's jurisdiction over American citizens.

The U.S. has a number of serious objections to the ICC--among them, the lack of adequate checks and balances on powers of the ICC prosecutors and judges; the dilution of the U.N. Security Council's authority over international criminal prosecutions; and the lack of an effective mechanism to prevent politicized prosecutions of American servicemembers and officials. [What are the chances that all the other countries in the world are just too stupid to see the ICC's shortcomings?] [Why should U.S. servicemembers have special status?]

These flaws would be of concern at any time, but they are particularly troubling in the midst of a difficult, dangerous war [as defined where?] on terrorism. there is the risk that the ICC could attempt to assert jurisdiction over U.S. servicemembers, as well as civilians, involved in counter-terrorist and other military operations--something we cannot allow. [Why? because you know that those operations will be in violation of the proposed international laws?]

Notwithstanding these objections to the treaty, the United States respects the decision of those nations that have chosen to joint the ICC. But they, in turn, will need to respect our decision not to join the ICC or to place our citizens under the jurisdiction of the court.

Unfortunately, the ICC will not respect the U.S. decision to stay out of the treaty. To the contrary, the ICC provisions claim the authority to detain and try American citizens--U.S. soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines, as well as current and future officials--even thought the United States has not given its consent to be bound by the treaty. When the ICC treaty enters into force this summer, U.S. citizens will be exposed to the risk of prosecution by a court that is unaccountable to the American people, and that has no obligation to respect the Constitutional rights of our citizens. [The International Criminal Court recognizes the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights.] The United States understandably finds that troubling and unacceptable. [The Government of the U.S., that is, including the officials who are contemplating actions that they know to be in violation of international law.]

Clearly the existence of an International Criminal Court, which attempts to claim jurisdiction over our men and women in uniform stationed around the world [This is a problem--what other country has the level of military presence that the U.S. has, worldwide?] will necessarily complicate U.S. military cooperation with countries that are parties to the ICC treaty [dictatorship and "might makes right" is the less complicated way!]--because those countries may now incur a treaty obligation to hand over U.S. nationals to the court, even over U.S. objections. The United States would consider any such action to be illegitimate.

We obviously intend to avoid such actions. Fortunately there may be mechanisms within the treaty by which we can work bilaterally with friends and allies, to the extent they are willing, to prevent the jurisdiction of the treaty and thus avoid complications in our military cooperation. Obviously, countries that have not ratified the treaty would be under no such obligation to cooperate with the court. [U.S. will continue to use its diplomatic influence and military might to work against the ICC treaty.]

By putting U.S. men and women in uniform at risk of politicized prosecutions, the ICC could well create a powerful disincentive for U.S. military engagement in the world. [Maybe those other countries aren't so stupid after all.] If so, it could be a recipe for isolationism--something that would be unfortunate for the world, given that our country is committed to engagement in the world and to contributing to a more peaceful and stable world. [Peace through war? or "The War on Peace?"]

For a strong deterrent, it is critical that the U.S. be leaning forward, not back. We must be ready to defend our people, our interests, and our way of life [...and the best defense is a good offense...] We have an obligation to protect our men and women in uniform from thi court and to preserve America's ability to remain engaged in the world. [i.e., to attack anybody anywhere at any time for any reason, as we see fit] And we intend to do so.

http://www.defenselink.mil/news/May2002/b065062002_bt233-02.html

Gina Barreca

2006-10-14T20:19:00.000-05:00

Let us now praise strong women...

Joel Achenbach's column in Sunday's Washington Post starts by discussing the recent Newsweek cover story about "Powerful Women" and then goes on to Arianna Huffington's latest book, Becoming Fearless, which is aimed at helping women reach their potential and be more powerful.

Since Joel has covered those two, I will approach this subject with reference to Gina Barreca, a professor of English literature and feminist studies; a woman with a very strong personality and presence. Gina came to my attention as a co-writer with Gene Weingarten--he contacted her with the intent of ridiculing her and making her look stupid because she was an "expert" on feminist studies and humor. He thought those two subjects were incompatible, and he challenged her to see who could be funnier in print. That's his specialty, writing humor, not hers, but she was funnier than he was every time. They went on to write a book together, and I saw them last year at the Miami Book Fair. They were both funny, but Gina was by far the more impressive--she is beautiful, brilliant, bold and witty. I couldn't take my eyes off of her.

I bought Barreca's book Babes in Boyland and read it this summer. It's a memoir about what it was like to be one of the first female students at Dartmouth College. Here's what it was like, at first:

"Classes begin, and once again Good Girl Gina sits up front. The American lit. professor appears to be a bulky, middle-aged, heavy-set, tweedy, standard-issue type. Wire-rim glasses perched on a long patrician nose, sparse white hair, broad chest, and deep voice all add to the sense that he's straight out of central casting. Gina feels this is what college is all about.

"Then the professor opens his mouth.

"He announces at the start, "My name is MANN, I am teaching a book about a sperm whale named Moby Dick. anybody who has a problem with that can leave right now. I have been teaching here for thirty years and I am not about to change my ways because there might suddenly be in my classroom a delicate flower whose feminine sensibilities I might offend." He pauses, and walks over to a large, beefy guy in the first row and puts his hand on the young man's shoulder. "And I'm not referring only to Pemberton here, either, although he is known to be sensitive."

"Applause breaks out, whoops and hollers...

"Gina buries herself as far as possible into her seat. How can you be a Good Girl in a place that doesn't want any kind of girl whatsoever?"

Barreca was from a working class family in Brooklyn; being female wasn't the only, or even the most difficult, barrier she faced. But it was the trait that she found could be turned to her advantage, the one that she finally derived her identity from. She has a great voice. Here is what she wrote recently when she found that her column was being dropped from the Hartford Courant: "Long Cool Woman in a Pink Slip" It ends, "I hope I won't be out of circulation long." And I'm sure she won't.

Nothing to Say

2006-10-07T17:26:00.000-05:00

I have been trying to post at least once a week--last year I posted every day for a long time; how did I do that?

I had nothing in particular to say today, and it struck me that the main purpose of a blog is that when you have nothing to say, you have someplace to say it.

It's a quiet Saturday. I've been in the house most of the day, only venturing out on a walk to Walmart to buy ribbons for a project. The weather is lovely, in the low 80's and sunny. I've been straightening up closets and so I had to look at all my photo albums. I'm not very good about putting photos in albums, so it didn't take long. Most of my pictures are in boxes.

All the highlights are there, though. The milestones, the trips, the loved ones. Pictures are good.

I'm extremely unmotivated. Now the question is, will this non-blog be enough to satisfy my one-a-week requirement, or will I still feel like I didn't blog yet this week?

Here's an interesting article about how hard it can be to make ends meet on $150,000 a year. We do love to read about other people's money and especially other people's money problems, don't we? I'm sure it's human nature.

John, by Cynthia Lennon

2006-09-29T20:06:00.000-05:00

It's about time we heard Cynthia's side of the story...

She knew him when. She was a Liverpool girl when he was just a Liverpool bloke. They fell in love, she got pregnant, they got married. The Beatles got famous, Brian died, the Maharishi disappointed. John discovered LSD, Yoko, heroin. Cynthia tells the story well; with or without a ghost writer, her voice comes through. This book doesn't break any new ground, but anyone who wants to know everything about the Beatles needs to read it. It sent me back to the Anthology to review the official version of how Cynthia was replaced by Yoko.

Not trying too hard to tie everything together, I will mention two other things.

(1) Today I watched The Lake House, a nice PG love story with Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock. It features a beautiful song by Paul McCartney, "This Never Happened Before"--my husband recognized Paul's voice before I did, which shocked me.

(2) Today at work, Sarah, a former co-worker visited the office with her 6-month-old baby. Fun times. Sarah lives in Las Vegas now, and her husband is an executive at one of the big hotels there. There was some event at the hotel recently (I didn't get the details of the event, it's the nature of conversation when a 6-month-old is present, the dialog tends to be fragmented) At any rate, Paul McCartney was performing or appearing at the hotel, and Sarah and her husband attended the after-party. She said she was just standing around, chatting, and she looked up and There. He. Was. Paul freakin' McCartney, right in front of her. She's a level-headed type, not easily rattled; she's Swiss, very sophisticated, not some teeny-bopper. But she was, in this case, non-plussed, at a loss, verklempt. Paul and she "locked eyes" she said, and then he reached over and touched her on the arm and said, "'s'all right." Her impulse was to reach and touch his arm in return, but when she made that gesture, the bodyguards moved in, and the moment was over. So today, I touched someone who recently touched and was touched by Paul McCartney.

I've thought about this before: what must it be like to live your entire adult life as someone to whom everyone reacts with awe. It's like being the Dalai Lama, but nobody annointed you, there's nothing official, you're just one of the 10 most popular people on the planet. Amazing. In my opinion, Paul handles it very well. He will always be my favorite Beatle. And that's not just because John dumped Cynthia for Yoko.

Achenboodle Book Drive

2006-09-23T19:32:00.000-05:00

Cassandra S. is a frequent commenter on Joel Achenbach's Washington Post blog. She lives in rural North Carolina. She's a grandma who faces hardships every day, but works to make the world a better place. She works with the local kids, tutoring in math and reading during the school year. Some of the commenters on Achenblog (colloquially known as "boodlers") have decided to help Cassandra's kids by sending books for her to use in the program. Yellojkt wrote it all up on his blog, including book lists, in case any of my readers want to jump on this bandwagon. Information on where to send the books is available by emailing me (kbertocci at hotmail.com) or yellojkt (see the link).

The Last Resort, by Alison Lurie

2006-09-23T15:54:00.000-05:00

I bought this book last spring at a bookstore in Key West--a lovely small bookstore the likes of which cannot be sustained by any normal American town. But being located a half block off Duval Street means that thousands of pedestrians pass by every week and also that the real estate prices are too high for Borders to even think about staking out the necessary square footage to establish one of their cookie-cutter superstores, so there it is, the Key West Island Bookstore, at 513 Fleming Street.

It's no secret I am a book snob, and I don't usually read "beach books"--my feeling is, that's why there are magazines. But I was in a light reading mood, looking over the pile of books in the "Key West section" of the store, and Alison Lurie is a Pulitzer Prize winner (albeit one I was unfamiliar with) so I picked up The Last Resort.

Lurie's tale of a New England professor and his wife who relocate to Key West in hopes of ameliorating their lives turned out to be the kind of book I usually don't read, but it was enjoyable anyway. Key West is its own reality and it is hopeless to try to convey its essence. If you are not there, you won't understand, and if you are there, you don't need anybody to describe it to you. Nevertheless, Lurie, who has been a part-time Key West resident for many years, makes a brave effort at describing the kind of disconnect people experience when they arrive on the island and establish residence.

I like this passage, that deals with the bright yellow multicar tram that tours the island, the Conch Tour Train.

Molly...had never been on the train, though it passed her house continually. The day she and her husband first moved in, the loudspeaker had called the tourists' attention to a large tropical tree with loose, flaky bark that grew in their side yard. "On your left, just ahead, you will see a fine specimen of one of Key West's native trees. It is a gumbo limbo, but natives call it the tourist tree, because it is always red and peeling."

The first time Molly and her husband heard this joke they laughed. They heard it again soon afterward, and then at regular intervals until sunset. It did no good to shut the windows; the loudspeaker was clearly audible through the uninsulated walls of the house. Polite calls to the Conch Train office over the next few weeks accomplished nothing; the woman who answered the phone appeared to think that Molly should feel honored to have her tree noticed.

After hearing the joke approximately every twenty minutes for two weeks, Molly and her husband discussed having the tree removed. But it turned out that the gumbo limbo was a protected species; any tree service that destroyed it would lose its license and be liable for heavy damages, as would the Hopkinses. An acquaintance suggested pouring bleach into the roots, but the gumbo limbo appeared to like bleach.

Finally, after getting permission from the Historical Prservation Society (a lengthy process), Molly and her husband put up a fence which cut off their view and darkened the yard, but concealed the trunk of the tree. On one memorable day at the end of the season, the Conch Train passed in silence.

Now, that is funny, and it does express the typical reaction a northerner would have in that situation. But here's the problem: if you have that reaction, you don't belong in Key West. You will have to change or leave. These characters have a small victory over the island but they will lose the war. You can be whoever you want to be in Key West but you can't change the culture. I remember the apartment I lived in for two and a half years where the Conch Train was always saying, "...Key West was discovered in 1544 by Ponce de Leon..." [According to more reliable sources, the date was 1513, but this is something else you can't get worked up about: in Key West, people make up stories. Get over it.] I loved having the Conch Train going by--I liked waving to the tourists and smiling at them.

The Last Resort is an uncomplicated book with mostly two-dimensional characters. The plot is a straight line. The writing is skillful and the setting is suitably exotic. It's a perfect "beach read"--if you like that sort of thing.

Until I Find You, by John Irving

2006-09-17T08:11:00.000-05:00

One day this summer, I was in the Memphis airport, passing time in a bookstore while waiting for my flight. I already had magazines to read on the plane and I had no intention of buying a book. When I saw John Irving's latest, it was a pleasant surprise; I hadn't heard anything about it. I picked it up, fanned through the pages. I reminded myself that I had no plans to buy any books. I put it down and walked away, out of the store. I sat down in the waiting area--for maybe five minutes. Then I went back, as if driven by forces outside my control, and bought it. It's a lovely book, 824 pages long. The cover is flesh colored on the bottom half and the title is "tattooed" on it, "Until I find you," on a banner across a broken heart.

John Irving is one of my favorite authors, although this book didn't do anything to move him higher in my esteem. His place in my writer pantheon is cemented by two things: Cider House Rules, which I think is one of the best novels of the 20th century, and Irving's love and respect for Charles Dickens, which may be even as great as my own. I've read all of Irving's books. They have disappointed me, more often than not, but when he's good, he's really delightful, so I'll continue to read whatever he publishes.

Until I Find You is interesting in its use of point of view: much of the story is told as remembered by the main character, Jack Burns. Over and over the narrator emphasizes the unreliability of the narrative, so that makes everything a mystery all the time. Quite often the reader learns that something presented earlier was not true, and then the correction may be corrected further later on. That could be irritating, but I didn't mind because the story wasn't all that emotionally engaging--possibly because of the repeated warnings, I didn't feel betrayed.

What I will remember about this book is the seediness of it, the creepy way Irving presents the theme of child sexual abuse. He manages to convey the events almost without moral content. Everything is told from Jack's point of view, and he doesn't really know that he's being abused. The psychological repercussions are shown but not really discussed. I was reminded of the theme in A Widow for One Year, when the middle-aged woman who has lost her two teenaged sons in an accident seduces a young man because he reminds her of one of her sons. It's presented as reasonable, but it's not, it's really sick. Similar themes run through Until I Find You--Jack is victimized by a series of older girls and women, all with weird rationalizations that he has no defense against.

The story line rambles--800+ pages is long enough to have the characters tour Canada, Europe, and California, for Jack to go from age four to all grown up, and to finally find his father, after searching for him, literally, spiritually, and metaphorically, throughout the book. I'd say the storyline doesn't merit all those pages. Les Miserables, Don Quixote, War and Peace--some books deserve that much paper. This one should probably spent a little more time in the editing process, and saved some trees.

The New Wheels

2006-09-10T21:02:00.000-05:00

First off, I have to say that starting this blog back up has not gone very smoothly. It turns out that reading, thinking and living all interfere in a major way with blogging. I'll have to cut down somewhere.

Anyway, I got a new bicycle last week (new to me, anyway)--it's red and it says "Key West" on the frame; I guess that's the model, like my car is a Toyota Tercel and my bike is a Sun Key West. Love it. It has 8 speeds, and some of them are fairly fast if the appropriate amount of muscle power is applied.

I celebrated the new vehicle by taking it out Saturday and riding to Boynton Beach and back--according to Expedia, that's 42 miles roundtrip. And it is a beautiful ride, along the beach, with lots of views of sand and surf, as well as glimpses of multi-million dollar mansions.

Here's the view from the beach where I decided to turn around and head for home.

Looking north:

Looking south:

Oops, see that rain? I ran into it on my way home, so I ducked into a shelter at a different beach.

It was raining, but the sun was still shining, just like in the Nilsson song:

I'm going where the sun keeps shining
Through the pouring rain
Going where the weather suits my clothes

Backing off of the northeast wind
Sailing on a summer breeze
Skipping over the ocean like a stone

So I sang that song for a while as I pedaled the rest of the way home.

The Professor and the Madman, by Simon Winchester

2006-09-07T20:03:00.000-05:00

Imagine that you could only have one book.

Would it be The Bible? Finnegan's Wake? The complete works of Shakespeare? What book could you imagine that would be endlessly edifying and useful, as well as dependably entertaining?

I refuse to make a choice, even hypothetically, that narrows all of literature to a single volume. However, if forced, one could do worse than to choose a really good dictionary. I love my American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language; I have copies at home and at work. But the original work that sought to define "the meaning of everything" in English was the Oxford English Dictionary.

In The Professor and the Madman, Simon Winchester has written the story of the OED, concentrating on the efforts of two men. James Murray, the professor, dedicated his life to the dictionary because he loved language, literature, and scholarship. W.C. Minor, the madman, shared those motivations, but he was also in need of an occupation to stave off the madness. His extreme dedication to the dictionary project was made possible by his incarceration in an insane asylum.

The process of creating the dictionary involved thousands of volunteers, combing through books in search of definitive and distinctive examples of words, which they sent, along with examples of their use, to the headquarters of the Oxford Press. From five million collected, 414,825 words were selected. The project took more than 68 years. (Murray was the first editor; at the time of his death the dictionary was about half finished.)

The professor and the madman were kindred spirits, despite the disparity in their social status. I felt that the defining exchange came late in their association, when Murray reached out to Minor in gratitude and friendship, offering him a distinctive gift. He sent him something only a few people on earth would recognize as a treasure (but the people who enjoy this book certainly agree it is)--the newly completed entry for the word "take." (It covered several pages and had taken months to compile.)

This is hardly a gripping adventure story. But there is drama in it, and passion. If you love words, it's worth a read. I enjoyed the feeling of being present at the creation of the great dictionary, which was an amazingly ambitious project and in its completion, a triumph of cooperative effort.

Coming Attractions

2006-09-06T05:16:00.000-05:00

I think it's generally a mistake to announce plans for the future. So many things can go wrong and then you are forced to retract the announcement or revise it or just leave it hanging there, as a testament to your inability to master your environment.

However, I received an email today from Amazon.com saying the new Jonathan Franzen book has shipped, and I'm inspired by that. I fully intend to have a season of book reviews on Read-Think-Live. I have read quite a few books over the summer, so stand by, here's a list of some of the titles I'll be blogging about in the coming weeks.

The Professor and the Madman, by Simon Winchester
The Last Resort, by Alison Lurie
The Sot-Weed Factor, by John Barth
Babes in Boyland, by Gina Barreca
Until I Find You, by John Irving
Digging to America, by Anne Tyler
In a Sunburned Country, by Bill Bryson
The Moral Animal, by Robert Wright
John, by Cynthia Lennon
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, by Mark Haddon

. . . and, I didn't forget, I said I would review I Am Charlotte Simmons, by Tom Wolfe.

. . . and the aforementioned Franzen book, The Discomfort Zone.

Stay tuned . . .

I Voted

2006-09-05T18:14:00.000-05:00

Today was the primary for state elections in Florida. Several people are running for governor and the two leading Democrats are pretty close.

It was rainy. When I showed up at my polling place I was the only one there.

I understand apathy, I understand that people are busy. I know how they feel; it seems like just one more thing to do in a life full of duties and chores. But, it's just the right thing to do, to take the time, pay attention to the issues and candidates and make the effort to vote.

I always think of the women who worked so hard for universal suffrage--nobody just handed us the vote as a gift. And the civil rights workers who gave their lives for voting rights--that happened in my lifetime. I can't take it lightly. Voting is important.

Here's a voting rights timeline for the United States. Here's the timeline for women's suffrage, by country (Switzerland: 1971!?).

Happy Labor Day

2006-09-04T19:16:00.000-05:00

Today's holiday served its purpose for me, gave me an opportunity to step off the treadmill of activities for a while and contemplate the condition of workers in America. It's a good occasion to salute the Service Employees' International Union, they are doing some very good work and have been reaching out to people outside their ranks. Joining their affiliate organization, Purple Ocean, is a good way to support workers' rights, and their website is a source for news about developments that affect working people.

It's also a good day to remember a great, underappreciated hero of American history, Eugene Victor Debs. I will include below some excerpts from the 1918 speech that resulted in a prison sentence for Debs; close to a century has passed, but the words still ring true, too true.

===========
June 16, 1918, Canton Ohio

...These are the gentry who are today wrapped up in the American flag, who shout their claim from the housetops that they are the only patriots, and who have their magnifying glasses in hand, scanning the country for evidence of disloyalty, eager to apply the brand of treason to the men who dare to even whisper their opposition to Junker rule in the United States. No wonder Sam Johnson declared that “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” He must have had this Wall Street gentry in mind, or at least their prototypes, for in every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the people.
...
Every solitary one of these aristocratic conspirators and would-be murderers claims to be an arch-patriot; every one of them insists that the war is being waged to make the world safe for democracy. What humbug! What rot! What false pretense! These autocrats, these tyrants, these red-handed robbers and murderers, the “patriots,” while the men who have the courage to stand face to face with them, speak the truth, and fight for their exploited victims—they are the disloyalists and traitors. If this be true, I want to take my place side by side with the traitors in this fight.
...
Do not worry over the charge of treason to your masters, but be concerned about the treason that involves yourselves. Be true to yourself and you cannot be a traitor to any good cause on earth.

--Eugene V. Debs

=======
Happy Labor Day, everybody.

Vacation is a State of Mind

2006-08-05T11:26:00.000-05:00

Early August. Everybody is on vacation, just back from vacation, or getting ready to leave for vacation. Individually their vacations may not be that much more exciting than mine, but collectively, heck, they are going to North Carolina, Colorado, Texas, France, California, Germany, Cape Cod, Hawaii, Canada... My traveling is done for the year so I might be tempted to the sin of envy.

So, when I woke up this morning, I rolled out of bed, threw on some shorts and a tanktop, told my husband, "I'm going for a 'big' bike ride; don't worry about me!" and took off. It takes about 15 minutes to get to the beach, then I turned south on A1A and just kept going. I toured Fort Lauderdale beach, went past the International Swimming Hall of Fame, the Sheraton Yankee Clipper Hotel, the Bahia Mar Hotel and Marina (where the big boat show is every year), past the Jungle Queen riverboat and all the famous spring break landmarks. Eventually A1A turns west and goes across the Intracoastal Waterway on a big bridge--the highest point my one-speed bicycle has ever attained, and the biggest hill I've ever ridden up (or down) in Florida. I took this picture of the Fort Lauderdale skyline from the bridge. On the other side, the bike lane ends and it's urban biking instead of beach biking. I turned around and headed home.

With one pit stop at Dunkin Donuts for a strawberry-banana smoothie (yum, with whipped cream!), I was home by 11 a.m. or so. Expedia says I rode 36.6 miles. It was fun and it felt just like being on vacation.

Ho hum, where's my hammock, I think it's naptime.

Tropic Magazine

2006-05-28T19:04:00.000-05:00

The Miami Herald used to have a Sunday magazine, like the New York Times has. The Herald's magazine was called Tropic. Tropic launched some illustrious careers and provided many happy hours of intellectual stimulation for south Florida readers. The Herald stopped publishing Tropic in 1998, and I miss it. I found out that I could get the articles in digital format from the Broward County Library, so I started spending time at the library going through the files. I enjoyed reading the stories and I kept thinking I'd like to share them with other people. I emailed some, and then I emailed some more, and eventually I had the idea to construct a website. That turned into a project that I worked on in my spare time for several months, and now the site is set up and on line, and this is its official opening.

My totally unofficial Tropic fansite: www.tropicfan.com

I hope you enjoy it.

It's All Sausage

2006-05-26T07:52:00.000-05:00

On my way to work two days ago I saw a freshly-killed possum on the side of the road. Yuck. Then I immediately passed a convenience store that was apparently selling breakfast; the smell of sausage and toast wafted out the door. It made me think about how seeing a dead animal makes me lose my appetite. But I eat dead animals almost every day. I thought, maybe it is because when you come upon a dead animal it's not a good idea to eat it--better to kill it yourself because then you know it's fresh. Okay, but seeing a live rabbit or deer or even a cow or chicken doesn't make my mouth water. Contrast that with the sight of a strawberry or a plum, or even a pecan or a peanut. I'm becoming convinced that my basic nature is vegetarian.

Now, I have to say my friend Setsuko has told me that when she goes to an aquarium the fish look yummy to her; she always thinks about eating them. But she doesn't feel that way about cows or chickens.

We use sausage as a metaphor for many things: you may enjoy the end result, but you don't want to know the details of how it was made. I see now that that applies to meat products of various kinds. To kill the animal, skin it, take out its intestines, cut it up and cook it is not at all an attractive prospect to me. I'm relatively certain that if I had to do that myself, I would be a vegetarian. As it is, I guess I'm just a species of hypocrite.

Artist Alice Comes Home

2006-05-08T19:22:00.000-05:00

Today marks the start of the Off-Season for ReadThinkLive. The original motivation was that our daughter, who had been the recipient of my wisdom daily for eighteen years, finally escaped my immediate vicinity and went off to college. I figured I would miss reading her passages from whatever I ran across that I thought she needed to know, or sharing my thoughts with her or giving her lectures about morals and values or whatever. So the blog would be an outlet for me and also a way for her to tune in at her convenience and find out what Mom was thinking about on any given day.

But tonight Artist Alice is coming home for the summer. The phone has already begun to ring with eager suitors. I had forgotten about that ringing phone; it's been peaceful these last months.

So for the forseeable future, I'll post when I have some burning issue to rant over or when I've read something that inspires me, but not every day.

Now, I must go clean the living room.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896 - 1940)

2006-05-06T21:49:00.000-05:00

"Show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy."

--F. Scott Fitzgerald

Today I watched an old movie, The Last Time I Saw Paris, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Van Johnson. It is based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and it made me remember that Fitzgerald is the most romantic literary figure I know. Somehow, the image of the young, handsome writer struggling with his demons to write stories of love and tragedy and tragic love is burned into my brain. He is the writer as tortured artist, one of those "too sensitive for this world" types. I know Lord Byron is the poster child for that, but Byron isn't as vivid to me. Plus, Fitzgerald is so American. I need to read some of his short stories again.

"Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you -- like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist -- or else it is nothing, an empty, formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations."

--F. Scott Fitzgerald

Crime and Punishment

2006-05-05T19:09:00.000-05:00

In 1981, I was teaching fifth grade at a Navy base in Key West. The news of John Lennon's murder reached me early in the morning, and I arrived at work to find the other teachers discussing the event. I was sad about Lennon's death, and hopeful that I would find other people who were sharing my feelings. Instead, what I heard was anger, and people expressing their wish for the punishment of the murderer. The death penalty would be too good for him, someone said, and there was general agreement, as people expressed their opinions about how much punishment he deserved. I had been sad before, but hearing that conversation I was heart-broken. What kind of way was this to remember John, who had worked for peace and advocated love. It was a moment of supreme alienation for me.

Now Zacarias Moussaoui has been sentenced to life in a super-maximum security prison and Americans of all kinds are expressing their sense of satisfaction that he will be denied martyrdom and instead subjected to a lifetime of harsh conditions, isolation and sensory deprivation. I am disheartened by the sentiments expressed by the people I live and work among.

From my viewpoint, the supermax prison concept might be justifiable if the total population was around 100. The 100 most dangerous criminals alive at any given moment. The unibomber, Charles Manson, people like that. But it's nothing like that. Prison construction and administration is a growth industry, and the United States has the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world. The supermax prisons are home for thousands of individuals, and many of them are not serving life sentences. That means that one day they will be out in society. The brutal conditions of solitary confinement do not produce people who can successfully rejoin the world and cope with the requirements of civilization.

I would like to see Americans let go of the idea of punishment. To lose one's freedom is punishment enough; it should be viewed as a necessary evil. We need a return to the concept of rehabilitation, education, and training for useful jobs. We need to find a way to allow inmates to remain connected to the social fabric, their families and communities. Humans are social animals. In isolation, we can never be fully human. We require communication, interaction with other people. Maybe what has gone wrong is that Americans have convinced themselves that inmates are not, in fact, people.

The Big Read

2006-05-04T17:50:00.000-05:00

In conjunction with the National Endowment for the Arts, some local educational and literary organizations are sponsoring this community event: The Big Read. The idea is to choose one book for "everybody" to read and discuss.

This is a national program, and the NEA selected four books for the local committees to decide among. Florida's selection is Farenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury.

Ray Bradbury was one of my favorite authors when I was young. His books, especially Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and The Illustrated Man provide some of my most vivid reading memories. For example, in Dandelion Wine, there's a scene in which three children encounter an elderly woman. She buys them ice cream, they sit on her porch, and during the course of conversation she tries to convince them that she was once young. They find the idea ludicrous. When I read the book, I was the age of those children, and the idea was as new to me as it was to them. I remain loyal to authors who introduce entirely new ideas to me.

I put Bradbury on my list of authors that everyone should read before they get too old--for most people who read, I'd say by age 25 you are likely to be too worldly, too jaded to be able to appreciate the work. I know I am. The books are almost irritating to me now--I tried to read Farenheit 451 last year when my daughter was reading it for English class, and I didn't get through it.

Other authors who share space on the read-'em-while-you're-young list include Taylor Caldwell, Ayn Rand, Howard Fast and C.S. Lewis. There are, on the other hand, some authors of "children's books" whose work I would recommend to anyone of any age. That list includes E.B. White, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and A.A. Milne.

Realage.com

2006-05-03T19:41:00.000-05:00

Internet quizzes can be fun, but this is a seriously useful site, where you fill out a questionnaire about your characteristics and lifestyle and it tells you your "real age"--a backwards way of saying, your life expectancy.

What is most useful is that it is totally specific about what answers caused the number to go up or down, so you can adjust your lifestyle to see what effect that has on your "real age." I get the email newsletters--they are tailored to my specific profile, and they have been quite useful. I know enquiring minds want to know, so I'll report: my chronological age is 48.2; my "real age" is 43.2. I have healthy habits and good genes, but I could improve by eating more vegetables and whole grains. If I also started eating soy products regularly, I might live forever. Tofu burgers! I don't think I'm quite ready for that.

Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn

2006-05-02T20:29:00.000-05:00

A young colleague from work gave me this book with a strong recommendation. The full title is Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit. A blurb on the cover quotes Jim Britell of the Whole Earth Review: "From now on I will divide the books I have read into two categories--the ones I read before Ishmael and those read after."

A telepathic gorilla is the main character. Our narrator is a young, self-styled "seeker." The book is an exposition of a philosophy that is offered as an antidote to the destructive worldview currently prevailing.

"You hear this fifty times a day. You can turn on the radio or the television and hear it every hour. Man is conquering the deserts, man is conquering the oceans, man is conquering the atom, man is conquering the elements, man is conquering outer space...and given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be conquered, they will conquer it like a foe, and one day, inevitably, their foe will lie bleeding to death at their feet, as the world is now." (p.73, p.84)

There were no brand new ideas in the book for me, but it helped me organize some of the ideas I got from East of Eden. The content is more important than the style, but it is well-organized and engaging.

If you are interested in a quick philosophical novel about ecology, you could do worse.

Communism and Christianity

2006-05-01T20:10:00.000-05:00

Happy May Day!

Of course, May Day is a traditional spring festival in England, and probably other places too. But it is also International Labor Day, a day to celebrate working people and support them in their attempts to improve their working conditions, everyplace except the United States of America. The U.S. has its own special Labor Day, in September, to differentiate ourselves from the Godless Communists. I say, the cold war is over now, and we should rejoin the international community and celebrate Labor Day the same day as everybody else. Then we could use September for another birthday holiday--well, Eugene Debs's birthday is November 5, maybe that's close enough.

I didn't have time to think about this blog today because I went straight from work to my Bible study group. I could think a long time and not come up with anything as good as this, from Paul's letter to the Hebrews, chapter 13, verse 1-3, labeled in the New International Bible as "Concluding Exhortations:"

Keep on loving each other as brothers. Do not forget to entertain strangers, for by so doing some people have entertained angels without knowing it. Remember those in prison as if you were their fellow prisoners, and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering.

...Grace be with you all.

TV Turn-Off Week, Part VI: The End of the Rant

2006-04-30T15:09:00.000-05:00

TV Turn-Off Week ends today. I have had a very good time doing something I don't get many opportunities to do: denigrating a holy icon of American culture.

In the interest of full disclosure and total candor, I want to tell you that our living room contains a 27" television set. It is not hooked up to cable or an antenna, and so it does not deliver what I call "television" into my home. We do watch movies regularly, and I occasionally get dvd's of material that was originally produced for television. I watch them on my own schedule, without commercials. Some of the shows that I have liked enough to watch entire seasons' worth of: "Friends," "Six Feet Under," "The Office" (British version), " and "Arrested Development." ("Arrested Development"--NPR says I should like it, and I have tried to like it, but I often fall asleep watching it--I think I'm done with it.) The only broadcast show that I watch more or less religiously is the Academy Awards. I watch a videotaped version of it, usually the day after the broadcast. I fast-forward through the commercials.

Coming up this week: book reviews and who knows what else...

TV Turn-Off Week, Part VI: TV Makes us Fat

2006-04-29T21:41:00.000-05:00

If you are sitting on a comfortable chair, staring off into space, you aren't burning very many calories. But you are burning more calories than you would be if you were watching television. When we watch tv, we become very still and our metabolism slows down. That's what the studies show, and other studies have shown a direct correlation between obesity and the number of hours spent watching television.

In addition to slowing our metabolism as we watch, of course, tv time takes away from available time to play sports or take a walk or go to the gym.

And let's not forget that while we watch we will be bombarded with messages urging us to EAT MORE JUNK FOOD!!!

Here's Dave Barry: "Maybe you are wondering, 'Am I overweight?' Well, here's an easy test to determine whether you have a weight problem. Go to the nearest window. Look out. If you see America, then you are overweight" (paraphase--I'm sure it was funnier when he wrote it.)

So Americans watch more and more television, and get more and more overweight. Of course television is not the entire cause of the obesity epidemic, but I really believe that the more tv people watch, the less inclined they are to take charge of their own lives.

Tomorrow: Full Disclosure and Disclaimers, and we say farewell to TV Turn-Off Week.

TV Turn-Off Week, Part V: Television is BAD FOR KIDS!

2006-04-28T18:28:00.000-05:00

One time about twelve years ago, a neighbor I didn't know very well asked me to babysit her six-month old baby. When I arrived at the house, she gave me the usual run-down: the bottle is here, the diapers are there, and she said, the baby is in the bedroom. Just leave the television on and she'll be fine. Then the mom left.

I went into the bedroom to find the baby propped up in an infant seat, facing the tv, about four feet away from it. The program that happened to be on as I entered the room was some kind of lurid drama, with people yelling and threatening each other. I can't report any details about it because of course I turned it off immediately. I picked up the baby and cuddled with her while she had her bottle and went to sleep. When the mom came home, she expressed some irritation that the television wasn't on. I didn't babysit that child again, but I'll never forget that experience.

That's not an illustration of my point, just an introduction to the rant.

Television is bad for kids. The time they spend watching tv would literally be better spent making mud pies. Watching cloud formations. Playing fetch with the dog. Fishing. Building forts. Talking to a friend. Daydreaming. Drawing. ANYTHING!!

Commercials are bad for kids. They have no defense when they are young, and by the time they get a clue, their minds are already formed with a background of advertising propaganda.

TV news is bad for kids. It is violent and frightening.

Television teaches children that they have a right to be entertained. That is a direct cause of boredom. My daughter has never known boredom, and it's partly because we never had television. She had books and art supplies. She could create a whole world with sticks and leaves. As a high school student she laughed when she told me that when new friends found out she didn't have tv, they would say, "What do you do?"--presumably they couldn't imagine how they would fill all the empty hours that would result if they didn't watch television.

I was pleased when I heard Alice say something about Levi jeans, pronouncing the brand like "levee." At age 17, she had never seen a jean commercial on television. Result: she didn't "know" that she needed to spend extra money for a brand name. She decided for herself what clothes she liked to wear, what jeans were comfortable.

American parents don't agree with me. Most kids have television in their bedrooms. Toddlers have their own specially designed remote controls, and their own specially produced shows and movies. American children spend more time in front of the tube than they spend in school. I'm crazy, out of touch with reality. But I'm very glad I raised my daughter without television, and what is more, she is glad, too.

TV Turn-Off Week, Part IV: TV News--Purveyor of Information or Corporate Shill?

2006-04-27T18:38:00.000-05:00

Occasionally, reading the newspaper, you will run across a "news item" with a headline like "New Weight-Loss Pill Works Wonders!" and the crap detector goes off, and if you have experience with newspapers, you will look at the top of the page--sure enough, there's the small print: "Paid Advertisement." I don't know if it's a law or if it's just journalistic ethics, but it's pretty consistent. Well, guess what, television news is apparently lacking either a law or an ethic that would require the producers to notify the public when they are watching a "news item" that is actually produced by a corporation, for the benefit of that corporation. I'm assuming that it is because no money changes hands--it's a barter, the corporation gets free air time and the tv station gets free, professionally produced video that passes for news.

A study just came out from the Center for Media & Democracy called "Fake TV News: Widespread and Undisclosed," that details the ways that tv stations throughout the country, in both large and small markets, spoonfeed prepackaged information to their audiences, using various ruses to make it seem as if the station produced the segment even though they didn't even check the facts presented.

Here's the link: read it and weep.