East Wind, Again

Bye Bye, PI!

2009-07-02T20:31:00.000-07:00

Q&A

2009-03-02T13:48:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, I like to go to book talks. I go for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it’s like reading a review, a shortcut to extracting a bit of knowledge from a book I know I’ll never get around to reading. Sometimes I’ve read something of the talker’s before, and I want to see how their mind comes out in speaking, to compare with what I know already of the way it comes out in writing--a tinkering with the instruments I use every day to guess what might be going on inside all those mysterious people around me I can know only through how they look and what they do and what they say.

But the main reason to attend these talks is to see what intriguingly idiotic questions the audience may come up with during the question period, and whether the speakers are skilled at reformulating bad questions in a way that lets them give good answers.

There was an evening a year ago when I wandered into the central library in search of frivolous fiction and noticed that Anne Enright was about to read. I went into the auditorium and listened. Her book sounded good, and she read well. When she stopped, she said she would answer some questions.

It was as if the audience had conspired on a plan to drip stereotypes on her till she went mad with irritation. One person asked about the Irish mother as anchor of the family, the next about pub culture and the strength of the storytelling tradition, another (or at least it would not surprise me were it so, though on this one I have no clear memory) some damn thing or other about potatoes.

And then came a question that started with ten years of unprecedented economic prosperity and ended with, “and can you believe it yourself?”

Enright had to this point managed firmly and politely to say things that responded directly to people’s questions while politely hinting at things like diversity in Irish family dynamics or Dubliners with no taste for pubs, but this last question confused her a bit. She asked to have it restated, which it was in almost precisely the same words. And then I was filled with profoundest admiration to see that, instead of flying toward the auditorium’s ranks of hard foam seats to throttle someone, she found something or other quietly and calmly to say.

With books about a bigger country, things get even worse.

People like Philip Pan (whom I heard at Town Hall in June of last year) or Xinran (Saturday at Elliott Bay Book Company) put years or decades of careful work into understanding and documenting what is happening in contemporary China, and come out hoping to convey one main message to people who may have only an hour or ten to devote to this subject: China is vast, complex, and changing dizzyingly fast; here are some illustrative examples. And then they are met with all the old questions that demand simple, all-encompassing answers: When will we see progress on Tibet? On prison labor? On the one-child policy? When will press restrictions be lifted, and how are people feeling about the Cultural Revolution?

Or even questions like those asked Xinran Saturday:

“Because of the huge, trillion-dollar indebtedness of America to Red China . . . do you you see Red Chinese influence taking us back to feudalism?”

“I think that China holds the key to the survival of mankind! Because I worry about global warming . . .”

Something about China does seem to draw lunatics, or people who if not quite lunatic are still unable to grasp the bigness of the subject. Even when someone like Xinran speaks explicitly of the inadequacy of her 50 years of experience to do more than scrabble at the edges of 5,000 years of culture, 1.3 billion people, the vast and terraced landscape, etc., etc., people still go on voicing these much-too-large questions, the kind that make my brother mutter to himself, “What about the world?” in imitation of something a shaggy young Metallica fan once asked him when I stood him in front of a class of Chinese high schoolers as a target for their English practice.

Even books only tangentially related to China have something of the same effect.

A couple of hours before Xinran spoke in the basement of Elliott Bay, Stephen Mitchell was there, reading from his new book of translations and commentary. Though the abominable presumption of calling his anthology The Second Book of the Tao awoke in me a half-remembered animosity (Assuming the primacy of the Daodejing in the Daoist canon! Appropriating Zhuangzi to the purposes of Stephen Mitchell! Grab-bag spirituality! Bah!), I had once spent an entire week absorbed in his Gilgamesh, finding that there, at least, I didn’t mind him stuffing bits of Stephen Mitchell into the chinks left by older writers. Take, for instance, the following:

When he walked into the main street of Uruk,
the people gathered around him, marveling,
the crowds kept pressing closer to see him,
like a little baby they kissed his feet.
“What an enormous man!” they whispered.
“How much like Gilgamesh--not quite so tall
but stronger-boned. In the wilderness
he grew up eating grass with gazelles,
he was nursed on the milk of antelope and deer.
Gilgamesh truly has met his match.
This wild man can rival the mightiest of kings.”

How much more faithful to my idea of an epic than the more careful and scholarly version by N. K. Sandars:

He entered Uruk, that great market, and all the folk thronged round him where he stood in the street in strong-walled Uruk. The people jostled; speaking of him they said, ‘He is the spit of Gilgamesh.’ ‘He is shorter.’ ‘He is bigger of bone.’ ‘This is the one who has reared on the milk of wild beasts. His is the greatest strength.’ The men rejoiced: ‘Now Gilgamesh has met his match. This great one, this hero whose beauty is like a god, he is a match even for Gilgamesh.’

Of course, one might wonder where the heck the gazelles came from, and suspect they were merely overflow from the teeming mental landscape of Stephen Mitchell, where an overpopulation had developed for reasons entirely unrelated to Gilgamesh but needing outlet before the grass was all eaten and the ecosystem wrecked.

But no mind! Afraid not of antelope, not daunted by deer, I would listen to this singular voice!

There were things in the reading to make me squirm, but I am always happy to have my suspicions vindicated. Mitchell draws the kind of audience whose loudest sighs of appreciation come with the simplest statements about harmony coming with the centering of the self. He has the kind of awareness of words’ rhythm that I’m still surprised to find rare. He shows no trace of doubt that if a though occurred to him it must be interesting, and if it occurred to his wife [link] it could fix the world.

As for his voice--there are hints that nature made it loud and raspy, but by generous application of life-affirming philosophy he constrains it to a quiet and unctuous huskiness.

He read, and his reading came to end, and people asked him questions. Someone asked a reasonable question, the kind to which he could give a brief but still revealing answer, a question about his work habits. I was interested to hear that making a version of Zhuangzi seemed to him straightforward: find the seven or eight translations into English and German; read, amalgamate, and transform. But for Homer he was somehow haunted by uncertainty about the meanings of words, and saw a need to consult volumes of scholarly commentary. Whence, I almost wished to ask him, this sudden sense of responsibility to the interpretive tradition? Where is our dauntless Stephen Mitchell, herder of gazelles?

But I stayed quiet, so as not to take up time that could be used by others to ask questions like “What’s the historical link between Daoism and Zen?”

What about the world?

Nice

2008-10-04T13:32:00.000-07:00

Shortly past a Saturday noon, a young woman was at the post office, mailing a box to Russia.

“Russia,” commented the clerk, whose tag said Susie Q. “Pretty nice country, huh? How’s the weather, is it nice? Is it hot?”

“Actually, right now the weather is pretty much like here,” mumbled the woman with the box, but could not seem to find the spirit to go on.

Kalaloch

2008-09-29T16:41:00.001-07:00

Library Opening Time

2008-09-20T09:59:00.001-07:00

South Lake Union

2008-09-19T17:39:00.001-07:00

Obama's Acceptance Speech

2008-08-28T19:16:00.001-07:00

Sweater

2008-08-07T07:58:00.001-07:00

Well worth abandoning on the street.

On and Off Button

2008-08-03T19:39:00.001-07:00

J had a stash of Obama paraphernalia in his desk drawer. He’d open it up enough to give you glimpse, and try to tempt you.

“Window poster? Button? Button? Poster?”

K took a poster.

P demurred. He would vote, he said. But no button.

I, too, resisted, until one day at the tail end of the primary season I saw a news story about how people were still giving Clinton money. Because they were feminists. Because, evidently, sex is more important than anything, and anyone who doesn't think so is either a man or might as well be.

I broke.

I gave Obama $50.

I let J take a button out of his drawer for me.

I pinned it on my backpack, where it stayed for a while. Then came the sad attempt to justify a self-serving decision on campaign finance for the general election, and it came off again. Then McCain going on about offshore drilling, and back on it went.

“Hey, Obama,” an old friend said when he saw it.

“Somebody was pushing it at work,” I explained. “I finally gave in and took one. Sometimes I just get too disgusted with him, and I take it off. But then I consider the alternative, and I put it back on again.”

A couple of days after this was the Berlin speech. My candidate stood before the vasty crowds telling them how they had fomented some Fascism and cooked up some Communism but Americans were still magnanimous enough to fly in food for them. A canny trick, getting Germans to cheer for American exceptionalism, but ew, I thought, icky. The button came off.

Then I read some parts of some of Obama’s exams from when he was teaching law, and o, I thought, how clever, and repinned it.

The other day, Obama found it behooved him, too, to sniff about under the oceans for oil and electoral support. But before I got around to using my backpack again, I picked up The Audacity of Hope, borrowed from J, and read a little while, and the projected unpinning and repinning canceled each other out.

There cannot be a healthy conscience in a presidential candidate. No decent person could choose to run for that office. But there is a mind there. For today, that is enough.

Heather Lake

2008-08-02T19:08:00.001-07:00

Yellow and Orange

2008-08-01T17:37:00.000-07:00

The purpose of these things is obscure to me, but they look nice.

July

2008-07-02T21:14:00.000-07:00

There is a great heavy two-propellered helicopter that circles above the lake. "Look, J, look out the window!" Little Boss says, and sees my arm already uplifted, pointing at the great brown-green thing bumbling along the stretch of sky between the ceiling and the top of the cubicle divider.

"They're practicing for hanging the flag on the Fourth," J says, and I don't know what he's talking about or if there is the slightest justification for his air of authority, but I watch the thing bumbling off around the bottom of the lake toward the hill on the other side, and feel that its particular purposes in flying round and round the lake today are insignificant in contrast to the very fact of its being. You can see at a glance it's meant to help someone kill somebody, but it has a weight about it that makes it hard to entertain the possibility that a thing like this should simply not exist. We stare at it for a long while, J and Little Boss and I, despite the long list of things less than half done.

On the way away from work a few days ago, J and I were near blinded by the sun glaring off the sticky upper surfaces of the leaves of a maple growing from a square in the sidewalk. "They're so shiny!" J said. "I don't know how they can be so shiny! This morning on my way to work, the sun was on it, and I, like--" he waved his hands in the air, squinting his eyes.

This morning, I scuffed my feet good along the rectangle of foot-cleaning carpet (or at least I guess that's what it is) in the lobby of our building, because walking up the sidewalk under the maples my soles picked up a tacky coating that made them go snick-snack, snick-snack, snick-snack against the ground.

"I never noticed it last year," J said, and pointed out the little hardened dribbles and drops of sap all along the sidewalk, in the afternoon as we made our way down the hill toward the tram. "But I guess I still had my car then." And so did I still have mine.

There is one tree, that one that was so blindingly shiny the other day, that seems even sappier than all the others along there. That was the one that dropped a leaf on my head yesterday. I noticed it landing there, but not till two blocks later did it occur to me that while I'd felt it land on my head, I'd not noticed it flutter to the ground. I put up my hand and found the leaf, a good big one at least four inches across, still stuck to the back of my head. I gave it a good yank, and it threatened to bring some hair with it as it came away, and then the back of my head was all snarled and glued together with sap, and I combed it all day with my fingers before it came straight again.

It is July and it is hot and usually I would be dejected because it's hard to face up to the way the sun comes out in the beginning of July and shine oppressively straight through to the middle of September. But this year it was cold and it was rainy and it was cold and it was rainy and it started to seem that the world had got stuck and was never going to remember there are seasons and things should change.

It is different now from last week, and I am pleased.

Suicide?

2008-06-30T17:40:00.001-07:00

This seems odd. Is attempting to cross the street to be construed as suicidal? Are they trying to save walkers from themselves? (The small print in the picture, too blurry--sorry--to read, says "American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.")

Oh, I See

2008-06-29T08:28:00.000-07:00

I noticed one day that the Ban Ignorance, Not Dogs banner was gone from its railing at Mercer and Dexter, and then a couple of days later that it was back, with a URL. So now I know.

More Literature

2008-06-27T07:58:00.001-07:00

This one is in German.

Swann's Way

2008-06-25T08:05:00.001-07:00

"Soup"

2008-06-10T13:32:00.000-07:00

Mercer Street

2008-06-05T08:01:00.001-07:00

Pit Bulls

2008-06-04T20:03:00.000-07:00

"Ban ignorance, not dogs?" read one of the hairy dudes at the corner.

"Who's trying to ban dogs?" wondered the other.

"It's a pit bull," one realized, looking at the picture. That, apparently, explained everything.

"Ban ignorance, not children," one tried out. The other one demanded an explanation, which I didn't hear because the light had turned and they were moving away.

In the morning, moving the other direction, I was stopped again by the light. There was another woman there.

"Excuse me," I said, "Do you happen to know what that sign means? I've been wondering about it for several days, that one over there that says, 'Ban ignorance, not dogs.'"

"Well, many people who live in apartments or condos aren't allowed to have dogs," she said very slowly and clearly, as if to two or three dozen mental deficients. "And that is a pit bull, which is not allowed even in many places where other dogs are allowed. Many people who own dogs have very strong feelings about them."

The light turned.

"Thank you," I said.

"At least, that's what I think it means," she said, in a more normal tone of voice. "I'm a dog owner, you know."

Rancor

2008-06-01T13:12:00.000-07:00

Huh?

2008-05-30T07:58:00.000-07:00

Kingston Ferry Dock

2008-05-24T11:14:00.000-07:00

Trivial Preoccupations

2008-05-23T22:41:00.000-07:00

"Please do not become alarmed--please use the button marked 'alarm,'" I read aloud in wonderment.

P snorted. "And the spelling's not very good either, or--wait, this one's different. One of the elevators has a word spelled wrong, and an extra colon or semicolon or something, too."

"You really are a compulsive proofreader, aren't you," I commiserated, but then I thought he was having me on. How likely was it, really, that there would be different versions of the same sign posted in different elevators?

But later I got in Car 7, and sure enough, when I compared it with my photo from Car 8, there was the very colon P had complained of.

Did it have, though, the grammatical problem of Car 8? I cannot be sure.

Will I be compelled, next time I'm in that building, to ride all 16 elevators so I can photograph the signs and compare? Dear me.

But I refuse to become alarmed, despite my current distance from any "alarm" button to act in my stead.

Manhattan Beach

2008-05-19T19:17:00.001-07:00

Failure

2008-05-18T20:50:00.000-07:00

Just the Place for Some Fake Grapes

2008-05-18T16:24:00.001-07:00

Another Mystery

2008-05-17T08:18:00.001-07:00

Space Needle

2008-05-17T07:44:00.001-07:00

More Data

2008-05-16T10:46:00.001-07:00

Perseverance

2008-05-14T10:07:00.001-07:00

Signs on this general theme have been appearing in this general location for a couple of years now. I suppose the desired result must not yet have been achieved.

Hillary Hillary Hillary Hillary Hillary

2008-05-08T14:01:00.001-07:00

Those blue splotches all along the white fence are Hillary posters. There's one in the front window, too. (The blue house to the right contented itself with a single Obama sign.)

Can Identify Cats, Can't Spell

2008-05-06T13:32:00.001-07:00

Myself, I don't know what a Siamese looks like. I suppose really that's more important than the spelling.

Double Bluff Beach

2008-04-28T23:12:00.001-07:00

Instructions

2008-04-13T10:03:00.000-07:00

Wind mechanism daily by application of coffee. Set querulum swinging. Alternation of the querulum between, e. g., the inefficiencies of workplace administration and the tedious qualities of the acquaintance, or the ills of the body and the fidgets of the mind (endpoints may vary between models) regulates the mechanism, ensuring a consistent interval between airings of the cuckoo.

The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum. Heinrich Böll.

2008-04-12T07:38:00.000-07:00

I once met a German woman who, standing in a circle of seven or six people, ventured a sally that fell flat. We knew this because, having emitted an utterance, an utterance wholly incomprehensible, she followed with two small woofs of apologetic laughter and the explanation, "German humor, I guess."

For a long while thereafter, I presumed there was none such, that Germans had merely abstracted from other peoples the idea that humor was a desirable quality, and so assigned the title to some category of phenomenon that ought to have borne an entirely different label.

But on an evening that seemed set to be yet another in a long string of the sort of evenings where all efforts to put together the small traces of people's activities in the world into some order that looked amusing petered out before they got anywhere, I started into reading The Clown. I don't remember how that story went except that it was terribly bleak and awfully funny, and for the time I was reading let me abandon my struggles and have Böll achieve for me the task I had been bent on, that of gazing on the small, sad facts of human existence and making of them a little joke to entertain myself with, crafting a silver lining to a world mostly cloud.

It was at another cloudy time that I happened across The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum for 25 cents in the Salvation Army in Juneau. The subject was a little obscure to me. The book was issued in the year I was born, when, I think, it may still have been possible to know what "honor" was, whereas now it is an armchair notion that can be academically reconstructed but not intuitively understood. So I was not entirely sure what the book was talking about, but it was very consoling, funny but not the least bit lighthearted, and I shall not doubt the existence of German humor again.

Salaried Employee

2008-04-11T06:34:00.000-07:00

I took a small trip, for a reason I had not much faith in. There was a flight one evening and a flight back the next, and in between a night of creaky bed in an ungainly hotel suite just slightly shrunk by the makeshift means of a Mexican radio station and a small crumpled pile of half-dirty clothing. Five low-grade meals, two long car rides slightly lightened by the life histories of uninteresting men. The purpose of the journey, a day with screen and projector in a darkened conference room, passed in the way it was expected to pass. Home four days; do it again.

Yet Another Conversational Failure

2008-04-03T06:44:00.000-07:00

I wanted some lamb, and unfortunately to get the lamb out from behind the glass you actually have to talk to somebody.

--Hello.
--Hi. Could I have a piece of leg of lamb, please?
--Which one?
--I don't care.
--This one?
--Okay. They all look the same to me. Am I supposed to be able to distinguish a difference?
--Well, it's size, mostly. That one in front is probably two pounds heavier.
--The small one is okay.
--And then, lamb is just like ass.
--[???]
--Some are good-looking, some are not so good-looking.
--[???]
--But these ones are all good-looking.

Had it been a moment of greater mental acuity, might this exchange have turned out differently? At least I did end up with the lamb (ass-like or no), which is the main thing.

Somewhat Perplexing

2008-03-27T21:25:00.001-07:00

Forest. Janet Taylor Lisle.

2008-02-17T10:27:00.000-08:00

The MV LeConte, one of the smaller boats in the Alaska Marine Highway Fleet, has a small bookcase stocked with children's books provided by an organization in Juneau, and it was from this "library" that I chose Forest to divert myself on my journey.

But it is not a diverting book. (Perhaps this is why it is reduced to spending its time floating up and down and up and down the fjords of Southeast.) It concerns a young girl's discovery of a race of intelligent squirrels in the forest surrounding her town, and her efforts to prevent their extermination by the town's adults. The resourcefulness and discernment of the girl and her brother were, I suppose, heartening, but the brutality and obtuseness of the adults were chilling. I suppose I should admire the book for departing from the usual excessive optimism of things of its general size and shape and font size, but I am a lazy reader and don't much want to be reminded of the harsh realities of the world, and I was glad the book was not very long.

On Beauty. Zadie Smith.

2008-02-15T20:26:00.000-08:00

The night I spent in Frankfurt, I had no alarm clock, and I had to be at the airport at six in the morning.

I could ask the hotel front desk to wake me.

I could go buy an alarm clock.

Or I could lie in my little kapakahi hotel room (with what looked something like a storage space soaring over the corner where the miniature bathroom had been stuck in, and a great big mirror over the narrow bed to make it all seem wider) eating peanuts and raisins and Turkish deli chicken and reading Zadie Smith all night.

Thus it is that I have only the haziest idea of Zadie Smith and how it was that her book was on beauty. My vague impressions:

Smith sure can hear people talk
Odd that my haphazard book harvesting yielded, in a single week, in two different countries, two novels with major characters named Zora
What, Rembrandt again?

Adding Machine

2008-02-15T19:29:00.000-08:00

I've been waiting for my adding machine for more than three months, and at first, today, I was delighted to learn it had arrived. No more trying to store Social Security numbers in a little battery-powered calculator that would hold only one at a time, and in any case turned itself off as soon as it felt my attention had grown less than lavish, leaving me to look up the number all over again. Hooray!

But the new machine is monstrous and malevolent, and sits there on my desk holding me in its baleful gaze and pronouncing its judgment: "Thou nullity!"*

-----

* For what was all working for a living but a procuring and a pimping for the money-bags, one's lecherous tyrants the money-bags, so that they might breed. . . .

Murphy applied at a chandlery in Gray's Inn Road for the position of smart boy. . . . This was the first time he had actually presented himself as candidate for a definite post. Up till then he had been content to expose himself vaguely in aloof able-bodied postures on the fringes of the better-attended slave-markets, or to drag from pillar to post among the agencies, a dog's life without a dog's prerogative.

The chandlers all came galloping out to see the smart boy.

"'E ain't smart," said the chandler, "not by a long chork 'e ain't."

"Nor 'e ain't a boy," said the chandler's semi-private convenience, "not to my mind 'e ain't."

Murphy was too familiar with this attitude of derision tinged with loathing to make the further blunder of trying to abate it. Sometimes it was expressed more urbanely, sometimes less. Its forms were as various as the grades of the chandler mentality, its content was one: "Thou surd!"

--Samuel Beckett, Murphy

The Ancientry

2008-02-15T07:08:00.000-08:00

It was getting on toward noon and the computer would not cease its grandstanding, so I picked up my magazine and went to sit in the lunch room for a bit. I was admiring Sandra Tsing-Loh's identification of herself as "whitish" in race and thinking I might have an answer to That Question at last when J appeared, with yogurt and banana, and asked if he might sit.

I assented.

My eyes straying from the text of the magazine, they fell upon an ad for a cell phone with very, very large numbers on the screen display and buttons.

Hmm, thought I, and flipped back a page. There, the ad was for some means to the removal of wrinkles.

I was a little bit alarmed. "Clearly, I am reading an old people's magazine," I said to J, showing him the ads.

"What are you reading?"

"The Atlantic," I said, closing the magazine and flipping it over so he could see the cover.

No recognition dawned. "I am not familiar with the Atlantic," he said. "I guess I'm not old enough . . ."

And I am even more doddery than I thought.

Valentine's Day

2008-02-14T19:16:00.000-08:00

At the French bakery there were trays and trays of heart-shaped tarts with strawberries and blackberries, and so many couples celebrating all over the place that I had trouble finding a place to sit, even though I took my lunch hour late.

And on the street outside, another loving couple:

Caucus

2008-02-09T17:18:00.000-08:00

This is the story of a very young man with hooded eyes and an overlarge black overcoat.

His name, which I do not remember, started with an L and seemed to be a surname, but it was impossible to be quite sure. I met him yesterday outside a restaurant we lunched at after the Obama rally. J greeted him with amusement, listing all the many occasions recently when he’d run into him by accident, and exhorted him to caucus for Obama. But L was dubious. Obama hadn’t outlined any concrete plans in his speech, L said. He’d been long on uplifting phrases and short on specifics. Not like Hillary. L had been to hear Hillary the night before, and Hillary had gone into great detail about her plans for when she was in office.

Go to the candidate’s website for detailed policy proposals, J told L. A rally speech is supposed to be vague but inspirational. And if you don’t caucus for Obama tomorrow, all of us here are going to kick your ass.

All of us there looked at L. L just looked anxious.

And then it was caucus day, and I set off down the hill. For the first couple of blocks, everything seemed normal enough, but as I crossed Mercer, I started to notice large numbers of people striding purposefully toward the Seattle Center. I knew I was supposed to caucus at the Center School, but I couldn’t remember where that was. So, hoping she’d lead me there, I followed a woman in a hat crocheted in sherbet and sky blue with a pompom on top, a woven bag striped in various shades of orange and brown, and a black belt marked with patterns that I thought might have been meant to suggest computer circuitry, like in Tron.

I fell into confusion at a place where most of the purposeful walkers merged into a great big line near a makeshift sign that said, “Democratic Caucus--Alki Room.” But I didn’t think I was supposed to go to the Alki Room, and the colorful woman went around the line and onward, so I went around, too.

Then I lost her. Finding myself in an unpopulated corridor between the fountain and Key Arena, I was cast into doubt, but was rescued by a signpost with a map on it, where I learned that the Center School is inside the building where the food court is.

So in I went, past hordes of small children eating fast food under the supervision of their respective minders, and mounted the stairs to the place where my very own line was forming, the line for four or five precincts, including 1718, where I live.

I stood, listening to the telephoning of the women behind me, who were trying to get someone who apparently had no place of residence but someone-or-other’s couch to just borrow someone’s address already, and get to a caucus before the doors closed.

I gazed out over the railing at the toddlers in the food court, and saw a vast expanse of black overcoat coming up the stairs. “Huh, J’s right, the kid does show up everywhere,” I thought to myself. I raised a hand.

“Hey,” L said, still looking anxious, as he dashed past toward the end of the line.

At last, I got through the doors, squeezed through a tiny hallway stuffed with a long table and hordes of signers-in, put down my name, and made my way to the classroom where precinct 1718 was to make its decision. All the right-side-up chairs were taken, and some people were sitting on tables, but there were a couple more chairs someone got down from a table for me and the red-haired woman who walked in just before me.

Some more people came in. We waited, everyone looking happy and asking each other what was supposed to happen next, a question to which no one had any very definite answers.

“Do you know where the precinct boundaries are?” I asked the red-haired woman. “I didn’t look that carefully at the map.”

“I don’t know, but they were really small,” she said. “The guy with the clipboard asked me where I lived, and then he asked me exactly which corner . . .”

“So we should know all these people, then!”

“Yeah, I’m looking around, trying to think if I’ve seen any of these people before.”

There was in fact one who looked familiar: L, sitting there on the other side of the big central table. How did he get there before me, I wondered, when he should have been dozens of people behind me in line?

Eventually, things got started. Someone told us to choose a tally-taker and a secretary while we were waiting. The person whom we’d been waiting for showed up, and tried to get someone else, whose volunteer badge said Noel, to take over the proceedings. But Noel had already agreed to be secretary, and the person awaited had perforce to blunder on.

It would be the blind leading the blind, he said, and it was. He directed things by reading, haltingly, from some pieces of paper densely covered with small black print, and deviating where a deviation seemed in order. Did anyone know what these little orange cards were for? No? Never mind, we wouldn’t use them. Or maybe they were for . . . well, anyway. Did everyone think we should divide the one minute allotted for a pro-Obama speech between two people, even though the rules said it was supposed to be only one? Okay, then. Did everyone think we should have a debate, prohibited though it might be? Very well. But a short one, four speakers for each candidate, the speakers allotted 30 seconds each. And then, okay, we really don’t have time for debate, though you may have thought that was what this was for, that isn’t what they want us to do.

One half of the first Obama-supporter speech had been, oddly, I thought, L. I'd leaned over to the red-haired woman. “The only person here I recognize,” I confided, “is that guy over there who wants to speak for Obama. I just happened to meet him yesterday because he’s the friend of a coworker, but yesterday he was for Clinton.”

“Fascinating!” the red-haired woman said, and we listened to his speech, which was more anti-Clinton than pro-Obama, and overflowed his 30 seconds so the other person never got to say what she thought she was going to say.

We were in a hurry all the way through, to most people’s evident disappointment. The moderator seemed quite disgusted with his instruction sheet, though he did dutifully start in to the party fundraising portion, after profuse apologies for how horrible it was, reading in a peculiarly stilted cadence for some paragraphs before saying, “Anyone who wants me to skip this say ‘Aye’!”

The response was loud and affirmative.

“They said we have to be out of here by three,” someone reminded us. (We’d started about 1:45.)

We returned to the count. The tally-taker failed to follow her little chart, as it only went up to 25 caucusers, and we had 55: 12 for Clinton, 39 for Obama, 4 undecided. (But most of the undecided turned out merely to have overlooked that blank on the sign-in form. The one truly undecided person remained steadfastly so, given the inadequate time allotted to her to gather opinions.)

“Well, just double it,” someone said.

“But that only takes you up to 50, and we have 55,” someone else objected.

“Well, you just divide,” someone else said. “Are there any math majors in the room?”

There were two, sitting either side of me, but they agreed that a major in math just involved combinations of letters--you ended up no better with numbers than anyone else. “Though I help primary school students with their math homework,” the red-haired woman reflected, “so you’d think--”

They got it worked out somehow. Four delegates for Obama, one for Clinton. Time to go on to choosing delegates to the legislative district convention.

“So you Clinton people, you can go have your little election over there,” the moderator instructed.

Big laugh, except from the embattled-looking Clinton people.

“Your very, very small election.”

Meanwhile, us Obama people decided to dispense with the orange cards and just send whoever wanted to go. Which turned out to include L. I hope he is not as fickle as he appears.

And so I put on my coat (not nearly so big nor so black as L’s) and started back up the hill, where, on the particularly steep block before the one that gets me to my corner, I found myself gaining on the colorful woman with the hat and bag and Tron belt. Except it wasn’t a Tron belt, I found, as my eyes grew ever closer to her behind. It was a map of a subway system. But just when I was a foot or two from being close enough to read the labels for the subway stops and find out what city it was for, I was at my building, and she crossed the street and was away.

Politics

2008-02-09T11:29:00.000-08:00

After an inconclusive Super Tuesday, the Democratic candidates suddenly decided the state of Washington was some use after all, and rushed to find venues to give speeches. Wednesday night the Post-Intelligencer just said they were planning to be here, but I noticed Thursday morning that they'd specified times and places.

J, from work, is a genuine Obama supporter (not like me; I merely find Obama less offensive than the alternatives), and when I mentioned there was to be a rally, he decided to take the day off and go listen to his candidate talk. And then I decided to go with him.

We got there some hours before the doors were supposed to open, but already there were about two or three hundred people ahead of us in line--one of two lines, Obama having booked a building with two entrances. By the time we'd been there an hour, our line was doubled back around the other side of the block. Our part of the line, the earliest arrivers, was made mostly of very, very young people, much younger than me and J (and neither of us would yet, I believe, be classified by sociologists as having escaped our youth). But looking across at the people who showed up later, I saw faces less fresh and garb less flamboyant, and more people drifting down the block from the bus stop every minute.

A few minutes before the doors opened, three more people joined our party, and then we went inside. Everybody was trying to cram through one door, but J enterprisingly led us around to another entrance, and so we ended up with splendid seats with an unimpeded view of the stage.

We sat there for some hours longer, wishing we'd had more for breakfast and speculating about the seating capacity of the arena. We watched a woman in a white sweatshirt who stood by herself, dancing and dancing to the tiresome music the campaign had provided for our amusement and motivation (or whatever it was they thought all that soft rock and country would inspire in us), and then rooted for her against a lithe and shameless woman in the next section over who decided to challenge her to a contest.

We slumped in despair through a long, long drone a musician read off a piece of paper at us about the video he was going to show, and then through the long, long video itself, which I really believe did contain at some point the phrase "creed, color, sex, and race." I mean, really. I ask you.

Not too long after that, though, things got started at last. Someone told us how many people were there (18,000 inside and 3,000 outside), Christine Gregoire claimed apple pie for the state of Washington, there was lots of yelling and screaming, and then the charismatic candidate at last showed up and gave his speech.

I don't find speeches very interesting, but this one at least was possible to listen to. As Karl says, the man is easy on the ears. And most of his propositions were fairly sensible, I guess. I am uninformed.

I don't think it mattered too much what he actually said, though. Mostly all of those thousands of people just wanted a chance to lay their eyes upon him, for after the great shout of joy that went up when he finally walked up onto the stage, all those ranks of seats sparkled with camera flashes, and then were dotted with ever more empty red chairs, as people skulked up the stairs toward the exits.

There were still at least 80% left, though, by the time Obama finished making his unfulfillable promises and his triumphant exit.

And then, at last, we got to have lunch.

Original Thinking

2008-01-24T17:58:00.000-08:00

This morning I managed to leave the house at least six or seven minutes earlier than usual, and so instead of swinging my legs as fast as they would go, I bounced along in a springy fashion that slowed my progression, and looked at the pink streaky sky, and chirped to myself enthusiastically. "Tonight," said I to myself, "I will go straight home after work, and I will eat leftovers, and read! That will be lovely, reading!" said I to myself.

I grinned widely and bounced even higher, and felt ever so smug over my brilliant idea.

By afternoon, when I had disposed of various suspicions about the computer's behavior and set myself methodically to confirming that it was really doing what it was supposed to do and not trying sneakily to take people's money away from them, my thoughts wandered back to my plans for the evening. It was then that it struck me: there's no very great brilliance in resolving to do exactly the same thing that one does, after all, always do.

But I shall enjoy myself anyway. So there.

Shopaholic Ties the Knot. Sophie Kinsella.

2008-01-21T21:25:00.001-08:00

There is what I considered to be quite an amusing incident involving a shopper held hostage in a dressing room by a shop assistant who knows her boyfriend's ex-wife. But this was another book whose plot hinged on the protagonist telling wholly unnecessary lies, and I didn't think it worth finding the rest of the series.

Julia Quinn: the Bridgertons.

2008-01-21T19:22:00.001-08:00

"So, what's in the bag?" SH asked me.

It was a Barnes & Noble bag. Green. It was a Friday evening in October. One bar had become too loud for our taste (SH, LB, JD, and me) and we were on our way to another.

"I think I won't tell you," said I to SH.

But a few minutes later, we'd found our way to a booth in the second bar, and there had fallen a silence all too profound. I changed my mind.

"So," I said to SH, "this is what's in the bag," drawing out To Sir Phillip, with Love.

"Smut?" said LB, intrigued.

"Well . . ."

"Smut!" she declared, with confidence.

"It does have too many sex scenes," I acknowledged, "but really it's quite amusing . . ."

"Don't you like sex?" JD inquired.

"Well, of course, but I don't like to read about it, especially in something that's supposed to be light and entertaining! But you see there are eight siblings, and there's a book about each one, and I thought I could get away with just reading one, but then . . ."

"OCD," someone diagnosed.

I suppose so.

'Twas AL who lured me in to the insidiously compelling story of Violet Bridgerton and her eight chestnut-haired, alphabetically named offspring. I was visiting her in her village outside Linz, and I'd finished my Mo on the train. "Do you have any books you don't want anymore?" I asked. "I'm all out of everything, and I still have the train ride back to Frankfurt, and then the plane."

I've been taking AL's book suggestions since we were both 16; no one do I trust more, even if she is a Bronte person.

She started pulling things from the shelf in the hall. "Well, there are all these depressing Australians . . . I definitely don't need to keep those, but maybe you might like them." She looked dubious. "Or there's Zadie Smith, there's something kind of irritating about her, but . . . or Julia Quinn!"

She sprang into the bedroom. "MR lent me these, but this one I bought myself, and you could have it," she said, with a certain enthusiasm, getting Romancing Mr Bridgerton down from the privileged shelf over the bed. "But they're addictive," she warned me. "You see a scene in one book, and then it'll show up in another one, from somebody else's point of view . . ."

I decided to take my chances.

At first it looked like I was going to pull through. I read the book, it was mildly amusing, and I did not look for more. In Vienna, we visited both branches of the British Bookshop, but I came away with my virtue unstained. (AL emerged with On the Way to the Wedding. "That was €12," her brother pointed out to her. She made excuses.) In Frankfurt, I bought Haruki Murakami. In Toronto, I thought about Sherman Alexie. In Seattle, I slept a lot and ate satay.

But then there was Juneau, rain and the hospital and Julia Quinn at the Salvation Army for 25 cents.

And then Juneau again, bad adobo, more rain, the mall bookshop, and hours to kill before my flight even left.

And then I'd read three, and once you've read three you're in for it.

Between the first and the second, 13 days.

Between the second and third, 11.

I got off the plane in Seattle and bought the fourth. A couple of days later, the fifth, on the way to meet LB's new SH. And then caved altogether--sixth, seventh, eighth, all purchased with a single transaction ("Find everything okay?" asked the shop clerk) and finished before the week was out.

And how were they? Not bad. Crammed with joyous insult and riotous high farce, the stories somehow manage to endow each sibling of the eight with a discernible individual character, sustained from book to book, so that by the time you embark upon the eighth it's like going home for the holidays.

Even so. I'm willing to tolerate a high level of historical inaccuracy or I would not be reading Regencies in the first place, but some of Quinn's usages are really quite jarring. When a character says, "I can see it now!" and quotes a hypothetical newspaper headline, I start to wonder just when that idiom arose, but to use "mean" for "unkind" rather than "stingy," or "smart" to indicate "intelligent" rather than "stylish," is just so far off I can't even pretend to be reading about the early nineteenth century.

And then there are the verbs of saying. A lot of whispering and murmuring, querying and barking, are distracting but on the whole forgivable. But why, oh why, must Quinn's characters perpetually be grinding things out? The Viscount Who Loved Me is by no means atypical, but shall serve as an example: on pages 46, 52, 73, 81, 149, 153, 178, 286, and 336, a total of five different mouths "ground out" things instead of saying them. On pages 73, 213, 217, 315, and 322, they "bit off" their utterances. Their words were "choked out" on pages 140, 241, 323, and 346, and "bit out" on pages 70 and 325.

I ask you.

An Insular Possession. Timothy Mo.

2008-01-20T09:20:00.000-08:00

There is a character in An Insular Possession, a stocky man in a rusty black cassock, who shifts, for amusement and exercise, massive boulders from one position to another on the beach. Through the sustained application of carefully placed pressure he can coax a seemingly immovable mass to turn over, and over again, exposing the inevitability of its original position as mere illusion.

This, I am tempted to say, is what Timothy Mo does with Hong Kong itself, another weighty object rather difficult to envision otherwise placed. Or at least, he is clearly up to some sort of monumental exercise.

On the front end of the narrative you have a grand description of the Pearl River and its delta, elaborate meditations on enislement, the slow erosion of what is stationary by what flows quickly past. At the end of the book, this frame is closed with a sequence of notes on the characters' later lives, illustrating the shifting certainties of individual character and human relationships as abraded by the rapid flow of historical development.

And then there is all the play with painting and photography. There is a watercolorist with his easel, caught in a sudden unexpected shower, who later looks at the unfinished painting and sees in it unmistakable signs of rain that he nevertheless failed to act on even as he captured them on paper. There is a photographer (the same character, some ways on) whose attempt to define the character of a group of sitters is destabilized by the servant flourishing a chamber pot off to the side.

What all this adds up to I am too lazy to work out, but clearly it has to do with time, contingency, historical accident, how some things inevitably follow others--when a big wind blows up a black cloud, there is going to be rain--and yet things that seem stable (a person's adamant opposition to profiting from the opium trade) may nevertheless move.

Mo's title encourages the notion of Hong Kong as his subject, but by the time his narrative finally reaches that location, nearing the end of the book, he has contrived to make it surprising that he has got there at all, or even that it has got there at all--that settlement, on that island.

But of course it should be surprising, a European settlement on the south coast of China. I don't know what should have led me to regard it as a boulder in the first place.

And so I beat a hasty retreat from this subject.

Convergent Agendas

2008-01-17T19:26:00.000-08:00

I stood staring blankly at the empty spot on the shelf where the Alamos malbec should be until the smiley gray-haired man came along and I stepped out of his way and into action, grabbing the frighteningly cheap Big Fat Llama cabernet and striding briskly off to the chocolate section. There I fell into another reverie, wishing I were in Metropolitan Market where they have the Dolfin dark chocolate with cardamom and white pepper, or maybe in Germany where they have Lindt with jalapeno and passion fruit filling, only to be woken again by the same man, smiling this time yet more broadly, darting in at knee level after his Toblerone.

Not invariably am I out of sync with the rest of mankind.

And . . . We Have A Winner!

2008-01-13T15:04:00.000-08:00

Slow, unsteady, nay, to all appearances veritably stationary, the sole entrant in the toilet-cleaning race can't help totter, in the end, over the finish line.

Particulate Matter

2008-01-11T17:38:00.000-08:00

Just back from a meeting in a conference room that looks out on LAX from a 23d floor just south of there.

We were there just overnight, and stayed in a hotel yet nearer to the airport than the conference room was. On the way back to the airport, we circled round to the north to visit In-N-Out Burger.

At this point, there was only about a 23 degree wedge missing from our airport pie, and I felt unfulfilled. If we'd been in an amphibious vehicle like they use for the Ride the Ducks tours in Seattle, we could have gone out upon the water to complete our circuit of the airport and investigate the purported fog.

"I forgot to look at a map before I came," I'd told the project manager as we waited for the smokers to come back from downstairs. "What part of the city is the airport in? What direction am I looking?"

"That's west," someone said, crooking a finger to our left.

"So that should be the ocean, right there. I guess it looks like the land stops, but I can't quite tell because of the smog."

It was not smog, I was informed. It was fog, for if it were smog it would be brown and I wouldn't be able to see the mountains.

It was brown.

I couldn't see the mountains, though there might possibly have been something-or-other looming over there, hard to tell.

I suppose maybe sometimes it is yet browner, and not even the vaguest hint of a mountain. And yet . . .

Oh, well, let them call it fog, I'm back in Seattle now anyway.

Winter Holidays

2008-01-02T06:39:00.000-08:00

I thought I saw, one day last week, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath in a new Beetle, great hulking dark-haired man hunched up into the driver's side ceiling, and on the other side a plain, cheerful-looking woman with medium-light hair, debating with spurious acrimony while halted at a light. The sort of moment that doesn't make it into historical record--certainly not for a Plath kind of a poet--and is later tidied out of memory. They might drive on from there to Whole Foods, it looked like, and then go home and bake a holiday cake, in amiable if fleeting content.

Cucumbrance

2007-12-30T21:32:00.000-08:00

What if the doorbell were to ring, and when you opened the door, sitting there on the mat was a knotted plastic bag with a liquefied cucumber jiggling back and forth, rot barely confined within its bag of green skin?

And then from on high, a great big rock were to drop, granite probably, of the size that you can lift but just barely, and cannot move far. About the size you might use to build a retaining wall. Right onto the cucumber, which would splat through the slats of the porch, dripping down to feed the lightless things that languish below.

You can think of things more disgusting, probably, than a cucumber left to uncrisp itself in the bottom of the fridge, and of things more delicately delightful than the fresh and crunchy salad of the cucumber in its prime. But is there anything that makes such a swift and horrifying transition to vile from divine?

A columbine fades and withers to a dark nub on a dry stalk, but it's not revolting when it stops being beautiful.

A neglected slump of chicken fat, putrefying in a pan, may get pretty bad, but it just wasn't very nice in the first place.

Some people improve with neglect, though others may decline.

Cucumbers need attending to.

Crooked Accountant Tofu

2007-12-20T07:03:00.001-08:00

This is presently my favorite thing to eat. It's a modification of Tommy and Christie's modification of Christie's mom's recipe, and requires (quantities are guesses, of course):

--1/2 lb pork, chopped into little bits (or ground)
--1 T corn or other starch
--2 T light soy sauce
--2 T sesame oil
--1 t chili oil
--3 T cooking oil
--2 T Tianjin dongcai (see 4th item here for a picture of the stuff itself and the bottom of this page for what the jar looks like)
--1 c chicken (or some sort of) broth
--two poblano chiles, cleaned and cut into strips
--1/2 lb oyster mushrooms
--one block firm tofu, cut into small cubes
--1 t dark soy sauce

Mix pork with starch, light soy, sesame oil, and chili oil, and let sit for a while.

Heat cooking oil in wok. Fry Tianjin dongcai in oil. Before it threatens to burn, add pork mixture and stir around. Because this mixture has a lot of thickener in it, it will stick to the bottom of the wok, but that's okay as long as it doesn't burn. When the pork is mostly cooked, add the broth, chiles, oyster mushrooms, tofu, and dark soy, and stir around so the crusted stuff dissolves from the bottom of the wok. Simmer for several minutes. Add a little light soy if it's still needed. Done.

It should end up slightly soupy. Caution: too much dark soy is dangerous.

How to Make Mapo Doufu

2007-12-19T22:51:00.000-08:00

Mr. Newduck says he needs a mapo doufu recipe. (Most people of sense and judgment, of course, already know how to make mapo doufu, and they can ignore this.)

One needs:

one block firm tofu, in cubes (about 1 cm x 1 cm x 1 cm)
oil (preferably peanut)
about half a pound of chopped (or ground) pork
a tablespoon or so of chili bean sauce (e.g., Guilin sauce)
several fermented black beans, chopped up
perhaps some chili flakes
around 3 T soy sauce
about 1 t corn or other starch, mixed in a little bit of water
1 bunch of scallions, chopped into 1-cm lengths
1 T Sichuan pepper, ground

Boil some water. Dump in cubed tofu. Wait until the water comes back to a boil, then take tofu out. Drain and set aside.

Heat a fairly large quantity of oil in a wok. When it is very hot, add pork. Stir around until it turns white. Add chili bean sauce, and stir around until there is a strong smell of chili bean sauce. Add black beans, chili flakes (if desired), soy sauce, a little bit of water (or broth), and your parboiled tofu cubes. Cook for two or three minutes, until the sauce seems to be going into the tofu. Add scallions, and stir until they're bright green. Stir in thickener. Remove everything from pan to dish, and sprinkle Sichuan pepper over the top.

Oh, the Relentless Banality of the Quotidian!

2007-12-19T07:30:00.001-08:00

Er, sorry. I'll go sweep under the bed now.

Or shall I vacuum the potato chip crumbs off the floor of the car?

Anyway. Sorry.

Spring?

2007-12-15T09:55:00.000-08:00

It is December, and my spider plant has flowered! I don't remember it ever doing that before. Poor confused thing.

HELLO SEATTLE

2007-12-12T19:15:00.000-08:00

There's a purple one, and a red one, and an orange one, and for a month or more they've been running back and forth on their little short track from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center to the Westlake Center, with their front all lit up saying TEST TRAIN, and nobody but all those fat engineering guys has gotten to ride them.

Of course, there's no point in riding them, since they don't go anywhere, but even so, if you see those fat engineering guys riding back and forth every day, you start to develop pangs of envy.

"So, are you excited about tomorrow?" I asked J last night, five minutes before it was seemly to leave our desks.

"Tomorrow . . . ?"

"The streetcar's opening!"

I thought I heard, from P's direction, a derisive snort. But you don't want to pay attention to P.

"Are you going to ride it?" I asked J, who rides the bus.

"No."

"But it's so cute, all little and purple and everything!"

Snort.

Oh, well.

This morning at 8:05 by the clock at the Lake Union Park stop, there was a big burly guy with an orange vest and a wheelbarrow, setting out sad little potted plants every yard or so along the strip of dirt that sets the tram line off from the sidewalk. And then there were a couple of Fox news guys, with a camera and a little monitor, testing to make sure they had their equipment right.

And so when after work I trudged down from the office to Fred Hutchinson, I was all filled with happy anticipation. I was going to ride the . . . er, Streetcar . . . to the Westlake Center, for free! and then I was going to ride the Monorail from the Westlake Center to the Space Needle, and then once I walked up the hill I would be home, in only about twice as long as it takes me on foot, and oh so well traveled!

The tram stop is in the middle of a slightly wide road, and when I got to the crosswalk there were already three people at the stop and two more waiting to cross from the other side of the street.

I went to inspect the departure time display, which said it was 5:30 and there would be a tram in 6 minutes and one in 18. I pulled out my Economist, and tried to read about affordable Lake Forest, IL housing (what?) without being blown over by the big opening day banner that billowed behind (and, forcefully, against) me in the wind.

Some time passed.

I started reading about Las Vegas's water recycling.

Some more time passed.

I craned my neck at the schedule display again.

"It's changed," the cute tiny woman standing under it said. "It said one minute, and now it says three minutes."

"I guess that means it's actually tracking something!" I said optimistically.

"I hope so," she said, peppy but dubious.

"Or else it's just throwing random numbers up there," I considered. I went back to my water shortage.

"Oooo, is that it?" said I, a minute or two later.

"I think it is!!" said the other woman. "It's cute!!"

It was the orange one, and it said HELLO SEATTLE on the front. It stopped and let off about ten people--ten people!--let on some more, and went to sit, full, a few yards away at the end of the line.

It was going to come back, we hoped, the small woman and I decided. There were, after all, tracks over on this side of the street, too.

It did come back, though not for a curiously long time.

"It's cute!!!!" she said again, and on we went.

There really were a lot of people on there. It would have quite given the illusion of being a real tram in a real city, had I not seen with my own eyes all those people arrive at the end of the line and just keep on sitting there to ride back again.

"It's like we're on a tourist attraction," I heard someone say.

"It's like the subway, except really slow," her friend said.

"We could have walked there in the time we spent waiting," said another member of the group.

"Oh, we're here," said another. "X says she's not going to make it . . . oh, there she is, don't get off, she's getting on . . . hey, why did you say you weren't here?"

And then fifteen minutes had passed and the ride was over, and I went across three crosswalks and up two escalators to the Monorail stop.

I paid two dollars, waited 20 minutes, learned the thing had broken down, was refunded my two dollars, and walked home.

Total travel time, two hours.

Market Research

2007-12-09T17:17:00.000-08:00

--And if you could have dinner with any famous person, living or dead, with whom would you dine and why?
--I'd prefer not to.
--You'd prefer not to what, ma'am?
--Have dinner with any famous person, living or dead.
--Mmmmm, just a moment . . . give me a moment . . . mmm . . . well, you have fulfilled our requirements for a focus group, but our quota is full . . . .

Disappearing Acts. Terry McMillan.

2007-11-24T16:24:00.001-08:00

It was in an excessively costly but otherwise most admirable laundromat in Geneva that I happened across Disappearing Acts. Someone interested in black American culture had apparently been there washing clothes, for as well as the McMillan there was a book of poetry by what I should probably not call a black man whose anger had distorted his judgment. But I shall so call him, for while I left the poetry book sitting there on the table having read only one or two poems, and I carried Disappearing Acts away and read it all, if there was anything that seemed to the idle (or occupied with matters such as how fun it was to activate a soap dispenser, a washer, and a dryer all from one centralized payment machine) and uninstructed eye to unite the two volumes, it was the idea that black men have so much to bear that they must be forgiven all transgressions, as long as they provide a cogent explanation for the warping of their character.

Disappearing Acts says on the back cover (at least of this edition) that it is a love story, and the copy contrives to indicate that follows the standard arc from first meeting to Scrabble to happily ever after. But in fact the great uniting of the initially resistant protagonists occurs very close to the opening of the novel, and from there it is a depressing (though perhaps meant to be uplifting) story of accommodation of expectation to reality. The strange thing, though, to me, was that it seemed quite possible that McMillan saw the whole affair as a balanced one, with equal efforts at accommodation to be made from both sides. She moves back and forth in the narrative from the male character to the female, carefully delineating the hopes, aspirations, struggles, and failings of each, giving each equal time and attention, and counting on her reader to root for the two to make it in the end.

But the woman is, while tiresome, snobbish, and not particularly convincing as a repository of the great songwriting ability with which McMillan has endowed her, pretty much normal. McMillan makes her eat too much, and have trouble confessing that she is epileptic, but these are pretty small and surmountable failings. On the other hand, the man is alcoholic, narcissistic, and prone to fits of destructive violence, his actions constrained by the spells of excessive optimism and pessimism by which he is alternately seized.

They end up together, but they would be better off apart.

But the guy has, in the end, started night school, where he's taken an introductory course in psychology and learned that he has trouble relating to women because he's angry at his mother. So doubtless everything will turn out all right in the fullness of time!

A Rake's Vow. Stephanie Laurens.

2007-11-23T19:40:00.001-08:00

There are few pleasures in life greater than that of picking up a book someone has abandoned somewhere, reading it, and then proceeding to abandon it somewhere else.

In fact, after a moment's thought, I conclude there are in fact no greater pleasures--perhaps one or two equivalently great, but none I can think of touched with quite the same illicit thrill. Maybe in the old days, when one wasn't supposed to, er, well, there were certain things one wasn't supposed to do, er, well, anyway. People probably enjoyed all sorts of stuff a lot, then. But now we are jaded.

But picking up an abandoned book smacks of theft--still forbidden, as far as I know, though certain persons of my acquaintance do seem as if they may view the matter differently. And reading it as fast as one can smacks of not wanting to be caught. And then abandoning it again--that is like littering, isn't it? Or, well, abandonment. Or, you know, some sort of deliciously naughty thing, anyway.

Fondly do I remember coming back one snuffly, cold-ridden July day to the foreigners' hotel room in Chongqing where I'd rented a bed, only to find another foreigner there, with an alarm clock precisely like mine, renting the bed neighboring. She had just finished a book! and wanted to lighten her backpack of it. I took it gladly. It was a war novel by a Vietnamese woman, and I am sorry I cannot remember her name or that of her book, for really it was excellent. I read it on the train to Chengdu, whereupon I took it to the airport and leaned it against an outer window of the terminal, where I was sure some other English reader in desperate straits would seize upon it with joy and delight.

I remember, too, staying up late in the narrow bed in the TV room at friends' house in Juneau, gobbling away at some strange sort of psychological drama from the 1960s that I'd picked out from between two Harlequin romances on the give or take shelf in the Haines ferry terminal, and put back there on my way back through the next day. It was not the sort of book to make any kind of dent in historical memory--it can't have stayed in print for long, and, most assuredly, with the physical decay of the last extant copy all knowledge of the book will be lost from the world. As well it should be. But it was fun, being in such a hurry to finish reading something that probably ought not even to have been written in the first place.

And so it was with The Rake's Vow, one of the awfullest books I have ever read. I had been sitting, that afternoon, in the yellow autumn sun on the ferry from Lindau (oh confounded Lindau) to Konstanz, snuggling my head into my woolly hat and fortifying my mind with Timothy Mo on the rise to historical prominence of the Pearl River delta. Very clever, Timothy Mo. Very edifying. Very admirable, and amusing withal. And there were gulls, and soft-spoken German tourists (none of those dreadfully vocal Koreans and Americans and Hong Kongers I'd encountered on the train ride down), and schools of teeny tiny fish in the green lake waters, and everything was just most thoroughly civilized.

I debarked in Konstanz and found a narrow little room in a stag-bedecked hotel with a bowl of lovely little tart apples sitting on the front desk for one to grab on one's way out. I went out and wandered until I found a cozy Turkish restaurant with a mysteriously pizza-heavy menu (but no mystery, really--it was Germany, and Germans do love their pizza), where I had wine, and one of the better salads ever, and baked shells with ground beef and tomato sauce and garlic, yes garlic, yes, really, it's okay if you put garlic.

And then it was back to the hotel, where instead of returning to my ever-so-worthy Mo I looked through the little bookcase at the top of the stairs until I found something in English, and I took it back to my room and began to read of the adventures of the lady in the derriere-hugging Regency dress, and the peculiar sensations that passed through her whenever that arrogant devil so mysteriously beloved of his elderly aunt (or was it her elderly aunt, and he was a godson? Or . . . well, whatever) looked at her, or found an excuse to touch her, or rescued her from a ghost, or not a ghost, or whatever it was, or wasn't. But anyway he was mighty sexy, oh, yes.

Before long I grew tired of ghosties and overblown sex scenes, and decided I would rather be asleep. But then it was morning, and it was raining, and I picked it up again, and read until another ludicrous sex scene reminded me that the breakfast room was in danger of closing, whereupon I switched Stephanie Laurens for Zhuangzi and proceeded decorously down to refuse boiled eggs and dine upon muesli and yogurt. And then I went back upstairs and switched back to Stephanie Laurens again, until someone from the front desk called to ask whether I'd had breakfast, and then someone else opened my door with vacuum cleaner in hand, and backed again embarrassedly out, and then I came to yet another of those awful sex scenes, and I decided I really had better check out and go find where I was going to spend the rest of my stay in Konstanz (for I wanted to stay some days, but the stag hotel's rooms were all reserved).

I did find another hotel room, tall and blue, with a view over rain-slick rooftops to the spires of the cathedral. Once there, I did my laundry, thinking how little inclined I was to really do anything, and then read some more, until another really foolish sex scene chased me out into the rain.

I had weak Assam at Osiander, and made my routine check of the Daoism shelf. Then strudel and coffee in a cozy place all dark wood, rose velvet, and mosaic-tiled tabletops, across from the cathedral. And then, after inspecting the massive cathedral doors all carved in relief, I slipped inside, found me a pew, took out my Stephanie Laurens book, and read another sex scene, with a mighty internal cackle at the heights of unfittingness I had achieved.

And, eventually, back at the hotel, finished the book, hid it in the bedside table under the New Testament, and went out to look for supper.

Really it was an awful book, and the sex scenes tediously prolonged and vilely numerous. What does one want a sex scene for at all, in the middle of what is supposed to be a fluffy entertainment?

But the odd thing--or if not really odd, just to me unexpected, since I'd never run into the phenomenon before--was that the sex scenes were far from gratuitous, at least if one chooses to grant the book any right of existence at all. If the sex were left out, nothing either of the main characters did would make any sense whatever. With the sex, it did. Not, perhaps, a very interesting sort of sense, but nevertheless, what they were was revealed in how they acted in the bedroom (I vaguely recall it was always a bedroom and not, say, a cathedral).

It reminded me of a comment someone once made to me about how it was little wonder, considering So-and-so's very annoying habits in playing such-and-such a video game, that he had trouble getting his significant other to have sex with him.

It is all interrelated, after all.

Though one does not necessarily want to read about it, at least when one's taste and judgment are not worn down by rain, drunken Bavarians rising from the mist, and Lindau, everlasting Lindau.

The Goose Girl. Shannon Hale.

2007-11-23T19:13:00.000-08:00

This is one of those stories about a princess who is not very happy being a princess, but has some adventures and ends up finding that a princess has to be a princess after all. It is pretty entertaining, but not as interesting as (and published earlier than) The Princess Academy, which is about a bunch of girls who have no interest in being princesses until they are coopted by a coercive state. Though I guess in fact there is a born aristocrat in there, too, who ends up being reinstated in her allotted role, after a half-hearted effort to escape.

I suspect God may be hiding somewhere behind all this, but maybe I only think that because the author bio on the back flap says Hale lives in Utah with her family. People who live in Utah with their family probably have God lurking about them somewhere, don't they?

Hale really is, by the way, an active propagandist for literacy, as displayed in this somewhat illogical (or perhaps I mean hypocritical) blog post. (Kids are to be taught that they should read for the pure pleasure of it--because then they will keep on reading for pure pleasure, and then they will be good at reading, and then they will be good, wealth-producing citizens.)

Dark North. Gillian Bradshaw.

2007-11-23T18:01:00.000-08:00

Oh, the joy that swelled in my breast when I realized that Bradshaw had abandoned (at least for now) her only moderately amusing contemporary science-fictiony thrillers and returned to period novels. The hero of this one has both tracking skills (combined, of course, with the ability to move undetected) and political ones of sorting out friends from enemies and taking care what he says to either. I was filled with admiration and envy (given my own tendency to snort and rear and trample shards beneath my feet) and forgave Bradshaw for chronicling his conversion to literacy.

Bidding for Love. Katie Fforde.

2007-11-17T21:28:00.001-08:00

If I could get myself to stop reading Katie Fforde I would, but since I can't: Something that I like about Fforde is that in every book there is, twined about the love affair with a man (usually fairly tiresome), a love affair with a job or occupation (sometimes rather interesting).

Fforde also makes me laugh aloud, though when glancing back through this book I couldn't figure out exactly what it was that I was laughing at.

Then We Came to the End. Joshua Ferris.

2007-11-17T09:42:00.001-08:00

I was sixteen years old when I first visited a German-speaking country, and naturally I assumed I would learn to read German someday. Such an easy language, so much like English: it seemed merely a matter of time. I might as well get a head start, though, and always it's good to have an excuse for a visit to a bookstore. So I went and I browsed (I think it was in Nuremberg), and I came away with a translation of a Rosemary Sutcliff novel. Then I sat on the train every day (it was the first visit to Europe for everyone in the family, and we were 走马看花, glancing at the flowers as we flitted past, getting a general overview of the terrain) looking up words in my dictionary and writing them down in my notebook. By the time we reached Lisbon, I had read three or four pages, and felt well on my way to full competence.

My second visit to the region came on the eve of my experiment with Chinese history school, and while I was taking Japanese for my second foreign language (look at the bibliography of any book published in English about China, and you will find many more Japanese titles than German, or French), I figured that sooner or later I would need to read something in German. And was it for nothing, after all, that I spent all those days getting sunburnt on the top deck of that Yangtze River ferry, squinting at a German textbook and listening to the people congregated at my back muttering to each other, "What is she reading? It's in a foreign language! She's reading a book in a foreign language!" I stood behind the Hofburg and gazed at the Roman ruins, and then I went to a nice tall, narrow bookstore and looked about until I found a book titled something like National Unity and the Multiethnic State, and then I found myself a notebook composed of tremendously gray and gritty recycled paper, and then I scrabbled away for days, to my immense self-satisfaction.

This year, I am old and gray (or so my brother claims, anyway) and sober and sensible. Having come to a mature accommodation to my own grave limitations, I flew blithely over to Germany without the slightest linguistic preparation. I ran cheerfully about mangling German and forcing other people to speak English. In the many bookstores I visited, I noted that no one had Zhuangzi but there were great numbers of translations of the Daodejing (though not so many, of course, as we have in English, and at least one of them a retranslation of one of the more notable English versions). I looked at the names of authors in the fiction sections, finding that though the bulk of the books available were translations from English, some authors were much more popular there than here. I observed that even if I squinted, the stores were clearly not American ones, the sizes and shapes and colors of the books being somehow just slightly different. I bought no books, nor did I attempt to read anything.

The one small exception was the first paragraph of Then We Came to the End. This is one of the most impressive opening paragraphs I have thus far encountered (you can find it here, if you click to skip the intro, click to continue, and then click on the EXCERPT tab), and I thought it worth seeing how it looked in German, so I picked up the novel from the stack and opened to the first page.

It looked incomprehensible.

I read it through.

It was incomprehensible, though it stirred some small twinges of memory.

I have lived perhaps half of my life, certainly (barring curious sociotechnical innovations) more than a third. My hard-earned Chinese is slipping away, and it is exceedingly unlikely I will ever read German.

So it goes.

The Feng Shui Detective. Nury Vittachi.

2007-11-13T20:52:00.000-08:00

Everyone says it is dreadful in Singapore: hot as sin but without any of the interesting dirt and decay you'd expect from the tropics, no good Chinese food, and if there's a landmark there no one has ever told me about it.

So I'd never so much as considered visiting until I read The Feng Shui Detective. But now that I've read it, I'm terribly anxious for my sister-in-law to get a job there (she's got two interviews next week), so I can go and visit and see if the people there really talk in as amusingly chaotic mixture of tongues as Vittachi makes them appear to do.

Of course, Vittachi lives in Hong Kong, not Singapore, but . . . they're close together, right? Surely he knows what he's talking about. If you don't trust Nury Vittachi, who can you trust?

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. J. M. Rowling.

2007-11-13T20:36:00.000-08:00

There were those who went on summer vacation under the redwoods and hid under an electric light hooked to a portable generator for most of the week, until at last they were done with Harry Potter, whereupon they emerged, looking distant and troubled, to don bathing suits and freeze themselves in the river.

There were those who exercised great self-restraint, not buying their Harry Potter until the end of the vacation, when they had exited the campground but had not yet made it home, whereupon they read with all their might (tussling over a shared copy) for two days.

There were those who alienated their friends and spouses by canceling social engagements to stay home and read.

There were those who stole a copy from their children and laid it upon the table in front of them in the office at lunchtime, bending close, with glasses off, and squinting.

And then there was I, who, when I managed to borrow an already much-read copy, some weeks after the release, had trouble summoning the energy to read more than 30 pages at a time.

I think it took me a week to finish the whole thing, and then I kind of wished Harry had just stayed dead at the end so I wouldn't worry about having to read a seven-part series about his children.

The Sex Life of My Aunt. Mavis Cheek.

2007-11-08T07:05:00.000-08:00

I started this book because I was passing through Wallingford, and the Wallingford branch library is little more than a distribution center for things people have ordered through the hold system, with very little else on the shelves. There was an amusing turn of phrase on the book's first page, and so I thought maybe it would do until I had a chance to go to a bigger library.

Why I finished it I don't know, for it grew less entertaining and more depressing the farther in I went, and certainly my life would not be impoverished by lack of familiarity with the oeuvre of Mavis Cheek.

The book is about adultery. For some reason, I do not like to read about adultery. Perhaps if I were married I would find the subject more alluring. But an adultery story almost invariably involves a lot of lying, and I find it painful to read about somebody lying. There are many sorts of misbehavior I can quite easily see how someone might find themself engaged in, but deception generally sounds neither necessary nor tempting to me, so when someone in a story starts lying, I am visited with a great sense of implausibility, and I want to throttle someone. Preferably the fictional character, but since that's not possible, perhaps the author.

What I really should do, unless it's one of those books that serves some purpose other than to hobble you so you can't accomplish anything useful, is just put it down.

Day 3

2007-11-07T06:15:00.001-08:00

I woke up this morning to the beep of the alarm clock and a feeling of deepest perplexity. Why is this happening again? Didn't I go to work yesterday, and the day before? It was reasonably enjoyable, but isn't twice enough?

The Princess Academy, Shannon Hale; The Braid, Helen Frost.

2007-11-04T13:05:00.000-08:00

It would be futile to deplore, I suppose, the tendency of novelists to write about literacy, either directly (as in these two books for children) or in slightly disguised form (as when a character harbors a talent for the visual arts). Writers can't help but draw on their own experience, and writers' own experience consists largely of reading and writing.

I just wonder how it is that the literate experience as depicted in novels is so unremittingly positive. In this Hale book, for instance, one girl learning to read lifts her whole community out of poverty; in the Frost book, characters who can read are the focus of universal envy. There is nothing unusual about these two books' treatment of the matter. Learning to read crops up all over the place in fiction, particularly children's fiction, and almost always it is presented as an unqualified good thing.

Possibly, this bias reflects the inclinations of writers intensified by the filtering mechanisms of publishers. Even if someone should write something about how literacy warps the personality, if it were too convincing it might depress book sales (which are quite too depressed for publishers' comfort already), and so its publication would be at least marginally less likely than that of the average manuscript.

I expect, though, there is more than a natural tendency to self-glorification going on in the case of children's books. Children's literature has always been morally prescriptive, but it seems like in place of all the praying that went on in them a hundred years ago, we now have a great deal of reading (along with a ubiquitous assertion of individual identity and a wide vein of ostentatious ethnic tolerance).

And so now I have come around in a useless circle, for I still don't know what's so all-fired promotable about reading.

How to Be Idle: A Loafer's Manifesto. Tom Hodgkinson.

2007-11-04T12:19:00.000-08:00

I was idle all summer and well into fall, so there was little, I thought, for Hodgkinson to teach me. Except perhaps in the chapter on smoking, and really, who’s going to take up smoking? But it was fun to read excerpts from the writings of historical personages on the virtues of lying in bed in the morning, of napping in the afternoon, of prolonged periods of malingering.

I happily followed Hodgkinson's lead in bewailing the Industrial Revolution's squeezing of productivity from the masses, whose inclination had been to work only so often and so much as necessary for subsistence (but I felt smug, for it was midsummer and I was lying on a straw mat in the redwood forest in a quite preindustrial sort of a slow period between bouts of copy editing) and in deploring the hours of sleep lost with the advent of electric light (though I cheated one night, scribbling things in my tent under a flashlight suspended from the gear loft).

And then, some time later, fall came, and my determination faded with the light. I agreed to show up in a particular place every day at 8:30 a.m. and stay there right through to 5:00, and my loafing days were over.

Perhaps I should start smoking after all.

Packaging

2007-11-02T14:32:00.000-07:00

The Corpse in the Koryo. James Church.

2007-10-29T21:27:00.000-07:00

There were fake Bavarians in the train station.

I take this on good authority. "They probably weren't even Bavarians," said authority said to me, when I described the people in lederhosen or bodices and floofy skirts I saw running around everywhere as I stood at a round table in Munich station, eating my doner kebab. The good authority had spent four hours finding someplace to sit, itself, in Munich on this, the first day of Oktoberfest. It had arrived at noon, but everyone else had got there at ten in the morning. Which misstep reminds me, 100 km west of Lindau (Lindau being where I and the good authority met up, I having miscalculated and the good authority having missed its last train to that 100-km-distant place) probably is not, in fact, Bavaria. Baden-Württemberg, I should think. Dang. Maybe not such a great authority, after all. Though appealing, with the blond and brown and gray hair and the laryngitis and eight legs and all.

Right, so real Bavarians, quite possibly, but there's just something not all that terribly convincing about lederhosen. I mean, even my own father has been known to wear lederhosen. With desert boots and a Gabby Hayes hat, and nothing else. In Colorado. I ask you.

Not like when you show up at the bus stop in Seoul on an autumn afternoon and find row upon row of middle-aged women in hanbok, waiting for the Popemobile to come along. Anachronistic garb, perhaps, but you know those are Koreans. Who else is going to show up and put on hanbok and stand there by the side of the road like that?

Anyway, I was not staying in Munich, just standing up eating a doner kebab, because Oktoberfest seemed to me much better avoided, and so as soon I'd ingested the thing I went to the grocery store (There is a grocery store in the train station in Munich! Oh, the contrast with dismal Seattle!) after a bottle of water and a fizzy-widget can of Paulaner and went to find a compartment on the train toward Zurich (and oh, that I'd stayed on till Zurich, and not stepped off in Lindau, blasted Lindau . . . but oh, how wisdom does come too late).

I sat in my compartment, sipping my beer, smugly. (Not yet, you see, having visited Lindau.)

And then it was that it was borne upon me, the proximity of Koreans.

Fervent Koreans.

Loud Koreans.

Angry Koreans.

Disputing, in the next compartment, fervently, loudly, angrily, for the longest time. Until we'd left the station. Until the conductor had checked my ticket. Until I'd finished my beer. Until we were pretty darn near blasted Lindau.

This is where James Church (who is not named James Church, but let us leave that side for the moment) comes in.

For James Church says that while you may not be able to tell what a Korean is thinking, you can always tell what a Korean is feeling.

This seems to me true. His descriptions of Korean hillsides in fall (I lived on a Korean hillside in fall) and communist apartment buildings (I lived in a communist apartment building) and bungly bureaucracies (oh let me not recount the bungly bureaucracies I have borne) all seemed equally convincing. And so, thanks to his book--which was also an entertaining read, containing lots about persimmon wood, and corpses, and translations of nice poems, too--North Korea is no longer to me the place of impenetrable mystery it seemed to me at the age of ten, when I held in my hands my first passport, thing of mystic potency, opening to me all borders but those of (I seem to remember it explicitly stating) North Korea.

Good book.

Three Cheers for the Bolt-Affixer!

2007-10-29T20:23:00.000-07:00

Journey

2007-10-10T11:20:00.001-07:00

There are photos here.

Intracultural Communication

2007-10-10T10:28:00.000-07:00

"Now this is not really so bad," I said to myself, getting settled into seat 12F for Air Canada Flight 541 from Toronto to Seattle. I had made it from Vienna to Frankfurt and Frankfurt to Toronto, and was on the last leg of the journey home.

"Maybe you've enjoyed wallowing for three weeks in your complete inability to derive meaning from the soft murmur of conversation around you, but comprehension, too, has its compensations. Listen to the pretty flight attendant, how she flirts with the geezer in 12D. Isn't that charming? And listen to the geezer's wife, next to you, and how she's voiced an intention to 'get some shut-eye,' now wasn't that worth hearing, hmmm?"

"All right," I conceded grumpily. "One has, in any case, an ethical obligation to come to a nuanced understanding of the foolishness that surrounds one. Easier, I suppose, in one's native tongue, on one's home continent. Now go away and let me read my book."

I retreated, and attempted to absorb myself in Haruki Murakami.

But my ears did not support this enterprise. "My balls are all scrunched," they said they heard the geezer say.

"Oh, come now," I chastised. "You don't expect me to believe he said that, do you? Or, or, or, maybe he was making those origami ornaments, and he accidentally put them in his bag and they got deflated, or, or, or, something . . ."

But the geezer unbuckled his seatbelt, rose to his feet with his legs well apart, and directed his hands purposefully into his crotch. They worked there for a bit.

"Much better," the geezer said, sitting down.

"Now, see," I pointed out to myself. "You never heard anything like that before, did you?"

I refused to reply.

Leipzig

2007-10-09T23:51:00.000-07:00

Fifth and Denny

2007-09-14T17:16:00.000-07:00

Waiting for the crossing light, Wednesday morning, I heard: "Theology books are a lot easier than psychology books for me. Theology books are like, 'God, God, God, God, God.' Psychology books are like, 'Aaaaaaaaa!'"

And then the two young men in backpacks jaywalked past and were on their way.

Home

2007-09-09T00:03:00.001-07:00

Bloodwood. Gillian Bradshaw.

2007-09-03T07:14:00.000-07:00

Usually, in a thrillery sort of a book, you can be pretty sure the protagonist will end up alive. In this one, she's diagnosed with a fast-growing inoperable cancer right in the first couple of pages, so you can be pretty sure she'll end up dead. Other than that, little to remark on. I was glad to learn that for her next book Bradshaw's returned to period fiction.

Teller Again

2007-09-02T11:25:00.000-07:00

The little bank teller is getting good at depositing checks now! And his small talk is improving! He said to me, this time, "So what are you doing this weekend?" in quite the manner of a normal bank teller. A small warmth grew within me, to witness this blossoming into full grown tellerhood.

"Well, I was supposed to go hiking," I told him, "But it looks like I'm going to get dragged to Bumbershoot instead."

"Hiking sounds like more fun," he agreed.

So far so good.

"Bumbershoot's getting expensive," he remarked. "It's $35 this year. Last year it was $25, or $20."

I assented vaguely.

"But that's really not my kind of thing," he confided, standing straighter. "I've never been to a concert in my life!" His eyes glowed with a curious pride.

His skin kind of glowed, too, in the manner of someone whose life hasn't been long enough for him to have got around to going to a concert. Or learning to judge the relative volume of one whole or 6 2-cm chunks of hot dog, for that matter.

"I'm going on a road trip!" he said.

I hope someone else is doing the driving. I think driving is harder than depositing checks. Maybe almost as hard as small talk, which he doesn't seem after all quite to have mastered yet.

Happiness Sold Separately. Lolly Winston.

2007-08-29T14:41:00.000-07:00

I know where I was when I first picked up this book. It was in the new books part of the library, by the 5th Avenue entrance, the place where anyone who felt like taking the elevator up to the little observation platform at the top of the building would have been well placed to spit upon my head.

I know, too, where I read it, at home with my head reclining southward upon a dingy yellow cushion and my feet pointed toward the north, my right hand stretching out to the northeast after snacks and drinks that rested in that direction.

What I do not know, cannot so much as guess at or try to reconstruct, is what made me think it a good idea to remove the book from the library and introduce it into my dwelling.

That is where I went wrong.

Instant Leftovers

2007-08-18T15:35:00.000-07:00

Suppose it to be three o'clock Saturday afternoon when you decide that a good way to occupy the time left before you need to leave for your friend's dinner party would be to clean the refrigerator.

Further suppose that when you look in there you find there are some raw and perilously old chicken breasts sitting there in an old salsa container, and also half a can of skinny bamboo shoots.

You may then find yourself soaking black mushrooms, brewing jasmine tea to chill in a pitcher, and abandoning yourself generally to an Irrational Midafternoon Cooking Frenzy, with the end result that everything will go back into the fridge again, just in slightly altered form, while you conserve stomach space for your friend's chicken paprikash.

In the interim, this is what you will do.

Assemble (amounts approximate):

1 pond cooking oil
1 T Sichuan peppercorns
2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
1/3 c Shaoxing wine
1 t salt
2 T chili bean sauce
3 T minced ginger
2 T soy sauce
1/2 can skinny bamboo shoots
5 rehydrated black mushrooms
1 t cornstarch mixed in water

Slice chicken and marinate in salt and Shaoxing wine. Remove stems from mushrooms, cut caps into narrow strips. Heat oil until quite violently hot. Throw in Sichuan peppercorns. Before they start burning, throw in the chicken, and stir it until it's pretty much white on the outside. Add chili bean sauce and ginger. When the chicken is mostly cooked, put in bamboo shoots, mushrooms, and soy sauce. Cook until flavor has gone into the bamboo shoots and mushrooms, add cornstarch, mix up, and remove from pan.

Runaway Princess. Kate Coombs.

2007-08-12T11:16:00.000-07:00

I somehow thought the princess might run away and meet with great dangers and greater triumphs, but then she ended up addressing small problems in a small way, sort of like Encyclopedia Brown, who (I vaguely recall) solved small mysteries by hopping over short chain-link fences into other people's back yards and cogitating there.

So this book was not as dashing and dramatic as I had hoped, but quite amusing withal. I was particularly pleased with what happened when a bunch of princes got turned into frogs, especially the effect on their battle technique once they found themselves human again.

The Balloon Man. Charlotte Armstrong.

2007-08-11T20:54:00.001-07:00

Many are the charming things about Charlotte Armstrong. One is that her sentences have, sometimes, a certain complexity that is seldom seen these days (or so I think, though I don't read as many mysteries and things as some of my acquaintance) but was perhaps more mass marketable in the 1960s. For instance:

By the time Sherry, having rested an hour, gone back to see Johnny briefly, and taken a bus, rang Mrs. Ivy’s bell (duty bound to thank her once again), it was 4 p.m.

Another is that she can render a baddie strangely sympathetic. She has the generosity of spirit to frame malevolence as the natural outcome of conjoined weakness and lack of imagination--to be combated, certainly; condemned, possibly; but in any case to be compassionated.

This aspect of The Balloon Man did serve, though, to make me admire Kate Atkinson yet more than I already did. In One Good Turn, the baddie appears at first to be but one of many befuddled bystanders, and indeed she is, like everyone else in the story, genuinely confused and surprised by each peculiar turn of events. She seems, in fact, so ordinary and confused that the occasional startlingly cold-hearted thought she is reported as having makes you think not that she is evil but that you yourself are quite normal and unexceptionable in your own evil-thinking ways. And then it turns out . . . well, I guess I won't actually say how it turns out, but that is one bad woman, and you liked her.

California

2007-08-04T00:40:00.000-07:00

Shallows

2007-07-29T11:22:00.000-07:00

Odd Preoccupations

2007-07-14T08:15:00.000-07:00

Sometime recently I was in the company of someone who, when some attempt at religious classification arose, ostentatiously and insistently called himself an Apathist. I cannot say I much liked his manner, but I did like his term, with its implication that religion is just not a useful enough idea to bother about. If I thought the word had any kind of widespread currency (a perfunctory Google search yielded this, which for all I know was posted by the same eccentric individual who brought the term to my attention in the first place; a link to the place the word would have been in the Free Dictionary if it were in the Free Dictionary, which it is not; and a Manifesto which is "temporarily available, please try again later"), I might just adopt it too. Of course, it would be either dishonest or deluded for an early-twenty-first-century American to claim that religion simply doesn't matter. Even with the feeble, flawed, and fragmentary tools of contemporary social science, I suspect, it would be possible to trace a direct route from the religious beliefs of individual U.S. citizens, through political institutions designed to compress individual ideas into group actions, to the death, dismemberment, and derangement (variously and in combination) of some U.S. citizens and an awful lot of other people in Afghanistan and Iraq. (For example.) But if Apathy is a conviction not that religion has, in fact, no significance, but merely that it should not have significance, then I could be an Apathist.

Feeling that running around trying to demonstrate the nonexistence of God gives Him altogether more weight than He really deserves, I've never taken the trouble to read atheist books. Therefore is it that I am unsure whether atheism really has more to do with an active belief in the absence of deity (which seems a waste of time) or with pointing out the evils of belief in things that probably do not exist (which seems more likely). If there is a set of standard arguments against religious belief, which I suspect there must be, I am unacquainted with it. I did discover recently, however, while driving in circles around the West in the company of the sort of vocal believer who makes it hard to preserve one's antireligious thoughts fuzzily unarticulated, that the distinction between belief about deity and belief about religion is a crucial one.

I do not think, however, I am the only muddle-headed person who has, occasionally or routinely, got these two ideas confused. I have been asked whether I'm really an atheist or just an agnostic, thought for a minute, and said agnostic, by which I meant that I am unwilling to identify the really very extremely unlikely with the absolutely impossible. But if I call myself agnostic, it seems to me, I am taken to regard a religiously-oriented existence as a legitimate way of being, good for those whose boat it floats, feasible even for myself.

This is not the case. I am firmly convinced that it is harmful to people to catch hold of an undemonstrable proposition, embellish and elaborate it, and organize their lives around the idea that it is true. If nothing else, it diverts vast buckets of thinking to irrigating fields of mental tares.

Suppose, for instance, the afternoon sun, lighting a finger of fog that creeps up from the bay.

"Wah!" one might well think, joyful.

"Oh, look, God made it!" one might alternatively think, losing a little bit of the time in which one might be absorbing the view.

And the more substantial one's religious beliefs, the worse it gets, to where one might hardly see the glow of light flowing up the valley from the surface of the water for saying to oneself, "How can one look upon the beauty of the Pacific Northwest and still doubt its creation by a divine Hand? Now how would He have done that, hmm? It has to have been one day about six thousand years ago, which means that there really hasn't been time for those pines over on the other side of the water to have evolved from unicellular organisms, but then, the platypus is really not a very viable sort of organism, so evolution was really not a very good idea in the first place, and I really must remind my kids not to listen to anything any of the other kids at school say to them, cause they might get confused."

Here we get past mere wasting of time to the systematic perversion of people's modes of thought to allow them to maintain a set of ideas at odds with what they see around them.

Of course, religions are not the only elaborate, socially transmitted systems of counterproductive thinking habits, but they are distinctive in that they so easily reduce to a single, simple, dubious core proposition.

Anyway. It was my contention, driving in circles in the West, that religion promoted bad thinking, but I didn't have a concrete example to hand (having slept too ill the previous night to be able to extract much from my memory, much less organize it).

But I happened across a good example today of the sort of mishmash of strained argument and misdirection that can grow out of the desire to maintain (and promote) a religious way of thinking. In this newspaper opinion piece, Michael Gerson very carefully avoids making a claim to the existence of God, on the grounds that "proving God's existence in 750 words or fewer would daunt even Thomas Aquinas." Well. In fact, there's pretty near nothing that can be usefully explicated in 750 words or less. That's why newspaper articles allude to commonly-held assumptions, quote experts, refer to other publications, summarize. That Gerson employs none of these strategies leads me to suspect he does not in fact believe God's existence can be proved, which makes the implication that it could be (if one had more than 750 words) rather dishonest.

Instead of positing the actual existence of God, Gerson says, he's just going to ask about the effect of godlessness on human morality.

It's easy to answer by pointing out the ways in which religious morality undermines itself, as Christopher Hitchens convincingly does in his reply to Gerson. But this does not address the peculiarity of Gerson's basic proposition, that if it would be good for something to be true, it would therefore be both possible and desirable to act, even if in the complete absence of evidence, as if in fact it were.

How can such a very strange idea be so common?

Perhaps if I'd happened across this pair of articles on a Sunday, rather than a Saturday, morning, I would have been the recipient of divine guidance, and all would now be clear.

Eggs? How so?

2007-07-08T21:21:00.000-07:00

This is the way to make fried rice.

You need (in order of appearance):

oil
Sichuan pepper (whole)
meat (sliced)
chili bean sauce
garlic (minced)
ginger (minced)
celery (chopped)
frozen peas
soy sauce
dark vinegar
old rice

What to do:

Put a wok on high heat (a.k.a. a military fire). Make a lake of oil in the bottom of the wok. When the oil has become quite martial, throw in the Sichuan pepper, and then the meat right after. When the meat has turned white, put in a good dollop of chili bean sauce. Stir in garlic and ginger. After a while, when the meat is pretty much cooked through, add the celery and peas. When the peas are thawed, add a little soy sauce and vinegar. Put in the rice, and thump the big chunks to bits. When the rice has separated into grains and absorbed the sauce, serve it up, with beer. Maybe even Japanese beer.

Telling All, Part 2

2007-07-04T12:20:00.000-07:00

I go to the bank to deposit my paycheck.

"Can I help you?" he says.

(Wait a second, thinks I, to myself.)

"Were you at a different branch, a couple of weeks ago?" I ask.

He takes my check and deposit slip. "You go to more than one branch? The Seattle one?"

(Are we not now in Seattle?)

"Yeah . . . I didn't know they moved you back and forth." I note he is working a good bit faster than he did last month.

He puts on a pained look. "Well, they--do you know X?"

(Who? Am I expected to know the people who staff my bank?)

"Uh . . ." I tell him he can print my balance on my receipt.

He runs the receipt through the machine. "He's my uncle, he worked at that branch, so--I couldn't work there."

(Didn't someone realize this before you started?)

"Oh." I take the receipt. "You can give me the cash in quarters."

"That's a lot of quarters!" Thoughtful pause. "Have a nice day!"

"I will. I can wash my clothes now."

He looks deeply perplexed, but after a minute his face clears. "You'll have lots of bus money! You can wash lots of laundry!"

I've revised my opinion. He doesn't spend his lunch hour weeping, he spends it trimming his sandwich with pinking shears, because he's developed the impression that that's what people expect of him.

Fire

2007-06-28T22:58:00.001-07:00

The Absorbing Adventures of Ron Scollon, Linguist

2007-06-21T22:20:00.000-07:00

Chapter One. In Which He Converses about Shoes.

Chapter Two. In Which He Watches a Family Move House.

Chapter Three. In Which He Discourses upon Apples.

Chapter Four. In Which He Finds That Looking Downward at People Makes Him Feel Powerful.

Chapter Five. In Which He Revenges Himself upon a Banana Thief.

Chapter Six. In Which He Reads the Newspaper.

Chapter Seven. In Which He Buys Coffee.

Chapter Eight. In Which He Gazes out the Window.

Chapter Nine. In Which He Transmits Messages.

Chapter Ten. In Which He Is Encouraged to Hold His Peace.

Chapter Eleven. In Which He Uses the Toilet.

Illiteracy

2007-06-21T00:05:00.001-07:00

I like to think of myself as literate, but just now I was trying to write to Rose, "Do you ever use your email?" but it came out, "Do you ever youse your email?"

Lord almighty.

Cachinnation

2007-06-20T23:28:00.000-07:00

While consulting my Merriam-Webster's this morning (the person I'm editing seems to be addicted to using hyphens in the middle of what ought to be closed compounds), I ran across the word cachinnate, "to laugh loudly or immoderately," which I really do think I ought to try to find a way to use sometime soon.

One Good Turn. Kate Atkinson.

2007-06-14T22:21:00.000-07:00

The problem with Kate Atkinson is that after you finish one of her books you wander around for two weeks feeling like your best friend has moved away. Of course, you might see her again next year, but then you might not. It's all most disheartening.

Making Niter Kibbeh

2007-06-13T18:52:00.001-07:00

Just Lipstick

2007-06-11T21:05:00.000-07:00

I went to see my grandma and her crew in a motel near the airport where they were waiting to board a cruise boat to Alaska. They had two rooms, and we kept standing in between them and blocking the hall. Before I got there, a joke had grown up with the people in the opposite room, about "breaking up the fight."

"Look, is that blood on her mouth?" the guy said, pointing at me, on one of his passes through. "Oh, it's all right, it's just lipstick."

I've only worn lipstick once in my life, for several of the last few hours of 1993, and the one time I actually purchased a lipstick it was a deep brown in color. But apparently it's possible to inhabit a state of mind in which the merest hint of femininity (I'm more often addressed as "ma'am" than as "sir" or "brother," but the latter two do occasionally crop up) is enough to call forth a presumption of redness about the mouth.

Newfanglement

2007-06-11T17:17:00.000-07:00

I had no idea what the Crawlie was that I saw on my walk on Friday, but some kind person at Yelp asked these people for me and found out that it's the larva of a multicolored Asian lady beetle. Evidently they didn't used to live here, but only moved over here in the last decade or two. (Were it not a newcomer, I would of course have been able to identify it at a glance. I knew what the Duckie was, after all, didn't I? See?)

Duckie

2007-06-11T16:43:00.001-07:00