Above picture was sent to me tonight by Book Buddy and all-around good friend Stephanie. She knew I'd love it. And I do.I will put my tree on the sun room. Very excited! Being vaguely pagan, heathen, or at least a-religious I'm not much of a Christmas person, but I do worship books so what could be more perfect?
"Oslo — The Norwegian military said Tuesday it plans to put its troops on a
vegetarian diet once a week in a bid to fight a new kind of enemy -- climate
change." Full story here.
I say hooray for the depressed Norwegians. They really, really get it about what individual people can do to have even a prayer of halting this runaway train we call global warming/climate change. I fully believe that human actions -- not evil intent, just normal human progress -- is the major cause of [probably] harmful climate change. I'm part of the problem -- you don't see me giving up my car, or moving out of my too-big house, or even (yet) giving up beef. So when I see a large group of people who DO make meaningful changes I'm impressed. The Norwegians have hit upon a really simple way to make a difference. And improve their health at the same time.
Here's a good article about the connection between beef and climate change. I'm not giving up a nice juicy steak now and then, but, inspired by the Norsemen, I hope to cut back a lot. Fair warning husband and son!
I would like to make my book list even more perfect by having each author listed only once. Right now, nine of the 93 books I've listed are by just two authors: Willa Cather (top, five novels) and Edith Wharton (four novels). George Orwell accounts for three titles, and the following authors each have two novels on the list:
John Updike
John Galsworthy
James Baldwin
James Joyce
James Salter
Jack Kerouac
Carson McCullers
Aldous Huxley
F. Scott Fitzgerald
If my math is right, and it often isn't, I think that means I have to remember 18 other books I've read in order to make every name appear just once on the list. Oh joy! I can now spend more hours checking lists of books and the dates published to make updates to my list.
1900: Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser 1901: 1902:The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle 1903: 1904: 1905: The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton 1906:The Jungle by Upton Sinclair 1907: 1908: 1909:Strait is the Gate by Andre Gide 1910: 1911:Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton 1912:Death in Venice by Thomas Mann 1913:O Pioneers! by Willa Cather 1914:Dubliners by James Joyce 1915:The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford 1916:A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce 1917:Summer by Edith Wharton 1918:My Antonia by Willa Cather 1919: My Man Jeeves by P.D. Wodehouse 1920:Main Street by Sinclair Lewis 1921: To Let by John Galsworthy 1922: Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse 1923:The Fox by D. H. Lawrence 1924:Billy Budd by Herman Melville 1925:The Professor’s House by Willa Cather 1926:The Silver Spoon by John Galsworthy 1927:Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather 1928: Point Counterpoint by Aldous Huxley 1929:A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway 1930:The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett 1931: Babylon Revisited and Other Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald 1932: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley 1933: Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald 1934:And Quiet Flows the Don by Mikhail Sholokhov 1935:A Clergyman’s Wife by George Orwell 1936:Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell 1937:The Citadel by A. J. Cronin 1938:Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier 1939:The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West 1940: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers 1941: What Makes Sammy Run by Budd Schulberg 1942:The Stranger by Albert Camus 1943: The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand 1944:The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham 1945:The Egg and I by Betty MacDonald 1946:All the King's Men by William Penn Warren 1947:Aurora Dawn by Herman Wouk 1948:The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh 1949: 1984 by George Orwell 1950:The Town and the City by Jack Kerouac 1951: The End of the Affair by Graham Greene 1952:East of Eden by John Steinbeck 1953:Casino Royale by Ian Fleming 1954:Lord of the Flies by William Golding 1955:After Dark, My Sweet by Jim Thompson 1956: Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz 1957:On the Road by Jack Kerouac 1958:Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov 1959:A Separate Peace by John Knowles 1960:Rabbit, Run by John Updike 1961: Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger 1962:We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson 1963:The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin 1964:Herzog by Saul Bellow 1965: The British Museum is Falling Down by David Lodge 1966:Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys 1967:Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin 1968: A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley 1969:I Know Why the Caged Bird Sing by Maya Angelou 1970: A Fairly Honourable Defeat by Iris Murdoch 1971:Black Sun by Edward Abbey 1972:Surfacing by Margaret Atwood 1973:Nickel Mountain by John Gardner 1974: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert N. Pirsig 1975: Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt 1976:Ordinary People by Judith Guest 1977:Death of an Expert Witness by P.D. James 1978:The Sweet Dove Died by Barbara Pym 1979:Sophie’s Choice by William Styron 1980:The Second Coming by Walker Percy 1981:Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith 1982:Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler 1983: Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala 1984: White Noise by Don DeLillo 1985: Continental Drift by Russell Banks 1986:The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster 1987: Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner 1988:Dalva by Jim Harrison 1989:The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro 1990:Immortality by Milan Kundera 1991:The Kitchen God’s Wife by Amy Tan 1992: The Secret History by Donna Tartt 1993: Montana, 1948 by Larry Watson 1994:Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson 1995: The Tortilla Curtain by T.C. Boyle 1996:We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates 1997:Midwives by Chris Bohjalian 1998:Charming Billy by Alice McDermott 1999:Plainsong by Kent Haruf
To be read, so I can fill in the blanks. 1901:MY BRILLIANT CAREER by MILES FRANKLIN
1903: THE CALL OF THE WILD by JACK LONDON
1904: THE GOLDEN BOWL by HENRY JAMES
1907:THROUGH THE EYE OF THE NEEDLE by
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
1908: THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY by G.K. CHESTERTON
1910:HOWARDS END by E.M. FORSTER 1919: MY MAN JEEVES by P.D. WODEHOUSE Read 2014
It took me a long time, and I mean a long time, to complete this list. I get obsessed at times.
Trick or treating is now officially over. We had a lot of kids this year, maybe 15 groups of 3-6 kids each plus 5 or so doubles & singles. Good! There's not that much left-over chocolate. I should take it to "work" or give it away. I'll do a little of both, but I'll eat a goodly amount of it too. So there.
Lyrics by Lou Reed
There's a down town fairy singing out, "Proud Mary"
As she cruises Christopher Street
And some Southern Queen is acting loud and mean
Where the docks and the Badlands meet
This Halloween is something to be sure
Especially to be here without you
There's a Greta Garbo and an Alfred Hitchcock
And some black Jamaican stud
There's five Cinderellas and some leather drags
I almost fell into my mug
There's a Crawford, Davis and a tacky Cary Grant
And some homeboys lookin' for trouble down here from the Bronx
But there ain't no Hairy and no Virgin Mary
You won't hear those voices again
And Johnny Rio and Rotten Rita
You'll never see those faces again
This Halloween is something to be sure
Especially to be here without you
There's the Born Again Losers and the Lavender Boozers
And some crack team from Washington Heights
The boys from Avenue B and the girls from Avenue D
A Tinkerbell in tights
This celebration somehow gets me down
Especially when I see you're not around
There's no Peter Pedantic saying things romantic
In Latin, Greek or Spic
There's no Three bananas or Brandy Alexander
Dishing all their tricks
It's a different feeling that I have today
Especially when I know you've gone away
There's a girl from Soho with a T-shirt saying, "I blow"
She's with the 'Jive five 2 plus 3'
And the girls for pay dates are giving cut rates
Or else doing it for free
The past keeps knock, knock, knocking on my door
And I don't want to hear it anymore
No consolations please for feelin' funky
I got to get my head above my knees
But it makes me mad and then it makes me sad
And then I start to freeze
In the back of my mind, I was afraid it might be true
In the back of my mind, I was afraid that they meant you
The Halloween Parade
At the Halloween Parade.
See you next year, at the Halloween Parade
I'm very excited about a new list I'm working on -- as of 20 minutes ago. I follow a number of book blogs, including this one, which led me to see the blogger's list entitled A Century of Books. She got the idea from this blog. I'm going to see how many years, from 1900 to 1999, I can fill in with the name of a book that I read that was published in that year. (I can word that differently, and I probably will later.) Considering that I've read quite a few George Orwell and Willa Cather and Edith Wharton novels I hope to fill in a lot of dates from the 20s and 30s. I feel sure I'll have a book to list for every year after about 1970, which is when I was out of school and could read whatever I wanted.
I've got a list of books read since 1984, the year my second child was born. Can't wait to get home tonight from my Dinner Group so I can fill in the blanks. (The Dinner Group is what I now call The Book Group that I joined last January and isn't really a book group at all. It's a dinner group and it feels better if I just call it that. I didn't want to be in a dinner group, I wanted to be in a book group, but I've bitched about that before and won't repeat myself too much here.) Below is what I served when it was my turn, in August, to host the Book Group, I mean the Dinner Group. Tonight we're pretending that we're getting together to discuss Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri, which I'm almost finished and liked a lot. A whole lot, which is unusual because it's a short story collection and I thought I didn't like short story collections.
Post dinner report: Once again, I'm ready to quit this group. I really hate myself the morning after each dinner. I talk too much, I interrupt people, I'm overly nervous. I simply don't like myself and don't want to feel that way. I've tried to quit before but failed. Sigh.
I hardly saw them all but I saw a lot, including Lou in about 1999, no 1998, at the 9:30 Club in DC. He made some awfully good music. And he had a good marriage. Two pretty great things. 71 wasn't a bad run for someone who, shall we say, didn't always show the best judgment. He'll be missed.
Chris Richards, Washington Post, 10/28/13 "Reed was our most uncompromising rock star. The pedestal that so many reserve for Bob Dylan? It belongs to Reed. Reed, the grouchy genius. Reed, the street poet with the lousy singing voice. Reed, the inscrutable self-mythologizer. Reed, the guy who always made rock-and-roll feel mysterious and alive."
A number of years ago I bought one cardinal climber vine (Ipomoea sloteri) at a farmers' market. Since then I've grown them every year using the seeds I collected at the end of the previous season. The hummingbirds love these flowers, and although they are pretty and reliable and long-lasting (I still have a few blooms), they aren't spectacular. You have to be very near in order to see the little blooms. But next year (I'm always saying that... "but next year") I hope to plant tons of them and see if they'll make more of a splash. Don't know yet if the deer will allow that since I've only grown them on my deck and behind fencing.
In January I entered Goodreads' book challenge and chose 100 books as my goal for 2013. Time's running out. I'm 28 books behind schedule, according to Goodreads. I guess they have a way of predicting my personal speed of reading -- one of those algorithms it seems like we're always reading about these days. (I think the word "algorithm" was one I heard or read way back in 7th or 8th grade and then never heard again until social media came along.) I've read 50 books so far in 2013, with, what, 2 1/2 months to go? Goodreads therefore must predict that at my speed I'll finish 22 more by 12/31. Therefore I'm 28 behind schedule. At least that's the way my mind figures it. So I guess to meet my challenge I have to more than double my reading rate for the next 10 weeks. Not bloody likely. Although I did just start reading Old Filth an hour ago and it's so engaging that I'm racing my way through it. Who am I in competition with? Myself? The Grim Reaper? Yes, him! He'll win.
These flowers make me so happy. They bloom from July to October, produce hundreds of blooms and thousands of seeds (for next year), and smell heavenly. They start blooming late in the day, bloom happily all night, then begin to fold up at 11 AM or so. The deer generally don't eat them until late in the season when everything else is gone.
I prefer red 4's, but am too stubborn to go out and buy seeds for reds. The plants shown in this post are the descendants of 4's I planted a few years ago -- white blooms with a hint of pale, pale yellow. I like the process of gathering and saving seeds for the next year. I have many baggies of various seeds scattered about.
I've been a very bad gardener this year, just awful. I may post pictures to prove my point. Or maybe not. I've also been a very bad blogger this year. (But I've read a LOT of good books!)
I know that the caterpillar became a black swallowtail butterfly and that Lucy likes studying the praying mantis outside the front window. But what is (are?) that (those?) flying insect(s) on my leg? It (they?) landed while Doug and I were canoeing around the local reservoir recently. They landed, flew away, returned, flew away, returned, on and on. If it's a them they spent a long, long time hooked up like that. And I mean hooked up in the sense that it's used most often these days.
It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but ...God* created us equal.
Hard to argue with this, right? Um, apparently not.
It's also hard to believe that a guy who likes to pose for such pictures now and then doesn't think of himself as exceptional, but I'll let that slide for now. I've always cringed when I read about Americans, or the United States, as being exceptional. So arrogant! It's a pretty great deal we've got here in the ole U S of A (well, for most of us but certainly not all) but we really need to get over ourselves. Or at least stop telling the rest of the world that we're exceptional (and that includes, I'm sorry to say, Mr. Obama who doesn't do much that I disagree with).
I love these! And I must admit that I want one. Not going to happen. A regular white one costs about $200 and these go for about $800. I can think of much better uses for $600 but it would make me smile several times a day. Lots more to look at here.
Nonplussed. What a bad, bad word. So confusing. So often misused. So often the cause of me having to stop reading whatever I'm reading to, once again, look it up. It does not mean "unimpressed" or "indifferent." It means "confused" or "perplexed." Maybe blogging about it will imprint it on my brain.
I'm reading Tom Robbins' novel Skinny Legs and All. I've wanted to read one of his books for years and, for no particular reason, I chose this as my first. In addition to some humans, other main characters include a can of beans, a dirty sock, a conch shell, and a spoon. These characters have interesting conversations and through some sort of quantum mechanical plot device are able to move about. Right now they're headed for Jerusalem -- from Idaho. Another feature of this book is an Airstream RV that's been redesigned to look like a turkey. I'm an equal opportunity reader for the most part. Not a fan of science fiction or vampire novels, but otherwise I'm pretty much open to anything. But I am having a bit of trouble with a talking can of beans. I'll plow ahead because I'm determined to finish this book and try some of his others.
Note: I officially gave up on this book on Monday, Sept 2. Mostly because my knowledge of the Old Testament is just not robust enough to understand all the references. But I'm not giving up on Tom Robbins. I'll try Jitterbug Perfume soon and if THAT doesn't take then I'll cross this author off my "must be read" list.
I stumbled upon this website, called Cosmetics and Skin, while googling around reading about skin cleansers. The site seems to take no advertising -- a labor of love I guess. I especially like the links on the right -- histories of different manufacturers, Maybelline for example. The old print ads and photos gathered there are wonderful. It makes me think how much the internet has added to the lives of people who get slightly obsessed with something -- like skin care products. With some time and effort they can gather all their knowledge in one nice package and put it out there for the rest of us to stumble upon.
I've started borrowing library books on my Kindle (the Kindle I swore I'd never own and never love but I do own and I do love). The last two books I borrowed are still on my Kindle despite having long since reached the end of the loan periods. I got the usual notices via email when the loan periods had ended, my Amazon Kindle account tells me that the loans have expired, but there they sit, on my Kindle and ready to be read over and over and over.
I Googled around to see if this is common and yes, it is. Most people seem to think that I'm not holding up the line for future readers by keeping the books on my device. But it does seem strange, and I feel a little like I'm cheating by not removing the books. But I'm going to keep them there to see how long this goes on.
We live in an odd world these days. Or maybe it just seems odd to someone my age who has witnessed all these changes in communications. I learned to type on a manual typewriter, my first office job seemed so high-tech at the time because I used a fancy electric typewriter, and now I can see into some Chinese person's bedroom just by going to Google Earth. Will my kids be able to say, when they're my age, that they've seen such dramatic changes? Hard to believe.
In mid-June I got a head cold, just a routine head cold, but it caused both of my ears to become blocked up. So much so that I couldn't hear much of anything for a week or more. I finally broke down (relatives and friends hounded me into it) and saw my doctor. She prescribed antibiotics (grrrr -- I knew she'd do it even though I'm in that club that thinks we take far too many unnecessary antibiotics). But, it turns out to have been a good thing because at this same time I'd been bitten by a tiny tick and within a few days after starting the antibiotics for the ears I noticed the classic bull's eye around the site of the bite. The doctor extended the Rx for the anti's and said they would do double-duty: combat the nasty Lyme spirochete and any bacterial opportunists in my ears. She said I could also take standard OTC antihistamines (over the pharmacist's counter that is, since you now have to register with the Drug Enforcement Agency to score pseudoephedrine -- thanks methheads).
Two weeks of antihistamines and three weeks of antibiotics later one ear was still annoyingly blocked up. So I saw an ENT specialist, reluctantly. I was pleasantly surprised when he sent me home with this little balloon device. Nothing pharmaceutical, nothing invasive -- unless you count blowing air up your nose invasive.
I think it helped! I used it for a week, felt that my ear was gradually clearing up, then stopped for a few days. The blockage started creeping back so I resumed using it, and now my ears feel fine. As with many medical treatments, I'll never know if the ears were going to clear up anyway so I don't know for a fact that the balloon worked, but I'll use it again if this should happen again.
Otovent seems to be big in the UK. People there use it for what they call "glue ear." I've been telling people that I had "blockage of the Eustachian tubes" which everyone seemed to immediately understand. But if I was in London I could have just said "glue ear" -- a vaguely disgusting term although it is succinct and descriptive.
I loved telling people that I was treating my blocked Eustachian tubes by blowing up a balloon with my nose.
Without intending to, I've been reading lots of books this summer in which poverty is a major character, or at least an important element in the story. Some of these books are nonfiction so I kind of knew what I was getting into. But some are fiction and I had no idea I'd be encountering detailed descriptions of hunger and deprivation. Some of these books I would recommend; others I would not.
Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (Barbara Demick) I know (knew) nothing about North Korea before I read this book. It's the true story of how a handful of North Koreans managed to escape from this repressive country, and the reader learns much about the famine and starvation that has plagued the country ever since the fall of the Soviet Union. Among the many vivid images is an account of how starving citizens would head outside in the very early morning looking for grass shoots that had popped up overnight. This was considered breakfast. The Clergyman's Daughter (George Orwell) I'm slowly working my way through George Orwell's "other" novels -- meaning those other than the ones many readers know well: 1984 and Animal Farm. This novel is set in the UK in the mid-1930s. Part of the plot involves a period of amnesia for the main character who finds herself wandering around the countryside searching for food, which often means eating rotting apples she finds in orchards, and wrapping herself in newspapers at night in a mostly unsuccessful attempt to ward off the cold. Behind the Beautiful Forevers (Katherine Boo) This book, written by an LA Times reporter who spent several years living in Mumbai, India, tells the horrific story of improverished trash scavengers who live in improvised cities near the international airport in Mumbai. It's hard to capture the level of poverty so let me just quote a line or two:
...85 percent of the workers were part of the informal, unorganized economy. A few residents trapped rats and frogs and fried them for dinner. A few ate the scrub grass at the sewage lake's edge. And these individuals, miserable souls, thereby made an inestimable contribution to their neighbors. They gave those slum dwellers who didn't fry rats and eat weeds a felt sense of their upward mobility.
...[they lived in] a hut on the camp's stenchiest lane, where the feral pigs gorged on rotten hotel food. The house was ten feet long, six feet wide, filthy, lightless, and crammed with firewood for cooking.
...[a resident] saw that he'd have to become a better scavenger. This entailed not dwelling on the obvious: that his profession could wreck a body in a very short time. Scrapes from dumpster-diving pocked and became infected. Where skin broke, maggots got in. Lice colonized hair, gangrene inched up fingers, calves swelled into tree trunks, and Abdul and his younger brothers kept a running wager about which of the scavengers would be the next to die.
I couldn't finish this book. It literally turned my stomach. I have a very high tolerance for depressing real-life narratives, but this book was simply too much for me. It seems to be a popular book club selection, but I can't recommend it.
Girl in Translation (Jean Kwok) This debut novel very closely follows the author's true story of immigrating to New York from Shanghai with her mother in (I think) the 1980s. They manage to survive by working in a barely legal clothing sweatshop in lower Manhattan, and living in a hovel in Brooklyn with no heat, often no electricity, and thousands of roaches, rats, and mice. While it's an uplifting account of the main character's success in overcoming poverty, it's hard to read the descriptions of all those multi-footed house-mates. And again the main characters have to eat some of the most awful foods to stay alive.
Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (Chris Hedges) This is a nonfiction account of pockets of poverty in the United States, specifically an Indian reservation in South Dakota; Camden, NJ; a small town on the border of Kentucky and West Virginia; and a rural migrant-farmer community north of Miami. I only read part of this library book but only because it was due and I couldn't renew it. So I'll get back to it eventually. The part I read was about the South Dakota Indian reservation and wow was that eye-opening. And sad. Here are a few passages:
Whiteclay, Nebraska, an unincorporated village that exists for only a block and a half before vanishing into the flatlands of the surrounding prairie, has only five or six permanent residents. It exists to sell beer and malt liquor.
Whiteclay’s primary business venture brings in an estimated $3 million a year in revenue. Whiteclay’s clients, however, are some of the poorest people in the country. They are Native Americans from the Pine Ridge reservation that is less than 200 feet away, just over the state line in South Dakota. … Alcoholism on Pine Ridge, although the sale of liquor is banned on the reservation, is estimated to be as high as eighty percent.
The fury of self-destruction sweeps across Pine Ridge like the Black Plague. Whiteclay is the modern-day version of the old Indian agencies. It is where Indians surrender. It is where they hand over their self-esteem and autonomy and wait passively in line for a bag of flour, a piece of lard, a few blankets, and the firewater that blunts the pain of what many have become.
Families, wracked by alcoholism, poverty, despair, and domestic violence, living lives in which tenderness and security are grabbed in desperate snatches, disintegrate swiftly under the onslaught of the reservation. The violence imposed on Indian culture has become internalized. Despair and pain of this magnitude lead to lives dedicated to self-immolation. The agony is expressed in self-defeating and self-destructive urges that shred what is left of dignity and hope.
Depressed yet?
I've moved on to other books with either more humor or less reality: Our Gang by Philip Roth (dated but fun and easy), Every Day is Mother's Day by Hilary Mantel (great read and weird as cat sh*t; Hilary Mantel reminds me of Shirley Jackson), and Revenge Wears Prada: The Devil Returns by Lauren Weisberger (big-time guilty pleasure). I'm reading Revenge because of something I said at the most recent meeting of my book group. (I always say something that I regret at these monthly get-togethers.) I was slightly critical of the writing in Girl in Translation. The author got an MFA in creative writing at Columbia University so I was primed for a book with, well, creativity. But I found the writing to be flat, overly simple, and a bit dull. Nothing wrong with that of course, but it didn't seem very creative. The other group members disagreed with me heartily, saying that they loved the story (so did I) and they thought it was so interesting (so did I) so what's not to like? To prove to myself that I'm not a book snob who only likes books with flashy, literary flourishes I got Revenge from the library. No fear of finding literary flourishes in this book!
