August 27, 2007
The Folk of the Air
I remember once, in high school -- it was just after French class, not that that matters -- I got in a conversation with two or three other girls who were earnestly trying to convince me that the female orgasm couldn't have been invented until the Renaissance. No way, they said, were ladies having a good time in the Middle Ages or before. I tried just as earnestly to talk them out of it, though this was before I read Shakespeare ("Graze on my lips, or if those wells be dry, stray lower where the pleasant fountains lie") or Chaucer or any of those bawdy old reprobates who had known any number of enthusiastic women in their days.
I'm remembering this as I re-read Peter S. Beagle's book The Folk of the Air, wherein one character is occasionally possessed by a ninth century Viking named Egil. "Egil didn't think much of our civilization, the little he saw of it. He thought it was probably all right, for people who didn't really care a lot about anything."
Yes, quite right, I thought when I read this. I don't much care about anything, none of us do, not like people used to do. And I bet it all comes down to how much cynicism we have now, how jaded the world is getting as civilization goes on repeating, not like how things must have felt when all the love-and-springtime metaphors were brand new.
Only now I'm realizing of course that's nonsense. Cynicism isn't new, and love-and-springtime metaphors were old the second someone first said them. I don't go around feeling all the time because I haven't had to, yet; you wait until things start happening to me and then I'll be feeling all over the place.
It's just like that old argument about the orgasms. It's just like the first time you discover music or sex or the pleasure of laughing with your friends and you think whatever your parents knew was a dim shadow of this, this thing you've found out all on your own. I don't think people change so much from era to era. I don't think we change at all.
Incidentally, The Folk of the Air is a very good book that I think stemmed from ideas for several different very good books. You'll like it if you are or ever were very into the Renaissance Faire and can still think of it without blushing for yourself. It also has a paragraph I've been quoting for years, a goddess talking about humanity, as follows:
"There is nothing like you anywhere among all the stones in the sky, do you realize that? You are the wonder of the cosmos, possibly for embarrassing reasons, but anyway a wonder. You are the home of hunger and boredom, and I roll in you like a dog."
Posted by didofoot at 12:49 PM | Comments (0)
August 24, 2007
Black tie and a fuckup
Last night I went to an anniversary event for a local charity. I get assigned a lot of these stories (profile pieces, human interest), so I mostly knew what to expect. Or so I thought. The event started at 7:00, so I showed up at 7:20, having learned from experience that if you get to one of these things on time you stick out in a painful fashion and no one wants to talk to you.
So at 7:20 I walked through the door, and backed out in a hurry. All of the eight people milling around inside were wearing black tie, something the invitation email definitely had not specified. I was wearing a sundress and a corduroy jacket.
Hell, I thought. I'm going to have to chat up people in tuxedos while I look like a turnip-truck refugee.
Still, a job is a job. "When will things get started?" I asked the woman at the door, who gave me an odd look and said "It started at 5:30. This is pretty much the end of it."
Ah. Again, I was misled by the invitation. Just to be certain the evening was a total loss, I asked about the media rep I was supposed to meet there, whom the staffers had never heard of and who was not on the guest list.
Undaunted, I made my way home and telephoned the charity offices. The woman who answered was utterly panicked. "I just got in," she said. "I just work here. I don't know about that."
"That's ok," I said. "Maybe I can just leave a voicemail for whoever deals with press?"
"I don't know about media!" she said.
"Okay," I said, "I'll call back tomor--" CLICK.
So now I am going to start making my calls in an effort to find out whether this charity even exists. If it's just a money laundering scheme I guess I should expose it. If not, I guess I should interview someone. At least I know the dress code for today: PJs, bottomless coffee and cheerful cynicism. (On casual Fridays we at the home office are permitted to wear cheerful cynicism. On other work days, it's strictly wry good humor.)
Posted by didofoot at 08:06 AM | Comments (0)
August 23, 2007
Blue Latitudes
I just finished reading Blue Latitudes, Tony Horwitz's nonfiction best seller about Captain Cook. The Pulitzer Prize-winning Horwitz presents a ton of information about Cook, from his globe-encompassing routes to small details about the man (Cook was tall, and did not seem to understand the point of religion). He also travels to many of Cook's landing sites, comparing Cook's first impressions of places like Tahiti and Hawaii to the modern day islands, noting how colonization and Christianity have changed island cultures almost beyond recognition.
Lest you think this book is dry, this is the paragraph where I tell you about Roger, the English ex-pat who lives in Australia and follows Horwitz around on his journey, drinking and attempting to "pull crumpet." Roger's comedic booze-and-babe commentary is so well-timed that you feel he must have been invented by the author, or at least greatly rewritten from the original. He seems like the imagined Brad Pitt to Horwitz's humble Edward Norton: a handsome, rugged man's man who can go off and have man-fun while Horwitz schleps from Cook scholar to Cook scholar. "He was tall and broad-shouldered, with sun-streaked blond curls, and blue eyes set in a perpetually tanned face," Horwitz writes breathlessly.
And Roger gets to say all the things Horowitz can only hint at. After a page of restrained description of modern Tahitian slums, tense with the attempt at being non-judgmental, Horwitz gives way to Roger's complete disregard for political correctness. "It's an utter shitbox," Roger says. "The architects who designed this town must have been unemployable anywhere else."
Strengthening the "imaginary friend" theory, Roger does not manage to pull crumpet until the epilogue, despite his sun-streaked curls. After all, you can't have your imaginary friend leaving you to roll on the beach with some island princess. You've got to have him with you to provide wry, occasionally slurred commentary.
In some ways, Roger is the crew to Horwitz's Captain Cook. Cook referred to his crew as "the People," and like Roger, the People were cheerfully, drunkenly lecherous, only kept in line through great exertions on Cook's part. Then again, Cook himself was not above a souse-up now and then. "Can we make a friend more welcome than by setting before him the best liquor in our possession?" he wrote in his journal.
I heartily agree, and that is why all guests to our home are offered glasses of the most expensive bottle of two-buck Chuck money can buy.
Blue Latitudes is an excellent combination of armchair travel and history. You might also like it if you like some of the more hapless characters in Christopher Moore books.
Posted by didofoot at 10:51 AM | Comments (0)
August 17, 2007
Fear and Joking in Dolores Park
I'm writing an article about the SFPD's K-9 unit, which means Wednesday found me standing in Dolores Park taking pictures of a couple of cops and three dogs that are trained to kill me where I stand.
I don't know whether you've spent a lot of time around cops. I haven't myself, and frankly they make me nervous. They are armed. I'll say it again. THEY ARE ARMED. I know, I know, it might be tough to explain shooting me for no reason...but conceivably they could do it and get off with just a warning.
When I am nervous I tell a lot of jokes, as my poor in-laws can attest to. (Or "in-loves," as I like to call them, since Gene and I are not married.) When I am nervous around cops, I tell a lot of crime jokes.
"He's really calm today," one of the cops said about her narcotics-sniffing dog. "It's unusual."
"Ha ha! It must be because I didn't take my normal bath! In drugs! This morning! Because I bathe in drugs every morning!"
(I tell BAD crime jokes around cops.)
"Why aren't you wearing your vest?" the other cop asked her, referring of course to her bullet-proof vest.
"I dunno, I normally do," she said.
"You should wear it all the time," he said.
"Yeah," I said. "I might be packing heat." Ha ha ha, we all laughed. "After all, this is a really big purse," I added. Ha ha ha, I laughed, while my new cop friends eyed me with sudden suspicion.
In retrospect, it is probably unwise to try and be funny around people with guns. And dogs. I was allowed to pet the dogs, but now I'm thinking that was just so they could get my scent for later, when the chasing and fear happens.
Posted by didofoot at 07:38 AM | Comments (0)
August 16, 2007
FAA-gettabout it
I just checked the FAA website to see whether I'm allowed to put nail scissors in my carry-on when I fly to San Diego today. That's where we're at now: nail scissors might be on the list of evil items.
It turns out you CAN carry nail scissors on now, though this is a new permission, or, as I like to think of it, a newly returned freedom. However, the list of things you can't bring in your carry-on includes sabers, bows and arrows and spear guns.
Spear guns? Were those ever allowed on airplanes? Do they really have to list that on the site, like if they don't there are people who will show up confidently toting their spear guns, ready to board?
The list also specifically mentions Transformers as an allowable carry-on item. Barbies are not addressed, although you can do serious damage with those spiky plastic shoes of hers.
You can find the list here. For all that I hate them and all they stand for, I must give them shouts and propers for an excellent website, easy to navigate, with a clear list of what you can and cannot bring on board an airplane. For a government site it's remarkably clear.
Posted by didofoot at 07:12 AM | Comments (2)
August 15, 2007
Eclipse
Before I lost the book, I was reading Michele's copy of Eclipse, the third in a series of vampire/werewolf/teen novels by Stephanie Meyer that we both enjoy. (The first two were Twilight and New Moon.)
The above description (vampire/werewolf/teen) is intentional: in these books, teenage girls really are the third monster. The books chronicle the love triangle between a teen girl, the vampire she loves and the werewolf who loves her. The vampire loves her back, so there are a lot of scenes where they almost kiss, or kiss a little. Except he also wants to eat her and it takes all his self control to keep from ripping her heart out at any moment; if they kiss too much he is liable to lose control and kill her. This means love scenes generally go:
[KISS!]
Vampire: Knock it off!
Girl: Ooh, sorry. I am bad.
As the reader is frequently reminded, if the girl can't keep her immense attractive powers in check, the vampire will do her some serious violence. And it will be all her fault for being just too tempting. Does this rationale sound familiar? You may have heard rapists using it. She should never have worn that dress/walked down that street/tried to kiss her vampire boyfriend. It was all her fault.
Now, the werewolf does not want to eat her. But he is new to the werewolfing game, and it is all too easy for him to lose control, turn into a wolf, and attack whoever is nearest. Which means she better not make him mad! Again, sound familiar? Domestic violence, anyone? She made him so mad, he just couldn't help beating her up/rending her with his fangs and claws. It was all her fault.
I feel a little sick for loving these books so much, but I really enjoy the main character in spite of her manifest flaws. Other than her relationships with supernatural guys, she is sane, logical and responsible. She does her homework and tries not to make her parents worry. It's pleasant to spend time with such a nice, normal girl.
In short, I cannot help reading these books. The main character is too darn likeable. It is all her fault.
You'll enjoy this series if you like the supernatural sex appeal in early Anita Blake novels, the sexual tension between Buffy and Angel, or rationalizing violence against women. You might also like them if you really enjoy Anne's sensible and slightly boring character in Persuasion, but I make no promises.
Posted by didofoot at 08:44 AM | Comments (2)
August 14, 2007
My first recalcitrant source!
I called an unnamed large university today in search of a quote about a pending lawsuit against them. When the PR guy heard the subject of my call, he...hung up on me. He kind of snorted first. Now, I might have expected such scorn after he heard the name of the paper I work for, but no, he waited me out. When I called back I went into the voicemail. Of a phone line that is staffed 24-hours. Interesting.
I haven't been hung up on since middle school, when Michele would hang up on me occasionally to be funny. I don't think this guy was being funny, except unintentionally. Anyway, suddenly I feel like Robert Redford in that Deep Throat movie (not the porn one, the news one), battling for the truth in the face of a hostile world. Except I don't really have time to track down the truth so instead they will get the black mark of journalism, "[giant unnamed university] refused to comment [and bloody hung up on our reporter, the yobs]."
I think my internal mutterer is British. Huh.
Posted by didofoot at 07:53 AM | Comments (1)
August 09, 2007
Stay tuned for the sequel: Hondas and Geckos
As anyone who has spent time at our house knows, Gene and I own all the video games. By "all," I mean most arcade, NES, SNES, N64, Sega and Atari games, as well as some of the XBox games and a few other systems. We don't have those fancy-pants new systems like Wii, but we do own thousands of games, all stored on our living room computer.
We don't have TV, so we can't just flip on a Friends rerun if we need to unwind of an evening. Instead, Gene sometimes flips through the games, trying various new titles out, while I sit beside him reading or egging him on. Last night he discovered my new favorite: an arcade game called Cadillacs and Dinosaurs.
That deserved the italics. And you know it.
The game is based on a comic book series called Xenozoic Tales about a post-apocalyptic world where dinosaurs have retaken the planet. The main characters, lacking normal fuel, have modified their classic Cadillacs to run on dinosaur shit.
Well, you can imagine. As you walk along, you often come upon a little huddle of bad guys sitting around torturing dinosaurs: slicing them up, or lighting their eggs on fire, or just beating them with sticks. So you fight these guys, presumably to save the dinosaurs, but then sometimes the dinosaurs also turn on you. Other times they fight for you.
This game must be a tree-hugger's dream: You're fighting as hard as you can to save some natural beast or phenomenon which would cheerfully kill you as soon as look at you. And you've found an alternate fuel source for your car.
You will like Cadillacs and Dinosaurs if you like Cadillacs, dinosaurs, and things that are absurd.
Posted by didofoot at 11:10 AM | Comments (2)
August 08, 2007
Fuck with me and I will wallpaper your bathroom.
I've been applying for more gigs recently, seeking to fill those lonely hours that are currently filled with teaching Link how to fish in the Nintendo 64 Zelda. (That is the lamest puzzle, closely followed by the one where you have to capture all the escaped chickens in the village to get your lousy heart piece.)
Almost every ad I read says "Must have degree in English or journalism." Must have degree in English. I just want to print that sentence from all the ads, make a giant collage, and use it to wallpaper the bathroom of every person who ever sneered at me for getting a "useless" degree.
(None of these ads pay a living wage, though. Ooh, look, my wallpaper is starting to peel a little at the corners.)
Posted by didofoot at 08:51 AM | Comments (0)
August 07, 2007
Bank
I recently tried to open a new account with a local credit union, but somehow my thousand dollar check has gotten kind of misplaced. The girl I talked to on the phone put me on hold for a long time while she talked to the mail room guy, but no one's seen it so far. "I think it hasn't come in yet," she said uncertainly.
"You think?" I said.
At this point I'm pretty sure that this credit union is just three people working out of someone's basement. Yet still I am considering opening an account with them, assuming they ever track down my money. So who is dumber? As always, it's me.
As if to prove such an assertion beyond a reasonable doubt, I spent much of yesterday playing the Nintendo 64 version of Zelda, which has 3-D characters, cute voices and adventure game-style puzzles as well as the more traditional hack and shoot. It is awesome. More awesome than my article, apparently, which is due today at noon. But last night I dreamed I had to take a take-home test and write a Shakespeare play for Hagar, so waking up to find I only have one article to write was a big relief.
Posted by didofoot at 08:00 AM | Comments (0)
August 06, 2007
The Roald Dahl Omnibus
This weekend I read a bunch of Roald Dahl's short stories for adults. His stories are told in a voice I associate with Thurber: that boozy, 1950s war-of-the-sexes voice, where male characters are only interested in sex and drinking and female characters are only interested in nagging their husbands and drinking. It's so far from anything I know to be true that it reads like a pleasant escape to a different world, like reading science fiction.
One thing Dahl does that Thurber can't is plot his stories like a sonuvabitch. Almost every one of Dahl's stories has a tense middle and a one-two surprise punch at the end. Also, a lot of the endings make you smile, even though they often involve murder. Murder is hilarious and/or satisfying in the mind of Roald Dahl, and once you're in there with him you start to enjoy it too -- at least until you start thinking about how much of your childhood reading was influenced by a man who thinks murder is the last word in comedy.
I read somewhere that they're planning to release the unfinished manuscript of the sequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. They're calling it Charlie and the Hilarious Blood Bath.
Well, I guess J.K. Rowling already sort of wrote that one.
Try Roald Dahl's grownup stories if you like Thurber's writing style or Saki's black humor.
Posted by didofoot at 12:30 PM | Comments (1)
August 03, 2007
The Witch and the Cathedral
The Changeover is a soothing read because nothing really bad happens. I mean, bad things do happen, but you're removed from the emotion of the scene because of the beauty of the writing. It's similar to the way Michael Ondaatje can write an emotionally-charged scene that actually calms the reader down -- although I'm not sure he does that on purpose.
Example from Ondaatje's new book Divisadero:
Then he took [Anna] by the hand, and never let go of her on the twenty-minute walk down the hill to the farmhouse, the quarter horse nodding beside them, and Anna screaming his name.
The twenty-minute walk, the nodding horse -- the sleepy pastoral setting makes the screaming funny. And I don't see why he would want to do that, since it's rather a pivotal moment in the whole novel: we're supposed to feel the horror of what just happened, but you can't feel it with that horse nodding next to you.
D.H. Lawrence was the master of summoning the landscape to rise and support the emotion of his story. Things were always churning restlessly, reflecting the inner turmoil of his characters. Ondaatje can't or won't do that. Perhaps that's why I can get lost in an Ondaatje novel but keep getting thrust out of Lawrence. It's hard to walk on such a shifting land.
Right now I'm re-reading The Witch and the Cathedral by C. Dale Brittain, and this is a different kind of "nothing bad will happen" book. In this series (which begins with A Bad Spell in Yurt and goes on from there), there's nothing upsetting: the only people who die are old, no one gets hurt or goes hungry. My favorite thing about the series is that everyone gets to perform the job best suited to his or her personality. Whether you are a trombone player, a glass blower, a pastry chef or a priest, Yurt has room for you. It's cheery and soothing.
The books all deal with a hapless wizard named Daimbert, and they're filled with the kind of cocoa humor that makes you warm and cotton-headed rather than making you laugh. There's nothing in here to shake you out of your quiet evening: just a pleasant little kingdom, filled with nice folks and innocuous mystery plots. You can snuggle into Daimbert's cozy study with him, with roses climbing over the window and a fire crackling in the hearth. In the morning you get fresh crullers for breakfast (unless you've pissed off the kitchen maid again; then it's stale donuts for you).
You'll enjoy Yurt if you like the simplicity of fairy tales, the small sensual pleasures in Jonathan Carroll novels, or mysteries that are easy to crack, as in The Cat Who... books.
Posted by didofoot at 10:55 AM | Comments (0)
August 02, 2007
The Changeover
I finished The California Feeling sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk outside our house while Gene changed the oil on his bike. I felt cliched all over again: lolling around on the filthy city ground, happy as a hippie in the sun and shit. (I mean, I hope not shit. But not everyone is thorough about picking up after their dogs around here.) The California feeling is all about the here and now, provided the here and now is sunny. You can't worry about what you may or may not be sitting in.
There is just nothing sexier than watching a boy work on a bike, and that goes double for me. One of my top three favorite books of all time is The Changeover. (The other two, if you wonder, are probably Pride and Prejudice and Hamlet.) In The Changeover, there's a scene where the heroine sits on the front steps and drinks coffee while her fella fixes his bike. I read this book at an early age and have read it probably twenty times since then, and I confess it influenced my tastes more than a little. (This doesn't go for all my favorites, though. If Gene busted out some ballroom dance moves, or showed up with his stockings fouled, ungartered and down-gyved to his ankle, I would not be so impressed.)
What I love most about The Changeover is the way the heroine wakes up to the world throughout the book. Everything develops identity and importance, even telegraph poles and toasters, but not in an irritating way. (See Tom Robbin's otherwise excellent Skinny Legs and All to see how inanimate objects can become really obnoxious.)
Every telegraph pole stood centred on a single leg gathering wires up, looping them over little stunted arms, and Laura felt her way into being a telegraph pole, or a roof rising to a ridge and butting against itself. The Baptist church squared its concrete shoulders, its doorway touching its own toes, carrying a great weight of square, white blocks on its bent back.
You might like The Changeover if you like the straightforward narrator and tingly first love in I Capture The Castle, the pleasant, sensory world of The Magician's Assistant, or the sideways poetry-prose of the better Alice Hoffman novels.
And a brief warning: almost every edition of The Changeover is cursed with a terrible cover. Don't be fooled by it. It is your protection against people borrowing what will come to be one of your favorite reads; my own copy has a worse cover than most, which is the only way I've been able to hang onto it for fifteen years.
Posted by didofoot at 04:53 PM | Comments (1)
August 01, 2007
The California Feeling
Monday found me lounging in the sun by my parents' pool, sipping a strawberry margarita and reading The California Feeling by Peter S. Beagle. Self, I said to myself, you could not be more cliche right now.
Beagle is known for his fantasy novels, especially The Last Unicorn, but in my opinion he saves his best writing for his essays. I recently read I See By My Outfit, his book about traveling from New York to California in the 1960s with his best friend. The California Feeling is about his explorations of California after he gets there, and like I See By My Outfit it makes you want to travel around with him forever, right there in his head. He seems to like everyone he meets, and makes you like them too, even the anti-semitic rednecks, even the idiots, even the drunks.
Beagle is also one of those people who has a knack for being in a significant place at a significant time. Or maybe he's just one of those people who knows how to make his life sound significant. He goes to the Monterey Jazz Festival and sees a newish performer called Janis Joplin. "This one will last, however the music changes. That edge is there," he says. He visits Joan Baez at her Institute for the Study of Nonviolence. He talks to Cesar Chavez, who "has a very nice face."
But my favorite part is when he muses about California itself, and the way the land affects the people:
See, they don't have winter here. I mean, they have a winter -- where I live, it's liable to rain any time between November and June, or all the time -- but they don't have winter. The idea of it isn't carved into them right down to the chromosomes, the way it is with us.
I am sitting poolside, waiting for my dad to refill the margarita pitcher, nodding. Right on, man. Right on.
Try The California Feeling if you like quiet, meandering explorations like Under The Tuscan Sun, or memoirs written by nice, ordinary people.
Try I See By My Outfit if you like the camaraderie in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, or armchair travel.
Posted by didofoot at 10:04 AM | Comments (0)
