4 September 05
This Must Be A Sign
Though I’m not sure of what.
Yesterday I took a walk west out the Putah Creek levee. After passing under the freeway, I found some scattered pages torn out of a book. I picked these up and read—it was Candide.
30 August 05
Science Writing
Partly for professional reasons—the need to inform myself about West Nile Virus and the possibility that Avian Flu will emerge in lethal and pandemic form any minute now, and will possibly enter the United States via California, possibly in wild birds—I’ve been reading about epidemics.
John Barry’s The Great Influenza is an excellent read not just about the horrifying events of 1918 but about the emerging field of medicine in the U.S. My grandfather got this flu when he was a quartermaster in the Canadian Air Force, but his letters mention it only obliquely (“I had a mild case, unlike some of the others”—for “some of the others,” read “poor bastards writhing in cyanotic agony, blood streaming from their eyes and ears,” but you don’t write this in letters home to mother, especially when said letters are censored. It’s extraordinary how little has actually been written, fictionally or otherwise, about this pandemic given how many millions of people it affected.). Then, while I was in L.A. a couple of weeks ago, I picked up a copy of Mike Davis’ new Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu.
Both these writers are journalists and have written a lot about non-scientific subjects. Yet the way they both approach science is inspiring to me: it’s hard to make a virus with codenames such as HPAI H5N1 interesting, but Davis has written a searingly compelling book. So has Barry.
I want to write like this. I want to take a subject about which I know ostensibly little, research it, and write like this. I wish I knew how to start. (Of course the way to start is to start, and there are lots of reasons for not starting such as I’m working 50-60 hours this week and so on, but still.) Anyone have any suggestions?
7 August 05
Omniglot
This site is a guide to written language which seems pretty comprehensive. All manner of scripts are covered, everything from Glagolitic to Tengwar. The multilingual tongue-twisters are quite fun as well.
19 July 05
Hurrying Through Harry
Not long after Pica finished the new Harry Potter book yesterday did I take it up, and finished it myself around 9 PM this evening. It’s a far better read than its predecessor, which was in need of about 200 pages worth of excisions. And lines are already forming, or at least should be, for the release of the seventh book. There are, as they say, major plot developments in need of resolution.
I also found today that Wikipedia has a great set of articles discussing the Harry Potter series. And yes, they’ve been updated in the past couple of days!
17 July 05
Tour de France or Harry Potter?
In July, my mornings tend to go like this: I get up, get the tea on, get online to check on the Tour de France website to see what’s going on. The time lag between California and Europe means that normally I can catch the last hour or so; there are newsflashes every few minutes.
A friend brought over my copy of the Half-Blood Prince last night. She stayed to have a bowl of gazpacho with us. I stopped reading around eleven; got up around 7, intending to intersperse my TdF newsflashes with Harry.
It was not to be; the intense heat has driven a lot of ants indoors. They were swarming over one of the catbowls. This is the hardest day of the Tour, with six brutal Pyrrenean climbs. I caught the end and George Hincapie’s stage win.
I finally finished the book at 2:30 this afternoon. Several readers of Feathers of Hope are reading it too, so I will say nothing except hurry up so we can talk about it…
15 July 05
Hot 'n' Harry
It’s hot, the kind of heat that if you go jogging in at six pm you’re risking your life. We are getting the Delta breeze at the moment but it’s still really hot.
But it’s a dry heat.
Barring Alaska, Hawaii, and a few other Pacific islands, the west coast is the last place on the planet to get hold of a copy of Harry Potter legitimately today. There is a free showing of the third film at the Avid Reader which started about 45 minutes ago, and which will end pretty much at midnight in time for readers, young and not so young, to be able to pick up their copies and lug them all over Davis with them all weekend.
We’re off on a drawing class tomorrow at the Sacramento Zoo, and I can’t stay up till midnight tonight. So the earliest I can get my copy is around five tomorrow afternoon.
See you at the other side of this.
13 July 05
Resh
Yesterday afternoon a friend happened to mention she was starting Advanced Beginners Hebrew that night. (Davis is a great place for contradictions in terms.) I decided to join her. No long, thought-out language learning strategy, here. I seem to remember I started classical Greek in much the same impetuous way.
This class is only an hour long, once a week. This means there is lots of work outside, but 8-9 on a Tuesday I can handle.
Aleph. Bet. Gimmel… Mem sofit.
9 July 05
Fetishizing Reading
I’ve never been a big fan of the Levenger catalog. I know many people who read a great deal who are: they get it regularly, look through it (every single page) each time it comes, even though as far as I can tell it doesn’t change a lot from one to the next. Lots of nicely finished cherry book stands, lots of highly laquered fountain pens, lots of lamps you can’t possibly read a book without. It seems to sigh “I’m upper middle class but intellectual too, you wouldn’t catch me hanging around with those C-grade Yalie louts.” Though I fetishize pens myself, I write with them. The better they write, the better the pen. Not the most laquer or gold.
These friends who read a lot rarely buy anything from this catalog: nothing in there turns out to be indispensable to reading. I think it’s a pleasure, a secret pleasure, in its own right, a bit like the late J. Peterman catalog, which was ludicrously over the top but well written and somehow able to convince readers they really were world travellers from the 1930s without the inconvenience of world wars or non-existent air conditioning.
One of these well-read-Levenger-catalog-reading friends sent me a link to a New York Times piece on the Levenger catalog. I think I get it now. This is to books and letters what Martha Stewart Living is to tablecloths and housedecorating.
It’s a good thing, people.
23 June 05
Arguing About Dashes
I’m working on the biggest publication project I’ve ever tackled. I’m doing the design, layout, and production editing for the California Wildlife Diversity report to Congress. This is hitting my desk a chapter at a time, and my job is to turn it into something that looks good, incorporating about 50 maps. The report will then become a book, about 300 pages, and the book will include 4-color photos.
The editor, a good friend of mine, is excellent. We see eye to eye on most details, I catch a lot of things she misses and vice-versa, and it’s a pleasure to work on this because it’s a project that’s being well managed. (My next two weekends will probably involve a lot of office time, but I had planned on my entire June being a nightmare, which it absolutely isn’t.)
Barbara and I cycled back from a friend’s house tonight arguing about how you punctuate the following four words, used to describe one of the bioregions in the report: Central Valley Bay Delta. Central Valley is one entity; Bay is a second; Delta is a third.
Barbara thinks it should be Central Valley—emdash—Bay—endash—Delta. I think the endash should be a slash, though I dislike them (they’re untidy and ugly, a bad combo). We discussed this heatedly for about a mile and a half, as the California fuchsia by the side of the road starts to come into bloom and the sun already sets a few minutes earlier than it did just two days ago…
2 May 05
Countermeme
Only because my blogson says (in an attempt to dismantle the internet):
“Which book, out of the millions ever published, do you most wish never to read again?”
Lots sifted through my mind this afternoon, mostly books that have a cop-out last line, but a whole BOOK of cop-out rose out of the Aegean Sea: John Fowles’ The Magus.
It’s just a nasty novel.
On to you, Maria. Sorry. You sent me the Fahrenheit 451 meme…