17 October 04
Writing for Oprah
When I lived in the 13th (Vietnamese) arrondissement in Paris in the early 80s, my then husband and I were befriended in the supermarket by a sephardic couple (he was learning English, overheard us, wondered about English conversation). They had a television, we did not. They invited us over regularly on Friday nights (their Shabbat evening featured an oil lamp and exquisite stewed clementines) to watch Apostrophes, a show on which the host, Bernard Pivot, interviewed about five or six authors whose books he had read (another gluttonous passion of his was wine, so when he did the wine week with Hugh Johnson and other oenophile writers, it was a double treat: watching this guy ENTHUSE was a spectacle).
The French in general have a much higher level of popular discourse than we do here or in Britain —philosophy is taught as a compulsory subject in high school, so even kids whose destiny is to become mechanics or plumbers have a vague understanding of Descartes and Hegel. Pivot’s show was watched by hundreds of thousands; book design is almost nonexistent as a profession except for children’s books, because the French buy BOOKS to read, not because they’re pretty or enticing on the cover (this would render them suspect, in fact). However, Gallimard, Grasset, and Garnier Flammarion rubbed their corporate hands and stocked up local bookstores in preparation for Friday nights when one of their own was to be featured on Apostrophes, because sales would skyrocket the next day. (Pivot saved them millions of francs in marketing.)
Oprah Winfrey triggers the same hand-rubbing mechanism in publishers here. The books she plugs are in general quite different; though I don’t watch her show (still don’t have a TV), I know enough from spending time in bookstores where the Oprah Book Club sticker pops out at you from all over the place (salivate, salivate go the publishers) that she leans heavily toward fiction about women in history whose stories were inadequately told (if at all). (The genre has become a self-perpetuating one—Maria of Alembic and I were giggling about this during a recent visit: imagine a woman in history about whom almost nothing is known, and make up her life story; get it published; get on Oprah. Pass it on.)
That Oprah is getting millions of Americans to read when they otherwise wouldn’t is a) astonishing b) mahvelous c) slightly sad. But I’m reminded by Siona who is going to lead a discussion about The Red Tent soon that I balk heavily at reading a book that is either recommended by Oprah or that is making the book club circuit. I confess this is probably just on principle. My sister has two small kids and felt her mind turning to jelly—a book club is perfect for her, because she doesn’t have the time or other resources to choose reading material for the couple of hours a week she can spare. (I did read The Red Tent on my sister’s recommendation and did enjoy it, but it adheres to the above formula perfectly.)
I hope my powers of discernment never deteriorate to the point where I can’t figure out what to read by myself, from reviews, or through the recommendations of intelligent, literate friends, many of whom I’ve never met but whose words I read daily in blogland.
The irony is I participate in a pre-digesting activity myself by sitting on the committee to choose next year’s Campus Community Book Project. The irony is that this committee has tremendous power and weight (hey, we do a lot of work for it outside our regular jobs; there has to be SOME payback). I sometimes wonder whether the book project shouldn’t be, instead, the whole campus being the committee: everyone reads all these books and then we vote…
11 September 04
Bloggers Do The Berkeley Bookstore Beat
Today we travelled by train to Berkeley to meet up with bloggers Chris from Creek Running North, Siona from Nomen est Numen, and Maria from Alembic. Our aim was to visit Berkeley bookstores, of which there are a plethora, too many to do in a day, but no matter. We first walked up to Cody’s on Telegraph Avenue, the largest and most famous of Berkeley bookstores, where we browsed for an hour, several of us emerging with more books than intended. Siona brought her own lunch so we wanted to eat outside, so we picked up take-out Indian from a restaurant on Telegraph (walk 500 yards in Berkeley, you’ll find an eatery that meets the needs of the moment) and had our lunch by Strawberry Creek on the UC Berkeley campus. The Indian food made for a messy picnic, but was very good. Meanwhile the Cal marching band was warming for the football game later on in the afternoon. (A bit of Aggie Pride here—I think the UC Davis Marching Band-Uh is better).
Chris had to leave early, but the rest of walked down Shattuck to the used bookstore Pegasus, where I found a book on line-and-wash (our third art book purchase of the day). Our return trek netted us an office supply store (complete with Clairefontaine and Rhodia notebooks, as well as Lamy and Stypen fountain pens—Maria bought a Lamy pen), as well a decent espresso place by the BART station.
Too many things to do in Berkeley as usual. No chance to visit art stores, alas. We even found a very intriguing new restaurant half-a-block from BART—Ristorante Raphael, kosher Italian vegetarian food. But we were full from our Indian meal, so it will wait for next time.
These blogger bookstore outings are quite fun. Perhaps we should all next go on a field trip to Powell’s!
9 September 04
El Diccionario del Besbol
This resource came in handy this evening, before attending my Spanish class.
From the National Baseball Hall of Fame
31 August 04
Fearing Safety
It is a luxury of someone (white, educated, well above the poverty line) living in a democracy (at least for now) that I can expect pretty much expect to live without fear of being arrested unless I do something stupid. I live in a place where I can leave my car unlocked, both at home and at work if I should by some chance drive to work. My commute doesn’t take me through a war zone, unless you define the Solano County Mosquito Abatement Squad in those terms.
I’ve been reading, on the recommendation of Maria from Alembic, who had it from the London Review of Books, Thank You for Not Reading by Dubravka Ugresic, a Croatian writer and intellectual of staggering vitality. When I compare my life with hers, I see no hardship, no rigors, no wars. I see a privileged life as the daughter of an expatriate, endowed with two passports which expands your choices enormously of where to work (especially since they’re both “desirable” nationalities), where the obvious planting of oneself in opposition to the prevailing culture confers yet more privilege (sometimes points can be gained from being a Brit, even a stuffy one).
Going to the Code Pink Counter Convention in Davis’ Central Square tonight, I am filled with a mixture of fear and despair. Fear for the ignorance that might, just might, get Bush reelected. Despair because the world in such a scenario looks much worse than it did in the 70s, when it looked pretty bad, all those nights I stayed up arguing with my father about the Bomb.
We must not be safe. We must avoid hiding behind our gated communities, real or imagined, and feel as though all this is outside our sphere of influence, interest, or humanity. We must keep looking for a way to make our own existence more precarious—for the safety of all.
This is for the Ecotone Wiki’s joint blogging topic, Making a Safe Space.
25 August 04
What’s Goth?
One of the more interesting (used here as a synonym for frustrating) things about my burgeoning logocentric connection with my mother is her awareness that she lost twenty-five years of American popular culture and language by living in Spain and came back to find that her mother tongue was no longer, well, current. And she assumes mine is. (Even though I lost almost the same amount of time and didn’t even grow up here!)
So, for instance, on Sunday when we had lunch on a figged patio in Sonoma, she asked what “goth” was.
The answer to this question is different now than it would have been ten years ago. I flounder. Do I describe the former or the latter? I try and explain as best I can, but she’s never even really seen one (I decide we should start with the noun goth rather than the adjective). So I’m reduced to selecting body parts like some demented early Renaissance poet, when it would be so much easier just to point one out in the street. They are thin on the ground in Sonoma, though, upscale chichi pseudo-Tuscan hamlet that it is. Goths, even their latest watered-down suburban incarnation, tend to be “urban.” Dressedinblack. Edgy. Or edgy-wannabes. (I gave up trying to explain what edgy was a couple of years ago.)
She tries so, so hard to find all this out on her own, surrounding herself with reference books and, when she gets really daring, online resources. There’s just one problem: all the definitions use words that themselves need defining in relation to the culture. She feels at sea in the country whose passport she carries, an immigrant from a past where words meant what you thought they meant. I’m sympathetic but ultimately can’t really help her; she tends to listen hard and then decide this, too, will elude her.
It was much easier when she asked me later on to remember specific sweeties from my grandmother’s sweetshop in Lancashire from the early sixties for a story she was working on. That was easy: Smarties. Sherbet fountains. Jelly babies. Dolly Mixtures. Gobstoppers. Liquorice Allsorts. Toffee. The smell of that wood-panelled paradise came flooding back, mint mixed with tobacco mixed with citrus sugar, along with assorted memories of inedible things in the boarding house where we were staying, such as blancmange in the shape of a bunnyrabbit (poor bunny, said my four-year-old Californian self, refusing dessert). Memories of double-decker buses filled with the warm fug of cheap cigarette smoke and wet umbrellas, everyone going somewhere in the rain that never stopped. Memories of grandma in her hospital bed, breathing, breathing…
24 August 04
Psst!
This is one of many hundreds of words in the Dictionary of All-Consonant Words, part of several such collections at the Strange & Unusual Dictionaries home. After all, you never know when you’ll run out of vowels.
(From LibrarianinBlack)
23 August 04
Precept
Forty-five years ago today, I was born not too far from here.
My mother and I have grown closer over the years; the connection has been writing. I send her a poem, she sends me one, kind of thing.
This is the one she sent me for today:
Precept
Even then,
our little girl
saw beauty
in a snail on the move
whose disguise
lies in doing things
slowly.
She painted one,
not in camouflage
but strident walnut taupe,
for its journey up
a sturdy turquoise blade
that dared to stab awake
the lasting
blue.
Her work hangs,
now in a wood frame,
part of this empty house,
and I’m seventy.
18 August 04
Back To Class
My second semester of Spanish started yesterday. Again, this is through the local city college. Thankfully we’re using the same exact text so I don’t have to spend lots of money on new books. It’s a long class period—I think fifteen weeks, running the middle of August through the middle of December. We meet twice a week, in a slightly more inconvenient location (south Davis rather than on the UC Davis campus) than last time. I didn’t make good on my intention to study lots of Spanish over the summer, but at least we’re starting out with a review of last semester’s work.
3 August 04
A Different Kind of Thought
I just finished reading a book so remarkable I’m not sure what to say. The book is Temple Grandin’s Thinking in Pictures and Other Reports from My Life with Autism. I had heard a lot about this book—my sister works with autistic children, for one thing—and when the chance came to evaluate it for next year’s Campus Community Book Project, I leapt at it.
I have always thought I had a visual mind… When people talk, I immediately render what they’re saying into pictures. When the topic is very abstract, this is hard, which is why it’s hard for me to get my head around REALLY abstract concepts. I couldn’t have been a philosophy major, for instance.
But I have NOTHING on Temple, a woman so courageous it leaves me humbled. She thinks only in pictures. Every thought she’s ever had is an image, and they get stored in her head, sequentially, so she retrieves them as though from a hard drive. This method of thinking has allowed her to be an amazing designer of facilities for livestock, with whom she identifies and is able to “see as”: thinking like a cow, she calls it. So she’s been able to design chutes, insecticide vats, vaccination restraints, and even restraints for slaughter that are humane and dignified, cutting down on the amount of unnecessary stress on the animals. When the book was written, a third of all livestock facilities in the United States were designed according to her principles. All of which are done in her head, visually, from every conceivable angle, like pieces of neurological Meccano.
Yet it is Grandin’s account of growing up autistic, of the tantrums, the isolation, the terror of being an adolescent and not fitting in, unable to communicate, yet miraculously tumbling on two or three mentors who didn’t mind that she was different (understatement of the year) and finding her calling as a designer-the journey is quite spiritual. And that she is able to articulate all this, an experience that is usually perplexing and completely opaque to non-autistics-no wonder this woman’s such a heroine in those circles.
My hope is that she’ll be a heroine in other, much bigger, ones. She has so much to teach us all about difference, tolerance, other ways of seeing.
13 May 04
The Footnote’s Triumph
Tony Grafton is one of those great ferreting historians who should be declared international treasures. Like astronomers who look a little to the side when viewing something like the Pleiades in order to see them better, in peripheral vision, he rumages through discarded and often ignored bits from the past and removes, from the detritus, a mirror. His Footnote: A Curious History is one such.
I picked up a book in the library the other day: Ibid: A Life, a novel in footnotes by Mark Dunn. The premise is that a manuscript gets destroyed by a careless editor and all that remains are the footnotes. I haven’t gotten very far, but this promises to be a great read. I’ll let you know.
Terry Pratchett, whom I’ve also been reading voraciously as I predicted, is a master of the device: a simple phrase such as “everything happened at once*” is turned into a chuckle or more by a simple asterisk. Gentle mockery of pedantic erudition doesn’t debase erudition itself. Where, for heaven’s sake, would we be without the philosophers?
Here’s my plea for the continuation of the footnote, which I will lay at the feet of the sages of the marketing departments of university and other presses, who maintain doggedly that footnotes frighten people off with their terrifying “ibids,” their ghoulish “see alsos,” their scary “this practice is not unknown in the culture of X”s. If a note’s worth putting in at all, put it at the foot of the page. Don’t bury it in the back where we have no way of knowing whether it’s just an ibid or something really juicy. We can decide for ourselves whether to ignore it or not, rather than get paper cuts scratching through the “notes to chapter 6,” spilling our tea and fumbling with crumpets and losing our original places in the process.**
Look at us, people. We write our blogs every day, splashing links to this and links to that throughout like insects to toil and moil on our behalf to say look! and see this! and that too!—the link in the blog has not only brought the footnote into its own, but is practically its raison d’etre. We’re now grown up enough, I think, to be able to deal with footnotes. What say you?***
——*“This is not precisely true. It is generally agreed by philosophers that the shortest time in which everything can happen is one thousand billion years” (from Mort).
**Though having just divulged the fact that I’ve borrowed a book from the LIBRARY, not paid $22 for it, will no doubt render my opinion worthless to said sages.
- A bit of gratuitous pseudo-Elizabethan English designed to raise the level of diction in an otherwise prosaic paragraph, repeated TWICE by the Lord Aragorn (Pippa and Fran, you must have been really tired that night) to the King of the Dead and his mates in the film version of Return of the King, but too Falstaffian for anyone including the King of the Dead to respond any way at all other than by guffawing. Speshly when you say it THREE TIMES. (This is of course why Peter Jackson cut away from the scene without letting you see it.)