23 December 03
Immersion Learning
At left is a bit of typography from a sign outside a bank in vila. Pica noticed this sign on account of the unusual DE ligature; meanwhile I did what I was doing throughout the trip to Spain – notice the language. Try to figure out patterns in words, phrases and make sense of a language that I’ve never studied. My favorite book in one of the places where we stayed turned out to be a copy of the Oxford Spanish Dictionary.
I’ve returned from Spain determined to learn Spanish. I don’t know what it will be like to learn a language at age forty. I’m monolingual, but along the way I’ve studied Hebrew, some German, some Latin, and most of all French (six years in secondary school). I’ve signed up for a class in the new year, and right now I’m starting by trying to read, with aid of dictionaries and grammars, whatever Spanish I come across.
23 November 03
Sangreal
I just galloped through Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code, a nonstop-paced thriller that starts with a contemporary murder in the Louvre that quickly leads into the mysteries of the Holy Grail. Brown has taken an actual set of conspiracy theories and has repackaged these in terms of a best-selling thriller. Whatever be the truthfulness of these tales of long-standing secret societies, the heterodoxies they attest to are enthralling, and make for a compelling read.
21 October 03
The Book Project Turns Pink
The Campus Community Book Project was launched a week ago and so far the response has been great. The wide variety of programs ranging from talks, lectures, and workshops to martial arts demonstrations, a peace picnic, and a performance of Lysistrata means that there’s something for everyone. The visit by the author of Gandhi’s Way, Mark Juergensmeyer, last week was a great success.
Tonight we heard Medea Benjamin, Green Party candidate for Senate in 2000 and one of the founders of Code Pink, explain how U.S. policies have been a disaster in Afghanistan and Iraq and how social movements are, in her view, the way to change the world (as opposed merely to the electoral process). Her three visits to Iraq this year and her conversations with people who are having to live through the results of the occupation give her an authority that radiates through her vibrant energy.
The peace movement is demoralized, almost defeated. Today, I felt I got some batteries recharged. It is important to keep going, not to let fatigue and hopelessness stop us. Benjamin sees a lot more than I do to demoralize her, but I have rarely seen so much energy in one person.
We wore pink. Arnold’s going to get a pink delegation on the eve of his inauguration in November. Being silly is a good way for me to stay engaged; it’s certainly more fun than the alternatives.
7 September 03
Bees: A Secret Life
I finished reading Sue Monk Kidd’s Secret Life of Bees yesterday. Several people have recommended it to me but it is also under consideration for next year’s Campus Community Book Project.
The story of a white girl coming of age in the Deep South during the era of Civil Rights unrest, it weaves the orderly, matriarchal society of bees through the sometimes turbulent lives of a group of women, most of whom are black, and the black Madonna, an interesting and incongruous figure in this setting. The writing is good. The story is powerful; the threads are drawn together at the end in a satisfying but not quite predictable way. Why, then, am I so ambivalent about this novel?
For a book that features so many strong female African American characters, I fear it will only be seen by black readers (if this book ever has any) as yet another Aunt Jemima story. A friend pointed out recently that black movie audiences and white movie audiences are, today, almost completely segregated. Eddie Murphy, for instance, has made the crossover into the white mainstream, but he no longer has a strong black following. At least in certain films. Did I go and see Antoine Fisher? No. I didn’t. I wanted to; it didn’t come to Davis. But surely that only strengthens her point.
If there’s anything I’ve learned over the last year when racial tension has been rife in my office and in the university, it’s this: African Americans are sick and tired of liberal white angst about race. They don’t want to hear any more “I get it now” stories. They want action, they want change; they don’t want to see or hear about any more handwringing. Liberal white guilt is the least effective agent of change.
The Secret Life of Bees is a story about a white girl, for white people, about a successful, healing, powerful interaction with black people. From where I sit today, it reads as fantasy. I wish it weren’t so.
4 June 03
Gandhi’s Way
The UC Davis campus embarked on an ambitious but very successful project last year, namely, to have students, staff, faculty, and the community read the same book and then talk about it. The chosen book was The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman. Dozens of events were organized around this book in Fall 2002, culminating in the visit to Davis by the author and some of the protagonists of her book.
This was always going to be a hard act to follow, but in the end Gandhi’s Way, by Mark Juergensmeyer, a UC Santa Barbara professor of sociology, was selected as the project for Fall 2003. Published over 15 years ago, it calls itself a “handbook of non-violent conflict resolution”—a book whose time has surely come. We are hoping it will help campus and community members learn to welcome, instead of avoid, conflict, and think creatively about ways to bring about change that works for both parties. The Davis Enterprise ran a nice write-up about this project on Sunday.
8 May 03
The Pleasures of a Good Bookstore
Lance Knobel of the excellent Davos Newbies (which I just discovered because I followed the little red light on Geoblog) tells of an exciting new bookstore opening near the British Museum in London by none other than the London Review of Books. I’m envious.
Here in Davis, though, we are lucky enough to have three independent bookstores alongside the UC Davis Bookstore: Avid Reader, Bogey’s Books, and Sweetbriar, the latter two dealing mostly in used books. Just up the road in Woodland there’s the Next Chapter. All this despite the inevitable appearance of Borders, for which I politely decline to provide a link. While Borders, which started out as a nice little independent in Ann Arbor, does understand the importance of making browsers feel comfortable and provides them with chairs and a coffee shop, it is now just too big for its boots.
I overcame my usual knee-jerk Borcott and went in last weekend, looking for a book on Photoshop and a DVD. On my previous three or four visits, I had gone in because no other bookstore in Davis had what I was looking for. On each occasion, I looked on the shelf, failed to find the book, waited at the information desk, and was told by a pleasant young salesperson (different each time) that according to the computer the book was in stock, but wasn’t it on the shelf where it was supposed to be. Each time there followed a sort of tortuous and progressively more frantic attempt by the saleseperson to locate the book—always to no avail.
This time, it was even worse. The DVD in question (Bull Durham, Extended Edition,) was indeed in stock, but it was in the back, and nobody currently in the store was authorized to open the box it was in. The pleasant young salesperson was unable to predict when such a box might be opened: it might be tomorrow, it might be in three weeks.
That’s it. No more Borders for me. Not for anything. I like to support Powells in Portland and browse in the Avid Reader, despite the suspect politics of its owner. I can probably wait till next Tuesday for the book I want. And on trips to Berkeley we immerse ourselves in Cody’s, Black Oak, and occasionally Diesel and Pegasus.
6 May 03
Mother Tongue?
It’s been just over fifteen years since I moved back to the U.S. from England (and previously Spain). It’s hard to remember the sense of dislocation—primarily linguistic—that I know I felt at the time. Within two weeks of my arrival, though, I had picked up Paul Fussell’s Class which provided a crash course in decoding the quite complex but often ignored American class system.
A clerical job with an architectural firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts, immersed me in the world of young, hip Tufts-educated musicians needing a day job and slightly older and more sophisticated urban architects—and the American English they spoke. Within a few weeks I had learned the correct usage of the words “like” and “totally” in addition to being able to quote Harvard architecture guru Jorge Silvetti (“Jess, but it is very very ogly”).
My mother, a Philadelphia native, returned to American shores from Spain a few years later with my father. Unlike me, she did not have exposure to the rapid office banter of my young colleagues. Life in Bodega Bay was much less edgy, but her re-entry into the American linguistic arena has consequently taken a lot longer and been fraught with perplexing neologisms and, worse, re-introduced words and expressions.
During our recent trip to Bodega Bay she showed us her ongoing lexicon: a notebook with strange, unfamiliar, and interesting uses of American English with which she is able to navigate this morphing of her mother tongue. She subsequently shared her discovery of the online version of this: Wordspy. Today’s word: Upshifter. I suspect she will politely decline.
30 April 03
An Opinion of One’s Own
I’ve been on a bit of a Virginia Woolf kick lately. I seem to be a binge reader—settle in on an author and if I like their work I read many books until I’m ready to move on, not necessarily in chronological or any other order. I tend to read greedily and if I haven’t quite given the book enough of a shot or if I just loved it, I go back to the beginning and start again.
I came to Woolf because I resisted reading The Hours—I started it some time ago, before anyone knew about Hollywood plans, but it irritated me. Mostly because it felt like monstrously bad film editing. My film buff friends tell me the editing in the movie was much better. At any rate, it felt wrong to get cross about the Cunningham book when I hadn’t even read Mrs. Dalloway so, like many others, I have read that novel in the wake of the publication ofThe Hours.
I wasn’t disappointed. I moved straight on to To the Lighthouse and am now reading A Room of One’s Own. The writing is spectacular; the eye that looks deep into the souls of every character is searing.
What Woolf does is poke at, try to get at, the essence of the interior world, which is inherently not really up for grabs—as Jess Banks used to say in class of Beckett, “effing the ineffable.” I finally did read The Hours this past weekend and found it clever but, Senator, you’re no Virginia Woolf.
Part of the blame lies in our particular cultural and historical circumstances. The world would reject a Joyce or a Woolf in 2003; the writing of high modernism would come over as overblown and bombastic now. Aping it is like copying the masters of Abstract Expressionism, not Raphael; it seems all wrong. My gender-politics friends point to the value of outing Woolf, as if that were all the license one needed. It seems like a sideline, a distraction to me.
In A Room of One’s Own, written in 1928, Woolf discusses the different attitudes of the world to women versus men writers. At worst, the world says to poor Keats or Tennyson or Carlyle, “Write if you choose. It makes no difference to me.” At best, the world says to women, “Write? What’s the good of your writing?”
In 2003, where words pour out onto keyboards 24/7 in a middle-class torrent (the poor are still, as in Woolf’s day, circumstantially unlikely to write), the charge of the world might be this: “Write if you want, but your words will get lost in the ether within three years, probably far sooner. The publishing industry is in crisis. Do not look for the next Woolf or Joyce; look instead for the next Stephen King or J.K. Rowling. If you in fact happen to be the next Stephen King or J.K. Rowling, brush up on your P.R. skills.”
I am grateful to Michael Cunningham, all the same, for getting me on my reading binge in the first place—this particular one was long overdue.