giving up, a week at a time

I have noticed something disturbing about my work habits or lack thereof. When I start feeling overwhelmed or feel like I have a lot going on, I give up on writing for the rest of the week. Instead of figuring out when the next actual available time to work will be, I look ahead to the whole week at once, shrink in horror, and spend any down time I do get rebelling and denying as hard as I can. And projecting to “next week,” when this will all be over and things will be different.

Hmm.

Something else, not related, that I have noticed lately: it is really, really easy to talk about television! Even KFC, a writing group full of book people, ended up talking about television a lot at our last meeting. And when I cast around for a conversation topic, TV usually works. Have I mentioned that Sanguinity and I are watching Twin Peaks for the first time?

It’s finally a sunny week here in Portland. On my bus ride this morning, the sky was blue with small perfect clouds in the distance. It was so storybook perfect that for a second I wondered if I might be dreaming, or part of a movie or simulation without realizing it. I am prone to this kind of paranoia on the bus, suddenly wondering if everyone but me is psychic and can hear my thoughts and so on.

Fourgates pointed me to a guy who’s testing the “10,000 hours” concept on golf! He’s at the one-year mark. I envy his metrics and coaching team.

How many inches of ramen in a packet? Cockeyed.com measured. I’m actually liking a lot of things on that website, including the costumes and how he documents failures as well as successes.

the web goes twannnnng

This is a “flog your blog” post, prompted by my role model junglemonkey. To participate, please leave a comment with a link to your blog and a few words describing it, so my readers can make friends with each other and have more good stuff to read! Then post a “flog your blog” invitation on your own turf.

As far as I know, my readers number in the single digits, so they won’t swamp your server. It’s fine if your blog has no overlap whatsoever with mine in subject matter. Say hello!

Ellen Raskin in the air

I haven’t actually seen the reissued editions of Ellen Raskin’s three novels that aren’t The Westing Game, but I guess the announcement’s been floating around me in the kidlitosphere. Something, anyway, led me to this foreword to the 2004 anniversary edition of The Westing Game. It’s written by Raskin’s editor and friend, Ann Durell.

I love that they met in a smoking car.

I love that Raskin practiced for her reading of The Westing Game, the part where Theo sings– by singing herself, on the subway, because it was a tougher audience than a reading. (Don’t you wish Raskin could have met Lynda Barry? Who started off her talk in Portland a few months ago by singing, so that talking wouldn’t make her nervous by comparison? Those two would have hit it off, and with Louise Fitzhugh along they could have taken over the world.)

But mostly what stuck in my head from the introduction was this:

She said, with her usual candor, that she didn’t know what children’s books were like. She read only adult ones. But I never even tried to edit her “for children.” She was too wise, too funny, too ingenious–and therefore unique–to tamper with in that way. She said that she wrote for the child in herself, but for once I think she was wrong. I think she wrote for the adult in children.

I am grateful for that. I think I had a lot of adult in me when I was a child.

So. The reprint rights for the three novels were bought along with a “nearly complete” posthumous book called A Murder for Macaroni and Cheese, which is listed for release in May. And, and and and, “The Westing Quest, a sequel to The Westing Game.” (No “nearly completed” attached to that, I notice.) But this news is from 2007. Is there…? Will there…? Or…?

Probably not. Right? I try not to think about it. Because it could end up like waiting for the fourth Star Wars movie.

printing update

Now I have been to both class and open hours for both letterpress and screenprinting! I was really nervous both times to go to open hours, where I would have to try to remember what we learned and do it myself with minimal supervision. But I’m glad I went. If possible, I’m going to keep alternating letterpress and screenprinting practice on Sunday afternoons through the rest of the term. At least until my final project takes over and dictates what I need to work on.

At letterpress open hours, I finished off my six-word memoir, printing it onto scrap cards a little smaller than index cards. I’m using them for notes and…lists. :) I know no competent letterpress person would be happy with their quality, but I was proud that I went through the process, period! And I think I know what would have helped that fade-out at the bottom: masking tape on the rails so the rollers get up and over just a little sooner and don’t “wipe” the bottom of the type. Next time I’ll be more exacting.

As for screenprinting, it was (heh) a wash today. Another student and I coated our screens with emulsifier, exposed our images on the light table, and then….everything washed out in the shower. No image. We think that either there was no photosensitive stuff mixed into the emulsifier or it was too old and didn’t work. Our instructor, who was there cleaning a letterpress, was very apologetic and said they’d get the supplies straightened out by next week. My goal was just to go there and see what happened, so no worries. Here’s what I printed in class a few weeks ago, an illustration by Elizabeth Enright from The Sea Is All Around:

It was cool to meet someone from the Tuesday class today, and talk about our final projects a little. Tomorrow my class continues working in InDesign, and soon we’ll get to binding. I really must get my revisions done!

ramen reboot

I was at FuBonn again over the weekend, and felt so knowledgeable when I grabbed the multi-pack of Paldo Green Tea Chlorella ramen, because I knew I liked it! But I also got some new varieties to sample.

Sanguinity and I both came down with a cold a few days later. I made up the “creamy tom yum” flavor of Mama ramen from Thailand:

I was wary of the “creamy” part, but this was delicious ramen! The noodles themselves were dusted with spice, and the seasoning packets separated out the tamarindish paste, the regular powder seasoning (with creamer), and a small sub-compartment with the hot chile powder. Okay, it wasn’t quite the same as fresh tom kha, but it reminded me of it in all the right ways.

Here’s a review from ramenrater. They didn’t like it as much as I did.

And, from the Guardian via @bittman (Mark Bittman’s twitter stream), this fascinating 2005 history and defense of MSG. Google tells me I’m not the only one who sees “MSG” and thinks “Ever So Much More So”!

not a comic

Whoops, I spaced Hourly Comic Day on Tuesday. I’ve done it a couple times but I don’t think I’ve ever gotten them posted on the official site. Kate Beaton sets a great example of just doing some hourly comics sometimes, on days when it seems called for. So I don’t feel too bad.

Here’s something that could have been a Three on the Third comic, but probably won’t be:

When Element One, “Evidence suggests I’m not particularly good at my job,” combines with Element Two, “Judging by today, this is one of the stupider jobs in the world,” it seems like my resulting conclusion could go one of two ways. One way is, “Oh well, no reason to angst too much then.” The other is, “MY WHOLE LIFE SUCKS DOUBLE.” Why do I always go the second way?

Mileage news: When I posted my January miles to the Million Mile Ultra, it was my biggest month since last July when I ran that 50-miler! Yay! On the down side, not one mile yet in February. Will walk tomorrow morning.

review of a book I can’t find

Where is my (library) copy of Blythe Woolston’s The Freak Observer? I finished it day before yesterday, so it can’t be too many layers down. But I’ve checked the bathroom, by the bed, my backpack, the kitchen counter, and in the sofa cushions. I suppose it might be at work.

The book is about a grieving girl starting to put her life back together, while things keep happening around her. You know, just life things, things that happen especially when you’re a teenager and can’t control that much around you, as far as people moving and school grinding on and your family trying to make ends meet.

I agree with this review at A Chair, A Fireplace, & A Tea Cozy that it feels good to read a book where working-class feels real. Shift work, jobs held and then lost and then replaced by other jobs, none of them great, hoping that enough family members have enough jobs among them at any one time to keep things going. Loa calculates what things cost in relation to wages and her family’s time. Her description of her part-time job at the nursing-home cafeteria is wonderful. Exactly what she has to do, how much of it there is, and it has to be done a certain way. It’s the kind of job knowledge and sheer endurance that isn’t respected or compensated, but is nonetheless accrued with a lot of time and work and hopefully lets you keep your job even if you’re still in high school. The last book I read with that working-class feel was on my 2009 list, David Gifaldi’s Listening for Crickets. They’re more rare than you might think.

There are a lot of science and art references in the book, and they hit a nice balance for me too. Loa didn’t have the “I’m only sixteen but I live for science (or painting, or whatever)” trope. That trope is a guilty pleasure of mine, but I think it’s one that appeals to my inner teenager and is actually a fiction. Things hit Loa hard, but it can be all different things. Also, I didn’t feel pressured, as a reader, to buy into some “let’s present a science metaphor and all express awe at it oh wow and now let’s congratulate ourselves for being deep and sensitive” *cough* Madeleine L’Engle *cough* thing. It was just stuff, albeit rich stuff. If you’ve read the book, you can see some of the art at the author’s website. And other cool tangential material; Woolston is a professional indexer and it kind of shows!

I liked Loa herself a lot, and that’s where the book is a little frustrating to me, at least on first reading. Loa is grieving, and I think on the taciturn side anyway. (Props for this not coming off as the frozen-ness that marks a lot of Sarah Dessen protagonists, for instance, and that I think is a bit of a false-depth device. Loa is also honest and hilarious, which helps a lot.) It took about 35 pages for me to hook in and care about her. The story opens with multiple layers of trauma that still aren’t the main trauma in Loa’s life, and I rattled around in it all.

On the other hand, by the end I really appreciated that the changes and resolutions didn’t fix or even address the Big Everything issues. Some smaller things got straightened out, and showed almost incidentally that Loa was changing and healing. When I find the book again, I want to go back to the beginning and see if it strikes me differently.

I have a feeling this book may stick in my head for awhile. It won the Morris Award for best debut novel, so I’ll definitely be watching for more from the author.

fog

Southeast Portland was very foggy when I went out to catch my bus this morning. I was glad when someone else came to stand at my bus stop, because if there were two of us the driver would see us and stop, right? (It worked.)

I like how fog lends solitude to a walk, even in the city. It’s like snow– everything is quieter. When I’m cross-country skiing, the most popular trails on Mt. Hood feel uncrowded (partly because sound is dampened and partly because I’m watching my feet a lot). I suppose for some people fog is just a pain, like snow is a pain for commuters, but for me it hasn’t lost its magic.

And fog is so literary. When I got to the Hawthorne Bridge, I couldn’t see the west bank from the eastern end of the bridge. People were taking photos (I’m no photographer, but that struck me as futile!). The fog made me want to smuggle something, made me think of Huck Finn and Poldark.

But the book I always think of when I step into a fog is Julia Sauer’s Fog Magic. Its status as a Newbery Honor book in 1944 is probably what kept it in print; I still have the Pocket Books paperback I got in the late 1970s. It’s a quiet story about a girl who loves the fog, and who finds that on foggy days she can slip back in time to a long-ago village. Her adventures start when she sees through the fog the outline of a house where there has been only a cellar hole for many years.

I just found a sweet web tribute (angelfire, that’s a time-trip itself!) to Julia Sauer, her partner, and the Nova Scotia village the book was based on:

Julia was a Librarian and an Author. Alice was a Fruit Farm Proprietor. It was talked in the village that they were wealthy ladies since they drove a big sports car to the envy of many here at that time….

Julia was a very hospitable lady. She was always so pleasant. She had a quiet, soft voice and a very friendly and welcoming smile. All were drawn to her charisma and charm. She was heavy in stature and both she and Alice dressed in country style attire.

It was a common sight to see them walk along the roads of Little River and stop to visit or chat with folks along their way. Little River was blessed by their kindnesses in many ways.

There are some books that form a quiet, almost unnoticed part of a reader’s DNA. Fog Magic is one of mine.

Everything’s better in letterpress…I hope

Tonight is my first letterpress class! We’re supposed to bring in a six-word story or memoir to practice with. I’ve been jotting over the week, but didn’t come up with anything I was really in love with. Here’s part of the list:

liberal arts major, liberal, minor artist.
She looks around while she drifts.
work, then live. wait, what happened?
we have to talk, she said
why do you read those storybooks?
excellent student becomes a crappy secretary
well, I can read books. yup.
sheltered white girl reads a lot.
Married at 23, not repenting yet.
Perpetual student of life. Middling grades.
making lists, then throwing them away
fantasy dog was better. oh well.

I’ll let you know what comes of it!

Trip Report: Albany, Oregon

When we saw that our friend Pat was starring as Granny Weatherwax in an adaptation of Terry Pratchett’s The Wyrd Sisters, Sanguinity and I knew we had to be sure to catch the show. Sang’s a Pratchett fan and likes the witch series especially. We’re both fans of Pat, who invited us to stay overnight with her and drive home the next morning (Albany’s about 90 minutes by freeway from Portland).

Leboyfriend dog-sat Louie overnight. I feel so much better knowing Louie’s with his favorite guy while I’m gone, especially since Louie’s not a “hold it for twelve hours” dog anymore now that he’s an old man dog. (In fact, other than two trips I’ve agreed to with my in-laws, I’m srsly thinking of not traveling until the post-Louie era. We’ll see if that holds.) Leboyfriend has been battling a major bug for the better part of three weeks now, but still came over. He’s so good to us.

Sang and I hit the road around two in the afternoon. It was sunny and I’d been running around all day with no coat, just a hoodie. Freedom! We crossed the 45th parallel. We neglected to do the spedometer test. Does anyone pull out their stopwatch and do that? Are they planned on purpose for boring stretches of road? Do certain people who fix up old cars or whatever use them over and over?

We mostly know Pat from the internet, though we’ve met up a few times. But hanging out with her still includes seeing the stars of her blog posts, sort of like seeing characters in a book come to life. It’s the VW Bug! It’s the wisteria over the porch! And the kitties Mojito and Margarita, who are just as pretty as their photos! (The first time I went to a play Pat worked on, she introduced me to a man named Don Taco who builds sets, repairs stuff, and solves problems. I’d been thinking Don Taco was an internet pseudonym, so I blurted out “You’re DON TACO?” with a look on my face that clearly said some mix of you’re real?! and wow, a celebrity. Mr. Taco gave Pat a sidelong look, wondering what was going on.)

And most notably, we got to meet Pat’s boyfriend J, who turned up as a surprise for the weekend! I know he wasn’t exactly as I’d imagined from the internet– I remember thinking his voice was different– but close enough that now I can’t call up my original made-up version of him.

We had really good food (and alcohol, lemon drop, whee!) at a place that started serving dinner before five p.m., which is good because Pat had to do her makeup and get to the theater. And because we were hungry. Everything was within walking distance; Albany is a very appealing small town with lots of Victorian houses and old buildings. I did a little sock-knitting and chatting and then the rest of us wandered to the theater too. The ticket reservation system for out-of-towners involves calling the jewelry store down the street and requesting seats, and the nice lady really did right by us– fifth row center. The theater is small and cozy and festive.

And the play was fun! They whipped smoothly through a rather astounding number of scene changes, juggling a plot of witches and princes and Shakespeare. I’m definitely going to read the novel, though I might start with Equal Rites, in which I understand Granny Weatherwax is introduced. When I get to the letter P in alphabet reading, if not before. Pat ruled the stage in a wimple and Fluevogs.

Hanging out, a big and wonderful breakfast (featuring, for me, potatoes with sausage gravy), and a drive home talking about Pratchett. Turns out it was almost exactly a 24-hour trip, and precisely what a weekend jaunt should be.