Summer!

The blog posts I’ve been reading from other parts of the country talk about summer being halfway over. An ultrarunner in my hometown even says she counts July 1 as the first day of fall! Well, okay, she goes to Badwater in July and everything feels cooler when you return from Badwater, so I see what she means.

But. Here in the Pacific Northwest, summer starts right after the Fourth of July. My life has become easier since I accepted this. Portland has long, long springs. They start in February and go right through June.

Now it’s time for our couple of months of real summer. The tomatoes and peppers in the garden can get serious now. We can ditch the down comforter on the bed some nights. And sunshine is coming, maybe even in the mornings!

So today is hot dogs cooked outside, and a cooler full of soda pop, and watermelon and ice cream. I’m about to go see if there’s enough rhubarb for another cutting yet. Happy summer, everybody.

book review: The Fault In Our Stars and Are You My Mother?

The practical reason I’m reviewing these books in the same post is that they are both due at the library. But also, each of them led me to do something I hadn’t done for a long time.

———————————————————-

John Green’s The Fault In Our Stars is as good as you’ve heard. At least right now I think it is– my reaction to it was all emotion. I stayed up til midnight finishing the book, and I haven’t done that for ages. I was a little teary at one point when we were getting on toward the end, and then I read something that made me say “WHAT?” and burst out crying…and laughing…and then crying…and laughing. I mean, loudly, with a bandana’s worth of nose-blowing. I was kind of a wreck until the end.

(I’m not a nerdfighter, btw. I didn’t get much out of Looking for Alaska except “troubled-girl trouble at prep school, blech.” And John Green is so omnipresent on the internet that I have a perpetual “oh, he’ll still be around when I get around to him” attitude. So this was a surprise.)

I don’t know how I’ll feel about the book in a couple of weeks, but wow. And I do think that Hazel and Vera Dietz would be friends, so that’s a good sign.

If you’ve finished the book, there’s an author Q&A tumblr here.

———————————————————

Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? prompted me to whip out my little notebook and take notes, and I hadn’t done that in a long time either. It was a very thinky book for me. I had hoped that all my little notes would coalesce into a beautiful essay and my life as an English major would come to fruition, but this did not happen. They stayed little notes in my notebook:

I have a soft spot for books and essays that fill in with literary history and criticism– Flaubert’s Parrot being a good example. I wouldn’t have liked Are You My Mother? as much as I did if it didn’t include Virginia Woolf as well as the psychoanalysts.
The world of psychoanalysis seems so small. Not only in the sense that its practitioners all seemed to know each other (“She supervised him for five years. He analyzed her son.”) or that it is jargony (“I associated to [topic x]” was a phrase that made me recoil), but that it is all focused on this exclusively human, nuclear-family-based storytelling. I guess I am used to always stepping back and looking at social constructions, and biology that includes other species.
And yet what a perfect match that is for the pains-taking of Bechdel’s drawing and documentation. I was struck by how many hours she must have spent drawing writing, re-drawing her own journals, newspaper headlines, textbooks. Printed, handwritten, her own, others.
Her interest in transitional objects reminded me of Lynda Barry’s explaining what an image is, in terms of a young child’s doll or toy. It is alive, and it isn’t. It is you, and it isn’t. Maybe this is a natural preoccupation for a cartoonist who is drawing herself over and over.
omg, the part that casually mentions that uterine fibroids sometimes have hair and teeth? A lot of cartoonists would have gone to town drawing that. I am glad she didn’t.

A few of the connections did strike me as a little forced, particularly in the part about mirrors–though I’ll happily sling Lacan some of the blame for that. And I don’t really get the end. A way out from what? It seemed arbitrary, albeit self-consciously so because in the recursive story of her family and her book there’s no clear beginning or endpoint. BUT. In the heart of the book (around page 194, says my note), I began to feel I was being shown an intricate network of relationships, reflecting and affecting each other. A subtle, fragile system that was much more complex than literary “themes” repeating, and that did not seem self-centered. I think she got somewhere.

The Dollar Store and Krave

I don’t know which was the more hilarious sighting at the dollar store this morning:

1. Fly swatters with a big fake flower attached to one side of the plastic-mesh panel, so that when they’re hanging on your wall your thoughts will turn to pretty flowers instead of fly guts… or

2. Don DeLillo’s Point Omega, in hardback.

My own purchases were more pedestrian: movie candy (Twizzlers), and otter-pop-like things that are chocolate-flavored.

Speaking of chocolate, a couple of weeks ago Sang and I were walking down the cereal aisle at the supermarket when I said “Heeyyyy!” and veered over to inspect a box of promotionally-priced Krave. two boxes of Krave cereal, priced at $1.99 each Sang was amazed I’d spotted it among the gazillion cereal boxes. Had I seen advertising for it somewhere? I said no: the box just sent out the bat-signal for CHOCOLATE.

I got the double chocolate version (of course). My review: except for a technicality (no frosting), these are Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs! I’m on my second box already, eating them both dry and with milk. Sang’s review: like eating a ~~bowl of milk duds~~ charcoal briquet with cocoa powder…”literally tastes like cardboard.”

Apparently, Krave started in the UK, where they also have hazelnut and chocolate caramel flavors. Lucky ducks!

We Met Violet Beauregarde

Sang and I went to Sunday Parkways in North Portland last weekend. We rode our bikes, and ate ice cream, and watched a magic show, and even stood in line for the free photo booth.

While we were waiting, a friendly blueberry came by to promote…eating blueberries, I guess. I asked her if she felt like Violet Beauregarde. “Yes!” she said, and showed me that she was chewing a piece of gum. She was psyched that I remembered the name, because a couple of people had called her Veruca Salt earlier.

She gets around! (And has a FaceBook page.) Here she is last summer at the Corvallis Farmer’s Market.

From the Mixed-Up Brochure Rack

From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler hit Fuse #8’s Top 100 List yesterday, and one of the commenters linked to a brochure (pdf) the Metropolitan Museum of Art gives out about the real-life art that appears in the book. It contains a long author’s note about how she got the idea! It starts like this:

The beginnings of the idea for the book started with a piece of popcorn on a blue silk chair.

My three children and I were visiting the Museum, wandering through the period rooms on the first floor when I spotted a single piece of popcorn on the seat of a blue silk chair. There was a velvet rope across the doorway of the room. How had that lonely piece of popcorn arrived on the seat of that blue silk chair? Had someone sneaked in one night—it could not have happened during the day—slipped behind the barrier, sat in that chair, and snacked on popcorn? For a long time after leaving the Museum that day, I thought about that piece of popcorn on the blue silk chair and how it got there.

…and there is much more, including the solution to the real-life mystery of the statue.

I wonder if the museum has to guard against people sneaking a single piece of popcorn onto that chair, in tribute, the way Julie Powell left butter in Julia Child’s replica kitchen at the Smithsonian. I would be tempted…an air-popped kernel, of course, so it wouldn’t damage the silk.

I also ran across Talk Talk, an out-of-print book of talks by Konigsburg. Interlibrary loan, I love you!

Update, 8/28/12: The talks had quite a bit of discussion about “political correctness” that I did not find especially astute. Specifically, there was a distressing lack of “maybe I am not the expert to be talking on this.” However, I was interested to see that E.L. Konigsburg had a hard time finding books that felt like “home” when she was a kid, because of class issues. She would try, she said, and the book would be about a girl named Betsy, who took naps, and whose mother had “help.” One of the very first exceptions was Little Women. There’s Hannah Mullet, of course, but maybe the fact that the March women talk about money and take jobs made the difference?

first skateboard lesson

Methodical instruction from my nephew Nick. My lesson was after Sanguinity’s, so I benefited from some pedagogical refinements like learning to turn before learning to push.

As you can see, I favor the goofy stance.

heron

By the end of the week, on Friday, I was feeling nature-deprived. In the car on the way home from chinuk lolo I said to Sanguinity, “On Sunday we could go for a hike in the Gorge.”

“We could do that,” she allowed.

“I want to.”

She agreed right away. It was that kind of I-want-to in my voice.

On Saturday, while Sang was teaching in Salem, I ran down through the college canyon. Well, mostly I walked, especially once I was on the trail and looking around. I became aware of how much I was telling myself stories in my head that I already knew, about what plants were growing near each other, what was in season, what birds were on the water. Sometimes I find it comforting to know all that stuff, feel local, narrate it to some invisible audience in my head. But now I was sick of it and felt a strong desire to learn something new from walking through and watching. Anything new, just something.

The salmonberries were ripe, but the thimbleberries hadn’t turned red yet. A juvenile mallard swimming with its parents was still in its fluffy plumage, but not for long. The turtles were sunning on their usual log; the bee tree was busy.

I continued down across the landbridge and into the lower canyon. As I crossed one of the small footbridges I saw a heron out of the corner of my eye. It was close, a few arms’-lengths away, and standing still. Clearly it did not want to be noticed.

And that seemed to be enough for me– discovering a new heron hangout. I don’t even know if it’s a habitual one, like the spot further up by the peninsula. The itch for something new was scratched. It was even okay to skip the hike on Sunday for the sake of getting the tomatoes, basil, and peppers into the garden before it really was too late, instead of just feeling too late.

When I mentioned the heron to my dad in an email, he wrote back: Great blue heron’s 2nd defense, if not being observed fails, is to stab the attacker’s eyes. We had to wear protective goggles when banding g.b. herons in a nesting colony. Even nestlings know, “go for the eyes.”

book review: The Beginner’s Goodbye, by Anne Tyler

This review contains spoilers!

The Beginner’s Goodbye is fewer than 200 pages long, and some aspects of it felt too slight. It’s a first-person narrative, but the beginning is strangely summary-like, flitting from incident to incident in the narrator’s attempt to explain the phenomenon of his dead wife’s reappearance and his theories on why it might be happening. It isn’t until 25 pages in that we see the circumstances of her sudden death…and those scenes, at their house and in the hospital, are masterful. The unreality, the weird details, the dialogue and misunderstandings, all perfect. The book is worth reading for these ten pages.

The portrait of grief that follows, however, didn’t bring much I haven’t seen before in Anne Tyler’s other books. It reminded me very much of The Accidental Tourist after Sarah leaves Macon, but without the humor of Macon’s devising his domestic systems. This protagonist even has a job similar to Macon’s– he edits a series of questionable how-to books for beginners on every conceivable topic. And as in Tourist, someone the protagonist knows in a professional capacity starts dating his sister…but unlike in Tourist, there’s not much tension, as we have every indication the guy is decent and successful and it’s a good match.

I wouldn’t say that this was merely Accidental Tourist Lite, but I did feel that a lot was left undeveloped, or mentioned too late. The new love interest at the end seemed almost random, like the narrator could have picked a different co-worker just as easily, to show us the importance of getting to know, love, and cherish someone because time goes so quickly. Turns out he and his new wife have known each other since first grade, which would have colored their relationship for me throughout the book, but I didn’t know til near the end.

The observations and word choices I have admired for so many years are still here (this is Anne Tyler’s nineteenth novel). Yes, Thanksgiving sweet potatoes are cobbled with mini-marshmallows. Yes, 911 dispatchers’ questions sound like statements, with the pitch going down at the end. The doctor’s chef-like clogs and too-long pants and crisp white coat rumpled by the practical satchel strap, and her blunt bad haircut, are perfectly in focus in my head. But not so much the history and texture of the marriage, though we’re dutifully told about their first meeting, courtship, wedding, squabbles. Maybe the problem is that the narrator is waking up to the missed opportunities and misconceptions he had, and we the readers aren’t getting there any faster than he is. I spent a lot of the book not being able to see as much as I wanted.

Daniel Pinkwater and Anne Tyler are two authors who have meant a lot to me (a lot!) over the years, but whose books I don’t rush to anymore. Maybe the part of me that drank up their work got saturated at some point. Even if their new stuff is just as wonderful–and I can’t really tell if it is or not, I can only tell that it’s largely the same–I can’t imagine loving it the way I loved the older work that I was so thirsty for.

just a tidbit

Even though I couldn’t delude myself into making my usual annual birthday declaration that “this year I’m going to write in my blog EVERY DAY,” I am feeling the urge to post more! Here’s a photo my uncle took of me and my conscientious security detail at my sister’s wedding in Colorado. (Okay, it’s me and my cousin. But he was conscientious in keeping stray raindrops off my hairsprayed ‘do.)

Now to the garden, to get beds ready for tomatoes, basil, and peppers. It suddenly feels almost too late, but it’s not, it’s just the first really warm weekend in ages.

Four Minute Diary

I peeked in at Lynda Barry’s Tumblr, which I’d sort of forgotten about for awhile, and read about the four-minute diary:

Why is it so hard to keep a diary?

IT ISN’T!

Keeping a diary is much easier if you limit your writing to four minutes each day: two minutes spent writing a list of what you remember from the day before and then two minutes making a list of things you saw.

Her post included a video you can use to time the four minutes, but I didn’t. Also, I misremembered about the second list and wrote what I did, not what I saw. Still, I wrote. Yesterday:

I stood at the kitchen counter shelling fava beans onto a plate and listened to the radio.
I gave Simone some “mixed grill” wet food, and she was all excited about it and jumped up onto the counter before I could put the dish on the floor, but then she didn’t finish it.
I played a round of Farm Hustle, and watched Sherlock vids with Sang before bed.