Blogatrix

Going Ape

2012-02-07T16:34:00.001-08:00

My friend Charles and I recently decided to stage a Planet of the Apes-viewing marathon. We set aside a whole day, but weenies that we are, we only had the stamina for two of the five original films—can you imagine? Back in '75, my father and I made it through the whole lot, back to back—and in the theater, with no brisk walks around the block or spoonsful of hazelnut butter to sustain us.

Two movies last week were enough, nonetheless, to flood me with nostalgia. As a child I had a complete set of PotA action figures, and now I rue the day I let them go. It occurred to me that such things can probably be had on Ebay—indeed, that PotA action figures are probably the very reason God made Ebay—and so, after Charles went home, boxed set under one arm, I jumped on line to see what I could find. There they were, with their inexplicably Latinate names: Cornelius, Dr. Zaius, Colonel Ursus: the original 1969 figures, starting at $499.99. Or one can purchase a turn-of-the-millennium, 30th-anniverary commemorative ape for just under ten bucks.

Dare I say this aloud? By any standard except that of Earnest Collector, the recent knockoffs kick the originals' hairy butts. Action figures have apparently come a long way over the decades. I hazarded a guess that they pre-dated my own self, as an invention, by not all that long, and research confirmed this guess. If you define an action figure as a toy figurine of an adult male character, then the first of them hit the market in 1961. Macho men, brace yourselves: the first action figure was the Ken Doll. Safe to say he didn't get a lot of action, though—Barbie was pretty straight-laced in the 60s, don't you think?—so really these playthings didn't take off as a genre sui generis until G.I. Joe appeared in 1964 (which makes Joe and I exactly the same age), and didn't explode in popularity until Star Wars figures started coming out in the late 70s.

At any rate, the early PotA apes are crudely made. Their colors are garish; their facial features do not even pretend to resemble those of the individuals they represent; and I am pretty sure they are not Fully Posable. I don't remember them being so unappealing, but at some point in the last 30 years I obviously upgraded my own memory of them. Memory is scheming that way.

I was disappointed, but not surprised, to find no Ziras among the apes for sale on Ebay. Zira is by far the smartest of any primate in PotA; she gets all the best lines; and she is essentially the only female protagonist in the series (Charlton Heston's girlfriend, Nova, is just a prop for male fantasy: entirely mute and clad in an animal-skin bikini). The Ziras from both eras of PotA toymaking have been snapped up. I'm still thinking I might have to have some of the others, though, the ones from 1999. From '69, not so much. My false lying nostalgia is not worth the additional $489. Anyway, part of what you pay for with those earlier items is the fact that they come in their original boxes. And what would be the good of that? Then you couldn't play with them!

A Natural History of My Bookcases

2011-11-05T18:00:00.000-07:00

I like to rearrange the furniture in my house, an act that cures a very particular form of boredom called Domestic Aesthetic Ennui (DAE). Every once in a while I find I must rearrange not only the easily-moved, but also the not easily-moved pieces -- and of course the worst offenders are the bookcases. Bookcases are heavy; they're tall, so that they don't fit through doorways without a lot of swearing; and it goes without saying that you have to take all the books off the shelves to move them. When you do that, your books get into a Terrible Jumble.

My books have been in a Terrible Jumble since my last major attack of DAE a couple years or more ago, and this disarray has bothered me ever since. So recently I undertook to reorganize my books -- a good project for rainy days, and complicated enough to last until the sun comes out again in Oregon (sometime around July 2012).

Many arrangements of books are possible, of course. My preferences run along the lines of Quarantine. For starters, I favor the strict segregation of fiction and non-fiction. Non-fiction itself is subdivided into two categories: reference works, and those meant to be read cover-to-cover. These two shall not miscegenate, but live not only on separate shelves, but in separate rooms. Likewise, poetry has not only its own shelf, but its own bookcase, which it shares with my music collection. Poetry rightly co-mingles with music, and should not be sullied by having to rub dust-jackets with prose. As for the works of fiction, it doesn't matter to me if they're alphabetized by author name, but I do care, for some reason, that they be lined up chronologically. To put Rabelais after Richardson, or Atwood before Austen, strikes me as a librarical abomination.

Strictness as to family, genus and species poses difficulties with authors who write in more than one taxonomic rank, as I also like to have all the books by a single author filed together. Sometimes these works land in one place, sometimes in another. Switching up my taxonomies helps relieve the condition known as Domestic Biblio-ennui.

(Volumes in other languages get an exception clause in the article of the constitution dealing with separation by type. Everything related to, for example, Italian -- textbooks, DVDs, dictionaries, collections of short stories -- is shelved together. I like to be able to take in at a glance how much of my life I have devoted to the study of foreign languages and enjoy a moment of ego inflation. And there is one other shelf in my life in which categories mix, the shelf for Oversized Books. All bets are off when it comes to the Oversized, which might fall into any genre, any style -- though a lot of them seem to have reproductions of great art in them. These stand next to my high school yearbooks, the sublime shoulder to shoulder with the ridiculous.)

A confession: as I was working over my shelves this past week, I came upon an appalling number of items that were not actually books -- notebooks and three-ring binders from endless projects; pocket folders and flashcards from workshops and classes; photo albums of all sizes, and even photo frames; sketch pads and packs of drawing pencils; owners' manuals; newspaper clippings; magazines; tchotchkes. I'm sure my books are quite put out about it and have been clamoring -- if only I could hear them -- for the expulsion of these interlopers. The only tchotchkes that will be allowed to stay are the literary ones -- small sculptures of don Quixote and Sancho Panza, for example. As for the rest of that detritus -- who knows where it will end up? These are matters that will take more than one rainy season to resolve.

Undoing a Terrible Jumble is an opportunity to improve on past arrangements. Now, for example, for the first time ever, I've decided to give mysteries a shelf of their own. This arrangement helps me keep tracks of books in a series and not buy a copy of a thing I've already read, which happens more than I'd care to admit. (I don't seem to possess any other genre fiction, so no other genres will get real estate to call their own). Also during this latest rearrangement I had a stroke of genius and decided to put all the unread books of any sort together on one shelf. Whenever you finish a book, there's another that's Just the Right Thing for the moment, but you can't always lay your hands on it. From now on, when I finish a book, I'll have all the options for the next-up reading matter at hand, and JTRT will not be overlooked.

Another confession: my "shelf" of unread books is two and a half shelves long. Some of these books were gifts, and I perceive a pattern of my resisting books other people think I should read. Some I bought myself because I thought I should read them, and I perceive the same pattern. Some were impulse buys, usually from bookstores in other cities, which makes them souvenirs as much as readables (but money spent at independent bookstores is always money spent well). Other books simply haven't yet been Just the Right Thing -- or their moment of being JTRT was long enough for the purchase, but too short for the consumption. I'm not concerned; their time will come.

I'm afraid a large number of my books fall into the category of partly-read, or started-but-not-finished. This can't be a good statement about my habits of mind, but at least I'm fair about it. A book might not be enjoying its JTRT when I start it, but I'm willing to assume it's worthy, and set it aside for another time. I was too young for the Lord of the Rings, for example, the first time I tackled it, and after much labor got bogged down early in the third volume. I took it up again, successfully, some 15 years later, and who could possibly argue that it wasn't worth finishing? On the other hand, a book that is given two tries in two different life stages and still doesn't speak to me is destined to become a trade-in.

I haven't designated a separate shelf for these works that might turn out to be either fish or fowl. They just go on the bookcases with their brethren: the books I've read and loved and want to read again; the books I've read and not loved, but that shaped me in some way that makes me not want to part with them -- fiction and non-fiction, poetry and prose. I can't separate out the partly-reads. Such distinctions are too fine, even for a categorizing neurosis as active as my own.

A Small Domestic Horror

2011-10-28T18:50:00.000-07:00

Some time around the middle of last summer, a baby possum started visiting our laundry room. Every time Rick or I went out there, it would turn its frightened eyes to us and flee. It hurried in its waddling possum way through the kitty door and out into the back yard, where we supposed it lived. Sometimes it would hiss.

We weren't bothered. Possums, with their pig-like bodies and their long, bald, rodent tails, are not quite cute, but this one had an aura of confusion about it that endeared it to us. A locus of commotion, with bicycles and clothes baskets and cats going always in and out, the laundry room did not seem a well-thought-through hangout of choice for a creature so night-loving and so solitary. Who knew what it was up to, there among the major appliances? It did not, itself, seem to know what it wanted.

Summer scrolled off the screen, and come September it was time for Rick and me to go down to the cellar and clean the furnace filter before the chilly season started. Our cellar is not a place I like to go even in the best of times. It's a crawl space, not a basement, with ledges of dirt and walls of dirt and a floor of dirt with a plastic tarp. There's no light save for the feeble glow of the flashlight in your hand. You descend by stairs so steep and narrow you have to turn sideways to lower yourself into the hole, and once you're inside, the square of daytime at the open hatch seems far away.

For some reason on this occasion the cellar was even more dank than usual. Some of the strips of thick black plastic that line the floor were wet, and the air smelled like sickness and like rot. This could not be good. Rick and I consulted and decided that the baby possum must have been finding its way in. But how? It hadn't breached the air vents, which were tight, nor could it have gotten around the hatch door which, though peeling, was intact. We thought about the laundry room, so popular with our possum. A pipe runs through it en route from the furnace to the house. The possum must have been squeezing through the narrow passage around that pipe and dropping into the cellar, where it was doing dirty, wet, possumy things in the earthy darkness.

Rick and I were standing next to the furnace – for there is nowhere else in the cellar to stand – and I was peering at the ceiling, wondering how to block up the creature's secret entrance, when Rick touched my arm and said softly, “Look.”

His feeble flashlight beam traced a wobbly half-circle across the walls and came to light on a thing – a thing that lay on a hip-high ledge of dirt. We'd walked past it in the dark and now it lay between the exit and ourselves: a curved and skinny length of fur in the shape of a body no longer there, and an open jaw, full of teeth, gaping at us. Nothing else was left of what we guessed was Mama Possum. How long had she lain here, and what forces, nibbling madly away at her right under our home, had reduced her to a winding stripe of hair and a single bone?

Suddenly the cellar seemed like a place no living thing should enter, a place whose very air one should not breathe, a passageway between life and death where creatures clawed at the earth and failed to find an exit. All the tired metaphors of horror fiction grew animate inside me: my skin crawled; I shivered; and then I bolted past the yawning jaw and up the narrow steps into the back yard. I had to stand out in the sunshine quite some time before the feeling passed.

My Culinary Autobiography

2011-10-14T19:22:00.000-07:00

Until my junior year of college, I'd never, ever cooked a meal for myself. All those prior years I'd relied on my parents and then, for a little while, on dormitory cafeterias to make food magically appear.

My junior year I went to live as a foreign exchange student in Bordeaux, France, where I rented a room in a house and faced the fact that I would have to become cuisinically self-reliant. That first night in my new home, the reality of it struck me like a side of frozen beef. I had absolutely no idea what to do.

To complicate matters, or perhaps to simplify them, but at any rate not to facilitate them, I had no kitchen access. My cooking supplies consisted of a single-burner propane campstove in the salle de bain and one copper pot. I ate a lot of canned ravioli that year -- a sad regimen in any setting, but in France, the world's culinary capital, a downright pathetic one.

When I was 20, however, I became a vegetarian. I rented apartments with real kitchens, acquired classics like the Moosewood and Recipes for a Small Planet, and made the local co-op my grocery store of choice. I became very sincere, the kind of person who would throw her arm out in front of a friend who was peeling carrots and cry, "STOP! What are you doing?? Most of the nutrients are in the peel!!" My then-boyfriend was a vegan, and I enjoyed animal products -- scrambled eggs, mostly -- only furtively, during my breaks at the restaurant where I waited tables. And for the first time, I discovered the fun of cooking -- the aesthetic pleasures of it, the art, the satisfaction. I baked my own bread, sprouted my own sprouts, forswore sugar for honey and white for whole wheat everything.

This enthusiasm and joie de manger lasted several years, until I found myself in relationship with a man who was not only belligerently carnivorous, but who had some way-out-there eating disorder that made every single experience at table, for years on end, a misery. All the pleasure I'd once found in cooking collapsed, since cooking always ended in a meal, and mealtime was invariably dreadful.

And then, finally, I had a Picky Child. Picky Child would not actually consume items I considered food, so for a long time I fixed two entrees every night, one for him and a different one for me. When Picky got to be about 12 -- old enough to microwave his own damn Pizza Pockets -- I said to him, "You know what? If you're going to eat these things, you're going to have to make them for yourself." I think this tough love stood Sam in good stead for later apartment living, and it freed me from a bit of resentment -- but I didn't go back to being a joyous cook. When you eat alone, it's easier to simply fix, rather than prepare, a meal.

My habits were not altered when, a couple years ago, I married a man who truly doesn't care for food and wishes he didn't have to bother with it, a man who says things like, "Shitting! It almost makes eating worth the trouble!" We muddled along together, the two of us, working out ways to get dinner on the table with the least possible effort.

Well, for one reason and another, I recently decided I would benefit from a rather rigorous Detox Diet. This diet represents a significant departure from my previous eating habits in both ingredients and prep time. By necessity I'm spending many more hours in the kitchen these days than I have since my early vegetarian life, more than 25 years ago now. I am chopping, sauteeing, roasting and stewing, filling the house with delicious smells, and a curious thing has happened: I am beginning to remember the joy of cooking. The extraordinary color of fresh-pressed carrot juice, the gorgeous silk texture of winter squash soup, remind me that cooking can be a kind of art project. And it's not only the colors and the textures, but also the possibility of creating something I haven't created before, that make cooking sculpting -- the fashioning of edible 3D art.

I think if you were to take a non-artist, set her loose in a warehouse of art supplies and say, "Make art," she'd likely clutch. The possibilities are too may, the task too daunting; we novices cry for guidance. If, on the other hand, the novice were given an egg carton and a sheet of green construction paper and told to sculpt an artichoke, she'd probably produce -- not a masterpiece, perhaps, but a creation nonetheless. The same need for structure has been true for me in the kitchen. Set me adrift in the grocery store, and I'll cling to the life raft of prepared foods (albeit "healthy" ones), bobbing forever with my tub of hummus rather than braving the open waters of endless ingredients and foods that must be made from scratch.

Vegetarianism once provided me useful parameters, limitations that freed me to create. Now this detoxifying diet is having the same effect. I can eat meat and eggs and butter, vegetables and nuts, and little else. (The new regimen is not a Paleolithic Diet, though there really is such a thing, for folks who believe the healthiest menu for us primates is that of our ancestors from before the development of agriculture some 10,000 years ago, but it's along those lines.) It's a diet with no grains of any sort, among other no-nos. I don't think it's the final word on How Humans Should Eat; for now, at this time in my life, it's simply something to try, and I'd like to have fun with it if I can.

Given the diet's parameters, I started wondering if I could invent a bready sort of thing as a vehicle for toppings -- much like crackers, sandwich breads, pieshells, pizza dough and bagels -- but made from almonds, so this morning my kitchen became an art studio. Using the "ice crush" setting on my blender, I ground a cup of almonds into a kind of crunchy meal. This I mixed with egg whites so it would glom together, with a little salt and water; I spread it on a sheet of baking parchment: I stuck it in the toaster oven. When it was baked enough to hold its (funny) shape, I buttered it and ate it up. The outcome wasn't really bread. It was too crunchy to be a pancake, and too thick and misshapen to be a cracker. And while it won't win any awards, it wasn't bad, my creation -- but what to call it? I settled on Toasted Almond Amoeba.

The Paleolithic people would disapprove of my amoeba. They do not favor nuts. One doctor on a Paleo website states, and he is probably right, that nuts contain substances that interfere with the absorption of certain important minerals. Another, non-medical, writer on the same site argues we must forgo nuts because we should all resist the wrong-headed, carbocentric and unnatural desire to snack. He makes this assertion with great sincerity. But I've forgiven him; I think he is 20.

The Functional Beauty of Baby Bats

2011-10-01T19:42:00.000-07:00

I dreamed of a trip to Italy for something like 30 years before I finally made it happen. Dreamed for 30, studied Italian (in homeopathically small doses, but it added up) for 15, and saved my pennies for 10 before at last I crossed the pond.

To teach myself Italian, mainly I read children's books. This past summer I imbibed a story that provided me my all-time favorite Italian word: pipistrelli, meaning "bats," (and its variant pipistrellini, "baby bats.") The story was about princesses and witches, and, along with the spell-casting and broomstick-riding vocabulary I acquired, pipistrelli wasn't a word I expected to encounter in real life. And in fact, most of my real-life Italian interactions did turn out to be along the lines of mi scusi; grazie; and the ubiquitous prego (which apparently can mean anything at all. Prego is the tofu of the Italian language: it absorbs the flavor of whatever it is cooked with.) At any rate, it didn't matter that I'd learned a word that had no practical value. Pipistrelli earns its keep in phonemes alone. Or as the garden writer Toby Hemenway says, "Beauty is a function."

My first Sunday in Rome I went to the famous Galleria Borghese, where I spent several hours bedazzled by useless beauty (Bernini was able to make marble into flesh and blood). Then I sat in the dappled sunlight on a bench in front of the palazzo where the gallery is housed, watching tourists in rented pedicabs struggle up a hill. Downhill a little ways someone was playing classical guitar, and the notes from his instrument, carried by the wind through the trees, were also dappled like the light. I wandered for several hours on the Borghese grounds and eventually down some stairs that tipped me into the vast Piazza del Popolo, a stone-paved, circular plaza hugged by three churches, three palaces, an ancient Roman gate, and the balustraded overlook I'd just descended. Entering the Piazza I encountered on a small museum, tucked away in one wing of one of the churches, dedicated to the genius of Leonardo da Vinci.

I was already a Leonardo fan; intrigued, I decided to go in. Artists and engineers had studied Leonardo's 300 extant notebooks and had built for this exhibition many of the inventions the 15th-century polymath had designed: a machine gun and a cannon; a loom and a device for making threaded screws; a horizontal drill; wind- and water-speed gauges; a movable bridge for transporting troops; musical instruments; swimming flippers, scuba diving equipment and an underwater communication device; a catapult; an excavator; ball bearings and odometers; flywheels and chain crankcases; cogwheels; a kind of camera and a device to help the painter use perspective; gliders and jacks; clocks and mills; and more, all from scribblings and codices full of "drawings, writings, complex personal thoughts, curiosities, personal facts and idiosyncrasies." I was enthralled -- and how much more enthralled I would have been, had I understood anything at all of engineering!

After passing through these wonders I found, playing on a continuous loop at the back of the museum, a documentary film about the modern construction of the inventions. The film was in Italian with no subtitles, and I understood maybe 10 or 15% of the information it presented. No matter. I was content to rest my feet and catch what I could.

Then the filmmakers came to the most famous of Leonardo's never-built inventions: his "airplane." And what do you suppose were the inspiration for the great man's flying studies? The wings of pipistrelli!

Nothing could have made me happier than encountering my favorite word this way. Pipistrelli, so lovely on the tongue and in the ear, had made an unlikely journey from the pages of a paperback on my nightstand to a back room in a squirreled-away corner of the eternal city, where it shone for a moment an illuminating ray on a fascinating but until that moment muddy subject. Never doubt, dear reader, the usefulness of beauty! -- however unexpectedly it turns up.

Afternoon in the Garden of Cicadas and Female Solidarity

2011-08-20T11:05:00.000-07:00

I'm a Yankee, with a Yankee's natural suspicion of Southern institutions and mores, and a cold-blooded northerner's resistance to the physical climate below the Mason-Dixon line as well. Nevertheless, when I made my first trip ever to the South this week, I encountered things that, were I a displaced Southerner, would leave me forever pining for home.

I just spent three glorious days in Savannah, Georgia, a city whose beauty can hardly be overstated. If I were a native Savannahian, I could hardly bear to be parted from the nation's first planned city, founded 1733, an urban gem with twenty-two city squares. These leafy plazas, along with long meridians of trees dividing the wider avenues, make Savannah not so much a town with a lot of parks as a park with a number of streets.

The city sits on a bluff a bit above the winding eponymous river, and you can walk along the picturesque waterfront and enjoy the sight of paddleboats and barges. In town, you can walk from square to square on streets and sidewalks cobbled in brick and in ships' ballast.

But the city's most astonishing aspect is its great number and variety of 18^th and 19th-century buildings – Georgian; English Regency; Italianate; Neoclassical; Federal; French Gothic; Greek Revival; Romanesque Revival; Victorian – more than two square miles of old houses, museums, churches and civic buildings almost uninterrupted by more modern structures. Savannah is alone in possessing such a collection of antebellum architecture, as it alone among southern cities was spared destruction during the Civil War (or, as they style it there, the “War of Northern Aggression”). General Sherman gifted the city, intact, to Lincoln on Christmas of 1864.

The city was built, to be sure, on the backs of slaves and indentured servants. Ever it was thus: one era's exploitation becomes another era's treasured historical artifacts and font of a multimillion-dollar tourist industry. The Savannah College of Art and Design provided much of the impetus for the historic center's loving revitalization. With a boost from the book/movie Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, tourists began to swarm in to see the city that cotton built, that Sherman saved, and that SCAD gentrified. And naturally, many longtime Savannahians were driven out when real estate prices went crazy in the newly-restored old neighborhoods. So, like many blessings, the construction and preservation of the historic city has proven to be mixed. Still, native Savannahnians must cherish the grand old dames of their city streets, and have their favorite garden statues and alleyways, beloved wrought-iron gates and rooflines.

If I'd grown up among them and had to leave them behind, I would miss the Georgian flora and fauna, too. One morning I befriended a lizard the color of an Asian pear, scampering over a vine-tickled garden wall, and near the river I photographed a sign: Please Do Not Feed the Alligators. Cicadas roared to life in the bushes as though fired up by a pull cord, manic gas-powered cicadas, playing a cacophonous vibrating soundtrack to my daily walks. Most of all I loved the Spanish Moss. A staple of southern gothic horror fiction, the moss drapes in an opportunistic and rather menacing way from every tree branch and telephone wire (except, apparently, where innocent blood has been spilled; it won't grow from the eighteenth-century Hanging Tree in Wright Square, for example.)

I had thought the August air would slap me like a wet warm washcloth, but I found it mild and pleasant, and (when the wind wasn't blowing from the direction of the paper mill) it smelled good – green and clean and sweet like the river and the trees, with just a hint of salt air from the Atlantic a dozen miles away. The sound and smell and feel of the air, so distinctive and so flavorful, must get into the bones of the people who grow up here, and leave them lonesome for it when they're away.

One final aspect of southern living struck my fancy during my three days down south. I was surprised and delighted on several occasions when women I'd just met addressed me as “Baby”: “Where you from, Baby?” “Have a good trip, Baby,” and once, as I was being seated in a restaurant, “You all alone, Baby? I think we can manage that.” When men call you Baby, it's condescending, infantilizing; but when other women call you Baby, it's a term of welcome and of affection, and something more – it's a warm embrace into a circle of sisterhood. It says, “You're safe here. You're one of us.” If I were a homesick Southerner, I'd miss such an affirmation. Come to think of it, even a hardened Yankee like myself might miss these things when she goes home.

Moral Vortex with Navel at Center

2011-08-11T21:28:00.000-07:00

I consider it an honor to be liked by children. Children can spot a phony a mile off. Like cats, they will not pretend to like you just because protocol demands it. If they like you, it's because you've proven yourself worthy.

The other day Rick and I were departing for somewhere or other, and we asked our friend Mary Jane to take us to the airport. Mary Jane arrived in a van with three children in tow. Rick took the front seat so he and MJ could review the Cubs' performance that season, and I joined Carolina, Rosie and Lucia, ages 3, 2 and 1, in the back. The girls were lined up in their carseats like See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil, and I sat facing them.

The younger two and I had not met, and Carolina had never cottoned to me before, but for some reason on this trip all three of them found me irresistibly comical. I taught them the hand game “Here's the church / Here's the steeple / open the doors / where are the people?” They had not encountered it before. Poor little culturally illiterate children! – thank heavens I'd come along!

But then, after some 200 repetitions of “Here's the Church,” Carolina demanded to see my bare tummy. I shook my head. And at once I thought – by refusing, do I send some kind of unhealthy message about the unacceptability of the human body? What is wrong with a tummy, after all? Then again, if I flash the children once, will I have to do it 200 times? I stalled around, unable to come up with some calmly authoritative pearl like, “Grownups don't display their torsos.” Or a clever rejoinder like, “My tummy? Oh, sorry, I didn't think to bring it along.”

My hesitation precipitated further moral dilemmas. Perhaps if I'd been casual and immediate about lifting the corner of my shirt, the tummy could have been received as just another unremarkable car game. But by delaying, I'd loaded it with a sense of the forbidden. Carolina continued to press the issue. What if she demanded an explanation for my refusal? What could I say – that a tummy must not be seen? That I was embarrassed? That my stomach was unlovely? None of those seemed like good telegraphs for little girls. I should have been cheerful and firm in saying no, but it was too late for that now. I'd found myself – as, alas, happens so often – vaulted into ethical confusion, paralyzed by the many facets of the issue apparent to me, and quite unable to follow the dictates of common sense.

After much deliberation, I reasoned that a belly button was really more silly than obscene, and that no harm would likely come from baring mine, at least no more harm than could come from driving Carolina to make her unnerving demand 198 more times. I peeled up my t-shirt, and when the girls beheld my naked innie in its jelly-roll of flesh, they were rocked with seizures of helpless, shrieking laughter. Then I thought – is this what I want to be liked by children for? And I quickly got them back on the straight and narrow, making churches with their little hands.

Rocket Science

2011-07-09T19:14:00.000-07:00

In spite of abundant and mounting evidence to the contrary, I have held a lifelong belief – and I persist in this belief – that cutting my own bangs is a good idea.

“How hard can it be?” I say to myself each time. “I know I can do this.”

And each time, I emerge from the unfortunate chopping not with a smooth and even sheaf of hair at my brow, but with what appears to be a series of columns, each truncated at the base at a different angle, intermingled with sudden, inexplicable bursts of alopecia. It's the kind of haircut that leads people to say things to me like, “You cut your own bangs, didn't you?” The kind that leads my hairdresser to say things to me like, “Oh – what happened here?” And to reassure me again and again that I can come in for a trim anytime for only five dollars.

It's not the five dollars that stops me. It's that in one moment my bangs are fine, and in the next moment, the pointy, Lilliputian spearheads of individual shafts of hair are jabbing the tender creases of my eyelids, and I have to make them go away right now. I charge into the bathroom, scissors in hand, and say, “Okay – I'm going to do it right this time.”

But no matter how thoughtfully I proceed, how many hairpins I involve, how many days of neurotic micro-trimming ensue, my bangs invariably turn out as though I'd sawn them off in the dark with a butter knife. My learning curve seems to be as steep as the left-hand side of my shorn fringe after I've had my way with it.

A Monument in the Desert

2011-06-24T19:42:00.000-07:00

And if I hadn't taken Art History this spring, I wouldn't properly appreciate Las Vegas! Why, here's the Doge's Palace, complete with the Grand Canal and the Bridge of Sighs, hard by the Pirates of the Caribbean; here stand the Eiffel Tower and Margaritaville, cheek by jowl; the Winged Victory who graces the Louvre looks just like this one, only not as stacked.

Vegas! -- where, whether indoors or out on the sidewalk under a broiling desert sun, you need never be without air conditioning. Vegas, now family-friendly, with a Disney castle (not like a real castle but like a giant blow-up of a toy); Vegas with roller coasters, Vegas with men dressed as M&Ms on the sidewalk having their pictures taken with children, yet still among playboy bunnies hawking cigarettes, among bare booties and bare boobies and divorce and bankruptcy lawyers and young women vomiting up their night's daiquiris at ten in the morning; Vegas, where the hits of Elton John travel with you from destination to destination, where you wander – or stagger – in the cigar and coconut-suntan-oil-scented air, saying “What's that supposed to be? Oh never mind, it doesn't matter” before snapping its picture on your cell phone; Vegas, that glittering mashup of simulacra, where all of human history and geography has been folded into a single origami figure, a mile long and a single street wide, each iconic monument adjusted to fit the sensibilities and expectations of tourists – clean, pristine and pretty, and above all BIG, and stripped of all those pesky historical contexts and social meanings – all spectacle, all surface and no depth, all stimulus all the time, leviathans of past civilizations vaguely famous to their viewers but without any raison d'etre except that they look cool; an approximation of humankind's achievements served up for dull consumption by a deep-pocketed and attention-deficit public, remodeled in Mobster Chic.

Vegas, where it's nighttime twenty-four hours a day, where you can watch 51 television screens simultaneously and bet on the outcome of the game playing on each one, a pyramid to your left and live lions to your right and New Orleans behind and the New York skyline ahead, a stogie in your mouth and a drink in your hand and a naked lady on your knee, while an all-you-can-eat buffet awaits you and your jumble of electronic devices; Vegas, where the floors are of marble and the ceilings are thirty feet high, and the more opulent the setting, the more jaded the visitor; Vegas, where the five senses are beat off round the clock, while the mind is neither shaken nor stirred. Vegas, had I not studied Art History, I might not understand who you really are: a monument to that blank-eyed, all-imbibing, un-ironic facet of the American character that says, who needs the original Venice? – in Las Vegas we can all be Meyer Lansky.

Motivation Affects Perception

2011-06-03T17:05:00.000-07:00

We peer at the world, all of us, through the thick lenses of our own points of view. My recent study of art history reminds me that we cannot do otherwise. Our vision is always distorted, and sometimes it is obscured.

Here's an example: I came upon this famous painting the other day. I was quite taken with it – and I completely missed the point.

In Art History class we'd been observing a lot of portraits of upper-class Renaissance women, and there's a sad sameness to them. They tend to be quite covered-up, expensively but conservatively dressed.

They are always in profile, so that they themselves cannot engage the viewer: they're the objects, but not the subjects, of their own portraits. They're nearly always in tiny, shallow enclosed spaces, because, in fact, they lived mostly small and shuttered lives. If there's landscape in the background, it's so their husbands can show off their land holdings, among their other possessions. The women in these paintings were pretty jewels kept in jewelry boxes, from which the lid was sometimes lifted so they could be shown off for a time.

When I stumbled on Titian's 1538 Venus of Urbino, I wanted to shout, Hallelujah! This Venus is out of the box! Hers is a sense of spaciousness; there's more than room to swing a cat in her suite, and she is stretched out, langorous. Nor is she denied her gaze, but looks right at the viewer with a comfortable, almost bemused expression. Oh, and she's buck naked, and very much at home in her skin. We never even get to see the skin of those other women, much less learn how they feel about it, or about anything else. I was very happy for Venus.

But then I learned (and I wanted to smack myself on the forehead for overlooking the obvious) that the Venus of Urbino was a pin-up girl. She was commissioned by Guidobaldo della Rovere, Duke of Urbino, for his home (his locker room wall, perhaps?). Titian named her “Venus” to toss a veil of respectable classical antiquity over her nudity, but he wasn't really trying very hard; unlike Botticelli's and Giorgione's Venuses – preceding female nudes in Renaissance painting – this goddess appears not in a mythological setting but in the Duke's own house, with the duke's dog at her feet and his servants at the back of the room. (The handmaiden kneeling on the floor appears to be hurling into the hope chest.) Venus has one hand draped over her bush, but is she modestly shielding it, or drawing attention to it? Or is she playing with herself? Whatever she's up to, the disappointing truth is that she's doing it for the duke's entertainment and not her own. I had completely misinterpreted the painting, and I was crushed.

Perhaps this painting, like all enduring works of art, holds meaning that was undreamed of by its intended audience in 1538. After all, Guidobaldo, the old goat, has been compost for 500 years now, but Venus is still kickin' it. Here's what I think: The Palazzo delle Rovere an all-female household these days, and its inhabitants like to run around in their birthday suits, take the dog out for a game of fetch, play ping-pong, and make their own art. The woman at the back of the room is rummaging through the chest looking for a tube of Titian Red oil paint. Or maybe she's getting out the party hats and noisemakers, because tonight the other Venuses are coming over for a slumber party, and after a skinny dip in the courtyard, they're going to make an enormous bowl of popcorn and watch Thelma and Louise.

Annunciation

2011-05-28T18:39:00.000-07:00

The Virgin Mary is a woman after my own heart, at least as she appears in 15th-century paintings of the Annunciation.

The Annunciation is the moment in the Mary story when the archangel Gabriel appears to Mary to tell her that she will bear the Christ child. (According to Catholic tradition, the angel greets Mary with “Ave, Maria,” and it is the word “ave” that actually impregnates her. I've always loved the comic understatement from the book of Luke that follows: “Mary was troubled, and considered in her mind what sort of greeting this might be.”)

This moment appears in hundreds of paintings; it is beloved of artists in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. When Gabriel comes calling, Mary is usually home alone. In the medieval period, she's often shown making handicrafts. But some time in the 10^th or 11^th century, Mary learned to read, and from then on, Gabriel always finds her with her nose in a book.

Some paintings capture the moment just before the angel speaks, and Mary – here's where she's most my kindred spirit – is so engrossed in her reading that she fails to notice the large winged being who's materialized at her side. In other depictions, Gabriel has just finished delivering his unlikely message. Ever the model of the good Renaissance woman, Mary registers no surprise. Nor does she betray annoyance at the interruption. But – this is the best detail of all – in many of these paintings, she keeps her place in her book with one finger, so she can go back to her reading when the angel takes his leave.

And what is it that she's reading? Blessed are the art historians, for they shall uncover the answer to this and even more obscure questions! Certain paintings actually show words on the page, tiny and perfect, and some clever scholar has gotten out a magnifying glass and a good Latin-English dictionary and ascertained that Mary is reading not A Room of One's Own, but rather the Book of Isaiah, which prophesies the birth of the savior to a virgin.

The expression on Mary's face as she receives the angel's communique is often described as “modest” and “demure,” but I know what she's thinking beneath that polite exterior: “Couldn't he have waited til I got to the end of a chapter?”

Pre-Owned Owns

2011-05-07T21:52:00.000-07:00

Some people think that re-gifiting is cheap, tacky or even a statement about the low esteem in which the gifter holds the giftee. Rick and I, on the other hand, are lucky to run in a circle that embraces regifts as the earth-friendliest way to fête a friend.

Yesterday was Rick's birthday, and I got him long-longed-for computer speakers to replace the old ones that had died. Better yet -- for him, not just for me -- I got them off Craigslist for two dollars. The pleasure Rick takes in a present is inversely proportionate to how much you spend on him. The fact of getting a really good deal is a second present for him all unto itself.

And buying stuff used might be our best weapon in the war on plastic. Really, apart from a few choice items -- shoes, power tools, undies -- it is hardly ever necessary to buy a thing new. By buying used, we sidestep packaging; we avoid generating demand for the manufacture of a replacement item with all the resources and embedded energy it takes to make it; we save money; and we get a little zing from the thrill of the find. Garage sales, Goodwill, Craigslist, Ebay, classifieds, Freecycle and second-hand shops are the Seven Green Wonders of the World. Or at least of the Retail Continent. And let's face it -- in a culture as rich as ours, a person can live pretty well on cast-offs.

A Small Contribution to the Lexicon of Musicology and/or the Human Condition

2011-04-17T17:59:00.000-07:00

From time to time I am seized with an experience both vivid and peculiar that I've never spoken to anyone about, because I haven't had a way to name it. It happened again yesterday, and so I coined a word: musikschmerz.

The term riffs on the German weltschmerz, “world-pain,” which is the intense pain you can feel over the suffering of humanity. I have attacks of weltschmerz while reading the paper sometimes, and I have to push my oatmeal to one side and rest my forehead on the kitchen table and cry. For whatever strange reason, certain compelling pieces of music can provoke a similarly anguished sensation.

Some months ago I read an essay by James Wood in the New Yorker on rock drumming. I confess I'd never paid much attention to rock drumming before, but the article was so lucid and so delightful that I kept it, with the intention of finding all the songs he writes about and trying to pick out the techniques he analyzes in his piece.

Late yesterday afternoon I needed a break from my work, so I got out the Wood article and my laptop. The focus of the article is really Keith Moon, the long-dead drummer for The Who, but as a point of comparison Wood starts with a brief description of Ringo Starr's drumming in The Beatles' “Carry That Weight.”

I knew “Carry That Weight” the way that all of us know all Beatles songs, because they are everywhere. I couldn't have told you the name of that piece if I heard it, nor did I know any of the lyrics. I couldn't think how “Carry That Weight” went until Wood quoted the chorus: “Boy, you're gonna carry that weight / carry that weight a long time.” I thought, oh, yeah, I know that song. Then I thought, yeah, I like that song. Then I thought, wow, those are good lyrics.

So yesterday I found the song on Youtube, and I never made it to Quadrophenia – never made it past the first page of the Wood article at all – because I was overcome by a full-blown episode of musikschmerz.

The early phase of musikschmerz is about the joy of discovery. Such simple chord progressions, such simple phrasing, and yet such genius! I read a little more, I listened again. But then curious joy turned a corner, as it will do in such an attack, and became something like pain. That beautiful music thrust a dagger into my heart; those beautiful lyrics gave the dagger a twist. Pain gave way to obsession, and I listened over and over, 20, 30 times. I tracked down the lyrics and memorized them, memorized every nuance of the instrumentation.

You might all still be with me at this point, because everyone loves some pieces of music; we are hard-wired to love music. But when my musikschmerz works up a real head of steam, it becomes imperative that I play the song myself. (By play, I mean on the guitar, or recently and with somewhat more felicitous results, on the piano.) The internet has made it possible to look up chords and lyrics for any song every written, and to look up lessons for playing those chords if you don't know them already, so musikschmerz often sends me into a frenzy of research, notetaking, and testing things out. The sensation is urgent and painful, and I usually end up messing with my instrument until I'm emotionally spent. The canyon between my abilities and my desires is almost always excruciating, but that's not the source of the pain. Musikschmerz is the sensation of being stabbed by beauty, and of being compelled to drive the blade in a little deeper in imitation. I manage to produce just enough satisfying moments, make just enough pleasing sounds, that I keep coming back for more.

So it was that Rick found me last night when he came home from a hard day's work. I had not put the chicken in the oven to bake. Neither had I cleaned up the puddle of cat pee by the door. I was in the back room surrounded by bits of paper with scribbles on them like “D7sus 4=D,GA, C,” and with my laptop, and my piano, and a dagger in my heart – and how could I explain?

Funeral for an Old Friend

2011-04-09T17:53:00.000-07:00

The dear old truck!

It became a member of the Underwood family in 1981, when it was brand-new and bright cherry red. I learned to drive in that truck, nearly taking it into a ditch once when my mother was giving me lessons – wisely, out in the country somewhere. Not long after that lesson she and I drove across the country, almost the whole length of Interstate 70, to visit family in Pennsylvania. I'm sure the truck can still recite from memory the Tennyson we read aloud on the way.

The truck made another long voyage on I-70 in the other direction when, because of my mother's generosity, I was allowed to take my British boyfriend to the Grand Canyon in it. We slept in the back; the truck had a camper shell in those days. The screws holding the camper shell in place eventually rattled loose, and on another memorable drive one afternoon the whole thing lifted and twisted off while we were going sixty down the freeway. We left it in a ditch – hhmm, lots of ditches along roads in Kansas, I guess – to call my parents and find out what to do. When we returned to the scene, another motorist was making off with the camper shell. Sheepish, he offered us fifty bucks for it, which we took.

The truck took me back and forth between my home town and my university countless times, sometimes loaded with bedding and books, sometimes empty because I was homesick and only going down for a weekend visit. In its cassette player I listened to my Workingman's Dead so many times the tape grew thin and snapped, getting tangled in the sprockets the way tapes did, the way only people over 40 remember.

The truck was with my parents all through the 80s and into the early 90s. By that time I was married and a mother, and poor as Oklahoma dirt during the dust bowl. For the great sum of three hundred dollars my then-husband got a real estate license, but he needed a respectable vehicle to do the job. So my generous parents sold us the truck for a dollar, and we spruced it up – it got a new coat of paint, canary-yellow this time – and it helped us make a living for half a decade. Then it became my commuter car, still getting good gas mileage though it suffered the slings and arrows of fortune: it got rear-ended once, and another time someone drove right into the door, so that it never shut quite right again.

The truck got stolen once and turned up, about a mile from home, just as I had given up all hope of recovering it. I was headed home from a shopping excursion (in a borrowed car). I went to turn on my usual street, but a cab was blocking the way, so I drove up to the next block, a street I never traveled, and turned there – and came upon my dear old truck. Joyriders had ruined the ignition, so I learned to hot-wire it myself, and that's how I drove it for a long time until I could afford to have a new ignition switch installed.

Old dogs get gray around their muzzles, and old trucks get rusty around theirs. One time when I took the truck into a drive-through car wash, parts fell off.

I bought a Cabriolet convertible, and the truck became a secondary vehicle, something to move couches in or haul horse manure for the garden. Rick came along – I was long-divorced by then – and he was in need of a truck for his own business as a residential remodeler. So I traded the truck for an equivalent value in labor around my house, which meant Rick was there a lot, and, well, you can see where that got us. The truck can claim not only to be versed in poetry and 1960s folk-rock, a faithful travel companion and co-worker, but a matchmaker of sorts as well.

The dear old truck worked hard in its late years. It carried heavy loads – plywood, table saws. It got so rattlingly noisy there was no hope of listening to music in the cab. The driver's-side sun visor fell off, so driving became both a deafening and a blinding act. Eventually the passenger door couldn't be unlocked and its window couldn't be unrolled. The vinyl seat covers split and foam stuffing began to pooch out. Rust ate a hole right through the floor at the driver's feet; you could see the road flying by under you, and clouds of carbon monoxide blew up from below and into the cab. Finally the truck began to lose bodily fluids. For months, Rick refilled the radiator before starting the motor each morning. But the day came when its motor would not turn over. It was time.

We held a little funeral service. I put a bouquet of flowers under the windshield wipers and said a few words about what a good truck it had been and about all the memories we shared. Then the tow-truck man came and took our friend away.

I like to think of the dear old truck now, motor purring, bright cherry red once again and with all its parts intact, breezing past the roadside ditches with the music blaring, on that great interstate freeway in the sky.

Contraindicated

2011-03-13T16:26:00.000-07:00

I had a little too much coffee this morning, an accident that even by itself can result in unpremeditated shopping. Then I made a questionable judgment call that wreaked havoc on my neurobiology.

Coffee is a wonderful drug, but it's difficult to titrate. Too little, and it has no impact. Too much, and it gives me a sensation of waiting in the wings before delivering an important speech before a crowd of thousands. If I get the dose just right I'm jubilant, though not dangerously so. But today I landed somewhere between jubilant and petrified. Then I mixed medicines, and all was lost.

Normally a rainy Sunday afternoon in March would find me in a slump induced by low barometric pressure and the looming prospect of another work week. I don't want to leave the house for any reason, least of all to make purchases, an activity of which, puritan environmentalist that I am, I normally disapprove. But in my altered state, all things seemed possible: sculpted abs, income taxes filed on time, even dressing well. So it was that I found myself turning my car up Southeast Hawthorne, that hipster boulevard, perhaps the hipsterest of all boulevards in America. Grinding my teeth (in a happy way), I told myself I was okay because I managed to bypass the skirt of tree-frog green -- my favorite color! -- and the stripy pants so hypnotic they made my eyes twirl in opposite directions in their sockets. But I wasn't okay. I was going to the bookstore.

Uncaffeinated, I am a stern taskmaster in the bookstore. Hardcovers are strictly off-limits. New releases are not to be perused. In fact, browsing in general is frowned upon. Lest I lose all control, I keep my eyes on my boots as I speed past the display aisles, beelining for the computer to look up a pre-approved title. But today the sly bookstore people -- damn them! -- had placed titles by two of my favorite authors on sale. Yellow sale stickers flashed in my peripheral vision as I tried to hurry past them. I had told myself I would look for just one book, and if they didn't have it, I'd place an order and leave. Now I started playing little mind games: I'll open it up to a random page, I said to myself, and I won't buy it if I see anything there that doesn't grab me. I won't buy it unless it's second-hand. I won't buy it if it's more than seven dollars. Soon I had a stack of Alexander McCall Smiths under my arm. I took myself by the elbow and steered myself away, but did not escape the bookstore altogether until I'd added a Michael Chabon and two Mike Davises to my stash.

I can handle either drug by itself. Really, I can. But two Americanos and a book sale and I'm tweaking in the mystery aisle. Clearly, coffee and books should not be taken together.

Career Aspirations

2011-02-14T22:20:00.000-08:00

A few days ago I read in the paper about a Furbearing Carnivore Coordinator, and I knew right away that that was what I wanted to be when I grew up. I don't know if U.S. Fish and Wildlife would have me, even though I am experienced; I coordinate all the meals of the furbearing carnivores in my household (and many of the meals of the skinbearing carnivores as well). But it hardly matters; it's the title I covet. Maybe I can claim the name even in the absence of recognition or a paycheck, the same way that when I book an airline ticket I often select for myself the title "Captain," "Abbess" or "Emir."

If I absolutely can't be an F.C.C., then I want to become a Volunteer Bear Tech. Bear Techs defend the right of bears in national parks to be wild animals. The position involves educating and monitoring the skinbearers in the parks so they don't do stupid things like feed the bears. Probably I lack the qualifications for this job, but I would be proud even to hold the title Assistant Volunteer Bear Tech.

I once met a woman from Eastern Oregon whose job entailed her being lowered by helicopter into the company of moose. She tranquilized and tagged the animals so that the state could get a clearer picture of the size, habits and health of the herd. I likely possess no skills that could qualify me as a Moose Elucidator. But that doesn't stop me from dreaming. I may hold that title yet, if the furbearers in my home ever learn to cook for themselves.

A National Holiday

2011-02-08T19:22:00.000-08:00

Shocking but true: two nights ago, I attended my very first Super Bowl party.

How could I have reached my fifth decade and never observed this most American of holidays? My father would have taught me to love football, but in childhood I was a patent-leather, hair-bow-wearing girlie-girl and wanted nothing to do with such things. As a young adult I suffered from severe Leftist Disapproval of Sport. And later I dated a series of non-Americans who understood no more of downs and yardlines than I did of sticky wickets. So my football viewing, and my experience of the famous parties associated with it, has come late in life.

As new life experiences go, it ranks with my first encounter of the Grateful Dead as a college freshman -- I didn't get what all the fuss was about. But the Dead grew on me with time, and I think football and its group rites might as well. Our hosts had a screen in every room so you could meet all bodily needs without missing a play. Naturally, the teenagers gathered near the food (I took tabbouli to share. Well, somebody had to provide whole grains and fresh vegetables, didn't she?) We arranged ourselves in proximity to the t.v., for some reason, in inverse proportion to our commitment to the game. Toddlers, doting grandparents and dogs sat close in. The socializers settled behind them. Lining the periphery were the real fans, unsmiling, arms crossed, clothed in vestments of team colors. They made no small talk, but exploded in joy or rage from time to time. My friend Suzy, a native Pittsburgher, wore Steelers earrings and carried a Cheez-It colored towel. She cried when it was over.

I didn't track the game real well, but that's what Rick is for. (I returned the favor by explaining pop culture references in the ads). The running and falling down seem straightforward enough. Other rules, not so much: there's a 15-yard penalty for excessive celebrating, for example, but none for giving another man early Alzheimer's. But the sport offers other delights. The players' names, for example: Driver and Battle (their teammates Steamer, Squasher, Skirmish, Mêlée and Fracas had been sidelined); Zombo, Atari and Beluga (well --that last guy turned out to be Bulaga, alas).

Our party was a microcosm of bipartisan civility and mutual tolerance. Cheeseheads and black-and-goldbloods shared the sofa with nary a snarky comment. My Pennsylvania birth notwithstanding, I was rooting (don't tell Suzy) for Green Bay. The team is the only professional sport franchise in America that is publicly-owned. The Packers belong to the people of Green Bay. They're, like, the food co-op of professional football.

I should have been ecstatic when they prevailed. But I think I might need more practice as a fan, the way I needed to hear "American Beauty" about a dozen times before I embraced the Dead. I'll get another chance: the Packers are already holding 7/1 odds for taking Super Bowl 2012.

A Mystery Solved

2011-01-28T18:33:00.000-08:00

Barring very cold weather, our cats sleep out of the house. Not outside, mind you, but not inside with us where they would wake us at 3 a.m. in a fit of flesh-kneading affection and high-decibel purring, or scratch and meow to go in and out of the bedroom repeatedly, or leave a nice puddle of pee at the door for us to tramp in first thing in the morning in our sock feet. Unless it’s close to freezing, out they go – to the laundry room, from which they can exit the house via a kitty door or go upstairs to the loft and sleep on Christmas ornaments and papers from graduate school.

The loft is accessible only by a wooden ladder nailed to the laundry room wall, and each cat has its own method of ascending. Dylan likes to start at the far end of the room and attack the ladder while running full tilt. Max, ever cautious, climbs one slow paw at a time. And Fiona – to be honest, I don’t know how Fiona gets up there, but I know how she gets down: she drops from the opening in the ceiling like a great orange hailstone and lands with a tremendous, reverberating metallic clang on the lid of the washing machine.

Said washing machine stopped working the other day. Rick dismantled it and found a broken part. He took it to the washing-machine-fix-it place, and the washing-machine-fix-it-people told him our problem was due to our slamming the lid. What? we said. We are mild-mannered people, slammers of nothing. Ah, but an orange cannonball shoots from the ceiling every morning and blasts the washer on its way to breakfast. Mystery solved.

Solved, but not resolved. How to protect our appliances while accommodating our cats? Cat-devotion and carpentry come together. A duct passes through (and warms) a little nook behind the wall of the laundry room on its way to my office. We created a cat-sized entrance to the nook and we put some old wool sweaters on the floor. Now the cats have a cozy little bedroom all their own.

Culture Shock

2011-01-14T17:06:00.000-08:00

A tether ball pole in front of a house on Alameda Ridge put me in mind, the other day, of sixth grade. I had never encountered tether ball until we moved to Kansas, and in my early days as a sixth-grader I was daunted by the speed and violence involved in its execution. Neither had I ever seen foursquare, to which I reacted with much the same alarm. These aggressive games contributed to my culture shock after our relocation. We'd only moved two states over, but everything was different here: the milk smelled funny; the floor plan of the classroom invited far too much cooperation among children; and worst of all, boys and girls played together at recess.

My former playground, in Laramie, Wyoming, had been strictly sex-segregated. I spent my hours there with my girlfriends practicing to become a horror-movie actress, screaming at the top of my lungs and recoiling at the sight of imagined horrors. I don't know what the boys did at recess, but it was incumbent upon us to hate one another whenever we had contact: to the boys fell the job of mean-spirited taunting and pranks, and to the girls, the job of being disgusted and disdainful.

As I recall there were a few exceptions. A neighbor named Ken who was in my class walked the same direction home as I, and we enjoyed a jolly friendship, albeit one that was limited to those three blocks each afternoon. At some point I stopped thinking of Ken as a boy; he was just Ken. Also I had a mad crush on Pete. Pete was short, cute, freckled and gregarious. He had a solo part in the school's Christmas pageant: the class choir sang "I'm Gettin' Nuttin' For Chistmas," and when we got to the end of the line "Mommy and Daddy are mad," it was Pete's job to holler "Boy are they mad!" Pete also contributed the winning name in the contest to christen our classroom's white mouse. The mouse was dubbed Puff, undeniably the best possible name for it. (My friend Tricia offered up the name Bilbo, which I had to privately admit was also a very fine and erudite name for a mouse and a close second to Puff.) I myself had not wanted to volunteer any old received idea of a name for the mouse; I wanted to invent a name. I screwed my brain tight and concocted "Twinx," which I then had to spell for the teacher, knowing in my heart it was a terrible name and that it would only serve to reinforce the general perception of my weirdness and the fact that Pete was way out of my league. It all ended after a few weeks anyway, when my best friend outed me by telling Pete that I privately referred to him as Sweet Pete. I had to give up liking him then. (I have never quite forgiven her that betrayal).

At any rate, I had no idea whatsoever how to behave on the playground in Kansas when faced with friendly, egalitarian interaction between my kind and my sworn enemies. I had never seen such a spectacle, and after humiliating myself a few times on the foursquare court and at the foot of the tetherball pole, I retreated to a safe spot on the stairs leading to the school's back doors. I made friends with some fourth-graders, and eventually gained a reputation as someone who would do a British accent on request. Only younger students ever approached me, though. My sixth-grade classmates were busy with their own incomprehensible, violently high-speed, unisex endeavors.

Literary Pilgrimages

2010-12-31T09:49:00.000-08:00

I traveled more in 2010 than in any previous year of my life -- 12 out-of-state trips in 12 months -- and on some of those trips I inadvertently happened upon holy sites. In September, driving north through California on our way home from Yosemite, Rick and I passed through Calaveras County, home of the celebrated (or notorious, depending on which version of Twain's story you favor) jumping frog. In case you fail to notice that you are on hallowed ground, you are startled into awareness by the numerous, very large jumping frogs gracing the main street of the town of Angel's Camp. Blame my cats if he don't weigh five pound!

In October I had the fortune to happen down the very street in Key West where Hemingway wrote A Farewell to Arms. I didn't go into the house, but peered over the garden wall at it. The best thing about the Hemingway House is that about 60 descendants of his polydactyl cats still live there. They have names like Emily Dickinson, Archibald MacLeish and Gertrude Stein. The H.H. website has this, among other things, to say about them:

The vet comes to the museum to administer their yearly shots. The whole procedure is [....] a cat rodeo, with cats being rounded up by means of treats, and the vet administering shots as fast as possible with the help of staff members. The job must be done rapidly, since the cats soon sense that something is amiss and will begin howling warnings, and slinking and scurrying in all directions.

In November I traveled to Boston. I didn't have a lot of time to poke around what must be a trove of findings literary and otherwise. But one morning I did take a hop-on-hop-off bus around the city's historic center. You know: pub where the Boston Tea Party was planned; church with the one-if-by-land,two-if-by-sea steeple, and a lot of other neat old stuff. We drove past the cemetery where lie the remains of the woman who inspired the creation of Hester Prynne, as well as a house -- now a burrito joint -- where Edgar Allen Poe lived. Most magnificent of all, I was able to stroll in the Boston Public Garden and visit the sculptural homage to Robert McCloskey's "Make Way for Ducklings," which is of course set in that park.

So I finish the year with my horizons broadened and my spirit fortified. 2011 will no doubt grace me with more literary field trips, some of them perhaps even intentional.

all photos by Jan Underwood

A Warm Christmas Memory

2010-12-22T18:53:00.000-08:00

That first winter we were together, Rick could not help but notice how cold I always was, from my core to the tips of my toes and fingers, and especially my nose (perhaps because it protrudes so far from the windbreak of my face.) For Christmas that year he bought me all manner of warm clothes: long johns and fleece pullovers and hats and gloves and thick furry socks. And he asked our friend the lovely and talented Asia Henderson to knit me a nose-mitten, which she did, in festive red wool with two dear little nostril-holes and ribbons to tie it to my head.

My nose-mitten really does keep my nose warm, but I've only had the nerve to wear it in public once. I donned it for a wintry hike on Mt. Tabor, and the other hikers gave me some very, very strange looks. Rick maintains they were jealous.

Light One Locally Made, Vegetable-Dye-Containing, Hemp-Packaged Candle

2010-12-08T17:00:00.000-08:00

Shortly before Hanukkah, Rick went to the grocery store to get candles for the menorah. Hanukkah candles come in packages of 45, which is how many you need to get through a Hanukkah season. Rick knew that; what he didn't know is how many varieties there are. He didn't want to get the wrong thing. So he asked a store employee for help: Now, how does this work? Are the white ones for Orthodox Jews, the blue-and-white ones for Conservative? What do Reform, Reconstructionist, Renewal Jews light? Which ones do the Lubavitchers favor? Maybe it doesn't work like that; maybe the blue-and-white ones, for example, represent the pro-Israel lobby. The store employee felt himself unequal to the task of addressing these concerns. He went and got Sarah, the resident Judaica expert at that supermarket. Rick put his question to Sarah.

"I know what you need," said Sarah. "Wait right here." She returned with a package of rainbow-colored candles. "These," she said, "are for Oregon Jews."

De Gustibus Non Disputandum Est

2010-12-03T09:34:00.000-08:00

Some curiosity was piqued the other day when in a blog entry I went into fits of exultation over a novel. People wanted to know what work could have inspired such excess of prose, and I’m willing to reveal its title, but with a caveat (caveat: that’s Latin, you know), that a book that sends one reader over the edge leaves another perfectly indifferent, and a book that one reader shrugs over is read and re-read and re-read until the cover crackles and the spine breaks. So it goes. De gustibus non disputandum est: one mustn’t quibble over matters of taste.

The truth about this particular novel is that it’s ruined reading for me, at least at the moment. I’ve picked up five or six books since then and set them down again because they didn’t measure up. I know I’ll get over it; I have been similarly afflicted many times before. I felt this way about Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, and about Alexandra Fuller’s crazy memoir Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight. At least three novels by Ursula LeGuin have left me feeling I never wanted to read anything else (I’m thinking of The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness and Always Coming Home. I’m sure I’m in crowded company on the point of LeGuin’s genius, though we might differ about the winning titles). Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic nightmare The Road is absolutely flawless and kept me up all night once last July. When I read A Primate’s Memoir, Robert Sapolsky’s account of living among a tribe of Kenyan baboons, I wanted to marry him; then I thought, no; I want to be him. I think Ann Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down should be required reading for being human. Kurt Vonnegut’s Bluebeard ruined reading for me for a time; I decided to read nothing but Vonnegut forever after, until I proceeded to another of his novels that left me saying, “Meh.” (Helter-Skelter, for those of you keeping score at home). A very large number of children’s books have put me in this worshipful state: The Phantom Tollbooth, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass; No Flying in the House (undeservedly not famous, I think) and anything by E.L. Konigsberg or Zilpha Keatly Snyder, to rattle off a few. The first adult book I can remember striking me like lightening was The World According to Garp, which I read at 15; the first book I read as a (sort of) adult myself that smote me thus was Great Expectations. I’m sure there are many more in the list, and it is only the power of amazing books to dim the memory of those that preceded them that prevents me from calling them all to mind.

But the book that left me slack-jawed, wide-eyed, and dumbstruck a few weeks ago was Michael Chabon’s Yiddish Policeman’s Union. Every word of this extraordinary work of imagination is in its rightful place. I fell in love with all its characters, with its setting, with its loony premise (in it, Israel did not become a Jewish state after the Second World War. Instead, the Jewish diaspora settled in Sitka. YPU imagines an alternative history that leads to jewels like this: "The winter sky of southeastern Alaska is a Talmud of gray, an inexhaustible commentary on a Torah of rain clouds and dying light." Or this: "Berko Shemets is observant, but in his own way and for his own reasons...He came to live with [them] in ...1981, a shambling giant boy known, in the Sea Monster House of the Raven Moiety of the Longhair Tribe, as Johnny 'the Jew' Bear." ) The thing is masterfully plotted, doubling as it does as a murder mystery in a slyly hard-boiled style, but is beautifully crafted at the level of the sentence as well; Chabon has a way with a metaphor like no one else. And it’s funny. So funny and wonderful and well-made that I haven’t been able to read anything since, and have been flapping around at loose ends for weeks now, naked without a novel to read.

It may be that YPU would be less delightful to the reader who is not Jewishly literate. It is packed with real and Chabon-invented Yiddishisms, for one thing. The reader will work out their meaning from context, but if you already know that a Shoyfer is a ram's horn blown ceremonially to usher in certain holidays, there is extra pleasure in discovering that "Shoyfer" is the name of a brand of cell phone used in Chabon's Sitka. If you don't know what tefillin are, the glossary at the back can't replace the jolt you get at the image of a Jewish junkie using his tefillin to tie off before he shoots up. On a larger level, the book is a meditation on Jewish identity and the nature of Jewish homelessness: "There is no Messiah of Sitka. Landsman has no home, no future, no fate but Bina. The land that he and she were promised was bounded only by the fringes of their wedding canopy, by the dog-eared corners of their cards of membership in an international fraternity whose members carry their patrimony in a tote bag, their world on the tip of the tongue." Some reading pleasure would be lost to readers who can't place passages like that onto a larger map of understanding and empathy that they already possess. Hence de gustibus. Or, so as not to mix metaphors: Strashen net de genz (Yiddish: Don't disturb the geese; don't shoot your mouth off.) After all, Zolst helfen vi a toyten bankes. Quibbling helps like medicine helps the dead.

For my part, meanwhile, I’ve decided to establish a new religious order, the Chabonites. Instead of praying or doing good works, we will read the works of Michael Chabon all day and into the night. We’ll read them all, and when we’ve come to the bottom of the stack we’ll start over again. That should cure me, til I’m led astray by some other wordsmith. I hear Jonathan Franzen has a new book out...

The Tenth Book

2010-11-05T17:30:00.000-07:00

Say you read ten books.

If you're like my mother, who reads the way a cheetah lights out after prey, then you read them in a single bound. If you have two jobs, four cats, sleep apnea and ADD, like someone else I know, maybe you don't leap through them quite so quickly. Whatever your pace, you read ten. And this is what it's like:

One book, a work of nonfiction, has some useful stuff in it amid a bunch of chapters not germane. You skim it, pull out the goodies, sell it back to Powell's.

A second, enticing from the outside, must be rejected after 40 pages because its narrative voice annoys you so very much.
Three you gobble up in as many days, and they are juicy, heartpounding, gory treats, but they're formula murder mysteries. They're not going to change your life.

One is a dense, slowgoing but compelling work with lots of footnotes, every letter of which you savor. You think about it for weeks. You talk to yourself about it in the car because no one else in your life gives a crap about its subject matter.

Two more are novels with moments of beauty and insight. They are flawed. They leave swaths of character undeveloped, plot threads untangled. There are parts you just don't get. You like them, but there it is.

Two others are pretty darn good reads. You keep them on your shelf, think fondly of them, recommend them, quote them to your friends.

And then there's the Tenth Book.

From the first paragraph you want to curl into a ball and suck your thumb because you weren't born its author. You want to run outside throwing your arms wide shouting Thank You Universe that I am literate! And greedy, gluttonous, you want to keep reading on and reading, reading and reading and reading but you forbid that it should ever end. You can't look at the author's jacket photo because it makes you want to scratch his eyes out in a jealous rage. And you are so in love that when at night it's time to slip the book onto your nightstand you kiss its cover first. You remember: this is why I read. You remember: this is why I breathe.

The Tenth Book illuminates all your humanity, it illuminates all humanity's humanity, and if only you could tear yourself from its pages you'd run under the sky and cry out Thank You Universe that I was born into a species that evolved the capacity for speech! A rain of blessings on the Sumerians for inventing the alphabet! -- bless your cuneiform, bless your clay tablets! Hail Ramses III and his papyrus histories! Hail the Aztec codices! Thank you librarians of Alexandria, of Kells! Cascades of gratitude for Carolingian monks, for scholars of Byzantium, for Gutenberg! Thank you Chinese paper-makers, thank you Remington and IBM! Praise the concocters of the First Amendment! And praise, praise that long long line of authorial ancestors, known and unknown, read and unread, whose collective efforts made the Tenth Book possible. Here I am, Universe, in all my human rawness and my radiance, in all my human joyous anguish, oh Thank You Universe thank you that a spark of life occurred in this coil of flesh with eyes that take in scribbles on a page with a bivalve brain that can decipher with a pair of prehensile grippers to turn a page thank you for this flank of meat gainfully employed so as to have two coins to rub together before spending them at the bookstore thank you thank you that this energy congealed into matter in such a place thank you that this craving heart has kept on beating thank you so that I might arrive at this moment thank you so that I could read this book.

A Perfectly Portland Wedding

2010-10-29T21:52:00.000-07:00

My friends Sean and Dvorah got married last night, in their condo in the heart of the Sovereign Nation of Southeast Portland, and I had the honor of attending. They wed for that most sentimental of reasons, health insurance. Sean organized the whole thing in a period of twenty-four hours, rounding up rings, witnesses and a judge who makes house calls.

When I arrived a throng of adults in witch hats were running up and down the sidewalk, drawing arrows in chalk and communicating with one another by walkie-talkie -- engaged, evidently, in some pre-Halloween merriment unrelated to the ceremony upstairs.

The wedding party consisted of six -- the happy couple, three friends, and the judge, dressed in orange fleece. "Would you like a glass of tap water?" Dvorah asked her. "We're indulging tonight."

The paperwork took longer than the ceremony. I cried anyway. I don't remember precisely what the judge said, but her speech included the word "troth," which I thought was classy. She went on her way, and the rest of us sat in the living room for an hour and enjoyed one another's company quite a lot. We exchanged anecdotes about dressing for Halloween as cauliflowers, about encountering unexpected geese frozen in blocks of ice in shower stalls, and the like.

After a round of hugs and mazel tovs, I bundled in my rain gear and set out to pedal home. As I was leaving the condo, I saw at the end of the block a man, in the dark, in the rain, in the street, bouncing up and down very high on a pogo stick.