stroobly

Tucker Max, you make me laugh

2006-02-05T23:02:00.000-08:00

Damn it, I have to post again, about a writer so funny that I actually read the book in one sitting--I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell--by Tucker Max. It's not the kind of book you can read the funny bits out loud to people at work though, unless they can composedly take in stride what has to be, hands down, the best anal sex scene in American letters. I laughed, I wept, I howled so loudly the neighbors would have thought there was something funky going on had they been able to hear it over the Super Bowl. I haven't enjoyed a grandstanding, cocky twenty-something smartass so much in years. The book is a Rake's Progress of comic incidents involving sex and alcohol--in varying degrees but near constant presence--that won't be shocking to anyone who went to college and attended parties of, shall we say, substance, but he tells his tales well. It is best to let him take you for the ride and not expect too much--good advice for both his bed partners and readers--trust me, you will not be reading this book for its tender, sensitive portrayals of youth.

2005-08-21T00:35:00.000-07:00

Nothing much new in the dog days of summer. All booksellers wait patiently with their eyes on the door for the next Big Thing to be delivered. In the meantime, here's a bookstore story from Pete, who was scanning in religion the other morning and heard--but couldn't see--a group of older ladies sitting in chairs talking...

"See how firm my bottom is, I've been working on it, it's really lovely, here, feel for yourself, feel how even it is..."

"Oh yes, that is nice and tight."

"Mine's nice too, feel this..."

"Oh my, that is nice."

"Oh, dear, well, mine's all loose and wobbly, here, feel this, what do you think I'm doing wrong?"

At this point his curiosity won out and he walked around the bookcase to see what was going on and found a group of women...

Knitting.

As God is my witness, J.K. Rowling will never go hungry again

2005-07-25T22:25:00.000-07:00

All human energy has been sucked out of the universe by the Harry Potter phenomenon. I admire Ms. Rowling for being able to write under pressure; just selling a few thousand of the books has turned my hair grey and sent me in to early menopause. My ovaries decided there are enough children in the world--proven by the fact that I just saw most of them running by wearing big black glasses and capes. Edith Head would be so confused. Ok, my pick for the cutest costume was a very small child who was wearing a wide-eyed look, a pillow case, big ears and mis-matched socks--he was a house elf. Almost worth enduring child-bearing to get one like that. There were some very bad costumes--I had to ask a bookseller whether there was a chicken character I had somehow overlooked and was told that that was a phoenix, but really, it was a grown-up who was happy to be able to wear his chicken outfit out in public again. There were some serious goth/SM get-ups which seemed to be motivated mostly by the excitement generated by getting the cape out of the closet as opposed to any story tie-in. Much fun was had by all. Except the people who came in and told us we were going to hell because we were promoting pagan devil-worship that will rot children's souls and turn them in to godless zombies. What would Jesus do? I think Jesus would have come to the party.

Is it too late to revert to being a colony?

2005-07-13T21:25:00.000-07:00

Really, this is a primer on how to rationally react to irrational terrorist acts in your country: first seek to understand it, then stand up to it. No car decals necessary.

Streets filled with smoke, please advise

2005-07-04T22:33:00.000-07:00

New endeavors make me feel foolish, like there is a spotlight shining on the lunacy of trying to do something new or out of the ordinary. This pain is probably required, in that moving anywhere out of one's daily habitrail is by definition uncomfortable, and that unless you're saying to yourself--oh, fuck it, no-one really cares--you're not pushing yourself enough. Usually the best things that have happened to me were when I was able to channel said fuck-it attitude and turn off the spotlight. Perseverance in the face of self-ridicule: onward.

Tonight the streets were full of smoke from what must have been a thousand pounds of gunpowder. I feel queasy about the country, like we're teetering on the brink somehow. I'd like to think that we're big, messy and eventually able to find consensus, but I'm afraid instead we may be big, blind and losing sight of what we do best.

I think Americans are like crows; we borrow, steal and refashion shiny things we like, we're gluttonous consumers not only of stuff, but of ideas. But what to do with ideology that refutes the very principles we're ostensibly setting off all the fireworks for? People to whom pluralism, tolerance, pretty much any Enlightenment ideals at all, represent an annihilating threat? A threat serious enough to warrant destroying the idea of the republic itself, because [fill in religious figurehead here] wants it that way?

I don't think we're mapping this very well. Partly because we're lazy, and tolerant in a redneck-libertarian kind of way, and we think we'll pretty much squash everything in our path. I expect competing claims about what constitutes a patriot, what worries me is what the patriot is fighting for: is this a little revolution that is good for us, or a negation of the common ground that binds us together? I think the people who hate our freedom are right here at home.

It's hot.

2005-06-29T17:58:00.000-07:00

These desultory days I've been wandering in and out of sites; I can't seem to commit to the heat of writing, so all I can offer is what I've seen along the way...

Need summer music? Try Otto's. I can only get the dial-up link to work, but this music would probably be just as grand played on a transitor radio.

The Guardian has their style guide on-line, for when you're too lazy to get out of the chair and look it up, which, sadly, is most of the time for me. The prescriptions are British, so fellow Yanks take care.

Thank you Cool Tools: this is a great way to tie up cables; using velcro beats twist-ties from the grocery store.

This is the kind of backyard it would be nice to have now. [from the Edith Wharton collection at Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Worth a visit.]

The cool summer jewelry of Rena Tom. I would like one of each. [via Design*Sponge]

I don't even know how to sew, but I'm thinking of figuring it out to get this apron/skirt from Amy Butler. I love all of her fabrics and this pattern would let you go wild. And while we're out on the porch swing sewing, why not work up some heirlooms from Subversive Cross Stitch? Your granny will pass out.

Those Romans knew what they were about when it came to water; I can't think of a civilization before or since that used it so well or had as much fun with it. (Yes, I know, also demonstrations of overwhelming imperial or papal power, but still, amazing.)

That is all...

Dept. of Geriatrics

2005-06-20T15:35:00.000-07:00

Today I went to my happy local Target store to get new contacts, my old ones having shriveled up into dried, deposit-clad flakes. It's been a while since I wore them, and even I couldn't reconstitute them from the grave. So the lovely doctor did all the flippy lenses tests, and told me that my vision was pretty much the same, but that last test, which was clear, and bright, and lo I could read the fine print, that was the bifocal test. So like the boomers before me, I went to the local spinner rack display to pick up some reading glasses.

I have a message for the boomers before me: this is all you can come up with? My choices ranged from maniac granny to librarian with a whip. I was hoping for something more along the lines of Italian film star, something to give heart to a girl with greying hair and stiffening eye muscles, not make me the woman most likely to be hit on by a man with a fetish for schoolmarms.

This summer my project is to look in every thrift store I pass for cool frames. If I have to hang something off my neck it should have rhinestones! Be turquoise! Glow in the dark! Give me stock market updates! Produce a calming cloud of negative ions!

I think some scientists had better get to work on this.

England, oh England

2005-06-18T16:45:00.000-07:00

It's worth being a former colony just to make fun of the mother country, even if it's only a vodka ad. (via Coudal Partners, via Unapologetic)

Small World Dept.

2005-06-17T21:53:00.000-07:00

Funny, I took the same calligraphy class that Steve Jobs talks about in this commencement address, which is probably the only thing Mr. Jobs and I have in common. There really was something about that class that resonated more than other classes at Reed. I think the clever teacher knew exactly how whacked-out all the students were from the competitive brain wars (my own was scorched earth, quietly smoking and belching occasional poisonous gases) and intentionally set up a quiet place to slow down and visit the lonely non-verbal part of your brain to practice, practice, practice something that you were not good at at all. Perhaps Lloyd Reynolds was a bodhisattva: he understood that wisdom is more important than knowledge, we are all beginners and if you don't read magazines you'll become boring. I did benefit from Reed: I am dead skeptical when anyone claims to be an expert, graduate school was a lovely diversion in comparison and attending all those seminars taught us to talk at conversation-flattening length on any subject if necessary; but for me it was a crushing place. One of the only lights I have from that dark time is sitting in that calligraphy class, relearning to write, to think about things like beauty and endurance, to care about the smallest gesture. A joy forever, indeed.

Imminent danger

2005-06-16T16:13:00.000-07:00

I've been writing a letter to address long-term patterns of discrimination at work, and my head is pounding; just cataloging the incidents puts me in a froth--I am overwrought. We've had two years of pent-up frustration and I've finally reached the point where I just don't care anymore: they can fire me, but I'll be damned if I leave without making it better for the women behind me. Does everyone get this feeling at work? I just want to explode, or become a guerilla commando.

Out and about on the web

2005-06-15T22:18:00.001-07:00

Maybe I've been without a dog for too long, but I find this photo diary of Buddy the Wonder Dog addicting. He is one cute beast.

Since it's too hot to knit, the latest craze at the bookstore is beading; I tried it, and while I find it less restful and more like a 14-hour kidney transplant surgery than expected, it is intriguing. I haven't found a lot of great sites, but I like the work of Sylvus Tarn: see this, or this ur bead curtain.

Oh how I want to carry shhhh cards around and deliver them with a flourish.

This site posts postcards that people send to it with secrets they can't tell anyone; some of the cards are harrowing, and it makes for oddly compelling reading.

Dept. of Deliciously Catty: Go Fug Yourself. I am helplessly drawn every day to this site to see what the girls have to say--it always makes me laugh. Oh, to be so skillful at skewering, but manage to not really be mean. It's an art.

Dept. of How Do They Write So Fast and So Well? I'm envious of the stories knocked out daily at defective yeti; like dooce, a writer who turns daily parenthood/life in to something that sounds a whole lot more fun than you may be having. Plus they manage to turn out volumes of prose. I don't think you can be a childhood prodigy in punctuation, but maybe they were...

More later...

Will he want a snack and a nap later?

2005-06-10T13:52:00.000-07:00

Milo got a deluxe scratching post today, covered in cat-attractive carpet and sisal, as tall as my hip. I ordered it out of a my-pets-are-my-precious-children-type catalog. I tied a toy on a string to it for him to bat around, but I must have doused the post with too much catnip because all he can do is loll around on the carpet staring at the ceiling. The otter is stoned.

Design notes

2005-06-09T10:43:00.000-07:00

I love utilitarian objects that do surprising things, like this sink. It might not keep you completely dry, but it's cool.

Here is another illustration of London Plane trees getting my vote as the most fabulous street trees in the world. See this, also this. (One sunny afternoon, while walking under the Plane trees along the Tiber in Rome, I saw a couple down along the path at the water level, um, shall we say, satisfying each other's pressing needs. It made me think of all the American cities where this would have immediately brought out the National Guard, but not in Rome, where the prevailing temperament seemed to be: Oh well, young people have these urges. In fact it was a bravura performance considering the number of tourists along the wall. That's amore.)

I had a dream about my hands

2005-06-06T21:24:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about tags and the words we use to describe ourselves. A website is a construction of our thoughts and images and connections to ideas and people. It's a dynamic form that begins to capture the multiple facets of a person--you can see someone working things out on their own and also interacting with outside influences. Other people can visit, comment, tell their own stories and leave a bit of themselves. It's like characters in a story stepping out to stretch their legs and visiting another book for a chapter or so. With tags we structure that interaction, word by word, and assess it on a continuum of importance--is this category as dear to me as a lover, or is it more like an acquaintance I make small talk with when the occasion warrants? Is it really me me, or just a passing fling?

I know that the pretending is all in the fun, and that we are malleable beasts who like to play with our fancies. Blogs give ordinary people the tools of writers and artists and the opportunity to be seen and heard. Art is often an exploration of identity. But I feel what is built is a balancing act--we cantilever this projection of ourselves out into the world and hope someone will reach back--but is there something that can't be expressed, some weight of here-ness?

I once had the opportunity to meet a half-brother I had never seen, who I found because of the spectacular explosion of data that had become available on the Internet (I had become a wily, lying sleuth and unearthed the birthfamily the state of Oklahoma had worked so hard to keep from me.) My brother was everything I could have hoped for, generous and articulate, and we wrote each other for a long time, while his family and mine tried to figure out what to do with the knowledge of inconvenient new relatives. Eventually we decided we ought to meet each other and picked a town fairly equidistant to both of us. Fraught is the word that comes to mind when I think about seeing him for the first time, and disappointment--I had thought I would finally see someone who looked like me, and it turned out we look nothing alike. The gods are rich in irony. But he wove a spell of history and pictures around me--ethnicity and eccentricity that most people take for granted. He told stories that I was a character in, but was it really me? The me that was there seemed to be causing a world of problems for the people in the story, which was sad, sad, sad. Being adopted can feel like a constant tearing and shredding--not knowing whether to stand up or sit down when your name is called--I've had three names and three mothers that I know of, and god, there could be more. Closed adoptions are a lab experiment concocted by a crazed social scientist. Anyway, the odd thing was, while I knew from our correspondence the spirit that had moved this man to bring himself to meet me and the depth of his need to reach out and honor our connection, there was something profoundly different about meeting him in person. He really was a stranger, an unknown, and I felt like I was moving in a strange Kabuki performance of myself. I remember realizing while we talked: there is something transmitted by physical presence, something I can't figure out with my brain--and that bothers me--powerful signals bodies send to other bodies without their owners knowing. Maybe it's soul.

So while I'm not sure what good it will do, I prefer to think of a blog not as building an edifice of names and labels and words but a tearing down of them. Somehow, in a way my brain can't figure out, I believe that using my own hands to tell the story will make myself a ladder out of here. Or at least one I can wave for help from.

Funniest response to Oprah's new book picks

2005-06-04T22:31:00.000-07:00

[No] Light [Reading] in August

Oprah presents, A Summer of Faulkner. Housewives lay dying.

From mediabistro: GalleyCat

But how could they understand the Wind in the Willows?

2005-06-03T22:30:00.000-07:00

It's raining here now. Something we do well here on the plains--thunderstorms. No misty isles for us; the streets are awash, the lights are flickering, the cat's hiding under the bed. It makes it very cosy inside. A few years ago an ice storm knocked out my power for three days and I learned a few things: there's not a lot to do after the sun sets if you don't have any light (clarity on why pioneer families had 16 children); you don't get cold if you put on all your winter clothes and get in a sleeping bag (how Alaskan friends of mine told me they drive in the winter); you do miss hot food and tea without a gas stove; it takes a lot of candles to be bright enough to read by (I have so many candles now I could start a church).

I read once that other languages don't translate the word cosy easily. [ok, how about, maybe lands with fairly dreary/harsh/long winters develop the concept of cosy to cheer themselves up that they're not on a beach in Greece?]

Remote gardening

2005-05-29T21:29:00.000-07:00

What to do without a garden? Squirrel away fabulous books, of course, and imagine yourself there. My favorite this spring has been Tuscany Artists Gardens, a book big enough to fall into, and you'll want to: steep edgy hills lined with cypress, stone pools with vistas out of a Florentine fresco and art hanging from the trees. Martha Baker's The Swimming Pool purports to be about design, but is really pool pornography--as if we all had access to ancient Mayan grottoes overgrown with vines, or could lounge cradled in hammocks, gazing out at an infinity edge that blurs into the Caribbean, musing on all the shades of turquoise there might be. Yes, yes, more, don't stop.

Well, we have to have a place to sleep, don't we? Thumb through La Vie en Rose and try to decide whether you'd like to bed down in a sun-washed room in a chateau with a nice moat outside, or an art-filled Paris apartment with soaring ceilings, deep baths (ok, all the baths are choice) and miles of books. This book has profiles of the owners, so you can try to figure out where your life went wrong that it isn't you in the picture. A decorating book that has some relation to places we might actually live if we were very lucky is Home Is Where the Heart Is, by Ilse Crawford. Lucious photos are accompanied by text that actually talks about ideas of home. Not your average dumb house eye candy. Although there is a staggering picture of a man in tangled sheets which singlehandedly makes the hefty Rizzoli price bearable. If you like that sort of thing in your home. Or garden, pool or bath. Ah, spring.

Bookseller notes

2005-05-29T10:40:00.000-07:00

The book I've been pressing on unsuspecting strangers lately is I'm Not the New Me, by Wendy McClure, because it's enviously hilarious and also, like normal life, heartbreaking. Added bonus: the glosses on 70's-era Weight Watcher recipe cards included in the book and here. I find that if people don't think these are funny, we are just not going to get along.

Customers always want to know what I personally can recommend, even though it would be better if I helped them find something they would like; in spite, I'm tempted to take them to the new R. Crumb book and say, "I like this, buy it," fully knowing they'd hate it. And they want to know if I have read the book as if I might dupe them into tasting some hogswallow I haven't actually eaten myself. This makes me want to bang my head against a nearby column given the massive number of new titles that comes out every week. I believe most people imagine the bookseller's life consists of long, lazy afternoons noodling among the stacks, a book of medieval poetry in one hand, Oprah's latest sensation in the other, just waiting to pounce on them and press unknown masterpieces into their trembling hands, but booksellers call themselves bookslingers for a reason.

All spleen aside, it is thrilling when you find a like mind and can trade information and ideas--or help someone find something they really need that neither of you knew existed. I'm always amazed at the things people are looking for and find interesting, although the customer who was upset that we didn't have a unicorn section crossed the line.

Meanwhile, I've rearranged the office

2005-05-25T08:00:00.000-07:00

And gotten a new browser, reorganized my bookmarks, divorced and married...well no, but it feels that way. I'm going out of town and I'm always afraid that if I die someone will see my house and think, good god she was a slob, so I stay up all night doing all the projects I've been putting off for three months. The lovely thing is when (and if) I return I walk into a place that doesn't look like the staging ground for the D-Day invasion. (Except behind the door, but don't look there.)

Tabasco now has chipotle-flavored sauce, and all is right with the world.

The universe expands

2005-05-23T20:37:00.000-07:00

Let's just take a moment from our massive re-education project to appreciate the beauteous work of Tord Boontje. And could I have the teapot with the rabbit, please.

Yesterday I learned I needed to learn web design, and today I found out that Norton's firewall is an unfriendly beast, I need to set up a website and that Internet Explorer does not like to play with others. Lord, can Linux be far behind? The hours are just flying by.

Heavy lifting

2005-05-23T10:38:00.000-07:00

I am off to the bookstore to stuff my arms full of web design books, because it seems while I was quietly knitting and fending off the cat, I missed a whole lot of class. I think it is good to come at technology from the backside, though--someone else has pioneered and suffered for beauty and I can just follow in their tracks.

Can this cat be saved?

2005-05-22T20:56:00.000-07:00

Why a blog? Because I like to learn new things that make my head hurt. And maybe someone will read this who can tell me how to keep the cat from biting. WWII could have been much shorter if we had had cats like Milo trained to sneak up and drop in on German Panzer divisions. Screaming. Panic. Surrender.