pedestrian saga

ON A RECENT list of fifteen books I’ve read that will always stick with me, I included Stephen King’s Misery, not for its literary value, but for the vivid memories of the context in which I read it.

Round about the summer of 1989, my siblings and I packed into the bench seat of a conversion van and headed west with Dad and Kara toward Denver, Aspen, and Grand Junction, for reunions with various families in the Colorado tribe of the paternal clan. Always one for themed reading (or maybe it was unplanned and serendipitous?), I brought Misery along for the ride through the Rocky Mountains, where the story unfolds. Read the rest of this entry »

Ah, there you are, little Kevin, baby boy.

New mama’s got a son in her eye
No clouds are in my changing sky
Each morning when I get up to rise
I’m livin’ in a dreamland

(Stills/Young)

Congratulations, Em and M!

Put the blame on meme: “Don’t take too long to think about it. [Yeah, right.] Fifteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you, for whatever reasons. This isn’t your top 15 canon or even books you’d necessarily recommend, just books that have made their mark on you. First 15 you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. [Ha!] Tag some friends, including me.” All right, RFM.

Equipped with lousy reading recall, I might not handle an intelligent conversation on the content of these books. But most of them stick with me for secondary reasons, remembered for the context and environment in which they were read, or the intense emotional response they elicited. With the exception of Misery, I would drop everything to relive any of them. So, 15-ish, roughly in order read (titles linked to LibraryThing):

1. Hop on Pop and Green Eggs and Ham, by Dr. Seuss: Ah, reading as a contact sport or dramatic recitation.
2. Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, by Robert C. O’Brien: Fell a little in love with Justin, was inconsolable for days after finishing it. Repeatedly.
3. Misery, by Stephen King: Cheap creeps relished around age 13 while the family van wound through the Colorado Rockies.
4. Black Boy, by Richard Wright: First half was assigned reading in junior English, but I couldn’t put it down, ignored my teacher during class to read ahead through the second half, and obsessed on RW a good while.
5. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, by Hunter S. Thompson: Funny, angry, and insane, it channeled lots o’ fantastical high school angst.
6. Mildred Pierce, by James M. Cain: First brush with L.A. lit, an affair to remember.
7. A Good Man Is Hard to Find, by Flannery O’Connor: Uh, wow.
8. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, by Italo Calvino (trans. William Weaver): Earnest, naive undergraduate discovers metafiction on a hot summer night.
9. A Concise Introduction to Syntactic Theory: The Government-Binding Approach, by Elizabeth Cowper: Favorite textbook ever! Generous portions of technical whup-ass served with creamy saccharine vending machine coffee in the charmingly stale Ballantine Hall student lounge.
10. Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (The Path to the Spiders’ Nests), by Italo Calvino: First novel I read from cover to cover, painstakingly, in the original Italian. By the window overlooking Via Dal Lino.


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11. Catch-22, by Joseph Heller, and Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut: Beloved absurdist WWII satires of the hyphens and numbers! To crack either book is to risk hyperventilation.
12. Le città invisibili (Invisible Cities), by Italo Calvino (trans. William Weaver): The only academic paper I’ve really been proud of I wrote on this book. Spent a LOT of time with it. In grungy cafés along Bancroft Way.
13. Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, by Marc Reisner: Wherein lieth the revelation that nonfiction about land development and water policy can be totally thrilling.
14. The Ticket Out, by Helen Knode: Perfect noir for a particular rut, living and loving and dying between Culver City and Los Feliz.
15. The Day of the Locust, by Nathanael West: Cockfights, midgets, degenerates, Los Angeles aflame…dig that scene!

Your 15? And maybe I’ll pick on some FB peeps.

Mad props to all the incredible moms in my life!

This is my strikingly beautiful sister serving Easter dinner. I remember when she was a baby, chillin’ with her, quite possibly the most peaceful moments I’ve ever experienced. She is going to be a mum soon.

Why did I want to see this film again? Someone must have dropped the “vampire” word, and I thought, “Why not? Will Smith¹ is a funny guy.” But as far as funny guys go, he’s more Keanu Reeves than Bill Murray—Eye rolls ‘r’ us when he tries to be serious.

The monsters in this movie are horrifying, as in, Egads! You spent how much money to generate such ridiculous, plastic baddies?

Half a star for the German shepherd’s riveting performance. [Sniffles] Excuse me while I hug my dog.

**1/2

¹Nothing but fond memories of the first dubbed Hollywood movie I saw in Bologna—Independence Day: Il giorno della riscossa. Will Smith opened his mouth, and the most beautiful Italian filled the cinema.

I will return to these photographs of reanimated book cover art over and over, they are so fabulous!

Hat tip: VSL

Ira Glass and Stephen Colbert at the same table on my computer screen…That’s, like, one striped tie or pair of spectacles past hyperventilation.

(Aunt Mary, faithful reader, more hyperventilation-inducing eyeglasses tomorrow! The Decemberists are performing on The Colbert Report Monday, April 27.)

Earth Day slasher flick
Drive rental car to Eugene
Dennis and Bruce rule!

One more thing I did this week to be happy was visit DogWoman at Open Salon, where I contracted the Extreme Sheep bug. What can I say? My immune system doesn’t stand a chance against viral marketing videos that feature Welsh shepherds making extremely geeky art. Symptoms include wide eyes, slack jaw, random tittering, and the compulsion to hit play over and over.

I hope to beat Very Short List to the punch by declaring this video the sweet chewy center of a delicious Venn diagram flavored with Wallace and Gromit, Andy Goldsworthy, and Wooster Collective.

Go on then. Watch the video and the BBC News making of. And three cheers for DogWoman, those “good dogs and sensible sheep,” and sexy British shepherding geek artists everywhere!

Another week in pursuit of happiness…

I finally sank my teeth into Season Five of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and relished Eurotrash Dracula, mysterious kid sister, Xander doppelganger, Spike backstory…with the Buff gymnastical ass-kicking a steady thrill.

I cast off self-defeating excuses (”I can’t afford a day off work, or the registration fee”; “I won’t know anybody there, and I’m a poser!”) and forged ahead through my first professional conference for library and information science—OLA in Salem. It was a fabulous experience!

• Allyson Carlysle’s presentation on the future of cataloging, a major motivator for attending the conference on Friday, was fascinating in an over-my-head-but-totally-validating-to-sit-in-a-room-full-of-people-who-embrace-minutiae sort of way. Now, in addition to her reading list, I have a stack of acronyms to study and the impetus to synthesize my vagabondage in the world of cataloging. Long live metadata!
• I dug the tag team presentation on manga collecting and cataloging, even if it, too, was mostly over my head. Chibi Vampire, here I come!
• The exhibits hall jump-started my orientation to MedlinePlus, a nifty source of authoritative health information from the National Library of Medicine and National Institutes of Health. Next week I’ll begin a volunteer project to help enhance the Go Local listings for Benton County, Oregon.
• I also cornered reps from Emporia State and the University of Washington for the prospective student inquisition. Conversation at the UW booth revealed that my application had been accepted, which sent me floating about the conference center all afternoon in a happy daze.
• Lunch was an exercise in immersion therapy—the horror of entering a party alone! I succeeded probably thanks to adrenaline from the well-timed UW news. I approached a friendly-looking guybrarian sitting solo and made conversation about library school and librarianship in the Portland area. The food was yummy, the cost was included in the registration fee, and I didn’t spill any on myself. w00t!

And on a gorgeous spring Sunday I cooked a vat of carrot soup and delivered a meal on two wheels to a new mum. My foray into the gluten-free diet proved more interesting than daunting. And, omg, isn’t a blooming magnolia tree the bomb?