12/04/08
This morning, on our way to drop me off at the MAX stop, Sophie says from her back seat, “Sheesh, I need a third hand! Maybe four.” She was trying to coordinate drinking juice with playing her Leapster and apparently adjusting her tights.
She’s a bright kid, interested in science. Fear for the future.
11/14/08
Deborah just called to tell me that Sophie won the 4 yo and under category in an “art” (coloring) competition at our local Value Village (first prize a $10 gift certificate, which they quickly spent on a “dancing princess rug” and some articles of clothing Ms. S apparently had her eye on).
While it’s kind of silly, when your child wins a contest, you gotta tell someone. This also transfers bragging rights in the form of “I knew her when…”
Restrictions apply.
11/14/08
Downtown, vines of white light are creeping cheerfully up our trees, chasing off the rust and golden leaves in stop action animation: one day they’re six feet up the trunk and twisting into the lower branches, the next, as you’re waiting for the commuter train, you notice they’ve crept up another foot, atropical artificial vines cheerfully thriving in crispening weather. You whistle goodbye willingly to the leaves, who had their time. You’re ready for twinkling trees and hot cocoa. You, and the homeless guy asking for change.
A tangle of lights (or luminous eyes) blink ferociously in an eloquently coded rail against illiteracy. You blink back. Ferociously. The lights snarl. You snarl. You know they’re wrong, or not right, you know this in your gut. You try to make your case to friends, not for the defense, but for clarity. Your small, limited supply of words fall golden on the ground and, in the rain, turn to cornflakes. Your tree stripped to a bare trunk and twigs, you thrash about trying to expose the major flaws, the short circuits, the damage done. Your lack of literacy confounds your purpose. You and the other writer, two howler monkeys chasing each other around a denuded festival tree, each with beautiful fur, tangled in the lights. The homeless guy finds leftover kettlecorn in a bin and settles down to watch.
10/23/08
Vandana Singh, an author out of Delhi, Portland, Austin, and leaf country (and incremental points between), has written six rich essays on writing, cognition, colonization, publishing, animal communities, and our biosphere at Jeff Vandemeer’s blog, Ecstatic Days
all in the form of smart conversation starters (and more). She’s moved on, a blog sitter while the owner was out of the country, and while she has her own site, she seldom sits still long enough to update it (leaving it in charge of her technologically capable daughter).
Our physical and virtual bookshelves house her non-Euclidean YoungUncle stories for “kids” (and people like me), and other large and small press collections with her short stories and novellas (Delhi, Of Love and Other Monsters, Thirst, The Room on the Roof, and much more). More importantly, she’s active in the health of this planet and its inhabitants, is a proactive parent, and a science teacher (professor of Physics at a Vermont college). In 10 fast years, from our first meeting in Portland through a mutual writer friend, I’ve watched her grow from a surface timid but interesting writer to a frequently published author whose work often sets me back in my chair and keeps me delighted, curious, and invested. I’m very proud to know her, even if geography keeps our friendship limited to correspondence, am inspired by her achievements and results, and am hungry as a pirate in a punt to obtain her first complete story collection, The Woman Who Thought She Was A Planet and other stories.
10/23/08
How many of you wear earbuds when you commute, please raise your hand?
Ma’am, there in the back–would you like an earbud? You must feel very lonely.
10/15/08
The following links on reading or using e-books sparked this entry of mine. (Links from Steve Shervais, a friend, writer, and systems scientist who has little time for reading or writing when he’s teaching, but is incredibly adept at skimming the Web for interesting articles and essays):
Note, this isn’t the monologue of a luddite, nor does it try to synthesize/summarize the volumes written about paper vs. online and their ability to save or behead the publishing industry–both with their advantages and disadvantages, often tied to subforms of each, and access to them.
I was in Powell’s City O Books yesterday working away from work (am there again now after being excused from jury duty, taking a break before heading into the office) bathing in the comfort and inspiration of 10 foot high loaded bookcases, and thinking about how a book’s physical presence, volume, mass, color gives me immediate tactile, emotional, olfactory, and visual feedback, a sense of how it will fit into my life from its start to finish (first impressions are often wrong–being a longtime book lover, I recognize book lust now when I feel it, and often carry a volume with me for a bit before buying or checking it out to let my hormonal response settle).
I like reading online–but typically only short pieces: articles, essays, and other materials harder to find quickly or easily (or at all) in the limits of a single store or library. I do have a lot of e-books, essays, and stories in different formats on my laptop, because they’re portable en masse, give me a convenient welcome alternative to work when the computer’s open, and they were free–but reading novels on the screen is usually a last resort for me (there’s a free seat on the commuter train and I don’t have anything in print to read, etc.).
Unlike paper-based books, e-books are elusive, never requiring a commitment, and fall too easily into the model encouraged by Internet browsing–they encourage snacking. Word bites. (Don’t we already snack far too much than is healthy–people often confusing snacking with sampling for the purpose of evaluation.)
I’m also never excited by opening an e-book. It has no presence to remind me that it needs to be read. I am sometimes moved to respond by reading some online material, but almost never inspired to originate. A book, however, will often kick my ass after only a page or passage. It’s a source of creative frisson (with fresh pepper, if I’m lucky).
Maybe we’re the last generation who will view books as a paper-based format. I’m not a luddite and like adapting to technology, but no longer for its own sake. I’d like to have an e-book reader that gives me more than my bookshelves can hold, that connects me to libraries, and that I can cozy up with. Maybe the next gen, or gen squared, will develop electronic books and readers that ground and inspire them in the same way that paper does for us, and hopefully in new ways.
Or maybe books shouldn’t be too easy to get. The online model encourages ownership (or rental) of far more books than we can read. It encourages dipping (often desirable second time around and very easy in an e-book–perhaps that’s the real market for them). Online storage never gives us the real sense of how many books we have and our duty to them. Online, they’re just lists, pictographic or text. Often accompanied by advertising (if you liked Joybuzz, you’ll love Shocking Tales Over Tea) prodding you into the next purchase. It isn’t long before you discover (and maybe not if you’re lucky) that the e-reading model is more about collecting and contributing to meta data, into lists of books, talk about books, uninformed opinions about books, than in the narratives and ideas and actions they inspire.
Closing bits: A book also doesn’t have DRM (yet). And it doesn’t bluescreen. And without books on my living room walls, there’d just be paint.
Time to return to work and, this evening, my own overly patient pile of books on the bedstand.
10/06/08
Must spin a short story from straw titled “Rumplestiltskin At a Rave Hosted by Mysterians” after using that phrase in a blog comment. Hopefully a golden, not a grim opportunity.
09/30/08
It may sound foolish, but, depending on one’s income, what can be more shocking than an increase in the price of a staple like milk is an increase in the cost of luxury items based on a staple (or a hidden staple like corn by-products)–ice cream, for example (only recently a luxury item in our home). Last night I paid $7 for 1.75 quarts, and realized that it was a tipping point. On the plus side, rising costs for transportation, fertilizer, and manufacturing are increasing the cost of prepared/junk foods faster than fresh foods, organic or not–a good thing for poor people who too often buy cheap filler foods because they (think they) can’t (or don’t know they can) afford anything healthier.
Makes me wish we had local Asian open-air market along with our very nice but expensive farmer’s market. In many of the Asian markets, sellers buy ripe foods with reduced shelf life and sell then for far less–which means you go to the market more often but spend less (for vegetables and fruit, there’s little cost savings in bulk).
HFCS rant: there’s a new commercial by the corn-processors guild showing a sensitive looking young man shying from a popsicle waved in his face by a woman we think is his girlfriend (or a demon in lovely human form sent to tempt him). But the bar contains high-fructose corn syrup, and he’s having none of it (although this could be masking a homophobic fear of having a phallic object publicly thrust at his face, but we’ll leave the subtext out for now). She looks at him with sardonic tenderness and assures him that HFCS is perfectly natural and poses no problems when taken in moderation–and how much could there be in an ickle popsicle? We assume in the next scene that he’s convinced and is happily slurping away while she privately plays a m4m fantasy and collects her check from the People of the Corn. Where are the fundamentalists when you need them!
(Let’s also note that it’s impossible to ingest anything in moderation that is an ingredient–often a primary ingredient–in most products containing sweeteners–which is damn near everything–even those with sweetness too low-down for your tongue to detect but not your biochem. Let’s hope the cost of corn-based additives balloons as the economy wheezes.)
08/14/08
Ever think about what a strangled bark (or glottal purr) of a word garb is? Is there an antonym for onamotapoeia? Other words that, read or pronounced, sound dissociatively different than the things or ideas they currently represent? Especially if you repeat them quickly.
08/13/08
Ripped from a recent job description for tech writing (instructional materials) for the Oregon Dept. of Justice. Everything you need to know about the job is in this snippet:
“Relies on limited experience and judgment to plan and accomplish goals.”
You don’t necessarily have to squint to glimpse the author’s intent. If you grant them intelligence and insight (perhaps more than they may have–better to see the glass as half full, even if it’s half full of arsenic), you can read it as a test. Maybe it’s a test of truth: they’re describing what you do every day, making something out of nothing, listening to your gut (if it growls, don’t do it!) or cherry picking from a few low hanging goals and slippery facts, or, god help you, producing whatever you think will please your employer most. Do they just want a functioning human being who can work with document templates? Or maybe they don’t want any big heads running around (as technical communicators), preferring instead humble friars. Or, as a friend said, maybe it means that they’re not going to tell you what you’re supposed to be doing.
Regardless, I think it sounds like a dream job. Especially if they stick you in the basement by yourself. You have no supervision. You have your own lab space. There’s probably medical marijuana stored nearby.
