ARDIRI

A Love Poesie for Benjamin Franklin

*Benny-boy, how I love thee, for you created the public library!*

Recent Reads (All of which I have loved and checked out from the San Francisco Public Library!)

Autobiography, Biography, and/or Travel Memoir

• The Autobiography of Malcolm X (as told to Alex Haley)

• Kim Sunee's Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love, and the Search for Home—drool-worthy food descriptions (and recipes!) alongside a heart-touching autobiography.

• Susan Jane Gilman's Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven

• Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic--The first graphic novel that I've read and enjoyed.  Very literate, intellectual, and sad and hilarious all at once.

• Stacey O'Brien's Wesley the Owl: The Remarkable Love story of an Owl and His Girl—My gawd, I love owls!

• Asne Seierstad's The Bookseller of Kabul

• Carrie Fisher's Wishful Drinking—Knee-slappingly funny.

 

History/Politics

• Katherine Powell Cohen's Images of America: San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury—My beleoved neighborhood!  Fantastic, brief historical overview from the 1880's to 2008 with photograph's gracing each page.

 

About Public Libraries and the Love of Reading

• Don Borchert's Free For All: Oddballs, Geeks, and Gangstas in the Public Library

• Emma Walton Hamilton's Raising Bookworms: Getting Kids Reading for Pleasure and Empowerment

• Vicki Myron's Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World

Fiction

• Andrew Sean Greer's The Story of a Marriage

• Robert Charles Wilson's Darwinia: A Novel of a Very Different Twentieth Century

 

Currently Reading

• Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World

• Donna Farhi's Bringing Yoga to Life: The Everyday Practice of Enlightened Living

• Carol Off's Bitter Chocolate: The Dark Side of the World's Most Seductive Sweet

 

Currently Browsing (i.e. not reading every single page)

• Mothisa Yamakage's The Essence of Shinto: Japan's Spiritual Heart

• Terence Conran's The Chef's Garden: Fresh Produce from Small Spaces

• Swami Vishnu-Devanda's The Complete Book of Illustrated Yoga

 

Future Reads

• Hooman Majd's The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran

• James Dalessandro's 1906: A Novel (about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake)

More Randomnalia--All Over the Place!

• Despite being car-free for a little less than ten years now, my slight-obsession with tiny cars continues.  Submitted as Evidence: Another picture of vintage Mini; this one in the Haight with a parking meter for perspective on size.

  

• The upside of high gas prices?  Shopping locally and supporting small-business owners!

• **Uh, hello, anybody there Reverend Jesse Jackson???**  Could you possibly be more of an ignoramus?  Really?!  I think not! 

Where the hell was your brain when you said (supposedly off-Mic) that Obama should be castrated? 

Why in the world would a black man suggest that another black man be castrated in light of the fact that black men were often castrated before they were lynched?

Ugh, and so much more that I dare not say here...Let me just say, that the Rev. Jesse Jackson made a fool of himself.

• In a related vein, I am nearly finished reading Toni Morrison's Beloved and am thinking that perhaps the Rev. Jesse Jackson might do well to (re?)read this novel as it provides a graphic, haunting, and all-together disturbing refresher course on the horrors of slavery.

• I am tired, oh-so-tired, sleepy-sleepy.  Teaching  English Literature and Language Arts to 33--yes, 33!--6th-8th graders can sometimes feel like taming lions after being dipped in vat of gazelle blood.

  On the other hand, today's sleepiness is a "rewarding tiredness" earned from getting those same kids to be really excited and engaged with what we're learning.

• The 1975 edition of the Vogue Sewing Book rocks!  So much information!  So concise! Such clear directions!

• I had lunch last weekend with a friend and her husband at Zazil Coastal Mexican Cuisine in the Nordstrom's shopping center and was pretty disappointed.  The food is so-so, but not worth the price, and the ambiance of the restaurant is more suited to a fast-food environment.  The three of us spent $158 dollars on lunch and dessert (luckily, we had $100 in gift certificates to spend there!).  I'm of the opinion that one should never feel as if they are eating in an upscale-cafeteria-like-environment when you're paying $50+ to eat lunch.  Give me a break!  Puh-lease!

• My Princeton Review Career Quiz results are:

My INTEREST color is BLUE:  People with blue Interests like job responsibilities and occupations that involve creative, humanistic, thoughtful, and quiet types of activities. Blue Interests include abstracting, theorizing, designing, writing, reflecting, and originating, which often lead to work in editing, teaching, composing, inventing, mediating, clergy, and writing.

My USUAL STYLE is YELLOW:  People with yellow styles perform their job responsibilities in a manner that is orderly and planned to meet a known schedule. They prefer to work where things get done with a minimum of interpretation and unexpected change. People with a yellow style tend to be orderly, cautious, structured, loyal, systematic, solitary, methodical, and organized, and usually thrive in a research-oriented, predictable, established, controlled, measurable, orderly environment.

So shocking!  Not! 

Some of the suggested careers are: philosopher (got that covered with my Bachelors degree) and teacher (been there, doing that), professor (perhaps someday?).  The quiz also suggested I look into working as a Media Planner, Web Editor, Book Publishing Professional--all of which I would find interesting.  I am definietely intrigued by the Media Planner career as I L-O-V-E to critically tear apart advertisements and their often inappropriate placement.  However, I do not see myself becoming an optometrist, a Rabbi or Imam, or an antiques dealer. 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

Reading is FUN(damental)

• Jean-Paul Sartre's Existentialism is a Humanism

(Reading for Masters Thesis)

I am reading this transcript of Sartre's 1945 lecture defending Existentialism from charges made against it by the Christians and the Communists.  The editor, Annie Cohen-Solal, in the introduction decries this book as NOT being a good introduction to Sartre's Existentialism, but I fully disagree with her.  If you've not read much philosophy or have never read any of Sartre's huge, intricate tome Being and Nothingness, Existentialism is a Humanism provides an excellent primer to Sartre's theories.

I am especially appreciating how Sartre conveys Existentialism as a philosophy of optimism rather than pessimism, which one could too easily feel when confronted with the terms "anguish, dread, despair, abandonment, alienation," etc.   He avers that:

"[...R]eality alone counts. Man is nothing but a series of of enterprises, and that he is the sum, organization, and aggregate of the relations that constitute such enterprises.

What matters is the total commitment.  [Existentialism is not ...] a philosophy of quietism,  since it defines a man by his actions, nor can it be called a pessimistic description of man, for no doctrine is more optimistic since it declares that man's destiny lies within himself."
(emphasis added, 38-40)

• The Life Room by Jill Bialosky

(Reading for FUN!)

I picked this one up off the "New Books" bookshelf at the library, intrigued by the cover which features a woman with one green eye and one blue eye (which I'll admit to pulling off last week to save contacts for the job interview.  I had a sample green contact so I wore it alongside my regular, clear contact in one--giving me one blue eye and one green.  That really freaked my students out!).

Turns out that this is a well-written book--compelling, with gorgeous word choice; a reminiscence of a woman's past loves from childhood to adulthood (as I understand it thus far, 100 pages in.)

Some excerpts:

"Her mother invited her best friends [...] They formed their own foursome, a group of women from the neighborhood whose husbands had either abandoned them, or died, or divorced them.  She [Eleanor, the main character] learned from them that you could fill an entire lunch talking about fabrics for your couch or the color to paint your walls. She also learned that it was possible to survive disappointment  if you chose to, or disappointment could put a dam in the middle of your life and you'd never be able to move forward.  She learned that love could last a lifetime or a day, that there were all kinds of possibilities for losing faith or finding it.  She learned that if you did not have faith, if you did not fulfill your dreams, they might hibernate in your head, creating such friction you couldn't lift it from the pillow." (emphasis added, 61)

and:

"Adam explained how a painter seals a canvas with a layer of gesso, that gesso used to be mixed with rabbit-skin glue and that it is used to prime a canvas before a painter begins to paint with oils.  He explained that oil rots fabric, hence the reason for priming it.  That always seemed an interesting irony.  That oil paint, the material a painter uses to create beauty, has the capacity to rot the fabric it is applied to.  As if all beauty is capable of ruin." (emphasis added, 91)

What happens to a dream deferred?

In working away on my thesis for my Masters Degree, I am re-reading Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, which is prefaced by this Langston Hughes poem:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Just a bit of retail therapy and a shot or two of randomnalia.

Things I love:

• Lucky Brand Sweet Dream Jeans--ah, indeed, they fit like a dream!  And I frequently get LUCKY and find them hardly worn--perhaps even never worn since they certainly look that way-- at Buffalo Exchange for $28 bucks--wahoozicool!

• Prescriptives Classic Red Cream Liptstick--I feel like such the 1950's glamourous movie star when I wear it.  Hot, baby, hot!  I just found this color yesterday and will try to get a pic soon to share, as we all know how hard it is to find a good red lipstick that doesn't make one look like a clown!  ETA:  OK, here's a pic where I have licked off a good majority of the lipstick, but you can get an idea of what the color looks like:

• Guerlain Maxi-Lash Mascara--very pricey, but damn it rocks (and if you calculate its daily usage over 6 months, it turns out to be only 15 cents a day!  Aren't I such a good rationalizer?)

• Public Libraries!!!--Thank you Benjamin Franklin!  Benjamin Franklin I love thee, for you created the library!

• The following excerpts that explain the philosophy(ies) of Existentialism by George Cotkin in Existential America:

"[...] existentialism begins with Sartre's maxim that men and women everywhere are 'condemned to be free,' forced to confront the dilemma of existence, to infinitude in the face of limits.  To be existential is to have those dark nights of the soul when the loneliness of existence becomes transparent and the structure of our confidence lies shattered around us.  To be existential is to encounter those moments when vainglorious systems of logic totter and polite evocations of Sunday preachers fail to touch the core of being.  To be existential is to wrestle with most fully with the jagged awareness of one's own finitude, with the thunderbolt fact that I will die and my death will be my own, experienced by no one else.  At such moments, the abstract is rendered concrete.  As novelist, Carson McCullers put it, 'Death is always the same, but each man dies in his own way.'  To be existential is to recognize, in the face of all these somber truths clutched close to our own sense of being, that we must act.  Despite the dread and anguish that accompany the shocking recognition of our freedom, that threaten to stall us in our tracks, we must take responsibility for our lives; we must create the world anew.  To be existential is, ultimately, to join with Camus's Sisyphus in a tragic acceptance of the limitations of existence while exulting in each affirmative breath of life, in each push of the stone up the mountain.

[and that there is an...] upside to existential freedom: the freeing from the shackles of tradition, the possibility of a more authentic existence, and the headiness that comes with the freedom to create and to be creative."
(emphasis added, pp. 3 & 6)

Loved, Loving & Finishing

Loved

• Choke by Chuck Palahniuk.  I'd give you some sort of numerical rating for this book, but I read it a couple of years ago and loved it, but not exactly, scientifically sure how much I loved it.

• Same with Fight Club (the novel) , also by Chuck Palahniuk.  Both are great books.  The novel Fight Club really has a make-you-want-to-really-go-out-and-live sort of feeling to it.   I especially love the scene (in the movie and book) about buying into the Ikea life.

Loving

• Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) by Zora Neale Hurston.

I've tried to read this novel before, but struggled with the colloquial dialogue.  Now, however, I am trying to make it fit into my thesis prospectus as a novel that has Sartrean Existentialism and thus am determined to read it.  And, DAMN!  Is it just full of gorgeousness! 

Here the narrator describes the main character, Janie's, "commence[ment]" of  "her conscious life":

"It was a late spring afternoon in West Florida.  Janie had spent most of the day under a blossoming pear tree in the back-yard.  She had been spending every minute that she could steal from her chores under that tree for the last three days.  That was to say, ever since the first tiny bloom had opened.  It had called her to come and gaze on a mystery.  From barren brown stems to glistening leaf buds; from the leaf buds to the snowy virginity of bloom.  It stirred her tremendously.  How?  Why?  It was like a flute song forgotten in another existence and remembered again What?  How? Why?  This singing she heard had nothing to with her ears.  The rose of the world was breathing out smell.  It followed her through all her waking moments and caressed her in her sleep.  It connected itself with other vaguely felt matters that struck her outside observation and buried themselves in her flesh.  Now they emerged and quested about her consciousness.

She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her.  She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom ; the thousand sister calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to the tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight.  So this was a marriage!  She had been summoned to behold a revelation.  Then Janie felt a pain remorseless sweet that left her limp and languid.

[...] Oh to be a pear tree--any tree in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world!  She was sixteen.  She had glossy leaves and bursting buds and she wanted to struggle with life but it seemed to elude her.  Where were the singing bees for her?" (pp. 10-11)

Finishing
(...at night while trying to fall asleep or while in the bathtub; unfortunately, I can't read thesis books in the same manner that I read for pleasure.  No thesis books in the bathtub as pencil must be in hand and mind fully engaged.)

• The Secret History by Donna Tart

Falling out of love with this book.  It started so strongly and had such an "atmosphere" to it, but now it has become a book that I am simply determined to finish as I'm on page 457 out of 524.  I'll let you know if it recovers itself.

Great food, Great People

Good times, great company, good book (Eat, Pray, Love), at Luna Park restaurant for The SF Book & Brunch Club-Saturday Evening Version.  (Pictured left to right: William, Angela, Maria, and me).

We started off with the Warm Goat Cheese Fondue with Grilled Bread and Sliced Apples, and then Maria and I split the Grilled Alaskan Salmon with Asparagus, Mashed Potatoes and Roasted Mushroom Vinaigrette--both of which were quite delish.

And, as no trip to Luna Park is complete without their Bananas Foster, we had a couple to share and some of the Make It Yourself S'Mores.  Finally, no grand meal is complete without some good wine, so I indulged in the Cava, Brut Rosé, Marques de Monistrol, Spain, NV (with desert) and the Albariño, Martin Códax, Rías Baixas, Spain, 2006 (which was divinely delicious!).

Recent Reads

• The Road by Cormac McCarthy=4.20 out of 5

  John picked this one up out of my books after we watched No Country for Old Men (which I give a straight 5!).  I had set this book aside this summer after reading Jim Crace's The Pesthouse, as two post-apocalyptic stories in a row can be quite a downer.

I liked this book, but not as much as I would have liked to have loved it.  I had heard so much praise of the works of McCarthy (esp. Blood Meridian) that I imagine I expected so much more of him.  His writing is sparse--perhaps Hemingway-ish--and is pointedly missing punctuation; especially with contractions.

Oddly enough, I found the fundamentalist Christian nightmare of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale to be much more frightening than McCarthy's post-nuclear holocaust world.  I think we are conceivably at a stalemate with nuclear weapons--excepting perhaps North Korea?  (I think the Iranian nuclear rumor is just a scare tactic)--whereas, there seems to be a serious drive to re-imagine American history as a country founded upon/created by  Christian men (NPR Link here).

Nevertheless, I must tack on this gorgeous little excerpt:

Rich dreams now which he was loathe to wake from.  Things no longer known in this world.  The cold drove him forth to mend the fire.  Memory of her crossing the lawn toward the house in the early morning in a thin rose gown that clung to her breasts.  He thought that each memory recalled must do violence to  its origins. As in a party game.  Say the word and pass it on.  So be sparing.  What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.  (emphasis added, McCarthy 131)

 

• Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott=4.75 out of 5

  Excellent read for those who get a bit fussy and nervous about writing.  And let's be realistic, who doesn't?  I especially liked the essay on procrastination.

• The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta= 3.9 out of 5

Perrotta writes convincingly and lushly of the realities of everyday life.  Characters are detailed, real.

I especially enjoyed the main character, Ruth's, spiel on her issues with Christian Fundamentalism as I am pretty much in agreement with her:

In a way she was grateful to Maggie's [Ruth's daughter] coach for making the situation so clear.  Until she'd seen those girls, those beautiful young athletes, sitting on the grass in the sunshine being coerced by adults into praying to the God of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and the Republican Party--the God of War and Abstinence and Shame and Willful Ignorance, the God Who Loved Everyone Except the Homosexuals, Who Sent Good People to Hell if They didn't Believe in Him, and Let Murderers and Child Rapists into Heaven if They Did, the God Who Made Women an Afterthought , and Then Cursed Them with the Pain of Childbirth, the God Who Would Have Never Let Girls Play Soccer in the First Place if It Had Been Up to Him [...] (Perrotta  161)

• The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible by A.J. Jacobs.  (I refuse to rate it as the author admits to looking up his Amazon ratings; naming it as one of his sins.)

  Heard about this book on NPR (Link to Bryant Park Project interview) and found it while browsing the new book section at the library.  (BTW: I have a pretty whacked-out library--the San Francisco Public Library Park Branch just a block off of Haight Street.  Just a few weeks ago someone overdosed in the library bathroom!  But the new book section rocks!)
  
  I've made it through A. J. Jacobs 198th day of living the bible literally and I have found it funny, entertaining, educational, and sometimes shocking.

• Currently reading--and loving--The Secret History by Donna Tartt.  Although set in somewhat contemporary times, it has a very Gatsby-ish feel to it.

Fiber is Good for You...

I participated in the Wee Tiny Sock Swap and received this cutie from Eileen of the blog Running Knitter.  I pinned it up with two of my favorite bookmarks--the one with Plato's "quote" is from the Santa Cruz independent bookstore The Literary Guillotine where I bought the majority of my books for my philosophy classes at UC Santa Cruz; and the other was made by one of my favorite third grade students (Oh my, I have favorites!  Who could've imagined?!).

The same week, I also received an unexpected package from my friend B. who is now in Portland (and I miss her dearly!).  She knitted me a gorgeous earwarmer (which I am using as a neckwarmer); included some chocolate; organic, fair-trade Earl Grey tea (my fave); Burt's Bees Hand Salve (much needed); and some small things.  Thank you, B., you're too sweet!

Having filled up my frequent customer card at Imagiknit, I bought some more Addi Turbo circular needles (size 0 as I tend to knit loosely; 16 and 24 inches) and indulged myself with some Misti Alpaca sock yarn, which I am using to make an airy cowl.  Speaking of cowls, you should get yourself straightaway over to Fricknits to check out all the lovely cowls Julia  made!  While you're there, you should definitely donate $10 for her Ravelraiser which has some seriously amazing prizes.

(Misti Alpaca Hand Paint Sock Yarn Fingering, Color 08)

Finally moved beyond the cheap thrillers...

During the months of November and December, I felt rather brain-dead, tired but not sleepy, and found that I was only succored to sleep or into a state of relaxation by cheap, paperback spy/intrigue thrillers.  At last, in January, roundabout the time I started The San Francisco Book and Brunch Club, my mind awakened from its winter stupor, decided it wanted stimulation, and so I started reading "literature" again.

Here are some of the books I have consumed since then with a 1-5 rating system (wherein 5=superb and 1=blargh-boring):

• The Blood of Flowers by Anita Amirezzvani= 3.95, almost a 4

• The Passion of New Eve (my third reading)=4.90 for brilliance, quirkiness, and for being the inspiration for my masters thesis.

• The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield=4.25
  

This book is enthralling in that it winds you around its metaphorical fingers like a master seductress.  It is a mystery in the way that Bronte's Jane Eyre and Dicken's Bleak House are mysteries--stories that intrigue you as they lead you down a twisted path of discovery.  It has hints of the literary Gothic (not the oftentimes cheesy mall gothic).  It is a love letter to the novel in that it is a story of what makes a writer a writer, and through its adumbrating its literary forebearers--the Gothic, the 19th century British novelists--while staying firmly tied to the contemporary.  The Thirteenth Tale is a perfect winter read.  If only I had had a roaring fireplace to read it by...

• Lilith's Brood (Trilogy collection of  Dawn=4,  Adulthood Rites=4, and Imago=3.5) by Octavia E. Butler
  

I generally don't consider myself much of a fan of science fiction, but this one was suggested by Matt of the book club upon hearing that my thesis considers gender, the deconstruction and/or distortion of the binary gender system, and the construction of gender in both Western and non-Western cultures.

• A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini=4

For me, one of the most striking scenes in this book was when the characters go to visit the giant Buddhas in Bamyan before their destruction.  This scene was amazingly well-written and brought forth my memories of watching the video of these Buddhas being destroyed by the Taliban in 2001.  I remember being struck by the complete inanity of such actions* and being imbued with a deep sense of sadness at the loss of such great historical landmarks (constructed in the sixth century CE).
*(Of course, not being a Muslim, I say "inanity" as I don't believe that it should be forbidden to depict living beings [humans or animals] as Islam does.)

• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro=2.95

I was definitely expecting more from this book; more Orwellian, more Atwood at her dystopic best.  Nevertheless, it was an OK read--compelling enough to pull me through to the end, but nothing spectacular.

• The May Queen: Women on Life, Love, and Pulling It All Together in Your 30's (Essay Collection)=Some stories were almost 5's, while others were blah 2.5's.

• God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens

Definitely a polemic as Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals was a polemic.  It is hard to read too much at once because Hitchens' is so blisteringly on attack.  I suppose that is his point, but taking the attack level down a notch would make for a much more readable thesis.

• Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert=4.25

Just delish!

• Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See=3.85

At the point of reading this, I was thinking to myself, "Please no more texts that have women at the mercy of misogynistic males!*"--nevertheless, I still read it.  This story is set in the last part of the period of footbinding in China and makes for an intense read in its graphic details of the cruel practice of foot mutilation alongside the general degradation and self-internalized-degradation of women in Chinese society.
*Recently read texts with women at the mercy of misogynistic males: The Blood of Flowers,  The Passion of New Eve (only portions of it), A Thousand Splendid Suns, and Snow Flower and the Secret Fan.

• World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks=3

I could only read so much of this story posed as an oral report on the takeover of the world by Zombies.  Too gross, too creepy, just too much.  It works well as an allegory for present political problems and unharnessed experimentation in biotechnology--but not well enough for me to read the whole thing.  I recommend the first section.

• The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards=4.75; gorgeous prose.

I love the following quote from the book and see a possible connection being made to Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (This a note to myself for future reference, BTW!):

There was not only one photo in a negative, his father said; there were multitudes.  A moment was not a single moment at all, but rather an infinite number of different moments, depending on who was seeing things and how.  Paul listened to his father talk, feeling a pit open up inside him.  If all this was true, his father was someone he could never really know, which scared him.  Still, he liked being there amid the soft light and the smell of the chemicals.  He like the series of precise steps from beginning to end, the sheet of exposed paper sliding into the developing fluid and the images rising out of nowhere, the timer going off and then the paper slipping into the fixer.  The images drying, fixed in place, glossy and mysterious. (Edwards 214-5)

• 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke=1.95

Started reading this before Arthur C. Clarke passed away in an attempt to better understand Kubrick's film interpretation.  Nyet--not so good of a book.  Although I'll give him some credit for sort of predicting the internet in 1968.

• The Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo (not yet finished)=so far, good.

• The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff=Just started it and am loving it thus far!  It is March's book choice for The SF Book and Brunch Club.