My carpal tunnel issue has been causing me some pretty intense pain lately, hence the extended absence here. I've started to think that Twitter might be more in my line right now since about 140 characters would be just about right for me to type at one time.

And it's not that there aren't things I'd like to be talking about - like what fun Candy Tan's reading and signing of Beyond Heaving Bosoms was at Powells recently. And how I couldn't think of a question until my drive home (natch). (I'll give you a hint about the question, it was inspired by these Dame Sally Markham sketches.) And how I got to meet up and chat with lilithsaintcrow and Meljean Brook and a few others. Candy told the story (thanks to a question asking for the "early warning signs" of a person getting into romance novels) of how she first read a romance and it was awful and she couldn't help but wonder at the intelligence of anyone who liked them - which is a pretty good parallel for my own first romance-reading experience - along with the subsequent revision of that opinion upon finally reading a good one. Candy read from the choose-your-own-adventure chapter of the book, which I highly recommend. (Not just that chapter mind you, but the entire thing.) The book is entertaining and true and the kind of thing I'd induce my husband to read, if it were truly possible to induce him to read anything. (He won't even read any of Wodehouse's Ukridge stories, just so you know what I'm up against here.)

There's also been my contemplation of impactful story endings and how they can be an important and significant in their own way as the first impression. I mean, obviously a book needs to give a first good impression or the reader won't give it much of a chance. But I find I hold stories with an ending that can't be improved upon - the kind that practically smack you upside the head they pack such a wallop and are just so perfect in their way - are the ones that keep me pondering a story for weeks thereafter, that make such an impression that there's never a question to myself of "did I read this or not?" when I come across it at some future point again, and that can even get me to hold off on reading or watching any other stories for awhile so I can really savor that one. And those are pretty rare, if you think about it. I mean, it's not as if any story that doesn't do that isn't worthwhile or terrific in its own way. It's just that those stories that can be terrific all the way through from start to finish yet hold back until the final moment what will elevate that story from damn good to genius don't come along all that often. Complicating it further is the fact that the elusive genius-making element is all in the eye of the beholder. For example, when I say that I find the endings of One Hundred Years of Solitude and My Antonia to be superlative, I can also acknowledge that other people may not find the endings to be anything special. But to me, the endings can't be improved upon, they were perfect for the stories, they had me just sitting there savoring them for a long while afterwards and made the next things I read or heard or saw pale and insignificant little things. Not many stories can do that, you must admit.

There's the amazonfail fiasco, which at the moment I'll only say astonishes me (since I don't have the hand power to say everything I'm thinking) from the point of view of their complete inability to handle the public and their perception of what happened and why. As a company completely founded and run within the internet age, and thus one would imagine more than savvy in knowing how the internet and its rumor mills works, it is utterly baffling how/why they *still* haven't made any overtures to the public. Utterly amazing.

There's also how my family is going to Disneyland next week to celebrate my baby's 13th birthday. Egads! 13! It just doesn't seem possible. My sweet little snuffling infant, always so ready to smile (except right after waking - can't say I can blame anyone for that), always wanting to be with her mom and dad, entering the snarling teen-age years where mom and dad are such idiots that it's some kind of miracle to her adolescent mind that we can walk and talk at the same time. Anyway. We've been planning on this particular celebration for years and booked/paid for the trip last year, which kind of worked both for and against us given the current economy. Nevertheless, we're all looking forward to it - not least because the weather is rumored to be quite warm and we're freezing here in Portland at the moment. I tell you, one is just not meant to be wearing 5 layers of clothes to a softball game, and that's what we've been doing about half the time this year.

OK, my hand it starting to cramp significantly, so time to pull the plug on myself. Back to reading old Agatha Christie mysteries and a book I picked up last week-end at Powells: Love My Rifle More than You. Here's the first sentence: "Sometimes even now, I wake up before dawn and forget I am not a slut". Sounds promising, no?

I'll just close by apologizing for my radio silence, which I suspect will be ongoing for awhile to come. It makes me feel a bit ghoulish, reading all of your posts, getting little insights into the goings-on in your lives while not saying anything myself. Just know I appreciate your posts, even if I'm not reciprocating in kind.

Tags: books, family

There's a song by INXS called Questions that I quite like. It's one those songs I fell for instantly - you know how those are? You don't even have to hear all of it and you know you'll be repeating it as soon as it's done. It fits the theme of the album it's on (Welcome to Wherever You Are) perfectly.

Anyway, there's this lyric in it "How will you hear when you've heard it all before" that I think can be taken a few ways. In one light I think that question can be answered by saying that you do what you can to hear it this time in a way you haven't heard it before, otherwise it won't be possible to really take anything in. That is, the listener has some responsibility to listen in the same way that the speaker has a responsibility to say something worth hearing.

I don't know why, but for some reason going off on that tangent puts me in mind of a book I read recently called Seduce Me by Megan Clark.

Let me back up a bit before moving forward. Some months ago (I can't remember exactly - some time last spring?) I attended a signing at Powell's. I know I picked up Generation Kill and Officers and Gentlemen that night along with Megan Clark's first book, Rescue Me (what does that say about me that I can remember the books I bought more readily than when I bought them?). I spoke with her a bit. I know we talked about how I didn't really read erotica - not that I particularly have anything against it as a genre and more power to the people who like it, but at that point I think I'd been able to finish reading maybe one or two books in the genre and was open to trying more - only, selectively. From what I've read, I'd say it's a very difficult balancing act fitting characterization and character growth, plot, and heavy duty sexuality into a story in such a way that I care even a little bit about any of it. I don't know if this is one of those biases based on the fact that I'm female, or if I'd be this way even if I were a man, but I don't much care for a story that involves sex for sex's sake. There needs to be more to it to hold my interest.

I found I liked a lot about Rescue Me and thought about it off and on for days thereafter.

So when there was another signing at Powell's recently (I'll have to tell you the anecdote I told Meljean that night about her book, my husband, and fire some time), I remembered that Megan Clark's next book was supposed to be out and decided I wanted to get it. [Let me pause for a short moment and note how amazed I was that these authors I met months before remembered my name and how to spell it. If you knew how many times I've spelled my name for people then received a fax or whatnot mere seconds later with my name mis-spelled you might have some notion of my astonishment.] I read Seduce Me shortly thereafter and found I had a similar reaction to it that I had to Rescue Me.

That is, I liked the stories even though I had a sense throughout that I knew where the characters and the stories were going. I'd "heard it all before". However, the journeys were well told and included some unexpected things, so there was still more I could hear after all. What puzzled me is the fact that I didn't really care for the main heroines in either story. It's an odd thing to me. Usually if I can't like a character that's driving a story, I don't want to know the story. Yet, with both of these books I was interested in seeing what would happen next.

This experience happening twice has me questioning things for myself. Do you need to like a character to like her story? How important is that connection between the reader and the character that's pulling you through a story? And is the reason I didn't like either heroine a result of my own internalized conceptions about females and sexuality? For instance, with the females I've known, those who have been with a large number/variety of sexual partners have been punishing themselves in some way, or trying to fill some "god shaped hole", or living down to some nasty labels or expectations that were affixed to them at a time in their life when they didn't deserve them. I think sleeping with a lot of partners means something very different for women than it does for men. And I don't mean this in that way of societal mores passing judgment and saying what's good for the gander isn't good for the goose, but rather in that way where the women were working through negative things and the multiple partners was more like a cry for help than anything else. It was a way to get temporary positive attention from men in a manner they could control more than it was ever about pleasure.

With that in my personal experience, I wonder if it means that I'm pre-disposed to put some wall between myself and a female character that's searching for her power via sex because I take that search as a kind of punishment she's putting herself through before she can clear the tunnel and see the light again. In a way, since that's more or less the entire point of these stories, delving into one's sexual power to find powers of other sorts, I guess it's kind of built in that a character will be taking herself down what I perceive as a dark road.

I suppose it's curious in a way that even with greater sexual equality, there is still a different meaning to casual sex based on whether you are male or female. I mean, if the main character were male and he was finding himself through sex I imagine I'd expect to see a very different kind of story unfold (getting back to Questions, the lyric "how can a child become a man without a child" might have something to do with that, among other things). Or maybe that's just me showing my age. Maybe to people in their 20s, these separate nuances of meaning don't exist. I don't think that's true, based on the power that calling a girl a slut still seems to have, but I know I could be wrong.

In the end, reading these books seemed to lead me to lots of questions: about the nature of my expectations as a reader, about whether my notions about sexuality have any basis in reality any more, and how true it is that nearly any story about a female coming into her own must necessarily involve a sexual awakening of some sort.

Anyway, if anyone else reads these stories, I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts. I would recommend them, and not just for the selfish reason that I'd like to see others talking about them. Just remember: they are erotica. They live up to the genre in the sexin' department, so don't say I didn't warn you.

Tags: books

Yay
Clearly, elevators were the place for me today. I was wearily leaving work and heard an elevator ding in just as I was walking out the door. At that time of day it takes forever to catch one and I was afraid I was going to miss it. Thankfully, two men were on it and they accidentally got off on my floor, thinking they were at their destination. Their little moment of confusion held the elevator long enough for me to make it. I got on with a colleague and the two men: a very tall cop and a nice looking fireman. The colleague got off on the next floor and I was flirted with by the cop and the fireman for the rest of the ride and all through the lobby. ::fans self:: That may be some kind of cliched fantasy, but it's an awesome one that I highly recommend.

Boo
Just saw the preview for the new movie of Brideshead Revisited and I can tell already they've taken out the subtlety and humor, changed the themes & characters, and all-around messed up the story. Plus, no evidence of Anthony Blanche. I mean, honestly, what is the story without Anthony Blanche to tell everyone the truth (that they don't want to hear)?

Yay
The house smells of blueberry pie. We bought a half flat of blueberries (Ivanhoe - I think I've found a favorite) and a half flat of raspberries over the week-end. We've been gorging ourselves, but still, something had to be done because there was just no way we were making it through the whole flat of berries in their fresh form. Today was the perfect day for baking, it didn't get above the mid-70s all day, and it's kind of too bad I didn't do any preserving because weather like this in summer is made for making jams and jellies. (And pies.)

Tags: books, food

Here's a typical example of how I choose books...

Some months ago I was at Powell's for a book signing. Before it got started, I went by the history/war/espionage section to see if there was anything that looked particularly interesting. There was a book called Generation Kill featured with a note by a Powell's employee that spoke to why someone would want to buy it. It grabbed my interest and I picked it up as a possibility. Then I went by the literature section and found an Evelyn Waugh book I'd never read (or even seen) before. When making my final choices, I picked the Waugh to take home that night.

One night while flipping channels, I saw that HBO is doing a series from Generation Kill. I thought to myself, "Oh, I'd better read the book before I see the series because I probably won't want to read it after I see it."

So when I was back at Powell's for another book signing earlier in May, I made sure to buy it. I highly recommend it. It's the story from a journalist embedded with Marines of the First Recon unit for the first month or so of the current war in Iraq. It's quite amazing how one can see that pretty much all of the current situation is traceable back to the very start of the war and rooted in the complete lack of planning for anything beyond invading the country. The soldiers have no training in the language and very little knowledge of the culture (they are dependent upon someone from Kuwait to act as a translator and it seems pretty clear the translator leaves a lot out when doing that job). They aren't told the purpose of what they are doing. There are moments when extraordinarily idiotic commands from above put many lives in jeopardy. It's compulsively readable. Evan Wright has an ability to sketch personalities by using a person's words of self-description coupled with his own observations to such an extent that at times you don't even need to be told who did or said what - you can guess based on past information and acts.

One side benefit of reading books like this is that it puts my job into perspective. As stressful as some days might be, at least I'm not being ordered to do things that are both against the standing company-wide orders that everyone knows and against even the barest understanding of common sense and safety. (It's the military version of The Dilbert Principle in action, with the obvious exception of the ability to do damage.)

HBO rarely lets me down when it comes to the series they sponsor (it's still a big mystery to me why they don't dedicate one of their channels to re-showing their own programming) and I'm quite looking forward to seeing the series now. It will be interesting to see if that wider exposure to this story will do anything as respects conversation about Iraq. From my point of view, it was very sad and frustrating to realize that this was a story from the first month of the war and five years later the situation is no better - in fact, arguably it's far worse - than at that first month. And so much of the mess could have been prevented had the administration put some effort into learning some facts about what they were getting into before the invasion began. Amazing.

Tags: books

( Starting with a brief 'Giving Credit Where Credit is Due' which is off topic for the rest of this post )

I have to say how disconcerting it was when I realized this morning that my dreams last night were scenarios out of famous children's stories. I'm not real certain of the inspiration, but I think odds are good that they were inspired by this discussion about world building over at Smart Bitches along with me realizing once again that I don't get drawn into alternate worlds in the same way I did when I was a child. I remember a discussion on that very topic was hosted by Michael Dirda some years ago. It seems it's a common part of the growth of a reader to go through the stages of real immersion into a book's world as a child to a place where one reads little fiction at all. I'm not yet at the stage of giving up fiction, by any means, but I certainly interact with it in a different way than I did as a child.

As a kid, I loved Laura Ingalls Wilder, LM Montgomery (still do), Madeleine L'Engle, CS Lewis, Carolyn Keene, then later AC Doyle, Agatha Christie, Jane Austen, F Scott Fitzgerald, and all of the other usual suspects. My love was due in part to that feeling that I could step into an alternate reality just by opening a book. It was a visceral thing I could feel down to my gut. I was there. I was truly "world's away". In my adult years, I think the only book that has drawn me in in that way is Outlander. But unlike before (like with re-reading Anne of Green Gables as a kid), when I re-read Outlander now, the pull is not the same. I see it with a more critical eye; while I might be in that world when I'm reading, I'm not 100% there. It's more like I'm 50% there, at best.

It turns out that 50% difference is a very large difference for me. That Maximum of 50% Rule applies to everything fictional nowadays. Actually, it's far more accurate to say the 50% Rule applies for what I find to be the best of the fiction I read nowadays. Anything less than what I find to be the best falls pretty sharply under that 50% mark.

There's a part of me that mourns this change. However, the greater part of me accepts that this change is just a part of growth. It's a waste of time to do anything less than accept that this is just how it is for me now. One thing that really helps with losing a sense of wonder is the increase in understanding I've found. As a child, there was definitely less of an understanding of all of the ways that fictional worlds work through and examine truths of the real world. That increased interaction with fiction in a cerebral way is likely the thing that doesn't allow the sense of immersion to come over me. But I think like nearly every other situation where one goes from innocence to experience, it's impossible to go back to innocence once experience is gained, and it's close to impossible to truly wish you were still (or again) that innocent. One can look back, but one can't go back.

( Finally, a P.S. on the dreams... )

Tags: books, dreams

Several months ago, I started to read Atonement. Then I misplaced it. Every once in awhile I'd wonder where it went because I wanted to finish it, but looking in all of the usual places that I leave books laying around didn't help. It was lost to me. Then yesterday when I woke up, I knew right where it was: As soon as its location struck me, I went straight to it. It's funny how that can happen sometimes, isn't it?

One thing I enjoy about books, beyond the stories inside the covers, is that they are objects that can sometimes tell a story beyond their covers. On the outside of Atonement I found a note I had written to myself all those months ago. Useless and irrelevant information now, but at the time I wrote it there was some meaning to it. In the archeology of my family life, that little post-it represented but a tiny fragment of information with its true meaning known only to me. What would someone else have made of it?

On the inside of this book - which I purchased used - I've been enjoying the archeology of someone else's life. The odd word is underlined (torpor, decorous), yet the word ha-ha was not. I assume the underlined words are ones the person who came before me wanted or needed to look up - that is what archeology must be, after all, a series of assumptions even if they are scientific in nature. I would also assume that a person would need to look up ha-ha before torpor or decorous. Or perhaps I should instead assume that this person had read Mansfield Park and thus had cause to look up the meaning of ha-ha at some time in the past. Or maybe a more logical assumption is that perhaps the context of how ha-ha appeared in this book explained its meaning while the contexts for torpor or decorous did not.

Every once in awhile moments like this help me remember a grade school assignment wherein we students had to imagine that we were scientists examining where we live at this moment in time at some future date as if it were preserved like Pompeii. Something had happened to stop all human life, and a couple hundred years later we were scientists come back to examine the objects that were found with the people. We were to make deductions about their use and meaning. What would future-scientist make of Mickey Mouse or Britney Spears? Would future-scientist wonder if the Mouse or the Britney were gods? How else could their presence be explained?

How easy it seems it would be to misinterpret meaning without knowing all of the contextual facts people know as they live each moment.

Perhaps the truth about some moment in the past is boring beyond imagining, but because it's in the past and it happened to someone else we get to add a tint of romance to it and imbue it with a kind of automatic import and grandeur and meaning that's not quite true. Even knowing how easy it is to be wrong, it still brings me a funny kind of enjoyment to guess about the meaning of people and things. It's not funny ha-ha exactly, but a kind of funny all the same.

Tags: books, words

There are some men who create our entertainment who obviously love women. I don't mean that kind of loving that is focused to the exclusion of nearly everything else on the sexual aspects of femininity. I mean that kind of loving that demonstrates a kind of fascinated wonder at how femininity differs from masculinity, how the strengths within the feminine can be different from the strengths within the masculine, and how the weaknesses of the feminine are different from the weaknesses of the masculine. These men don't create heroines in a way that defines their strengths in masculine terms. The heroines can and do stand alone. The heroines can and do walk alone into the forest accepting that they may not return. They can and do generate action in the plot that don't depend on the cliches and stereotypes of Hera (nagging fishwife), Persephone (helpless ingenue), Demeter (overprotective mother), Medusa (the bitter hag taking her revenge on all men for the actions of the one man who hurt her) and all of the other stereotypes we know and love. They also don't generate a story wherein it's written in such a way that one assumes the story would serve just as well with a man in the part because I swear sometimes it's as if stories are written as if they're Die Hard, then a search and replace was done to change every John to Jane. It's as if there's no actual consideration of how a woman might approach a situation with a different perspective, the writer is merely concerned with saying to the audience, "See - this woman can act like a man, that's how you can tell she's strong."

Joss Whedon is obviously one of the men who is truly intrigued by heroines. Even setting aside the obvious example of Buffy, there's also Cordelia, Fred, and Zoe to consider. Actually, pretty much all of his female characters stand up to scrutiny, if you think about it. They are complete characters that don't need a masculine foil in order for the audience to think them whole.

While watching Angel-A over the week-end I decided that Luc Besson is another one of those men. Obvious examples of his fascination with heroines as complete characters able to carry a story on their own are La Femme Nikita and The Fifth Element. These stories revolve around their heroines. These heroines are able to stand alone even if they choose not to.

It occurred to me that there's something different between the heroines of a Joss Whedon or Luc Besson story and heroines such as those in movies such as Charlie's Angels. The words to describe the heroines are nearly identical when comparing them, but there are some key differences. Describing those key differences escapes me, however. The best I can come up with is that the Joss and Luc heroines somehow seem to pay more finely nuanced attention to the details of how weaknesses can create strengths and strengths can create weaknesses in a person, while heroines such as the Charlie's Angels are more like caricatures of people. The caricatures show the broad outlines, give you the general gist to be sure. You know what you're seeing there, after all; you don't need any explanation of the thing you're observing. But what you're seeing also has the element of a joke to it: certain characteristics are exaggerated for affect, as if one needs to wink at the audience in order to make it palatable to accept the heroine as capable of driving a story.

That difference in approach and understanding makes all the difference in the world when it comes to me being able to appreciate and accept the heroines as worthy of my respect. My daughter was quite fascinated with the Charlie's Angels movies for awhile and at the time I couldn't put my finger on why I couldn't like them when it seemed a clear goal of the stories was to depict strong and independent women (besides the violence for violence's sake the movies espouse). I think I've finally figured it out for myself: it's that difference between taking the heroines seriously and treating the heroines as caricatures.

Now that I'm thinking in these terms I've got some re-thinking to do as respects how heroines written by men differ from how heroines are written by women. I wonder how many differences in interpretation I'll find on the topic of "strong woman" when examining the stories and I wonder what that says about the nexus of where men and women agree on what it means to be a strong person worthy of the terms 'hero' or 'heroine'.

Tags: books, movies

I came across this book meme and decided to try it. Sometimes I think of things like this as my virtual TBR pile. Well, these and banned book lists. As I told my daughter as I gave her the most recent list of the 100 Most Banned Books, "Here's a list of some good books to read." Granted that's not a foolproof method of finding books you might like, but it works as well as many other mostly random methods.


The instructions: “These are the top 106 books most often marked as ‘unread’ by LibraryThing’s users. The rules: bold what you have read, italicize what you started but couldn’t finish, strike through what you couldn’t stand and underline those you have no intention of reading.”

A few of these probably should be underlined, but I've found that today's intentions are tomorrow's "What was I thinking?" so I'm trying to keep an open mind. (But between you and me, odds of me getting a sudden inspiration to read Les Misérables are slim to none.)

( Some books I've read...Some books I've not )

Is that really 106 books? Too lazy to count...if not I could probably come up with some other books I've read and loved that others found tedious or that are reputedly very fine, yet remain in my TBR pile. And I keep hearing terrific things about Never Let You Go, but I keep forgetting that every time I think, "I need something new to read" and tear off to the library or bookstore. Is there a name for such a list of books? Those that you intend to check out and which could join those other very fine, though still unreads, that are scattered in clumps and stacks throughout your house?

Tags: books, meme

Wow, can't believe it's been over 2 weeks since I checked in here. How are y'all? The thought of reading through everything I missed inspires much woe (it'd be "skip 500" or some ridiculous number to completely catch up, I imagine), so point me in the right direction of any must-know situations.

So what have I been up to? Work, mostly. Lots and lots of work. I had this client ("had" being the operative word there) that was new for me and I spent oodles of time working through that one. Since it was new to me, I wasn't as invested as some of the people who had known these people for several years. But still - it's sad. Reflection after-the-fact made me feel a bit better about the whole situation - you know how you get that 20/20 insight about things AFTER something ends? - and help me take it a lot less personally.

There's also been the Hawaii prep work, which reached a crescendo at the same time as the "had" client reached its crescendo. I was responsible for a few sections of the Board Meeting materials - along with doing the Julie McCoy routine, making reservations and generally herding cats - and got to put some thoughts together regarding HIPAA that I didn't want to put together (my conclusion? Let's let the lawyers figure this out. Because who in the hell would volunteer to read the ERISA law? Not this girl, I can tell you that).

I also read Lover Unbound, which was disappointing. I've been out of touch with reading reviews for awhile, so I checked into Ward's bulletin board to see what people were saying there. The one critique I read more or less expressed my disappointments, so I know I'm not alone. My husband thinks it's pretty cruel for people to be posting such candid thoughts explaining their disappointment on the author's own website. He could be right about that. The public could also be right in thinking they may as well say what they want to say on her site just as they would anywhere else since those comments would be easy enough to find. I guess that's the downside for authors putting together those kinds of community fansites - they may get more honesty than they bargained for.

On a more raving fan note, I also watched the terrific, awesome, touching, thought-provoking and just all around amazing The War. I've always been more intrigued by WWI, so while there's a lot of things I knew just because you really can't help but knowing them if you pay any attention whatsoever in History classes (and The Winds of War - remember that thing? I'm sure I'd find it utter crap now, but I recall reading the book and thinking it was just so great at the time (ugh!)), there were also so many things that all came together for me by getting them presented in the big picture fashion used in this documentary. It's truly a stunning achievement, how they put it all together, how they focused the presentation around four American cities and its residents and were able to give such a global overview despite the use of an American lens. I was utterly amazed at the amount of color footage that came from the Pacific campaigns - I never knew that much color footage existed.

And, oh!, the heartbreak of seeing all those young men, physically fit, captured at a peak of physical strength, and knowing how so many of them ended up. Even the survivors were never the same.

It helped me understand something one of the interviewees said that I believe to be true in relation to the use of atomic bombs (she said - more or less - "You will never be able to convince a person of my generation that using those atomic bombs wasn't the right thing to do, maybe even a good thing to do"). Growing up, I saw those bombs from the point of view of knowing the horrible kind of devastation they caused, knowing the effects that are still being realized for people who lived there as well as their offspring, seeing how that moment was the start of a worldwide escalation in the use and threatened use of that kind of technology. In short, there seemed to be no positives - only negatives. Then one day I heard my dad, who participated in the Pacific campaign and who has never related a single thing about that experience to his family, say to my uncle (who had been a part of the Manhattan Project) how very much he and every soldier he knew appreciated what they had done in developing those bombs. To say that was a shock is playing it down quite a bit. I had never thought of it from that point of view - that point of view of only knowing what they knew at the time, that point of view of living through the experience of war with the Japanese as it was unfolding - and it helped me forgive our government a little once that realization set in. They couldn't know what they were starting, only what they hoped they were ending.

And in that vein, I'll admit that I often wonder about the documentaries that Germany and Japan produce. I made a friend in high school who was a German exchange student. He grew up adjacent to one of the former concentration camps in one of those small villages where all of the villagers claimed they had no idea what was going and where it's impossible for outsiders to believe they had no idea what was going on. This kid wasn't even born when those things happened, and yet he was very sensitive on the topic and didn't want to talk to us about it. I imagine it would be hard to realize that your grandparents or some nice old person you've known your whole life could allow such a thing to happen. The guilt must be amazing. And yet...one of my high school teachers was in the infantry and I recall that he related experience after experience with Germans where they would denounce Hitler after the surrender, but when he questioned them on specific points laid out in Mein Kampf they were in complete agreement with the particulars of those statements. They hadn't really given up on believing in all that Hitler espoused. If you believed that they told the truth on both counts, you had to conclude that they had given up on the messenger, but not the message. All that makes me wonder if the seeds aren't still there, waiting for the right conditions to sprout up again. Or if there are a few seeds, but they'll stay seeds forever. Given that, what do they tell themselves? And how does it differ from what we tell ourselves? [In a scary aside, I'll just relate that a headline in my local paper today was on the topic of a skinhead convention here in Portland. We haven't heard much on those idiots around here since the 1980s and 1990s, so that was terrible to see.]

Well, as you can tell, in between insane work days, those stories have been much on my mind.

Next week I've got some projects to get finished up before I escape the unseasonably cold early autumn we've got going on for a too-brief spell. After that it's going to be rain, snow and cold, cold, cold for several months. I am not looking forward to it.

And finally, don't let me forget to send off a birthday card to a friend. E-mails still don't quite do it, do they? So yeah, string on the finger time.

Tags: books, movies, work

This morning on my way to the park and ride I experienced this behavior:

The van ahead of me approached an intersection where the light was green. He (it was a contractor's van, so I'm going with "he") started braking. The light turned yellow, he let off the brake and lurched forward, as if thinking he'd go for it. Just after the jolt forward was the quick brake to stop. Thus I got stuck at one of the longest lights around town and missed the bus I was rushing to meet.

Methinks talking on a cell phone was likely involved in that little bit of WTF? behavior.

I drove to work and was reminded not just by Mr. Van, but by many other drivers as well, just why I hate driving to work. I much prefer the bus. Honestly. I don't understand why anyone would want to deal with things like people stopping at green lights, pedestrians rushing into a busy street - not! at the crosswalk, mind you - waving a right arm as if that's a charm that'll prevent being struck and/or a spell that'll induce drivers to want to stop randomly instead of continuing on at 35 mph, people coming into a lane without a signal or even a look back over the shoulder, and the various other bits of ass-hattery I observed on my commute today. I much prefer letting someone else deal with all of that while I read or stare out the window.

Of course, riding the bus on a regular basis does mean that at least 4 times per week I have to hear a cell phone conversation (a long and loud one, natch) I'd really prefer not to hear. Plus there will be those days when the bus will be late. Or worse, early. But on balance, those are minor inconveniences in comparison with the alternative.

Why are the roads so clogged with people so eager to hop in a vehicle and get out there to experience such random and weird behaviors? I understand that there is a certain percentage of people who are actually working while driving around and I understand there's another percentage of people for whom the bus or public transport just won't do it. But I'm pretty convinced that still leaves the larger share of people who prefer to be conscious of every stop and start in traffic, who like getting cut off, who don't mind watching people illegally use the shoulders of the road to get ahead while they do the right thing and sit there, who find it an adventure to miss the exit because people won't let them over in time to catch it.

Once again I'm out of step with the larger culture I'm living in.

( And on an unrelated topic, a reminder for myself re: Gilgamesh... )

Tags: annoyances, books