Spilt Melk, or, Shortcuts

Warning:  This is a baseball post.

Oh, and...

Warning:  This is a writing post, too.

As the Airman used to say to me, "Sit down, shut up, and hang on."

*****

This morning my favorite PBS affiliate, KQED in San Francisco, posted this article to Facebook and Twitter, an open letter from a fan to the Giants.  In it, the fan deliberates so many repercussions of SF Giants' outfielder Melky Cabrera's positive test result for performance-enhancing drugs.  KQED asked in their teaser, "Do you still love the San Francisco Giants?"

Oo, boy.

Yes, Virginia, I still love the San Francisco Giants.  I also happen to still love every other baseball team, with the exception of the New York Yankees.  I love all of the minor league teams, I love the college teams, I love the Little League teams, and I love the little kid who was at the park the other night in a batting helmet almost too big for him sending grounders past his dad.  I love baseball, pure and simple.  I love so many things about baseball.

But I've only loved them recently.

When I graduated from high school, I was a huge Twins fan.  Loved all things Kirby.  Had my own "Buy a vowel Hrbek" sign.  Wanted to see the park someday.  I still haven't got there--and won't because they are in a new ballpark now--but I got a little heartbroken along the way and got sidetracked.  In the mid to late nineties I sort of gave up on baseball...right about the time Mr. McGwire and Mr. Sosa started beefing up and hitting home runs all over the place.  I didn't give up on baseball because they had been found to have used drugs, but because baseball, by my definition, was a sport where you didn't look like an athlete of any kind of stereotype but yet you made amazing things happen.  I stopped watching baseball when they stopped looking like average guys and started looking like cartoon characters.  To me, the game didn't look amazing anymore.

And, of course, we all found out why.

(Someone that I dated once said that he stopped watching baseball when the players went on strike in the nineties.  Strangely, even in my cash-strapped position, that would be less heartbreaking than drug use.  A union fight is a union fight.  Drug use is a short cut.)

I didn't come back to the game until 2004, and that's only because my brother was fool enough to take me to a ballpark.  I was hooked at the entrance gate.  Keep in mind that I saw Bonds play that day, and while I wasn't impressed and knew what was going on already with him, I wasn't following players at that point.  I was following ballpark experience, the experience of going to a game at AT&T.  Since then I have visited the Coliseum (blech; sorry, Oakland, I love you, but I hate your venue) and Petco Park (nice ballpark, no excitement, though).  AT&T still wins.  AT&T wins regardless of whether the Giants do.  I attended games through the Bonds' era, and into the long drought after Bonds, and even when I had to fight to get seats from opponents' fans who were sitting around me waiting for us to lose and Johnny-come-lately Giants' fans who decided to start flooding the ballpark in 2011.  I loved AT&T after we sent Molina to Texas and Dave Roberts moved to San Diego and Mike Matheny left to heal from concussions.  I'm not there now, but I'm still there in spirit.

Let me just say this about Melky Cabrera:  I didn't hate him, and I don't hate him now.  I can say that even though he doped up AND even though he used to be a Yankee.  (Chris Stewart is now a Yankee, and I don't hate him, and I have always love Sabathia, so I think the Yankee hatred lies in their leadership...no, I don't like A-Rod, either.)  Honestly, I was sort of ambivalent about him.  I liked the idea that we got a better batter for an awful pitcher (Sanchez), but I'm sure that now someone in Kansas City is getting the last laugh on that one.  I was probably more hurt by Mota getting suspended for his drug use than Melky, because I didn't know Melky as well.  But any drug use is not okay.  When Mota comes back, I'll treat his bullpen time like I did Bonds' at-bats, with silence.  I will pause the passion and look away.  And I'll do the same for Melky.

I too have questions on how this could happen, and what the Giants (or any other ball club) could do to stop it in the future.  It all comes down to this--do you assume that any phenomenal player is using something as a crutch?  Should we presume guilt on Jeter, Fielder, Wright, Vogelsong, Cain, Dickey, Harper, Pence, Sandoval, Strasburg, etc, etc, ad nauseum?  What then, would be the magic number?  What's "too good" for you?

I didn't hate Melky.  But I was bored by him.  I'm not bored by the Giants, or baseball, in general.  Only if the player is too good am I bored.  Show me your humanity and I'm interested.  Which, remarkably, sort of makes the guys who take the shortcuts perfect for the job in my eyes, if it weren't for my love of integrity as well, and my hatred for shortcuts.

*****

As a side-note, I promised that this post would be about writing as well.

In the past couple of months we've heard some pretty wild things from the political ad campaigns and from non-fiction writers fabricating certain things in their books.  I won't point fingers; you've probably read/heard about them from MSNBC, Fox News, or other news organizations.  It makes it difficult for me to care about current events, or to pick up a memoir without wondering how much of it is a shortcut to get me, the reader, to pick it up.

Does that mean I'm going to give up on current events?
Does that mean I'm going to only read novels?  (Hmm, that's a thoug--juuuust kidding...)
Does that mean I'm going to give up baseball?

Lack of integrity, and the short ride instead of run to the finish line, could ruin the journey.  Or it could pinpoint who I cheer for.  I'm still cheering for the Giants, but not all of them.  I'm still reading books, but not all of them.  And I'm still following current events, but not all of them.

After all, I have my own race to run.  And I can't afford a shortcut.

Sit down.  Shut up.  And hang on, dear reader.  

That Song by Alison Krauss, or, A Way With Words

Formal-ly

I go through cycles of music and podcasts when I head out on my walks to the ocean these days.  If all of the podcasts are spent, I switch to a playlist that drives me to pick up my feet.  If there are podcasts waiting, they get first priority, for walking allows my brain the only multi-task that receives the information.

I listen to all kinds of programs:

• "The Writer's Almanac" with Garrison Keillor;
• "The Rachel Maddow Show" with Rachel Maddow;
• "Here's the Thing" with Alec Baldwin (yes, THAT Alec Baldwin);
• "Selected Shorts" with various celebrities reading short works of fiction to an audience;
• "Alt.Latino" with Jasmine Garsd and Felix Contreras;
• "WTF" with Marc Maron;
• "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross;
• "A Way With Words" with Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett.

Notice a pattern?  No?  Well, then just remember the last one on the list.  That one will stick out--like a sore thumb, as the saying goes--later.

*****

I've been in love with words all the way back to pre-kindergarten days.  According to legend, I'd run around the house playing with words (I was a neat freak even at that age and playing with my toys often meant, well, organizing them) that I heard from my parents, my live-in grandmother, and rare glances at television.  My mother was a huge proponent of children's literature, particularly rhyme, and I would beat out a song of Seuss or Silverstein until I drove everyone crazy or concerned.  When my mother saw how hungry I was for words, she collaborated with my father and grandmother to mispronounce some things, out of fear that my using words like "compromise," "obliterate" (say that one for a second...it's like a KA-POW from a comic book), etc would get me all kinds of teasing from my schoolmates on the first day.  So they "corrected" me to call that long, thin pasta with the accent on the first syllable instead of the second ("SPAG-hetti") and that "compromise" word as an altered promise instead of its own saying.  

As you can imagine, I got laughed at anyway, for the wrong reason.  I learned to shut up, in other words, which I guess is the blessing one is looking for when one's child is running around the house audibly tasting words like "obliterate."

As a side effect, I also learned to (quietly) be even better at grammar, spelling, and usage than most kids, then most adolescents (that wasn't hard--have you ever listened to teenagers?), and then most adults.  I wouldn't correct people, but I would look up what they said later if it was questionable.  It usually was, but, again, I didn't question the person who uttered the word or phrase--I just used it as a learning experience of my own.  I loved entertainers who played with correct and incorrect usage, or language that leaned to one tone or another: a favorite was David Letterman ("I don't think there's a man, woman, or child alive today who doesn't enjoy a good beverage," spoken with an extra-thick layer of cheeeeez).  I listened to Garrison Keillor on "A Prairie Home Companion" and spoke like a Minnesotan for hours after; I listened to my dad tell a story and would ask people the next day what the "Sam Hill" they meant by something.  I learned what was "formally correct" and loved the rest, just as much as a good beverage.

Somewhere in there, though, my mother's fears were realized.  I was a freak when it came to language, and she even admitted to me that when I went to college she was afraid to write me for fear I would sit at the receiving end with a red pen the size of a sword and proof her letters.  I found this both stunning and not surprising.  Sure, I loved English (with passing crushes on Spanish, French, German, Italian and varying dialects of English), but didn't everyone else, too?  Come ON, the word is "obliterate."  Slowly, roll it off your tongue.  The word is packed with passion, no?

Eh, not so much, answered the world.

College didn't help the addiction; rather, it festered there.  My first class was Intro to Literature, and there I read Joyce's "Araby," with its "music" in "horse harnesses."  Now I was hearing the music of words and the music that I was supposed to hear from description, and God help us all.  I took a Shakespeare course and learned that back in the Bard's day you had one way of talking to your friends and one way of talking to people higher in the classes than you were or could hope to be.  That taught me more about formal and informal usage than my French classes ("tu," "vous;" it's all you) and my required grammar course.  I put that grammar course off until the very end, thinking it was going to be some woman wearing a tight bun with a ruler in her hand ready to smack me if I mixed "I" and "me" the wrong way.  Turns out, that class was about shifting trends in English over the years, etymology, and the nuances of formal and informal.  No rulers would be damaged in the participation of that class, and the gentle provocations of my professor taught me to think about language with even more love and devotion.

Doktor Enabler.

After college I wrote training manuals and kick-ass emails on a corporate path to what I thought would be something phenomenal--a big City.  San Francisco must be not only full of metropolitan, worldly-wise English-speakers, but I was looking forward to hearing other languages, which didn't happen much in Southwest Missouri outside of a college campus.  I showed up in the Bay Area and soaked up the music of Hindi, Spanish, Russian, Italian (umm-HMMM, that's what I'm talking about), Cantonese, Korean, Tagalog...no French except from a friend who spoke it as a second (maybe third) language.  But the English in San Francisco...I was so disappointed, and had a hard time hiding it.  A regret now is that I shared my cringing at, like, you know, the vast, like, people who, like, talk like, well, you know, this.  Argh, I growled to anyone who knew me, half those words can be, what's the word, OBLITERATED, and we could have...English.  Musical, Seuss-ical, English.  Or I could stand to listen to your conversation.  Your, like, hesitating, is, like, killing my writing and wordsmith's ear.

Worse than alienating people with my love of language was when they asked me to help them correct the issue and I discovered that most of them possessed a) no love of language, and/or b) a strong aversion to learning a love of it after grade school.  My first roommate in San Francisco asked me to proof her college papers for a comp class.  I did, returned them, and she took offense.  "My instructor said this sentence was fine, and he used to work for the New York Times."  I swallowed the urge to point out to her that he used to work for the New York Times.  I backed away, telling her that I was probably wrong, and that I wouldn't mess her up by proofing her pieces anymore.  She looked relieved.  I felt relieved myself, but a little lonelier for the confrontation.  Didn't she love words enough to play with them?  Didn't she respect herself enough to question the instructor?

Maybe, though, I thought in a scary supposition to myself, I had been in the City so long that I was mispronouncing spaghetti all over again.

*****

These days, unemployed, I see plenty of assaults on the English language by people who are supposed to guide the rest of us to success.  I see people who are gainfully employed getting paid to treat words like dollar bills at Magic Mike's.  I see entry-level, middle management, and top leadership communicating poorly.  And I'm expected to expect less.

I do.  Because, regrettably, in the last few years expecting more has cost me friendships, and, still not regrettably, brownie points with managers.  But privately, secretly, in the dark of night or on those morning walks to the ocean, if no one's around, I correct myself, or correct big shots in media (NBC Olympic commentators, mostly, or business leaders who had it in for me).  I never correct friends or my beloved baseball players that don't speak English so well...not because I couldn't, but because I don't speak Spanish so well and I have no desire to correct people I love.  I guess that's part of the problem.  I should have remembered that regarding correcting myself.

Obliterate.  Ok, Rainman, enough...

Back to my podcasts...for in them lies the most release if there is no music playing.  (Can I just say that the best song lyrics are better than the words I used to say wandering around the house as a toddler?)  The last podcast on that list, "A Way With Words," is one of the rare cultural gems of San Diego County.  The show is recorded and produced here, where people used to, as late as last year, speak in golden sentences and now talk, like, you know, San Franciscan, like, English.  This morning I listened to this week's podcast with relish.  I learned why the word "colonel" is said with an "r" sound.  And then a caller came on and asked why we couldn't just readily exchange "I" and "me" in a sentence, and why the heck all the rules, and blah, blah, blah.

I held my breath, hoping there were no rulers in the room.

The hosts, as gently as they could, sympathized with the caller.  They expressed the belief that people who felt the need to correct others should probably be selective about the time and place for the correction.  And then The Reason came in, and my loneliness in love of language was relieved for a moment.  The female host expressed the belief that there are different applications of language for different situations in our world...formal and informal.  While use of "me and my friends went to the movies" isn't incorrect, it's not as formal as "My friends and I went to the movies."  There's a time and place for "Me and my friends went to the movies," and there's a time and place for "My friends and I went to the movies."  Knowing the difference, she explained, is like dressing for the party.  One kind of party requires t-shirt and jeans.  Another kind of party requires a floor-length gown.  It dresses the speaker for the situation.  She also mentioned that knowing the difference and using the difference is a form of respect for others.  Fitting the language to the situation works to respect the other person not only in fitting in with the group, but, she said, in putting others first.  "If you say, 'My friends and I,'" she said, "the placement in the sentence is putting others--'my friends'--before myself."

Wow.

And that, dear reader, says it all for me.  Que milagro, as they would say just south of here.  And I'll say nothing at all again about the subject for a little while, again, now. 

P.S. - This song is the inspiration for today's rendition of Life For Rent.  Silence, and golden considerations.

Just Ray

There’s a novel by Dennis Lehane--and maybe you’ve heard of it--called “Mystic River.”  In the book Lehane introduces a character by the name of “Just Ray” Harris, a man named because all of the other gangster “_______ Ray” names were taken in Boston.

I don’t know why, but I thought of that when I heard that Ray Bradbury had passed way Tuesday night.  Maybe it was because when I hear the name Ray I don’t think of Ramono or my cousin’s husband or “Field of Dreams” first.  I think of Ray Bradbury.  I haven’t read his books in decades, but I can tell you when I did read them and how they affected me.

To ignore that influence would be like removing one of my senses.  It’s more than amputation.  It’s more than a lost tooth.  It would be a denial of my own skin.

*****

Somewhere in the storage unit in Missouri or in a wicker hamper under my childhood bed in Ohio is a pink, loose-leaf binder, a little bit bigger than an iPhone.  In that notebook are scrawlings of my experiences in a special school program called T.A.G.  Once I briefly explain what T.A.G. was--no, it wasn’t the playground game, or what you do to people in photos now on the social networks--you’re going to accuse me of tooting my own horn.  The best part was, I didn’t toot that horn, then or now.  I was God-awful at grade school; when I was in first grade I was so sluggish that I kept all of my homework assignments rather than turn them in half-finished, and on the last day of the school year had to stay in a classroom with a teacher’s aid to finish them while everyone else went to another location to watch a movie.  I looked to be doomed academically--I did way too much staring out of windows.

(My mother got on to me for that at first.  Years later she had to explain it to my best friend.  “That’s where her stories come from--it’s best to just leave her alone when she does that.”)

Ok...T.A.G.

T.A.G. stood for Talented And Gifted.  Not many kids were asked to be in this program; I think in my class there were four of us.  (I won’t name names--that’s their horn.)  I honestly can’t tell you how we were selected, but I do know this--my parents learned something from this program, and not just me.  The program had a county fair kind of thing at one of the schools so that all of the students could mingle and the parents could watch us in action and talk to the county coordinators.  My mother met the director of T.A.G. and made some sort of self-deprecating statement about how she couldn’t figure out how her kids could be chosen for this program.  “Mrs. Schlosser,” he responded, “You must have done something right.  If only three kids in Williams County could be in T.A.G., two of them would be yours.”

So, yes, my brother was in T.A.G., too.  Which is also pretty remarkable considering his early years, but I’ll let him tell that story.

I don’t begrudgingly state that my brother was in this program and shouldn’t have been.  I state that because for a long time I felt I shouldn’t be in T.A.G.  For a long time I felt that my brother deserved to be in and that I was just piggybacking on my genius brother’s reputation.  (He’s still smarter and more gifted than I am.  Just saying.)  I wrote about my frustration in the little pink notebook.  Because I was known for my love of words, that’s what the program was trying to develop in me, so I had to turn in that notebook occasionally for the teacher to review and guide my writing.  She read my fears and wrote a small note next to them in the margins:  “Your mother has a great story from meeting the director about this.  Ask her about it sometime.”  I did.  She shared the story with me.  I stayed where I belonged, and played with my words in essays and poetry.

The program believed in pushing us outside of our comfort zone, and one way they did that was having us read stuff we wouldn’t get to read in the standard curriculum.  To this day I couldn’t tell you if the rest of my classmates ever got to read “The Martian Chronicles” or “Fahrenheit 451,” or if they had to wait for high school or maybe a literature class in college to get it.  (By my senior year of high school I was reading Dorothy Parker, so I’m grateful for Mr. Friend, my journalism/English teacher at the time, for believing in my literary development enough to handle her at 18.)  I was not a fan of science fiction, and while the “The Martian Chronicles” were satisfying they were slow-going (even for my daydreaming).  But “Fahrenheit 451” was mind-blowing--the writing, the suggestions, the idea that life could be found and preserved in very fragile, very flammable dead trees.  (To this day I am still working on a short story that plays on the virtual/ebook counterpart of "Fahrenheit" and just realized it writing this.)

If I fell in love with Ray in middle school, and then in college the infatuation grew worse.  I was at a Barnes and Noble in Springfield, Missouri, poring over the section of writing how-to books, and stumbled into a familiar name with what for me was a new title:

“Zen in the Art of Writing,” by Ray Bradbury.

I’m willing to bet that whoever finds that compact pink notebook will find, nestled next to it, “Zen.”

*****

According to sources, Bradbury took exception to being called a science fiction writer.  He thought of “Fahrenheit 451” as his only science fiction work, and the rest of his fiction was fantasy.  I can see that, somewhat.  I always thought of his work as literature, though.  Just literature.

Like the detective stories of Mr. Lehane.  Just literature.

Just Ray.  Just right.

Post Script--The evening after writing the first draft of this post I asked my brother if he remembered T.A.G.  “Sure,” he said, a little tight-lipped.  Did he remember reading Ray Bradbury?  “Some of it,” he answered, a bit uncomfortably.  “I remembered reading ‘The Martian Chronicles’ and ‘Fahrenheit 451’--I still have ‘Fahrenheit 451’ in my bookshelf in there--and what’s the one with the guy with words all over his body?”  The “Illustrated Man?”  “Yeah, that’s it.  But I only remember the first two.”  (I had forgotten about “The Illustrated Man,” so it was all the same to me as well.)  He paused.  “That’s when I stopped reading for fun.”  With Ray?  “No, they assigned ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ right after ‘Fahrenheit 451.’  I hated ‘The Diary of Anne Frank,’ but we had to read it.  So I just shut down and read it, and then ‘The Illustrated Man.’  I didn’t read anything else or didn’t remember any other required reading for ten years after that.  I didn’t enjoy reading again until you sent me ‘A Fool’s Progress.’”

Huh.  So I wasn’t the only one to struggle with T.A.G.  Or hang on to “Fahrenheit,” one way or another.

Commencement

I loved my university years.  I got to go to a classroom  and talk about (and listen to) good books and writings, and I had to participate with a grasp (nay, a love) of the subject or hold a diminished opinion in the eyes of mentors I revered.  Despite that pressure, university life fit me like a glove.  I had clear expectations and yet enough play on the rope to either create a hammock or hang myself.  I always managed to create the hammock.

Sooner or later, though, I had to graduate.  Sooner or later, my luck in life ran out.  I got back to the same setting later, for a semester, at Berkeley’s extension.  But that experience was a mild reprieve, too brief.  Be sensible, sayeth the world.  Go out and do the things to support yourself, to conform, regardless of the cost in the long run.

In my own way, I dropped out of college.

*****

Lately, I’ve had a fascination with commencement addresses.  I find them on YouTube and Facebook--not by purposefully searching for them, but by skimming through the day’s news and stumbling upon them--and I post them on my Facebook page.  (“Share.”  Such a powerful word when I was a kid, and so diminished now.  Shouldn’t we call the button “Shout-Out” instead of “Share?”  Perhaps the term “Shout-Out” is too MySpace.)  Sometimes I post them first to watch later, and sometimes I watch them first.

I’ve spent the last two weeks reading the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson, and at one point in the narrative Isaacson urges the reader off the page to go explore YouTube, to go find and watch Jobs 2005 commencement address at Stanford.  Jobs attended college himself only briefly, and spent much of that short stay skipping his required courses and attending courses that truly inspired him.  (If you haven’t seen the video, I too encourage you to see it, just to experience how a college drop-out--someone who would normally have no business standing behind a podium addressing a field of college graduates--addresses a field of college graduates.)

Reading about Jobs for the last two weeks, I realized that there were lots of things Steve Jobs had no "authority" to do.  His temper provokes most of that impression.  I can’t judge whether it should, for I have a temper myself, a temper that like Jobs tends to fester from what Jobs called “B players.”  In the opinion of most, Steve Jobs shouldn’t have managed people.  Steve Jobs shouldn’t have had kids.  Steve Jobs shouldn't have been issued a California driver’s license.

Well, that last one is more of an observable fact than a judgment call.

Questions on management and children, however, are an easy way out of the debate as stating that a college drop-out shouldn’t speak to a group of graduates.  Is this the phrase that should preface the judgment call?

“But then, who am I to say?”

I can say that phrase when I see a college drop-out giving a commencement speech, because, while I did graduate from college, I never got to attend my commencement.  A Missouri ice storm in December prevented me.

*****

“But then, who am I to say?”

My review of the Jobs biography will most assuredly be misconstrued for hero worship.  Fascination with the subject and the writing are sure to produce that in the reader who comes here wanting to know, “Well, how was it?”

It?  The life or the book?

The book was inspiring.  That’s the only adjective you’ll get, to take a page from Jobs’s simplistic style.  At times I worried that Isaacson might pull a little hero-worship of his own, but then he would throw in an anecdote or quote of Jobs and make you realize that Jobs could be the grumpy, moody, reality-challenged guy the media claimed he was.  Just when the reader is about to give up on Jobs, then Isaacson pulls you back the other way, and you look up from the book with a gasp and realize what a genius looks like.

The writer or the life...

Well, the writer, yes...I have to say that it takes a lot of courage to write a book like the book Isaacson wrote--a lot of courage and maybe a small measure of stupidity.  But the writer also brought a thin, Gorilla-glass layer of wonder to the page.  Isaacson is no techie--some of the terms are explained in repetition, and for those of us who hear “RAM” and “ROM” and “USB” and glaze over, that was helpful.  For anyone more tech-minded this might fester into the most boring account of Jobs’s genius that you could find.

But not having a tech-bent aspect to it, just a wonder aspect, means you remember the driving force of the other genius--Jobs--and what I now take beyond the last pages of the book: nothing’s impossible (even when it is).

“But then, who am I to say?”

The life of Steve Jobs taught me a lot about what drives me, too, particularly in my least favorable character trait:  my temper.  Surprise, I have one.  If you’re reading this post, you’ve probably encountered it, and if you haven’t, I’ll do my level best to keep it from you, but I will be fighting it all my life, so be warned.  For years I’ve fought with it--hard to say when it started, but it became much harder to control after my mother passed--but I couldn’t really give you clues into why it would surface so strongly and so fiercely.  After finishing this biography, I have a pretty strong clue--my tolerance for “B Players” is about as steady as Jobs’s.  

As Aaron Sorkin stated in his commencement address this year, “More and more we expect less and less of each other.”  Jobs refused to accept less, and I have a hard time with it as well.  Recognition is half the battle, no?  And now that I know why the trigger occurs, and recognizing it from seeing it mirrored in the account of Jobs, means I have a stronger hold on how to improve my approach from that of Jobs.

Curb your antagonism.  Nothing’s impossible (even when it is).  Not a bad take-away from 600+ pages.

Textbook closed, dear reader, and onward, to infinity.

Out Loud

Back in the early sixties, my mother tried on college with the intent of going to medical school.  She thought that she would complete her general education requirement at Defiance College in Northwest Ohio.

When I started college based on a dare (my manager at the time dared me to audit a literature class by a teacher she had loved), my mother informed me on the phone one Saturday night, much to my heartbreak, that she hated her literature class in college.  This was difficult for a writer to hear, but I was patient.  “Why’s that, Mom?”

“The professor always read out loud to us.  As though we couldn’t read for ourselves.”

Since my mother was the only one in our immediate family without a degree (my father went to a community college to obtain his boiler operator’s certification, my brother has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Ohio State University, and I have an Associate of Arts from Ozarks Tech and a Bachelor of Arts from Missouri State University), I won’t be disclosing a spoiler here by saying that my mother grew increasingly disillusioned with college and quit.  I’m not sure if it was just the literature class; she heard of JFK’s assassination during a class, and there were other issues with group projects.  College isn’t for everyone, and her leaving it didn’t set her apart from the rest of us.

When they married my father asked my mother to quit her job--he was traditional.  She stayed home, took care of him, and nearly three years after their wedding I came along.  Almost two years after that my brother arrived.  My most prominent childhood memory was of my father coming home from work, and, while my mother cooked dinner (and she cooked it, too; my father didn’t allow us to have a microwave because he thought it would give us cancer.  Ironic, given my mother’s fate), he would read to her from the Reader’s Digest or from one of Patrick McManus’s outdoor adventures.  When my mother revealed to me that she hated to have people read out loud to her, I reminded her of Dad’s ritual.  “Yeah, well, that made him happy,” she said.

She lied.

In the last two weeks of my mother’s life, she would drift in and out of consciousness.  Some moments she would be weak but perfectly lucid, others, completely out and eyes half-closed.  She ended up in the last week in the second phase, but the first week I would still have time with her.

“What’s happening?”

What do you mean, Mom?  You want the radio?  TV?

“No.  Tell me with your voice.”

Well, Dad and Mike went for a walk out to the pond, Mom.  The sun’s out.  It’s cold.

“Let me hear your voice.”

You want me to sing to you, Mom?  (I won vocal choir contests in high school.  I could make her cry with my singing.)

“No.”

What would you like me to say?

“Read to me.”

What?  I had graduated from both schools by that point--the distaste she had for reading was tattooed in my memory.

“Read to me.”

I stared at her.  She blinked.  “Please.”

What would you like me to read, Mom?  A book?  A newspaper?

“Twain.”

Oh, great.  Dialect Man.  Which Twain, Mom?

“Any of them.”

How about “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”?

“Yes.”

So I read, out loud, to my mother, who either no longer had the means to argue me reading out loud, or who finally had found someone who could read out loud well.  It’s comforting to think I could share my love of literature, somehow, when it was most needed.

*****

My mother hated literature classes and loved literature.  She sheltered me from a lot of fiction growing up, but when I got to college it was my mind to corrupt, my heart to burst open...  

North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers' School set the boys free...  

When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old man-servant--a combined gardener and cook--had seen in at least ten years...  

Either it was drizzling or there was a lot of dust in the air.…

I loved to hear and read and taste good writing.  I drank it, got drunk on it, all through community college and university.  For five years (six if you count the year off between degrees in Ohio) I overdosed on literature, showed up, listened to people argue language and plot and characterization around me, listened to people read well out loud, and eventually had to graduate.  I went to college for two reasons.  The first was sort of the same reason people who are native speakers of another language speak to each other in that language, even if they can speak English--it’s a relief for me to speak literature with others.  The other reason was to make me a better writer.  

Well, Jo, you ask, why didn’t you go to school for writing?  Because then I wouldn’t have gotten to read as much...

*****

Years later and miles from those classrooms, I still read passages out loud.  I listen to others read as well.  Once a month my writing group sets their pens aside, we meet in a clean, well-lit cafe in the Mission, and we read our works to each other.  If we get too nervous, other people read our work for us.  Last time someone read my poetry for me.  I was touched.

The need to speak and hear a passage still drives me to all kinds of megaphones.  I sit by the window that faces west in my apartment, reading by the winter sun... 

The tides came upon San Francisco four times per day, lifting and lowering the city’s skirt with impunity...

I read that slowly, once, in a voice well-traveled, tasting consonants, vowels, and pauses in the punctuation.  Then I can’t help it; the world must know, the world needs to taste this too, and I post it on GoodReads, which in turn posts to Facebook and Twitter.  Messages curl up in virtual bottles, closer to the size of test tubes, just the smallest and sweetest slices of kumquat, thinly sliced beef, a delicate sheet of cheese.  I have to no spouse to read this to, so here you are, dear reader...can you hear the music of it, can you taste the language?

Oh, listen to this one...

P.S. - Passages above, in order from top to bottom, can be attributed to the following works of literature:

• “Araby” - James Joyce
• “A Rose For Emily” - William Faulkner
• “What I Have Been Doing Lately” - Jamaica Kincaid
• “Going To See the Elephant” - Rodes Fishburne

Back From the Amazon

There's been a lot of heated discussion lately, rising to a shrillness like that of Occupy, about the choice to buy from Amazon or to buy from independent bookstores.  I'll probably get burned at the stake for this post, but I thought I would offer up my take on the fight, as a writer, as a reader, and as someone who has lived in a graduating increase of immediate, surrounding population.  (What does that have to do with the price of eggs, you ask?  It will become apparent in a moment.)

So I'll start simply with the argument for the independent bookstore:

• I love bookstores;
• I love bookstores the way an alcoholic loves bars.  I could go home and drink, too, but it's more fun to drink with people;
• I love bookstores with a funky personality;
• I love bookstores that I can walk to, from work or from home;
• I love paper books.  I read more this year than I have in any other year (part of the perks of unemployment), and I still didn't read down the stack of books that I had accumulated from bookstores throughout the Bay Area over the years;
• I love having a stack of traditional books to read next to my bed;
• I love new and used bookstores.

Mark you, these are my reasons.  They aren't reasons for you to go, dear reader, but reasons you might go.

Now, my argument for buying from Amazon:

• I rent movies from Amazon.  Because I read so many books over the course of my free time, I don't spend enough time watching movies to warrant a Netflix subscription, and renting two movies a month from Amazon is cheaper than watching two movies a month on Netflix;
• I have a Kindle.  My primary reasons for loving the Kindle are listed here, but here's the short span--it's light and I can carry a whole freaking stack of books on it.  I can read the whole freaking stack on my phone, my laptop, or my Kindle.  And if I read the whole freaking stack on the Kindle the newsprint background (no, I do not own, nor will I ever own, a Kindle Fire) and the ability to increase the type size means my eyes get a break without my glasses.  If you have ever been a city commuter on mass transit, that lightweight aspect is a big thing;
• Some books are still cheaper on the Kindle (I don't know for how much longer, but they are);
• Sometimes Amazon is the only place to find a particular book, unless you want to wait a long turn-around time to order it from the local bookstore.  Case in point (and this book was on environmentalism).  I ended up getting that book from Green Apple here in the City, but that's because I held out and waited;
• I like the reviews on EVERYTHING in Amazon.  Not just selections that critics or bookstore employees deemed worthy to read, but anything I pick up and am torn about reading (although I have to admit, more and more I go to GoodReads for that);
• I haven't always lived in a great big, gloriously messy, cluttered and wonderful City.  The last known address before San Francisco was Sunnyvale, and the bookstores in the South and Central areas of the Peninsula aren't as numerous as they are here (rephrase:  NOT WITHIN WALKING DISTANCE).  Before that, I lived in Southwest Missouri, where there were library bookstores, a bookstore out by Chesterfield Village in Springfield, and the two chains, Borders and Barnes and Noble.  Before THAT, Branson, Missouri, which I think had a library...yep, it will get worse...lastly, before that, in Northwest Ohio, where one very small hole-in-the-wall bookstore existed five miles from me, one chain (Waldenbooks, Defiance Mall, Defiance Ohio) 30 minutes from me...or, if I was feeling really adventurous, bookstores an hour west or an hour east in either Fort Wayne, Indiana or Toledo, Ohio, respectively.  If I still lived in any of those places, with the exception of, well, here, for crying out loud, I would probably be ordering from Amazon.

*****

My mother loved books--her favorites fell under the category of children's literature, but when she passed my brother informed me that an adult favorite of hers was Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," which makes sense in the fact that my mother could love ANYTHING, no matter how depressing--and we had quite the collection growing up.  My grandmother on my father's side also loved books, and she lived with us in an addition that was built on the original house, so more than once during my childhood I would catch my father shaking his head as he looked around him and muttering, "God help us if a lighted match drops in here."  (He was a good one to talk--the guy was hooked on Reader's Digest magazine, In Fisherman, and Cabela's catalogs.)  The most books my mother had by one publisher could be spotted within four steps of walking in the door--she probably had every Reader's Digest Condensed Book ever published.  Condensed books were the scourge of literary society at that time, but I have enjoyed one or two in my day (one was a novel about the life of Annie Oakley, and watch it, the book is hard to find, so I had to give you a link to AMAZON...).  Every generation has its devils.

My belief is simple--there's room for all of it.  Mr. Russo wants to do away with Amazon.  Mr. Manjoo wants to do away with the independent bookstore.  Extremists.  

Here's the deal.

If I can possess and readily use writing instruments that are as varied and progressive as the fountain pen to the gel writer to the laptop to the iPhone, then I will want the same variety in my reading instruments.  I'm willing to read a damn scroll if I find it entertaining, and I have stood in line and went online for both fountain pens and paperbacks alike.  Why do we all have to fall in a neat, well-mannered row?  Why oh why do we all have to be the same?

Onward, dear reader, however you may roam.

Into the Wild: Bukowski and Drinking

A few weeks back I wrote on my brother from another mother, that fella from the Midwest too, Monsieur Hemingway.  I particularly loved his letters back to his home and family from Paris, a love of mine that normally leads me to North Beach, of all places.  It ain't Paris.  Hell, it ain't even Italy (but don't tell the wait-staff that--I want them to keepa speakin'-a Italian, ifa you knowa what I mean).  But North Beach manifests in a great cafe culture.  You order a drink or two or cannoli or two and you sit with your book or your journal and you watch the world.  You hope other artists show up.  You hope to overhear a great debate about the writings of Sartre and Camus.  Or, barring all of that, Jo, you snob, you just listen and let the world wash over.

Probably the only disappointing aspect of Charles Bukowski's is something inconsistent with Hemingway--and that's a hatred of baseball.  Bukowski was not a baseball guy.  I can forgive him for it.  I have forgiven him for it about two hundred times since I moved here.  Not everyone likes baseball, after all.  The number one complaint that I've heard is that it's a slow sport.  (Usually the people who say this to me don't watch hockey either, which I would think would be the polar opposite of baseball, but watch football instead, a sport where much of each quarter is spent slamming into each other at the 45-yard-line just trying to get a down.)  Still, I'm trying to be open-minded.  So it's okay that Bukowski likes the ponies instead of sluggers or hurlers.  I'm fine with that.

I found Bukowski's "Sifting through the madness for the word, the line, the way" about the same time that I found the Vesuvio Cafe.  But one at a time, gentle reader.

When I first moved to California in 2004 I was unemployed by my own hand as well, and living in Sunnyvale with my roommate, my brother.  My writing cafes were on Murphy Avenue in Sunnyvale and off of Dana in Mountain View.  I would park the car, unpack my HP laptop, and go sit with caffeine for two hours and write emails back to people I missed in Missouri.  On one of those sojourns in Mountain View I wandered around and found a two story bookstore in Mountain View one afternoon, a bookstore I found out was later a California chain called Books, Inc.  (It's still there, by the way.  Yes, I'm just as shocked as you are.)  I wandered around as I normally do with my book selection process, trying to find the best book to leave with, when I picked up the Bukowski volume, read the first page, and knew I was done shopping.  I took Bukowski back to the cafe with me and didn't bother with the laptop.  I just spent two hours reading his gruff, sympathetic voice.

Since buying that book in 2004, I've dabbled in it.  This year I sat down and read him every morning, after finishing my morning pages, one poem at a time, until I was done.  I knew I couldn't keep him, and I knew where I wanted to give him away.

The Vesuvio.

On another trip to Books, Inc (that was lethal stuff, finding that bookstore) in 2004 I came across a book chock full of San Francisco cafes, and I decided that while I didn't want to learn how to park in San Francisco, I did want to learn how to get around there.  North Beach, while a hike from the N-line (I didn't take buses until I moved to San Francisco in 2006), was a favorite.  I loved the beat culture--I had brought "On the Road" with me from Missouri as a part of a small, migrant collection.  Walking up Columbus, I found City Lights Books and one of the cafes in the cafe book that I could write on and cross off the list, Vesuvio.

I know that seasoned San Franciscans will probably disagree with me, but I don't think it would be much of a stretch to call Vesuvio a dive bar.  The space is dark despite a wall of windows, decoupaged from floor to ceiling with any manner and color of coasters, flyers, paraphernalia, and statements.  I walked in, and, miles from home had no desire to get drunk--the only thing I could get without alcohol was coffee or juice.  I went with coffee, a dollar a cup in 2004, and climbed up the narrow stairs to the second floor.  The Vesuvio, in all of it's funkiness, looks out over Jack Kerouac Alley to City Lights and to engraved sidewalk blocks with Ferlinghetti verses stamped in them.  Color, like a coat, is everywhere, and crammed.

I haven't been back since that writing in Vesuvio, until this past Saturday.

Once a year San Francisco has an event called Santa Con, a self-made, city-wide convention of men and women who want to dress up like Santa for a day and go revel in the streets.  There were groups of them at Vesuvio Saturday.  Across from me, completely unrelated to the revels, were two women with a pit bull in the booth with them, talking about the DVD boxed sets available of the Real Housewives and Jersey Shore.

Ah, but in front of me, dear reader, was another scholar, deep in a book, sipping his coffee, and doing his level best.  Level best at what, you ask?  Beats me.  Beat poetry.  Take a beat.  Prop Bukowski against the window.  Write with a vodka cranberry.  Pack up, leave Charles for a hope of a scholar, and walk out into the night.

Just the way Bukowski would have done.

Onward.

Musings: Ernest

On Thursday my sister-in-love and I visited the Carlsbad Library briefly about a half hour before closing time.  She had forgotten to return some items when she volunteered that day, and I was in need of having to get out of the house without spending a fortune.

She walked to the books and magazines for sale, I walked to the new arrivals.  Several titles caught my eye, all thick and small-fonted; I needed something I could finish enjoying before Tuesday.  At the end of the section is the non-fiction, where I found Volume One of the Cambridge collection of the letters of Ernest Hemingway, which contained correspondence dated from 1907 (when he was eight years old) to 1922 (well, you can do math).  Normally I'm leery of these kinds of texts; I'm hardly a scholar.  But the book drew me.  I checked it out and took it home.

The next day, in breaks between pages and job postings, I began a marathon journey of deep skim of the book.  Reading academic texts like this are roughly on par with carving a turkey or visiting an art exhibit for me--there will be meat left on the bone, which I will either discard or place in a stew pot for a second pass, or there will be paintings and sculptures that I will miss entirely because their color or placement in the crowd was disadvantageous.  This is the way I enjoy art, food, and literature.  The book opens with what feels like sixteen different introductions and forwards and introductions to this volume and forwards of just this volume, blah, blah, and even more blah, with an introduction to why some typos were left in and others weren't, symbols for what kind of correspondence it is...OH, you say, ENOUGH ALREADY.  Hence, the deep skim.  Parts of the opening numbers were entertaining--Hem had the same problem that I do where he spells words with phonetics borrowed from different languages or different versions of the same language.  He also liberated his mind all the time, coming up with new spellings of words and winking at the reader, playing with the sounds of words, playing with defects of his typewriters.  These days we curse the Apple "auto-correct"; Hemingway had sticking keys, worn ribbons, and one typewriter that locked all of his letters into capitals.  "THIS MILL IS DIRTY AND ONLY FUNCTIONS IN THE UPPER REGISTER," he explained, "SO IF I NEED THE EMPHASIS USUALLY GIVEN BY CAPITAL LETTERS I WILL INSERT SOME PROFANE PHRASE OR VULGAR EJACULATION LIKE SAY HORSESHIT FOR EXAMPLE."

My auto-correct, by the way, tried to clean up his expletive.

All this was gleaned from the vast collection of smarts at the beginning of the book.  More treats were to follow.

*****

The downside to visiting family for vast amounts of time is that you don't get to exercise your art much--the upside is that the same family members don't give a flying fig of Hemingway's political correctness or his backstory.  You don't get to work on your own novel, but you do get to read things without thinking about whether you "should" or not.  I am probably the last woman who should be saying this, but screw Hemingway's masochism for, say, the time it takes to read 650 pages sometime and read him as a person. Don't get me wrong--every time I read "A Moveable Feast" I sincerely wish he didn't make Hadley look like his attending nine-year-old niece, but, as my brother so succinctly puts it, "People in hell want ice water."  You can't have it all.  I don't try to analyze Hem's issues with women.  At least, not this time around.

I have found that it is so much easier to read Hem than Naipaul, and they have been accused of the same things as writers.  Problem is (and it's highly likely I'll get shot by proponents of the ERA for saying this), Hem is a good writer and Naipaul sucks AND is a masochist, so he's 0 for 2 on the reason for me to read him.  Hem has to be read with my open heart and my naive mind.  I'm the date I want to take along for this ride, because I know that I won't say to myself that I should know better.  Other people have soap operas, following the Kardashians on Twitter, and watching movies with gratuitous vomiting and bodily function jokes.  I have Ernest.

The next six intellectuals who read this piece will shake their heads, giving up on my soul for the 986th time since meeting me.  You enjoy your high road, while I take the horse path.

*****

Things I Relate to Hem About:

• He was a fan of baseball as a rule, particularly of the Chicago Cubs and the New York Giants.  Guess who the New York Giants turned into;
• He knows Michigan geography.  I vacationed in Michigan as a kid, so when he says "bigger than Traverse Bay," I grin conspiratorially;
• He loves playing with language.  I walk around whispering "que milagro" when I'm alone because I like how it rolls;
• He loved cats, particularly weird physical specimens;
• He exaggerated.

Things I Can Understand About Hem But Am Trying to Overcome Myself:

• His misunderstanding of and getting hurt by the opposite sex;
• His "I am indignant to violence, not afraid of it" philosophy;
• His over-simplification of the world;
• His anger;
• His exit.

*****

These letters...I skipped most of the childhood ones.  I hungrily consumed the Red Cross ones, gave a passing glance to his post-war years, and am now soaking in his Paris years, like a warm bath brimming with bubbles.  His letters courting Hadley, by the way, were sweet and broken; the guy could be vulnerable and all humility, but too much of that would have made him, oh, I don't know, Fitzgerald?  Here's the secret that, as cummings would say, only the "mind could hide":  I LOVE HEMINGWAY'S EGO.  There, I said it.  I hate the resident expert in blogs but I love Hem, and these letters are teaching me why.  Someday, I'll be able to articulate why.

*****

I rarely write letters anymore, for who has time to read them?  My letters take the form of blog posts, which are too long to be read by anyone but me either, or journal pages, which I read even less than my blogs.  Some famous author (Anderson?  Fitzgerald?  Faulkner?  Who remembers...) remarked to Hem once that (I'm paraphrasing, hang on to your knickers) we write letters for posterity.  Hem thought this reason was ridiculous, as though we would keep the shell casing after firing a gun.  For Hem, the casing and the posterity would take care of itself, but the letter is designed for the here, the now.  Hem lived by the hour and LOVED LIFE SO THOROUGHLY you can nearly wring it out of his letters like pond water.  I am learning that he loved the Oak Park Library enough to have read, but how much did he read, how much influence did he soak up from the world around him, and how much was "F you and I will write my way"?  I'm reading that section now.  WWI shaped him.  His first heartbreak shaped him.  His time in Paris shaped him.  He let all of these things shape him but he didn't let the world make him a trendy writer--it gave him reason to be end up as THE Writer.  I don't know how to stop that censorship in myself--I have to read everyone recommended to me, accept, copy...and I want Hem's independence instead.  

I'm learning that.  I have an imperfect but strong teacher.  He may have a bum typewriter, but he's telling me about Paris...and it's late and I need to get back to him.  Good night, San Francisco Giants.  Buona sera, self-consciousness.

Dear Ernest,

Onward.

(Photo courtesy of the publication, which obtained it from Ermini Studios, Milan, Italy.)

Into the Wild: Kingsolver by the Sea

This past Friday I turned yet another book loose into the wild through the BookCrossing program.  I'm trying to find places that would be appropriate for the theme of the book (my last release was a book of poems by Mary Oliver, who writes primarily about nature, so I put her on a park bench at the top of the Pablo stairs), and since Kingsolver's book is titled "High Tide in Tucson" I thought I should take the book where tide and land meet, to Ocean Beach.

I'm perfecting the art of this kind of book release with each drop.  Ocean Beach is usually pretty populated, save for days that it's raining or there's the threat of tsunami (I've been there at both).  I know that my chances are better for getting stopped when I try places like this, but I also know how to pace things so that I can walk away from the book without revealing ties to it.  Today was a calm and cool day, and the population sparse, so I just dropped it on the bench.

I have dropped thirteen books so far with this program, and no one has registered them found and/or added notes.  This business is a haphazard one, very much a "message in a bottle" technique.  I can only hope that they aren't discarded--that someone finds them and enjoys them.  And if it's just the homeless finding them, well, at least I'm giving the homeless something at last.  And I'm giving them something that doesn't enable them to drink or get high.

BookCrossing has another type of release, called a "controlled release," where you go on the site and see if anyone wants your specific book and you send it to them.  I'm saving that for a mood booster--just leaving books and never hearing back can border on the "imaginary friend" side after a while.  And some of these books have me perplexed as to where to leave them; where, in God's name, am I going to drop the Reagan biography in Northern California without someone torching it?  That one may go to the library, she says with a wan smile.

In other notes:  I actually walked the three and a half miles from my apartment to the ocean to place this item, a refreshing walk in the cool morning through the forest of Golden Gate Park.  As I passed I was warned that coyotes had recently been spotted in the outer reaches, I passed a crowd of people heading to a bluegrass festival that wasn't strictly such, and I had the opportunity to see a newly-minted windmill on the approach to the sand.

I love the copper band around the rim, but...couldn't they have made the windows bigger?  I don't know my maritime architectural requirements.  It just seems as though with the view this building affords that windows so small are limiting the occupants.

Books next to release in the wild:

• "Dutch:  A Memoir of Ronald Reagan" by Edmund Morris.  Currently on page 500, with 192 readable pages to go and clearing about 100 pages a weekend;
• "Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way," a collection of poems by Charles Bukowski.  Currently on page 109, savoring at no discernible rate of consumption, but I know where I'm putting this one upon completion, and am looking forward to the drop--a location that I haven't been to in six years.

Onward, dear reader.

Extra: Quest Literature

Yep, me again.  :)

Just a quick note for my faithful readers...times, they are a-changing at Notes.  In the coming weeks you will be seeing the regular iPod-driven selections ("That Song by Elvis, or, Long Live a City in the Desert," for example) interspersed with my personal favorite, more "quest" pieces.  And what will the quests be?

Well, one you already know...my Pablo stairs.  More updates on that to come.  And the other?

Adventures, dear reader, in setting books loose "in the wild."

This past week I donated my usual large stack of books to the Main branch of the San Francisco Public Library, and got a new reaction--the usual "Thanks much for donating, do you need a receipt?" (No, I don't; just take 'em and enjoy) was replaced with "In the future, can you take these to some depository place we have set up in the Mission?  Would that be convenient?"  Um, no, it would not, but I understand...it must be some sort of effort to keep costs down.  In that instant I had a flash of inspiration--lay off the library donations for a while, and go back to the BookCrossing gig.

Ah, you ask, what's BookCrossing?

Click on the links.  Go take a look.  I'll wait.  (Yes, it's free.  It's worldwide.  It's legit.)

Some of the posts will be my notes from releases, from searching for the "wild" books, and, if I'm lucky, an occasional find.

And you, dear reader, are invited to participate in my quest, as always.  You can:

• Read the adventure, and enjoy;
• If a book sounds good and YOU want to read it, I will mail it to you for you to release once you're done reading it, regardless of where you are (just tell me where you leave it);
• Or, search for or release a book in your neighborhood (WORLD-WIDE, people) and share your story of the literary equivalent of a "message in a bottle."

By the way, I don't work for BookCrossing.  This is designed to be, like Desert Solitaire and the writing marathon for 826 Valencia, JUST...PLAIN...FUN.

You game?

Onward, dear reader.

P.S. - Insert your own favorite tune here.  :)

A Different Song by U2, or, I Found What I'm Looking For

Ok, let's be pleasant. My last few posts weren't pleasant. Let's make some pleasantness, shall we?

Recognize the title of the book in this picture?

It's ok, I'll give you a little time...or a little more time...

Remember now? Ok, here's the exciting conclusion:

Last Thursday I took a day to explore a couple of the libraries in the City. I was homesick for the library experience I had at Carlsbad and I wanted to curl up again and read in a library. I've never had that kind of experience at the libraries in the City because, well, usually there's either someone there who doesn't speak English who's ignoring the "sssshhhh" rule, or there's a homeless person leaving a odorous print on the environment, or some such thing that sets me off.

It didn't happen this time. Now, it probably helped not having a traditional job--I could slow down and enjoy my library time, which I did. I didn't enjoy it in the same way as I did in Carlsbad, but I enjoyed it all the same, giving me a chance to say to myself, "hey, why don't we try a new one every week?" I fell in love in a hesitant way with my local one in the Sunset (there was some chatter in Cantonese, but it passed quickly enough when the ladies found what they wanted in the new fiction shelves), and after reading there for a couple of hours I even crossed the street and tried a new hotdog joint called Underdog, which was tasty and exotic, in its own organic way.

Then I took the train down to the Main Branch of the library and explored the other floors after donating five books and checking out two (I'm never going to win this "no new books" struggle, am I?). Normally when I go into this branch it's a quick walk around the first floor fiction and then checkout and go, so I was completely unaware of the study rooms on the third and fourth floors, as well as the breath-taking periodicals room with the spiraling staircase to the sixth floor. (Shockingly enough I have taken the elevator to the sixth floor before when the museum they have there had a display on Harvey Milk. Completely bypassed all the other floors. Yes, I'm a jerk.) I spent some time on the international floor and general collections writing in my journal (where everyone was quiet as mice, English or no), wrote for another hour in one of the study rooms, and walked the rest of the building slowly.

Then it hit me...I wonder if "Desert Solitaire" is here.

It was listed as there, but it wasn't in the racks in the general collection or in the "new books" by the Page Desk, which is where the location listing was. Sigh. Ok, fine. But it was also at another library.

I'll give you three guesses on which one it was at. And the first two guesses don't count.

Yeeees...the Sunset branch.

No problem, I thought. It's early, 2:30 p.m.--I'll put it on hold now and pick it up tomorrow.

It took them TWO DAYS to put the thing on hold. What's so funny about this is I am used to Grainger picking an item in stock and putting it on hold for a customer in no more than thirty minutes. So you can imagine why I was stir crazy. But they finally had it, and Saturday I walked into the library and picked it up in the holds section and just stood there, with a huge grin on my face, trying not to cry. Abbey, you bastard, I found you. I have climbed highest mountains, I have run through the fields, and HERE...YOU...ARE.

And now, to pick up where I left off in Carlsbad. By the way, if you can get a copy, it's worth the search.

Onward to the next quest, dear reader.

P.S. - This song is where today's post of Life For Rent comes from. It's the first song I thought of when I walked home with the book. The heart is indeed a bloom.

That Song by U2, or, Disappointment

My brother is a huge devotee of Edward Abbey. Back when I lived in the States I introduced him to "A Fool's Progress," a novel that I thought was hilarious and sad, and he took the horse by the reins and opened it up on the plains, reading and buying anything Abbey. He loved in particular Abbey's works on the desert, and traveled to Page, Arizona on a dare that he read between Abbey's lines.

This past week in Carlsbad my brother and I got in an impassioned discussion about nature and society and he loaned me "Desert Solitaire" to read. I made it to a chapter entitled "Cowboys and Indians" before I had to give it back. Since I now hail from a City entrenched in environmentalism and green, I thought I would find a gazillion copies of "Desert Solitaire" over a span of the San Francisco libraries and bookstores.

The Main Branch of the San Francisco Library no longer has it--they are all overdue and billed or missing. (How fitting, given Abbey's anarchy.) There are copies available in two other branches that I don't often go to, but I may have to make a special trip, for the book is not to be found on the shelves of bookstores in San Francisco. If you want Abbey in this town, you can read "The Monkey Wrench Gang." THAT'S IT. Not "A Fool's Progress," which I could readily find in Southwest Missouri. Not "Desert Solitaire."

What. The. F....

To add insult to injury, if you go to the websites of two Pacific Northwest favorites of mine, Powell's Books of Portland, Oregon, and Elliott Bay Book Company of Seattle, Washington, Abbey is readily available in nearly all of his forms.

Our big-time, supposedly literary and environmental City, is shown up by the grunge capitals of the universe. It may be time for me to move north.

My hope was this: I have the free time. I'll find this book in my City, my beloved land of culture and anarchy and nature-loving, tree-hugging freaks. I'll find it and see the City again and I'll be proud to BUY LOCAL. But local doesn't have it. So I'll have to check it out of the library, instead of reading it and donating it to the library.

It's a heartache.

Onward, dear reader.

P.S. - This is where the title of this post of Life For Rent comes from. Thought I'd pick one with my Boss in it, as well. Enjoy.