Definitions

Fiona just defined the word "knuckles" for me. She said that baby pigs drink milk from their mommy's knuckles. This gets even better when you realize that one of her favorite songs of late has been the Jim Gill's song "Knuckles Knees" from the album Jim Gill Sings Do Re Mi on his Toe Leg Knee in which "knuckles" is pretty much every other word. I don't have the heart to correct her definition.

More than it might first appear

Good god I'm on a lucky reading stint! (Which isn't that big of a surprise considering the number of books I currently have checked out of the library....)

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell is my latest literary thrill. The book is composed of thirteen chapters which comprise thirteen stories about thirteen year-old Jason Taylor. There aren't obvious transitions between stories, but they are all clearly connected even when their tone varies widely from nearly gothic moments in "January Man" and European philosophy in "Solarium" to contemporary political repercussions of Thatcher and the Falklands war in "Stones" and the liberated ecstasy of a boy in nature in "The Bridle Path". There is a load of complexity lying beneath the simple surface plot of a year in a 13-year old boy's life.

What ties all the disparate parts together is the main character who allows us to understand both the cruelty and the beauty of a 13 year old boy. Jason's awareness of social castes and rites does nothing to help him get through life any easier than anyone else. Instead he shows us all the stumbles and excruciating moments as he navigates a year while writing poetry under a pseudonym, trying to avoid the local bullies and confronting daily wrestling matches with "Hangman," which is what he names his stammer. There are moments of longing and joy and excitement as you watch Jason's maturation over the course of the book. I may have related to Jason even more closely when I realized that I was the same age as the main character in the year that the book is set, 1982.

The writing is beautiful and Jason's internal observations (things he'd never dare say aloud) can give you shivers, like this line, "Listening to houses breathe makes you weightless". To go from shimmery prose like this to the condensed slang of adolescent boys (everything is "epic", that is, until that word is no longer hip) gave me an appreciation of the variety of prose in which Mitchell is proficient. There is so much British slang used in the book that it serves as a warning to any American writer who thinks they might be able to reproduce such dialogue--they would invariably get it wrong.

And on that subject, I have just two teeny weeny uninvited editorial comments: one, the only American who appears in the book (and then only very briefly) uses the word "polystyrene" for "styrofoam" and "stone" for the "pit" of a cherry. Why didn't the editor catch that? (Though I realize this is a small blip compared to all the errors in American speech that Deb at Blue Pencil found in Joanna Trollope's novel Girl from the South.) And there was one faulty food reference that I detected: after the main character's mother has gone back to work, he comes home to find "the pressure cooker sat on the stove, leaking stewing steak fumes. (Mum starts them off in the morning so they cook all day.)" That wouldn't be a pressure cooker she's using if it cooks all day--that would be a crock pot, slow cooker or whatever they call such a contraption in England. A pressure cooker is used to cook things faster than normal, the kind of pot you might use when you come home from work and are trying to get dinner on the table (the lid is sealed to the pot so when the liquid inside boils, it is trapped inside the pot. Having nowhere else to go, steam builds up pressure. This results in shorter cooking times.)

But these really are small complaints when compared to the wonderful story that takes you so many unexpected places.

Pathetic

I woke up Sunday all perky, knowing that there was something to look forward to, but not quite remembering what that would be. And then I got distracted making blueberry pancakes from the pounds we picked at the Dexter Blueberry Farm on Friday. Of course, my kids wouldn't eat blueberry pancakes since they are pathologically afraid of anything that could be construed as "good for them" even when it is drowned in maple syrup.

So I forgot that the Yarn Harlot was coming to the AADL and instead continued on our mission to finish the office that we have been building for, oh, let's be generous and say 4 years, though I think 5 would be a little closer to the truth.

We are in the home stretch: we finished staining and finishing and putting up all the trim (that's a lot of trim when you realize that the office has 5 windows) two weeks ago. We have the bookshelves in and this weekend we embarked on the hunt for a desk which finally, after going to every flipping depressing-as-hell furniture store in Ann Arbor, landed us at Ikea on a Sunday.

Take my advice and don't go to Ikea on a Sunday. We got lucky and arrived just before the insane hoards of people and were able to get the kids into Smalland so they could play in the ball pit for 45 minutes while we tried to track down what we wanted. By the time we left, they were running shuttle buses to remote parking areas and there was a 25 minute long line in the cafeteria. So we didn't get to end the trip with a dose of gravlax (it's good gravlax) and instead dealt with our plummeting blood sugar levels with 50 cent hot dogs, potato chips and lingonberry juice that they sell on the way out the door.

So I didn't get to see the Yarn Harlot due to my own feeble-mindedness. But I am typing this not from the crammed-in-back crappy addition (that we plan to pull down sometime in the future when we have recovered from this renovation experience) but from a clean new desk, on a new chair, in my now functional office! Still more to do here--gotta get the blinds up, a door knob on the door and all the books on the shelves--we retrieved 15 bins of books and papers from my parent's basement where they have been stored and inaccessible for years.

I made a dinner that was the antithesis of lunch:

Clockwise from the top: kale and beet greens from the garden sauteed with garlic and dried hot peppers, steamed green beans from the garden, salad with feta and the first tomatoes, cucumbers and scallions from the garden, beets from the garden, Avalon organic pumpernickel bread, and boiled new potatoes from the Farmer's Market

And after dinner, I settled in and did the incredibly therapeutic action of sifting through the box that contained all my Northwestern papers and files. There was a recycling bin on the other side of me and I dumped anything with the phrases "paradigm," "dialectics," "mimesis," and "theatre as metaphor" into the recycling bin. What do you know? Not one paper survived.

When I drove the two full recycling bins of verbal wankage to the recycling center on Monday and tipped them into a dumpster, I felt a remarkable levity. My escape from academia was a really close call--I am still grateful for the awkward moment when I walked in on my lovely advisor crying in her office because the politics of the department were so fucking ugly. It was an encounter of only a few minutes, but I remember leaving there and thinking "That'll be me in 20 years if I don't get out now."
And got out I did, but seeing all those papers again, and chucking them, made me realize how different my life would be if I hadn't had that revelatory moment. I could still be blundering along producing incomprehensible babble that no one wants to read. Getting rid of the reminders of one of the more screwed up parts of your life is a wonderful way to remind you of how good your current life is.

And if you feel a hunger for academic discourse or you just don't have enough confusion in your life, check out the AADL Friends Bookshop in the coming weeks where my collection of books with titles like Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics will soon be available for purchase!

Harlot alert!

Most of you probably know this already, but the Yarn Harlot (a.k.a. Stephanie Pearl-McPhee) will be at the Ann Arbor District Library Downtown Branch this Sunday, July 30 from 2-3:30 PM. Her blog is one of my (and pretty much every other knitter's) favorites.

Here's a link to the event info.

Freaky

Freaky item #1:
Peas from my garden in mid July. Mid July?! Peas are a Spring crop and I already had one bountiful harvest but they flowered again and ta da, I have sweet sweet peas in the middle of Summer.

Freaky item #2:
A princess puzzle for Fiona from Granny Kathy.

You might need a closer look to get all the good freakyness:
Heh heh heh. Deciding which dress the princess should wear is kind of boring, but putting robot stickers on her face, now that's fun! So much for Granny Kathy's Feminize-Fiona project....

"so ugly and so glorious..."

I tried not to feel glad that my kid came down with strep throat yesterday, but since she did and since she slept a lot of the day, I was able to finish The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. So I'm offsetting the downer guilt for being a crummy mom with the invigorating oomph that a really fine book produces. This is a difficult book to write about--a phrase like "The power of the human spirit" sounds incredibly trite, but frankly, I can't think of a better way to express the mash of feelings that this wonderful, quirky, intense, sometimes funny, sometimes tragic book inspired in me.

I think the best I can do is quote a line that captures the essence of the story:
"I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant."

I read the last 100 pages with tears streaming down my face, but despite the fact that the narrator is Death and the subject matter is the Holocaust, the book is incredibly life affirming. It reminds me of one of my other favorite books, Everything is Illuminated (which also devotes a significant amount of its plot to the Holocaust) and The Book Thief is going to join the company of Everything is Illuminated by bumping Operating Instructions by Anne Lamott off of my Top 10 list (which is still a mighty fine read, mind you, but now that both of my kids are potty trained, the daily relevance of the "shit storms" that Lamott writes about has decreased).

If you are on my regular list of gift-book recipients, please be advised that you will most likely, be receiving a copy of this book from me when the appropriate celebratory occasion comes around. I gotta tell you, it is great to know what you'll be giving everyone for Christmas on July 22nd!

Rampant Reading

It's a good thing that comp grading is over for the near future and I finished my canoeing piece for the Community Observer because, people, I got some reading to do! There are times when I feel I make no progress on my reserve list at the AADL. One of the nifty new things about their website is they let you know where you stand in the queue for a book; right now I happen to be # 16 of 22 requests for Monica Ali's new book, Alentejo Blue (yes, I put in a request for it despite the fact that I didn't like or finish her other book, Brick Lane...This one sounds kind of promising).

For some reason, I hit the jackpot in the last week on the reserve lists and received numerous e-mails telling me to hightail it to the library to pick up a ton of books.

First we have the three books that I have already started:

From Top: Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende (about 100 pages left, so-so read but not so bad that abandonment is immanent), Bad Twin by Gary Troup (about 50 pages left, a trashy gimmick novel tied to the TV series "Lost") and Black Swan Green by David Mitchell (only just finished the first chapter but looks very promising)

Then we have the four books that might soon be making me even more of a book polygamist:

From top: The Antelope Wife by Louise Erdrich (next book group book), Tied to the Tracks by Rosina Lippi (whose Homestead is on my Top 10 favorite books), The Stolen Child by Keith Donohue (ok it has been publicized up the yin yang, but I like the subject matter) and Brookland by Emily Barton (which sounds like my kind of historical novel).

and the four books that are a part of a a little Michael Chabon crush I'm having since finishing (and raving about) The Final Solution:

Werewolves in Their Youth (by Chabon), McSweeny's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories (which Chabon edited), A Model World (by Chabon) and The Classic Illustrated Sherlock Holmes (to try and tap into Chabon's thoughts and why he wrote The Final Solution)

And don't forget the two books that wait for my continued reading of young adult fiction which has been encouraged of late by how much I loved reading Fly by Night:

So You Want to Be a Wizard by Diane Duane (recommended on some blog recently, wish I could remember which one...) and Bella at Midnight by Diane Stanley (which A Fuse #8 Production--she who led me to Fly By Night--gave a very good review)

I ask you, why does the bounty of books descend upon me in the midst of decent weather and in prime produce season (which means I must spend some time away from my beloved couch being outside so I don't get seasonal depression in the middle of the summer, and, when inside, preparing numerous fruit pies and freezing enough pesto to get me through another winter....)?

So people, where the hell do I start?

Pesto Delivery Device

I have discovered the finest Pesto Delivery Device and it is called:

The Radiator.

This is the first noodle I have found that delivers an appropriate amount of pesto to my mouth--that is to say, a ton. Basil season is upon us folks, better go get yourself some radiators.

Simple is good

With the heat index in the 100 degree range and the air so think that I feel like I'm treading water when I'm just standing up, the amount of energy I have for cooking is pretty minimal. Last week I made a strawberry rhubarb pie

(yes, it really was that fluorescent red orange color and mighty tasty too)

but this week it seems insane to have the oven on for that long. Hopefully some cooling breezes will come along because I'm taking Fiona blueberry picking at the Dexter Blueberry Farm on Thursday morning and I'd really like to be able to make a pie with them.

In the meantime, we are eating cold around here. Today for lunch I made the simplest and, in my humble opinion, the best potato salad. I had some cooked redskin potatoes left over from dinner over the weekend. I mixed up a dressing of lemon juice, olive oil, salt, pepper and chopped fresh dill. Then added about a quarter of a diced Vidallia onion and the potatoes. Done! Of course I would probably eat a brick if you doused it in a salty, lemony dressing...
I also had a tuna sandwich with slices of fresh farmer's market cucumbers (a completely different vegetable from the waxed supermarket variety and a fine excuse for having The Best Damn Summer Beer Snack every evening) and spicy sprouts. And you see a few baby carrots that Fiona wouldn't finish from her lunch which, in my role as the Human Garbage Can, I felt compelled to finish. (I alternate the role of Human Garbage Can with those of the Human Napkin and--reluctantly--the Human Snot Rag.)

We'll be doing some main course salads later this week, most likely another grilled tuna salade nicoise now that my green and purple beans are growing in the garden. And I might be able to stand turning the stove on just long enough to make these mango blue cheese quesadillas that I read about over at Weekly Dish (the small people will get their regular beans and cheese quesadillas) because they sound like a lot of flavor for little effort or btu's.

What are you eating in the heat?

This girl knows how to have FUN!

Brian took the kids camping this weekend so I could have some writing time. I'm trying to finish up a personal essay piece about canoeing and relationships for the Community Observer and haven't been able to finish a paragraph before a small person interrupts me with a request for a beverage. I am beginning to think there is something wrong with my kids in their perpetual need for beverages.

But this weekend, I am free from my tot-tail (as opposed to cock-tail) waitress role and can sit at the computer until my butt gets numb.

Of course, one can not write the entire 48 hours the kids are gone so some diversions are necessary. And I'll tell you folks, I know how to have fun!

I decided to clean and wax the floors.

Before you mark me up as an obsessive compulsive, let me explain that the floors in this house have not really been cleaned or waxed in the 7 years I have lived in this house and I strongly suspect that they weren't treated very well in the 8 years prior to my appearance after my husband bought the house. These old oak floors have seen a lot of traffic in the almost 100 years they have been down and we certainly haven't treated them with the respect they deserve.

Now that I have established the floors' needs and our neglect I'll take on the question "why this weekend?" When liberated from ones children, couldn't I come up with something a little more, well, fun? Go to a movie? Invite some childless friends over and relish the feel of an uninterrupted conversation?

Those things sound nice, but getting down on my hands and knees and cleaning and rubbing wax into the floors then buffing them to a shine fulfills some other need in my psyche.

I remember reading a forward to one of Jeanette Winterson's books in which she declared that in order to write, one must get rid of all dingy underwear. Despite being in an impoverished-artist state, she threw away all her graying underwear and went out and bought bright colored underpants. When she washed them out in the sink and hung them to dry around the apartment, she felt like she was accompanied by a flock of energizing parrots. And she felt the words pour forth.

That's kind of how I feel about the floors. No one else is going to know the charge you get by wearing hot pink undies when you are sitting down writing. No one will notice that my kitchen floor now shines for the first time in my residency. But I know and this sense of external brightness and order makes me feel like I can create clean, organized prose. So bye bye muddled mess of words and hello cleaned, waxed, and buffed paragraphs!

Oh, and I gotta tell you, it is actually pretty fun to wax a floor at 11:30 PM with a big glass of red wine and Bob Marley blasting on the stereo.