the place for thinking

I've been a rotten blogger for months now.

I kept meaning to post something, but somehow never got around to it.

I was going to write something about my great-aunt (who's doing fine* now and my sister is living with her, an arrangement that seems to be working out for both of them).

I was going to write something about commuting, now that I take BART to work every morning.

I was going to write something about observing more black women with straightened and colored hair recently than I've seen (or noticed) for years.

But the thing that got me to open up the old Blogger account is Errol Morris' set of essays on Fenton's two photos of an empty road in the Crimea. He starts out trying to establish in what order a pair of photographs were taken and goes on into thoughts about war, about intention, about how you figure things out. Nikita Khrushchev even shows up (so to speak) in the second section. It's fascinating reading and I've taken to reading some of his other essays in his Zoom columns on the NYT website. It's a lot of food for thought and so it's getting late and even though I'm getting over an awful cold and should be in bed, I keep reading.

Because it's fun to think about this stuff.

I am rediscovering the pleasure of thinking about things that have no immediate use. I have always loved this. But I had sort of stopped for quite a while. Somehow having a job that, though it uses a lot of mental energy sometimes, is not overly intellectual has freed me up for the not-so-simple pleasures of thinking.

You would have thought being in academia would have done that. I think it does it for a lot of people. But it didn't do it for me. In part, I think it was because that was what I expected university life to be like (too many movies, probably). But I think it's also because this thinking thing has always been about fun for me and once something gets past the fun part to the work part, I don't so so well.

I'd say that mentally, I'm a sprinter rather than a marathoner. I have to trick myself to do things that take longer than 20 minutes** to complete. I have a lot of tricks now, switching between tasks, promising myself some sort of treat if I stick to it for another ten minutes, and so on to get things done. Often enough the tricks work and I end up spending an extended period of time working without feeling bored or trapped, but it doesn't come naturally to me.

So for me thinking is, at it's best, a ludic activity.

Which also might explain why I haven't blogged in months. It's felt too much like work and I hate working. But maybe it's going to feel like play again.

* well, as fine as you can be at 93+ years old.

** ok, I exaggerate, longer than a half hour.

thinking in black and white

I don't usually think about writing about race. For one thing, I wouldn't know where to start. Part of that is because I've been a progressive (and an academic manqué) and therefore my impulse is to place race among the array of power dynamics facing all of us. Throw in the multiplicity of race prejudice and I can't really think of anything to say.

But sometimes, things break through. The second thing was this post from Lower Manhattanite. I'd heard, read about the Jena 6 awhile back, but I hadn't heard about the sentencing. The chilling thing about LM's story is that 14 years ago is nothing, nothing at all.

The first thing though came completely out of the blue. I pay about as much attention to professional tennis as I do to professional golf, which is a little more than absolutely nothing. I'm guessing it's a big tournament and a little Googling uncovers that it's the U.S. Open. I was riding the BART into work a couple of days ago, something I'm still getting a kick out of, when I glanced over some one's shoulder and saw the sports page. On the page a headline that read something like "Henin beats Serena" something like that, I may have the verb wrong. I probably do. But the thing that has been bugging me for days is that Henin and Serena. The white player gets her last name, as is usual for athletes, unless they have some nickname thing going on. Serena, hell, they can just call her by her first name. There's this nearly ubiquitous use of women's names rather than their surnames in this culture that's bad enough. But it's the casualness of this racism, this seemingly completely unconscious condescension that floors me.

And you can bet that the writer would completely deny any racist intent if I called him on it too.

again and again

Yesterday I was watching Seven Samurai. I don't remember why I got it from Netflix. I've probably watched it about six times by now. It just keeps getting better and better. Once I'd finished watching it, I started to re-read "The Last Samurai" by Helen DeWitt. It's a wonderful book and reading it made me think about two things, the pleasures of rereading and why some books are so satisfying and others aren't.

For the latter, I'm not going to make some argument about high art. This summer I"ve been compulsively re-reading Terry Pratchett's Discworld series and Charles DeLint's Newford novels. You could probably make the argument that Pratchett's a genius, but I don't think the same could be said for DeLint. But re-reading both of them gives me a lot of pleasure. Part of the fun is they're both good at constructing plots. But once you get past the what-is-going-to-happen-next stage of reading, what is there?

In their cases and in DeWitt's too, it's making a world that's so fully realized that a reader enters it like Alice (or Death) going through a mirror. It's not a matter of spelling everything out. That makes for tedious reading and gets in the way of the effect that I'm trying to describe. Theodore Sturgeon once wrote something about description to the effect that a writer needed to imagine every detail in a room, everything, but then she needed to leave out everything except what the character (or pov) would notice. Who knows how many writers can actually do that? But the point, I guess, is that the world (country, neighborhood, street, house, or room) that's written so so well imagined, even if not explicitly, that it's all there, ready. A reader is held in the imaginative world of the book.

When that doesn't happen, there has to be high style, great plotting, or something to make a book worth reading. Recently a friend recommended The Shadow of the Wind. The cover blurbs compared it to Eco, Borges, Garcia-Marquez. Do reviewers just pull this shit out of the air? Ok, there was a library in it and a mysterious character is a writer, but there the resemblance stops. A worse conceived book I can't imagine reading. I started to make notes on all the lapses of logic, failures of character development, and just plain stupid writing, but had to give up after half a chapter. It's the sort of thing that can embitter a reader.

But the worst thing about it (aside from being pretty tone-deaf though that could have been a translation issue) was that it was supposed to take place in Barcelona and I could never see the city. It's as though all the action took place in feebly illuminated corners of rooms or dark streets, surrounded by an impenetrable fog. Characters pop up in one spot, then merged into the fog to pop up at another. This is pretty bizarre when you remember that this is Gaudi's city. It's famous for it's beauty. And according to Google, it doesn't rain all that much there either. If a writer can't make a living place palpable, then reading them is going to be a chore.

This summer, no more chores.

translations

Last weekend I was reading the Pevar/Volokhonsky translation of The Brothers Karamazov. This is one of those books that I have on my lifetime read list. Somewhere, long ago, I got the notion that there are certain books that you have to have read to be a civilized person. Of course the list just gets longer and longer and there's no way that I'll ever get caught up, so I'll never get that civilization Brownie point, but I persevere because lots of these classic texts are fun to read*. For example, the best thing about The Brothers K is that all of the characters so far are completely insane. They go about ranting and raving and having these religious/philosophical conversations in the midst of some fairly sordid wheeling and dealing. Much fun. Part of the reason I chose this edition was an article in The New Yorker not so long ago about translation and translators. The P/V collaboration are supposedly more true to the Russian than the Constance Garnett ones that I'm sure I read in high school.

The Garnett ones are supposed to be characterized by a British, Victorian habit of slang. If so, it's not something I would have noticed as a teenaged reader. The world of Crime and Punishment (the single Russian novel that I'm sure I read in high school) was strange enough that if it was strained through some English vernacular, it hardly mattered. But the world of Pevear and Volokhonsky is definitely some where different again, not English, nothing I reconize except in some Gogol stories. This makes me think that it's probably a good translation.

It's odd, the effect of translation. If you don't speak or read a different language, you completely depend on the proficiency and agility of the translator. Douglas Hofstadter spends an entire book messing around with the idea of translation in one of his books. If you read a lot, you run into a lot of different translation of the same material. I expect that people who do this for a living (scholars and such) develop a neutral attitude towards different translations, not much minding variation unless something is dreadfully wrong or it's in their area of expertise. But as an amateur reader, the differences in translation can bring you up short. For example, a few years ago I bought the newest, bestest, most complete translations of Luis Borges, an old, old favorite of mine. Although I definitely think the language is crisper, clearer somehow, like a wiped bathroom mirror, there are things that bring me to a screeching halt as I read the stories.

For one thing Andrew Hurley, the translator, calls the story "Funes, The Memorious", "Funes, His Memory". Even though he has a completely reasonable explanation for his choice in the notes, this change just jars my reading funny bone. The original translations, even if they had flaws, are part of my mental picture of Borges. I read them before I was 25. I cannot remember at all why I began reading that copy of Labyrinths or even how I knew who Luis Borges was. But Borges is part of my mental landscape now and that landscape is made of imperfectly rendered paraphrases of his thinking.

But imperfect approximations are life. Right now, I'm feeling an imperfect approximation of a good sister. My younger sister had quit her job and given up her apartment because my great -aunt said that she'd be willing to have Michele come out and take care of her. What wasn't so clear was that Aunt Marjorie was only willing to do it for a short time and now has decided that she doesn't want Michele there at all. I have some responsibility because I was the got between who made a bad translation of what Aunt Marjorie wanted through the filter of what I thought she needed and the desire for a clean, elegant solution. So MIchele's life is a mess (again) and there's nothing I can do about it. And no matter what my rational mind says I feel guilty because in this 56 y.o. is still the little girl who loved her little sister and always wanted to protect her**.

But I can't.


*This is not true of Henry James, who I've completely given up on reading, along with Faulkner. Some styles are just too uncongenial.

** I'm on the right in the photo.

the civil war is over

Fuck Shelby Foote.

I started listening to his immense (three volumes, more than three thousand page) work a little less than two years ago. I can’t remember why I wanted to know more about the American Civil War. Idle curiosity, probably. I also don’t remember why I thought the Foote work was the one to get. I think that it had good reviews on audible.com and perhaps I thought that three volumes meant that it would be comprehensive. I listened pretty faithfully until the war got to Gettysburg and I had to stop. It’s a brutal battle, a stupid one too. I’d had enough of war. I started listening again back in March just to be finished.

Now after I’d listened, up to Gettysburg anyhow, I rented a couple of the Ken Burns Civil War episodes. Shelby Foote is pretty prominent in the series. He knows a great deal about the different battles and the different players, particularly from the Southern side. Initially, this was something I liked about the books. As a Northerner, not the mention as a black woman, I never thought much about how the Southerners considered the war. As far as I knew, there was nothing good on their side of the argument, nothing at all. And although I don’t think there was any virtue in the decision to secede, the early parts of Foote’s book allowed me to understand a little of their point of view, messed up as it was. He also showed some of the machinations on the Northern side pre and during the war.

Foote seemed like a charming man in the documentary, wry, insightful. He probably was a charming man, being dead now and all. And if nothing else, through him I developed a great liking for Stonewall Jackson, religious maniac and general.

So why did I write fuck Shelby Foote? Because after all these hours of listening to his books, his Southern bias and subtle racism has driven me around the bend. Much of the end is a nauseating hagiography of Jefferson Davis, the megalomaniacal president of the Confederate States. Foote called Davis’ two years in prisons a martyrdom equivalent to Lincoln’s assassination and described Davis’ ironing (manacles on the ankles) as though it were an unthinkable punishment. He somehow managed to forget to mention that the ironing only lasted three days, unlike the years that blacks spent ironed and whipped and imprisoned under slavery. Foote’s inconsistent reference to African Americans as Negroes or blacks throughout the books also began to get on my nerves. Even though he started the books in 1958 when Negro may have been the best polite choice, the final book came out in 1974 and the persistent use starts to feel like a sneer.

And does he sneer. Any retreat by the North is a terrified rout. Any by the South, a strategic tactical ploy in the face of overwhelming odds. He makes little of Ulysses S. Grant as a strategic general, even though you can see Grant out-thinking the South from Vicksburg on. Foote smears Grant as a president, implying that he was as corrupt as the (truly) corrupt men in his administration, but manages not to mention Grant’s real commitment to black suffrage. He refers to Grant’s Memoirs as though they were a desperate attempt to make money. (Grant was dying of cancer as he wrote them and they did make a lot of money.) Foote passes over the fact that Memoirs are still highly regarded, still in print, unlike the work of Jefferson Davis. (And Grant was a friend of Mark Twain, who knew?)

Oh and that Reconstruction thing? All wrong. The worst of it was the disenfranchisement of ex-Confederate soldiers, not the brutal disenfranchisement of blacks when it ended.

Foote had nothing but praise for the Southern side. He praises Robert E. Lee, who basically screwed the South with the Gettysburg adventure. From the second Wilderness campaign on, he’s wearing down, wearing out Confederate troops. At times, Lee seems insane. The massacre in Lawrence, Kansas is not as bad as evicting people from their homes. Southern marauders? No problem.

Time for bed, more on this later.

this awful, awful war

I think that like many people, the war in Iraq is like wallpaper. It's somewhere there in the background and you don't' really think about it unless something changes, like someone moves a picture and you can see the difference between the faded and unfaded material. Or you look up and notice that part peeling away where you did that half-assed job of pasting.

But unlike wallpaper, we have to notice that in Iraq the unchanging fact is more and more people are dying every day. The government has decided to let in 7,000 lucky souls as refugees. But there are something like 3.2 million refugees or displaced people as a result of this disaster.

What's really gotten me going lately is listening to Chandrasekaran's "Imperial Life in the Emerald City" about the complete fuckup of the post war (dis)organisation and now today I discover this. First of all it looks as though the US government had been thinking about Iraq in less than friendly terms for years. But in the run up to the invasion the planning became a fucking *PowerPoint presentation. As the officers interviewed for "Fiasco" (my next listen) said

Lt. Gen. McKiernan later told Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks (Fiasco, p. 75):

"It's quite frustrating the way this works, but the way we do things nowadays is combatant commanders brief their products in PowerPoint up in Washington to OSD and Secretary of Defense... In lieu of an order, or a frag [fragmentary] order, or plan, you get a set of PowerPoint slides... [T]hat is frustrating, because nobody wants to plan against PowerPoint slides."

and

Retired Army Col. Andrew Bacevich told Ricks (Fiasco, pp. 75-76) that PowerPoint war planning was the ultimate insult:

"Here may be the clearest manifestation of OSD's [Office of Secretary of Defense] contempt for the accumulated wisdom of the military profession and of the assumption among forward thinkers that technology -- above all information technology -- has rendered obsolete the conventions traditionally governing the preparation and conduct of war. To imagine that PowerPoint slides can substitute for such means is really the height of recklessness."

Jesus wept. So they didn't plan much, they completely disregard decades, hell centuries of experience, they drop what few plans there are, they steal everything that's not nailed down, put their cronies in positions of power, ruin a country, and we're supposed to just let them go on doing it.

Ok, I'm beat. Let's impeach the asshole.

*If you know me, you know how much I hate PowerPoint.

looking for work II

I think I should have mentioned that the second encyclopedia job was in DC and I was out in Virginia when the n-word incident happened.

But I was back in Jersey for the Smuggler's Attic job. I was in charge of the psychedelic section, the one with the little brightly colored plastic boxes, black lights, and posters. I can't imagine the same thing in a mall now. Selling that sort of drug paraphernalia (including screens and poorly made pipes) would likely get a place closed down now - or papered with unconvincing protestations that everything in the store is ornamental or for tobacco. (Who are these things fooling?) The store also sold heavy "Spanish" furniture, easily chipped enamel kitchenware, light inexpensive cotton clothes, and cast iron candlestick holders. The floor was this red, yellow, and orange shag that had to be raked free of detritus, including gum, every morning.


Seventh job, age twenty (maybe) working in a bookstore, I think it was Waldenbooks. I'd gone back to school, art school this time. All I remember about this was shelving poetry books when I showed up after having taken acid the night before.

[Wait a minute, just before the next one I worked like a day selling sandwiches in someone's brother's shop. I'm not sure that counts, but call it 7.2.]

Eighth job, age twenty two, housekeeper for a rich family in Nantucket. They raised Weimaraner dogs. I lived in a tepee that summer. I listened to the Watergate investigation as I cleaned because the old guy in the couple was a rabid Republican and he ranted at the tv set for hours. I cut my hand open rushing to do something or other. I had the scar for years, but it's just a trace now.
I met one of my best friends that summer.

Ninth job, age twenty-two, kitchen help in a Nantucket nursing home. I don't know about now, but back when I lived on the island, there were no, zero, not any jobs after Labor Day. Smart people had saved enough or had something to tide them over. I'd actually saved some money and was planning to go to Mexico and paint, but things sort of took a detour. I never left and this was about all there was for jobs come October. I rarely saw the people in Our Island Home, I sliced butter and put it on pats, arranged plates and shoved dishes into the dishwasher. I lasted two months, which was something of a record for summer people.

Tenth job, age twenty three, nanny for a rich family in San Francisco. Through some judicious lying and support from back East (thanks, Susan!) I got this job through an agency. Come to think of it, they'd probably have sent anyone short of an ax murderer out to the Hamm house. They'd gone through something like thirteen nannies in nine years, according to the nine-year old girl. Living in jobs are the worst. Unless you're out of the building, there's no way that you're off duty until everyone in the house has gone to sleep or passed out. I went out dancing a lot when I had that job, stumbling in at three, up at six-thirty for the kids' breakfast. But I saw La Jolla and Jupiter Island in Florida. I smelled my first swamp fire and had my first grapefruit from the tree, little brownish, greenish fruit, incredibly sweet.

Eleventh job, age twenty-three, cashier at Stanyan Street Foods. I don't think this lasted very long, because U can barely remember anything about it. This was my first job in natural foods, but not my last.

Twelfth job, age twenty-three, handyperson for a woman who bought houses, rehabbed them and sold them. I think one of the houses that I worked on isn't too far from where I live now in Emeryville, though I couldn't find it for the life of me. It was a nondescript little bungalow, but the wainscoting in the bathroom was pure redwood under decades of paint.
Margaret Pillow, the boss, paid women less than she did the men she hired, but considered herself a feminist because she was hiring women in trade work in the first place. I'm not sure that attitude's all that uncommon even now. I made five dollars and hour, but I didn't always work. I had no car and walked everywhere.

looking for work

I might have been doing this seven or so months ago if I hadn't gotten sidelined by working at Trader Joe's. I made a couple of shaky attempts at finding a new job before I left CSUMB, but my heart, or perhaps my brain, wasn't in it. Now, by quitting TJ's, I haven't left myself much choice.

So I've spent today (from about ten-thirty) to now (about one-forty) trying to type out a list of the things that I'm good at , so that I can make a new resume and start really looking. Most of the time has been spent reading blogs and my email and feeling very, very tense. I know that this stupid on a cerebral level, but on those lower (say reptilian brain) levels, I'm terrified. I can't remember when I last looked for a job. I mean look at my job history:

First job, age sixteen, receptionist for my best friend's dad. I think he asked me. It happened to be the summer of the Newark riots. I didn't listen to the radio then much more than I do now, so I had taken two buses, wondering all the while why they seemed to be running so late, before I flagged down a cab. The driver asked me where I was from and told me that I'd better get back there. "All hell is breaking loose down here." But stupid and responsible, I persevered and got to the office just in time for Dr. Nichols to look at me in shock, toss me in his car and drive me home. I saw cops driving by. One held a rifle out the window of the car, his hand wrapped in a bloody bandage. I saw a tank coming up one of the big streets. I saw kids grabbing watermelons out of a store whose window had been broken in.
That summer, aside from the riot, I learned to file, answer the phone, and discovered that I really liked canned iced tea and tuna fish sandwiches for lunch.

Second job, age eighteen, selling encyclopedias door to door in NYC. I think I found this job in the newspaper. I remember going to some office near the Flatiron Building in Manhattan. They'd drive us to these poor neighborhoods uptown or in the boroughs. It seemed like the poorest people were the most anxious for their kids' futures, willing to buy these crappy (worse than World Book) encyclopedias. I got to feel so bad about it that I'd end up bobbling a sale that I could have closed. After a while, the team would get dropped off at different places, then meet up to spend the day playing handball and hanging out. They even had a field trip up to New Haven, not that I sold anymore books there.
This summer I started drinking coffee (black with three teaspoons of sugar) and smoking cigarettes (tried a bunch but settled down with Kools at some point). I went to a sensitivity workshop (I think in New Haven) which left me thinking that they're not quite bullshit, but easily gamed. I also started smoking hash that summer, so ended up (with a bunch of co-workers) too high to get it together to go to Woodstock. The day of the moon landing, it was raining with the sun shining and we were all dancing around in the street.

Third job, still eighteen, selling baby's bargain clothing at Bamberger's (long gone). Since I was making no money selling encyclopedias and college was looming, I got this job. My first for a big company and I guess my first in real retail. I had to clock in and ate lunch in the cafeteria, usually by myself because I was real shy. I saved up enough to buy a nice grey, imitation leather trench coat. (Hey, I was eighteen.)
Again a job that showed me how much most people care for their kids. The sun suit sets ten for a dollar were sort of depressing. So thin, so bright, so badly made.

Fourth, eighteen yet, doing phone sales. This has got to have been the worst job I have ever had and is why I'm usually pretty polite to telemarketers. The bosses had a phone list from who knows where that had all phone numbers by neighborhood, whether or not they were listed. That last part pissed off any number of people, who had no problem yelling at the people who'd interrupted them in the middle of dinner to sell real estate. I think it was real estate.
That was a bad one. There were I don't know how many of us working inside a smoky, windowless room that I got to on the bus, looking at lists of names and numbers.

Fifth, nineteen, selling encyclopedias again. Why didn't I learn? It's an easy job to get because no one wants to do it for very long and very few are any good at it. The guy who ran the office was a phenomenal salesman. He could have sold someone a set if he came to their door in his pajamas with a rubber chicken on his head. I think I sold two sets in a single day and then quit.
It was on this job that I got called nigger for the first and only time. It came from a couple of little kids in a yard. I wasn't afraid of them, exactly but it gave me the feeling that I wasn't very safe out there. In these door to door things, you get dropped out somewhere and hook up with your ride at the end of the shift. So you're out there all by yourself. Was coming back past their yard on my way to the pickup when a woman (I remember that she had dark hair, was on the smallish side) called out to me. She had a German accent. She made the kids apologize and said to me that she was trying to keep them from being like that, " . . but these people around here . . . ."

Sixth, nineteen, working in The Smuggler's Attic. This was a Pier One sort of place in the Willowbrook Shopping Mall in Wayne. New Jersey. I got the job because the guy who was hiring had up a side that said only people over twenty one could work there. I bullied him into hiring me.


I think I've procrastinated long enough. Time for a nap, I think. More on Smuggler's Attic and my job history later.