The Man of My Dreams by Curtis Sittenfeld

I'm listening to an interview with Curtis Sittenfeld, while sitting in the library writing on my work laptop. Curtis is about 2 years younger than me, since she won a Seventeen short story contest in 1992 when she was 16.

This title is a very ironic title, but I bought this book on the day that Dave proposed to me, which was a bit bizarre.
We were in Mendocino shopping at a bookstore and I saw the book - it is her 2nd novel after her debut, Prep, about a girl from Ohio who goes to an East Coast prep school.
So I bought it, but Dave thought I already suspected that he was going to propose that night and that's why I picked it. I didn't even think about the title of the book until after Dave had proposed and he pointed this out.

The Christmas weekend was very romantic and I already wrote about it in a more private journal.
But this book is really awesome, the character has a lot of similarities to me in having low self-esteem, not believing that the words "Hannah's boyfriend" are real. (she feels like it is an oxymoron like jumbo shrimp).

And Curtis apparently is constantly having the reporter question of whether or not the events in Prep and in this book are autobiographical. She basically points out that now that the two characters are out, there are a lot of differences between them so they can't both be autobiographical...
(Oh she is saying in the interview that Ethan Canin, who is a doctor and a alumnus of the Iowa Writers Program, was one of her teachers in graduate school there in Iowa).

Curtis is a Stanford English major grad also, and there are various scenes in this book, especially in the college years, where I see a lot of stuff coming from my memories of Stanford (Hannah doesn't go to a cappella and improv shows as a freshman because she thinks they're kind of stupid, but then realizes all the bonding and socializing happening at these shows).
Also Hannah didn't like eating alone in the cafeteria and has a very similar relationship with her therapist - she has this idealized notion of the therapist's normal life which is similar to mine.

The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation, by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón

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A summary from the Amazon site below. This book has the clearest timeline I've ever seen of the events on 9/11, and an easy to understand view of the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission's report.
It's interesting in light of Rumsfeld's quote that so few understand the war in Iraq. Perhaps Jacobson and Colón should bring out a second book directly about Iraq, too.

"On December 5, 2005, the 9/11 Commission issued its final report card on the government’s fulfillment of the recommendations issued in July 2004: one A, twelve Bs, nine Cs, twelve Ds, three Fs, and four incompletes. Here is stunning evidence that Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón, with more than sixty years of experience in the comic-book industry between them, were right: far, far too few Americans have read, grasped, and demanded action on the Commission's investigation into the events of that tragic day and the lessons America must learn." - Amazon review excerpt

The Riddle of the Wren by Charles de Lint

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I seem to be on a "first novel" kick - both writing and reading. This is Charles de Lint's first novel, which has been out of print for a while. de Lint says in the author notes that this isn't the first book he wrote, but the first book he started, and that he had written seven different versions of it.
Like Pat Murphy's The Shadow Hunter, it was reprinted several years after its first publication as a hardcover limited edition, and he was "pleased to find it in the seeds of themes he's still exploring in my work to this day."

I really was impressed by the depth of the world he created - language, race names (erlkin, etc) travelling between worlds by tracing symbols on henge stones - it reads like it is a book in a long-established series.
And the main character's journey to really find out who she is and how she's supposed to accomplish what seems to be an impossible quest, resonates with me as well.
Also, when browsing around on his site and that of his wife, Maryann Harris, I found this account of how they met (it's the foreword to a collection of the yearly Christmas stories that he writes for her each year). It seems so random that people so compatible meet so randomly.

ASJA meeting at Mechanics Inst

Pat invited me to a meeting of the ASJA (American Society of Journalists and Authors) - we're both not members but we shelled out $10 for the privilege of hearing two senior editors at two San Francisco publishing houses (unnamed here) reveal how writers can make use of new information and technologies on their route to successfully publishing, and publicizing, their books.

Pat's take on the evening as a whole was that they were making the situation seem a bit too rosy - it might be easier to publish as writers these days but definitely not easy to make a living. They had proposed that writers hire their own publicists at a relatively high cost to fill in the gaps left by the publisher's publicist when they move on to the next book. This sounds like a good idea but in practice not very feasible - sounds like it eats up the advance for the book quickly.

However - the meeting was interesting and was held in the Mechanics Institute, a very beautiful and historical building in SF on Post near Mont. BART. We went down the staircase pictured above, and peered into the library windows on each floor. It looks awesome and the library was open, but we needed member key cards to get in.

Clinton: Don't Let the Perfect become the Enemy of the Good

I went to a rally for Prop 87, which establishes a $4 billion program to reduce oil and gasoline usage by 25 percent, with research and production incentives for alternative energy, education and training, funded by a tax of 1.5-6 percent on producers of oil extracted in California. (And here's a link to the Forum show about the prop, and thanks to Forum for the concise summary of prop87, cut and pasted above).
Bill Clinton was the star attraction - so much so that when the rally was asked, "What are we here for?" many yelled back "Bill!".
He was very smart, the speech just went from point to point flawlessly and of course he is a master of the art of making everyone feel like he is speaking to each of them.
It was just amazing to actually see him in person - I was relatively close to the stage, and he was the first President I ever voted for (in 1992 when I was 18).

Don't Let the Perfect become the enemy of the good - that the opponents say the proposition is bad because it's not perfect. No, it's not perfect but it certainly seems like it will be better than what we have now. He pointed out that people have been using this argument to impede change for 600 years and that Californians shouldn't fall for it now.

Mikebaudio, who I found on Flickr, was there also and took much better pictures than I did. He took the above picture of Clinton and SF Mayor Gavin Newsom, and here is Bonnie Raitt, who sang "Something's Happening Here" - the acoustics were great for those there live but the little movie I made of her sounds very muddy.
Below is a view of City Hall that I took. Note the blurriness of the Treo, I had forgotten the real digital camera, The view is looking up from where I was standing. It was very beautiful. Apparently this was a big day for Clinton, he went to another rally in SF after this one, and then went to Stockton!

Cruel Tutelage by Monkey - song lyrics and dancing

MONKEY! I'm dating this post on the night we went to the Monkey show, but actually writing it a week later when we received the CD I ordered from Asian Man Records (buy it, it's $10 including shipping!)

It's very fun to finally hear the lyrics more clearly than we could hear them in the club show. - especially "Trailer Park Love" - "If she don't get flowers, she'll burn off your pants."

So far my favorite songs are "You Don't Know" and "Would You Wanna?" It's pretty cool that we actually know two members of this band which has been chugging along making this music for ten years already.
Oh and also after listening to the album a couple more times, I have the line "Give me the head of the head of the radio station" from "Voice of America," constantly running through my head.

Too Late to Die Young by Harriet McBryde Johnson

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Another book bought on Oct 25, this one at Modern Times bookstore.

She opens the book by telling us about what it was like for her, growing up with a congenital neuromuscular disease, and then having to watch the Jerry Lewis telethons every year, talking about all the children with muscular dystrophy who were surely going to die (even with the help Jerry was asking for).
Her parents had tried to say, for example, that the boy they talked about on the telethon who had died had some sort of other muscular dystrophy, the kind that kills people (similar to mom trying to tell us her cancer was not the kind that was so harmful).
It just sounds very hard to grow up as a kid - but she did grow up, outside of most expectations, and now has been protesting against Jerry's telethon's regularly for years, and working as a practicing lawyer (and author!) in Charleston, SC.

The other big point she makes here is the "false necessity" of the nursing home and other care centers for the disabled. She is arguing for increased aid for those who need it, so that they can have caregivers in their homes. It sounds like having a small team of trusted people to help with things that she can't do alone, must be cheaper than a nursing home, especially since she can keep working as a lawyer to fund this team.
At one point in the book she falls out of her wheelchair and has to unexpectedly go to the hospital in a town she doesn't know. There's a very real danger that she could fall into needing a nursing home, since the hospital won't take care of her for as long, and she wasn't able to physically get home to be near her team.

And the book is not all policy and argument, by any means, although she loves to talk.
It's also mostly funny. She gets a whole lot of butts out of her face in the crowd at the Democratic Convention, (they end up building a little cage around her to keep people away) and it made me think of how crushed I feel in a crowd, just being short.
She writes also of the joys of zooming along in her power chair on her way to the courthouse in Charleston, and just generally living life, a life that she didn't think she would have this long. She keeps thinking throughout her childhood and adolescence, "Well, I'm not going to live that long, but when I die, I might as well die educated," for example, or "I might as well die a lawyer"...

She just wrote a YA novel about two girls at a "crip" summer camp, which also looks quite good.

The Shadow Hunter by Pat Murphy

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I also found this book at Borderlands on Oct 25 along with "Green Glass Sea" - an autographed copy of the 2nd edition of Pat's first novel!
I think I had never read this before - it's very interesting in that she wrote the book in 1982 (on a typewriter as she points out in the intro) and then went back into the story in 2002 to "update her future" - adding things like cell phones and such that are now prevalent but were pretty uncommon or not invented in 1982.
It's an interesting meta-time machine right there - the character of the Neanderthal boy in the book is brought forward into an utopian world created by a scientist (reminded me a bit of the Jurassic Park island) and then the 2002 version of Pat goes and reframes the future to fit the new future.
(She compared this a bit to trying to fix just one thing in a kitchen - you end up wanting to redo the whole thing).

I liked the book and Pat's ability to put us in these different worlds and minds, even in the 27-year-old "promising young writer" version of herself, as she put it.

The Green Glass Sea by Ellen Klages

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I completely loved this book - I think I was one of the first to buy it at Borderlands on Valencia in SF as they hadn't yet put it out on the shelves and I had brought up the postcard to them, asking "Do you have this here yet?"
Then I took it home and read it all afternoon. I was sad when I was done just because the main character, Dewey is such a great character - had I read it when I was younger or if I read any slower, I would be able to live with the character longer.
The story is about Dewey and Suze, two girls growing up at the Los Alamos site, in the midst of all the top scientific minds building the bomb. Dewey gets to talk to Nels Bohr just randomly on the street for an hour about her scientific projects, for example.

From the very beginning, where Dewey is coming on the train to New Mexico but she doesn't know where exactly she's going because of the secrecy around the war, I was hooked in. Details like her experience of the sleeper seats and the observation car reminded me of our trip across Canada in 1987 from Banff to Vancouver.
Anyway, I won't go on any longer about it. It's an awesome book, for everyone (not just for kids). I'm happy for once that we eavesdropped on Ellen as she sat behind us at the Neil Gaiman event, otherwise I might not have known about her (unless PM happened to tell me).

Best American Non-Required Reading 2005

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Foreword by Mr. Eggers, with much stuff about 826 Valencia and the people who were on the editorial board for the book (more interesting to me now that I am trying to be on the editorial board for the 826 Quarterly) and Intro by Beck.
A lot of great stuff here - I recommend it - I liked "The Death of Mustango Salvajie" by Jessica Anthony, about a female bullfighter. And Al Franken has a piece here about his USO Tour in Iraq and Afghanistan, called "Tearaway Burkas and Tinplate Menorahs".

It was also fun to read in combo with "Firebirds" and "The Green Glass Sea" and thinking about writing for teens/young adults in general.

Elemental: The Tsunami Relief Anthology

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This is a book to benefit the Save the Children foundation for tsunami relief -- a very interesting anthology of science fiction and fantasy, and for a good cause (although I checked it out from the library).

To remember the favorites:
"Report from the Near Future: Crystallization" - this was a pretty scary account of a humongous traffic snarl in LA that would clog up the entire region. Triggered by just a few seemingly small events. Seems like a little too close to reality for comfort, but very well done.

"Tough Love: 3001" by Juliet Marillier
The author had just run a writing critique group where she learned that "no amount of literary technique is going to make a person a good writer."
This story was very entertaining because the participants in the group were all aliens who chose pseudonyms of famous writers, and the one who decided to call himself Gaiman was the coolest.
and "Sea Air" by Nina Kiriki Hoffman, about a boy who realizes he's meant to be of a different race entirely - even though he's always been afraid of the ocean, he eventually rejoins his family in the sea. (this is like several other stories I vaguely remember. It seems very Lovecraft).

Digging to America by Anne Tyler

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I love Anne Tyler. When I was reading this it was during a time when I was thinking about a supergroup salon of wise women - Anne Tyler, Nora Ephron, my therapist, and PM of course.
I always forget how much I like Anne Tyler's work - I don't think about it that much, but when I see a new book I always pick it up and I'm surprised and pleased.

This book opens with what seems to be a purely coincidental event - two families congregating at the Baltimore airport to welcome Korean orphans that they are adopting.
This chance meeting of these families at this pivotal point in their lives becomes an event they mark every year, highlighting their cultural differences and characters as Tyler moves around in perspective throughout the book. We're in Maryam's world (the matriarch of the Iranian-American side) for most of the book, but it was so cool to have a book starting with one of the characters as an infant (Jin-Ho, arriving from Korea) and then later in the book we get a couple chapters from her POV as a young child. What do all these well-drawn family members look like, to this newest addition to the family?

Liz Hickok - San Francisco in Jello

We are now the proud caretakers of this print - from Liz Hickok's series where she creates San Francisco out of Jello and photographs the results!

All thanks to Leo and his "Take care of my stuff, I am going to Japan!" party, and to Birk, who noticed the picture on the wall going up the stairs and commented that it was Jello!

I had heard of Liz Hickok already and am fascinated by her work, but I had just been too focused on getting up and down the stairs without falling to look to the side and notice the pictures.

Pedro and Me by Judd Winick

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This is a very moving graphic novel by Judd Winick, Pedro Zamora's roommate in the infamous Real World San Francisco house and good friend. Some parts were a little hard to read, thinking of Mom especially in the hospital scenes around Pedro's bed (They were all there when he passed away, friends, family, everybody). I read it really quickly a few weeks ago but it hit me pretty hard at the time. Dave read it also and no longer disses Judd anymore.

The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets by Eva Rice

This story is what happened when us war babies grew up and needed answers. When we got them, they weren’t what we expected at all.

Set in 1950s London, this book begins when Penelope is invited to impulsively share a cab with Charlotte, a stranger who sees her standing at the bus stop. She also gets invited to tea, which she accepts because she muses that if this were the beginning of a book, she has already started it off by getting in the cab - not going to the tea would cut off the story in the beginning.
I liked the characters and the first person perspective - I won't blither on more about the story itself, but this is a book that looks and feels like a frothy "chick lit" book on the outside, but has some real substance when you get into it. (Very like Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld).
It's also a treat to see the beginnings of the rock era in England - Johnnie Ray is the hottest thing ever to these girls. But Penelope's uncle from America has brought over some 45s and pictures of Elvis, soon to conquer everywhere in the next year.
Buy on Amazon!

Hot Ticket!?!

Kari and I were talking about the Khaled Hosseini reading and I told her about the gaggles of high school girls taking pictures of him after the reading with their cell phones. She asked if he was Hot. I said, yes, I think he is.
She had to unexpectedly have a day off this week due to testing snafus, and the bonus was that Barack Obama was on Oprah that day.
I mentioned that Obama and Hosseini could run for office, and Kari put in that they could run as the "Hot Ticket!" Kari is volunteering to be their campaign manager.

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

I went to the Khaled Hosseini event for One Book One County (San Mateo Reads) event, today at San Mateo Performing Arts center. I had loved this book, The Kite Runner, although it was so emotional and disturbing that both Kari and I are not sure if we would want to re-read it again soon.

Dr. Hosseini was asked at the end of the night whether he thought that "the pen is mightier than the sword" and whether his work would help to bring peace to Afghanistan.
He said he had no hopes of that, but that part of fiction writing is talking about the kinds of things that people don't want to talk about, but that they know to be true. For example, the Pashtun/Hazara prejudices he writes about in the novel - he's been criticized by other Afghans for "bringing out their dirty laundry."

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Blankets by Craig Thompson

I've been wanting to read this for a while and just saw it in the graphic novel section of the San Mateo Public Library (hidden away upstairs in the teen/YA section there are DVDs, manga, graphic novels, plus a coffee stand!) - Sidebar, it feels completely sinful to wander around in a !library! with a steaming cup of hot coffee. But no signs against it!

I read the entire book one night while my partner was at a sleep center study. It was awesome. Set in Wisconsin, mostly in the winter, it begins with Craig and his brother as little boys, they share a bed, fight, and draw on large pieces of computer paper (this is pictured in the acknowledgements to thank their dad's friend who gave it to them. It was dot matrix computer paper, connected together with the holes on the edges, which I remember my dad bringing home from work when I was little).
They also challenge each other to walk on top of the crusty frozen snow without falling in, I remember this vividly from growing up in ND.

Craig eventually meets Raina, at a Christian summer camp and falls in love - she gives him a handmade quilt (more blankets!).
She is beautiful and hangs out with both the geeks and the popular people - unbellievable to Craig.

On BART the other day I was looking in the reflection of the window at the cell phone screen that an older gentleman ahead of me was looking at. I realized how common this practice probably is (the voyeuristic looking at people in reflections) but how awkward it is to describe.
An example of the kind of detail in this book is that Craig and Raina are shown looking at each other through the reflections in the windows of her dad's car when her dad is driving them home.
Look at all the words to show that but in the book it was one panel and it said it all. (Craig was in the back seat of the family minivan and so this was the best way for him to see her).
Buy on Amazon!

Factoring Humanity by Robert J. Sawyer, and YouTube

Recently I have been checking out a lot of Robert B. Sawyer's books from the library - this is the latest.

There's a lot here in the plot to try to summarize (and it's probably summarized best on Sawyer's site) but I'm thinking about it in conjunction with YouTube because of the descriptions of a "human overmind" in the book.

Heather Davis, a psychologist, has been trying to decipher a set of radio messages from our neighbors in Alpha Centauri (yeah, this is kind of like Contact, isn't it.)
They turn out to be the plans for building a Hypercube, a four-dimensional cube, also often called a tesseract.
(Sidebar - I remember how amazed I was when I first read the word tesseract somewhere other than in Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time. I naiively thought she had made up the word, so it was quite mindblowing to think that at least the concept existed, if not the mode of travel used in the book).


And Heather eventually gets this device built (its first form is as an unfolded hypercube that only stays rigid while under sunlight). After she gets inside one of the cubes, it folds itself up, disappears, and Heather inside can actually see and access the "overmind" of all humanity - "Neckering" or linking to different people through each other.

Kind of uber six degrees of separation, as she finds her husband's mind by first finding the prime minister of Canada and then working her way back down.
It's really a mind-blowing concept, but especially the way Sawyer describes it, with Heather getting caught up in historical figures' minds, etc, not all that different from websearching in process, but amazing to think of actually being able to look out through someone else's eyes and know what they're thinking (and all they have thought about before).

And then I came back to the computer, where YouTube was up (I was looking at a WoW machima movie earlier).
On one of the popular lists I find this series of videos from a man named Martin, who apparently has now passed away (the most recent video is from his wife).
I hadn't thought of YouTube as much as a "video journal" or archive medium, on top of all the Steven Colbert clips, but this really makes it an accessible (buy cheap webcam, get youTube account and net access) venue for people to tell their stories (and get them heard by more potential viewers in a more immediate way than even blogging does)

The end of the book calls out more hopeful uses for the overmind - Heather ends up being the ambassador for the human overmind when the Alpha Centauri overmind comes calling, which leads overall to greater peace in the world, less selfishness, etc. (Why would the human race as a whole feel empathy or a sense of community if it thinks humans are the only ones in the universe...)
There's so much dreck in YouTube that I'm definitely not saying that it's the path to all human understanding, but certainly it is contributing to the "small world" feeling.
I just did a search for Iraqi videos on YouTube. It appears most are being made by Americans in Iraq, instead of Iraqis themselves or else they are just spoofs.... but here's a kid singing.

Buy on Amazon!

Rose of No Man's Land by Michelle Tea

Here's an interview she did before writing this book and here is the SF Chron's very long review.
Although this is set in a dilapidated town on the East Coast instead of in ND, and Trisha's family is way less dysfunctional than mine was, much of this is resonating with me - especially the "in crowd" clique, constantly concerned with fashion, shopping, and the mall, which Trisha ends up pretending to be part of in order to get a job at "Omigod!" which apparently is the trendiest spot to the clique.
I don't know, I can't really do it justice in this space. I now want to go read the rest of her stuff too, instead of just hovering in the bookstore and voyeuristically paging through Rent Girl, for example. This is her first actual fiction book, and looking at the Amazon blurbs, it amazed me that the whole book took place over the course of one day.
It just kind of washed over me in a rush and I wasn't really thinking about how quick the timespan was...

Buy on Amazon!
And she is going to be moderating a panel at the Women on Writing conference in March again this year.

Firebirds, edited by Sharyn November

Buy on Amazon!.
I originally became interested in this book because I evesdropped on Ellen Klages at the Neil Gaiman reading and found that she has a story in the new Firebirds anthology (Firebirds Rising) - which is her famous story about the girl raised by "feral librarians" (DZ overheard her mention this story which is why he perked up my ears too, normally we are not so nosy... ha ha).

But the new book is still "in processing" at the San Mateo library system so it may be a while before I can get a copy. I think this means that all the librarians are passing it around to read before they release it to the general public!

The editor of this book is Sharyn November (who I really want to meet after reading through her site - I'm not sure if I would be able to ask people who know me to describe me as she has), and also a motherless daughter whose page about her mother has inspired me). Plus, the Firebird imprint is also responsible for Pat's "The City" coming out in paperback finally.

I am just going to list the stories and authors that I really liked, with short blurbs about them so I can remember to go back and get their other works:

* The Baby in the Night Deposit Box - by Megan Whalen Turner. Best described almost as a girl raised by "feral bankers" - a baby is deposited into a bank and grows up there safe from the clutches of her evil aunt, until the evil aunt comes to make her withdrawal. This was so hilarious and sweetly odd that I told it to dz in the hot tub, and he actually listened to the whole thing.
I got all excited looking at the author bio which said she lives in Menlo Park but curses, she has moved to Ohio!

* Mariposa by Nancy Springer - really great story of a woman who has lost her soul (quite literally - it's a physical object in this world and she's about to get an artificial one put in, like plastic surgery). She decides to try to find it first, and returns to her childhood home and her mom and grandmother (who have certainly found their souls already or not lost them) to see if she's left it there.

* Medusa by Michael Cadnum - good to get the story from Medusa's perspective for once! As he said in the Author's Note, she couldn't always have been such a terrible creature.
Also note that he has a book out about the Vikings: Daughter of the Wind.

* The Black Fox - adaptation of trad. ballad by Emma Bull and illustrations by Charles Vess
Very nice to have a mini-comic story from Charles Vess here in the anthology

* Hope Chest by Garth Nix - a train pulls out of the station in a sleepy little town, leaving a large steamer trunk precariously balanced on the edge of the platform, with a little baby swaddled in a pink blanket on top. Of course the townspeople save her before she can fall, finding a note that reads, "Alice May Susan, born on the Summer Solstice, 1921. Look after her and she'll look after you."
And she does.

* Little Dot by Diana Wynne Jones - from the cat's point of view, about "her human" (a wizard, apparently) and also has a very interesting mobile hen-house type contraption that the cat can actually use to fly around the yard and the house with.
I am surprised I haven't yet read anything else by Diana Wynne Jones, she seems really quite awesome, and she wrote Howl's Moving Castle.

* Flotsam by Nina Kariki Hoffman
Jeff meets a young alien named Poppy at the basketball court, who needs to get back home (and looks human enough to pass until he tries to talk...). She also wrote a book recently called Catalyst which has first contact themes as well, but not the same characters or world.

Sidebar - we just watched Star Trek: First Contact last night on DVR - which I find fascinating because the 2063 year that they travel back to, the year of first warp drive and first contact, is not that far away. They can now shield microwaves using a "invisibility" cloaking device. Not far to visible light...

* Cotillion by Delia Sherman - I can't succinctly summarize this at all but to remember it - ball, faery world, Valentine brought back to human form by girl (and lots of cool music played on old instruments). This is the story of Tam Lin, btw, I am cribbing from a review elsewhere to remember that.

Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders, by Neil Gaiman

Fragile Things: Buy on Amazon

I just finished this a couple days ago and it is very wondrous indeed. It's been inspiring me to write more stuff of my own and just imagine (for example, the butternut squash that was sitting on our countertop for several days started to assume a sinister aspect in my mind - is it a visitor from the fairy world? An alien? Why aren't we eating it? What's up with that?).
Dave did bake it up yesterday and made a soup of it, it was delicious and hasn't harmed us (yet).

I'm not going to say anything about the stories themselves as they should be a surprise and Dave hasn't finished the book yet. Neil has a great intro in the beginning where he talks about each story/poem in the collection - his intro is much better than anything I could do.

Dave and I were lucky to see him reading in Berkeley, Monday, Oct 2. It was a surprise from me to Dave, and he was very surprised, although he had guessed it was Neil Gaiman that morning (of course I did not confirm and remained cagey. It was good that the event was at the Berkeley Rep instead of at Cody's, because I could honestly say when we were driving up there, "No, we're not going to Cody's!")

We didn't get to stand in line for a signing (and so didn't get our copy of Good Omens signed, as well as American Gods, etc) and didn't go to Kepler's the next day for the signing there, but I think it worked out well that we got our pre-signed copy.

FngKestral on Flickr went to both events, here's his/her pictures. The Kepler's event looked like a bit of a madhouse and Gaiman looked much more tired there. The above picture shows him exactly how he looked at the Berkeley reading we went to. We were in the front row!!!

Sitting behind us was Ellen Klages, whom we were eavesdropping on because she mentioned being a Nebula Award finalist. After Dave found out her name, we told her we would read her work, and when I googled her at home we discovered she is a friend of Pat's, and has co-written several of the Exploratorium science books with her and that Ellen has her first novel (The Green Glass Sea) coming out in the next couple weeks. (post to follow on that, although I did order her chapbook story "Time Gypsies" and can write about that). Ellen also has won a Nebula in 2005. I'm planning as well to get the Firebirds Rising anthology from the library, to read Ellen's story about a girl being raised by "feral librarians".

826 Valencia Tutoring Notes

Tutoring Esmeralda

I did not write this, but someone doing drop-in tutoring at 826 Valencia last year did, and I think she is describing one of the girls I worked with last Monday (this Monday I had a job interview).

The girl's name is Esmeralda, and I recognize her easily entertained nature, especially about spelling -- in this journal note she laughed and laughed at how she was spelling "butterfly" - "butfly".
When I was helping her (if this is the same person) - she got into a giggling jag when trying to spell Mississippi (she didn't need to do this for her homework, she was being challenged to do it by her friend who was already very adept.)

"Miss-iss-i-pipi (ha ha ha giggle giggle)" I think it was all the "pees" that got her going.

etc...
Until finally she got it - "Miss-iss-ipp - i !"

I just signed up to help some fifth graders come up with stories in their classroom next Wednesday morning, then to go over to Rockridge for my 1:10 appt.

A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin

Storm of Swords: Buy on Amazon

I can't remember if I have already written about the other books in this series.
This is the third one. I started this off originally by reading Game of Thrones, the first book, in a weekend in order to go to the Kepler's book club on a Sunday night and talk about it.
Pretty crazy.
I do kind of inhale these books even when I am not on a deadline, making it harder to write intelligently about them.
I hated Sansa in the first book but actually really like her now, that is one of the traits of these books, unexpected char and plot development - he has no qualms of killing off any character.
Other favorite people are Arya, Danaerys, Jon Snow, and Samwell Tarly.
I finished this on April 11 and immediately went to get Feast for Crows, the newest book.
In Storm of Swords, at one point I thought 3 main characters had just died. It turned out to be only one of them had died so it was a little less nervewracking.
He does kill off a lot of his characters but many do seem to keep coming back.

Letters to a Young Artist by Anna Deavere Smith

Very inspirational and chatty book by Anna Deavere Smith, writer, actress, playwright, former Stanford professor and currently teaching at Yale!

Letters to a Young Artist: Buy on Amazon!

She's set the book up so that she is writing a series of letters to a young high school student, a painter named BZ who has "won a mentor" in a contest.
I want to take some notes on some of the memorable bits of advice below as I think I will bookcross this near the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland so that others will have a chance to read it (for free) also.

I actually have met Anna also, briefly when I was working in the office of the Dept of Drama at Stanford (under the incomparable Office Manager and all-around character, Athena, who should be the star of her own short story someday).
Anyway...I had answered the phone for Anna, took messages, put stuff in her mailbox, etc...and eventually got to see her play Twilight: Los Angeles (which is based on the LA riots) on my birthday for free as a comp play!
I had the weirdest experience concerning Anna's "fame" as an actress and also as someone who I actually "knew" - in the summer my sisters and I were driving back to Stanford from North Dakota and we stopped at a theater to see the movie Dave.
ADS is in Dave in a minor role, but still is onscreen for a good while, and I was totally frustrated because I knew I had seen her before and could not remember what other movie she was in.
When I was leaving the theater, it finally hit me.
This is Anna Deavere Smith who I've actually spoken to, in real life! I think this was the first time of just randomly seeing someone in a movie that I had seen first outside of movies and TV.
(I told this story to Karen from work on Friday night and she told a matching, yet opposite, story of seeing this gorgeous guy in the Gucci store, waving to him, and then trying to figure out why she knows him, since he had waved back and said hi. She realized that the guy had been Damon Wayans!)

Anyway.
I never actually took a class from ADS at Stanford, I sat in on her Interviewing class but didn't keep going with it. I think it looked more than a little bit scary and a lot of work. I wish I had taken the class.

This book is really quite inspiring just from its conversational tone - the letters are all one-sided, of course, from ADS to BZ, but she fills in the gaps for the other side, "So you say they're going to tear down your high school's painting studio and put in a biology lab? Fight back!"
and so on.

* Presence - example, Gloria Foster, the Oracle in the Matrix movies. Study photographs to learn about presence.
* "Being in it, and out of it, at the same time" - feeling as others is empathy - more useful and more important than sympathy, which is feeling for others
* confidence - determination sometimes even more important
* self-esteem "Be strong, be new, be you"
* discipline - example of Anna's swimming
* The Man - whoever has the money or whoever has the power to work out the money needed and the venue needed to expose your art - man or woman, etc.
* wow - she was a fat kid? hard to believe! She was terrible at jumping rope and so now is learning to jump rope to break some of those chains (perhaps I should take gymnastics or something...)
* procrastination - "active avoidance" - if she has something to do, she programs herself to do it so quickly that procrastination can't set in
* mentors - are different than teachers because you pick them, you seek them out
* from p. 87:

"I just got a call from my agent saying that there's a job for me on a television show called The West Wing. Have you seen it? It's written by Aaron Sorkin, who wrote a movie called The American President, which I am in. And the actor Martin Sheen, whom I adore (and who was also in The American President), is in it. I don't think I'm going to do the show... Do you like it? Have you seen it?"

* From p. 88:

" You're funny! You think I'd be a fool not to do The West Wing?"

* From p. 89:

"My publicist agrees with you, he's saying, "Get on that plane, and go to LA!!!" He says The West Wing is a big hit."

* Lots of advice here about feeling alienated and depressed. BZ apparently was feeling pretty alone at her school as a high school painter.

Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell by Pat Murphy

"
Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell is about the nature of reality and the nature of identity-and some of the confusions of being a writer. "
-Pat Murphy, from her website.
Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell (Buy on Amazon).


This book is just crazy good!
I remember liking it the first time I read it but is even more entertaining now after having met and hung out with Pat a little bit. (This copy was actually a gift from her, given to me at our gamegirls design meeting).

I'm not sure I'll ever again have the experience of reading a book with so many identities, alter egos, pseudonyms, and even characters named directly after the author, all sharing various traits with the author which are very fun to try to puzzle out, during a span of time when I'm actually in communication with the author herself.

In this book we have: a cruise ship, an author on board (Max Merriwell) who writes as two different pseudonyms (Mary Maxwell and Weldon Merrimax). And wait, Pat Murphy (the real one I've met) wrote and published two previous books under these same pseudonyms (Wild Angel by Mary Maxwell and There and Back Again by Max Merriwell).
And even weirder, the pseudonyms appear as real people on the ship as it is passing through the Bermuda Triangle, causing very mysterious events.
There's two women traveling on the ship, Susan, the main protagonist, who is a bit unsure of herself after a divorce and gets a good pep talk on confidence from Mary Maxwell - see below.

Susan is a big fan of both Mary and Max and has some commentary on these books she's reading (She's reading Wild Angel on board), and is traveling with a friend, also named Pat Murphy!
(the fictional Pat Murphy is a young graduate student in physics who is writing the Bad Girls Guide to Physics: and Pat and Susan had met while working at the SF Public Library)

Of course, Pat Murphy (the real author, the one who also works at the Exploratorium and studied biology) actually "collaborated" with the fictional character and put up a real website at the www.badgrrlzguide.com link above. I was really entertained to find this out, I think I didn't bother to check it when I first read the book.
(Apparently the hope was that the Exploratorium would eventually publish a Bad Grrlz Guide to Physics...I'd guess the URL was going to be used for that).

Pat's also provided some entertaining points on differences between real and fictional Pats (fictional is a better pool player, and so on) and includes in the website the recipe for the famous
Flaming Rum Monkey, invented in the novel.

On top of all this, for the price of admission we also get a lot of writing advice (Max is having a writers' workshop on board, saying a few things that I actually remember hearing from Pat when attending a seminar she gave at a conference) plus Clampers and a giant squid!

Here is the conversation between Mary Maxwell and Susan which I am trying to keep in mind when I find I'm losing confidence and/or trust in myself. The other thing that is good to remember at those times is Pat (real Pat) calling me "a force to be reckoned with!"

" Mary was leaning back in her chair, studying Susan's face. 'I think you tell yourself the wrong sort of stories,' Mary said.
'What?' Susan said, startled, but trying to remain relaxed.
'You kick yourself for getting lost. You tell yourself that you don't look good with short hair. You avoid taking the shortcut. Little things, but they all add up. You don't trust yourself at all.'
Susan didn't know what to say. 'I suppose you're right,' she began. 'But...'
Mary held up her hand. 'No buts,' she said firmly. 'You need to learn to trust yourself, to trust your abilities. There are so many possibilities for a woman who knows how to use her imagination.' Mary sipped her drink, still considering Susan.
Susan bit her lip, feeling inadequate. Mary seemed to be taking her on as a sort of project, and Susan wasn't sure how she felt about that. She leaned back in her chair, wondering how she might distract Mary and take her attention off of Susan's shortcomings." (bold type added by me above)

Susan sees Weldon Merrimax at the bar and thus is able to change the subject.
I really see a lot of myself in these comments about Susan. I showed this passage to my therapist because we've been talking a lot about me not being able to take praise very well and being so hard on myself. Also I totally do this same thing when I feel too under the microscope with my therapist, I try to change the subject and start talking about something completely different, even though we're actually there for the express purpose of looking at these kinds of things for me. Must be more than a little frustrating for her.

Hi-Liner Class of 2005 Family Histories

So I was looking around on the website of my alma mater, Valley City High School, and saw this interesting link to several essays written by Mrs. Wendel's English class on their families' personal histories. (Mrs. Wendel was my 7th Grade English teacher, this is an 11th grade class here).

Since they are public record and out on the web I don't feel any guilt in linking to them and maybe perhaps being inspired by them for other stories. There's a lot of North Dakota grit here just in the first few stories in the As.
I do notice that the habit of starting your essay with a question "Have you ever... " and then "Well I ..." is firmly entrenched in these kids.

Hi-Liner Histories

The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay

This book I picked up in the hallway at work, it had a "Free, take me" sign sticking up out of it, written on paper from the nearby print shop.

It's a story of Peekay, a young English boy growing up in South Africa, surviving initially in a boarding school where he is regularly beaten up by Afrikaaner boys who hate him because he is English and England sent many Afrikaaners to concentration camps during the First Boer War.
He eventually finds mentors when home for vacations, and spends most of the happy times of his childhood actually in a prison where his friend and mentor Doc has been imprisoned (mainly just for being German). He starts out coming to continue taking piano lessons from Doc but finds another passion in the boxing team at the prison and builds a lengthy successful boxing career which continues on to boarding school.

It's a very strong individualist, survivalist story, another reviewer on Amazon compared it to "The Kite Runner" and it is very similar but perhaps a bit more episodic and not as emotionally jarring as "The Kite Runner".

Game Developer's Conference, Pat, Ames, and Writing

Spent most of the afternoon on Friday with Pat walking around the Game Developer's Conference, apologies to Pat for this picture because I forgot to get a better one of her later on.
This is Pat listening/ talking to Ames and I after we sat down to have a beer after wandering around the show, and then Ames saw me and ran over to say hi.
This was such a fun conversation that I forgot to get my coat out of our company's booth before the booth was dismantled, and our studio head took it back in his car.

Pat and Ames found they share a love of wolf stories, which was quite cool! Ames and I were also inspired to write, especially to try writing in the morning although I meant to do that this morning (Saturday) but did not.
In riding home on light rail I found also that Pat and I have a similar attitude on the "adventure" of public transit: it's kind of a pain and a stress to get on and to the public transit, but once you're on it, you don't really get as stressed as you do when driving and you really feel when driving as if you could have controlled the situation if there's traffic, etc. But on transit, if it's late, it's late. Pat actually took BART to Caltrain, then Caltrain to light rail, to get to the show.