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."

Buy on Amazon!

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.