Survival of Memory

The other day I read John McPhee's The Survival of the Bark Canoe (1975) and parts reminded me of the one canoe trip I took in Maine when I was fifteen, a trip that's usually a blip on the memory timeline. Often books with grand outdoor adventures make me feel less-than for not doing that sort of thing all the time. This time I felt wistful, yet also proud of this thing I'd accomplished many years ago. Even if our windy day wasn't as severe as theirs, it was a big challenge for the members of my Girl Scout troop, and having met it, we added another layer resilience to our cores. 

At first place names were the biggest memory trigger. I had it in my head that Moosehead Lake is where we paddled. And then McPhee mentions in passing a leech on someone's leg -- and that struck a deep chord. I'm not much of a freshwater person even now; to that fifteen year old, leeches were new and viscerally alarming.

Reading, I could picture a souvenir map I bought of the region. I didn't think I had it anymore, though, but I couldn't really bring to mind any snapshots of the trip, either. Or then again -- didn't I dig up a picture to post for Mary Sam, maybe when we turned 50? Where are they? McPhee of course is keeping notes for himself on their trip. A couple of the men he paddled with knew their Thoreau and his journalistic The Maine Woods (1864) and while they have a copy, they also can conjure excerpts from memory. Didn't we have BSA-issued booklets, journals for our canoe trip? Gosh, if I had that, where would it be?

As it is for anyone on a packed-out trip, food is a major theme. McPhee notes that the canoe-builder and defacto leader (despite, it turns out, having perhaps the least backwoods or tripping experience) insisted they each pack their own. McPhee and his friend have a variety of things, and McPhee waxes on about Mountain House freeze dried foods. These absolutely were about the major brand in play ten years later when I started backpacking with my Girl Scout troop. I've certainly eaten the meals they did. The canoe-builder poo-poos McPhee's reflector oven. The writer brings it anyway and they all relish the things he bakes for them. Probably, we Girl Scouts used one on my Maine trip; certainly our troops and summer camp units messed around with reflector ovens. I never became anything like expert with them and the sight of one still makes me roll my eyes. 

While he focus of McPhee's narrative is the crafting of the canoes and what it's like to paddle one and care for it, we get his usual digressions into interesting natural history and character study, too. The canoe-builder comes across as a talented craftsman and a bit of a savant, but a terrible leader. While he takes charge and his companions defer to him almost always, we eventually learn that he's been on scant few long trips before this and has no idea which techniques and gear are truly useful. Not only does McPhee's reflector oven redeem itself, the flashlight he was told to leave behind is a clear necessity, too. McPhee teaches everyone (excepting the friend he brought) pray and draw strokes and other crucial paddling skills. Skills I've had since I was twelve or thirteen. Idle canoeing in the Cove at camp and preparing for the Maine trip taught me that. Everything about being in Girl Scout troops taught me leadership and consensus-building.

I found the scrapbook from my trip in the third place I looked. While I certainly would have guessed it was made by Hallmark -- Dad's mom work in an office supply-Hallmark store and kept us well supplied -- the robin on the cover was a surprise. The Instamatic photos must have been cheaply developed; they are faded and yellow-brown. The journal existed and was right there to remind me that it rained lots; that we hit about 160 miles (!); that we had not only the guide provided by the Boy Scout high adventure camp that ran the trips, but also miscellaneous adults I did not particularly remember. Perhaps I didn't have great leadership modeled to me if I don't remember them? Or is that an indicator that they were good and melted into the background? In the official photo of the bus-load that travelled from Richmond were the faces of people I remembered and people I'd forgotten til just that moment.

Gentrification Book Reading Notets

 How To Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood by Peter Moskowitz New York : Nation Books, 2017)

Tiny summary: Capitalism combined with state and federal laws to set us up to value real estate over people. Author documents examples in New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco and New York.

Author's thesis statement: "In every gentrifying city -- that is, in every city where there is a combination of new coffee shops and condos, hipsters, and families struggling to hang on -- you can usually trace they start of that change not to a few pioneering citysteaders but to a combination of federal, local, and state policies that favor the creation of wealth over the creation of community." (p. 23)

Federal examples:

"Regan cut all nonmilitary spending by the US government by 9.7 percent in his first term, and in his second term cut the Department of Housing and Urban Development's budget by an astonishing 40 percent, hobbling cities' ability to pay for public housing." p. 42 

GI bill's focus on home ownership fostered suburbs, broke habit of multi-generational living

FEMA's failure to serve black New Orleanians post-Katrina

Misc

Quotes Jane Jacobs: "'Private investment shapes cities, but social ideas (and laws) shape private investment. First comes the image of what we want, then the machinery is adapted to turn out that image.'" p. 68

Urbanist Richard Florida with 2002 book The Rise of the Creative Class is a leading force in hyping the creative class at the expense of the poor, working, and even middle class. Emphasis on creating cities or districts that cater to the needs and tastes of this group at the expense of others (who were generally in the districts first). (See section beginning p. 78)

Viral video in San Francisco captured white men bullying Hispanic people off a city soccer field because the former paid for the time and the people who'd always lived in the neighborhood followed the practice of the community. Moskowitz sees this as an example of how "[a]s our cities' landscapes have changed, we have too, increasingly viewing ourselves not as community members with a responsibility to each other but as purchasers of things and experiences. This is what pissed off Hugo the most -- the idea that these people felt they had more of a right to space than he and his friends; that the amount of times spent in a community and the traditional way of doing things, of accessing public space, did not matter and only money did." (p 136)

"How do you begin to form a tenants movement in a city where many residents feel like consumers of luxury products, not community members?" (p 215)

Local

Tax breaks favor Twitter over small-business owners; they bring in the massive stadium and its team with expensive tickets and demand for mostly service-wages jobs to support it.

Localities put incentives in place for real estate or tech companies rather than making sure people's basic needs met. Once those companies arrive, rents go up and businesses open that cater to richer people meaning people who had been living there have to go further for basic needs. See Detroit's "7.2" (beginning page 91) for example. "The people who are benefiting from all these subsidies -- the gentrifiers of the 7.2 -- do not seem to realize the work that has gone into bringing and keeping them here. They consider themselves cunning pioneers ... ignoring the fact that hundreds of millions of dollars that could be used to keep [Detroit native now displaced] Cheryl West in their homes...." p. 95

"The suburbs were the prototype for gentrification, not aesthetically but economically. Suburbanization was the original American experiment in using real estate to reinvigorate capitalism. Gentrification can be understood as a continuation of that experiment .... The suburbs are also a good reminder that housing, planning, and economic policy in the United States is deliberate, and that its main purpose is to produce money not adequately house people." (p. 147)

Given that urban gentrification pushes poor people to the suburbs, "The suburbs are being reused, reconfigured, and repopulated. They are becoming poorer, and that has wide-ranging implications for policy and the lives of lower income people." (p. 147) 

Moskowitz's concluding suggestions (p 209-13)

Expand, protect, and make accessible public lands. 

Give people an actual say in what happens in their city.

Heavily regulate housing. (e.g. rent control)

Implement a New Deal

End protectionism, add infrastructure. 

Raise taxes, raise wages, spend on the poor.

Juxtaposition

 

I liked the way these covers looked together on my Goodreads page  

Recommended 9: Isolation

Isolation is a word that can encompass living with or seeing with a few -- or a few dozen -- others, such as on a wildfire-fighting team, or if you launch into space (or just role-play the latter). I do okay leading a solitary life, and some days seeing 5 or 6 coworkers (plus some patrons, but always for just minutes at a time) is more than enough people time for me. Yet for two nights in a row, explosions on TV made me jump way out of proportion to their loudness, and I recalled Kate Greene writing that isolation, boredom, and/or the same environment for a length of time dulls your senses; your days "smooth over, lose their texture." (p. 115) 

In the last two days I finished up a book about a practice Mars mission, listened to an episode of This American Life episode ("Boulder vs. Hill," aired 12/18/2020), and got lost in Susanna Clarke's new book, Piranesi. Plus, you know, I spent most of 2020 not seeing people, even for holidays. I've been deep into thoughts on isolation.

If you'd like copy my deep-dive into feeling isolated -- and to come out feeling generally okay about it -- check out: 

The This American Life episode called "Boulder vs. Hill." It has just two acts, each featuring huge 2020 civic undertakings. As I listened to the act about  fighting wildfires, I made connections to to Kate Greene's book about an earth-bound Mars mission practice. The firefighters work in bigger teams; the faux astronauts had a greater variety of tasks. Both groups felt that those back home didn't understand the importance of their work.

Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars, by Kate Greene. 

Journalist Kate Greene spent 4 months living in a geodesic dome in Hawaii to help gather data about both food variety for astronauts and insights into close-quarters life. Each chapter is a reflection on a different topic or experience, though of course themes of isolation and getting along continue throughout. A good general read on space sciences.   

Piranesi by Susanna Clark 

There are just 15 of them, and only two living: the Other and the narrator, whom the Other calls Piranesi. Piranesi tracks the tides, talks to the birds, catalogs the statues. The Other has been working on immortality and other projects. One day Piranesi suggest that's not a good use of time, and the Other reminds Piranesi they've had this conversation before, that he gets confused. Furthermore, he should be alert to someone new appearing, someone dangerous. These conversations lead to Piranesi digging back in his old journals, which leads to him question his understanding of reality.

Dreamy and page-turner-y and compelling; set in a liminal space like Lewis's Wood Between the World or maybe Lev Grossman's Library. Given that the Other sees Piranesi only twice a week, a pandemic-worthy meditation on being alone. 

Thick: And Other Essays by Tressie McMillan Cottom
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Tough issues illuminated in prose that I’d call “conversational,” but she uses footnotes, so maybe I can’t.

"Because I was such a big deal to an actual big deal, the black man seated to my left made a great effort at small talk. I wish he had not bothered. I hate small talk. It is small. Small is for tea cups and occasionally for tiny houses. Too much small talk is how a country is given to sociopaths who thrive on shallow chatter to distract their emotional sleight of hand. Talk should be meaningful or kept to a minimum."

View all my reviews

 

 

Where Do I Put Magazine Notes?

Among the things I like about Shelfari is the ability to note quotations that speak to me. But what of the good bits of The New Yorker? I guess I have moved beyond filling blank books with tidbits, so here I am circling back to the neglected blog.

The February 11 and 18 issue includes the beginning of a memoir Joseph Mitchell began. He jumps right into reflections on parts of the city he's haunted, experienced. A long paragraph lists things (old hotels, old markets) that draw him to them, including,

I am also strongly drawn to a dozen or so old buildings, most of them on lower Broadway or on Fifth and Sixth Avenues in the Twenties and Thirties, that once were department-store buildings and then became loft buildings or warehouses when the stores, some famous and greatly respected and even loved in their time and now almost completely forgotten, either went out of business or moved into new buildings farther uptown.

Yes. Before we went to the Eastern Shore, I reviewed Lost Communities of Virginia (a book I just adore), and then I watched Capeville (the featured community) and similar places come and go up route 13. I keep describing it as a rhythm: isolation, railroad brings connection, cars rise, isolation settles as the main road skips the town, or simply makes a stopover unnecessary. Every town had a tiny, beloved (perhaps) store, car dealer, factory, bank -- and now they are completely forgotten in favor of the Dollar General, Food Lion, and Suntrust. When I poke around Richmond history, I wonder what made Miller & Rhoades, say, special. Perhaps the answer is nothing -- it's just the one that I saw fade in its downtown location, shiny in the suburbs, then go out of business. Someone two generations older than me knew other places that did this (even if she knew M&R, too).

Reading to Learn

I imagine early childhood educators know this truism well, but I didn't know it and it made me sit up and take notice:

The next pitfall [for children struggling in school] is third grade. 'Because third grade is a magic year,' [Harold] Fitrer says, 'It's the year you switch from learning to read to reading to learn.' The transition is so crucial, he says, that many cities use third-grade reading scores to predict how many jail beds they'll need in the future.

From an article in Style (June 6, 2012) about the city's last-resort programs.

S/F

For the first time in about a month, I had a whole weekend with nothing planned. Cool weather called us outside: Saturday Phil and I biked to the park, and Sunday I read an dozed in the hammock. With two reading days, I finished The New Yorker's science fiction issue (June 4 & 11, 2012). I enjoyed the reflections of contemporary authors on s/f; my favorite story was Jennifer Egan's "Black Box." Having encountered the "problem" of fictional aliens being described as human-like in the introduction to some collection of short stories I gobbled down one teenaged summer (in my memory, Ursula K. LeGuin made the observation - or maybe it was a collection of her stories?; either way, I associate having my eyes opened to that point by her), I enjoyed revisiting the topic in "The Cosmic Menagerie," by Laura Miller.

Many of the personal reflections touched on the ghettoizing of s/f. William Gibson, shows how important it was for him; an implicit cry not to discount any reading. He recalls science fiction authors he read seeming to flow naturally to Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs: "... my own Golden Age of Science Fiction came, in some sense, to an end, the otherness of my adolescence joining up with the wider tributary of all literature, the mother of all otherness. Had science fiction not found me when it did ... I suspect I might not have found that river. Or else, finding it, I might not have recognized it, and turned away."

Covers, Judging Books by

This blog entry features a history of covers for the same book by Lois Lowry. I really like not only the eeek-that's-dated feel, I also like that her publisher seems to have done a nice job keeping up with the styles of the day. And remember, fashion can change fast for kids.

Yet, I am still shocked to find that books with terrible 1980s covers have checked out of my lib recently. I don't know if some kids are drawn to the old-fashioned covers, if they are blind to the datedness, or if some grown up made them get a book and the kid just grabbed the skinniest thing she saw.

See also:
Awful Library Books
Guys Lit Wire "Get Past this Cover!"
"Cover Stories" stories at Reader Girlz.

Reading: Where Did it All Come From?

My reading of late has been eclectic. I diligently keep up with a variety of print and online resources that can tip me to cool books coming out, books patrons at my lib will like. Friends and colleagues make suggestions, of course. I try to read across genres, of course: just reading what would appeal to me won't help me "sell" books. With all of this going on, I always have a list (formerly paper, increasingly Shelfari) of To Read titles. Or, I have a stack: I'm looking at you, right-hand side of my cubicle!

Off said stack, I grabbed Children of the Waters by Carleen Brice to read on my dinner break. I give it several pages, and find it fragmented. "Why did I want to read this? What made me think I would like it?"

From there, I wonder why it matters. Here it is: read it on its own merits. See what happens. (You can always give up - like Jurgen which you know you must owe Capital City Library fines on.) Will it change the way I read it if I know why I thought I should read it, why I put it on a list, why I put a hold on it to get it from another branch? Maybe. I might not have finished Terry Pratchett's Nation if a friend hadn't said "it picks up; it's worth it."

I flipped over Children of the Waters - race, estranged family members; "insightful" and "resonate[s]." Hunh. Sounds like I may well like it and that some of our patrons might, too. I still wonder where I heard about it. Someone connected it to Big Machine maybe?

Banned Books Week Greetings (from Capital City Library)!

For the second time in a year, I just began reading Something About Eve by James Branch Cabell. Last time, I gave up on it for the more pressing project of planning our June camping trip. This time, I may put it down in favor of Jurgen, the truly challenged title of his. I had to use my suburban library card account to get at a good online literary reference work (hmm, Cabell being 100 years past, there's probably a perfectly good print reference around here that would have answered it) to check the facts. According to an entry by Joseph Flora in Continuum Encyclopedia of American Literature (http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lfh&AN=18749062&site=lrc-live) :

Before Jurgen, C.'s reputation was modest. But on January 14, 1920, John Sumner, executive secretary for the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, assured C. of national attention by pressing charges against Guy Holt of McBride's for publishing an obscene book. In October 1922 the work was exonerated in a famous trial important to freedom of expression in America. Meanwhile, a host of defenders were discovering C. One of his most vocal defenders was H. L. MENCKEN. With Mencken, C. became one of the chief symbols for rebellion against the genteel tradition and for new directions in life and art.

Interestingly, despite the praise Flora and others heap on Cabell in the various entries collected in the Literary Reference Center's database, he doesn't make the cut on the American Library Association's list of challenged classics. And if I am going to link to a list like that, I guess I ought to ask: how many of those have you read?

In other news, Downtown CCL got timers for the public PCs. This kind leaves a little box on my screen, showing me the minutes ticking down. Useful, yet stress-inducing. In non-news: they still haven't weeded non-fiction.

Capital City weather: cool and cloudy

Dept. of "Wow!" (Robot Division)

The inspiration for the automaton in Brian Selznick's lovely book The Invention of Hugo Cabret belongs to the Franklin Institute and may be seen in operation here. The F.I. urges readers to nominate it to the Robot Hall of Fame.

In the book, Hugo restores an automaton and is surprised to learn the identity of it's creator -- a man he knows, with a hidden history. Selznick's illustrations -- movie stills, of a sort -- move the story along.

Reading
The 21 Steps, one of Penguin's web-native stories.

ReReading
Dolye hipped me to the source of this shoe-tying fun several years ago.

Books: Mudbound by Hillary Jordon. Like books by all the authors to whom I want to compare her, this one has left me haunted by its characters. If you like Faulkner, Kingsolver, Caldwell, or Lee Smith, give this one a try.

Also, Selling Good Design, a book about the "exhibits" of modern furniture that department stores put on in the late 1920s; exhibits that helped move "modern" from the potentially bizarre and outre to an acceptable way to decorate.

Garden: tried to rake up the last of the willow oak leaves, but with those skinny things, some always escape. Finished just before a midday thunderstorm. Lily of the valley and bleeding heart blooming happily; hyacinths nearly done.

Spring cleaning: yeah, did some, mostly so I could reward myself and sit and read

Yard birds: grackles, juncos, house sparrows, purple finches, mourning doves, red-bellied woodpeckers, carolina wrens, cardinals

Listening: to P doing his radio show

Random
From a book of history I weeded: When Oberlin College began admitting women in the 1830s, it "made sure not to 'neglect' female students' 'domestic education' and assigned them tasks of cooking and cleaning for the male students. Womanly modesty was also carefully enforced. . . . At Mount Holyoke, however, there were no men to keep the women demure and womanly." (Lillian Faderman. To Believe in Women: What Lesbians Have Done for America - A History Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1999; p. 179).

Library-Literary Nerdiness: six degrees of Francis Bacon. (via Library Stuff)

Homer Simpson Untooned: kinda the reverse of Simpsonizeme.

Ref Desk Random:
- Meeting room
- Explain downloadable audio collection
- How to get a library card
- Take your cell phone outta here
- Didja know you have to have a state license to sell cars? Do you have books on that?
- Yes, adults can see MySpace. Oh, not on that PC. It's busted.
- Where's Science Fiction?
- Meeting room
- Books on the Buffalo Soldiers for a boy of about 8
- ValueLine
- How to get a library card
- Caught up with a friend/patron
- Where's my print?
- No cell phones
- Meeting room

Weekend Round-Up

In between steps of lasagna-making, I finished Kindred yesterday evening. What a compelling, riveting book. I hope I can coax my library's book club into a thoughtful, compelling discussion tonight.

The lasagna turned out nicely, though that sauce (yeah, Mom's recipe calls for doing the sauce from scratch, too: I missed that 40-minute step when I skimmed the recipe in the morning!) seemed awfully thick.

Sunday morning we went bird watching, beginning by the River in a stiff, chilly wind, and finishing at Forest Hill Park. We didn't see anything special for our trouble. After lunch, we picked up step-kid and ran a few errands. By the time the three of us wandered over to Byrd Park with some kites, the wind had died down enough to make flying Phil's fancy one nearly impossible. The SpongeBob kite did okay, reaching tree top level for a while. Ever since I followed the advice of the kite store fellow and cut the cartoon character's legs and arms off the kite, it has been a reliable flier.

Saturday we floundered through some house projects. Somehow, we never got to the yard, even though it was about 70 degrees. Oh wait: P did re-plant the elephant ear. Since I am not doing it right now, I don't think I will be cutting back the monkey grass this year. And now that the daffodils are blooming away, I hate to bend them over in the cause of raking up the last of the leaves. . . . I thought I planted other new bulbs where the pond used to be; so far I see the signs of exactly one new leaf.

I wandered into the City Library and picked up:
- Alice in Sunderland, an interesting art-book / graphic novel which has less to do with Alice that I thought it might, and
-How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read, not because I need to study that skill (heavens no!), but because I want to see how someone built a book on that theme.

Still reading:
- My lib's copy of Life Stories: Profiles from The New Yorker. Only, here's an email from our ILS saying it's due, so I guess I better note this quotation and bring it back: Paul Broyard, who moved to Connecticut after years and years in NYC: "'People in New York have psychotherapists, and people in the suburbs have have handymen. While anxiety in the city is existential, in the country it is structural.'" (p. 292) Personally, I have a lot of structural anxiety, and a handyman. I thought it came with home-owning.

This morning, in order to avoid housework before a 12:30 start to my workday, I'm trying a few things on this Wired how-to list to speed up my computer, but I am too timid to try a lot of it. I might need User Switching and Secondary Logon, right??

Reading

Remember a little while ago I listed Parable of the Sower as a current read? That was the wrong Octavia Butler book. It's been on a personal To Read list for ages, but for bookclub, I was supposed to be reading Kindred. We're doing a One-City-One Book kind of program, with titles on a time travel theme at "all" age levels. Kindred is suspenseful: a black woman keeps time-jumping to the early 1800s. She has no control over it (at least, not by page ninety-one), but sees that she's saving a particular white kid from harm each time.

Though I should focus on the assigned book, I snuck in a YA book with the irresistible title, Don't Pat the Wombat. It's about some middle-school aged kids in Australia, a good teacher or two, an evil teacher, their trip to a pioneer camp, and a wombat or two. It should be easy to sell to a kid who wants a funny book. I never know if it's important or not to tell kids that the clothes references will make no sense, because the book is more than 10 years old. At what point does, "those kids must be dorks if they dress like that" give way to "this happened a really long time ago, so their clothes sound funny, but that's cool 'cause it was way back in the day and all"?

And on my bedside table I have a New Yorker collection of profiles. One from c. 1978 on Johnny Carson rocks. I started really reading the magazine in high school, a year or two later, and this piece is in that high New Yorker style that I find so irresistible, yet obnoxious, all at once.

Capital City weather: 60s and clear most of the week
At the Byrd: On Sunday when we went to Mary Angela's for pizza: a special event with Tom Hanks for his new movie. I should have realized the people in line were dressed too well, looked too Republican, for it to be the French Film Festival.

Read: Uglies by Scott Westerfeld. (I've been meaning to read this for an age.) Freakin awesome S/F adventure set in a world where at 16 everyone has an operation to be made uniform -- and pretty. I put a hold on a copy of the next book in the series, Pretties, just now!

I-Could-Have-Written-That-But-Didn't Dept.

On reading The New Yorker via Library Stuff.

Reading

All [fiscal] year long, I have been working towards a goal of reading across "all" genres of YA lit. ("Goal" as in "performance goal": that's how cool my job is. My boss asked, "What skills will you work on in the next year?" and I got to answer "read more.") This December, on a quiet afternoon, I pulled out my copy of my goals to see what quantities or specifics I'd set: to see how I was doing. Imagine my surprise when I saw the goal was to read genre fiction for adults! I quickly grabbed a mystery novel involving a cat, to put myself back on track.

Next on deck: David Baldacci. Only, I'm going to have to renew that volume, because I let a slender paperback by Henry James distract me. Yup, you caught me reading literature. The book, Washington Square (1880), could easily be recommended as a read-a-like for Jane Austen, or even sold simply as a romance, but I don't know that my patrons would fall for that.

In the novel, a young man about to be married tells of "the great advantage" of purchasing a new house: "... you get all the latest improvements. They invent everything all over again every five years, and it's a great thing to keep up with the new things. I always try to keep up with the new things of every kind."


Back Yard Birds

Like everyone else, we mostly get squirrels. Also since we put the feeder up in the late fall:
junco
song sparrow
mourning dove
cardinal
downy woodpecker
carolina wren.

Since we pulled up the pond* (we maintain a bird bath, so as not to cut off anyone's favorite watering hole), we haven't had waxwings. I really suspect that's what attracted them last year. Too bad, too, since now I have nice digital camera to record any cool visitors.

*In the pond's space, I planted bulbs. They've shot leaves up, since it's been so mild!