It's okay, my BOOKS are my friends.

And we just finished it. We are bereft! Luckily, I cleverly noticed that author Richard Price wrote a whole bunch of episodes, and his latest book "Lush Life" was conveniently available in the Cupertino library's excellent bestseller browsing section, so I snapped it up!

Lush Life: A Novel

Richard Price

It absolutely filled the void for the time I was reading it. All kind of criminal-cop dialogue and urban decay and the general awesomeness that The Wire delivered so consistently. He's written seven or eight other books, of which I have only heard of "Freedomland" and "Clockers", so I hope those live up to my sky-high expectations. No pressure or anything.

And, although Richard Price didn't write it, I really liked the last episode of the series. <SEMI SPOILER>I thought it was so tragically satisfying the way someone is always waiting to fill any vacancy (retirement, death)  ... like Sydnor becomes McNulty, Michael becomes Omar, Dukie becomes Bubbles ... everything changes but nothing changes at all. Too big and cracked-out to change.</SPOILER>

I could have watched that forever. I bet the City of Baltimore's PR department is pretty happy it's done, though.

My usually-reliable NYT magazine had a LAME article about Jodi Picoult, who (they say) is "the most visible and dedicated practitioner of a subcategory of contemporary genre fiction that might best be described as the literature of children in peril." Uh, no.

Now, I would like to think I KNOW from kids-in-peril authors. And JP is NOT among them. The whole point of kids-in-peril lit is that it's about the KIDS, and their own problems, their own consequences, their own resourcefulness. JP's books are all about the PARENTS (even the NYT admits it) and the myriad ways they can suck at their parenting. I would like to propose that we give JP the category "There's So Many Ways To Screw Up A Child" and let her be the figurehead for that. But keep off my favorite genre.

12 Raining Twilight Coast

Robyn Hitchcock

I recently finished The Dead and the Gone, the cheery sequel to Life As We Knew It. Both are stories of What Happens After catastrophic climate change caused by an asteroid crashing into the moon and altering its orbit. With the increased gravitational pull from the moon being closer to Earth, enormous tides flood coastal areas, volcanoes erupt, ash causes mass crop failure ... and then to top it off there is a flu epidemic.

the dead and the gone

Susan Beth Pfeffer

Exodus

Wait, what's this I hear from NASA? They are planning to crash a huge satellite into the moon? And "the resulting debris plume is expected to rise more than six miles"?

Well then. Looks like I'd better find my can opener.

No pithy observances. No narrative cohesion. Just a bunch of pictures for the Zeh/Thompson/Bateman diaspora.

Here's Ainsley showing off her Quadrilla creations, which she makes entirely her own self and then shouts MARBLE FUN! as loudly as possible when the marbles run down. I love this set but I'd kinda like a whole other room for it to go in -- its epic scope dominates our living room/kitchen. Either that or a piece of plywood to make it transportable when I need to get out my TV-Watchin' Chair and watch The Wire.

That's right, it's gone! It included a whirlwind trip back East to NJ, NY and Boston; crazy 8th grade projects and crazy 8th graders at school; Eric's new part-time Follow the Dream job, which keeps him working all day Saturday and Sunday; the news that I am teaching 6th grade history next year (!), monster birthday preparations for the world's lowest-keyed birthday; and mad hula. Crazy!

So, Ainsley's birthday party was last weekend, scheduled for our neighborhood park. The Bay Area reported variable weather, but here in SJ it rained. It teased a bit, but then it really rained. This is about how the day went down:

7:30 AM: Amity at park, claiming three tables. Last year there were four separate parties happening at the same time. Cloudy but dry.
8:00 AM: Mother-in-law takes over waiting at tables. A&A go to diddams for balloons
8:30 AM: Skies open on MIL.
9:00 AM: Balloons acquired. MIL soaked.
9:30 AM: Park wet. MIL wet. Balloons wet. Mood damp.
10:00 AM: Decision made to move inside. Sad plastic-sealed note with sad little map left at park with sodden ballons. But wait! Entire party is based around rainbow parachute games! Where to do parachute in tiny tiny house?
10:15 AM: Garage!
10:20 AM: Oh no! Car with dead battery cocooned in garage! No room for parachute.
10:25 AM: Push car out of garage with help of neighbor (weekend stand-in husband, for tasks of this nature)
10:26 AM: Oh no! Car windows rolled down, rain pouring in!
10:28 AM: Jump-start stupid pre-rolled vehicle to roll up windows.
10:30 AM: Panic! 14 kids * 1.5 adults per kid + rain / tiny house = bad idea!

Kids everywhere

After all this, the party was actually lots of fun. Parachute worked great in the garage (preschoolers were TOTAL SUCKERS for the parachute -- I was like Jesus Christ for hooking that up), we all ate food on (quick thinking!) "picnic blankets" spread over the carpet on the living room floor, and the completely lowered expectations worked in our favor (no one could judge me for a crappy party when it was supposed to be AT THE PARK. You know, with the pony and the bounce house and all. Or maybe not any of that last stuff).

"Picnic" in the living room

Parachute fun in "the cave"

Die, snail scum! Die! Die!

1 comment

And on the hula front, my halau is preparing for ho'ike, this big hula extravaganza that is happening on June 6th. I am in two short simple hulas that defy my every attempt to master them. I anticipate bringing shame and dishonor to the sacred art of the hula and to my hula brothers and sisters in just four short weeks.

Not tons of time for reading. Plus I think I'm getting old. I just love me the Genre Novels and the Nonfiction now, just like granddads the world over. Behold:

The Partly Cloudy Patriot

Basket Case

Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe

The Glister: A Novel

Oy, February. With the rain and the cold and full weeks of school and the hey hey hey; it's just too much.

I started teaching a graphic novel elective last week (also: the return of Scrabble! which in three short years has grown from six die-hard players into the Most Desirable Elective with The Longest Wait List, rivalled only by Israeli Cooking, which -- come on -- has weekly food! That's right, haters! Scrabble rises supreme).

Right, so, the graphic novel elective is a combination of Reading, Sharing and Writing (we all read some together, we share what we've read outside, and then we write our own). First classwide book is Bone, which everyone loves and I would have thought everyone would have read, but no. That's next week. For this week I modelled a sharing with this unsung gem:

Mail Order Ninja Volume 1 (Mail Order Ninja (Graphic Novels)) (v. 1)

whose name pretty much says it all. Ninjas are awesome.

Up next is The Arrival, an absolutely stunning book with no words at all. Have I talked about this before? Every time I think about it, I'm awed anew. Run right out and be absorbed by this. It requires several readings but is worth every second.

The Arrival

So the whole world knows that HOLES was a huge mega-hit kids' book followed by a medium mega-hit kids' movie, all intended for kids around the age of 10, we would assume. In fact, my school teaches the book in 4th grade. But HOLES is a bit scary and mature in parts, and 4th grade seems a bit early to have it as approved curriculum, at least to me. Its sequel, Small Steps, came out several years ago and I didn't bother to read it. "Here kid, you like HOLES? Read the next one. Now let me get back to Go Fug Yourself."

Which is why I found it troubling when the 4th grade teacher came to me last week and said, all sotto voce, "I think Small Steps belongs in the Middle School section."

ME: (non-committal, faking like I've read it, totally cool): Mmmm?

HER: You know, because of the drugs. And the sex.

ME: !!!   ???

ME: Well, urm, it's, you know, the kids already, and well, FIRST AMENDMENT and CENSORSHIP and ... I have to go over here now.

Small Steps (Readers Circle)

And the drugs? Well, in Holes, all the characters meet at a juvenile-detention center, and one of the characters is there for having sold little baggies full of parsley for $50 a pop. In Small Steps, they reference that. BECAUSE IT WAS A PLOT POINT IN THE FIRST BOOK. YOU KNOW, THE ONE YOU TEACH.

So again, it stays in the general collection. Don't get me all worked up expecting drugs and sex and then get nothing. Damn!

I don't have much ground to complain about corporate wage-slavery these days (not now that I'm a whore for rich Palo Alto parents) and I didn't really have to pay my dues all that much in the past. Three years at a very small publishing company, then part-time there and at that terribly well-known search engine LookSmart until I got dot-commed in January 2001. Teaching has its own cliches and characters, but there's not tons of overlap.

But damn if this book didn't give me a conference-room anxiety dream as if it were YESTERDAY.

Then We Came to the End:

Ferris Joshua

Man, is this book pitch-perfect. It's told in the first person plural, which takes about two pages to get used to and then draws you in as if you're part of the company, an ad agency that had its own dot-com heydey and is now starting layoffs and other morale-killers. For me, the author gets everything right: how disproportionately triumphant small work successes can make you feel, how sometimes your co-workers -- even the ones you hate -- are closer than your family, how everyone knows everything that happens even when no one tells, the jokes and stories people tell each other over and over again ... it's just Spot On. L

This isn't a great book -- it's more of a novelty in its conception and execution -- and maybe it spoke to my own experiences because of an ad agency's similarity to publishing (the "creatives" who can't be held accountable for their craziness and the management that used to be going somewhere) but I don't think anyone who's ever done time in a cubicle, clipped a Dilbert cartoon, or watched "Office Space" more than twice would fail to recognize themselves in this.

Plus funny!

Here's a book I wish I enjoyed more:

King Matt the First

Janusz Korczak

It's a pretty dated little tale of a boy who becomes king and does things as king that king-children would do (like decree that every child in the kingdom should receive a pound of chocolate). He runs away to war, establishes a children's parliament, banishes his ministers ... There's a long subplot about his friend Bum Drum, king of the African cannibals, that probably played well in 1923 when it was originally published but not so much with the PC crowd now. All in all, it's a series of little adventures that ends rather sadly and abruptly when little King Matt's reforms backfire, he loses his kingdom and is banished to a desert island (after his death sentence is commuted). !! Not anything I'd be handing to any kids too soon.
 
BUT. In case you aren't steeped in Jewish history, Janusz Korczak, the author, started a children's orphanage for Jewish kids in Warsaw in 1910, one that sounds kinda close to Matt's kingdom (with a children's parliament and court system and all). In addition to being a doctor, this orphanage and the children it served became his life.

I think we all know how well the Jews of Warsaw fared during the Holocaust. Korczak was a prominent citizen and had mulitple opportunities to escape the Warsaw Ghetto but refused to leave behind the 200 kids he accompanied. In fact he followed them all the way to the gas chambers.

So reading this in my warm American home as a novel for well-fed American kids leaves me unmoved, but imagining them as escapist tales for Jewish orphans on the train to Treblinka leaves me ... moved. 

I shouldn't write about this until I finish it, but it's just occupying so much of my mindspace, I have to purge. I heard about this book on Forum's annual book roundup, which is quite a mishmash ... and then but a few days later it showed up in my Book of the Day page-a-day calendar, so I thought -- Kismet!

First, it has the best title ever:

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

Max Brooks

and second, it's very cleverly done. The story is told completely through interview transcripts and does a great job of switching between voices (like one military grunt that keeps referring to the legions of the Living Dead as "Zack", as in "we kept firing but Zack just kept coming" -- ha ha!). And, well, it's giving me a lot to think about, aside from zombies. For instance (although I've been thinking about this before this book) -- how utterly USELESS is every last whit of my education, come the revolution (or the undead invasion)? I can't sew, can't cook, am not handy, am not really a social organizer or Leader Of People ... I am so destined to get eaten when Zack gets here. Again, in the book, there's a very telling scene in a refugee camp, where everyone is listing their previous occupation as "analyst," "executive", "consultant", "artistic director"  and all they want to find is some carpenters and masons. Everyone winds up working for their old cleaning ladies.

Although I haven't yet finished the book, I am happy to know that ultimately humanity does win World War Z. Somehow the customer service reps manage to triumph.