Peeking into the rock

Reading The Global Pigeon by Colin Jerolmack. It's research for the girls who save the world from fascism through their magical connection to urban birds book. It was recommended to me by none other than Donna Haraway who I met through Katie King at FOGCon. It does not have in it what I intended to be looking for but it has all sorts of other things that I didn't know I needed. That last category is a mark of a felicitous reading choice, I think.


Other than that, I'm trucking along. I find it is better for me to work on a bit of this and that right now because I can't concentrate very well what with the sleep deprivation and the chronic intestinal issues. Oh yes and now I have a very mild neuropathy too, so that takes some of my focus away as I obsess over its progress--if it gets to a certain level we have to stop chemo to prevent its becoming permanent. As it is, my dose has been dropped. This phase of chemo is just to be sure anyways: there's reason to think that in many cases the first round withn the adriamycin/cytoxan is all a person needs. But survival rate is higher and recurrence is lower for people who've had both, so that's where we're going. But yesterday was 6 of 12 doses, so the light is at the end of the tunnel either way. The oncologist says most of her patients make it to dose 9 or 10, but some make it all the way to 12. I would like to get to 12 just to be sure (and also quite honestly so I can feel so very tough, but I don't admit to that often), but I'm fine with following her advice.

We've been repairing the outside of the house and clearing foliage because the painters are coming on Saturday. I probably shouldn't own a house because I'm not houseproud enough to do what needs to be done. Honestly when stuff gets broken or dirty I don't care enough at all. It's weird because I used to take pride in just doing what needs to be done and in mechanical competence. But I'm kind of broken a bit myself, I guess.

While at the library I also picked up a Tobias Buckell book because I keep bouncing off his writing and I want to like his work. And another book called Watermind by M.M. Buckner that was near it on the shelves because it looked interesgting and I've never heard of it or the author. I want to read more genre stuff that's more recent but it's hard at the library because most of the requests for material seem to be coming from the grognards.

Emma told me there's a magnificent petrified forest in Chemnitz and now I want to go there more than ever. My dream itinerary for next spring is: Eastercon, a couple weeks with Frank and Hana in Loughborough, some days in Paris with Andrea, and then on to Chemnitz, Prague, and maybe a bus tour of Poland and if my bro-and-sis-in-law are in Langaland, a few days in Denmark. I imagine it would be summer before I got back home.

I would also like to travel in the States some: to Portland to see my aunt and a friend or two, and maybe the Woodstock Memory Hole if anything is going on there right now: to LA to see my other aunt: to Houston to visit Nancy Zeitler, a friend who's been living there for years & I've never visited her there: to Silver Spring Maryland to visit Katie King, who I visited over a dozen years ago: to Chattanooga to visit Sharon Farber, who I visited 29 years ago: to Philadelphia, just to see it again after 50 years gone from it: to New York, to visit Phil Josselyn, who I've never visited & when he visits me I realize how much I miss him: and to Boston, to visit Mary Porter, who I visited 26 years ago but never in the house she lives in now.

That's a lot.

( oh, I don't know what a spoiler is, so the cut's just in case somebody cares )

for some reason youtube is refusing to play this playlist I'm listening to as a playlist and I have to poke it after every song. That's okay, I guess, I'm not liking the playlist that much either.

I can't even remember what I read in the weeks I didn't post, which is why I have joined this little game.  Anyway, my bathroom book is A Hundrede Thousand Fools of God which is not about religion especially: it's about everything to do with ethnic music in ex-Soviet Central Asia since before it was ex-Soviet to roughly now. It comes with a CD to which I have not listened yet. It's more of my father's ethnomusicology trove. It's really interesting, and the author's point of view is one of the least annoying and most nuanced ones I have read when assessing Soviet history. Even things he hates (like the Soviet penchant for inventing large-ensemble music styles for each nationality, whether the instruments and the musical styles were suited for it or not) he is able to look at with open eyes. It's refreshing to read something that is neither an apologia nor the usual dumb, uncaring knee-jerk anti-sovietism that you see around the place.

My bedroom book is Stephenson's Reamde which I am having trouble with. It's very, very scary, because he's got this whole normal, benign world that people are moving through and then -- people who view large amounts of murder as a simple, sensible business strategy get involved. It is very long, and very detailed -- not loving graphic details of murder, but it doesn't need it to be unsettling and even occasionally disgusting (I don't mean that the writing is disgusting, but ddisgusting things happen).

I seem to have inordinate amounts of trouble with all sorts of things lately. I haven't really finished very many of the books I've started this year.

On another front, I got deferred for giving blood today. My hemoglobin was 11.5. It needs to be 12.5 to give blood. Last time it was low and then it came up enough when they re-tested it. I do not like this development: I used to have remarkably high hemoglobin, and now it is below the normal range (it should be 12 to not be considered to have anemia or something). I am pissed off. My diet is normally high-ish in iron. I have a reason at hand for why I might be dropping hemoglobin levels, but I do not see an immediate answer for what to do about it. Also, I still have no health insurance, so I'm looking for self-treatment first. I will go see the doctor but first I will do whatever I can find that is obvious so as to be able to come in with that information and make the most efficient use of his time.

On still another front, a PSA: too many livejournal users are using the automatic location finder thingy and they are publishing the exact address from which they are posting. This is a dumb move, folks. If you want to post a location, use some kind of cute shorthand instead of your whole address.

skipheller says that if Christianity was all like this, he'd be a believer.

Hell, I'm a believer -- not in Christianity, but I believe in Sister Rosetta Tharpe and I believe in laying down the sword and shield and I believe in rocking out for the love of man and the universe and also, now, I believe in Skip Heller.

In related news, I have been having the world's best radio luck. All week I keep running into Gillian Welch's "Elvis Blues" which is the best piece of expository anything I've run into for a long time -- as good an explanation of American culture in its three minutes as "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" is in its what, 90 minutes or whatever. And hauntingly beautiful. I have nearly learned the song. I can't stop thinking about it or singing it. Friday morning, on KPIG, I heard not one but two shit-kicking songs about Impressionist painters. Friday night, on the Robert Louis Stephenson School's student radio program, I heard this wonderful song about a crazy guy who thinks the woman on the billboard is his girlfriend and I don't mean the one about the woman on the billboard wearing nothing but a beach towel and a smile -- this was about real, dangerous, sad insanity blowing up in a person's face with cops and reporters and broken bottles. Googling fails me -- either the band or the song is called "Pablo Picasso" or "Citizen Coke" -- or something that sounds like that -- maybe it was a local kids' band. And today I caught the tail end of a Fresh Air interview with an author, and I thought "That sounds like Stephen McCauley," and so when I parked I just waited to hear more and it was, and the reason Terry Gross was interviewing him is that he has a new book out. Yay Steven McCauley! I think it's called Alternatives to Sex.

He said he feels guilty because every time Jennifer Aniston gets in the news for her unhappy personal life, the film of "The Object of My Affections" is shown on tv, and he the book sells a few more copies.

We have this tradition on my side of the family, in which we all meet at the Anarchist Book Fair and because it happens in the month of our birthdays, sometimes my brother and I get presents. This year I got him Newton's Wake by Ken MacLeod and Singularity Sky by Charlie Stross. My stepmother got me this book -- a tome -- called Beasts of the Field: A Narrative History of California Farmworkers, 1769-1913 by Richard Steven Street. It's huger than that. The endnotes alone are 240 pages long. The index is 27 pages long (two columns). There are six pages of abbreviations. The text is a mere 625 pages of large format and small (but readable) type. And it gets us to 1913.

It's a wonderful book. It's really well written, excellently documented, and covers everything and everything: technology, culture, internal politics of the Spanish army, church, and everything, landscape, botany, agronomy. I've read the first 46 pages which gets us to the establishment of the missions and estancias and pueblos in Alta California and discusses the relatively primitive agricultural technology used in them and why it was like that. The part I'm on now is about the structure of the work gang, the living arrangements, the ways that order was kept.

Oh, the book fair. This year I was crashing from the oral surgery and whirlwind trips all over the landscape so I was not in fit state to browse books but I did get a pamphlet by George Lakey responding to Ward Churchill's renunciation of nonviolence, an argument I didn't even know about before. I haven't been keeping up. My brother points out the George Lakey led the Friends youth group we hung out in in Philadelphia, and I can almost remember that. My stepmother pointed out Ward Churchill: he has this lantern jaw and pretentious long hair, and he looks just like the sort of macho posing college professor who would say things to scandalize and titillate, and I bet you'll never catch him trashing a cop car (by the way, I'm not wedding to nonviolence in every circumstance, but I think it's an important component of any strategy when you're facing opponents whose ability to harm you is so many more times your ability to harm them). He's the guy who got in trouble for saying that the CIA executives in the World Trade Center were evil and deserved to die -- I first heard that misquoted as "everybody in the World Trade Center was CIA and deserved to die" and I was as pissed off as anybody, because of course a huge number of people in the building were custodians and cooks and firefighters.

Jason and Emma looked exceedingly cute wheeling around the book fair. So did my father, staffing the War Resisters League table with our friend Jim Haber. I was impressed with the size of the fair this year, and the fact that they had a little carnival corner out front with booths where you could "topple the heads of state," (soda cans with portraits of world leaders on them you could throw bean bags at) "circle the A," (throw rubber rings over large letter A's made of something black) "drench the dunce," or "pin the molotov on the cop car" (it's a joke, okay, and it's not my joke anyway). My stepmother Moher kept admiring the more creative mohawks on the young folks. There were all ages -- infant, child, adolescent, young,middle, old adults. You could get baby clothes that have "Baby Brigade -- We refuse to be pacified!" on them. And other things.

I had a vegan sandwich which was really good. And then we came back to the house and Luis and I crashed and after a while we ate dinner and now I have to get ready for the other side of the family.

You take the list, you delete what's not on your shelves, and add the same number that you delete.
I don't know what it's supposed to demonstrate.

J.R.R. Tolkien
E.A. Poe
Shakespeare
Kurt Vonnegut


Dr. Seuss


Maxim Gorky
Patricia Wrede
Cordwainer Smith
Pamela Dean
Jhumpa Lahiri

(deleted: Tim Powers, John Donne, Nalo Hopninson, Kinky Friedman, David Brin)

On other fronts, my son drove a couple of guys from the dorms to the San Jose Airport and to San Francisco. After he got there, he found out that the one he drove to San Francisco is the offspring of friends of my father and stepmother. The key exchange that started the recognition of this fact: "My husband works in harm reduction. Do you know what harm reduction is?" "Yes, I do. Do you know Moher Downing?"

famous all over town.

A book none of you all probably have: Mal'occhiu, which I keep losing around the house, and is ethnography about Sicilian Canadians. Or Icelandic Essays . Or Cement.

Music I have you all probably don't: this is too easy. It's cheating, in fact. Because I have a couple dozen CDs compiled by my father. Okay, not cheating. Fiddle, Sing Me the Blues , or maybe The Henry Kaiser Folk Experience which has a lame sounding name but is actually Appalachian-Montagnard fusion, as far as I can tell, and they do "Sweet Sunny South" almost as scary as Dock Boggs and "Farewell to My Stepstone" almost as scary as Bascom Lamar Lunsford and that's saying something, or maybe Oi Dai by Värtinna. O crappies, I just thought of something. Emma, you don't count. You're in my same house.

A movie I have that probably none of you all have: "Me and the Colonel," which is a philosophical WWII buddy adventure comedy with Danny Kaye from a play by Franz Werfel. Or "Svengali," which the nice fellow picked up recently.

A place I have been that none of you have probably been: I was going to say Watsonville but that's when I remembered Emma and went back and said she doesn't count. So I'll say Wolf Creek, South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge Reservation. I was going to maybe say Wounded Knee because it's more show offy because people have heard of it and it's important, but then I thought somebody else might have made a pilgrimage there or something.

Something I've eaten that maybe none of you have probably ever eaten: Gran Choclo, which is this Peruvian giant corn. It doesn't taste very good, at least when it has been frozen and then cooked according to the instructions ("add some lime or cinnamon").