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Houses Temporal | Book Reviews | ||||
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| Houses Spiritual | Quick Links to Daily Entries • Book reviews "The Perfect Storm" "Mad Ship" "Idoru" "Ship of Magic" "Cold Mountain" "With Child" "The Testament" "Holes" • Relax on the Ghost Planet • No rain • Rain • Being a journalist • "Return to Me" mini-review • My mother has always been strong • "Gladiator" review • Vietnam • What can a teacher hope for? • Regret and mortality
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Ramblings of Ordinary Madness
| Tuesday, July 4, 2000 |
Pause
My dad has died.
He died this morning, on the kidlet's birthday, and now we're all three left numb and once more not knowing how to feel.
My little brother was with dad when he died, which was probably a good thing for both of them. They've had the kind of closeness from the start that I could only dream of. It took a while, a decade or so ago, for me to come to grips with the unconscious jealousy I felt over that. But it's in the past now, and I'm glad they had that nearness here, at the end of dad's life.
There's a lot to do. Flights to book, clothes to pack, clothes to buy (who keeps funeral-appropriate clothing around just in case these days?), plans to make for substitute teaching and the usual round of minor nuisances.
I'm not looking forward to the flight across country. Too much uninterrupted time to think.
Oh well.
My father has died. He believed he was going to a better place, and I know he did. Whatever comes after death, I'm convinced it has much to do with what we expect, and my dad expected strongly to be meeting with old friends in a glad place after he died. Oddly, I believe he *is* better off now. I know he was ready to die. He'd been wanting to die for a couple of years.
And now he has.
I wish I knew what to feel, how to react, which way to act. I just move forward, trusting that it'll all come to me in time.
Happy birthday, kidlet. Journey well, Pop.
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Current Reading:
I don't remember what ever possessed me to pick up Jane Smiley's Moo and read it, but it was one of the funnier books I can recall. So I was delighted when I received Horse Heaven as a gift this spring. So far, I'm enjoying it very much.
Recently Read:
”The Perfect Storm” stayed on various bestseller lists for umpty-dozen weeks or months last year, but somehow I never got around to reading it.
I regret that.
This is an absolutely wonderful book, one I’m tempted to start making required reading for my newswriting students. It’s a terrific example of high-quality journalistic writing, and the fact that it spent all that time on the bestseller list helps prove that the best journalistic writing can hold its own with the best fiction.
Junger’s book tells the story of an unusual storm at sea one Halloween. The storm itself was a convergence of three other storm systems, including a hurricane, that combined to form what one expert called the perfect storm. In the book, several crafts and their crews battle the storm in their own ways. Lives are lost. Heroic rescues are made. Close calls and miraculous saves are all too common. And in the central thread that holds the book loosely together, one craft and crew simply vanishes.
I can’t recommend this book highly enough. It’s out in mass market paperback now, just in time to coincide with the release of the book-based movie at the end of June. I’ll be there for that, too.
Rating: 5 ships out of 5. Top-notch reading.
Maybe one of the reasons I didn't like Idoru so much was that I was champing at the bit to get to this book instead.
It wasn't a disappointment.
My admiration for Robin Hobb (who also writes under the name of Megan Lindholm, although all those books seem to be out of print) grows with every book I read. In Madship, she's picked up the previously existing strands of the Vestrit family, the pirate Kennit, and the mad ship Paragon, woven them more complexly together, and added an indolent, cruel ruler (the Satrap), a simmering political situation in Bingtown, a desperate, pushy dragon who wants to be born in the Rain Wild, and last but not least, a growing sense of awareness among tangles of sea serpents drifting toward some unknown destiny. The sense of connections skirting somewhere just on the trembling edge of discovery grows with every page.
Whew.
It's great! I love it. Book Three, Ship of Destiny, is due out in August. Heck, I might even spring for the hardcover. Maybe.
RATING: 7 ships, out of 5.
Okay, I read it. It didn't thrill me. I'm still not quite sure what was going on, and there were certainly no characters to care about. So. I read it. You can bet your bottom dollar I won't be reading it twice.
RATING: 1 computer chip, maybe 2, out of 5.
Okay, I'm convinced. Robin Hobb, along with George R.R. Martin, may actually make me enjoy medieval-type fantasy again. I'd basically given up on it after years of twee dragons, feminist fairies, fey prince charmings and magic users who fling magic spells around like confetti at no cost whatsover. And don't even get me started on series based on video games based on board games based on cartoons based on comic books. Blech.
So. That said...
This is a damn good book. Like Hobb's earlier Farseer trilogy, this one is peopled with complex, multi-dimensional characters who face heart-squeezing problems that can't be solved by a quick swish-swish of the magic bolo. There's magic in the books, but it's old, little understood, and potentially dangerous.
Hobb doesn't take any easy shortcuts, either. The frustrating son-in-law ship captain could easily have been painted as a standard villain with no redeeming virtues, but Hobb complicates matters by letting us understand his world from his point of view. The would-be villainous pirate is handled the same way: We may not like what he does, but we understand his drives. And he even becomes, in some ways, sympathetic. The main "good guy" characters are no less complex. The spurned daughter and would-be ship's captain is short-tempered, proud and impatient. The former first mate turned out of his best job has a mild drug addiction. The most fascinating human character is the 13-year-old son yanked from his life in a monastery and forced into becoming a sailor against his will.
But it's a tribute to Hobb's imagination and writing skill that two of the most fascinating characters in the book are two ships: Vivacia, a newly quickened liveship just learning her new life, and, most striking of all, Paragon, a liveship who went insane and apparently killed his crew. The title of the second book in this series is Madship, and I'm hoping it's about Paragon.
RATING: 6 ships, out of 5.
Roughly four years into a war he'd expected to last less than a year, a Confederate soldier named Inman decides he's had enough. One day Inman simply gets up from his convalescent bed in an overcrowded and understaffed hospital and starts to walk home, thinking of making a life with his pre-war sweetheart.
Home is an isolated community in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, and half of "Cold Mountain" tells the story - adventurous, monotonous, joyful and painfully sad - of Inman's walk home. He finds humans both good and bad along the way, and his journey echoes some of the classic journeys of literature.
The other half of the "Cold Mountain" is the tale of a journey of a different sort. While Inman makes a physical journey across the mountains, his sweetheart Ada is making an equally difficult journey from pampered child of privilege to back-country survivor.
The intertwined story of these two lives, and the lives that brush against theirs, wends its way quietly through every pathway of the reader's heart. I can't remember the last time I read a book that worked such quiet devastation. This is an astonishing work of fiction.
And it's the author's first published book. Wow. I can't recommend this book highly enough.
Rating? 7 stars, out of 5.
With Child
San Francisco PD Inspector Kate Martinelli is going through a rough patch. Her live-in partner has left her - maybe temporarily, maybe not, she's battling an increased reliance on alcohol to get her through the long nights, and her work partner is planning on getting married. In the middle of all this, her work partner's soon-to-be stepdaughter, 12-year-old Jules, asks Kate to help her look for a street kid named Dio, whom Jules had befriended in a local park. From that point, the story takes off, involving street kids, a serial killer, a wedding, shootings, recoveries, kidnappings, and various approaches to the theme of families. What constitutes family? How do parents and children relate? What does it mean to be with child... and maybe without?
I enjoyed this book more than I expected to, but it isn't without its fault. First and foremost, for me, was that the author wrote the book apparently under the assumption that I'd read all her other books first. Later research showed that this is either the second or third Kate Martinelli book, but it was the first I'd read. A lot of essential background was missing from With Child, for the reader who comes to this particular book first.
Rating? 4 baby rattles, out of 5.
Holes
I read Holes at the insistence of the kidlet, who'd found it recommended in an online list of books to read while waiting for the next Harry Potter book. I applaud anything that gets kids to read, and she really liked this one, so I dove in.
Holes is an easy read with a deceptively involved story. The author, Louis Sachar, weaves together contemporary and historical, real and fantastical, truth and legend into a deft meld of a story that leaves you smiling not only for the actions but for the symmetry of the plot. Good book... and a fast read.
Rating? 3 1/2 to 4 holes, out of 5
The Testament
John Grisham writes about one good book for every four or five standard potboilers. I've reached the point where I can't stand his potboilers, so I have to read reviews and locate the good ones before I'll try another. Generally I can recognize the best ones, because standard mass-pop reviewers don't like them as much as the crap.
That said, The Testament is one of the good ones.
All of Grisham's best writing - A Time to Kill, The Chamber, and The Testament - has a spiritual element that's missing from the potboilers. He writes best, with the most emotion, when he lets his Baptist loose for a little while. By spiritual, I don't mean Bible-banging or crystal-waving. I mean simply telling stories that ask larger questions than "Will they ever get all that photocopying done in time to stop the crooked lawyer from killing the little boy with lung cancer?"
The Testament is a weird book. I like it when Grisham writes weird.
Rating? 3 wills, out of 5
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| Wednesday, June 28, 2000 |
Regret and mortality
I'm pretty sure my dad is dying.
Today, when I called to talk to him, my aunt had to hold the phone to his head so he could talk. He's too weak to hold the phone now.
He's too weak to walk. Too weak to sit up. Too weak to raise his head. And he can't or won't eat. Another of my aunts described him as "a skeleton with teeth." She was crying when she told me. My little brother, a couple of days ago, thought he was having a heart attack. The stress is getting to him.
And here I sit, on the other side of the country, going about my life as usual, mostly. Well, except for the house closing, which is supposed to happen within a week, and the kiddo's birthday, which is in less than a week, and two midterms at school (one to take and one to give). And my mom's still lying in a nursing home bed dying slowly of Alzheimer's.
And the dog still has to have medicine twice a day.
Sometimes I just sit and stare. I don't know what to do. What do you do when your parents are both dying slow-motion deaths thousands of miles away? How do you deal with this?
I wish things had always been better between my dad and me. My mom says we fought from the start. Two hard-headed Scots, she called us, and I guess she was right. He had his ways and his opinions and wasn't going to change on account of one uppity kid. And I had to rebel. I wanted him to love me so much. I wanted him to like me even more.
As I got older and began to understand a few more things here and there, I came to think that maybe, for me and Dad, our arguments had become our way of showing affection. He couldn't show it any other way when I was a kid. After my little brother was born, when I was 13, my dad started to mellow out dramatically. It was almost like watching the shell melt off a person.
I can still remember the day my mom told me, in one of my weekly phone calls home from college, that my dad had actually worn a pair of jeans. I nearly fell to the floor. A few weeks later, when she reported that he'd bought - and worn - a polo-type knit shirt, I did have to sit down. This was not the dad I'd grown up with. The dad I grew up with wore work uniforms or khakis and button-front shirts exclusively. Mom spent hours every weekend starching and ironing them. He'd have fallen dead of a heart attack before being found in jeans and a knit shirt.
That was the dad I grew up with and loved with all my heart even while fighting him constantly. That dad, on the day I was deposited at college, hugged me awkwardly on the sidewalk in front of the dorm and murmured, "You know I love you, Bugs." It was the first time I could ever remember that happening in my life.
I cried then, much the way I'm crying now. Because I love him, too. I'm glad that in the years since he began to melt, we've come to a gentler accommodation with each other. I think my mom's Alzheimer's stripped all that was left of his rigidity away. He cared for her as gently as a child until he could no longer do it alone, and we had to put her in a nursing home.
Since then he's been alone, he thinks, although he has family and far more friends than I do, for instance. But he feels alone without my mom, and I think the loneliness has been eating away at him as much as the cancer that's crept into his body and begun to suffocate his spine.
I'm afraid he's dying, and it scares me.
I love you, Pops. I always did. I always will. But if you feel like you need to go, I'll understand. I hope you'll understand if I just don't know how to feel.
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| Thursday, May 18, 2000 |
What can a teacher hope for?
Teaching is interesting work, in that you spend most of your time trying to plant seeds that might not bear fruit for years. So much of it is a calculated crapshoot: Will this work? Does this student need gentle urging or a tough-love push? Does that student need understanding or a firm resistance to habitual charm?
Most teachers will tell you that the time spent in the classroom is actually the least of our jobs, in many ways. Granted, that's the official contact point, but many of us truly get to know our students outside the classroom, through offhand conversations or their writing.
One of the things I promised myself when I became a teacher was that if I ever found myself not caring about my students, I'd quit. Life is hard enough for all of us. None of us needs any more of those worn-out, uncaring teachers in our lives. I promised I wouldn't be one.
So far, that's a promise I've been able to keep.
What got me thinking about this was a phone call I got last week from the mother of one of my former students. It reminded me, with a visceral shock, of how powerful the job of teacher can be. The mother mentioned a letter I'd written to her, two years ago, and how much it had meant to them when their daughter was killed.
I don't still have the letter, obviously, but I did find a copy of the rough essay I based the letter on. Here it is... my answer to the question "What can a teacher hope for?"
January 19, 1998
I do know the difference between sadness and depression. This isn't depression. This is sadness. Pure, undiluted grief.
I just found out that one of my students was killed last night in a car accident, on the way back to campus. She was to be married in May, and she and her fiance and some friends had gone out on a date.
Life is so unfair.
Granted, that's not so very original. Granted.
But still...
She was such a beautiful girl, and truly sweet-natured. Long dark hair, a shy smile, a quiet manner. Not an A student, but a dedicated one. She gave things an honest effort, and was always present, always attentive. She came to see me a few times, with various questions of greater or lesser importance, and always left me smiling. She was just beginning to come into some self-confidence, and see some possible direction for her life.
She was alive, truly alive and awake. And it's just not fair that she should have to die. Not fair at all.
That's all.
After the initial shock wore off, and I cried for a while in the shower, it got easier to deal with. But not easy. She wasn't my daughter, but she was somebody's, and the pain is real.
In a fleeting way, sometimes to little effect but sometimes, maybe, to large effect, they're all my children. I have contact with them for such a short time; it's easy to think I can't possibly make any significant impact. But then I remember the teachers I had for a single class, or maybe two, who changed the way I look at the world. Who opened doors for me in walls I didn't even realize were there. Who believed in my talents when they were still young and unformed and all know-it-all intensity.
And I know that it is possible to make a difference in a life. It really is.
What an awesome responsibility.
In light of Caroline's death, I find myself musing on this: In the contact I had with her, did I make her life better in any way? When my ship passed hers in this vast sea of the world, was it a friendly exchange? Did I come away from it stronger, or better, or open to new possibilities? Did she?
I did. I hope she did. I think she did.
It doesn't change the unfairness of her death. It doesn't even remove much of the sting of loss. My heart still aches for her family and friends. But it eases my mind, somewhat, to remember her laughter on the day we all sat on the floor and wrote in crayon by candlelight, or the look on her face in the jeweled stained-glass light of the Episcopal church one early morning, her obvious delight in her own professionalism the day her group presented their final ad campaigns to the class. And to know that our contact was positive, for both of us.
Ultimately, that's all a teacher can hope for. And it's enough.
Ultimately, it's enough.
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| Wednesday, May 10, 2000 |
Vietnam, 25 years later
David Harlow was a peripheral part of my life, the big brother of one of my friends. I remember when he went to Vietnam, leaving behind a brand-new wife, who was pregnant with a baby he never saw.
David's was the first military funeral I ever attended. I remember the chapel was packed, with more young people than I'd ever seen at a funeral. The casket couldn't be opened, and somehow that horror only made things worse. His death had sent a ripple of shock through our small town, and brought Vietnam into a sudden crisp focus.
He was buried on an overcast day, on a hillside cemetery behind a little church far out in the rural countryside. I remember how red the piled-up dirt was beside the grave, the rich gummy red clay of North Mississippi. I remember the folding of the flag, and his mother crying. I remember the heart-thumping startlement of the guns firing. But most of all I remember the cold chills when a bugler, out of sight behind a building, began to play Taps.
That lonely cry drifting among weeping mourners under the weeping sky, with the faint scent of graphite spiking air already rich with the damp muddy smell of Mississippi rain, is something I'll never forget.
David's death snapped the entirety of Vietnam into focus for me and my friends in a way that nothing else had. My blind gung-ho Americanism was never the same after that. I only regret that it took a senseless death - one of so many thousands of senseless deaths - to bring me to my senses.
May we never have to be jarred that way again.
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| Monday, May 8, 2000 |
Hail, Caesar!
Okay, I admit it. I'm a sucker for a cool costume epic, as long as the characters are even moderately more than cardboard. So I enjoyed the heck out of "Gladiator."
Russell Crowe is fast becoming one of my favorite actors because of the way he disappears into each of his roles. Watching that pineknot-tough swordsman in a skirt out on the sand of the gladiatorial arena grimly slicing and dicing to stay alive, I kept flashing on images of the pudgy, pasty-faced, gray-haired scientist in "The Insider." It seems hardly possible that they're the same man. But it's there, in his eyes.
Joaquin Phoenix has the tough task of playing a wacko emperor. It's to his credit that he manages to keep the character not only bonechilling creepy but also somewhat sympathetic. We may hate what he is, but we can sort of understand how he got to be there. And it's a sad comprehension.
My one major beef with the movie is that it's so testosterone saturated it apparently had no room left for female characters. Other than the emperor's sister, Lucilla, the only other females are Maximus's wife, seen only in brief flashback and dream sequences, and some females gladiators who show up just long enough to get sliced and diced along with the rest. Surely Rome had a few more women.
That admittedly small quibble aside, this is a dandy trip of a movie. Go, get some popcorn, settle back, and prepare to relive those glory days of "I am Spartacus."
"Gladiator" photos from About.com's Movies/Review Forum
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| Friday, April 28, 2000 |
My Mother
My mother has always been strong. We always joked about how she could lift anything, carry anything, work all day tirelessly, never get sick. My mother's strength was a source of pleasure and maybe of pride.
My mother has always been strong, and now it's her downfall. Now she lies in a bed, unable to lift herself, unable to sit up, unable to walk. Alzheimers has taken her mind. Everything that made her herself - her humor, her intelligence, her talents, her amazing warm heart - all that is gone. It has leaked away into some nameless place, leaving her a mostly blank slate.
She is still a strong container, but now she contains nothing. Her mind no longer knows how to live, but her body doesn't know how to die.
My mother was always so strong. I miss her strength.
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| Monday, April 24, 2000 |
Media masticulation
Saturday, enjoying the return of something near normality, I took the kidlet to see a movie. The options were severely limited in the "appropriate for a sensitive 11-year-old" category, so we ended up choosing "Return to Me," billed as a romantic comedy. I figured I could suffer through it, if worst came to worst.
Imagine my surprise when it turned out to be funny. Really funny. It had been so long since I'd seen an actual romantic comedy in the true sense of the genre that this one blindsided me. It's far from a perfect film, but as a pleasant, entertaining, funny way to pass a couple of hours on a spring day, a person could do far worse.
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| Wednesday, April 19, 2000 |
Being a journalist at the beginning of the 21st century is like being a footwasher at the prince's ball: You're grateful to be there, but the circumstances leave a lot to be desired.
I've done journalism from just about every angle in the past twenty years. I've sold ads, delivered papers, written stories - news, sports, features, you name it, taken and developed and printed photos, designed pages, mastered several computer systems, been three kinds of editor, been a managing editor, and last but certainly not least, I've taught journalism for eight years, on both senior college and junior college levels.
So when I say I have mixed feelings about the profession, well... I have the right.
On one hand, it's always good to see my former reporters, or former students, do well. A story today from the front page of the Jackson, Miss., Clarion-Ledger by a student I taught three years ago was enough to bring a big smile.
On the other hand, it's tough to see reporters get saddled with the blame for events outside their control, when all they were doing was their job.
But underneath both the pride and the frustration lies a deeper layer of utter unease with what the profession seems to be becoming. While I was working in the profession, I was bothered by things I considered ethical lapses among the media. Changing to the classroom caused a tectonic shift in my perceptions.
Now, what worries me is sheer lack of knowledge, pure and simple. It's unnerving how very little college journalism students know. And it's difficult, as a teacher, to be faced in a college classroom with most students still writing like 9th graders, in the best of cases. I feel myself lucky if I have as many as five students per semester who can actually write on a college level. That was the biggest shock I had to deal with when I started teaching college eight years ago.
It's not just me, either. Other professionals - teachers and working journalists - are trying to bring the problem to public attention. It's not a popular task. Here's a thought-provoking article from a Milwaukee newspaper on Living a Professional Lie. It's food for thought.
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| Thursday, April 13, 2000 |
Rain. Rain is good. Today we had as close as it gets, up here, to thunderstorms. There was no lightning, and no storm, but at least there was thunder and rain.
One thing that's cool here is that rainbows - on the rare occasions when they happen - tend to be double. They also tend to be full half-circles. Down south, a double rainbow was almost unheard of, and most rainbows were enormous, so much so that you had to take part of the arc on faith, since you surely couldn't see it.
I watched "When Worlds Collide" today, with two 11-year-olds. We all had a good time snickering at the end, when the colonists to the new world just jumped out of their ship as soon as it landed. It was all so silly and naive, but endearing in its way.
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| Sunday, April 9, 2000 |
Golfers are watching the Masters today. Baseball fans are still excited about the new season. Students are dreaming of spring break.
Me? I'm thinking about rain. Rain is something I've had a love-hate relationship with for decades. Arthritis makes me dislike it, but I love it by nature. There's nothing like a day of quiet rain, unless it's a slam-bang thunderstorm, complete with crashing thunder, strobing lightning and lashing winds.
They don't have thunderstorms out here in California. Heck, they barely have rain at all. Sure, there's rain in the winter, but it's all crammed into two months or so, and then there's nothing at all for months on end. Some people think this is a good thing about California.
I hate it.
All those rainless months just suck my spirit right out of my body. By the time the rain finally comes, generally late in September or October, I'm living in a state of constant nervous frazzle. I feel like the sound of fingernails on chalkboards. Screechy.
So rain's on my mind today, because there was a small weather system yesterday, and it rained all around us. Not here, though. This time of year, you never know which rain is going to be the last for nine months, so there's an edginess to the weather... an odd wistfulness that borders on regret. Was the rain three weeks ago the last for this season? Did I miss it? When rain comes so seldom, it seems it should be observed, celebrated in some way.
Today the sun is bright, rain is far away, and I'm looking out a flowers in the garden and weeds in the back yard, wondering if there'll be more rain this spring. And if there is, will it be the last?
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| Friday, April 7, 2000 |
Y'know, some days you just need to have a laugh. Okay, most days I need a laugh. Several of them, in fact. So when I need a laugh, desperately, I just thumb a ride on the nearest interplanetary craft and take a quick hop over to the Ghost Planet. Never fails for me. Then again, I've got a notoriously weird sense of humor.
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Ridley Scott knows how to direct an action picture, and this is one of his better efforts. It's hard to keep yourself from comparing the gladiators and arena to such contemporary appalling spectacles as professional wrestling, the Jerry Springer show, and professional athletics - basketball, football and hockey in particular.