Day 167: The Witch of Hebron

The Witch of Hebron by James Howard Kunstler.  ISBN: 9780802116912 (uncorrected proof - published September 7, 2010).

There would be quite a few benefits to living in a world without electricity or oil.  We would automatically lead healthier lives with the necessity of traveling by foot or horseback.  We would probably eat heartier, but all of the food would be natural, with no chemical additives.  I imagine butter and bacon grease isn't so bad for us if you take away the preservatives and the leisurely lifestyle.

We would once again be force to rely on each other in a cooperative manner rather than a server-and-served capacity.  It's hard to treat someone as subservient or disrespectfully when you will rely on them to doctor your animals or your children, when you might rely on them to grow poppies for your laudanum supply since there are no longer more reliable anesthesia methods available.  At the very least you rely on them to help watch your property and protect your family from wild animals and outsiders.

We could see the stars again.  Bright.  Luminous.  More awe-inspiring because we have no hopes of reaching them again.

I had the privilege and misfortune of living without electricity for four months.  It was not a complete lack, we did have solar panels, which were used sparingly, and of course there were battery powered flashlights for trips to the bathroom and to light the kerosene lamps.  We were in an isolated area, the nearest neighbor was about a mile and a half and there was no light pollution to speak of.

It was not an easy adjustment for me.  There were moments when I sought refuge in the comforts of electric lights and hot running water and central heat.  But there was also a pleasure in learning to build a fire in the wood stove.  There was a romance in writing letters to friends by kerosene lantern or reading the works of Dumas, who probably wrote his work in similarly dim and cold surroundings.

I don't know that I want to go back to a life without electricity or automobiles, but I think I would be prepared to see the good, to revert back to a life where knowing my neighbor is a necessity rather than a pleasantry.

My review can be found on Goodreads.

Day 166: Adaptations

"Rear Window" by Cornell Woolrich in Adaptations: From Short Story to Big Screen.*
ISBN: 97814000053148.

The premise of this short story is that a nosey neighbor with a broken leg and too much time on his hands witnesses suspicious behavior in the building next to him.  He suspects murder and calls the cops.  The question is, how morally responsible are we for reporting suspicious behavior?

This is such a tricky question for me.  As a librarian I unequivocally believe in every citizens' right to privacy.  But if someone's life is in danger or has been taken, don't I also have a responsibility, as a social being and a community member, to prevent harm?  These are the ethical dilemmas of both my profession and my own moral compass.  I am actually not so frightened of the people who come to the library and check out books about bomb making or euthanasia; these are people who act openly even if only in front of their circulation clerk.  I'm more concerned about the people who hide in their homes and do research solely on the internet.  Not that I think their actions should be monitored either, but there is something to the "I'm not doing anything wrong so I have nothing to hide" mentality.

But what if I did observe this behavior in a setting I was not meant to observe?  If I viewed suspicious behavior in someone else's home, I honestly don't know how I would react.  It's likely not a decision I would make on my own.  I would probably discuss it closely with family or friends to determine the best reaction.  I certainly wouldn't rely solely on my own speculations and paranoia to make the best judgment.  But I think perhaps the best I can hope for is to never have to make that decision.


*Film adaptation is Rear Window (1954).  Short story was originally titled "It Had to be Murder."
**Post originally written August 14th, 2010.  I'm a little behind on my reading.

Day 165: Breaking Night

Breaking Night by Liz Murray. ISBN: 9780786868919 (ARC - publishes Sept 7, 2010).

Early in the book Murray talks about her dad going through the trash.  Man, oh man, do I love dumpster diving.  I've never really been brave enough to actually dig through dumpsters, but I've always been fond of trash.  In fact, my first forays into dumpster diving were around the age of 8 or so. 

We were station in Altus, Oklahoma at the time, and there just wasn't a whole lot to do in the neighborhood.  I sometimes made extra cash by picking up aluminum cans and having my dad take them to the recycling center for me.  I usually got about three to four dollars from a 12 gallon trash bag of cans (crushed of course).  But I also picked out small appliances and took them apart.  I remember finding a rotatory dial telephone once and spending the evening removing the casing and separating the parts.  I kept the bell for awhile, and stuck the magnet on the fridge, I saved all the screws and placed them in my mom's tool box.

But I've also picked up furniture on the side of the road.  One of my favorite tables I picked up while walking back to my dorm room one day.  It wasn't in very good condition, but it had that amazing kidney shape and was fairly tall, with a drawer.  In order to cover the poor condition of the table top I wrapped it up in a piece of green fabric and it looked passable in my last dorm room and first apartment.  It worked quite well for dropping mail.

I'm not opposed to going through trash for something usable.  I'm not quite ambitious enough to dig through the really nasty stuff, but I will definitely pick up things on the top that aren't touching questionable substances.  We throw away so much in this country, but then it seems no one has time to try to fix anything or find it a better home.  Some of us have to be proactive about find those throwaways new places to live.

My review can be found over at Goodreads.com.

Day 164: Breaking Night

Breaking Night by Liz Murray. ISBN: 9780786868919 (ARC - publishes Sept 7, 2010).

I don't have a whole lot in common with Murray.  I certainly didn't have parents who did coke (to my knowledge, anyway) and I don't recall ever going hungry even if I didn't get everything I ever wanted.  I did skip school.  It wasn't so much that I wasn't motivated to go, or that I spent the day hanging out with my friends.  Usually I took the day off because I didn't have any friends, and was often actively antagonized by my classmates.

With so little to look forward to in my day, and what seemed like mostly pointless classes, I just stayed home.  I think my mother knew that most of the time I was faking illness, and then there were the times were she left for work before I was even awake and told her I didn't go because "I wasn't feeling well."  It was true, for three out of four years the idea of going to school filled me with a dread that curled up in my stomach and stayed there all day. 

I didn't do much with my days.  I actually usually just did homework or read ahead in my textbooks.  I watched Ricki Lake and The Price is Right.  I napped a lot.  I just enjoyed the lack of pressure of staying home.  I didn't have to work hard to be invisible or quiet, to try and go unnoticed.  A good day at school was one where no one talked to me or about me or pointed at me and laughed.  A good day off from school was one where I was able to do whatever I wanted, no one missed me, and I could breathe.  If I had been able to go to high school where I could just focus on my classes and be left alone, I would have been fine.  Instead I took the maximum number of health days from class I could without failing or getting my mother in trouble.

In contrast I hardly ever missed a class at Antioch.

My review can be found over at Goodreads.com.

Day 163: Mockingjay

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins.  ISBN: 9780439023511.

Collins' take on the role of media in this book is absolutely fabulous.  In fact, I think someone could write a very well written college-level paper about the Media as Character and manage to astound their professor if they were ambitious enough.  With three books' worth of material you could easily write about 15 pages and include an analysis of the personalities of different news and "news" shows.

I'm actually very happy that there as no internet in the Districts or the Capitol.  It would have made the dumb complacency of the Capitol highly unbelievable.  With a tightly controlled televised media, it's easy to pipe whatever thoughts you want into households and make people swallow it.  Since there was no communication between districts, you had to accept the information as true, or know that it was fabricated and altered, but not how.  No one was able to fact check, so it was nearly impossible for anyone to start a rebellion because no one really knew how bad it was except for their own little District.  Not that I think the internet would have helped form a revolution, but it would have potentially created a more informed citizenry.  Our civilization is complacent in different ways.  We seem to enjoy being uninformed and somewhat stupid, but I think that's a different topic.

I was actually surprised that the rebellion decided to use Katniss in pretty much the same way the Capitol used her during the Hunger Games.  In fact, I was surprised that Kantiss allowed this.  I suppose I shouldn't have been; by this point it probably felt natural to have cameras follow her around.  I'm not saying I didn't expect the Rebellion to use her for publicity, but sending her into combat situations with cameras seems like a very risky move to a group of people concerned with losing a sustainable population of humans.

Sure, we throw camera men, etc. in to combat situations, but we have billions of people where the world Katniss lives in probably only had thousands.  We're also not used to the idea of watching live combat situations for entertainment (unless you count boxing, a handful of other sports, and cop shows).  It seems to me that the Rebellion would want to distance itself from the Capitol as much as possible, but then when you're trying to reach an audience I suppose you work with what's best.  Kind of makes you think about the TV shows we watch and have foisted on us, not to mention the kind of news they try to feed us.

An excellent spoiler-free review can be found over at books i done read.  I have previous posts about Hunger Games and Catching Fire.  Click the shiny links.

Day 162: Mockingjay

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins.  ISBN: 9780439023511.

Holy crap.  That was not the ending I was expecting, despite all the griping from other book bloggers I've been reading, or skimming really in an attempt to avoid spoilers.  It's definitely a worthy ending to the series, and I think will be appreciated much more once people calm the fuck down and get over the hype.  I will agree that the tacked on epilogue was very end-of-Harry-Potteresque and I hated them both.  They were unnecessary, the story was over, I don't need to know what happens after everything is wrapped up.  That's what fan-fiction is for.

Now I'm going to get on a soap box and start yelling at people.  Here we go.

Cut out the Team Peeta, Team Gale, Team Whatever bullshit!

Ahem.  Thank you.  Seriously, you have no idea how much this annoys me.  Sure, it's cute when they do the sketches on The Daily Show.  However, it is obnoxious and insulting when grown women (in particular) do it and not much better when teenager girls do it.  You wanna know why?  Of course you do, because I'm ragey and hatey and it makes for good blogging.  It's insulting because it assumes that (in this case) Katniss only has two options and that she can't make valid decisions for herself, so we, the audience, ought to barge in and make them for her with yelling and shouting and fan-girling all over the place.


Oh, but she's a fictional character, so it's okay to have a little bit of fun with it, etc.  Okay, so it doesn't have a direct influence on a real person's life, but I don't think this is behavior we ought to be encouraging women to participate in.  They may end up distrusting their own judgment regarding their selection of mates, and the idea of using a system as childish as Team X or Y kind of makes me sick to my stomach.  It also removes any sort of autonomy or power or even responsibility from the person in question to make her own decisions about her future.

Without giving away too much about the end, I think Katniss made the right decision for her, because it was probably the first and only decision she actually made on her own. In fact, I think Collins tried to slip in some "OMG STFU about the Team shit" herself when she has Katniss make this statement very early in the book: 

"The very notion that I'm devoting any thought to who I want presented as my lover, given our current circumstances, is demeaning."  Page 40.

Yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.  Yes.  For the first two books Katniss was consistently told us she had no interest in getting married regardless of how she felt for anyone because she didn't want to bring children into a world with the Hunger Games.  Rather than applauding her maturity in this decision (when she seems to avoid being mature about much else, granted - teenager), people are yelling and screaming and fawning and pressing for her to choose one or the other and right now.

They're fictional characters and they're going to end up with who the author wants them to end up with, but they're also stand-ins for real human beings and we need to respect who they are and who they represent as people.  Don't get pissy when they make the "wrong" choice, it's not your decision to make and we read to grow.  Watching other people make the wrong choice is often more helpful than having them live perfect lives, and often a lot more exciting.

I am decidedly Team STFU, by the way.  And maybe a bit Team Buttercup, but who can go wrong loving a cat?

An excellent spoiler-free review can be found over at books i done read.  I have previous posts about Hunger Games and Catching Fire.  Click the shiny links.

Day 161: a general update

So...I dropped two books from my reading since the last time I made a general update.  I just could not get into Kelly Armstrong's Frostbitten and I think Bozo Sapiens was just a little too smart for me given my current level of brain activity.  I might try that one again at some point, but the nature of the writing does not make me want to read it non-stop.

Anyway, I finished Mockingjay yesterday so expect two posts about that.  You'll find out whether I'm Team Gale or Team Peeta.  I'll also be discussing the use of media in Mockingjay, which I found to be a fascinating element of the series.

I've decided to participate in Banned Book Week this year, and while I'm willing to take suggestions I've already got a tentative list that includes: Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, The Golden Compass by Phillip Pullman, Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of Grapes of Wrath by Rick Wartzman, Gerald's Game by Stephen King, and maybe a few others if I have time/lack inspiration to write multiple posts on one book.  I am more than willing to have multiple posts during the week, so if you want to be a guest blogger feel free to email me with your post, or to ask for details.

I don't have plans for reading between now and Banned Book Week which is September 25-October 2 (and starts on Shel Silverstein's birthday appropriately enough).  I've pretty much decided to work on my stack of ARCs that I picked up from ALA with the occasional library book thrown in.  So from now until about the 25th, my reading will be a surprise to the both of us...unless you're watching my Goodreads account, in which case you'll at least know what I'll be posting about next.

By the way, today is Richard Wright's 102nd birthday.  His book Black Boy frequently shows up on banned book lists.

Day 160: My Empire of Dirt

My Empire of Dirt: How One Man Turned His Big-City Backyard into a Farm by Manny Howard.  ISBN: 9781416585169.

So I talked a little bit yesterday about caring for plants.  But I bet you didn't know I actually worked on a farm for a few weekends when I was an undergraduate.  One of the professors lived on a couple of acres and he raised turkeys and vegetables mostly.  A friend and I went out to repair a wooden fence.  This was work I really got into.

Howard didn't much appreciate it because he felt his fence was just aesthetic.  I'm sure his neighbors would disagree with him.  People just don't expect chickens to wander into their yards in big cities.  The professor's was less of a partition fence and more of a corral for the turkeys.

The first step in fixing the fence was to determine which parts of the wood were rotten.  This was accomplished by using the claw of a hammer or the point of a knife.  There's something very satisfying about finding the rotten wood, the way the knife just sinks into it.  Some pieces were so rotten that you'd whack the board with the hammer and it would completely break in two.  Replacing the boards often took two people, one to hold it in place and the other to hammer it down.  Then we would paint it.  We must have replaced 60-some feet of fence over the course of several weekends.

And then there were the turkeys.  We weren't really required to do anything with them, but when the professor asked me to feed the turkeys I was all for it.  It consisted of taking a bucket of table scraps and tossing it the yard and then calling the turkeys.  I did this, only to see the flock rushing towards me and gobbling angrily.  Not knowing what else to do, I turned and bolted back towards the house while my friend sat there laughing her ass off.  I yelled at her to open the door, it was something along the lines of, "Oh shit, oh shit, open the door!"  Of course when I turned around I saw the professors huge dog* herding the turkeys towards to food (and therefore me).

I doubt the turkeys would have actually hurt me, but at the time I panicked and had no clue what else to do.  It's kind of hard to think rationally when you have about twelve 20 pound birds coming at you at what seems an impossible speed for mostly flightless birds.  Turkeys, I have no qualms eating them after that experience.

*He came up to my thigh and I'm 5'8".

My first encounter with this book was via the Colbert Report.  However, I found this to be a pretty accurate review, although I only gave it three stars.

Day 159: My Empire of Dirt

My Empire of Dirt: How One Man Turned His Big-City Backyard into a Farm by Manny Howard.  ISBN: 9781416585169.

I have almost no desire to spend time outside, particularly doing something like gardening.  I am decidedly beyond domesticated, I am leisure-ized.  However, I do have a bit of experience in gardening and there is some small part of me that enjoys it.  The other part just wants to go back inside, pick up my book, and have a beer.

Anyway, my most recent gardening experience was a little more than a year ago.  Anticipating a period of unemployment I took on odd jobs on top of my 25-30 hours of paid work, 10 hours of unpaid practicum work, and 10-15 hours of homework in order to pad my savings a bit (I left graduate school with about $5000).  One of those jobs was weeding a fairly large yard for a former professor, now former coworker, and still good friend of mine.  I had done previous work for her that included feeding her laying and meat chickens when they were still chicks, watching the house, taking in mail, and feeding/caring for her 7 cats and 3 dogs.  The longest stint was for about 2 weeks and I was ready to go home, and this was before the chickens.

So having a good rapport and being familiar with her home already, she asked if I would like to weed her flower beds.  Since she was and is a good reference and an even better friend, I agreed.  Besides, I could use the money and the forced time spent in the daylight and the dirt.  There is definitely something to be said about working with the ground and plant matter.  I received a great deal of satisfaction watching the weeds pile up and the beds start to look less cluttered and more cultured.  I even enjoyed correctly identifying the poison ivy, although the resulting blisters were much less enjoyable.

But the idea of maintaining a yard for a long period of time has absolutely no appeal to me.  I would feel guilty not being out in it if I had a nice yard, and feel even more guilt when the yard goes to pot, which it inevitably would if I had one.  I enjoy the benefits of lawn and grass and beautiful flowers, but I don't like the necessity it creates.  Which is funny, because this blog necessitates the crap out of me.

My first encounter with this book was via the Colbert Report.  However, I found this to be a pretty accurate review, although I only gave it three stars.

Day 158: Speak

Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson. ISBN: 9780141310886.

One of the ways Melinda copes with her difficult social and emotional situation is by self-harming.  I don't think many people know this, but I practiced self-harm through a large portion of my teenage years.  I was probably about 14 when it started, and I didn't stop until I was about 17 or 18.  I still self-harm on particularly stressful occasions, but not as regularly as I used to.  In fact, I can't recall the last time I did it, but the urge is still there.

I don't know why other people do it, but I'll tell you why I did.  I was invisible.  I was invisible to everyone except for the person I wanted most to be invisible to.  My brother was physically abusive to me and I was constantly terrified that it would turn into sexual abuse.  His behavior was erratic and he would get angry for what seemed like no reason.  He was on drugs and his friends were verbally abusive to me and sometimes inappropriate around me and my friends.

Mostly I think I was internalizing the abuse.  It was a way of having some control over the pain and the fear I knew I would be facing again, but didn't know when to expect.  I never cut very deeply, they were surface wounds and always on my forearm, but I felt that I deserved it and that it's what people wanted for me because no one was stopping what else was going on.  On particularly bad days I would scream at my mother after being hit or tormented by my brother and then lock myself in my room and bang my head against the wall until I felt like vomiting from the headache and the crying.  It had the added benefit of upsetting my mother as much as it upset me.  I was trying to speak, but no one was listening, so I stopped talking.

It was an extreme relief when my mother installed outside locks on our bedroom doors.  There had been times where I had to sit against the door because my brother would pop the other lock with a screw driver so he could come in and hit me.  There are days when I really don't know how I survived those years, because I desperately, desperately wanted to die, but just didn't know how to go through with it.

This is a pretty good review, if somewhat on the short and scanty side.  This has been discussed before by guest blogger Dan Walker.  Read his post here.