Girl Detective

If you’re free any time today, head to the Minnesota State Fair for Minnesota Cooks Day. Admission is discounted, and there are demonstrations by local chefs all day, with free food samples of what they cook! I’ll be at the Simple Good and Tasty booth this morning, and doing things my kids wouldn’t want to the rest of the time, like visiting Creative Activities, Fine Arts and such.

My piece on how to enjoy the fair with your family is up today at Simple Good and Tasty. Check out yesterday’s post on guilty fair-food pleasures. You know: Oh, no, I shouldn’t. OK, one bite. Chomp. Ummm. OK, well one more. Wait, where’d it go?

I don’t know about the rest of you, but my version of seasonal affective disorder happens four times a year, not just between fall and winter. Each shift in weather and schedule brings its own need for realignment and re-equilibration.

7yo Drake started 1st grade today, and I’ve got four (4!) different articles I’m working on. 4yo Guppy doesn’t start preschool till next week. I’m trying to calm things down myself. Today rather than having more coffee I made iced Evening in Missoula tea. The heat and humidity are certainly not helping. The switch from summer to fall is off to racing start; I hope things settle down soon.

After Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun, I wanted to read Josh Neufeld’s graphic “novel” (narrative, I’d say), A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, which depicts New Orleans and some of its inhabitants before, during and long after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.
Neufeld was a Red Cross volunteer in the aftermath of the hurricane, and began by chronicling his experiences online, which eventually led to this book.

The city itself is almost a character, since the book begins with the storm before it moves into the people. There are seven main characters in a rotation of five stories. They have different ages, ethnicities and religions. Some left; some stayed. Some returned; some did not.

A.D. New Orleans shows, in pictures and text, an up-close reality very unlike the lawless chaos the media was so eager to emphasize. As with Zeitoun, the personal is political, and the specifics point to universalities. This book makes it all too easy, and decidedly uncomfortable, to imagine oneself in one (or several) of the characters’ shoes. Highly recommended.

The August selection for Twin Cities’ Books and Bars was Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun, a meticulous recounting of one New Orleans family’s experience of Hurricane Katrina and its deadly aftermath. The eponymous man of the title (whose first name is Abdulrahman) remains in the city before during and after the hurricane. He chose not to leave, though his wife, Kathy, and children did. It’s also their story, about the struggles of one refugee family and the difficulty of remaining in contact with those left behind.

Epitomizing the phrase “the personal is political,” Zeitoun addresses issues of class, race, politics and, as trite as it may sound, humanity. As the book began, I was irritated by the writing. Eggers’ description of Zeitoun seemed to pedestalize the man, while reading more like a screenplay at times than a work of critical nonfiction.

Zeitoun pulled onto Earhart Boulevard, though a part of him was still in Jableh. Whenever he had these morning thoughts of his childhood, he wondered how they all were, his family in Syria, all of his brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews scattered up and down the coast, and those who had long ago left this world. His mother died a few years after his father passed on, and he’d lost a treasured brother, Mohammed, when he was very young. but the rest of his siblings, those still in Syria and Spain and Saudi Arabia, were all doing well, extraordinarily so. The Zeitouns were a high-achieving clan, full of doctors and school principals and generals and business owners, all of them with a passion for the sea. (12)

As I read on, though, I was completely and utterly won over to Zeitoun the man and to the plight of his family specifically, and New Orleans in general. This is often painful read, but tremendously moving and heartening. It’s an examination of the racism that persists, especially toward Arab-Americans and Muslims in the wake of 9/11. The current debate in New York City over what should be where in the aftermath of 9/11 shows how fresh these issues remain. The book is also an education, about the Muslim tradition and an unforgivable government and media debacle in our history.

The recent furor on whether Jonathan Franzen and his book are being overhyped because he’s a white male makes me wonder at the amount and content of the praise Zeitoun has received, e.g., Entertainment Weekly picked it as a book of the decade. I can’t and won’t say whether it merits the praise, but I do say it’s an emotional and provocative narrative, well worth reading, discussing and ruminating on how the future might change, given this oft-ugly chapter of the past.

New gap on TBR (To Be Read) shelf:

New residents of AR/IDCTR (Already Read/I Don’t Care To Read) shelf:

We did it! My husband and I finished reading Neal Stephenson’s System of the World well before the end of August for my self-assigned Baroque Summer reading project. We read Quicksilver in June, The Confusion in July, and the third volume in Stephenson’s sprawling, insane, erudite and entertaining Baroque Cycle trilogy this month.

SotW continues with main characters Jack Shaftoe, Daniel Waterhouse, and Eliza, duchess of Qwglhm (which Stephenson says is a joke and not meant to be pronounced, but I hear in my head as the Simpson’s Chief Wiggum saying his name, but with a K sound in front of it ending with a mushy r: Kwiggulm”). And there are a host of other characters (Isaac Newton, Princess Caroline, Louis the Sun King) who are almost as entertaining as the ones Stephenson invented.

“Men half your age and double your weight have been slain on these wastes by Extremity of Cold,” said the Earl of Lostwithiel, Lord Warden of the Stannaries, and Rider of the Forest and Chase of Dartmoor, to one of his two fellow-travelers….

“I am astonished that you should call this an extremity of cold,” answered the old man. “In Boston, as you know, this would pass without remark. I am garbed for Boston.”

Stephenson is a huge geek, and the book is about (among many, many things) the rise of finance, philosophy, natural sciences, and computers. If you’ve enjoyed other Stephenson, like Snow Crash or Diamond Age, it’s likely your thing. It also reminded me, in its sprawling, inventive craziness, of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Susannah Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. If you liked any of these, and aren’t opposed to doorstoppy books, give the trilogy a look. If not, or if you don’t identify as a geek, this probably isn’t a good fit.

I had a good time reading these as a summer project. They’re so dense it was sometimes hard to keep track of the details and personae, but reading them consecutively and reading along with my husband helped a great deal. I was involved with the characters, learned things from the historic details, was eager to return to the book when I was away from it, and sad to leave it when it was done.

Geeky stats: Trilogy begun 4 June, finished 21 August 2010. Other books read in that time: 12, out of which 8 were graphic novels. Total pages (not including intro and outro material and acks): 2,618.

How long before we succumb to a re-read of Cryptonomicon, which the trilogy is kind of a prequel to? Not long, I bet, though as usual my TBR list is long.

The Scott Pilgrim comic series by Bryan Lee O’Malley is about the 20-something slacker kid of the title and his efforts to woo and win the girl of his dreams, Ramona Flowers. There are many obstacles along the way, like his chaste romance with high schooler Knives Chau, and Ramona’s seven evil exes, whom Scott must defeat in combat. Lucky for him he’s the best fighter in the province. (He’s Canadian.)

I think my favorite is volume 1, since it epitomizes the out-there, wacky visual humor of the entire series, and often made me laugh aloud. My least favorite was volume 3, since it wasn’t as funny. My favorite character was probably drummer Kim Pine (below, left).

The entire series of six is a fun-filled ride of manga-inspired goofiness that I highly recommend.

Oh, and the movie’s good, too.

Here is an excerpt from Neal Stephenson’s System of the World, volume 3 of the Baroque Cycle. One of the fictional main characters, the natural philosopher Daniel Waterhouse, is in a carriage with Isaac Newton. I found it particularly hilarious, and a good example of how Stephenson mixes humor and scientific history, with some characterization thrown in for good measure. Is it hilarious if you haven’t read the book?

In an apt demonstration of the principle of Relativity, as propounded by Galileo, the platter, and the steaming morsels thereon, remained in the same position vis-a-vis Daniel, and hence were in principle, just as edible, as if he had been seated before, and the pies had been resting upon, a table that was stationary with respect to the fixed stars. This was true despite the fact that the carriage containing Daniel, Isaac Newton, and the pies was banging around London…

Isaac, though better equipped than Daniel or any other man alive to understand Relativity, shewed no interest in his pie–as if being in a state of movement with respect to the planet Earth rendered it somehow Not a Pie. But as far as Daniel was concerned, a pie in a moving frame of reference was no less a pie than one that was sitting still: position and velocity, to him, might be perfectly interesting physical properties, but they had no bearing on, no relationship to those properties that were essential to pie-ness. All that mattered to Daniel were relationships between his, Daniel’s, physical state and that of the pie. If Daniel and Pie were close together both in position and velocity, then pie-eating became a practical, and tempting, possibility. If Pie were far asunder from Daniel or moving at a large relative velocity–e.g., being hurled at his face–then its pie-ness was somehow impaired, at least from the Daniel frame of reference. For the time being, however, these were purely Scholastic hypotheticals. Pie was on his lap and very much a pie, not matter what Isaac might think of it.

…Daniel, as he spoke, had tucked a napkin into his shirt-collar–a flag of surrender, and an unconditional capitulation to the attractions of Pie. Rather than laying down arms, he now picked them up–knife and fork….And he stabbed Pie. (p. 457)

At Kung Fu Monkey, Jane Austen’s Fight Club. (HT G. Grod.)

Some anniversaries have blown by this summer. My blog anniversary was in June; I can’t even find the archives anymore, though, so I can’t remember what day it was in 2002. And I moved to Minnesota in June of 1998 where I was immediately confronted with sights like this:

except the trees were at least 4 times the size of the one above, and advertisements for cars on sale due to hail damage.

I was flabbergasted. I’d been prepared for a rough winter and distinctive accents. I had NOT known to expect tornado warnings and giant hail stones, like these that damaged our car recently in the ‘burbs.

Hard winters AND hard summers? I almost picked up and left. But didn’t. And here I am, with husband and two sons, twelve years later.

Another culture shock was Minnesotans wrote checks for everything: fast food, movies, small purchases, high end restaurants, and more. While I haven’t elongated my o’s, I have adopted this check-writing habit. Did you know it’s less expensive for businesses, especially small ones, to process checks than credit/debit cards?

Can we all just not apologize for how busy we’ve been and how lax we’ve been about blogging, etc.? Good.

My summer reading project has been Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle trilogy: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World. Not only am I on track to finish, but I’m actually a bit ahead! As with Infinite Jest, which I read last summer, this has been an entertaining, involving and educational read, and I’m so glad I’ve finally gotten around to these books.

Stephenson mixes fascinating historical characters like Isaac Newton and Leibniz with fictional ones like the Shaftoe clan and Eliza. The result is a wild ride that succeeds in making things like science, history, finance and philosophy not just understandable, but fun and funny, with some etymology thrown in for good measure, like the origins of the words mob and face.

I chose well when I picked this project and hope to give a better review near the end of this month.

What are you reading now, and what are you reading next? Next for me is Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun.