Archive for March, 2010

I’m going to go ahead and say it. The Norman Y. Mineta San Jose International Airport, Terminal C, architecture circa a long ass time ago when it was apparently in vogue to make things look and feel unpleasant (I think maybe of the Fluorescent Tube and Beige School, Low Ceiling/Concrete genre) is, for its size and class, the ugliest airport structure I have endured in recent memory. Of course, I’m not exactly an expert on the subject. But I know what I (don’t) like.

This past weekend has been almost unendurable in its pleasantness. Staying at my in-laws in Arroyo Grande, I woke each morning with a dumb grin on my face, bouncing against walls and windows like a terrier until I was allowed out to the beach or hillside. Two birds of paradise bloomed in the front yard. There were palm trees. Boing boing!

It was Sunday today and I went for a hike with David and my mother-in-law, Cathy, to Oso Flaco Lake and then on to the seashore here on the Central Coast of California. Oso Flaco Lake is spring-fed and outflows in a robust channel to the ocean. The stream-channel-outflow-thing has tremendous velocity and changes course in front of your eyes, eroding micro-cliffs of sand and curving tighter and then looser again.

Houghton Mifflin’s annual “Best American” series is getting far-flung. In 1915, the first Best American Short Stories anthology was published. These days, you can get a yearly dose of Best Comics, Best Crime Reporting, Best Medical Writing, Best Short Plays, et cetera. Last year I read The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2008 and was pleased. This year, I just finished reading The Best American Science Writing 2009.

Like any anthology, this one has its ups and downs. It made for a quick read and a couple of ah-ha moments, but if you miss out on it, you won’t be hopelessly left behind.

I first saw this over ten years ago, unexpectedly, on cable or something, under the eaves over the garage in the room I lived in in a house in southwest Portland with Mike and someone else who was possibly the Devil. Enjoy.

Photo of Rowan Atkinson by Gerhard Heeke

I’ve been shopping at Powell’s City of Books for my entire life, and as such, maintain a complicated, sometimes fretful relationship with the enormous bookstore not unlike relationships I might carry on with a human, full of bluster and happy times and occasionally anger. In the way of a blunted, old friendship, sometimes I take for granted the gems that still can be found.

My goal was to find a good edition of Plato’s Republic, but I was in, oh, what you might call the Plato section; this being Powell’s, reputed to be the largest bookstore in the free world, you could probably build an inhabitable structure out of their selection of Platonic texts. Tucked into the rows somewhere, which, by dint of the astronomical number of volumes Powell’s holds and the rather unassuming dun brown color of the spine, was an adorable copy of Plato’s Symposium or Supper from the Nonesuch Press, from 1924.

The Daily Shoot assignment for March 17: Grab your camera and walk 2 minutes in any direction. Stop. Find a photo worth making from where you stopped and post it.

This was challenging. The place I ended up two minutes into my morning foot commute to work that day was wretched: the low brick wall near an abandoned, grimy building owned by the city. An area rife with graffiti and trash, but without any of the strange intrigue that such areas sometimes have. Just ugly.

I tried photographing it to capture the bleakness. But it just looked like a sad dirty wall and some sad dirty sidewalk. I tried looking up, but just got, yawn, some bare tree branches and telephone wires. Again, yawn.

It wasn’t until I kneeled next to the wall, crawled in close, and really looked that I saw that there were small plant-lings growing here. Unfurling. Happily being plants. And I was satisfied.

I think that this is a great exercise. The timed, pseudo-random photographing. Dadaism would be proud.

This is not a book for the impatient. Dense, demanding and highbrow, Norman Rush’s National Book Award-winning novel about an obsessive academic chasing idealized love in the Botswana bush of the early 1980s is both adorable and infuriating in its impenetrable cleverness.

To you, the reader, Norman Rush says “You’d better work as hard as I did.” Mating demands familiarity with all of the major liberal arts fields, from western philosophy to political theory. The vocabulary is borderline cruel, forcing me to keep a dictionary handy. Echt, adumbrate, lares, bouleversement, noetic, crescive, elenchus, divagate, apercus, anschluss, sessile—on nearly every page of the 500-page intellectual trial was a word I’d never even seen before. What was he thinking? Does he hate us? Maybe not, but you’d better be up-to-date on your classes of socialism and your grasp of Middlemarch and Latin phraseology.

At the beginning of the year, I set some outlines for some reading I’d like to accomplish in 2010. These goals represent not only book titles, but, in some cases, areas and concepts I’d like to explore. There’s some philosophy and some science in here, as well as some classic novels I never seem to get around to reading. Let’s see how it’s going.

The Oregonian recently used a photo of mine, on the front page, without permission. Was this an accident caused by staff stretched too thin in a failing publishing industry? Or ignorance of how to find digital content, legally, to use commercially? The situation has been rectified with an apology and offer of compensation, but leaves me concerned that this might be happening more often than I’d like to think.

Okay, I confess. I know that A User’s Guide to the Universe edged out The Drunkard’s Walk in this poll about which science title I should read next, but in true me fashion I ended up purchasing all four books. And when the package arrived and I scanned the first pages of each, I found it entirely impossible to put Mlodinow’s fantastic surveying romp through probability, chance and statistics down. I read the first 100 pages in one sitting.

This is the kind of book I unqualifyingly recommend to everyone. Most things I read and like have audience segments. I can’t really recommend Dumas to my friend who really loves YA novels; I don’t think David would be into Jane Austen. But this book? Read it, read it, read it.