A New Feature: LD's cool stuff

Man, I wish I'd thought of this one during NaBloPoMo. It was actually inspired by tikiranch, whom you must visit if you haven't done so yet. His blog made me realize that I have some pretty cool stuff too, and that I should share it with the whole internet, rather than have it sit around the house, unappreciated by everyone but me, and occasionally a cat who needs something to knock over.

So, my first item is something I found this summer at the local flea market. It's a wonderful place, with three large buildings, two buildings consisting of bays with roll-up doors, and rows upon rows of ancient folding tables covered with equal parts goodies and crap. This item stuck out like a jewel. I've never seen anything like it before or since. The first time I saw it, no one was around and it wasn't priced. I imagined it must be rather expensive, since it was so unusual. A few weeks later, it was back. I told the man watching it that I'd seen it a few weeks ago and hadn't been able to get it out of my head. He told me that the time I'd seen it was the only other time he'd brought it. Deciding it must be fate, we struck a deal for $15 and it's graced my dining room ever since.

It's apparently an advertising/storage piece for pharmaceuticals. After I bought it, I googled the company and learned that Bauer and Black were in business in Chicago during the early twentieth century, operating under that name from about 1901-1928. The Pure Food and Drug Act, referenced on the chest, was passed in 1906, meaning that this was produced somewhere between 1906 and 1928 (I'm guessing more towards the early range, though, because it seems likely that as time went on, there'd be no need to advertise compliance with a particular law, it would just be assumed).



It's not in the best condition, but it's a very interesting piece nonetheless. In case it's not obvious from the picture, it's constructed of a very flimsy, thin sort of wood and covered in paper on all sides but the bottom. It's a minor miracle to me that the piece survived at all. But still, it's one of those things in my home that I enjoy looking it literally every time I see it, that's never quite blended in to the background. I hope you enjoyed seeing it, too.

Booking Through Thursday, a 2009 first

One of my New Year's Resolutions is to stop neglecting my poor blog. So, here I am, posting something for 2009. It's a Booking Through Thursday and it goes like this:

Happy New Year, everyone!

So … any Reading Resolutions? Say, specific books you plan to read? A plan to read more ____? Anything at all?

Name me at least ONE thing you’re looking forward to reading this year!

My main reading resolution is to stop flaking on my library books. I'm horrible. I'm surprised they don't have my picture behind the counter. I'm surprised they haven't called the cops on me like they did to one woman earlier this year that I read about. I returned four books last week that were 16 days overdue each. Yikes. Why? I just forgot. So I'm going to stop doing that.

I am also going to be braver. About a year ago, I checked an H.P Lovecraft book out of the library. I read one story and was so scared that I locked the book in my car overnight. I didn't even want it in the house. I'd like to say I returned it the next day. The truth is that it fell under the seat and I returned it six weeks late. But anyway, I watched some H.P Lovecraft movies on Halloween and liked them, so my sister got me a book of his short stories for Christmas. That's right, now they'll be in the house all the time! I've read two of them, and they were both pretty good: one was about a cannibal, and the other one was about an undead guy. I don't know if I can hack the one called "Rats in the Walls," but I'm going to read the rest of them.

I want to read some of the books that have been lurking unread on my shelves for years. I recently rearranged my bookshelves to have all of the unread ones together, and they took up their own whole shelf. I'm really missing out, either on wonderful books, or on much-needed shelf space. My goal for 2009 is to start finding out which.

Another goal is to simply find more new stuff to read. There's nothing that I'm hotly anticipating. Im not sure why. So I'm going to work on keeping up with new books better, discovering new authors, trying new things. That's not a bad new year's resolution on the whole, to try new things. We'll see!

It's the Little Things That Count

I've clearly been a pretty unsinspired blogger lately. I could offer a variety of excuses: The Holidays made me do it, No Good Books, Blah With Life, etc. None of them are really true, and I think it's just that after forcing myself to write every day for a month, when most days I didn't really want to, I still needed a break.

But I decided to post today, to close out 2008, and also to share with anyone who may read this blog a new favorite site of mine!

I love collecting stuff. I always have. I have a collection of mid-twentieth century salt-and-pepper shakers. I have a collection of gargoyle figures. At my parents' house, I have stored away my collection of wooden Welsh love spoons (mostly bought in the Wales shop at Disneyworld). I have a very small collection of clocks made by the Telechron company. I get a lot of this stuff at a huge flea market in my area, often for very cheap (I estimate that I have about 30 salt-and-pepper shakers, and I probably have only spent about $60 on this collection).

But when I'm out there, I often see lots of other cool stuff that I wouldn't know quite what to do with. Sometimes, one of the tool vendors that my dad likes to check out will have a bunch of rusty old nails in a very cool box. There's another vendor that always has a huge box of greeting cards from the fifties and sixties. Or, mixed in with a bunch of costume jewelry on the dollar table will be a name tag with an interesting logo. I usually pass this stuff up, thinking "What would I do with it?"

Well, the Tikiranch knows. You take it home, dust it off if need be, and post it on one of the coolest websites ever. I came across the Tikiranch about a year ago, via Bighappyfunhouse (another favorite of mine) but I've recently become semi-obsessed, adding it to my daily blog rounds and now, to my sidebar. I even love the name, "Tikiranch," evoking as it does a bunch of tiki gods wearing cowboy hats and roping cattle. The site is very simple, but it makes me happy every day. The stuff he finds is aesthetically pleasing, definitely, but I also see a deeper message, of finding value in the small stuff. Most people who bought them new probably threw away the box that these gloves came in, even though it's got a cool look to it. It's inspired me to think a little differently about what's trash and what's treasure, and to try to enjoy the small things as much as Tikiranch does.

But if you just like looking at cool old Santa stuff, this is also a good site for you. Check it out, as my New Year's gift to all of you...you won't be disappointed!

Party Like It's 1994

Well, as you can see, I took a breather from this after NaBloPoMo, for several reasons. One is that I'm just busier. I was playing in two orchestras this season, so I had two rehearsals a week to make, plus job hunting, getting ready for the holidays, etc. But I guess mostly it's because NaBloPoMo just wasn't that enjoyable for me this year and that it sort of killed some of the fun of the blog for me. Also, I haven't been reading anything spectacular. I've got For Whom The Bell Tolls going, but it's going kind of slowly and I couldn't really even state an opinion about it at this point.

But I picked up an old favorite this week, and felt like writing about it. I remember when I first got Girl by Blake Nelson. It's hard to believe that was almost fifteen years ago. I really enjoyed the book, and I'm pleased to say that I still do.

I don't know how much other people would like the book anymore. For teenagers today, it would probably seem like an artifact. Maybe in the future, it will be routinely assigned in history classes for students to learn about life in the 1990s, although there is an awful lot of fucking in it.

At base, it's a coming of age story. It's written in the vibrant voice of Andrea Marr, exactly as she'd tell the story verbally. Andrea's just a cool person. the back of the book says that it "chronicles Andrea's jittery journey from suburban mall to Portland's thriving underground rock scene -- and back again, as she discovers sex, betrayal and even love." And I guess that's as good a summary as any. Andrea is very energetic, and her run-on, breathy sentences tingle with such excitement that even a routine trip to the local after-school hangout seems like a momentous event. In her life, it is. Similar to The Perks of Being a Wallflower, it's about someone in the process of becoming who she's going to be, and seeing the whole world open up before her, bit by bit.

I was a little older than Andrea when I read the book, but it still resonated for me. I was also buying lots of clothes from thrift shops, going to see local bands, hanging out in coffee shops and meeting lots and lots of interesting people. I didn't then and don't now agree with all of her choices. I think she sort of "sold out" towards the end, as she started spending more time with a more conservative preppy crowd. I also think that she let her best friend Cybil go too easily, after Cybil's band took off and scored a record deal in Seattle. She played fast and loose with some of the men in her life, too.

But it never kept me from enjoying the book. Andrea reminded me somewhat of my best friend at the time, and when I gave her the book and told her that, she was a bit offended by the comparison because she thought Andrea was a slut. But what attracted me to Andrea -- and to Karen too -- was her energy and her love of life. Andrea's a character that pops right off the pages and inspires you, even if you're not exactly sure how. Karen was a lot like that too, and I think she felt better once I told her
that.

I was interested to see what had become of Blake Nelson, and how others viewed the book. Amazon.com shows that he's written several other books about teenagers since Girl's debut. There were two editorial reviews that completely opposed each other. One pointed out that it was more authentic than many teen books which came off more like catalogues than anything else ("Jenna called me on my iPhone and wanted to go to Starbucks, and I told her I was watching Surivivor but she insisted so I threw on my Gap jeans and my favorite American Eagle t-shirt and finished my Coke and ran downstairs to find my sketchers and beg my parents for the keys to the Jetta..."). They also pointed out ("they" being Publishers Weekly, I should have said that from the start) that the book didn't encourage judgement and captured the inconsistency of emotion.

Kirkus Review was fairly scathing, accusing Nelson of "bad valley girl parody" and superficiality. They also stated that the Cybil character wasn't developed enough, for allegedly being andrea's best friend. Some of these are valid criticisms, but I had an issue with the way they kept saying the book was about "teenage rebellion." Like the "teen angst" tag they tried to hang on Wallflower, it trivializes the experiences. I guess it's an easy way to dismiss a book you don't care for, but I thought it was horribly inaccurate in this case. There's little hint of Andrea wanting to 'rebel'. She doesn't spend a lot of time around her parents, but she does value the opinions of most of the adults she encounters. There's an early scene where she wears one of her thriftstore dresses out to Cybil's first big show. Her mother sees her and is horrifed. She ultimately lets her wear it, with a parting shot along the lines of "If you want to dress like a clown, that's your problem." It rings in Andrea's ears the entire way to the club, and she's a wreck by the time she gets there. That's not the point of view of someone who's out to 'rebel'.

Andrea is just seeking out alternative ways of living. When you're a teenager, the way most adults live looks mind-numbingly boring. They spend a lot of their time at some job, a good chunk of the rest of it doing things like maintaining the house and paying bills, and most of their so-called "free time" watching TV or reading stuff. Andrea's asking the age-old question "Is that all there is?" in her own way.

In B4 Deadline

NaBloPoMo just ended, and I made it! Congratulations to everyone else who did too!

Blast Off: My First Early Review

I mentioned earlier this week that I had been sent a copy of William Elliott Hazelgrove's new novel, Rocket Man. Hazelgrove wrote the book with the support of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park (Illinois), and got to work on the book in the house in which Hemingway was born. This is his fourth novel, and will be out from Pantonne Press later this month.

A week ago, the Booking Through Thursday question was related to these early review books, and whether or not reviewers should feel obligated to review them positively. Now that I've received one, I understand the dilemma a bit better. Getting a review copy, with a letter from the publisher, makes the endeavor much more personal. It's not some random book you happened to pluck off the shelves, written years ago by someone who's moved on to other projects by now, or maybe even moved on from this mortal coil altogether. It represents the hopes and dreams of a real person, and your response to it may help determine whether said real person will get to keep his or her home or not.

Even without all of this, Rocket Man probably would have been a challenge to write about. Picking up an independently published novel like this is a little like going to that sketchy dive in your neighborhood and ordering the food. Things in there are not quite what a diner who sticks mostly to known local places and/or chain restaurants has come to expect. There may be burned out light bulbs, battered carpeting, grotty restrooms, ass grooves in all of the chairs, and people smoking despite the fact that it's been illegal in the state for over five years. In some of those places, the food is in keeping with the decor. In others, it's much more delectable than at the four-star restaurant with the wait list down the street.

Rocket Man had its share of cosmetic problems: misspelled words, AWOL punctuation, continuity errors, and in at least one case, a word used incorrectly. But it turned out to be a decent book, that got better as it went along. If you pick this one up, you need to give it a chance.

It's hard to write about a character who is having an existential crisis, because such crises are always in one's head. In a sense, both G of Citizen Girl and Nathan of Summer People were in the grips of existential crises, but they just came off as whiny assholes, and at first, Dale Hammer comes off exactly the same way. His major damage seems to be that he and his family have moved out of a trendy city neighborhood to a wealthy suburban subdivision. Dale, a novelist, feels that he has sold out. He hates the community and the people in it, and misses no opportunity to sneer at their materialism, their shallowness, and their fidelity to law and order. The first scene of the book is about his decision to drive over an undeveloped lot to ferry a group of Cub Scouts from Dairy Queen to McDonald's, rather than use the roads like a normal person.

This scene gets five full pages, and is painted as a triumph of individual freedom over fascist repression (due to the fact that another adult is in the car and freaks out the entire time). I was starting to think that Hazelgrove could have used a good editor, and I guess this would be my main criticism of the book. Someone needed to put a stopper in sentences like: "The party around our marble bar on the patio was dried up salsa and obelisks of salted rims that had dashed many a margarita the night before." But fortunately, these ramblings got scaled back quickly in favor of more dialogue.

Dale is facing an uncertain future. He and his wife have been having problems ever since they moved to the suburbs. His writing is not going well, so he's taken up mortgage brokering, which is also not going well. He somehow got conned into being the "Rocket Man" for his son's Cub scout troop Rocket Day, and the higher-ups in the troop do not appreciate his laid-back attitude towards the particulars of Rocket Day (minor things like making sure the rockets are ordered, and learning how to launch them). His traveling salesman father appears on his doorstep, fired from another job and kicked out of the house by another wife, to sleep over his garage and meddle in his life.

It takes a while for all of these issues to fully emerge and settle on the reader's impression of Dale. I thought he was just an asshole at first. I especially disliked him after a scene between him and the man who started Rocket Day. Dale has never met this man before, as the man's son is several years over, but he goes to his house to obtain the launchers and learn how to operate them. He takes two cell phone calls during the course of his demonstration. At the end, the conversation takes a surprising turn as the man revealed how much being Rocket Man had meant to him, how much he was going to miss it, how difficult it was for him to watch his son get older, and what a noble and beautiful event he felt it was. The man's soliloquy actually made me cry when I read it, but Dale blows it off with a flip comment about how he was unsure whether to shake the man's hand or get the net. After bitching for nearly 100 pages about the phoniness, boredom, and materialism of everyone around him, when he actually is confronted with something real, he responds exactly the way the rest of the cyborgs would.

But I kept going with the book after that, and it did get better. Dale's dislike of everything around him is just a symptom of his real problems, and by the end of the book, he has made headway on them, even if they haven't all gone away. While I wouldn't describe this as a funny book, there are some genuinely funny scenes, such as when he drops in on a tenant to collect rent, who staggers out shirtless from behind the couch into a pile of dirty laundry to give an eloquent take on racism in America. Dale's father also provides constant comic relief, as he tries his gentlemanly southern charm routine on everyone he meets, sometimes to great effect, and sometimes not so much.

The publisher told me that this was a book for the times. I'm not sure if I'd go quite that far, but it's an excellent read. Whatever the final verdict on this book winds up being, it was nice to read something with so much heart. A lot of the books out there are very formulaic. You know what's going to happen in them just from reading the back. No one involved in its production ever loved for itself, just for its ability to move lots of units and hopefully become optioned as a movie or television show. The reason Rocket Man was published was because people believed in it, and wanted to share it with you and me. I'm glad for the opportunity to read something like that. Here's hoping it goes as far as it can.

Thankfulness

Booking Through Thursday, one day late for the holiday:

Today is Thanksgiving here in the U.S.

Now, you may have noticed that the global economy isn’t exactly doing well. There’s war. Starvation. All sorts of bad, scary things going on.

So–just for today–how about sharing 7 things that you’re thankful for?

This can be about books, sure–authors you appreciate, books you love, an ode to your public library–but also, how about other things, too? Because in times like these, with bills piling up and disaster seemingly lurking around every corner, it’s more important than ever to stop and take stock of the things we’re grateful for. Family. Friends. Good health (I hope). Coffee and tea. Turkey. Sunshine. Wagging tails. Curling up with a good book.

So, how about it? Spread a little positive thinking and tell the world what there is to be thankful for.

This is a good one! Here is my list:

1. Thankful for my family, including my boyfriend and cats, and friends. They're always there when I need them, and always make me feel better about things. We have a lot of fun together and share a lot of things. Even when things aren't perfect, they're wonderful and we always work them out.

2. I'm thankful for my mentors. I met them by pure chance several years ago. They've helped me so much, serving as graduate school and professional references, and getting me involved with a local professional organization. Right now, they're all doing well, and I'm not. This would be a perfect time for them to turn their backs on me. It happens to people who lose their jobs all the time: people who have been friends and/or mentors for years suddenly look at them and see not their longtime associate, but their worst nightmare come to life. But my mentors are still there for me, providing as much advice and moral support as they can, and still offering to serve as references for me whenever I get a glimmer of hope. There's nothing in it for them at all. They're just excellent people and I'm lucky to have them in my life.

3. I'm thankful for orchestra. It gets me out of the house a couple of times a week, it helps me connect with something I love doing, makes me feel like a part of things and keeps me sane.

4. I'm thankful for Barack Obama, more specifically, that he got voted into office. The country needs change, optimism and a fresh outlook. He's got a lot of challenges ahead of him, but I think he's up for them.

5. I'm thankful for the libraries. My area has lost a few of them over the past few years, and may lose a few more in the near future. Libraries have always seemed almost too good to be true to me, though, and I'm glad they're still around, in any form.

6. I'm thankful for my apartment. Low rent, spacious, decent neighborhood, offstreet parking, porch, dishwasher, garden, free heat and laundry -- it has everything. I'm glad I opted for a cheaper place, too.

7. I'm thankful that I don't work at my old job anymore. I've been thinking about them more lately for some reason.And every time I do, I almost laugh out loud, I'm so happy not to be there anymore. I will continue to feel that way even if the next best job I can get is cleaning bus station toilets with my tongue, I'll laugh between gargles. And be glad that I'll never have to go back there or deal with those people ever again.