Things to do in Charlotte: The Whitewater Center

I recently had two little adventures at the Whitewater Center. First, I went mountain biking. Let me tell you, mountain biking and I: we are never going to be best friends. This is the third time I've tried it and it always ends like this scene from The Princess Bride: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqaNi0UfOoI

As you wish, tree stump my bike ran over, as you wish. I think the time has come to sell my mountain bike and just buy a cheapish road bike with a few gears that I can use for regular, lazy biking. The main thing standing in my way is my total lack of knowledge about bikes. I imagine trying to write a craigslist post for my bike and all I can come up with is:

One mountain bike. Red.

It's definitely red.

I fared much better when I went kayaking on the Catawba River. I love kayaking; I try to get as much of it as possible in (on the ocean) whenever I go home to the DR. It was so great to be out on the (very) calm river in the evening. It reminded me of rowing while I was in high school in New Hampshire. Something about the low-slung late-summer light was particularly evocative. I only did one term of rowing, because I didn't love the vomiting into trashcans after intense indoor practices, but the river on a spring evening I could've loved every day forever.

Ursula Le Guin's "The Farthest Shore"

This is the third book from Le Guin's Earthsea Cycle, and also the third book of hers I've read. One particularity of Le Guin's style that people seem to find sort of objectionable (on Goodreads, anyway) is how impressionistic it is. I wonder, though, if it's because fantasy and science fiction tend to be such overwhelmingly male genres and Le Guin's writing (to me) feels so essentially female. So yeah, there's not a ton of physical description and there's a lot of introspection. It gives the books this dreamlike quality that maybe is not for everyone. Personally, I don't understand how anyone could prefer pages and pages of tedious description or impossible-to-remember fictional history (I am looking at you, Silmarillion), but to each his own, I guess. In this particular book, Ged (who has been a main character for the two previous books) has risen to Archmage. All over Earthsea, magic suddenly begins to disappear. As magic drains away, a malaise spreads over the people, such that their lives are full of sickness, conflict, and a weird sort of resignation in the face of it all. I am not even going to feel bad about partially SPOILERING a book that was published in 1972, so I'm going to go ahead and say that the source of the problem turns out to be that one dark mage has unlocked the secret to escaping death, and become immortal. In opening a rift between the land of the living and the land of the dead, he causes the entire world to enter a state in which it can neither fully live nor fully die. Ged, along with Arren, a prince of Enlad, sets out to stop Cob. Mostly the book worked for me as a parable about the paralyzing effects of fear. In this case, a great fear of death prevents the full flourishing of life; by escaping death, the dark mage and those who follow him also essentially escape life. In the end, the plot of The Farthest Shore is the most traditional one Le Guin has come up with among the three books I've read. There's even a prophecy about a great king and a solution that only comes at very great sacrifice. On the other hand, the book is basically the Tao of Earthsea. It turns out Le Guin was heavily influenced by the Tao?

Which gives me a great excuse to post a favorite passage from the Tao--one I think Ged would like--because why not?

"Therefore the Master

acts without doing anything

and teaches without saying anything.

Things arise and she lets them come;

things disappear and she lets them go.

She has but doesn't possess,

acts but doesn't expect.

When her work is done, she forgets it.

That is why it lasts forever."

PS-I really love Stephen Mitchell's translation of the Tao (which is where this little excerpt is from).

Kobayashi Issa

This weekend, I read a book of Issa’s haiku. His poems are full of humor and melancholy; apparently he had an incredibly tragic life. He does more with a few words than some people (me) do with whole pages. Here are some favorites: This world of dew is only a world of dew - and yet…

*

Just to say the word home, that one word alone, so pleasantly cool

*

As the great old trees are marked for felling, the birds build their new spring nests

*

The snail gets up And goes to bed With very little fuss

*

In my old home which I forsook, the cherries are in bloom.

*

For you too, my fleas, the night passes so slowly. But you won’t be lonely.

*

A world of trials, and if the cherry blossoms, it simply blossoms

Snow leopard cub, king of my heart.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Jk4J1dsEJ44

This was on Jezebel today. Sometimes you just need to watch a snow leopard fall off a branch. I've watched this like 5 times today.

Some books...

Here are some books I have read these last months: I read Tan Twan Eng's The Gift of Rain and The Garden of Evening Mists. Both books are set in Malaysia during WWII, and both are concerned with how people coped with the Japanese invasion. It seems to me (and maybe it's just something missing from my own education) that one doesn't hear nearly as much about Asia's war as one does about Europe's, although the scale of atrocities is similar. For example, China is second only to the Soviet Union in number of war deaths. So, it was fascinating to read both of these novels on that level. Furthermore, Eng is a really gifted, empathetic writer, and his characters are rounded, full of contradictions and self-delusion. Both books are beautifully researched; brought to life by vivid detail. There is such a love of place in both stories. Of the two, I thought Garden of Evening Mists was superior, even though I would say that Eng's rendering of his female protagonist was just a little bit...masculine? It didn't really bother me when I was reading; after all, you can put a lot down to idiosyncrasy. I only noticed it later, when I was nit-pickily looking back on the whole thing. The stories are quite similar, in that they both feature a young, local protagonist falling under the sway of an elder Japanese mentor with whom he/she has a complicated relationship. It's almost as if, having written The Gift of Rain, Eng thought he could do the whole thing just a little bit better, and did.

I read another 100 pages of Infinite Jest this past week. I'm sure you're wondering why I'm mentioning this book I haven't finished here, but it feels like an accomplishment. This book is a slog. The internet tells me it's going to be worth it. I have to say though, Foster Wallace is not exactly my kind of writer. It sometimes feels like he hates all his characters. Which is fine, except why should I care, then? Every time I read this, I have this image of Foster Wallace just sitting at his desk, sweating and working so, so hard. Every sentence feels labored. He sure doesn't make it look easy. You read Alice Munro, for example, and you can delude yourself into thinking, "hey, I could do this." She makes it seem so easy to write something great.

On the other hand, I listened to Consider the Lobster on a road trip, and it was excellent: melancholy and sharply observed. Especially the essay on the Maine Lobsters Festival. As I later learned, the audio version is super-abridged from the book...but it's read by DFW himself, so...

I am currently reading Rivers of Gold, Hugh Thomas's history of the early years of the Spanish Conquest (from Columbus to Magellan, as the subtitle would have it). For my purposes, no detail is too minor, but if I were reading this for funsies and not for book research, I might wonder if it's necessary to know the name of every banker that ever gave Columbus a maravedi and every Genoese merchant living in Spain and the name of every sub-assistant to the Inquisition that blablabla. 

I have also been listening to hundreds (seven) of the Mrs. Pollifax books, which (if you're not familiar with them) are a cute series of adventure/mystery stories about a middle-aged widow who inveigles the CIA into recruiting her as a spy. They're set in the bad old days of the Cold War. They're buzzy, light reading. I gardened to these in the spring.

AND OF COURSE, I continue to both read and listen to the Disc World books. I often think about Terry Pratchett and his Alzheimer's and I wonder if it's any comfort to know you've created something so wonderful as the Disc World.

Inside the Apple

Recently, I've been re-reading (for about the hundredth time) a collection of poetry by the late Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai. Amichai was assigned reading during my first creative writing class ever (in college), and I can remember so clearly reading one particular poem of his, "Inside the Apple," for the first time. It was printed all crooked on that extra-thin 8X10 you always got at the school copy place. To me, it's a perfect poem. You know how sometimes things are just precisely in the key of you? Sometimes I wish I could read it with someone else's brain; I love it so much, I wish I could meet it again. But anyway, here it is:  

Inside the Apple

You visit me inside the apple. Together we can hear the knife paring around and around us, carefully, so the peel won’t tear.

You speak to me. I trust your voice because it has lumps of hard pain in it the way real honey has lumps of wax from the honeycomb.

I touch your lips with my fingers: that too is a prophetic gesture. And your lips are red, the way a burnt field is black. It’s all true.

You visit me inside the apple and you’ll stay with me inside the apple until the knife finishes its work.

How I feel after a night of little to no sleep.

When I haven't had enough sleep, a funny thing that happens is that I feel the complete range of human emotions every 15-20 minutes.  Here I am, getting up this morning:

Discussing things I need to do at work:

Ordering lunch:

The best/worst part about today is that a small portion of my mind has remained unaffected, and it's just sitting there mocking me like "Are you crying about your dog dying IN THE FUTURE? HAHAHA."

Seriously, you guys, Vikings is a great show.

It's like a tiny Game of Thrones. I hope it becomes a huge hit for The History Channel, so they can get more money and have more than 9 episodes in a season.

Human Hair Buffet

Now that Spring is well under way, I've taken up gardening again. Last year, I didn't do anything except water my plants, and I can't pretend my front yard didn't look like something a depressed second grader drew in therapy. Basically, gardening is fun if you love being outside, but also want a contentious relationship with nature, which obviously I do.

And so it has come to pass that I have been reminded once again of humanity's no. 1 enemy:

I imagine that every time a slug bellies up to my yard, it must feel the same kind of joy a compulsive eater feels when they see a Golden Corral. No. 2 on my hit list is either deer or rabbits, but let me tell you why. Come with me on a journey to a time three years ago when I fell in love. The object of my affection: hostas. Just look at them...

I mean, it's fine if you don't get it, just picture something you get the sweats for, like a fancy bike or a steak. I planted three of these beauties and beside slugs giving them a swiss cheese look all summer, every year, EVERY YEAR, something chooses the second before they bloom to just eat them down to little green nubs in the earth. Luckily for me, they are the sorts of plants that just go dormant and are then reborn in the spring. I am determined that this year will be different.

The other day, I looked online for a solution to my problem. People had lots of nice suggestions for my slug problem (eggshells everywhere, bowls of beer for them to drown in), but really only one suggestion for my deer or possibly rabbit issue: human hair.

Yes, human hair.

Apparently the smell scares them off. This sounds great, but I'm sort of concerned about how walking into a salon and demanding hair off the floor is going to make me look. Should I bring my own bag? Should I go to my own salon where they know me, and risk looking crazy there, or to a strange salon where they don't know me and will probably imagine that I'm using the hair in a voodoo ritual? What does one wear to request human hair? I assume it's dirty sweatpants, gardening boots, and a crazed look in one's eye. Maybe a caterpillar to fall out of one's hair at a strategic moment. Because that's what I'm wearing all summer.

I just want everyone to know that if I had a SPAM name, that name would be Tabitha Warpl.

As I go through my 1200+ comments that I received while this blog was abandoned on hiatus, I find that SPAM names seem to be composed of the kind of first name someone would choose if they were a teenager who read too much Victorian fiction, and something that sounds like a last name but patently is not.

Thomas Stroptar...Vivian Pertff...Dorothea Heimmml...I mean, how does one go about becoming a spammer? Because I don't want to brag (yes I do), but I think I might be the Don Draper of SPAM names.

Good questions: Why is my dog barking?

As a dog owner, I am often asked why my dog is barking her fluffy little head off. One time some neighbors called me late at night just to ask me that very question, except instead of asking, they were telling. And what they were telling me was that they were going to call the police. Another time, they did! Being responsible for other living things is so exciting! I have made a checklist of reasons dogs bark (in my experience), and I'm going to share it with you, so the next time your dog is barking you can go down it like I do in my head, which is not terrifying or anxiety inducing at all.

"I am your dog and I am barking because...

...that shadow is shaped like a bird I saw one time.
...there is an axe murderer in our house.
...the neighbor is sitting out on his patio and sometimes he gives me treats.
...I found a snake in the lawn. It's poisonous.
...I'm showing this deer what's what.
...this deer is showing me what's what.
...OoOh yeah. It's a migratory goose, and it's landing in our yard.
...I heard a dog bark.
...hobo in the attic
...mailman. Always. How long must I be denied?
...a dog went for a walk past our house. How long must I be denied?
...the ups guy threw a package at our doorstep from 35 feet away. His terror is only somewhat satisfying.
...someone is currently breaking into our car.
...a rabbit is eating your squash
...there is an axe murderer in our house, freel this time.
...the moon....exists."

Resolved

For the new year, here are some modest goals:

-To visit the UNC Botanical Gardens and the Congaree National Forest, when the Spring comes.

-Be more intense about exercising (hahahahaha). I guess at least I'm exercising regularly? For a while there, I was really into crossfit. It's just...so much muchness. This is me at the gym lately:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ue6l7P5lROY?feature=oembed] 

-Update this blog more, duh.

-Be more patient and less....judgemental and negative

-Find a fun summer sport challenge...this year's was bootcamp. Sailing?! Is sailing a sport? Climbing?!

-Cook more things from Sunday Supper at Lucques, my favorite cookbook.

A brief update.

It's been a while since Molly stopped by to stare at you with her soulful eyes and whine at you until you feed her, and so: an update.

Molly has been keeping busy this winter, in spite of the fact that I, her terrible owner, have refused to put out a space heater for her to hog and she honestly feels like giving up on life every second except when a pillow falls off my bed. For reasons that REMAIN UNCLEAR every human pillow is more comfortable for a dog to lie on than a dog bed made for a dog. But I digress.

She has lately taken up a sport, or so she tells me. The rules of dog sports are a little obscure (run, run, RUN, stop, RUN), but she did make it clear that the prize was "MOR FUD, U GIV." When I said that no food would be made available after a recent win, she replied with a cryptic "NO WORRYS, MEATSTICK."

Here she is, being escorted to her podium by two men who are not imbuing this moment with the dignity and quiet admiration it deserves:

Meanwhile, I am reading Tana French's latest murder mystery, as well as the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation of War and Peace, and someday soon I will write a post about these things.  

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'Broken Harbour' by Tana French

Broken Harbor by Tana French

"Bonjour Tristesse" by Francoise Sagan

This weekend I took a break from pretending to read Infinite Jest (a book by which I have been awed and annoyed in turn) to basically inhale something that is more my speed. This short, short novel is a coming of age story set in the French Riviera during the 50s. Cecile is seventeen and staying the summer in a villa with her father, Raymond, a widower and a libertine. They're a superficially happy duo, indulgent of each other, needing no one, as another character puts it. Raymond is a womanizer, a creature of passion and whimsy, and Cecile, with no better example, is the same. Unlike her father she's afflicted by a growing ennui she can't quite understand. When Raymond impulsively casts aside his young mistress and becomes engaged to an older family friend--Anne--Cecile takes it upon herself to stop the marriage from occurring, with tragic consequences.

Cecile's relationship with Anne animates the book, and it's a complicated one. Cecile admires Anne, even adores her in her role as friend and adviser, but when Anne steps into the role of mother, Cecile becomes resentful even as she desperately craves Anne's understanding and love. Cecile is faced with a choice between turning into the sort of person her father and his friends are (they're painted as bitter, emotionally stunted, glitzy, fun people), or the sort of person Anne is: elegant, graceful, competent, but also someone whose life is ruled by order, by routine. Even while she flirts with the idea of becoming someone like Anne, she resents Anne's attempts to improve her, finding them insincere and invasive. She is almost as contemptuous of her father's friends and their way of being in the world, but Anne's way requires change, which is painful, and the sort of life that Anne represents requires an understanding of love which Cecile does not achieve until, perhaps, the end of the book. Not of love as an intense, temporary passion, but as fidelity, constancy; a feeling of need rather than one of desire, maybe. At the end of the novel, Cecile is haunted by an intractable sadness, which the poem that serves as the book's epigraph implies is the beginning and the end of love.

The poem (which also gives the book its name) is by Paul Eluard and is called "À Peine Défigurée" (Hardly Disfigured) and it took me a few tries to find a translation of the poem that was transparent...I think it's one of those that doesn't translate well. I reproduce the original and this useful, if imperfect, translation here, as well as a more standard translation:

Adieu tristesse
Bonjour tristesse
Tu es inscrite dans les lignes du plafond
Tu es inscrite dans les yeux que j'aime
Tu n'es pas tout à fait la misère
Car les lèvres les plus pauvres te dénoncent
Par un sourire
Bonjour tristesse
Amour des corps aimables
Puissance de l'amour
Dont l'amabilité surgit
Comme un monstre sans corps
Tête désappointée
Tristesse beau visage.

Farewell Sadness
Hello Sadness
I see you on the ceiling
I see you in the eyes that I love
I see you in the smile that betrays you.
Hello Sadness
Power of love
From which kindness rises
Like a bodiless monster
Unattached head
Sadness has a beautiful face.

And the more common translation:

Farewell Sadness
Hello Sadness
You are inscribed in the lines on the ceiling
You are inscribed in the eyes that I love
You are not poverty absolutely
Since the poorest of lips denounce you
Ah with a smile
Bonjour Tristesse
Love of kind bodies
Power of love
From which kindness rises
Like a bodiless monster
Unattached head
Sadness beautiful face.

TL;DR/You should read this book because: you love coming of age stories, short novels, movies with Jean Seberg in them (she plays Cecile in the movie), stories about French people being extra-French, or you agree that Claudine at School is the best Claudine novel (duh).

I guess it's a good day for a run in the sense that a blizzard hasn't formed like I prayed it would all day so I would have a valid excuse for skipping my run. Here are some other valid excuses for skipping a run, according to me:

-A stiff breeze made you turn around for a sweater and when you walked back outside 30 minutes later, you realized some people would describe the sun as setting. I mean, at least one person. Probably. Running in the dark is dangerous!

-You decided to go running on the greenway, but then on the way there you realized you needed to stop at the pharmacy and then you decided to get a flu shot, and there's always a chance of side effects the next day. So you thought ''better play it safe and take it easy.''

-Your dog keeps getting distracted while you're running with her and what if she made you fall and you busted a hip, you know? Slow down to a walk!

-''Shin splints.''

-You're almost at the end of your audio book.

Despite my gift for coming up with 100% solid reasons not to go running, it seems I'm getting better at it. Is it possible to become good at running out of the spite you feel for literally everyone who has ever run without being chased? As if to prove their accomplishment meant nothing? Because I think that's what might be happening here.

My own personal Questing Beast.

Did you ever read The Once and Future King when you were a kid? You SHOULD have. You didn't? Don't worry, that's why we have Wikipedia:

"As King Pellinore describes it, the hunt of the beast has always been the burden of the Pellinores, and all Pellinores are in fact trained for the hunt from birth... Having searched fruitlessly all his life for the beast, Pellinore is convinced by his friend Sir Grummore Grummursum to drop his quest. However, when it turns out later that the beast had been pining away for lack of attention, King Pellinore nurses it back to health and resumes his Sisyphean hunt."

I too am on a hunt. A quest, even. For The Most Perfect Walking Shoe Ever Made. I need it before I go on vacation in October. The things is that I enjoy walking while on vacation. Like between 5 and 10 miles a day. I also enjoy looking 'funky-fresh'. Look at how cute this girl looks while living out of a suitcase. Here is a graph I made:

So, to summarize, I need a shoe in which I can walk 10 miles, but that is also pretty enough to wear with dresses. It can't have a heel. It must be black or brown or gold or silver or covered in glitter, because those are the only colors I like. It can't make my legs look weird. It must have an interesting detail. It has to look good with my preexisting purses. I want it to last a full three years before it falls apart.

I mean, I am a simple girl with simple (first world, entitled) needs. Why can't I get what I want?

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3LxEo3Jbps?fs=1&feature=oembed]  

I'm so glad someone wrote a song about my feelings and someone else made a creepy video for it.

Things of the Fall

Since autumn is almost upon us, I decided to dig out my bike...oh, but I have to tell you about the little store-room off the carport.

The room of doom.

I don't know if you have the privilege of living in an old house. My house was built in the 1960s, which is not that old in terms of the whole world, but is pretty old in terms of these guys:

My house has spiders of every kind: little ones, big ones, and (most importantly) poisonous ones. The lifespan of a black widow is one year, and mating season is the summer, with eggs hatching in the fall, which is relevant because spiders are protective little jerks. Also, fecund. My carport is just brimming with egg sacs new and old. They look like all of your nightmares:

You guys, I went in with a flashlight and broom and committed a holocaust. I fought a black widow-mother for my bike. I touched so many egg sacs (sidebar: why are sacs such a big thing in nature? Please discuss). Now I'm sitting here, on my couch, writing this. I keep thinking I feel the prickle of baby spiders walking down my back. I'm covered in spider webs and glory (glory is what I call the mysterious, intense itch between my shoulder bladesOHMYGOD AM I DYING?).

I love you, schwinnsy.

Tigerface

I watched "War of the Arrows" tonight, and it only took me three hours to finish it! (Movie is 2:02 long.) If there is a way to watch movies that doesn't involve reading about the Qings on Wikipedia and looking at naked pictures of Prince Harry, I don't want to know it. I feel like this worked out well, because I finished just in time to take my Ambien ten minutes ago. I read somewhere that if I stay up on Ambien, my furniture will talk to me. That's not my plan tonight, but if I could choose one inanimate object to hallucinate about it would definitely be a picture of this guy from the movie:

Look at that forehead! Great job, CGI guys! Whoever said that putting a human facial expression on a tiger would make it way scarier was SO RIGHT.

Inception

Yes, I waited this long to watch "Inception". No, I didn't think it was that awesome. I should've just watched an episode of "Foyle's War," a BBC series about a man's brave attempt to never express strong emotions with his face (and WWII). 

You'd think I would've loved "Inception", because my movie preferences when I'm by myself are dictated by two main concerns:

-Average handsomeness of cast

-My ability to fall asleep for three minutes at a time and not miss important plot points.

Inception does pretty well on both levels. No, really, it makes more sense if you take a nap halfway through.

You might be asking yourself how one goes about measuring average handsomeness in a movie. Great question. All you have to do is compare each actor to a paragon of handsomeness.

Basically, I prefer brunettes and anything that is not a Leonardo DiCaprio. I really should've gone with Foyle.

Lately...

I signed up for an online lit class on Coursera: "Fantasy and Science Fiction: the Human Mind, Our Modern World." Have you heard of this thing, Coursera? It's pretty neat. My particular class is being taught by a U of Michigan professor. Yesterday, we submitted our first essays. The way grading works--because it's free for now and a bajillion people are taking the class--is that everything is reviewed by a group of your peers. So today I read five little essays on the Brothers Grimm's "Household Stories". Some were awful and one was GREAT, as you might expect. Mine was ok, I think.

My father is taking a Finance class, apparently. I'm trying to talk him into taking a World History class with me in the fall. I wonder what would happen if we had to peer-review each other. I AM PREPARED TO FAIL YOU, DAD. Just fyi.

Molly won an Olympic medal, which I reproduce below: