Category Archives: books

There’s no word for it…

When I was diagnosed with bone cancer, the weight of that word meant many things: I had some sense that I would lose my hair, that I would become thin, that I would be fighting for my life. I knew all of that because my disease had a name, albeit a frightening one (oh, and how glad I am that google did not exist then to tell me just how frightening a bout of bone cancer might be)….

So this article from the NYTimes highlights Ugandan women who have breast cancer and don’t even have a name for their condition in their language, caused me to wonder what it would be like to be diagnosed with a life-threatening ailment which carried no meaning, no cultural baggage, and no fears (a la Susan Sontag). I suspect that I would not have followed through with the treatment had I not been more afraid of dying of cancer than I was of chemo.

Related to that, is a book that I picked up yesterday called Improvising Medicine, about the cancer epidemic in Botswana. What connects these research pieces is that there is currently a surge of cancer in Africa and its unknown whether this is due to an actual increase in the disease or an increase in diagnosis rates. And, although I haven’t yet begun reading Livingston’s book, the summary tells me that, like the NYTimes article, it addresses many of the socioeconomic challenges of treating a disease in communities without sophisticated medical care options.

Perhaps a book that will hit a bit closer to home for me is a new release from UCPress, Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us, which combines cultural analysis and memoir in addressing the complex social nature of this disease in the United States. The summary says, “Jain explains how a national culture that simultaneously aims to deny, profit from, and cure cancer entraps us in a state of paradox—one that makes the world of cancer virtually impossible to navigate for doctors, patients, caretakers, and policy makers alike.” Indeed, my experience is that treatment for cancer now hinges so much on what type of health insurance one has and the process of “shopping” for a doctor who will tell you what you want to hear, which seems a wrongheaded approach to a cure.

Even though thirty years have now passed since I first heard that dreadful cancer word spoken in connection with the symptoms of my own body, I still find it difficult to comprehend the life-changing event that was my diagnosis and treatment for osteosarcoma. As I look back on what I went through then, it remains a kind of encapsulated moment that is hard for me to connect with now. But what I remember most significantly, was the feeling that the temporary horror of my cancer treatments was worthwhile to endure because of the possibility of eradicating my disease, and I trusted that my doctors were giving me the treatments that would increase my odds for survival. I suspect, now, that my faith in my doctors was naive, as was my willingness to endure mutagenic treatments. And if I had not lived in a society where I was told that it was my (heroic) responsibility to “fight” and “kill” that cancer, I am quite sure that I would not have consented to the amputation of my leg and the months of high-dose chemotherapy treatments afterwards. Of course, with 30 years of hindsight it seems to have been a wise choice. But I can’t help but wonder how differently my experience would have played out if I hadn’t been part of a community that encouraged, even championed, a specific behavior for me as a “victim” of cancer.

on hope & history…

From Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, on hope and change and activism:

Causes and effects assume history marches forward. but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension. Sometimes one person inspires a movement, or her words do decades later; sometimes a few passionate people change the world; sometimes they start a mass movement and millions do…All of that these transformations have in common is that they begin in the imagination, in hope. To hope is to gamble. It’s to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk.

As someone who studies those slow eroding drips of history, I love how Solnit affirms the notion that individuals can create large-scale change. I need to remember this for those days that I feel apathy, and for those moments when I feel small.

7 things I’ve learned from logging out of FB

A few weeks ago, in a contemplative moment, I realized that I missed reading novels. So I thought a bit about why I just didn’t seem to have time for novels anymore, and made a decision. I would experiment with only logging on to FB whenever I had finished reading a novel–as a reward for finishing something important.

It’s harder than it sounds to do this, mostly because so many of my web apps now integrate with using a FB login. And if I’m logged out of FB then I’m logged out of them, too.

So here you go, Seven Things I’ve Learned From Logging Out of Facebook:

1) I need to reconstruct my logins for various web services (everything from goodreads to blogging) in order to access them while being logged out of FB.

2) More than before, I’ve been noticing those ubiquitous FB “Like” buttons everywhere. That my medical provider has one on their site is creepier than zombies.

3) I like novels (better than I like FB).

4) Logging out of FB during election season couldn’t have been better timing.

5) I’m carrying on conversations outside of a for-profit proprietary software platform. Even in real life sometimes.

6)I can still post on FB through my twitter and instagram feeds. So I don’t think anyone has even noticed my absence.

7) When I’ve finished a novel I’ve found that haven’t had much interest in logging into FB anyways. Instead, I’m grabbing the next book from my nightstand.

I write…

From Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert, by Terry Tempest Williams:

I write to make peace with the things I cannot control.
I write to create red in a world that often appears black and white.
I write to discover.
I write to uncover.
I write to meet my ghosts.
I write to begin a dialogue.
I write to imagine things differently and in imagining things differently perhaps the world will change.
I write to honor beauty.
I write to correspond with my friends.
I write as a daily act of improvisation.
I write because it creates my composure.
I write against power and for democracy.
I write myself out of my nightmares and into my dreams.
I write in a solitude born out of community.
I write to the questions that shatter my sleep.
I write to the answers that keep me complacent.
I write to remember.
I write to forget.
I write to the music that opens my heart.
I write to forget the pain.
I write to migrating birds and with the hubris of language.
I write as a form of translation.
I write with the patience of melancholy in winter.
I write because it allows me to confront that which I do not know.
I write as an act of faith.
I write as an act of slowness.
I write to record what I love in the face of loss.
I write because it makes me less fearful of death.
I write as an exercise of pure joy.
I write as one who walks on the surface of a frozen river beginning to melt.
I write out of anger and into my passion.
I write from the stillness of night anticipating–always anticipating.
I write to listen.
I write out of silence.
I write to soothe the voices shouting inside me, outside me, all around.
I write because of the humor of our condition as humans.
I write because I believe in words.
I write because I do not believe in words.
I write because it is a dance with paradox.
I write because you can play on the page like a child left alone in the sand.
I write because it belongs to the force of the moon: high tide, low tide.
I write because it is the way I take long walks.
I write as a bow to wilderness.
I write because I believe it can create a path in darkness.
I write because as a child I spoke a different language.
I write with a knife carving each word through the generosity of trees.
I write as ritual.
I write because I am not employable.
I write out of my inconsistencies.
I write because then I do not have to speak.
I write with the colors of memory.
I write as a witness to what I have seen.
I write as a witness to what I imagine.
I write by grace and grit.
I write out of indigestion.
I write when I am starving.
I write when I am full.
I write to the dead.
I write out of the body.
I write to put food on the table.
I write on the other side of procrastination.
I write for the children we never had.
I write for the love of ideas.
I write for the surprise of a beautiful sentence.
I write with the belief of alchemists.
I write knowing I will always fail.
I write knowing words always fall short.
I write knowing I can be killed by my own words, stabbed by syntax, crucified by both understanding and misunderstanding.
I write out of ignorance.
I write by accident.
I write past the embarrassment of exposure…

words are always a gamble, words are splinters of cut glass.

I write because it is dangerous, a bloody risk, like love, to form the words, to touch the source, to be touched, to reveal how vulnerable we are, how transient we are.

I write as though I am whispering in the ear of the one I love.

Photo above taken on a rambly drizzly walk in Tuscany. Because I also write to remember where I’ve been…

exploring the edges…

Because I’m such a fan of Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map, I chose to download another book by him that Amazon recommended, called Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. Usually I avoid books like that that sound like the latest evolutionary-biology-turned-pop-psychology type of text. But based on my enjoyment of his other book, I downloaded it and began reading anyways.

Lately I’ve been mentally debating the risks of big change versus the comfortable rhythms of my mostly-suburban lifestyle. Some of this line of thinking comes from my desire to buy a house in an urban-ish SoCal neighborhood and some of it has to do with my thinking about what I want to do with my life once I’m an empty-nester. I feel torn between a desire for nature and quiet and places with ponds and lots of trees (and perhaps, an ocean nearby), and the hustle of an urban space filled with noise and smell and remarkable public transportation options. As I was mulling through this possibilities recently, a friend suggested that cities are more generative spaces, where more innovation occurs–and that if I want to stay in a world of high-tech, I would be better served by making a leap to such a space. Johnson argues along these lines, too, saying:

“Recall the question we began with: What kind of environment creates good ideas? The simplest way to answer it is this: innovative environments are better at helping their inhabitants explore the adjacent possible, because they expose a wide and diverse sample of spare parts—mechanical or conceptual—and they encourage novel ways of recombining those parts. Environments that block or limit those new combinations—by punishing experimentation, by obscuring certain branches of possibility, by making the current state so satisfying that no one bothers to explore the edges—will, on average, generate and circulate fewer innovations than environments that encourage exploration.”

While I don’t think that cities have an exclusive market on “innovation” or “experimentation,” I do feel convinced that I need to surround myself with a lot of novel input in order to foster my curiosity about the world and my place in it. Often, my best ideas come when I’m outside of familiar territory (i.e. my living room couch or the neighborhood where I’ve lived for 20 years), so I think I need to continue to find ways of doing that, more often.

Them “gay” books: a response

My daughter’s photo accompanied a BlogHer post this week, that same image of our old living room bookshelves that the New Yorker online featured awhile back. As I read the BlogHer post and looked at the photo, I suppose it was really the first time I thought about our bookshelves as “gay.” I mean, these shelves were in the living room of a heterosexual married couple with two children. Suburban, middle-class normal, not-gay. Kind of.*

The author of the post used the photo of our living room to illustrate her discussion of why she doesn’t encourage (or allow? it’s a bit unclear) her child to read “gay” books because she doesn’t want her to be “exposed to alternative lifestyles,” especially books that might depict intimate interactions between same-sex couples.

I grew up in a home with “traditional” values where I was often told not to read certain books because they had ‘inappropriate’ sexual content. True confession: whenever I was told not to read something, I went right out and got my hands on a copy of that book and read it to try to figure out why it was forbidden. Perhaps this was because I found the world that I was growing up in to be awfully confusing. My family belonged to the LDS church and we lived in the Bible Belt–there were so many arbitrary rules and restrictions in my home and in my Christian friends’ homes that it was hard to make sense of it all. Books allowed me to either escape my own world, or to help me understand it better. The school librarian was a close friend and she would let me read books on my lunch hour instead of going out to the playground with the other kids. Sure, I read a lot of stuff that I didn’t understand–much of it about sex, which was a complete mystery to me having had to piece together a bit of schoolbus crudeness with some rudimentary biology lessons and nothing of that connecting well at all to the romantic scenes that played out on the pages of the novels that I read. For example, I remember reading a scene in one of those ‘forbidden’ books where a girl and a boy started kissing at a party, and it mentioned him putting his tongue in her mouth. I wondered about that a lot–I’d never seen anyone kiss like that and it sounded pretty gross. But the girl in the book liked it. Liked it so much that she then let him put his hands inside of her clothes. Again, confusing. I wondered why she let him do that. Why it felt good to her. And more than anything, why that was so scandalous that I shouldn’t be reading about it. I probably thought a lot more about that scene (and others like it) than I would have otherwise–simply because I knew I wasn’t supposed be reading it.

So because the whole censorship thing didn’t work all that well on me, I decided that when my own kids started reading, I simply wouldn’t censor them. Ever. I went to the library with them and we talked a lot about the books they chose. And on the shelves in our living room were books with explicit sexual content right next to books written by Mormon General Authorities (ok, truth: I did that on purpose sometimes–BoydK could really benefit from some time next to Nabokov, IMO). There was always a mix of all kinds of stuff–nothing forbidden. Occasionally I’d find my kids reading something that I thought warranted a conversation that went something like:

“I saw you were reading Such and Such. What did you think about that? Were there any parts that you found confusing or that you’d like to talk about?”

Interestingly, the only books that I remember causing me some alarm as my daughter read them, was the Twilight series. I didn’t forbid it, but instead I did read along with her and then had a conversation about why it’s not okay for a dating partner to stalk you in your bedroom or to treat you violently during a sexual encounter.

Was it “gay” of me to let my teenagers read anything that they wanted off of our rainbow-colored family bookshelves? I don’t think so. Are my teenagers “gay” now because they read books with gay characters? Well, they’re no more or less gay than they were before, I’d say. Just like they’re no more or less heterosexual than they were before they read books with heterosexual characters. But I’m also not invested in any particular outcome for my kids’ sexual expression. They can be gay or not-gay or gay-ish or whatever suits their desires. I suspect that they might approach their future relationships a bit like they have their reading material–pulling various items off the shelf and reading for awhile to see if it’s compelling enough to continue. Maybe realizing that one is not right and putting it back and reaching for another. Sometimes choosing a favorite genre and sometimes something in a new vein.

But the bookshelf analogy breaks down pretty quickly when you compare texts to people–humans can’t be as easily ‘read’ or ‘shelved’ as books can. And maybe that’s the most important lesson that I want my kids to learn from those rainbow shelves: there’s a big colorful world out there and as they move out on their own they’ll come across all kinds of ‘content’ that challenges and provokes their point of view. It’ll soon be their job to filter through all of that and choose the path that makes the most sense for their inclinations and passions. And just like I can’t control the use of Creative-Commons-licensed photos of my daughter like the one above, I also can’t control my kids’ future choices. Instead, I simply have to trust that they’ll be wise about the decisions that lie ahead as they select their relationships.

*Maybe we were gay–we did like rainbows and a bit of cross-dressing and were strongly engaged in the fight against Prop 8. 🙂

I go and lie down…

A colleague recently turned me in the direction of Wendell Berry’s writings, so I’ve been reading Hannah Coulter on my iPad while traveling. It’s such a quiet, easy book–one that makes me feel connected to land and family. Perhaps, so far (about halfway through), it paints too pretty a picture of Hannah’s world, but I think that’s the point–to enjoy the perspective of a woman looking back on her life and making meaning of it all. I suspect that my mother and her friends might tell similar-sounding stories and I will someday, too.

And now that I’m knee-deep in his novel-writing, I’m also exploring Berry’s poetry:

The Peace of Wild Things

By Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

social media & me

I’m game to try nearly any new form of social media. I’m Instagramming, Flickr-ing, Google+ing, Gowalla-ing and Colo r-ing, in addition to the ‘traditional’ forms of Twitter, GoogleReader, Facebook and WordPress. A few things I’ve tried and rejected–I didn’t care much for Tumblr, for example. Or Foursquare. And I rarely consult Goodreads or LinkedIn, although I maintain active accounts in both spaces. My favorite spots tend to morph over time, too. At first I rarely Facebooked, but now it’s my primary go-to space because most of my close friends are such avid users and I want to keep abreast of their lives. Same for Twitter. But there are some people who are important to me who don’t use social media very often (or not at all). To keep in touch with them I use Gmail, IM, Skype, and/or texting. But it’s a lot to keep track of these various ways of communicating. And, with differing levels of privacy, I find that I ‘behave’ differently in the various spaces depending on how open they are.

Though for several months my favorite platform has been Twitter, I find that I rarely ‘follow’ the Twitter feed anymore. It’s sort of gone the way of my RSS blogfeeds–something to dip into only if I have some time to kill, and I’m never caught up. Recently I also removed a lots feeds and ‘follows’ from my lists because either I found them uninteresting or I simply never got around to reading their content. In addition to paring down my lists, I’m also finding myself far more reticent to share as frequently anymore–it’s wearying to have the world know so much about me, and I don’t want to do things simply for the sake of tweeting that I’ve done them.

And, more than that, I’ve found that one of the primary losses from my life with all of the social media whirling around me, is that I’ve lost time for books (and for poetry). So earlier today when I was walking the library stacks to retrieve some research-related tomes, I discovered some other interesting-looking books nearby. Books that I wanted to make sure to add to my nightstand. So I grabbed those, too. Sure, I have too much going on right now to be reading a lot. But at the same time, I don’t want to be the kind of person who isn’t always reading something. And I never want to be that person who can’t pull themselves away from their smartphone long enough to read a chapter (or two!) of a good novel each day.

What about you, what are your favorite social media sites? And how do you work to keep your “in real life” experiences in balance with your online ones?

Reading is Sexy

“Great writers are either husbands or lovers. Some writers supply the solid virtues of a husband: reliability, intelligibility, generosity, decency. There are other writers in whom one prizes the gifts of a lover, gifts of temperament rather than of moral goodness. Notoriously, women tolerate qualities in a lover—moodiness, selfishness, unreliability, brutality—that they would never countenance in a husband, in return for excitement, an infusion of intense feeling. In the same way, readers put up with unintelligibility, obsessiveness, painful truths, lies, bad grammar — if, in compensation, the writer allows them to savor rare emotions and dangerous sensations. And, as in life, so in art both are necessary, husbands and lovers. It’s a great pity when one is forced to choose between them.”
~Susan Sontag

It’s been awhile since we’ve talked books (other than cookbooks) on my blog, but of course that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been reading. Although, of late, I’ve been reading more on my iPad than in ‘analog’ form. While there’s nothing quite as wonderful as holding a book in my hand and feeling its spine crack every so slightly with each turn of the page, the convenience of using an eReader makes them my favorite format these days–especially because I can sync my reading between my various desktop computers and laptops, my iPad, and iPhone (I have more of these devices that I can keep track of nowadays!). Here’s a list of some of the books that I’ve either recently finished or am currently reading:

The Great Railway Bazaar
This travel narrative by Paul Theroux is a description of his rail travels around Asia (including the Orient Express and the trans-Siberian express), and is what I dip into before bed most nights. He’s got me dreaming of future train-related adventures (I’m compiling a list of all those must-do journeys!). I’ve also got his book The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific on my nightstand–to read as soon as I finish the Railway Bazaar.

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
I discovered Jeannette Winterson through her Bill Moyer’s interview about religion and writing. I first read her book Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles because I’m always game for a re-telling of a classic narrative. However, her writing in that book didn’t charm me nearly as much as in Oranges. But of course, I am always a fan of a coming-of-age tale, and the experience of the young protagonist who finds herself at odds with her family’s religious tradition because of her sexual orientation, resonated on many levels with my own experience. I’ve also just barely finished reading her book Written on the Body, which had some of the most tantalizingly-beautiful descriptions of physical love that I’ve ever encountered. The ending left me a bit flat, however (a cancer story–ugh). But I still highly recommend it, especially as a potent rumination on the way we humans tend to ‘create’ our lovers to satisfy our own needs.

Tess of the D’Urbervilles
This past year I’ve been re-reading many old favorite novels–especially those that impacted me significantly as a teen or young-20-something. I dove back into Tess for that reason. I first encountered Tess in high school and probably re-read it every year until my mid-20s (as well as Hardy’s entire oeuvre–his bleak settings with such tragic scarred characters really spoke to me when I was younger. Why, I’m still not sure). Tess grabbed me all over again, the words and storyline so familiar. I’m at once comforted by the routine-ness of the story, as well as freshly horrified by the plotline. I see myself, my daughter, and every other woman I know, vulnerable on its pages.

Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics
For someone who knows the West as I do, Solnit’s writing feels as familiar as the rolling hills of California. A perfect accompaniment to my many recent roadtrips, and an affirmation of the importance of this land and our stewardship over it. Her chapter “Sontag and the Tsunami” sums up many of my own feelings about the cultural valence of war, poverty, and calamity:

“We cannot wish that human beings were not subject to the forces of nature, including the mortality that is so central a part of our own nature. We cannot wish that the seas dry up, that the waves grow still, that the tectonic plates cease to exist, that nature ceases to be beyond our abilities to predict and control. But the terms of that nature include such catastrophe and such suffering, which leaves us with sorrow as not a problem to be solved but a fact. And it leaves us with compassion as the work we will never finish.”

PilgrimSteps

just one step at a time…