something to look forward to…

Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn are Pulitzer-prize winning authors who appear to have dedicated their lives to investigating injustice and trying to get the world to pay attention. In Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, they’ve written a guide for those who want to help, and examined programs that worked and those that didn’t – and why. If you are at all interested in this topic, this would be a great place to start. I read Half the Sky for bookbrowse.com about four (four!?) months ago.

The most surprising fact was this:

There are more women trafficked to brothels every year – right now, today – than the number of slaves transported annually at the peak of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Does this shock you? I hope so. It surely shocked me when I read it. This is happening right now, and right here. These women are brought to the U.S. and all over the world so that they can be forced to have sex with men who pay money to someone who keeps these women as livestock.  It is disgusting and unbelievable and ubiquitous. And makes my heart hurt.

I was impressed that the book didn’t sensationalize the good or the bad but treated this subject with the seriousness it deserved, and critiqued the results of aid programs, not just the intentions behind them.

The fact that we need books like this makes me sad. I’m glad that someone is writing them, but hoping for the day when the need for them becomes history.

…

On a lighter note – Kristof was speaking at the Public Library Association’s biennial conference here in Portland in March. I was working the exhibit floor for BookBrowse.com (with the fabulous Davina) so I probably could have gone to hear him talk 1) if I’d really wanted to, and 2) if I’d known about it beforehand. (Mary Roach was there as well, also didn’t find out about that one until it was too late – that one I would have attended for sure!). Kristof also writes a twice-weekly editorial column for the New York Times.

so very NSFW

You may have heard of Mary Roach. She’s the woman who wrote Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (of which I have heard great things but have not read). It became a best seller – so clearly this woman knows how to make the strange accessible to the masses. I found Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex on the sale table at Borders and grabbed it.

I don’t remember the last time I laughed so much reading a book.  Bonk is not a book about sex, it’s a book about the ridiculous situations that arise when you are trying to study sex scientifically.  Hamsters are wearing polyester pants.  People are having intercourse inside MRI machines.  Roach has a fine sense of the ridiculous, and the skills to let all of us in on the joke.  Roach travels the world to witness first-hand (whenever possible) the studies that tells us what we know about bumping uglies.

One of the most interesting things in the book was finding out how little is really understood about the physical realities of human sexual intercourse.  And the most interesting stuff seems… well, rather explicit for an open forum such as this. Instead, I’ve decided to share the topics of a few of the footnotes, to give you an idea of the randomness of the world and the breadth of her topic.

In no particular order (I can see my spam folder filling up now):

the sale of soiled panties in Japan
premature and retarded ejaculation
copulation rates of primates
the maternal fastidiousness of earwigs
the passage of flatus at coitus
artificial insemination of dogs in the 18th century
boar odor spray
the odor of the flowers of the Spanish chestnut tree
the great-grandniece of Napoleon and her gay husband
the Masturbate-athon
the Personal Pelvic Viewer (PPV for short).

Seriously, how can you not read this book?

travel/love/life envy

I woke up worrying about how to pay the rent when I’m going to be gone (and therefore miss out on my primary job) for most of the pay period before July’s rent paycheck shows up.  But then my phone rang – before I was even out of bed – with someone saying they’d basically volunteered me for a part-time gig and did I want it before she committed me irrevocably? Sometimes I forget – The Universe provides.

I’ve been reading a lot of things lately that feature people traveling and doing the thing that they love.  People that get to travel because of the thing that they love.  People that found the thing they love by traveling, or found that they love to travel because of the thing they love. And they found the person that they love because of the thing they love, or vice versa. Or something like that. Sometimes they get a bit jumbled up in my head – so Julia is speaking in a gothic English accent about the proper way to bake French bread while driving an old pickup full of manure. Oh yeah, and they’re all writers – though writing is far from the only thing they do.

I want a life like that. To do the thing(s) that I love, and have that become the center of my life, and to find someone to love who wants to inhabit my life filled with that thing that I love and traveling.

I am only nominally making money by writing right now, but I do have a bit of a chaotic work existence, with a bunch of small avenues where revenue comes in the way that these (lucky!) folks have – in form, though definitely not in scale.  It’s not perfect, but it’s a start.

Step 2: more writing.

Vehicular and Authorial Romance

I am a car nut. Specifically, a muscle car nut.  I hung out w/car nuts in high school and they brainwashed me into believing that late 60s muscle cars were the only cool cars that existed. 70s were ok, (and closer to our price range), but the coolest guys had the 60s muscle and raced it on the strip. The man I married got noticed because he drove a 60s muscle car. Because of him (among others), I have been exposed to other beautiful vehicles, and the joys and pains involved in restoring old iron to street-worthy condition. So when a new-favorite author writes a book about his love for an old truck that he’s in the process of restoring… well, that’s just a book with my name on it, isn’t it?

Truck: A Love Story is a year in the life of Michael Perry. A rather eventful year, in which he commits to restoring his old International pickup truck, growing a garden, and (unexpectedly) to a woman he wants to marry. It’s also the year that his book (I think Population 485, but could have been Coop) hits the big time and he must travel to support it through radio interviews and book-signings.

The reason I like Perry so much is this: he’s a master at observing ordinary life and finding something extraordinary to say about it. He’s not the first, or the greatest, or the most famous writer to make a living doing this – he’s just my most recent discovery in this area. Also, his humility: he’s conscious of the fact that he is indeed no one special, and his life is not all that special either. Except that it is his life, and therefore special to him.  What he writes about is not terribly significant in the details, only in his awareness of it – how one lives it with purpose and joy, appreciating the miracle of waking up and finding someone or something to love. Even if all we have is Mom and an old pickup.

Gives me hope to read of men with humility, sensitivity, wit, and a thing for old trucks. And did I mention, a musician as well? Because I would like all of those things in one package, thank you.

reading roadblocks of my own making

I have a confession to make.

No, I’m not confessing that I was full of crap when I said I’d write every day – you can see that for yourself.

No, you also know I’m a big slacker and skip work whenever I think I can get away with it. And stay up past midnight when I swore I would start getting to bed earlier.

The real confession is this: I’ve been pissed off at a book for a week.

It’s childish and ridiculous, I know this.  It’s not the book’s fault I have to review it. Or that I hadn’t finished the review yet (didn’t even start until the day it was due). I chose the gig, I even chose the book. But I’m blaming the book anyway.

I am a procrastinator from waaaaaaay back.  Certainly when it comes to writing, some kind of pressure is necessary – and that pressure is rarely internal. So the deadline is my frienemy (frenemy?). I hate it, but can’t accomplish much without it. Much like having a job – don’t like it, can’t keep a roof over my head without it (anyone who has a solution to this one, please pass it along!).

For the first time, I received a review copy a month before the review was due.  I picked it up two weeks ago and lied told myself I’d read it, get it done early and for once not email the review just before midnight on the due date. No one is surprised that the story did not unfold in quite that manner.

I read 95% of it (short stories, so it wasn’t technically necessary for me to read every story to review it adequately) more than a week ago – and then just carried it around with me, not reading it. And since I hadn’t finished it – and hadn’t written the review – I really couldn’t read anything else. I’ve been busy this last week (luckily) and watched a lot of Hulu and DVDs. But each night as I went to bed, I would find myself grumbling (in my head – I haven’t gone so far as to actually yell at the book out loud) that I couldn’t read any of the dozen books sitting on the shelf. Each night, they looked better and more interesting than the night before. Torture, thy name is unread books.

Last night, after work, I read the last four stories, finished my review of Best European Fiction 2010, and emailed it – and the joy was quite out of proportion with the product, let me assure you. I practically danced to my two (!) stacks of unread books and grabbed The Madonnas of Leningrad and started reading – after midnight, naturally.

And it was wonderful. Finished it an hour ago. Granted, it was only 228 pages, and I did take the day off. Still – it’s good to be free!