To quote Teresa.

Go to Electrolite right now if you haven't seen it already, and read the comment thread for this entry. Mike Ford has written a sonnet...

Oh goodness. (Via Atrios) Thomas Friedman appears to be having serious problems with cognitive dissonance....

Our War With France
It's time we Americans came to terms with something: France is not just our annoying ally. It is not just our jealous rival. France is becoming our enemy.

I have been reading blogs lately. Too many -- I've been overdosing. I grow tired of recurrent internecine bickering between the Democratic candidates' supporters on dKos, and Matt Yglesias has gone and got himself a day job, which is cutting back on both his trademark irony and his posting volume. Although Atrios catches a lot of interesting events almost as soon as they happen, the level of vitriol in the comments there gets old.

Every once in a while, though, I run across something... Today there were two fine somethings I was glad to have found. Calpundit did a blog interview with Paul Krugman about his new book. (How bad did you think things were now from an economist's point of view? Well, scratch that. They're worse....)

Train wreck is a way overused metaphor, but we're headed for some kind of collision, and there are three things that can happen. Just by the arithmetic, you can either have big tax increases, roll back the whole Bush program plus some; or you can sharply cut Medicare and Social Security, because that's where the money is; or the U.S. just tootles along until we actually have a financial crisis where the marginal buyer of U.S. treasury bills, which is actually the Reserve Bank of China, says, we don't trust these guys anymore — and we turn into Argentina. All three of those are clearly impossible, and yet one of them has to happen, so, your choice. Which one?

More and more females are being made to quit work or school or college. I spent last month trying to talk a neighbor's mother into letting her 19-year-old daughter take her retests in a leading pharmaceutical college. Her mother was adamant and demanded to know what she was supposed to do with her daughter's college degree if anything happened to her daughter, "Hang it on her tombstone with the consolation that my daughter died for a pharmaceutical degree??? She can sit this year out."

The sun was just beginning to set and the sky was a combination of blue, orange and gray. I was standing, in the warm, dry grass, waiting for a pot to fill with water, when I heard someone knocking the garden gate. It was Ihsan, our ten-year-old neighbor across the street. He was holding freshly made ‘khubz’ (something like whole-wheat pita bread) and squinting across the street at his next-door-neighbor’s house.

Ihsan: They found Abu Ra’ad…
Me: What?! Did they? Is he…
Ihsan: He’s dead. Ra’ad and his sisters are at my house.

I looked at the house across the street and saw that three cars were lined up in front of it, as if in a funeral procession. Ihsan followed my gaze and shook his head solemnly, “They didn’t bring him home- they’ll bury him tomorrow at dawn.” He handed me the bread and turned to run back home. As he darted away to cross the street, he lost a flip-flop. He squealed as his foot hit the hot asphalt and hopped around on one leg like some bizarre stork.

Here I received this fine id courtesy of papersky, and then I found I didn't really know what I wanted to say. After posting a few entries, I just... fell silent. Shyness? Mmm. Well, some.

But we just had a visit from Dave and Elizabeth Clement, and he told me he'd recently acquired a LJ identity -- decadentdave, of course. I thought I'd take the chance to jump back in.

I've been spending a lot of time worrying about American politics lately, and expressing my opinions of current affairs in the comment sections of blogs. I might do some of that here.

But for now, I just wanted to record for posterity (or for however long this stream of electrons lasts) that:

* The new Johnny Carino's restaurant that opened up near us does awesome things with flavors. I suppose we should have been a little dubious at an appetiser called "Italian nachos"... but we took a chance, and it turned out to be a wonderful success. Kept the basic structural principle of nachos, but after that nothing was the same. The chips were what they called "pasta chips" - delicate, light, crisp, flaky. Over that, let's see: black olives, jalapeno peppers, mushrooms, paper-thin chicken slices and Italian sausage, then over that, cheese broiled until bubbly -- I think asiago, and a creamy sauce that tied it all together. I may have missed some of the goodies. A platter for four looked huge, but was so delicious it almost seemed to have been skimpy, once it was gone.

* Though we've been in NJ for five years now, this was the first time we had occasion to drive the winding Henry Hudson Parkway, taking Dave and Elizabeth to their next stop, Don and Charity's place. Lord, that's a gorgeous drive! Now I want to live in the Bronx.

* I am convinced the knotted highway interchanges at the northwest corner of Newark Airport must have accidentally duplicated some evil Glyph of Confusion.

* Also, Mapquest's aerial photos are totally cool.

* And most important of all: visits from great people like Dave and Elizabeth do wonders for one's mental health. (Hi there, Dave, when you read this!)

Another of my Minicon treasures was Sue Blom's Inca: The Scarlet Fringe. Normally books don't stay unread this long around me, especially books I expect to be good, but, well, see a couple of posts back: Real Life intervened. I didn't read it on the plane on the way back as I had planned. And then... but I got to it eventually.

The main wonder for me was the recreation of the very different yet utterly believable culture. I'm not familiar with the historical Incas, so I have no idea whether what Sue has done here is to translate a real, known, long-past culture into fiction, or imaginatively recreate what their culture could have been. I suspect it must have been some of each, but it's all convincing. The surprising details that keep cropping up to remind you that this place is not even slightly European, could be invention, or they could be the results of intensive research on her part. Either way, it's admirable and enjoyable.

I also very much liked the character of the protagonist. It's not a spoiler to say that he is Atahualpa, who was the Great Inca at the time of Pizarro's arrival, because a) this is alternate history, so knowing who he is doesn't tell you a thing about what will happen to him, and b) you find this out on the first page, anyway. I found myself admiring him very much. He's calm, clever, emotional yet self-controlled. She never says straight out that he's charismatic because he never thinks of himself that way; you decide as you read that he must be, though, from the entirely natural way he manages to engage, charm, and disarm just about everyone he meets. (Damn, I wish I could pull that off half as well as she does!)

And I can't wait to read the next book.

Humph. The picture doesn't seem to be working! I'll try it again.

Update: Aha!

Apparently you can't update the picture for a post when you edit, you have to choose it right the first time. Even though the web page appears to offer the option of updating the picture selection, it is a snare and a delusion. Okay, I can live with that.

So then, this is Sascha about a month ago, concentrating as he plays with a stream of water at the bathroom sink.

Well. That was a week, that was. Work -- the day job -- suddenly became extraordinarily urgent and tried to turn itself into a 24/7 job. Now it's scaled back to a more reasonable 10 or 11 hours a day.

We did manage to get into NYC for Mother's Day. So-o-o... I'm going to burble just a bit about my beautiful grandson Sascha. Twenty months old, now, talking in single words, occasionally stringing two or three of them together just for fun. Such a delight. If I can make this LiveJournal picture thing work, that's him beside this entry. Clearly I have every excuse for being an enthralled grandma.

Today I even had time to sneak peeks at the news. Hey, how about those Texas Democrats! Stakeout at the OK Denny's... It's been a while since I actually got a laugh out of US politics, but that story is genuinely funny.

In other, less amusing, news, it seems the Bush administration has given up on finding WMDs and is recalling their team of experts. And voice recognition experts are saying that the tape that surfaced a week ago probably is Saddam Hussein. In general, the US seems to be making a rather large number of mistakes. Par for the course. They'd have to be much worse than they are, to be worse than Saddam Hussein, but of course after a bit, Iraqis aren't going to be comparing life under the Americans to life under Saddam. They'll be comparing it to life as it could be if the Americans would just leave their country. Some are saying this already; others will have more patience, I'm sure, but eventually they'll all be thinking it except for the few who manage to profit by the American presence.

A credible widely publicized schedule for leaving would be a really good move about now. Someone said something-or-other about a year, but that sounded more like a trial balloon than a plan. And besides, wasn't that the last guy in charge, who is now being recalled? The job of running Iraq seems to be turning out to be a temp position.

Oh well, but at least Salam Pax has posted again.

Oh.

Oh...!

I still have tears on my cheeks. I just got to the end of Wild Swans. Beautiful, wonderful, heartbreaking. Unforgettable. I am astonished and humbled. The courage to write such a book, the sureness that can strike not one false note from beginning to end. The weaving of two such... nettlesome... threads into a seamless whole.

And oh, that dream, right on the first page.

So I finished River Rats, and I liked it quite a bit, and maybe later I'll write something more about why I did. But then I picked up Peg Kerr's Wild Swans, another treasure from the Minicon dealers' room. And I'm loving that, too. But that's not the impulse that's driving me to post right now. I came to this one part, you see...

"Since Eliza was accustomed to going barefoot all summer, the soles of her feet had hard calluses. Mud was easier to wash off bare feet than embroidered silk, anyway."

...and I thought, my yes, that's true. Going barefoot all summer, I remember that. The first warm day when Mum would let us go out without shoes. The way every tiny pebble at first dug into my winter-tender soles, and the gradual adventuring to rougher and rougher ground. First the smooth sun-warmed concrete patio, but that was no fun. So then the dusty yellow clay of the back yard, and the hole that we dug last year to be a fort, with the cracks in the dried caked mud at the bottom, left by the last of the snowmelt. Dry on top, damp mud underneath. The not-yet-mowed grass patch, soft and cool with new shoots that hid twigs ready to poke my instep before they snapped. Then oh! We'd want to go down the lane to Donny Tallis's place to play, which meant venturing out the back gate onto the gravel lane. Gingerly stepping, wincing, feeling each stone. Mum would call out the window, "If you're going to leave the yard, put your shoes on!" We'd call back, "It's all right, Mum. We're fine." The stones hurt, but we knew that for the price we had to pay for barefoot freedom all summer. And Mum, with barefoot memories of her own, no doubt, would smile and let us go. "Watch out for broken glass, then!" she'd caution us. By the end of a week, our soles would have toughened, and we'd be able to run, not tiptoe, over the gravel.

Are kids allowed to run barefoot these days? In the country, maybe. But in suburbs? New developments like the one where I got those memories, where there are boards and raw earth, bent nails, shards of glass? How many kids grow up never knowing that it's possible for human beings to run around outside quite happily without shoes?

All right, that worked out just fine.

Robert is sleeping right now, after going out at an ungodly hour to drive all the way to NJIT and meet with his team to coordinate the marketing paper on selling cellphones in Brazil. It's been a hectic week for him since we got back from Minicon.

It's raining. I'm sitting by the window where I have my computer set up, and I can look down to puddles on the black asphalt of the church parking lot next door. The tall old trees and the bushes between this house and the church haven't leafed out enough yet to hide it, as they almost do in summer. Right now the branches are sketched in wet black, dotted with impressionist points of new spring green. I like the company of trees all year -- winter lets you see their structure and their strength, but there a lot to be said for their spring renewal phase, too. There's a connection to all the other people who have ever looked at a tree in spring and seen a sign of hope. The feeling is not original -- but then, that's exactly the point, isn't it?

New Jersey is beautiful at this time of year. It seems everything is in bloom at once -- forsythia, magnolia, weeping cherry, plum, apple, pear, daffodils, hyacinths, tulips. They're planted in such profusion, you don't have to go to any formal public park to enjoy them; you can drive along almost any street in any little town here, and you're surrounded by flowers. And we haven't even gotten to the time of irises, azaleas and dogwoods yet. It's better in the sunlight, like yesterday, when the whites, pinks, and yellows are more intense against a clear blue sky, but even under grey clouds, it's lovely. One thing about this rain, it's turning the grass a vivid green.

New Jersey is odd, to me. But nice. After nearly five years here, I'm now getting used to the idea of no central city, just a very dense network of small town after small town. There is apparently no central planning for roads, either, and as for the NJ idea of road signs...! Basically, if you don't know an area well enough to navigate by landmarks, you'd better expect to get lost. Maps help, but not enough to compensate for exit signs that you can't figure out until you're past the exit. But I'm not complaining. Once you know that's how it is here, and don't expect anything else, it's just funny.

After Robert wakes up, we'll probably go for a drive, if there's still enough light. We'll eat in a diner, and we'll bring home enough leftovers for at least another full meal, because diner portions are gargantuan. It makes eating out quite inexpensive.

So right now, I'm going to read Caroline Stevermer's River Rats, picked up in the dealer's room at Minicon.

Progress so far: I've set this page up, tinkered with a few options, and downloaded both a PC client program and a Mac one. This post will be a trial run of the Mac client.

I want to make it clear from the beginning that this is all bluejo's fault. When I asked her for a code, all I intended to do was say hi from time to time in her comments section. Really. But it seems in order to do that, I have to have a journal of my own. And all of that blank space is such a temptation...

I don't know what I'll write about here. I don't want to promise anything, to myself or anyone else. Is this an attack of stage fright? Silly, since nobody's reading. Well. Let's see how it goes.