Out of nowhere, I swear, I have the sudden strong urge to learn to play the ukelele. I know…they’re everywhere now. Maybe my brain finally reached optimal uke saturation or something. But mostly, it’s Amanda Palmer’s fault. Check out this:
and this:
Now tell me you still don’t want a ukelele.
Lorajean and I have a date to take a beginner’s ukelele class in early December. If I like it as much as I feel like I’m going to, I’ll buy one and go for it. Strum strum strummity strum strum…
Kiddo is really into music. I’m thinking I can learn the basics and then get him a little uke of his own and teach him what I’ve learned. Though if you could hear the way he already instinctively strums his kid-sized acoustic guitar or plays his drums you’d know that he’s going to take those basics and leave me in the dust in about five minutes. Natural musician, that one. It’s going to be a challenge to keep a light touch about it as a parent and not try to live through him, because damn am I envious of that gift he’s got.
The Revolution of Every Day is done. Started October 2005, finished October 2011. Eight drafts. I printed it out, gave it a big wet kiss, and sent it out into the world. Fingers crossed, yeah?
This means I get to turn my attention back to the next novel, started in–when the hell was it? 2009?–and then back-burnered so I could do some needed heavy revisions on Revolution. I was only one chapter into the first draft when I set it aside, and now it’s sat for so long the only way back into it is to start over again. The original working title had been Cold Black Stars. Then it became Damascus. Then Joshua Mohr published his Damascus, so… Yeah. He kindly offered to share the title, but I think I’ll let him have it. (He offered this on Twitter. How unexpectedly magical and uniting has Twitter proved? It’s a tool, folks. All in how you use it.) So we’ll just call this one Cold Black Stars until and unless another title asserts itself in the writing. If its lucky enough to find a publisher, the marketing department will rename it anyway.
My first two novels were set in New York. This one is set in Oregon, and it feels like the first time I dreamed in Spanish: I truly live in Portland now. No longer a New Yorker in exile. It’s good to be home.
Today, presumably under orders of Oakland, CA, mayor Jean Quan, police used rubber bullets and tear gas to break up a completely peaceful demonstration.
Here you can read the Twitter feed as the raid happened, and watch a video.
Outraged? Let them know!:
Mayor Jean Quan 1 Frank H. Ogawa Plaza 3rd Floor Oakland, CA 94612 Contact phone: (510) 238-3141 fax: (510) 238-4731 TTY: (510) 238-3254
Wishes & Stitches is the third book in her Cypress Hollow series. Rachael is a terrific storyteller, and writes some of the best dialogue you’ll find anywhere. AND this one is her best yet. She sets up the romance formula in this novel and then subverts it in the most wonderful ways. It’s smart as hell, this book. You’ll enjoy it.
A Life in Stitches. I already loved Rachael before I read this collection of essays. I love her even more after reading it. It’s lovely and heartfelt and honest.
You may know Sara Shepard from her best-selling YA series, Pretty Little Liars. Her second adult novel, Everything We Ever Wanted, has just been released. I was lucky enough to read it as an early manuscript, and I’m looking forward to seeing where she went with it in its finished form. Here is my interview with her, from when her first adult novel, The Visibles, came out.
On May 30, 1995, the NYPD rolled an armored tank down East Thirteenth Street in NYC’s lower east side. Hundreds of police officers in riot gear mobilized to evict a few dozen squatters from two buildings. I was just a bystander. Like many in the neighborhood, I knew very little about the squatters. They existed in a shadow city just to the left of our own. Who were these people, and why had the City seen fit to remove them from their homes with military force? The tank; the great mass of cops in riot gear; snipers on the rooftops… What the hell was happening in New York?
What I remember is the crowds, the intersection of Thirteenth and A choked with people. More cops than I’d ever seen in one place before. I’m not anti-police in the least. My brother is a police officer. He’s a good person. Police forces are made up of human beings, with all the various complications, the shades of gray that human beings bring with them. Let me say that again: I AM NOT ANTI-POLICE. But I saw something that day that had never before occurred to me might be possible: I saw police officers–who before that point had only been symbols of safety and protection for me–looking for a fight, hoping someone would throw a bottle or a fist so they could react.
That stayed with me. The tank stayed with me. (A TANK! A FUCKING ARMORED TANK ROLLING DOWN THIRTEENTH STREET!) There was a protest sign that day that read: LONG LIVE THE REVOLUTION OF EVERYDAY LIFE! That settled down deep in me and it became the seed of the squatter novel I’ve been making vague reference to around here since I started it in October 2005.
I used the events of that day as inspiration, a jumping-off point for my novel, The Revolution of Every Day. It’s fiction, but it draws on the history of the squats in the lower east side. In the novel, the City has set its sights on three squatted buildings on Ea 13th, attempting to evict them so that the buildings can be turned over to developers. I had wanted to write about a very specific time and place in New York, a part of New York that I had loved and that was now lost. (Indeed, when Billy and I decided to leave New York for Portland in 2007, because we could no longer afford to live in the city where we were both born, it wasn’t that hard of a choice. The New York we loved was already gone.) I wanted to recreate that time, because it felt like the beginning of the end of something, the point when money won. And I wanted to find answers: Why did the City evict these people from the homes they created out of abandoned buildings? Why did the City let so many buildings lie empty when the streets were filled with homeless people? How was it possible that the government drove an armored tank down a residential block? What happened to my New York?
This all happened ten years before I sat down to write the novel. The Revolution of Every Day was my original working title. Then I lost my nerve about using the word “revolution” in a title, and the book became Adverse Possession. But now I’m reclaiming that original title, because that’s what the book is about. The revolution of everyday life.
And now, look what’s happening in New York! Look what’s happening worldwide! One of the (many) reasons I’m so fired up about the Occupation is because it resonates deeply with the world I’ve been moving through in my novel for the past six years. My characters are pitted against the city government, which is choosing the interests of big business over the well-being of the citizens. (And they’re pitted against themselves and each other, because it’s a novel and novels are first and foremost about PEOPLE.) If I could set my characters free from the pages, they’d race down to Liberty Plaza as fast as they could. Hell, they’d already be there.
That protest sign that inspired my book is a reference to The Revolution of Everyday Life by Raoul Vaneigem, a Situationist, which I read while doing research for the novel. The epigraph for my book is drawn from it:
“People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have corpses in their mouths.”
I feel like the world of the novel inside my head and the real world around me are converging. The research, the thinking, the writing and rewriting (and rewriting) left me able to understand and embrace the Occupation more readily and fully than I might have before.
We’re on the verge of something big here, a momentous change. When and if the tipping point comes, and where that will lead us, I can’t say. But we’re here now. We’re awake. We’re standing up. The possibility in that is tremendous.
Been a long time gone, hunh? Life gets in the way of blogging sometimes. But no worries. All is well. Life is good.
I’ve been somewhat preoccupied with the Occupation of late.
I’ve been discussing the Occupy movement on Twitter, have been finding and sharing information there and on Facebook, have had some fascinating email conversations about it, and then I remembered…Oh! I have a blog! I could expand this conversation, couldn’t I?
I want to share with you an email I wrote the other day in response to a series of tweets between me and a friend who was not sure how she felt about the Occupy Wall Street movement. It was the beginning of an excellent discussion, one that’s still going on. I’d like to invite you to join in. Here’s what I wrote (edited some, to respect the privacy of the other participants), where I stand:
“I think the Occupy message is actually quite clear, and it has nothing to do with jealousy of the 1% and some misguided idea about the “American dream.” …The message is this: We have two major political parties in the United States. Effectively ALL the political power is split between those parties. And both of those parties live and die by donations from the extremely wealthy and from large corporations, and so government time and time again chooses the well-being of big business over the well-being of the citizens of the US.
And no, I don’t think it’s a disconnect that this movement is happening with the aid of smart phones and laptops. As I said, the problem isn’t that corporations and consumer goods exist (though certainly we’ve been distracted by our “toys” while our rights were being undercut). The problem is that corporations hold all the power. I learned about the movement online, mostly by following links on Twitter. And then we went downtown as a family and marched with the Occupiers, and took part in a General Assembly. And you know what? It was democracy in action, that General Assembly. (Slow, cumbersome, messy democracy. Damn, it’s a lot of work.) It was real people, brought together–mostly online, by this movement–meeting in real life, in the real world, and having a vitally important conversation. It was so damn beautiful.
I’ve got my family to take care of, my two young kids, so I can’t be downtown camping with the occupiers. But I can follow the movement online, on the Occupy websites, on twitter, and I can take part in the conversation that way, too. That’s how I know what the occupiers need when I do get the time to get down there, maybe bring some warm, dry clothes, some food. That’s how I know when the marches are happening and where. That’s how I know what’s going on with the other occupations around the country. Occupy Boston was raided by the police and I was one of thousands watching and witnessing on the livestream. Technology connects us all. I don’t think it’s a failing or hypocrisy of the movement that it’s being used to great advantage.
When the banking crisis (caused by the irresponsible actions and extreme greed of the financial sector/Wall Street) happened, our government bailed out the big banks. Massive amounts of US taxpayer money went to save these institutions that were failing as a direct result of their own actions. (And not a single person has been brought up on criminal charges for what they did.) The banks “needed” to be bailed out to save the economy. The thinking was that they had to have money to keep offering credit, so that our economy would keep rolling. Except that they then STOPPED lending. They did not keep offering credit. They sat on that money, earning interest on it. Meanwhile the Fed has kept interest rates at near zero (to encourage lending) so the banks have been making money hand over fist. And the bankers getting huge bonuses still. And the US economy continuing to circle the drain, and people out of work, losing their homes because they’ve lost their jobs, no jobs out there to get… I don’t think I need to tell you how bad it is out there.
And while all this is going on, there’s the super-rich 1% of Americans with 40% of the nation’s wealth. They’re being taxed at 30%. The working poor? Taxed at 16%. If the 1% were taxed at a higher rate, we’d be able to make a huge dent in the deficit. I don’t have those numbers in front of me, but I read somewhere recently that all the cuts to social programs that are being proposed by Congress would result in the same $ as some miniscule raise in the taxes of the super rich. Why isn’t that happening? Because the super rich own our politicians.
So what’s the goal? Get the money out of politics. Separation of government and corporations. Real democracy, for the people, by the people. I think the goals are still forming. Think evolution, rather than revolution. What’s happening in the Occupations is conversation. Desperately needed conversation. Yes, there is grave inequity between nations and peoples outside of North America. Yes, children and adults alike starve to death on a regular basis here in North America and around the world. Yes, we’re caught up in ridiculous wars. Yes, the environment is in deep shit. But you know what? It’s like on an airplane–you have to put your own oxygen mask on before you can help anyone else with theirs. Our country is failing. It is absolutely, unequivocally going to shit. And many of us are finally waking up to the fact that we need to ACT. That it is on us to act if we have any hope of things getting better. More equitable. If we want to keep those kids from starving. If we want to end the wars, save the environment. It starts with taking our government back from the corporations. Starts with cutting those puppet strings. No, I’m not sure how we’re going to do it. I know that the Occupations feel like a good starting point.”
I’m nervous about putting this out there. I’m no great political or economic thinker. But this is what I believe to be true. I’d love to hear what you have to say for, against, on the fence… To that end, I’m changing the way I handle comments from this post forward. I used to reply via email, an old habit from the early blog days (2003). From now on I will respond to comments within the comments, so we can all join in the discussion together, unless a comment merits a private reply.
You can also find me going on about this and retweeting the hell out of related tweets on Twitter, but be warned that I also talk a lot on there about my kids, and making pickles, and freelance deadlines, and writing. (Basically, Twitter ate the blog content.)
Want to get involved? You don’t have to camp out to help out. Check in with your local occupation! See what they need! Join in a General Assembly! (I’ve only attended one so far, because they conflict with the kids’ sleep here in Portland, but the one I did attend was fascinating. The human mic gave me goosebumps.)
Today is my 38th birthday. Yesterday, I completed the final run of Couch to 5k. That’s nine weeks, going from huffing and groaning through 60-second running segments to comfortably running for 30 minutes without stopping. It may not seem like much, but it’s a lot to me. I’m much stronger at 38 than I was at 37. I’m proud of myself.
Happy birthday to my heart, lungs, and legs. Thanks for getting me up the big hill three times a week.
Confession: I’m newly obsessed with fermenting. I’ve been fermentation-curious for a few years now, but just this week I’ve finally taken the plunge. I thought it would be hard. I thought it might be messy. (I had heard rumors of exploding pickle jars.) I thought I might accidentally poison my entire family. I thought I needed an expensive crock like this. (OK, I knew I didn’t need such an expensive crock. I just WANTED that expensive crock.)
After another disappointing batch of vinegar pickles, which make me MAD because that means I wasted precious pickling cucumbers from our garden to make mediocre pickles, I finally decided to educate myself a bit on what it would actually take to make proper sour (lacto-fermented) pickles. You know what it takes? Not much. Certainly not a $100+ German crock.
To get started I borrowed Wild Fermentation from the library. It came with a fascinating DVD. Sandor Ellix Katz is charming and informative and really, really excited about sauerkraut. If he ever gives a workshop in Portland, I’m going. (I might actually be in danger of becoming a sauerkraut groupie.) Turns out you can use plain old canning jars for fermentation, and you can ferment just about any vegetable. And you can NOT get anyone sick by fermenting vegetables. Botulism? Strictly a risk from canning, not from lacto fermentation. I tried it out two days ago with three wee pickling cukes that were ready in the garden that day:
I also gathered about a cup of nasturtium seed pods to make “capers.” In the book, he insists this works. I tried one today and while they aren’t ready yet, it was tasty, so I’m optimistic:
You place the vegetables and some garlic (and dill, for the pickles) in the jars and top them with brine, then weigh the vegetables down with smaller jars filled with water. The idea is that the vegetables have to stay submerged, or whatever is exposed to the air will mold.
Making small batches in jars is great, but I want to make larger batches of pickles, and great big crocks of sauerkraut. And my birthday is coming up on the 20th. So Billy and I agreed we’d invest in a couple of crocks–not the expensive ones, though. In the DVD, Sandor (may I call you Sandor?) makes an interesting point in favor of the less-expensive crocks, like this one. With the fancy ones with a water channel designed to seal out the air and so avoid a layer of scum that has to be skimmed off, you need to close it up and basically leave it alone until the pickle is “done.” This means you can’t taste it as it goes to learn what “done” means for your particular palate and preferences. Since he assures the viewer that the presence of mold is not at all dangerous, this was a good enough argument for me. I opted for the lidless crocks. You invert a plate over the contents to hold them under the brine, and then weigh the plate down with a water-filled jar.
Today I bought one of these one-gallon crocks. Portlanders won’t be surprised to learn I paid less than what’s listed on that site at Mirador: $19.50. They didn’t have any two- or three-gallon crocks in stock today, and won’t have them for a few weeks. I’m impatient to try making sauerkraut, so I think I’ll be heading over to Urban Farm tomorrow, where I saw the larger sizes at a good price.
I brought the one-gallon crock home today and went out to the garden and lo! There were pickling cukes ready! Not enough to make a full batch, but enough to make it worth my while.
Per the instructions in Wild Fermentation, I covered the cukes, 2 heads of garlic (also from our garden), and three heads of dill (sadly, not from our garden because I accidentally killed our dill by planting it out front where I often forget to water) with brine. I used six tablespoons of sea salt to 1/2 gallon of water.
None of our plates fit into the crock quite right, but a neighbor’s plate, which had arrived at our home with a lovely little zucchini bread loaf on it, fit perfectly. (So…uh…DC? If you’re reading this? I’ll get your plate back to you as soon as I can get to Goodwill and find one that’s the same size.) I covered the cukes with the plate and weighted it down with a pint jar filled with water.
And that’s it. I’ll check it, and the two jars, each day and skim off any mold that might form. I’ll give a little taste to check progress and learn how long we like our pickles to ferment.
Next up, sauerkraut! Then kimchi! Pickled beets! Pickled radishes! Pickled green beans!!!!!
Last night I finished the first pair of socks I’ve made for Kiddo since he learned to walk. See, wool socks are crazy slippy and we’ve always had wood floors, and… Little kids and very very slippery socks on wood floors? It just seemed like a bad combo to me. Plus their feet grow SO FAST when they’re little. Now that he’s five he’s got more control over those limbs (sort of) and his feet aren’t growing at quite the same ridiculous clip and he’s old enough to understand when I say, “you MUST hold on to the railing when you’re walking down the stairs in these socks.” Old enough to understand does not guarantee willingness to comply. I have to admit, I kind of feel like I gave him a loaded weapon when I put these socks in his hands today. (Yes, a touch overprotective. Why do you ask?)
He’s so excited about these socks. He specifically requested that some part of them be “golden.” Luckily my sock-yarn stash is deep enough to accommodate pretty much any sockish request. The ball band for the main color has been lost for years, but I do remember it’s lightweight STR. The heels and toes are lightweight STR in “Sun Stone.” I think I’ll be making myself a pair out of the rest of that “Sun Stone.” How awesome would a pair of socks in that color be?
1. Sock Summit: didn’t get there, even though I could have walked there (a long walk, but not an unreasonable one) from my house. I was way too tired after a month of relentless freelance and too little sleep and just needed to take it easy with Billy and the kids. I did get to pass David in the hall a few times, though, since he and his girlfriend stayed with us, and that was great.
2. Couch to 5K is still going well. I finished Week 7, Day 1 today. It’s all straight-through runs now. No more walking segments. Billy and I are signed up to do a 5K run together on our anniversary in September! What better way to celebrate seven years of marriage?
3. I’ve started washing my face with honey. It’s Heidi’s fault. So far, my skin loves it. I had been using Dr Hauschka for years, and was happy with the results but not so much with the price tag. Luckily, organic raw honey is pretty cheap here, so if I’m getting good results with a product that’s even more natural than Dr Hauschka AND way cheaper? Well, yeah. It’s worth keeping a jar of honey in the shower.
4. I picked up a couple of running skirts at Goodwill, the kind with the teensy shorts attached. They’re great for running in the heat, super comfortable but I don’t feel naked like I would in just the teeny shorts, but…a question for my running friends: um…what do you do about the chafing?
5. Summer has finally arrived in our garden. You may or may not find a zucchini in your mailbox soon. Don’t worry: it’s organic.
