Recent Events
May. 12th, 2007 09:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pameladeanMostly it's book, book, book, like a chicken.
However, I did make an unexpected trip to California. Sun launched David's project, and he was invited to bring his spouse. There was some last-minute dithering about whether it could really happen after all and then about exactly when the company picnic to celebrate the event was going to be. But I flew into San Francisco on Friday, May 4, and was met by Eric. We took BART, which I had never ridden before, into the city and stayed at a tiny peculiar hotel with a diner on the first floor, the hotel desk crammed into a corner amid the tables. The neighborhood was Union Square, more or less. It was quite noisy. The cable car ran right under our window, filled with happy drunken people until the wee hours. This was oddly soothing, for some reason. The room was pleasantly furnished, but missing one light bulb. We thought another was burned out, but in fact the lamp was merely unplugged. The hinges of the bathroom door needed oiling. But it was fine enough refuge for one night. It had one wall of exposed bricks, with an extremely businesslike steel beam cutting right cross the room. I assumed carelessly that the building had originally been industrial, but Eric remarked that the beam was a later addition and was earthquake-proofing, so that the masonry would not be unsupported. That was rather sobering.
We walked around the neighborhood for a while. The emphasis on shopping was boring, but it was fun to look at the crowds. We got into Chinatown, which was more interesting. We marvelled at the front of the Ritz-Carleton, which looks like a temple, and smiled at the statues of owls dotted here and there to scare the pigeons. We scouted around for restaurants to have lunch with David in on the following day. Finally we got on BART again and went to Borderlands, which Eric had only recently been introduced to by Shweta and a friend of hers. It's a beautiful bookstore with space and light, and all my books; people I know were well represented too. The cat was not In, unfortunately. I found a copy of Heat of Fusion, which both pleased me and made me sad. David and I had bought a copy when it came out, though we couldn't afford it. Then we needed a present for his sister, so we gave it to her and never replaced it. So I'm glad to have it, but I think it's the only book of Mike's we have that isn't autographed to us, and that makes me sad. I wonder what he would have written. Oh, indeed I do, altogether, not just there.
Then we went to The Herbivore, and ordered things we didn't like as much as other things we'd had there, but we were well enough nourished. A gentleman in a white hat with a guitar came and sang songs in Spanish right beside our table very loudly. He had to sing that loudly, as Eric pointed out later, in order to be heard in the back of the long narrow restaurant, but he did not endear himself to us. I hate live music, or any music, during dinner. Dinner is for conversation. The fact that Eric and I were both so tired that I ended up observing that, after all, we could only really be silent together in person, did not change my basic opinion of live music during dinner.
We went back to the hotel and exchanged news and reading material. In the morning we checked out, leaving my luggage with the hotel, and went looking for a Peet's for coffee. The one we found was so close to the old ferry building that Eric suggested we walk on over, so we went through it briefly, looked at the slice of bay and bridge available for perusal, and wandered happily amidst the market stalls until it was time to meet David. David called while we were waiting for a bus, but said he had a camera, and so he was perfectly well occupied. The Muni bus we took was on the F line, which Eric described as a working museum; our particular bus originated in Philadelphia in 1948. So I got to take two forms of transportation I had not taken before. I liked BART; it's roomier than anything in Minneapolis. We found David easily, and we went through Union Square and back to Chinatown, with David taking such pictures as seemed good to him. Having rejected a number of restaurants on the grounds that dim sum is not Pamela-friendly, we found a basic restaurant full of Chinese people, and went in for some very nice food. I had shrimps with greens, which was just what I wanted. The dehydration of the whole plane trip caught up with me at that point and I got quite dizzy, but a glass or two of water and some food settled it.
We walked back to the hotel, and I retrieved my stuff and said goodbye to Eric, getting rather choked up but not actually bursting into tears. David and went to the garage where he'd put the rental car and we had a pleasant drive to Santa Rosa, where we were magnificently entertained by his cousin Cynthia, whom I had not met before but took to right away. David's cousin John and his significant other arrived for dinner, with a beautiful dog rescued from a Mexican street fourteen years ago. I was still awfully tired from travelling, but hope I managed to be sociable enough. We drove back to Palo Alto despite all the wine we had been plied with, arriving at David's usual hotel around midnight and collapsing fairly quickly. In the morning we went to the Sun picnic, where I am only a little sorry to say that I spent most of my time talking to Mark, who lives in Minneapolis, and to Gordon, whom David and I have both known for years. I was pleased to meet Gordon's wife and also to make the acquaintance of their dog. I did get to meet some local Sun people and exchanged small talk with them.
Our flight out of SFO was delayed enough that we would have missed our connection in Las Vegas if we'd taken it, so David called the emergency number for the travel agency Sun uses, and we ended up flying out of San Jose through Phoenix instead. We got exit row seats. The extra leg room in addition to the fact that I was sitting next to somebody I am attached to made the flights home much pleasanter than the ones out there. We had some nice conversation on the way home.
Then I spent the week cleaning the house and cooking for the Romance Exchange, which was today and seems to have gone off pretty well. I was very glad to see everybody, since I had had to miss the last one. In case inspiration fails me next time, I list the dishes: hazelnut mushroome pate, mushrooms with garlic, ginger, and cashews in puff pastry shells, asparagus-goat cheese tart, spanakopita, smoked salmon, various crudites, bread and crackers, medallions of goat cheese; gingerbread, and chocolate tofu pie. And tea, of course. A merry time was had by all, including many particularly egregious puns by carbonel, and David and Lydy joined us near the end for some conversation.
Now it's back to the book again. Because Pat is catching up with me. I'm sure she'll finish hers before I finish mine.
Pamela
However, I did make an unexpected trip to California. Sun launched David's project, and he was invited to bring his spouse. There was some last-minute dithering about whether it could really happen after all and then about exactly when the company picnic to celebrate the event was going to be. But I flew into San Francisco on Friday, May 4, and was met by Eric. We took BART, which I had never ridden before, into the city and stayed at a tiny peculiar hotel with a diner on the first floor, the hotel desk crammed into a corner amid the tables. The neighborhood was Union Square, more or less. It was quite noisy. The cable car ran right under our window, filled with happy drunken people until the wee hours. This was oddly soothing, for some reason. The room was pleasantly furnished, but missing one light bulb. We thought another was burned out, but in fact the lamp was merely unplugged. The hinges of the bathroom door needed oiling. But it was fine enough refuge for one night. It had one wall of exposed bricks, with an extremely businesslike steel beam cutting right cross the room. I assumed carelessly that the building had originally been industrial, but Eric remarked that the beam was a later addition and was earthquake-proofing, so that the masonry would not be unsupported. That was rather sobering.
We walked around the neighborhood for a while. The emphasis on shopping was boring, but it was fun to look at the crowds. We got into Chinatown, which was more interesting. We marvelled at the front of the Ritz-Carleton, which looks like a temple, and smiled at the statues of owls dotted here and there to scare the pigeons. We scouted around for restaurants to have lunch with David in on the following day. Finally we got on BART again and went to Borderlands, which Eric had only recently been introduced to by Shweta and a friend of hers. It's a beautiful bookstore with space and light, and all my books; people I know were well represented too. The cat was not In, unfortunately. I found a copy of Heat of Fusion, which both pleased me and made me sad. David and I had bought a copy when it came out, though we couldn't afford it. Then we needed a present for his sister, so we gave it to her and never replaced it. So I'm glad to have it, but I think it's the only book of Mike's we have that isn't autographed to us, and that makes me sad. I wonder what he would have written. Oh, indeed I do, altogether, not just there.
Then we went to The Herbivore, and ordered things we didn't like as much as other things we'd had there, but we were well enough nourished. A gentleman in a white hat with a guitar came and sang songs in Spanish right beside our table very loudly. He had to sing that loudly, as Eric pointed out later, in order to be heard in the back of the long narrow restaurant, but he did not endear himself to us. I hate live music, or any music, during dinner. Dinner is for conversation. The fact that Eric and I were both so tired that I ended up observing that, after all, we could only really be silent together in person, did not change my basic opinion of live music during dinner.
We went back to the hotel and exchanged news and reading material. In the morning we checked out, leaving my luggage with the hotel, and went looking for a Peet's for coffee. The one we found was so close to the old ferry building that Eric suggested we walk on over, so we went through it briefly, looked at the slice of bay and bridge available for perusal, and wandered happily amidst the market stalls until it was time to meet David. David called while we were waiting for a bus, but said he had a camera, and so he was perfectly well occupied. The Muni bus we took was on the F line, which Eric described as a working museum; our particular bus originated in Philadelphia in 1948. So I got to take two forms of transportation I had not taken before. I liked BART; it's roomier than anything in Minneapolis. We found David easily, and we went through Union Square and back to Chinatown, with David taking such pictures as seemed good to him. Having rejected a number of restaurants on the grounds that dim sum is not Pamela-friendly, we found a basic restaurant full of Chinese people, and went in for some very nice food. I had shrimps with greens, which was just what I wanted. The dehydration of the whole plane trip caught up with me at that point and I got quite dizzy, but a glass or two of water and some food settled it.
We walked back to the hotel, and I retrieved my stuff and said goodbye to Eric, getting rather choked up but not actually bursting into tears. David and went to the garage where he'd put the rental car and we had a pleasant drive to Santa Rosa, where we were magnificently entertained by his cousin Cynthia, whom I had not met before but took to right away. David's cousin John and his significant other arrived for dinner, with a beautiful dog rescued from a Mexican street fourteen years ago. I was still awfully tired from travelling, but hope I managed to be sociable enough. We drove back to Palo Alto despite all the wine we had been plied with, arriving at David's usual hotel around midnight and collapsing fairly quickly. In the morning we went to the Sun picnic, where I am only a little sorry to say that I spent most of my time talking to Mark, who lives in Minneapolis, and to Gordon, whom David and I have both known for years. I was pleased to meet Gordon's wife and also to make the acquaintance of their dog. I did get to meet some local Sun people and exchanged small talk with them.
Our flight out of SFO was delayed enough that we would have missed our connection in Las Vegas if we'd taken it, so David called the emergency number for the travel agency Sun uses, and we ended up flying out of San Jose through Phoenix instead. We got exit row seats. The extra leg room in addition to the fact that I was sitting next to somebody I am attached to made the flights home much pleasanter than the ones out there. We had some nice conversation on the way home.
Then I spent the week cleaning the house and cooking for the Romance Exchange, which was today and seems to have gone off pretty well. I was very glad to see everybody, since I had had to miss the last one. In case inspiration fails me next time, I list the dishes: hazelnut mushroome pate, mushrooms with garlic, ginger, and cashews in puff pastry shells, asparagus-goat cheese tart, spanakopita, smoked salmon, various crudites, bread and crackers, medallions of goat cheese; gingerbread, and chocolate tofu pie. And tea, of course. A merry time was had by all, including many particularly egregious puns by carbonel, and David and Lydy joined us near the end for some conversation.
Now it's back to the book again. Because Pat is catching up with me. I'm sure she'll finish hers before I finish mine.
Pamela
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no subject
Date: 2007-05-13 01:57 pm (UTC)It sounds (from the dishes you served) like you are quite the cook yourself (yet I'm sure I'd heard that from Mike anyway).
I have regrets about books not autographed too, but he always seemed to hate it so much. I have a story about that I'll e-mail to you sometime.
trip report loc
Date: 2007-05-13 03:20 pm (UTC)About that "working museum": One of my odder San Francisco experiences was sitting at a bus stop in a semi-off the beaten path neighborhood (sort of between Castro and Glen Park, IIRC), and seeing a CTA (Chicago Transit Authority) streetcar about as old as I am go by.
From Santa Rosa all the way down to Palo Alto is quite a hike! It certainly gives a view of my personal thesis about the Bay Area that it's more like a small European country than like an American city. Ten or fifteen miles in almost any direction from almost anywhere, and if you haven't put out to sea, you're in a very nother place with very much its own, independent identity.
You weren't clear which Mark from Minneapolis you meant, but from here in Chicago, it was Minneapolis we had in mind when Karen Trego and I used the figure of 400 miles in the Seven Warming Signs of Fandom: "You travel 400 miles to party with people you can see at home."
no subject
Date: 2007-05-13 07:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-13 11:49 pm (UTC)Hazelnut Mushroom Pate and loud Mexican music
Date: 2007-05-14 02:48 pm (UTC)Loud Mexican Music: La Perla del Pacifico restaurant on Nicollet at 60th has (had--haven't been for a year or so) excellent food, but the extremely loud music on our last expedition put us off. The place is much too small for strolling musicians, especially a saxophone.
Re: Hazelnut Mushroom Pate and loud Mexican music
Date: 2007-05-14 09:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-15 12:17 am (UTC)-grins- Are you having a race then? I should like a race of Scribblies. I know that I'll win out no matter what. It's not my turn to tell Steve about such races. -twinkle- Just sayin'.
Mmmm. Arry and her family plus the current not-quite-Fairchilds equals happy thoughts. :D Looking forward to your book, Pamela!
Between your recommendation and Michael Moorcock's, I have begun to read E. Nesbit. I wish I'd known about her books as a kid. I am trying to decide about getting more Nesbit from the library in time for jury duty, or whether that would ruin my pleasure.
- Chica
Question from a fan.
Date: 2007-05-22 09:55 pm (UTC)In "Juniper, Gentian and Rosemary"--this sort of fills me with blind rage--I really hope you were drawing all your creative energies from this book either from your imagination or from your own coming of age story.
Because you know what? I don't live in a beautiful three-story Victorian house. My best friend isn't a poet. I don't have supportive, witty and intelligent parents who read Shakespeare with me. I could never afford a telescope for astronomy, except maybe for Christmas. I've never read Jane Austen. Sorry, just haven't and the majority of the thirteen year-olds you will meet usually haven't. Actually, the majority of Everyone you might meet hasn't read Jane Austen, but whatever.
My point is I can't relate to Gentian at all (aside from all the things mentioned above, she's too SMUG all the time), and I don't think the book's age group can either, and I'm really hoping you wrote that book for yourself. If you did write it for yourself, then why push it on the rest of the world? Don't books like that belong in the famous Trunk Under the Bed?
And don't get me wrong. Good book, it reads as lightly as a dream. You really got the skillz to pay the billz, your retelling of Tam Lin is proof enough of this. I just wonder if I would have liked it more from Juniper's perspective. And I wonder if I would have liked it more if Gentian was a girl who felt awkward all the time and didn't read books and if her parents maybe weren't so perfect. I can't seem to work out an ounce of sympathy for Gentian because she's got a very nice life, and a very nice mystery with a very nice boy and she's so very smart and oh, lord, does she know it.
To quote an Amazon reviewer on "Juniper, Gentian and Rosemary"; 'I fell in love with her world - it is the life that I always wished I had.'
To quote another reviewer; 'I have yet to meet a 13-year old with the intellectual capacity and vocabulary of Gentian, the main character and heroine. The way the children speak to each other, their musings -- it doesn't feel real.'
Maybe it's ridiculous to be jealous of a book character, but I am. And I'd like a bit of an explanation for why you wrote this book. You aren't obligated to explain, but I figured you might be able to answer what was the inspiration for this book and its atmosphere and characters, and why you chose to publish it. Thank you.
Re: Question from a fan.
Date: 2007-05-23 01:05 am (UTC)It's not so much that her father, her parents, nearly enough sold her soul to the Devil through something near kin to incompetence; it's that, yes, witty, yes, articulate, yes with the excellence of material provision, but no, not at all with the willingness to give their children choice of risk or scope or learning, their own truth or presence in the world.
This very nearly destroys Gentian, her sisters, her family; it was (to me, anyway) far from clear that her parents, at the end, recognized that what had happened was a fundamental error of objective, not a fault in execution, or that Gentian would ever recover entire or near to entire her capacity for trust. (To the point where I keep hoping she will meet Patrick Carroll at University, so she'll have someone to talk to about having one's imagination of the universe destroyed.)
The language, well, in grade 6, when I was ten years old, my vocabulary tested at a level appropriate to someone who already had a university degree. (Never score higher on a standardized test than your grade school teacher.) This may not make it common, but I didn't see either Gentian or the Giant Ants as much in the character of impossible.
-- Graydon
no subject
Date: 2007-05-23 02:35 am (UTC)P.
Re: Question from a fan.
Date: 2007-05-23 02:49 am (UTC)I can't really make some of your questions make sense without assuming that you, in turn, assume that your reaction to the book was inevitable and natural, that your reaction is the universal reaction of readers, and that I had to have known that. But none of these things is true. Reactions are all over the place; see Graydon's comment in response to yours, for one pretty much on the other end of the spectrum. I've also gotten a lot of reactions that are just orthogonal to yours, that concern themselves with other aspects of the book. I did worry a little about some of the things that you object to, but since an early reader who also had no Victorian house and no telescope told me irately to quit wallowing in survivor guilt and get on with the story, I quit worrying after that.
It's pretty evident to me by this time that I wasn't clear enough about what I was doing in the book. Some people do get it, but a huge number don't. It's always interesting to see what rushes in to fill the vacuum that I inadvertently left.
I have to add, though, that I don't really see the relevance of whether thirteen-year-olds have or haven't read Jane Austen. I've read a lot of books full of characters who have read a lot of things that I haven't, and I either just collect the information I need from the context, or think, "Hmmm, maybe I should read that." Such matters in books have never been a big deal to me, including when I was thirteen. I'm kind of boggled that you didn't bounce a lot harder off Tam Lin, on the whole.
I do know that Gentian is smug about some things. It doesn't serve her very well.
It's hard to answer questions about inspiration, but I can toss out a handful of things. One is the ballad it's based on, Child No. 1, "Riddles Wisely Expounded." There are a lot of different versions of the ballad, and it fascinated me that while sometimes the person asking the riddles of the young woman was the Devil, sometimes he was a great knight who married her because she was clever enough to answer. Another is my lasting frustration and fury with sexism and with gender essentialism. Yet another is my pleasure in instances where women support one another rather than supporting the surrounding misogynistic culture. Another was how easy it often is to sabotage oneself under what seem like the best circumstances. Another was the notion that the Devil can't create anything new. And another was astronomy. It all goes into the mix.
I hope this is useful, because it's about all I've got to offer.
P.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-23 06:47 am (UTC)Your writing is always worth waiting for, Pamela. The Secret Country books have been my comfort books for a long time. So has Liavek.
I remember finding "Owlswater." I was beside myself with delight. I didn't know that people outside of books could BE beside themselves.
Thank you for sharing your worlds. And your towel sprites! :>
- Chica
Re: Question from a fan.
Date: 2007-05-23 07:14 am (UTC)I am trying to understand why Gentian has to be just like you.
Realize that I'm not like Gentian either, madeforfandom. And I'm not trying to start an argument. I just don't get it. I had nothing in common with the hero from _The Catcher in the Rye_ and I didn't like that book.
(If you feel that this is an argument, madeforfandom, then please do write me and tell me so. chica at dreamcafe dot com)
-muses- My parents didn't read Shakespeare to me either. After I read _Peter Pan_, I wept. I didn't want to be Wendy, not for any reason; I was angrily grieving that Peter had never come and got me to be a Lost Boy.
That I wasn't male was not the point, to me.
Nothing wrong with being jealous of a book character. Maybe you cannot have her childhood or her parents; but what stops you from being what you want to be? Would you rather be angry?
- Chica
* Patricia McKillip's _Fool's Run_