Saturday, February 1, 2014, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

The Big Read 2014

Maharaja's turban ornament.

Last Saturday, January 25, 2014, the San Leandro Main Library hosted "Passport to India," the kickoff event for this year's Big Read. We were treated to a slide show about the influence of the maharajas in India's art and culture, which was presented by Kalpana Desai from the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. The presentation was followed by samples of traditional Indian sweets and savory snacks and a display of typical spices of Indian cuisine courtesy of Santos Spice Products of San Leandro. There were also demonstrations of henna tattooing, of sari tying, and of the board game Pachisi, the national board game of India. More news about this year's events can be found at the Big Read Blog.

 

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

Saturday's Readers Roundtable group will be the first of the book discussion groups for this year's Big Read selection, The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri.This is the story of a first-generation Bengali immigrant family and was also the selection of the month for the Readers Roundtable in May of 2005. The handout material for the Big Read references a 2003 "Fresh Air" interview with Jhumpa Lahiri, which can be found here.

The Namesake was also made into a movie in 2006, directed by Mira Nair and starring Kal Penn (born Kalpen Suresh Modi), who also starred as "Kumar" in the "Harold and Kumar" movies and as "Dr. Lawrence Kutner," for two seasons of the television series "House."

 

Other Books about the Immigrant Experience

In the United States, one of the recurrent themes of popular literature is that of the struggles of immigrants and their children. The two I remember best were recommended to me by my mother.

• Anything Can Happen by George and Helen Papashvili: The very funny semi-autobiographical account of the adventures of a young Georgian immigrant who arrives in the US following his service in the Tsar's army during World War I.
• Mama's Bank Account by Kathryn Forbes: This account of growing up within the Norwegian community of San Francisco formed the basis for the movie "I Remember Mama."

I vaguely remember a book I read as a teenager about a family of three sisters from one of the Baltic states who find themselves in the US as "displaced persons" following World War II, but I don't remember the title, and Google isn't helping me.

You probably have your own favorites, and your recommendations will be welcome in the comments.

Of All Authors, Why Nikolai Gogol and "The Overcoat"?

Last week, Sherryl and I listened to a recording of "The Overcoat," the short story by Nikolai Gogol that Ashoke Ganguli was reading at the time of his train accident. You can find the recording on YouTube in two parts, Part 1 and Part 2. It is also available in a PDF version from Project Gutenberg. We were struck by the part beginning in the third paragraph when Gogol explains how his ill-fated protagonist received his bizarre name.

His family name was Bashmatchkin. This name is evidently derived from “bashmak” (shoe); but when, at what time, and in what manner, is not known. His father and grandfather, and all the Bashmatchkins, always wore boots, which only had new heels two or three times a year. His name was Akakiy Akakievitch. It may strike the reader as rather singular and far-fetched, but he may rest assured that it was by no means far-fetched, and that the circumstances were such that it would have been impossible to give him any other.

This is how it came about.

Akakiy Akakievitch was born, if my memory fails me not, in the evening of the 23rd of March. His mother, the wife of a Government official and a very fine woman, made all due arrangements for having the child baptised. She was lying on the bed opposite the door; on her right stood the godfather, Ivan Ivanovitch Eroshkin, a most estimable man, who served as presiding officer of the senate, while the godmother, Anna Semenovna Byelobrushkova, the wife of an officer of the quarter, and a woman of rare virtues. They offered the mother her choice of three names, Mokiya, Sossiya, or that the child should be called after the martyr Khozdazat. “No,” said the good woman, “all those names are poor.” In order to please her, they opened the calendar to another place; three more names appeared, Triphiliy, Dula, and Varakhasiy. “This is a judgment,” said the old woman. “What names! I truly never heard the like. Varada or Varukh might have been borne, but not Triphiliy and Varakhasiy!” They turned to another page and found Pavsikakhiy and Vakhtisiy. “Now I see,” said the old woman, “that it is plainly fate. And since such is the case, it will be better to name him after his father. His father’s name was Akakiy, so let his son’s be Akakiy too.” In this manner he became Akakiy Akakievitch. They christened the child, whereat he wept and made a grimace, as though he foresaw that he was to be a titular councillor.

"The Overcoat," Russian commemorative stamp.

Saturday, January 4, 2014, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

Octavia E. Butler 1947-2006

Kindred by Octavia Butler

The reader's guide at the end of the paperback version of Kindred contains a good biography of Octavia Butler. For those of you who read a different edition or who listened to the audiobook, I will summarize.

Octavia Estelle Butler was born on June 22, 1947, in Pasadena, California. Her father was a shoeshiner, who died when she was very young. Her mother, Octavia Sr., worked as a maid and was often forced to take young Octavia with her to work as she couldn't afford childcare. Butler has said that her early observations of the relationship between her mother and her mother's white employers forms much of the inspiration for Kindred. Octavia was painfully shy and uncomfortable around other people, and left to her own devices, became an avid reader even though she suffered from dyslexia. In her teen years, she discovered science fiction, which at that time was aimed at a mostly teenaged male audience. She was inspired by a bad science fiction movie to think, "I could write better than that." She received an associate degree from Pasadena City College and then went on to Cal State Los Angeles, but she dropped out, preferring to take writing classes through UCLA extension. It was at a couple of different sci-fi writers' workshops, though, that she met her mentors, Harlan Ellison and Samuel R. Delany, both giants of science fiction.

Interesting trivia: In last month's selection, the fictitious character, Bernadette Fox, moved from Los Angeles to Seattle and was the recipient of a MacArthur fellowship grant. In real life, Octavia Butler moved from Los Angeles to Seattle and was the recipient of a MacArthur fellowship grant.

A list of Butler's works can be found at her official web site, as can a short bio and list of her awards.

On YouTube, I found an interview with Octavia Butler, conducted by Charlie Rose. In grand YouTube fashion, it has been split into two parts.

Part 1


Part 2

Saturday, December 7, 2013, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple

Meet the Author

Maria Semple was born in Santa Monica in 1964. Her father was a screenwriter and wrote the pilot for the Batman television series. Her family lived in Spain, Los Angeles, and Aspen. She attended boarding schoole at Choate Rosemary Hall and received a BA from Barnard College. After graduation, she became a screenwriter for television series including Beverly Hills, 90210; Mad About You; and Arrested Development. In addition to Where'd You Go, Bernadette, she has written another novel, This One is Mine. She lives in Seattle with her partner, George Meyer, and their daughter and teaches writing. Below is a brief video clip of Semple talking about her novel.

Scenes from Seattle

Queen Anne Hill as seen from the Space Needle

The structure at the crest of the hill is the former Queen Anne High School, which has been turned into apartments, but it could just as well be "Straight Gate."

Queen Anne-style house

Possibly the model for Audrey Griffin's "white castle."

Craftsman-style house in Seattle.

Bernadette is not impressed.

Inside the Space Needle

 Seattle icon and scene of the birthday lunch for Bee's friend Kennedy.

Cliff Mass, Meteorologist

Seattle fixture and Bernadette and Bee's favorite weatherman.

Dale Chihuly chandelier in Seattle

Perhaps similar to the one Bernadette fell asleep under at the compounding pharmacy.

Antartica

Ushuaia, Argentina

The jumping-off point for tours of Antarctica.
  

An Antarctic iceberg

 One of the colorful kind that caught Bernadette's attention.

Swimming in the volcanic fumarole on Deception Island.

Notice the tourists in the red parkas. I first heard about this place when watching a Jacques Cousteau special about 30 years ago or so and has been on my bucket list ever since. I was so angry with Bee when she refused an opportunity to swim in the hot springs.

The gift shop at Port Lockroy

This is where Bee met the two English girls. Bernadette was not here.

An Adelie penguin rookery

These parents have chicks and are not fighting.

Palmer Station, Antarctica

Apparently the most coveted research post in Antarctica.

Your Humble Narrator

The story is pieced together from the viewpoint of Bernadette's daughter, Bee, short for...

Balakrishina

The blue, flute-playing baby Krishna.

Director Stanley Kubrick

This is what I imagine Bee's "Kubrick" face looked like.

Saturday, November 2, 2013, 2 PM, San Leandro Main Library

The Round House by Louise Erdrich

Meet the Author

This is Louise Erdrich's biography as lifted wholesale from the University of Nebraska Center for Great Plains Studies:

The eldest of seven children, Louise Erdrich was born in Little Falls, Minnesota on July 6, 1954. She grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota where her parents taught at the Bureau of Indian Affairs school. At an early age Erdrich was encouraged by her parents to write stories. Her father paid her a nickel a story and her mother made covers for her first books. In high school, Erdrich continued her writing by keeping a journal.

In 1972, Erdrich was among the first women admitted to Dartmouth College. She majored in English and creative writing, and took courses in the Native American Studies program headed by her future husband, Michael Dorris. She graduated in 1976.

In 1979, Erdrich earned her Master of Arts degree in writing from Johns Hopkins University. For her thesis Erdrich wrote poetry that would later be published in the collection Jacklight. She also began writing her novel Tracks. After John Hopkins, Erdrich worked at The Circle, the Boston Indian Council Newspaper.

Erdrich met Michael Dorris again when she was invited to return to Dartmouth to read her work. The two exchanged addresses and began a lengthy correspondence while he was in New Zealand and she in New Hampshire. In 1981 Erdrich returned to Dartmouth as a writer-in-residence in the Native American Studies Program. Dorris returned to Dartmouth that same year and the two were married in October of 1981.

Erdrich's marriage to Dorris began not only a domestic partnership but also a literary one. Dorris became a collaborator and agent for Erdrich. The two first wrote romantic fiction under the name Milou North to earn extra money. Milou was a combination of their first names, and north referred to their location. They also collaborated on Erdrich's other novels for which Dorris offered editorial suggestions on Erdrich's writing. Only two works, however, contain both Erdrich's and Dorris's names, The Crown of Columbus and Route Two, a collection of travel essays.

As Erdrich's agent, Dorris persuaded Henry Holt and Company to publish Jacklight and convinced Erdrich to compete for the Nelson Algren Fiction Award. Erdrich won this $5,000 award in 1982 with "The World's Greatest Fisherman." This story later became the opening chapter for Love Medicine.

Dorris had adopted three children when he was single. Erdrich also adopted them and the couple had three more children together. In 1991, their oldest child was killed in a car accident. Additional family problems put a strain on the marriage and the two separated after fifteen years of marriage. In 1997, Dorris committed suicide. Later Erdrich revealed that her husband had been depressed and suicidal during their marriage. Erdrich moved to Minneapolis, only a few hours away from her parents in North Dakota.

Erdrich's fiction is influenced both by her heritage and her life experiences. Her father's parents ran a butcher shop. Jacklight contains a section of poems entitled "The Butcher's Wife." A butcher shop is also featured in her novels The Beet Queen and Tracks. After college one of her many jobs was waitressing. Waitresses appear in several of her works.

Love Medicine is Erdrich's first and most critically acclaimed novel. It was originally published in 1984 and republished in an expanded form in 1993. Erdrich received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Fiction for Love Medicine. It is the first of a series of novels that are interconnected with one another. The other novels are The Beet Queen, Tracks, The Bingo Palace, Tales of Burning Love, and to a much lesser degree The Antelope Wife.

Erdrich has also won the Pushcart Prize in Poetry, the O. Henry Prize for short fiction, the Western Literary Association Award, received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and several of her stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories series. Erdrich's short fiction has also appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, and Paris Review. She is one of few American Indian writers who are widely read.

In the video below, Louise Erdrich talks to the PBS News Hour about her 14th novel, The Round House, which of course is our book for discussion this month.

Law and the Reservation

 In the afterword to The Round House, Erdrich mentions the Amnesty International report "Maze of Injustice," subtitled "The failure to protect Indigenous women from sexual violence in the USA." At that point the Tribal Law and Order Act of 2010 had just been signed into law as a step toward a remedy. In 2011, The Violence Against Women Act, which had been signed originally in 1994 (an effort led by then-Senator Joe Biden), was due to expire, and during the reauthorization hearings, language was added which would have extended protections to native Americans as well as undocumented aliens and LGBT victims. Due to the expansion of protections, the reauthorization bill was opposed by conservative lawmakers, and only a watered-down version stripped of additional protections was able to pass in the House. In February 2013, Louise Erdrich wrote an article in the opinion pages of The New York Times about the consequences to native women of the failure to pass the Violence Against Women Act. A month later, in March 2013, the reauthorization bill finally passed and was signed into law by President Obama. At the signing ceremony, a young woman named Diane Millich of the Southern Ute tribe told of her own experience with violence at the hands of her non-Indian ex-husband and how that was made possible by the jursidictional conflicts that are now addressed by the act (see the first 2 minutes of this video).

Some followup to the book Gods Without Men

Area 51 and Roswell

Area 51 is the light rectangle in the center.

In regard to the discussion of UFO sightings in the desert, it turned out that most of us had Area 51 and Roswell, New Mexico, blended together in our minds. I was pretty sure that Area 51 was in Nevada, but not absolutely sure, so I had to look it up. It turns out that Area 51 (AKA Groom Lake) is in southern Nevada and is actually administratively part of Edwards Air Force Base, itself located in the California desert not too far from where the action of the book takes place. Groom Lake in Nevada is where many top-secret spy aircraft have been tested (including the U2 spy plane), also where captured technology from other countries was evaluated. Due to the extreme secrecy that surrounds the facility, rumors have been rife over the years that the base had something to do with either extraterrestrial exploration or captured extraterrestrial ships on earth or both. Due to a Freedom of Information Act request made in 2005, the CIA finally publicly acknowledged a few months ago that there was a test facility at that location, but didn't reveal anything more. Go to the Wiki page if you want to read more (standard Wikipedia caveats apply).

Roswell is nearly two states away from Area 51.

Roswell, New Mexico, is located in the southeast corner of that state, actually quite a way from Area 51. In July 1947, a local newspaper reported that a "flying disk" had crashed on a ranch near there and been taken to Roswell Army Air Force Base for analysis. From thence have sprung many books, television series episodes, and movies about captured alien technology and alien autopsies. The Roswell UFO Incident, of course, has its own Wiki Page.

Changelings

Twice in Gods Without Men, the idea of a changeling figures in the story. First, the child Judy disappears at the site of the UFO cult and is widely believed either to have been abducted by aliens or to have been incinerated in the explosion of the extraterrestrial travel machine that consumed the cult's founder, Schmidt. A fully grown late teen-aged "Judy" later appears to confirm the alien abduction story and become a key figure in what remains of the cult. Later, "Judy" reveals to another character that she is not actually Judy but a young girl from Salt Lake City who was picked up by one of the cult elders and groomed to impersonate the original Judy. When asked how the mother of the original Judy could have been taken in, the substitute answers, "I was the answer to her prayers." The second incident comes at the end of the book, after Raj is returned to Jaz and Lisa with his autism cured, when Jaz begins to suspect that Raj is not his son but a completely different child.

As we were discussing this, something flashed by my mind, but the conversation had moved on, and the thought was gone before it was even fully formed. Later I remembered what I had been thinking about was a movie that I saw a year or so ago, called "The Imposter," about a Texas family whose youngest son had disappeared at age 13. The family got a call three years later from Spain from someone claiming to be the lost teen. His older sister traveled to Spain and identified him as her lost brother even though he was shorter than any male in her family, had brown hair and brown eyes instead of blond hair and blue eyes, had a much heavier 5-o'clock shadow than is normal in a teen, and had a heavy French accent. As the story unraveled, people asked how the family could have been so easily and thoroughly duped, and the answer was that "He was the answer to their prayers." It was one of the most disturbing movies I've ever seen and is available on Netflix (there is also a fictionalized version called "The Chameleon"). Here's the trailer of  "The Imposter".

Saturday, October 5, 2013, 2 PM, San Leandro Public Library

Gods Without Men by Hari Kunzru

The title is taken from a short story by Honoré de Balzac, "Une passion dans le désert". The relevant excerpt is quoted at the beginning of the book and roughly translated means, "In the desert, you see, there is everything, and there is nothing ... It is God without men."

 

About the Author

Hari Kunzru was born in England in 1969 and grew up there, the child of an Indian father and a British mother. In an interview with Granta, he tells of having had fantasies as a child of being abducted by a UFO. He earned a BA in English Language and Literature from Wadham College, Oxford, and an MA in Philosophy and Literature from the University of Warwick. Before being a published novelist he worked as a travel writer, television presenter, and music editor at a magazine. He has published three other novels, The Impressionist (2003), Transmission (2004), and My Revolutions (2007), and a collection of short stories, Noise (2005). In 2003, he was award the John Llewellyn Rhys prize, but he turned it down because one of the sponsors was the Mail on Sunday, a paper with a notorious anti-immigrant editorial position. He has been active in the cause of free speech, including reading excerpts from Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses aloud at a literary festival in Jaipur, India, in 2012. In the YouTube clip below, he talks about his position on free speech and reads aloud a poem, "The Love that Dares Speak Its Name," which was banned in England in the 1970s on grounds of blasphemy. You may not want to watch if you are offended by homoeroticism or blasphemy.

Background for Gods Without Men

The Mojave Desert

In an interview in the Paris Review, Kunzru tells of how he first traveled to the Mojave after being trapped in Los Angeles after 9/11 and needing to get out of the city to clear his head.

Rock formation near Hole-in-the-Wall campground in the East Mojave; my husband and I camped near here in 1989.

 

The Pinnacles

The pinnacles of the book were probably based on the Trona Pinnacles, but in looking at pictures of them, I could not find a particular group that looked like three fingers.

There apparently was a real "Schmidt," though I seem to recall that his name was not Schmidt, who set up a radio transmitter near the pinnacles in order to contact extraterrestrial life, but I can't link to the article that mentions that, because I forgot to bookmark it and now I can't find it.

Fray Francisco Hermenegildo Tomás Garcés

Francisco Garcés, as the author acknowledges, was a real person, though his presence in the novel is highly fictionalized. Here is a link to his page as a "saint of the day" at AmericanCatholic.org, and here is a picture of his historical marker in Winterhaven, Imperial County.

 

The Ashtar Galactic Command

There was, and still is, an Ashtar Galactic Command. You can visit their webpage here. I couldn't find any record album by them, but I did find out that in 1977, someone claiming to be the Ashtar Galactic Command broke into a British television broadcast to deliver a message to Earth.

The Marfa Lights

In the acknowledgements in the back of the book, Kunzru says the book was written, in part in Marfa, Texas, and in the Granta interview linked to above, he says, "I’ve never seen a UFO myself but the closest experience I’ve had is something called the Marfa Lights in Texas. It’s a paranormal phenomenon in which a fluctuating number of twinkling lights appear to be levitating over the desert night sky. Though the number varies it’s otherwise a fairly regular occurrence. No one can explain it. It’s a reliable fast-food-like UFO experience, if you’re looking to have one."

 

The Madeleine McCann Story

In the Granta interview, the interviewer references the media frenzy, as it is portrayed in the book, surrounding the disappearance of Raj as being reminiscent of the events and subsequent media circus surrounding the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. This was the case of a 3-year-old from the UK who disappeared while on vacation with her family in Portugal in 2007. You can read about it in particular detail on Wikipedia, including the widespread vilification of the family by the tabloid media and the sighting of a possible abductor carrying the child in his arms.

Simulated Iraqi and Afghan Villages in the Mojave

The account of ersatz Iraqi villages in the Mojave desert is based on fact. These training villages are located at Fort Irwin.

For extra credit: Baghdad Cafe

This was one of my favorite movies from the 1980s. It is set in the Mojave, and it begins with a vision in the desert. I am embedding the theme song clip below. You can see the entire 1 hour and 28 minutes on YouTube.

NaNoWriMo?

The other day, I was reading the comments in a blog, and one of the commenters made reference to padding word count "NaNoWriMo style". I just had to go and look that up and found out it stands for "Nation Novel Writing Month," which is an annual challenge taking place in November in which participants commit to writing a 50,000-word first-draft novel during the month of November. Those of you with writing aspirations, if you are interested, click on the link above to go to the site to sign up.