crazysalad

Banned Books Week 2009

September 26-October 3, 2009 is Banned Books Week.  Celebrate your freedom to read by picking a book that makes you cringe, cry, squirm, angry, sad, uncomfortable, happy.  Challenge yourself.  Challenge your beliefs.  Think.  Be thankful you still can.  Breathe.  Love.  Read. 

It's interesting looking over this list of books and the reasons why they were challenged.  As a mother, I have certainly felt some of the same concerns about the books my three daughters read (or the TV programs or videogames they watch and play).  And I have withheld certain materials from my girls because I felt they were inappropriate.  To me that's good parenting.  But that ban didn't extend to my friend's or neighbors kids or the entire school district. 

Now that my kids are older and I have less control over their world, I will occasionally find them reading or looking at something online or listening to music with lyrics that surprise me.  Having been raised Catholic, my first reaction is, oh, they shouldn't be reading that!  Old habits die hard.  It's easier to control someone if they don't ask questions.   It's easier to forbid something than to examine or discuss it.  Heaven forbid you might actually change your mind.  Your belief system.

The funny thing is when I do look a little deeper into what my kids are reading, listening to, and thinking, it has generated some great discussions with them.  Brought me closer to them.  Introduced me to lots of new music and books I never would have picked up on my own. LIke Richard Siken's Crush, collection of poems about longing, love and pain.  I can't wait to read it.

American Library Association’s Top Ten Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2008 (out of 513 challenges as reported to the Office for Intellectual Freedom--love that name!):

1. And Tango Makes Three, by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell
   Reasons: anti-ethnic, anti-family, homosexuality, religious viewpoint, and unsuited to age group
2. His Dark Materials trilogy, by Philip Pullman
   Reasons: political viewpoint, religious viewpoint, and violence.  Retained by the publicly funded Dufferin-Peel Catholic School District in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada in 2008 with a sticker on the inside cover telling readers "representations of the church in this novel are purely fictional and are not reflective of the real Roman Catholic Church or the Gospel of Jesus Christ."
3. TTYL; TTFN; L8R, G8R (series), by Lauren Myracle
   Reasons: offensive language, sexually explicit, and unsuited to age group
4. Scary Stories (series), by Alvin Schwartz
   Reasons: occult/satanism, religious viewpoint, and violence
5. Bless Me, Ultima, by Rudolfo Anaya
   Reasons: occult/satanism, offensive language, religious viewpoint, sexually explicit, and violence. Banned from the Orestimba High School's English classes in Newman, California in 2008 by the superintendent after complaints that the book is profane and anti-Catholic.  Teachers claimed that the superintendent circumvented the district's policies on book challenges and set a dangerous precedent.  The book is about a boy maturing, asking questions about evil, justice, and the nature of God.  
6. The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky
   Reasons: drugs, homosexuality, nudity, offensive language, sexually explicit, suicide, and unsuited to age group
7. Gossip Girl (series), by Cecily von Ziegesar
   Reasons: offensive language, sexually explicit, and unsuited to age group
8. Uncle Bobby's Wedding, by Sarah S. Brannen
   Reasons: homosexuality and unsuited to age group
9. The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini
   Reasons: offensive language, sexually explicit, and unsuited to age group
10. Flashcards of My Life, by Charise Mericle Harper
    Reasons: sexually explicit and unsuited to age group

Sunflowers

“Did you see the sunrise this morning?”
the old woman on Dale Street
who gardens with the parrot on her shoulder
asked me as I was walking home from Grant’s Deli
with a baguette under one arm and a cup of boiling Italian roast
burning my palm.

“And did you see the sunset last night?” I asked her.
Under a summer peach and apricot sky
my daughters and I had gone out to our front-yard garden to gather tomatoes—
bagfuls of yellow, roma, green zebra, cherry, heirloom—
and more to share with the neighbors
and handfuls of fragrant basil for our pasta dinner with fresh, no-cook sauce.

The parrot woman smiled.  “We are blessed.”

Recipe for (Almost) No-Cook Tomato Sauce

3-4 tomatoes
A handful of basil
2 cloves of garlic
Olive oil
Pasta

Boil water for pasta.  Cook pasta.  (I like farfalle ("butterfly") pasta with this sauce because the wings in the pasta hold the sauce nicely. 

While pasta is cooking, chop tomatoes.  Tear or chop basil into small pieces.  Slice garlic.  Heat olive oil in a saucepan and add garlic.  Cook until soft, but not brown.  Add chopped tomatoes.  Cook for a few minutes, just long enough to reduce the water (juice) from the tomatoes a little.  Turn off heat. 

Drain pasta and add to saucepan with tomatoes.  Add chopped basil.  Stir and serve.

The Sun
by Mary Oliver

Have you ever seen

anything
in your life
more wonderful

than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon

and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone--
and how it slides again

out of the blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower

streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance--
and have you ever felt for anything
such wild love--
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure

that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you

as you stand there,
empty-handed--
or have you too
turned from this world--

or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things?

I Did It!

This month, I did something I have been wanting to do my whole life.

I wrote a book. 

A novel.

In one month.

I wrote a novel in one month!

I just finished less than an hour ago and now I am sitting here unable to leave my desk, not really believing it's true. 

But here it is right in front of me.  The Dream Thieves.  It's a ghost story (or a "gross story," as one person misheard).  It's a story about a war and the clash of cultures and generations.  It's a story about mothers and daughters and the memories that haunt us and redeem us.  And food, of course!  How food defines us, nourishes us, and holds us together.

Some people have compared writing a novel to giving birth.  Having given birth to three beautiful, healthy babies, the loves of my life, I can tell you, it's not even close.  Or maybe it's just that I know from experience, that conception and giving birth is the easy part.  The hard part is raising them and then sending your babies out into the world. 

That comes next.

But for now I am happy to just sit here stunned by my accomplishment, the fulfillment of a long overdue promise to myself. 

I'm am so, so grateful to my real-life daughters for believing in me and supporting my dream. 

To Tyler, who inspired me and is writing her third novel!
To Kelsey and Siena, who helped with dinners and the dishes and fed the cats so their mother could go out to her office and bang her head against the keyboard day after day:  I love you more than all the words in the whole "entier" universe!

And tomorrow I will answer all the email and pay all the bills and return all the phone calls and buy some groceries.  I promise.

Love,
your Mom, the writer

"Those who discourage your dreams likely have abandoned their own."

Sweet Dreams...

Every day do something that won't compute...

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

Listen to carrion -- put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

--Wendell Berry, 1973

Sowing the Seeds

My friend, Julia Dashe, has spent the last three years of her life creating the school garden at Morse High School.

Julia is one of the most passionate, engaging, hard-working, funny people I know.  She loves working with kids, planting seeds, and helping things grow.

What about you?  What inspires you?

What do you love so much that you do it willingly, lovingly, whether you get paid for it or not?

I don't mean your job.  I mean your life's work.  Your calling.

I’ve found mine. 

It’s not a job that has a name.  At least not yet. 

I’m making it up as I go along. 

That’s the best kind of job, if you ask me: the one that didn’t exist until you came along.  The one only you can create. 

The Real Enemy

Do you believe one person can change the world?

When that question was posed at a recent book club meeting, nearly every hand in the room went up in agreement.

Now, do you believe YOU are that person?

We all looked around.  We were in a room full of at least forty people, mostly older women, in the La Jolla Library.  We shifted in our seats.  One brave woman finally raised her hand.

I believe it. I believe that each person on this earth is capable of changing it. 

So why didn’t I raise my hand?

Was it modesty?  Was I afraid of what people would think of me?   

What were the others thinking?  (Who am I?  How can I make a difference?  Why should I bother recycling when most people don’t?  Why bother voting?  My one vote won’t change anything.  Why should I worry about someone else’s problems?  I’ve got my own problems to take care of.)

Or was it peer pressure that silenced me?  No one else had their hand up so I wasn’t going to be the first to stick mine out.  I didn’t want that kind of public scrutiny.

Why not?

How can I believe I can change the world if I can’t even take that first step?

If I can’t even raise my hand to speak for myself, how can I expect others to do so?  As Isabel Allende has said, with all of the privileges we have in this country, we have an obligation to help others, especially other women, who have less than we do--less money, less education, less power.

That takes courage.

No, more than that.  It takes audaciousness:

1.    A willingness to defy the status quo, the restrictions put upon us by society in the form of laws, religion, manners or tradition.

2.    A sense of adventure.

3.    A spirited fearless daring.

That’s what it takes.

Are we so wrapped up in our own world (work, relationship, TV) that we can’t be bothered to step outside our comfortable little boxes?

Well, one person can make a difference.

One person has.

The book in question at that discussion was Three Cups of Tea, the selection for the One Book, One San Diego program this year. The idea behind the program is to get everyone in the city to read the same book.  (Talk about audaciousness.  Getting everyone in the city to read a book would be a miracle.  The same book?  That would be a revolution.)

"How can Americans say they are making themselves safer?"  Pakistani Brigadier General Bashir Baz is quoted in the book, as he and Greg Mortenson watch a live CNN feed from Baghdad in the fall of 2003 of wailing Iraqi women carrying children's bodies out of a bombed building.  "Your President Bush has done a wonderful job of uniting one billion Muslims against America for the next two hundred years."

"...Osama is not a product of Pakistan or Afghanistan. He is a creation of America.  Thanks to America, Osama is in every home.  As a military man, I know you can never fight and win against someone who can shoot at you once and then run off and hide while you have to remain eternally on guard.  You have to attack the source of your enemy's strength.  In America's case, that's not Osama or Saddam or anyone else.  The enemy is ignorance."

Greg Mortenson has dedicated his life to promote education and literacy, especially for girls, in remote, volatile regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan.  He has established over 61 schools, which provide education where few education opportunities existed before.

Mortenson has gained the trust of Islamic leaders, military commanders, government officials and tribal chiefs from his tireless effort to champion education, especially for girls.

When the porcelain bowls of scalding butter tea steamed in their hands, Haji Ali spoke.  “It you want to thrive in Baltistan, you must respect our ways,” Haji Ali said, blowing on his bowl.  “The first time you share tea with a Balti, you are a stranger.  The second time you take tea, you are an honored guest.  The third time you share a cup of tea, you become family, and for our family, we are prepared to do anything, even die,” he said, laying his hand warmly on Mortenson’s own.  “Doctor Greg, you must make time to share three cups of tea.  We may be uneducated.  But we are not stupid.  We have lived and survived here for a long time.”

“That day, Haji Ali taught me the most important lesson I’ve ever learned in my life,” Mortenson says.  “We Americans think you have to accomplish everything quickly.  We’re the country of thirty-minute power lunches and two-minute football drills. Our leaders thought their ‘shock and awe’ campaign could end the war in Iraq before it even started.  Haji Ali taught me to share three cups of tea, to slow down and make building relationships as important as building projects.  He taught me that I had more to learn from the people I work with than I could ever hope to teach them.”

If you want a truly amazing story of how one person can make a difference, read the book.  Even better, go hear Greg Mortenson himself.  He will be in San Diego this week, speaking at various places around town. 

I want to go to Camp Pendleton.  For one, in all my 18 years in San Diego, I have never once stepped foot on a military base.  Second, I want to hear what Mortenson has to say, especially to a room full of Marines.  Finally, I want to hear the questions that the audience has for him.  I have a lot of questions myself.  And this time, I will be there, with my hand up in the air. 

That’s the first step.

Moving at the Speed of Life

Part of the problem with modern life is the speed at which everything moves.  Fast food.  Jet travel.  High-speed internet service.  Everything comes at us in a constant stream, a barrage of stimulus. 

“Technology is a way of organizing the world so that we do not experience it.”—Max Frisch

Sometimes I think our ability to affect change in the world has moved beyond our ability to understand or control it. 

Injecting human growth hormones into animals? Cloning animals for food?  Why do we do this?  They grow faster that way.   It’s more “efficient” to “produce” animals this way.   Andrew Kimbrell calls this ethics of technology “cold evil.”

Do we know what the hell we are doing?  Do we care?

As Gandhi said: “there is more to life than increasing its speed.” 

I’ve often felt out of place, confused, disconnected from the society I live in. As though I was born in the wrong century.  Not that I am a Luddite, as some have accused me of being.  I love change and growth.  But at my own pace, not imposed upon me.  I want to taste it, experience it, digest it. 

I’m slow.   

On their Inner Work Blog,  Jerry Ruhl and Robert A. Johnson write about "Wisdom in Chaos and Confusion":  “David Bohm, a brilliant theoretical physicist, in his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order, conceptualizes the universe as manifestation of what he calls the universal flux. Bohm asserts that everything is process and in process. There are no stable enduring phenomena. What appear to be solid objects are simply slower processes than the human process. We perceive these as static if we vibrate at a faster frequency, and we perceive these as chaotic if we move slower. Each has its own rhythmic vibratory rate, its own velocity. Faster processes are more ephemeral. Our experience of constancy is an illusion created by relative velocity.

How might you appear to a redwood tree? Like wind or rain, people might be perceived as fleeting and intangible. To hummingbirds we are sluggish and clumsy, almost tree-like in our movements.

Modern science explains that we do not see the swirl of atoms or the hectic race of galaxies — our narrow sensory perceptions trap us. We imagine the world to be semi-static and filled with enduring things. Yet the truth is more fluid. We are ripples in a flowing ocean of changing life. We are waves breaking against some mysterious shore.

Life is constantly in flux, yet in our culture confusion is generally held to be a mistake or even a pathology. Confusion is not inherently a problem to be solved. It reminds us that life is always in transition, that everything we think is permanent is actually only temporary.

To be confused is to be in the swirling midst of what is. A basic spiritual principle is learning to accept what is instead of insisting that life be a certain way.”

'The Dying West'

                                                                           Photo: Rob Davis

"Monday, Dec. 17, 2007 | Used to be that Jim Kemp would run cows along dirt paths from Campo north to Mount Laguna and south to Mexico. But then the roads through the region were paved, so he began using them to move the cows from pasture to pasture.

"Now, I shudder just to drive them across the highway," he says, speaking quietly, his voice carrying a hint of Jack Palance gravel.

At 77 years old, Kemp is a remnant of a once-vibrant breed. Cattle ranchers, dusty denim and spur-wearing cowboys, are fading into San Diego County's history. Between 1997 and 2002, the number of cattle farms in the county dropped 40 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Since 1975, the USDA says the number of cattle dropped from 61,000 to 22,000"

Continue reading this voiceofsandiego.org article and see the video here.

 

A Partial History of My Stupidity

I love when poets speak to one another in their poems and how one poet will write in response to a line or poem by another poet, sometimes speaking to each other across centuries, across languages. 

I recently heard Ed Hirsch read this poem and he said he got the idea from a line in a poem by Czeslaw Milosz in which he says that the “history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.”

A Partial History of My Stupidity

      

Traffic was heavy coming off the bridge

and I took the road to the right, the wrong one,
and got stuck in the car for hours.

Most nights I rushed out into the evening
without paying attention to the trees,
whose names I didn't know,
or the birds, which flew heedlessly on.

I couldn't relinquish my desires
or accept them, and so I strolled along
like a tiger that wanted to spring,
but was still afraid of the wildness within.

The iron bars seemed invisible to others,
but I carried a cage around inside me.

I cared too much what other people thought
and made remarks I shouldn't have made.
I was silent when I should have spoken.

Forgive me, philosophers,
I read the Stoics but never understood them.

I felt that I was living the wrong life,
spiritually speaking,
while halfway around the world
thousands of people were being slaughtered,
some of them by my countrymen.

So I walked on--distracted, lost in thought--
and forgot to attend to those who suffered
far away, nearby.

Forgive me, faith, for never having any.

I did not believe in God,
who eluded me.

--Edward Hirsch

Here is that Milosz poem:

Account

      

The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.

Some would be devoted to acting against consciousness,
Like the flight of a moth which, had it known,
Would have tended nevertheless toward the candle's flame.

Others would deal with ways to silence anxiety,
The little whisper which, though it is a warning, is ignored.

I would deal separately with satisfaction and pride,
The time when I was among their adherents
Who strut victoriously, unsuspecting.

But all of them would have one subject, desire,
If only my own -- but no, not at all; alas,
I was driven because I wanted to be like others.
I was afraid of what was wild and indecent in me.

The history of my stupidity will not be written.
For one thing, it's late. And the truth is laborious.

--Czeslaw Milosz

(Trans. Robert Hass and Robert Pinsky)

Come, My Friends

...I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone...

...I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought....

...Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

                -Alfred Lord Tennyson,
                  from “Ulysses”

Practice

 

   "After you lose some great passion in your life, or a dream that you've had collapses, it often takes a really long time before you can come to terms with what that loss meant to you...

   This is what practicing is all about.  You're striving for some unattainable goal.  And consequently every day you are going to end up not achieving what you dream of and, yet, the next day somehow you start again.  And try again.  And the fact that you don't achieve what you dream of each time you sit down is what leads you forward and makes you continue.

   And I think it's true for anything.  It doesn't matter if it's music or dance or acting or an art form or baking a cake or parenting even.

   I think this idea of practice means that you come back to it--almost no matter what happens."

--Glenn Kurtz,
classical guitar player and author of "Practicing: A Musician's Return to Music"

Link to NPR Interview with Glenn Kurtz