Happy Halloween!

I hope everyone has had a great Halloween! I spent my time at my friend Mary's house, giving out treats and enjoying the
sight of our days-long decorating efforts, including a lovely path of luminarias to the front door, and a scarecrow in a lawn chair, with eyeball glasses, a tie-dye shirt, and a baseball cap. Also, we had an endless loop of scary sounds on a CD (wolves howling, ghostly screams, vampires saying scary stuff, etc), and all manner of Halloween decorations. Some guy around the corner had an AMAZING UFO display--a full-sized flying saucer he'd made, complete with rotating colored lights, dry ice, and happy aliens! Mr. Strega came over Mary's house to fill his pockets with Reese's Peanut Butter Cups.

Adorable children were
in abundance, including a precious little one dressed in a fish costume (her mommy was dressed as a mermaid), and an adorable witch, about three years old, wearing a gorgeous costume of black velvet with pink ribbons, carrying a pumpkin treat bag in the same color as her dress ribbons. She came back twice and checked out all the decor. Some of the kids came to the door eating apples a neighbor had given out--something I always love about this small town, where there are still lots of trick-or-treaters, and nobody seems afraid of poisoners and weirdos who sit in their dark, dank houses, inserting needles into apples. This always a holiday of warm light and the sound of kids laughing and having fun in our neighborhood.


Later, after the last little ghost had gone home and the leaves blew down the street in tatters, Mr. Strega and I went to a local park to look for the new comet that has recently appeared in the constellation Perseus--and we found it! So, it was a fun time overall, probably one of the best Halloweens I have had in a long time.

Tomorrow I celebrate the Day of the Dead, but it is a more private celebration for me.

Goodnight.

The Good, The Bad, The Ugly, and the ?

A "top scientist" (how come that phrase ALWAYS occurs in these kind of stories?) suggests that one day the human race will branch off into two distinct types: the hotties and the homelies, basically. It will be just like high school, only on a global scale.

I think that the "top scientist" has been perusing his H.G. Wells and Huxley a little too much, with a large dose of wishful thinking. Check out the photos in the article, too.

Fires

I have lived through two major earthquakes (the Sylmar quake and the Loma Prieta quake), as well as innumerable brushes with flooding, horrible weather, having lightning strike just a little too close for comfort twice in my life, driving over my road to my house only to return a short while later to find the road collapsed, etc. Still, I have never lived through terrible fires such as those taking place in Southern California, and I cannot imagine how awful it must be. I did grow up in Los Angeles and saw fires on the ridges all the time when the Santa Anas came through--and of course, Mr. Strega's house was in a hilly area, so he saw brushfires all the time.
I just wanted to express my sympathy towards all those experiencing this terrible disaster. Please consider donating to the Red Cross (www.redcross.org) to help the fire victims.

Not an Enthralling Experience

Recent news story. I would not like this experience at all (though I must say, I have gotten much more used to large snakes, due to life in the bellydance world. Occasionally a dancer will, after all, have a snake in her act, and I've had to deal with snakes backstage and so forth). I think my next book will be about life in the bellydance lane (actually, Mr. Strega and I have a collaborative book about how we
met and so forth, definitely a "chick lit" book, which I am hoping to just finish as a sort of writerly sorbet after the massive banquet of The Strega's Story).

It is a cold day at the Ponderosa, and I have a fire going to warm the place up. We are in serious Halloween mode around here, and the spirits seem to be very active these days, in a way.

My daughter Prada had a dream so strange last night that she called me to tell me about it (she lives far away now). She had brought some work home with her, but was tired, so she told herself that she would just nap and then wake up. She said that it's likely she would have just slept till morning, as she forgot to set her alarm, but dreamed that my grandmother Mary (whose nickname was Nani in our family) came into her room and started tickling her feet to wake her up, and said, "Wake up, honey, you have work to do!" Unbeknownst to Prada, this is exactly how my grandma used to wake me up in the morning, on the rare occasions she did so. Then, just as Prada woke up, she heard my grandmother ask her, "Why did your mother stop feeding me last night?" Again, unbeknownst to my daughter, I was working on a scene for my book that night in which my grandmother was having dinner with friends, and I stopped the scene (in frustration because it wasn't moving well) right at the moment when my grandmother was about to eat something.

As I said, it's definitely Halloween around here.

Knit Yourself the Car of Your Dreams

And I thought I was cool, knitting a shrug and a pair of gloves last year! An art student in the UK has knitted herself a full-sized red Ferrari, using twelve miles of yarn. The article is very short, but has a good picture of the car and the knitter.

I actually have heard of someone knitting a giant-sized cozy (like a tea cozy) for their house. I think I'll stick to gloves.

Well, I'm off to get my flu shot, and then back home to finish Phase 3 of Halloween decoration. Ciao!

Deborah Kerr

I wanted to honor the memory of Deborah Kerr today--she was a wonderful actress and played Anna in "The King and I." My grandmother and I ALWAYS watched that movie whenever it was on TV.

I'm pleased to say that I am plowing through a difficult scene in The Strega's Story, like one word at a time, practically. I feel I have to become even more isolated from friends, activities, and family than I already am in order to finish this, so I have curtailed a lot of things this month. I'm hoping it doesn't last long. I think the one regret I have about this book is that I wish I hadn't written it so randomly at first--I pretty much had to reconstruct everything I had written as a student at State in order to get the book to flow better.
It's been an exercise in what not to do next time, so that was a good learning experience--but it took two years to undo!

Well, the Ponderosa is decorated for Halloween, about 3/4 of the way through. My kids always like this, even though they are grown up, nearly--my youngest will be 18 in December. Still, it seems one can never shake all the growing-up traditions.

I hope to have less dull posts soon, but for now, I'm mired in an ocean of revision and writing--a full-on book is such hard work, and I hope I have it in me to do another one after this!

Star Wars, Anyone?

Mr. Strega, an alpha geek, has emailed me two short YouTube films, which must be watched in sequence. Long ago, when Mr. Strega was just a little shaver, he was in a rocket club (but he swears he was NOT in the chess club). BTW, when Mr. Strega was eight or nine, he went to a meeting of his rocket club, and the clubhouse happened to be open. He strolled over there and happened upon an illicit poker game going on amongst the elder members of the rocket club. Mr. Strega asked to join up, to the mirth of the elder members, who allowed him to ante up and then dealt him a hand--which turned out to be four queens! Thus, Mr. Strega won the forty-dollar pot, and rushed out to buy...more rocket stuff (he was an alpha geek even then).

But anyways...for you Star Wars fans, I bring you the rise and fall of a life-sized X-wing fighter (powered by the good guys in Star Wars, as I recall). Someone says a bad word at the end, so cover the tender ears of your offspring or turn the volume down if you are offended by such things. You must watch the first clip, and THEN the second. And may the Force be with you.

Wonder Bukiet

I have refrained from commenting on the "Wonder Bread" article by Melvin Jules Bukiet in The American Scholar, but you may wander through it for your edification here:

I couldn't help but think how much he would probably hate my book, which is full of magical realism (that actually happened in real life, though), but he might be appeased by the actions of some of the folks in The Strega's Story: smoking (cigarettes), drinking, out-of-wedlock pregnancies, adultery, spousal abandonment, betrayals, accidental infanticide, and suicide, among other things (yes, there's positive stuff, too). And, heck, the recipes are pretty good if Bukiet doesn't like the rest of the book. Plus, I'm not a young, hipsterish writer from Brooklyn, just an old bat from Santa Cruz. And I stopped eating Wonder Bread when I was about twelve or so. Besides, who am I to comment deeply on this? I've only read a couple of the books he mentioned. I do dislike the snobby tone of his piece, and the creeping sense that somehow I was being made privy to sour grapes.

Plus, I found a blogster who said just about everything I felt, and in a much sassier way, so I will leave you to click on the link masquerading as the title of this entry and return to reading the collected stories of Kafka (no kidding, this is what I am reading right now).

Something Bush Can't Steal From Him

Good job, Al.

AND...Doris Lessing, author of The Golden Notebook, has won the Nobel Prize for literature.

I'm glad to see a day when two people I greatly admire are honored in this way.

Phantom Vibes

This is a strange tidbit from the news...

Santa Cruz Turtle Escapes...Slowly...

A cute story from the Santa Cruz Sentinel, and it all turned out well!

London's Fearsome Chilies

Mr. Strega makes a mean and fiery pork curry, one step of which is to fry hot chilies, filling the air with five-alarm capsaicin incense. We have to throw open doors and windows, no matter what the weather--and yet it's worth it for delectable curry. However, some Londoners didn't have such a positive experience. Click on the link to see.

Funny

For those of us who, now or in the past, had occasion to warn students away from using Wikipedia as a reliable source of information....

Dorothy Allison

I was at the alma mater today for an afternoon talk at the King Library with Dorothy Allison, courtesy of the Center for Literary Arts. Dorothy was such an enormous inspiration, especially to writers like me who came from working-class roots and didn't have tons of connections to the literary world. I also loved that she discussed the early years of feminism, which I had some incipient knowledge of as an undergrad. Finding and reading those early works, the poetry and prose of that time, was an enormous liberation for me as a young woman trying very hard to define my place in the world and discover my voice.

Anyway, I was tremendously inspired by listening to Dorothy and am going to re-read some of her books and essays. I ended up wishing she could have been a writing mentor to me, happy to have heard her speak, and inspired to get home and write! And so, I did!

Gallery of the Lonely Presidents

CNN has a great article today on "the presidents nobody remembers," including Millard Fillmore, Martin Van Buren, and Rutherford B. Hayes. It sort of reminds me of the Island of Misfit Toys.

One interesting note about Hayes: he signed a bill allowing female attorneys to argue cases before the Supreme Court.

Also, Martin Van Buren was known as "Martin Van Ruin" by opponents.

And Millard Fillmore had, at one time, been an indentured servant (a clothmaker). He
also founded the White House Library. (trivia courtesy of Wikipedia).


As for news around the Ponderosa, I have been struggling along with the book and also
with a large change in schedule, to which I am still getting used to (those of you who know me in "real life" know what I am talking about). Plus, in the middle of a large project like my book, my imagination gets a bit spongy. But I'll try to check in more.

Thanks, and Hail to the Chief.