Small Wonder

Author Barbara Kingsolver has an interesting web site. There are small excerpts from many of her works — these alone are worth the price of admission — and the FAQs are informative.

Is it possible to become a writer if you don’t like to read?

Answer: Not on your life.

Believe it or not, someone really did write to ask me that. (I’m tempted to reply: If you didn’t like Dalmatians, would you breed them?) But in all fairness, many more people have asked these interesting questions: Who are your favorite authors? What one book would you take to a desert island? And finally, Do you read other people’s books while you’re writing?

I read as if time were running out, because technically it is. As I grow older I find I’m increasingly impatient with mediocre entertainments: I want books that will take my breath away and realign my vision. As a writer of fiction, I mostly read contemporary fiction, but I also return constantly to the classics. My favorite dead authors are probably George Eliot, Jane Austen, Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner and John Steinbeck. Among my favorite living ones are Doris Lessing, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Annie Dillard, Alice Munro, Isabel Allende, Russell Banks, Linda Hogan, John Irving, Toni Morrison, Eudora Welty and Reynolds Price. And I rely on Emily Dickinson, Sharon Olds, Pablo Neruda, Dylan Thomas, and William Shakespeare; I immerse myself often in poetry, I guess, for the same reason painters rinse their brushes — to keep the colors true. I also love memoir if it’s truly great, which is to say, about something larger than one person’s life (Nabokov’s Speak, Memory; Margaret Mead’s Blackberry Winter; Nancy Mairs’s Waist High in the World), and I’m devoted to good science writing (Darwin for the poetry of his world view; Stephen Jay Gould for the insight).

If I were exiled to that famous island where they only let you take one book, I would cheat and take two: George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

I’ve heard writers say they don’t read other books while they’re writing, for fear it will somehow contaminate their style. I don’t share this worry. When I’m writing, I read Steinbeck and Shakespeare with all my might, and pray to be contaminated.

[Thanks to Debby]

BoSox and Cubbies

Those most tragic and romantic major league teams the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs are moving into the postseason. Doesn’t that give you a warm and fuzzy feeling?

Let’s see if they’re around for the League Championship Series.

By the way, seven of the eight franchises advancing were playing a century ago when the major leagues began. This includes the Twins who were the Washington Senators for 60 years, the Braves by way of Boston and Milwaukee, the Athletics from Philadelphia through Kansas City, and the Giants formerly of New York. The Yankees were originally the Highlanders and the Red Sox the Somersets and then the Puritans. But they were all around. The Marlins are the exception.

Road to Nogales

The Arizona Daily Star has an intersting and amusing description of the trip from Tucson to Nogales. One excerpt:

The hard-to-miss mountains on your left are the Santa Ritas. The highest peak is Mount Wrightson, named after William Wrightson, killed by Apaches near Sonoita in the 1860s.

The second-highest peak, topped by the Smithsonian Institution’s observatory, is called Mount Hopkins, after a man named Gilbert Hopkins. Also killed by Apaches. You may notice a theme here.

“Apache,” by the way, is not an Apache word. It’s a Pueblo Indian word, and it means “enemy.”

The Continental road leads up into Madera Canyon, where in March 1860, a young woman named Larcena Pennington Page was kidnapped by Apaches. She had malaria and couldn’t keep up the pace, so her captors stabbed her, took her clothes and shoes, and dumped her off a ledge.

Sick, wounded, starving and almost naked, she started back on her hands and knees. Nine to fourteen days later – accounts vary – she crawled back into the lumber camp where she had been abducted and nearly scared the loggers to death, so ghastly and unexpected was her appearance. Larcena Pennington, as she is usually called, lived to the age of 76 in Tucson, but her father, first husband and two of her brothers were eventually killed by Apaches. The number of Apaches killed by Penningtons is not recorded. A downtown street is named after the family.

The lumber camp in Madera Canyon was an outpost of the sprawling Canoa Ranch, part of which now lies under the town of Green Valley. A Scottsdale company has proposed developing other parts of the old land grant: plans include three or four ground-watered golf courses in addition to the seven Green Valley already has. The Canoa Ranch project promises to generate the only warfare in the Santa Cruz valley this coming year.

Where in the world?

From Primary Sources in The Atlantic (January/February 2003)

Despite recent events fewer than one in five Americans aged eighteen to twenty-four could locate Afghanistan on a world map, and only one in seven could locate Iraq on a map of the Middle East and Asia. Nor did Americans have much success in identifying U.S. states: barely half could find New York, and only a third could find New Jersey. Worst of all, 10 percent of Americans could not find the United States on a world map. And although it provides little solace to consider some of the strange lacunae in Europeans’ knowledge (for instance, despite the 355-mile border between Germany and the Netherlands, nearly a third of Germans couldn’t identify the latter—which they seemed to locate just fine in 1940), Americans can take heart from this: more than a third of young adults in the United States were able to place the island used for the fourth season of the television series Survivor in the South Pacific.

Surprise, clean air is cost effective

From the Executive Summary of a Report to Congress on the Costs and Benefits of Federal Regulations and Unfunded Mandates on State, Local, and Tribal Entities

OMB reviewed 107 major Federal rulemakings finalized over the previous ten years (October 1, 1992 to September 30, 2002). The estimated total annual quantified benefits of these rules range from $146 billion to $230 billion, while the estimated total annual quantified costs range from $36 billion to $42 billion. The majority of the quantified benefits are attributable to a handful of clean-air rules issued by EPA pursuant to the 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act.

See the entire 200-plus-page report.

Just a third of Arizonans
give thumbs up to Bush second term

From The Arizona Republic

Barely one-third of Arizona voters say they would give President Bush a second term, a statewide poll revealed Thursday.

The 34 percent support for his re-election, with 44 percent preferring someone else and 22 percent undecided, reflects a dramatic plunge in popularity for Bush. In 2000, he beat Al Gore in Arizona by a margin of 6 percentage points, or nearly 100,000 votes of 1.5 million cast.

Arizona?

Arizona?

She would have been buried to the neck and then stoned

Amina Lawal, the Nigerian peasant woman sentenced under Islamic law to death by stoning for having had sex outside marriage, was acquitted and set free this week. One aspect of her legal defense is worth noting. As reported in The New York Times: “The court also gave a nod to what defense attorneys had called the ‘sleeping embryo’ theory: Under some interpretations of Shariah, an embryo can be in gestation for up to five years, meaning that Ms. Lawal’s baby could have been fathered by her former husband.” [Shariah is the body of religious law governing the Sunni and Shia branches of Islam.]

Governors of California

The circus that is the California governor’s recall is in one way at least out of character for the state. California has had only eight governors in the past 60 years.

  • Earl Warren 1943-1953
  • Goodwin Knight 1953-1959
  • Pat Brown 1959-1967
  • Ronald Reagan 1967-1975
  • Jerry Brown 1975-1983
  • George Deukmejian 1983-1991
  • Pete Wilson 1991-1999
  • Gray Davis 1999-

A crime of passion

Michael Lewis has an article on the California recall in this Sunday’s The New York Times Magazine: All Politics Are Loco!!!.

“…how did California go so quickly from order to chaos? Republicans say it’s because Gray Davis caused and then covered up the state’s financial crisis. Democrats claim the attempt to remove Davis from office just six months after he was legally elected is a right-wing conspiracy. Both are obviously wrong. What we have here is a crime of passion, committed by the people upon their ruler. It demands an investigation.”

Lewis talks to a few of the people behind the recall, Gray Davis’ neighbor, and some of the obscure candidates. The article is about people; its cummulative effect is to explain what’s happening.

[This article is posted in 11 sections. This is, I suppose, to get 11 “hits” to register for all the ads. That’s fine, ads are better than paying, but it’s still annoying. The printer friendly format is an easier way to read the article.]

Warren Commission Report

The much disputed Warren Commission Report was issued on this date in 1964. According to the report, the bullets that killed President Kennedy and injured Texas Governor John Connally were fired by Lee Harvey Oswald in three shots from a rifle pointed out of a sixth floor window in the Texas School Book Depository.

The Warren Commission was chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren, former Governor of California. It included Senators Richard B. Russell and John Sherman Cooper, House Members Hale Boggs and Gerald R. Ford, and two private citizens with extensive government service, Allen Dulles and John J. McCloy.

Red ink

If last October 1st Congress had abolished the Departments of State, Justice, Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, Labor, and Education, and it had abolished NASA, EPA, and OSHA, and it had abolished itself and the federal courts — or at least if it hadn’t funded these — the U.S. Government would still be $110 billion in arrears this fiscal year.

Income

According to a Census Bureau report issued today — Income in the United States: 2002 — median household money income last year for Whites (not including Hispanics) was $46,900, for Blacks (not including Hispanics) it was $29,000, for Asians $52,600, and for Hispanics $33,100. The median for all households was $42,900.

The median income for full-time, year-round workers was $39,400 for men and $30,200 for women.

The median household income in Maryland was $55,912, highest among the states; West Virginia was lowest at $30,072.

$150,000 last year put a household in the highest 5%; $84,000 put a household in the highest 20%. Households with incomes under $18,000 constituted the lowest 20%.

There were 109,297,000 households in the U.S. last year.

Ah, nuts!

From The Week

A California elementary school is searching kindergarten students’ lunch boxes each morning for illicit peanut butter sandwiches. All foods containing nuts are banned because one boy has what his mother says is a life-threatening allergy. The children must also wash their hands each morning when they arrive to avoid contaminating the school. One mother, whose child is also allergic to peanuts, says, “This kind of nonsense makes me crazy.”