Blogging Locations #4, Book Review - Multitasking vs Overstimulation - 30 Days Reflections on Self Love

Here's another spot where I've blogged before we had internet at home - the Best Western motel on the way into town! 

I was there for a Garden Club meeting earlier in the year, had the computer with me, and unexpectedly discovered their wifi. Thereafter, I'd often pull in there on the way home from somewhere and sit in the truck outside the office and get my internetting done. Or once or twice I walked or biked down and sat in the bar to do it, but people smoke in that bar and it was almost unbearable! I felt more creepy, too, in there than sitting in the truck.

It seems like that huge storm just passed us by - it's been clear and sunny here for the second day in a row and no rain in the forecast for the next several! Thankful for an Indian summer. I'm hoping it might enable some of my plants to go to seed - I allowed several of my cilantro and other plants to bolt early, in the hopes that I'd be able to save seed from them. It didn't work last year - got too cold too soon - but this year I started it earlier, and I saw friends' gardens up in Anchorage (where it gets a little warmer) where they were going to seed a month ago. Mine are still obstinately flowering… Bitt had a beautiful post a month or two back about a seed farm she visited on the east coast.

I'm going to do a book review today, for a book that I listened to on tape. This is a medium that I've only recently started exploiting: I love the intimacy and connection of reading, but I'm also a very aurally-oriented person and I love to multitask. Long car journeys or cookathons seemed like a great niche for absorbing more through my ears. I borrowed House of Sand and Fog, by Andre Dubus III, for Phil and me to listen to on our last Anchorage trip, but it turned out that Phil had started reading it once before and had put it down, not wanting to get into what it had to offer. But I was intrigued by the style and wanted to hear it, so had been listening in snatches, and then a minor marathon last night and this morning, while I worked on translating. 

I'll review it in a moment below, but first I want to review that methodology! In brief, it wasn't the best idea. As I said, I'm a multitasker, but I think that working on my translating job and listening to a book was using overly similar parts of my brain. This evening, I am fried! After running some errands and going for a walk this afternoon, I just don't feel like doing anything - and there's still quite a bit on my list. Big tides here this week - at lower tides you can hike where the water is here.

My first thought about car journeys or long kitchen spells, or cleaning/organizing-type stuff, seems like a much better idea: I think that what I did was an abuse of my capacities.

What about you? Are you a multitasker or do you get overstimulated/zapped?

Having just talked about overtaxing my brain, I'll turn to today's Reflection on Self Love. Tina asked us once again to highlight and appreciate three areas of our physical body, and led with a very courageous and moving appreciation of three of her own. Oh dear, I thought I'd gotten away with this part last week! I definitely found some resistance to having to do this again. However, I love the spirit of her goal to change how we view our physical bodies: "We need to shift the qualities with which we define them from aesthetic ones to purposeful ones." When you think about what your body does for you, rather than how it happens to be looking today, it's certainly easier to feel grateful.

OK - deep breath! - and apologies - I'm not much good at self portraits, so this is going to be sans visuals.

I thank my hands for all the work they allow me to do, both communicating by means of writing and typing, and gardening, harvesting, handling and preparing food, and a whole host of other things. They even allow me to clean the rest of my body, to give the gift of loving touch, to put food in my mouth. They go into all sorts of places, both delicious and noxious, and have scars and calluses from all sorts of hard work. My index fingers have the huge knuckles of my dad and his mom, whom I otherwise don't much resemble. My pinkie fingers are ludicrously short and don't even reach to the top knuckle of my ring fingers. 

I thank my nose for how it constantly informs and protects me. It tells me when a dish of food that I can't taste (because it contains ingredients to which I'm allergic) is well-balanced and when it needs adjusting. It tells me when there are gases around that I may not want to be inhaling! It keeps me attuned to the changes of season and the proximity of animals. I happen to somewhat like my nose aesthetically too - it is a nice shape and size, even if it does have a little mole right on the tip!

I thank my lips for all the amazing work they do in producing intelligible sounds and words. (If you've ever had anesthesia at the dentist's and tried to talk afterwards, you'll know that lips aren't just for the p's, b's and m's!) I also thank them for their fullness and the pleasure that that can let in. 

Ok - cooling my blushes as the sky blushes pink in the west here…

Back to House of Sand and Fog. It is an inexorably unfolding tragedy, on a par with the ancient Greek tragedies in terms of the universal horror depicted and damningly painful denouement, but it is on the physical scale of an epic. Despite the fact that it is set in the '80's SF Bay Area and that the protagonists are an Iranian immigrant family (particularly the paterfamilias), an ex-drug addict whose husband has left her, also new to the west coast, and the cop who falls for her, I felt that it was redolent of the Classics and their themes and devices. 

Although the narrative is mostly present tense, the story never proceeds linearly: the reader/listener is dropped into the midst of a scene and many of the events preceding it are revealed through the reflections of the current narrator. One of the most virtuosic elements is the intimacy of the characters - the story unfolds through the interwoven perspectives of the three main characters and all of them are made to feel believable and sympathetic. All of them are warped and at times despicable, but you can always understand why they get into the binds that they do. 

Since the book is so character-driven, it is also extremely discursive - we are held in suspense in the main plot whilst one or other character is made to reminisce about earlier days, tell back-stories, make connections. I could see how some people might not prefer such a discursive journey, but it's extremely effective at what it's doing.

The prose and many of the images are enduringly beautiful or evocative, the kind that will remain with you. 

Some of the plot's credibility is sacrificed to that of the characters. For me, the only way to reconcile this was to suspend disbelief and remind myself that this is a tragedy. Just like in Greek tragedy, everyone ends up either dead or bereft, in what seems a hideously unfair way. 

And so, I had to end by asking myself whether Phil was right to avoid even getting entangled with it - is this the kind of uplifting message/view of the universe/society to which I wish to expose myself? And I end ambivalent. I feel like I learned a lot from listening to the book, particularly as a writer, but I can't say that it's the sort of message that I want to be putting into my cells.

Just a word more about the experience of listening to it on tape rather than reading it: this was an unabridged reading, by the author and his wife. I enjoyed it a lot - there were very few distracting moments when something was read with inappropriate inflection, as can happen when people read aloud. He does quite an impressive Persian accent too. 

What are you looking for when you choose a book to read?