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Rotary Talk

March 03, 2010 - View Single Entry

Way back last October I was asked to speak to the local Rotary Club. Rotary meets for lunch every Wednesday at the Ocean View, which, just for the record, doesn't have an ocean view from any of the window I saw, though if you stand out front you can glimpse a bit of Oak Bluffs harbor on the far side of Our Market (my favorite liquor store).

Way back last October, March 3 seemed a long, long, long way away. I did a little poking around in my head, looking for possible topics, ideally something that would touch on Mud of the Place without coming across as self-overpromotion. Rotary International is not something I'd ever consider joining, so not surprisingly I flipped through my mental address book and didn't find any Rotary members in it. It's a service organization, most of its members are business people, and I was pretty sure most of its members were men. Not, in other words, an audience that would be enthralled by literary esoterica or a portrait of Martha's Vineyard as a Seasonally Occupied Territory.

March 3 kept seeming a long way away until about the middle of February. Way back in October my Rotary contact had told me I'd be contacted about two weeks before I was scheduled to speak. I wasn't. Since it had been rather a long time, and since day in, day out, I don't rub shoulders with Rotary people -- true, hardly anyone wears club insignia these days, and I wouldn't recognize it if they did -- I began to wonder if I was still on the schedule. My contact was in Florida for the winter. I left a message at her Vineyard home number but didn't hear back.

An e-mail to my writers' group elicited both my contact's e-mail address and two reports that my talk had been mentioned in the Vineyard Gazette's Oak Bluffs town news column. I reached my contact, confirmed the engagement, and got the info I needed about the physical setup at the Ocean View dining room.

I already knew what I was going to talk about: psychic maps. Earlier this winter I wrote a short To Be Rather Than to Seem piece about psychic maps and took it to my writers' group. They were intrigued by the whole idea: how the mental maps we navigate by day to day are very different from the street and road maps we buy in a store. I had several pretty good stories about my psychic map of Martha's Vineyard, and while walking with Travvy one morning it dawned on me that I wrote Mud of the Place in part to expand people's psychic maps of Martha's Vineyard. Surely I could make a talk out of that.

I could and did, and it went pretty well. I even had a visual aid: a road map of Martha's Vineyard. I clipped it to the Rotary banner behind the podium and just to my left, then I illustrated my psychic map of the Vineyard by blocking off Chilmark and Gay Head with one piece of construction paper and Edgartown with another. More than one previous Rotary speaker had told me that the audience was dead or dull, but I found them attentive. Not only that, I sold all four of the Mud copies I brought with me. Given that the audience was about 30 people, that's damn good.

Here's the written version. While speaking, I embellished, compressed, and digressed, but this is the gist.

February License Plate Report

February 28, 2010 - View Single Entry

Indiana, South Carolina, North Carolina, Delaware, Virginia, Wisconsin, and Missouri.

Pretty good haul for February. It almost makes up for lackluster January. Heading into March I've got 25 states colored in. Last year it was 28.

Speaking of license plates, I've got brand-new 6531s for Uhura Mazda. At inspection last year, the mechanic said that the registry was cracking down on old, cracked plates and mine weren't looking so good. So when it stops rain-snow-and-drizzing and gets warm enough to wield a wrench without freezing my fingers, I'm going to replace the old ones with the new ones. I've also got to do something about the seat belt that Travvy chewed almost through, way back when he was barely, or not quite, one. That it passed inspection last March was one of the miracles of 2009. Miracles are not something a skeptic should count on.

Travvy Is Two!

February 27, 2010 - View Single Entry

Time flies like a Malamute in pursuit of a rabbit.

Travvy, formally Masasyu's Fellow Traveller, turns two years old today. It's not official till late tonight, but that's OK.

We want to thank Mama Mayhem (Masasyu's Bound and Determined), Papa Trouble (Masasyu's Here Comes Trouble, and especially Lori Hicks of Masasyu Alaskan Malamute Kennels in Canandaigua, New York, for making it possible for Travvy and Susanna to hook up with each other.

A friend who's an amateur astrologer did charts for both of us and the approxmate time that we decided to go home together. She concluded that both of our prospects improved greatly from the moment we met. For a while there, I had my doubts, but now that I can look back on (almost) two years together, I know for absolute sure that the stars were right. My world needed some shaking up. Travvy and the death of my sourdough starter shook me out of the literary doldrums.

Yesterday was the second anniversary of Rhodry Malamutt's passing. After Rhodry died, I sat near his grave many times to tell him how the search was going and ask him to send me the right dog. He did. Thank you, Rhodry.

Snow-Ho-Ho

February 12, 2010 - View Single Entry

It snowed Tuesday night, not as much as it was supposed to, though. As one of the newspapers had it, "Northeaster Snubs Northeast." It did slam the mid-Atlantic area, including D.C. Having lived through two monster snowstorms in Washington, 1979 and 1981, as I recall, and knowing that the city just got almost two feet on top of almost three in the last week or so -- well, it's hard to imagine just how bad it is.

Well, as they say, that's there and I'm here. Here we got more than Boston did. Guy on the Boston-based radio station I listen to all the time, WUMB-FM, said it took him five minutes to shovel out. Here it took longer than that. I didn't bother to shovel Uhura Mazda out in the morning because the crusty snow was frozen to all her windows. My feeble ice scraper was getting nowhere, Travvy's leash was in my left hand, my snow shovel was up on the deck, and (most important) I didn't have to go anywhere till late afternoon. By then the sun had done most of the work.

The snow isn't deep, maybe three inches, but it's heavy. So heavy that it hardly drifted at all despite the high winds Tuesday night. It's hard to walk in. Wherever it's been compressed by car tires it's slick -- I wore my Yaktrax this morning -- and everywhere else it's crusty, but quite firm enough to hold me up. But it's beautiful to look at. Trees are striped with snow from tips to trunk, the lines so smooth they might have been painted with frosting or shaving cream. Barbed wire looks like strings of popcorn. The young oaks behind the school look birches if you approach from the north; from the south the gray-brown bark is bare and they look like oaks.

And as with the snow we had at the beginning of January, it isn't melting except in direct sunlight.

P.S. I forgot the part about changing the battery in my smoke alarm. The thing is on the high ceiling next to my west-facing window. I can't reach it without the stepladder, which is parked out on my little deck. For several days it had been bleeping that its battery was low. My first trip up the ladder, I found that the battery was a 9-volt. In my drawer I found AAs, AAAs, and Ds but no 9Vs. Yesterday i remembered to throw a 9V battery into my grocery basket. I moved my desk chair, the object that looks like a small easy chair but is really a crucial part of my filing system, and my scanner and went out to get the ladder.

Every step of the ladder was crusted with snow. Even after I brushed it with my hands, poked it with my shovel, and let it fall to the deck, it still had some icy snow on it. I brought it in anyway and set it up. I climbed up and stood on the next-to-top slippery step and proceeded to wrestle the old battery out, the new battery in, and -- by far the hardest part -- the alarm back into its hole on the ceiling. All, mind you, with my hands above my head. I fantasized the newspaper headline: West Tisbury Woman Breaks Neck, Dies in Fall from Stepladder; Was Trying to Fix Smoke Alarm.

The old battery had fallen to the ground, provoking the interest of Travvy the malamute who has been known to eat rubber gloves. I vaguely recollected hearing a story about a dog that had died from eating a battery. From the top of the stepladder, the battery looked as far away as cars on Route 128 look from an airplane. Besides, Travvy was now ignoring it so I did too, or tried to.

Finally the alarm stayed snug in its hole. I climbed down the ladder, took it outside, came back in, and pushed the furniture back into place. The alarm is no longer bleeping. The green light is on. It's working. I think.

My New Vest

February 09, 2010 - View Single Entry

Yeah, I'm still here. I've got too much work. I overbooked myself because last fall writing was more interesting than editing and as we all know writing doesn't pay. I took on a lit crit book that I didn't really have time for because the subject was science fiction, then I figured that if I hustled I could do a 1,000-page biography of a twentieth-century fellow I didn't know much about. Trouble is, I hate to "hustle." Hustling means editing eight or nine hours a day instead of five or six, and that leaves precious little time for anything else -- or little time for anything more precious.

And the lit crit book turns out to be abominably written. Like if an academic has been immersed in the works of (among others) Chip Delany, Octavia Butler, and Robert Heinlein, shouldn't some of their feel for the English language have rubbed off on him? Guess not. Part of this guy's problem is his weak vocabulary, which is not to be confused with the penchant for jargon that afflicts so many professorial types. If a writer doesn't have the right word ready to hand, he uses a not-so-right, if not an outright wrong, one, and the result is sentence after sentence that isn't clear or doesn't make sense. Editing books like this takes longer not only because you have to puzzle out the meaning of a sentence before you can tweak it, but because when you can't intuit what the author meant you have to compose a query more tactful than "WTF? I have no idea what you're trying to say here."

I also waste time fuming at the book's in-house editor, who may or may not have actually read the thing line for line. When the in-house editor falls down on the job, the copyeditor has to do a lot more than copyedit. Here there's an upside to having other jobs to do. When I get too pissed at the lit critic's incompetent prose, I can go work on the 1,000-page biography, which is in much better shape.

I'm also writing a Mary Daly obit for the Women's Review of Books and my first One Wired Sister column for the WRB blog.

Anyway, that's why I haven't posted anything here since the January license plate report. It's also why my Lands' End order arrived Saturday, courtesy of eight-year-old Ava because it had been delivered to my neighbors' house, and I didn't get around to opening it till last night. The gray down vest is quite stylish -- it's got lighter gray trim on the shoulders -- and much, much cleaner than my old red one. I loaded the left pocket with dog treats, slipped my clicker into the right pocket, and wore it this morning when Travvy and I took our usual walk and stopped to play/train on the (fenced-in) school tennis courts. Temp was in the low 20s F. The vest was plenty warm. It didn't clash with the tomato-red thrift shop sweater I was wearing. In fact, since the sweater has gray and gold bands at the cuffs, the vest even looked intentionally coordinated with the sweater. It's a keeper.

So are the new on-sale turtlenecks, one in "Aztec gold," the other a satisfyingly loud "garnet paisley." I'm not 100% committed to the spice brown chinos: they were described as "boot cut," which I like, but the boots the copy writer had in mind must have had a circumference of at least two feet. Which is to say that they're a little too bell-bottomy for me. The upside of that is that I won't wear them to the barn, and it would be nice to have one pair of pants that doesn't have barn stains and horse smells and hay pouring out of the pockets. I'll probably keep them and get used to the bells.