Stanley’s journal entry for Aug. 29, 18xx, reads:
Advice is plentiful, and words are as numerous as the blades of grass in our valley; all that is wanting is decision.
Self is now on p. 227, which means: PROGRESS!
Stay tuned.
Month: January 2014
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Self is now almost halfway into Henry M. Stanley’s How I Found Livingstone in Central Africa. My, it is such a great book, gripping and true. Self hopes she can finish reading before the end of time, but the book is so absorbing that she just doesn’t think she’ll be able to. A year from now, she might possibly still be reading it.
Excerpt, p. 232:
All last night, until nine a.m. this morning, my soldiers danced and sang to the manes of their dead comrades, whose bones now bleach in the forests of Wilyankuru. Two or three huge pots of pombe failed to satisfy the raging thirst which the vigorous exercise they were engaged in created. So, early this morning, I was called upon to create a shukka for another potful of the potent liquor.
Excerpt, p. 233:
September 17th — The banquet is ended. I slaughtered two bullocks, and had a barbecue; three sheep, two goats, and fifteen chickens, 120 lbs. of rice, twenty large loaves of bread made of Indian corn-flour, one hundred eggs, 10 lbs. of butter, and five gallons of sweet-milk were the contents of which the banquet was formed.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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One of the things self really enjoys doing is looking at the posts of other WordPress bloggers on the week’s theme.
This week’s theme was BEGINNING.
Self was looking at the pictures on the blog Death as a New Beginning. They were of a dead hawk. The hawk was stiff; its eyes were wide open. Never mind that self didn’t get why a dead hawk would be a new beginning, but she was just fascinated by the pictures.
There was a little bit of red matter in the dead hawk’s beak.
And it reminded her of the only time she has seen a squirrel up close: it was in her living room. When self first caught sight of it (right next to the sofa), she thought it was a stuffed toy. It wasn’t moving at all. She stepped up close and looked, and noticed that it had teeth. Sharp teeth. Ugh. So this was not a stuffed toy (Never mind what a stuffed toy would be doing in her living room. Hold that thought. Self is a writer, so her mind does tend to make big narrative leaps). And that’s when she noticed blood on the squirrel’s teeth.
You know, it’s funny how, when you think of squirrels, you really don’t think of them as animals. No, you think of them as animate stuffed toys, prancing about your yard. In reality, however, they have a smell, they have sharp claws, and they also have extremely sharp teeth. And how this dead squirrel happened to get into self’s house was really a mystery — that is, until she belatedly noticed that Gracie, her beagle, was nearby, looking up at self with an expression that self could only describe as triumph. Yes, it was Gracie who dragged this poor dead squirrel to the living room, as a kind of trophy.
EEEKKK!!!!!
Self’s scream was ear-splitting. The Man had to exert himself to get a shovel from the shed and bag the poor creature.
Today, self was washing dishes at the kitchen sink when she happened to look up — it was such a beautiful day — and she saw a whole flock of birds nesting in the trees.
She heard a lot of chirps and tweets yesterday, but she couldn’t be sure the sounds weren’t coming from her neighbor’s parakeets — he keeps about a dozen of them in the shed right next to self’s fence. But it is so nice to listen to birds, no matter what the source.
So today, self looked up, and — Holy Cow! — so many birds! And they were all aiming for her bird feeders, it seemed like (She has 2). She loved watching the birds swooping about, resting momentarily on a branch and then darting lower. From the purposeful way in which the birds were congregating on the trees in her yard, self knew they had specifically come to gorge themselves on the sunflower seeds and cracked corn she fills her bird feeders with. She couldn’t take any pictures because the tree-tops are far, far away. But — so nice to have birds to look at. Wouldn’t you agree, dear blog readers?
Stay tuned.
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Today, self watched “Frozen.” What. A. Great. Movie. Self loved it so much, she almost wanted to sit through a second screening. It was about sisters, one of whom has to shoulder the burdens of becoming Queen, while the other one gets to be brave and feisty and stubborn and wrong and lead a more interesting life. Well, both sisters are wrong, at various points. But self identified with the older sister, the one who feels her lot in life is to live in sorrowful isolation. Self cried, harder even than she did in Catching Fire. As she walked out of the theater, self heard a couple of older teen-aged girls raving about the music: “Wasn’t that song by Demi Lovato?”
Last night, she decided to get caught up on another of her favorite heroines, Gwendoline Christie, who plays Brienne of Tarth in HBO’s Game of Thrones. In an interview in October, Gwendoline said that her part in GOT was done. Self got such a shock on hearing that, because it can only mean one thing: Brienne gets killed in Season 4. Noooooo!!!
And, this little morsel: self read somewhere that Jennifer Lawrence got hurt while filming a scene in Mockingjay — apparently the mishap involved choking. OK, now, what scene could that have been? Could that be the one with hijacked Peeta after his rescue from the Capitol? Because doesn’t he put his two hands on Katniss’s neck and — self, STOP RIGHT THERE!
And now, to the ostensible reason for this post:
Lev Grossman of Time Magazine conducted a five-part interview with Suzanne Collins and Francis Lawrence on The Hunger Games. The final part was published 22 November 2013. Here’s an excerpt:
Lev Grossman: When I read people writing about The Hunger Games, there seems to be a split between people who read it as an allegory of the emotional experience of being an adolescent, and there are people who read it more literally as an exploration of the moral issues surrounding war and political oppression. Is it both? Are you comfortable with both?
Suzanne Collins: I have read so many interpretations. There’s a whole Christian allegory. There’s you know, I’ve seen people talk about it like Plato’s cave, which is really fun. I’ve seen an indictment of big government. I’ve seen, you know, the 99 percent kind of thing. I think people bring a lot of themselves to the book. When Hunger Games first came out, I could tell people were having very different experiences. It’s a war story. It’s a romance. Other people are like, it’s an action-adventure story.
You know, for me it was always first and foremost a war story, but whatever brings you into the story is fine with me. And then, of course, if a person interprets it as an adolescent experience or a Christian allegory, you can’t tell them they didn’t. That was their genuine response to it, and they’re going to have it, and that’s fine. You can’t both write and then sit on the other side and interpret it for people.
I can tell you that for me it was a war story. But it also has so many ethical issues because you’re dealing with war, and there’s all these other ethical issues surrounding with, you know, there’s violence, there’s war, there’s hunger, there’s the propaganda, there’s the environment’s been destroyed, there’s a ruthless government, misuse of power and all these other elements that come into play with it, and people may respond to ones that are most important to them, and you know other people come for the love story. That’s fine.
You can read the rest of the interview here.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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Self chose to post about beginnings by listing New Year’s resolutions:
1) Never forget: This is a picture of the flowers she left on her Dear Departed Dad’s grave in Bacolod, in October. The flowers she left are a promise she made, to honor his memory in person, every year, in the city where he was born.
2) Self is posting this second picture to remind herself: It is good to feel GOOD.
Life is good, especially when one starts the day with a free breakfast and fresh mango juice: Self took this picture in Bacolod. 3) Before last summer, she hadn’t seen a Cal Shakes play in four or five years. From now on, she will go every year. This is a promise.
Cal Shakes in Orinda. The play was Oscar Wilde’s “Lady Windermere’s Fan.” Jessika R accompanied her, and we had much wine. It was August. Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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Self is tackling her back issues of The Economist with great gusto. Today, she got through three.
The 12 October 2013 issue has an obituary of General Nguyen Giap, the man who won the battle of Dien Bien Phu, a great watershed which marked the end of French colonial rule in Vietnam. The general died Oct. 4. He was 102.
There was a war movie made of this battle, starring Mel Gibson (Self finally remembered the name of the movie: “We Are Soldiers.”) In that movie, self remembers the warren of tunnels the Vietnamese had built, and a small man who seemed to be a general (though his uniform was just as plain as that of an ordinary soldier) telling his men: “We will grab the enemy by the belt buckle, and pull him close.” (This line was delivered in Vietnamese, with subtitles. Which added greatly to the power of the scene. Self remembers being so stunned by that line that she never forgot it. Even though, at the time she saw the movie, she knew very little about the battle itself.)
The Economist describes the battle strategy thus:
This victory had been a long time in the making. The French had fortified the valley, in northwest Tonkin on the border with Laos, so he had taken his troops into the mountains that encircled it. The French thought the hills impassable: craggy, forested, foggy, riddled with caves. General Giap recalled the words of his hero Bonaparte, whose battle plans he was sketching out with chalk when he was still at the Lycée in Hue: “If a goat can get through, so can a man; if a man can get through, so can a battalion.” Slowly, stealthily, in single file, 55,000 men took up positions there, supplied by 260,000 coolies with baskets, 20,000 bicycles and 11,800 bamboo rafts. Artillery was carried up in sections. From this eyrie, trenches and tunnels were dug down until they almost touched the French. The enemy never stood a chance.
General Giap’s heroes were Bonaparte (audace, surprise), Lawrence of Arabia, and Mao Zedong, especially Mao’s “three-stage doctrine of warfare (guerrilla tactics, stalemate, offensive warfare).”
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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Cricket Online Review Vol. 9 No. 2, featuring work by Thomas Fink, Mark Young, J. D. Nelson, Changming Yuan and William Southern is live now.
Mark Young’s poem “dedicated to minimalist footwear” was such a hoot!
P. S. This is a good place to submit, dear blog readers. They published two of self’s flash fiction: “My Dead Chinese Professor” and “Bread.”
Stay tuned.
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Poem 53 of the One Hundred Poets (translation from the Japanese by Clay MacCauley)
written by Udaisho Michitsuna no Haha (937 – 995)
Sighing all alone,
Through the long watch of the night,
Till the break of day: —
Can you realize at all
What a tedious thing it is?The poet was the daughter of Fujiwara no Motoyasu, and became the mother of the imperial commander Fujiwara no Michitsuna. Self’s personal copy of the One Hundred Poets is the one published by George Braziller in 1989, and edited by Peter Morse. Each poem is accompanied by an illustration by Hokusai. Here’s how Morse describes Hokusai’s illustration for Poem 53:
The woman has been awake, for her clothing is rumpled due to her restlessness. She has come out on the porch with a lantern, presumably at dawn, to look for her missing husband. We see a pipe and tobacco pouch resting on the pillow within the house, the sign of an absent man. Around the corner of the house we can see a cistern and water dipper.
This figure of the lone woman appears several other times among Hokusai’s drawings . . . She is always waiting for a man, a situation generally suggested by the poem.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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What does JOY mean, for self?
It means, right now, old friends.
It means celebrating connection.
It means, life continues. PAY IT FORWARD.
In the Moment : Jessika and Pepe with us at German Haus beer garden in Redwood City. Self knew Pepe’s dad when we were graduate students at Stanford. 
The woman in the white top is Virgie’s, creator of THE quintessential Visayan delicacy: mango tart, as well as other sinful indulgences: in Bacolod, where else? Her energy and optimism are infectious. 
Look at the great smiles on the faces of these teachers at Pampanga Agricultural College, in Magalang, Pampanga! One of the teachers holds a present they gave self when she visited, in September. Here are a couple more WordPress blogs that succeeded wonderfully in expressing the theme JOY:
HAPPY, HAPPY, HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Kanlaon 