Nom de Plume

“Psst, have you seen Ernie?” one pinus contorta whispers to another.

The second pinus contorta rustles his needles and looks around. “No, where’d he go?”

“Well …. I heard he got …. bonsaid.

A sharp intake of breath. All the trees still. Even the wind hushes. The horror, the sheer unmitigated horror.

Ernie got bonsaid.

Steve wants to take a bonsai class. There’s a place in the neighborhood that sells bonsai and has in-depth workshops on how to create bonsai. But I have to be honest: they make me uncomfortable. It’s like reading about grown men getting castrated, healthy people being sent to the gas chamber, people whose limbs are broken so they never grow back straight. Stunted and twisted on purpose. They’re so unnatural, dwarfed miniature replicas of themselves, like women who get plastic surgery to look like Barbie. They give me the creeps.

But I seem to be the minority here. In fact, the Puget Sound area even has a stolen bonsai registry. Their copy is great. “Bonsai Theft is not a popular subject, and is not widely discussed, but like many other societal problems is a reality.” But here, go ahead and read for yourself.

My poor little pocketbook. The beast needs a new alternator.

When I moved to Seattle a year ago, I thought “What the hell? I’ll apply for a job at Publicis.” So I went through their online submission process and never heard a thing back from them. Which, quite honestly, was fine by me, since I felt royally burnt out on them from my employment/freelance with the Boise office. So imagine my surprise when I received the following e-mail today–a full YEAR later.

From : Employment PublicisUSA
To : Zia Munshi
Sent : Feb 24 2005 12:03:56

Subject : Thank you from Publicis!

Thank you for your interest in employment with Publicis. We are in the process of reviewing your qualifications. If we have an opportunity that matches your experience, we will contact you. Otherwise, we will hold your resume for one year and frequently review for any additional openings. Once again, thank you for your interest in Publicis.

Human Resources

Sushi pillows. Need we say more?

Contrived. Don’t bother. I couldn’t even finish it.

It’s back, with a vengeance.

Ever since they tightened up the temperature gauge, my alternator light goes on–normally while turning right–and then it goes off. Last night, though, it went on and stayed on when I hit a speed bump. So am working from home today and will run it up to Car Tender. Think it’s a wire, but who wants to break down on the 520 bridge and have everyone hate you?

The dog is ecstatic. Well, he would be if he weren’t asleep on the couch.

Basically, the more fucked up a tree is, the more Steve wants it for the rapidly emerging Japanese garden. So far, we have one of those Dr. Suess-looking things that grows wider than tall, a dripping poofed willow thing, and a bonsai shrub something or other. And now, Steve has his heart set on a shore pine.

Furthermore, it can’t be any old shore pine. It can’t be poodled. It must have two stalks. It must be at least ten years old. And it has to be under $300 dollars. Which means that we spent most of the weekend going thither and yon searching the available stock at many different nurseries.

It is all, as he says, “part of the master plan.”

Hmmph. It’s a good thing he’s so cute.

Animal Bones - All sizes/types
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Reply to: xxxx
Date: 2005-02-21, 2:30PM PST

I am looking for different type of animal bones for an art project. If you happen to have a yard with lots of dead animals or something email me please! I can’t pay much but I can pay some. I’m a poor art student. Thanks!

When we first meet Ramchand, a clerk in an Amritsar sari shop, he is late for work. Ramchand is habitually late for work.

In fact, he is not terribly happy, longing instead for the life he would have had if his parents hadn’t been killed in an accident when he was an child. One of the most affecting sections describes his childhood. His father took him on his lap, saying he would send him to an English school so Ramchand could have a better life than he. But the uncle who took him in after his parents’ death also took him out of school and claimed his father’s shop for his own. Thus, Ramchand is not even a shopkeeper, but a clerk in someone else’s.

So Ramchand decides to teach himself English; his bumbling attempts are both funny and sad. At the same time, an opportunity for advancement presents itself when a wealthy family comes to the sari shop to outfit the daughter for her wedding, and he is sent to their house. Ranchand starts to see his world expand.

But it’s not quite so easy to escape the confines of poverty and lack of education–and this tale, while funny, is also heartbreaking. Ultimately, Ramchand is confronted with the choice of existence or principles.

I thought Bajwa did a good job caricaturing upper class Indian families. She even pokes gentle fun at her own class–and maybe even herself–in the character of Rina, the rich, affianced daughter who publishes a book on a sari shop clerk. For me, this sly insertion redeemed the subject matter because it’s too easy–too hip — to write about the victim, especially when the writer is clearly not one.

All in all, The Sari Shop wasn’t as powerful as some other Indian lit out there, but it was very readable.

Wanted-Someone who can buy puppy for and let me make payments to you. - $800
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Reply to: anon-60298522@craigslist.org
Date: 2005-02-18, 10:37AM PST

Hi .. I really want this puppy at a pet store it is a very small chihuahau. the cost is $800 and I don’t have $800 all in one sum. He will go fast. I am hoping there is a nice person out there that could buy him for me and let me make payments to you. I could do.. $200 to $300 payments.
This is not a scam. I just really love this puppy and I know someone else will get him.
I will go with you to get a notorized legal letter stating that I owe you the full amount and we will set dates and payment amounts.
If this sounds like something you can do. Please email me.
Thank you so much!!!

~S

Gave him a bath this morning–he acted abused but is now free of dog slime from two daycare days at Elizabeth’s frolicking with Koya and Aslan. Or rather, being frolicked given the size disparity.

Joan Castleman decides to leave her novelist husband Joe as they are flying to Finland. where he is to receive a literary prize. The novel flashes back over the course of their marriage and his career. There were parts I found a little tiresome, especially in the beginning as Joan narrates her tale a little too glibly–but it all leads to a shocking end that we are teased with at the beginning, but decide, no that can’t be.

Well, if that’s not cryptic and garbled enough.

Suffice it to say that this was a sly, subversive book. Joan appears glib at times, but this is part of Wolizter’s deft characterization. Joan and Joe come alive. The Wife also has a lot to say about women vs. that whole slightly misogynistic era of male writers who have deeper love affairs with their egos than with their women. You know, the Roths and Updikes that formed such a large part of the American literary scene for too long. For that alone, I enjoyed this immensely. All in all, a recommend.

It’s three in the morning and I can’t sleep. So pissed off about work that I finally just got up.

One of the reasons I wanted to do book reviews on this blog was because I often forget what I’ve read. I find myself at the library, checking books out–only to come home, crack open the spine to the first page and then think, “This looks familiar ….”

It’s one of the hazards of not having a TV and reading really fast.

When you read as much as I do, it all kind of blends together. Every now and then, there’s a popper–something that one actively recommends to friends, instead of saying, “Yeah, it was good,” and the. moving right along.

Shearer’s The Celestial Jukebox is a popper.

Set in the fictitious Southern town of Madagascar, The Celestial Jukebox weaves together the stories of an aging Chinese grocer and his slow fall into love with a Honduran migrant worker, a 15-year old Mauritian boy obsessed with American music, a neglected wife and mother of two in an upper middle-class suburb, two farmers, one white and one black, and their intertwined lives, a girl who comes back to visit her roots …

Beautifully written. Hauntingly written. Go read it.

The Mount Holyoke Quarterly article on blogging!

And here are the alum blogs:

Donna J. Albino
The Heretic’s Corner
Mary Pugh Clark’s Photo Blog
Marya Morevna’s Battleground
Nice Person
new, interesting ways to procrastinate
The Sound of Crystal Chimes When Struck
Treading Water
Word Ridden
The World According to Blerg
You think you know, but you have no idea…

I like a regency romance (and anything within a hundred years) as much as the next person, but I’ve noticed an oddity: the best trashy novelists are usually confined to paperbacks, while the crappier novelists get the hardback deals.

Unfair, I say. Especially for this hardback. Unreadable.

It was probably my state of mind at the time, but I finally conceded defeat and returned The Golem’s Eye to the library–only three days late. Somehow it just seemed like too much trouble to bother. I didn’t get past the first chapter.

How can you not like a heroine you first meet as she wanders upstairs to an attic bathroom wearing her grandmother’s wedding nightgown to slather mayonnaise on her face and strew rose petals in her bath?

Cutter lives in a crumbling Florida mansion with her sister Ginnie. Her grandmother has just died, and Ginnie and their brother are trying to sell the house–and Cutter is waging war against the realtor: she dribbles honey for ants, leaves scads of hair she is braiding Victorian style in tangled masses on the coffee table. Meanwhile, she waittresses and writes obits in the vain hope of buying her siblings out.

Her sister is having an affair with her married English professor, whose wife Elizabeth suffers severe agoraphobia and stress. When Elizabeth shows up at the house after an anonymous phone call tips her off about the affair, Cutter and Elizabeth forge an odd relationship–eventually culminating in a way for Cutter to keep the house and Elizabeth to assert her own independence.

Sly and offbeat, fun for a rainy sort of day.

Minnesota, 1923–The Real Minerva is about fifteen-year old Penny Niebeck, her hardened mother Barbara, and Cora, “the Maagdenbergh woman,” who just moved to her grandfather’s farm and who perplexes the town with a shadowy past, a prediliction for wearing men’s clothing even though pregnant, and an amazing sense of self-reliance.

Barbara is a housekeeper to the town’s richest family, with an impersonal sexual relationship with patriarch Laurence Hamilton. When Penny confronts her mother, they argue. Penny runs off to Cora’s farm, hearing that she needs a hired girl. She arrives in time to call a doctor for Cora, who has just given birth to a baby girl–and she stays. Barbara’s pride keeps her from visiting her daughter; she and Laurence turn to each other for comfort. Penny and Cora develop a deep, complicated relationship with each other and the baby. Then Cora’s abusive ex-husband appears.

By far, the real strength of this book lies in its depiction of the relationships between mothers and daughters: Penny and Barbara; Cora and her daughter; Cora as a mother figure to Penny. Although at some times overwrought, this was the first book in a long time that I actually got teary over.

The story would have been more satisfying without the neat little bookends of the prologue and the epilogue. Also, I sometimes found the character of Cora a little forced.

Now you see it.

Now you don’t.

Link