Nom de Plume

I managed to upgrade myself to the latest version of WordPress. This is probably not that big a deal to many of you, but I personally find it scary to dink around with mySQL databases and lots of random files that need to be overwritten.

“Talk to me,” I said, flinging myself onto the bed where Steve was reading. I was amped from swimming a mile and a half.

“Do I have to?” he asked.

“Yes.”

He sighed. “Well,” he said. “Today, I had a plumber look me straight in the eye and say, ‘I’ve been working on this pipe for months, and I can’t give you another inch.’”

As my mother is in Iraq (though currently “vacationing” in Romania), she can’t oversee some of the stuff she needs to do at the ranch. So I’m heading down there on Sunday for a week to have the patio done, get blinds for the windows, and arrange for the new fence. Busy times. The hardest part is going to be driving into town to get online. Oh, the horror! No e-mail at the tips of my fingers …

Steve spent most of last week being sick. And of course, being a sharing sort of person, he passed it on to me. I don’t have the full-on flu that he has, complete with sniffles and congestion–but I’m TIRED. Argh.

A little while ago, I got an e-mail from Alison Pace announcing the publication of her new book. As she was very nice about removing me from her mailing list and because I thoroughly enjoyed her chicklit novel If Andy Warhol Had a Girlfriend, I went out and got a copy. Oh yeah, and the title, Pug Hill, may have had something to do with it too.

Hope has lots of hang-ups, a secret crush, and a deadly fear of speaking in public. When her parents ask her to speak at their 40th wedding anniversary, she runs out to enroll herself in a public speaking course. Luckily, there’s the one thing that always calms her down: watching all the pugs cavort at, you guessed it, Pug Hill, a little corner of Central Park.

So Hope goes through the public speaking course, watches pugs, makes a whole bunch of self-discoveries, including that she doesn’t really have any romantic interest in the object of her crush, rediscovers that her first real love (first mentioned about three-quarters of the way through the book) is really still her only love, and then meets up with him on the beach at the end. In other words, the plot kind of limps along on a bunch of half-baked premises.

And it’s a shame because Pace really does write well. There is a glimmer of a more serious novel in Pug Hill, but it gets lost in the chick lit formula.

Karin Muller spent years searching for the meaning of life. Having studied judo for years, she was impressed by the dedication of many of its Japanese practitioners–something she was told that she would have to become Japanese to fully understand. Wa. The state of harmony. So she decides to spend a year in Japan. One of her instructors finds a Japanese host family for her and off she goes.

But she is quintessentially American, and it is with decided cultural biases that she navigates Japanese life and culture. It seems she can do nothing right for her host mother Yukiko, who considers Muller a barbarian. After several months staying with the family, she strikes out on her own–at which she finally starts to understand her own place in Japanese culture. This was a riveting read, which I enjoyed thoroughly.

At first, I hated it. Then, I got sucked in. Then I lost interest. And finally, I liked it again. This enormous tome — purported to be like Venice itself — has several intermingled storylines. There are the letters from the Roman poet Catallus with their florid prose and lovelorn laments. There is the narrative of the German printer Wendelin von Speyer who publishes Catallus’ poems against a backdrop of the Inquisitors. There is the singular voice of his Venetian wife, a loving, superstitious woman. And there’s Sosia Simeon, a Serbian woman who transmutes her suffering into a nymphomaniacal fervor and is like a Renaissance reincarnation of Catallus’ Lesbia, littering the canals with the hearts of young men. Vivid and colorful, great summer reading.

Ze, a middle-aged detective, is investigating the death of a socially-prominent young woman in modern day Lisbon. All clues lead to nowhere, and he is left juggling these dead ends along with the recent loss of his wife and the maturing of his teenage daughter. Juxaptosed with the investigation is a recounting of history: Felsen, a likeable businessman who has been coerced into cooperation with the Nazis and who is sent to Portugal to mine tungsten, a mineral essential to the war effort. As the novel progresses, Felsen undergoes dark changes, becoming a ruthless character who gets what he wants. Finally, in an explosive end, the two plots come together and leave us with an unsettling account of how the ghosts of the past are omnipresent, much as we like to think otherwise. This was one of the best, most compelling mysteries I’ve ever read–and incidentally, made me want to go to Portugal this summer. Which may just yet happen if I ever get around to renewing my passport and getting tickets.

After her blockbuster Nickel and Dimed: : On (Not) Getting By in America , Ehrenreich turns her lens on the jobs of middle-class Americans. In Bait and Switch : The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream , she uses the same formula: she will go undercover, find a job, and then write about her experiences. So she legally changes her name, crafts a resume highlighting her PR experience, lines up references … and hits the job market.

And she doesn’t find anything. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Unless, of course, one considers the few sales jobs that are offered to her … on commission. What follows is a whole-hearted blasting of the American corporate system that doesn’t value its employees. Don’t get me wrong — I completely agree with a lot of her points — but ultimately, I felt that she remained on the fringes of corporate America rather than in its midst. And as a result, her analysis smacked of sour grapes.

Smunshi, of course, being the smushed together form of Smith and Munshi.

(This last is Steve’s latest obsession: water gardens.)