The Rage Diaries

Where to go in 2008 ...?

I am thinking ahead to 108 in 2008 ... what to put on it, whether I even want to do it, or whether there's another effective way to map out and execute a new project.

The Reduce-Reuse-Recycle challenge worked out really well for a lot of reasons this year: the incremental nature made it easy to incorporate new actions into everyone's lives; the tripartite nature of the challenge let us mix up the activities each month; it was a collaboration where we all shared information; we have somewhat quantifiable net results. I don't think I want to do another reduce-reuse-recycle challenge, but I would like to do another month-by-month venture that picks up the best traits from Reduce-Reuse-Recycle.

What areas do you think we can take this into in 2008? Fiscal fitness? Consumer activism? Conscious commerce? Think about one area you'd like to tackle in 2008 and make your suggestions below.

106 in 2006: How I did overall

And here's the last of the list -- how I did overall. I missed 21 items on the list.

In the grand scheme of things, that's not too bad. Especially, I may add, in a year that began with a lot of noise and mess, then moved on to one temporary relocation, nine weeks of using an outhouse, twelve weeks of working two jobs, two yard sales, a cross-country wedding reception, and roughly 570 hours spent in the car driving 14,630 miles prior to my job switch.

Did y'all have lists or resolutions? How did you do?

106 in 2006: How I did with the nonprofits

On reflection, this is one I should have defined more clearly early on. Instead of the "pick a group that's doing well and scored decently on the Charity Navigator!" perhaps I should I have picked a specific goal and directed my resources toward groups that worked in that area. And perhaps I should have aggressively looked for smaller operations that aren't as well-funded and well-known as many of the groups I donated to. Ah, well -- lessons learned.

January -- KQED's fundraising drive

February -- The Asian Elephant Conservation Program

March -- The Land Trust Alliance

April -- Common Cause

May -- The Oasis Exotic Bird Sanctuary

June --The Greenbelt Alliance

July -- The Elephant Sanctuary (at Hoehenwald)

August -- Surfrider Foundation

September -- American Tortoise Rescue

October -- The Nature Conservancy

November -- Island Cat Resources & Adoption

December -- Modest Needs

I'll be keeping up the donations in 2007, albeit with some changes. I haven't decided which ones -- maybe donate to one group all year? Maybe pick a field and focus exclusively on that?

106 in 2006: How I Did, Books Category

I broke this out as a separate post because, well, dang. It's a lot of books. The full tally is after the jump; everything's listed in chronological order, with links to books (when I remembered them) and the original entries.

What I read last week: The "this is what I get for trying something new" edition

A few weeks ago, courtesy of the geniuses over at Good Morning, Silicon Valley, I read "Wikipedia Brown and the Case of the Captured Koala." It was funny, so I clicked over to read Adam Cadre's other short stories online; I was taken with "December" and "A Winner Is You," both of which managed to make me want to know more about the family around which they are written.

Well, the family is referenced in Cadre's first novel, Ready, Okay! So I tracked down an old library copy of the book and read it last weekend.

Perhaps I disliked the book because it's about hyperemotional and disaffected high schoolers doing the usual coming-of-age thing, and if I want to read about teenagers reveling in the notion that they have just invented sarcasm and irony, I can always surf MySpace or LiveJournal. This book was about as focused as your average high schooler's LiveJournal. Writing a novel about adolescents ought not automatically lead to writing a novel like an adolescent. It is one thing to capture an authentic tone for your narrator, but another to do so at the sacrifice of narrative momentum.

The frustrating thing for me, as a reader, is that I kept seeing promises of so much more. Cadre's got a good ear for dialogue, and he can set a scene like nobody's business: the one and only time that protagonist Allen gets invited to September's house for dinner is a hoot from beginning to end. And buried under the riffs to nowhere, the occasionally implausible characterizations and the Caligula-like tableaux (where were all these orgies and drug parties when I was in high school?), there is a story that hurtles along toward a tragic conclusion. Despite disliking much of the book, I was genuinely stricken by what happened to two of the characters. So you can see where there are working parts; it's just the novel's total machinery is grinding out of gear.

Normally, if I dislike my first experience with an author, he or she is dead to me. However, I figure my first experience with Cadre was through his short stories (more enjoyable), so I'll keep an eye out in the hopes that his next book has grown up a little.

What I read last week: the "It All Comes Back to Spending" edition

This feature is back! Did you miss it? I did.

Marc Cooper's The Last Honest Place in America: Paradise and Perdition in the New Las Vegas reminded me in some ways of the infamous Not Buying It. For one, both books caused me look up and inquire to the room at large, "Why must lefties be so goddamn humorless about capitalism?"

Also, both authors only go halfway with their efforts to lend personal authenticity to this so-called "universal" experience -- Levine natters on about how she defines herself by her spending but doesn't ever examine why she accepted this benchmarking criteria, and Cooper loves to gamble, but has no problem deriding the other people in Las Vegas as mere suckers to be bled dry by heartless corporations. Both authors ultimately posit that they're more savvy than the other participants in human commerce, instead of exploring the common threads that pulled them toward this interest.

However, once I got past those issues, it was an okay book.

What I read last week: the Stephen King edition

I spent seventeen hours in beautiful Austin, Texas, last week. Of those hours, approximately two of them were spent being lost and eight of them were spent being a jackass at this fine event. While my co-panelists had many thoughtful things to say about HBO as an industry bellwether or cultural transmitter, the first thing out of my mouth at the roundtable was, "Well, someone has to speak up for Real Sex."

Despite this inauspicious opening, some people still talked to me. One of them said of my being a reporter, "But how wonderful! You must have such discipline to keep writing regularly."

Startlingly, I did not blurt out the first reply that crossed my mind: I wouldn't call it discipline so much as I would call it a healthy sense of self-preservation. Nobody with half a brain will mess with an editor. At least, nobody with half a brain will mess with an editor more than once.

What I DIDN'T read last week: the anything with a spine edition

You few, you proud, you selective -- you readers -- I like to imagine that you've been wondering why I have not posted any "What I read last week ..." entries for two weeks now. The pithy and obvious answer: because I have not read any books for two weeks.

Does admitting that mean I've lost my bookworm cred?

It's been a fairly hectic two weeks, what with the usual two-and-a-half hours I spend on the road in rush-hour traffic each day, and ripping the bejeesus out of my yard, and getting the paperwork in order for refinancing the house, and discovering that the mighty Saturn's repair bill is more than the actual value of my trusty ten-year-old car (sob!), and going to Monterey to see their new white shark, and honestly ... I have not really had "time" for reading. Or "working brain cells."

So here is what I have read in the past two weeks: catalogs and comics.

Because I am an assiduous recycler, I do not have the compleat catalog of my bulk-mail inventory, but all the usual suspects have passed through our recycling bin: Pottery Barn, Restoration Hardware, Crate & Barrel, Rejuvenation Hardware, Archie McPhee's, Johnnie Boden, J. Crew, Lands' End, Garnet Hill (which, in a shameless display of cross-company leveraging, sold my name to no fewer than five of its affiliates), the Oriental Trading Company, the Sundance Catalog, Design Within Reach, CB2, Uncommon Goods, Chiasso, Title 9 Sports, Athleta, Smith & Hawken, White Flower Farm, Art.com, Exposures, Flor, the Company Store, the Vermont Country Store, the Popcorn Factory, Williams-Sonoma, Sur le Table, Zingerman's, Penzey's Spices, Wireless, Flax Art & Design, Signals, Levenger, Olive Juice, Bas Bleu and the aptly titled What On Earth? And it's true --that's what I exclaimed upon finding it in my mailbox.

You know, reviewing that list makes me feel like I've left some catalogs out. The Fright Catalog, maybe? Cuddledown? Fine Cheeses of New England Monthly? I have every confidence that if these catalogs haven't already arrived and been recycled, they'll be waiting for me today.

And then there are the comics. Last week, I picked up and read Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall along with my usual stash, and gosh, is it gorgeous and sharp. James Jean's art in story is simply charming, all whimsical lines until the first panel where they skew, horribly and suitably, into jumbled confusion. Tara McPherson's art is similarly beguiling; I have adored her work on Thessaly and The Witching (one of the covers over on the left), so it was great to see her here. The Fables hardcover will be of the most use to die-hard Fables readers, because it provides juicy backstories and little continuity call-outs, but it's a nice stand-alone read if you are a collector of alternate fairy-tale interpretations.

This week, I picked up the final issues of Seven Soldiers (only six months after its promised release date!) and Planetary, which I am sure I have been reading since the Bush I administration. Or maybe it just feels like it since the issues don't come out on what could be called a "frequent" basis. Of the two, I think I enjoyed the Planetary finale more, despite having to haul out a crib sheet to remember what plot callbacks came from where. The Seven Soldiers wrap-up was ... well, it was Grant Morrison, so it's not like I wasn't warned, but I still feel a little deflated. Morrison has J. Michael Straczynski's problem -- great set-up, tremendously detailed fictional words and backstories, and weak denoument.

But now that those comics are done and my recyling bin is full, perhaps I can redirect my attention to something where there are more words on the page than pictures. Maybe. Tune in next week ...

What I read last week: the bohemian edition

As promised in "What I read last week: the fan edition," I am in the middle of reading a bunch of books about American sub- and countercultures. I'm interested in how subcultures come into being and how they affect people within and without their charmed circles. So I read Ann Powers' Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America. She's another reporter/writer who used her life as the launching point to a greater examination of some aspect of American culture. However, she has the brains to write about what she did, as opposed to doing what she wanted to write about. That is a crucial difference.

The book is about how people who don't fit into "mainstream" society manage to craft and refine their own alternate social groups. Powers uses her experiences living in group houses in 1980s San Francisco to talk about the reasons people decide they don't fit in; to highlight the work it takes to belong to any specific culture; to celebrate the deeper motives and ideals that power people's desires to create a community. (And, to my delight, she talks about the roles consumption plays in creating or maintaining a social identity.)

One complaint I have is that I couldn't shake the perception that it's a lot of goddamn work to maintain any specific subculture. Thus I couldn't stop asking, "Why would you bother?" and I didn't find an answer that satisfied me emotionally. This is my hang-up. Perhaps this goes back to third grade, when reading Blubber (a primer on how quickly children turn against their friends, if there ever was one) and watching The Wave left me slightly suspicious of anyone who enthusiastically embraced the sheltering identity of a social group. (Perhaps I'm reaching.) Whatever the root cause, I am now a person who thinks it's great that you cast your lot in with the psychobillies, the Rainbow family, or any other subculture out there, but cannot say I've ever felt the urge to do so myself. However, Powers makes it clear that for a lot of other people, it's the interplay between fellow travelers that helps each individual figure out who they are.

What she spends considerably less time on is the radical possibility that any subculture can become as restrictive or confining as the one it was reacting again. Similarly, there's not any attempt to answer the question, "What would a counterculture be if it didn't have permanent opposition?" Can these subcultures stand on their own when they're the norm, or are they powered by people's perpetual sense of outsiderdom?

Despite not really examining what debts bohemia owes to we straight-and-narrow types out there, Weird Like Us is not a bad book. It's even a great read. Powers is an elegant writer, with a distinct voice that reaches out and pulls the reader into the rhythm of her prose. But why should you take my word for it? Read "Ann Powers Remembers Tower Records" (LAT, Oct 11, 06) to get a flavor of what Weird Like Us reads like. There are the splashes of perspective grounded in objective fact; there is the transmutation of an intimate episode into a universal human experience; there is the articulation of what it means to be an outsider, delivered in the language of the world she says she doesn't belong to.

That is what ultimately makes Weird Like Us a satisfying read. She has the ability to transmit an alien experience, in terms that make sense, yet without diluting the subject's fundamental quality of otherness. I wish more writers were weird like her.

What I read last week: the fan edition

My favorite feature reporting assignments are the ones where I get to immerse myself in a whole new group or subculture. I am perpetually intrigued by the way people filter and amplify their everyday experiences based on their ruling passions. I am slightly envious that they have found the lodestar that guides their lives.

So it's no surprise that I adored Shari Caudron's Who Are You People?

It helps that I could immediately identify with her -- "I wanted a grand, ferocious, larger-than-life fervor that knew no bounds," she wrote in the introduction. However, what really won me over was the curiosity, sense of purpose, and honest self-examination that she brought to the project. That, plus a relatable style that can only come from decades of writing for general-market magazines and a storyteller's sense of when to rely on anecdote and when to rely on reportage. This is a really fun read.