the casual vacancy is a cuttingly mean book about a small town

i had long been on the waiting list for j.k. rowling's casual vacancy at my local library. right before new year's eve, my turn came and i picked up the book. i'd read that the book was a major departure from the harry potter series - a book for adults, not children. well, i finished it yesterday and it was indeed a departure.

it's a mean-spirited book. it feels like rowling was taking revenge on a whole lot of people in some small town who she felt had wronged her. there are no redeeming characters, not much of a story, no real resolution of what little story there is and no redemption for anyone at the end. in short, it's a disappointment.

that said, in some ways, it's a book i wish i'd written. i think anyone who grew up in a small town or lives in one has dreams of exposing all of the pettiness of various people for the pettiness that it is. and she definitely does that. what's sad tho', is that she comes off petty herself in doing so. a writer like jonathan franzen does it much more elegantly. his book, freedom, also had a lack of any redeeming characters, but somehow it didn't make him seem as uncharitable as rowling comes off with this book. possibly because his story was just better. the casual vacancy doesn't actually have much of a story.

i guess i expected better of rowling - her harry pottery characters are such well-drawn characters and the stories so well-plotted and drawn. i knew this wasn't going to be harry potter, but i thought it would be good. it wasn't. i'm just glad i got it from the library and that i didn't buy it.

have you read it? what did you think?

a bit random for today, but it's been grey and dreary for days

small stone :: four

chickens pecking in the herb beds. a little half-grown grey cat stalks, doing the pre-launch wiggle of her haunches and then running straight for one little black hen. she aborts at the last minute, not daring after all. and the chicken gives her a good scolding.

small stone :: five

looking at a friend's photos of armenia on facebook. hearing the echoes of memories not my own in the beautiful, evocative images. feeling provoked to tears.

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vignettes of memories:

going to a bar in kazan with my russian (tatar?) girlfriends. it wasn't something they did often (or ever). all i really remember is their big, round eyes and the decor - which was faux cave, draped in plastic plants.

defying the last of winter in kazan (apparently my brain is in kazan) with long, cutoff jeans shorts on an april day. 

stuffing myself and my backpack onto a VERY busy tram (also in kazan) and at one point, being held up completely by the surrounding crowd, as my feet left the ground.

what is it about watching living daylights (the first bond with timothy dalton) that reminds me of kazan?

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is america in decline? and how much does it have in common with europe?
read more here.  

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i really like maria konnikova's thoughts on language.

while you're there, stay and read more of her blog posts, you won't regret it.

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have you read j.k. rowling's casual vacancy?
what did you think?

of bullying and dead squirrels

in the past month or so, we've been developing a new concept and some new projects in my little company. part of it has been to look a bit more deeply into bullying. there's a new program on television that is following an actor who is trying to make a difference on the atmosphere in an ordinary public school. his interest in bullying (which is called mobning in danish and seems to me to resonate so much more in danish than it does in english) arose when his own son was attacked twice inside of three weeks by a group of neighborhood boys. since then, he's had countless speaking engagements in schools, bringing attention to the problem of bullying.

of course, looking into this topic got me thinking about my own experiences bullying and being bullied (the whole miss king bitch shit incident). i imagine i did my share of making fun of particular people and of freezing others out of some or other group - i think we probably all did and to an extent, i think it's a natural part of the process of growing up and finding your position in the scheme of things. but i only very clearly remember one incident where i was just truly mean and horrible to someone (tho' i'll admit there were probably others).

there was a girl who was very dorky and unpopular. she had none of the right clothes, right glasses, right haircut. she wasn't smart or pretty or funny. tho' i don't think i realized it or thought about it at the time, i think her family didn't have much money (which probably explained the clothes/glasses/haircut thing). she was the butt of many jokes and probably doesn't look fondly back on her years in school.

i was driving one afternoon with a friend and although for some reason i didn't have my glasses on, i was behind the wheel. i must have been 14-15 and my eyes were pretty bad and i definitely needed glasses or contacts in order to drive. so basically, there i was, driving along a quiet city street in our little town, pretty much totally unable to see. suddenly my friend shouted, horrified, because i ran over a squirrel.  she looked at me incredulously, thinking i'd actually tried to hit it, but in truth i hadn't seen it at all, since i wasn't wearing glasses.

we stopped the car and jumped out to check on it. it was dead, but strangely unharmed - it wasn't flat or openly bleeding - possibly the car going over it had scared it death. well, the whole incident occurred in front of this dorky, unpopular girl's house. so we got it in our heads that we'd toss that dead squirrel into her bicycle basket, which was parked out front. it was done in a careless, thoughtless way - not at all premeditated - the idea arose just because we were stupid teenagers and happened to be in front of her house with a dead squirrel at our disposal. if it hadn't happened right there, we wouldn't have gone out of our way to drive by her house and put the dead squirrel in her basket, we actually had nothing against her per se, so there was really no ground for this rather shockingly malicious act.

i never knew how she felt about it, but can you imagine how horrified you'd be if you came out and found a dead squirrel in your bicycle basket? i think i'd be traumatized for life. you wouldn't be able to help wondering who hated you that much and would be so evil.

and yet, as horrible as it sounds, it wasn't really an evil act - more of a highly thoughtless, stupid one, brought on by a particular collusion of circumstances and not so much by ill will. it was just dumb kids, doing a dumb thing. and i wonder how much of bullying starts that way and ends up totally wrong.

i don't have an answer to that question, but i do feel a rather odd urge to look up that girl from back then and tell her i'm sorry about the dead squirrel in her bicycle basket.

small stone :: three

working intensely. ideas flying. catching some, letting others slip away. scribbling frantically in a notebook. thinking in two languages. energizing. draining. creating. laughing. fika. hitting the wall. renewed by some bad (for someone else) news. not really feeling very guilty about that (let's just say that for troglodytes what goes around comes around). definitely not just another day at the office.

kitty nurble comes home

last summer, we met the fabulous kit lane in person (it was at lisa's house - they both live in minnesota). you may know her as the inventor of bobbaloos. (she is wonderful, by the way.) and as a little joke, we presented her with a hairball extracted from the outside (not one of the thrown-up variety) of our norwegian forest cat, lila. we also gave her real gifts, so we're not totally mental. today, this little creature arrived - our very own kitty nurble - composed largely of lila-hair. a little piece of our beloved (and aging (she's 14) cat).  it was getting a bit dark when i took this, so more proper photos of it tomorrow in good light. and this is not at all a very blurry shot of frankie trying to mangle welcoming it:

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small stone :: two

days shared.

laughter.

sumptuous plate of healthy salad.

laughter.

wine.

the unbearable lightness of being.

life.

small stone :: one

carpet of beech leaves. wet with rain. scattered bits of gold in a grey, soaked, winter world.

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this small stone is part of the mindful writing challenge. 

a month-long exercise in noticing things properly. 

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i can't tell you how hard it was NOT to take a photo of the glimmery gold beech leaves today.

when my cooking mojo returned and we ate our way into 2013

the holidays returned my cooking mojo to me. i will admit that it had been a bit lackluster around here in the kitchen of late, but a brined turkey stuffed with rye grains for christmas and a new year's feast of epic proportions (i didn't get shots of the 6 different appetizers) changed all that. i'll be blogging all the recipes on the long-neglected domestic sensualist blog in the next couple of days.

but i will admit it leaves me feeling like i may never need to eat again. or at the very least, that a detox is in order. maybe i need to unearth my juicer.

here's hoping you all had a wonderful new year's eve and are enjoying the beginning of 2013.