Good sign

There is a "Please do not remove signs" sign written on cardboard, attached to a stake, and firmly planted in the median strip on Ainsworth near 30th. It is the only sign in the median for blocks in either direction.

Playing Monopoly, then playing pretend

I spent my Saturday with the neighbor kids so their mom could go to the hospital with grandma, who's having knee surgery. I'd promised Sierra we'd play Monopoly, so we did--at my lovely backyard table, in the sun! We dealt out most of the properties first, which moved the game along nicely. Sierra and Miles have an amazing new updated Monopoly set, where you have a debit card instead of paper money, and the bank is essentially a very small ATM type thing. Also, everything costs a lot more. In the thousands and millions. But it's still Monopoly. We played a whole game, and Miles, the little brother, won. (We made a couple of slightly unorthodox trades that were perhaps more favorable toward him. But. Yeah.) Then I worked on my garden (death to the holly tree stump and the holliettes!) while they climbed my hawthorne tree, and then they played this elaborate game in which they represented closely aligned but different tribes who were waging war on a third tribe. The best part was when Sierra said, "Okay, Miles, now we have to speak to them in a language we all understand," and he said, "No, I'm going to speak my own language." Oh, the older sibling/younger sibling dynamic. But yay for little kids playing make-believe outside. Yes, there's a potentially problematic tribal element, but it wasn't cowboys and Indians, and there was no war-whooping. And there also were not TV show characters involved. Overall, excellent stuff.

I want that shirt

Outside the New Seasons on Killingsworth, a guy in a wheelchair is panhandling. He's got a puppy on his lap and his shirt says "and blessed art thou among women."

Social Interactions

Today after school I got a cup of coffee at Floyd's. I wanted to sit and zone and check email and be in my head, but around some other people. The end of the school year is rough. I'm done, the kids are done, and we all still have so much work to do, and it's not over.

But there's this old guy at Floyd's today, he wants to chat. He's on the couch, I sit in an armchair nearby with my coffee. He ruminates about how important coffee is to this nation. I nod and smile--he's right. He says, "Where would we be without coffee? I say, "Asleep. I'd be asleep." Then he starts telling me about how his dad's parents came from Norway--I say, "My dad's parents too." He keeps talking then he says he forgot the story he was going to tell me. The guy in the other armchair moves to a nearby table. I get out my computer and open it, shutting him out. I'm not unfriendly, but I'm not friendly. A little while later, he leaves.

No conclusions. Still thinking about it. Lots of thoughts. Thoughts about Portland vs. Brooklyn and how much less I interact with strangers. Thoughts about generational interactions and how those are also much more rare these days--I have very few people in my daily life who are older than my mother, and not many people in my daily life who are her age. Thoughts about choosing my computer over hearing his story, as much of it as he could remember. Thoughts about loneliness.

Also thinking about how many of my interactions with strangers happened on the subway in New York, on the buses, on the street. I am an interactor. I welcome the interactions and they come to me. But it happens less here. And it wasn't sustainable there.

Like I said, lots of thoughts.

My hundred most influential writers, continued.

Today I cut the following people off my list, and in this way I got it down to a hundred:

Rosemary Wells
Ezra Jack Keats
Aesop
Peggy Parish (Amelia Bedelia)
Edith Hamilton (Mythology)
Euripedes
Lorrie Moore
Aristophanes
John Cheever
Brian Selznick


Below are the others who didn't make the final list (but who got written down--I should've written down more of the writers who flew through my head). I am still uncertain about comic book artists and zinesters. Cindy Crabb (Doris) is the only zinester on the list as it now stands, and Lynda Barry is the only comic book writer. Celia and I were discussing this, and she said how it would be interesting to make lists every few years, and see how they evolved. My list at twenty would've had more zinesters on it, I'm sure. Maybe this list should too. But I think partly I feel like my friendships with zinesters were the influence, as much as their writing in their zines. It was the dialogue. This list isn't about dialogue, it's about writers who made a deep impression on me through their books, through their published words. I'm annotating the list now, and I'll post it sometime soon.

Amy Hempel
Zora Neale Hurston
Walter Mosley
Arundhati Roy
Amy Bloom
Toni Cade Bambara
Thornton Wilder
J.R.R. Tolkien
Isaac Bashevis Singer NP
Leo Tolstoy
Ernest Hemingway
Vladimir Nabokov
Thomas Hardy
V.C. Andrews
John Saul
Stephen King
Ralph Ellison
Richard Wright
Susan Cooper
Charles Simic
Naomi Shihab Nye
Katzuro Ishiguro
Michael Ondaatje
William Maxwell
W.G. Sebald
Ntozake Shange
Tennessee Williams
Arthur Miller
Jose Saramago NP
Mimi Nguyen
Aaron Cometbus
Langston Hughes
Joy Williams
Wallace Stegner
Harper Lee
Gary Larson (Far Side)
Bill Watterson (Calvin & Hobbes)
Berkeley Breathed (Bloom County)
Mad Magazine
Nella Olsen
Dorothy Allison
Leslie Feinberg

Another Portland novel: The Girl Who Fell from the Sky

I just finished reading Heidi Durrow's The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, one of those books where you're very aware that you're reading a first novel, it's not perfect and there are moments that jar, but it's also something special and you're glad it got brought into the world.

Also, it's set in Portland!

This was the second book I've read recently that was set in Portland, the other one being The Mozart Summer. I didn’t know that either one was set in Portland until I started reading it: coincidence! Both books have scenes set in Laurelhurst Park. Both books have scenes set in Laurelhurst Park in the middle of the night!

Much of The Girl Who Fell from the Sky takes place in northeast Portland, a northeast Portland post-Vanport, pre-gentrification. When Rachel is eleven, she moves from Chicago to live with her grandmother at 4725 Northeast Cleveland Avenue (a block from where I was living a year ago, on the 4800 block of Cleveland), two blocks away from the Wonderbread factory (since closed), and we learn that:

Grandma was the first colored woman to buy a house in this part of Portland. That’s what Grandma says. When she moved in, the German dairy store closed [here’s some tangentially related Portland history], and the Lutheran church became African Methodist. Amen. That part’s Grandma too. All of Grandma’s neighbors are black now. And most came from the South around the same time Grandma did.

By the time Rachel is a teenager, the neighborhood has changed some more:

“Them closing the drive-through dairy was one thing,” Grandma says. “But not feeling safe in your own home . . . It was the best of the best black folk living around here when I first come. And the rest of them hard workers, mostly from the shipyards—not like them kids ruinin things just to get some new sneakers. Look at us now.”

Even I can see it. Things just aren’t the same. Across the street Mrs. Lewis put bars on her windows, and the neighbor next door got a big dog. There have been three break-ins on this street in the last month. On the block where there was a real grocery store, now there’s just a convenience store, a liquor store, a church, and a place that you can buy hair. The closest grocery store is a twenty-minute bus ride away.

An interesting book. Worth reading. Really ambitious structurally, with too many points of view, and a lot of unraveled threads left hanging (Aunt Loretta? What happened?), but Durrow does a lot with the huge amount of material and emotion and drama she tackles. Plus you could argue that’s how life is: structurally ambitious with too many points of view and unraveled threads hanging, too much material and emotion and drama. Hard to pull off in a novel, but completely captivating.

I need to finish this upstate New York novel I'm writing, so I can start a Portland novel.

Still listing writers. Also determining factors.

I'm still working on my list, talking it over with people (thanks to Laurel, R.E., Megan, for listening to this lately). I've realized that I do need some definition of influential--or several definitions--and I also have to figure out the distinction between influential writer and influential book. I think Antoine de Saint-Exupery will make it onto my list on the basis of The Little Prince alone, but I haven't read any of his other books. Same with Harper Lee and Anne Frank. I've read a lot of Charles Simic's work, but if he ends up on my list, it will be because of Dimestore Alchemies, his prose poems about Joseph Cornell. It's a book that's meant a lot to me as another lens through which to view Cornell, one of my favorite artists and a very odd guy. It's also a book that's hugely influenced how I think about writing about art.

Recent, late additions to the tentative list:

• F. Scott Fitzgerald (Again, he's important primarily for one book, The Great Gatsby--but this also illustrates one of the trickiest bits of trying to make a comprehensive, influences-throughout-my-life list; I still think it's a great book in so many ways, and it was interesting to reread it after living in New York for a while and knowing the city, having a sense of how geography helps to define the characters and their relationships, something I missed about the book reading it growing up in Minneapolis. Also, I'd read it at least twice before we read it in English class my junior year of high school, but Mr. Shandorf helped me see things in the book that I didn't know were there, and I think of reading Gatsby in that class as one of my first and most formative experiences of really understanding the depth and layers you can find in a great novel. So I think I have to include him.)


• Lewis Carroll (An amazing oversight!)


• Langston Hughes (Hugely influential, but... top 100? still debating)


• Betty McDonald (Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle) (Absolutely an oversight--these are books I loved, my sister loved, our parents read to us, and Emilyn and I still reference them. If that's not seminally influential, what is?)


• Astrid Lindgren (Pippi Longstocking) (See Betty McDonald.)


• Peggy Parish (Amelia Bedelia) (See Betty McDonald.)


• Harper Lee


• Joy Williams? (I love her stories but I can't think, now, of just how important she was, then--which in this case is college, I think?)


• Wallace Stegner (An oversight. Except, though I love Angle of Repose and Crossing to Safety... a hundred writers is turning out not to be as many as I'd thought it was. And honestly, depending on the determining factors in our definition of "influential," and how truly comprehensive I'm able to be, the anonymous author of Go Ask Alice might end up outranking Wallace Stegner in a seminal list. He's been more important recently, but I read that book so many times as a kid.)


• Grace Paley (Another huge oversight.)


• Charles Baxter (I've read several of his novels and loved them, but he would be on this list for one short story: "Gryphon." I read it first as a kid when it was anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 1986 (I was ten in 1986, and I remember finding this book on a shelf in my house. I tended to read random books I found on shelves in my house, which explains a lot about this list.)

Wow. I just looked up the table of contents for The Best American Short Stories 1986, and it's impressive how many of the writers on my list I read here for the first time. I didn't realize how much my tendency to read random books explained about this list. Talk about early influences:

* Basil from her garden / Donald Barthelme
* Gryphon / Charles Baxter
* Janus / Ann Beattie
* The convict / James Lee Burke
* Star food / Ethan Canin
* Gossip / Frank Conroy
* Communist / Richard Ford
* Bad company / Tess Gallagher
* Today will be a quiet day / Amy Hempel
* Doe season / David Michael Kaplan
* Three thousand dollars / David Lipsky
* Sportsmen / Thomas McGuane
* All my relations / Christopher McIlroy
* Monsieur les deux chapeaux / Alice Munro
* Skin angels / Jessica Neely
* Invisible life / Kent Nelson
* Telling / Grace Paley
* Lawns / Mona Simpson
* Health / Joy Williams
* The rich brother / Tobias Wolff.

It was edited by Raymond Carver. Also interesting. I imagine I thought Alice Munro was really boring when I was ten. But I remember several of these stories distinctly. I remember reading and rereading Mona Simpson's "Lawns," about a klepto college student who worked in the school post office and stole packages (I just looked it up, and yep, that's the one). And yeah, "Gryphon." Indelible marks. Which is probably one feature of the most influential writer. I have to figure out my criteria. My rubric.

This list is a sort of autobiography, really. I was thinking I need to look through the book lists in old zines, and I probably should look at old journals, too. But--zines, maybe. Old journals, not going there. We'll do the best we can with what we have to work with.