M.E. Breen

I can’t stop watching the World Cup. I watch it live on my laptop, two games a day starting at 7:00am, then recaps, then the post-prandial World Cup Daily podcast with James Richardson. I’ve been thinking a lot about whence this obsession springs and have hit upon a number of flattering theses. One of them is that I am building a Theory of Man while watching, so it isn’t really a waste of time. Another is that I am brushing up on my geography, history, and cultural stereotypes, which is also mostly not a waste of time. I feel caught in the embrace of a giant. I feel like Jonah in the belly of the whale, a Jonah with his feet up, eating potato chips and rooting for the Côte d’Ivoire.

Then there’s this:

“The rest of the world follows a sport that rewards resilience and neuroticism. Soccer is a sport perfectly designed to reinforce a tragic view of the universe, because basically it is a long series of frustrations leading up to near certain heartbreak.”

Exactly!

(Read the rest of that article here.)

I also love how everyone falls so flamboyantly and acts like everything hurts so much, because a) it probably does hurt so much, and b) it’s so theatrical and unheroic, or at least unstoic. I think the players get that they are playing out the great drama of human existence for us. It seems bigger than everyone, bigger even that the biggest stars, because everyone remembers everything, and the memory of football is the memory of colonialism, among other things. Every game feels informed by the entire history of the world. Not kidding!

I have more thinking to do on this topic, which in any case was only meant to serve as a segue to this bit from Pliny my friend Andrew sent me. He wanted to know if I’d read it before I wrote Darkwood. The answer is no, even, Heck, no!, even, Pliny who? But anyway, I really like it:

In Italy also it is believed that there is a noxious influence in the eye of a wolf; it is supposed that it will instantly take away the voice of a man, if it is the first to see him. Africa and Egypt produce wolves of a sluggish and stunted nature; those of the colder climates are fierce and savage. That men have been turned into wolves, and again restored to their original form, we must confidently look upon as untrue, unless, indeed, we are ready to believe all the tales, which, for so many ages, have been found to be fabulous. But, as the belief of it has become so firmly fixed in the minds of the common people, as to have caused the term “Versipellis”  to be used as a common form of imprecation, I will here point out its origin. Euanthes, a Grecian author of no mean reputation, informs us that the Arcadians assert that a member of the family of one Anthus is chosen by lot, and then taken to a certain lake in that district, where, after suspending his clothes on an oak, he swims across the water and goes away into the desert, where he is changed into a wolf and associates with other animals of the same species for a space of nine years. If he has kept himself from beholding a man during the whole of that time, he returns to the same lake, and, after swimming across it, resumes his original form, only with the addition of nine years in age to his former appearance. To this Fabius adds, that he takes his former clothes as well. It is really wonderful to what a length the credulity of the Greeks will go! There is no falsehood, if ever so barefaced, to which some of them cannot be found to bear testimony.

Pliny (Natural History, 8. 34)

Tomorrow I’ll be reading some scary scenes from Darkwood, discussing villains, and guiding kids in the creation of their own creeps and monsters at The Reading Bug in San Carlos.

That’s Weds, June 3, at 3:00 pm.

As an example of the fun of writing wicked,  I offer you Ovid’s Envy:

The battered doors swung open; there was Envy
Eating the flesh of snakes, the proper food
To nourish venom with. Minerva turned,
As Envy rose, torpid and slow, the snakes
Half-eaten on the ground, and she came forward,
Torpid and slow, and as she saw the goddess,
All bright and beautiful in her armor,
She groaned aloud and sighed for that bright presence.
Pale, skinny, squint-eyed, mean, her teeth are red
With rust, her breast is green with gall, her tongue
Suffused with poison, and she never laughs
Except when watching pain; she never sleeps,
Too troubled by anxiety; if men
Succeed, she fails; consumes and is consumed,
Herself her punishment.

–from Ovid’s Metamorphoses

The Darkwood paperback goes on sale today. Huzzah!

Si Quaeris Peninsulam Amoenam Circumspice

Sorry for the long break between posts. I was in Michigan! I only went for a week, but every trip for me involves a week of gearing up and a week of winding down, plus a few days to worry about how the plane stays up in the air, and there you go, almost a month.

In Michigan I discovered I am a closet patriot, or a tourist of patriotism, or maybe I should say: my love of country surrounds my heart like a becalmed sea. A trip out of state whips up the water.

As a patriot I am literal + sentimental = dorky. Right this very moment I am listening to the Sufjan Stevens album about Michigan, and I loved the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum in Grand Rapids, and I loved sticking my hand in the cold lake.  I also loved how when we were heading out with the dog the neighbors came over to find out how the bathroom renovation was going. They had some advice on how to stop new sink hardware from leaking. You could get this kind of advice in San Francisco, but you’d have to go across the hall and ask for it; it doesn’t wander over the property line with its hands shoved diffidently into the back pockets of its slacks.

At the Ford museum I sat down in the Vice President’s seat in the mock Cabinet Room and pounded my hands on the table as if in outrage over something the Secretary of State just said. The guard came running in with this look of wild hope on his face like maybe he could finally shush someone, or, joy of joys, escort them out. He was about 19 and wore a pair of handcuffs on his belt but no sap. He followed us all the way through the special exhibit on the Cold War. I wished I could have offered him something: magenta streaks in my hair? Platform boots? Star and sickle tattoo? Instead I just looked Dutch.

This was my first trip to Grand Rapids, which is, in fact, the land of my people — my father’s people, whom I never knew. So maybe my insistence on eating walleye and asparagus and homemade pear-pineapple jam and even a delicious terrible thing identified by the hand-written sign at the smokehouse as a ‘hunter stick’ wasn’t so much the tourist’s desire to eat a baguette in Paris as — what? The astronaut’s longing to taste something other than Tang? The amnesiac sampling cookies in hopes that one will restore his memory?

My family left a trace. My grandfather, by all accounts a wise and decent man, (my grandmother usually gets stuck with ‘severe,’ and ‘tight-fisted’) taught at Grand Valley and at Calvin College, and you can find his name there. It isn’t that they have disappeared from the place, it’s that they left me no special map or key by which to find them, no nicknames, no smells of pipe smoke or lavender sachets, no pile of old eyeglasses, not even one of the beige washcloths my grandmother was said to favor because they showed less dirt.

We went up to J’s land, near Montague, and took a survey of the trees. We looked at needle clusters and cones and leaf shapes. Eastern white oak, northern red oak, Hemlock, white pine, Norway pine, Norway maple, Sugar maple, red maple, American beech. The land doesn’t look the way it looked before people settled it and planted trees for timber, but it looks the way it looked when J’s grandfather tromped around hunting deer. Whatever direction you look, the view is the same, the trees replicating forever, the whole family history, the map of the world.

Truckstop has killed twice. That sounds pretty fierce until you consider the number of attempts: one hundred thousand million rabdillion. It goes like this: walk, stop, stare at shivering pile of earth, tilt head to side as though listening to secret communiques from said pile, raise forefoot, stare harder, lurch elegantly at pile, tunnel one snout-length into pile, attempt to worm barrel-shaped cur body into snout-sized hole, surrender to tugging on leash, express dismay via sneeze, blink dirt from stubby blond lashes, walk five yards, repeat.

The first time she caught something I was alone with her and there were lots of people around. They were good-looking people jogging in pairs wearing wicking fabrics. The thing she caught was a gopher. Gophers rank fourth among her targets after outdoor cats, squirrels and crows. Indoor cats fail to rank, but a sighting of the neighbor’s cat on our shared fence induces a semi-asthmatic shriek-bark that, well, I can’t describe it, except maybe it’s the sound a lemming makes the moment it throws itself over the cliff.

So crows are all over the beach and gophers* are all over, or rather under, the park. But the gopher she actually caught, three or more years ago now, was at the beach, so maybe it had a broken heart, or was a spy, or its life journey had wound to an end and it wanted to die in sight of the wide water. I like the last explanation best and also it seems the most probable, because no vigorous, self-respecting gopher can be caught by a dog in a matching pink collar and leash.

Anyway,  what I’m trying to tell you about is the second animal she killed. Before I say any more, I should mention I grew up with several generations of NIMH-level genius pet rats adopted from the Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley, and once when my cat chased a fruit rat under the stove I set out a water dish and a bunch of grapes for it until I figured out how to rescue it. I’ve never lived on a farm or in the heart of a city or anywhere else where rats might pose a special threat. So, I like rats.

But there we were in Golden Gate Park like we so often are, a pair of humans in decidedly non-wicking fabrics and our mutt, in her only fabric. Truckstop is doing the usual stop-stare-lurch, and the next thing we know she veers into a clump of grass and comes out with a rat. She killed it in two seconds, dropped it, and trotted on. You have never seen anything like it. Ok, very likely you have, but it was amazing. Not as a physical feat, not as a reminder of the swift brutality of nature, but simply because after all this time, after three years and the radzillion attempts, she got what she wanted, and then she didn’t care. I don’t mean she didn’t care. And I don’t mean she acted like I acted when I bought the $160 jeans I had flagged in Lucky magazine and yearned for for weeks and finally decided I deserved because of how badly I wanted them, and then as soon as I owned them felt so embarrassed by my reasoning I never wore them, and anyway they weren’t that flattering. Nor did she act like a professional assassin, for whom killing is deadly serious and life is a joke. No! She acted like she really wanted something, and then she got it, and she enjoyed it, and then she moved on, like, That’s cool. That was cool. What’s for lunch?

I was so struck by this because in some ways, right now, I am getting what I want. By that I mean my life is happy, is changing in ways that bring me joy, and though it is also changing in ways that make me sad, what I don’t feel like doing is emitting the agony-ecstasy shriek of the lemming. What I do feel like doing is sitting here with a mug of the tea my downstairs neighbor gave me for letting her puppy out while she’s at work, listening to the National (new National), and, well, that’s it. It’s cool. You get what you get, darling T, and you tunnel on.

*Get a load of this thing I just learned about gophers: the invasive Spanish grass that turns our California hills green in spring and gold in summer needs freshly turned soil to grow. Gophers love to eat this grass, and their exploding population depends on it to keep exploding. As they dig around looking for tasty roots they turn the soil, producing exactly the conditions it needs to grow. They turn the soil so much I heard it described as “boiling in slow motion.**” Anthropologists have trouble studying California soil because a nail from 1998 is going to be gopher-churned into the same layer as an arrowhead from 1338. So basically the gophers have inadvertently mastered agriculture and overcome the Malthusian paradox.

**I learned all this from Mark R. Stromberg, Ph.D., Resident Reserve Director of the Hastings Reserve near Monterey.