Mortaine’s Blog

I’ve gotten this one three times now:

The phone rings. The caller ID says something like “Low-Cost Mortgages!” and a phone number. I pick up (otherwise it’ll go to the answering machine, and the ringing phone annoys me). Dial-tone.

Yes, they are now using my Caller ID as their advertising venue. An intrusive phone call with a hang-up, and a caller-id message to get their ad across.

Do these people actually think this will work?

Well, a couple of somethings. John and I went to the Cement Ship, down in Aptos, had mochas while we walked out to the ship, talked, and generally had a nice time together. While we were there, we took some pictures of various stuff, including each other (how sweet), birds, the ocean, etc.

We then went to Cole’s Barbecue, which is a really great BBQ place in Aptos and in Santa Cruz. John was drooling the minute I mentioned Cole’s until we got there!

A funny thing happened while we were there, though. We were sitting at a table by the window, and I could see this woman digging up some plants next to the railroad. It was hard to tell what she was doing, but it was pretty clear to me that she was transplanting from public property. I’m not sure, but I think that’s illegal in these parts. I took some video of it on my little digital camera, but it was very blurry and hard to make out, so I deleted it.

Still, it got me thinking about it. Is that illegal? Is it a harmless crime? I mean, these were just plants from the side of the railroad. But they were plants that may have been deliberately placed there by the city. Are they stealing from the taxpayers by taking them, or doing a public service by removing the outgrowths? Personally, I think that if someone is transplanting from what is obviously not her property, that she’s stealing, and probably should be caught.

My friend Jeanette had some neighborhood kids who were stealing her flowers. Not only were these flowers that she had bought and planted herself, they were plants that she was painstakingly taking care of, protecting them from the condo’s landscape gardeners and everything. To have someone come along and uproot them was both frustrating and hurtful. I don’t imagine that the city workers who planted the original plants feel the same way, but I do suspect that they were planning on those outgrowths to take root and propagate and make more plants. Once or twice I’ve gone out to the yard to find little holes dug in the earth, and some of the plants just don’t seem to “take.” I usually attribute it to my bad gardening skills, the dog, the neighbor’s cat, or some other little gremlin. But what if it’s not? What if it’s a crime being perpetrated on my home?

John did take a little quicktime movie of me having my beer (1.6 MB). Here’s a picture from that moment, too:

After lunch, we went home and worked on the computers (see yesterday’s entry about Linux), I finished reading “The Turn of the Screw” and read The Caretaker (Harold Pinter play) as well. Man, that one was tough– I didn’t know what to say about its theme! I also scanned through some poems I had already read, to make my notecards on them for studying later. Just looking at my notecards tells me I don’t have enough modern poetry or prose, and I know I don’t have enough cards on American writers (though I have read enough). Most of my cards say “British” on them.

I found out this morning that the lower-division science fiction class was approved by the department and the school– the next step is approval by the General Education ctte. and then it can proceed as a course for Spring, 2003.

So, in the ever-continuing attempts to get linux working on my main desktop machine, John is now trying to monkey with the bios settings. And I am one click away from spending $80 for a 40 GB hard drive (inc. shipping). The current 12 GB drive doesn’t seem to want to “take” linux, and the bios is our last resort at this point.

I currently use Yellow Dog Linux on an iMac Special Edition DV (Graphite– the first kind), and I like it. But I can’t use anything that isn’t completely open-source, because Linux PPC is not compatible with x86 architecture (the stuff in Inel-based PCs). So, I am running linux on a macintosh, and have now made a geek choice to use linux on my pentium box.

So, right now we’re trying to get Redhat 7.2 to install on this hard drive. It’s looking, um, spotty at best. Just after I clicked to buy the new hard drive, the installer “un-halted” (it had seemingly stalled out), and is now apparently working. We’ve gotten to just after this point before, however, and had the installation stop with some scary messages from the hard drive coming back. It almost looks like a problem writing to the hard drive, but we’ll see.

[wait. . . . .]

[wait. . . . .]

Oh, my god– it seems to be working! Wow!!!

Nope– take it back. It crashed with a lovely series of scary messages having to do with input/output errors (which usually have to do with reading and writing to stuff). Looks like I’m getting a new hard drive. I hope that one works, at least.

I had to cut short my journal entry this morning, as my ride showed up to take me to class.

So where was I? Oh, yeah. . . .

I had read The Dispossessed shortly after I moved out to California. I’d bought it at a Thrift Store for about $1.00, and read it in a couple of days. When I moved out here, I was very poor, and Mom wasn’t making enough money to really afford my school and rent and stuff. I was trying to cut expenses by eating less (also, I wasn’t hungry much). My social life was going to the matinee movies with the friends I made shortly after I moved out here. I spent a lot of time studying. I was happy, in that I could generally get around town OK and I wasn’t sick, and I wasn’t in any really bad relationships. But I wasn’t really “living it up,” either.

The Dispossessed is about a man (Shevek) who comes from a moon colony which is very poor, but which has an anarchist/socialist way of life. So they have few resources, and nothing to spare, but they value everything they have, especially themselves and their friendships. The main character is a brilliant physicist who ends up going to the capitalist society on the home planet to study and work with the physicists there. The novel is split into two “halves”– the time spent on Uras (the capatalist world) and the time spent on Anarres (the socialist moon).

After I read this novel, I was so moved, I gave it away to someone I passed by at school. It was the kind of impulse that would have made Shevek proud. I didn’t notice the author’s name, and I only later remembered the novel title.

Without realizing it, I had read my first LeGuin novel.

Two years later, I was in this summer school class, devoting several weeks to studying her work. It was fascinating. We approached her work with respect, but also with criticism, and I learned an important skill– to blend my fannish love of good fantasy writing with a healthy mix of critical analysis and objectivity. I greatly enjoyed the course, and we ended up reading The Dispossessed again.

That was in 1995. Skip forward 5 years. I’m in graduate school, Spring 2000. I’ve just been accepted into Ursula LeGuin’s creative writing seminar, even though I’m not a creative writing major. Whooo hooo! I don’t know how much my writing improved, but I learned a lot about the craft as a craft. I learned about playing with sentence structures, and using writing exercises as a way to improve certain elegances. I know that’s not a word, but it expresses what I mean here. I later bought her book Steering the Craft because of its value for those writing exercises.

So, I have gone from a casual reader to a critical undergraduate student to a direct student. What’s next?

Fast forward one year, Spring 2001. I’m taking the literary criticism graduate seminar. Fascinating stuff. We have to apply several different approaches to literary criticism to a single work throughout the semester. Very challenging to write that last paper, where all four approaches must be combined. I found that one of my approaches was incompatible with the other three– they resulted in conflicting meanings for the same symbolic entity. Anyway, I knew early that I wanted to use a work of LeGuin’s for this– by now I was working on a mild academic obsession. I really wanted to use The Dispossessed, but chose instead a short story titled “Newton’s Sleep.”

This is a wonderful short story about a space station colony that begins having “visions” that are real or not, depending on who you ask. Isaac is the main character, and he is very objective and rational, even to the point of being irrational about rejecting the illusions. Isaac is very similar, in some ways, to Shevek, in that they are both scientists and objective personalities, but Isaac can’t accept the poetry in his world, and Shevek embraces it completely and sees aesthetics in everything, including physics.

Now I have become the “critical graduate student.” In this case, I am deliberately reading much into the story, because I have to write four different papers on this topic.

In Fall 2001, I taught English 1B, in which the Freshmen in my class must read a novel of my choosing. I was talking to a friend of mine who I randomly ran into at the mall and I asked him what he would choose. The first one out of his mouth was The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin. I had considered it, but (and here is where I weep and weep because it’s the wrong reason to reject this novel!) it is 500 pages long. Instead, I chose The Lathe of Heaven, another LeGuin novel, but much shorter. Also, there is a PBS movie version which was re-released in 2000, and which I bought on DVD that Spring. I understand an A&E version is due out this summer.

Teaching The Lathe of Heaven was one of the more painful experiences of my life. For starters, it was a terrible semester. Any time you have to go into a classroom 24 hours after two planes have run into the Twin Towers, you know its going to be bad. Also, my students never really seemed to “get it.” A couple of them really enjoyed the novel, but most of them almost seemed to not have read it when we came to class. Their in-class essays were so uninspired, I let them do a “make-up” at the end of the semester, after we had re-visited the concept of literary analysis. The general idea was to have them describe the theme of a story in terms of characterization, setting, tone, mood, voice, symbolism, language, etc.– it would have worked better if they had applied those ideas to the novel, because there was more there to discuss.

At this point, I have read, learned, learned from, and taught “LeGuin.” I may have more opportunities in the future for teaching her work, and if I ever get to teach the lower division science fiction class, I will not only get to teach The Dispossessed, but also many other favorites of mine and of others. I don’t know if it’s a good novel for Freshmen, because the ideas are so dense. But I think it’s a good novel for SJSU students, because it blends “hard science” with philosophy, political science, and economics, all into a literary masterpiece that can be read for “letters” credit in their GE requirements.

Anyway, that’s my long story about how Ursula LeGuin has entered my life and stayed there. I’m off now to read Henry James (”The Turn of the Screw”) and go to bed.