Tunguska » things I read about in books

The Morning Half-Life Blues

Girls buck the wind in the grooves toward work
in fuzzy coats promised to be warm as fur.
The shop windows snicker
flashing them hurrying over dresses they cannot afford:
you are not pretty enough, not pretty enough.

Blown with yesterday’s papers through the boiled coffee morning
we dream of the stop on the subway without a name,
the door in the heart of the grove of skyscrapers,
that garden where we nestle to the teats of a furry world,
lie in mounds of peony eating grapes,
and need barter ourselves for nothing.
not by the hour, not by the pound, not by the skinful,
that party to which no one will give or sell us the key
though we have all thought briefly we found it
drunk or in bed.

Black girls with thin legs and high necks stalking like herons,
plump girls with blue legs and green eyelids and
strawberry breasts,
swept off to be frozen in fluorescent cubes,
the vacuum of your jobs sucks your brains dry
and fills you with the ooze of melted comics.
Living is later. This is your rented death.
You grasp at hard commodities and vague lusts
to make up, to pay for each day
which opens like a can and is empty, and then another,
afternoons like dinosaur eggs stuffed with glue.

Girls of the dirty morning, ticketed and spent,
you will be less at forty than at twenty.
Your living is a waste product of somebody’s mill.
I would fix you like buds to a city where people work
to make and do things necessary and good,
where work is real as bread and babies and trees in parks
where we would all blossom slowly and ripen to sound fruit.

Marge Piercy

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What I’ve been reading…

A Nurses’ Story by Tilda Shalof

This autobiography from an ICU nurse was a bestseller for good reason. The story hustles along from patient to patient. All of the patients are critically ill and many of them die. For all the heartbreak though, the stories are not depressing or maudlin, just a really intimate look at what really happens in the ICU – the day to day work lives of a group of women tasked with providing expert care and comfort to our sickest family members and friends.

This weekend’s review in the Globe suggested that Shalof’s recent follow up to this book, “The Making of a Nurse” could have used more political context – about SARS, about the Harris’ government’s cuts to health care, or about the whole system of public care and it’s assailants. I’m not sure I agree. There are lots of great books that discuss the gender politics, economics, and political missteps that gutted the nursing system in the 1990s and that have left it in its still frail state today. But this isn’t that book… this is the very specific individual nurses’ struggle to learn to provide safe and competent care. And the stories she tells about her patients are wrenching and hilarious by turns and have stayed with me.

Rumour has it there’s a movie deal in the works for this book, and I couldn’t be more glad. ER was a great show, because medical emergencies can be made dramatic and engrossing, with a new tale every week. Where ER always fell short though, was in their portrayal of nurses – there are always more doctors than nurses and physicians were consistently the ones to provide hands on care and health teaching to every patient. Not the reality of any ER I’ve ever been in.

Historians often have a difficult time uncovering the histories of regular people. A book like this, about the day to day lives of nurses today, feels like a great record to send into the future.

Winterlong by Elizabeth Hand

She apologies for her debut novel in the afterword, describing it as a portmanteau of all of the characters and ideas she had stewed over as she was becoming a novelist.

I was enthralled by the ideas of high tech psychiatry gone wrong, the image of Washington D.C. reverted to wildness five hundred years from now, talking monkeys, and a remade social order. But there’s a whole lotta things beyond that in this book, and some of the bits don’t mesh in a coherent way. For one thing, the key crisis in the story is a main character becoming evil, and I still don’t really understand why.

This book was recommended by Cory Doctorow, who says “I loved her feminist apocalyptic novel”. hmm. Is that what that was?

The Linux Cookbook

My mom saw the cover of this one, picked it up eagerly, and then saw that all the “recipes” were computer concoctions. Funny!

So, this is a big fat book on stuff like how to do stuff in Linux. It’s pretty straightforward, though it’s a bit of a big book, so kind of daunting. But it rewards flipping though while sitting next to the computer. For example, I can make a terminal bell ding. (it’s control – n in case you can’t wait to read the book.) I know, I know, that and a $1.75 will get you a cup of coffee, but anyway, it’s kind of fun. Also I am a sucker for the big ideas of the open source… here’s a bit from the introduction:

{Richard Stallman} would not accept the kind of world proprietism would offer: No sharing your findings with your fellow man, no freedom for anyone to take a look “under the hood” of a published work to understand it or to build upon it, and certainly no general advance. There would not even be a way to improve or extend your own copy of such works, or gain insight from the writing of other programmers. The proprietary mode would mean the end of computer software as literature.” (from p. 17)

still on the go are Otherland (which is awesome so far, I don’t know why it’s not on this list) and The Anarchist in the Library, more on those later.

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