Credit 
Shit hot header graphic by Paul, w/assistance from "The Thing?"
Copyright Copyright 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 by Paul Woodford. All rights reserved. |
 I’ll get to Rachel. Be patient.
Since I starting using an iMac a year or so ago, I haven’t touched Donna’s Windows PC. She asks me before opening documents attached to incoming emails, or when she gets a message telling her to take some action or other to improve her computers’ performance, and I of course always tell her not to do it. But I don’t think she knows how to update her antivirus program. I really should be doing that for her. Just in case.
So, last night: at 8:45 PM and again at 9:10 PM, back-to-back calls from “Windows.” In the first call, a man with an Indian accent told me he was “calling from Windows” to alert me that my Windows PC was infested with viruses and that someone was using it to send spam messages as part of a network of hijacked computers. He wanted me to go to the computer and log in, at which point he’d confirm my IP address and help me remove the viruses and botnet files. Everything about the call hit me as wrong, so I told him so and hung up. Ten minutes later a female with an Indian accent, his “manager,” called. I said the same thing to her and hung up again.
It wouldn’t surprise me to learn Donna’s computer has been infected and hacked. But have you ever in your life heard of Microsoft tech support cold-calling registered users to tell them they have problems? And then there’s the whole idea of giving some stranger remote access to my wife’s computer. Might as well invite the next random guy I pass on the street into our house and show him where we keep the good silver.
This morning I Googled “Windows telephone scam” and learned it’s a well-known one that’s been around a while. As with my calls, most originate in India. The scammers represent themselves as employees of Windows, scare you with stories of viruses and botnets, and try to talk you into giving them remote access to your PC in order to fix it. If you go along with it, at some point they’ll ask you to pay for one or more critical files, which they’ll say are essential parts of the fix. I didn’t see that part coming, but I did see the part where, once you’d let them into your computer, they’d inject it with the very viruses and botnet files you thought they were helping you get rid of.
The linked article, dated Oct 4 2012, mentions an imminent major Federal Trade Commission crackdown on boiler room call center operations. I’ll assume for now the FTC did indeed crack down, just as I assume someone actually does work at the National Do Not Call Registry. That and three bucks might get me a cup of coffee at Starbucks.
Because in spite of any FTC crackdown, in spite of the Do Not Call Registry, we still get these calls. Savvy people, at least in the tech industry, have been on to these “I am calling you from Windows” scammers for years now. But they’re still calling, and they wouldn’t be doing it if they weren’t making money at it. Probably every one of us has reported Rachel from “cardholder services” to the Do Not Call Registry, but she keeps right on calling.
The linked article contains this wishy-washy statement: “While Do Not Call laws have stopped most reputable companies from harassing people over the telephone, they have had only limited effect against those whose reputation can’t go any lower.”
Couple of problems with that. One, even back in the bad old days, reputable companies didn’t run telephone scams, did they? Okay, maybe those “record of the month” clubs. Two, only limited effect? How about no effect whatsoever? When Congress set up the Do Not Call Registry several years ago, most of us thought it would be used to put illegal boiler room operators out of business. Apparently they just moved overseas, where US law can’t touch them.
I’m not especially tech savvy, but I like to think I have good spidey sense when it comes to scammers. Sadly, many people don’t. A good basic rule to follow is this: if they call you, it’s a scam. That also works for text messages, email, and online pitches: if they initiate the contact, it’s a scam.
You know what? Forget the first part of the rule and just remember this: it’s a scam. These days that seems like the best advice.
“A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard. Surprised—it always surprised him to find himself awake without prior notice—he rose from the bed, stood up in his multicolored pajamas, and stretched. Now, in her bed, his wife Iran opened her gray, unmerry eyes, blinked, then groaned and shut her eyes again.” —Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Philip K. Dick
 Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s
Philip K. Dick
The novels are:
- The Man in the High Castle
- The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
- Ubik
Philip K. Dick can overwhelm. He was a man with a brain on fire, his stories so densely packed with ideas you need to consciously pause and come up for air between chapters.
Reading PKD is like taking your mind to the gym for a demanding workout. What makes his strange novels readable is the pedestrian, everyday nature of his characters, who stolidly confront unworldly events by carrying on with their jobs and lives. It’s not easy to explain, but try to imagine Blade Runner (the movie based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) without the grounded, workaday character of Rick Deckard … you wouldn’t buy it. PKD didn’t just write science fiction, he wrote a lot of realistic fiction as well, and that grounds even his most fantastic ideas.
This collection of four novels is published by The Library of America and edited by Jonathan Lethem. There are two companion collections: Philip K. Dick: Five Novels of the 1960s and 70s, and Philip K. Dick: Valis and Later Novels.
The Man in the High Castle
The story is intensely compelling, but rough and in my opinion unfinished. Had it been given to someone like Stanley Kubrick, it could have been turned into a legendary and seminal movie, like 2001: a Space Odyssey. It is a story of parallel worlds; in this one it is the early 1960s, 15 or so years after the Germans and Japanese won WWII. The east coast of the former USA is occupied by the Nazis, the west coast by the Japanese. The remnant of the USA lies between. The Germans are still wrestling with succession of power issues, and fallout from their political intrigues affects much of what happens in Japanese-ruled San Francisco. A woman living in the independent Rocky Mountain States reads a book about a parallel world where America had defeated the Axis in WWII, a book presenting a much different America … and she begins to see glimpses of such a world. She’s not the only one: a high-ranking Japanese officer in San Francisco briefly wanders into that world, and what a coincidence … he read the same book! This story is packed with ideas and cultural insights into eastern ways of thinking, and I hoped it would go on longer. I now think David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas, may be a PKD fan.
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
My least favorite of the four novels, this one is a victim of its times in that it’s mostly about hallucinatory drugs. As to the science fiction, there’s very little science to back up the ease with which humans flit back & forth between Earth, Venus, Mars, and a few habitable moons; nothing to make Palmer Eldritch’s trip to Proxima Centauri and back within the span of only a few years even remotely possible, and trust me, I would have suspended disbelief over the flimsiest bit of hocus-pocus, say, a warp drive. No, the focus is entirely on the drugs Can-D and Chew-Z, and there were times I was tempted to skip ahead. It’s a story for stoners, like Frank Herbert’s Dune.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
I thought I had read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in my early 20s, but I didn’t recognize the novel this time around. That may be the result of having watched Blade Runner too many times, which differs from PKD’s story in several significant ways. Here are three: there’s a touch of provincialism in PKD’s novel, a sincerity and straight-forwardness totally absent from the movie; PKD’s city (San Francisco, not Los Angeles) is sparsely populated, most of the former inhabitants gone to colony planets; Deckard (unlike his character in the movie) is a low-level independent contractor to the police department, a man with pedestrian dreams and aspirations, and a wife to boot.
And there’s more: the movie ignores PKD’s Penfield mood organs, electric animals, and Mercerism. The genius android hobbiest who takes in Pris halfway through Blade Runner has his equivalent in PKD’s chickenhead Isidore, and Deckard is deadly when it comes to spotting and retiring androids, but otherwise PKD’s story is vastly different. The affair between Deckard and the android Rachel Rosen is a more depressing story altogether, not at all like the movie, which I now perceive to have been given a Hollywood happy ending. Thus endeth my love affair with Blade Runner; thus beginneth my newfound purist’s love for the PKD original.
Seriously, if you haven’t read this most seminal tale, do so now. Do it before you read another word of science fiction … yes, it’s that important.
Ubik
The most dreamlike and hallucinatory of the four novels. I rejected The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch because it was specifically about drugs and stoners; I embraced Ubik because though PKD was clearly stoned when he wrote it, here he doesn’t write about drugs. Capiche? I willingly admit I didn’t fully understand Ubik, but like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Ubik enthralled me, even with its many flaws. PKD envisions a 1990s future where man has set up colonies on the moon and nearby planets, and is beginning to work on travel to other solar systems. People with psionic abilities are used by unscrupulous companies to spy on, and interfere with, the work of other companies; the characters in Ubik work for a “prudence organization” that hires itself out to combat industrial espionage. And then it gets weird, seriously 1960s San Francisco brain fever LSD weird, and you either love it or hate it. I love it, and lingered over the incredible details of PKD’s vision, which he surely must have goaded along with drugs: the homeopape machines, the conapt doors that won’t let you out until you put a nickel in the slot, the effects of time displacement, the half-dead people dreaming in their moratoriums, the slowly-unpeeling layers of the mystery Glen Runciter’s gifted employees are confronted with, the suddenly stale cigarettes and strangely altered coins, the Des Moines of the 1930s.
 Wool Omnibus (Wool #1-5)
Hugh Howey
Everyone has been raving about Hugh Howey’s self-published Wool stories, so I downloaded a copy to my Nook and jumped in. What fun! Good old post-apocalyptic sci fi with plenty of follow-through, something I can’t get enough of. In so many science fiction stories, the climax occurs too soon and the story just stops. I always want to know what happens next, and usually spend a day or two after finishing a sci fi novel trying to imagine what happened after the book ended: so mankind finally leaves the Solar System … okay, then what?
In the Wool stories, a denizen of an underground silo figures out a way to get her hands on a real protective suit before she’s ejected into the toxic hell that is the outside world, a suit that will allow her to crest the hill that blocks the outside view of the horizon, and discovers that there are OTHER SILOS! And just as I’m about to ask “Okay, then what?” Hugh Howey anticipates my questions and keeps going: well, here’s what, and when that happens here’s what, and when that happens, here’s what.
Howey has written sequels to the stories in Wool, sequels that will answer some of the questions I have now, that will scratch my imaginative itch. You can bet I’ve already downloaded those sequels and will be reading them soon.
It doesn’t hurt that Howey’s a good writer who can make characters interesting and dimensional, that he can keep readers flipping pages to find out what happens next. The Wool Omnibus downloaded as 1,200+ pages. Granted, there was extra spacing between lines and twice that between paragraphs, so probably with normal formatting it would have been an 800-pager. Still, 800 pages? That’s a long novel. And yet I read it in about three days, unable to put it down for anything but the most important tasks. I love this stuff!
 Shift Omnibus (Wool #6-8)
Hugh Howey
The continuation of the story begun in Howey’s Wool Omnibus, this one covers the history behind the construction and manning of the silos. Shift focuses on three silos, one of which houses the founders, the men and women who built them in the first place, who now are alternately placed in suspended animation and then revived to work six-month “shifts” managing the silo complex. We also get experience life inside two declining and failing silos, the ones featured in the Wool Omnibus, this time from different points of view.
As I remarked in my review of Wool, Howey’s habit of anticipating questions and then exploring them is very satisfying, and I was enrapt throughout these eleven hundred-some pages. I didn’t rate this second omnibus quite as highly as the first, perhaps because the narrative here was a bit more broken: the story jumped between silos and characters so often I had to do a bit of thinking to reorient myself. Still, it was a very satisfying read, and I anxiously await the third omnibus, which I hope will pull all these separate stories together and answer some even larger questions introduced here.
- See all my reviews
 My cold is evolving, changing every day, slowly (I tell myself) getting better. I felt energetic enough to wash the motorcycle this morning, but still not fit to be out in public. I won’t be at my book club meeting this afternoon, nor will I be able to take Donna’s girlfriend out on a hot date tonight. Sitting around the house is hard enough, but nights are the worst. I can stay sort of busy during the day, but when it’s time to go to bed there’s nothing to distract me from the constant need to cough and blow my nose.
Who knows where these things come from? Our daughter-in-law Beth was picking up the same cold when I was in Las Vegas. Maybe I caught mine on the road somewhere and then gave it to her. Maybe we got our colds from different sources.
Donna left yesterday for San Jose. We’re taking separate vacations this spring; I was in San Jose myself a few days ago. Why couldn’t we go together? Because I wanted to go by motorcycle and Donna didn’t. Even if Donna had wanted to ride with me, there’s no way we could have packed enough for two. We’ve done this before: I’ll go on a long ride, and then Donna will take a trip of her own a week or two later. She’s going to spend a week with our goddaughter Natasha, and while she’s there visit some fabric stores and, she says, the Tesla dealer (as if … I don’t know where she gets the idea we can even remotely afford one of those).
We do need another car, though. Polly’s riding around town on her Ducati with no helmet, despite innumerable promises, and I’m probably going to have to take the bike back (it’s still in my name). If I do that, she’ll need a car, and the only car she can afford is Donna’s old Lincoln, and then only if we outright give it to her. Or, actually, she could take her bike, which has been hanging in my garage for years now, and pedal her promise-breaking ass to and from work. Hmm … that is an option, come to think of it!
The poor dogs moped all the time I was gone, and now they’re moping for their mom. I’ll bring them both to the airport next Saturday night to pick up Donna … they know an airport trip means a loved one is coming home, and they start wiggling and writhing halfway there. Sometimes I wish we had tails, if only so we too could wiggle and writhe during moments of anticipatory bliss. Right now the girls are sitting by my office chair, waiting for me to share my cheddar goldfish crackers.
 Schatzi & Maxie, missing Donna but temporarily distracted by what I’m eating at the desk Amid the trumped-up “scandals” congressional Republicans and the media flogged all week, the one bright point, at least to me, was when Representative Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) said this to Attorney General Eric Holder: “I cannot have a witness challenge my character! The attorney general will not cast aspersions on my asparagus!” I won’t embed the video because I don’t want that man’s face on my blog, but here’s the link. Obviously, Gohmert doesn’t know that most of our asparagus is grown in Mexico, otherwise he wouldn’t be so defensive of it … after all, some of it could be terror asparagus.
But I digress. Donna just called; she sounds like she’s having fun. It’ll be time to feed the critters soon, then myself, then search Netflix for something to stream tonight. I hope tomorrow morning’s pile of used tissues is smaller than last night’s.
Twenty-five hundred miles, eleven days, three states … and only one guy tried to kill me. Not bad.
Since I already posted about the purely motorcycle-related aspects of my trip, this will be more of a photoblog of places and people. Click on any of the thumbnails below to see the full-sized photos on Flickr.
I left Tucson for Las Vegas on Thursday, May 2, along the way stopping to photograph a wildlife overpass on US Highway 93 between Kingman and Hoover Dam. I used to wonder why they built these overpasses in the middle of nowhere, and then one day it dawned on me they’re for the critters. In Vegas I spent the night with my son, daughter-in-law, and grandson. Friday it was on to San Jose … a very long ride indeed, one that took me past the northern edge of Edwards AFB … to spend the night with my goddaughter Natasha, her husband Natale, and their daughter Georgianna.
 Wildlife overpass on US 93 |
 Gregory, Quentin, Buc the dog, me |
 North Gate, Edwards AFB |
 Natasha, Georgianna, me |
I spent Saturday and Sunday with Burt and Donna Marie, hashing friends from way back, at their home in Novato, riding through San Francisco and over a fog-shrouded Golden Gate Bridge to get there.
 In the city, Golden Gate in the distance |
 Riding over the bridge |
 View of the bridge from Marin |
 Burt & Donna Marie at our favorite store |
Monday was a part of California new to me, riding US Highway 101 north past Santa Rosa and then cutting through mountains to the little town of Lucerne on the east shore of Clear Lake, where I stayed overnight with college friends, Greg and Corinne. Greg, of all things, is a preacher now, but the three of us slipped right back into old times and had a great time catching up. Interestingly, the area where they live is a hotbed of marijuana growers, many (but not all) of whom sell their product legally to California medical marijuana dispensaries.
 Me & Greg at Clear Lake |
 Greg & Corinne at their home |
I rode on to Sacramento and Placerville the next day, Tuesday, checking into a somewhat run-down Motel 6 right off the highway at a town called Cameron Lake (which did not exist when I last lived in Sacramento, but that was over 40 years ago). I was a little nervous about the kids in the room next door, who looked like Boston bombing fugitives. Another college friend, Robin, met me there, and we talked for hours at a little pizza place nearby. Somehow I managed to not take a single photo that day.
Wednesday I rode US Highway 50 through the Sierra Nevadas to South Lake Tahoe, where I checked into another Motel 6 (this one ten times nicer than the one in Cameron Park, and no fugitives). I puttered around South Shore and Stateline, taking photos and visiting places Donna and I remember from our courtship long ago, including Donna’s Dad’s old club, the Glass Crutch, long out of business but still standing. Thursday I rode around the lake on my way to Reno, something I’ve always wanted to do. Lake Tahoe is smaller than I remember it being; a planned four-hour ride took only two. But everything I saw during those two hours was drop-dead scenic.
 Zephyr Cove, South Lake Tahoe |
 Stateline, South Lake Tahoe |
 The old Glass Crutch, Donna’s Dad’s club |
 Emerald Bay & Vikingsholm, Lake Tahoe |
 Riding around Lake Tahoe |
 Riding down Mount Rose to Reno |
In Reno I stayed with Jim & Lenore. Jim was one of my squadron commanders at Soesterberg AB back in the early 1980s, and we’ve stayed in touch since. Lenore was kind enough to let me wash my dirty clothes, something I knew I’d have to do at some point during the trip if I was to finish it with clean underwear. Since I recently had a knee replaced, and Jim even more recently a hip, we took a walk through the neighborhood to show how tough we were.
Friday it was back to Las Vegas, but I took a longer route, riding down the California side on US Highway 395, then cutting back into Nevada just north of Beatty. And that’s where someone tried to kill me. Riding southbound out of Beatty after stopping for gas, suddenly a car coming from the other direction swerved into my lane to pass a slow RV. It was as if he or she didn’t see me at all … I actually had to move to the shoulder to get out of the way, and even at that the car passed within a couple of feet of my left side. At that point I flipped my brights on and left them on for the rest of the trip. I flipped something else too, for all the good it did.
After getting into Vegas Friday night I decided to stay over Saturday. I wanted more time with the kids, and to unwind from the long Reno-to-Las Vegas leg of my trip. My son Greg borrowed a motorcycle and asked where I wanted to ride Saturday. Anywhere, I said, as long as it’s not far! We rode to Red Rock Canyon, Bonnie Springs, Blue Diamond, and Mountain Springs, about 100 miles in all (some photos from that ride are in my earlier post). Along the way we dropped in on an old hashing friend, Rudy. Back home, Gregory took a port butt off the smoker and we had a great BBQ dinner.
 Lenore & Jim at their Reno home |
 Walking around their neighborhood |
 Rudy & me at his Las Vegas house |
 Greg pulling pork for dinner |
When I stopped in Cameron Park I felt the initial twinges of something coming on, but it held off until my ride from Reno to Las Vegas, when it got worse: a head cold, with lots of stuff draining down into my throat. I kept it at bay Saturday, borrowing some antihistamine pills from my daughter-in-law Beth, but it settled in for a stay during my ride home from Las Vegas to Tucson on Sunday, and got worse from there. Today is the first day I’ve felt as if I may live after all, which is why it’s taken me a few days to get around to writing a post-trip report. It’s a good thing this blog isn’t a podcast, because I still have no voice.
People ask me why I go on long solo motorcycle trips. They may not understand when I try to explain it, but my fellow motorcyclists do. The planning considerations, which are more exacting than for car trips: packing right, ensuring you have the tools you might need, choosing the best roads and scenic byways. Being one with your machine. The smells (Bakersfield is fertilizer; Pacheco Pass over to San Jose is fresh cut corn; Lake Tahoe is pine). The surprisingly noticeable differences in temperature as your elevation changes, even by only a few feet. The thrill of curvy mountain roads. Even the challenges of riding in the rain (which I experienced twice during this trip). You don’t feel as if you’ve merely moved from Point A to Point B … you feel as if you’ve accomplished something.
And now, having accomplished something, I’ll settle in for the hot summer months. Next big trip will be in late August, when my friend Ed and I will ride to the Four Corners Rally in Durango, Colorado.
Just back from an 11-day solo motorcycle trip through Arizona, Nevada, and northern California. I’ll post separately about the places I went and people I visited; right now I’m still high on riding and wanted to discuss the purely motorcycle-related aspects of my trip. Click on any of the thumbnails below to see the full-sized photos on Flickr. I’ll start with packing:
 Packed Goldwing |
 Carabiners & bungee cords |
I stuffed six days’ worth of clothing and a pair of sandals into my suitcase, knowing that somewhere along the way I’d have to do laundry. In the saddlebags and trunk I carried two jackets (one for cold weather, one for warm), two helmets (a comfortable half-helmet for dry conditions and a less comfortable full-face for rain), a rain suit, heavy and light gloves, and bandanas. I packed long johns and a sweater for the days it might be necessary to layer up. I left room for a laundry bag, which gradually filled up during the trip. This in addition to the toolbag I always carry, containing almost everything I might need including tubeless tire plugs and compressed air canisters. Maps, of course, and glasses; also a Nook, iPad, cell phone, camera, tripod, and chargers. The first photo shows the fully-packed and loaded bike at a motel in South Lake Tahoe; the second shows the carabiners and bungee cords I use to secure the suitcase to the rear seat.
Between Novato and Clear Lake, and then again between Clear Lake and Placerville, I had to wear the rain gear and full-face helmet. It never got cold, but it was plenty wet … and the rain gear worked as advertised. From Placerville to Lake Tahoe and from Lake Tahoe to Reno, I wore my sweater, warm jacket, and gloves. Just saying, it’s a good thing I brought all that stuff along.
The Goldwing ran great. I endured a couple of 500-600 mile days and more than one stretch of sustained 80 mph speeds; nary a burp or stutter. I used the old-man footpegs my friend gave me, the ones where your feet drop to about three inches off the pavement when you put your weight on them, gradually learning to hoist my feet back onto the regular footpegs in curves. I say gradually based on the number of times I scraped my heels going around curves while adjusting to the new pegs. Actually, I’m surprised my boots held up as well as they did … the heels aren’t ground down at all, though they should be.
Almost every time I stopped for gas I had to soak paper towels in water to wash bug splatters off my windscreen and helmet visor. I packed a spray bottle of Windex and a couple of rags for that purpose, but before I even got out of Arizona on day one the bottle tipped over in the saddlebag and drained, soaking my backup gloves and paper maps. Happy to say that paper towels, well soaked, do not scratch Lexan. Also happy to say that after a night draped over the shower curtain rod in a motel room the gloves and maps dried out. In time, I hope, the odor of Windex will fade.
I rode by myself, and apart from exchanging waves with riders heading the opposite direction, didn’t have much interaction with other motorcyclists until nearly the end of my trip, when I added an extra day in Las Vegas to be with my son, daughter-in-law, and grandson. Gregory borrowed a big BMW touring bike and the two of us hooked up with a friend and fellow rider, Jim, who rides an old-school bobber. We rode through Red Rock Canyon, proudly sporting our Knuckledraggers colors, then on to the Mountain Springs Saloon, a local hangout.
 Me, Gregory, Jim |
 Jim flying his colors |
 Jim & Gregory |
 Gregory & me at the saloon |
Two trips back I mounted a Butler Cup to my handlebar. It holds 34 ounces of iced water, and it’s proven itself a lifesaver. On the last leg of my trip, riding from Las Vegas to Tucson in 95°F weather, I had to stop and refill it twice.
Let me warn you, if ever you need to ride from Las Vegas all the way to San Jose in one day, stop in Barstow for gas before you get to the Bakersfield turnoff. I assumed there’d be truck stops near the intersection, but there were none, and I drifted into a desert gas station 30 minutes later on fumes. Perhaps because of that experience, when a guy panhandled me for gas later that day, at another station near the foot of Pacheco Pass, I put a couple of gallons in his tank. That particular leg was my longest day, 10 hours of riding and close to 600 miles. The next longest ride was from Reno to Las Vegas, about 500 miles. I elected to ride back on the California side, taking US 395 from Reno to Big Pine, then cutting through mountain passes to US 95 in Nevada somewhere above Beatty. The run down US 395 was exquisite and cool, almost all of it at elevations between 7,000 and 8,000 feet, surrounded by snow-capped mountains. After crossing into Nevada, I couldn’t help noticing the contrast:
 Southbound, US 395 in California |
 Southbound, US 95 in Nevada |
On Friday, between Reno and Las Vegas, I began to experience cold symptoms. They didn’t start to get really bad until Sunday, my last day on the road, when I left Las Vegas for Tucson. Traffic was light and I was able to ride fast all the way home, where I promptly crawled into bed with a dachshund and a box of Kleenex by my side.
Bloggage about the trip soon. As soon as I feel better, that is.
You Can’t Read That! is a periodic post featuring banned book reviews and news roundups.
YCRT! News Roundup
Edward de Grazia, RIP. I grew up in the 1950s and 60s, when he successfully fought the banning of books like Tropic of Cancer and The Naked Lunch, and quite naturally read both as soon as they became available to American readers.
I always knew there was more to Anne Frank’s diary than the edited version I read as a teenager. Now the complete and unedited version of The Diary of a Young Girl is out, and has upset at least one parent in Michigan, who doesn’t just want to keep her own kid from reading it, but all kids. Apparently Anne had a hoo-ha … and wrote about it. In a rare bit of good news, the school district has decided not to ban Anne Frank’s unedited diary.
The Middle School Survival Guide offers no-nonsense instruction to the challenges faced by preteens and teens in social and family situations and discusses sexual relations, including pregnancy and serious sexually transmitted diseases. That’s too much instruction for one Philadelphia area parent, who succeeded in having the book pulled from the school library.
Imagine living in a country where a headline like this is considered unremarkable: Harsh Fines Cancelled, Banned Books List Publication Soon?
Despite it’s own board’s 4-2 recommendation that the book remain in the curriculum, a Chicago area school district, based on the objections of two parents, has banned The Perks of Being a Wallflower.
“Where they burn books, they will untimately burn people.” But that only happened in Nazi Germany, you say? You’re about to read about a book that has been burned not once, but several times … in the USA.
YCRT! Banned Book Review
 Bless Me, Ultima
Rudolfo Anaya
I read Bless Me, Ultima because it is frequently challenged, often banned, sometimes even burned. I read it because it has been banished from Tucson classrooms and school libraries. I read it because I live in a majority Mexican-American community in the southern slice of Arizona that until relatively recently was part of the state of Sonora, Mexico. I read it because many readers have praised it.
Anaya wrote his novel in 1972. Copies were confiscated and burned at a New Mexico school less than a year later. Burning, it turned out, was not to be a one-time aberration: Bless Me, Ultima has been burned again and again: the most recent burning was in Norwood, Colorado, in 2005.
My interest in what is sometimes called Chicano pride literature began in January 2012, when Tucson Unified School District administrators cancelled Mexican-American Studies classes in mid-session, pulling novels and textbooks from students’ and teachers’ hands and packing them in boxes labeled “banned books,” a story that resulted in international outrage and made Arizona a laughingstock. Bless Me, Ultima was one of TUSD’s targeted books.
Why do non-hispanics hate this novel? The most-often cited reason is that it contains profanity, violence, and sexuality. I can attest to two instances of the English word fuck. Then there’s the Spanish word chingada, which roughly translates to the same thing. Chingada appears so many times that if you were to eliminate all the other words in the novel, you’d still have 20 pages of chingada. Also, the kids in the story frequently address one another as cabrón (asshole). Yes, there is violence … murders among the adult characters, frequent fights among the schoolboys … but I must say that if there’s any sex I missed it.
Other challenges spell out what I consider to be more likely objections: the story is irreverent toward Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular, full of pagan mysticism, and frankly pro-magic (in that Ultima is a practicing medicine woman who uses her arts to stymie and even kill witches). This aspect of the novel, of course, should be neither here nor there in a society that respects the separation of church and state (insert ironic emoticon here).
Arizona State Schools Superintendent Tom Horne dared utter what I believe to be the real reasons behind white antipathy toward Bless Me, Ultima. In interviews leading up to the infamous TUSD book bannings he characterized Mexican-American studies and the books used in those classes as “civilizational war” and stated that in his view the histories of Mexican-Americans and Native Americans are not based on “Greco-Roman” knowledge and thus not part of Western civilization. Oh, yes, he really did say that.
So there you have the reasons Anaya’s novel generates so much hate. Now I come to the difficult part, explaining why I didn’t fall in love with the novel. I’ll refer back to the 20 pages of chingada and a host of other Spanish and Indian words sprinkled throughout the narrative: yes, Mexican-Americans living near the US-Mexico border use Spanish and Indian words in everyday speech, but after a while all this multiculturalism becomes a burden.
Antonio keeps telling us Ultima is not a witch, but she has an owl as a familiar and she casts counter-spells against three known brujas (witches), killing two of them before she herself is killed … not directly, but by the father of the witches, who kills the owl and thus Ultima. So she’s a witch. C’mon.
Apart from Antonio and Ultima, the other characters are paper cutouts, acting and speaking in predictable ways. It was interesting to see Antonio begin to question the teachings of the church and to embrace the paganism of Ultima and the mysterious golden carp, but that was all the excitement the novel offered, and Antonio’s doubts (like 20 pages’ worth of chingada) grow tiresome after much repetition.
It’s an okay story. I question how relevant it is to today’s readers, but as a cornerstone of Mexican-American literature it is undoubtedly important. I’m glad I read it, but having read it, I remain more interested in the reasons white people hate it than I am in the novel itself.
 I leave on another mini-Gypsy tour tomorrow morning, this one a ten-day solo motorcycle ride to Nevada and California. I’m staying with relatives and friends, mostly, hoping to catch up with old times and get in some good riding along the way. Here’s my itinerary:
Thursday, May 2: Tucson to Las Vegas, where I’ll overnight at my son’s house.
Friday, May 3: Las Vegas to San Jose via Bakersfield. This’ll be the longest single leg, almost 600 miles. Will stay with our goddaughter Natasha and her husband Natale.
Saturday, May 4: San Jose to Novato, a short ride. I’ll spend two nights with hashing friends there, perhaps working in a short ride up and down the Coast Highway on Sunday.
Monday, May 6: Novato to Lucerne (north central California) to see a couple Donna and I have known since college at Sac State. He’s a preacher now, so we’ll probably argue all night.
Tuesday, May 7: Lucerne to Auburn. I was going to spend two nights with friends in Folsom, but they’re dealing with serious medical issues and I won’t be able to see them after all. Instead, I’ll spend Tuesday night at a motel in Auburn and spend a couple of hours with another college friend who lives in the area. Possible side trip through gold country.
Wednesday, May 8: Auburn to South Lake Tahoe via Placerville. This is part of my backup plan since I can’t stay with my friends in Folsom. I’ll enjoy riding up Highway 50 through the high Sierra Nevadas, then overnight at a Lake Tahoe motel.
Thursday, May 9: South Lake Tahoe to Reno. The distance is short, but the ride will be long: I’m going to ride around the lake (something I’ve always wanted to do), head down Kingsbury Pass into Nevada, then north to Carson City and on to Reno. I’ll be staying with old friends, a former F-15 squadron commander and his wife. He, by the way, is recovering from knee surgery, so I’m sure we’ll have lots to talk about.
Friday, May 10: Reno to Las Vegas on Highway 50, the “Loneliest Road.” Another long day, about 500 miles. Will recuperate at my son’s again, then leave early in the morning.
Saturday, May 11: Las Vegas to Tucson.
All in all, somewhere between 2,000 and 2.500 miles, depending on how many side trips I manage to work in. Some of the point-to-point rides in California are short ones, allowing for extra exploration. The tour will be my first long one since having my left knee replaced. I’ve been practicing, and don’t think the knee will be a big problem, but if it is … if, that is, I’m miserable on my first day’s ride to Las Vegas … I’ll call everyone and bail. I can spend a day recovering at my son’s in Las Vegas and then just ride back home with my tail between my legs. Don’t think that’ll happen, but it’s good to have an escape clause.
Posting at Paul’s Thing will be light to nonexistent for the next ten days. I’ll post OTR (on the road) entries to Facebook, and will catch up with you all here when I get back.
Y’all ride safe now. I promise to do the same.
 From a post I wrote in 2007: “My father did an interesting thing a few years back. He had assumed, like most Missourians, that the mule was the state animal. Not so, it turned out — Rebuplicans in the state government had resisted repeated attempts to enshrine the mule as state animal, fearing that people would confuse the mule with the jackass, symbol of the Democratic Party. My dad took it on as a project, mobilizing his American Legion Post, crisscrossing the state to speak at public meetings and press the flesh with politicians, and in 1995, then-Governor Mel Carnahan signed the bill naming the Missouri Mule state animal. My dad did that. How about that?”
Today I learned that Lois, Dad’s second wife, shared his research and records with a local Cape Girardeau author who just published a book about the long campaign to elevate the Missouri mule to official state animal status, and thus a book about my father. The book is also about Lois’ family, prominent Cape Girardeau players from way back (the Missouri state flag was designed in Lois’ childhood home).
I learned of the book on Facebook, where one of my Cape Girardeau area sisters linked to it and expressed surprise that she had known nothing of it before reading about it in the newspaper. Another sister chimed in with mega-dittos (and thus a tip of the hat to another prominent Cape Girardeau native, Rush Limbaugh). Donna and I are close to Lois, and we didn’t know about it either. I sense a disturbance in the family force. More to come, I’m sure.
Donna and I participated in a charity road rally yesterday. We were told to pick Tucson landmarks associated with certain themes, photograph ourselves in front of them, and email the photos in as we took them. The choice of landmarks was up to us, which I liked. One of the themes was “religion” (which was appropriate since the charity was organized by Catholic Community Services), so we picked the Tucson Bicycle Church, a structure made out of bicycle parts and put up to memorialize riders killed by local motorists. Here are some of our submissions:
 Theme: Architecture |
 Theme: Arizona History |
 Theme: Religion |
 Theme: Arizona Wildlife |
After the rally participants met at the local Sheraton for lunch and speeches. The photo winners were announced (alas, we didn’t make the cut, but they did show one of our photos on the big screen) and a silent auction was held to raise money (we bid $75 for a $200 gift certificate for new eyeglasses, and won). As we were leaving I noticed a guy eyeballing my T-shirt, on which Donna had embroidered my name and a lovely F-15 Eagle. Sure enough, he came over to ask me about it, but his question threw me for a loop: “Are you a driver or a WSO?”
I had to think about it for a second. I mean, I know what I am — a pilot, a “driver” — but I couldn’t figure out why he was asking me that. The F-15 Eagle embroidered on my shirt is clearly a single-seater. There ain’t but one person in it, and that’s the pilot. After a second I gathered my wits and answered “I’m a driver,” upon which he stuck out his hand and said “I drove Vipers.” We shook hands and he walked away.
Sometimes people confuse the F-15 Eagle fighter with the F-15E Strike Eagle fighter/bomber, but no USAF pilot I know, and certainly no F-16 pilot, would misidentify the single-seater as the two-seater. They are different planes with different missions:
So was this guy a wannabe, an imposter? Very likely so. If he’d really flown Vipers (F-16s) he’d never have mistaken an Eagle for a Mudhen. I haven’t run into a wannabe in years. I remember a guy telling me how, as an enlisted Marine, he’d snuck onto an empty C-130, started it up, and flown it around the airfield while tower controllers pleaded with him to land. As fucking if. It’s astounding, the fantastical bullshit wannabes come up with … and equally astounding they’re brazen enough to expect real pilots to believe them. At least yesterday’s wannabe was more subtle than most.
I shared this story (and the side-by-side photos) on Facebook and am afraid I came across as someone bragging about having flown fighters, an egotistical and off-putting thing to do. I know this because one of my friends left this comment:
Touché. I deserved that.
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Paul’s Thing
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A weblog by Paul Woodford, a retired USAF F-15 pilot living in Tucson, Arizona |
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