Before the Coffee Gets Cold

Posted on January 18, 2024 by smellincoffee

There is a little underground cafe in Tokyo where, if you sit at a certain chair under the right conditions, you can find yourself in that chair in that cafe at some other time, where you can meet someone who was in that cafe at that time. You cannot change the past, but you can revisit it: you can see someone who is now gone, ask questions that lingered on the tip of your tongue for too long but never found life in breath. What happens in that seat cannot change the past, but it can change you — but you have to make the most of the time, completing your business before the time-changing coffee before you grows cold.

This is a fascinating little volume of stories, all tied to the same place: a chair that inexplicably serves as a limited time-travel device when paired with a certain blend of coffee. There are many rules to this travel: you can’t move from the seat when you arrive in the past, you have to be there to meet someone who was there in that moment, etc. In addition to the rules, there is a challenge: there is a ghost in the chair, a woman in white intently reading a book who responds to no one but the shop owner, who offers her periodic refills. She doesn’t look like a ghost — she looks human and living, and she’s physical to the point of being touchable – but she’s otherwordly, and only when she takes a brief bathroom break can anyone else saddle up and sally forth into time. Given the limitations — and the risk of being trapped like the woman in white – only someone who had serious emotional baggage to unpack would dare try, and those are the stories we get here. The stories are often sad, but sweet, and there are interconnections. One character, for instance, is a steady presence in the cafe, appearing in every story: we learn in a later piece that he continues coming in hopes of going back to see his wife so he can give her a letter, but how we learn this is that his wife comes in to go back in time herself: he has Alzheimers, and she wants to return to when he didn’t so she can find out what letter he’s wanting to give her.  I most appreciated the fact that this is not a series of set pieces in which the cafe owner meets a series of randos who want to time-travel: most of the characters appear in several stories because they’re regulars of the cafe, and their lives are bound up together. The interconnectedness makes the cafe and the people’s dramas feel real, despite the fantasy elements like the woman in white.

This was a fascinating little collection of stories, and I see that it’s part of a series which I may continue exploring.

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What You Are Looking for is in the Library

Posted on January 17, 2024 by smellincoffee

I realize it’s a bit early in the year for this, but What You are Looking For is in the Library will most likely be my favorite novel of the year. Of course, it’s not quite a novel, more of a series of interconnected short stories, in which characters who range from young people to the recently retired find their way into a library in search of something — skills for a possible new career, some place to go to and be around adults that also can keep a toddler entertained, an excuse to get out of the house. What they find is a reference librarian who, putting down her felting project, gives them exactly what they needed — even if they didn’t realize it at the time. In addition to giving them books related to their direct query, she will often throw something else in — an unexpected book recommendation that will change their lives. A young women frustrated by progress in her career receives a children’s book that inspires her to take up a new craft and regain her passion: a woman who came for children’s books is also given one on astrology that, while she doesn’t believe in, gives her perspective to reframe her own vocational frustrations. The beauty of it, though, is that this change is not something being imposed on people from a mystical source: the librarian merely provides the catalyst for a change that was waiting to happen, a change that was instigated by the people themselves who are often hovering at a transition point in their lives. The subjects range in age from young to old, at varying points of their lives, and as the book develops the reader will begin to see connections between the stories via shared characters, illustrating how we can impact those around us without knowing directly. This is a book about positive transformation through books and relationships, and it’s one I can see myself returning to or gifting.

Highlights:

“Madam Mizue put down her spoon. ‘Ah, Ms Sakitani, so you’re on the merry-go-round, too,’ she said gently.
‘The merry-go-round?’
With a chuckle she smiled at me. ‘It’s a very common condition,’ she said with apparent relish. ‘Singles are envious of those who are married, and married couples envy those with children, but people with children are envious of singles. It’s an endless merry-go-round. But isn’t that funny? That each person should be chasing the tail of the person in front of them, when no one is coming first or last. In other words, when it comes to happiness nothing is better or worse – there is no definitive state.’

Madam Mizue took a sip of water. ‘Life is one revelation after another. Things don’t always go to plan, no matter what your circumstances. But the flip side is all the unexpected, wonderful things that you could never have imagined happening. Ultimately it’s all for the best that many things don’t turn out the way we hoped. Try not to think of upset plans or schedules as personal failure or bad luck. If you can do that, then you can change, in your own self and in your life overall.’

Then she looked off into the distance and smiled.

While rolling the felted globe in my fingers, I was struck by an idea: Ptolemaic theory and Copernican theory; geocentrism and heliocentrism. Aeons ago, people used to believe that the Earth was stationary and the heavens moved around it. When in fact it was the Earth that rotated. Something clicked. That’s it. I was forced to move from Mila to the information resources department. And I have to do housework and childcare. If I put myself at the centre of everything, does that mean I always see myself as a victim? And why I always end up wondering why can’t people do things that work for me.
I stared at the blue sphere on my palm. The Earth moves. Morning and night don’t stay – they go.

What do I want to do now? Where do I want to go?

~~~
Still looking at the rice ball in her hand, Yoriko continues, ‘I remember
sitting in the passenger seat, looking at you and feeling devastated because
I’d been fired, when in fact I hadn’t lost anything. I myself was no different
from before. I’d simply left the company I worked for. That’s all. I still had
the option to derive joy from my work and happiness from spending time
with my loved ones. It all just depended on me, and what I did from then
on. That’s when I realized that I wanted to work freelance in future.

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Teaser Tuesday Ice Storm Delay Edition

Posted on January 16, 2024 by smellincoffee

“It’s funny. No matter where you go, or how many books you read, you
still know nothing, you haven’t seen anything. And that’s life. We live our
lives trying to find our way. It’s like that Santōka Taneda poem, the one that
goes, ‘On and on, in and in, and still the blue-green mountains.’ ”

Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, Satoshi Yagisawa. Trans. Eric Ozawa

Then I raise my eyes to a signboard made from styrofoam that is pinned
above the box, and experience a sudden jolt. Below the words ‘river crabs’ written prominently in red is a line in smaller black lettering that says, ‘For deep-frying! For pets!’  For pets …?

It is natural in the food section to expect that crabs would be sold for consumption, but when suddenly presented with the option of keeping them as a pet instead, I don’t know what to think. Be eaten or be loved. A lump forms in my throat at the thought of the utterly different fates awaiting these crabs huddled together in the plastic box. When I worked for the company, what kind of crab was I, I wonder? While still inside the box I was raised to be a manager, but ultimately wasn’t my fate to be eaten up by the organization?

What You are Looking for is in the Library, Michiko Aoyoma

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Days at the Morisaki Bookshop

Posted on January 15, 2024 by smellincoffee

Takako’s boyfriend has just unceremoniously dumped her after announcing he’s engaged to his other girlfriend, the real one — the one she’d never heard about, but one whose existence now seems obvious in retrospect. Why was it they never had tea at his apartment, always hers? Suddenly at a loss for what to do with her life, she accepts an offer from her uncle to help him with his bookshop. Moving into a little room above the shop and struggling with depression, she begins slowly habituating herself to her odd uncle and his place here in Tokyo’s Jimbocho neighborhood, saturated with used bookstores and coffee shops. Although at first she’s merely there out of resignation — she needs a place to stay, after all — as the time passes she opens herself up to both the people around her in the shops and to the books within, and begins rebuilding herself. Days is all about human connection, experienced through literature and conversations and (frequently, in this novel) conversations about literature. Although the prose and its translation are very plain — unornamented, as Asimov used to describe his own style — there is nevertheless richness and beauty here. The settings, which range from cozy shops to the beauty of the mountains, are always vivid, and the relationship drama was compelling — about love and finding one’s way. I thought it lovely in its simplicity.

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A year after the Selma tornado

Posted on January 12, 2024 by smellincoffee

A year ago I paused to take a quick shot of the turbulent sky, a mix of gloom and glory, of bright morning light and dark storm clouds. I posted it to Instagram with the caption “Skies, current mood: conflicted”. The tornado came from the south, a roaring scythe that destroyed thousands upon thousands of trees and hundreds of homes along Dallas Avenue before dog-legging into Old Town and destroying much of the state’s largest contiguous historic district, followed by much of East Selma for a second course, and then finally cut across the bypass that directs freight traffic around the north of the city to plow up areas around 14 East. It took perhaps half an hour to visit more devastation than this city has seen since the Yankees burned it at war’s end in 1865. It was surreal that so much had happened so quickly. Now, a year has passed, and where do we stand?

Video taken while helping a friend remove things from his destroyed house two days after the storm

I’m no expert in these matters, of course, just a citizen who sees things. Cleanup is largely done: what which is still unfinished will remain so, like the exposed houses standing with their walls and roofs open to the elements whose absent owners couldn’t even be bothered to return and tarp them. Support from surrounding areas was enormous following the tornado: the town was flooded by utility workers who had power on in most places in only a few days, which is incredible considering the mount of damage. There were private utility companies, government agencies, and armies of volunteers helping to wrestle the remains of trees off of houses and cars, tarp homes, and start pushing things in the direction of normal. For weeks and months some streets were lined with barriers of fallen pine limbs because of inter-governmental issues, but they eventually disappeared. The main issue now is abandoned homes with absentee landlords: there are blocks in both Old Town and East Selma where ruins just sit, constituting eyesores and fire hazards. Although a lot of people have left Selma in the last year because of the storm damage, I suspect most of these absentee landlords were either gone already. Although there are groups like the United Methodist Committee on Relief who are partnering with locals (Church Street Methodist, St Paul’s Episcopal, etc) to rebuild new homes, it’s hard to imagine people wanting to move into neighborhoods marked largely by neglected ruins – which attract wildlife and pests, including teenagers with a penchant for arson. The fallen walls of the historic cemetery, Old Live Oak, have still not been repaired, which is a disgrace considering that the picturesque park is one of Selma’s tourism assets: the statue of Elodie Todd Dawson, Abraham Lincoln’s half-sister in law, is one of the most photographed in the state. Today, because history or nature have a wicked sense of humor, we’re again watching for tornadoes — though the threat level has been shifted from “Enhanced” to “Slight”. 

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Distracted by Alabama

Posted on January 10, 2024 by smellincoffee

Jim Brown moved to Alabama in the 1970s to teach history at Samford University, and became fascinated by Alabama, both by its wild biodiversity and its people and their folk traditions, from shape-note singing to basket-weaving and herbalism. Distracted by Alabama is twelve essays with ample illustrations about different aspects of Alabama: it is an unusual book with a wondrous mix of topics. waist deep in both ecology and folklore, and often in the same essays. Although there are some essay-chapters that are strictly about folk traditions and crafts, like the one on the songs of railroad construction men used to coordinate their strikes together when building the lines, there’s more mixture than strict separation, hence the ‘entangled threads’: another entanglement is that the men and women that Brown explores these areas with are themselves not fixated microspecialists, but people whose passions frequently take them between disciplines. A historian Brown is friends with and explores the history of the Cahaba river with, for instance, as they fish its banks, may introduce him to another subject and experts thereof, who will (as Brown forges a friendship with them) introduce him to still other tributaries and streams of interest and tradition. Here covered are rivers, salamanders, fish, birds,  herbalism, railroad songs, and folk crafts like basketweaving and shape-note singing, just for starters. It’s quite the collection with enormous interest to any Alabamian, and has added both to my hunt-down-and-read and hunt-down-and-visit-on-the-weekend lists.

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The Exchange

Posted on January 9, 2024 by smellincoffee

Over twenty years ago I saw a fat paperback with an interesting cover depicting a businessman caught in strings above his head. That book, The Firm, was an absorbing thriller about a young lawyer who begins working at a boutique tax firm, only to find that it’s tightly connected with the Mafia. For me and millions of other readers, The Firm was an introduction to John Grisham as breakout star in the world of legal fiction, building such a reputation in the 1990s and early 2000s that he has been able to coast on it since. The Exchange livens things up a bit by taking readers into the world of international law and arbitration (with a terrorist state, no less), but its use of Mitch McDeere from The Firm is disingenuous and hollow, serving no point but bait for we schmucks, the consumer-readers. Mitch is the character from The Firm, fifteen years later, but his status as a man who took down a Mafia firm has no bearing on the plot whatsoever beyond making him uncomfortable when he goes down to Memphis to have a pro bono case pitched at him. (This entire sequence is completely irrelevant: the case subject involved is Epsteined, and despite a really interesting potential plot being wiggled before the reader, Mitch is soon back in New York to start this novel’s story.) The novelty of this book — the plot of which involves a kidnapped lawyer (an Italian beauty, because pretty women and children make the best hostages) being taken by terrorists does a fair bit of service to make the book more interesting than its actual writing. It’s unusual terrain for Grisham, to say the least, though the teased-at story involving DEA agents who were ambushing and murdering drug carriers would have been more interesting, in my opinion. I was fully prepared to see Mitch fighting for justice and defying threats from goonie boys, but I suppose that’s more Greg Iles’ style. Truth be told, not much happens in The Exchange after the first hundred pages, and most of what happened before was wholly irrelevent to the plot. We do get more information into Mitch and Abby’s background, though, and Abby pops out as a character in her own right when the terrorists choose to approach her to convey ransom demands to Mitch. Why they wouldn’t just contact Mitch is a question for Grisham’s nonexistent editor, but Abby was a strong part of Mitch’s efforts to take down the Mafia in The Firm, and I suppose he thought readers would be offended if she was relegated to the background here. The book was a servicable if disappointing diversion that achieved such benign mediocrity by the international aspects of its story.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books to be Published this year!

Posted on January 9, 2024 by smellincoffee

 The Sher-dar madraseh is yet another sign that Islam in the Iranian world is like a woman’s plain chador worn over party finery, a cloak that covers, disguises, or incorporates much traditionally Iranian, pre-Islamic, Zoroastrian belief. This time, General Alchin Yalangtush Bahadur had let the veil slip and revealed his real religious underwear.

In Search of Zarathustra



This week’s Top Ten Tuesday is releases we are looking forward to in the first half of 2024. Given how many books there are already printed that I want to read, I am not in the habit of looking for new releases — but I did write down a few titles last year as I heard about them.

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, Jonathan Haidt

Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up, Abigal Schrier

Wolves of Winter, Dan Jones. Sequel to his Essex Dogs. 

ST TNG Pliable Truths:     A DS9 prequel novel in which Picard mediates between Bajorans and the withdrawing Cardassians.  And there’s Ro Laren. 

Those were the ones that made my radar. What follows are books from Amazon’s ‘to be released’ list:

The Tusks of Extinction. A SF novel about….resurrecting woolly mammoths. Cool!

Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet, January 2024.

Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, Kyle Chayka

Our Moon: How Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

Making It in America: The Almost Impossible Quest to Manufacture in the U.S.A (and How It Got That Way).

The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America

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In Search of Zarathustra

Posted on January 6, 2024 by smellincoffee
© 2002
300~ pages

Today is the Feast of the Epiphany, in which Christians celebrate the arrival of the Magi to Bethlehem. It is fitting, then, on this day about wise men of the east following stars, to take a look at at a Persian whose own view of the heavens has influenced at least three major world religions. Zarathustra or (Hellenized, Zoroaster) is a name I’ve been bumping into for twenty years, in my efforts to understand the evolution of Judaism and Christianity; when I saw that the author of a history about Babylon had done on the famed ‘prophet’, I was eager to read it. I was expecting a history of what Zoroastrianism is and how it influenced other religions — particularly Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, with their shared vision of a Messiah at the end of history. It is, sort of, but not as organized or formal as all that: Kriwaczek instead mixes history, tourism, religious exploration, and literary analysis to follow not only the way Zoroastrian beliefs and praxis still exist under a Muslim or Eastern Orthodox skin in parts of eastern Europe and Central Asia, but how various religions and philosophies that drew from Zoroastrianism (Gnosticism and Manicheanism, especially) shaped history across Eurasia. As a study into the complexity of religions and cultures, it’s absolutely fascinating, seeing how much intermixing there is between cultures — and remixing, in the case of the Roman adoption of the Iranian Mithras cult.  Kriwaczek suggests that Mithras was a figure in primitive Iranian mythology who, at the development of Zoroastrianism, was elevated to be a figurehead or liaison between the ‘good’ deity of Zoroastrianism, Ahura Mazda, and the people. Unfortunately, Kriwaczek does not assay Zoroastrianism itself: the lay reader will get the idea that it was archly dualistic, with a Good Deity and a Bad Deity fighting, and that light (and especially fire) and spirit were associated with the Good Deity while the Bad Deity was associated with darkness and things of the world. There is, however, no real detail on practices, theology, etc. What I was most curious about was Zoroastrianism’s potential effect on Judaism and Christianity, turning the quality-control inspector of Judaism[*] into the Archfiend, the antagonist of God who hates him and all his works — but that isn’t address beyond exploring various Christian heresies that took their inspiration from Zoroaster’s arch-dualism. Happily, Kriawczek does spend time dwelling on Apocalypticism, which is still part of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam today — though it is central to Christianity, of course, given that Christians believe Jesus to be the Messiah who heralds the End of Days and triumphs in the last epic battle between Good and Evil.

Although this is a bit scattershot, rather like his Babylon, I enjoyed it enormously, in part because the huge mosaic of humanity that encompasses, and the thread uniting such a variety of beliefs and practices.

Highlights:

For the Iranian world has had to suffer foreign conquest on all too many
occasions: Alexander, Genghis, the armies of Islam, Tamerlaine, Babur.
One after another they came, they saw, they conquered and they destroyed.
Everywhere throughout the country, the ruins left by successive invasions
still dot hillsides and valley floors: castles whose entire garrisons were put
to the sword; townships abandoned and never resettled; walled villages of
sun-dried brick, forever bereft of population and slowly crumbling back to
the dust from which they were built. And each time Iranian civilisation and
culture discovered a way of surviving, of rising again from the flames like a
phoenix, of clothing its old ways in new clothes.


“My Iranian companion tried to bend the truth a little: ‘I am from the
Ministry of Antiquities in Tehran,’ he said grandly, waving a grubby scrap of paper in front of the man’s nose.
‘Oh no you’re not,’ said the man with total conviction.
My companion was rather taken aback. ‘Why do you say that?’
‘No government official from Tehran ever got up so early in the
morning.'”

[*] A Jewish website that I read 15+ years ago but cannot find now used the character of “Mr. Slugworth” from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory as an illustration of Satan’s role in Judaism. In that movie, a man who identifies as Willy Wonka’s rival but who is in fact an employee of Wonka tests the children visiting the Chocolate Factory by bribing them, asking them to filch an Everlasting Gobstopper so his company can reproduce it. All but Charlie fail.

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My Selma

Posted on January 5, 2024 by smellincoffee
© 2023
240 pages

Willie Mae Brown was a child during the Civil Rights movement, which reached its high point in 1965, with the Selma to Montgomery march that resulted in the Civil Rights bill of 1965, with great assistance from the local sheriff and state troopers who gave the movement a media spectacle when it attacked the first march down Highway 80, resulting in “Bloody Sunday“. Willie Mae was not involved in the movement, being too young, but she offers here reminiscences of growing up in town during the sixties. I’ve read two other Selma memoirs during this time — one of young boy growing up in Selmont prior to the march, and of another who was an adult pharmacist working downtown. The opening chapter is a emotionally impactful and florid invocation of what growing up a young girl in the segregated south was like, complete with a description of the March 7 attack which she was absent at, and which veers into the realm of fancy, inventing dogs and robed Klansmen roaming the streets. (There were no dogs, the city authorities had as much tolerance for Klansmen as they did Yankees, and I’ve never heard or read of of Klan activity within Selma in this period or in the 1870s despite actively searching for it.) The memoir improves much as she moves to her own life, describing how her parents saved up enough money to move into a ‘white’ area of town: her father ‘Dah’ worked for the railroad and their family appears to have been relatively well to do, owning land and a rental property.

 Since I knew she wasn’t involved in the movement, I read this principally for the same reason I read Ordinary Average Guy,about growing up in a trailer park in this same period: the little details of life in those days fascinate me and provide a richer view of the town that was than the politically-oriented histories. The most interesting stuff is the unexpected, like Brown recalling a neighbor woman skeeting a bit of breastmilk onto the floor before feeding a child to “calm the haint”. The majority of the book is simply these recollections of childhood, with drama between siblings and cousins happening concurrently with occasional glimpses of the casual inhumanity of the racial order — a time when the sheriff’s deputies were perfectly fine beating on the door in the middle of the night to effectively demand her father’s hunting dogs to enlist in a manhunt. Being a child who lives her life within Selma’s black community, Willie Mae is largely sheltered — but she does run into racial antagonism herself, when she begins working for a white woman who asks her for help bringing laundry into a laundromat, not thinking about the fact the laundromat owner is a hateful ass who has no compunction against hurling racial abuse at a child. The woman is embarrassed and shamed at her own naivete, and bawled out by Willie Mae’s mother as well. The timeline is a little questionable since the mood being invoked is always one of January – March 1965’s political activism and racial tension constant, with no clear idea as to when these things are happening. This is made worse to frequent mentions to “coloreds being killed”, which – well, has little connection to what was going on in Selma. The only black person killed in those months was Jimmie Lee Jackson, shot in Marion, another county over — though his death partially inspired the Selma march, so it is worth mentioning. The only man killed in Selma, in fact, was a white minister named James Reeb who was accosted and beaten, and then — oddly, very oddly – taken to Birmingham instead to Good Samaritan (the ‘black’ hospital) or the Baptist or Vaughan hospitals in Selma. (Even Montgomery would have been a better option than Birmingham, nearly two hours away!) Towards the end, young Willie Mae gets a glimpse of ‘Kang’, and sees the crowds gathering outside of Brown Chapel.  Wrapping up, I’m not sure what to think of the book: it’s certainly well-written, prose wise, and I suppose if you were absolutely ignorant about racial relations in the 1960s it would be eye-opening. The book make depressingly clear to me how prejudice begets prejudice — Willie Mae and her contemporaries have the same contempt for poor white ‘crackers’ that the latter have for them, regardless of their actions — the only difference being these two communities of prejudice being that poor blacks weren’t in a position to participant in bullying. Power or no power, though, racism poisons the soul, and it’s sad to see this made manifest but not reflected on.

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