High Five number one: Books

Now that this exceptional summer has faced like Napa wine on the tongue, I've decided to play a game that a few of us used to play back in the day: The High Fives. This involves making lists of "bests" for no particular purpose.

I'll start with the Five Best Books I Read This Summer (or at least my favorites) in no particular order.

1. Anathem by Neal Stephenson. More ideas per page than any book I've read in a few decades, it's one of those books that you can't explain what it's about without either missing the point or copying out the whole thing. This is the novel from which I was most likely to read passages aloud to my wife (who's a mathematician, which matters in this case). Carrying this enormous tome around for three weeks also did wonders for my upper-body strength. It's about seeking the truth even when it contradicts everything you've been told. It's about the way ideas affect our world in a direct way, even physically.
2. The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death by Charlie Huston. Man, this novel was a surprise. This is the book that was most likely to send me running to the library/book store to find everything else by the author. A gory, violent, book about love, forgiveness and redemption. A story about a sad young man who takes a job with an outfit that cleans up after bad things happen to people. He is transformed by the power of love, both his own love and the love of others. Totally life-affirming. Lots of violence, however, so not for the squeamish. Oh, and it's a comedy.
3. The Lazarus Project by Aleksandr Hemon. Last year, I read Hemon's exceptional Nowhere Man and felt blessed by every page. His troublesome, partly autobiographical prose can make you mad sometimes and at other times ecstatic, but at all times, you know the characters that make up his novels are fully human. This book is an interesting reminder that what we know as "The War on Terror" is not new to the 21st century, nor is it the first time powerful people misused civic fear. Being married to someone who is from the same region as Hemon, and who experienced many of the same things coming to America, makes this book resonate all the more with me. I feel like I know these characters (and the author).
4. Sinister Forces - The Nine: A Grimoire of American Political Witchcraft by Peter Levenda. The book most likely to keep me awake at night, not reading, but just thinking. Levenda is a talented historian of great precision and wit, and sources his books thorouhgly and solidly. But sometimes, you wish he hadn't done such a great job of showing what's underneath our civil society. His sections about the Salem Witch Trials in the 17th century and the unbelievable group known as "The Nine" formed in the 20th by one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory still raise the hairs on my arms. This was a hard book to find and I'm still looking for the second and third books of the trilogy. I've just started Levenda's great new book, Stairway to Heaven: Chinese Alchemists, Jewish Kabbalists, and the Art of Spiritual Transformation. If any of you are history buffs, I highly recommend his famous 1994 book, Unholy Alliance: A History of Nazi Involvement With the Occult. (I guess Levenda just likes long titles.)
5. Taoist Yoga: Alchemy & Immortality by Charles Luk and Lu K'uan Yu. The breath, or "Qi" (Chi) heats a furnace in your belly (dantien) which then heats the distillation flask in your solar plexus (upper dantien) and the result of that distillation is a golden elixer which rises to a space behind your eyeballs that then is radiates to heaven. When I was in California this summer, I read a few pages of this book every night before I went to sleep. The concepts seem to stick with me when I practice my taichi. I'm not sure about the immortality part, but there's something going on when I practice these techniques and it sure feels good.

The Grapes of Wrath

Hunger is a great motivator, it seems, and it's a hungry man and dog that drive down the mountain for a visit to America's produce stand, Salinas, California.

At 18 meters above sea level, the 22 square miles of Salinas California (the birthplace of John Steinbeck) produces 80% of the lettuce in the US, not to mention peppers, beans, broccoli and anything else that you can grow in rows. As one of the old men in the cantina where I ate lunch today said, "You could plant a rock in this soil and it'd grow." I doubt it's that easy, but this dense, rich earth does look fertile. As long as you have water, that is, which is a commodity in increasingly short supply in this part of the country. Apparently, the people who've built McMansions in the many new developments along the highway on the way here are demanding so much water for their neatly manicured lawns and hot tubs that there's less and less available for farming. But if there's one thing that Americans do well, it's pack productivity on to an acre of land, and despite using less water per hectare, these fields have been yielding more and more each year.

I don't have a lot to say about this trip into the fertile valley today, mostly because I've got a stir-fry full of fresh vegetables, garlic, ginger, plump avocados and jalepenos that would blow your sneakers off and locally-made balsamic vinegar almost ready on the stove. I'm having a malt-based aperitif while I type this.

The main thing I came away with after my trip today and the fantastic enchiladas in mole sauce at the roadside cantina full of farm laborers who had finished their day of work at 1pm (I can't even imagine what time they started this morning) is that the Mexican immigrants who come across the border legally and illegally to do backbreaking work for low pay are a lot like the families I saw growing up on the Northwest Side of Chicago. From the men and women who get up early to work long hours to the schoolchildren in neatly-pressed uniforms walking hand-in-hand to the Catholic School, these were people I recognized. They may have accents, but there were more than a few of the parents and grandparents of my schoolmates at St Genevieve's that had accents, too. The Catholic iconography is everywhere in this community, from the dashboards of cars to the murals on the walls of farm buildings, the Blessed Virgin is everywhere, and you know what? I never noticed that she looks Mexican before.

For those that choose to spend their time watching cable "news" shows, you'd think that the influx of these people is the worst thing that could possibly happen to the US. But when you see these people, these families, these kids and their lives, it's hard to see this recent wave of immigration as anything but the continuation of a tradition that brought my grandpa here from Sicily and my Mom's parents from Southern Italy. If America changes for the worse, it'll be less because of the people who risk their lives and safety sneak here just to pick the vegetables that are sold at Dominick's and Jewel than it will be because of the people with hate in their hearts.

Wouldn't you know it, on my way back up Hwy 1 to the mountain, all I could find on the radio were bitter men, angry that these people were coming to America. Tell you what, if I had to pick a neighbor, it would be the tired folks who I saw in Salinas today before it would be those men on the radio.

Sorry for the sermonette. I've got some veggies to scarf down. Next week, I think I'll drive down to Monterey and Big Sur, to watch the surfers and walk Mozart on the beach. Tonight, it's shaping up to be a beaut of a sunset.

Why am I here?

It's a fair question: why would someone travel across the US just to sit on top of a hill with a very large dog when there are plenty of things to do in places that actually have convenience stores and street lights?

OK, here's the short version. I have friends that work in Silicon Valley, who have a wonderful house in a very remote place in California, near Monterey. They have a large, pleasant, if somewhat taciturn dog, named Mozart, and they like to take long trips to exotic locales. Rather than board Mozart, they ask me periodically to come out to said wonderful house in the very remote place, to keep the dog company. Mozart seems to like me, which is good because I wouldn't want to be around such a huge animal who didn't like me. I guess I'm one of the few people whose lifestyle allows for dropping everything for a month and getting on a plane in order to throw a ball for a dog. It is one of the benefits of being a part-time artiste émergent and full-time mystic. My micro-enterprises in Chicago can take care of themselves, and daughter Miko knows how to deposit the checks.

Long periods (say, three days or more) of isolation from other humans, while enjoyable, tends to cause me to become somewhat loony, so normally wife and helpmate Sanja would come with me on a trip like this. But Mathematics waits for no woman, and since untold thousands of students manque d'intérêt will be descending upon UIC expecting to learn Mathematics, Sanja has to stay at home this time. So, she pinned a note to my chest (not to my shirt, but to my chest) and an envelope with some mad money to my underwear, and put me on a plane (or really, the Orange Line to the airport). She looked a little wistful as she bade me farewell, as if contemplating the odds that I might not be seen again.

Now, the place. Oh, the place. Why would someone build a Spanish villa on a remote mountain, twenty miles from the nearest convenience store? I'm not sure, but surely they had nobody like me in mind when they did. Survival can be tough up here with the redwoods and bigfoot ("bigfeet"?), but a grand piano does make the time go better after dark, when the chupacabra run and the tiny reptiles scamper up the adobe.

I'm sorry, I have to go see if I can manage to coax an espresso machine that's more complicated to run than the hadron superconducting supercollider to bring forth an Americano before I take Godzilla for a walk in the hills. Such is life in the wilderness. If you don't hear from me again, please tell Sanja the extra key for my bike is in the little drawer to the left of the computer at home.

Cloud Hands

The plane landed at 7:30p San Jose time. Mika and Misha met me at the airport, bringing Igor and Jasmina's SUV with Mozart in the back. After a brief greeting, they went their way home and left me to try to navigate myself to Hazel Dell.

I'm not crazy about driving in the mountains in the best of conditions, and the deep shadows of twilight made the switchbacks of Rt 17 seem like the minotaur's maze. Igor had kindly printed the directions to Hazel Dell, with pictures, but the late rush-hour California traffic is not so forgiving of a clueless traveler.

It's not so much the first 25 miles through the mountains, but last 8 miles after exiting Hwy 1 that makes this an adventure. A little light would have helped, but except for the veiled glow of an occasional house, it was dark and deep. Finally, after only a few false turns, I made it to the sometimes one-lane Hazel Dell Road. I had been pretty much steadily climbing since leaving the airport (when it was still light out). Trying to make conversation with the taciturn German shepherd helped a bit, but Mozart's navigational help was minimal. I came eventually to the last 1.5 mile climb throught the redwoods to the house.

I don't like to walk from one end of my home to the other when it's dark, much less travel to a mountain aerie that I only visit once a year, but when I finally got to the house I was comforted by a note from Jasmina that there were freshly-baked muffins in the oven and to make myself at home. I'll be seeing them in a month, but until then, it's just me, the dog and the stunning, if indifferent presence of Nature.