Saturday, September 29, 2007

I read Déja Dead by Kathy Reichs

So, working in a bookstore as I do, I get a lot more exposure to popular fiction than I did as an English/French major at a small liberal arts college. I've been shelving bestsellers the past few weeks, and I noticed the newest Reichs book, partly because it's got a nice shiny cover. The blurb says the series is the inspiration for the tv show Bones, which I know friends of mine adore. I caught the last ten minutes or so of last Tuesday's episode, and it was interesting enough. Being more inclined to books than television, I picked up the first in the series, just to see if it was something I should get into.

From what I could tell from my short exposure to the show, the books are drastically different. For one thing, in the books, the heroine is called "Tempe" instead of "Bones", when people use her nickname. The first one is set in Montreal, not Washington D.C. There's no Booth, no Zach, no Hodge or Angela (these are the things I pick up from listening to my friends). Temperance Brennan in the books is a lonely, somewhat angry woman with a lot more issues than Emily Deschanel's Bones, what with the alcoholism, the marriage on the rocks, the chauvinistic co-workers, and the almost complete lack of a social life. On the television show, she seemed more the mad scientist type: brilliant, but slightly naïve, in a sweet sort of way. Temperance Brennan of the book gets herself into a lot of dangerous situations in Déja Dead, but it seems like it's less because she's got a hankering for justice and more because she can't find much to live for. Passion, sure, but the self-destructive channeling of it gets Brennan stalked and almost killed in Déja Dead.

Given the choice between an empowered but self-endangering woman and a woman whose head is so deep in her work that she has to be saved from burning herself on hot coffee, I'm more likely to take Bones over Tempe. In both cases, Brennan tends to rely on the men around her to avert the consequences of her actions, but at least Booth isn't a jerk the way Claudel is; Bones seems to enjoy her life more. It's also interesting to see a female mad scientist: other women dedicated to their work retain a social sharpness verging on the brusque (Scully from The X-Files) comes to mind. Deschanel's vague loopiness is endearing, and I like Booth more than any of the men I've encountered in the books.

So saying this, of course, I ended up picking up one of the other books, which I'd taken out from the library just in case. I can only hope that Tempe doesn't decide to scramble off on any life-endangering trips down Prostitution Row in Fatal Voyage. Meanwhile, I might tune in on an occasional Tuesday to cleanse the palate with a more cheerful Temperance Brennan.

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Football season

So last weekend, having lived most of my life in a university town, I went to my first college football game. Sure, I'd heard the games from far off: the sudden swell of cheering like the roar of the sea, the anxious horns as fans tried to escape yet another dismal loss. I'd been to junior high and high school games, both as part of the pep squad and part of the laity. This was nothing like any of those: sheer scale of magnitude transformed it from a game into something verging on worship.

The stadium holds 72 000 people and most of the seats were filled. I don't think I'd ever seen that many people together in the same place, and all of them focused on the movement (or not) of a ball that from my seat in the nosebleed section was barely visible. I don't consider myself a rabid fan of football in general, but the groupthink crowd mentality was overwhelming: I was on my feet for two hours shouting my throat out for the home team among all the Greek girls and boys in their finery and the regular joes in their astounding variety of university-themed t-shirts.

We lost. Of course we did. We mostly lose, these days: our coach was brilliant for two years and has been flagging since. At least being the hosting team, it's not such a schlep to get home, and there's still the satisfaction of being part of a mass of losers, while the out-of-place fans in the other team's colors rejoice. We all went home grumbling about penalties, about passing games, about the coach, about this and that, as if any of us could have turned the game around.

In the morning, it all seemed vaguely surreal. I think it's a trick of the lights: everything in the bowl of the stadium seems hyper-real, ultra-detailed, each replay shown in full color on the immense screen that distracted drivers for months before they finished the construction of the lower wall. The cameras that captured footage of the game were powerful enough to show us craters on the moon during halftime. The smell of fried food and diesel fumes in the air. Time got skewed by the gravity of the game. The day faded into sunset, but it was noon-bright until we left the stadium and crept back to our car, where the twelve-minute drive home took three quarters of an hour, the cars bumper to bumper along the narrow little streets. How could anything else be as true as the muscled young men on the gridiron with the eyes and thoughts of half the state's population on them, and the voices of the seventy-two thousand of us there raised in chorus? But then, it was nothing like my regular life, so how could the game have been anything but a vivid dream?

Hard to say. Either way, I'd do it again.

Saturday, September 8, 2007

the itch to be elsewhere

Funny how the smallest things can trigger nostalgia. I'm wearing a sweater I'd only ever worn in France, and the sky is grey as it was most of my time in Cambrai, and if only I could walk through the grande place, past the bakery and the perfume store, smelling the baking and the sweet oils and the damp cobblestones, then life would be perfect. That was always the best part of my walk home, and it didn't matter about the rain and the dog droppings and the weariness of twelve hours in school. Instead I'm in Fayetteville, which has its own charms, but this is the longest I've been home in five years and it's making me twitchy. Out of the past 26 months, I was out of the country for twelve. A year out of the last two years. That's an odd thought.

Missing India is easy: Rani is there, soaking up all the sunshine I'm missing, eating dosai and chutney. Jaya has a new host daughter, no doubt, and I'm not sure if she got my letter at all. All I can do is watch Indian movies and eat the occasional dish of dal. There's no one to practice my fragments of Tamil and Hindi on.

Missing France is even easier because it's so fresh, and so much more similar. I'm not likely to turn a corner and find a Krishna shrine or a water buffalo here, but I might find a little narrow street, or a section of the highway that reminds me of the fields of the Cambrésis, or smell the rain on the air and slip back to Cambrai in my head. I almost miss waking up to the sound of cars on cobblestones clattering down the narrow alley between my window and the row houses across the way.

I do appreciate America. I love that I can get vegetarian food fairly easily. I love the broad open highways. I enjoy the fact that at least America tries to subvert its racism, instead of the open disdain the white French have for the children of the Maghrebain immigrants, and that the fairer North Indians have for the darker South Indians.

But I miss waking up somewhere else. I miss the sense of history of Europe. I missi sitting in Starbucks in Odéon, looking at the prow of the building where the streets come together at an odd angle. I miss the solemn stone corridors of the temple in Madurai, and the tiny aarti lamps in all that gloom, and the smell of camphor. I miss the sun on the rocks in Italy, the lazy self-importance, the freshness of the food.

I suppose the price of travel is knowing what you're missing, and the dissatisfaction that comes with that.