Do You Secretly Hate Hillary?

How much do you really like the candidate you say you're voting for? Here's a test that's supposed to tell you whether you're lying to yourself. Or something.

New on the Bookshelves

I receive maybe a dozen books a week from publishers wanting a review. A leaning tower of January titles stands precariously across the room from me. Well, I can't review or even read most of them, but I figure what I can do, now that I've got this blog thingie, is to list the books I've been sent that are coming out in the week ahead.

This doesn't mean, of course, that these are the only new books coming out. Just the ones that I've been sent. So here's what you'll find in the bookstores this coming week.

Bang Crunch: Stories, by Neil Smith (Vintage; January 8)

The Christian World: A Global History, by Martin E. Marty (Modern Library; January 8)

Day: A Novel, by A.L. Kennedy (Knopf; January 8)

Homecoming: A Novel, by Bernhard Schlink (Pantheon; January 8)

The Painter of Battles: A Novel, by Arturo Pérez-Reverte (Random House; January 8)

Vienna Blood: A Novel, by Frank Tallis (Mortalis/Random House; January 8)

This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, by Drew Gilpin Faust (Knopf; January 10)

The Senator’s Wife: A Novel, by Sue Miller (Knopf; January 11)

I’m Looking Through You – Growing Up Haunted: A Memoir, by Jennifer Finney Boylan (Broadway; January 15)

Kyra: A Novel, by Carol Gilligan (Random House; January 15)

Gambling With My Vote

In addition to dithering over Obama vs. Clinton (or maybe Edwards), I've also been procrastinating on filling out my ballot because of the state initiatives. Those of you not in California don't need to read the rest of this entry, but like most people who live here, I dread studying the ballot initiatives. And like a lot of people, I tend to vote no if I don't understand what's at stake. Also, as Kevin Drum often argues, voting no is a way of telling the legislature to do its job and stop passing the buck to the voters.

But now it turns out that voting no is exactly what the proponents of Propositions 94, 95, 96 and 97, which have to do with Indian gaming, want you to do. Patty Fisher, the Mercury News columnist, explains why in an excellent column.

Tricky bastards.

Taking Nothing for Granite

After all the premature obituaries for Hillary Clinton's campaign, it was nice to see her in a too-close-to-call race in New Hampshire. Especially after all of the nonsense about her "crying" yesterday. I thought it was one of the few really humanizing moments I've seen from her, but of course the punditry had to ascribe it either to weakness or to sheer fakery. I hate the media, even if I am one.

Our absentee ballots have arrived. (Californians, at least in this county, are being urged to vote by mail because of the secretary of state's ruling that electronic machines are unreliable.) My daughter has already filled hers out -- she voted for Clinton. I'm waffling again, after having decided that I would vote for Obama.

At least Hillary's strong showing may curb some of Andrew Sullivan's gloating.

Department of Redundancy Department: It's Always Better When It's Free

Headline in today's Mercury News:

Free gift coming for Xbox 360 owners

Chris-crossed

I admit it: Whenever I'm in a bookstore, I check to see if I've been blurbed. That is, if I've been quoted on the cover of the paperback edition of a book I've reviewed. It's nice to see one's own words live on, even if the quote has been lifted from context, and one is identified only as "San Jose Mercury News" or "San Francisco Chronicle" or whatever paper published the review.

Occasionally they even mention your name. And sometimes they get it wrong. On the jacket of Gregory Curtis's excellent book about prehistoric artists, The Cave Painters, I found this quote from my review of his earlier book, Disarmed: The Story of the Venus de Milo:

"Absorbing ... Enormously entertaining ... Curtis is a writer of generous wit, who packs his book with delicious portraits of scholars, writers, artists, and politicians who contributed to the mythologizing of the Venus de Milo."

All very nice, and a good sampling of my opinion of the book. Except that the quote was attributed to:

--Chris Matthews, San Jose Mercury News

I mean, I don't usually mind when people get my name wrong. I gently inform them that it's Charles, not Charlie or Chuck. (I even used to let myself be known as Chuck, until my wife told me the nickname always made her think of hamburger meat.)

But Chris Matthews? Of all the bloviating newstalkers I think he's the one I least want to be identified with. Well, no, I wouldn't prefer to be confused with Limbaugh or O'Reilly or Hannity, but that's because their politics are so foul. Chris Matthews irks me because he's such an addle-brained sexist, who can't get over the fact that Hillary Clinton is a -- gasp! -- woman, and who has embarrassing man-crushes on macho men like McCain and Fred Thompson and -- at least around the time of "Mission Accomplished" -- George W. And I hate watching Keith Olbermann grit his teeth when he's forced to share an anchor desk with Chris M.

I e-mailed Knopf about the mistake, and a very contrite publicist said that the editor who messed it up sent her apologies. Apology accepted.

Where Do You Live, Exactly?

I don't normally respond to telephone surveys, but in an election year, I get kind of curious about what they're asking, so yesterday I agreed to participate in one. Unfortunately, it wasn't about whether I preferred Clinton or Edwards or Obama, but a survey of Mountain View residents about the development of a shopping center near us.

I did my duty, however, and stayed on the line answering questions that were clearly aimed at finding out whether we wanted a Home Depot to replace the failing Sears store in the center, and what it would take to persuade us that we do. I have no opinion one way or the other -- I don't shop at either. But one question broke me up: Do I agree or disagree with the statement "Mountain View should be more like Palo Alto"? The questioner even asked, "Why do people always laugh when I ask them that?"

Well, the truth is that I've lived in both Palo Alto and Mountain View, and the quality of life in both is about the same. To the outsider, Silicon Valley is one long indistinguishable suburban smear from Redwood City to San Jose. My brother-in-law, who visited us for the holidays, even asked me, "Does Mountain View have a government?" As if we depended on a volunteer fire department and neighborhood watch. I pointed out that we got our water through pipes and that we weren't reduced to kerosene lanterns, but he was still surprised that the population of Mountain View is something over 70,000.

But I knew exactly what the questioner meant. No one would have asked, "Should Mountain View be more like Los Altos (or Sunnyvale or Menlo Park)?"

The usual line about Mountain View is that it's Palo Alto without the attitude. It's also Palo Alto without the bureaucracy and the intense NIMBYism that has turned at least two potentially lucrative commercial sites into ghost shopping centers -- empty stores, awaiting replacement tenants who can jump all the approval hurdles.

I know this means nothing to the outside world. People who visit here are also surprised that Mountain View is a pancake-flat town -- not the Swiss village clinging to the mountainside that the name suggests. (There are mountains -- little ones -- that can be viewed from here.) The best you can get from outsiders is, "Oh yeah, isn't that where Apple has its headquarters?" To which the response is, "No, that's Cupertino. We've got Google."

It is, as I've always said, a nice place to live, but you wouldn't want to visit here. Unless you like to take naps.

On the Twelfth Day of Christmas

Well, it's the twelfth day of Christmas, and as soon as I can get the twelve drummers drumming out of the house, the holiday season is officially over. Actually, for us it ended on New Year's Day, when we took down the decorations and put the tree -- I bought a little potted fir this year -- outside. And yesterday, I drove my brother-in-law to the airport in a driving rainstorm. So it's all back to normal.

Well, as normal as anything is in an election year. I have to admit that the enthusiasm for Obama in Iowa is contagious. And now I read that he's leading Hillary by twelve points in the New Hampshire polls. I still think Hillary's experience would make her the more effective president, but I've got nothing against Obama. The symbolism alone makes me happy -- that of a black man as the leader of the United States, a country that was conceived in liberty for everyone who was a white man, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, except for black slaves, who were counted as only three-fifths equal and then only for purposes of apportioning representatives.

What Year Is It?

Amid the calls to ban wood-burning fireplaces and to neuter dogs and cats, the anti-immigration and anti-tax diatribes, the denunciation of global warming as “baloney,” and the sternly worded opinion on Pakistani elections, I found this rather charming comment in the letters to the editor in today’s Mercury News:

I am mildly irritated by those who pronounce the year as “two thousand eight.” I’ll bet not one of those people said “one thousand nine hundred ninety-nine.” So, why the grammatical schism? What did they say at the turn of the last millennium?

Ed Jacklitch

San Jose

Well, each to his own, Mr. Jacklitch. I happen to find that “two thousand eight” comes out more smoothly than “twenty-oh-eight.” And I submit that this schism, if that’s what it is, is a matter more of diction than of grammar. It’s too bad that we don’t have YouTube videos of Ethelred the Unready giving the royal New Year’s proclamation for 1008 so we can check up on the way the date was handled in the King’s English. (Though it would have been in Anglo-Saxon or Latin anyway.)

I imagine we’ll waffle between “two thousand something” and “twenty something” for a few years longer. Probably until 2020, when saying “twenty twenty” will be irresistible.

Which reminds me that it’s been a long time since there was a lot of discussion about what we’re going to call this decade. People were arguing for “the naughts,” “the aughts,” “the nulls,” “the zeroes,” “the zips” and “the ohs.” It made me wonder when we started naming decades. I’ve read a lot of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels, and I don’t recall anyone ever saying something like “back in the forties” in them.

The habit of singling out a decade and putting a label on it seems to have begun with “the Gay Nineties,” a phrase that the not-always-to-be-trusted Wikipedia claims wasn’t coined until 1926. (It also notes that the phrase had to do with “merriment and frivolity,” not the current meaning of “gay,” even though it was the decade of Oscar Wilde’s triumph and tragedy.) But we seem to have skipped over the 1900s and 1910s when it comes to labeling. We don’t start treating decades as cultural units until the Roaring Twenties.

It’s a lazy habit anyway. What we call “the sixties” – protest, youth rebellion, sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll and all that – really began in 1964 with Beatles coming to New York and LBJ escalating the Vietnam War with the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, and didn’t end till … oh, maybe the rise of disco and the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a decade of merriment and frivolity again?

Afterthought: I wonder if Mr. Jacklitch referred to 2000 as "twenty-hundred"?

You Keep Using That Word. I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means.

For the news media, the Christmas Day tiger attack at the San Francisco Zoo is the gift that keeps on giving. Especially since celebrattorney Mark Geragos heard the sirens and signed on to represent the Dhaliwal brothers, survivors of the attack.

One thing that the story I read in the Mercury News doesn’t explain, however, is why Geragos, best known as a defense attorney for the likes of Scott Peterson, Michael Jackson and Winona Ryder, is on the case. Seems like the Dhaliwals need a plaintiff’s attorney. Who’s suing whom?

But what really caught my interest was something that the Merc quoted Geragos as saying about the security guard who allegedly failed to respond to the brothers’ pleas for help: “She was completely diffident.”

I think I’d be diffident – i.e., timid and shy – if someone told me a tiger was on the loose. Although on the other hand, diffidence is not something you want in a security guard, so maybe Geragos has a point.

Or perhaps he meant to say “indifferent”? I hope he wasn’t trying for “disinterested,” which too many people use to mean “uninterested,” when what it really means is “impartial.” But that’s a gripe for another day.

Anyway, see what I mean? This is a story with something for everyone: zoo-lovers, zoo-haters, lawyers, lawyer-lovers, lawyer-haters, the morbidly curious, and even wordfreaks.