Moving!
After four years with Friendster blog, I needed a new space. My legs demanded a greater range, a bigger place. So I moved to a hew home, Coffee Talk.
See you guys there! There’s plenty of coffee for everybody. 
Being a Book Editor…
1. I get to read everything I want—nah, not really.
2. I almost lost appetite for actually paying money for books in hopes of getting reimbursements from work.
3. I get to look smart in my spectacles but not necessarily nerdy, because I can justify a sexy librarian look.
4. I can act like I know what you’re talking about because I look like I know stuff.
5. I copy-edit everything, from manuscripts to books, from free magazines to newspaper headlines, from billboards to advertisements.
6. I have an inner red pen, like, all the time.
7. I have an itch every time you make grammatical/spelling/pronunciation mistakes.
8. I smirk at ads copywriters who can’t spell and their works.
9. I rant about idiots who think they can translate books.
10.I get to act like a god to my writers/translators—in my own cubicle.
11.I get to act smugly superior because I read unpublished manuscripts/proofs/advanced copies of world-class writers.
12.I actually know what “Starred Review” in Publishers Weekly really means: a hard earned label you can paste on books to boost sales, but the adjectives pertaining to the books are not necessarily understood by readers—or book people for that matter. The same goes to NYT Book Review.
13.I don’t always have time to do what I really, really want—like re-reading Agatha Christie’s mysteries.
14.I still can’t draw a line between work and pleasure.
15.I can name-drop but that doesn’t mean that I’ve read their books.
16.I have a knack for spotting sex scenes in romance novels just by flicking the pages.
17.I secretly re-read my works and my own writings, published and unpublished, to masturbate intellectually.
18.I adore Thesaurus.
19.I named my pet “Webster”.
20.I have secrets about me and books that I will never, ever tell you.
Books | Comments (3)
The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
Kalau ada satu buku yang menggugah saya belakangan ini, itu adalah The Thirteenth Tale karya Diane Setterfield. Buku ini terbit tahun 2006, dan langsung melejit ke puncak tangga New York Times Bestseller tanggal 1 Oktober 2006, berkat pujian-pujian dari advanced proof-nya. Amazon memilihnya sebagai Editor’s Pick tahun 2006, dan para pelanggan Amazon menobatkannya sebagai Best Book of 2006.
Tapi sebenarnya apa bagusnya buku ini?
Oke. Bayangkan kisah ini: Dongeng di dalam dongeng, rahasia, kebenaran yang setengah-setengah, dusta (banyak sekali dusta), yang melibatkan sebuah rumah besar yang bobrok, lapuk, dan nyaris ambruk, anak gadis yang cantik dan keras kepala, kakak lelakinya yang sakit jiwa, pengurus rumah yang rabun dan nyaris tuli, tukang kebun, pengasuh anak, dan anak perempuan kembar yang liar dan hidup dalam dunia mereka sendiri. Dan, semua itu dipadu dalam jalinan prosa indah yang dituturkan oleh Vida Winter, penulis Inggris paling laris, yang kerap memberikan dongeng menawan tentang kehidupannya, hanya saja tak ada satu pun yang benar. Namun, karena merasa dirinya telah menjelang ajal, Miss Winter mengundang Margaret Lea, si kutu buku penulis biografi—yang juga memiliki hantunya sendiri—untuk menuliskan cerita yang sesungguhnya.
Tentu saja proses mengurai fakta-fakta tidaklah menyenangkan, bagi kedua wanita itu. Fakta, kebenaran, memang sering kali tidak nyaman. Terkadang, kita lebih memilih dusta, dongeng, apa pun yang memberikan rasa aman dan tenteram. Seperti kutipan indah di bawah ini, yang saya ambil dari bab pertama:
“My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? When the lightning strikes shadows on the bedroom wall and the rain taps at the window with its long fingernails? No. When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed, don’t expect hard-boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid. What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie.”
“Kebencianku bukan terhadap pencinta kebenaran, melainkan pada kebenaran itu sendiri. Bantuan apa, penghiburan macam apa yang terkandung dalam kebenaran, jika dibandingkan dengan dongeng? Apa gunanya kebenaran, pada tengah malam, dalam kegelapan, ketika angin meraung seperti beruang dalam cerobong asap? Ketika kilat menerakan bayang-bayang di dinding kamar tidur dan hujan mengetuk-ngetuk jendela dengan kuku-kukunya yang panjang? Tidak. Ketika perasaan takut dan dingin membekukanmu menjadi patung di tempat tidur, jangan berharap kebenaran dengan tulangnya yang keras berbungkus kulit akan datang menolongmu. Karena yang kaubutuhkan adalah kenyamanan sebuah dongeng. Dusta yang memberikan perasaan aman yang membuai dan menenangkan.”
Dan pada akhirnya, setelah fakta-fakta akhirnya terungkap tanpa dapat dibendung lagi, Vida dan Margaret mau tak mau harus menguatkan diri menghadapi hantu-hantu yang selama hidup membayangi langkah mereka—meski terkadang disisihkan ke tempat yang paling jauh, tapi selalu ada: geming, sabar, menanti.
Hm.
Bagi pencinta buku, penyuka literatur, takkan sulit mengidentifikasi diri dengan para tokohnya. Vida Winter yang penulis novel, yang selama dua tahun memberikan 19 versi kisah hidupnya kepada wartawan yang mewawancarainya, dan ketika dikonfrontasi hanya mengatakan, “Itu memang profesiku. Aku ini pendongeng.” Kemudian ada Margaret Lea, si kutu buku yang sejak kecil hidup di antara buku-buku antik milik ayahnya, mengatakan, “Tentu saja aku lebih menyukai buku daripada manusia.”
Pada akhirnya, kecintaan pada buku dan literaturlah yang membuat buku ini berbeda. Dan meskipun fakta, kebenaran, kenyataan sering kali menyakitkan kala terungkap, ingatlah bahwa selalu ada kenikmatan dan kepuasan ketika kita mengetahuinya.
Buku ini akan diterbitkan dalam bahasa Indonesia dengan judul Dongeng Ketiga Belas. Hak pembuatan filmnya telah dibeli Heyday Films, yang memproduksi film-film Harry Potter, namun belum ada kelanjutan beritanya.
Cover edisi bhs Indonesia, karya emte
Haunted by your ghost.
Ghost
Indigo Girls
There’s a letter on the desktop
That I dug out of a drawer
The last truce we ever came to
In our adolescent war
And I start to feel the fever
From the warm air through the screen
You come regular like seasons
Shadowing my dreams
And the Mississippi’s mighty
But it starts in Minnesota
At a place that you could walk across
With five steps down
And I guess that’s how you started
Like a pinprick to my heart
But at this point you rush right through me
And I start to drown
And there’s not enough room
In this world for my pain
Signals cross and love gets lost
And time passed makes it plain
Of all my demon spirits
I need you the most
I’m in love with your ghost
I’m in love with your ghost
Dark and dangerous like a secret
That gets whispered in a hush
(don’t tell a soul)
When I wake the things I dreamt about you
Last night make me blush
(don’t tell a soul)
When you kiss me like a lover
Then you sting me like a viper
I go follow to the river
Play your memory like a piper
And I feel it like a sickness
How this love is killing me
But I’d walk into the fingers
Of your fire willingly
And dance the edge of sanity
I’ve never been this close
In love with your ghost
Unknowing captor
You never know how much you
Pierce my spirit
But I can’t touch you
Can you hear it
A cry to be free
Oh I’m forever under lock and key
As you pass through me
Now I see your face before me
I would launch a thousand ships
To bring your heart back to my island
As the sand beneath me slips
As I burn up in your presence
And I know now how it feels
To be weakened like Achilles
With you always at my heels
My bitter pill to swallow
Is the silence that I keep
It poisons me I can’t swim free
The river is too deep
Though I’m baptized by your touch
I am no worse at most
In love with your ghost
You are shadowing my dreams
(in love with your ghost)
(in love with your ghost)
(in love with your ghost)
~
Lucky for me, I don’t have any reason to feel so depressingly tragic as this song would definitely send me plummeting down any bottomless abyss nearby.
Thank you, Adrian, for introducing me to this beautiful sad song.
Music | Comment (0)RIP Tastespotting
Whaaaaaaat?
www.tastespotting.com is NO MORE. With a very terse notification (in a handwriting note):
“Thanks for a great 18 months! In light of recent legal complications, NOTCOT will no longer be operating tastespotting.com. Jean NOTCOT 6.13.2008″
Talk about Friday the 13th. Bummer.
Tastespotting had been a delightful feast for the eyes, and now is no more.
Food porn! We need more food porn!
Paradoxes
It’s funny when I think of life’s lessons that I’ve learned sometimes come in paradoxes. There’s no this or that. Only this and that, and everything in between.
Like when I questioned myself what is my purpose in life, I found how tiny I am in this universe—nothing but a speck—and somehow, on the contrary, I realized how unique I am, how intricate I was built to be different from any other, how everything was already written even before I was born. That doesn’t really answer the one most baffling question human race ever encounter, but somehow it gives me an assurance that I am not without purpose.
About a week after my father passed away, I was sitting alone in a cafe, trying to read a book, when suddenly I was overwhelmed by so much emotions. I was struck at how small and insignificant everything is. And yet, how important it is to cherish the ones you love. Family is always the one you can count on. When all else fail, you can always return home.
And a year after, when we were faced with the possibility of losing our childhood home, I found myself staring at how fleeting everything is—nothing is permanent, even something you thought was rock solid.
…you learn to build all your roads on today because tomorrow’s ground is too uncertain for plans, and futures have a way of falling down in mid-flights.
…you learn that even sunshine burns if you get too much, so you plant your own garden instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.
And yet somehow, it’s not such a bad idea putting an effort to build something, to invest in something. Starting a relationship. Building it, maintaining it. In the course of human history, they must have gotten something right, haven’t they?
Well, as frightening as it may be, it doesn’t look so bad at all.
Reflections | Comment (1)I am Ronya
Kutipan yang indah dari buku anak-anak yang, meski jarang saya baca, kali ini sanggup melumerkan hati saya.
Dari Ronya Anak Penyamun oleh Astrid Lindgren:
"Kuhirup dalam-dalam musim panas ini, seperti lebah-lebah hutan menghirup madu. Kukumpulkan dalam batinku sebongkah besar musim panas, dan aku akan hidup dari bongkah besar itu apabila… apabila sudah bukan musim panas lagi."
Lalu, ketika Ronya dan Birk sedang menjelang bahaya:
…kedua anak itu bercakap-cakap; tentang hal-hal yang perlu dikatakan sebelum terlambat. Tentang betapa baiknya begitu menyayangi seseorang, sehingga tidak perlu takut menghadapi yang terberat.
Apalah artinya menghadapi yang terberat, jika kita saling menyayangi? Manakala musim dingin tiba, kita akan hidup dari kenangan musim panas yang menghangatkan jiwa.
Books, crap... | Comments (3)The Boulevard of Broken Dreams
You know it’s a warning sign when you start to hear Chet Baker’s Little Girl Blue moaning from your iPod. That, and the angelwings picture starts to appear on your YM. And then, the songs trickle down to Stacey Kent’s So Romantic, or The Boulevard of Broken Dreams by Diana Krall.
The Boulevard of Broken Dreams
I walk along the street of sorrow
The boulevard of broken dreams
Where gigolo and gigalette
Can take a kiss without regret
So they forget their broken dreams
You laugh tonight and cry tomorrow
When you behold your shattered dreams
And gigolo and gigalette
Awake to find their eyes are wet
With tears that tell of broken dreams
Here is where you’ll always find me
Always walking up and down
But I left my soul behind me
In an old cathedral town
The joy that you find here you borrow
You cannot keep it long it seems
But gigolo and gigalette
Still sing a song and dance along
Boulevard of broken dreams
Music | Comment (0)
Grisham Did It Again
The Appeal
John Grisham
Doubleday
January 2008
Mr. Grisham did it again. He’s back in the game, on his familiar turf, the thing that made him a rich man.
Unusually, the book started with a verdict. If you want to know what happens after the end of Erin Brokovich (Julia Roberts) and A Civil Action (John Travolta), this is it. The case was Jeanette Baker v. Krane Chemical. Baker, the widow, survived her husband and son, who died of cancer which supposedly caused by irresponsible and illegal chemical disposal by Krane Chemical in a small town in Mississippi. The disposal and spillage contaminated the water that run through their town, and so great was the rates of cancer—15 times above the national average—that their Cary County was infamously known as Cancer County.
This is a story about David versus Goliath, where David was the dejected victims and their lawyers who had lost all their money in pursuit of justice, and Goliath was Krane Chemical, the evil corporate America, with Carl Trudeau as the owner, a Wall Street predator.
But actually… Goliath was even bigger than that. Because Trudeau found the supreme court judges were not friendly enough, he decided to buy a judicial seat in the upcoming election. Millions and millions of dollar poured down to launch the oblivious perfect-and-straight-to-the-core candidate, and tricks after dirty tricks of campaigning were whipped out, without the voters having a single clue what was behind all the drama.
In the course of reading about the campaign, I sometimes forgot about Jeanette Baker and the victims of Cancer County. Thus was the state of politics, in my humble opinion. The people is forgotten and the big goal is on the main stage, lashing out pretty but poisonous promises to unsuspecting voters, not unlike a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Mr. Grisham was adamant to show us the uglier facade of politics. Sometimes he got a little carried away picturing the goody-goody David and the heartless Trudeau. But hey, what’s a fiction without such extremes?
All in all, it’s a good one from Mr. Grisham, who had distracted over the years to the land of baseball (Bleachers), Italiano la dolce vita (The Broker), baseball plus Italiano la dolce vita (Playing for Pizza), and nonfiction (The Innocent Man). This is a legal thriller dripping with sarcasms and so much personal view on politics and justice system. Never again you will see electoral process and politics the same way.
The rule is: If the court was unfriendly, buy a seat and select your own judge.
Books | Comment (0)Nothing, except Change, is Constant
Landslide
I took my love, I took it down
I climbed a mountain and I turned around
And I saw my reflection in the snow covered hills
Till the landslide brought me down
Oh, mirror in the sky, what is love?
Can the child within my heart rise above?
Can I sail through the changing ocean tides?
Can I handle the seasons of my life?
Well, I’ve been afraid of changing
‘Cause I’ve built my life around you
But time makes you bolder
Even children get older
And I’m getting older, too
Yes, I’m getting older, too
Oh, take my love, take it down
Climb a mountain and turn around
And if you see my reflection in the snow covered hills
Well, the landslide will bring it down
Music | Comment (0)