those that tremble as if they were mad

2009-03-16T09:24:00.000-07:00

Dark Places

This weekend I allowed my growing booklust almost entirely free reign, making several injudicious purchases, one judicious purchase (all three Bourne books for $8!), and a binge visit to the library. Mostly to get a second glance at the last line, I re-read The Great Gatsby in an afternoon, causing poor Dave to choke with unrestrained anger at what he calls my ungodly "speed reading." If this is my super power, so be it - I always wanted flight, or the ability to shoot shock waves out of my hands, but I guess beggars can't be choosers.

Since another weekend day yawned out before me, I then picked up another library find: The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion's meditation of grief, loss, and mourning. I'm not sure what made me think that now was the time to read this book; I was choosing literature for vacation, and I had avoided Magical Thinking up to this point because I knew it would do to me precisely what it is now doing, viz. causing a thrill of fear to ripple through me in unsteady increments.

The book follows Didion's mourning period after the death of her husband, while her daughter Quintana was in the hospital battling (first) pneumonia and septic shock and (then, later) invasive neural bleeding. Didion makes early mention of the fact that there aren't a great many (non-self-help) books that deal directly with grief, especially outside of poetry. Right now, three-quarters of the way through Magical Thinking, I can readily understand why.

Not because the field of inquiry is in any way unrich; no. It's because reading about the unexpected grief of others - the surprise loss, the deadly ordinariness of death's door, the meticulous re-creation of events and medical history created and combed through to make some semblance of sense of things - is terrifying and even immobilizing. When Didion researches her daughter's condition, the blockages in the brain, the blood clots wending their way towards her heart, I am suddenly hyper-aware of my own anatomy. I feel my head swell, my heart clench, my blood flow - not in a celebration of ongoing life, but in a terror that each tremor could hold some unknown meaning. I don't want to feel my body - I want my body to feel.

In the face of Didion's unflinching self-reflection, I wonder if I'm missing something in my squeamishness. She makes a point of chastising herself for failing to anticipate all this tragedy, for ignoring her husband's fearful premonitions. There aren't enough books about grief, she says (despite quoting at length from one of her husband's own) - and here I am racing through the pages of her own, trying to expunge from myself this dark totem.

But I just don't know. Can human beings face death and loss before the time comes? Should they try? It remains a mystery to me, as I head into the final pages.

One last thought: To avoid scaring away those interested, I will say that Magical Thinking is well worth reading. Last night I said to Dave, "It's extremely depressing, but still really beautiful."

"It is?" he asked, skeptical. He doesn't like Joan Didion, and I'll often call something beautiful just to indicate that it has qualities of good.

I don't remember if I replied at all, but in retrospect the answer is yes. Didion retains her straightforward, journalistic style, so the prose is not overflowing with symbols or similes. But the very structure deserves to be called beautiful - the way she lets us into her obsessions, the way she works these dark thoughts over until they are smooth, letting us run our fingers over the surface.

2009-02-11T10:28:00.001-08:00

Our skin and bones make noise

First of all, I'd like to say that the photo above does not necessarily have anything to do with the content of this post. It's just a picture of a contender at the Westminster Dog Show that I got off of Jezebel, in which it looks a lot as though the dog is floating in mid-air. Upon a second glance, it looks more like the dog is being lightly abused. No matter.

The picture is, in its own way, relevant to this post precisely because of where I first ran across it, on the excellent and addictive pop-culture live-action amalgamation that is Jezebel. Like many people, I work at a desk, with a computer, a mouse, and a lot of time on my hands to deal with. Inevitably, I turn to the internet to while away the hours, furtively flipping between Firefox tabs the way, perhaps, a secretary might have hidden a novel on her lap some fifty or sixty years ago (or now, if one's office blocks all the good websites).

My problem is this: as much as I love it, I hate the internet. I've had a hard time articulating why to myself: not all the content is bad - some is great - and it's obviously an invaluable reference tool (I choose not to link to Wikipedia here, because honestly, you can do that for yourself, and there's other stuff out there too, guys).

Nonetheless, I can't help but feel that the internet, as a venue, tends to lower the level of any discourse that encounters it - comment strings are anonymous and vehement, there is often no editing, and daily transcipts of celebutante exploits can travel faster than brushfire via news sites, Jezebel-esque blogs, and sundry social media. You can go to the New York Times looking for information about NAFTA and leave having inadvertently learned that someone in Hollywood doesn't think any woman is as pretty as Julia Roberts.

I'm not pointing fingers at anyone who creates internet content; obviously I blog, and people can't be blamed for doing something they enjoy, can market, and are able to get paid for (not that I am, but someone out there is, I'm sure). Rather, I'm interested in the way that people - again, myself included - ravenously consume the worst and most mindless of information when it's available, how willingly we reduce our (inter?)national conversation to gossip.

Perhaps it's just that the internet is a great equalizer: in Edith Wharton's time, it was only the affluent who were afforded the opportunity to ruin lives with razor wits or cleverly phrased groupthink. But in the age of the internet we are all involved in the lives of socialites - indeed, we all have the opportunity to be socialites; our fifteen minutes of fame have never been more accessible - and anyone can be our Lily Bart. We all scramble to have our say, but what the hell are we talking about?

I'm willing to admit that perhaps this is just my problem; it's my choice to read what I read, write what I write, engage in whatever. For this reason, I'm trying to make a conscious effort to expose myself to different forms of thought and expression - not just writing, but music, art, film. How is it different to talk about fear, anger, or qualities of light in a story or in a song rather than in plain narrative? And how does it affect your thought patterns to encounter such varying conversations?

To that end:

Music
Books

Just a small start.

2008-11-05T08:35:00.001-08:00

OBAMA!

I could scarcely be more pleased - nay, ecstatic - about Barack Obama's decisive victory in the presidential election last night. The upswell of emotion not only around the country but, in fact, around the world inspired tears, champagne toasts, and a spate of text messaging with my family to end all spates of text messaging, ever.

How's THAT for historical.

However, I'm deeply saddened by what looks like a victory for Prop 8 in California, which endangers the thousands of recent marriages between gay couples in that state. Marriages which were beautiful, joyous, and long-awaited.

And so I would like to say, for the record, that I think that a ban on gay marriage weakens the sanctity of heterosexual marriage, or perhaps I should say: of marriage generally.

What a damn shame.

2008-09-19T08:24:00.000-07:00

A Public Service Announcement

So, it was inevitable: Dave has started a blog. A cheese blog no less. I have long been a proponent of his writing, and now that he is combining that skill with my favorite consumable substance, I am filled with incandescent joy.

Sometimes it drives me nuts that he is so much funnier than I am, but then I remind myself that I am a better scuba diver*. Regardless, I recommend visiting his new site: After Cheese Comes Nothing.

*Despite my tiny ear canals.

2008-08-20T07:42:00.000-07:00

My Current Copy is a Dog-Eared Paperback

Today I am thinking about missing people. The thought pattern can be tracked back pretty easily, both the the many (many...many...) visitors who've been through Chicago lately and to the fact that I'm re-reading Marilynne Robinson's Gilead. The first time I picked that book up was, I believe, in 2005, not long after it came out. It was summertime, and people were leaving. The class directly ahead of me at Grinnell was wrapping up their graduation pomp, I was mildly ill, and overwhelmed by all the comings and going. And there was Gilead, on sale at the tiny Grinnell bookstore.

What else was happening? I ask to jog my own memory. I remember Dave's house (erstwhile nicknamed LeSchwArk for all its illustrious residents) during a picnic, almost cracking my tooth on a crawdaddy, crawling upstairs and hiding in Dave's room because I was sick and I just wanted to read. I remember Vanessa in a dress, maybe the first time I had seen such an outlandish thing. I remember the long, lush fields of green.

I was leaving too, although not permanently. The next semester would see me in St. Petersburg, in a tiny apartment on Goroxovaya Ulitsa which smelt of my grandmother's coat closet (there are old parasols in there. I was quite taken with them when I was younger, because they made me feel I was a lady. Little did my proto-feminist brain know). It would be months before I returned to a cold and frozen Iowa tundra, and by that time I would be different, and a significant number of my close friends would be gone. So we were reveling/reckoning that summer.*

My first copy of Gilead was hardbound and expensive, and I think that one Ms. Rachel Pierce is still holding it hostage somewhere. At the time I wasn't as taken with the story as I had hoped to be, after hearing so much positive outpouring from friends who'd read it. My experience with epistolary novels was limited, and so perhaps I got stuck on the form, or on the protagonist.

In a sense, it's reasonable that I would relate to him (the protagonist, that is) more as I am than as I was. At that time, I was surrounded by people in motion. I was actively leaving Iowa, seeking out the greater world, which is exactly what John Ames does not do. After his brother leaves to study German philosophy and goes prodigal, Ames reasserts his faith in the small town of Gilead, his vocation to stay and minister to the sheep in that byway of a place.

Here I am, three years later, and it must be said that I am not in Iowa. However, the action and aims of my life aren't what they once were; I'm no longer thrusting forward quite as violently, and I've come to feel the vital importance of winnowing. By that I don't mean that people should live narrow existences, or that every soul on earth would benefit from spending all their time in the space of a few square miles. But I do think that people tend to overlook how much choices free and shape them - if you leave all possible doors open, you never really get to test your strength in any particular area. You never form the bonds that you would if you moved forward in a definitive direction, and you never achieve the level of creativity and perspective that comes from working within a field of boundaries.

This is why I've always like writing poems within a form.

Gilead is the story of a man who is living with his choices, and who has come to see the light, the beauty, the formlessness of forms. That is something that I am thinking about. And how, you might ask, does this relate to missing people? Why in god's name did I bring that up at the beginning of this little post, only to let it fall by the wayside?

Well, in a sense I am thinking of that wordless nostalgia that tugs on me whenever I meditate on the happy past. Even people who have fallen away from me, run away from me, been pushed away, are attached to memories I will never be free from (even if I wanted to be). I think that the more you sift through the dross of things, the more you shave bits and pieces off, the more acutely you feel the need for what matters.

*Yes, ok, that's the title of an Ani DiFranco album. But it's appropriate! I swear.

2008-06-16T13:44:00.000-07:00

It's always sunny

I just got back from San Francisco, which I was visiting for a conference. Before leaving I was slightly apprehensive - not because I thought that anything bad would happen, but simply because I am a nostalgic person by nature, and I worried that being in a place I so loved living in would tap into some deep emotional wellspring, an unquenchable urge for the past.

This is the thing about places: I am attached to them. Back in college, I remember a friend of mine introduced a reading (from the literary magazine which she had edited, and which I myself would go on to edit) by noting that most, if not all the pieces to be presented centered, revolved, or oscillated quietly around the concept of "place" - an easy thing to do for would-be metropolitan youths stuck by choice in the middle of Iowa. I stood up and read a poem which had nothing to do with this idea, and I felt weirdly smug about it, as though I were transcending some undesirable state of mind or bucking a trend when in fact I was doing neither, I was just reading a poem.

But after living abroad, moving to various unknown cities, and watching how both my life and my writing change as a result, I don't disassociate myself from the concept anymore. Once you've felt displaced, a sense of place seems like a marvelous idea.

2008-05-12T13:02:00.000-07:00

Just My Opinion.

Well, it turns out that Dmitri Nabokov will indeed be publishing The Original of Laura, and I just think that is stupid.

I've heard some compelling arguments for retaining the cards (which contain the manuscript fragments) as archive pieces (though for the record, I am not swayed), but I think publishing them as an actual novel (or even partial novel) is irresponsible to Nabokov's name as a novelist.

But I've said my piece about it. This is just my whiny, teenage-esque grand finale of disapproval.

In other news, my grandmother is having some desperate craving for "French pastry," but after waving napoleons, eclairs, and croissants under her nose, we (or technically, my mother, since I'm not there to do the waving) are (is) experiencing no luck.

Her request (delivered post-suggestion-of-croissant, for the record) includes "pastry dough & cream in the middle & more cream on top & a squiggle of chocolate." Does anyone have any insight?

Doesn't this picture of a napoleon look exactly like that description?

Mon Dieu.

2008-05-06T07:22:00.000-07:00

Hard-Wired

There are some things that I remember in perfect pictures. The image of simultaneous Cyrillic and Roman signage on a dusty St. Petersburg afternoon, for example, seen through sleep-weary eyes and the dirty window of a tour bus driving in from the airport. Or, the first time I caught view of Grinnell College, also from a moving vehicle - a bunch of us kids, being shuttled in to our college home, were crammed in a van making uneasy conversation. The air was dusty, and I was disappointed when I wasn't dropped off on the tree-lined streets of North Campus (that didn't last long...South Campus is where the hippies lived, so of course I fit right in, even post-vegetarianism).

These memories feel to me like movie playback, scenes disconnected from the rest of eternity, but coherent and complete in the annals of my thoughts. But rarely does any image actually trigger a memory, making me woozy with nostalgia. Scents, on the other hand, do this all the time.

When I was younger, I used to think I was strange for reliving memories more completely through scent than through sound or sight. It seemed wrong - people were always telling me that the human sense of smell was far weaker than it is in other animals, and it didn't make sense to me that my brain would connect my memory to my nose. As I've grown, it's become apparent that many people live this way, that in fact it is in some ways hard-wired.

But science aside, I think scent-triggered memory is both interesting and beautiful, in part because it seems animalistic to me, primeval. I'll step into the vestibule of a restaurant and be completely overpowered by a memory of the in-window air conditioner at our motel in Soap Lake Washington, when I was ten years old. It's not the same as remembering what I did while on vacation as a pre-teen (read Nancy Drew novels, rub the "restorative" mud on my skin, watch the dragonflies copulate, get addicted to daytime television...) - instead, I'll remember for a moment what it felt like to be there, the way I was breathing, the boredom, a random itch on my left foot. And the constant top note is reconditioned air, with the knowledge of intense, bone-dry heat outdoors.

It's less a video clip and more deja vu.

Of course, the experience isn't always so intense - sometimes it's just sort of weird, and so it was with the inspiration for this post. The other day I went to the store and bought some new hand soap - nothing earth shattering, but I decided to buy a mango & something-else-fruity scent, because it was purple. And so is my towel. I like to have the bathroom matching.

When I first washed my hands I knew that the scent meant something to me, but I couldn't figure out quite what. It was somewhat pleasant, but not lovely - in fact, it was kind of saccharine, and I just couldn't place it.

So I started mulling over the sweet scents in my life that I don't really like - Naked Juice on someone else's breath, unpleasant perfume, cough syrup, bad rum drinks. But none of them quite fit the bill. Until I happened to glance at a photo of myself in Roatan, on vacation with Dave last year. And then it hit me! It was our bug spray. I have no idea what variety it was, as we bought all our liquids in Honduras, so as not to be mistaken for mad bombers in the airport. But, fueled by a mosquito paranoia and deep hatred for bug bites, I lathered myself with DDT each and every morning. And now, every time I wash my hands, I can relive it.

Hurray? I guess this is all a mixed blessing.

2008-04-14T12:17:00.000-07:00

Sunlight Came as the Biggest Surprise

I have obviously been feeling lazy. Or, more accurately, it would appear that I have been feeling lazy, since I've posted nary a word on this blog for at least two weeks. However, just because I haven't posted anything doesn't mean I haven't written simply hundreds of posts, only to delete them all or leave them languishing as drafts.

Memory has been causing my writer's block - too many memories, not enough time. Or, not enough structure - it seems cheap to me to just write down a story that I've been thinking about, when I haven't actually been thinking anything about it. How many people want to know the frequency with which I bought and consumed yellow box cake with hot pink sprinkles on to in high school?

Well, I'm hoping a lot. Because self-pity doesn't seem to be getting me out of this dry spell, and the only other tactic I can think of is word vomit. So below, I'm going to relate the story I've been mulling over most often, and then hope for the best.

To begin:

My high school was fairly homogeneous, not too much racial or ideological diversity (although we did still vigorously attempt to be the world's noble policemen through participation in such clubs as "Creating a World of Difference"). There was, however, a sufficient mix of decent Christians (like many of the kids I took honors classes with) and willful atheists present, such that our interactions had the occasional opportunity to snap, crackle, and pop.

One of my good friends, during my senior year, was a girl named M* She was (and likely is) a devoted Catholic, though this didn't really interfere with or color our daily interactions. At first glance, M* seemed to fit the stereotype for a sweet little church-going girl, but she was much more interesting than that. Intellectually curious, theatrically risque, and kind beyond measure, I have to say that my interactions with M* were one of the great and pleasant surprises of that year (surprising only because she transferred to my school that fall, not because she was Catholic. Technically, so am I. If you take my baptism as the word of God).

M* and I took an AP Psychology class together senior year, a class that was taught by one of my favorite teachers (she was a tart, sarcastic, totally awesome person, and was distinctly horrified to learn that I liked Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Shows what she knows!), which consisted quite frequently of heated debate.

At least, the debates were supposed to be heated, and I remember them that way, though I'm sure that a great many of them actually fell into the more lukewarm category of "class discussions." Regardless. One day, I walk into class and flip my textbook open to the page noted on the board. The topic for discussion was Doctor Kevorkian, and I immediately pointed this out to M*, because I thought it was interesting. The textbook noted how many people strongly opposed Kevorkian's practice of assisted suicides for terminally ill patients, and just as I was reading a sentence about his imprisonment, I noticed M* shaking an angry fist.

I immediately mapped her reaction onto my experience, and assumed she was angry about the jail term.

"I know, right?" I said.

"Doctor Kevorkian is a bad man," she said (it's quite likely she phrased the thing more delicately or articulately. But it was almost 6 years ago, so come on).

As a liberal high school student in a liberal area, I had rarely been so directly confronted with an opposing position on such a complicated subject as 'right to life' or 'right to death.' The two topics bled into each other, as M* and I carried on what I must imagine was one of the most respectful conversations about Kevorkian, and later abortion, that has ever been held between a self-assured pro-choice teenager and a faithful pro-life classmate. After twenty minutes or so, we realized that the entire class was silent, listening to our discussion. Blushing, we shut up.

I'm sure that neither M* nor I changed our mind as a result of this conversation. But it sticks out in my mind as the moment when I realized - really realized, not just said that I understood - that there could be two well-reasoned sides to a debate, and that I could respect someone who passionately argued for a belief contrary to my own.

A few more, loose, memories of M* - going to a tea house in Seattle with her and the aforementioned psychology teacher; putting on makeup in front of a tiny mirror in Ashland, OR; M* praying back stage before a play with another girl of the same name, a tough but fragile-looking girl for whom so much hinged on her faith in God and her country that she punched a kid who bad-mouthed George Bush, and left - in tears - a history class (again, taught by the same teacher) which covered Christian atrocities during the Crusades.

The second M* may not sound as delightful, but I assure you, she was. I miss them both. I hope they're doing well.

*I'm protecting the innocent again.

2008-04-01T08:41:00.000-07:00

I Get the Feeling this is Mostly About Embarrassment

My Response to a Meme, tagged by Sarah Aswell

No, that duck illustration has nothing to do with the contents of this post. It is an illustration of the pirate duckie that sits on my desk. That is all.

I've never responded to a meme before, but this one seemed kind of fun, in that middle school, MASH RAP kind of a way. I'm not entirely sure why the two things seem related, as this meme is clearly meant to describe the past, whereas MASH RAP is all about diving the future. Perhaps it is because both, ultimately, seem to be a tool for humorous self-effacement. Enjoy!

1. I can’t believe I’ve never… enjoyed basketball one iota. Except for that time that I tried out for the eighth-grade varsity team without ever having played before, just for the hell of it. And I even made a free throw on my first try during free-throw relays, thus sidestepping any rightful humiliation I could have claimed. Really, I’m just not that interested in watching it.

2. Every time I think about…I still cringe. Falling on my ass in a café in Nantes, right after silently congratulating myself for the savoir faire with which I’d ordered my cappuccino. (And for anyone thinking, “But what about that time you asked Aimee Bender to be your best friend?” - mostly I don’t cringe when I think about that, because no matter how humiliating it was, it was also devilishly funny).
3. I wish I'd...when I had the chance.. Taken college-level science courses.

4. I've never felt so out of place as when I... Met Dianne von Furstenberg. That woman and I are worlds apart, and I would say that the same goes for me and most of her admirers. It’s not that I don’t think she has done admirable things, I simply am not comfortable in the same room as her, her deeply expensive wardrobe, her life history as a princess, or the boredom with which she looked at me.

5. …is/are my guiltiest pleasure. Television. Absolutely. It relaxes me deeply, like drugs or hypnotism!

6. I hope…knows how grateful I am for… I hope my high school soccer teams know how grateful I am for teaching me what it feels like to be muscular and fit. Of course, they probably don’t, because I have repaid this fine favor with years of laziness.

7. In my darkest hours, I secretly blame…for my dysfunction. Indecisiveness.

8. …changed my life forever. Going to Russia. I feel like choosing my term of studying abroad for this question is a bit cheap, but it absolutely altered my outlook on the world. For two years after I left, my writing and my thoughts were saturated with St. Petersburg. I still have monthly dreams about going back.

Ok, and for the viral continuation of this mem, I tag Mark Bourne, Liza Newman, and Ms. Mozzadrella. Do what you will with this information.

2008-03-21T13:21:00.001-07:00

Spring is Sprung

There are quite a few people I've spoken to in the past year who say they prefer living in the Midwest, because they really crave natural seasons. I am here to call these people liars.

As far as I can tell, most people who live in the Midwest are just as averse to snow in late March as people who live in California - if anything, they complain more than I do. Maybe it's because, when I moved to Chicago, everyone warned me how hard it would be - how long, cold, and dark the winter. And while it truly has been all those things, I can't help but face into the icy winds coming off of Lake Michigan, and think to myself (loudly, in a shouting voice) IS THIS ALL YOU'VE GOT?

Maybe the issue is not that people don't crave seasons, it's more that the Midwest actually lacks them. For example, today we've been having the first blizzard of spring. To me, this does not suggest that Chicago is the bastion of meteorological diversity that some have implied.

I don't have much to go with this. I'm not depressed about the weather. But when I look out my office window to the scene below, I no longer feel like I am in a cherished snowglobe. Now it feels more like ash is raining down from the heavens, and yea, disbelievers, the end is nigh.

2008-03-05T11:59:00.000-08:00

Burn Baby, Burn

In the grand scheme of things, I am a pack rat. That is to say I hoard things, I collect what is useful and what is useless with almost no discrimination. A pair of socks with several holes in them may remain in my crammed drawers for years, simply because I'm too mournful to throw out a piece of clothing that someone once complimented (yes, people compliment my socks. You mean people don't compliment your socks?). At the bottom of each of my twenty or so defunct purses you will find beach glass, marbles, Russian alka-seltzer, sugar packets from old restaurants, torn movie stubs, and colorful push-pins.

It's safe to say that I hold with sentimentality.

But strangely enough, I do not want to save Vladimir Nabokov's last, unfinished manuscript. In the press these past few years (and most especially these past few weeks and months) there has been a flurry of debate over what to do with the pages of this manuscript, entitled The Original of Laura. Nabokov left explicit instructions for the book, if unfinished at the time of his death, to be burned.

For reasons of her own, his wife Vera did not do so before she herself passed away, leaving the manuscript in the hands of their son Dmitri. Evidently, Dmitri has been agonizing about what to do ever since, with the help of Nabokov scholars and readers worldwide (here are the first two articles that I read on the subject, by Ron Rosenbaum on Slate.com. I find his take on the subject interesting, if dramatic, but his tone somewhat self-righteous and irritating). My friend Keith brought this to my attention, since he knows I share his love for Nabokov's work. What would you do? he asked me. If it was your decision?

At first, I admit, I wasn't sure. Here was the opportunity for more of Nabokov's work to be released into the world - a beautiful thing, but at what cost? It troubled me that Nabokov, who presided over every detail of his writing with a dictatorial firmness, had asked for the manuscript to be destroyed. But would anything be lost by maintaining it against his wishes? Didn't Kafka ask for his work to be destroyed too?

After my moment of wavering nostalgia, however, I've decided definitively on "burn it." Because, as much as I adore Nabokov and would love another piece of his work to exist...it doesn't. One of the things I am most fond of is his obsessive control, the knowledge (or assumed knowledge) that everything in a piece by Nabokov is intended to be there. The thought of his son (a faithful translator of his father's work, by the way) not carrying out his last wishes (where the book is concerned) and destroy the manuscript cripples, to some degree, the melding of the real and the imagined, the dual reality that was Nabokov's literary domain.

Tom Stoppard (who noted the knee-jerk association of this scenario with Kafka's plea) got it right when he said that we as human beings have a "completeness complex" - people hungrily assume that they have a right to everything that has existed or could exist, that the burning of The Original of Laura is tantamount to a personal denial. It's simply not so. It was never our choice.

One last thought. If you demand completeness, consider this: the character of Nabokov's work was defined by his intentions. Whatever The Original of Laura could have been as a complete work, it will never become a finished product, it will never be able to live independent of the vision that Nabokov had in mind. Given this, I believe that the unfinished manuscript stands as a more beautiful contribution to his oeuvre as an intact mystery than it would as the empty bones of a piece, passed from hand to hand, unable to speak for itself.

2008-02-27T13:40:00.001-08:00

In Which I Use Many Footnotes

Recently I've been contemplating changing all the illustrations for this blog to things I draw pathetically myself in Paint. Not so much because I think it would be visually appealing (stimulating, perhaps), but more so because it brings to mind the fond memory of the time that I sent my friend M* a particularly choice piece of Paint art.

M* was, at that time, in her first job outside of college, and had let me know that she was so bored that she would drink glass upon glass of water, simply so that she would have to get up and go to the bathroom, such that she would have something to do. I have experimented with this singular piece of genius myself from time to time, and let me tell you, it works (an aside: the bathroom in my building has become a uniquely entertaining place. Today alone, while I was in there minding my own business, a woman went into a stall all the way at the other end and started saying "Ron? Ron?" and then Tsk!-ing wildly whenever this Ron did not respond, and angrily rolling out copious amounts of paper. I left in haste)!

So, I suggested that in order to alleviate her boredom, M* ought to start laundering money from her company, such that she could retire at age 25 in a glorious tropical paradise. The picture that I sent her was my interpretation of her, in a solid gold bikini, dancing in a rain shower of her laundered money. And yes, of course it was glorious.**

My other thought lately was to purchase a digital camera, and though that option may be less outstandingly! creative than drawings in Paint, it is a bit more pragmatic. For example, this past week Dave*** and I were in New York, where we did many wonderful things, including attending the wedding reception of my friend Sarah. I would dearly have loved to document that event, and many others, but since I don't have a digital camera it became impossible. I did later discover that Dave brought his camera along specifically so that I could take pictures of things, but he never once mentioned this to me until after we had returned to Chicago****.

This was the first time I had ever met Sarah's now-husband Ben, but he did make a good first impression when he immediately got into a heated discussion with me about Cormac McCarthy's new novel The Road. I know that I'm a bit late getting around to reading this novel, and that because of Oprah, 90% of humanity has already shoved at least one full copy of this book into their mouth to show proper affection, but that's just not the way I do things.

I won't get into the finer details of our conversation, partially because beer was involved and so I can't recall the whole thing. But I will say that the book thoroughly occupied my attention and reminded me of how easily McCarthy can alter one's sense of beauty to include within it the terrible and the diasporic.

The back of the book, I believe, calls it "Perhaps [McCarthy's] most personal work yet," and I thought that statement actually sells the book a bit short. When people think that they are getting into an author's heart, they seem to think that they are getting what they deserve. But The Road, while I'm sure it contains many elements of McCarthy's mind and memory and soul, seems to me to reach beyond that - beyond the desolation of a single human heart, and into the desert that humans all share.

That is what a good reader***** deserves from a masterpiece.

*Name withheld to protect the innocent
**Though not so glorious that I didn't forget to save it when my college deleted my old email account. What you see is a bastardized reproduction. Curses!
***Dave is not innocent, which is why I never try to protect his name. In fact, I don't know why I chose to start doing that in this post at all. I suppose it's because I recommended money laundering to someone I later depicted in flimsy swimwear.
****See? Not innocent! J'accuse!
*****I'm very much fascinated by the idea of a "good reader," and while I do believe they exist separately from bad and mediocre readers, I have yet to convincingly define them for myself. I do recommend, as a meditation on the subject, Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler.

2008-02-14T08:48:00.000-08:00

Vaguely in favor of heart-shaped things

Do I hate Valentine's Day, or do I love it? Or, to put it better, am I fully indifferent to the concept, or merely ambivalent?

If I'm ambivalent, it's the holiday itself that made me this way: fate has never destined me for a truly great or romantic Valentine's, and more and more, I think that's the way that I want it. Like so many people that I know, I find the holiday trite and unnecessary - why would you ordain a day on which to spontaneously show your love?

To give an example of why Valentine's Day doesn't exactly get my heart beating all pitter-patter, I'd like to relate a story which has nothing to do with romance, though it is tinged with the bittersweet quality of unrequited love: My junior year of college, Dave and I thought that a fun way to spend the day would be to go play with puppies. Unfortunately, in Iowa our options were a bit slim in this department, and we ended up at the Iowa City Pound.

At first, we thought we would be stuck in a room full entirely with cats and the scent of stale urine (pitter! patter!), but did eventually make our way to an outdoor concrete enclosure, where we fell in love with two vagrant mongrels: one was a puppy named Huxley who looked exactly like a bear, with huge paws, an unfathomably large nose, and the softest fur you've ever touched. I loved Huxley in the same way one loves Brett Favre, which is to say, as if he were a big stuffed animal.

The second dog, whose name I have regretfully misplaced in the annals of memory, was a different sort of a matter. Huxley was a baby, and it was clear that he was only going to be in the shelter for as long as it took for someone to come to the pound who had the legitimate means to adopt a dog. This other dog - let's call him Rambo - had bigger problems. Rambo had been abused at some point in his life, and was deathly afraid of all men. He sidled shyly into the enclosure, giving Dave a wide berth at first, but eventually allowing both of us to pat him and tell him he was a good dog (as I will do for any dog within hearing range). Rambo was also a documented (perhaps "established?" Does one really document such things?) chicken killer, which is a significant liability in farming country. When we left at the end of the day I was not concerned for Huxley, but Rambo weighed upon my conscience.

That sums up, more or less, how I feel about Valentine's Day: it makes you happy, but only temporarily, because the joy is forced. Candies & cupcakes? They give you a sugar rush, sure, but that results in a sugar crash (like drugs!). Fancy dinner out? Great, until you realize that the prix fixe menu is worse than what you'd usually get at any given restaurant, and the banter from 1st dates at nearby tables is exponentially more awkward and obnoxious.

However, I try not to be more cynical about things than I must be, and so I am choosing to be happy that it's Valentine's Day, if only for these two reasons:

1. I will pretty much take any opportunity to drink champagne
2. If not for Valentine's day, what would happen the the Heart-Shaped Things industry? This is a serious matter to be discussed at length.

2008-02-07T08:14:00.000-08:00

And furthermore, what?

Some days, you are at work pushing money around from one big company to another, and you just start to wonder, what is the point of human existence? Granted, this is a question that has consumed philosophical minds for centuries - indeed, for perhaps as long as human beings have been conscious. Not just as long as desk jobs have existed. But I digress.

Probably because I grew up reading fantasy literature, this question has always had a somewhat sci-fi edge to it in my mind, and that impression was only heightened by the short article I read today on Discovery News about human fetuses being created from the DNA of three parents.

The logic behind these experiments is very simple: if there is a small part of DNA in two parents which could result in a debilitating disorder, using the DNA from a third-party allows science to help the embryo bypass the potentially harmful effects while still creating a child from using boy & girl parts from the original two people. This makes a great deal of sense to me, because as much as the sci-fi nerd in me has bred an inborn fear of the Apocalypse (no, not the Biblical one! Perhaps I shouldn't have capitalized?), I am generally in favor of medical science. And not being ill.

However, I can't help but wonder what this type of in-vitro fertilization will eventually mean for our conception of mankind. Scientists in the article insist that "it would be incorrect to say that the embryos have three parents." Yet it seems to me that human beings, when conceptualizing their own "whatness" (I choose this word because I've already used "being" too much, plus it makes people sound like robots or objects. Cool), do not think in such simple, logical terms.

Adopted children, no matter how much they love the parents who raised them, often get the urge to know or at least meet their birth parents. Not because they find the families that they know inauthentic (keep in mind that I'm generalizing here based on the media perception and documentation of adoption), but because there is some small part of them that wishes to view their origins - the genetic building blocks that came together to result in their very existence.

With the nature/nurture argument placed on temporary time-out, I can sympathize with that logic. Because looking at any part of my body, or contemplating any single aspect of my own mind, brings the inexorable belief that we are complicated and fortuitous little chemistry experiments, and that researching my biological and psychological roots is the sensible first step to understanding myself. I mean, I'm not there yet, but it's a start.

And so I find it hard to believe that a child who carries the DNA of three people would not be curious about the third contributor to their genetic makeup - that some small part of that child would not consider that person a parent (at least when they got old enough to be cripplingly self-analytical).

So while I don't believe that the essence of one's humanity is negatively affected by starting out in a lab, I do think that this discovery is more definitive than simple in-vitro fertilization. Because it is contributing a new angle to the age old question: what are we? And while this may be less important, it is contributing no answers.

******Image credit: 'Good Morning in Room 220' by MegElizabeth on Flickr.com.

2008-01-30T08:30:00.000-08:00

Slow Down

I have a mind like a steel trap where Calvin & Hobbes cartoons & quotes/plots from bad TV shows are concerned. The near-photographic perfection of my memory regarding these things has never helped me out on math, science, or history tests (for those, I had to use hard work and dedication to actually learn things). I did not choose to be this way, it's simply who I am.

At any rate, because of this skill the first thing that come to mind when I think about the past few days of my life is an old Calvin and Hobbes strip (from 1988! I'm a genius!), in which Calvin has come down with the flu in the middle of the night, and is sitting up frightened in bed.

"It's scary being sick..." he said (and yes, I'm assigning agency to a technically fictitious character here. I write ficiton, ok? This is my world!) "Especially at night. What if something is REALLY wrong with me, and I have to go to the hospital?? What if they stick me full of tubes and hoses? What if they have to operate? What if the operation fails? What if this is my... my... last night... ALIVE??"

This past weekend I developed a fierce set of hives all over my body (as well as a charming rash on my posterior), apparently as the result of an allergy to an antibiotic I had been taking. I've had outbreaks of hives at various points in my life, so this shouldn't necessarily have been the scariest thing in the world: usually, I assume that my body is healthy enough to heal most anything, because I am young and invincible. However, last year at about this time I had a similar allergic reaction, complete with hives in my throat, the cause of which was never determined. I was not on the same antibiotics at the time.

Because of the air of mystery surrounding my condition, I couldn't help but be nervous, and every new symptom made me go a little bit more crazy. The appearance of each hive caused me to hyperventilate in Dave's general direction (note: playing Scrabble while stressed out due to illness will not calm you down), and the swelling up of my hands like link sausages made me miss work 2 days in a row. When my breathing turned wheezy (wheezy sounding: it was still not hard to breathe, my throat was not closing up, and the doctor didn't find any hives in my throat this time) I laid awake in bed until 4:30 in the morning, wondering if I should go stab my EpiPen into my thigh.

Luckily, the antihistamine that I was prescribed seemed to do away with most of my visible symptoms (Dave is still calling me by my new Indian name, Fat Paws), but didn't help at all with the sudden pain in the joints of my hands, wrists, and feet. This reached the point, yesterday, where I could barely carry home a bag of groceries without dropping them everywhere and suffering for it later. This seems to have gone away more or less on its own, though flexing my hands still feels...weird. Not painful, just not right.

When I was a child I didn't really relate to Calvin's fear of illness, perhaps because I so trusted in the wisdom of my parents to get me well again. But now, with a not-really-life-threatening, but-incredibly-annoying condition on my hands, I suddenly knew just what he was talking about. What if I don't know what my throat closing up feels like, and I just ignore it? I worried. What if this is the first sign that my body no longer intends to fight disease?

This all made me realize what it feels like to have an invader in your body, something steadily, stealthily doing you harm from the vantage point of your own bones and sinews. Whatever I was allergic to, it was in my blood. By now, I'm really just fine. But this experience really shook me up, and I'm curious how many other people have become a bit more wary of their illnesses as they've emerged from childhood.

*** Image Credit: 'From my sick bed' by angusf on Flickr.com

2008-01-17T11:46:00.000-08:00

The Belly of the Beast

in which I recount the saddest story ever told

This is a story for all the girls and boys out there who were afraid, up to this point, that it was impossible to send a sandwich through the the US Postal System. Let us rejoice! For the world is rife with possibility. And please do not be shy, I know there are a lot of you out there, just waiting to provide your friends and lovers with the best that sandwiches have to offer. So let us begin.

A few months ago, when I was still living in the South Bay Area and rarely even stopped to remember that such a thing as "sleet" existed, my friend Rachel came to me with a problem.

"I was hungry," she said, "and we were out of chips. I tried to go to the store, but I couldn't get the top up on the car, and so I just sat there in the garage, sadly banging on the hinges of the car top, getting hungrier by the minute. And the worst part of it is, even if I had gotten to the store, they would only have had those stupid, healthy, organic chips." It's worth noting that it was also a dark and stormy night. Let's ignore for the moment the fact that our poor bereft waif was trying to dive a convertible.

Rachel was living with well-to-do relatives in New Jersey which attending a sadly lacking graduate school. Before you start thinking that she is a fat, lazy, chip-hungry maniac with poor eating habits, you should know that she is one of the thinner, healthier people I know - the very person who taught me what polenta was. I plan to use the rest of this story to illustrate her intelligence, but if you're not convinced, you will be once she has her PhD.

Being the kind and generous soul that I am, I quickly sent her a box of chips via parcel post, which I am told she ate happily. In return, she told me about a deli near her house with sandwiches so delectable that an ex-resident of the town, who now lived in San Francisco, had them sent to him every week.

"I will send you one of these sandwiches," she said. "And then we'll be even."

Days and weeks go by, each one more sandwichless than the last, and eventually I sort of forget that we ever made this deal. So one Saturday afternoon, while I was out on a walk, I happened to miss the mailman when he came to deliver me a package. I looked at the sticky slip on my door, completely baffled as to what this package might be. It wasn't my birthday. It wasn't Christmas. What's left? I assumed my parents were most likely to be responsible for outright benevolence, and didn't think much of it (since I am an ungrateful whelp). It was too late to go to the post office, and for whatever reason they couldn't re-deliver until the following Tuesday.

Finally, my long-awaited package arrived. I was at work when this happened, but Dave sent me an email.

"I don't think you're going to be very happy," he says. "It was a sandwich. Past tense."

Suddenly the whole conversation about New Jersey and magical delis comes rushing back, and I gaze in mute horror at the screen. My perfect sandwich. My lusted-after sandwich. My gift sandwich - it was all disappearing. And it was all my fault for not being more proactive about going to the damned post office.

When I got home that evening I looked at the now-moldy wunderkind of mail-order sustenance, which Dave had lovingly placed in the refrigerator for my perusal. It was not packaged for long-term survival, just wrapped in layers of wax paper and placed in a thick envelope for Fragile things. It was delicate and ephemeral, like all good things on this earth.

Unfortunately, although it still smelled awesome (no, really!) it was not to be ingested. And so I made the long march out to our apartment building's dumpster, and shoved it unceremoniously inside to be baked into further putrescence by the California sun.

And then I shed a tear. I'm sure that, by now, you're all crying with me.

HOWEVER. Don't lose heart yet. For after explaining to Rachel the sad fate of her benevolent gift, she promised to send another one some day, with better planning and execution.

"Because you really should taste that sandwich," she said.

And so, flash forward to this past Monday, when Dave let me know that I had received yet another missed package slip, this time on the front door of our apartment in snowy Chicago (the discerning reader will realize that I have transitioned, in the course of this post, from "sleet" to "snow." You're getting up-to-date weather reports, people). I knew that Rachel had been in New Jersey again, this time doing some research for her Masters thesis. A familiar, sinking feeling developed in my gut. I would never taste the sandwich of my dreams, I decided, and I should just learn to live with it.

But, this tale has a happy ending. For this time, I did not have to wait an entire weekend-and-then-slightly-longer-for-no-good-reason-goddamnit - indeed, the package arrived the very next morning, safe in David's loving arms. For some still-unknown reason, he didn't devour it on the spot. What a nice boy.

And, more important than either the mail system or David's hibernating appetite is the true fact of Rachel's brilliance. For this package contained not only the sandwich and some wax paper, but also two items of insulating iced tea.

Bravo, Rachel! And bravo to you, gentle reader, for getting past the saddest story ever told and on to the happy ending. How many times in your life will you ever again be able to muster the same courage?

******It should be noted that on days when I'm terrified by the prospect of applying to MFA programs and simultaneously bored at work, sandwiches are often all I can think about.

******Photo credit: http://www.phinker.com/phink85.htm

2008-01-15T10:51:00.000-08:00

The Darkest Stuff of the Human Mind

Back in my first year of college, lo these many years ago, I took a physics class. Now, there are some who will argue that it was less a "physics" class and more a "get-out-of-science-free" card. And yes, the class was given many nicknames, like Physics for Poets, Physics for the Lazy, or Stars and their Friends (thank you Orhan Pamuk).

But I also really loved that class. Due to a singularly unpleasant chemistry class and a youthful disposition, I let math and science fall somewhat by the wayside in high school, meaning that I didn't have the calculus credit or the wherewithal to become a physics whiz in college. But that doesn't mean that I'm not interested in science. I find the theoretical conversations that exist in the realm of physics to be not so far removed from the philosophy classes I did take in abundance. And furthermore, I am always deeply enchanted when I find that there is math out there to support an idea that sounds perfectly insane.

So anyway, this physics class. What I remember most strongly, besides the fact that the professor tossed out popcorn balls to illustrate the Big Bang, was a cosmological notion I came across while studying for the final.

I can't remember the exact wording, but the gist was this: if dark matter - which is an important, if highly debated, part of the scientific explanation for gravity in the larger universe (or so I've been led to believe) - indeed exists in a non-speculative sense, it makes up the majority of all that exists. Therefore, everything we've ever studied on a grand or minor scale, from entomology to cosmology, is nothing more than the ephemera of the universe.

How's that for a reorganization of your priorities? When I got tired of studying, I ran down to Bob's, the student-run coffee shop, and told my friend Ashley what I had read. I was so excited by the idea that my every aspect was bubbling over, but poor Ashley was tired, and she looked at me and said:

"Adrienne, it's finals week. Please do not give me even more to think about."

Oh well. Sorry Ashley.

From what I can tell, the study of the universe and its structures is full of these gratifyingly bizarre facts and theories, and the one I read about today - in a New York Times article by Dennis Overbye - may just be the strangest one yet. Not surprisingly, what really got me about this theory was the aesthetics of the thing, spurred by a moment early on in the Times article. Overbye wrote:

"The basic problem is that across the eons of time, the standard theories suggest, the universe can recur over and over again in an endless cycle of big bangs, but it’s hard for nature to make a whole universe. It’s much easier to make fragments of one, like planets, yourself maybe in a spacesuit or even — in the most absurd and troubling example — a naked brain floating in space. Nature tends to do what is easiest, from the standpoint of energy and probability. And so these fragments — in particular the brains — would appear far more frequently than real full-fledged universes, or than us. Or they might be us."

There you have it: a Boltzmann brain. It's simple, it's smart, and it floats in outer space.

For me, the creepy and interesting thing about this concept is not its lasting implications for physics, consciousness, or thermodynamics. Rather, I am fascinated about what it would mean for the existence of this moment, as I am experiencing it.

If I were a mere figment in the imagination of a "freaky observer," as the Boltzmann brains were called, that would mean that a snapping synapse in the empty universe was resulting in a person who was reading about that same synapse. My life would be an imagined headline in an intelligent mind, proclaiming that the mind itself may turn out to be real .

To me, this is rather like a person convincing themselves that their dreams indeed believe in them.

*****Photo Credit: Jef Poskanzer on Flickr.com.

2008-01-07T15:02:00.000-08:00

Champeen!

I have always been a little bit overzealous in my fitness aspirations. For example, as anyone who speaks to me about running will know, I exercise maybe once a week, but it has for several years been my stated goal to be able to outrun a tiger.

If I just want it badly enough, I can accomplish anything, right? Mommy?

Anyway, the one thing I have been pretty good at in the past, which makes me feel suitably tough, is boxing. Yes, it's usually cardio-kickboxing, which is not exactly the stuff of or Million Dollar Baby or Rocky, but who wants to die in the end of the movie? Or lose?

I'm hoping to do more boxing in the future, but for now I'd like to make plain my prowess with a couple of fight portraits, taken in Portland, OR, this past December. They illustrate a triumphant match between a punching bag and the heralded team made up of myself & my young cousin Eddie.

It's probably worth mentioning that Eddie tried to beat me up right after these photos were taken. But I was not defeated!

2007-12-18T08:04:00.001-08:00

The City is a Strange Protector

This morning on the El (so many of my stories start that way these days) I was standing around, waiting for a seat to open up. It doesn't particularly annoy me to stand - the ride isn't very long and I sit down at a desk all day. All the same, there's a sort of sport to getting a seat; you have to hedge your bets about where to stand, which people to face (Did I hear him rustling his newspaper? Is he closing it in preparation to disembark, or just turning the page? And is that tarty woman applying more lipstick or reaching into her bag to get her gloves?).

A man finally stood up in my vicinity, freeing a space which I quickly made for. At the same moment however, a young boy sitting just behind the newly vacated seat stood up and headed for it as well. We both stopped and looked at each other. The spot he was leaving was next to a heavily corpulent man wearing the world's poofiest jacket - that is, it was 3/8 of a spot. I was just about to raise my eyebrow condescendingly at the kid (ok, I admit it, the El turns me into a monster) when I realized he was just moving to sit next to his mom. I stood aside and let him pass, squishing myself in next to the man made of down stuffing and Cheetos.

For the rest of the ride, I enjoyed sitting behind the little family I had discovered, hearing the kid's mother begin to scold him for not tidying his room, and then watching as they both dissolved into laughter over some whispered joke I was not privy to. When I was younger I spent a lot of time riding buses with my mother - not every day, or every week even, but more times than I can count on one hand. I remember it as bestowing a strange sense of security - we had gotten lost in the middle of the city, and somehow, just by looking at a couple of signs, my mother had put us on a warm crowded vehicle straight into the heart of familiar territory.

One evening, after shopping downtown for several hours, my mother and I had strayed too far from wherever it was we began, and it had started to rain. I don't remember how we got there - maybe we were dropped off, maybe we just made the long trek from my grandmother's house. Neither option would be out of character for my mom, who taught me by age six to walk faster than companions with legs three times my size.

We waited for what seemed like several hours at the bus stop, me swinging around the light pole and probably whining about how cold I was. To pass the time, my mother started telling me the story of Interview with a Vampire. Our family has historically had little to no compunction about taking young kids to adult movies, but for whatever reason I hadn't gone with her to this show, and I think I like the story all the better for it. She talked all night long, in the dark and the rain, and continuing on the soft seats of the bus (really: Seattle buses are nicely outfitted, even if they don't run enough routes) as the windows steamed next to us. When we got to the part where Kirsten Dunst's character burns in the sunlight, huddled against the mother figure of her afterlife, I remember feeling hollow and sad, but energized.

The story carried me through, and eventually we got back to my grandmother's house, where we spent most weekends, and had a normal dinner and evening. I probably read a book, or some of the Archie Comics that fill that house in voluminous piles (an aside: I swear I picked up at least 50% of my young vocabulary from the Riverdale Gang). But no matter how normal or even boring the day became, I've remembered that bus ride ever since, safe by my mother's side.

In the face of all that maternal goodwill, I feel like I need to provide a counterpoint for how bizarre and unsettling city life can also be. In this case, I can't help but think of the most hilarious thing that has happened to me in recent memory: walking to my office building, I pass several 7-Eleven-type establishments, and at least 2 or three bars. As I passed in front of a convenience store the other day, a man happened to be walking out of it, laughing out loud to himself. I pricked my ears up, because I felt like this was a man worth listening to.

Suddenly, providentially, he spoke! And these were his words:

"I aint' never gonna be good. I was born bad!"

And then he continued laughing, deep from his belly until long after I had turned the corner and walked away.

****Photo credit: http://www.logodesignweb.com/stockphoto/

2007-12-05T10:35:00.001-08:00

White Out

For Thanksgiving, Dave and I went to Madison, where we spent perhaps the most relaxing few days I have had in a long time - despite the fact that his skittish dog has not yet learned to love me (my own personal tragedy). For the sake of this story, however, all you really need to know is that one day we went downtown with Dave's friend Alex and knocked around some bookstores.

The first one we went to was one of those peculiar mixes of pleasant dust motes and very poor selection. We couldn't find anything particularly good, save for one old copy of Gargantua and Pantagruel which looked like its pages had been cut open with a hacksaw. However, Alex was the one looking for that gem, and he decided that it had too much commentary.

I spent a fair amount of time shuffling through a shelf of old humor compilations, replete with every Crazy/Naive Wife and Witchy Mother-in-Law joke you could imagine, plus some several Good Old Boys in the Wilds of Africa numbers. In-law jokes represent to me a particular style of humor, meant more to elicit a groan than an actual belly laugh. Today it's snowing, and it reminds me of a story my sixth-grade teacher once told us, which carried with it almost the same flavor.

One winter, she said, her town was hit with a deep overnight snowfall. Everyone woke up and started stamping around, throwing snowballs, and generally having a good time. One of her friends however, seemed somewhat perturbed, and so my teacher asked her why.

"I was just surprised to see it had snowed this morning," she said.

"Why?" asked my teacher.

"Well, because I didn't hear it!"

At the time, as I recall, everyone in the class found the joke hilarious. It was one of those stories that makes you laugh mindlessly, if skeptically. The thing is, however, as sixth-grade kids I believe that if we taken the time to think anything at all, we probably would have found the joke funny for all the wrong reasons. Most likely, we would have considered the surprised woman a fool, just plain wrong about the properties of snowfall. That is, after all, the principle that makes a mother-in-law joke so hit-you-while-you're-down hilarious: the mother-in-law is always stupid.

But I don't think that's the way my teacher meant the joke to come across. The way I think about it now is that it had simply never occurred to anyone in my class that snow would make a sound. Whereas, to this one woman, that belief was completely natural and fully ingrained. That's what we found so funny, and so unlikely: a mind unlike our own.

2007-11-13T10:31:00.001-08:00

One Day my Wish will Come True

Today I only have a few random things to impart, and it is in that spirit of randomness that I include a picture of a little pig with two noses and one eye (but all heart?). Because honestly, nothing is more random and fascinating that disfigurations resulting from mal-accomplished animal husbandry.

I first discovered that on a trip to the Kunstkamera Museum in Russia, which houses Peter the Great's collection of freaks. My friend Sabrina and I thought that we would be all over this little vacation destination, but in fact lost heart after a significant amount of time in the human fetus room. There was a pretty fascinating attention to detail, however, a testament to the dedication of some of the first scholars of anatomy. For example: a tiny human hand, not only perfectly preserved, but accompanied into the formaldehyde afterlife by painted nails and a little lace cuff.

My mother thought that the museum was the cat's meow, and she's successfully brought four children into the world. So it's possible that Sab and I are just wussies. Always something to consider.

The past few days have found me more than a little homesick for Russia - or perhaps not just Russia, though the memory of seeing the St. Petersburg streets gussied up for Christmas with snow and faerie lights tugs at my chest. I guess I'm a bit heartsick for wide open spaces, adventure and strangeness. Sometimes this leads me to read job postings in Appalachia, just for the hell of it.

A large part of my mood - both good and bad - is being governed by my continued participation in National Novel Writing Month. The concept always gave me a bit of indigestion before this year, because I thought it cheapened and made (mere) craft out of the work of writing. But as an actual participant, I'm really enjoying it. Mostly I feel the flexing possibility of actual accomplishment: yes, the novel I am writing now, in its current draft and formulation, may be bunkum, but I have written 64 pages in 12 days. I can write 64 pages of something, and not hate them all (just some)!

The writing of 1,667 words (at least) per day is wreaking a bit of havoc on my free time, however. It takes about 1.5 to 2 hours to complete the goal, which means that I don't ever want to go out to dinner, go to an improv show, or even watch a movie. It is a little bit wearing.

But it feels like a very different world from my actual job, where I am bound by duty to spend 8 hours of every day. Most months out of the year, when I get home it will take me a little while to unwind, and when I do I won't want to stop. Actually getting to work on my writing, as opposed to reading, watching a movie, or drinking a glass of wine with Dave, seems like an uphill road. But since beginning to work on a NaNo novel (or whatever...I still find the abbreviation silly), writing has become a separate and welcome world for me. Though some days I may end up only half-satisfied with what I've produced, I always wish I could continue. Certainly, I've been reminded that 8 hours a day on the novel and maybe 2 (or zero) in a desk job would be preferable.

But that's a pretty airy and distant dream. Not a bad sort of dream to have.

2007-11-05T07:48:00.000-08:00

You Mean you Don't Know?

Not to beat a dead horse, but I did finally see The Darjeeling Limited this past Friday. Much to my surprise (because I hadn't clicked on or read any of the mini-ads that are popping up all over the NYTimes.com, though now I somehow can't miss them) the Hotel Chevalier short was attached to the feature film in theatres, so now I've seen it three times. I cannot help but ask myself, Why?

Although I preferrred watching Hotel Chevalier in theatres for its higher resolution and saturation of color, I was disappointed by its interplay with the full-length feature. As a short supplement to a richer and more complex storyline, Chevalier could have come off quite well. The details in the brief picture are all in the implications: everything remains unsaid between the two ex-lovers (played by Natalie Portman and Jason Schwartzman), forcing us to imagine why she might have bruises on her arms, why he has run away to gay Paris. Knowing that this 15 minute interlude is a mere prequel, we are ready for the complexity that certainly must be coming to sustain a feature-length film with these characters.

But it never comes. Wes Anderson, for all his cult following (and believe me, I still get a brief thrill up my spine when I think about watching Rushmore for the first time) seems to have faded away into his own self-conscious aesthetic. While the characters in The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic were charmingly oblique, we were at least able to discern the limits of their motivations - their various births and implications. In The Darjeeling Limited, however, Anderson never quite moves beyond the coy characterization of Chevalier. It's up to the audience to decide whether or not the people he sets before them are real, and that's not quite fair.

Those in attendance with me on Friday expressed a similar ambivalence.

"Did you like it?" we asked one another, chewing on our lips in anxiety.

"Um, sort of?" came the inevitable reply.

Perhaps this type of storytelling - implication over explication - is an appropriate method for a generation of people stuck in their twenties, trying to look cool while we flail around for something to do. Indeed, perhaps all of us, desperately seeking respect and engagement from a world which considers us too young to have a family and too inexperienced to have a "career," are meant to see some echo of our own disembodied techno-freak personalities in the wispy, unsatisfying Anderson (and similar - this also seems to be a symptom of a lot of short-story writing these days) protagonists. We have the attention span for as much knowledge as we can get on Wikipedia: perhaps we don't deserve to watch characters who know any more than that about themselves.

It's the new cool in inner life: if you have to ask, you can't afford it.

Or maybe I'm just stressed out about National Novel Writing Month and paranoid about my own artistic output. It's only fair to put that option on the table too!

*** Image credit: http://www.visionarts.ca/photoillusion.htm
It's actually a bit more interesting in this location, because the original website is equipped to play up the optical illusion. Don't you see the moo cow?

2007-10-31T07:13:00.000-07:00

Puppy Love

Yesterday, while walking home from an improv show at the Annoyance Theatre, something truly magical happened. Or possibly it was something spooky: you decide.

When I leave an improv show I often find that everyone around me is trying to be a lot funnier than usual, as if to try and get in on the act. It can be annoying, but usually it's just a symptom of the ebullient high spirits which accompany a really excellent piece of performance, especially one in which you've been laughing for twenty minutes at some guy who's talking in an effeminate-yet-indefinable fake foreign accent, and trying to hide the fact that he's just watered down his imaginary salsa.

It made sense at the time, I swear.

Anyway, I was in the same jokey mood as those around me, which I usually express in story-telling mode. So as we walked down the darkened residential streets I began trying to amuse someone with the story of the Peculiar Dog Man of West Argyle Street. The Dog Man is not an urban myth, but a vaguely unsettling neighborhood character whom I see from time to time, walking his white American Eskimo Dog (I put this particular breed before you as a likely guess). The thing about him that makes me frown and cross the street when he's nearby is not anything particularly menacing. Rather, it's his simple propensity for engaging people in prolonged conversations that they do not want to be in.

Now, I've only ever seen him actually do this with other dog walkers: he'll blink his big, bleary eyes and start asking someone painfully obvious questions like: "So do you like dogs?" while their unknowing pet answers the call of nature. Because I don't actually have a dog, I assume that I'm immune. But I do in fact like dogs quite a bit, and I'm always concerned that I'll accidentally lean down and pet his before looking at its owner, unwittingly pinning myself into a half an hour of semi-decipherable small-talk.

The people whom the Dog Man talks to always look like they're trying to escape: they shuffle their feet and lean their bodies purposefully backwards while giving uncomfortable half-smiles and making hopeful comments about how late it's getting. The Dog Man himself keeps a cheerful disposition through it all, tugging gently on the American Eskimo's leash.

My friend was very much charmed by the description of this character.

"Tell me more!" he said seriously.

I was just about to explain reluctantly that I didn't really have any more to tell, when we happened upon a pair of people standing outside of a dark apartment building. One of them was in house slippers and a muumuu, urging slowly towards the door. One of them had rheumy eyes and a little white dog with him.

"That's him! That's the Dog Man!" I hissed, and lo it was. Up close he looked even crazier, and he grinned at the air around us - he never looked distinctly in our direction, but into the streetlights beyond - as we passed by. We stared over our shoulders for half a block, unable to believe our luck.

That is the magic of Halloween, ladies and gentleman: just when you think you're sort of making a scary story up, it comes true.

2007-10-24T08:41:00.000-07:00

Nip/Tuck

This past weekend I've been unable to read my new New Yorker, owing to the fact that I wanted to finish Cancer Ward first. But finally, last night I had nothing holding me back, and I began reading an article by Adam Gopnik about the emotional and artistic politics of novel abridgement and additions. Little did I know that it would make me so damn mad.

One of the abridged books being discussed is Moby Dick, a favorite of mine. When I first read it (not too long ago, in fact), it caught me off-guard with its humor, as well as with the beautiful way in which it combines insanity with philosophy. As such, it was only with measured restraint that I was able to stop myself from condemning outright the idea of an abridgment. I tried to give it a chance - Gopnik seemed at first to be praising the cuts, and so I wondered, Am I wrong? Am I being unfair?

But what decided me was learning that "The Whiteness of the Whale" was one of the chapters that Orion – the publishing company whose “slim classics” series Gopnik was writing about – snipped out. Moby Dick can simply not be Moby Dick without its contemplations of evil and hopelessness intermingling with the most basic facts of reality and work. That chapter embodies much of what I love in the novel, and I was furious that Orion would cut it, and that Gopnik, whose writing and opinions I usually respect, would condone their cuts.

Luckily, the article at least was not that simple. Yes, Gopnik began by saying that Orion's abridged versions are not simple savagery. They have not made trash out of masterworks, per se. Rather, they have done what any good modern editor would do when faced with these pieces of complicated magnificence: they cut out the authorial excesses, and made them into good and digestible stories. Which is of course to say, they've excised the genius.

So, point for Gopnik.

But what I find really maddening is the idea that a “good modern editor” would find it necessary to cut out the most interesting parts out of a book. Yes, this notion is a bit debatable: certainly I have heard from some writers/publishing folk that editors today are actually doing less and less (whether or not that is actually a good thing). But something rings true about Gopnik’s glib aside: the modern publishing world does seem to gravitate towards the marketable, for the same obvious reason that publishing houses have marketing departments.

But why do people, the market, need novels to be slimmed down and shut up? Do we lack in passions? Intelligence? Grit? Certainly a world in which Cormac McCarthy could make it to Oprah’s Book Club is not a world in such dire need of simplification.

In fact I think that the problem is more complex. My experience, such as it is, has shown me that writers today are often taught that they should write for their audience instead of themselves. That's not totally crazy: most novels today are not created in an atmosphere of aristocratic plenty. If you're lucky enough to be a writer all the time, then you're a writer for a living, and as much as one might rather consider their work as pure art, it also becomes a commodity. I think this may result in authors fearing their audience just slightly, who then might alter the work to fit the vision of a made-up readership, instead of the original idea, the needful idea.

It’s only natural that this would bleed over into the editorial process. Really, an editor should be the one who is most concerned with the audience: they should be the rational creature who looks into the eyes of an alternate world and figures out what, if anything, needs to be done to make it comprehensible.

All this may be straying a bit far from my original topic. But my essential fear and frustration is that we are allowing ourselves - readers, writers, and editors all - to accept less than the naked and tumultuous truth of things. Less than the most beautiful and terrifying world that a mind can dream up.

2007-10-19T09:50:00.000-07:00

Après le Déluge

The area around my building is a little bit wild, in the sense of wildlife and wilderness. Part of the reason for this is the fact that the neighborhood is full of Vietnamese and Chinese dives, with their attendant scents and sounds: roast ducks strung up by the neck, garlic fighting decayed vegetables, odd scatterings of breadcrumbs outdoors being attacked by a legion of pigeons.

The pigeons themselves add another component: this is the type of pigeon swarm that clearly thinks with one mind. They're usually to be found in a refuse pile near an unnamed parking lot, shuffling nervously whenever someone walks by. If a car should be so audacious as to approach, or if a person does something fishy, they'll all jump into the air en masse and waft around the half-block radius between my house, the El, and a random pair of buildings. In the air they can look somewhat majestic, a giant many-membraned creature, an animal that can explode in many directions and then re-condense at a moment's notice.

I have not yet been shat upon by these pigeons. Here's to hoping.

Finally there is the peculiar weather. The weather that I walk through, the weather that I live in, is actually quite placid. There are occasional light showers, sunny skies, mild cloud cover. I'm not talking about Chicago at large, but only the neighborhood around my home.

Many a time I will walk out the door in the morning, or get off the train in the afternoon, and see streaks of water across the pavement, trees with tell-tale water-laden branches. The air will feel thick and the clouds may cluster and begin to look ominous off in the distance. But somehow I never end up caught in the rain; somehow, the rush of weather always passes and the threat is gone. I walk outside after the storm.

2007-10-18T08:04:00.000-07:00

Into the Open!

I have a habit of associating my sympathies immediately with whichever character I am first introduced to in a book or short story. I then proceed to view the story through their eyes, since the best writing, in my mind, provides not only a situation unusual to my life, but also a viewpoint. This is also the way I prefer to study philosophy: first immerse yourself into the world of a philosopher, and come to understand the world through the lens of their work. After that, you'll be ready to critique them: you'll emerge, blinking and sleepy and suddenly remember that not everything Lacan ever said is valid for your lifestyle. But now you'll know why.

So some more notes on Cancer Ward: I initially found it difficult to distinguish between Kostoglotov - the book's "hero" (notwithstanding that I find that a ridiculous way to describe a character, akin to the vague exclamation "I win at life!" But in this case "protagonist" didn't seem right, since the action is moved forward by the thoughts and feelings of an ensemble cast.) - and Yefrem. The latter is a bit more of a tough, a womanizing man's man who is, under our gaze, drawn in by the Christian sympathies of Lev Tolstoy, and then killed. Enough of Yefrem.

The reason for this was that the character with whom you enter the cancer ward is Rusanov, the living, breathing emblem of Soviet bureaucracy. To him, there is little difference between Kostoglotov (whom he calls "Bone-Chewer") and Yefrem, because both are crude and objectionable. Kostoglotov is also an exile, and his presence in the same ward as Rusanov is representative of Rusanov's fears: that he, he!, a great Soviet comrade-in-arms, has been reduced to fever dreams and communal bathroom, a life and death shared with the basest of society.

Oleg Filimonovich Kostoglotov, however, is fairly unique in the ward in that he seems to be getting better (I haven't read the end yet, so don't tell). While the men around him sink out of society's view he is becoming lusty and bold, remembering what it is to be in love, and listening to the strains of Beethoven's Fourth as they drift over the trees surrounding the clinic. He's not out of danger, either from the cancer ward or from his tumor: either could swallow him in a moment. But for him the world is approaching, not receding, and he is able to run up and meet it and perhaps even escape

"Into the open!"

I must admit that lately I've been feeling an unwilled distance from the world: it's a familiar tune to those who are young and employed in a job which is just fine. In the morning I go to the office after a half an hour brushing hair and teeth and getting dressed. All day I remain on two floors of a building - cheerful, bright floors, but nonetheless I sometimes wish I were an errand girl, simply to have somewhere to go. Then at night I am ostensibly free, but I'm exhausted, and often end up staying at home. Again, that's fine. But sometimes it feels like a five o'clock world without any whistle blowing.

Yesterday I walked by a coffee shop & patisserie (I feel like that's the right word for it since it's wedged in between a million French Vietnamese restaurants, and it sells Napoleons) on my way to the train. The cafe is right by my house, but I never get to go because they aren't open on weekends and I eat breakfast at work. I noticed that it looked empty, so I decided to stop in for an espresso and a pastry as a small treat. This small act outside of my routine made me feel incredibly alive, at least for those five minutes.

I can't decide if that is a good, or an terribly sad thing. Perhaps both. At any rate, I have now begun associating my emotions much more directly with Kostoglotov: he the confused, hormonal, trapped and sensitive person. Like him, I want to run outside.

Into the open!

2007-10-16T07:34:00.000-07:00

Endocrine, La Comedie Humaine

When I was younger, my mother always considered me to be the more sociable of her children. It wasn't that my siblings were loners, exactly; rather, she took pleasure in telling me that I could "make friends with a tree stump."

Her words.

Lately, however, I've been moving a great deal, which can make a girl shy. And on top of that I have a full-time job making me tired, actual ambitions which occasionally cause me to hunker down, and a person who's almost always at home whom I like a lot better than most of the chumps you just pick up off the street. So when Dave and I do end up hanging out with someone new, sometimes I feel like a conversation jump-start might not go amiss.

Luckily, there are books. You might not think that something that creates such creatures as "bookworms" and "nerds" - generally solo beasts - would be such a social (if you will) aphrodisiac. But you must consider how many books there are: many are written by utter cranks, or are, through their mere earnestness, wildly hilarious. Yes, regular "intellectual" books can also stimulate conversation, but those are the pieces of literature which I discuss with people I already know.

The absolute, number one best-ever book for guaranteed success at a party (or anywhere. In a funeral home this would go over well) is a little jewel called Gunfighting at Home and Related Subjects by one ER Fenjohn. Who this mythical man Fenjohn might be is hazy and unclear. We see a photograph of him at the beginning of the book ("Author answering the door at night with gun in pocket and hand on gun.") and we get certain insights into his character through all-caps exclamations like "I AM A GUNFIGHTER," as well as hand-drawn cartoons featuring two cons named Whacky and Frosty. But what is his essence? From what dark womb did he escape? Why does he look so much like Hugh Hefner?

The answers to these questions are not for us to know. But I do know that this book is as good as the first time, every time.

The second book in my aresenal is a more recent acquisition (I should point out that both of these books are technically Dave's), which was picked up at a local used bookstore this past weekend. The book, Gustav Eckstein's The Body Has a Head, is, at first glance, simply an anatomy text. Certainly it describes the body and its organs, the mind and its methods. But a glance at the book's description on the back cover makes it clear that this is an odyssey of a stranger kind:

"Looking back, it seems all indirection. The earliest memories are scanter than other people's, only occasionally a clear one. Cheese -- ridiculous. There was an inborn love of cheese; on a half-dark wintery morning, because it was Christmas, I was permitted to walk what for my legs was miles and when the grocer had weighed the cheese he sliced off a slice from what was my mother's, gave it to me, because it was Christmas, and I could nibble it all the slow way home, and there was the tree."

From there it really only gets better - for example, the title to this post is also the title to the chapter on the endocrine system.

Beyond that, I had more to say: about, for example, how I've begun reading Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward. I haven't actually finished the first book of the Gulag Archipelago yet - a book which contains phrases almost literally crystalline. Cancer Ward is a bit less personal, less elegant. But at the same time the narrative and character development in the book are dreamy and tight-knit, and it may be a better overall piece of literature in my opinion.

But more on that later. It seems a bit ridiculous to talk about Solzhenitsyn in the same breath as ER Fenjohn.

*** Image credit: code poet on flickr.com

2007-10-12T07:20:00.001-07:00

So Fantastic

Here's the problem with an active imagination: sometimes it goes places that you never wanted it to go. In a sense, this goes back to my last post about weird fears, but there's more to it than that.

A couple of days ago I got this week's New Yorker - a big victory for me since it means that the post office is effectively recognizing the correct address for me after all my moving around. I'm always fascinated by their Annals of Medicine - ever since I started reading Atul Gawande (or perhaps ever since I developed a morbid fascination with the defective human body) I've been hooked. They tend to follow modern literature in their choice of diseases to focus on: autism, dementia, schizophrenia, and in one case a truly spectacular piece of strangeness called Lesch-Nyhan Disease in which the mostly-male victims are constantly impelled by a dark force to chew off their own fingers. If that doesn't make you shiver with fear, I don't know what will.

This week the spotlight was on the scannable brain activity of patients in vegetative states. As discussed by specialists in the article, many patients in persistent vegetative states are refused treatment by insurance companies (big surprise there!) and generally left be, under the assumption that they are thoroughly unaware, and that little improvement is to be expected.

The article stuck with me, and not simply because the neurologists quoted throughout were indeed able to find normal brain activity in several of the patients they visited. Instead, this got me thinking about the black hole that is a human hopeless case. The vegetative patients in the article were referred to as zombies. As zombies. That's not just funny or weird; in a psychological-defense kind of a way, I think that it is accurate.

If we look at a patient with brain damage, we see a slowly decaying and barely living thing; a creature more helpless than a baby, breathing through science. And in most healthy human beings, this invokes deep fear. Pity yes, anger maybe. But fear. Here is a fate that may be worse than death in several different ways. Way 1: Your mental life is incapacitated, suggesting that the soul either does not exist or is trapped in uncomfortable limbo between life and death. Way 2: You are buried alive in your own body, and no one will ever know.

And so on. To me, recognizing the existence of such a human condition seems almost like a talisman, drawing them towards me. A goose walking over my grave if you will. This is what makes a vegetative patient like a zombie in some sense: they bring their emptiness to you and (through no fault of their own) breathe it slowly into the space that you occupy. It's eerie, uncomfortable, and completely unfair, but there it is.

That's the trouble with imagination: it's morbid and it's absolutely free, living a life of daunting flight among grounded creatures. It makes us fear that our lives have been dreams had while dying, that everything is the blink of an eye.

Of course some of the worlds it builds are made of gingerbread instead of garbage. But for example, is this a good dream, or bad?

(credit to Keith):

"I have this recurring dream where I find this book I've written and it's really really brilliant. Eventually I realize that it's a dream and the book will be gone when I wake up, so I sit down and transcribe the whole thing out and put it in a secret pocket in order to slip it past Dream-customs at the Border but somehow they find it every fucking time."

And when my imagination is stronger than reality, causing my mental image of things to take precedence over actual fact (ex.: yes, but I can imagine him being a crack addict. Yes, but I can imagine that that's the kind of bitchy thing s/he would do), is that a good thing?

(I guess it is when the statement goes: Yes, but I can imagine that I got the manuscript past Dream Customs. I can imagine that there is a race of invisible people who occasionally watch us, occasionally place a hand on our arm, a chin on our shoulder. Gently, gently). It could be.

*** Image credit: wimpers on flickr.com

2007-10-10T06:36:00.001-07:00

Things that go bump

Yesterday I was exhausted. Don't know why, for whatever reason. So when I got home, after missing several trains and standing in the new encroaching cold (a good thing, by the way), I sat on the couch with Matthea Harvey's new book Modern Life (which I've mentioned before).

As one might expect from Harvey, the book is beautifully off-balance, with deer-ostrich Frankensteins and sailboats escaping from the sailors into a storm. And as I was turning the page to poem 4 ("If Scissors Aren't the Answer, What's A Doll to Do?") I heard a horrible retching sound, then laughter from above, from nearby. One of our neighbors is a recent graduate of the Art Institute, and he has been taking stop-motion animation shots out the window between our doors. This requires the window to be open, which really doesn't bother me; it's not as though it's inside my house. But it does, I have discovered, greatly amplify the sounds I hear from outside.

I tried to ignore it, but there it would be again: pause, vomit, and then the same gurgling laughter. I couldn't tell if the laugh was coming from the same throat as the other expectorant, but it sounded to me as if the person were vomiting up blood. In the dark, in the cold.

And there came one of my greatest terrors: for some reason, I've been harboring this fear for awhile (a nightmare fear more than a stressful, conscious one) that some terrible thing will happen to void my entire sense of meaning. In dreams, it takes different shapes: diseases, war, aliens, and ever since 28 Days Later came out, ultimate zombie apocalypse. And there was this sound from somewhere near or even within my small building: violent death sounds, and sounds of devilish delight in it.

I think that the lucid dreamscapes of the Matthea Harvey poems couldn't have helped. Certainly, if I hadn't been exhausted, if I hadn't felt like throwing up myself on the El earlier in the day, I might have thought first of idiot frat boys laughing as they drink too much or punch each other in the stomach. I might have thought: I might be wrong.

But unnameable terrors are not rational, of course. Like this one: later in the evening David and I began watching David Attenborough's Life of Mammals series, specifically, the meat eaters edition. Clearly, the Siberian tiger was one of Attenborough's favorite, because besides calling it the "ultimate graceful killer" or some such thing, he smattered the documentary with eerie images of muscle and orange and black.

Suddenly I remembered reading The Giver long ago, probably in the library of my elementary school. There's a scene in that book where Jonas's younger sister is clutching a rhinoceros toy (or was it an elephant?) and Jonas, already the receiver of the world's memories, tells her Did you know that there used to be real rhinoceroses? And she laughs.

With a chill, that was the feeling I got watching the Siberian tiger run across the snow. It was so big, so real. Was there really such a thing? Could the world really change so much as to erase something like that?

2007-10-05T08:38:00.000-07:00

The Silence of the Grave

Working from home today only makes my questions about riding on public transportation more insistent. Here I am, in my pajamas, with no need to commute, and I feel like I am having El flashbacks. Only without the benefit of having had an enjoyable drug experience to flashback to.

Here's the thing about the train: it makes people evil. And I don't just mean other people, I mean me as well. When I am walking down the street or interacting with people in my office I make a conscious effort to be reasonable, if not in fact kind. I make way for those who are passing, I chat with people, I smile and attempt to be accommodating when it's appropriate.

Commuting, however, turns people into altogether different animals. I'm not sure why - we're all going to work, which is not a place most people want to be anyhow. And yet, any sign that an outside body is going to slow you down on the way (crowding the train, getting in your way, or, as an alternate example, driving just below the speed limit on the freeway) seems to makes ones personality boil all the way over. Once, on the train, a woman roughly pushed me out of the place I had been standing for ten minutes as we mutually tried to exit the train, then turned to me and said, between her teeth, "ExCUSE you!" Of course, she could just have been a jerk*, but it's difficult to know for sure.

The El is almost always quiet in the morning, and quite often in the evening: it's a lull broken only by exhuberant children, mysteriously reunited friends (I've seen this more than once, and they always talk loud), and cell phone conversations. Perhaps this is what allows us to encase ourselves in self-interest: a pact seems to exist between riders of the train, refusing to acknowledge that the time spent in transit is real, agreeing that we are not really interacting with one another. And so, when one person's self-interest rubs up against another (as when, for example, two people standing equidistant from a newly open seat must fight silently to claim it), the experience is highly abrasive. Not only are we forced to remember that other people exist, we are also forced to accept the fact that they are having none of your train-induced solipsism.

I just read a story by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky which addresses this anxiety perfectly: a scientist answers a call for the development of new fuels by harnessing the power of people's ill-will. While testing the product, the city government disconnects a train car - which is outfitted with a sort of malice-converter - from its locomotion, smack dab in the middle of morning rush hour. As the commuters onboard grow more and more malevolently impatient, the car begins to chug along.

I really don't like how much spite I feel towards strangers on the El. They bump into me, they take my seat (which could, arguably, just be called "a" seat), and I begin to honestly believe that they are stupid and cruel people. Hatred manifests. I do make an effort to take a deep breath and remember what I fool I'm being, but it disturbs me how little control I have over my emotions in these situations.

And so I like the deadly silence of the train, but I don't really trust it, and I don't understand it.

*Like the elephant "Stampy" in the Simpson's episode 'Bart Gets an Elephant.' Doesn't everyone remember that? Isn't anyone else's life composed mostly of inappropriately prevalent recollections of Simpson's episodes and Calvin and Hobbes cartoons?

2007-10-03T11:47:00.000-07:00

Mise à jour

A little update: the Wes Anderson short Hotel Chevalier, filmed as a prequel to his new movie The Darjeeling Limited, is now available for (free!) download on iTunes.

As to the rest (of life, the universe, and everything) I have been blushing all day after speaking with an author I am hoping will speak at the Chicago Google office, but I don't want to air details on the unpredictable internet until everything is finalized. I am exhausted with happiness.

And one thing, a query to everyone who has dipped their pen into the same strange combination of cultural wells as me: does anyone else think that David Hemmings' character in Bl ow-U p (directed by Antonioni, god rest his peculiar soul) was the inspiration for the photography scenes in the Austin Powers movies ("Yes, yes, yes. No! No! No!")?

I mean, could it possibly just be coincidence?

2007-10-01T09:38:00.000-07:00

Surprise!

I can be startled fairly easily - I have an extremely low tolerance for shock, and am always the first one to jump when the killer in the movie wakes back up for one last stab at the blood-soaked hero. These shocks resonate in my system, causing trauma and developing into stupid nightmares in which I scream out loud and wake up (lightly!) strangling my bedmate.

Despite all that, I am not easily surprised. Surprise, for me, comes when something highly unexpected - on an intellectual or emotional level, as opposed to on the level of one's emergency-response nervous system - comes to pass. I've read enough Foucault to believe that pretty much any action can have unexpected results, so it's rare that something deviates so wildly from my expectations that I sit up and take notice.

However, in an amusing turn of events, this weekend something did. Some of you may remember that many moons ago (in October 2006, I believe) I posted on this blog about the strange woman I met outside of a Safeway in Mountain View. She, a paranoid, scruffy, corndog eating woman was collecting signatures and financial contributions toward a bill she wished to take to the state legislature in order to make pet abandonment illegal.

I gave the woman 10 minutes of my time, a careful signature, and a $10 bill. I little expected anything to come of it, except that perhaps she would be able to buy more corn dogs. Or even fruit! Who knows? Months upon months went by and lo, I had forgotten all about this strange person, who made me contemplate our personal role in a democracy.

Then, I got a letter. It was from Senator Sheila Kuehl (D) of California, and it thanked me for my interest in the issue of pet abandonment. Although she could not currently take action on that point, wrote Senator Kuehl, there is a Bill currently in consideration to protect pets under current domestic abuse laws.

And you know, you could have knocked me over with a feather. Having looked at the greasy sheets of lined paper on which my mystery woman was collecting her signatures, I never expected the petition to reach any sincerely concerned participle of the government. Of course, for all I know, those modest proclamations were merely mailed in and glanced over, with no effect even as lasting as a horror flick like The Grudge (of all things) would have on my delicate mental state. But something beyond me and my dangerously enlivened interlocutor came of that gray Safeway excursion, and I'm glad.

In oddly symbiotic news, this weekend I met the new dog that Dave's parents recently adopted, a teddy bear-looking entity named Maggie Munze.* Maggie was rescued from a puppy mill, and being around her was like no other dog-related experience of my life. She shared few characteristics with the dogs that I have known: no barking, no begging, no resting her head in your lap. And indeed, she had no idea how to play. Dave's mom said that she occasionally goes to her crate and picks up one of the toys they have bought for her, only to move it to a different part of the house and leave it again.

It was a strange experience. I think that Maggie Munze is suggestive of the effects that a lack of love can have on a creature: not only does she not understand how to show or receive affection, she does not fully seem to understand the purpose of it.

I think she'll get better though.

*Actually, her name was just Maggie when we arrived, but Dave had been pulling for 'Munze,' and so we just started calling her Munzie as soon as we walked in the door.

And finally, on a completely unrelated note: Matthea Harvey has a new book of poetry coming out soon, and I encourage everyone to check it out. She's strange beyond your wildest hopes.

2007-09-28T14:42:00.000-07:00

Toilet Humor

I had a different thought about what I posted yesterday. Specifically, it was a thought about people's artistic output, or lack thereof - what one friend called our "post-creative culture." I suppose what really concerns me is that I notice people censoring themselves and self-editing, because they think that whatever it is that they're doing, it's only something that someone else has done before, which seems like the ultimate insult to one's unique perspective.

This is like the death of the creative individual, brought on by the birth of the ultimate creative individual.

Perhaps I am projecting.

Anyway, I also wanted to end this week, which has made me braindead, sleepy and floppy like a newborn, with something funny. A story:

Yesterday I walked into the bathroom and noticed that the trash can in the stall (for men: these exist for tampons, etc. Do not feel jealous that you do not have them) was bulging with non-standard paper products. I had to look closer, and when I did I discovered that the can was in fact stuffed with someone's financial documents - bank statements, notes from an accountant, etc.

At first this struck me as odd. However, when I thought about it, the concept began to make sense to me. It takes forever to meticulously shred one's financial papers, but it has to be done to ward of identity theft (or so I'm told: it's like the Bogey man). But who would ever look in, let alone steal from, the catamenia bin in a corporate office building? That would be a health hazard!

It was a small moment of genius.

2007-09-27T09:08:00.001-07:00

So over it.

Now, something was making me think about the war in Iraq, and can't remember what it was. I do know that it wasn't the president of Iran - neither his speech at Columbia nor his decision to shut down all discussions about Iran's nuclear program.

I believe it had something to do with trying to carry an extremely heavy desk home with Dave, though I don't know what. On Saturday we went to the Brown Elephant thrift store on Clark St. and, without consulting me, Dave decided we would truck the thing home sans truck. Often when he makes decisions of this type I try to be game, because my own image of my physical fitness is somewhat idealized - picture me outrunning a tiger, for example, or becoming world-class boxer. Then you should have a good idea.

However, my actual, technical physical strength is a bit different. Picture instead, if you will, me walking half of a heavy and unwieldy piece of furniture about 4 blocks, nearly bursting into tears, being driven home the rest of the way (10 blocks or so) in a friend's van, and having a cramp in my arm for the rest of the day. Dave felt terrible, I felt terrible, it was a great time all around.

Earlier today he sat at the desk in the gray light of seven a.m. - a white desk in a blue room on a muted morning. It made me very wistful - I wished I could sit there and drink tea, but instead I walked to the train, past the Buddhist monk on our street who waters his flowers in the morning.

...Now, you might be asking yourself What on earth does this have to do with the Iraq war? And the answer of course is: Nothing. The lesson to take away is that I'd rather write, think, and talk about practically anything except our current, bloody war. The last time I had a conversation about it I got into a philosophical argument with my boyfriend's family about the implications of torture for the immortal soul (I was "contra" torture), and I have been exhausted ever since.

But that makes me wonder: why? This is a defining battle in our times, with subtle veins of deception and danger threading out from sources around the globe. We have networks of blackmail, lies, violence; moral uncertainty, religious blasphemy, and a seemingly endless string of abhorrent personal decisions. How is this not interesting?

I'm beginning to wonder if anyone these days (who does not work for the news media or any national government) is really willing to talk about something that many, many others have mulled over before. It's almost as though we've worked so hard to convince ourselves that we need to be original and unique human beings that we've somehow alienated our interests from the world.

And it's not just the war, or our numbingly repetitive political scene (Democrats vs. Republicans: rawr...) - we seem to have become too cool for almost everything. Why talk about our creative ambitions when there are so many other starving artists out there? Isn't it lame to like well-reviewed music or movies? I don't know - maybe this is culture's natural reaction to becoming top-heavy in any area: it tilts over and hides the offendingly important object of our attention under a yawn.

Now, most people are able to pick at least one category of life (environmentalism, government, indie rock, writing, whatever) and continue to care genuinely about it. And that's great. But most of the time they still won't talk about it. Maybe they're worried that no one would be interested.
Or maybe it's just passe to take yourself seriously.

*** Oh, and yes, there really was something that was making me want to write about the Iraq war, but I really can't remember what it was. C'est la vie.

Photo credit: KOP on Flickr

2007-09-25T09:13:00.001-07:00

Circus Freaks

I have not been to a circus since I was 13 years old, or so, but I have loved them all my life. I love that they are peculiar, that they are theatrical, and that they embraced the absurd side of performance long before the theater did. Yes, Beckett's world is bizarre, but wouldn't you like to see Estragon, Vladimir, Pozzo, Lucky (obviously not Godot), Malloy, and Krapp shove their way out of a tiny Peugeot and then light each others' pants on fire?

Since the last time I attended a circus I was still at an age when pairing a too-large Victoria's Secret dress with a sickly yellow thrift store blouse seemed like a good idea, I've had to seek my pleasures elsewhere. You can find an aura of big tops and organ music in the later Tom Waits album, which are full of dissonance, sadness, and vocal sepia tones. And one can always appreciate the idiosyncratic complexities of the average human mind (today in the course of a conversation with a friend we both paused to wonder: how do you transpose physical distance into quick breaths or heartbeats? What's the multiplier when you're walking, running, swimming, or riding an elephant?).

But the thing that has always made me feel closest to my own dark uncertainty that reality means anything at all (besides maybe drinking too much whiskey - but that is cheating and makes me vomit) is books. Surprise! (no.)

While reading a review of the seventh installment of Harry Potter on Salon.com, the idea was suggested that a good piece of fantasy literature will provide you with a "shiver of awe."* As a young reader I could not get enough fantasy - that was where I lived and what I breathed. I can remember certain favorites - Half Magic, Dealing with Dragons, The Hobbit & The Lord of the Rings trilogy (of course...read to me by my father, who kindly skipped over the Elven songs when my siblings and I were young and impatient. Now, those are some of my favorite parts) - and most of them, I believe, had the quality of awe. These books (and there were many more that I'm not remembering offhand; like I said, I read all the time) made me deeply, seethingly jealous. I wanted to live in their worlds instead of my own, where bravery had no bearing and there were no parameters for adventure.

As I got older, I switched magical realism in for fantasy literature most of the time - school has a way of teaching one to do so. But some of my finest reading experiences have come from returning to the land of my childhood, picking something up or reading something anew (in some cases, even reading something aloud). Although I'm still jealous of the characters in books like The Golden Compass (which I'm re-reading now) and Momo, something different happens to me now when I read about them. I suppose I am inspired - and why does that seem like such a silly way to say it? - since it was these books, after all, which made me want to write in the first place. And so new ideas come streaming out of me, interweaving with those in the books themselves. My life becomes a part of their lives - as I wanted all along.

An illustrative example: when I was about 15 I read the tale of the peculiarly warped journey portrayed by Brooke Stevens in The Circus of the Earth and the Air. In this book the world of one man comes unhinged when his wife disappears into a magician's trick at an illusive and mercurial circus performance. He follows her to the seeming ends of the earth - a madman's opus, a religious fanatic's dream, an island on which the theatre is worshipped by an army of actors, stuntsmen, and mercenaries. I have not read the book in years, but when I did it became a test of sorts, helping me sift through the world: I made everyone I could read it, and all of my friends either loved it or hated it. Any lukewarm reactions drove me away, pointing to what I assumed was a lack of passion and a lack of possibilities.

* Of course, this reminds me uncomfortably of the much-teased "shock and awe" campaign of the Iraq war. It makes sense though, really: a good fantasy novel and a successful imperial war campaign both seek to unsettle their target audiences, causing them to question, for whatever length of time, their grasp on reality.

2007-09-24T07:08:00.000-07:00

Old Man Winter

I have a policy about riding on public transportation (which here means planes, trains, and any other form of shared locomotion, no matter the cost or level of luxury): if someone sitting beside you keeps trying to shove something in your face, don't read it.

This policy was developed on a plane ride home from New York City my senior year of college, where I was interviewing (unsuccessfully, I would later find) for an under-paid job in educational publishing (the stuff that liberal-arts dreams are made of!). Some guy sat down next to me, as tends to happen on airplanes, and tried to talk my ear off. I made polite sounds for a few minutes, and then strategically fell asleep, not to awake until the wheels hit tarmac. In the interminably long interval between when we reached the terminal and I was able to file out into the aisle, I noticed the guy next to me fiddling with his phone quite a bit, and then holding it up for my observation by awkwardly twisting his wrist in his lap. I took out my own phone and pretended to listen to messages for the next 10 minutes, but could sort of see his phone number out of the corner of my eye.

Today, on my way to work on the El, I sat down in the only available seat, next to a sort of dirty looking older man who was writing furiously in a reporter's notebook - the type that makes it easy to flip up the pages as you scribble down notes. I've recently begun re-reading Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, and so was fairly absorbed in my own world. I did notice that the man never stopped writing, but he seemed harmless enough. He fiddled and twitched, his pen skating across page after page. But he left me alone.

Until 2 stops before the end. Suddenly the man began stretching wildly, whacking me in the arm and waving his notepad in my face. And so what could I do? I looked. I suppose that I hoped it would be something interesting and odd, the Good Will Hunting of the bag man set. But all it said was "Jesus Christ is your personal savior." That's apparently all he had been writing for upwards of half an hour.

Quelle boring, bag man.

On a mildly related topic, I am actually looking forward to the onset of winter. I remember getting a text message from Chicago last October, saying "OH my jesus it is snowing!" Ominous though it may seem, that must be coming soon. When I was younger I would curl up on the couch with a book when the weather was dark, consciously turning a blind eye whenever a spot of sun appeared (rare enough, in a Seattle winter). I was protecting the aura of mystery around my reading, the sense that I was bearing something along with the characters in my book of ghost stories.

This may also be why I generally ignore the offerings of public transportation strangers: if I don't see the mundane nature of what they're doing, I can hold them in hope.

2007-09-19T10:22:00.001-07:00

Disasters are the most perfect thing of all

After spending yesterday thinking about the beautiful potential of a world molded in the image of your own mind, perhaps it's not surprising that today I am thinking about megalomania.

As anyone will know who has glanced at the front page of the New York Times, one Mr. Nuon Chea has been arrested under "suspicion" of being a high-ranking official in the Khmer Rouge. According to a source of the Times, Nuon Chea was a man of strictest and most disinterested brutality, telling those who worked for him to kill even useful prisoners since "[They could] always get more." On another occasion he told the same source to burn a pile of bodies in a pile of tires and, most ominously, to "leave no bones."

Now that he has been arrested, he told his wife not to visit him in prison or memorialize him when he dies. "When I die," he said, "all will be finished."

I don't want to regurgitate any more of the article, since I can't convey the depth of suffering that was experienced during the reign of the Khmer Rouge. But what could he have meant when he said "When I die all will be finished"? Indeed, two questions come to mind to answer that question: Could he possibly believe that when he dies, all is finished, and Does anyone not, in some way, think the same of themselves?

I think that most human minds, fragile and vainglorious as they are, tend to believe that they are at the center of something. Indeed, they believe that what they make, want, and see is the true weaving of the world, and that human creation - especially their own creation - is a manifestation of true reality. Or at least, of the best reality.

But I also think that most people are able to reserve this belief for their own private universes. Most people, whether they are prideful, kind, modest, or even cruel, manage to temper their narcissism with reason and account for forces stronger than themselves.

Maybe I'm reacting theatrically, but Nuon Chea's statement to his wife makes me feel as though he stopped tempering his beliefs. Looking at his words feels a little like staring into a scary darkness, the end of which cannot be seen.

But I still believe, somehow, that beauty can save the world.

2007-09-17T20:06:00.001-07:00

How and when and why did God make the angels?

Lately, Dave has been bothering me to switch banks, and not without good reason. Here in Chicago, there simply aren't that many Wells Fargos, and most of the ones that do exist specialize in home loans instead of providing me with an ATM. And so, each and every time I want to withdraw cash I'm forced to swallow at least a $2 ATM fee - more if Wells Fargo really is charging me $1.50 for transactions done with other banks.

But still I don't switch. Why? It's not as though I have a solid business relationship with them - I've never opened anything except a checking and savings account, never received a high-interest C.D. or any sort of tantalizing offer. Indeed, my student loans lie with them, and it's easy to transfer money from one account to another online, and yes, I have somehow tricked them into giving me free checks (with a tricky, tricky "free checking" account). But on the whole, the reason I hesitate to switch banks belongs to altogether another comfort zone.

I read a quote this morning in an article about the Solovetsky Islands - islands which are most holy to the Russian Orthodox Church, and which have also become a site of increasing tourism. "This land, is it a means for earning money, or is it a holy place?" asked the acting head of the island monastery. "The two cannot exist together."

While I appreciate his sentiment, and come close to agreeing with it, the words made me think - strangely enough, about my relationship to the bank. I think it is an aesthetic one. As ridiculous as this will sound, I know the colors of Wells Fargo, and I know their style. I know how to get around in their bizarre corporate head, even when the decisions they make are maddening or seemingly random. And that, to me, is a comforting thing. I remember walking into a Wells Fargo branch in Grinnell, Iowa, and telling the women there that I wanted to close my savings account and transfer the money into checking. At first they seemed concerned in their banking way, and asked me why I would want to do such a thing. You see, I said, I have $300 tied up in that account (the minimum to keep it open), and I need that money to go to France with my boyfriend. Immediately the employees broke open into smiling people who wanted to know about my life, who cared about my plans, and who didn't mind one bit that I was closing my more lucrative connection to them.

So I have built an idea of Wells Fargo, an image made out of memories and aesthetic notions which I can cling to and understand while trying to navigate the strange financial world.

This is perhaps not a good enough reason to keep open a bank account that loses me money. But I feel like it is evidence of something: the beautiful - and in other, more extreme conditions, worshipful - things we create in a semi-hostile environment. That is, the holy ideas, the art we are still able to build with our minds in a place that is a means for earning money.

2007-09-13T09:09:00.001-07:00

Is God a Trickster?

Many cultures throughout history have listed one or more gods on their roster whose job it is to shake things up a little. This can be either a god of chaos, a god of death, or simply a god of practical jokes. Personally, I've always been a fan of the tricksters - the coyote gods (like Shakespeare's fairy Puck in A Midsummer's Night Dream [I know, not a god]) who go around keeping us unsteady, making sure that nothing ever gets too boring.

Yesterday I had an experience which brought to mind this quality of gods and the universe, and which basically made me look like an idiot. It went thusly:

I was looking forward to spending some time alone last night, watching a movie, working on an art project, what have you. Dave and I had just purchased expensive living room paint (curiously named 'Kurdistan'), and were walking back towards home when I decided to stop at a store along the way and pick up a bottle of wine. I know nothing about wine, so I was on the lookout not for the finest of bottles, but one with an appealing label and a reasonable skinflint price. After wandering around the store for a few minutes I picked up an $11 bottle and made my way to the register.

"You know your wines," said the proprietor of the establishment, ringing me up. "But you should let this breathe for a long time."

"Oh?" I asked, obliviously happy in the face of an undeserved compliment. "How long?"

"A couple of hours," he said. "It's a '72. So it needs to breathe. But it's a wonderful wine."

Now, a cultured person might already have picked up a couple of cues, which were pointed out to me later, suggesting that this bottle of wine might not be as...economical as I had led myself to believe. For example, does any low-end wine need to breathe for a specified amount of time? Can you purchase a '72 for $11?

Can you guess? The answer is no. However, I walked home happily, telling Dave how ridiculously pleased I was to be mistaken for a connoisseur. This was my second mistake: the sin of vanity. My first and most important mistake, however, was misreading a price tag that said "$110.00" as "$11.00."

When I arrived at home and was about to uncork the bottle, I glanced at the receipt. Here my unbelieving eyes met, for the first time, with reality, which told me that after tax I'd just spent $124 on a bottle of wine I intended to drink alone, paired with Netflix. I ran back to the store where I apologized profusely, and luckily they took the unopened bottle back and provided me with a well-deserved $13 replacement, as well as a $108 credit card adjustment. The man who'd sold me the bottle looked a little abashed and slightly annoyed.

"I thought you knew the bottle," he muttered. Luckily, his son was extremely gracious and told me that it happened all the time, which I did not believe but nonetheless appreciated.

All this leaves me to ponder the theological implications of my actions. Was there a hidden message for me in this experience? At the end of the day I was left completely off balance, and I can't help but suspect that some kind of coyote god trickster heard me crowing and cooing with unearned pleasure after being told I knew my wines, and decided to have a little fun with me. If so, I guess I've learned my lesson (read: look at the price tag, you fool).

Of course, the other possibility is that I was intended to drink that wine and somehow, through my sweaty and unbecoming thriftiness (for indeed I jogged all the way back to the store), I thwarted that beautiful fate. We shall never know.

2007-09-06T13:10:00.001-07:00

Je vous cherche.

A convergence of events: rumors begin flying that the 15 minute prequel to Wes Anderson's film The Darjeeling Limited will not be in wide release with the feature-length material, and I find a great place to eat moules et frites in Chicago.

The prequel, entitled "Hotel Chevalier," is set in Paris, stars Natalie Portman, and I think that it's only because of the French connection that the buzz around this short film keeps making me think of food.

From what I have read, the film follows the de-unification of two lovers in Paris (a theme not unexplored in the annals of film), and may be essential to one's enjoyment of The Darjeeling Limited. It was originally supposed to be screened alongside the full-length film. So why the change? As a blindly giddy fan of Wes Anderson films, I can't help but feel indignant and worried that the two shows are being separated before birth; Anderson's work is the sort of thing I love so much that any new release makes me break out in a cold sweat, fearing that I will not like it as much and that the magic will be broken.

Having a short companion piece, filmed (as it is rumored) well over a year before Darjeeling Limited was a concept that comforted me aesthetically. I've always been intrigued by bodies of work with continuity - some of my favorite short-story writers do this to great effect (Shirley Jackson and Kate Atkinson, for example) - especially the kind that is simultaneously subtle and obvious. Quiet, eerie connections between stories and films throughout an artist's career (or within a single body of work) evoke a certain psychological realism for me, like experiencing someone else's deja vu. Wes Anderson's movies do share some commonalities - if not in story lines, then in themes, actors, and overall cinematographic style - but adding a short film as a supplement to a larger work strikes me as a bolder move. A related work that is not a mere sequel.

I realize now that I posed a question that I cannot answer: why the change? We'll have to wait and see.

But to tie back in to my earlier culinary vein, every restaurant I eat in is essentially part of an interconnected narrative for me. Our neighborhood is flanked by the Swedes and the Vietnamese (that's right: Andersonville and Uptown), two completely different parts of my life now converging around my apartment. When I step off the El in the evenings I am immediately assaulted by spicy scents of beef and basil, and I remember walking down the Ave in dreary Seattle rain, searching for a Pho place with the correct combination of free cream puffs and sweet chrysanthemum tea. I have never, to my knowledge, been able to consume an entire bowl of Pho by myself, but on days when I want to eat light - when I see water everywhere and solid food seems like a virtual impossibility, as in the Seattle springtime - it is all that I crave.

Conversely, the perfect Swedish breakfast I had on Monday reminds me (and this is cheating, I know) of the street fair hunger of Decorah, IA's Nordic Fest. I remember burly men smelting iron, women in postcard-perfect smocks at a weaving loom (or...is that a false memory? Well, those women were doing something wholesome), and most of all I remember the Lefse and the meatball sandwiches.

Both foods, and both memories, make me feel nostalgic, pensive, and connected to my past. It's a feeling that can be achieved through food, stray scents, and good art (and also, I suppose, by a fluke of emotion, but that's not really relevant here...), and I hope that ol' Wes is up to the challenge. It's a tall order, I know, but come on: movies cost at least nine bucks these days. He owes me.

** Image credits: "Je vous chercher" came originally (I think) from PostSecret. The "Nordic Fest Poster" is by Robin Peterson of Fernwood Studios.

2007-08-23T08:04:00.000-07:00

...which, like all good ideas, ended up dead.

Recently, a lot of things have been happening to me. How boring to say, yet again, that I've moved to Chicago and traded unseasonable warmth for thunder storms, winter flowers for snowfall. But I have.

I've also been reading a lot, since my week off allowed me a little bit of breathing room, and so does riding the El to work every day. Not to mention that staying with Mairead is like living temporarily in a literature candy store. She hands me books and says "You must try this!" and I know something good is about to happen, as if I am about to taste Mexican hot chocolate.

The most recent thing she handed me was Matthea Harvey's book of poetry Sad Little Breathing Machine, which contains the kind of work that I often lose hope might exist. Specifically, and initially, I'm thinking of the poem that got Mairead talking about Harvey, entitled "Ideas Go Only So Far."

When I'm writing, I often have the urge to combine realism and something akin to magical realism, but can end up shying away from more outrageous things for fear that I'll lose the real meaning I'm aiming at inside of a chimera. What I admire about Harvey's poetry is her ability to traipse outside of the mundane without seeming to overextend herself. Cool and collected, it's evident that Harvey's poems are part of Harvey's world. I can imagine her sitting in the warm hum of the laundry room, watching the machine-washable baby from "Ideas Only Go So Far" agitate calmly.

Being in a new city gives me the same sort of pleasantly off-balance feeling as Harvey's work. I know that I am home, but it's a watery, indiscreet, and, for the moment, untranslatable place.

2007-08-08T21:41:00.000-07:00

Oh My!

Sometimes I check my neglected blog, as if expecting someone to have updated it in my absence. What a thing to do!

Tomorrow I'm leaving the West Coast for the Midwest again, for who knows how long. What a thing to do!

2007-07-25T16:42:00.000-07:00

Movin' Time

As some may know, August 10th should see me moving eastward to be swallowed by larger Chicago. I feel like my life has been in constant flux lately, and to ground myself I'm planting evidence of one of the places I've been.

Ok, yes, this is partially just an excuse to post photos of myself in a tropical paradise, but who doesn't like that? Also, everyone likes monkeys.

This is me in Roatan, Honduras, playing with a baby monkey named Buddy. Dave was convinced that we could smuggle him back to America if only we wrapped him up in enough towels. Sadly, this did not come to pass, and my experience of playing with him and his soft dry monkey hands was woefully brief.

But not to worry, our grief was salved by the sea.

2007-06-27T14:53:00.000-07:00

Impressionable Youngster

Yesterday I celebrated another successful Authors@Google event, starring luminary sports writer Frank Deford. This is a man who's won more awards than I've ever even wanted, and written extensively and intelligently - nay, beautifully - on a subject that rarely even catches my interest (the notable exception is when the Seahawks make the Super Bowl. Never again, guys).

Luckily, this time I managed to avoid asking an embarrassing question, instead impressing Frank with my wily intuition by spotting him, lost and in rental car, in the labyrinth of Google's many parking lots. I went up and knocked on the window.

"Are you Frank?" I asked. There were 3 minutes until the event was supposed to start, and he was late, due to a delayed plane. I had picked him out by looking for the face most disconcerted by all it saw.

"How did you find me?" He seemed genuinely impressed. I decided that the day was going well.

As I mentioned, I'm not much one for sports chatter. I like to pretend that I'm knowledgeable when it suits me, but I doubt I've often fooled anyone. Hearing Frank Deford speak fluently about the intricate psychology of the sports world was an illuminating experience - it almost made me wish I knew a statistic or two to make myself sound well-spoken. But moreover, it reminded me how much I value (wisely or not) the perspective of a person fully immersed in their subject.

To me, sports are sports. I neither think them vapid nor fascinating, crude nor essential. Occasionally I might like to play pick-up soccer or ride my bike, but that is all peripheral. All of which is to say, any sport I participate is part of me - I am not making myself part of it.

What am I missing? I may never know. Certainly I don't believe that an intricate understanding of the sports world is worth more than an intricate knowledge of anything else - education, violin making, artificial intelligence. But as a person still seeking a place in the world, I'll take my intangible envy wherever I can get it.Publish Post

**If you're interested in Frank Deford, I encourage you to read his work, including his newest book The Entitled. He's a real sharp guy, a classic sort of human being, and his writing looks beyond individual games into the very morality of the sports realm.

He's a senior writer at Sports Illustrated, a commentator for NPR's Morning Edition, and a correspondent on HBO's Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel. Among other things.

2007-06-22T15:14:00.000-07:00

Awkward Chic

I know I haven't posted here for awhile, and for that, I apologize. But in order to make it up to you, I have decided to recall here an embarrassing story. Well, two parts embarrassing, one part great. Let me preface this by saying that when I do something embarrassing, something that I'd truly like people to forget, I tend to just tell a bunch of people to get it over with. It's a knee-jerk reaction, but it works for me.

So:

Today, Aimee Bender came to read at Google as part of the Authors@Google program. Bender is a writer I've admired from afar for quite awhile. Her prose is cozy somehow, comforting in its darkness, familiar in its fairytale qualities. She mentioned, during the Q&A session after her reading, that she hopes readers come away from her work feeling oddly satisfied; that is, satisfied without knowing quite why. And indeed that's how I feel when I read - for example - Willful Creatures. It's as though I've woken up from a particularly allegorical dream, but there's no rush to examine it, I can still lay in bed awhile longer.

At any rate, after the reading I got to have lunch with Aimee, showing her and several of her friends around the bizarre labyrinth of Google's main campus ("On your left you'll see our dinosaur, surrounded by pink flamingos..."). She was very conversational, nice enough to answer the questions that me and the other Authors@ team members peppered her with while we ate.

So what's the embarrassing part? After lunch as we were leaving, I asked Aimee Bender to be my best friend. I don't know why I phrased it that way - what I meant was "A bunch of wonderful authors come to visit Google, and when they turn out to be incredible people as well I feel like I know them, and I wish I could hang out with them more" (that's one of the liabilities of the Google sense of entitlement - it feels like people should want to just hang out with us).

But I phrased it "Be my best friend!", because deep down I am just an awkwardly enthusiastic girl who occasionally speaks before she thinks. Obviously, not too very deep down.

Anyway, that is my story. If you want, you should reply to this post with embarrassing stories of your own, turning this one silly post into a teen TigerBeat type forum for humiliating self-discovery. Doesn't that sound fun?

***In the meantime, you should check out this one other Aimee Bender story/collaboration, because I think it's great:

Hotel Rot

2007-05-14T15:11:00.000-07:00

Shameless Plugs

Those of you who know me well may know that I work on the @Google team (Authors@Google and Women@Google specifically) as a part of my work at Google. I think the events we produce are phenomenal, both in quality and in breadth. In the past we've featured authors as varied as Atul Gawande and Martin Amis, and had visits from women like Hilary Clinton and Jane Fonda.

One of the great things about these events is that they're taped and available on YouTube.com.
You can also check out the new @Google website, which is available here (that's http://www.google.com/talks/authors, if the link doesn't work or you just like to see things written out).

We've also begun inviting political candidates in a new series called Candidates@Google. On May 4 we hosted John McCain, which was a very interesting event for a highly liberal campus. Eric Schmidt led the conversation with McCain, who stepped up to some very difficult questions from the crowd. You can check out some of the press coverage at the links below. I also strongly encourage you to look at the YouTube videos if you've got the time!

AP Sunday Article

Red Herring Article

(*and oh yeah, the illustration for this post actually says "Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year," not "I'm Great!" liked I had hoped. Oh well. I can dream.)

2007-04-27T09:50:00.000-07:00

"Ростропович ушёл"

I have an admission to make: until today, I did not really know who Mstislav Rostropovich was. And perhaps that is a tragedy, because he is gone. Of course, having been educated in an environment of intelligence, introspection, and pedantry I knew about his collaborators: about Prokofiev, about Shostakovich. In St. Petersburg my friend Jim and I rode an escalator up from the metro - one of those incredibly long Russian escalators that give you the sense of either descending into or escaping from the bowels of hell - under a poster for a performance of Shostakovich pieces at the Marinskii. In high school, when I asked my friend Jason - a talented violist - for musical recommendations that were fiery, extreme, and schizophrenically beautiful, he pointed me again to Shostakovich.

Admittedly, I have fewer obscurely aesthetic memories of Prokofiev, but I love his music, and I think that makes up for it.

However, I knew nothing about their virtuoso: an outspoken proponent of artistic freedom, a cellist, a conductor, by all accounts a genius. Here is a man who spoke openly against Soviet suppression, indeed against all suppression of creativity by the deadweights of fear, stupidity, and apathy. In 1970, he wrote: “Explain to me, please, why in our literature and art so often people absolutely incompetent in this field have the final word. Every man must have the right fearlessly to think independently and express his opinion about what he knows, what he has personally thought about and experienced, and not merely to express with slightly different variations the opinion which has been inculcated in him.” International press published his statement. Pravda did not (ref: NY Times).

Why does it upset me to have missed out on knowing about this man? Of course, he was a great musician, but his work continues to exist in recordings, in memories. In part it makes me feel like a far poorer student of Russian culture: shouldn't I have known? But then, a person can only absorb so much in five years. After all, I know about 2H Company.

In fact, I think I'm just struck by the vital importance of cultural icons. Not to diminish Rostropovich as a man: from all accounts I've seen he was an incredible human being as well as a distinguished artist, playing (for example) an impromptu concert at the fall of the Berlin Wall. But when Kurt Vonnegut died, I realized that people do not just love the art of their idols (a term I'm bandying about here pretty loosely), by proxy they love the human beings as well.

Never have I been so devastated by the death of a stranger as I was by Vonnegut. I wanted to sit still all day with my head on someone's knee, being comforted. It was a reaction I knew to be irrational: even friends who love his writing just as much as I do felt compelled to say things to me like: "Well, he was old, you know..." But I still took the loss very personally, like a sucker punch from a slightly less beautiful world. I had in a sense - and perhaps without knowing it - considered him to be something of an intellectual father figure: aloof, sarcastic, and spot-on.

And so, by feeling these things, by allowing myself to mourn for a man I'd never met, never known, I made a deal with the world. By accepting the anonymous condolences of the world for a mourner, I offered my own sentiments up for those like me who love irrationally: too much and too well.

So I'm sorry for all those who loved Rostropovich, whether he was known through a handshake, a photograph, a record or a kiss good night. The best I can do is listen to his Bach Suites, to say I'm sorry and offer my own faded and quiet farewell.

2007-04-12T11:15:00.000-07:00

God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut

"If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a

one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind."

Kurt Vonnegut Jr., 1922-2007

2007-04-04T11:56:00.000-07:00

Pretty Nifty

I'm getting pretty close to finishing the arduous task of completing my taxes for the first time without almost any help from my father. When this isn't making me feel simultaneously proud of myself and semi-pathetic, it makes me think about where my taxes go.

There was a brief period in my high school years in which an enthusiastic student teacher tried to invest everyone in Honors American History with a sense of civil service while also teaching us about the Dust Bowl Era and the Great Depression. While it was difficult, as a jaded high schooler, not to find his ardency quaint, there were a couple of things he said that stuck with me (not to mention his frequent use of Rage Against the Machine in the classroom).

One of those things was his resolute statement that he did not mind paying taxes; that, in fact, he enjoyed paying them. He listed such services as schools and libraries and roadways, extolling the virtues of participating in their creation through hard work and a patriotic sense of duty.

I don't disagree with him. Paying taxes doesn't hurt me, and I certainly appreciate roads and schools as a general rule. But speaking to friends who are working abroad, or to those who evaluate regularly the state of our public services, it becomes clear that America is not really a country wherein these services are of paramount importance.

By saying so, I don't simply mean to harp on the much-lamented state of public schools, or potholes in the road, or even corrupt officials. I'm more interested in what I perceive as the collective subconscious opinion of these services. It isn't that people don't use libraries, nor are most people looking for viable alternatives to our current sanitation departments. But America is, seemingly by nature, without pride in our public services. We simply don't seem to care about them on a personal level, no matter how integral they are to our existence.

My sense is that this emotional ambivalence occurs because public services bespeak no progress to our lazy minds: they're ubiquitous (at least where I live...), and we see them as rights. It is, rather, the innovations that fascinate our society, the ability to tweak and to delve that we see as valuable. If nothing else, people sure love what's clever.

Is it good to place such importance on the different and the new? This is arguable, certainly. But I suspect that if people take real pleasure in innovations, then perhaps that is what their minds really need. Or, that it is at least useful. Take, for example BookCrossing.com.

BookCrossing is a website that registers people from around the country for a "read and release" program - a roving library, if you will. Someone reads a book, registers it, and then leaves it on a designated park bench to be picked up by a stranger and looked at through new eyes.

Logically, there is nothing about this program that is superior to a library. It's no more free, no more convenient. But...then there's the mystery.

Part of reading is, ultimately, escapism. And the beauty of the BookCrossing project is that it endows the experience of reading - hell, just touching - one particular book with an enigmatic quality by making it's reader aware of the readers who came before them.

In most situations this will not actually improve the quality of the book. But one of the things that makes life so frustrating is how constant it is, how consistent. Even for the most avid reader, time can make pages into mere pages, words into mere words. And so I am for the small curiosities as much as the institutions, for BookCrossing as much as for libraries. I will keep paying my taxes, but when I get bored I will think of something new.

2007-03-05T13:22:00.000-08:00

Kicking and Screaming

So, I've been discussing last week's post with several people, and I was reminded of the secondary reason that we do get around to reading the books that we love. Namely? We do not get around to quitting the books that we don't.

Personally, I always feel like a little bit of a cad setting a book down half-finished. I always pick them up with so much bright-eyed enthusiasm, so much of a fetishist's touch. And then, after feeling my way through a couple of hundred pages I yawn, grow disinterested, find my affections waning. What about that new Murakami novel that just came out? I might think. Maybe I'll just stop by the bookstore...

And then I suddenly sense that I'm being somehow evil. It isn't, interestingly, the author that I feel any allegiance to, it's the book itself (often a specific copy of the book). I know that setting it down to read something else decisively slims the odds that I will ever pick it back up again. And - much like those childhood episodes in which every single stuffed animal in my room slept on my bed lest one of them feel slighted - I feel that I am doing some injustice to the story itself. So I rally, pick it back up, and power through.

Now, most avid readers have been advised at some point in their lives to avoid falling into that kind of trap. If you don't like it, people say, put it down and leave it there. You don't have to finish every book. Otherwise they will turn into evil entities, and come to consume you.

Both frames of mind are ultimately compelling to me, not because I am a rational human being, but rather specifically due to my feeling that the stories themselves are entities, individuals, somehow alive. There are times that you don't want to be around your dearest friends because their personalities somehow clash with your mood or your schedule - sometimes this can go on for weeks.

And sometimes, it's the best feeling in the world to commune with your most fiendish enemy. The point is, just like with people, you won't always be in the right frame of mind for a book. The volatile moodiness of a human being can color and texture whatever they're reading, thinking, doing. But the colors aren't indelible. They'll shift like your mind, they'll shift like the sea.

And so, while I'm glad I finally buckled down and finished Anna Karenina (containing by far the most irritating and least endearing heroine ever to be illuminated by the centuries - I'm a Dostoevski girl, if you couldn't tell), I'm not to sad that Swann's Way (note, James!) fell by the wayside for a little while. I love Proust, and I'll pick him back up again. You know, when I feel like it.

***Also, check out the new Venus Zine for a small essay by me, alongside another by the inestimable Ms. Mairead.

2007-02-28T10:26:00.000-08:00

Phantom Works

I'm very interested, lately, in those books that people want to read, but don't: the taboo books, the too-long historical novels, the books with lovely covers that sit on our shelves and rarely get picked up.

How does this happen? Is lack of time really the only factor in play when a person who proclaims to love books hasn't read The Death of Ivan Ilych but has read Every Thug Needs a Lady? (world's best bathroom reading, by the way)

I think there's a touch of covetousness involved, of unrequited book-love. Case in point: while browsing in the bookstore the other day, a friend of mine ran his hands lovingly, sensuously over the spines of new hardcover novels, and said: "I think I love books more than I love reading."

Certainly, there's a certain academic/literary smugness involved when your reading list is really killer. But how many books can you buy and leave on the shelf before you're a seventy-year-old post-reader, wallowing in self-pity and a frightening fifty-year sea of the unread?

As such, I'd like to post a list of my own phantom reading list items here. Hopefully it will keep me honest, and hopefully people will have some ideas of their own.

1. The Gulag Archipelago
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's deeply influential work about the Soviet labor camps. Having heard this book praised no fewer than seventy-nine times in the course of my Russian education, I picked up Volume 1 idly at a used bookstore and flipped through. I was immediately taken by the tone, the scope, the art, and the despair. In fact the despair of the author seems inextricably linked to the artistic rendering of this book, more so than in most cases. Sentences stumble through histories and disciplines, occasionally interrupting one another in footnotes as if crying out in desperate pleas for understanding.

2. Anything by Caryl Churchill
Caryl Churchill is better than anyone I've ever read at creating a reality so eerie, so chilling, that you feel certain that it is creeping into your own world drop by drop. It doesn't hurt of course that Churchill's work is made up of plays, and so are intended to come more fully alive through the active participation of human beings. Sparse and honest, her work is more than worth reading and re-reading.

3. Blood Meridian
I recently finished reading Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy (All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain), and was more fully absorbed than I have been by a work or set of works in a long time. And yet, strangely, I have found it very difficult to describe exactly why. I suspect that it is because the very thing I admire about McCarthy's work is his ability to imply, to intone a reality that cannot be written, spoken, or consciously comprehended. All the same, after reading all those "soulful cowboy books" I am hungry for more.

4. Ninja
This new graphic novel qua comic qua childhood fantasy come to life by Brian Chippendale just...seems cool. I know very little about it beyond the review I read on Salon.com, but...just look at it! It's the culmination of a lifetime of frenetic imagination; it's weird, and it's beautiful. What more could you want?

2007-01-24T11:24:00.000-08:00

This is my new vision of the future: barbecues.

It isn't fancy, it isn't difficult to achieve in mediocrity, but how to achieve barbecue perfection? On February 18 we will officially have an apartment with a patio, fully equipped to house a barbecue. But will our own personal grill ever live up to the blissful Grinnell Pigweek? That wonderful week when hiring someone to grill a pig for you for 24 hours was suddenly in vogue, and you practically couldn't turn around for falling over a succulent pig?

For vegetarians, this question may seem moot, but keep in mind that we will also have the capability of grilling vegetables and portabello fungi on our grill. It will be fantastic.

SO the question is, how to realize the true grilling fantasy? Below are some illustrations of the "barbecue fabulous dreamland" as viewed through very different pairs of eyes. But which is best? Only God or a democratic vote can decide.

Option 1:
Option 2:
Option 3:
Option 4:

2006-12-08T08:15:00.000-08:00

So, in case anyone who heard about my unicorn painting was wondering, here's a picture of me presenting the winning painting to my team at work. The unofficial title was "Unicorn Dancing over Hearts towards Candy Mountain, with Hot Air Balloon Above."

All that, and this has still been an incredibly odd and stressful week.

2006-12-06T13:07:00.000-08:00

Things that occur when I step away from my blog for a few minutes:

1. The absolutely-insane-astronaut/deep-sea diver-on-the-ceiling-I-Love-Lucy-grape-stomping-croquet-playing
Google Holiday party
2. I decided to make hot toddies, and recipes vary. I thought that they involved only whiskey, hot lemonade, cloves, honey, and cinnamon, but I have been proved wrong in this regard. Some people even think that they involve tea. What's with that?
3. Carter Adams came to visit, and then a few days later the bus containing himself and the bands he was managing a tour for flipped both its shit and its physical being, burst into flames, and effectively cancelled the tour. Thank god, no one was too seriously injured, but still, seriously? I hope the band members don't blame poor Carter, whom they blamed for everything else. He wasn't driving, guys!
Read about it here at Pitchfork:
http://pitchforkmedia.com/page/news/39981/Mr_Lif_The_Coup_Survive_Bus_Accident#39981
(look for the headline 'Mr. Lif, The Coup Survive Bus Accident')

By the way, that image up top was originally intended just to illustrate the Google party, but it's actually done by an artist (Michael A. De Feo) who does some pretty cool tagging in NY (thank you Google Image Search). Check it out here: http://www.mdefeo.com/streetart/underwater_2/

2006-11-17T16:12:00.000-08:00

Just now, trying to reach a work-related (though public-facing) web page of little to no interest to anyone that isn't me, I was mysteriously redirected to this Wikipedia page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anno_Domini

Anno Domini

Am I meant here to infer some kind of mysterious transformation that has taken place in my life? Yes, I was sick yesterday with lymph nodes swollen from here to tomorrow, but, although I am now restored and rested, I just do not feel divinely reconstituted. Perhaps fate is saying otherwise?

Or perhaps fate is saying that my imagination is incredibly overactive? There is a theory (much espoused by Dave of late) that human beings in 1200 B.C. and earlier did not possess selfhood, were not conscious in the way that people are now. Those humans were said to have a "bicameral mind," that is, a mind with a portion that caused schizophrenia-like hallucinations that they associated with a god or authority figure telling them what to do.

I find this theory both compelling and disturbing: it's partially based on literature from that which, evidently, does not contain many (if any) human beings acting of their own accord. Rather, it's all literature of a Divine Mover. I'm not certain that that is evidence enough of a huge psychological shift: couldn't it just be evidence of a huge rift in our and their storytelling?

Are people greedier now?
More self-motivated?
Certainly we have a culture that puts much more importance on the concept of "I" than have existed in times past. People now are more prone to view themselves or their children as pinpoint centers of the universe, as uniquely capable, as important to the world by dint of their very existence. But then again, it isn't as if cultural difference weren't still rampant: In America (land of, believably enough, the American Dream) parents tell their children from day one how special they are, how they can do anything they want, and how the world had better watch out. In Russia on the other hand, although children are still loved and spoiled, there's less of a sense of Original Entitlement. A parent whose child wants to go immediately from high school into the highest reaches of the government might say: "What, you're too good to start at McDonald's like everybody else?"

So those are some of my doubts. But they don't really take into account that psychologist Julian Jaynes, who originally presented the theory of the bicameral mind, has actual psychological and physiological evidence for his theory too.

2006-11-07T12:33:00.000-08:00

As we sit and wait for the election results to come in, a lot of people are wondering: are we going to get a Democratically-controlled House? It's something we haven't seen in a long time and I, for one (yeah, yeah, among many) am pulling for it. I'm even wearing my little "I Voted!" sticker, with all its patriotic optimism.

So, in the spirit of things that we do not see very often, I'd like to present two more, which I encountered this weekend.

Enigmatic Object #1:

Mountain View is a town surprisingly full of cultural diversity - sort of. In a lot of ways all the sushi restaurants and the Asian grocery store where I buy sake just make it seem all the more like the Disneyland of mostly white, highly American, i-pod liberals.

But in some ways that's unfair. I've met a great deal of Russian immigrants since coming here, for example; there are so many, in fact, that they do not share my enthusiasm at what I perceive as a shared linguistic exoticism. To them, Russian is the absolutely normal language for a Russian person to speak (well, obviously), and since there are a ton of Russians around, they figure that since I talk the talk I simply must be one of them. So I am boring. And a little weird for my eagerness.

Also, this past weekend Dave and I were walking downtown, and we saw a Muslim man and woman - seemed to be husband and wife - walking in the opposite direction. I've known several Muslim girls in my lifetime, most of whom have worn a khimār, but I've never seen a woman in full hijab (I am only hoping to be getting terminology right here). And it struck me as so odd; I'm not bothered by it, but I was certainly struck by it. I experienced a very starry-eyed-little-girl desire to run up to the woman and have her explain her beliefs to me. But saying to someone "I don't understand your kind of modesty - can you please explain it to me?" just doesn't sound innocent, so of course, I didn't.

I would still be interested in talking to someone about it though; it's such a bold and visible difference from the life I was raised in. A little girl walking down the street with her father seemed curious about just the same thing; I heard him explaining, as they passed, "Well, it involves their doctrines of belief, and..."

Enigmatic Object #2:

I like to watch nature videos a lot, especially if they star David Attenborough, the charmingly poncy BBC explorer. Dave and I have been receiving - through delightful, delightful Netflix - Mr. Attenborough's Life of Birds DVDs, and we watched one on Sunday night.

And here's the amazing thing: there were a few protracted shots of songbirds in Britain, early in the morning, which were described on the show as, at that dawn hour, having "nothing to do but sing." And so they were singing. But the thing that got me, the thing I'd never seen before, were the tiny puffs of air coming out of the birds' mouths as they sang.

Blowing clouds of mist on a cold day is something that, logically I suppose, any warm-blooded animal should be able to do. But have you ever seen it? A tiny bird, the smallest robin, sitting on a tree branch as the sun comes up, miniscule and emitting clouds.

2006-10-31T15:35:00.000-08:00

This Halloween I am Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Am I old Buffy?

Or new Buffy?

Only time will tell. New Buffy has much better stakes, though, and mine look more like one of those childhood giant pencils. Plus, I have leg warmers, and I know all the words to old Buffy's cheer squad cheer (How funky is your chicken? How funky is your chicken? How loose is your goose? Our goose is totally loose...etc). Well. That's as much incisive criticism as I am prepared to offer regarding the old Buffy - new Buffy - me Buffy tripartate.

2006-10-27T16:22:00.000-07:00

Two things: one, today I met Diane von Furstenberg, who comes off as very charming and open in her lectures (talks, Q&As, what have you), and is disappointingly distant one-on-one. Granted, my one-on-one with her was about two seconds long in front of the iced tea tray, but it was still disappointing.

I suppose it's because I felt led on. Not only had there been Gopnik the day before, who makes everyone around him feel smart and interesting simply by possessing both of those characteristics himself, but also because I had originally expected her to be cold and distant, and had been warmed up by her talk. Let that be a lesson to me: not everyone who says they love all women actually want to talk to all women.

The second thing: in order to offset news of the soft taffeta breeze from the fashion world, I will post a couple more pictures of my gentle brother with big fuzzy dead things.

2006-10-26T17:14:00.000-07:00

I very rarely have the opportunity to feel star-struck, but I did this afternoon, and it's all because of Adam Gopnik.

I have to admit that I didn't really know who he was until he came into vogue with Paris to the Moon, but that's also about the time that I started reading The New Yorker in earnest, so perhaps it's fair. So why become swoony upon meeting him? He was simply a delightful person to meet; very casual and interested and funny. And it was my first experience meeting someone whose work and art I honestly admire, and whose success I am quite impressed by, whom I was also able to speak to like a normal human being.

Well, sort of. Because he is not a particularly normal person. On one level he is abnormal on a upscale New Yorker (the type of person, not the magazine) level: he has taught his children to love naturally raised, most especially French, turkeys. But on another level, his knowledge is broad. He can tie into conversation, as into his essays, myriad strands of thought that could have been utterly disparate, and make them seemless.

And now I realize that I could go on gushing and swooning, but I won't. Why is it that he so impressed me, I wonder? I suppose it was just because he put me so much at ease.

Anyway, I recommend his new book, Through the Children's Gate, and I would love to know if anyone else is able to meet people that they're huge fans of without melting into a puddle afterwards.

2006-10-23T17:53:00.000-07:00

This weekend I went to Safeway with Dave. Outside the store, as is often the case with grocery stores, there was a person asking for signatures and donations in the name of her cause. Her particular goal was to make pet abandonment illegal, which I think is fair enough, so I stopped to listen to her talk about it.

Unusually, she was asking for a $10 donation in order to "join" the organization (which organization it was never became clear to me, exactly). At first I balked at the price of signing, but maybe I've been watching too much West Wing or something, but I decided that this was an opportunity for me to exercise democracy. So, after shopping for various materials with which to make red beans & rice (did you know Safeway doesn't carry ham hocks?) and a roasted chicken and a toothbrush and what have you, I went back outside with cash in hand and told the woman to say what she had to say.

This woman was a little bit dirty. Her operation was shoddy at best, with weathered signs and a 50-cent notebook on which to collect signatures. When I came back outside to sign up, she was eating a corndog. She needed to set the corndog down in order to point to various things, and I offered to hold it. But the corndog was sliding down the stick and I tried to lightly nudge it back up and she adopted the tone of someone who is about to be done a grievous wrong.

"Don't touch it," she said, putting her hand to her forehead as I unwittingly disobeyed.

Ok, so the crazy lady had a corndog, but did she have politics? I guess I'm not sure. She talked about traveling with the one group of animal activists who are still trying to make law, and thus are not eligible for federal grants. She talked about how difficult the fight was, how only one person (not me) had signed up all day, and how frustrating and ridiculous it is to pass law. She also mentioned that her group had made animal cruelty illegal in California.

It was a little difficult to believe that she was responsible for the entire legal battle for animal rights. But I didn't know. And certainly, an unpopular group that needs to ask for large amounts of money from squeamish shoppers has the chance to become bedraggled. So I signed up. Despite her somewhat OCD tendencies, she seemed sincere, and she had the manner of a person who has had to deal with a lot of fuck-ups (she made me stay for an extra few minutes while she checked over what I had written for legibility, for example).

And I didn't really care if the money ended up going to food for her, if her signs were shams. And I did, in the end, feel like I had participated in something. Democracy now?

2006-10-13T16:24:00.000-07:00

I've been going to a lot of talks lately, as well as mentally organizing a reading list for myself, and the combination of these things (especially since I'm currently re-reading The Master and Margerita) has made me think a lot about when I was in Russia and how hungry I was there for comprehensible words, especially in the early days.

For example, there was a terrible weekly English-language paper called The St. Petersburg Times that was distributed near my school (and at which, incidentally, my friend Sabrina was a copy-editor for a time; the only one they paid!). It was so poorly written that under normal circumstances I would never have given it a second chance. However, when I originally decamped for foreign shores, I figured that I should bring very limited English-language reading materials to encourage myself to read - and thus learn - more Russian. Of course, I wolfed down the novel I brought with me in the first week or two, and from there on out I was scrounging for scraps; the The St. Petersburg Times was a regular and welcome addition to my fare (if you want an example of how low I sunk, I did at one point read The Devil Wears Prada in a single night).

In the midst of this, a strange thing occured that for some reason resonated with my homesickness, my desire for anything written down that I could easily understand (in any language), and the sort of dizzy circus that Russia occasionally makes of your mind.

My friend Roxanne was in St. Petersburg at the same time as me, and on her birthday she invited me out to the theatre with her. After seeing an amusing but peculiar version of Don Juan (starring, for anyone in the know about teleseriali, some guy from Brigada! Girls ran onstage and gave him tons of flowers! His co-star was dressed as a giant chicken throughout and we never knew why!) we decided to go back to Rox's erstwhile apartment and toast her new year.

However, Rox was in the middle of moving from one dorm to another, and thus the apartment she was staying in wasn't hers; the guys who lived there were a funny mix of ex-pats, who called and said they were at a bar down the block when we arrived with vodka. They said they'd be right by, and instructed us to wait at the courtyard gate. As we stood there, on a dark sidestreet looking somewhat fancy in our theatre clothes and laughing about the show (really! a giant chicken!), three men(/boys/manboys) approached us; two circled away from us, and one walked straight in our direction, holding a white piece of paper forward in his hand at near-eye level.

Somehow, without knowing in any way what was going on, Roxanne and I both suddenly assumed that the boy was holding a chloroformed cloth, and that he was going to knock us out and do god knows what. We back up against the gate, but didn't have much time to react before he was right there.

As it turned out, he was holding out a paper explaining that he was deaf and dumb, and asking us for a handout. Now, I've seen people do this in America, but in Russia it's a pretty well-known scam; one guy distracts you with his pity plea, and his cohorts suavely pick your pockets. The strange thing was, although he was practically laughing and almost certainly lying, his friends didn't make any attempt to get anywhere near us. As I've said, we were on a dark side street, alone. If the operation had miraculously been legit, or if they'd been trying to rob us, it would have made sense for the other guys to at least come near to us. But they didn't.

I left this situation with a weird taste in my mouth for several reasons: partially, it was unsettling to think I was about to be chloroformed. But then, the misinterpretation, the misinformation, was so very strange. We felt danger for the wrong reasons, the boy with the paper was lying, and the mini-heist or trick or whatever it was was pulled off so poorly. What was it that we didn't understand?

Finally, I remember being somewhat relieved that I could read the piece of paper. In the midst of that bizarre, even if imagined, danger, I still had a conscious desire to consume and hold onto language. It grounded me.

And now, for no particular reason, but because I wanted to include a picture, here is Reynold's 'Self Portrait as a Deaf Man'

2006-10-09T17:49:00.000-07:00

First, a quick fix, in the form of Kurt Vonnegut on the Daily Show:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iI-jlbyDf0k

Second, yesterday I had, and took, the opportunity to see Tom Brokaw give a talk. At first I was impressed by his poise and candor; he spoke with great openness on any subject presented to him (by Eric Schmidt, of Google). However, when the talk proceeded to the Q&A phase, it quickly degenerated. One of the hot topics facing the media today is whether or not those who are dispensing the news are doing so with impartiality; I've heard Rush Limbaugh talk with as much vehemence as Jon Stewart - and using much the same language - on the topic of whether or not the media lives and breathes scratchy toady breaths under the thumb of political parties.

However, when asked whether various facets of the media are simply telling their corresponding audiences what they want to hear, he just answered that today's consumers of the news have a great deal to choose from, and must be more discriminating than viewers past. This is a valid enough point. But when the question was rephrased, when Brokaw was asked whether the media itself was living up to its end of the bargain (of, in this case, presenting accurate information that viewers must sort through and interpret as they will), he was incredibly dodgy.

I suppose one can chalk that sort of behavior up to taking care of one's own. As an active member of the team of Big Names in the tv news sky, Brokaw has a right to believe that the people he works with are Doing the Best that they Can. It is also, to a degree, admirable not to engage in the bitter debate between the extreme news left (Steven Colbert, perhaps) and the extreme news right (Fox News, anyone?), when little ever comes of such a dispute other than name calling and tattletaling. But there was a sense, in the room in which I was sitting, of palpable anxiety, a thirst for information and for an actual opinion. The question was being asked about newscasters and newspapermen at large - the NY Times, not the Onion; BBC Nightly News, not The Colbert Report. Are these women and men fulfilling their responsibility to present the public with impartial and important information? And, perhaps more importantly, are they searching for it?

Reading over what I've written here, I have too agree with Brokaw to some degree: the news is not just a pill we have to pop, it's the story of the world, and that's bound to take some sifting through. My main frustration was, and remains, that he did not acknowledge that part of the responsibility falls on those people who are presenting the news: they have chosen that life, it is, in the best of cases, their calling and their passion. So the fight for better news reporting should be also theirs, and they should own it.

2006-10-04T16:39:00.000-07:00

Martin and the Great Deer

Martin and the Great Bear!

Sorry, no pictures of the bloody deer pelt as yet.

2006-10-02T16:26:00.000-07:00

The monkey represented here is mimicking the bad behavior of his human captor. Does this go to show that all evil finds its root in mankind? And if the animal kingdom is equally susceptible, is it culpable? If so, can we blame all of our problems on baby monkeys?

This monkey's fight face would suggest: maybe. Just maybe.

2006-09-29T11:57:00.000-07:00

an excellent story about intuition:

my brother, one of the more interesting people I've ever met, chose to become a hunting guide in lieu of going immediately from high school to college. as such, he has a fair amount of frontier knowledge; if the apocalypse should come, I will feel very safe having him around to teach me about living off the land.

not to imply that he is either bloodless or bloody: he loves the outdoors, the peace and quiet of solitude. as such, he made a trip to our cabin in oregon recently, in order to spend some time alone and make an attempt at two new goals. They were:

1. shoot a deer with a bow and arrow
2. shoot a bear

a week ago, approximately, he shot said deer using the desired method. he then sskinned the deer and set the hide out on the porch to dry (or what have you.)

the next day, it was gone.

his initial assumption was that a bear had eaten it, and as such he woke up early the next morning to lay in wait for this bear and avenge himself, and realize the trip's ambitions all in one blow. indeed, in the early light a big bear came ambling up and he, davy crockett that he is, shot it.

now, wanting to save at least this pelt for a bear-skin rug (which I will be begging him to give to me for years to come), he carefully skinned and cleaned the bear. and, lo and behold, inside it's stomach he found the hide of his deer!

2006-09-20T17:02:00.000-07:00

I was thinking about a new yorker article I read by-the-by. it was about wikipedia, and the various war-dialogues going on between Jimmy Wales - Wikipedia's founder (unless you're giving credit to Larry Sanger, but he's resigned) - and his classic encyclopedia detractors. the question is: do you want your information to be served to you by a huge mass of less-informed people with complete access, or do you prefer a highly educated specialist?

it's kind of like long-tail economics: not just anyone can be a specialist, but the information is a high quality (like a single competitor, with a lot of money. this is a real bastardized long-tail simile, by the way). anyone, on the other hand, can contribute to wikipedia, so there are a great deal more contributors.. but the knowledge may be of a lower quality (think of an economic sphere with a ton of competitors who spend very little money each, but a ton overall). of course, the information isn't always worse; it certainly isn't meant to be worse. but that's part of the debate.

one thing that was mentioned in the article was frustration with the idea of "actual" information (or similar). I believe that it was in response to someone saying that the information on wikipedia isn't real or whole in some way and a classic encyclopedia's (like britannica) is (though it could've been the other way around for all I remember). "What is real information?" someone asked (and I approximate). I'm not sure I buy that if, say, 2 + 2 = 5 in some guy's world, he should be able to assert that into the rest of humanity's faces and expect them to dig it or even listen. but a great deal of the world's knowledge - historical knowledge, for instance - is widely understood to be open to debate. what happens and what is are things so much based on peoples' moods, impressions, and pathetically unreliable memories that there is merit in hearing multiple perspectives on such things.

also, I do not pretend to know anything about neuroscience except what I've heard from other people or read someplace, but it seems pretty clear that human consciousness is still largely mysterious. why do people come to believe what they believe? about god, about socialism, about (more contemporarily) the idea that nothing is worth believing in? a keen and well-trained meditator, or a user of psychotropic substances, has experienced things that others would laugh off. but the experiences of these people exist in enough profusion to be talked about. I wonder if anything that is widely experienced enough to be ridiculed is worthy of some attention.

so back to wikipedia, and the question of whether the information posted there by (as it were) amateur specialists is real:
I think that wikipedia itself is a locus of opinions and personal knowledge wide-reaching enough to be interesting as both an encyclopedia and a social experiment. therein lies enough solid traditional fact to give a reasonable picture of the world as most people know it, and also enough aberration to account for those parts of the world and of the social mind that we just don't understand. it may be a crackpot view of the world, but it would be pretty damn interesting to understand the world from the viewpoint of a crackpot.

2006-09-20T09:45:00.001-07:00

maybe I'm not classically introverted, but I still really like this:

http://www.salon.com/mwt/col/tenn/2006/09/15/introverts/index.html

it reaffirms my desire to occasionally read the salon.com advice
column. I do certainly believe that there is a certain amount of
information that is transmitted between people sitting together,
silently; that perhaps information does not exist only in the
encyclopedic, language-based way that we are taught to know it.

2006-09-18T09:51:00.000-07:00

while I ruminate on the possibilities for further literary animals to figure into my posts, I'll give an applicable, real-life example of an animal-related list. brought to you by http://www.canongate.net/Lists/Animals/10LeastIntelligentBreedsOfD and the letter d.

10 least intelligent breeds of dog:

1. Afghan Hound

2. Basenji

3. Bulldog

4. Chow Chow

5. Borzoi

6. Bloodhound

7. Pekingese

8. Mastiff

9. Beagle

10. Basset Hound

I also have some spectacular monkey related photos, but the'll have to wait for the nonce.

2006-09-14T14:24:00.000-07:00

Jorge Luis Borges was a master of pseudo-scientific classification, and below you can find the list (found in Other Inquisitions) which is perhaps the paramount example of this skill. As this blog takes its name from a portion of the list, I thought it was worth posting.

" On those remote pages it is written that animals are divided into:

(a) those that belong to the Emperor,

(b) embalmed ones,

(c) those that are trained,

(d) suckling pigs,

(e) mermaids,

(f) fabulous ones,

(g) stray dogs,

(h) those that are included in this classification,

(i) those that tremble as if they were mad,

(j) innumerable ones,

(k) those drawn with a very fine camel brush,

(l) others,

(m) those that have just broken a flower vase,

(n) those that resemble flies from a distance."