The Hanged Man

2011: The Year In Facebook Status Updates

2012-01-11T20:43:00.003-05:00

I thought my friend Jason's status was so funny, I'm reposting it here:

"I'm so pretentious. I made a quick run to Movie Stop to check their used Blu-Ray discs. Clerk: "Be sure to bring in any used movies you have for store credit." Me: "Sorry, I don't buy crap. Everything I own is crucial." :)"
· January 29, 2011 at 12:09pm

Next month I turn 46. Last night I was carded.
· May 20, 2011 at 8:37am

Just overheard in the bar: "It's crawfish, so it's a good time...it's family night, so you gotta watch what you do."
· June 2, 2011 at 7:18pm

I missed the whole thing. I was out on my lunch break, looking for cards to wish my niece and nephew "good luck" this year at college. Then, when I saw our office building was evacuated, I went to a bar for a beer rather than stand around on the sidewalk.

I believe pretty much everything you might need to know about me can be found in this summation of the last hour or so of my life.
· August 23, 2011 at 3:04pm
(This was after an earthquake hit NYC.)

For once, the only people in my neighborhood actually live here. It's kinda nice.
· August 28, 2011 at 2:58pm
(This was after a hurricane bad enough to merit shutting down the entire subway system hit NYC.)

I'm at a bar (surprise!) and I can't escape the shrill argument raging behind me amongst a group of drunk teachers. It's a political argument that's at the level of just calling people "whores" by those who, I'm trying not to judge, don't know a thing about how the world really works.
I miss the days of teachers like my friend Amy or my Dad who just feel asleep when they got drunk.
I miss my dad.
· September 9, 2011 at 7:15pm

Most creative, effective spam mail subject line, which cause me to click on it even though I knew it was most likely spam:
"Mum killed after garlic bread row"
· September 15, 2011 at 10:52am

Quote of the day: "Do I have ink on my face again?"

It's the "again" that makes me laugh.
· September 23, 2011 at 8:38am

Recent iPhone Pictures

2012-01-07T21:57:00.004-05:00

October 14th

2012-01-05T21:31:00.002-05:00

I posted the below on Facebook on October 14th of last year. I meant to expand on it here but don't really have anything else to say. Facebook is too ephemeral and this I want to remember.

I found out tonight that my favorite old man bartender from my favorite dive bar retired this past July. He was someone who didn't like anyone so when you gained his trust or at least diminished his contempt, you felt like you had achieved something. He had great stories of what it was like growing up in the midwest in the early / mid-20th century and he made me feel better about getting old. He had a sense of gravitas and dignity that younger bartenders (hell, people for that matter) just don't have.

I'll never see him again, but worst yet, I never got a chance to tell him "thank you."

Things To Do Around The House

2012-01-04T20:42:00.002-05:00

Two nights ago I was, like the subject of a first year art student's attempt at surrealism or a housewife finally succumbing to the DTs, standing on a chair and vacuuming the ceiling and walls. I was doing this because I was coming down with a cold, obviously. My apartment is in an old building, dating back to the beginning of the 20th century. The ceilings have cracked with some of the plaster has begun snowing down.

This doesn't bother me. It's one of those things that needs to be repaired every two or three years but I'm not in the mood to have repairmen schlepping through my apartment and the damage isn't bad enough yet to force the issue. The building settles, cracks appear in the brick facade, water gets in and saturates my ceiling, voila. It is, however, happening in my bedroom and once I felt a cold coming on I thought it best to remove as much potential irritant as possible. So that's why I was standing on a chair, vacuuming plaster from the room's open sores.

Last night I wanted to use a neti pot to clean out my sinuses. A neti pot is basically a small teapot. Short and stout. Handle. Spout. Unlike a teapot, you put the spout in one nostril, then tilt your head so that the water runs through both sinuses and out your other nostril. It is gross, but it does help when you have a cold. I didn't have a neti pot, but rather than brave the chilly temps and go out and buy one, I decided to make my own. I boiled water in my electric kettle, poured it into a bowl to cool, then transferred it to a measuring cup that has a spout, and was proud of my ingenuity.

Unfortunately, the spout on the measure cup was not designed to be inserted into a nostril (perhaps this is a safety feature). I stopped trying when I realized all I was going to do was end up looking like Jack Nicholson in Chinatown. So I poured the water sort of at my nostril, getting a surprising amount in my nose with much of that making the journey out the other side.

All this and I still found time tonight to break a favorite mug. It's amazing I get anything done.

How To

2011-12-20T13:01:00.003-05:00

A list of links found while websurfing at work. Didn't have the nerve to click on any of them. I'm hoping that the removal method is not the same for every one.

How to Get Rid of Wasps

How To Get Rid of Genital Warts

How To Get Rid of Diarrhea

How To Get Rid of Spiders

How to Get Rid of Skunks

How to Get Rid of Back Fat

How to Get Rid of Hemorrhoids

How to Get Rid of Moles (Skin Moles)

How To Get Rid of Cellulite

How to Get Rid of Warts

2011-11-08T19:55:00.000-05:00

Being Boring, Part 2

2011-08-17T20:21:00.002-04:00

Slate's article "Overrated" sent me back for what I think is the inspiration for many online articles: The Book of Lists, published in 1977 and edited by David Wallechinsky, Irving Wallace, Amy Wallace ("and their dog Wally" according to the National Lampoon). It's just a book of lists, each well researched and with a light tone that's minus the superior attitude that infects much current writing. Online, the structure of the list has become ubiquitous to the point where it seems there's no other. There's little overall context and none of the protracted thought an essay requires, but they're easy to produce and read and that's what the Information Superhighway is about: Info and speed.

But in 1977 it was an innovative way to structure information. The Book Of Lists was so full of details and ideas that I even read, numerous times, about subjects I didn't care about (sports). It was also a great way to learn about sex.*

I remember as a kid seeing the below list and thinking "Ugh. I hope I never have to read one of those for school." Of course now there are several on the list I look forward to eventually tackling, boredom be damned.

The 15 Most Boring Classics
Based on a 1950 survey of readers taken by the Columbia University Press bulletin, The Pleasures of Publishing.

1. Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan
2. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
3. Paradise Lost by John Milton
4. Faerie Queene by Edmund Spencer
5. Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell
6. Pamela by Samuel Richardson
7. Silas Mariner by George Eliot
8. Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott (sounds more like Dickens to me)**
9. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
10. Faust by Johan Wolfgang von Goethe
11. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
12. Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust
13. Das Kapital by Karl Marx
14. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
15. The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot

Some thoughts: a number of these books were mention at Slate, either in the main article or the reader comments. Given the fact that this survey was conducted 61 years ago, my thesis that contemporary readers want entertainment and equate books with television or the internet doesn't really hold water. Another theory: maybe these books are really boring, or rather frustrate reader expectations to the point of diminishing returns. You have to be really interested in 19th century whaling practices to finish Moby Dick, for example.

Four of the books are translated works, which makes me wonder if the fault is the translator's rather than the author's. It seems like the standard for translations in the first half of last century was to make the work "literary" which often meant wordy and obtuse. The works by Cervantes, Proust and Tolstoy have since been published in new, lauded editions. I wonder if they would still make the list. Possibly, as they are all very long works.

Does anyone still read Eliot, Richardson, Thackeray or Scott? Even in school or university? Those are novels that have fallen completely out of fashion, possibly because the conventional wisdom is that they are dreadfully boring. There's been too much of interest in literature in the last 60 years for people to still be slogging through Ivanhoe.

_______________________________________
* Thank you David, Irving and Amy.
** You bastard!

Being Boring

2011-08-16T21:56:00.002-04:00

This past Thursday, Slate.com posted "Overrated: Authors, critics, and editors on "great books" that aren't all that great." My initial reaction was "Oh Jesus. Again?" I have not been keeping track, but it seems like I have read countless "Classic Books That Suck" articles online. I know an article like this is perfect solution for the slow days of mid-August. Email some writers, ask them to send a paragraph about a classic they hate, copy, paste, post, voila! Something to fill time and space while what's left of the publishing industry is on vacation.

I could point out the duplicity of one media criticizing the supposed achievments of another, especially one which it desperately seeks to usurp, but most likely it's just a matter of websites earning money from page hits, so the more page hits they can generate with either "controversial" articles or by encouraging readers to submit their comments and bicker with each other, the better. The better for them, that is. Ultimately the whole exercise becomes dispiriting.

There was a time when it was exciting to find contrary opinions online, provided some reasons why, rather than just knee jerk antipathy, were included. Anyone who is well read can think of an author or a classic novel they dislike. For example: I can't stand Jane Austen's work. I've had numerous people explain why she's a "great writer" and while I can intellectually appreciate their arguments, I still find her voice smug and her characters annoying.

On a small scale, it can be cathartic to pronounce your individual taste when it contradicts conventional wisdom. But on a large scale, it seems less about individuals with unique opinions and more about "let's piss on literature!" "Everything they told you was good is garbage!" After reading the article and attendant comments, I decided to print it as a pdf in order to easily scan the material, perhaps including one or two of the more imbecilic remarks on Vox Plops. I was trying to avoid Slate.com's annoying format quirk that forces you to click on a "more comments" button after every 10 or so entries. In pdf form, however, I was facing 70 pages of people essentially saying "Okay, but you know what book I hate?" I re-read about 15 pages before deciding I had had enough. More than enough, to be accurate.

There were some bright spots and flashes of insight. My interest in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain has been renewed. One person pointed out that even though he doesn't know it, Holden Caulfield is grieving for his older brother and not just suffering from teenage ennui. Catcher In The Rye, along with Ulysses, seems to be a particular target; they're two novels that really piss people off, probably due to not only with their reputations, but how much their admirers love those books. They don't just inspire fans. They create obsessives. People who take the arts seriously define themselves by what they like and what they don't. People who hate Salinger or Joyce's novels (different from hating, say, Crime and Punishment) are reacting not only to the books' status in society, but in individual reader's lives.

Unless I'm projecting, hidden within the various criticisms is the complaint "I was not entertained by this novel. I expect to be entertained. I could have been spent the time doing something else, but instead I read this book which did not entertain me. Therefore, this book sucks." I'm not arguing that people shouldn't think of reading as pleasure or entertainment and I'm certainly not arguing that people should be bored by their leisure activities, which, once you're out of school, is most likely what reading is. But the idea that "not being entertained = boredom = bad" saddens me. I know I'm being reductive but I couldn't help but see most of the comments as customer complaints, the ire of consumers who didn't get what they want. I don't recall any work of literature making such a promise to the reader.

Not Only, But Also

2011-08-15T20:01:00.002-04:00

In addition to posting sporadically upon this very blog, I also grace this site and this one with my wit and wisdom, provided I can either segment it in seven pieces or react to other's comments online.

For those too lazy to click, understand that I know where their sloth or entropy comes from:

7 Promises I've Yet to Follow Through On
By The King of Empty Promises

1. To burn the five episodes of the BBC's The Story of Ireland I download to dvd for my mother.
Promise made this past spring.

2. To burn the vhs of XTC videos lovingly collected by my friend Ben to a dvd for my friend Dave.
Promise made in January, 2011.

3. To loan my friend Bob the audiobook of David Cross' I Drink For A Reason that I had borrowed from the library.
Promise unfulfilled: I had to return the audiobook to the library.

4. To copy my dvd of Los Angeles Plays Itself for my friend Steve.
Promise made May 2011.

5. To burn some Betty Hutton movies to dvd for my friend Stacey.
Promise made November 1, 2010. Burned three movies to disc, have yet to give them to Stacey.

6. To loan my friend Kenny my copy of The Saragossa Manuscript.
Promise made in 2010, along with open-ended promise to get together for "movie night."

7. To post a list of 7 of 7Now! on a regular basis.
Promise made to my friend Karl in 2007. 2007? Good Lord!

New York The Magical Town

2011-07-21T15:57:00.004-04:00

The city slowly transforming into a children's video game.

Office at Night

2011-07-06T13:20:00.002-04:00

The Highline Glows At Night

2011-06-27T10:16:00.002-04:00

A Large Head In The Park

2011-06-24T14:47:00.002-04:00

The Subway A Happy Place

2011-06-23T10:34:00.002-04:00

Have You Tried Your Foot? I Understand It Is A Delicacy

2011-04-20T10:33:00.003-04:00

The below is excerpted from a series of emails among my friends. Names deleted out of basic decency.

>>Might I point out my friend G. and her relationship with K....totally in his destructive grip.

>Hasn't he died yet!!!???

>>Yes, he did die. He fell down the stairs while he was visiting his family in Sweden. He might have been drinking ;)

>Ooooo... um, so I was totally kidding about him dying. I'm an ass!

>>Lol it's ok, it happened over a year ago. She moved to Sweden shortly after.

Things that make me laugh about the above exchange:

1) "Hasn't he died yet?" sounds exactly like the sort of contemptuous thing I would say about someone I strongly disliked. It's reassuring to see I'm not the only one who commits faux pas like this.

2) The cheeky "He might have been drinking" is both jaunty and cruel. To top it off, his death is reported with a winking smiley face emoticon.

3) The mortification upon reading the news comes through. The person who wrote it is a genuinely good person and I'm sure she blanched and crumbled a bit as she wrote those words.

4) The final line, while reassuring, reads like a non sequitur. Like Italian widows wearing black, one year is the expected period of time that should lapse before you start taking pleasure in another person's death or reporting it with smiley faces.

Forty Days of Lent: Day 40

2011-04-17T20:49:00.002-04:00

So today was the first full day in New York after being in Hawaii. I slept late, transferred photos to the computer, cleaned the apartment. I went for a walk over the Williamsburg Bridge and into Manhattan but all I could focus on was the color of the city, the steel grey and dark blues, the drab look created when everything looks desaturated, the color muted and softened. I missed the bright blue sky, the aqua blue of the Pacific, and green. God I missed the color green.

I went to my favored haunts, looking for the comfort or routine inherent in a beloved restaurant bookstore or dive bar. Had one of the bartenders told me a personal bit of gossip about another one of the bartenders, not the sort of thing he would probably want people knowing, or had I simply misheard him?

I woke a little after 4:00, headed to the bathroom and saw something I can't quite explain: soft white light in a circular form, hazy and indistinct, was shining against the glass shower doors. It didn't look like the light was on the doors but was instead floating over the bathtub. I've gotten up in the wee small hours to use the bathroom but had never seen anything like this. I wasn't able to get back to sleep.

Forty Days of Lent: Day 32

2011-04-09T22:07:00.001-04:00

Kauai, Hawaii

I'm at the airport waiting at the gate and while I strive to be charitable, I can't help but see the human race as an endless freak show. I see a girl with with a horrible dark scar across her face and instinctively look away. Upon sneaking a second glance I realize she just has her hair in her face. Perhaps I'm tired. I don't fly well.

I lose the bottle of water to airport security. I suspect the "no more than 3 ounces of a liquid may be taken on the plane" rule is more of a sop to airports and shops from which they get revenue. The first thing I see after getting through security is a store where you can re-buy anything taken away from you. In addition to replenishing my water, I buy what I think of as my "I hate to fly" kit, including ear plugs for the descent, hoping to God that maybe this time my eardrums will stay where they belong. Tylenol PM was recommended as a sleep aid by a coworker, but I can't find any.

"Can I help you?" the girl behind the counter asks.

No point in lying. "I need something to knock me out. I was looking for Tylenol PM, but you don't seem to have it."

"How about the Unisom Sleepgels? They're supposed to make you sleep."

They work, but only for a couple of hours and then I feel groggy and restless, which I wouldn't have thought possible.

But we land and are immediately focused on the logistics of getting the rental cars and deciding if we want to open a Costco membership and shop there even though it is about 45 minutes from where we will be staying. It's not until we stop at a beachside restaurant that I realize, as contentment overcomes me, that I am in Hawaii and it is beautiful and that there are chickens wandering around our table.

I've been reading Sarah Vowell's Unfamiliar Fishes, her history of how Hawaii became part of the United States. She focuses on the contrast between New England missionaries and while comparing creation myths writes:

...the fruit of knowledge poisons [people] with fancy ideas and so they are cast out of a garden bearing a striking resemblance to the island of Kauai. (Though having been to the pleasantly sleepy Kauai, I can see how after a few days of lollygagging amidst the foliage, a woman would bite into just about anything to scare up something to read.)

Whereas a few days of lollygagging amidst the foliage is exactly what I want. That and a margarita or two.

Forty Days of Lent: Day 31

2011-04-08T20:32:00.001-04:00

I had forgotten how much Americans (real Americans, not your New York smarty-pants types but real Americans) love sports. Even the women. I remembered this at the airport hotel bar where I overheard a number of people bonding over The Game. Apparently, real Americans have trouble figuring out how to use hotel elevators, too. There were a series of episodes of The Sopranos in which Tony's stasis between life and after-life was represented by showing him stuck in a hotel. I think I know how he felt.

I am heading to Kaua'i, Hawaii, which, if it is the after-life, it's obviously paradise. The trip sort of fell into my lap: my friend Suzie invited me unexpectedly, though I'm hoping from now on, habitually. The invite, however, came three days after I had bought my tickets to London, forcing me to reenact three times, once per boss, the rehearsed and humbled speech: "I have the opportunity to stay for free for a week in Hawaii. Unfortunately, it is just a mon after I return from London and Paris. I have the vacation time, but even I recognize this is pushing it..." Happily, they all agreed, one of them stopping me short after the word "Hawaii" by saying "Oh, you gotta go."

Packing my clothes takes next to no time, especially as "just bring shorts and tshirts. No long pants!" was emphasized. I spent much more time (much more) trying to figure out what books to bring and what music and movies to add to my iPad. Another question subjected to my inner deliberation was whether to take my bag with me to work and leave from there or return home before going to the airport. Each option had its advantages and while it seems like not that big a deal, I really put a lot of thought into each scenario before finally deciding to leave the luggage at home for the day.

It was a good thing I had. When got home, I could hear the irritating high pitched whistle: my alarm had been set off, but was not in full blast annoying alert the police mode. I could also hear that Allan, my downstairs neighbor, was playing NPR much louder than normal, in an attempt to drown out the whistle. My landlord had, once again, set off the alarm when he let the exterminator in the apartment. Had I gone straight to the airport after work, the alarm would have been whistling nonstop all week long. I hope it's not going off now.

Forty Days of Lent: Day 30

2011-04-07T08:25:00.000-04:00

Forward Into The Past

Those of you who read this blog (perhaps I should say "both of you") will have no doubt noticed that I've fallen behind, way behind, with this year's Lenten entries. I'm typing this while looking at a calm Pacific Ocean on my last day in Hawaii, but I can't offer this trip as an excuse:. I was slipping even before I began packing my bag. My tardiness isn't due to lack of ideas or things to write about, either. It's just that unlike previous years, I couldn't make writing habitual, the real reason for taking in this task every spring.

Some, or both, of you may have also noticed that postings suddenly appear dated a few days ago, even though you know you checked the blog* (thank you, by the way) on that day and there was nada. Well, one of the better features about Blogger is that you can alter the date and time of any entry, which offers interesting possibilities for making yourself seem more prescient than you really are or altering your past so it harmonizes more with your present. Me, I'll be using this handy feature to fill in my 40 Days of Lent postings as I want rather than in chronological order. For example, I'm more interested in writing about this week's trip to Hawaii than I am in posting about Godspell or Elizabeth Taylor, so I will write about that first and then go back and post something on each of the earlier days that I missed.

----------------------
* Due to either autocorrect or a typo, this originally read as "blob," which come to think of it, might be the more accurate word.

40 Days of Lent: Day Twelve

2011-03-20T21:48:00.004-04:00

New Murals in the Neighborhood
It may not feel like spring yet but there's new murals in the neighborhood. I made sure I got pictures before they were ruined by people writing all over them.

40 Days of Lent: Day Eleven

2011-03-19T08:55:00.002-04:00

The first thing I saw this morning when getting off the subway was a middle aged man with a dark smear of ash on his forehead. "Wait a minute" I immediately thought "is it Ash Wednesday? It can't be. We just had Ash Wednesday." A long moment ensued in which I was completely thrown off my bearings, as if the past two weeks were just a dream. I tried to reorient myself in time: "today is Friday, I'm going to Hawaii next Saturday, Ash Wednesday was a couple of weeks ago, I got ashes at St. Pat's..."

I looked again at the man. What I had mistaken for ash was in fact a large dark mole. Relieved, I thought "he should have that looked at, cause it may not be healthy and it's confusing the hell out of people around him."

40 Days Of Lent: Day Ten

2011-03-18T11:14:00.001-04:00

Possibility of More Karma

I didn't buy gifts for many people while visiting London and Paris. What I did get, I got as impulse buys. "Oh, here's an [object]. [Person] loves [object]s. I'll get it for them. They'll love it!" For what it's worth, I didn't buy myself that much either.

However, I did make a point of bringing back coins in a variety of denominations as a gift for one of my boss's kids. He's become fascinated by currency and money (the words "apple," "far" and "tree" come to mind), particularly money from other countries. His older brother, on the other hand, is the artist of the family and likes making things, including a Lego picture frame that's much nicer than it sounds.

While pouring the pile of coins onto my boss's desk I suddenly saw my future. Inspired by this gift, his kid will grow up to work in finance - perhaps currency exchange - and become wealthy whereas I inevitably will end up lying in a gutter somewhere. Not recognizing me, he will feel compelled to throw me a few coins as he walks past but not know why, and the universe will then be in balance.

It reminds me of another time I saw my future. A friend was complaining about the unseasonably hot weather and asked "why is it so hot all the time all of a sudden?" I gave her a rather incredulous look, to which she responded "You don't think it's that, do you? Ugh, I hope not." The irony of the situation is that her husband works as a lawyer for energy companies. Hearing her denial, I flash forwarded to see myself crawling across a scorched desert that was probably once a major American metropolis and thinking back on our conversation right before I died.

No, I don't ever see my future as dying peacefully in bed surrounded by my loved ones. Hopefully I'll be pleasantly surprised.

40 Days of Lent: Day Nine

2011-03-17T23:01:00.006-04:00

Godspell's Probably Inadvertent But Nonetheless Subversive Demonstration Of The Religious Impulse

I've always had a soft spot for Godspell, the musical retelling of the gospel of Matthew done as children's theater. The songs are either undeniably catchy or touching, whether or not you agree with the words. The nonstop mugging of the cast gets on my nerves, but it's balanced by beautiful shots of a depopulated New York City. The Last Supper scene always gets to me, more for its depiction of someone saying goodbye to friends he'll never see again rather than for any New Testament reasons.

However, last time I watched Godspell a little bit of business went by and I thought "Did I just see what I think I saw? They couldn't possibly have meant that the way I'm interpreting it." It is, in just a few seconds, an effective demonstration of the religious impulse, almost a parody of said impulse.

It's about 24 minutes into the movie, during the comedy bits that follow the song "Day By Day." The disciples are cavorting in a junkyard (which is a sentence I can't imagine ever writing again) when we see one of them plant a small twig.

Jesus then comes by and waters the twig.

Unbeknownst to the first disciple, another disciple comes along and replaces the twig with a young tree.

The first disciple, while ignorant of the perfectly normal explanation of what has happened, is amazed at this "miracle."

Rather than look for any logical or natural reason for what occurred, she attributes it to Jesus and His magic...

and becomes His follower.

As mentioned above, I don't think this was intended as anything more than comic business. While this is happening, the other disciples are painting each other's faces and playing with a beat up car. Nothing else in the film is as subversive, but it's hard not to see this little vignette as an example of someone becoming religious because, in their ignorance, they attribute to a god or religious leader something that's actually part of the natural world.

40 Days Of Lent: Day Eight

2011-03-16T12:02:00.002-04:00

Karma

When I'm keeping my hair short, I go to a cheap barbershop and tell them to sse the #6 guide on the clippers and that it's just like mowing a lawn. However, whenever I decide to grow my hair a little longer, or to be more accurate, lumpier, I go to the rockabilly themed barbershop that's about a half hour's walk from my apartment. I make an appointment with D. and I'm usually happy with the results.

But there is a twist. With D., the longer you can keep him engaged in conversation, the better the haircut you get, so it's best to come prepared with a couple of topics to discuss. I hadn't realized this until one time D. was either talked out or not in a social mood. Then my haircut consisted of clip-clip-clip okay you're done. That's it? Yeah, that's it.

Beyond the obvious benefit to my coif, I enjoy talking with D. for as long as possible because he's an entertaining conversationalist. He once swore me to secrecy before telling his idea for a novel. Upon hearing the idea I regretted my promise and wished I was the sort of person who stole ideas. It was that good. Another time, his story of the police trying and failing to arrest a local drug dealer slowly evolved from "guess what happened in the neighborhood today" to a great unfilmed Keystone Kop misadventure. "He looks like...Stan Laurel" D. said of the drug dealer, an image that still makes me laugh.

So while getting my hair cut last week, I was able to keep D.'s attention for a good long time with stories about my recent trip to London and Paris. "You took your mom? That's so sweet! I'd love to take my mom and dad on a trip overseas, but one at a time, thank you. Not together."

This seems to be the definition of karma: do something nice like take someone on a trip and the universe rewards you with a better haircut. On the other hand, last time I saw my sister, she asked "Did you get a haircut?" Hearing yes, she looked it over before asking in earnest "Did you do it yourself?"

40 Days Of Lent: Day Seven

2011-03-15T15:41:00.001-04:00

Didn't make this up. Honest.

40 Days of Lent: Day Six

2011-03-14T21:30:00.002-04:00

Want to check your email but you got your period? No problem!

Seen near the Pompidou Center.

40 Days of Lent: Day Five

2011-03-13T16:09:00.005-04:00

My mother had promised her hairdresser that she would bring him back a pack of French cigarettes. He didn't request any particular brand, just wanted French cigarettes.

While wandering underground through the maze of shops and less important artworks near the Louvre, we spotted a tobacconist that also sold tickets to the museum. Two birds, one stone. While buying my ticket, I asked if I could also have some cigarettes, pointing to a pretty white pack among the many choices on the wall.

"Which one?" the clerk asked.

"Le 'Fumer Tue,' s'il vous plait."

"Pardonnez?"

Thinking I was mispronouncing the name, I repeated it and pointed. "Non, non, le Fumer Tue...les blancs...ah, oui. Merci."

While ringing them up, the clerk said in English "Do you know what 'Fumer Tue' means?"

"Non, non."

"'Smoking Kills.'"

It wasn't the name of the brand, it was the blunt warning on the pack. So yes, I stood in front of a line of people wanting to buy tobacco and kept repeating "Can I have the Smoking Kills cigarettes? No, not those. The Smoking Kills ones. Yes, thank you."

40 Days of Lent: Day Four

2011-03-12T22:12:00.000-05:00

I like gargoyles.

From Notre Dame and Sacre Coeur.

40 Days Of Lent: Day Three

2011-03-11T16:51:00.002-05:00

Woke up this morning to news of an earthquake in Japan, one of the largest ever to strike the islands, and attendant news and concerns about resultant tsunamis. It's seems unseemly to be writing or even thinking in my customary cheery way, yet that's how I feel. Things are not just going okay, they're actually going well. I don't hate my job, my current living situation is one of comfort, I certainly don't want or need for anything, my outlook has been upbeat. Maybe there's a certain naïveté to my current state, but lurking at the back of my mind is the awareness of how it can all change, the speed with which everything can go wrong. But until that happens, I'm going to appreciate things being good for as long as it lasts.

One of the people I work with is a bit of a Chicken Little. In 2008, when the stock market began to slide because of the overvaluation of e housing market, he ran around the office in a positive panic, just barely stopping short of predicting that soon we'd be eating our young. It was an entertaining experience. I was so enchanted watching his meltdown that I didn't even pause to worry about the fact that our economy might be imploding and we might be heading into a new depression. I find the era and the culture of the Great Depression fascinating, but that doesn't mean I necessarily want to live through one. After news of yesterday's disaster, he went online and found a wealth of information about the possibility of tsunamis striking the east coast on a website called Armageddontome.com. Basically, if a giant wave heads towards the NYC area, we'll have time, but not nearly enough, to get to safety.

Even this news didn't alter my mood. I know I'm going to die someday, but for some reason, I just get upset about that fact.

40 Days Of Lent: Day Two

2011-03-10T19:07:00.002-05:00

Telling my friend Bob the previous story, he commented that Paris has been having a huge problems with gypsies, which could account for the man's overreaction (my opinion) at the ATM machine. Happily our only direct encounter with people I assume were gypsies was not that bad at all.

We were making our way along the Seine when a woman in front of us held a gold ring out, saying she had found it on the ground. Perhaps it was my mother's? Maybe she had dropped it on the ground? My mother said no, not her's and then immediately said she was worried about whomever it was that had lost their ring: what an awful thing to happen while on vacation.

My mother said the woman should keep the ring as we had no idea how to return it to its proper owner. But the woman insistently gave the ring to my mother and rather than argue, we said okay and were on our way.

We had walked about four steps before the lady called to us and rubbing her fingers together in the universal sign for money, indicated she wanted us to give her money for the ring. "Oh...." we said, catching on to the scam. We handed the ring back to the woman with an unspoken attitude of "nice try" and resumed our walk.

Crossing a bridge, we saw the woman again, surrounded by some companions, one of whom bent over, placed a gold ring on the ground and then picked it up. This woman made her way towards us holding out the ring. "Nooooo...we just did this with her!" I said, gesturing to the first woman and laughing at how lackluster their scam seemed. Happily, both women laughed too, in a friendly way,nas if to say "Oops! Silly us!"

40 Days of Lent: Day One

2011-03-09T17:11:00.000-05:00

Ash Wednesday!

First day of Lent and getting ashes smeared on your forehead is one of my favorite religious rituals. The enthusiasm that John Doe brings to singing about the Fourth of July is almost, but not quite, how I feel about Ash Wednesday.

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Last Tuesday, after arriving in Paris and enjoying a good lunch at a bistro across from the Gare Du Nord train station, I found myself doing a quick dash among unfamiliar streets in a desperate search for a bank with an ATM. I had booked a flat from a remarkably laid-back landlord who had waived both the security deposit ("I don't need it") and 1/4th of the rent ("you can pay me in cash when you get here"). I had most of the rent in British pounds but was hoping to exchange it at a place with better rates than the kiosk at the train station. But apart from the more touristy locales, Paris is not over-run with places to exchange currency. Plan B: find an ATM and withdraw the rent in Euros while my mother waited in front of the apartment with the luggage.

I jogged along, thinking that eventually I had to run across a bank. I later found out that at the end of the first street, had I turned right instead of left, I would have found several banks a block or so away. But I am by nature gauche so it took me a little longer to find a bank and when I did, I was greeted with a sight like something out of a Michael Haenke film.

A pretty woman (there are no other types in Paris) was standing at the ATM while her male companion was roughly shoving two small children, running interference and keeping the children at arm's length from the woman. From what I could see, the children were not aggressively begging; they were just sort of standing there, looking unwashed and sad like ghosts from a Henry James short story.

How was I going to react to the situation when it was my turn at the ATM? It became a moot point, as the kids had silently disappeared by the time I began punching in my code. Didn't see them at all during my quick jog back to the apartment.

Letter Of The Law, Rather Than The Spirit

2011-03-06T14:55:00.003-05:00

While I was in Paris, I saw some girls wearing a ḥijāb, the traditional Muslim head covering. But one girl in particular stood out, because in addition to the head covering, she was wearing the tightest blue jeans and the spikiest heels I had seen in days. She almost looked like the result of one of those children's books in which the pages are cut and you can mix and match tops and bottoms. I wonder if the look was the result of a compromise with her parents. It was the best illustration of East and West, traditional and modern, and the religious and secular worlds I had seen.

London

2011-02-26T16:01:00.002-05:00

As with most trips I've taken, getting out of town is the worst part. I'm not referring to rushing through the airports, the inevitable patting down or fumbling attempts to get all your carry on electronics back in your bag with one hand while slipping on your shoes with the other. I'm referring trying to maneuver through New York City's subway system with a piece of luggage. Those who complain about the inconvenience of heightened security at airports have no idea what it's like trying to squeeze onto an elevator at a subway station with a large bag, only to be confronted by people who will not move to accommodate you because they hope that you'll get off instead. Oy. See ya, New York assholes. Won't miss you at all.

I should compare this to the fact that my mother, with whom I am traveling, was offered a seat on every subway today, save one. I was even offered seats next to her when people saw that we were together.

This Yakov Smirnovesque "in my country this, but in this country that" is an inevitable effect of traveling and being an Anglophile, it's easy to guess which side of the scales are loaded with gold and which have lead. Another effect is feeling like I'm in a dream: everything is familiar yet slightly different. Houses and buildings look different, so many made with incredible red bricks, and you imagine that cars move differently. It's been 15 years sine I've been here, but this morning, on the tube of all places, it all came back to me, not as distinct memories, but as sense memories, as emotional impressions of what it was like to be here and I felt so happy my eyes watered.

The Wave

2011-02-02T22:24:00.001-05:00

The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean
Susan Casey

What's the matter, John? Blue Meanies?

Newer and bluer Meanies have been sighted within the vicinity of this theater. There's only one way to go out.

How's that?

Singing!

It’s a great ending to Yellow Submarine, and if you think of the “Blue Meanies” as the giant unpredictable waves becoming more and more prevalent in the oceans due to global warming, you can substitute “surfing!” for “singing!” and you’ll have an idea of half of Susan Casey’s book. As waves became bigger, surfers like Laird Hamilton have adapted, creating a new kind of surfing in order to ride 60 and 70 foot waves, which are too powerful and far from the shore to paddle to. Now a surfer is towed by a jet ski and positioned on the water to catch previously unobtainable waves. The risk is much greater that far from shore. Experienced surfers have drowned. The book contains a description of a particularly gruesome accident with a life-saving rescue by Hamilton, who hotwires a stalled jet ski with pair of iPod earphones and uses his wetsuit as a tourniquet.

In contrast to surfers with their spiritual quest to experience great waves, there are the other stars of Casey’s book, the scientists who try to understand the water and predict its behavior.

“Well, it’s not oceanographers looking at them anymore. It’s physicists! Because they’re discovered that these waves are behaving in a manner that is similar to light waves. They can suck the energy from both sides and concentrate it in one spot. And light waves are partially particles and partially wavelike. It’s moving [the study of waves] into a whole different dimension.”

The nature of light has been one of the conundrums of physics, because sometimes light acts like a wave and sometimes it acts like a particle. The idea that the water in the ocean may be the same way underscores a point made throughout the book: we really don’t know very much about the ocean. With global warming, the little we knew may no longer be true. For years sailors told stories of enormous monster waves in otherwise calm seas. Such tales were dismissed as physically impossible. Now it seems that they were happening and may become more of the norm.

A statistic is repeated several times in this book: on average, two large ships are lost at sea every week. The fact that this statistic is little known, let alone a source of widespread outrage, says a lot about how much we take for granted in a global marketplace. One of the effects of living in a technologically developed country is that you assume things are stable; in fact you come to depend on it. The chaos is kept far away; others have to deal with it. The people Casey interviews are all dealing with the chaos in various ways. Some try to understand it and others try to ride it, if for only a few moments.

On a slow day at work, slow because of a snowstorm the previous night (speaking of chaotic nature), I lent The Wave to our receptionist. At the end of the day, she returned it to me, saying that it was scaring the hell out of her but she couldn’t stop reading it and she was going to have to get her own copy. A perfectly succinct review.

What Was In The Package

2011-01-24T22:56:00.003-05:00

Nunzilla!

The package was from my friend Elizabeth and contained a Christmas card and Nunzilla!, another "thank you" for letting her stay in my apartment during a recent visit to New York.

In the name of fairness, I should point out that the post office manager quoted in the previous entry was not trying to be difficult. He was trying to be helpful, short of the one thing I needed him to do, which was give me the package.

The postal system is in trouble for the same reasons as record companies and dvd stores are. They have a huge infrastructure set up to deliver less and less media to fewer customers. The infrastructure was put in place to deal with a much higher volume than is currently shipped. I can remember just a few years ago we used to get two large plastic bins full of mail every day at work. It took one of the assistants the better part of an afternoon to sort it all. The fact that the he liked to take his sweet time and peruse whatever magazines and catalogs came in is only partially relevant. Now our daily mail fills about half of one bin and the items being sent don't ever seem particularly important.

I have mixed feelings about the post office. I only go when work compels me, mostly to drop off certified mail. The post office we use inevitably has a long line, yes, but otherwise seems well run and the people who work there are pleasant. It's the opposite of the post office we used to frequent which seemed to be deliberately living up to the stereotype of unhelpful arrogant bureaucracy. Rules changed arbitrarily, without warning and never to the customer's advantage. It was staffed by people who were, in a word, assholes. The postal workers at the counter talked and joked with each other but didn't hid the fact that you were interrupting their chatting time. I did get to have a heaping dose of tasty schadenfreude when, in the wake of anthrax being discovered in the mail shortly after September 11th, I went to the post office and saw the formerly obnoxious staff wearing breathing masks, goggles and plastic gloves. They seemed fairly tense and very unhappy, which is good.

My grandfather Hanlon worked for the post office. (In a nice bit of contrast, my other grandfather worked for the phone company). The stories that have been passed down, of employees who could tell just by feeling an envelope if it contained cash, have given me a certain mistrust of the service, which is odd because I think the service is probably as good now as it has ever been. Various frustrations aside, getting something unexpected in the mail is one of those little pleasures I will miss if it's ever gone.

Look how well Nunzilla! gets along with the others in my black and white collection.

P Off

2011-01-20T15:53:00.004-05:00

Included with my mail yesterday was a crumpled card, dated the day before, informing me that I had something at the post office that the mailman was unable to deliver and that I needed to pick up. Looking at the card I saw my local post office was open till 7:00pm. I had time, why not go?

But when I get to the post office, a sign in the window says they are only open until 5:30. The doors were locked but a guy on a bicycle by the front door explained that one of the managers would occasionally unlock the door and help people, "but I don't know if he'll help you."

When the manager came to the door, I showed him the card and asked if I could pick up my package.

"No, we're closed. You'll have to come back."

"You can't just get my package for me?"

"Well, I can tell you if it's here, but I can't give it to you. We're closed."

Showing him the card: "It says you're open until 7:00."

"Those are old cards. We close at 5:30 now."

"Um, are you going to get new cards?"

"We have them, but we're not allowed to use them until we use up all the old cards."

"Okay, can I have the package rerouted to another address?"

"No, you can't do that. But you can have the package redelivered to your apartment."

"But I'm not at my apartment when the mail comes. That's why I'm here now."

"Can you come before 5:00?"

"I'm not taking time off work to come pick up a package."

"Saturday? We're open Saturday. Can you come then?"

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I don't know what the package is, but whatever it is, it better be pretty spectacular.

Recent iPhone Photos

2010-12-14T21:12:00.002-05:00

By "recent" I mean "taken within 2010."

The Year In Status

2010-12-13T11:52:00.003-05:00

While I am not a fan of the way that Facebook has cannibalized the internet, it has been good for some things. Friends can post pictures once so others can check at their leisure. It has also unleashed people's creativity, albeit in bite-sized doses. For all the Facebook apps that I want nothing to do with (Farmville, Mafia Wars, etc) there's something clever like the above: a random overview of my status updates for this past year. It's particularly handy, given the fact that I often can't remember what I've done last week, let alone for the last year, so reactions like "When did I see Fountains of Wayne?" are not surprising. What is surprising is how many of these posts deal with death, either directly or subtly. On the other hand, anyone who has perused this blog might notice that the only time I have anything to say is when I want to say "miss you."

My Poster for One Sheet Redux Show Currently at Maxwells

2010-11-19T15:00:00.003-05:00

Originally I was going to write quotes from the film's omnipresent voiceover on the various leaves but decided I liked the image as is.

Many thanks for Henri Rosseau for painstakingly fashioning his unique views of nature so that I could come along a hundred years later and make a collage of them.

Catching Up

2010-11-10T16:22:00.003-05:00

I have a piece in this show - it's the first time in a long time I've made anything. Best of all, I'm fairly happy with the results. The theme of the show was artists creating new posters for existing movies. Eventually I'll post my poster here online; for now you can see my interpretation of Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line, along with other good work, at Maxwell's, 1039 Washington Street, Hoboken NJ.

Nice write up about the show here.

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Other doings:

I've been posting semi-regularly on 7NOW!, random, subjective, opinionated, at time ornery lists of seven items. Since I don't usually detail my current faves on this blog, 7Now! is a good spot to see what I'm listening to, reading, watching, etc.

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My friend Tammy is going to be working in Yemen for the next year, presumably checking toner cartridges before they're shipped overseas. She has been writing about the experiences here; given that this blog was born out of my overseas travel, you may find Tammy's experiences interesting.

Rat Girl

2010-10-29T10:04:00.003-04:00

Rat Girl
Kristin Hersh

Everyone goes through hopefully brief periods of intense upheaval in their lives. I worked with a woman who, in the space of less than a year, started a new job, suffered the loss of a close family member, had to adopt the family member's young son, discovered she was pregnant (with twins!) and had to move from the United States to Australia. The fact that she was able to handle these seismic changes with fortitude, good humor and grace is a testament to her and a lesson to me for when I get upset that someone has taken the stapler from my desk and not put it back.

Rat Girl is musician Kristin Hersh's memoir of the tumultuous year she turned 19, during which her band Throwing Muses moved from playing in seedy clubs to recording their first album, she was diagnosed as bipolar and put on medication, and she found out she was pregnant. It's no roman a clef; Hersh would rather write about her love of swimming, which leads her to sometimes sneak into stranger's backyards to use their pools, than offer any information about the father of her baby. It's an impressionist memoir of her life almost 20 years ago, one that appears intimate but is actually rather removed. To paraphrase George Carlin, she's only telling you what she wants you to know.

However, what she is telling you is interesting and not just for her fans, though they will appreciate the book's inclusion of song lyrics where appropriate, as a way of underlining the lyric's inspiration. "Oh that's what that means. It makes sense now." The sections dealing with the band are memorable not because they tell you anything new about the band, but because they remind you of what it was like to be young and ride around in a junky car with too many friends, everyone sitting on each others' laps to make room. But it's Betty Hutton who steals the show, as she was wont to do.

Kristin Hersh and 1940s film star Betty Hutton being college friends is one of those unfathomable historical pairings, like Al Gore and Tommy Lee Jones being college roommates, but their scenes together are Rat Girl's highlights. Whether smoking in a bathroom as Hutton's moods travel 360 degrees or recounting Hutton trying to teach showbiz style to Hersh, who affects a deer-in-headlights blank stare onstage, it is an affectionate portrait of someone who had once been one of America's biggest stars. After finishing the book, I wanted more Betty and began seeking out her movies on Turner Classic Movies. Her eagerness to entertain an audience is a revelation. I can't imagine a better tribute.

Pariah

2010-10-22T23:01:00.003-04:00

Pariah
Bob Fingerman

Full disclosure: the author is a friend of mine.

The ability of people at a certain age to use their friends as a surrogate family, especially if they have friends of both genders with different enough personalities to serve various roles within the group, is something that has been noted more than once and not just on sitcoms. But in large cities, the dynamic is different as you have to spend much of your time in close proximity with people you, at best, are indifferent to or, at worst, actively dislike. Pariah is a novel about people who are forced by circumstances (read “zombies”) to depend on people they don’t like very much just to survive. It is an active demonstration of Satre’s idea that “Hell is other people.”

Trapped within an apartment building by streets full of the walking dead, the characters become parodies of urban dwellers who can’t make or do anything themselves because they assume they can always buy whatever they want from a store. Cut off from any stores, they have little else to do but slowly waste away and turn on each other with what little energy they have left. This state of dwindling entropy is eventually interrupted by an inversion of the archetypal modern urban horror story, the murder of Kitty Genovese. In 1964, Ms. Genovese was attacked and ultimately murdered after coming home from her job as a bar manager. It was reported that many of her neighbors heard her scream for help but did nothing because they did not want to get involved. The case became the perfect symbol of how callous and selfish people are in big cities. As is often the case, the truth was more complex and more interesting. One of Genovese’s neighbors did yell down and in fact frightened her attacker away for a while. Another neighbor phoned the police. Later sociological experiments inspired by the case indicated that the more people who are involved in a situation, the less responsibility or control any one individual feels. If something traumatic happens in front of you and no one else is around, you feel the full responsibility of the situation. But if the same event happened and you are part of a crowd, you are more likely to leave the responsibility to someone else. It’s not that “we don’t want to get involved” but “we don’t know what to do but hope someone else will take care of this.”

As mentioned, Pariah breaks the stasis of its trapped apartment dwellers wasting away by introducing Mona, who is the opposite of Kitty Genovese. Instead of being attacked while her neighbors watch, Mona is able to walk the streets without harm, surrounded by the zombies yet somehow repelling them. She is safer in the streets than the people are in their apartment building. It’s not long before she becomes their delivery person, at first picking up the bare necessities like food and water, but soon going on expeditions for items to pass the time and entertain. But once someone’s situation is no longer life-threatening, are they necessarily going to be a better person? How much of our actions are determined by our surroundings?

My only complaints with Pariah have to do with the pacing. The novel is made of three sections and I read it in three sittings, which probably accounts for my sense of impatience with the first third of the book, despite its merits. To wit: it’s hard to keep a situation of hopelessly trapped characters interesting for a length of time. Fingerman uses flashbacks, plot twists and comic scenes to get around this, but my enthusiasm for the book didn’t really begin until Mona’s appearance. I think the final third is the strongest section of the book, as Fingerman’s vision of hell as other people, both living and dead, comes to dominate.

Ten Little Indian Boys Went Out To Dine...

2010-10-21T23:23:00.002-04:00

Last week I was talking with a friend, someone I had not seen for several months. She had had a very fulfilling summer. It seemed like she hadn’t completely left the season or its experiences yet. Part of her was still there while the rest was talking to me on a rainy night in October in Brooklyn.

She asked what I had done this summer and as often happens when asked such questions, my mind went completely blank. I must be the easiest person in the world to stump: ask me what I’ve been doing recently or what my favorite books are or even what I had for lunch and my mind empties. If only meditation worked this well. I knew I had done some things this past summer but I couldn’t really recall anything specific. Something happened, but it was located within a void in my memory, a void that had a definite shape. It wasn’t until the conversation moved on and she began telling me about a friend with serious health problems that it came back to me. What I Did This Summer. I visited my friend Ben in hospice and said goodbye to him two days before he died.

It has been a terminal couple of months. My nephew lost two friends; one was hit by a car, the other drowned. A sign of the way we live now: within an hour of the boy's drowning, almost all of his friends knew because they texted each other on their cell phones. The days of parents preparing their children for bad news are gone. A co-worker’s father fell to his death while hiking. A friend’s brother died. Ben died, which while not entirely unexpected, was and is still painful. During the 1990s I experienced a similar cycle. I thought of it in terms of concentric circles. I heard of acquaintances losing loved ones, then distant friends, and soon closer friends were experiencing great losses. I recall thinking that death was getting closer and closer to me and being unsettled by the idea. This cycle seemed to end with my father’s death. I’ve known people that have died since then, but the pattern, the sense of the steady approach, was gone.

I don’t see any pattern now. It’s random and chaotic, which means you never know when you’re going to get hit. A co-worker has developed Bell’s Palsy. Last night, a bartender at my favorite dive bar told me that his sister has been in the hospital for quite some time. She’s been developing blood clots and her doctors cannot figure out why. “I’m really sorry,” he added. “People are supposed to tell their problems to the bartender, not the other way ‘round.” With all this going on, it’s no wonder I can’t remember what I’ve been doing for the last few months.

Cloud Atlas

2010-09-28T23:02:00.004-04:00

Cloud Atlas
David Mitchell

Cloud Atlas is a collection of six stories, separated by genre, locale and time but linked by motifs, themes and perhaps a soul. As clouds move across the sky, so do people move across the expanse of time, similar yet unique. The novel is structured like a palindrome, sections running in the order A B C D E F E D C B A, as follows

A. the diary of an American notary sailing from Chatham Islands to San Francisco in the 1800s
B. letters from a young ne'er-do-well musician staying at the home of an aged, formerly great composer
C. a suspense thriller about a journalist investigating corruption at a nuclear power plant
D. first person account of a British publisher who runs afoul of gangsters
E. a science fiction story, an interview with a clone in a corporate-run future
F. a post-apocalypse story about a primitive society encountering someone from a more advanced civilization

Except for the post-apocalypse story, each story is split in two, with the first half ending with a cliffhanger resolved in the second. Each story is read (or experienced) by a character in the succeeding section, so that the diary in A is read by the letter writer in B, whose letters are in turn read by the main character in C., etc. As mentioned above, there are also recurring motifs and themes in each story and the novel presents a fairly bleak overview of human history. Yet reading it is anything but bleak. Mitchell is an entertainer; this is meant as a compliment. Each section is fueled by the primary narrative need: the desire to find out what happens next. I’m a fidgety reader by nature but this novel commanded my attention and I finished it much faster than normal. Mitchell is a master at elements of craft that are easily overlooked, such as pacing the flow of ideas, creating rounded characters and writing in different genres and forms. Reading Cloud Atlas is a pleasure. It’s after finishing the novel that frustration sets in.

A book exists in your mind in two forms: one while you are reading and the other in memory when you think about it after finishing. It was during the latter that my opinion of Cloud Atlas lessened a bit. The stories are linked but any attempt to create a coherent narrative for the novel as a whole based on these links and repeating motifs is inevitably frustrated by something within one of the stories. These contradictions don’t indicate the novel is deliberately ambiguous or slyly playful so much as it is without a larger design. The memory of the pleasure I experienced reading Cloud Atlas has been subsumed by the frustration I feel that there is no larger point beyond the presentation of six clever tales, enjoyable but ultimately as substantial as clouds.

Today's Reading

2010-09-03T10:17:00.003-04:00

A nice refutation to those who criticize fiction for being too unlikely or unrealistic, this excerpt is from Alex Ross' The Rest Is Noise, his history of 20th century classical music. It reads like something by Thomas Pynchon and best of all, it made me laugh out loud.

One day in 1948 or 1949, the Brentwood Country Mart, a shopping complex in an upscale neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, was the scene of a slight disturbance that carried overtones of the most spectacular upheaval in twentieth-century music. Marta Feuchtwanger, wife of the emigre novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, was examining grapefruit in the produce section when she heard a voice shouting in German from the far end of the aisle. She looked up to see Arnold Schoenberg, the pioneer of atonal music and the codifier of twelve-tone composition, bearing down on her, with his bald pate and burning eyes. Decades later, in conversation with the writer Lawrence Weschler, Feuchtwanger could recall every detail of the encounter, including the weight of the grapefruit in her hand. "Lies, Frau Marta, lies!" Schoenberg was yelling. "You have to know, I never had syphilis!"

A Helpful Clerk

2010-08-25T12:44:00.003-04:00

Last night I stopped in my neighborhood bookstore, something I need to do at least once a week; otherwise I feel weird. I picked up a copy of Cult Magazines: From A to Z as a birthday present for a friend. On seeing my purchase, the person at the cash register said "You know, we also have copies of the fetish magazine Bizarre in really good shape," leading me to a glass case and producing two copies of the magazine. They were digest-sized and filled with drawings of ladies in skin-tight clothing. My friends know I have a habit of smelling books; happily, I was able to restrain myself from sniffing the copies of Bizarre.

I considered adding them as a gift but the price was more than I wanted to spend, though still reasonable given the magazines' condition. "I find ladies in clothes like these much sexier than when they're naked" the clerk told me.

"Oh" my helpful response.

"Have you seen the Puerto Rican porn magazines we got in?"

"Yes, yes, I did see those" because I had. Those magazines featured black and white photos, taken in sequence, showing people sitting around in a living room removing their clothes piece by piece. They were like stills from the drabbest stag film ever made.

I should point out that this is a regular bookstore and I was not wearing my dirty raincoat. So is it me? Is there something about me that says "tell me all about the second-hand dirty books you have in stock?"

Freelance Online Critics and Scholars

2010-08-24T16:12:00.007-04:00

It has been a slow day at work: one boss is working from his beach house; another is not feeling well and is working from home. In addition, this is the end of summer, the limbo before a Labor Day that has worked out to be later this year than usual. So I'm rather bored.

It still seems to be bad form to open a book at your desk at work but reading something on the internet is okay. The impression of being engaged and aware of your surroundings, dissolves when you're pouring over a book but not when you're immersed in the computer screen.

So thank God for online critics and scholars with their blogs dedicated to art, design, and literature. (I don't bother with political opinion blogs. I've never been that bored.) Some recent finds that have not only made the days pass quicker but have actually enriched them:

Got Medieval
A medieval scholar's playful blog featuring the hallmarks of medieval life I like best: crazy thinking, religious domination, scary monsters. He finds outstanding images I have not seen elsewhere.

Res Obscura
My friend Andrea just alerted me to this blog today. Still exploring but love what I've seen so far.

A Journey Round My Skull
Someone else who unerringly finds bizarre and beautiful images from artists both past and contemporary.

BibliOdyssey
An archivist with wide-ranging taste shares images from a variety of little known or soon to be lost forever books.

Caustic Cover Critic
Speaking of books: want to understand good book cover design? Read this blog. Even if not interested in the hows and whys of design, you can marvel at the expertly chosen examples or laugh at the bad covers on display.

Now it's time for me to go home.

Role Models

2010-07-29T22:07:00.005-04:00

Role Models
John Waters

“Being rich is not about how much money you have or how many homes you own; it’s the freedom to buy any book you want without looking at the price and wondering if you can afford it.”
- John Waters

An apropos quote, considering I bought Waters’ latest book Role Models immediately upon seeing a signed copy at St. Marks Bookshop. Nope, never even looked at the price. I knew no matter what it was, it was worth it.

Role Models acts as a bookend, and in some ways an answer to, Waters’ first book Shock Value. Shock Value (published in 1981) was the work of a hilarious, bratty young man and a manifesto, a call to arms against snooty good taste. Role Models is the work of a still hilarious, yet more refined older man, who has seen bad taste become mainstream, the only taste left in America. Parts of it read like a mea culpa, most noticeably in the chapters about Leslie Van Houten, one of the convicted members of the Manson family, and Shelia Alberta Bowater, aka “Lady Zorro,” a lesbian stripper in one of Baltimore’s sleazier clubs from Waters’ youth. Whereas Shock Value featured an almost gleeful attitude towards the Manson family – a picture of John posing with Tex Watson probably lost him (John, not Tex) more than one movie deal – Role Models’ chapter on Ms. Van Houten is actually an impassioned plea for parole based on the belief that people can change and reform themselves in prison. It’s also a testament to Waters’ friendship with Van Houten, even if Waters’ mother comments when a letter from Leslie is delivered to their house, “Does the Manson Family have to have our address?”

The chapter on Lady Zorro is also heartbreaking because if focuses on the damage she inflicted upon her daughter who, against the odds, has managed to pull her life together and now has a bemused attitude towards her alcoholic and destructive mother. In his early films Waters collected people and ideas that were against the norm, as an enemy of his enemy (middle class manners and hypocrisy) being a friend. But as an older man, Waters seems to recognize the cost it takes to live outside the norms, both to yourself and those around you. He now seems horrified by Lady Zorro’s home life and instead respects her daughter’s quiet dignity.

It’s an attitude I can understand. When I was young, part of what attracted me to a particular group of friends was that they were not “normal.” They were funny, all a little crazy, but had neither a desire nor an ability to fit in. The sentimental inclination is to say that we all formed our own family, but that’s not quite true. It was more like these outcasts formed their own asylum, with each one taking turns being either inmate or social worker. I guess because I am fundamentally middle-class and bourgeois and normal, I assumed that they too would eventually calm down and we’d grown into funny wacky adults together. But that’s not what happened. Some of them died from drugs, some people’s craziness eventually make them impossible to be around, and some of them slipped into desperate lives that are as far from normal as you can get but still function. I remember when I realized “They’re never going to get better. This is who they’re going to be for the rest of their lives.” That sort of melancholy, that surveying of a devastated landscape behind you, came to mind reading Role Models. The lucky ones who live and endure get to remember and talk about those who didn’t.

This makes Roles Models sound like a dreary affair; it is anything but. Waters writes with his customary wit, and his insight into people and the arts still surprise like flash bombs. He’s equally adept at writing about singer Johnny Mathis, artist Cy Twombly, author Jane Bowles and gay pornographers. His article about avant-garde fashion designer Rei Kawakubo didn’t make me want to wear her clothes, but I understand why Waters does: “…I like to wear a blue coat that, if you look really closely, you realize, no, it doesn’t need to be cleaned; those coffee stains are part of the fabric. This way if a drunken fisherman spills a drink on you, you’ve turned him into a fashion designer and he’s none the wiser.”

One final word from Waters, and it’s not a bad one to live by: “I’ve always said true success is figuring our your life and career so you never have to be around jerks.”

Amen.

2010-07-14T23:44:00.002-04:00

The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains
Nicholas Carr

Ever since I’ve lost God, or rather misplaced Him, I’ve been looking for the prime cause a little lower; within my brain, to be exact. Once I stopped thinking of “my second favorite organ” (to quote Woody Allen) as a fixed operating system but instead as an ongoing work-in-progress, one that you could effect by your actions and that, in turn, would effect you, I’ve become interested in how the cauliflower inside our heads gets anything done. Neurology has replaced psychology and, as it is still a fresh field for me to explore, I am fascinated by the ideas that grow there.

One favorite idea is that technology changes us fundamentally because technology changes our consciousness. Our ancestors of long ago, who lived their entire lives without various tools, might as well be a different species. It’s a very Marshall McLuhan idea, though I was infected with it by David Cronenberg. The way that technology changes us, that it is never a passive tool free of consequences, is the underlying thesis of The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains by Nicholas Carr. Carr moves from the anecdotal and personal (“I can’t seem to concentrate on reading anything for very long nowadays”) to trying to find the reasons why. It’s not just that concentration and deep reading are a bore or old fashioned in today’s infobyte culture. It’s because prolonged exposure to the internet and how we surf the web causes changes not just in habits or learned behavior but in the physical structure of the brain itself.

Like the internet, The Shallows contains multitudes. It is a history of books and reading and of the internet, including an overview of Google (the book grew out of the author’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”). It includes a demonstration on how technology changes consciousness. Clocks changed man’s perception of time (the first people to demand precise time measurement were monks in the middle ages who wanted to know exactly when to pray) and maps changed man’s perception of space. It is an accessible primer on the physiology of the human brain and how experience is transformed into memory and a demonstration of why human memory is nothing like computer memory. It is a warning of the consequences of individuals and cultures abandoning the concentration that comes with focusing on a text in favor of gorging on information in a short period of time.

In a digression, Carr himself admits the irony in the fact that he set out to write a book about the fact that he seems to be losing his ability to concentrate on anything for an extended period of time. To finish his book, he had to deliberately curtail his internet usage, but confesses that as the book neared completion, he found himself going online more and more.

I find myself with a slightly different problem. I’ve always been a fidgety reader, but once I get past the initial phase of looking around, looking at the cover of the book for the umpteenth time, flipping through its pages and re-reading paragraphs, then I am hooked. I can’t blame the internet for that. However, I now find it takes a great deal of effort to watch a movie. It is rare I watch a film in one sitting at home anymore. Inevitably I have to stop to make tea, check email, take a nap, or indulge in some other distraction. I suspect that this is internet related and that it is the similarity of the television screen to the computer monitor that makes me want to mentally “click” on to some other idea. This doesn’t happen when I watch television shows, probably due to the faster-paced storytelling.

Happily, I’ve become interested in reading in a way that I have not in years. An irony to add to Carr’s: I was completely hooked on his book about how books are losing their place as the prime purveyors of information, particularly to sections discussing how human brains work. Having finished The Shallows, I try to force myself to concentrate more, particularly while at my job, rather than get swept away in the tide of instant messages, emails, jumping online and indulging in all the other distractions. I can’t control the world around me, but I can try to exorcise some control over how it affects and if it changes me.

(And yes, I did look at the internet many times while writing this post).

2010-06-29T13:31:00.003-04:00

Okay, I can't take credit for discovering these; I'm reposting them from Caustic Cover Critic, which is a great blog in its own right. I don't know what is worse: the fact that there is an Anne Frank manga or the fact that Astroboy is apparently one of the characters.

The Timechart of Revelations

2010-06-28T15:40:00.003-04:00

If the Bible was more like USA Today, or for those who need a quick reference to the End Times, because who really will have time to read once the seas are a-boiling?

Sinners: please click on to make more legible.

Thank you to Andrea and Troy Collins.

More Paintings on the Walls of My Neighborhood

2010-06-20T15:36:00.002-04:00

Louise Bourgeois, 1911 - 2010

2010-06-01T22:26:00.002-04:00

I didn't love everything she made, but seeing her sculpture Maman at the Guggenheim in Bilboa was awe-inspiring. It's a work that seems to give birth to more art: I don't think it's possible to take a bad picture of the sculpture.

The other thing that comes to mind aboutf Ms. Bourgeois is the scene in The Spider, the Mistress, and the Tangerine, a documentary about her life, in which she cries while recalling how much her father's infidelities hurt her as a child. To watch a woman in her nineties still weep over a trauma so long past is beyond heartbreaking. May she rest in peace.

2010-05-18T12:47:00.002-04:00

I was visiting friends in Louisville this past weekend and rediscovered something I hadn't realized I'd forgotten: what it's like to sleep in complete silence. The bedroom I was in faced the back of the house and opened onto a neighborhood that is quiet at night. Even the iguana in the room was silent. (This isn't metaphoric or an attempt at surrealism. My friends' son has a pet iguana.)

The contrast to my usual sleeping arrangement was obvious my first night home. Every piece of street noise, every passersby's conversation, was enough to jolt me awake and miss the quiet of Louisville. I once saw a report on 60 Minutes about sleep deprivation and how noise, even if it doesn't wake you up, can keep you from entering deep restful slumber. No wonder New Yorkers are so cranky.

Last night, I felt sleepy around ten o'clock and thought it would be nice to get a full eight hours rest. Not long after I lay down, I heard drums playing; obviously a rhythm track from some passing car. I waited for the sound to fade as the car pulled away...but it didn't. Assuming someone was parked in the street and playing their radio loud, I looked to see if I could determine which car it was. No luck. But a moment or two later, the drums stopped. Great.

Except then they started again. This time it was obvious that it wasn't a recording but someone was playing live. Naively I kept expecting them to stop, even while waiting on hold for almost ten minutes to register a noise complaint with the police. I gave up on the noise complaint and went outside to see if I could get a sense of the situation. The drumming was coming from the erroneously name Ascenzi Square, which is in fact a triangle situated between two streets across from my apartment.

I expected the source of the noise to be some surly drunk hipster having an impromptu jam session, so imagine my surprise when I saw that the cause was in fact a drum circle made up of eight girls in their early twenties. "Uh...I'm sorry to ask, but can you guys perhaps do that somewhere else? I have to get up early tomorrow." There might have been a quiet "sorry" but none of them argued with me, so I thanked them and left.

"What do you have to get up early for?" one of them asked as I walked away.

"Work - sad, but true."

"I have to get up tomorrow at 7:00" another said.

"Well, it's not a contest, but I get up at 6:00."

After that, no more drumming (thanks ladies!) though it took another hour and an episode of Glee to make me feel drowsy enough to sleep.

A Favorite Passage

2010-04-17T22:08:00.002-04:00

Each year, author Alan Bennett publishes selections from his diaries in the London Review of Books, and they have been included in his omnibus collections Writing Home and Untold Stories.

Below is one of my favorite passages, his memorial of Dudley Moore, who, along with Bennett, Peter Cook and Jonathan Miller, formed the influential comedy troupe Beyond The Fringe. What I love about this passage is how much it accomplishes seemingly effortlessly, with a natural flow of ideas one into another. It memorializes a friend, includes some gossip, challenges (not unkindly) some notions the deceased had, offers insight into how both jazz and comedy work, and ends with an illustration of the simple ways someone long ago can still influence you.

25 May
Thinking about Dudley M. since his death, I'm struck by how little was said at the time of his musical abilities. In particular his talents as a jazz pianist. This would have come as no surprise to him as his success as a comedian and subsequently as a movie star put his musical accomplishment in the shade; jazz became marginal...

...when later in life with that slightly aggrieved air with which he discussed his early career Dudley complained of being unappreciated by his colleagues in Beyond The Fringe, this was partly what it was about. He was a very funny instinctive comedian but he was not a writer and, no good at one sort of language, he found that music, the language he was good at, was largely discounted. And when on chat shows and interviews he gave his always defensive account of himself, complaining of the inferior status he had been accorded, particularly by Peter, music was at the heart of it.

Of course, words and music are not the only languages and at this time, when we were all in our twenties, what ranked him above the rest of us and indeed anyone I've ever come across since, was his sexual success. This, unlike his musical accomplishment, was the subject of constant discussion and enquiry and it was a topic on which, while not boastful, Dudley was always frank, informative and very funny.

That Dudley, given the chance, could talk illuminatingly about music was brought home to me in almost the only conversation I had with him about jazz, when he explained the difference, as he saw it, between a good and an average performance. It had to do with the musical beat, which he told me to think of not as a brief and indivisible moment but as an interval with a discernible length, and a beginning, a middle and an end. The art of playing good jazz, he explained, was to try to hit the beat as near as possible to its ending.

To musicians this may well be a truism but I had never come across the notion before, and it linked, as Dudley then linked it, with comedy timing in the theatre, where the same applies and which I did understand and practiced, though instinctively.

This conversation would have taken pace in New York sometime in 1963 in the apartment which he was then subletting on Washington Square and where he also taught me to add a spoonful of water to the mixture of the scrambled eggs we invariably had for lunch. It was there too that, possibly in order to wean me off Elgar, he played me the long sinuous romantic theme that begins Bruckner's Seventh Symphony. Though I always add the water when scrambling eggs, I have never got much further with Bruckner and the opening of the Seventh is still all I know.

Graffiti and Pictures From My Neighborhood

2010-04-11T21:39:00.003-04:00

40 Days of Lent: Day Forty

2010-03-28T21:03:00.002-04:00

The story goes that, late in his life, Guglielmo Marconi had an epiphany. Th godfather of radio technology decided that no sound ever dies. It just decays beyond the point that we can detect it with our ears. Any sound was forever recoverable, he believed, with the right device. His dream was to build one powerful enough to pick up Christ's Sermon on the Mount.

--from Perfecting Sound Forever by Greg Milner

And that's it for this year's 40 Days of Lent postings. I know Lent doesn't end until Easter next Sunday, but I've hit my goal of 40 entries. Anything beyond this will be like the bonus features on a dvd.

Cheers to all who read.

40 Days of Lent: Day Thirty Nine

2010-03-27T22:30:00.002-04:00

Race With The Devil

I just finished watching Race With The Devil, a movie that seriously freaked me thirty five years ago when I saw it as part of a double feature with my friends Steve Gutin and Johnny Paucilo (sp? - sorry John). I suppose I was wrong when I wrote about penis surgery footage being the one thing I couldn't watch, because when I saw Race With The Devil, I was so unnerved I kept leaving the theater to sit in the lobby until the scary parts were over. It's the only film I saw as a child that had that effect.

It's not a bad little thriller. Two couples, Warren Oates and Loretta Swit and Peter Fonda and Lara Parker, set out on vacation in a Winnebago, intending to drive from San Antonio to Colorado. The first night out, the men spy on what they think is an orgy, but is in fact a Satanic ritual complete with human sacrifice. They report it to the police, but sense with growing paranoia that everyone they meet on the road is in league with the Satanists and end up on the run for their lives. Watching it now, I can see it's completely of its time. It mixes the paranoia of the early 70's with its interest in the occult and the popularity of chase movies. At the time I liked movies with chases and lots of stunts. Main characters who were doomed never bothered me. So why couldn't I be in the room with Race With The Devil?

Because they were being chased by Satanists, of course. Had it been a biker gang, bad townspeople, even aliens, it wouldn't have affected me the same way. But making them Satanists just made the threat that much worse. Not only could they kill you, they could also send your soul to hell, so reasoned my young Catholic mind. I couldn't even watch a chase scene that consisted of pick up trucks ramming into the Winnebago because the pickups were driven by those in service to Satan. I went out to sit in the lobby for what had to be the third or forth time, only to return a few minutes later and see the credits had started. Despite my embarrassment, I asked my friends how it ended. I don't think we ever talked about my inability to watch the movie. There wasn't much to discuss. I was simply scared beyond rational control.

40 Days of Lent: Day Thirty Eight

2010-03-26T23:16:00.003-04:00

Some Things I Thought While Waiting For My Friend Bill In The Basement Of The Whitney Museum

- As soon as I start updating my blog, he'll show up. Any second now...

- Oh, the elevators. I've been watching the stairs and forgot all about the elevators. It's only one flight down. Has Bill become a lazy man?

- David Hockney or Andy Warhol?

- She's cute.

- Hope Bill shows up before this band plays/hope this band isn't too loud.

- Hope Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon don't think I keep getting my iPhone out so I can take a picture of them. I'm just obsessed with what time it is.

- God love you, why would you chose to look like that?

- You are not going to just leave your empty coffee cup sitting there...yes, you are.

- I haven't seen Bill in a couple of years. Maybe he's here and I don't recognize him.

- She's cute too.

40 Days of Lent: Day Thirty Seven

2010-03-25T23:14:00.001-04:00

The Crystal World
J.G. Ballard

I was out for dinner the other night (Happy Birthday, Kenny!) when my sister and I got into a conversation about the work J. G. Ballard, British writer of science fiction (if you can call it that). She had recently re-read Concrete Island, a book of his she hated the first time she read it, but found she liked it more this time. It goes without saying I envy her finding the time to re-read stuff – even stuff she hates! – whereas I don’t have time to read everything I’m interested in.

But how to explain Ballard? He considered himself a surrealist, writing the literary equivalent of Salvador Dali or Max Ernst’s work, which explains the consistent depictions of human beings in strange landscapes. The standard expectations of fiction, such as realistic characters with recognizable psychological motivation and verisimilitude in plot, didn’t mean much to him. He thought science fiction was the best mode for writing about the changes technology had wrought on the individual psyche, but generally avoided the genre’s trappings (aliens, spaceships, robots). Even when his work is experimental in form or content, the language is always clear, accessible. The tone is reasonable; you just have to get over your “what the hell?” reaction.

It’s this contradiction that gives his work its power: the reasonable British voice describing the most irrational things. He seemed completely uninterested in morality, whether his characters were “good” or “bad.” As the environment changes unnaturally and people go mad as a result, such a man-made dichotomy seemed irrelevant.

The Crystal World is one of Ballard’s apocalyptic novels, but it’s a beautiful apocalypse. Everything within a jungle in Africa – animals, plants, people – is slowly crystallizing, turning into stunning clear jeweled objects. The contradiction is something so beautiful being so bad. There are enough descriptions of the natural world in crystal form that you wonder is Ballard is a frustrated painter, describing images he couldn’t create. In terms of literature, it’s like reading Joseph Conrad as you drift off to sleep. Its tale of squabbling Westerners moving into a mysterious jungle keeps turning into descriptions of a jungle that looks like it was made of glass.

The transformation of the world inspires some to embrace this change and deliberately allow all or part of their bodies to crystallize. The explanation for the phenomena is a quirk in how space and time relate, so that anything that crystallizes is actually frozen in time, neither alive nor dead, and eternal. It’s mysticism linked to science rather than spirituality.

40 Days of Lent: Day Thirty Six

2010-03-24T22:34:00.003-04:00

I Have No Idea What's Going On
Illustrations from children's books

40 Days of Lent: Day Thirty Five

2010-03-23T07:17:00.003-04:00

Super Size Thou

This reads like something from The Onion, but apparently it's legit. Actually I think it's a pretty interesting idea and I'm glad someone thought of it and was able to do the research.

from The Los Angeles Times:

Last Supper helpings have grown

An unusual study looks at the food portions in artistic depictions of the Last Supper throughout history. The apostles have eaten better and better over the years, scholars say.
By Melissa Healy
March 23, 2010

The Christian faith holds several acts of "super-sizing" to be miracles accomplished by Jesus Christ -- a handful of fish and loaves of bread expanded to feed thousands; a wedding feast running low on wine suddenly awash in the stuff. Now a new study of portion expansion puts Jesus once more at the center.

In a bid to uncover the roots of super-sized American fare, a pair of sibling scholars has turned to an unusual source: 52 artists' renderings of the New Testament's Last Supper.

Their findings, published online Tuesday in the International Journal of Obesity, indicate that serving sizes have been marching heavenward for 1,000 years.

"I think people assume that increased serving sizes, or 'portion distortion,' is a recent phenomenon," said Brian Wansink, director of the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab and author of "Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think." "But this research indicates that it's a general trend for at least the last millennium."

To reach their conclusion, Wansink and his brother Craig, a biblical scholar at Virginia Wesleyan College, analyzed 52 depictions of the meal the Wansinks call "history's most famous dinner party" painted between the year 1000 and the year 2000.

Using the size of the diners' heads as a basis for comparison, the Wansinks used computers to compare the sizes of the plates in front of the apostles, the food servings on those plates and the bread on the table. Assuming that heads did not increase in size during the second millennium after the birth of Christ, the researchers used this method to gauge how much serving sizes increased.

And increase they did.

Over the course of the millennium, the Wansinks found that the entrees depicted on the plates laid before Jesus' followers grew by about 70%, and the bread by 23%.

As entree portions rose, so too did the size of the plates -- by 65.6%.

The apostles depicted during the Middle Ages appear to be the ascetics they are said to have been. But by 1498, when Leonardo da Vinci completed his masterpiece, the party was more lavishly fed. Almost a century later, the Mannerist painter Jacobo Tintoretto piled the food on the apostles' plates still higher.

New York University nutrition researcher Lisa R. Young called the Wansink study fun. But as the author of "The Portion Teller," a history of portion size through the 20th century, she also pointed to the three decades that ended the millennium as a "tipping point" for humankind.

There is scant evidence that the body mass index of people in developed societies soared into unhealthy ranges for most of the 1,000 years studied, Young said. But there is little doubt, she added, that that changed in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s -- coincidentally, when portion sizes began a dramatic run-up.

The Wansinks, however, suggest that portion growth may have a provenance far older than industrial farming and the economics of takeout food.

Instead, they suggest, it's a natural consequence of "dramatic socio-historic increases in the production, availability, safety, abundance and affordability of food" over the millennium that started in the year 1000 A.D.

"The contemporary discovery of increasing food portions and availability may be little more than 1,000-year-old wine in a new bottle," the Wansinks wrote.

40 Days of Lent: Day Thirty Four

2010-03-22T16:36:00.002-04:00

What I Can't Watch

When I was a younger man, I prided myself on being able to watch or read most anything. Part of it was the punk ethos, part of it came from liking horror movies, part of it was perhaps my version of machismo, an Aesthete's Macho: there's nothing I can't watch.

However, when I was in my early twenties, I discovered something I just couldn't look at. It was at the Chestnut Cabaret in Philadelphia at a Butthole Surfers show. Films were projected onstage behind the band while they played. As this was during the Reagan years, it was inevitable that one of the films would be a loop of mushroom cloud footage. On stage right, however, I saw what I could not watch and was surprised by my inability to look as I was at the content.

What I couldn't bring myself to watch were medical films of penis surgery.

It was so bad that I had to lift my left hand and block that part of the stage from view. Every once in a while I would move my hand to see if the film had ended, but nope, still going on. I recall at one moment moving my hand and seeing the gloved hands peeling the skin back as if it was a banana. [Shudder]

Something about that show seemed to coincide with losing my taste for the horror genre. I don't think the two are connected, apart from the fact that one of the reasons I rarely watch horror films or read horror novels is that I feel vulnerable now in a way I didn't then. No matter how obnoxious they are, I feel bad for the victims when they are suffer.

Incidentally, this posting has nothing to do with the healthcare bill passing last night.

Forty Days of Lent: Day Thirty Three

2010-03-21T21:16:00.002-04:00

Oh damn, it's happened again. The thin line between my real world and my fictional map of the same momentarily dissolved.

Today's post was intended to be a passage from Jim Woodring's late 1980's comic Jim. Jim was a collection of automatic writing, strange drawings and comic stories. One of my favorite pieces from the comic, a piece that exists, God as my witness, was a fake PSA warning people about praying while drunk. It was very funny and was never reprinted in any of the Jim anthologies that followed. However, i could not find the piece in question, despite going through all my old issues several times.

However, one thing I did find was a story in which Jim sees something in a book that disturbs him so much that he sets the book aside. Later, when he is compelled to look at it again, he's mystified because he can't find it...similar to what I was experiencing. "That's funny" Jim concludes "it's not here at all." No, not funny at all.

I've had this sort of experience before. Much of the worst excesses of the Bush years felt like my paranoid story ideas from years before. As I watch my worst thoughts come to pass, I began to wonder if maybe I should just not think some things for everyone's sake.

The clearest example of this phenomena occurred a number of years ago. For a while I had carried a story I called "The Flood" around in my head. One of the elements of this story is that the main character is haunted by an image of a woman sitting on a man's back that causes either catatonia or seizures each time he sees it. One Sunday afternoon, I was in the gift shop of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and saw a postcard of the image I had been imagining. Not the exact image, but close enough to make me seriously uncomfortable. It was like assuming a role in a story I had invented. There was nothing I could do except accept it, calm myself and try not to freak out over the weird coincidence.

40 Days of Lent: Day Thirty Two

2010-03-20T16:48:00.002-04:00

It's amazing how quickly the anger comes on when old resentments are mentioned, especially when someone blithely gets their facts wrong. Historian Nell Irvin Painter was on The Colbert Report to discuss her book The History of White People when she stated that, for example, people were once referred to as Irish and then started subcategorizing, such as Scots-Irish.

Colbert was quick to correct her. "Scots-Irish are not Irish."

"Yes, they are."

"No they're not. Scots-Irish...there's no Irish blood in Scots-Irish people. They are Scotch Presbyterians who were given land in Ireland, they took our land, they drove my people across the river Shannon, where we forced to farm rocks by Oliver Cromwell and I will see him rot in Hell before you call Scots-Irish people 'Irish!' You wanna fight?"

It's always interesting seeing what will make Stephen break character, how passionate he gets, and how quickly he is able to switch back to entertaining once his point is made. He shifts from wishing to see Cromwell rot in hell to playfully challenging Ms. Painter to armwrestle in the space of a few seconds.

The whole interview is here. You're not really going to learn anything about the history of white people, but if you want to see Stephen's rant, it's at around 2:20.

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Nell Irvin Painter

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

Health Care reform

40 Days of Lent: Day Thirty One

2010-03-19T21:55:00.002-04:00

On Wednesday, I was out with my friend Cindy, who was visiting from Los Angeles. The only guideline we had was that we wanted to avoid anyplace overrun with St. Patrick's Day Celebrants. As anyone who knows me can tell you, I am very proud of my ancestors*, but loathe holidays in which everyone feels it's their duty to get drunk (see also Halloween and New Year's Eve).

We met for tapas and then went for Mexican food, only to discover that my go-to place for sloppy Mexican food, Maryanne's on Second Avenue, was closed, or rather "seized" due to non=payment of taxes. Peering through the window, Cindy said "It looks like it didn't happen that long ago. There are still napkins on the tables."

However, all I could think was "one more regular (or semi-regular) haunt is now gone." Not to be self-pitying, because I know the loss of a favored spot is nothing compared to the loss of a job suffered by those who work at such places when they close, but so many places are closing that I haven't had time to find new places yet. I've kvetched before (did you know the "k" was silent?) on this website about Telephone Bar closing. Last fall PlanEat Thai in my neighborhood closed, and that was a restaurant that I thought was going to last forever.

Is this what Alzherimer's is like? The landscape slowly changing or shifting around you, but you just react in befuddlement? I know the cliche is that "in New York, the only constant is change" but is it so much to expect a bar or restaurant to stick around for a while? It's not as profound, but is what I'm feeling a fraction of what my grandparents, social butterflies that they were, experienced when their friends began dying?

Cindy and I got food somewhere else but I was pursued by the sense that my New York was slowly shrinking. Donde est last straw? When is it no longer a city I recognize? Fortunately, this story has a happy ending. I walked past Maryanne's tonight and the restaurant was not only open but full of people. I stopped in and asked the hostess what had happened. "Oh," she laughed "that was all a big misunderstanding."

------------------------------------
* re: How The Irish Saved Civilzation: you're welcome. Is it so much to expect a "thank you" every once in a while? I still don't think we, or rather I, have received proper due for that. Sheesh.

40 Days of Lent: Day Thirty

2010-03-18T23:49:00.004-04:00

The Stigmittens Are Here!

Knitted by my friend Carol for me, these fingerless gloves will always remind me of the agony our Lord suffered while they keep my hands nice and warm. Perhaps the name of this blog should be changed to The Happiest Boy In The World.

As a bonus, she also sent me this great Virgin Mary nightlight.

Thank you, Carol. Words can't express my appreciation.

40 Days of Lent: Day Twenty Nine

2010-03-17T07:29:00.003-04:00

Happy St. Patrick's Day From Jack Chick!

Spreading his message of strict dogma and intolerance to everyone - now in Gaelic (or "Irish" as it says on his website). I'm surprised it's not one of his anti-Catholic tracts.

40 Days of Lent: Day Twenty Eight

2010-03-16T21:21:00.003-04:00

Spring has come to New York. People run up the subway stairs, hurrying to get into the sun.

I ran into my landlord for the second time since having an argument with him a month ago. The first time I saw him post-argument we said hello to each other but didn't really talk much. The argument was about the fact that he lets himself in to my apartment when I'm not there, which according to NYC tenant's rights, is a big no-no. Invasion of privacy and all that. My landlord only does it when he wants to fix something in the apartment or to let the exterminator in to spray for bugs. I realize I should be happy my landlord pays an exterminator to spray every other month, and his own unannounced visits are rare and a small price to pay for an inexpensive apartment in a good neighborhood.

But my landlord is not a young man and sometimes forgets the code for the front door alarm to my apartment. He also once forgot where he put my rent check, so I had to write him another one. A few days later he found the original check: it was under his pillow. "Why did you put my check under your pillow?" "I don't know - I don't know how it got there!"

The argument wouldn't have happened if it hadn't been one of those nights when I was in a hurry. I wanted to drop my stuff off at the apartment after work, change and head back into Manhattan to meet friends for drinks. I was going to be a little late but it was worth it to change from my office-drag into jeans. As soon as I opened the front door of my building, I could hear my alarm going off. I got to my door and saw a piece of paper on the floor from my landlord that said "John - call me!" Worst yet, the top lock on my door did not work.

I called my landlord and exclaimed that I could not get into my apartment. "Oh, I was gonna tell you about the alarm. I don't know what I did!" After a few minutes of mounting panic, I figured out that when he had left my apartment, my landlord had not locked the deadbolt. I had been trying to unlock what was already unlocked, which is why my key wouldn't turn properly. Got into the apartment only to see some strange hieroglyphics on my alarm system. I entered my code and nothing happened. Alarm kept tolling, strange hieroglyphics remained. I entered the code several more times, reasoning that it hadn't worked the first time cause I hadn't done it just so, to no avail.

Somewhere in this apartment is the user's manual that came with the alarm system, but it was nowhere I looked that night. I called my friend Kate, who lived here before me, on the off chance she would still remember how to reset the alarm of an apartment she hasn't live in for over five years. No answer. After pushing various buttons, I stumbled on how to reset the alarm and the resulting silence was, well, alarming.

I called my landlord back to explain how to reset it should this ever happen again and, because of my frustration, let slip "you know, you're not even supposed to be in my apartment when I'm not here without my permission," which is true, but just because something is true doesn't mean you should say it out loud. So a quick argument ensued, ending when I apologized, done because I had to be on my way. I wondered if I'd ever get my apartment sprayed for bugs again.

So when I saw my landlord tonight, I was relieved when we began chatting. I can only hope he forgot the argument. He showed me a cell phone he bought on ebay. It was an older model but still in great condition, and he was frustrated by the company's customer service department's inability to activate the phone. It wasn't too hard to see he was talking about more than phones when he said "Just cause it's old they want to get rid of it - not everything that's new is better," especially since he followed it up with the fact that the only take people's age into account when they are on a waiting list for internal organs, and never their moral character.

40 Days of Lent: Day Twenty Seven

2010-03-15T23:19:00.003-04:00

I have a friend who's ill and I'm worried he's not going to get better. I have another friend who's leaving town this weekend and I suspect tonight was the last time I'll see him. But despite being a middle-aged man, when I look at these images I feel a little less sad.

Thank you, Chuck Jones.

40 Days of Lent: Day Twenty Six

2010-03-14T17:41:00.002-04:00

Deep In The Heart of Texas

The entire article from The Huffington Post is worth reading, but I thought I would quote the first sentence because I can't summarize it any better:

"A far-right faction of the Texas State Board of Education succeeded Friday in injecting conservative ideals into social studies, history and economics lessons that will be taught to millions of students for the next decade."

There is a slideshow with the article detailing some of the changes that were pushed through. It's the standard ultra-conservative party line: Reagan was The Greatest President Ever, minorities didn't play much a part in this nation's development, free enterprise is the best system every time everywhere. My favorite change, which is simultaneously the pettiest and most Orwellian: the US government will be described as a "constitutional republic" rather than "democratic." Amazing.

This reminds me of what George Carlin said about school: "They're only teaching you what they want you know."

Here come the new Dark Ages!

40 Days of Lent: Day Twenty Five

2010-03-13T23:17:00.005-05:00

Closing Time
Joe Queenan

Joe Queenan’s memoir Closing Time begins with what could be the start of an amusing affectionate anecdote about the time his father got stuck on the roof of their house and had to stay there all day. But because his father was a raging alcoholic who terrorized his children, the day is remembered as less humorous than peaceful, one of the few afternoons of peace the Queenan children got to experience.

I’ve read Queenan’s work before (he’s contributed to Spy, Esquire, and The Wall Street Journal among others) and while I can appreciate his wit, I don’t like the accompanying nastiness of his writing. Queenan sees this as part of his job as a satirist and while I certainly have a mean bone or two in my body, this tone has always kept me from being an enthusiast. In addition, his satire picks on easy prey and I disagree with his politics. On the other hand, I can’t be too hard on someone whose book of celebrity interviews is entitled If You’re Talking to Me, Your Career Must Be in Trouble. Full disclosure: He is also a supportive friend and mentor to one of my friends. I’ve met him a couple of times and he couldn’t have been nicer. The first time he mentioned he was working on a book about his father but it wasn’t easy. The book is Closing Time.

Queenan grew up poor in Philadelphia in the 1950s and 60s, the son of an alcoholic who could not hold a job for long and a woman who had children but didn’t have much interest in them.

…he had simply suffered through so many calamities that the only way he knew how to respond to adversity was to brutalize those closest to him. Happily, his preference for victims shorter than forty-eight inches kept my mother out of the line of fire. Like many Irish-Catholic men of his generation, he would never dream of raising his hand to his wife, not only because he feared that it would have brought down the curtain on their marriage, but because men like him had an unwholesome reverence for their spouses, viewing them as domestic stand-ins for the Virgin Mary, with the one notable difference that, unlike the Madonna, they also cooked and cleaned. My mother was not a Madonna; she was an emotionally inert woman who had injudiciously brought four children into the world with no clear idea of how henceforth to proceed. While my father was skinning us alive with his trusty old belt, she would entomb herself in her bedroom, surrounded by newspapers she never seem to learn anything from, pretending not to hear what was going on downstairs. But the walls were not thick and the sound must have carried, if not in her conscience, at least into her cochleae.

Understandably, Queenan was motivated by escape: from his father’s beatings, from his neighborhood, from his class. He doesn’t want to be rich, he simply wants to stop being poor. A combination of luck, self-determination and the influence of a few kind souls saves Queenan, but this memoir is neither self-aggrandizing nor sentimental. There is no reconciliation with the father, no forgiveness, no moment that puts all the abuse into perspective. The book is a meditation on urban entropy, poverty, class differences and how culture and education can, but not necessarily will, help. (“Marguerite, a product of the slums, knew that if you were standing in front of a Brancusi and the light hit it just right, you could briefly forget you were poor.”) It is also funny and compulsively readable. When looking for passages to include in this essay, I found myself reading pages at a time until forcing myself to stop. Queenan is a master of smart conversational prose that always pulls you forward because you want to see what the next sharp detail, funny line or larger insight will be, as in this section describing he and his sisters riding in the back of his father’s delivery truck:

If I was not careful, I could have easily tumbled out into the street and been flattened by oncoming cars. But I was careful – I was born careful – and these outings were rollicking good fun. Anyway, back in the Paleocene 1950s, when being fond of one’s children had not yet come into vogue, poor people didn’t seem to mind all that much if one of their offspring when flying out into traffic, as everyone had spares.

40 Days of Lent: Day Twenty Four

2010-03-12T21:40:00.002-05:00

My cousin Katie commented in response to this post:

It's driving that causes you to miss the beautiful. Wilkes-Barre is a beautiful city and you've seen it and photographed it because you've always walked it, John. When you drive, the run-down seems to stand out. When you walk (or bike-ride as my Dad loved to do) you get to see the beauty in the details. I always try to get out and walk when I'm home. It reminds me why I was so happy growing up there. And that snow storm, on that particular day, was one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen.

Well, there's so much to respond to here. While I will always prefer walking to driving, I do love the blur of the landscape passing by when you are in motion, whether on a train, bus or in the passenger's seat. It's one of the reasons why I don't often read on buses. I prefer looking at the landscape in motion. When I walk, it's more like I'm looking at still photographs, whereas in a car or train, it's more like watching a movie. But yes, walking or biking gives you the time to appreciate the details.

The other night, in response to a friend's comment that he could see himself living in Los Angeles (a city that I profess to "hate" even though every time I'm there I enjoy myself a great deal), I instinctively said "I couldn't live in a city where you had to drive everywhere and had no public transportation." My friend pointed out that LA had fine public transportation and he in fact had friends who lived there who didn't know how to drive and got around just fine. I suppose I was thinking I could never live in a city that was not conducive to walking. A common characteristic of everywhere I've lived is that the were all pedestrian-friendly: cities that not only invited but also rewarded walking with the little surprises and treasures that Katie refers to. (Another characteristic of the places I've lived; they've all been near and partially defined by bodies of water, whether the Susquehanna, Thames or Hudson Rivers, the San Francisco Bay or the Potomac. I suppose i don't ever want to feel completely landlocked.) I've lived in Brooklyn for almost six years now and I still miss being able to walk to work.

In America, cities founded before the invention of the automobile were based on a 19th Century European model: a central downtown area with a mix of commercial and residential buildings, designed with the idea that people would walk to their destinations. I was lucky enough to grow up in such a town. However, much of this country is now based on a Los Angeles model: urban sprawl connected by roads with the assumption that people will drive everywhere, and that driving is somehow inherently better than walking. Even Wilkes-Barre, where I grew up, now seems more of a sprawl of malls, industrial parks and suburban developments than a town.

All of which is fine if you love driving or are a real estate developer, but having grown up in a town where everything you needed was within walking distance, I find it a frustrating way to live. I have friends I have not seen in years and I believe one of the reasons is because I don't like being in their house. They live in a suburban development and there is nowhere to go, nothing to do, unless you drive. I feel trapped inside their house. (Full disclosure: it's possible I haven't seen these friends in years because they grew tired of me, but I really prefer to blame their house.)

Driving is for efficiency, but this efficiency is linked to economic concerns not necessarily in the driver's best interest. A number of years ago, I imagined people whose entire lives seemed to consists of driving an endless triangle between the industrial park where they worked, the suburban development where they live and the shopping/strip malls where they shopped. If you legally declared that those could be the only three places they could go, almost anyone would protest. Yet many people do spend their lives shuttling between these destinations.

Walking brings contemplation. It's also not as goal-oriented as driving, though God knows there is much pleasure to be had in cruising around in a car or driving on a dark highway at night. But one of the things that I feel so grateful to have experienced is growing up in an area in which I could walk anywhere. This brought an early sense of autonomy and self-determination, as opposed to having to ask my parents to drive me any time I wanted to do somewhere. This probably explains why I've lived where I have and why my life has had the shape it has: because I am determined to live in cities where the element of chance that accompanies walking as opposed to driving is primary. This lack of efficiency, this importance of contemplation and belief in significant chance happenings has a great deal to explain my mindset and life.

I was lucky enough to grow up in a town that had its economic peak during the early 20th century, when people could still afford to build beautiful buildings of stone and brick. We can't afford to build such buildings now. That's another feature of shopping malls and most suburban developments: they're ugly at worst, boring at best. Even if you did walk among them, you'd be bored.

Yes, Katie. The snowstorm the day of your father's funeral was beautiful. He deserved no less. Snow makes everything beautiful but I had forgotten how ethereal and glowing it makes my, and his, hometown.

40 Days of Lent: Day Twenty Three

2010-03-11T21:55:00.002-05:00

Karma

The other night I was having dinner at my favorite bar and got into a conversation with Scott, the bartender. Scott's one of those bartenders who, if he recognizes you, reaches over the bar to shake your hand and tell you how good it is to see you again. He's going to be going to Europe soon, visiting London, Paris, Prague and Berlin. I told him what I remembered of London and Paris, paid my bill eventually and said goodnight.

Once outside I recalled I had a great photobook/traveler's guide to Paris that was invaluable when I was there five years ago. I had lent it to a co-worker for vacation, and she loved it too. So I turned around to go back in and ask Scott if he wanted to borrow the book when two girls who were heading in said "You know, you're going in the wrong direction. You were just in here."

"Yeah, I know" I said "but someone said something that made me mad, so I'm going back in to fight him."

"Oh, no! You have great bone structure - I'd hate to see it get ruined in a fight."

So there you go. You go to do something nice and the universe throws a nice compliment your way.

40 Days of Lent: Day Twenty Two

2010-03-10T23:38:00.003-05:00

What happens when it's midnight and you haven't written anything for your online journal yet and you don't have any ideas that you can finish by the self-imposed deadline and your friend Jeff's comment from yesterday has brought up all sorts of old Lampoon nostalgia not only for the individual issues themselves but for the times (early 1970's) when they were published and the times (your teen years) when you began buying them, though it should be said that Bob's suggestion that you write about the current Vatican sex scandal in which a choirista was apparently soliciting male prostitutes isn't a bad idea either:

You just post a National Lampoon cover you found online.

40 Days of Lent: Day Twenty One

2010-03-09T21:05:00.004-05:00

Nazi Literature in the Americas
Roberto Bolano

Roberto's Bolano's experimental novel is a catalogue of imaginary extreme right wing literature that somehow took root in North and Latin America. In tone, it recalls Jorge Borges and Stanislaw Lem's imagined fictions along with the pieces Woody Allen wrote for The New Yorker in the early 1970's, such as "If Impressionists Were Dentists" which imagined the letters Vincent Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo, but substituting dental procedures for art-making.

The central idea seems to be a play on the way that most people in the arts lean left or at are at least liberal. It is written in the same dry, deadpan language of most literary surveys. What if someone paid serious attention to more right-wing authors? It leads to laugh out-loud lines like these:

She took to drinking in dives and having affairs with some of the most unsavory individuals in Buenos Aires. Her well-known poem 'I Was Happy with Hitler,' misunderstood by the Right and Left alike, dates from this period.

In 1958 she fell in love again. This time the object of her affections was a twenty-five-year-old painter. He was blond, blue-eyed and disarmingly stupid.

As a young man Salcvatico advocated, among other things, the re-establishment of the Inquisition; corporal punishment in public; a permanent war against the Chlieans, the Paraguayans, or the Bolivians as a kind of gymnastics for the nation...
He was a soccer player and a flutist.

He is against monopolies, especially cultural monopolies. He believes in the family, but also in a man's "natural right to have a bit of fun on the side."

It is the pacing, the mix of the straightforward with the absurd, that recalls Woody Allen's influential early work.

But there is also something else here. All of Bolano's authors end up sad failures. Part of you wants to say "thank God" as they are horrible people and their beliefs are destructive. Yet there is also a remarkable melancholy that creeps in as you read yet another case study of someone whose passions and hard work ultimately lead to nothing. It reminds me of Thomas Pynchon's Mason and Dixon, in which all the conspiracies of those in power (the Dutch East India Company, the Jesuits, the British Crown) ultimately came to nothing as those organizations passed into irrelevance. As one who lived through the Bush years, it can give you hope.

On a personal note, apropo of nothing, I have the nice surprise of realizing that the photo on the cover of Nazi Literature in the Americas, like many of Bolano's other early novels, was taken by my downstairs neighbor Allen. The cover seemed familiar without my ever realizing why. I like the idea that the book was in my apartment while the man who created the cover image was just one story down.

40 Days of Lent: Day Twenty

2010-03-08T21:54:00.003-05:00

Barbie and Ken Pieta
One of kind craft/sculpture available for purchase here.

Very special thank you to my friend Carol for telling me about this.

40 Days of Lent: Day Nineteen

2010-03-07T22:57:00.005-05:00

The Summer Book
Tove Jansson

It was the cover of NYRB’s republication of The Summer Book that initially interested me. Like all their books, it is a simple, elegant design, using a pleasing mix of colors and an image that seems perfect. It was perfect: it was a watercolor of an island silhouetted against a light sky by author Tove Jansson used for the novel’s first edition. Unlike DVD companies that forgo a film’s original iconic poster in favor of a mundane picture of its stars when designing their discs, NYRB knew better than tamper with perfection. The DVD comparison isn’t far-fetched. NYRB reminds me of the Criterion Collection in the way they republish lost classics in handsome editions, usually with insightful introductions by contemporary authors. I have a number of their books; I haven’t read them all, but they are all beautiful objects.

Admiring the cover, I thought “Tove Jansson? I know that name – how do I know that name?” The explanation was on the back. Jansson was the creator of Moomin, a delightful comic strip that began publishing in the 1950’s. Finding out she also wrote books is like discovered an unknown novel by Charles Schulz or Walt Kelly.

The Summer Book is the story of Sophia, a young girl who bonds with her grandmother while they spend the summer together on a small island in the Gulf of Finland. Despite this set-up, the book is not sentimental or even overtly emotional. Sophia behaves much like a child, alternately charming and frustrating, and the grandmother can be moody, swinging from wise and sharing to irascible in the space of a few sentences. They’re two women, one young enough that she hasn’t fully learned how to “be nice” so people will like her and one who is old enough to gratefully let go of such social pretence. On this isolated island, they’re just themselves.

They’re themselves, surrounded by a natural world of old vegetation, unexpected storms, and debris that washes up on the beach. The vignettes of the book are described in a language that’s restrained but filled with a sly humor wise to the characters’ traits. Jansson’s description of a sometimes harsh landscape and the people who chose to live there reminds me of Annie Proulx and the episodic nature of the novel recalls comic strips. It is a sensuous book, passages written to appeal to the senses as to how things smell, feel, taste as well as look and sound. A passage I particularly like:

Grandmother snorted. “We sowed our own tents,” she said, remembering what they had looked like – huge, sturdy, grayish-brown. This was a toy, a bright yellow plaything for veranda guests, and not worth having.

“Isn’t it a Scout tent?” asked Sophia anxiously.

So her grandmother said maybe it was, after all, but a very modern one, and they crawled in and lay down side by side.

“Now you’re not allowed to go to sleep,” Sophia said. “You have to tell me what it was like to be a Scout and all the things you did.”

A very long time ago, Grandmother had wanted to tell about all the things they did, but no one had bothered to ask. And now she had lost the urge.

“We had campfires,” she answered briefly, and suddenly she felt sad.

“And what else?”

“There was a log that burned for a long time. We sat around the fire. It was cold out. We ate soup.”

That’s strange, Grandmother thought. I can’t describe things any more. I can’t find the words, or maybe it’s just that I’m not trying hard enough. It was such a long time ago. No one here was even born. And unless I tell it because I want to, it’s as if it never happened; it gets closed off and then it’s lost. She sat up and said, “Some days I can’t remember very well. But sometime you ought to try and sleep in a tent all night.”

40 Days of Lent: Day Eighteen

2010-03-06T22:46:00.002-05:00

40 Days of Lent: Day Seventeen

2010-03-05T22:32:00.003-05:00

25,000 Years of Erotic Freedom
Alan Moore

I’m disappointed by 25,000 Years of Erotic Freedom. Perhaps I should rephrase that. I was disappointed by Alan Moore’s book of that title. When I heard that writer Alan Moore was going to be writing a book about erotica and pornography, I expected a fresh perspective on these controversial topics. One thing that Moore’s work has never suffered from was a lack of ideas.

But while Abrams has done their customary exemplary job with the book’s design and production -- it is a handsome book to look through and the illustrations are well-chosen -- the essay within is a little lacking. The more sexually open a culture is, the better it is. There’s good pornography and bad pornography, aesthetically speaking, so we should strive to make good pornography. The social or political reasons people have against pornography are either repressive or disingenuous. Whether you agree with those statements or not, there’s not much here to argue with. The text is more manifesto than essay, so the reader is left with little more than what Mr. Moore thinks. Historical proof or logical arguments aren’t really part of this book. That’s a shame because I would be interested in reading a serious scholarly work that used historical precedence and logical arguments as a justification for erotica.

40 Days of Lent: Day Sixteen

2010-03-04T23:06:00.003-05:00

Drawings by Carl Jung

Granted, he's not as good as my friends Andrea or Cindy, but I think these drawings done by psychotherapist Carl Gustav Jung are still mighty impressive. Which is to say that when I saw them in person, all I could think was "Wow"" as I felt my head buzz.

I don't know if I accept any of Jung's theories as anything more than myth, but the fact that he sought to express his ideas in visual terms apart from analytic theory makes me think that he understood exactly how these things work and makes me want to cut him some slack.

All of these drawings come from Jung's Red Book, a work in which he struggled to reconcile his ideas of myth and individual consciousness. I may write more about this book and Jung later on, but for now...wow.

40 Days of Lent: Day Fifteen

2010-03-03T22:04:00.004-05:00

Ghostly Hands Wave Arian Christianity Good-Bye

Arian Christianity was a branch in the first few hundred years of Christianity that argued that Christ, while important, was not the equal of the God that created the universe.

Many of the barbarians that sacked the Roman empire were, in fact, Arian Christians, which, in addition to their destructive tendencies, put them at odds with Roman Catholic Christianity. In fact, this argument over the precise nature of Christ's divinity was one of the reasons for the Council of Nicea, which determined the belief structure of Catholicism for almost 2000 years.

Once Arian Christianity was defeated, traces of it were wiped out even from churches built to practice the faith, which leads to the interesting moment in the second episode of the BBC's History of Christianity when Diarmaid MacCulloch visits a form Arian Christian church. The barbarian king Theodoric has been replace in the church mosaics by a gold field and his courtiers have been replaced by curtains.

But whoever did the censoring didn't do a perfect job, because as MacCulloch points out, you can still see their hands on the columns in the mosaics.

I love these ghostly hands, reaching out of the darkness. They're like something from a surrealist painting, or, had they been in black and white drawings rather than multi-color mosaics, like something you'd see in an Edward Gorey story.

I love how they beckon us into the darkness, into the past. "Step into the dark" they say "and we'll tell you what we believed before we were erased from our own church." Join us.

40 Days of Lent: Day Fourteen

2010-03-02T16:43:00.002-05:00

The Chilean earthquake was so powerful that it has shifted the Earth's axis and shortened the day.

Read that sentence again, and here's the article from which I got my info:

Chile earthquake: Earth axis shifted, day shortened
March 02, 2010 04:17 PM EST

The earthquake that rocked Chile has apparently shifted the Earth axis, according to a report by Ker Than of National Geographic news.

The magnitude 8.8 quake is the fifth strongest ever recorded, according to the USGS, and apparently caused the axis of the Earth to shift by about three inches.

Calculations done by geophysicist Richard Gross of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory say that, by speeding up the Earth's rotation, the quake could have shortened an Earth day by 1.26 millionths of a second.

Scientists explained the phenomenon by drawing comparisons to a figure skater. Keith Sverdrup said that as a skater spins and pulls her arms in, she starts rotation faster. During the quake, a portion of Earth's mass pulled in, speeding the planet's rotation ever so slightly.

Don't expect to notice a significant change to your day, or any change at all, for that matter. Apparently scientists can measure Earth days only with an accuracy within 20 millionths of a second, meaning the recent changes can be estimated but not scientifically proven.

I have two thoughts about this. One: "Cool." The other: "Uh-oh."

40 Days of Lent: Day Thirteen

2010-03-01T22:34:00.004-05:00

Naked Lunch
William S. Burroughs

So I finally got around to reading Naked Lunch on its 51st birthday. Unlike other literary touchstones, it’s half-century mark passed fairly unnoticed, apart from a hardcover facsimile edition put out by its publisher. However, the copy I read was (improbably as it may seem) the movie tie-in edition meant to capitalize on the David Cronenberg film of almost twenty years ago. Yes, that’s how long I’ve been buying and holding on to books without actually reading them. Disgraceful, isn’t it? Oddly enough, it feels like yesterday when I bought the book. In defense of the book, it has not dated at all in those 20 or even 50 years. There are contemporary writers who wish there work was this fresh and inventive.

So it is a black humor fantasmagoria mix of pulp detective and science fiction, addiction memoir, perverse sex, Mid-Eastern travelogue, and beat poetry. It’s also funny and the closest to a Hieronymus Bosch painting in print as you’re likely to find. Oy. Look, anything I have to say about Naked Lunch has already been said by better writers than I, so there’s not much point in trying to describe a book as ludicrous and impressionist as this.

Naked Lunch, like most of Burrough’s work, seems to fall in the “Grandfather” category. Not meaning things that are allowed to slide despite laws passed afterwards, but things that influenced people who influenced me. Cronenberg and Alan Moore’s Watchmen and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and the Firesign Theatre: all of them were influenced by Burroughs and all of them influenced me, but did Burroughs himself? Reading this book, as much as I liked it, it’s hard to find a line of heritage.

However, it did make me laugh. That’s something, in the face of the horror of human existence, n’est-ce pas?

40 Days of Lent: Day Twelve

2010-02-28T13:38:00.003-05:00

The City and The City
China Mieville

There is a city, Beszel, and another distinct city, Ul Qoma, that exists in the same space and time, as if one city is superimposed on or interweaven with the other. Residents in each city ignore the other, having learned how to not see or interact with them, even as they walk together, inches apart. It is a serious offence to travel between the two cities without permission. When it happens either intentionally or by accident, it is called “breach” and investigated by a creepy corps of the same name.

When the body of a resident of Ul Qoma turns up in Beszel, there’s nothing inspector Tyador Borlu would like more than to turn it over to Breach. But it is discovered to not be a case of breach, and Borlu, in the best tradition of detective fiction, has to solve a crime by moving in circles he doesn’t understand.

China Mieville’s novel exists within the genres of detective and speculative fiction just as the characters exist in two city-states. There is something appealing about a police procedural taking place in an initially unfamiliar world. With his superimposed cities, Mieville has found a metaphor for what living in urban areas is like, how you move without really seeing the other people around you. It’s also a meditation on how different cultures can exist side by side without understanding each other, whether western capitalist vs. communist or Judeo/Christian vs. Moslem.

40 Days of Lent: Day Eleven

2010-02-27T22:26:00.004-05:00

A History of Christianity - Episode Two: Catholicism

If the first episode was history of Christianity as travelogue, then Diarmaid MacCulloch traces the rise to power of the Roman Catholic Church in the second episode by touring a number of great cathedrals.

It still seems incredible that what began as a small Jewish sect would ultimately become a world powerhouse religion. It did this becoming adopted by the powerful, most famously by the general Constantine “as he hacked his way to power” and established a Roman empire, and later by the aristocracy as that empire began to fall. Men of privilege, power and wealth kept all three by becoming high ranking members of the church when they began to lose political power.

When he became emperor in 306, Constantine made Christianity the state religion, focusing on St. Peter, perhaps because Christ says that Peter is “the rock on which I will build my church.” In Greek “Peter” means “rock” so it’s one of Christ’s rare play on words. “The power of Christian Rome” notes MacCulloch “founded on a Greek pun.” If this is true, then personally, I love it.

40 Days of Lent: Day Ten

2010-02-26T07:07:00.004-05:00

Now The Trees Are Attacking Us*

Following up on yesterday's post about the animal kingdom's revenge when a killer whale lived up to its name, I wanted to note that a man was killed yesterday when a snow-laden tree branch fell on him in Central Park.

Perhaps instead of "40 Days of Lent" this feature should be "Countdown to The End."

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*Which sounds like it could be song idea for Rush.

40 Days of Lent: Day Nine

2010-02-25T09:46:00.002-05:00

Neko Case, Modern Day Nostradamus

I saw the below article online this morning:

Whale drags trainer off platform in fatal attack

By MIKE SCHNEIDER, Associated Press

ORLANDO, Fla. – A veteran SeaWorld trainer was rubbing a killer whale from a poolside platform when the 12,000-pound creature reached up, grabbed her ponytail in its mouth and dragged her underwater. Despite workers rushing to help, the trainer was killed.

Horrified visitors who had stuck around after a noontime show watched the animal charge through the pool with the trainer in its jaws. Workers used nets as an alarm sounded, but it was too late. Dawn Brancheau had drowned. It marked the third time the animal had been involved in a human death.

The whale, named Tilikum, apparently grabbed Brancheau by her long ponytail, according to the head of animal training at all SeaWorld parks, Chuck Tompkins. He told ABC's "Good Morning America" that her ponytail swung out in front of the whale.

"That's when the trainer next to him (Tilikum) said that he grabbed the hair, pulled her under water. And of course, held her under water," Tompkins said...

[A witness] said he heard that during an earlier show the whale was not responding to directions. Others who attended the earlier show said the whale was behaving like an ornery child.

No, the whale was behaving like what it was: a wild animal. While reading the story, all I could think of was Neko Case's remarkably prescient song People Got A Lotta Nerve, released in 2008:

You know they call them "killer" whales?!
But you seem surprised when it pinned you down
To the bottom of the tank
Where you can't turn around
It took half your leg and both your lungs
"When I craved I ate hearts of sharks, I know you know it!"

40 Days of Lent: Day Eight

2010-02-24T20:58:00.003-05:00

Long gone graffiti murals once seen in my neighborhood.

40 Days of Lent: Day Seven

2010-02-23T21:10:00.003-05:00

Shop Class As Soulcraft
Matthew Crawford

Even though it was several years ago, it’s a conversation I remember well: talking with my friend Scott about how bored we with our office jobs (I had quit mine earlier that year) and how much we preferred making things with our hands. I was surprised how much I liked making stained glass windows and rudimentary furniture, particularly thinking my way around any unexpected problems. Scott grew up in a garage and built his own Volkswagon convertible in high school but had spent much of his adult life as a manager.

It’s a feeling Matthew Crawford knows well. After getting his Ph.D. in political philosophy, Crawford landed a high paying job at a Washington think tank…and quit ten months later to repair motorcycles. Shop Class As Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work is his explanation of why he quit and an examination of how the emphasis on white-collar jobs has affected people. It’s ultimately a contemplation of what makes work meaningful to the individual doing it.

Crawford argues that even as office jobs are being outsourced overseas, the work of mechanics and craftsman has to stay local. Things always break and you will need someone to fix them. If your car is broken, you’re not going to ship it to India to have it fixed.

I think the rise of office work had a lot to do with class snobbery. Middle-class people had jobs in which they didn’t get dirty. Lower class people got dirty. Working in an office with your mind was seen as more civilized, more dignified, than working on machines with your hands. Despite how our economy has changed and the decline in office work, it still seems uncommon for someone with an education to willingly chose blue collar work. But Crawford writes how thinking is involved in such work. It’s a different kind of thinking, more intuitive, more self-reliant.

When I was in school, we rotated between three different shop classes: woodshop, mechanical drawing, and print shop. I don’t recall getting much in the way of instruction in mechanical drawing. I think our teacher, an egg-shaped man, probably thought “why bother?” It was obvious our college-bound class (this was only eighth grade but the kids destined for college were already separated from those who were not) were never going to pursue mechanical drawing. The only thing for the teacher to do was the bare minimum until kids in class fulfilled their requirement, hit them when they got out of line and then never see them again. I didn’t have much aptitude for woodshop and I was convinced I was going to lose a finger in one of the machines. But it was in print shop that I finally understood the concept of having to work and being graded.

The assignment was to make notepads, a process that involved creating a design (which had to include “From The Desk Of,” your name, some sort of border and a picture, which could either be chosen from design books or made with a Photostat), making a metal plate of your design, then printing a number of pads. I made two pad designs: one had the Yellow Submarine on it (in black and white, of course) and the other had an Apple Bonker. Because thought what I was doing was so cool and because of what I was like at 13, I didn’t pay much (read “any”) attention to quality control. I made a pad with the Yellow Submarine on it! It was the only one like it in the world. No-one else had one. Our teacher graded our work surrounded by everyone in the class, not to humiliate but to demonstrate mistakes to watch out for. He took out a pen and mercilessly circled each imperfection, every mark made by a dirt on the metal plate, every flaw accentuated by the printing process. Each mark cost a third of a grade. If I remember correctly, I got a low B on the assignment. But as he ticked my grade down and down, I had, for the first time, the realization that I would have to work, that I wasn’t going to get a pass just because I had come up with the coolest thing. More than a mediocre grade on any test, those circles on my notepads demonstrated the idea of standards that I would have to measure up to or fail. It was the first time I “got” it; it was the first time I cared.

However, lowered grade because I didn’t understand work notwithstanding, I had made something unique in the world and was always proud that my father, who had the same name as I, used the pads in his classroom at school.

I initially began this paragraph with the sentence “It’s hard to think of anything I’ve done in my office job that has made me proud” but that’s not true. I’m proud of the annual reports that we’ve done. Not because they’re outstanding in any way (they're not) but because I spend a lot of time making sure they are free of mistakes, even if they’re mistakes other people would never notice. When we finally send them to print, I’m usually exhausted but feel a sense of accomplishment. This example is part of Crawford’s argument: that work has more meaning when you are creating a physical product, particularly if it is from start to finish. Dealing with products that exist to you only as theoretical concepts robs your job of meaning and introduces a certain nihilism, similar to my mechanical drawing teacher who couldn’t see the point of teaching students who existed only as names in his gradebook rather than as people who might be interested.

Last night I was reading the conclusion of Shop Class As Soulcraft while having dinner at a local bar. While I was there, the man who fixes their pinball machine came in and I got to watch him work, which was fascinating in the way that competence in a field you know nothing about always is. I had never seen the insides of a pinball machine before and loved its mix of the mechanical and the electronic. The man had trouble walking, even with a cane; it was as if his legs were at the wrong angle to his body. But he was able to move quickly around the pinball machine and had it fixed in less than twenty minutes. I’m aware he sounds like a fictional character and a clichéd one at that, but there he was. I asked how he had learned to fix pinball machines. He said that he just started playing around with them, trying to figure out how they worked, and began fixing them, so that now everyone calls him if there is a problem. Watching him figure out what was wrong with the machine, test his idea, repeat to make sure he was right, I saw someone who was less at work and more at play.

40 Days of Lent: Day Six

2010-02-22T19:13:00.000-05:00

Number One In Heaven

Below is a list of the ten best rock/pop albums as picked by the official newspaper of Vatican City L’Osservatore Romano.

1. Revolver by the Beatles

2. If I Could Only Remember My Name by David Crosby

3. The Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd

4. Rumours by Fleetwood Mac

5. The Nightfly by Donald Fagen

6. Thriller by Michael Jackson

7. Graceland by Paul Simon

8. Achtung Baby by U2

9. (What’s the Story) Morning Glory by Oasis

10. Supernatural by Carlos Santana

The opportunities for jokes and cheap shots are too easy, particularly with Michael Jackson's Thriller on the list. "Pretty Young Thing" is certainly something priests and Michael Jackson can agree on. You know they didn't pick Rubber Soul because the Vatican wouldn't like an album with a song called "Think For Yourself" on it. Etc, etc.

In addition to the "huh?" factor (downer stoner classic Dark Side of The Moon is included?), what I like is that the list shows personal taste, rather than just big albums by the usual big stars. David Crosby at number 2? It truly is a miracle.

40 Days of Lent: Day Five

2010-02-21T20:53:00.002-05:00

A History of Christianity - Episode One: The First Christianity

American television has produced similar overviews of Christianity, but none I have seen can compare with the lush visuals and clear language of this BBC production. It’s as much a travelogue as it is a history lesson, one whose images remind you of how visually beautiful Christianity is at its best. Oxford professor Diarmaid MacCulloch visits the locations of important historical events, sometimes to ironic effect. The palace where the Council of Nicea was held is now underwater, so MacCulloch sits beside a calm shore while discussing this first attempt to unify Christianity. Later he travels to China to interview a historian who deduced that an ancient Taoist temple was originally a Christian church based on the feng shui of its design – an impressive piece of detective work. However, irate villagers resentful of interest in Christianity overshadowing Buddhism prevent them from entering the temple.

Perhaps my favorite moment occurs when Professor MacCulloch approaches the site in Syria where St. Simeon stood atop a pillar for almost 40 years. Clutching his little digital camera, MacCulloch tells us how excited he is, having first heard about St. Simeon when he was eight. “I never thought I’d get to come here, and now here I am.” Anyone who has traveled knows that giddy enthusiasm.

Much of this first episode is structured around the church’s divisions (or diversity, if you want to be more positive about it). Leaving Jerusalem, some Christians headed west, a branch eventually adopted by the Emperor Constantine and made into the state religion of the Roman Empire. This is the story of Christianity I know well. However, other Christians headed east to Turkey, Syria and ultimately Asia. The stereotypes: western churches are more theological, eastern churches more mystical. The Council of Nicea was Constantine’s attempt to unify the faith and quell the endless theological arguments threatening to split his empire. The decision that Christ is “of one substance with the father” i.e. divine, worked for about 100 years, until some bishops began asking the damaging question “How?”

Nestorias, the Bishop of Constantinople, argued that Christ’s human and divine natures were like oil and water in the same glass. Even though they were in the same container, they were quite separate. Cyrill, the Bishop of Alexandria, on the other hand, argued that Christ’s human and divine natures were like water and wine in the same glass, mixed together.

There’s something I find both funny and deeply sad about this situation. The phrase “number of angels dancing on the head of a pin” comes to mind. The fact that people spent so much time arguing about something that either doesn’t exist or can never be proven astonishes me. This isn’t like a zen koan, something to be contemplated as way of spiritually training the mind. These were arguments as an attempt to “prove” something supernatural or transcendent. MacCulloch puts it in a historical context, saying “Understanding exactly how Jesus was God explained how He was powerful enough to save you from Hell,” but they might as well have been arguing over exactly how Santa Claus makes all those deliveries in one night.

40 Days of Lent: Day Four

2010-02-20T17:33:00.002-05:00

Great Images from BibliOdyssey

40 Days of Lent: Day Three

2010-02-19T09:26:00.003-05:00

Sometimes I forget how pretty my hometown is.

40 Days of Lent: Day Two

2010-02-18T09:28:00.002-05:00

If you have time, I highly recommend the article in the current Esquire about film critic Roger Ebert (available online here).

Warning: the picture that accompanies the article is rather startling. Ebert has been battling cancer in his mouth and salivary glands for years and the medical treatments have removed most of his jaw. Those who remember his rounded visage from "At The Movies" are in for a shock.

His surgeries have also left him without a voice. He communicates now by handwritten notes, improvised sign language and a computer that "speaks" for him. The article reads like the best short fiction: not in its narrative, but in the way little epiphanies are offered by otherwise mundane details. It is heartbreaking and hopeful, not because of Ebert's condition, but because life itself is heartbreaking and hopeful.

There are two outstanding passages quoted from Ebert's online journal that I want to quote:

(on death)

I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. What I am grateful for is the gift of intelligence, and for life, love, wonder, and laughter. You can't say it wasn't interesting. My lifetime's memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris.

(later)

I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn't always know this, and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.

I'm writing "40 Days of Lent" this year because I wanted to quote the second passage online. It should be printed on posters and hung in classrooms, incorporated into speeches, reprinted in anthologies. It should replace the story about the two sets of footprints in the sand. It should be repeated every day. Unfortunately, I'm all teary-eyed now and I'm writing this at work, so I'm going to go answer some emails and schedule some meetings.

40 Days of Lent: Day One

2010-02-17T15:39:00.003-05:00

Schmutz Wednesday!

Always my favorite of holidays, getting some schmutz patshkened on your kop, though hopefully not all over your punim. That would be shreklekh.

I went to St. Patrick's Cathedral this morning for my ashes, a place so ploimdik you could plotz. I've written before how there's something about smearing dirt on your head as a religious ritual that appeals to me in a way that more mundane liturgical rituals do not. I don't understand try to understand why; only a shmendrik would try.

I have decided to am going to do my "40 Days of Lent" postings again this year, as you can no doubt tell. Yesterday an email from my friend Andrea reminded me that Lent was beginning, but I planned on not posting this year. Then last night I read something I liked so much that I decided I would post during Lent just so I could share that one passage, which I will do tomorrow or the next day.

As I don't have a lot to say today, I'll conclude with the below picture of some ducks pulling a cart of naked ladies, originally seen in the Chronicle of Saxony (1492).

L'chaim!

Oh Damn. The Telephone Bar Has Closed.

2010-02-15T11:52:00.003-05:00

A thought that recurred fairly often: "If I can't think of anywhere else to go, I'll just stop in Telephone Bar." Perfectly located on Second Ave, around the corner from St. Mark's Place and St. Mark's Bookstore, a few block from my subway stop, I could always find a seat at the bar. This past Saturday, that thought was quickly replaced by "uh-oh" when I walked past and saw that the windows of the front door and the three red British phone booths that lent it its distinctive look were covered in brown paper.

At first I hoped they were just remodeling, though there was no sign on the door promising to reopen soon. Once home, I went online and discovered that, after 22 years, the Telephone Bar and Grill has closed. It has been sold to someone who owns other bars in the East Village, all of which sound, from their online descriptions, rather crappy. So another piece of "my" New York is gone. Unfortunately I missed their final night on January 31st. Apparently it was a "thank you" for their regulars.

It didn't quite capture the ambiance of pubs in Britain, which at their best, feel like auxillary living rooms, but it was a comfortable place just the same. Their chicken wings had the right blend of sweet and spicy and their portobello mushroom sandwich was wonderful. Nice mix of beers and whatever game was on tv was never too loud.

My friend Karl reminded me that when we first lived in New York, it was our "go to" place in the Village. I think I've taken everyone who ever visited me there at least once, although recently I didn't stop in as often as I once had. To be honest, I don't go to any bar as much as I once had. But four or five years ago I was a regular. I recall one particular couple I met at the bar: he was a researcher in neurology and she was born in Germany. They had met and married while he was stationed there in the army; her accent was still strong. They were at the bar having a drink before they went to see an off Broadway play. She liked experimental theater and he was a good sport. We had a great conversation, which was unexpectedly continued when I stopped in the bar the following Saturday...and there they were in the same seats, this time having a drink before dinner.

This was shortly before I traveled to Europe (which was the initial catalyst for this blog). She had traveled widely and gave me suggestions of places to see and what to avoid. Disappointed that I wasn't going to Germany, she kept making a case for the beauty of her homeland. He and I talked about conclusions drawn from neurological experiments, or rather, he replied to my naive questions with explanations on how the brain works and how this impacts our behavior. I understood a meager fraction of what he was saying but no matter. The conversation helped form a new way of thinking for me, moving the source of human behavior from personalities created by nature/nurture to synapses firing away in our mushy brains. In my completely undisciplined manner, it's become a subject of study for me. Just as her recommendations on travel influenced what I saw in Europe, his explanations on how I was experiencing "experience" influences me still.

I never saw them again after that day.

RIP, Telephone Bar and Grill.

I Want I Want I Want

2010-01-07T10:53:00.002-05:00

Stigmittens

This is more appropriate for a 40 Days of Lent posting but it's too good to wait. More info can be found here.

I still regret not buying the religious wristwatch I saw years ago. It had Christ at the center and, instead of the numbers 1 - 12, a name of a different apostle.

04:44 Ghost Story

2010-01-02T23:57:00.004-05:00

Ghost Story
Peter Straub

There are two general rules I follow regarding reading. One, I rarely re-read books, even the ones I like. I don’t have enough time to read all the things I’m interested in, let alone re-read old stuff. This policy has saved me from being disappointed by old favorites. For example, I’ve been thinking of re-reading Catch-22, but part of me would prefer to remember it fondly rather than be disappointed by how it, or I, have changed.

My friends Ben and Cindy re-read; mystery novels mainly. Cindy has a good memory and can usually recall the solution, no matter how convoluted. On the other hand, Ben experiences a vague sense of déjà vu while re-reading, but the ending is always a surprise.

“Not enough time” lies at the root of my other rule: I don’t take part in book clubs. I can pick out my own reading material, thank you very much, and while I’m always interested in hearing what other people have to say about books, there’s something about the mandatory nature, the obligation, of book clubs I instinctively mistrust. They’re too much like homework.

However, a few months ago I broke both rules. The Onion’s AVClub (the satirical newspaper’s review section) began an online book club and Ghost Story by Peter Straub was one of their initial selections. The timing seemed fortuitous as I had been thinking of re-reading Ghost Story, which was one of my favorite horror novels of my teenage years, although “horror novels of my teenage years” is a bit redundant. I stopped reading horror,apart from the occasional short story, when I was in my early twenties. There was no conscious decision or reason at the time. I just read other things instead.

Each month, one of The Onion’s AVClub writers selects a novel. A few other writers read it and post essays about the book, and then readers of the website add their feedback on the novel, the essays or, this being the internet, anything at all. The book club started, as new projects often do, with a great deal of energy and enthusiasm. It probably helped that the first two books were Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, two utterly strange and fairly unique books. There’s not much in American letters that’s comparable to either novel. A tone of bewilderment pervaded the essays and comments as everyone tried to grapple with both the novels and their reactions. However, books chosen later drew much more mixed reactions, with naysayers slipping into bratty “this sucks” mode rather than arguing intelligently about why “this sucks.” (I am referring to those posting comments anonymously; the reviewers consistently wrote perceptive essays whether they liked the novel or not). Full disclosure: one of the later novels chosen was John Crowley’s Little, Big, a personal favorite, which made the obnoxiousness of some of the comments especially frustrating. I know, I know: anyone who cares what anonymous posters on the internet say is just asking to have their feelings hurt. But still…

So in October I re-read Ghost Story for a book club.

I should have stood by my two rules.

Ghost Story is about a vengeful spirit who returns to punish the men who had killed her many years before, and destroy the town where they live for good measure. Except she was already a ghost then, so they didn’t really kill her, but that, along with much else in the book, doesn’t make sense when examined closely.

The novel touches on several potentially interesting things: men’s fear of women, the purpose of storytelling in our lives, post-modern ideas that the characters are self-consciously aware that they are taking part in a story, the difference between horror in life and horror in entertainment. But Straub doesn’t have address any of these ideas.

Re-reading it, I was surprised at how stodgy it seemed. Why did I like this as a teenager? I think the answer lies in the fact that at that time, Ghost Story was considered the “classy, literary” horror novel, especially when compared to Stephen King. In the same way, as a teenager I preferred Michelob because I thought it was the classy beer. Its story of a small town slowly dying is deliberately patterned on King’s Salem’s Lot, but whereas King is not ashamed of his pulpy influences and has fun with them, Straub seems to be a bit of a snob and aims for respectability rather than scares. Much of Ghost Story reads less like a ghost story and more like a soap opera. It recalls those 1970s novels about middle-class college professors having affairs in the suburbs, the spawn of Updike and Cheever. It’s not the book’s language or ideas that made it seem literary, but the fact that Straub refers to Hawthorne and Henry James, Poe and Stephen Crane.

Worst of all, it’s not scary. Just as I want my comedy to be, you know, funny, I expect my horror to be scary. The lack of chills wasn’t due to my having read the book before, either. There was plenty my memory had wrong. It just seems hard to believe that once I read this book thinking that, supernatural elements aside, it was an accurate depiction of what adult life was like, whereas now I know better.

03:44 The Savage Detectives

2009-12-31T23:21:00.004-05:00

The Savage Detectives
Roberto Bolaño

While in his early forties, Chilean author Roberto Bolaño discovered that he had an incurable liver disease that would ultimately prove fatal; precisely “when?” was unknown. After this diagnosis, Bolaño seems to have turned away from his previous life as a combative enfant terrible and spent his remaining years focusing on ambitious literary works including The Savage Detectives, which details the failure of a literary movement made up of combative enfants terrible.

The above is not intended as gossip but as context. Bolaño’s life is discussed in detail in the excellent introduction by translator Natasha Wimmer. Knowing this, it’s hard to read The Savage Detectives without thinking of it as a roman à clef or perhaps a parody of Bolaño’s life. One of the main characters is named Arturo Belano, for example, and his misadventures seem to follow a pattern similar to his creator’s.

The overriding theme is failure, the wasted potential and the directionless lives of middle aged men whose youthful dreams never paid off. The book is made up of three sections; the first, “Mexicans Lost In Mexico,” is perhaps the most enjoyable. It consists of diary entries by Juan Madero, a teenager who has fallen under the spell of a loose collective of poets called the Visceral Realists, who are defined less by what they stand for and more by what they dislike. As I live in a country in which poetry is irrelevant and literature is just another entertainment option among many, it’s heartening to read about characters who take poetry so seriously that they get into brawls over it. This is the “youth” section of the novel, which captures the joy of discovery, the excitement of new ideas and the mixed blessings of being accepted by those older than you but also dragged into the soap operas of their lives. Juan’s coming of age tale, however, ends abruptly with a cliffhanger. His absence and the lack of any explanation is keenly felt in the second section “The Savage Detectives.”

This is the longest section of the novel and consists of first person remembrances by those who encountered Belano and his fellow Visceral Realist Ulises Lima in the years after “Mexicans Lost In Mexico.” It’s an oral history (similar to George Plimpton’s biography of Edie Sedgewick) about a literary movement that produced little in the way of literature because its founders were too busy discussing it rather than writing. Love affairs, jail terms, dead-end jobs, political turmoil: it’s all here and at length, which makes the breadth of this section problematic.* It seems churlish to say “Can you cut your life story down a little bit cause I’m getting a bit bored” to a terminally ill man, but I think the novel would have been stronger had this section been edited. I was talking to a friend of a friend who was having the same experience with the book: he loved the first section but was stuck in the long second part.** However, at that point I had finished the novel and could tell him the payoff at the end was worth it, just as in Joyce’s Ulysses you have to slog through the novel’s two most tedious sections before you can reach the transcendence of Molly Bloom’s monologue at the end. Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima’s final tales include moments of grace for each man, and one of the most moving depictions of the selflessness of true friendship I have ever read.

The final section “The Sonora Desert” functions as an epilogue, returning us to Juan Madero’s diary and explaining what happened after the cliffhanger at the end of section one. It also provides closure to one of the storylines in section two and relates an “original sin” that explains the end of Visceral Realism as a movement and why Belano and Lima were doomed to lives of failure.

There’s much in The Savage Detectives that’s impressive. Bolaño is address a variety of life’s basic experiences by examining the day to day stories of a number of characters. He doesn’t overdo either the contradictions between stories or the distinct voices within. Even living as failures, the experience of life, with its attendant joys and sorrows, comes through. The book is also very funny.

-----------------------
* This is the first book I wished I read on a Kindle. I didn't take notes while reading and the ability to instantly SEARCH the text to access the myriad character names, places and incidents would have been a godsend.

** My nephew had the same reaction. While reading "Mexicans Lost In Mexico" I impulsively bought him a copy, thinking that, as he was going through some of the same things as Juan Madero, he would love it. He did, but then got bogged down in the second section's various monologues.