The Labyrinth Review

Crazy Like Us

2010-02-25T19:18:00.004-05:00

Two recent pieces on the weirdness of our society's approach to madness, very worth reading if you haven't already:

Ethan Watters's "The Americanization of Mental Illness" in the New York Times, January 8 2010, and

Louis Menand's "Head Case" in the New Yorker, March 1 2010.

My personal favorite quote from the latter:

"In the Hippocratic tradition, melancholics were advised to drink white wine, in order to counteract the black bile. (This remains an option.)"

Quote of the Year: early contender

2010-01-12T10:50:00.002-05:00

...this culture of perfect intellectual confidence, in which everything is sooner or later penetrated and unmasked—this culture of explanation, in which all the ancient problems are either solved or scorned, and every obscurity of human life, every fog and every cloud, is just a research paper away from satisfactory clarification. There is no riddle of existence that cannot be resolved, or robbed of its sting, in a David Brooks column. We are lucid now, and efficient; we are the quickest studies who ever lived. We throw no shadows. We know how things really work. We have the definite measure of everything. (Happiness, for example, is defined for us by social science; is an objective of public policy). Even as we cozily admit our fallibility, we exempt nothing from our brilliance. We dispel inwardness with our analysis of it. Hurriedly and without any suspicion that precious things are being driven away, we march smartly through all the pains and all the perplexities, and we call this dream of transparency, this aspiration to control, this denial of finitude, reason.

Reason is precisely what it is not. Reason is more provisional, more modest, more patient. Reason is not a festival of ideas or a catalogue of best practices.

--Leon Wieseltier on Philip Roth, in The New Republic

H/T Gregory Wolfe at dotCommonweal.

Shakira: She Wolf

2009-11-24T17:48:00.006-05:00

I wanted to like this album. I really did. I tried to like "Loba," its first single, with some success. It's catchy, if overproduced. But now that the whole album's here, I have to say...I'm disappointed.

Where's the passion? Where are the haunting melodies? Where is the richly-layered Latin orchestration? Where are the intelligent lyrics?

I listen to Shakira, most of all, when I'm dealing with passions I can't handle and I need some sort of musical catharsis. (That or Rachmaninov, depending on whether I'm in a pop or classical mood.) Her soaring vocals and intense lyrics have often soothed me when nothing else could. So I really can't figure out what's going on with this album. Shakira, what gives? There's no emotion here. It wouldn't make me feel better if I had a papercut, let alone a broken heart.

There are a few bright spots. "Mon Amour" has more of the passion, wit, and emotional honesty that usually marks Shakira's songwriting, although she didn't write the lyrics (in general, she did a lot less of the songwriting for this album, whereas in the past, most of the material she's recorded has been her own). The vocals on the Arabic-influenced "Why Wait" are stunning. But the rest of the tracks are forgettable, both musically and lyrically.

She's trying to be a standard-issue American pop diva with this album, which is a move I find incomprehensible from an artist who usually has such a strong artistic confidence and sense of self. She's in every way better when she does her own thing in her own way. My hope is that, since this is a comeback album, she felt she needed an easy commercial success so that with her next album she'll be able to do her own thing again. And I really hope that thing involves a return to her Latin roots. She both writes and sings better in Spanish. But if her next album is more of the same...ugh.

Autumn Rundown, aka Things That Were Awesome

2009-11-19T15:20:00.004-05:00

Okay, so I still don't have a lot of time for blogging, and I probably won't for a while. Among other things, I'm writing 1500 words of fiction a day (rain or shine, brain waves present or not), prepping my dissertation manuscript for placement with an academic publisher, and looking for a day job and/or teaching post. So all that's eating up more than the number of hours there are in a day, and I don't want to post half-digested thoughts here just to say I've put something up. Expect posting to remain light...but I'll pop in when I can!

And, here are some cool things that I would have blogged about this fall, if I had the time. First, music:

1. Sufjan Stevens, The BQE: Sufjan presents "a cinematic suite inspired by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the Hula-Hoop." It's gorgeous. Sufjan is ridiculously talented and one of the most innovative artists of his generation; at his most classical he reminds me of Debussy. As usual, the song titles on the new album are a work of art unto themselves, e.g.: 10. Interlude III Invisible Accidents; 11. Movement VI Isorhythmic Night Dance with Interchanges; 12. Movement VII (Finale) The Emperor of Centrifuge. And here's a sample of the sound:

2. Shakira, She-Wolf: The first new album from the Colombian pop superstar in four years, the full album comes out on Monday Nov. 23. The first two singles, She Wolf/Loba (I prefer the Spanish version) and Give It Up To Me (feat. Lil Wayne) are already out. I'm excited to hear the full album because Shakira is hands-down my favorite pop singer; there's a depth to her lyrics and a range in her musical style, not to mention the unbelievable vocals, that puts her a cut above most who work in the genre. I'm a little ambivalent about the new album from what I've heard and seen so far, though. She's known for racy music videos, but in these new videos it seems like she's trying too hard -- crossing the boundaries of good taste in an effort to get attention, maybe overcompensating for the fact that this is considered a "comeback" album after a long sabbatical during which she was mostly busy saving the world. The sound of the new album is definitely a new direction for her, airy dance pop that runs more toward a Michael Jackson/Madonna type sound with the Latin flavor substantially toned down. This makes me sad, because I have to say, I was hoping she'd go more this way with her new work:

(She did that for the soundtrack of Love in the Time of Cholera, a terrible movie based on an amazing novel, in 2007. Also, I want that dress.) And I guess I'm still hoping she'll return to a more Colombian sound in future work. Given the versatility she's shown in the past, I don't think there's any reason to assume she won't...

Ok, I think that's enough for one day. More when I get a chance!

cough cough

2009-11-19T15:19:00.002-05:00

And...I'm back. Did you miss me?

Out of Office Auto-Reply

2009-07-24T20:28:00.003-04:00

Ahem. Well, it would be an understatement to say posting's been light around here lately.

Truth is, after finally graduating in May (doctorate in philosophy), I've needed an extended breather, so for once I'm going to let summer be summer, and take some time to rest, for real. I.e., go to the beach, feel sand between my toes, and not think about how to string coherent sentences together for a while. So I'll be back sometime around the end of August or beginning of September...until then, enjoy the weather! I hope you all get to have your full share of relaxing backyard barbecues, beach trips, etc., between now and then...

Starving Artist Recipe #2: Ginger-Lime Cooler

2009-07-10T19:02:00.002-04:00

This is a simple recipe that can be made hot in the winter (sort of like a tropical hot toddy), or iced in the summer. Ingredient amounts, as always, are approximate, so adjust to your taste:

1 ginger tea bag
juice of half a lime
1 or 2 tsp sugar
1 or 2 oz coconut rum
coriander
ice

Boil water and steep a cup of ginger tea. Set it aside to cool. Squeeze the lime juice into a glass. Add a teaspoon or two of sugar, the coconut rum, and a dash or two of coriander. Stir until the sugar dissolves, then add ice. Pour in the cooled (or still hot, if you're impatient) ginger tea, stir, and enjoy!

Another Cat Story

2009-07-06T13:37:00.003-04:00

Today, while the landlord is fixing the bathroom, the two kittens are shut up with me in my room.

Buttons is a plump, sanguine character with the face of a contented tiger cub, the biggest and strongest of a litter of four, the alpha.

Velvet is the runt, a skinny jet-black animal with a hysterical temperament. As an infant, she would shriek if anyone tried to pick her up, and even now, being shut up in this small space is making her very nervous.

They're doing fine for the moment, although they weren't too happy when they first joined me, because I vetoed all the activities they considered fun: "Hurrah, let's pull everything out of the trash can and see if it's fun to play with!" No. Bad kitties. "Hurrah, let's chew up all the shoes and see which ones taste the best!" No no no. Bad kitties!

Then I went out to the roof for a moment. Buttons sat contentedly in the windowsill and watched me; Velvet could not handle being left in the room without the human. She was quite convinced that she would be trapped in the room forever and would starve to death. I could hear her meowing at the door; then she decided it would be better if she could see me and took Buttons' spot on the windowsill. By "took her spot," I mean she stepped right onto her, trying her best to violate the laws of physics by occupying exactly the same space at the same time, until Buttons got tired of the arrangement, hopped down, and left the windowsill to her nervous sister.

It took some time for Velvet to calm down again after I came in. She plopped herself in my lap for reassurance, and I'm sure that if she could have talked she would have whined, "Don't ever leave me again! Please don't ever leave me again!"

Rather needy, that one. As I write this, she's sitting on my lap, watching the letters appear on the computer screen. I'm not sure whether this creeps her out, or whether she's wondering if they're something she can eat. Either way, she looks intrigued, and a little suspicious.

Who's On Stage?

2009-07-03T09:58:00.003-04:00

Fun for your Friday morning, courtesy of the inimitable Animaniacs: here's Slappy Squirrel's Woodstock parody, complete with her version of "Who's on First?" and, as always, Dvorak's Humoresque, which is her theme song.

Decemberists: The Rake's Song

2009-06-29T10:00:00.007-04:00

So, my new musical obsession is The Decemberists.

Every once in a while, I hear a song that stops me in my tracks because of some indefinable quality in the music or the lyrics, and I know I have to get better acquainted with the artist. Sometimes, I think you can tell from just one song that a given artist has a deep well of talent and intelligence behind their work. The first song by Shakira that I ever heard was the playful "Whenever, Wherever," which besides being a fun, upbeat dance song with a catchy melody, also had that je ne sais quoi to set it apart: something in the subtle Latin flavor of the music and especially the use of traditional Andean instrumentation (panpipes and charango), as well as the simplicity of the lyrics, which manage to strike a timeless, elemental note that most artists find extremely elusive. I was hooked, and that was the beginning of my long fascination with the princess of Latin pop.

(Geeky side note #1: "Whenever," catchy though it is, is far from Shakira's best work. If you want to get a real feel for her music, go back to her early work in Spanish -- Pies Descalzos and, especially, Dónde Están Los Ladrones, which I think remains her best album to date. Her MTV Unplugged concert is basically an acoustic version of the latter album, with some inspired twists: "Ciega, Sordomuda" gets a mariachi accompaniment, for instance. )

The first Decemberists song that caught my attention was I Was Meant for the Stage, a track I came across when a friend sent it to me late last year, in a mixed playlist of indie rock. What's impressive about the song is that with a single mischosen word, the lyrics would have come across as obnoxious, even egomaniacal. Colin Meloy has such precise control of his storytelling, however, that he manages to bring it off as a simple testimony, all the more striking for its simplicity, of what it feels like to be doing what you're born to do. He takes an authoritative voice reminiscent of an ancient epic poet summoning his muse, and he makes it work.

I was really sold on the band, though, when they released The Rake's Song earlier this year. It's a horrifying tale of murder most foul that plays like an episode of Law & Order SVU:

Here's what's awesome about this song: first of all, it is a narrative, a murder ballad in the folk tradition of songs like "Down in the Willow Garden" (sometimes called "Rose Connelly" or "Rose Conley," depending on the version). "Willow Garden" has been sung for at least a century and probably longer: it's likely it was already with the people who would settle the Appalachians when they came over from England. This is a form with a very long history, and the Decemberists maintain a strong link to that history even while giving it a modern twist.

(Geeky side note #2: Holly Hunter sings a verse of Willow Garden as a lullaby in the Coen brothers' screwball comedy Raising Arizona. The inside joke, of course, is that if you know the rest of the song and not just that one verse, you know that it's all about bloody murder and is a rather gruesome choice for singing to a baby...despite the soothing melody...)

The Rake's Song is written in first person, even though the protagonist is obviously a separate person from the singer: a bold choice given that American audiences are conditioned to assume that whenever they hear "I" and "me," the singer is expressing his own inner thoughts. Colin Meloy, however, hasn't drowned any children lately; the scurrilous "I" of the song is a completely fictional character. That character, we discover, is a scoundrel who deserves to be hanged, and he knows it. Yet there is something oddly fascinating about him: his confidence, his sheer delight in evil. He is the archetype of the charming sociopath. He gets up on the stage; he tells his story in a chillingly straightforward voice; he claims to be utterly remorseless; then he disappears, leaving you hoping that you never meet him in a dark alley somewhere.

Along with the strong voice of the sociopathic narrator, well-chosen details help make this a memorable narrative ballad: the names of the children, for instance. They are specified, even though we never learn the wife's name, or the narrator's for that matter: Isaiah, Charlotte, Dawn, and Ugly Myfanwy. (That last one is just glorious.) They're unique names, so they give a weight of reality to the characters. The children would stand out much less as characters (and as victims) if they had more common names, whether modern (Michael, Hannah, Emily, Madison) or classic (John, Mary, Helen, Margaret). As a group, the names suggest neither a single time nor a single place: Isaiah is biblical; Charlotte suggests a little girl from England a century ago; Dawn is a modern American name; and Myfanwy is about as traditionally Welsh as you can get. All in all, the list of names has that "you couldn't make this shit up" specificity to it that makes the narrator credible.

I could go on, but I'm sure you'd rather just listen to the music than listen to me ramble on about it. In a nutshell: powerful storytelling, ambience, and the creation of memorable characters: that's what the Decemberists are all about, like the wandering-bard storytellers of the past. From the biography at the band's official site:

"There’s an odd bond between the music of the British folk revival and classic metal," says The Decemberists frontman Colin Meloy. "A natural connection between, like, Fairport Convention and Black Sabbath—of course, Sandy Denny from Fairport even sang with Led Zeppelin on ‘The Battle of Evermore.’ I think there’s a shared sense of narrative and ambience, of moving beyond the first person in your writing. And I thought it would be interesting to mess around with that."

Almost all of the Decemberists' material is steeped in this narrative tradition:

"[Hazards of Love] grew into the idea of creating a suite of songs based on old folk songs," says Meloy. "Building a narrative, piecing together disparate motifs, developing actual protagonists." Of course, working with elaborate song forms isn’t new territory for the Decemberists. As far back as 2004, the band released "The Tain," an eighteen-and-a-half minute single based on an Irish myth. The Crane Wife took as its starting point an ancient Japanese folk tale, which was interpreted across three separate songs. The album climaxed with "The Island," a 13-minute, three-section murder ballad.

Go listen.

Quote of the Day

2009-06-28T11:25:00.003-04:00

As in our own time the permafrost of modernity has at last begun to melt--and a more determinedly pluralistic world has bounded back into an often troubling life--the world we are seeing is not a strange new world, revealed as the glaciers draw back, but a strange old world: kinship, locality, embodiment, domesticity, affect. All of these things, but I would add that at times we are seeing them in something as actual--and as tangible--as the tomb of two friends buried in an English parish church. We did not see those tombs because they did not signify; but they are beginning to signify again.

--Alan Bray, The Friend

Via Eve Tushnet. I have got to read this book.

'Llectuals

2009-06-26T16:09:00.002-04:00

"Stop being pedantic!"
"Whoa, stop being pejorative."
"I will when you cease your pedantry."

This is hilarious. (Via Maud Newton.)

Goodbye

2009-06-25T23:32:00.000-04:00

Postscript

2009-06-23T22:50:00.001-04:00

I do want to clarify that my last post was intended solely as an in memoriam, on a very personal level, not as any form of argument on behalf of increased US meddling in the Iranian situation. It does not follow, from the fact that such deaths are unjust and tragic in the extreme, that we should "do something" about it.

After all, what would intervention mean, in practice, except more violent deaths like the ones we have already seen? Even the escalating rhetoric is a dangerous road. Moroccan-American writer Laila Lalami comments:

While the neo-cons’ calls for a muscular reaction are hardly surprising, several people from across the political spectrum seem to have joined them in demanding a louder response from the White House. Andrew Sullivan posted a steady stream of eyewitness accounts, videos, and tweets (much of which unconfirmed) over the weekend following the election. He switched the color of his blog banner to green, in solidarity with Mousavi supporters. He urged Western governments not to recognize Ahmadinejad as the victor in this election. In the Nation, John Nichols found Obama’s response to be “tepid” and “disappointing” and wished that the president would take a clue from Nicolas Sarkozy, who boldly declared that the events in Iran are “a tragedy.” (By the way, one little detail that seems to have escaped the attention of those who loved Sarkozy’s comment: he was speaking from Libreville, where he was attending the funeral of his good friend Omar Bongo, the dictator who has ruled Gabon with an iron fist for 41 years.) In the New York Times, Roger Cohen wrote that, although he had in the past argued for engagement with Iran, he felt that “in the name of the millions defrauded, President Obama’s outreach must now await a decent interval.”

This echo chamber worries me, because it seems to me it could easily pave the way for further escalation and eventual military action. Which is why Obama’s cautious stance so far on Iran is the right move.

That stance became ever so slightly less cautious today, with the use of words like "appalled," "outraged," "I strongly condemn." Escalation, military action. After what we have witnessed in Iraq over the last decade, these words should freeze us where we stand.

The Iran protests are an eerie echo of what happened in Tiananmen Square twenty years ago this month. The struggle for freedom, a heartbreakingly elusive goal for so many millions of our brothers and sisters, continues around the world. That's not a call for the American military to rush in like cowboys and set things right. Action -- which will probably always be frustratingly slow and subtle action -- should be taken if and only if there is the ghost of a chance it will do more good than harm. Until then, once more: it is good that we are watching. Never underestimate the power of human solidarity.

Neda

2009-06-23T20:41:00.006-04:00

By now you may have heard of Neda Agha-Soltan, an Iranian woman shot during the election protests on Saturday. Her death was caught on video, and now, around the world, she has become a symbol of the Iranian people's struggle.

I'm not usually bothered by violence in movies and television, mainly because whatever happens, you know it's fake. It's actors pretending to die, decorated with fake blood. (Kill Bill is one of my favorite movies, just to give you an idea.)

When I watched this clip, I broke out into a cold sweat.

I have never watched a human being die before. Not in real life, not in video footage, never. Think about it: you never see a real death on the news. The mothers of America would be up in arms. It's not considered proper. When CNN aired this clip, they blurred out Neda's face. You couldn't see her eyes go wild and then roll back into her head; you couldn't see the blood start to stream from her nose and mouth.

I wanted to write some sort of reflection on this, but I'm not going to. There are some tragedies so stark that comment would be an insult. I just want to say that I think it's worth watching the clip, even if it disturbs you -- not out of some kind of sick voyeuristic fascination, but as an act of solidarity. The visual might just make you realize, on a deeper level than you normally allow yourself to feel, how you're linked with Neda, how her death is your tragedy too. It definitely drove that home for me, anyway. Our common humanity is a tie that binds you and me and her and every other human being who lives and dies on this earth, under whatever flag, professing whatever creed. An injustice to one is an injustice to us all.

You can leave a message for Neda's family here.

Still Watching...

2009-06-23T18:29:00.001-04:00

Starving Artist Recipe #1: Black Bean Burgers

2009-06-20T13:56:00.003-04:00

Ingredients:
One can of black beans
One egg
Breadcrumbs
Minced garlic
Finely chopped green or red pepper
Finely chopped red onion
Salt
Cayenne pepper
Cumin
Paprika
Olive oil

Rinse and drain the black beans. Put them in a medium mixing bowl and squish them to a pulp, either with your hands or a potato masher. Add the peppers and onions -- roughly a half cup of each, or to taste -- and a teaspoon or so of minced garlic. Mix well. Break an egg into a smaller mixing bowl. Add salt, cayenne pepper, cumin, paprika, and/or other spices to taste. (You can be generous with the cayenne -- a couple good dashes from the canister, rather than just a teeny pinch. Black beans are aggressively mild and need a lot of spice to make them flavorful.) Beat the spiced egg with a fork until blended, then add it to the bean mixture. Mix well. Add breadcrumbs -- it will probably take 1/2 to 1 cup -- until the mixture forms cohesive patties.

Put a good amount of olive oil in a frying pan and turn the heat to medium. Make the black bean mixture into three patties. Put them in the frying pan and cook for about 10 minutes on each side, or until they're thoroughly hot and each side has a nice crisp to it.

You can put these burgers in a bun, but they're flavorful enough to eat by themselves, and really it seems like ketchup would be an insult. I haven't tried eating them on buns very much, but it might be a fun opportunity to experiment with the condiments. You can also do substitutes with the vegetables and spices. I've sometimes added worcestershire sauce to the spice mixture, and I've been meaning to try a curry powder version. I've also used artichoke hearts and corn when I didn't have green peppers.

Props to Rachel, a former roommate who taught me this awesome recipe. Seriously, I eat these things for dinner probably three times a week. Cheap, filling, and delicious!

More on Iran

2009-06-18T13:19:00.004-04:00

John Schwenkler at Upturned Earth continues to be brilliantly commonsensical on the Iran elections, pointing out the difference between "taking the side of democracy" and "making brash and unnecessarily inflammatory remarks that will do no one any good." He also offers some good links, including this one. (For a quick recap of what's happened in Iran this week, check out the Associated Press "timeline of Iran's post-election crisis, which has sparked the biggest unrest in the country in a decade.")

The instinct to cry foul, as loudly as possible, is understandably strong when the world watches a situation like the current one in Iran, where an election appears to have been stolen. But that's why we have journalists; no one who enjoys freedom should ever forget the degree to which that freedom is dependent on a free press. It is not President Obama's job to say exactly what he thinks about the election; it is his job to be diplomatic and speak only within the limits of his authority to intervene, with the recognition that if he makes a remark that can be construed as "meddlesome" or "inflammatory," it might wreak immeasurably more havoc than a similar remark from Average Joe Reporter. It is the press's job to get the truth out, whatever that may be. And that's where the censure belongs if the ball is dropped.

Pundits are eager to take a position on what should have happened in Iran or what should happen next; I wish everyone would place more emphasis on letting the facts speak for themselves. We need people who can tell us what happened, more than people who can tell us what we should think about what happened. Knowledge is power. Iran itself realizes this: as Slate's Jason Rezaian noted yesterday, "All journalists working in Iran for foreign media outlets have been told by the Ministry of Islamic Culture and Guidance, better known as Ershad—politely, I must admit—that we're not to report any further on the events taking place just around the corner." There are possible scenarios, I suppose, in which diplomatic or economic sanctions on the part of the international community might become appropriate. For now, though, it matters that pictures and news updates, many via the brave journalistic efforts of ordinary Iranians, continue to escape, despite the government's attempts to curtail them. It is good that we are watching.

Obama and Iran

2009-06-15T21:41:00.003-04:00

Astute commentary from Upturned Earth:

Just as I'd hoped, really. Straightforward condemnation of violence and the suppression of dissent, a renewed commitment to diplomacy no matter who is in charge, and no comment on the electoral irregularities beyond acknowledgment of the apparent frustration of many of the Iranian people...

Watch as the news ticker quotes John McCain calling the election 'corrupt,' and imagine how that might have gone.

Yeah.

Entertainment Today

2009-06-13T15:07:00.002-04:00

Your completely gratuitous bit of celebrity gossip for the day: beloved fantasy and horror writer Neil Gaiman is dating Dresden Dolls frontwoman Amanda Palmer. How very Tim Burton/Helena Bonham Carter of them! I look forward to some very spooky artistic collaborations.

A Strange Occupation

2009-06-13T12:19:00.003-04:00

Maud Newton links to an essay excerpt at the Oxford University Press blog, which cites a letter from W. H. Auden to Cyril Connolly on writing: "you really write about writing in the only way which is interesting to anyone except academics, as a real occupation like banking or fucking, with all its attendant boredom, excitement, and terror." Also, V.S. Pritchett, who took a slightly different view of the writer's occupation:

The last essay in that volume, on Virginia Woolf, written over forty years later, ovserves almost as an aside: ‘She worked harder than ever when she was famous, as gifted writers do-what else is there to do but write?’ That rhetorical question may at first reading seem to strike a bleak note, as though all else had lost its savour, but in context it gestures more towards an inner imperative, that achieved condition of the writer, whether critic or novelist, in which experience is not fully possessed as experience until it has been cropped, shaped, and coloured. Pritchett wrote so well about authors as different as Gibbon and Woolf in part because he, too, knew the compulsions and desperations of the form of willing slavery that is the writer’s life…

I don't intend to turn this blog into a series of ruminations on the writing life; for one thing it's a little premature given that I'm still firmly in the category of "emerging artists," and more importantly there's something unpleasantly cannibalistic in writing about writing. The essays are fun, though, and make me want to read the rest of the book when I get a chance!

Carless in Philadelphia

2009-06-13T10:56:00.005-04:00

So my car is in the shop, and this is where I realize the practical drawbacks of my choice to commit serious, unpaid time to my writing this year: I can't pay to get it out. I'm faced with selling it to the dealer and embracing the starving artist's transportation of choice, a bicycle. In a way, this makes me feel freer: I know that I'm not in a financial position to insure and maintain a car right now, and that I'm better off without one. I've been saying for a long time that I don't really need it, but I've never had the guts to take that step of actually getting rid of it. Somehow, once you have one, a car feels like a safety net, and psychologically it can be tough to relinquish it. I suppose it's a bit of a relief to have had circumstances (namely: rust) force my hand.

Still, I've had Trixie, my hard-working little Honda, for over five years now (and she was already five years old when I bought her, so this was her tenth birthday coming up). It's tough to get used to the idea of being without her. The last two nights, I've woken up at 3 AM wondering whether all this is really worth it, whether my half-finished novel will ever be publishable, whether I shouldn't just get a real job and have done with it. I don't believe any of that; I've made these choices for a reason. Still, the choice comes at a price.

For all the joy and camaraderie of the artistic vie boheme, the fact is that it is a form of poverty, and poverty is not always fun. It means that sometimes you don't just have to go without things you want, you have to go without things you need. That's the meaning of the label I occasionally apply to these posts: "sometimes Mimi dies at the end." In Rent, the character Mimi undergoes a miraculous and rather ridiculous resurrection at the end of the show, but in the original opera, Puccini's La Boheme, she isn't so lucky. After celebrating the life of friends, the opera closes on a tragic note, because when it comes down to it the friends weren't able to afford the expensive medical care necessary to keep Mimi alive. And that's the harsh reality of living like there's no tomorrow: sometimes, there really isn't one. Poverty can age you fast, weigh on your mind, limit your options.

I'm lucky enough to still have health insurance (for now) and a graduate education, for which I'm grateful. It doesn't look like I'll be dying of consumption anytime soon, and I won't be poor forever. But a lot of my artist friends don't, for example, have health insurance, and I wonder why it is that our health care system seems to screw them over just because they've committed themselves to doing something they're truly passionate about, rather than signing themselves over to corporate America for "benefits." (Doesn't even the word, "benefits," make it sound like a form of prostitution?) I'm not saying people shouldn't have to work hard for their living, but most of the artists I know aren't petty dabblers. They work sometimes 80 hours a week doing something that has no monetary rewards, only the satisfaction of creating something beautiful or revealing some truth about the human heart. I don't know enough about the various proposals for healthcare reform to suggest something more concrete, but I do think that people in the arts should have more options, and shouldn't be penalized for doing what they love and thereby providing a priceless service to society.

Anyway, the car breaking down is not the end of the world, and I'll probably get used to not having a car quicker than I think: especially in a big city, cars are a luxury, not a necessity. But I thought I'd let you know why I haven't been posting the last couple of days; lots of pragmatic stuff to deal with. I'll be back soon!

If I Daringly Put Basil instead of Oregano in the Meatballs, Did I Make An Experiment?

2009-06-09T15:40:00.007-04:00

Worth a read if you get a chance: Empty Rhetoric: Innovative Fiction and the American Literary Magazine, a critical essay by Daniel Green for Context. The essay's from 2003, and six years is a lot in the turbulent world of literary publishing -- one of the magazines Green highlights, 3rd Bed, has since folded. But the main point, about the overwhelming dominance of a narrowly neorealist, cinematic aesthetic in the leading literary magazines and the need for openness to real innovation, is as fresh and important as ever.

More on the American literary magazine to come, later this week when I've got a moment to cobble it together...

What Sort of Political Creature Am I?

2009-06-09T10:08:00.002-04:00

Most of the time I pretend I'm apolitical, because I hate labels in general and the left-right spectrum in particular -- but because this quiz (a) was fairly accurate and (b) produced such a nifty graphic, I couldn't resist coming out of the closet:

My Political Views
I am a center-left moderate social libertarian
Left: 2.05, Libertarian: 1.37

Political Spectrum Quiz

Give it a try, it's fun! I look forward to seeing a nifty graphic on some of your blogs, too.

Quote of the Day

2009-06-08T22:57:00.002-04:00

I originally began reading Proust's Swann's Way at this cordial invitation from Nonsuch Book, but alas, not only did I fail to finish by April 19...it's June 8 and I'm still reading. Proust is difficult for me. His language is delicate and luminous, his detailing is minute, but there's just a hint of fussiness and neurosis about it that irks me, so the book continues to delight me and annoy me by turns. I loved this quote; it's dense, but if you don't have the patience for all of it, read the last sentence -- the image of something needing to ripen in one's heart before one can appreciate great art is fantastic:

Sometimes in the afternoon sky the moon would pass white as a cloud, furtive, lusterless . . . I liked finding its image again in paintings and books, but these works of art were quite different -- at least during the early years, before Bloch accustomed my eyes and my mind to subtler harmonies -- from those in which the moon would seem beautiful to me today and in which I would not have recognized it then. It might be, for example, some novel by Saintine, some landscape by Gleyre in which it stands out distinctly against the sky in the form of a silver sickle, one of those works which were naively incomplete, like my own impressions, and which it angered my grandmother's sisters to see me enjoy. They thought that one ought to present to children, and that children showed good taste in enjoying right from the start, those works of art which, once one has reached maturity, one will admire forever after. The fact is that they probably regarded artistic merits as material objects which an open eye could not help perceiving, without one's needing to ripen equivalents of them slowly in one's own heart.

--Marcel Proust

the whimsical grotesque

2009-06-08T20:05:00.003-04:00

Journey Round My Skull has posted images and remarks from Rilla Alexander on a recent project: a series of delightful drawings based on Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights. The final designs now adorn new children's merchandise for Museo del Prado in Spain, which houses the original painting. I am seriously coveting those teacups.

Beware the Tremendously Very Bad Mammoth!

2009-06-06T09:56:00.003-04:00

This kid's story just captures the soul of narrative - the human art of storytelling at its simplest and purest.

Also, she's unbelievably cute.

Have a great weekend!

Shakira as Political Force

2009-06-05T10:38:00.002-04:00

So pretty much anyone who knows me knows that I'm a massive fan of Shakira. I try to argue that she's more brains than hips, but people don't always believe me...so in my defense, and hers, here's an extensive profile from the NYTimes that focuses on her political and charity work on behalf of early childhood education in Latin America.

I think it says something about the artist that any journalist who interviews her ends up taking this tone of profound respect:

Celebrity philanthropy, rock ’n’ roll philanthropy, is no longer a novelty, but what Shakira and ALAS were trying was indeed new. They were looking to use the power of pop to help the populations not of distant impoverished lands but of the Ibero-American world from which they come. They have a policy focus — early-childhood nutrition, education and medical care — that is on a scale beyond the reach of private charity. It requires the steady effort of the state. It cannot be addressed by rich countries’ check-writing. So the trick is to take pop celebrity, marry it to big business and permanently alter the way Latin American governments help care for the young and the poor. What the golden-haired young woman staring at her laptop was trying to do was a tall order, given the fragility of celebrity influence, the dubious track record of Latin American governments in providing social services and the lengthening shadow of a global recession that was straitening everyone’s budget. But she is not someone whom it would be reasonable to underestimate.

Also, she writes great songs. I'm dying for the first peek at her new album, which rumor has it will be released later this year...

Linguistics Over Coffee

2009-06-05T10:24:00.002-04:00

So this morning I'm sitting in the living room, still in my pajamas, having coffee with my roommate Elise, and I mention that a couple of my friends did something "asinine." Apologies for the slight vulgarity of the following post, but this conversation needed to be immortalized:

Elise (whose native language is Danish): Oh, so "asinine" is a real word? I heard people say it and I always assumed it meant "asshole," but I wasn't sure.
Me: Yeah, it's a word, it just means they're being an ass, only a little more polite.
Elise: Ok.
Me: Except it's not from "ass" meaning butt, as in "asshole"; it's from "ass" as in "donkey." Donkey-like.
Elise: Isn't it the same? I mean, butt-ass probably got its name from donkey-ass right?
Me: No, it's got to be a different word -- butt-ass is related to the British slang "arse" which is clearly an Anglo-Saxon word; donkey-ass is from the Latin word "asinus" meaning a donkey. They just happened to end up being spelled the same.
Elise:
Me: You just cannot believe how big of a dork I am right now, can you?
Elise:
Me: I should seek professional help.

Tiananmen: more story

2009-06-04T17:44:00.002-04:00

For further reading: PEN America has a phenomenal collection of links relating to Tiananmen, including a New Republic retrospective with links to the original coverage from 1989, a couple of prison memoirs from jailed Chinese dissidents, and various notes on the current situation.

Via literary maven extraordinaire Maud Newton.

Tiananmen: In Memoriam

2009-06-04T13:01:00.004-04:00

There's a scene in the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude where a man goes to a public square for a demonstration, and government soldiers silently surround the crowd and then begin firing into it, killing men, women, children: a sudden, brutal massacre that leaves few alive. Some time later, the man wakes up in a dark train car, and realizes that he is surrounded by the corpses of those killed in the square. The unnamed powers that be have put them all on a train to the sea, where they will be dumped in and forgotten by history.

He escapes from the train car, horrified and exhausted, and stops for shelter at a house along the road. He tries to tell the residents about the massacre, but they look at him like he's crazy. What are you talking about? Nobody died. It never happened.

And so he is left alone, for the rest of his life, with this memory of a train full of the dead, speeding toward the sea to be forgotten.

That's a heavy burden.

Twenty years ago today, the Chinese army massacred hundreds, perhaps thousands of students who were peacefully demonstrating in Beijing's Tiananmen square. The government's tight control of information relating to the incident has left it impossible to determine whether the actual number was closer to 200 or 2000; the official party line is that nothing of consequence even happened. They could not keep it entirely hidden, though; reports leaked out, even without a free press.

At least, then, there isn't just one lone witness, condemned to the solitude of his knowledge; there is a whole community of nations that knows and remembers. Let us remember, then. And let the memory be a clear call for all of us to work, speak, hope, and pray for justice, in solidarity with our brothers and sisters around the world -- justice not only for some, but for all, today and always.

(Photo from Wikimedia Commons)

The National: Fake Empire

2009-06-04T09:59:00.007-04:00

First of all, there's been a bit of an uptick in traffic here lately, so to all new visitors, a very warm welcome; thanks for stopping by! Make yourself at home, and as always, feel free to email me if there's anything on your mind.

Second, I was supposed to see The National play at the Electric Factory here in Philly last weekend, but due to my poor calendar-keeping skills, I forgot it was that Friday and planned something else for the same night. The concert had been a friend's suggestion; I wasn't familiar with the band at all, but I should have known they would rock: they came highly recommended by several friends with great taste in music. So anyway, this week I got my paws on a copy of the band's newest CD, Boxer, and I've been listening...and listening...and listening... Holy shit. I'll have to make sure I see these guys live next time they're in town.

In Vino Veritas

2009-06-03T10:24:00.002-04:00

I don't know how Denis Dutton manages it: his Arts & Letters Daily compiles so many worthwhile essays on such a range of topics that you get the impression he must do nothing but read periodicals 24/7 -- or else he has a small army of research assistants working for him. Anyway, item of the day from ALD: an astute article on modern Puritanism, the brutish habit of binge drinking that it inspires, and its interference with our ability to enjoy drinking wine in community, and in moderation. Viva Dionysus!

Excerpt:

If you wish to understand 'binge drinking,' and the vice that it exemplifies, I think that this is the intellectual domain in which the search should begin. When people sit down together in a public place — a place where none of them is sovereign but each of them at home — and when those people pass the evening together, sipping drinks in which the spirit of place is stored and amplified, maybe smoking or taking snuff and in any case willingly exchanging the dubious benefits of longevity for the certain joys of friendship, they rehearse in their souls the original act of settlement, the act that set our species on the path of civilisation, and which endowed us with the order of neighbourhood and the rule of law. When, however, people swig drinks without interest in their neighbours, except as equal members of the wild host of hunter-gatherers, when their sole concern is the intoxicating effect and when the drink itself is neither savoured nor understood, then are they rehearsing that time before civilisation, in which life was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Understandably, the first and natural effect of this way of drinking is an implacable belligerence towards the surrounding signs of settlement — an urge to smash and destroy, to replace the ordered world of house and street and public buildings, with a ruined wasteland where only the drunk is at home. Binge drinking may look like a communal act. In fact, it is an act of collective solitude, in which the god of modern puritans, the Self, reigns supreme.

Quote of the Day

2009-06-02T14:11:00.003-04:00

Proust describes asparagus, right down to the fragrant-pee effect. His attention to detail is unparalleled, as always; depending on my mood I find the minuteness of it either enchanting or irritating:

I would stop by the table, where the kitchen maid had just shelled them, to see the peas lined up and tallied like green marbles in a game; but what delighted me were the asparagus, steeped in ultramarine and pink, whose tips, delicately painted with little strokes of mauve and azure, shade off imperceptibly down to their feet -- still soiled though they are from the dirt of their garden bed -- with an iridescence that is not of this earth. It seemed to me that these celestial hues revealed the delicious creatures who had merrily metamorphosed themselves into vegetables and who, through the disguise of their firm, edible flesh, disclosed in these early times of dawn, in these beginnings of rainbows, in this extinction of blue evenings, the precious essence that I recognized again when, all night long following a dinner at which I had eaten them, they played, in farces as crude and poetic as a fairy play by Shakespeare, at changing my chamber pot into a jar of perfume.

Poor Giotto's Charity, as Swann called her, instructed by Françoise to 'scrape' them, would have them beside her in a basket, her expression as mournful as though she were suffering all the misfortunes of the earth; and the light crowns of azure that girded the asparagus stalks above their tunics of pink were delicately drawn, star by star, as, in the fresco, are the flowers bound around the forehead or tucked into the basket of Virtue at Padua.

If you like literary descriptions of food, by the way, check out lashings & lashings of ginger beer -- it will make you hungry.

Media Digest, cont.

2009-05-28T14:10:00.002-04:00

Via Arts & Letters Daily, here's a fun article on the phases of the natural life of a TV series, from birth to decline and fall. My one disagreement with the article is that it places House, MD in the "baroque" phase, when I think the finale of this past season put it firmly in the "decadent" category. (Decadent: when "writers lose interest in their themes and try to maintain audiences by concocting steadily more outlandish storylines.") Yeah. House has been my favorite tv show for a long time, I've pretty much watched it religiously for five years, and I'm sad to see it go, but I've gotta admit it's jumped the shark now. So I'm in the market for a new favorite show...weirdly like being single again after a long relationship.

Comedy Time

2009-05-28T13:22:00.002-04:00

Speaking of media, I'm becoming a huge fan of Australian new-media comedienne Natalie Tran, whose youtube vlog has nearly 300,000 subscribers. There's something about her deadpan delivery and perfect comic timing, not to mention awesome Aussie accent, that makes this way too entertaining. A sample clip:

Waiting for the New Media to Come of Age

2009-05-28T09:44:00.004-04:00

I've been thinking about the phenomenon of obsolescence. In between a thing's heyday and its final demise, there's a strange interim when it's going, going, but not yet gone.

Periods of transition are part of life, and part of history. Revolutions don't happen instantaneously. In retrospect, decades or centuries later, they may seem to have changed the face of the world in no time at all, but the fact is that major shifts in human thought and practice (the invention of the printing press, the industrial revolution) take decades to become settled and integrated into the old fabric of life.

It will be true for the digital revolution, too. Yes, old media are dying. Print newspapers will probably be the first to go, and as nostalgic as I get over the smell of paper and ink, I don't think that's anything to be afraid of. Newspapers, after all, are only a few hundred years old. Infants, in the grand scheme of things. It's not as though something that's been with humanity since the dawn of time (the ability to speak, for instance) is disappearing. Journalism will continue to exist, as it did in the ancient and medieval world (usually under the name "history," as in what Thucydides wrote), and as it does now in newspapers and other periodicals. The media change over time; the need to tell our story will always remain.

I want to point out something else, though. The death of the newspaper, though it's imminent, is not going to happen today, or tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow. That's not because people are stubbornly clinging to an outmoded means of expression, when they should just let it go and embrace newer ones. It's not fear that's keeping us from going digital overnight, it's the fact that the new media still aren't ready to take the place of their parents. They're not grown up yet. When they are, the old will die a peaceful death and the new will take over. We'll probably miss the old a lot less than we think when that day comes, because then we'll have adequate replacements. For now, though, newspapers, books, and magazines -- the whole world of ink on paper -- are still very much alive and needed.

Digital journalism is ever-improving -- blogs and the feed readers that syndicate them, magazines and newspapers that exist solely in online format, vlogs, podcasts, etc. -- but it hasn't come of age. The backlit screens on which most of us read them, for instance, make them an unpleasant strain on the eyes compared with paper, and unless you've sprung for a wireless device with an annoyingly tiny screen, you still can't roll up Slate.com and put it in your back pocket so you can read it on the train. Books can be downloaded to a Kindle and read on an e-ink screen, comfortably, but the prices of Kindles and other digital readers are still high enough to make them inaccessible to a lot of people, and on an aesthetic level there's still something vaguely unsatisfying about the format. These problems will eventually be ironed out, but they haven't yet. And as this year's Nobel laureate in literature, J.M.G. le Clezio, has pointed out, there is an immense segment of the world's population to whom new media are still out of reach and even old-fashioned books are precious commodities. Old media are obsolescent, but not obsolete.

There is a strange poignancy to holding something in your hands and knowing that it's obsolescent. But that shouldn't prevent us from enjoying the twilight hours of books and newspapers; it shouldn't scare young writers away from contributing to newspapers and trying to get their books published through conventional publishers. Contemporary writers still need to consider all the media formats that exist in today's world, arranged in an uneasy truce, and find out which ones (at this particular and quickly-passing moment in history) serve their own work best. The answer may be a blog, or it may be a print periodical: we exist at a strange moment when both are viable, and both still have contributions to make.

When will this moment pass? Ten years from now? Twenty? A hundred? No one really knows, but I think it's safe to say that the old will coexist with the new for a good while yet, and while that may be a confusing thing, it's only natural. Change takes time.

Literature-As-Music Metaphor of the Day

2009-05-27T00:46:00.002-04:00

So you all know I'm obsessed with the mysterious structural similarities between fiction and music. Here's a wonderful comparison, then, from Michiko Kakutani, in her NYTimes review of the posthumous John Updike collection My Father's Tears and Other Stories. Kakutani writes that the tales are a series of

memory arpeggios, played by an elderly man, reminding himself of the passion he once felt for a girl, the regret he felt over an opportunity missed, or the realization, as he writes in a poem, that “all a writer needs” really was back there in his Pennsylvania hometown with “its trolley cars and little factories, cornfields and trees, leaf fires, snowflakes, pumpkins, valentines.”

"Memory arpeggios." That might be in the running for phrase of the year.

Postscript: "arpeggio" = what Rufus Wainwright is playing with his right hand in this video. Don't you think it works well as a metaphor for elegiac tone in fiction? Or is it just me?

Read a Story...For the Children!

2009-05-25T10:00:00.003-04:00

This is hysterical:

So is the rest of Harper Perennial's "Summer Is Short, Read A Story" ad campaign, all available on youtube. I know I've written before about the idea of reading for pleasure -- I think it's awesome that a publisher has actually started trying to encourage it, in the form of mock "public service announcements." Reading for pleasure is good for you...like eating vegetables and not doing drugs (or like doing drugs, if you're Tony O'Neill...)

Via Galleycat.

Quote of the Day

2009-05-22T20:16:00.002-04:00

Ana Menéndez in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers, on why lovers of the written word should not fear the digital revolution:

Socrates was among those who thought writing was a dangerous fad. He warned that those who acquired the ability would stop exercising their memory and would become forgetful. Students would be inundated with information and would become 'filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom and be a burden to society.'

Martin Luther, himself a prolific writer, despaired of the printing press barely a hundred years after its invention: 'The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no measure or limit to this fever for writing; every one must be an author; some out of vanity, to acquire celebrity and raise up a name, others for the sake of lucre and gain.'

Socrates and Martin Luther were right in their own ways. The written word did erode memory. Where the ancients could memorize entire epics, we in the twenty-first century are hard-pressed to remember our own PINs. And when Joe the Plumber gets a book contract, it's tempting to see Martin Luther as the prophet of our own literary apocalypse.

But the nature of innovation is rarely neutral. It taketh away, but it also giveth. The invention of the alphabet did not do away with oral instruction - it's still a crucial part of education. And oral storytelling persists in our jokes and around our dinner tables. The alphabet did not replace memory; it only added another tool to memory's arsenal...

...The old forms are not being taken away, but new forms are being added. Story is deeply engrained into our psyches. And the need to give narrative shape to our fears and joys is much older than the printing press or the alphabet.

The Morning After

2009-05-22T16:02:00.004-04:00

Luna, my cat, just had kittens in March, and now she's in heat. Again.

We wouldn't let her out of the house because we didn't want any more kittens, and so she yowled. All. Day. Long. Usually all night, too. She desperately made out with inanimate objects and stared out the windows looking for tomcats.

I have four roommates. All of us are twentysomething; three of us are single. I have to say, it was making us a little edgy to have an animal go around the house yowling for sex all day, making her lust known in no uncertain terms. So finally last night, we were tired of the spectacle and we just let her out. Opened the back door and off she went. From the sound of it (and the number of cats lined up on the back wall this morning), she managed to get satisfaction from not one but at least four toms during the night. When we let her in this morning, she slouched into the house, fur messed up, hanging her head: a perfect walk of shame.

And now we're faced with finding a veterinarian for some quick and dirty emergency contraception, but at least she's not yowling anymore...

Postscript: Luna is not going out tonight. Her presence in the alley will be missed: at sunset, there is a row of tomcats on the wall, meowing sadly.

Welcome to the Real World

2009-05-19T13:42:00.003-04:00

Sorry for the continued slow posting around here -- it's seemed like every time I turned around, there was something to do toward the final deposit of my dissertation, and after that it turned to graduation plans.

So: I graduated on Saturday. I've got a Ph.D. in philosophy now, for real, and the fancy piece of paper to prove it. I'm officially Dr. Christine Neulieb, although I'm convinced that will sound like a joke for at least the next five years.

It was an emotional weekend. The culmination of eight years of intense study is a lot to take in all at once. As promised, we threw a huge party. A toga party. With a rented moon bounce, which looked pretty spectacular in the yard. The commencement ceremony and the party did go a long way toward providing a feeling of closure, but like I was discussing with some of the other new Ph.D.'s, a finished dissertation is like a phantom limb. It's been with you for so long that even when it's gone, you still feel like it's there and keep looking around for it.

The thing that surprises me the most is that I'm still crashing. I don't know how you measure the degree of willpower you're using at any given time but grad school was definitely an immense effort of will -- there are no words to describe how much sheer, white-knuckled stubbornness it took to get through it. I'm at the end of the race, I can finally stop running, but it's going to take me a long time to work down from 500 mph to 0 mph. It's still a long, slow crash. My appetite's slowly coming back, I'm sleeping better at night, but I'm still at a place where when I don't actually have to be anywhere, all I want to do is sleep. [Lassitude (n.): "A condition of the body, or mind, when its voluntary functions are performed with difficulty, and only by a strong exertion of the will; languor; debility; weariness: 'The corporeal instruments of action being strained to a high pitch...will soon feel a lassitude.' --Barrow."]

Bit by bit, though, there are moments when a sudden sense of accomplishment pounces on me. I actually did that. I f**ing did it.

I did it.

One of these days I'll recover enough to get back to blogging more regularly! Thanks as always for dropping by, and stay tuned...

Zoetrope All-Story: The Latin American Issue

2009-05-12T11:59:00.004-04:00

I was browsing at a bookstore the other day and was happy to see that the spring issue of Zoetrope: All-Story, dedicated to new Latin American writing, was still available on the newsstand. You should really pick up a copy if you get a chance - the writing, as always, is excellent, and the design of the issue is also brilliant: the illustrations come from an old sketchbook of Guillermo del Toro's. (I'd post some of the images here, but I do believe I'd get into some copyright trouble, so just buy a copy and have a look!) The stories are printed in English translation with the original Spanish in a separate section.

The editors write:

The view of Latin American letters, at least in the United States, has sorely needed an update for quite some time. Magical realism has been one of Latin America's most profitable exports for many years, operating as the prevailing commercial literary mode long after outliving its usefulness . . . [so] we have attempted to show some of the talent that exists among [the] new generation; and it's no coincidence that the writers here are all under forty years old, therefore born after the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Now I have nothing against magical realism and it's no secret that One Hundred Years of Solitude is my favorite novel, hands-down. But it's interesting to see a collection that takes a broader view of what's going on in the Latin American literary scene right now. I would so love to see the continued growth of a more pan-American literary conversation, and this issue of Zoetrope is an exciting contribution to that conversation.

Sounds of a Neighborhood

2009-05-10T19:46:00.003-04:00

I live in a Puerto Rican neighborhood, and it's pretty much a given that on a warm Sunday afternoon, there'll be a great mix of Latin music floating in the window. Usually it leans toward contemporary pop, but today for some reason it's been old-school all the way, and I'm loving it. A sampler:

...perfecto.

Boo!

2009-05-08T08:58:00.001-04:00

I loved this piece in the Guardian last week on why scary movies are good for children. I've always thought (and ranted about, etc.) how Disney's saccharine versions of traditional fairy tales have destroyed a genre and done more harm to children than the original, horror-rich versions would have done: by "mollycoddling" children when we tell them stories (as the Guardian writer notes, reviving a delightful and underused word), we leave them less prepared for the fact that, in real life, bad stuff happens. I wonder why we don't worry more that if they're too sheltered, they might just be too fragile later on to deal with things they will have to deal with in life? People die. People try to screw you over. People steal. Etc...

Some good news on this front: Guillermo del Toro, master of monsters extraordinaire, is helming the remakes of The Witches and The Hobbit. They will be scary. They will be awesome. Can't wait!

Via Neil Gaiman's Journal.

Writing as an Identity

2009-05-05T22:35:00.003-04:00

Nathan Bransford has a post up today on the idea of writing as identity:

One of the more unique aspects of writing is the way people associate themselves and their identities with their words on the page. People don't just spend time in the evening reflecting on the capricious vicissitudes of life and/or zombie killers from another planet. It somehow becomes more than that. You can see this in the way people talk about writing: some people compare it to oxygen, i.e. something that they can't live without. They don't say, "I like to write, it's fun, I enjoy it." They say, unequivocally, "I am a writer. It's who I am." I'm going to be honest here and say that while I don't judge people when they define themselves as writer, whatever their publication status, I find it a little unsettling when they make it an overly intrinsic part of their identity.First of all, people just don't tend to define themselves by their hobbies. You don't hear anyone shout to the rafters, "I AM STAMP COLLECTOR!" or "I AM A CONNOISSEUR OF REALITY TELEVISION!" And until you're making a living at it, writing is a hobby. It's something you do in your spare time. (Right?)

...Here's where that becomes problematic. Once someone makes the leap from writing as a fun, intense hobby to something wrapped up in identity, it's a dangerous road to be walking on. As we all know, the path to material success in the writing world is ridden with obstacles and rejections. And when people begin to wrap up their identity with the publication process, the rejections become personal, and a judgment on a book becomes intertwined, in the writer's eye, with a judgment of self...I hear from these people all the time. They're the ones who start spamming agents, who write me angry e-mails, and who go on tirades about the publishing process. They've stopped enjoying the writing process, and because writing is so wrapped up in their self-conception, they can't bear the pain of rejection and instead look outward for blame.

The question: "Until you're making a living at it, writing is a hobby. It's something you do in your spare time. (Right?)"

For what it's worth, I have to weigh in: no. I don't think that's right at all. I think that writing really is a vocation, not a career or a hobby. I.e., it's not something you choose; it chooses you.

It's a bit more difficult to articulate exactly what it is that makes writing different from a "fun, intense hobby." It's all the more complicated because some people arbitrarily make writing their identity without real self-examination, without asking the hard questions: do I enjoy this, or am I forcing myself to do it in answer to some desire for external recognition? Do I need to do this because I have found within my heart a spontaneous, overpowering need to write, or do I only wish that need was there? Is writing something I have to do in order to flourish as a person, or is it just an ego trip? Do I have the talent? Why do I really want this so much?

It's way too easy in American culture to decide that you're a writer. As Stuff White People Like points out, "It’s no secret. White people want to be writers. Why wouldn’t they? Work 10 hours a week from a country house in Maine or England. Get called a genius by other white people, and maybe get your book made into a film. Every single white person harbors this dream. No matter what they tell you, all of them have at least one chapter of a novel stashed away somewhere."

The fact that some people think they have a vocation when they do not, however, does not disprove the existence of real vocations. There are people out there who are born to write, who need it like oxygen, for whom it is an inextricable and inescapable part of their identity. These are the people to whom Rainer Maria Rilke writes in Letters to a Young Poet:

You ask whether your verses are any good. You ask me. You have asked others before this. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are upset when certain editors reject your work. Now (since you have said you want my advice) I beg you to stop doing that sort of thing. You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise or help you - no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple "I must," then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your while life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse.

And Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in his memoir Living to Tell the Tale:

"The worst thing," [my mother] said, "is that he stopped studying law after all the sacrifices we made to support him."
But the doctor thought this was splendid proof of an overwhelming vocation: the only force capable of competing with the power of love. And more than any other the artistic vocation, the most mysterious of all, to which one devotes one's entire life without expecting anything in return.
"It is something that one carries inside from the moment one is born, and opposing it is the worst thing for one's health," he said. And he put on the finishing touches with the enchanting smile of an irredeemable Mason: "A priest's vocation must be like this."

Marquez, again, from a book whose title I've forgotten:

What matters most in this world to me is the creative process. What kind of mystery is such so that the simple desire of telling stories becomes a passion, so that a human being is willing to die for it; to starve, to freeze, anything, in order to be able to do one thing that cannot be seen nor touched and that, if you think of it, is good for nothing?

It's somewhat interesting that struggling young writers often make writing their identity; it's much more interesting that the world's great writers and artists, the ones who are long past the temptation to spam agents and howl about the injustice of the industry, invariably speak of their creative activity as an identity and a consuming passion.

I think part of what's troubling in hearing people talk about their identities as writers is the strange capacity human beings have to be mistaken about their own identities. Some of us are convinced that WE ARE WRITERS, that it is an inextricable part of our identity and we need it like oxygen, that we are born to be artists. Despite our passionate conviction, it may or may not be true. I think our reaction to rejection and failure is one way of testing the authenticity of the vocation. When rejection comes, one kind of writer accepts it with humility and perseveres, content to keep writing whether he is published or not, whether anyone recognizes him as a writer, whether the world itself dissolves around him, because he knows that he has no other choice. Another kind of writer throws a fit like a five-year-old with a wounded ego, blames the world for not recognizing his awesomeness, blames the publishing industry for failing to appreciate true genius. The existence of the latter does not disprove the existence of the former.

I believe my need to write is a part of my identity, something that I have "carried inside from the moment I was born." I believe this because writing makes me happy, because I enjoy it like nothing else on earth, because the ecstasy of creating is an addiction and a compulsion, because I don't know what to do with myself when I can't write. I believe it because I'm good at it: because choosing the right word is maybe the one thing in life that I'm really good at. And despite all this, I know that I could be wrong. I write every day in fear and trembling because if one day I come to a realization that I'm not as good at this as I think I am, or if - unimaginably - the desire to write, a desire that has driven my life for as long as I can remember, should disappear, then I would hardly know who I am. But that would be something that I would have to face. It wouldn't be the publishing industry's fault that I had made a mistake about who I thought I was, and I hope I would have the humility to accept that and move on.

It's frightening to do something that takes over your identity this way, and I can't explain why art does this when other occupations do not. As Marquez writes, the artistic vocation may well be the "most mysterious of all." Every time I search myself, though, I can't escape one fact: that my answer to Rilke's "solemn question" is a simple, resounding: "Yes. I must." So I do.

Top 5 TV Drama Episodes

2009-04-30T17:22:00.004-04:00

In the spirit of High Fidelity, which I just finished reading, and in case you're looking for a worthwhile way to kill 40 minutes, my votes for the top 5 best-written episodes of TV dramas:

1. House, MD, season 1 episode 21: Three Stories -- House is my favorite show, and I've seen this episode at least eight times. As a writer, I just sit there and drool. It's a tour de force. Not a single second, not a single line is wasted; there is some amazingly slick narrative framing; well...just watch it and be amazed.

2. Bones, season 4 episode 21: The Double Death of the Dearly Departed -- From the shameless quadruple alliteration of the title to the never-gets-old sight gag of sneaking a dead body out of a house to the giddy drunken rendition of "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," this episode is the one every crime drama screenwriter has always wished they could write, but didn't dare. It's tongue-in-cheek, just the right amount over-the-top, and hilarious in the process. It's self-parody at its best. It will remind you of Clue. Bonus: it will still be online at Fox on Demand for the next week or so.

3. CSI, season 5 episodes 24-25: Grave Danger -- Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, though the series doesn't advertise it. If you like Tarantino's style (I know it's not for everyone), you'll love it.

4. Grey's Anatomy, season 2 episode 18: Yesterday -- I am not a huge fan of Grey's, especially after the first two seasons. It degenerated into a soap opera rather quickly. That being said, "Yesterday," aka the spontaneous orgasm episode, is brilliant. It's almost unbearably sad, so don't watch it if you're depressed, because you might shoot yourself at the end. But it's sad with a point, and manages an analysis of the darker side of human passions that borders on the philosophical. You'll be older and wiser by the end. If I ever teach Plato's Republic to college freshmen again, this episode (with appropriate guided discussion) will be part of the curriculum.

5. Law & Order SVU, season 7 episode 3: 911 -- Breaks away from the usual narrative structure of Law & Order (dead body found, then interviews with suspects, then chasing after the requisite couple of red herrings, then the arrest of the criminal). Instead there's just a little girl on the phone, trying to tell the detectives where she is. Sometimes breaks from a formula feel contrived, like they were trying to shake things up just for variety's sake, but this one's really successful.

By the way, as I discovered when writing this, "Three Stories" and "911" both won Emmys for best writing in a drama series.

Happy watching.

Sufjan Stevens: For the Widows in Paradise

2009-04-30T17:21:00.000-04:00

Okay, so you know how sometimes you've heard a song before, maybe a lot of times, but then one day you hear it out of context and suddenly it's like you're hearing it for the first time? Or maybe it's just me. But I'm at a cafe right now, and this song just came on, and it blew me away. I can't believe I never realized before what an amazing song this is.

Enough gushing. Just listen. And forgive the silly visuals, there isn't an "official" music video for this song.

The Artist in the Garret

2009-04-30T11:11:00.003-04:00

Have you ever noticed that a disproportionate number of characters in fiction are single males living bohemian existences in garrets or basements and pondering the meaning of it all? It would be way too involved of a project to do the actual math on this, but I have a strong hunch that the proportion of such bachelors in fiction is much higher than it is in real life, where most people tend to live more or less ordinary lives, with marriage and babies and houses and all that in them. I find it interesting that novelists have such a strong tendency to write characters who live like -- well, like novelists. That's the case for the passage from V. S. Naipaul that I put up yesterday, and then there are the immortal opening paragraphs of Crime and Punishment (Dostoyevsky loves impoverished students in garrets):

On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge.

He had successfully avoided meeting his landlady on the staircase. His garret was under the roof of a high, five-storied house and was more like a cupboard than a room. The landlady who provided him with garret, dinners, and attendance, lived on the floor below, and every time he went out he was obliged to pass her kitchen, the door of which invariably stood open. And each time he passed, the young man had a sick, frightened feeling, which made him scowl and feel ashamed. He was hopelessly in debt to his landlady, and was afraid of meeting her.

And think of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, and Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte. Examples abound.

I wonder, do writers tend to put themselves so far to the margins of society that they have difficulty writing about people with more typical lifestyles, or are philosophically inclined bachelors really that much more interesting than the rest of us?

Quote of the Day (II)

2009-04-29T22:38:00.002-04:00

A fantastic graduation present arrived in the mail today: a copy of V. S. Naipaul's The Mimic Men. I've never read Naipaul before, but I am completely sold on this book based on the first paragraph alone:

When I first came to London, shortly after the end of the war, I found myself after a few days in a boarding-house, called a private hotel, in the Kensington High Street area. The boarding-house was owned by Mr Shylock. He didn't live there, but the attic was reserved for him; and Lieni, the Maltese housekeeper, told me he occasionally spent a night there with a young girl. 'These English girls!' Lieni said. She herself lived in the basement with her illegitimate child. An early postwar adventure. Between attic and basement, pleasure and its penalty, we boarders lived, narrowly.

That is one of those passages that makes me shiver, then turn green with envy. I'm a good writer; I'll never be this good. Damn I wish I could make words paint a picture like that. The last sentence alone is incredible: hardly anyone can build that much resonance in a single paragraph.

I'm looking forward to the rest of the novel...

Quote of the Day

2009-04-29T13:12:00.001-04:00

“Take that, Spain! We will dominate you and your florid prose, fine wine, and beautiful beaches once again with our English wit and neo-realistic family dramas.”

--Three Percent

C'est Moi

2009-04-23T10:32:00.003-04:00

Here's a dispatch from Laila Lalami at maudnewton.com, with some very intelligent remarks on being a woman writing from a male perspective. It's really not as complicated as everyone thinks:

Perhaps the reason I’ve never dwelled on the gender difference between my character and me is that I feel (with apologies to Flaubert) that Youssef, c’est moi. Youssef studies English at a university in Morocco (as did I); his mother is an orphan who was raised in a French institution in Fès (as was mine); he is gullible (as, unfortunately, am I); he speaks French fluently (as do I); yet he never quite feels at home with the French-educated élite (neither do I).

Quote of the Day

2009-04-20T09:50:00.002-04:00

It seems to me that if you place music (and books, probably, and films, and plays, and anything that makes you feel) at the center of your being, then you can't afford to sort out your love life, start to think of it as the finished product. You've got to pick at it, keep it alive and in turmoil, you've got to pick at it and unravel it until it all comes apart and you're compelled to start all over again. Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as a consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship. Maybe Al Green is directly responsible for more than I ever realized.

--Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

Unexplained offspring and malicious spacecraft

2009-04-15T17:34:00.002-04:00

So, I realize that most of my recent posts (that is, when I've posted at all) have been labeled "from the attic of the curiosity shop"...mostly because I'm still doing dissertation corrections and haven't really had the brain cells to write about anything "serious." I promise that will change soon. But in that vein, here's another curiosity: a friend emailed me this morning about a bizarre dream involving me and her, some of her family, and an unexplained daughter that I suddenly had. (I don't have kids, just for the record.) It made me laugh - I love how random dreams can be.

I just got to work but had to e-mail you about a dream I had before I forget it. I almost never remember my dreams, and I don't know if it was the jalapeños in my late-night chili or what, but this time I remembered it and it was bizarre! but fun...

We were all hanging out at my house, or really, my aunt and uncle's house which is farther up the driveway and on top of a huge hill. As in lots of dreams this setting was partly based in reality, but some of the features of the landscape were different, or parts changed throughout the dream, or hills changed shape as we crossed over them etc.

Anyway, the big hit was that you had a daughter! And you were totally nonchalant about it. She was three, but sometimes she became more like eleven, and all tall. She was slightly overweight and blonde. I kept trying to address it and you just acted like it was a total non-issue. I'm like "But when did you get pregnant? you never even said anything! I've been friends with you the whole time! How did you never bring it up?" You kept just going back to a story that you were telling as if my questioning was just an annoyance about something that was a total non-issue.

We had a conversation like this:

"Well, do you know who the dad is? or when you got pregnant?"

"Well, remember the time I went on a date when we lived at Perry Place and you were all making fun of me for bringing my laptop to the cafe because I didn't know when the guy was going to get there?"

"Yeah"

"Well, we didn't get coffee, we got wine."

And that was it, 'nuf said, as if all was explained and it was not at all a big deal. The more I brought it up the more you gave me looks like 'what is the big deal? get over it!'

These conversations were taking place as part of a big group, mostly my siblings and us, sitting indian-style at the top of the hill by my aunt and uncle's house. As we were all talking, and I kept nagging you and getting ignored, your daughter was playing behind us. She fluctuated in age and size, like I said. She was picking dandelions and some that were on their way to the white puffy stage (when the yellow part starts folding back in and they are more floppy). She picked up a handful of these, ran towards the top of the hill and as she ran they grew to the size of a broom, which she hopped on at the crest of the hill and flew off. (Harry Potter?). You and I were kind of half-watching her, half-talking to the group. As we were looking, she flipped upside down and started plummeting to the earth head-first. You saw her face and turned again to keep talking, totally not concerned. Someone else from the group went and retrieved her from the bottom of the hill where she might have fallen to her death, and brought her over to us all laid out on the ground. You said something like 'What did I tell you about picking dandelions?' and she hopped up, back to life, and said 'sorry mommy' and went back to playing.

As this had been happening a strange cylindrical space-craft with very malicious looking blades spinning at both ends had silently floated by above our heads. In the theme of everything being not a big deal, everyone sort of ignored it and I said "Oh, it's probably just going to Stewarts" (the army airport by my house). But as we had been all paying attention to your daughter, night had fallen and about twelve of them had come up above our heads and my aunt and uncle's house and were hovering silently in a circle.

We decided that, even though it was not a big deal and they were "probably just meeting up before they land at Stewarts" we should think about finding a new place to hang out. We split up in groups and your daughter led you and I down the back side of the house, bounding down this staircase that started to expand as we ran. Just as we passed the house one of the spacecrafts started cutting its blades into the roof so we realized that they were definitely a threat.

Anyway, the rest of the dream isn't as interesting and the details get fuzzy. Basically your half-mystical daughter led us all down to this fort under my aunt and uncle's barn and I woke up...

Yo ho and a bottle of rum

2009-04-08T22:12:00.004-04:00

On the radio, when I was driving home from work today:

"Sources report that the crew of an American cargo ship that was commandeered by pirates yesterday off the coast of Somalia has regained control of the ship..."

The reporter was trying to be professional, but you could hear sheer glee in his voice when he got to say the phrase "commandeered by pirates" on the air. I thought he was going to pee himself.

Would we get this excited about piracy, were it not for the immortal contribution Johnny Depp has made to American pop culture in the iconic character of Captain Jack Sparrow? I think it would be tough to underestimate the rum-soaked Captain's effect on our imaginations. Secretly, I think we all wish Somali pirates were as cool as the Pirates of the Caribbean, though we know the reality's probably a little less friendly.

Anyone want to take bets on how soon this real-life "riveting high-seas drama" will come to a theater near you?

"Verde Esperanza" (4.6.09)

2009-04-07T23:09:00.004-04:00

I don't usually do visual art and I'm not very good at it, but sometimes drawing is a welcome break from trying to string words together. This one took shape in my sketchbook last night and this morning...I should learn to paint. Getting this kind of color intensity from pencils left quite a trail of sharpener shavings behind.

Serendipity

2009-04-07T18:22:00.004-04:00

It rained all afternoon yesterday.

When I was driving home from work, the rain had stopped, but most of the sky was still overcast. I pulled up to the stoplight at 38th & Spruce in University City, and I could just catch a glimpse of the western horizon behind me in the rearview mirror. There was a break in the clouds and suddenly the setting sun dropped below it, kindling the clouds a bright orange-gold.

From the same intersection, I could see the Philadelphia skyline ahead of me in the east. When the sun broke through the clouds, every window of the glass-walled skyscrapers reflected it, so that the whole city was ablaze with orange flame. The rain-washed streets were radiant.

It was just a moment. By the time I hit the expressway, the angles had changed, and although the light was still clear and beautiful, the sudden illuminations had passed and the windows had dimmed. I kept looking in my rearview mirror at the sunset sky: the lone break in the clouds was still an intense gilded orange, surrounded by remnants of stormcloud stained violet and rose.

I haven't seen a sunset like that in a while.

It Is Finished

2009-04-02T23:14:00.002-04:00

Well, I’m back.

On Monday, I defended my dissertation. That 250-page behemoth (subject: theatre and representation in Plato’s philosophy) was the fruit of eight years’ hard labor. Eight years. First the MA/PhD coursework, then comprehensive exams, language exams, teaching, proposal of a topic, and finally the writing itself, which was by far the hardest stretch of the journey.

I passed.

With distinction.

And was encouraged to publish the thesis.

I still can't get this through my head.

I was a nervous wreck for days beforehand; I am stunned and humbled that it went so well, that I finally made it to this point, that it’s over. There have been so many times over the last eight years when I really never thought I would make it to this point. (And I have to say that I really wouldn't have, were it not for the fact that I’ve been blessed with incredibly wonderful and generous friends, family, and mentors, who have supported me, carried me through, made it all possible. I will never be able to thank them enough.)

So: it's really finished. I get a real, live diploma come the middle of next month. And now, upon this momentous occasion in my life, I should feel...what? Grateful, overjoyed, silly with glee, something like that probably, right? Is it strange that, to be perfectly honest, I just don’t feel a thing yet?

Not so strange, I guess. For me at least, it usually takes some time for these things to sink in. I’m sure there will be a moment, sometime in the next few days or weeks, when it will suddenly hit me all at once. But right now I’m sailing eerie becalmed waters, dazed, exhausted, numb, in disbelief.

Not a bad way to enter the semana santa. It’s still unnerving, though. I just can’t feel what this means yet. It’s too big. It’s too much. It’s here, it’s real, but I can’t comprehend it.

Feeling it or not, though, it’s official: I’m Dr. Neulieb.

Which still sounds like a joke.

Heart of Twilight

2009-03-27T11:32:00.000-04:00

Couldn't resist: here's the Animaniacs spoof on Heart of Darkness. (Bet you missed that when you were 10.) There are some great references in the music, too - listen for the 5 seconds of Tchaikovsky somewhere in the middle. (The composers for Animaniacs really seem to love quoting Tchaikovsky, probably because it's so recognizable - somewhere there's a Russian "Pinky & the Brain" skit set to "Marche Slave"...)

The Venezuelan Patriarch

2009-03-24T17:36:00.004-04:00

Enrique Krauze has a great article on Hugo Chavez in The New Republic. It's long, but well worth the time for a read - Krauze captures some defining aspects of the Latin American political imagination with uncanny ease:

The sacralization of history is an ancient practice in Latin America. In the region's Catholic countries, stories of the past, with their heroes and their villains, became instant paraphrases of the Holy Story, complete with martyrologies, holy days, and iconic representations of secular saints. But in Venezuela, where the presence of the church has been less rich and influential than in Mexico, Peru, or Ecuador, the transference of the sacred to the profane has been more intense, perhaps because of the lack of "competition" with strictly religious inspirations such as the Virgin of Guadalupe or the patron saints of Mexican towns. Venezuela's civic worship is unusual also in that it is monotheistic, which is to say, it has centered on the passion story of a man elevated to godhood. That man is Simon Bolivar.

Krauze points out that Chavez himself compared his meeting with Fidel Castro to "something out of a Garcia Marquez novel," and then comments: "During the fifteen years in which he patiently plotted his revolutionary conspiracy, forging his mystical links between his own genealogy and the nation's heroes, Hugo Chavez made himself into a kind of creature of magical realism." Which is a brilliant juxtaposition of Chavez's self-awareness and lack thereof: he can reference the novels of Garcia Marquez, but does not seem to grasp their ironic aspects. Similarly: "President Chavez has been an assiduous reader of Plekhanov, but perhaps not the best reader. I suspect that he does not know much about Plekhanov's place in history..."

Anyway, I'm not going to try to summarize further - like I said yesterday, my brain's fried right now and I'll just ramble on. Just go read the article yourself!

Update

2009-03-23T19:17:00.002-04:00

Okay, I am going to go ahead and admit that I only have two hands and one brain, and that posting will be light to nonexistent for the next week or so. I defend my doctoral thesis a week from today, and most of my energy this week's going to go toward preparations for the defense. O time-honored academic rite of passage!

Peace and all good things. I'll see you sometime next week. In the meantime, here's Yakko, Wakko, & Dot to keep you company:

perchance to dream

2009-03-20T10:49:00.002-04:00

I'm pretty exhausted from the last few weeks' workload (various projects, dissertation stuff), so I'll be taking the weekend off...check back Monday!

Charlotte Roche: Wetlands (Part One)

2009-03-18T22:43:00.004-04:00

Well, I wasn't shocked, but then again I didn't really expect to be. I just don't find bodies or sex acts shocking in general, I guess. I was, however, pleasantly surprised to find that this book has a bit more going for it than shock value.

Charlotte Roche's Wetlands is a compelling psychological drama. It takes the form of a confessional interior monologue, narrated by a teenager who is in the hospital because she injured herself while shaving her bum. The young narrator, Helen, puts up a front of bravado, needs to prove she's uninhibited, tries to shock you in any way she can by telling you what she does with her bodily fluids and what kinds of sexual experiences she's had. In the end, though, you realize that she's just a very frightened child from a broken home. The story is more sad than anything else.

It's a little troubling that some reviews have used the words "erotic" (e.g. here and here) and "pornography" (here and here) in connection with this book. If you get off on listening to a disturbed eighteen-year-old talk about her bodily fluids and favorite sexual positions, when it's obvious she's doing it just because she's desperate for attention and wants someone, anyone, to listen to her, you've got some issues. The emotional core of Wetlands is not sex: it's the aching need of a teenager from a broken family to be loved, a need that has pushed her to act out in some very self-destructive ways (drug abuse, extreme promiscuity, self-mutilation, vandalism).

Wetlands is not exactly a feminist novel either -- at least, it's definitely not a celebration of healthy female sexuality. If anything, you could say it's feminist in the same way as Mary Pipher's 1994 Reviving Ophelia. There was a spot-on review by Alice O'Keefe in the New Statesman on February 5, which concluded: "Wetlands, in the tradition of Plath's The Bell Jar, is a remarkable novel about mental illness that has been mistaken for feminist literature. " I think that's the most accurate thing I've heard said about it so far. When I was reading Wetlands, all I could think of was The Bell Jar.

All in all, Wetlands is a quick read, and actually quite a good one, if you don't mind being a little depressed at the end. That being said, though, fair warning: the book is *extremely* explicit. If graphic descriptions of masturbation, anal sex, and all the possible uses a disturbed teenager can invent for her bodily excretions would make you uncomfortable, then you might prefer not to read it.

Flogging Molly: Drunken Lullabies

2009-03-17T13:45:00.003-04:00

Happy St. Patrick's Day.

in search of the new brooklyn

2009-03-17T01:00:00.004-04:00

The most recent Sunday Times real estate page ran an article that started with this tantalizing line: "Philadelphia is the new Brooklyn." Basically, that's why I moved here after grad school -- it's packed with culture but still affordable, close enough to NYC that you can visit often, but without the absurd rents. Which, I suppose, is why artists settled in Brooklyn during the later 20th century, and why their contemporary counterparts are now migrating elsewhere. Brooklyn is no longer that magical place.

Of course, the article continues, depending on why it was you liked Brooklyn, Philly might not do it for you:

"To be a new Brooklyn means — well, it depends. It can signify a 'gritty arts enclave' (Philadelphia), a 'surprisingly O.K. place without all those rich people' (Oakland), a 'real-estate speculator’s dream' (Queens)."

Great; to each his own "new Brooklyn." Personally, though, I'm quite fond of the "gritty arts enclave" I've found.

In other good news, I found a part-time job, so I'll finally be able to get a subscription to the NYTimes on real paper, and enjoy the last days of the printed newspaper to the fullest! I've been waiting a long time for this.

Quote of the Day

2009-03-16T21:51:00.003-04:00

And while we're on the subject of the death of the newspaper, best quote of the day:

"Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism."

--Clay Shirky, via Deus ex Malcontent

It takes a good bit of brilliance to sum up such a complicated issue that way: with just a couple of simple, clear sentences that slice to the heart of a crucial distinction. Newspapers are one form that journalism has taken; they were the dominant form for a while; but they aren't journalism itself. If they're being superseded, it's because other avenues have opened for journalistic expression, avenues that will one day serve it even better than newsprint did.

But I will still mourn for the crinkle of paper and the smell of ink.

RIP: Seattle Post-Intelligencer

2009-03-16T18:18:00.002-04:00

Latest victim of the slow, tragic death of the newspaper: Seattle's Post-Intelligencer.

Well, it's not exactly dead. It will still exist in the virtual realm. But as the New York Times reports today, the print version is now history. The Times article is accompanied by this very eloquent picture, which kind of says it all. I don't think I've ever seen people look that grim at a funeral.

Seattle's oldest newspaper, the P.-I. has existed in print for almost 150 years. In other words, it's been around since Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and the ongoing American Civil War were news.

Considering that the last day of the paper's physical existence is tomorrow, St. Patrick's Day, perhaps a proper Irish wake is in order?

More Animaniacs

2009-03-16T11:38:00.004-04:00

More than a decade after I watched them as a kid, I still can't get over the brilliant use of music in these cartoons. Animaniacs was one of the few 90s cartoons -- maybe the only one?? -- to feature an original score, played by full orchestra, in every episode. Like the dialogue, the music is peppered with witty, blink-and-you'll-miss-it references to other songs. (Toward the end of this one, listen for "Shortenin' Bread.") I think it was the music, even more than the fantastic writing, that made this show an instant classic...

Proyecto Sherezade

2009-03-15T14:04:00.003-04:00

I've got some more translations up at Proyecto Sherezade, here (click on the "Stories in English Translation" link). Once again, great stuff: hallucinogens! kittens on death row! the icky detritus of nightlife in Madrid! spectacular car wrecks! Are you tempted yet?

I'm excited for this material to be available in English. My own literary sensibility is more or less pan-american - there's lots of free intermingling between Anglo- and Latin American literary influences in my brain, sometimes with interesting results - so I've really been enjoying this translation project. I think all communication is, in some way, a translation: when we talk, we translate our pre-articulate thoughts into a form that others can understand. Translating from one human language into another is just an extension of that very basic act of communication...

Melanie Rae Thon, "First, Body" (1998)

2009-03-15T11:43:00.002-04:00

A friend recommended this collection to me a while ago, and I finally got my hands on a copy. So worth it! Thus far, I've read the first two stories. They're on the long side, about 30 pages each, but the great thing is that they don't feel long - actually, it's hard not to read them in one sitting. Thon's prose is clean, lucid, and sensual, and her storytelling is urgent and absorbing.

The first tale, "First, Body," is about a Vietnam veteran called Sid, who's haunted by the dehumanizing power of war. He remembers killing a girl sniper in Vietnam:

In the morning, you find them, two dead boys and a girl in the river. Her blood flowers around her in the muddy water. Her hands float. Her long black hair streams out around her head and moves like the river. She's the one who strung the wire, the one who made the booby trap with your grenade and a tin can. She tried to trip you up, yesterday and the day before. She's the sniper who chose you above all others. Her shot buzzed so close you thought she had you. She looks at the M-16 slung over your shoulder. She looks at your hands. She murmurs in her language which you will never understand. Then she speaks in your language. She says, Your bullet's in my liver. She tells you. Your bullet ripped my bowel. She says, Look for yourself if you don't believe me. You try to pull her from the water. You slip in the mud. The water here knows her. The mud filling your boots is her mud. Slight as she is, she could throw you down and hold you under.
How would you kill me?
You know, with my body.
But you get her to the bank. You pull her from the river. Then the medic's there and he tells you she's dead, a waste of time, unnecessary risk, and you tell him she wasn't dead when you got there, she wasn't, and you look at her lying on the bank, and she's not your enemy now, she's not anyone's enemy - she's just a dead girl in the grass, and you leave her there, by the river.

As the story unfolds, you discover that he's essentially spent the rest of his life trying to revive that dead girl and restore some of her dignity. The symbolism is rich but never precious, and it never interrupts the flow of the narrative.

The second story is called "Father, Lover, Deadman, Dreamer," and it's about guilt: the guilt of a woman who, late one night when she was a drunken teenager, killed a man in a hit-and-run. Her life ended that night, though she didn't realize it yet.

I really love these stories. Thon has this magical ability to find the scraps of beauty and humanity in squalid situations and throw them into relief, and I love writing that can do that. Too much short fiction reads like the dutiful writing exercises of MFA students. These stories are just the opposite. They live.

Charlotte Roche, Wetlands

2009-03-14T14:01:00.004-04:00

So, I just ordered a copy of Charlotte Roche's Wetlands, mostly because (a) it's been so much discussed, and (b) I have a hard time imagining what sorts of descriptions could possibly be that shocking to anyone who's over the age of 18 and has a body. But the NY Times reports that at readings in Germany, "in several instances documented in the local media, the unprepared have fainted at some of the scenes." So we'll see. Charlotte Roche, I dare you to shock me.

It would be awesome if anyone wanted to join me in reading and exchange comments -- please email me if you're interested!

Bell X1

2009-03-14T12:35:00.002-04:00

Best quote from last night's (amazing) concert:

"Here's a song called 'Eve, The Apple of my Eye' -- causing teen pregnancy in Ireland since 2004."

What Are We Going To Do Tonight?

2009-03-14T11:01:00.004-04:00

Unsatisfied with Deus Ex Malcontent's seven minutes of Saturday morning cartoons, I started watching some old episodes of my favorite cartoon, Animaniacs, which I love for its obvious homage to classic cartoons from the 40s and 50s (well, in this episode, mostly to Fantasia). The music, of course, is Paul Dukas's The Sorcerer's Apprentice, with bits of the Pinky and the Brain theme song worked in at the beginning. Animaniacs might just be the most genius cartoon ever created.

Kids These Days (Tsk, Tsk)

2009-03-11T15:00:00.005-04:00

Three Percent quotes the Washington Post on the lamentable reading habits of today's college students:

Professor Eric Williamson -- a card-carrying liberal in full tweed glory -- argues that "the entire culture has become narcotized." An English teacher at the University of Texas-Pan American, he places the blame for students' dim reading squarely on the unfettered expansion of capitalism. "I have stood before classes," he tells me, "and seen the students snicker when I said that Melville died poor because he couldn't sell books. 'Then why are we reading him if he wasn't popular?' " Today's graduate students were born when Ronald Reagan was elected, and their literary values, he claims, reflect our market economy. "There is nary a student in the classroom -- and this goes for English majors, too -- who wouldn't pronounce Stephen King a better author than Donald Barthelme or William Vollmann. The students do not have any shame about reading inferior texts."

Roger Kimball, editor and publisher of the New Criterion, marches in the other direction -- he has no complaints about the market economy -- but he arrives at the same dismal appraisal of the academic culture. Universities and colleges "enforce an intellectually stultifying, politically correct atmosphere that pretends to diversity," he complains. "One of the results of this is a notable uptick in superficiality and a notable uptick in the anesthetizing of that native curiosity that was once a prominent feature of the adolescent mind."

The title of the Post article is instructive, though: "On Campus, Vampires Are Besting the Beats." The author, Ron Charles, laments the death of "serious" reading among college students, but his idea of serious reading seems limited to radical texts from the sixties and seventies: the Beat poets, Anais Nin, Mary Daly. The fifties get a nod with the rather more credible Ernest Hemingway. But in general, Charles chooses exactly the kind of texts about which older folk in the sixties would have said: "Can you believe the shit kids are reading these days! Rotting their little minds! What happened to the days when young people wanted to read serious literature with lasting value?!"

While it's true that contemporary culture has been narcotized and trivialized by material surfeit and electronic noise, and this is a real cause for concern, I think that my generation's interest in cheesy popular fiction should be a cause for hope, not despair. It means they want to read things that are fun. Things that give them pleasure. And I think that's a much healthier instinct than wanting to read things that will fill them with angst and make them into pretentious pseudo-intellectuals. I'm glad they have "no shame about reading inferior texts." As far as the future of literature is concerned - and people love to make dire predictions about it - I think that a worthwhile literature is most likely to spring up in response to an audience that wants to be pleased, not an audience that wants to be transgressive.

A fiction writer is a storyteller. His or her first duty is to entertain, not to transgress. Truly valuable literature comes about when, in the course of entertaining, a writer is able to say something really profound. The great writers have always done this, and will always do this. So, what kind of literary scene will my generation create? Maybe one where it's simply understood that good writing should give pleasure, and that "enjoyable" and "deep" are not mutually exclusive. In such a landscape - a more hedonistic one, you could say - the work of the lesser writers will also be more valuable, because even if it doesn't say anything deep, at least it provides us with a few moments of genuine enjoyment. I just don't think there's any justification for the production of "texts" that are neither profound nor fun, only "serious" or "radical." If college students are no longer interested in Anais Nin, then I say, good for them. It's a sign of taste.

(And it's almost amusing that the professor quoted in the article pooh-poohs Stephen King as an author of "inferior texts," when King's been so articulate about these matters...)

Dude, it's, like, bad feng shui

2009-03-11T11:12:00.005-04:00

I'm staying with my former roommates in DC, and realizing how much I miss having separate bedroom and studio space.

Writers don't, absolutely speaking, *need* a separate studio the way painters do - there are no easels to set up, no chemical fumes to avoid when the workday's over. All you need is a desk and a laptop. But I'm convinced that it's not the best idea, psychologically, to work in the same room where you sleep. It's better to have one room where you walk in and know that you're supposed to be productive, and another where you know you're supposed to start relaxing.

This house, the DC house, has a great setup. Upstairs, the bedrooms; main floor, common space; and in the basement, the artists' studios. There's a painter in the house, too, and when I was here we split the basement in half so that she had a space for her painting and I had a space to write. It's a bright, spacious basement, so it doesn't feel like being condemned to a dungeon. All the paints and lighting and other equipment on her side make it feel like there's serious creative business going on down here; on my side there's a massive conference table that we found on craigslist and some old utility shelves stacked floor to ceiling with books. She's got an ugly teal floral-patterned rug under her studio space, and I have a red one, which may be a bit of an eyesore, but at least they were free and make it feel even less like a basement down here. When I first finished my thesis, I'd come down here and work on my novel every night until three or four in the morning. I still feel more clear-headed and productive here in my old "studio" than I do anywhere else.

I don't have a separate studio where I'm living now like I did here, but I'm thinking maybe I should see about getting one...if I could afford it, it would be fantastic to have the space. Healthy. Inspiring. Good feng shui.

Regina Spektor on the artistic vocation

2009-03-11T08:00:00.000-04:00

I found this old interview the other day, and I love it for two reasons: first, Regina Spektor's mesmerizing loopiness, and second, the few minutes at the end where she discusses why she's a musician. She starts by saying that the only reason to write songs is because you have to, and at a further prompt from the interviewer this launches her into some awesomely bizarre metaphors about earthworm poop and baby Frankensteins.

Writing is my earthworm poop.

The She-Writer

2009-03-10T11:32:00.003-04:00

Following last month's publication of Elaine Showalter's A Jury of Her Peers, there've been a number of essays on the subject of women writers floating around the web, some of them actual book reviews, others more general: Chronicle Review, Slate, and the New York Times, to name a few. I haven't read the book yet, nor, to be honest, is it the sort of book I'd normally be inclined to pick up. As the Times aptly quotes American poet Elizabeth Bishop, “art is art, and to separate writings, paintings, musical compositions, etc. into two sexes is to emphasize values that are not art.” I have a hard time seeing how there could be more than a minor, arcane scholarly interest in studying the literature authored by people of just one sex - and that interest properly belongs to the faculty of sociology departments, not English departments. Literature is literature, and the shape of its author's reproductive organs has little to do with its value as literature.

I'm not saying women haven't, through most of history, been unfairly oppressed and shut out of the literary scene. I'd be the first to admit that, had I been born before my own century, I probably would have ended up either (a) insane; (b) a witch; (c) not a witch but burned as one; (d) a nun, just to escape being a wife or (e) a madam, just to escape being a wife. I know that, except for a handful of extraordinarily open-minded families, there was very little place in society for women with serious intellectual or literary interests, which might have been regarded as (at best) endearing little quirks. And there's nothing so utterly infuriating as having the driving passion of one's life thought of as "cute."

But somehow, that doesn't change my ambivalent attitude toward studies on the history of women in literature. I just have a hard time believing that anything really insightful is going to come from considering certain writers specifically as female (or as male), mostly because what defines the feminine and the masculine is so fluid and mysterious to begin with. Is violence in literature a "guy thing"? Is the depiction of the nuances of society life and manners a "girl thing"? Slate's Katha Pollitt writes:

Nobody says Henry James is a less ambitious writer because he wrote The Portrait of a Lady and not The Portrait of a Sea Captain. If The Corrections had been written by Janet Franzen, would it have been seen not as a bid for the Great American Novel trophy, but as a very good domestic novel with some futuristic flourishes that didn't quite come off? If the most prolific serious American writer was John Carroll Oates, would critics be so disturbed by the violence in his fiction?

It may be perfectly true that, statistically speaking, women writers are more likely to write about domestic situations and men are more likely to write about epic battles. Or not. Either way, I just don't think it's very interesting. The qualities that make a novel of manners a good thing of its kind are the same regardless of whether the book's written by John or Jane Austen, and to me, identifying and describing those qualities is much more interesting than the highly speculative game of figuring out whether women have more of an innate "knack" for such writing or not.

Nevertheless, I'll try to pick up Jury of Her Peers sometime, and if I get a chance I'll post something here about it...

Book Thieves

2009-03-10T11:17:00.003-04:00

When bookworms go Indiana Jones: article in Financial Times, via GalleyCat (the latter, fittingly, accompanied by a very Name-of-the-Rose-esque photo).

The article includes many useful tips, in case you're considering this line of work:

Most thieves simply cut out pages with razor blades and then hide them about their person. High bookshelves, quiet stacks or storage areas, or any lavatories located within reading rooms, are obvious places for such nefarious activities.

Also, for me, it solved the mystery of why security is so annoyingly tight at the Library of Congress:

He cites the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, where all staff including top directors are searched whenever they leave the building. That may, however, have something to do with the fact that in 1992 the library closed its stacks to readers for ever on discovering that about 30,000 volumes were missing.

30,000...that's a lot of books.

the wandering scholar

2009-03-08T22:54:00.003-04:00

Sorry for the slow posting lately -- I'm in DC, taking care of some final to-do's in preparation for the defense of my doctoral thesis, which will happen at the end of this month. (After said defense, there will be much rejoicing, and a toga party. With a moon bounce. And libations. Which could prove an interesting combination.)

The dissertation, by the way, in case you're interested, is on theatre and acting in Plato...hence the togas.

I'm expecting my schedule to return (more or less) to normal sometime around the middle of this week. Thanks for checking in, and for your patience!

flash fiction, courtesy of Elise

2009-03-05T15:20:00.002-05:00

I have a roommate who's got a great gift for telling punchy, expressive anecdotes. She's from Denmark, and a lot of the stories revolve around her being convinced that Nothing Ever Happens In Denmark. A few recent favorites:

1. Denmark is immune to natural disasters. As a general rule there are no earthquakes, no hurricanes, no floods, no tornados -- nothing. Except this one time, there was a tiny earthquake that people could actually (though just barely) feel. In one house, it knocked over a bookcase, which squished the pet turtle. This was a national tragedy.

2. Denmark is immune to natural disasters. Except this one time, the oxygen levels in the water of a certain fjord dropped too low, and all the fish died. (It then smelled very rotten in the state of Denmark, at least if you happened to be attending a boarding school located next to the fjord.) And there was much sorrow and lamentation.

With apologies to Denmark. I'm sure it's a lovely place to live.

It's a good day when...

2009-03-03T12:02:00.004-05:00

...a great band releases a new album. Here's a teaser montage for Bell X1's Blue Lights on the Runway:

And because I can't resist, and you have lots of spare time on your hands, full live versions of a couple of the tracks:

With pictures!

2009-03-03T10:28:00.002-05:00

If you like pictures and old books, and especially awesome pictures from old books, I've recently come across a number of sites that resurrect and publish them:

A Journey Round My Skull

Room 26 Cabinet of Curiosities

BibliOdyssey

Golden Age Comic Book Stories

...on second thought, just scroll through the rest of Journey Round My Skull's links...great stuff. Warning: browsing these sites may cause irresistible urges to purchase a letterpress.

(I originally stumbled across JRMS via Absinthe Minded, which led to the others: a blogosphere treasure hunt.)

...and it also takes discipline to eat guacamole

2009-03-02T21:43:00.002-05:00

In the last few weeks, several of my friends have remarked: wow, you must be so disciplined, to sit at your computer and write all day long!

To which my response is no, not exactly...it takes about as much discipline as it does for a heroin addict to shoot up. Really. It's mind-blowingly addictive. And that is all I have to say about that.

words, words

2009-03-02T19:42:00.005-05:00

My English translation of Ricardo Iribarren's Los ojos del jardín is up at Proyecto Sherezade! It was a fun project; Iribarren's story is magical, evocative, very creepy and worth a read in whatever language if you get a chance. I hope to be doing more of these translations in the near future, so I'll keep you posted.

The Last King of Scotland (2006)

2009-02-28T12:40:00.004-05:00

This is one of those movies I've been meaning to watch for a long time, but only just got around to. I'm glad I finally did: all I can say about it is that it's one of the best films I've ever seen. Forest Whitaker won Best Actor in 2007 for his portrayal of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, but James MacEvoy is equally riveting as naive Scotsman Dr. Nicholas Garrigan, who becomes Amin's personal physician in the early days of the regime. Dr. Garrigan comes to function as a sort of everyman, who draws the viewer into the film because it's so easy to put yourself in his shoes, to ask what you would have done in his situation, to sense the torment of his soul as he begins to realize the violence he's become part of. There is blood on his hands by the end of the movie. It's hard to imagine it's not on yours, too. The film is based on a book by Giles Foden, which I haven't read, but it also reminded me of a number of other great stories in the "psychology of a tyrant" genre: Mario Vargas Llosa's Feast of the Goat, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Autumn of the Patriarch, and even to a certain (less bloody) extent, Citizen Kane.

Here's the original trailer:

Chuckle

2009-02-26T19:15:00.000-05:00

And speaking of Americans and food:

Independent Foreign Fiction Prize longlist

2009-02-26T18:52:00.005-05:00

The longlist for this prize, sponsored by Arts Council England, was announced today - I haven't read any of the books on the list, and to be honest I'll probably wait for the shortlist to come out April 1 before I read a couple of them. (The "Books I Must Read Soon" list gets longer every day.) Still, in case you'd like to see what's in the running for best translated novel published in the UK, here it is, with the authors and their original languages:

My Father’s Wives (Jose Eduardo Agualusa, Portuguese)
The Director (Alexander Ahndoril, Swedish)
Voiceover (Celine Curiol, French)
The White King (Gyorgy Dragoman, Hungarian)
Night Work (Thomas Glavinic, German)
Beijing Coma (Ma Jian, Chinese)
The Siege (Ismail Kadare, Albanian)
Homesick (Eshkol Nevo, Hebrew)
The Diving Pool (Yoko Ogawa, Japanese)
The Armies (Evelio Rosero, Spanish)
The Blue Fox (Sjon, Icelandish)
Novel 11, Book 18 (Dag Solstad, Norwegian)
How the Soldier Repairs the Gramaphone (Sasa Stanisic, German)
A Blessed Child (Linn Ullmann, Norwegian)
The Informers (Juan Gabriel Vasquez, Spanish)
Friendly Fire (A B Yehoshua, Hebrew)

I love that the author of Blue Fox just goes by the name "Sjon." That's so badass. Also he writes lyrics for Bjork.

Coraline (2009)

2009-02-26T10:00:00.006-05:00

Kids' movie?

Yes, technically. It's based on Neil Gaiman's Coraline, which is a book for children (and a fantastic one at that, oozing imagination and love for the English language). The movie version is a lot scarier than the book, though; I think it would be absolutely terrifying to a five or six year old. More appropriate, probably, for the 9-11 age range -- if they like spooky. For adults, though: it's deliciously creepy, and the story and visuals are more than artistic enough to interest a grown-up audience. In fact, when I saw it, there were mostly adults in the theater.

The book was adapted for screen and directed by Henry Selick, who also directed Nightmare Before Christmas (and that alone should tell you something about its creepiness). The medium is stop-motion animation, which is not my favorite thing as a general rule, but here it's done beautifully. You won't want to stop looking at it. The basic story is that the little girl, Coraline, is exploring her family's new house and meeting the eccentric neighbors when she discovers a mysterious door that leads to nowhere. Or does it? On the other side of the door, it turns out, there is a copy of her home in the real world, except her "Other Mother" and "Other Father" live there. These beings, as you might expect, turn out to be a lot more malevolent than they appear at first. The Other Mother, in particular, is a thought-provoking personification of the destructive side of the maternal instinct:

A friend pointed out that Coraline is a little on the trippy side, and if you just can't get into through-the-looking-glass stories like Alice in Wonderland or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, no matter how hard you try, then you probably won't enjoy it. That's true, but for everyone else, I think this movie's definitely worth seeing. I happen to like trips through the looking glass, myself.

John Cheever || Love: A Testimony

2009-02-20T11:23:00.003-05:00

Did you finish reading the 1943 John Cheever story that's been running as a Five Chapters serial this week? If you missed it, it's not too late! Read it! Read it now!

One thing I thought was interesting about this particular story was its monochromatic emotional tone. There's really only one emotional idea here: nostalgia for a lost girlfriend. The tone is elegiac, autumnal, atmospheric, minor-key throughout. Usually, literary fiction evokes emotions that are more subtle and abstract, like a Debussy prelude. They're rarely just love stories, plain and simple. This story, though, clings to its simple palette of rust and gray -- autumn leaves, rain on the windowpanes, a broken heart -- like a melancholy indie rock ballad about lost love. The word "October" repeats over and over again. It's a sad boy with a guitar, in literary form.

It's really hard to do something that simple without lapsing into cliche: to be emotional but not maudlin, introspective but not navel-gazing. To be convincing and to say something fresh, not just wallow in your own emotions but write about them in a way that will resonate with anyone who's human. Does "Love: A Testimony" pull it off, or is it one of those stories where there's a good reason why it hasn't been reprinted and anthologized like so much of the author's other work?

Well, it's a little angsty, a little emo, for sure. I'd quickly get tired of a writer who only wrote this sort of thing, all the time (or a band who only sang this sort of song, all the time). But it's always cool to watch such a great writer handle material that would be annoying in the hands of someone less talented. And besides that, it's worth reading just for the beautiful cadence of Cheever's prose, which is a joy in itself. It's reminded me that I need to go read lots more of his stories.

Incidentally, I just watched Y Tu Mama Tambien, which is in a lot of ways exactly the same story (except with palm trees and much more explicit sexuality): two boys, one girl, a sexual coming-of-age, and a lingering "I don't know why it ended the way it did but I still think about it" afterward.

On Philadelphia

2009-02-19T10:09:00.001-05:00

I am in love with this bridge.

Paprika (2006)

2009-02-18T11:19:00.006-05:00

My experience with anime is limited to Spirited Away and that one freaky segment of Kill Bill, so I don't really have much to compare this movie to. But for what it's worth, I enjoyed it. I didn't love it, but it was definitely worth watching and has enough richness that it would probably stand up to a couple more viewings. Besides, it's visually stunning -- beautiful animation.

Paprika is a phantasmagoric sci-fi blend of dream and reality. The basic premise is that scientists have invented an electronic device to allow psychotherapists direct access to the dreams of their patients, but someone has stolen the prototype and is using it to terrorize people and try to take over the world. (Isn't that what all supervillains want?) The scientists must travel back and forth between dream and reality, trying to track down the unknown villain and restore balance to the world -- balance between dream and waking, darkness and light, yin and yang. (Because it relies so heavily on the eastern concepts of balance and complementarity, the ending might be a bit confusing to some western viewers.)

The coolest thing about this movie, besides the amazing visuals, is the way the dream sequences flow. It's spot-on. They feel like real dreams, with one image blending seamlessly into the next and events from waking life appearing at random in and out of context. Besides that, there's a great running comparison of dreams with movies that's actually very insightful, and some subtle exploration of how images from movies and tv make their way into our dreams just like our own experiences do. What does it mean that we often see ourselves as characters in movies? Does the overload of images in pop culture lead us to pigeonhole our own experiences into narrow, cliched categories? Does watching too many movies prevent us from fully experiencing our own lives, both in waking life and in our dreams?

And just by the way, the fact that this movie's animated does not mean it's suitable for children. Paprika is definitely an adult story. Watch it after the kids go to bed.

more literary ghosts

2009-02-17T12:17:00.010-05:00

And while we're on the subject of great 20th-century American writers, via ALD here's an interesting excerpt from Ian McEwan on science and religion in John Updike:

The three Bech books, which Updike always listed with his short stories, have alliterative titles, like the tetralogy, and read now like a trilogy of a distinctive comic genius. Henry Bech is a Jewish American writer whose career rises, fades horribly, and rises again to embrace the Nobel Prize denied his creator. In one of the final episodes, Bech Noir, Henry takes, rather implausibly, to murdering the critics who have offended him over a lifetime. A poisoned self addressed envelope, a discreet shove on a crowded subway platform disposes of two with little bother. To reach another, Bech done up in cape and mask, armed with gun and silencer, climbs a fire escape with an accomplice, his current lover in a catsuit, to take the life of Orlando Cohen, an old man with emphysema, whose chaste ambition was tobe "the ultimate adjudicator" of American literature and who had "refused to grant Bech a place, even a minor place, in the canon".

They find an emaciated, enfeebled Cohen breathing oxygen through a mask with a volume of Walter Benjamin's Selected Writings on his lap. This is comedy, high and dark, but it does not prevent the critic, minutes before his death, delivering a sharp dismissal of Bech's work for its failure to understand America. Its core, Bech had failed to understand, was essentially Protestant. The first settlers thought the Holy Ghost had led them to a Promised Land. Fighting for air, Cohen pronounces: "The Holy Ghost ... who the hell is that? Some pigeon, that's all ... but that God-awful faith ... Bech ... when it burns out ... it leaves a dead spot. Love it or leave it ... a dead spot. That's where America is ... in that deadspot."

Bech failed to find that spot, but his creator had long ago made it his subject. That dead spot was the ruined inner city of Roger's Version, a spoiled landscape through which a divinity professor takes a thirty-page stroll -- one of the great set pieces of the entire body of work; the dead spot was the shadowy centre of scores of novels and stories, in the freeways, malls, TV-addicted children, junk food, the boundless suburbs and their heartless intrigues and pursuit of ecstasy in restless, hopeful couplings, the messy divorces and their wounded children, the racial divide, the rackety politics filtered through TV screens, the national bafflement as manufacturing industries declined and the Japanese moved in with their cheaper cars.

I think that's exactly what Flannery O'Connor meant, too, when she famously called the American South "Christ-haunted." It's difficult to know what to do with religion in fiction. It's difficult to mention God at all, without seeming like you've got an ideological axe to grind, either for or against him. Yet the fact remains that literature has to deal with whatever profoundly affects the lives of human beings, and I do think, whatever you want to conclude from it, that the modern West (Catholic and Protestant) is still haunted by this "dead spot."

To be haunted by something means that it's faded from the front of your consciousness, but lurks in the background, stirring strong subconscious feelings. In that sense, I think it's our God-hauntedness itself that makes it so difficult to settle on a satisfying way to treat religion in the context of our fictions. If religion were still in the foreground of our cultural consciousness, we would have simple ways of navigating it when it came up in stories (e.g. the casual way in which Latin American writers deal with their cultural Catholicism); if we had forgotten it entirely, we could carelessly deal with it as we would deal with any other relic of an irrelevant past. As it is, though, the mention of God in American fiction tends to stir up our lingering subconscious feelings about religion, yet our conscious minds no longer know how to approach it -- so we flounder in our words, with the awkwardness of someone who's just run into an ex-lover he thought he'd never see again.

(For what it's worth, the only Latin American book I can think of that's distinctively awkward in its handling of religion is Garcia Marquez's Of Love and Other Demons, which is also in many other respects a very strange novella.)

John Cheever, Posthumously

2009-02-17T10:33:00.007-05:00

Wouldn't it be fun if you woke up one morning and found that a great writer from the past had contributed a short story to your favorite contemporary, online literary magazine?

This week, online litmag Five Chapters is running a story by John Cheever (1912-1982). The story, entitled "Of Love: A Testimony", was originally published in 1943 as part of the collection The Way Some People Live, and has been out of print since then. It will run in five installments (as per the "Five" in "Five Chapters"). Read it! Read it now!! From the L.A. Times Book Blog, via Laila Lalami.

30-Second Bunnies...

2009-02-16T21:17:00.004-05:00

...are my new entertainment. 30-second reenactments of all your favorite movies!

Scream:

Kill Bill:

...and more! Office Space! Titanic! The Shining! This is brilliant.

Fictional Skeletons

2009-02-16T14:45:00.008-05:00

I've been thinking a lot about the structure of fiction lately: about how the principles that give form and structure to a story have a lot more in common with the ordering principles of a symphony than with those of a logical argument. The mysterious musicality of fictional structure is incredibly intriguing to me. I'm still working out how to articulate my thoughts on this subject, so for now, in place of my half-baked musings, I've pulled some quotes from Aaron Copland's What to Listen for in Music, a book that could easily be translated into What to Read for in Fiction. The point being, how fascinating it is that any of these quotes about composing/listening to music applies equally to writing/reading stories:

“In the finished product, everything must be in its place. The listener must be able to find his way around in the piece. There should be no possible chance of his confusing the principal theme with the bridge material, or vice versa. The composition must have a beginning, a middle, and an end; and it is up to the composer to see to it that the listener always has some sense of where he is in relation to beginning, middle, and end. Moreover, the whole thing should be managed artfully so that none can say where the soldering began – where the composer’s spontaneous invention left off and the hard work began.” (24)

“A beautiful melody, like a piece of music in its entirety, should be of satisfying proportions. It must give us a sense of completion and of inevitability. To do that, the melodic line will generally be long and flowing, with low and high points of interest and a climactic moment usually near the end.” (40)

“Whatever the harmonic style of the music may be, the underlying chordal structure must have its own logic. Without it, a work is likely to lack a sense of movement. A well-knit harmonic framework will be neither too static nor over elaborate; it provides a steady foundation which is always firmly there no matter what the decorative complexities may be.” (57)

“It is insufficient to assume that structure in music is a matter of choosing a formal mold and then filling it with inspired tones. Rightly understood, form can only be the gradual growth of a living organism from whatever premise the composer starts. It follows, then, that ‘the form of every genuine piece of music is unique.’ It is musical content that determines form.” (92)

“Let us take the case of a composer who is working on a form that generally presupposes a coda, or closing section, at the end of his composition. One day, while working with his material, he happens on a section that he knows was destined to be that coda. It so happens that this particular coda is especially quiet and reminiscent in mood. Just before it, however, a long climax must be built. Now he sets about composing his climax. But by the time he has that long climactic section finished, he may discover that it renders the quiet close superfluous. In such a case, the formal mold will be overthrown, because of the exigencies of the evolving material.” (93-4)

“One all-important principle is used in music to create the feeling of formal balance. It is so fundamental to the art that it is likely to be used in one way or another as long as music is written. That principle is the very simple one of repetition.” (95)

Being an intelligent, sensitive reader of fiction means learning to "hear" this kind of flow in the work: the introduction of a theme, its repetition in different variations, and finally the resonance it takes on during the climactic finish, echoing, encompassing, completing all its prior forms and the subplots and subthemes that harmonized and contrasted with it. Writing fiction means having an intuitive sense of how to create that flow. And I can't think of any other way to conclude, except: that is just so cool!

slimy yet satisfying

2009-02-16T13:07:00.005-05:00

On a note somewhat related to my last couple weeks' worth of rants about the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, here's Upturned Earth on how irrationally freaked out Americans are by the fact that there might possibly be a few bits of extra protein in their food:

...in quite a lot of cases fresh food just is “dirty” food, and putting in place the kinds of safety and cleanliness standards that will keep Times readers from wrinkling up their noses and going “eeewww” will mean mandating a supply of food that is not only extra expensive, but pretty far removed from its natural sources. You can have fresh food or sterile food, but you can’t have them both.

...continued here.

Quote of the Day

2009-02-16T13:03:00.003-05:00

Kassia Krozser of Booksquare, on whether Digital Rights Management will prevent e-book piracy:

"I have yet to see solid evidence that DRM prevents piracy. Complex DRM is cracked with relative ease. If someone wants to create a pirated edition of a book, they’re going to put on their eye patches, buy a parrot, and drink a lot of rum."

Thou shalt not eat meat, or "Is food the new sex?"

2009-02-10T12:03:00.005-05:00

I remember writing something once, though I can't find it now, about how contemporary attitudes toward food -- eat organic! go vegetarian! -- have always reminded me of ritual purification, as though we'd given ourselves a new set of quasi-religious dietary laws. There seems to be a strong subconscious feeling that if we can only control what goes into our bodies -- make it 100% pure -- we'll achieve some kind of spiritual purity as well. It's almost a sacramental way of thinking, to make that kind of a connection between a physical act and a spiritual effect.

That's the basic premise of this fantastic essay by Mary Eberstadt, in the Policy Review journal of Stanford's Hoover Institute. (Via Arts & Letters Daily.) At first glance, her conclusion might seem like a stretch: "In the end, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the rules being drawn around food receive some force from the fact that people are uncomfortable with how far the sexual revolution has gone — and not knowing what to do about it, they turn for increasing consolation to mining morality out of what they eat." If you read the essay, though, I think she makes a persuasive case for it, and her tone is refreshingly objective rather than polemical.

Snippet Movie Reviews: foreign film extravaganza

2009-02-09T20:31:00.000-05:00

1. The Orphanage (2007). (Spanish with subtitles) Produced by one of my favorite directors, Guillermo del Toro. This is one of the darkest, creepiest movies I've ever seen. It's a ghost story about a haunted orphanage. Girl is adopted, grows up, gets married, adopts son of her own, and decides to move back to the now-abandoned orphanage with her family, to fix it up and open a camp for special-needs kids. Her adopted son disappears; malevolent ghosts are suspected of kidnapping. Bad dreams, things that go bump in the night, and seances ensue. I chose the word "creepy" carefully: This isn't really a "horror movie" the way Americans usually think of them; it's a ghost story, pure and simple -- and it made my skin crawl. If you like that feeling, watch away: this is a very well-told ghost story. If you like darker fairy tales, you'll probably love this one. I just recommend against watching it alone. Warning: spoilers ahead! But if you like happy endings or at least satisfying resolutions, as are usually found in American movies, do not watch this movie. There is a twist to the ending that's similar to the one in del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth, which is one of my favorite movies. Everything that could be interpreted as warm and hopeful at the end of Pan, though, is dark and disturbing here. I realize that both endings are open to interpretation; I'm just saying that for me personally, my spontaneous natural reaction to Pan was to feel uplifted, while in The Orphanage it was just the opposite. More like the cold, clammy hand of death closing around my throat. If you prefer the Disney version of Little Mermaid to the original Hans Christian Andersen version, then you definitely should not watch Orphanage, nor go anywhere near a room in which it is being watched.

2. A Very Long Engagement (2004). (French with subtitles) This movie is Amelie meets The Princess Bride -- and the combination works! I loved it. And that is all I have to say about that.

Poem of the Day

2009-02-09T13:46:00.000-05:00

(Me up at does) -- e. e. cummings

Me up at does

out of the floor
quietly stare

a poisoned mouse

still who alive

is asking What
have i done that

You wouldn't have

(I know they're pests and must be done away with. But I still feel bad about it.)

The Labyrinth Review

Crazy Like Us

Quote of the Year: early contender

Shakira: She Wolf

Autumn Rundown, aka Things That Were Awesome

*cough cough*

Out of Office Auto-Reply

Starving Artist Recipe #2: Ginger-Lime Cooler

Another Cat Story

Who's On Stage?

Decemberists: The Rake's Song

Quote of the Day

'Llectuals

Goodbye

Postscript

Neda

Still Watching...

Starving Artist Recipe #1: Black Bean Burgers

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Entertainment Today

A Strange Occupation

Carless in Philadelphia

If I Daringly Put Basil instead of Oregano in the Meatballs, Did I Make An Experiment?

What Sort of Political Creature Am I?

Quote of the Day

the whimsical grotesque

Beware the Tremendously Very Bad Mammoth!

Shakira as Political Force

Linguistics Over Coffee

Tiananmen: more story

Tiananmen: In Memoriam

The National: Fake Empire

In Vino Veritas

Quote of the Day

Media Digest, cont.

Comedy Time

Waiting for the New Media to Come of Age

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Read a Story...For the Children!

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The Morning After

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Zoetrope All-Story: The Latin American Issue

Sounds of a Neighborhood

Boo!

Writing as an Identity

Top 5 TV Drama Episodes

Sufjan Stevens: For the Widows in Paradise

The Artist in the Garret

Quote of the Day (II)

Quote of the Day

C'est Moi

Quote of the Day

Unexplained offspring and malicious spacecraft

Yo ho and a bottle of rum

"Verde Esperanza" (4.6.09)

Serendipity

It Is Finished

Heart of Twilight

The Venezuelan Patriarch

Update

perchance to dream

Charlotte Roche: Wetlands (Part One)

Flogging Molly: Drunken Lullabies

in search of the new brooklyn

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RIP: Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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Melanie Rae Thon, "First, Body" (1998)

Charlotte Roche, Wetlands

Bell X1

What Are We Going To Do Tonight?

Kids These Days (Tsk, Tsk)

Dude, it's, like, bad feng shui

Regina Spektor on the artistic vocation

The She-Writer

Book Thieves

the wandering scholar

cough cough