Samantha's Story

2006-12-14T20:45:00.000-08:00

I still hate that I should have loved you
But I do not hate you
I hate not the love, which was beautiful
But the loss of it, which was not
This is not a poem, even though it looks like one
These are my thoughts on a modicum of wine and a Pym's cup and the night and the buildings of the city talking to me about the forgetfulness of love and suffering, disjointed, and not in the least poetic
What I hate, fundamentally, is that there are so many people who come home and bury their head in the imperfect and often irritating neck that they can't get rid of and are loved, and are home
And that I was home, but I was not loved, not in the way that is home
And I am left with the night and the houses that speak to me, and are not home
And I am am theirs, and they are not mine
And that is me, in a nutshell.

2006-11-08T10:31:00.000-08:00

Quote of the day:

(from the comments)

All religion, Rosenzweig argued, responds to man’s anxiety in the face of death (against which philosophy is like a child stuffing his fingers in his ears and shouting, “I can’t hear you!”).

This, T., is why I wish I believed in God . . .

2006-10-12T15:09:00.000-07:00

So I'm watching Good Times on TVLand. Okay, frankly it's a little dated, but it gives me that warm cozy feeling of sitting on my grandmother's living room floor with a plate of cookies in my lap and a glass of cold milk. All my memories of the place--all my memories of childhood--still come to me in the grainy textures and bleak like of seventies film, though they suddenly burst into violent eighties color sometime around puberty.

Anyway, this is the funny thing: there I am, smiling slightly at the wide lapels and President Ford jokes, when I find myself admiring Thelma's outfit. It really is very becoming. And then I realize I'm admiring it because I own an outfit almost exactly like it. I wore it to work two days ago.

Truly that which has been, will be again, and there is nothing new under the sun . . .

2006-10-11T07:20:00.000-07:00

Sadly, sadly i will never write anything as prettyprettyimportantintellectual as a Booker Prize winner, or as TOTALLY EXCELLENT about them as this. (thank you god of hte machine which you can find on my blogroll if you're interested, which you should be.) I am supposed to be working. Instead, I am looking sadly out the windows that do not open. The air conditioning is broken, rattling like death in an old lady's throat. I think tonight I will finally eat some of the frozen fish sticks my mother bought by accident at Costco. But I will never finish them. No single girl could possibly eat five pounds of frozen fish sticks by herself.

2006-10-10T13:51:00.000-07:00

Tuesday song lyric . . . again, from my short-lived band. In a month or so, we'll have exhausted that repertoire . . . or at least the bits of it I can remember.

She wakes up in tomorrow
With a string of yesterdays
She don't feel no sorrow
That ain't the game she plays
Oh, and she may love you
For a couple of days
But she will leave you
No matter what she says

Dusty Rose
She walks down the road alone
River run and cold wind moan
She won't be coming back
Any more

She's as fair as the evening sky
And just as hard to hold
Oh, boys, she may cry
Or she may be bold
But soon you'll watch those violet eyes
Turning you down cold
The younger that she gets, now
The more the game seems old

So play with her in the evening
But don't you get too close
She's got no time for grieving
And nothing to lose
So take to heart my warning boys
Before she puts on her walking shoes
'Cause there's a big old chorus
Singing Dusty Rose's blues

2006-10-10T13:22:00.000-07:00

There's something stiff and self-conscious about peoples' claims that a piece of "literary" fiction made them laugh out loud. I never believe them; at best I suspect that they forced a laugh after a couple of re-readings revealed the passage was supposed to be funny. There is no real foundation for my skepticism, of course. Some people must genuinely find The Mill on the Floss hilarious. It's just that there's such an air about it . . . sophisticated, intellectual people are set apart by the fact that they can dig a belly laugh out of Ulysses, y'see.

It could just be jealousy, because I'm a literary philistine with a taste for trash (I still re-read my Anne of Green Gables books of a frosty winter afternoon). I'm a lazy reader, and it's hard to spur myself to do the coolie labour of reading big, hard works when the easy delights of PG Wodehouse and Dick Francis are beckoning from my bookshelf. Naturally I want everyone to be as lazy as I am, which means that if they say they really enjoy Gaddis--the way I enjoy Agatha Christie--they must be lying hypocrites.

But even if that is true (and I suspect it is), I must plead extenuating circumstances: the whiff of sanctimony that hovers around so many discussions of "important" books. Is it just me, or are there a lot of people who discuss books the way Victorian ladies used to discuss church: as a painful duty that ought to be enjoyed, but never is.

Of course, there are lots of ways to enjoy books, and I suppose that the way I enjoy them, getting swept up in a tsunami wave of language and story, is only one. But try as I might, I cannot but feel in my heart of hearts that it is the only one that really matters.

Anyway, the reason I write about this is that a couple of weeks ago I found myself telling someone I like, and haven't seen in a while, that I am "doing" Orwell's collected four-volume writings. Immediately I thought--and said--how awful that sounded. And then today, while waiting for a meeting to start, I dipped my nose into my Dorothy Parker's complete stories, and laughed aloud.

"What are you reading?" said one of the IT people.

"Dorothy Parker", I answered, and held up the book for her to see.

"Is she good?" she asked. "I've never read her."

I read her the passage that had made me laugh.

Sighing, Mrs. Weldon turned her attention to a bowl of daffodils, slightly past their first freshness. There was nothbing to be done there; the omniscient Delia had refreshed them with clear water, had clipped their stems, and removed their more passe sisters. Still Mrs. Weldon bent over them pulling them gently about.

She liked to think of herself as one for whom flowers would thrive, who must always have blossoms about her, if she would be truly happy. When her living-room flowers died, she almost never forgot to stop in at the florist's, the next day, and get a fresh bunch. She told people, in little bursts of confidence, that she loved flowers. There was something almost apologetic in her way of uttering her tender avowal, as if she would beg her listeners not to consider her too bizarre in her taste. It seemd rather as though she expected the hearer to fall back, startled, at her words, crying, "Not really! Well, what are we coming to?"

She looked as if she would like to laugh, if only she could see something . . . anything . . . in it to laugh about. She settled for a half-hearted smile.

2006-10-03T18:13:00.000-07:00

Tuesday Song Lyric . . . from my short-lived band. I wore a miniskirt and a velvet ribbon around my throat, and my hair hung all the way to my butt in perfect little ringlets. I wasn't a very good singer, though.

She wakes up
At 9 am
Lights herself a cigarette
She's got no particular reason
To get out of bed
Again

Ohhhhh, don't you walk away
Don't you leave me standing here
Again
Ohhhh, don't you walk away
There's a change coming . . . down the road

She goes down to the corner store
Buys herself a cup of coffee there
Goes and stands on the street awhile
Waiting
For something to happen

She goes to work in the daytime
Puts in her time okay
She doesn't speak much to anyone there
She's got nothing
Much to say

She goes home in the evening time
Lights herself a cigarette
Watches the sky wind down to nothing left
Goes to sleep . . . alone . . . again

As you can see, the lyricist (the artist formerly known as me) had not much command of meter or rhyme. Or, for that matter, sense. All we really had going for us was existential angst . . . and what I occasionally think of as uncanny prescience.

The dog is barking. I must feed and walk him.

2006-10-03T17:33:00.000-07:00

The other day I was saying . . . to someone else, I think, but maybe just to myself . . . how now that there's a little autumn tang in the air, I want to watch a football game . . . mud flying and limbs tangling and girls jumping up and down and shouting with their red, red scarves blowing against the frosty sky. I don't want to watch a professional football game; I want to watch a school game, full of friends and surreptitious beer and a healthy, innocent desire to crush the other team like bugs.

So tonight I come home and I'm tired and more than a little blue (it has been one of those days, you understand), and in between watching the playoffs I find myself watching Friday Night Lights, which is a new series about . . . a high school football team in Texas. Now, I went to a little school, with a little football team; we didn't even have cheerleaders. This is not exactly the kind of football I was thinking of. Apparently in Texas, high school football games involve coaches with headsets, and cheerleaders and marching bands, and they are televised. The captains marching forward across the field towards each other for the coin toss look like large and well padded alien invaders.

This is not the point. The point is that the show stars Kyle Chandler, who used to star in Homefront, a short-lived series about a fictional factory town in Ohio right after World War II. It was on when I was in college, and though we didn't actually get anything you would call "reception" in my dorm . . .

[yes, children, she whispered, in those days we didn't have cable]

. . . I huddled over my roommate's 13-inch television every Tuesday night, listening to the hissing soundtrack and trying to make out the moving figures, which are only dim white shades floating through a thick haze of static.

I loved that show. It was a technicolor fantasy world that wasn't quite true to its time, or any time. Its characters didn't belong anywhere except in the tidied up imaginations of screenwriters who could neither bear to let their creations wear the prejudices of their time, nor import a new and improved set of values from the future for them. No one was very bad, not even the snotty rich people who owned the factory. And the characters that were too good to be believed were at least dimwitted or homely.

And there was Kyle Chandler playing Jeff, the naive, handsome, and adorably clean-cut baseball player. Now he's playing a handsome, still somewhat adorable football coach. Clearly, he's found some sort of a niche.

But that's not the point either. Humor me. I'm blue.

The point is that Kyle Chandler isn't as cute as he used to be. The features that were clean-cut and boyish at 25 have coarsened at 40, and he has bags under his eyes.

But the really weird thing is that for a moment, as I was looking at him, and trying to pick out the boyish figure of yesteryear among the shifted planes of his face, it was like I could see the whole process of turning from a handsome young actor into Paul Newman . . . as if I could peek into the future at the eventual Kyle Chandler, his skin deformed and collapsed into a tragic caricature of the boy. And myself, she who used to be the beautiful Samantha Yeager, looking wistfully at photographs of a young actor and wishing that I was back in my dorm room, leaning against the cinderblock wall with a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other, peering through into the mist of a tiny screen.

2006-10-03T14:06:00.000-07:00

I love this man:

In "The Hungering Dark," Frederick Buechner writes:

"I suspect that the truth of it is simply that we are alive when, instead of killing time, we take time. When in the midst of our tearing around in our busy-ness trying to do something, we stop once in a while and just let ourselves be something, be who we are. When by unclenching our fists, we give life a chance to do something with us. When we take the little piece of time that we have in this world and pay attention to what it is telling us, not just to what it is telling us about the beauty of the sun as it sets, God knows, but to what it is telling us about all the wildness and strangeness and pain of things, the tears of things . . . as well as the joy of things."

So what is life speaking to you? I don't know about you, but when I listen -- truly listen -- what I hear is frightening and exhilarating, and when I don't just resume my shuffle along the sidewalk, pretending I didn't hear a thing, all the world is changed. Listening, and knowing what we give up when we choose this job and that pleasure, is a terrifying venture. What I'm learning, though, is that the alternative is far worse. So stop waiting for something, because what we all wait for is the grave, and immediately before and after it, an accounting for the time we were given.

If I had a blogroll, he'd be on it.

Yes, I'm a sucker for that muscular Christian, inspirational "be today!" sort of thing. But only if it's done well. After all, if you can hold the interest of lil ol' atheist me, you must be onto something.

2006-09-29T09:05:00.000-07:00

I'm afraid that my readers (all three of you) are going to have to suffer with Orwellmania just a little bit longer.

First, something from an essay that I found on Theodore Adorno and George Orwell via Mr. Orwell's wikipedia entry:

Fragmentary and nonsequential, solemn and simultaneously offhand, each fragment circles briefly around a theme. Some of the book's most celebrated formulations are defiantly paradoxical: "In psychoanalysis, nothing is true except the exaggerations." Others issue in wild generalizations: "Normality is death." Still other passages combine a knowing allusiveness (for example, to Hegel's famous dictum that Napoleon was the world spirit on horseback) with a simple image ("Hitler's robot bombs," the pilotless V-1 and V-2 missiles that killed thousands of people in London) to insinuate, in a few elliptical words, a considered view about abstract philosophical matters: "'I have seen the world spirit,' not on horseback, but on wings and without a head, and that refutes, at the same stroke, Hegel's philosophy of history."

The words have such a lovely portentous sound: "in psychoanalysis, nothing is true except the exaggerations." How deep! How clever! People like me, the impressionable liberal arts graduates of the world, have such a pronounced tendency to assume that things that sound so wonderful must also be true. We take sparkling epigrams for nuggets of real wisdom.

But when you tried to grab hold of the meaning of all these tenderly constructed aphorisms, they evaporate in your hands. If you say to yourself, "wery witty, but is what he says actually true?"--the whole thing falls apart like cotton candy, and the writing starts to look more like glorified cocktail party chatter than revolutionary thought. Almost nothing about Freud was true, and least of all his follower's wild claims for their pseudoscience. This is all very entertaining, a sort of intellectual Rubix cube that you can keep turning around in your head as you read. But it is not really enlightening.

(I should say that I have not read much Adorno, and that very long ago, and so perhaps he is much better than this sample makes out. But the phenomenon does exist with other writers, anyway.)

I used to be opposed to writing that was difficult on the grounds that it was a needless display of the author's ego, a form of pseudo-mental masturbation that ultimately gratified no one but the writer. Looking back, my stance seems like one part truth, one part misplaced proletarian anti-intellectualism, and one part reluctance to undertake the coolie labour required to enjoy Joyce or Eliot. (I will not give you Spenser. I don't care what you say.) Now that I have experienced the joy of cresting that mountain and arriving at a place where you can, say, laugh out loud at Tale of a Tub, I take all of it . . . well, most of it . . . back. But what one can still say is that once complexity began to be admired for its own sake--once people began to assume that it must be the sign of a very fine and brilliant mind--it became a hiding place for all sorts of gross intellectual sins. Many of them are still sheltering unnoticed among the gargoyles, as the onlookers congratulated each other on the difficulties of building such an intricate edifice.

2006-09-28T13:37:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the department of mental hypochondria. I may be the only patient. Mental hypochondria is like physical hypochondria, except it occurs when I read about personality disorders and instantly begin examining myself for psychopathy or narcissistic personality disorder.

I diagnosed myself with the latter during college, courtesy of a friend's copy of the DSM-III. (That's what we used to do before we had the internet, she said brightly.) As it happens, I was going through a brief stint of nice but unhelpful therapy for the eating disorder I no longer had.

[Typical conversation:

Me: Why do you have so many tissues in here?
Her: You really don't have any idea, do you?
Me: Nooooooo . . . .
Her: It never occurred to you that anyone might come into a therapy session and cry?
Me: Ooooooooh. (pause) Really? People cry?

As you can see, I was not a good fit with therapy.]

Anyway, I mentioned to the therapist that I thought I might have narcissistic personality disorder. She smiled. Then she chuckled.

Perhaps I looked offended. She tried very hard, and failed, to straighten her face.

"Sam," she said, "the first rule of Narcissistic Personality Disorder is that if you think you might have it, you don't have it.

Apparently, I am also not a psychopath. You probably guessed that because I have, like, a job. But it's nice to know.

Unfortunately, looking all this up, I have reinflamed my curiousity about possible NPD. For example:

Some narcissists are flamboyantly boastful and self-aggrandizing, but many are inconspicuous in public, saving their conceit and autocratic opinions for their nearest and dearest. Common conspicuous grandiose behaviors include expecting special treatment or admiration on the basis of claiming (a) to know important, powerful or famous people or (b) to be extraordinarily intelligent or talented.

I don't think I have a flamboyantly high opinion of myself--on the contrary, I think I have a rather accurate, if not accepting, assessment of my own flaws. On the other hand, I think I am smarter than almost everyone I know. I believe that this is just an honest appraisal of my talents: I am smart, I am not a very good artist. But presumably, all narcissists think they are just making an honest appraisal of their own (considerable) gifts.

Sigh. I am going to have to confine my reading to prostate disorders. I'm pretty sure I don't have one of those.

2006-09-26T16:12:00.000-07:00

I am reading Orwell, walking home in the twilight. Already, he is changing me. I look at sentences I have written, and I am ashamed of them. They appear to me now like misshapen behemoths, clomping destructively over sense and meaning, yet not getting anywhere very particular. Crippled by a heavy load of unnecessary adjectives and surplus clauses that have not been loaded onto them very securely, they seem to stagger in blind circles around the thing I am trying to say. No wonder my thoughts flee from them. How can my readers stand the awful spectacle?

Too, I am ashamed of looking at the dark wisps of cloud skidding across the pearly pink sky and thinking of a brightly lit livingroom and an evening with House and Jericho. I should not like tripe, and I should not want to waste my time on pasteboard dramas. If I were Eric Blair, I would be in Darfur or Palestine, fighting for something worth that vague sense of the eternal brushing across my consciousness as I contemplate the sunset.

I laugh, because at heart I am an impressionable undergraduate still.

2006-09-24T11:34:00.000-07:00

I had the weirdest dream last night . . . I was back in high school. By which I mean, not that I was seventeen, but that for some reason I was going back to high school, with the rest of my high school class, at 33. I remember remarking on the oddity of this in my dream . . . I wasn't entirely clear whether they could actually take away my college diploma if I didn't graduate this time.

Also, Tony Shalhoub was my headmaster. And also, Tony Shalhoub, star of Monk. In my dream, I first met him in a downtown restaurant, and was telling him how much I'd loved him in Wings, and then I was awfully surprised to find him on the schoolbus that was taking me back to my school.

They'd changed all the buildings around, and the teachers were all different, though they all seemed to know me.

I was not happy in high school . . . I was the dismal hippie chick who didn't read enough William Burroughs to actually reject all that excruciatingly dull normality . . . who watched a lot of teen flicks and wanted so badly for Prince Charming to rescue me from sticking out like a sore thumb and carry me off to that magical land where I'd get a cute little Volkswagon Rabbit convertible, an enchanting new wardrobe, and measurements more along the lines of 36-22-36. I haven't gotten the figure, the car, or the wardrobe, and I doubt that I'd fit in better with the self-satisfied solons of my high school class than I did then. But in my dream, I was so glad to be back. I remember saying to one of them on the schoolbus that no one would ever know me as well as my classmates. And then I woke up and thought, that might be true . . .

2006-09-07T19:39:00.000-07:00

I'm watching this commercial for a Discovery Channel series called "The Rise of Man". Its basic premise is don't fret if your life sucks, because we've been around a long time. The tagline is, like, "Don't worry about all this shit. We've survived five million years. You'll probably make it through the day."

Ex-squeeze-me?--as my dorky high school friends used to say. We haven't survived five million years. Last time I looked, we had only survived thirty-three years, which if memory serves, is like three years more than the average lifespan of those bipedal apes who are supposed to make me feel all chill and back to nature and "I will survive".

2006-08-31T21:03:00.000-07:00

someday I am going to start a story "the men who tied John Taylor to a tree for 36 hours were not bad men . . . "

That is all.

2006-08-31T06:06:00.000-07:00

Giggle. Snort.

2006-08-28T11:44:00.000-07:00

More internet loveliness: Sappho in twenty-six translations.

He is a god in my eyes, that man,
Given to sit in front of you
And close to himself sweetly to hear
The sound of you speaking.
Your magical laughter — this I swear —
Batters my heart — my breast astir —
My voice when I see you suddenly near
Refuses to come.

My tongue breaks up and a delicate fire
Runs through my flesh; I see not a thing
With my eyes, and all that I hear
In my ears is a hum.

The sweat runs down, a shuddering takes
Me in every part and pale as the drying
Grasses, then, I think I am near
The moment of dying.

2006-08-28T10:38:00.000-07:00

And now the pain of great beauty: the opening passages of The Iliad and The Odyssey, in three different translations. I'm surprised to find that I like different translators for different books; the Lattimore translation of The Iliad sings to me:

Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus
and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians,
hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls
of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting
of dogs, of all birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished
since that time when first there stood in division of conflict
Atreus’ son the lord of men and brilliant Achilleus. . . .

But the stark simplicity of Fagles' Odyssey appeals to me more:

Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy.

Many cities of men he saw and learned their minds,
many pains he suffered, heartsick on the open sea,
fighting to save his life and bring his comrades home.
But he could not save them from disaster, hard as he strove –
the recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all,
the blind fools, they devoured the cattle of the Sun
and the Sungod blotted out the day of their return. . . .

Though I like best the opening lines of Fitzgerald's translation:

Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story
of that man skilled in all ways of contending

That is how it feels, when you are writing something that is right . . . as if it comes from inside you and outside of you all at once.

2006-08-28T09:50:00.000-07:00

Sigh. Thoughts of autumn and death seem to be in the air.

More signs of my selfishness: I read this and wondered how my mother would eulogize me. I used to watch Unsolved Mysteries, once upon a time, and like cable news, a disproportionate number involved young white women who had mysteriously disappeared, often on a deserted stretch of highway. Invariably, the mothers (or fathers) described their daughters as full of life, fun, always cheerful and kind. The phrase "everybody loved her" inevitably popped up several times.

Now, perhaps Unsolved Mysteries only selects people who everybody actually loves. Or, possibly, the mothers can't see the reality of their daughters . . . my mother seems to honestly believe, despite all evidence, that my sister and I are both beautiful. Or maybe they just can't bear to tell the truth, that their daughters were fairly ordinary, with an ordinary number of friends and virtues.

But it seems impossible to imagine anyone saying about me "everybody loved her"; I am a distinctly aquired taste. I mean, as far as I know, no one actually hates me, but I'm pretty sure that the majority of my acquaintances would, if asked by a neutral third party, admit that they could take me or leave me. I'm not noticeably kind, cheerful, or thoughtful, and what thoughtfulness I do exhibit often turns out (to my vast dismay) to be of the "I wish she hadn't . . . " variety.

This is not to say that I don't have fine qualities. I am intelligent, compassionate, iconoclastic . . . and, erm . . . I can cook. I may have other endearing qualities as well. Which is what makes me curious: what would my fiercely honest mother say? I have difficulty imagining her staring wistfully at the floor and murmuring "everybody loved her". I wish I could hear my own eulogies.

Lest you take this and earlier posts as a sign that I am meditating excessively on my own death, let me hasten to explain that this is a sign of my self-absorption, not a morbid fixation on the thought of myself lying in ethereal state, surrounded by mounds of flowers and a satin-lined mahogany box. I often wish that I could read myself as described by a novelist friend using me in a thinly veiled portrayal. At least, I think I do. I've a feeling I wouldn't actually like it at all after I'd read about my more comically annoying qualities. In fact, I hate people talking about me behind my back; I get enraged when I find out someone I know has been doing it. But still, it's like doing drugs or having sex on a motorcycle . . . I know it's a very bad idea, but I still very much want to see myself described by a third person. Do others see me as fat or thin, pretty or plain, boisterous or boorish? Enquiring minds want to know.

I am thinking too much of myself. I need to be that novelist, writing characters, not wondering about what others think of me. I shall try to start writing sketches of the people around me. Artists can't be all inner life . . .

2006-08-27T19:49:00.000-07:00

I'm a terribly, terribly selfish person. Look at this blog--the entire thing is an extended session of navel gazing. Do I care about other people's suffering, or do I only want it to stop because it makes me sad? If I do get married, am I prepared for the endless, thankless sacrifice of children? I have so little tolerance for boredom that in conversations with people who don't interest me I have vast difficulties remembering what they just said. Do I want to love someone else, or only to be loved?

Oh, such adolescent whining. I am the worst person in the entire world. Just another way of making oneself feel important, really. In a world that has contained Hitler, Jack the Ripper and Kathy Lee Gifford, I'm not even eligible for minor league play. I hate this entry; right now I hate this blog, this extended series of trivial & utterly obvious discoveries of my banal inner longings. I think of John Cheever (was it Cheever?) describing a blue weekend like the one I have just had. "I have been watching the rain and loathing myself."

But that is not right either; I am dramatizing again. I am not loathing, but profoundly tired of myself. I would like to think about someone and something else for a change. But no one around me seems to require much thinking about right now.

I know that in a day or so I will not feel blue; it's just another attack of the Irishes, as my great-aunt used to call them--that technicolor melancholy that strikes for no reason, sweeps you into a deep hole under the mental bridge where the trolls live, and then disappears as suddenly and inexplicably as it came. I shouldn't even write about it. I have been fearing writing about it, to be honest--I had a sense that that sort of thing is what put Sylvia Plath et. al. on the road to destruction. But for some reason it seems to help. And it beats watching "obese-a-thon" on the Discovery Health Channel.

2006-08-27T19:37:00.000-07:00

With rue my heart is laden . . . the barbecue place across the street from me is closing. Tuesday will be the blowout last night. This is the perfect end to a deep blue weekend.

Pardon me while I feel sorry for myself. I love this place, because it does not belong there. Its plastic tablecloths, slapdash service, and menu, best described as "fiesta del fried things", would be perfectly at home on some southern back road somewhere.

You would think that this would be a recipe for barbecue greatness, but alas, that's not really its charm. The food is all right (I'm besotted about the mashed sweet potatoes), but the real allure of the place is the black people who sit at the bar, calling out to other regulars as they come in, the jukebox, and the owner, a middle-aged white guy with a greasy white ponytail. He has a general air of having forgotten something terribly important back in the sixties. It's the kind of place where after some roast chicken and a few jack-and-gingers, you can dance with an elderly black woman whose name you don't know, and everyone in the joint smiles at you as you spin past.

My neighborhood is gentrifying, and the clientele is scattering, and I guess Mr B can no longer afford to operate. So on Tuesday, I will go in and have some roast chicken and some mashed sweet potatoes and a few jack and gingers, and hope that there will be some other regulars to help me say good bye. And feel sorry for myself because there's no one else to help me close it out in style; my friends, who like their barbecue a little more upscale, can't stand the place.

2006-08-27T08:44:00.000-07:00

Neat. Embrace your randomness. Or non-randomness, as the case may be.

2006-08-25T19:44:00.000-07:00

Everything is too much tonight like those last evenings before school started, when the foretaste of fall, mingling with the last sweet sultry strains of high summer, filled one with the formless excitement of new beginnings. I am not young any more. My face is gaunter, my hands a little more like the talons they will eventually become, and the bartender didn't flirt with me last night. The cool night breeze skipping between the trees on my block seems to be carrying the taste of autumn, and death.

וְלֹ֣א אָמְר֔וּ אַיֵּ֣ה יְהוָ֔ה הַמַּעֲלֶ֥ה אֹתָ֖נוּ מֵאֶ֣רֶץ מִצְרָ֑יִם הַמֹּולִ֨יךְ אֹתָ֜נוּ בַּמִּדְבָּ֗ר בְּאֶ֨רֶץ עֲרָבָ֤ה וְשׁוּחָה֙ בְּאֶ֙רֶץ֙ צִיָּ֣ה וְצַלְמָ֔וֶת בְּאֶ֗רֶץ לֹֽא־עָ֤בַר בָּהּ֙ אִ֔ישׁ וְלֹֽא־יָשַׁ֥ב אָדָ֖ם שָֽׁם׃

2006-08-18T07:10:00.000-07:00

This is very weird, yet strangely compelling.

2006-08-17T08:34:00.000-07:00

You know what would be a really, really good novel? A novel about Caesar, told from the point of view of his four wives, each of them showing a very different man.

I wish I were talented enough to write it . . .

Unless it's already been written. It's not exactly a stunningly original idea.

2006-08-14T12:38:00.000-07:00

Wow. Amazing new blog.

2006-08-14T11:58:00.000-07:00

Curiously, writing that has done much to soothe my psyche.

2006-08-14T11:38:00.000-07:00

I have such a restlessness in me right now that I swear to you, I can barely keep myself in my seat. If there were somewhere that I wanted to go, I would have gotten up and made a start towards it, preferably barefoot, with my shoes in one hand and a cigarette in the other and only as much money as would buy me a hamburger and a beer at the end of the day. But I don't want to go anywhere, or at least, not anywhere real. I'd like to be young as I was never young, as nobody was ever young, not really. I want to be young in a J. Crew catalogue, where it is always the long, golden evening before the Princeton/Yale game. I want to be young in a medeival battle epic, armor and sword and the song of metal clashing against metal. I want to be striving so hard for glory that not an ounce of additional effort could be wrung from any fiber of my being. I want to catch the sun in flight and sing it down the fiery trail to the horizon. I am vibrating with heroic longing.

The worst thing about getting older is learning that none of that is real. At twenty, I thought it was all in front of me. No matter how sad I was, Someday was always waiting. Now I remind myself of those lines from Milton:

So farewell hope, and with hope, farewell fear,
Farewell remorse!

Nothing is ever so dreadful as it was at twenty. But fewer wonders seem to lie in wait. And so, now, when I am restless for them, it is a jittery agitation I feel, rather than that quick and sure impatience which stalked my early twenties.

2006-08-10T13:51:00.000-07:00

Lodge had come of age during a time when scientists began to coax from the mists a host of previously invisible phenomena, particularly in the realm of electricity and magnetism. He recalled how lectures at the Royal Institution would set his imagination alight. "I have wlaked back through the streets of London, or across Fitzroy Square, with a sense of unreality in everything around, an opening up of deep things in the universe, which put all ordinary objects of sense into the hsade, so that the square and its railings, the houses, the carts, and the people, seemed like shadowy unrealities, phantamal appearances, partly screening, but partly permeated by, the mental and spiritual reality behind."

~ Erik Larsen, Thunderstruck

2006-08-10T13:41:00.000-07:00

A safe but sometimes chilly way of recalling the past is to force open a crammed drawer. If you are searching for anything in particular you don't find it, but something falls out at hte back that is often more interesting.

~ J. M. Barrie

2006-08-07T11:42:00.000-07:00

Thought for the day:

"Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination are omnipotent. The slogan 'press on' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race."

2006-08-04T13:46:00.000-07:00

What I'm reading: Theft, by Katherine Anne Porter

She set the cup carefully in the center of the table, and walked steadily downstairs, three long flights and a short hall and a steep short flight into the basement, where the janitress, her face streaked with coal dust, was shaking up the furnace. "Will you please give me back my purse? There isn't any money in it. It was a present, and I don't want to lose it."

The janitress turned without straightening up and peered at here with hot flickering eyes, a red light from the furnace reflected in them. "What do you mean, your purse?"

"The gold cloth purse you took from the wooden bench in my room," she said. "I must have it back."

"BEfore god I never laid eyes on your purse, and that's the holy truth," said the janitress."

"Oh, well then, keep it," she said, but in a very bitter voice; "keep it if you want it so much." And she walked away.

She remembered how she had nevere locked a door in her life, on some principle of rejection in her that made her euncomfortable in the ownereship of things, and her paradoxical boast before hte warnings of her friends, that she had never lost a penny by theft; and she had been pleased with the bleak humility of this concrete example designed to illustrate and justify a certain fixed, otherwise baseless and general faith which ordered the movements of her life witih out regard to her will in teh mattere.

In this moment she felt that she had been robbed of an enormous number of valuable things, whether material or intangible: things lost or broken by her own faults, things she had forgotten and left in houses when she moved; books borrowed from her and not returned, journeys she had planned and not made, words she had watied ot hear spoken to her and had not heard, and the words she had meant to answer with; bitter alternatives and intolerable substitutes worse than nothing, and yet inescapable: the lon gpatient suffering of dying friendships and nteh dark inexplicable death of love--all that she had had, and all that she had missed, were lost together, and were twice lost in this landslide eof remembered losses.

The janitress was following her upstairs with the purse in her hand and the same deep red fire flickering in her eyes. The janitress thrust the purse towards her while they were still a half dozen steps apart, and said: "Don't never tell on me. I musta been crazy. I get crazy in the head sometimes, I swear I do. My son can tell you."

She took the purse after a moment, and the janitress went on: "I got a niece who is going on seventeen, and she's a nice girl and I thought I'd give it to her. She needs a pretty purse. I musta been crazy; I thought maybe you wouldn't mind, you leave things around and don't seem to notice much."

She said: " I missed this because it was present to me from someone . . . "

The janitress said: "He'd get you another if fyou lost this one. My niece is young and needs pretty things, we oughta give hte young ones a chance. She's got young men aftter her maybe will want to marry her. She ought have nice things. She needs them bad right now. You're a grown woman, you've had your chance, you ought to know how it is!"

She held the purse out to the janitress saying: "You don't know what you're talking about. Here, take it, I've changed my mind. I really don't want it."

The janitress looked up at her with hatred and said: "I don't want it either now. My niece is young and pretty, she don't need fixin' up to be pretty, she's young and pretty anyhow! I guess you need it worse than she does!"

"It wasn't really yours in teh first place," she said, turning away. "You musn't talk as if I had stolen it from you."

"It's not from me, it's from her you're stealing it," said the janitress and went back downstairs.

She laid the purse on the table and sat down with the cup of chilled coffee, and thought: I was right not to be afraid of any thief but myself, who will end by leaving me nothing.

2006-08-04T12:19:00.000-07:00

Instant message conversation of the day:

Matt says:
you're a leech

Sam says:
I prefer to think of myself as one of those intestinal worms that hangs onto your innards for years before finally infecting your brain, causing insanity and eventually a hideously painful death.

Matt says:
oh, well then that's much better.

Matt says:
carry on

2006-08-01T06:00:00.000-07:00

Quote of the day:

But as we’ve seen time and again, the logic of war, once started, is remorseless. However obviously wrong the initial decision to go to war, the consequences of ending it always seem almost worse, at least to those who have to admit that the death and destruction they have wrought has been pointless.

2006-07-31T14:01:00.000-07:00

I shouldn't have to explain that I am not anti-semitic. But these days, if you're even remotely pro-Palestine, it needs to be said. So, Mel Gibson makes me want to vomit, and then undergo some painful spiritual cleansing ritual in order to remove the stain of his disgusting opinions from my mind.

That gotten out of the way, this is the most interesting thing I've read on the subject:

The big fart smell hanging in the air, of course, is the content of his tirade: all the swearing at Jews and the anti-semitic ugliness that came pouring out. As a good child of a post-Freudian culture, I was raised to believe that what people say when they are plastered, or insanely angry, or deeply afraid, or otherwise stripped of their normal rational faculties is Who They Really Are. We talk that way all the time. "I thought he was a good man until the mask came off and I saw the ugly Truth". That sort of talk is natural as breathing for us.

That's because, in America, everybody is a Calvinist, including the Catholics. We believe that the fall is identical with nature, and therefore believe that when you see a man in sin, you see him as he "really" is. Goodness is the mask, corruption is his nature.

2006-07-26T20:11:00.000-07:00

Nobody cares about me.

That is not, strictly, true. But what a sweetly freeing sound it has right now. If nobody cared about me I could drive myself to drink, run away to sea, walk off into the night and never, ever come back. Maybe I don't want to do any of those things, in particular. But the thing is, I'd like to know that I could.

Let me be perfectly frank: I'm a little tipsy right now. Two bottles of mediocre white wine, a hazy and disappointing sunset, and a rather-more-handsome-than-is-really-good-for-him investment banker of the urbane Latin type . . . you know how it is. I composed the first lines of this post during the dark and surprisingly unsteady walk to my front door.

I have been in a strange mood since I got back from the Aegean. I go to parties and I feel as if I am not quite there . . . as if everything were very far away and not particularly important. Who are these people I talk to? Do they even really believe that they exist? Because, lets be honest, they don't seem to have much to show for it, do they? There is poetry in the smallest things of the earth . . . but the people I have been talking to over the last few weeks seem to have been writing in in (very) blank verse.

I could theorize that I am clinically depressed, out of sorts, soured on the riches of the world. But I don't feel sad. I just feel that . . . I would rather be home reading.

And then suddenly I was lonely, and wishing I had someone to laugh with. Not to talk with; I can read lovely talk in any newspaper. But someone to tease me about my drinking and pour me another glass of wine.

And so tonight to be a little bit drunk and telling funny stories about my mother's war on the Greek cab drivers, even to someone who left a little yet to be desired, was awfully sweet. And I swear, for a second there, before I set my purse down and fumbled my way through the front door lock . . . well, let's just say that I really do think I might have jammed my fedora onto my head, and thrust my hands deep into my pockets, and set my worn shoeleather on the long road to Frisco. If I had felt like it, you understand.

Fortunately for those who care about me, I didn't. After all, I have an early morning meeting, and a new cappucino maker to try out.

2006-07-25T10:24:00.000-07:00

I have nothing particular to say about this article except . . . I want a butt double. Not because I think that my bottom is inadequate--I don't actually know whether it is or not, since I can't see it. (Twisting around to look in the mirror doesn't count.) I just like the idea of getting to choose your own butt. Obviously, it would be even better if you could wear the butt around, but I'll take the ability to control my photographic butt.

And think how great it would be to be a butt double. I mean, you can think you have a good butt, but the fact is that unlike any other feature, you pretty much have to take someone else's word for it. And people aren't always honest about things like that. If you listened to my mother, you would think I was the loveliest, and slimmest, creature in five states. She may even believe this. But it is not true, on either count. I am distinctly average.

(You'll have to take my word for this, of course. But who's likelier to be lying? Me or my mother?)

Anyway, being a butt double would be professional, cinematic validation of your suspicions that you have a really nice ass. Of course, then I suppose you'd start getting into invidious comparison with other butt doubles . . . do I have a really extraordinary set of cheeks here, or merely something a cut above average? Which is why it's probably better to hire a butt double than to be one. Or something like that.

2006-07-18T08:53:00.000-07:00

I'm comforted that regular people sometimes write letters like this:

I’m sorry for it, quite sorry—sorry not just for this particular incarnation, but for the game itself! That it can be so unfailingly cruel as to force people who love each other to rip one another into chunks. It’s bizarre! You’d rather be butchered on a real battlefield than heartbroken—it’s not the mechanical enemy soldiers that cause the greater pain, but the soft soul you put your trust in. What kind of sense does that make? If not God’s cruel joke, than whose?
But–and I want you to believe this—that it’s beautiful nonetheless. Beautiful when it ends and beautiful when it begins, and beautiful a thousand times throughout. The spinsters beautiful and the sluts beautiful, the Romeos, the lovers. Holy holy holy! And here’s what you should know, that now, even for the pain you feel and the rawness that I remember and know, I honestly envy you now, more than ever. Perhaps it’s not to be described—but you have become more real here, from this.
At the moment, it may seem like lame consolation, but I tell you it’s a thousand times better to have suffered than to have never cried. And it’s not mere utility that you will gain—though you probably will—"The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.” But I want you to believe that there is something positive here, even apart from the joy or perhaps because of its absence—that the red rawness of the heartbreak now is something beautiful in itself! It’s the feeling of connection to the external world, the mark of your interaction with the universe about you, the callous that comes from fashioning your own life. Brave and robust and sacred!

2006-06-27T11:33:00.000-07:00

I'm really busy right now. I've landed a new project at work, and suddenly everyone wants to meet with me, I've got a special title, and people I've never heard of are stopping by to introduce themselves. And the funny thing, is I'm getting all impressed with myself, like "Yeah, I'm a PM now. I'm the King of the World!" Even though mostly the reason that I've been put in charge of this is that no one else really wants to be bothered.

I mean, don't get me wrong. It's an important project. And I'm excited about it. And I'm even excited about the extra work it will add to my schedule on a permanent basis, because frankly recently I've been underutilised and getting kind of lazy. But it's not like anyone thought "Samantha is just the genius we need to take this project to completion!!!" It's more like, "Hey, she seems to be willing to take this on."

Still, I had to get a PDA to cope with my meetings. See me admire the aristocratic elegance of my profile in the mirror! Watch me strut around the well-manicured grounds, preening myself on my magnificent many-hued tailfeathers! Observe me ever-so-carefully noting a meeting three weeks off, because God knows, I musn't overschedule myself--my time is far too important for that.

Hee.

So I'm at work, alone in my office, and I'm listening to Birds from Neil Young's After the Gold Rush. And some of it is so beautiful it steals your breath and almost stops your heart . . . the silences, principally. That sounds snarky, but there's something about those dark heartbeats before the music starts again that is achingly beautiful.

And suddenly my meetings don't seem all that important.

2006-06-20T08:18:00.000-07:00

One of the stupidist fears we let drive our lives is the fear of having brought something on ourselves.

We struggle along with the status quo because we fear that if we do something, and are wrong, we will not only hate being in a worse position; we will hate ourselves, for having put ourselves there.

We follow the herd, choosing what everyone else chooses, because that is somehow not like making a choice; no one can blame us for doing what the rest of the group is doing. Perhaps the rest of the group is miserable, but at least we are not alone in our misery.

For the longest time I have made myself unhappy believing in all the bad things that could happen to me, because I felt that at least if they did happen, I would not feel stupid for having disbelieved in them. So what if the sum of all the potential unhappinesses I have lived through is far greater than the few real ones that have actually occurred? At least I don't feel like a naive fool.

I thought of all that today, reading this article from the New York Times:

The situation is imaginary, but the dilemma it illustrates is quite real. A deadly influenza moves across the world from Asia, finally arriving on our shores.
There is no cure, and your doctor tells you that you have a 10 percent chance of dying from it. An effective vaccine is widely available, made from a weakened form of the virus. But it has an unfortunate side effect: there is a 5 percent chance that a patient will die from the less serious form of the flu it can cause.
Would you take the vaccine, or take your chances? What would you have your children do? If you were a doctor, would you tell a patient to get the shot? If you were the head of a large hospital, would you order the vaccine for all patients?
Judging by the numbers alone, there is a clear answer to this hypothetical problem: a person is much better off taking the vaccine. But people do not always arrive at health decisions by applying mathematical models, and in some cases the numbers may be less important than other considerations.
In a new study published in the June issue of the Journal of General Internal Medicine, researchers found that the answer depended on which role the person was asked to assume. Only 48 percent of the participants said they would take the vaccine themselves. But 57 percent said they would give it to their children; 63 percent said that if they were doctors they would give it to patients; and 73 percent said that if they were the medical director of a hospital they would recommend the vaccine for all patients.
The risks were the same for everyone, so there was no logical reason to recommend the vaccine in some situations but not in others. Yet the more distant the patient, the more likely people were to recommend the vaccine.
"Researchers have found these biases before," said Dr. Peter A. Ubel, the study's senior author and a professor of medicine at the University of Michigan.
"People hate the risk of bringing bad things on themselves," Dr. Ubel said, "but a sense of responsibility makes them overcome these instincts to think about what's best for others."

Resolution of the day: if you spend a lot of time worrying about being an idiot, your fear has already come true.

2006-06-13T14:11:00.000-07:00

At the birth of the human world, there was a single tribe on the African savannah. Tiny bands of East African Plains Apes roamed through the dry grass, hunting with the tools they carved themselves out of the local rock. We don't know them, and they did not suspect that we lay in their future, but we think we know one thing: that at one time, everyone in the world could understand each other. When they met to trade women, or goods, or spears, they spoke to the other bands in the ur-tongue that eventually gave us King Lear and Japanese rap songs. Some linguists think that they can guess a few of the words in this primal language. There's something about the thought that draws you in; even if the guesses are wrong, just reading that "Chunga" meant "nose or smell" and "tik" meant finger is enough to make you think, there in your air-conditioned cubicle, that you can feel the sun on your head and the soft grass under your feet and the puffs of dust swirling up between your toes as you pad across the African plain, chattering of ephemeral things, looking ahead only far enough to see a campsite for the night and think of the hunting to be had in the tall grass rolling away from you in every direction towards the far edges of the world.

2006-05-25T21:11:00.000-07:00

How do I explain this . . . the perfection of the peace of driving alone in the dark night . . . the way my mind rejects even the thought of a passenger sitting silently beside me, intruding on my thoughts, even though no one has suggested riding with me. What am I thinking about, anyway? Nothing but the red lights gliding along the road and the dim shadow world lurking at the far edges of my headlights, and the deep black night stretching away forever in every direction, and how distant it all seems from my foot on the pedal and the man on the radio talking about war crimes in Uganda. I am lost in these thoughts that are not thoughts but a being and a silence, and if I am not happy it is because the night is too eternal for happiness; it calls to something deeper inside me that has been waiting to meet it. This moment is perfectly itself--if it were not for the road and the cars and the darkness and the man on the radio, I could not be so serenely sensitive to the distance between myself and the rest of the world. Tomorrow I may long for a passenger to smile at me and change the radio station, but tonight I am by myself, complete.

2006-05-11T12:31:00.000-07:00

On watching our childhood favorites:

Rewatching the show was instant time travel; it hit me like a big muscley Proustian madeleine. Unlike good, innovative cartoons (say, Looney Tunes or The Simpsons), He-Man has little cultural currency—his image doesn't show up on T-shirts or as children's vitamins or on people's back windshields. The show is vacuum-sealed in 1983. The moment I heard its theme music—a trumpety anthem that makes you want to correct your posture and go rescue lost kittens—I felt again, in the most intense way possible, what it was like to be 4 feet tall, devoted to catching grasshoppers, ashamed of my chronically runny nose, and eager to escape from the inscrutably messy adult world into the clean moral lines of Eternia.

Sadly, I can no longer watch He-Man through 6-year-old eyes. The show, it turns out, is not quite the singular artistic triumph I once thought it was. Its creators seem to have spared every expense. It's a badly animated, low-budget scramble of every sci-fi and fantasy franchise that preceded it—Conan the Barbarian, Star Wars, Star Trek, Superman, even The Jetsons. It's set among craggy gothic castles and dramatic stone arches on a generic action-planet called Eternia; the time frame is a kind of medieval future in which battle axes coexist with freeze rays, video screens, flying Jet Skis, and memory-projectors. Plots usually adhere to the Bond formula: Villains take short breaks from marathon sessions of maniacal laughter to hatch the most transparent evil schemes, which He-Man foils while tossing off bons mots like a drunk uncle ("I guess they just don't make energy bows like they used to," he quips to a flustered Trap-Jaw; "Boy, the things people leave lying around," he says wryly while tossing two stunned Fishmen off-screen). The dialogue is tediously expository, written apparently for viewers who have slept through most of the episode: "Sorceress, you used the space portal to bring us here. Thanks!" or "Hurray! The power of Grayskull brought your memory back!"

For a little while, after my most recent breakup, I reveled in Little House on the Prairie. I needed to feel that childish faith that the world was basically a happy place, in which everything, in the end, turns out all right. Ultimately, watching it made me sadder than happier, because it reminded me of that lost faith; and then the silly plots and chronically vapid people started to annoy me. At that point, I turned it off.

But I do like knowing that it is still there . . . that any time I want, I can crawl into that warm eight-year-old womb and rest for a while.

2006-05-11T08:54:00.000-07:00

Shock of the day: I turn on the television to catch the weather report. It's still tuned to the History Channel, and is showing a picture of a Playboy cover on which a smiling woman is covering all the strategic bits with her slender arms.

Announcer: . . her final appearance was in Playboy magazine . . .

[Samantha briefly wonders why the History Channel is profiling a porn model before turning back to hunting through her underwear drawer.]

Announcer: . . . before she was taken apart with blowtorches and sold for scrap.

[Samantha turns back from underwear drawer to gape at the television set. What has America come to?]

Turns out it was a documentary on the Philadelphia experiment; the "she" in question was a ship.

2006-05-10T21:33:00.000-07:00

Odd interludes:

While I was visiting the opposite coast last weekend, I was staring out the window of a vehicle in which my companions and I were travelling, at the grass on the hillsides, which looks nothing like the grass on my coast. The chap sitting next to me asked me what was so captivating.

"The grass," I said. "It's so different from the grass in America . . . "

That same weekend, I was watching one of those futuristic shows that promise to tell you how great everything is going to be in the future. One of the segments was on stem cell treatments, and how they're transplanting people's nasal stem cells into their spine to help them get some function back. As an aside, the narrator noted that this works best on people between the ages of 18 and 35, when growth is faster.

"Wow," thought I, "I'd better hurry up and have a spinal cord injury soon . . . " as if it were only a matter of time, and best gotten out of the way quickly. I frequently have the same reaction watching cop shows . . . thinking how awful it will be to be in prison . . . as if I might suddenly committ a felony without knowing it.

The next thing is not a funny thing I said, but just frustration. I'm kind of scientifically illiterate, and the other night I was out with a friend who's a physicist. A propos of absolutely nothing, I asked him whether gas giant Jupiter was really, you know, gaseous, and if so, why? The answer, apparently, is that there's a lot of helium and hydrogen out Jupiter way, not so much of anything else.

Though he explained that there might be a liquid, or even a solid, core there, perhaps the size of the earth. When will we know? I asked. Can we send a probe there?

Apparently not. It's sort of like the inside of the earth--at this point we can't even imagine a material that we could make a probe out of that wouldn't immediately melt in the mantle. Same thing with Jupiter: too much gravity, pressure and heat. The only hope is that a big, big meteor or something will hit the core and send up a plume we can test. Pretty damn unlikely.

That really bothers me. I think I basically operate on the assumption that eventually people will know everything--or at least, everything worth knowing. But according to C., we just may never know what the core of Jupiter, or for that matter the core of earth, actually looks like. They're forever beyond our reach. I love the fact that there are mysteries in the world . . . but I want to think that they are capable of being solved. I don't want mysteries that stay inscrutable, things that even my super-genius descendants can never see.

Easier, maybe, to be a primitive tribesman, confident that there was someone in charge who knew what was going on--and would tell you, if you sacrificed enough goats.

2006-05-06T22:29:00.000-07:00

I struggle, you know, with this question of how much I am entitled to. Can I have new clothes, merely because they make me feel pretty, when there are starving families in Africa? Am I allowed to put 15% of my income in my 401(k)? Pay down my student loans? Move to a bigger place because I'm awfully crowded? Buy an SUV, a 5,000 square foot house, and a boat?

Is writing a novel as high a calling as feeding the starving, healing the sick?

Can I justly pursue my own happiness, when others are miserable? And realistically, wouldn't I be pretty much as happy living on drastically less, as long as I didn't compare myself to others? Aside from health care, vacation, and sociopolitical changes, are we really any happier than our ancestors of 100 years ago? And what does that say about the real value of my new microwave?

Here's one possible answer to those questions. I have neither the faith, nor the conviction, to live it. But I admire the purity of intent, the courage to follow one's creed to its inevitable conclusion.

2006-05-01T14:20:00.000-07:00

Smile.

Einstein, it is said, was once asked by a layperson to explain how radio works.

"Well," he said, "first I need to explain the telegraph. The telegraph is like a giant cat. The cat's head might be in New York, and the cat's tail in London. You pull on the tail in London, and the cat meows in New York. That's the telegraph.

"The radio is just like that. Only there's no cat."

2006-05-01T12:20:00.000-07:00

Sigh. Why can't we live in a world where it is forever May?

2006-04-24T14:24:00.000-07:00

Lovely Slate article today about London's sewers:

(That's why you read this blog, isn't it? Because it's the only place in the world that you can find the words "lovely" and "sewers" in the same sentence . . . of course, to be honest, you don't read this blog, do you? I mean, a few of you do . . . but most of you just click through from some random link and then go away . . . cosmic windowshoppers, you are. But I still miss you when you're gone.)

The street is quiet, and so are the men, in the manner of small groups of colleagues used to working together who must suddenly look after an outsider. So, they don't say much when, as I stand in the dressing compartment of the white Thames Water van (equipped with a microwave, a television, a basin, and lots of soap), they hand me thick woolen socks, white paper coveralls, crotch-high waders with tungsten soles (because tungsten grips but doesn't spark), a heavy belt holding an emergency breathing apparatus called a turtle (after the shape of its container), oversized rubber gloves, and a hard hat and miner's light. These are my lines of defense against hepatitis, rabies, methane, and other sewer scourges. But the men are my best defense, because they're the experts. Some have been working in the sewers for decades. They know them intimately. But with such a vast network, the men can't know every one. Some sewers haven't been visited for 15 years.
This one is the famous Fleet, the old river that gave Fleet Street its name; eventually it became an open sewer and then, built over with brick, an enclosed one. My guide for the night, an engaging sewer veteran named Rob, goes down the ladder first. The Fleet flow has been temporarily diverted to ease our entry, but I'm nervous, nonetheless, and I haul my legs inelegantly onto the ladder before descending slowly, my feet heavy with their tungsten load, waiting for the smell to hit me. It doesn't. People expect sewers to smell like their toilets, says Rob—like 3 million toilets—but the water content is rarely less than 90 percent, which dilutes most of the stink. At the bottom of the ladder, there is no stench, just a smell of damp and mustiness and the sight of bricks, bricks, and more bricks, stretching away in both directions for miles on end.

There's something delicious and shadowy about all that history, isn't there, a faint whiff of the archaic oozing out of that brick. . . . One day, a river running through a field, with birds hopping among the rushes to pluck juicy worms and waterbugs out of the damp ground . . . then a street running along the riverbank, crowded with houses and carts and piles of refuse, and dirty children playing in the water, a mother shouting over the rush of the river to come home and get your dinner before I come out there and get you . . . and then a bricked in sewer and all those ladies standing over it in their guaranteed-rustproof corsets and acres of fabric cascading over their bustles, the plumes on their hats jerking this way and that as they nod their heads to each other and admire how modern it all is.

Amazing, too, to think how a simple item like a sewer, something that we not only don't think about but don't want to think about, improves our daily lives, quietly going about its duties despite our distaste:

No one on the five-strong team knows how old this section is, but they don't think it's one of Bazalgette's. They say his name with respect, for Joseph Bazalgette is still the emperor of London's sewers, even though 150 years have passed since he was tasked with revolutionizing them, thus ridding the city of cholera and foul smells. In 1858, the amount of sewage discharged into the Thames was so great that the curtains in the Houses of Parliament, located right on the river's banks, had to be soaked in chlorine to mask the odor. The Great Stink, as it became known, catalyzed change, and Bazalgette spent 16 years and 318 million bricks building a vast network of interceptor sewers that carried London's waste away from its center to be dumped in the river farther east.

2006-04-24T11:40:00.000-07:00

The mind boggles.

The Bootes void is

the largest known region of empty space in the observable universe. Because it is so large, it is sometimes referred to as a supervoid. The void is roughly spherical and has a diameter of approximately 75 megaparsecs, or 250 million light-years, which is about 2% the diameter of the entire observable universe(!)

I am trying to wrap my brain around it, and my puny little collection of gray cells keeps saying "So what? Like, 7th Heaven is on."

Take the empty space between my window and the window in the next building, and double it, so that that building is 500 yards away and I can no longer see that its bored occupant is playing Spider Solitaire while he talks on the phone.

Double it again, so that his window is only a shiny rectangle among hundreds of others.

Double it still again, until his building is a dot on the hills . . .

And again, so the hill is a shallow swelling against the river . . .

Again, so that the river is a razor thin-strip cutting through a valley . . .

Again, so that the valley disappears into the wriggling contours of the land . . .

And again, so that all the edges of the land, all the hills and valleys and houses are blurred into a fuzzy flat alikeness, green-grey in the spring sun . . .

And again, so that it is all a pinpoint on the horizon . . .

And again, until you are out in space, peering at the globe through your viewport . . .

And again, so that the globe is tiny . . . a moonlet against the vast blackness of space

And again, until the sun itself is a cold, far star, just a little bit brighter than the speckles of light scattered across the oceanic void . . .

And yet you would still have to double it again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and still again, to even begin to imagine how big the Bootes void is.

The human brain is not made to cope with infinity . . . one of the reasons I think we keep asking ourselves where it all comes from. We are not so constructed as to actually believe

As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end . . .

We need a start and a finish, a ying and a yang, an action and reaction. We need limits.

What does contemplating the size of the void lead us to conclude?

First is the logarithmic scale of human awe, which seems to be built into our brains, and is arguably a common feature in any brain built by evolution and natural selection. The Boötes Void is not that many times more impressive, subjectively, than a cave so large you can fly a helicopter around inside. Both are big, awe-inspiring, and amazing. Despite this, most people would be more impressed by the big cave, because it’s something that we can more easily imagine ourselves interacting with, something that has features similar to those we run across on a daily basis - rocks, ceilings, walls, passageways, etc. But even if you added together every cave on every planet in the universe, you’d still fall many orders of magnitude shy of the volume of that void of all voids.

It might be possible to one day build a mind that experiences a linear increase in awe with every linear increase in size, for any given void or chasm. To such a mind, a 20 cubic meter hole would be twice as impressive as a 10 cubic meter hole. I can only assume that contemplating the Boötes Void would cause this mind to self-destruct.

2006-04-23T20:09:00.000-07:00

Some day I will write a short story about the kind of people who enjoy anticipating crises that never materialize--and what happens when a crisis actually occurs. We all know those people, the ones whose agonizing anticipation of future catastrophes obviously gives them more pleasure than pain. Somedays I think I'm one of them, since I can't stop worrying--but I don't think I enjoy my worries the way, say, my ex-roommate did.

I've never had any of the crises I agonized about actually occur, however; those crises that have actually happened to me have been far too frightening to worry about. Something to analyze in myself.

Question of the day: can you be a good writer without being excessively introspective?

2006-04-23T18:26:00.000-07:00

A line I will someday write about someone . . . maybe Velvet . . .

"I had long known that she lived in a world of colors so bright they stung her eyes, and ever-deepening shadows."

2006-04-23T17:33:00.000-07:00

Advertising notes:

I'm visiting my sister, and we're watching television, and there are commercials on for Southern Comfort. These commercials show people ordering it in bars--"SoCo and Lime, please" "SoCo Rocks!" "Bartender, a SoCo sour for my girl!"

Has anyone in the history of the planet ever walked into a bar and ordered anything with SoCo in it, unless they had a free coupon? SoCo is like St. Joseph's Baby Bourbon--who drinks it after the age of twenty?

Just askin . . .

I find the new Doublemint ads subtly creepy, like a 1950's town in a horror movie that eventually turns out to be peopled by psychotic killer vegetables from another planet. But there's also something weirdly appealing about them. I think it might be like that guy who asks you out seventeen times and you finally agree to go to a movie just so he'll stop calling and next thing you know, you've been going out for six months and you're wondering how your first name sounds with his surname?

I was going to blog about another ad, one that I really, really like . . . actually a series of ads . . . except that I find I can't remember what ads those are. But if I remember, I'll tell you!

2006-04-23T16:11:00.000-07:00

Joke of the day: I'm having a baby! 14 pounds, 1 ounce . . . I'd better start with the abdominizer right now . . .

2006-04-23T14:41:00.000-07:00

Thought for the day, from David Brooks' On Paradise Drive:

If God is omnipotent, omniscient, and good, why does He allow morons to succeed? One notices this phenomenon constantly; the most empty-headed, asinine, individuals float helium-like ever higher into the firmament of success, from plum post to plum post, without ever demonstrating extraordinary talent, original intelligence, or even a noteworthy grasp of the matters at hand. Often they have pleasant faces and a certain animal magnetism, and their ascent seems to be accelerated by the fact that they are not burdened by the weight of an interesting personality. THey've somehow acquired the reputation as One Who is Chosen, so when leadership jobs open up and selection committees meet, they are called.

Their unbearable lightness is pleasing to the selectors, who either want somebody safe and manipualable or are themselves memebrs in teh community of the eminently vapid. So the zero-gravity hero ascends one more level in his merit-free rise to greatness, where he will be in a position to promote other empty eminentoes, who will promote still more hollow leaders, to that gradually, day by day, they will all find themselves in a golden circle of high-cheekboned innocuousness--girded on left and right by a band of pleasing, unoriginal, stress-free, talentless paragons radiating benign self-satisfaction upon another without end. Amen.

This phenomenon represents a gaping flaw in the structure of the universe. It is a cosmic screw-up in teh Divine Plan. How in this universe can it be that htose who have a critical sensibility roughly equivalent to a golden retriever's, and who are so manifestly spiritually inferior to oneself, nonetheless manage to rise and rise? What's galling is not the undeserving success of this person, nor that he drives around in a Porche Boxster, nor that he lives with his coldly gracious wife and her buttery-chunks hair and their blandly perfect and effortlessly slender children on an immaculately manicured horse farm with a helipad. No, the material trappings of success are not what gall. Maybe you wouldn't want such niceties even if you could afford them.

THe infuriating thing is that he is not even aware of his shortcomings. Vapidity is the one character flaw that comes with its own missile defense system. The vapid person by definition does not possess the mental wherewithal to be aware of his own vapidity. This person has a blessed imperviousness, a milk-and-honey obliviousness to the meagerness of his actual merit. It has occurred to him that he is not the richest, the fullest, the deepest emblem of human accomplishment and worthiness. His conscience, like everything else around him, is clean.

Nine times out of ten, the universe is structured in such a way that he is never forced to come face-to-face with his true self. He is born to grace, grows up in the land of charm, is nurtured in the fraternity of self-confidence, floats up through the career of plush paneling, fund raising networks, and golf resorts, rests in teh paradise of garulous companionship, and retires at long last to Aspen, where he finally dies of happiness. The reckoning never comes! THe moment o ftruth is avoided. Moreover, he is untouchable by the likes of you. You could scream tirades at him , write long essays denouncing his hollowness, construct mathematical forumale proving his medicrity. He would whiz by in his golf cart to play out ht eback nine, and you'd be left spluttering into the void. Look at his resume! Look at his impressive shoulders, graying temples, slender nose, and perfectly trimmed nails. And then look at you in your scuffed shoes, spluttering.

I'm not sure I agree with this. Maybe I'm naive, or maybe I just don't have enough exposure to upper management . . . but I feel like people who make it there must do something better than I do. Maybe vapidity is a skill?

What do y'all thing? Is David Brooks onto something?

2006-04-23T14:40:00.000-07:00

I seem to have a few readers now . . . not a lot, but a couple, anyway.

Why do y'all read it? What makes you come back?

Speak to me, please . ..

2006-04-16T14:37:00.000-07:00

I'm against the death penalty anyway, so it's not like I had some kind of epiphany, but this site seemed to make it a lot more real to me. It's a catalogue of last meal requests from men who've been executed.

Choosing a meal is such a banal, yet utterly personal and singular thing. It makes it impossible not to confront the fact that we are snuffing out a human life, which, however evil, can never be replaced. We are destroying the universe inside their head, as large as the universe itself, which only, after all, exists in ours.

If I were choosing a last meal, I would have naan, and beef stroganoff, and lemon tart, and raspberry pie. But only if my mother could cater it. What about you? What would you want to eat, if you knew it was going to be your last meal on earth?

2006-04-16T14:27:00.000-07:00

This morning I woke up and listened to churchbells playing the alleluia. Christ is risen, they sang, in such heartfelt tones that even an atheist could not help but be glad. Then I watched some fastening bible-themed documentaries while I got ready for a little brunch--one on the location of the garden of eden, another on the quest for the true cross.

Whether or not you believe, it's such a happy day here, with life bursting out of its winter hiding places and the warm sun bathing everything in a lovely, lovely light. It makes you want to dare great things . . . sometime a little bit later though, because it's so pleasant right here, drowsing in the sun. It makes you want to be happy, forever and ever, and have the rest of the world be happy too.

And this quote from William Sloan Coffin (whom my mother followed slavishly, good liberal that she is) caught my eye:

If you love the good, you must hate evil; or else you are sentimental. But if you hate evil more than you love the good, you become a damn good hater! And the world has enough of that kind of activist.

Whether or not you believe we can conquer death, we can conquer the stench of death--the seductive glamor of hatred and rage. We can renounce them not merely by seeking to stamp them out, but by refusing to give into their charms. We can be the beauty we want to see in the world.

Happy easter.

2006-04-14T14:53:00.000-07:00

Benjamin Franklin's epitaph:

The body of
Benjamin Franklin
Printer
like the covering
of an old book
its contents torn out
and stript of its lettering
and gilding
lies here, food for worms;
but the work
shall not be lost,
it will (as he believed)
appear once more,
in a new and more beautiful edition
corrected and amended
by the author.

2006-04-14T14:09:00.000-07:00

Palestineblogging of the day, from City of Brass:

They don't make leaders in [the David Ben-Gurion] mold anymore. I came across this amazing quote of his just now:

'I don't understand your optimism. Why should the Arabs make peace? If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it's true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that? They may perhaps forget in one or two generations' time, but for the moment there is no chance. So it's simple: we have to stay strong and maintain a powerful army. Our whole policy is there. Otherwise the Arabs will wipe us out... I'll be seventy years old soon... if you asked me whether I shall die and be buried in a Jewish State I would tell you Yes; in ten years, fifteen years, I believe there will still be a Jewish State. But ask me whether my son Amos, who will be fifty at the end of this year, has a chance of dying and being buried in a Jewish State, and I would answer: fifty-fifty'. In conversation with Nahum Goldmann, in 1956; as quoted in The Jewish Paradox: A personal memoir (1978) by Nahum Goldmann
Quite a lot to unpack from that!

No, I'm not going to unpack it for you . . . you'll have to go read it yourself.

2006-04-12T08:34:00.000-07:00

So it's looking less and less likely that the Duke lacrosse team did what they were accused of. I don't know that they're innocent--but I do know that their accuser has some serious credibility problems. Some of the lacrosse players are clearly vile human beings, but there seems to be decreasing reason to believe that they are also rapists.

I've been following the coverage at left-wing feminist blog Amptoons, and one of the things I've been wondering about is this: are there special categories of rape for sex workers?

Not that I think that sex workers can't be raped . . . sadly, I think they're probably more likely to be raped than most women, because they spend a lot of time alone with strange men, and some of those men no doubt believe that it's okay to rape a prostitute. One could hope that the fact that they have sex with a lot of strange men gives them some sort of psychological shield from rape . . . making it emotionally more like simple assault . . . but I don't know that that's true, and it wouldn't matter in terms of assessing the moral and legal status of the act: forcing a woman to have sex who doesn't want to have sex is rape.

But what about having sex with a hooker and then refusing to pay . . . cancelling your credit card payment, or just refusing to hand over? Is that rape (since you went in intending to have sex under conditions that she wouldn't consent to), or just fraud? If you force her to give you the money back afterwards, is that rape, or just robbery?

But then, if it is rape, is it rape for a man to have sex with a woman whom he has misled into believing that he wants to date her? How about a woman (or a man) who has deliberately fucked up their birth control?

Are these stupid questions? Or am I onto something?

2006-04-11T20:20:00.000-07:00

Kieran Healy blogs his experience with trying to read a Dan Brown book on a plane:

I mean, can you believe this shit:

Descending from the chopper in her khaki shorts and white sleeveless top, Vittoria Vetra looked nothing like the bookish physicist he had expected. Lithe and graceful, she was tall with chestnut skin and long black hair that swirled in the backwind of the rotors. Her face was unmistakably Italian—not iverly beautiful, but possessing full, earthy features that even at twenty yards seemed to exude raw sensuality. As the air currents buffeted her body, her clothes clung, accentuating her slender torso and small breasts.
“Ms Vetra is a woman of tremendous personal strength,” Kohler said … “She spends months working in dangerous ecological systems. She is a strict vegetarian and CERN’s resident guru of Hatha yoga.” …She turned to Langdon, holding out a slender hand. “My name is Vittoria Vetra. You’re from Interpol, I assume?” Langdon took her hand, momentarily spellbound by the depth of her watery gaze.

I imagine it was the air currents from the chopper that were making her eyes water. My own eyes were doing the same by this point. I didn’t get much further, but I suppose it was worth it for the image of Harvard (the protagonist is “professor of religious iconology” there) and CERN (much like Dr Evil’s Island, apparently, except for being in Switzerland).

I had a very similar experience with Tim LaHaye's Left Behind, which I purchased in the Dallas Airport on the theory that millions of readers couldn't be wrong. Well, studies disproving a theory are just as important to the advancement of science as those that prove one. Consider the opening:

Rayford Steele's mind was on a woman he had never touched. With his fully loaded 747 on autopilot above the Atlantic en route to a 6 am landing at Heathrow, Rayford has pushed from his mind thoughts of his family.

Over spring break he would spend time with his wife and twelve year old son. Their daughter would be home from college, too. But for now, with his first officer dozing, Rayford imagined Hattie Durham's smile and looked forward to their next meeting.

Hattie was Rayford's senior flight attendant. He hadn't seen her in more than an hour.

Rayford used to look forward to getting home to his wife. Irene was attractive and vivacious enough, even at forty. But lately he had found himself repelled by her obsession with religion. It was all she could talk about.

All that exposition in four tiny paragraphs! It's like, instead of writing the novel, he just got your scattererbrained great aunt, the one who always gets stories wrong, to narrate the plot to you.

It's not because the novel's religious; if I can enjoy Harry Potter books, there's no reason I can't willingly suspend my disbelief in Armageddon. It's because the writing is so soul-shatteringly awful. There's no reason it has to be--the search for good, transcendance, gnosis is one of the most powerful human experiences there is, and it's shamefully neglected in modern literature. A crisis of faith, a battle with demons, a longing for God . . . these things should make a cracking good novel. Tony Woodlief, devout Christian, writes one of my very favourite blogs.

So how come the Christian book industry seems to be stuck somewhere below the quality of your better Harlequin romances?

It makes me want to write my own Christian novel, just to prove it can be done well.

And to be fair, it does make me want to pray. Lord, please do not let me ever write like that.

2006-04-04T21:57:00.000-07:00

Titter of the day:

In my spare time I have been attempting to construct an Eskimo sentence in my basement, such as will be suitable for the season. I have not get it perfected yet, but it is coming along pretty well, and with a little work it might pass for the genuine article. So far I have: kaniktshaq moritlkatsio atsuniartoq.

When completed, this sentence will proclaim: "Look at all this freaking snow." At present it means: "Observe the snow. It fornicates."

2006-03-31T14:09:00.000-08:00

Sigh. The last post was supposed to be about this extremely eloquent piece by Timothy Burke on the Duke rape case. The details of the case are so far fuzzy, but it seems pretty well confirmed that some of the drunk lacrosse players did, at the very least, say something really repulsive to the (black) strippers they'd hired, who left in a hurry after they were (allegedly) subjected to nasty racial comments and other general obnoxiousness. Specifically, the neighbours heard one of the boys shout "Thank your grandpa for my cotton shirt."

What the fuck? I mean, what the fucking fuck? Did I just dream that it was the 21st century?

Says Burke:

I would be willing to wager a good deal that if the sick little punk who said those words was sitting in a course on American history at Duke and was asked to stand up and provide a narrative of the history of slavery, emancipation, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, he would profess ignorance, or provide a kind of respectable potted Cliff Notes version sufficient to pass the US History AP but no more. Maybe his professed ignorance would be relatively genuine, or maybe it would be the suppression of the story he thinks he knows but also knows he cannot tell, because it’s not real or accurate history, only a shambles of racist tropes. In any event, he didn’t live it, not any of it, not even the events of the last fifty years which brought that history into the central consciousness of American national identity: the struggle for civil rights and racial justice, the cultural tableau of mainstream historical programs like “Roots” or “The Civil War”, the culture war of the eighties and early nineties and its address to race.

Where does that come from, then, that ability to shout in drunken, racist, misogynist rage, with the intent to deliver maximum pain to another human, “Thank your grandpa for my cotton shirt”? It doesn’t come from direct experience, likely doesn’t come from direct ideological or dogmatic indoctrination, it doesn’t come from the formal study of history or even traceable dissemination of historical representations in particular texts.

I want to say that he's just some sicko. But I don't know that that's true. By which, I don't just mean that I don't know the particulars of the case, or anything about the boy who shouted the slur--which is true, for he may never be identified. I mean that I can search my heart and find a possible motivation lurking there.

That's not some "we are all racist" thing. I've never shouted racial epithets; I've never thought anything remotely close to "thank your grandpa for my cotton shirt", and I think that in general I'm about as free of racial prejudice as it is possible to be when working with flawed human material.

But I've always thought that there are two kinds of crime: bad crimes, which you can imagine yourself committing in some alternate universe; and heinous crimes, which you just can't. Like, I can picture myself being a poor teenager who shoots some clerk in the process of holding up a liquor store. The motivation--money and fear--is one that I basically understand. On the other hand, I can't ever picture kidnapping and killing a little girl. I think that if there is a death penalty, it should be reserved for crimes in the second category.

I can't picture myself shouting racial slurs at a stripper. But I can think of one reason he did it which isn't exactly racism: the thrill of saying, or doing, something forbidden. I get a charge out of talking dirty in bed, for example; it gives me a sense of transgressing who I normally am.

And if who you normally are is a polite white boy who is expected not to make racial comments, then there has to be a thrill not just in saying those things, but in being seen to say them; in getting your peer group to ratify something you know is wrong. It's why teenage girls shoplift.

I'm not trying to excuse the little jerk at all--the fact that something gives you an illicit thrill is no reason at all to say things that are morally reprehensible and personally hurtful. I'm just trying to picture why he did it.

Boys used to get a thrill from writing dirty words on bathroom walls. Now that the words are no longer so powerful, they look for something with more oompf. And racism has replaced smut as the one thing that a polite person Must Never Say. So, maybe, he said it, just to see what it felt like.

2006-03-31T13:25:00.000-08:00

I suddenly feel as if I'm writing a great deal about race and class, dominance and ideology. Or perhaps I'm not writing very much about it at all (except for Palestine-blogging), but I'm certainly thinking about it a great deal. Which is odd, because I'm basically your standard-issue middle-class white girl, with very little patience for radical feminists or anyone else who wants to spend all their time scrutinizing every word, action and outcome for the dark hand of the dominant paradigm.

A few weeks ago I went to see this guy talk about his new book. He's a gay law professor at Yale, and his book is an argument against the pressure that members of minorities experience to conform--not to deny who they are, but to tone it down so that it doesn't make members of the majority uncomfortable.

I spent a lot of the talk disagreeing with him in my head . . . not about the fact that it happens, but about the meaning of it. He has a standard anecdote, which he used in both the talk and the op-ed that got me to go to the talk. Here it is, from the New York Times Magazin e:

When I began teaching at Yale Law School in 1998, a friend spoke to me frankly. "You'll have a better chance at tenure," he said, "if you're a homosexual professional than if you're a professional homosexual." Out of the closet for six years at the time, I knew what he meant. To be a "homosexual professional" was to be a professor of constitutional law who "happened" to be gay. To be a "professional homosexual" was to be a gay professor who made gay rights his work. Others echoed the sentiment in less elegant formulations. Be gay, my world seemed to say. Be openly gay, if you want. But don't flaunt.
I didn't experience the advice as antigay. The law school is a vigorously tolerant place, embedded in a university famous for its gay student population. (As the undergraduate jingle goes: "One in four, maybe more/One in three, maybe me/One in two, maybe you.") I took my colleague's words as generic counsel to leave my personal life at home. I could see that research related to one's identity - referred to in the academy as "mesearch" - could raise legitimate questions about scholarly objectivity.
I also saw others playing down their outsider identities to blend into the mainstream. Female colleagues confided that they would avoid references to their children at work, lest they be seen as mothers first and scholars second. Conservative students asked for advice about how open they could be about their politics without suffering repercussions at some imagined future confirmation hearing. A religious student said he feared coming out as a believer, as he thought his intellect would be placed on a 25 percent discount. Many of us, it seemed, had to work our identities as well as our jobs.
It wasn't long before I found myself resisting the demand to conform. What bothered me was not that I had to engage in straight-acting behavior, much of which felt natural to me. What bothered me was the felt need to mute my passion for gay subjects, people, culture. At a time when the law was transforming gay rights, it seemed ludicrous not to suit up and get in the game.

The fact is, most of us are not interested in hearing about things that don't really pertain to us. I don't really want to hear my colleagues talk endlessly about their gay rights work, but then I also don't really want to hear them talk endlessly about their cats or their new lawnmower. Yet somehow not being interested in race issues is always a signal of being a bad human being, rather than a signal of being a normal human being with a limited attention span and a healthy dose of self-interest.

I was the last questioner at the talk, and (she said, patting herself smugly on the back) afterwards he came up to tell me that I'd asked a really good question. It started with the issue of "reverse covering"--when members of the dominant group, or the minority group, pressure people to conform to a stereotype, as when managers penalize "unfeminine" women, or black kids ostracize academically motivated peers for "acting white". This, everyone at the talk agreed, was bad.

But surely, I asked, having a culture is a question of exclusion, as well as inclusion: an Orthodox Jew is observant because he prays every morning, but also because he does not eat pork. Culture is only culture to the extent that it says not only "these are the things we do", but also "these are the things we don't do", and part of that culture is punishing people who transgress those rules. Your mother cries if she finds treif in your cupboards; people frown at you on the bus if you spit on the floor.

How, I asked, can any subgroup maintain their culture if they don't set standards for what they allow, and enforce them on members who want to be part of the group? And, maybe more importantly, how can America have a shared culture if we are not allowed to say that there are some things Americans don't do?

His answer wasn't very satisfactory, by which I conclude that it was a very good question indeed. ;-)

But then a couple of days ago, while I was taking a shower, I suddenly wondered about it from a more subjective, "isn't this ridiculous?" kind of standpoint. Isn't it ridiculous that we don't want black businesswomen to wear cornrows? Why would clients possibly care? Isn't it ridiculous, in fact, that many companies are unable to assess the quality of a man's work unless he first dons a thin piece of printed silk around his neck, knotting it in such a way that a long tail flaps down nearly to his waistband? If aliens could see this, wouldn't they point and laugh?

Why do we need such elaborate signals to say "I'm one of you"? Shouldn't the fact that they're human, and employed by your accounting firm, be enough?

I know that it isn't enough, and that volumes have been written on this sort of thing by sociologists and anthropologists and many other people smarter than me. But it was kind of like one of those moments where you reread a word once too many times, and it suddenly sounds ridiculous and foreign to you. There you sit thinking "How could we possibly have a dumb-sounding word like 'knock' in the English language?"--even though you know you've said the word, and read the word, a hundred times before, and it always seemed just fine to you.

Is this the sort of conformism I want to support? Supporting something just because it is an evolutionary fact confuses "is" with "ought". But can I avoid supporting it? Is it really possible to stop judging people by their clothes?

2006-03-30T19:04:00.000-08:00

Now that there's no more curling, another form of reality television has caught my eye: American Inventor, which is basically American Idol for people who have products they think will take America by storm. The judges are a venture capitalist, a marketer, an engineer, and a woman who specializes in helping women bring products to market.

I love watching it because these people are crazy. Even the ones who have made it into the contest are crazy, like the handyman who sold his house in order to sink everything into a device to fill sandbags.

Some of them are crazy in a way that makes me sad, wasting their lives pursuing something that seems obviously doomed. But then there are the guys like the sandbag guy . . . crazy in a way that might just make the world a little better. The first primate who climbed down out of the trees and decided to sample life on the savannah was crazy too.

Favorite quote so far comes from the engineer/inventor, viewing yet another walking stick aimed at fending off assault (an astonishing number of people seem to think that Americans are just longing to swagger around urban areas like Fred Astaire):

"I've turned down a lot of sticks. And I'm going to turn this one down, too."

2006-03-29T16:41:00.000-08:00

Spring is finally in the air, and all the light of the universe seems to be singing in my bones. Just a few days ago, the dog and I found the first daffodils of spring peeking wanly out from behind a rock, and now the yellow blooms are unfurled everywhere. The beast and I sat on the rocks in the park this weekend with a book for me, and a stick for him, but the sky was too blue to read; I just lay back with my head between his paws, watching his head silhouetted against that vast cloudless expanse. The busy street that I live on was only a few hundred feet from us, but somehow it was like being in the eye of the hurricane . . . all the noise and activity seemed hushed and very far away.

Then today, we found the first buds on the trees . . . soon we'll be surrounded by green once again.

Spring is here, and I'm so full of it that I can barely sit still . . . I want to go dancing and get drunk and learn to parasail and fall in love. Instead I have to sit at my desk and file reports and agonize about my upcoming speech, even though the new season is reverberating in the molecules of air I breathe, trying to jar me out of my seat and into the open.

But spring is here, and the sap is rising in my veins, and I am happy.

2006-03-24T06:53:00.000-08:00

Quote of the day:

The essence of tyranny is the denial of complexity.

~Michael Moore Hates America

2006-03-23T09:59:00.001-08:00

We've an important announcement due at 10 am today at my company . . . so important that no one's doing any work. They're wandering up and down the halls, asking each other if they've heard . . . staring hard at that secretary (you know the one) who is always first with any bit of gossip . . . running out for breakfast to fortify themselves for the extended discussion session that will undoubtedly commence as soon as the announcement comes.

The funniest thing to me is the way that every action takes on a certain significance. Will I have been eating this orange when I heard the news? What about this grape? How about talking on the phone with my extra-tiresome supplier? And how every noise, from a dropped stapler to a ringing phone, draws crowds to gape at it as if it were a seven-car pileup.

2006-03-23T09:59:00.000-08:00

2006-03-23T08:15:00.000-08:00

The other day, I was instant messaging a friend who lives in Boston, and I realized, "Hey, I'm in the future!" Not just someone's future, but my future.

By which I mean, not that I have laugh lines around my eyes, and a considerably more womanly figure than I had in high school. All that is (sadly) true. But what grabs me is imagining myself trying to describe the world I live in now to that high school girl . . . that gawky creature with the permed hair, the pegged jeans, the penny loafers worn without socks, the argyle sweater with its sleeves pushed up to the elbows, and the sullen-yet-anxious expression seizing her face as she contemplated the quadratic equation on the board. That was when the fax machine was new, and push-button telephones were a novelty, cell phones were a suitcase-sized luxury for robber barons in movies, and we'd just bought our first VCR rather than renting one from the video store for special occasions. To her, the idea that I could type merrily away, chatting with a friend, in between accessing zillions of gigabytes of data off a worldwide network, would have been something out of a science fiction story.

I am finally old enough to appreciate technological progress emotionally. (And I'm not sure I'm happy about that).

But think how much more marvellous this must have seemed:

. . . for now let me concentrate on the desire of artists to document their interpretations for posterity, which is almost as old as the invention of a means of doing so—that's why we call records records—and which is, I think, perfectly understandable, if not always forgivable. When Adelina Patti heard the playback of her first 78, she exclaimed, "Ah, my God! Now I understand why I am Patti! Oh, yes! What a voice! What an artist! I understand everything!" I doubt anyone since then has responded quite so effusively to her records (she made them when she was sixty-two years old, a bit late in the game for a coloratura), but it's important to remember that they date from 1905, prior to which time the most celebrated soprano of the nineteenth century had never before heard the sound of her own voice. Being a diva, Madame Patti no doubt instantly took it for granted that opera buffs as yet unborn would want to hear it, too, and sure enough, the old girl was right.

I find that a little funny, because my voice sounds so much better to me in my head than it does when I hear myself singing on tape . . . but it reminds me that we live in a magical future of plenty and wonder. Our future . . . and all those people behind us who never watched a DVD or heard their own voice. Pretty amazing.

2006-03-21T11:43:00.000-08:00

I didn't know that CS Lewis had it in him:

She’s the sort of woman who lives for others—you can always tell the others by their hunted expression.

2006-03-21T04:33:00.000-08:00

Sort of related to the last post is this post from Eve Tushnet on Control Room:

. . . all I want to say is, Shouldn't this have been a story about Arabs, rather than another story about an American, again, still, some more?

This is a problem in tons of newspaper movies really. The Paper does this--the innocent black kids are treated as a macguffin to motivate changes in white characters' lives, not as individuals in their own rights. His Girl Friday does this with the death-penalty plot. I guess Control Room flips the formula by making the journalists the people who exist only to catalyze changes in important white people. ...She said, snarkily.

2006-03-20T12:08:00.000-08:00

More Palestine blogging . . .

For some reason, once I start Palestine blogging, I can never stop with just one post. It's like peanuts, or something.

Anyway, a colleague just came back from a business-related tour of Israel.

Naturally, we gathered around the water cooler to see his pictures, ask him if he's ever seen The Wall (pardon me, "Security Fence"), and otherwise delve into his experience. But the most interesting thing he said had to do with meeting the mayor of, first, the largest Israeli settlement in the West Bank, which is not the religious-nut-filled kind you found in Gaza, but basically a bedroom community for people who work in Jerusalem . . . as my colleague said, part of Israel's plan to create facts on the ground where there aren't supposed to be any . . . and then the mayor of an Israeli Arab village.

The annoying thing, he said, was that the Arab mayor didn't speak English very well (and my colleague's Arabic is not what it should be) and so they had to rely on the Israeli translator, who kept injecting his own gloss on things. For example, one of the things the mayor said that surprised my colleague was that even if the Palestinian Authority built a successful state in Gaza and the West Bank, almost none of the Israeli Arabs would move there.

"Why not?" asked my colleague, surprised.

"Because they enjoy the security, the peace, the government services . . . " said the Israeli translator.

(. . . the welfare state, said I, drawing on my knowlege of Northern Ireland. Indeed, said my colleague.)

The mayor got annoyed at having an Israeli spin put on all his answers, and broke into (very bad) English.

No, he said, not because of the standard of living. Because this is our land, and if we leave it, the Israelis will take it. And so much of Israel was built by us . . . Tel Aviv was built by our labor. We will never leave it.

This is something I did not know, and would not have suspected, about Arab Israeli sentiment. But it's also interesting because the Israeli translator probably wasn't particularly trying to propagandize for his side . . . it's just that the occupier sees different things from the occupied, the have different things from the have nots. The most devious forms of ignorance are those that seem perfectly logical . . . to us.

2006-03-19T06:23:00.000-08:00

The most reasonable post on Israel/Palestine that I've read in . . . well, maybe ever. From a Zionist, no less. What do I like? The admission that "my side did something wrong, but now we have to work with reality." Of course, that reality unfairly favors the Israelis, but he's right . . . the Israelis now have nowhere to go. Palestinians will not succeed in pushing Israel back into the sea, and it's time to think about building what we can out of the rubble.

I'm not sure I agree with him that a withdrawal to the 1967 borders would mean a withdrawal to pre-1967 international relations. A lot of things have changed--most notably, the Soviet Union is no longer around to help finance proxy wars in the Middle East. Certainly, Arab states, and Arab populations, would continue to be hostile towards a state whose founding they think of as an unjust colonial excercise, in which the brown people got elected to expurgate Europe's guilt about the Holocaust. But the continuing outrages of the occupation do an immense amount to fuel that hostility . . . and even at that, no Arab state has directly attacked Israel in thirty years. While the Arab world may continue to resent the existance of Israel, the resentment might fade to the level that Irish Americans feel about the Six Counties, if it weren't for the fact that Al Jazeera has stories about dead Palestinian children every few weeks. Israel may protest that such actions are necessary for their security, but since the Arabs don't recognize the legitimacy of Israel existance, this is not compelling.

Besides, compensation would go a long way towards diffusing that anger. And if those who support Israel would admit the injustice that the Zionist project did to the Palestinians, compensation might become a reasonable alternative to occupation.

2006-03-16T17:51:00.000-08:00

I'm giving my first real speech in early April. I'm taking over for a friend, who had to drop out, and for over a week now, I've been emailing back and forth, trying to settle on the topic.

Well, now we've settled, and I have to write the damn thing . . . and deliver it in front of an Asperger's lunatic who is known for grilling his speakers on their quantitative data. I'm nervous. But really, really excited, too.

2006-03-16T06:00:00.000-08:00

Robots!

When I was a little girl I read The Door into Summer by Robert Heinlein, which centers around a robot designer who has himself cryogenically frozen for 30 years, and then wakes up to find that the robots he designed have changed the world. Robots clean your house, wash your car, serve your food . . .

In the book, he goes to sleep in 1970 and wakes up in 2000. Where the hell are my robots?

Well, we've got the Roomba. Maybe that's not much . . . but I bet it becomes the first of many. Someday, our children will watch television (or holovision) specials, and they'll gawk at how primitive our first household robots were. "All it did was vacuum the floor!" they'll say in amazement.

Better late than never.

2006-03-15T11:47:00.000-08:00

Today is the 2050th anniversary of Julius Caesar's death. Right now, thanks to the miracle of diffusion, you are probably inhaling a molecule that he expelled with his dying words.

I take comfort in knowing that when he was the same age as me, he was despairing that he had accomplished nothing:

"Do you think I have not just cause to weep, when I consider that Alexander at my age had conquered so many nations, and I have all this time done nothing that is memorable."

Perhaps triumph yet lies ahead . . .

2006-03-10T07:18:00.000-08:00

Wow, that's a really good question. I wonder why I never thought of it. What about sneezing?

2006-03-07T17:14:00.000-08:00

Boy, I sure hope that someday I meet the man special enough to send this to.

2006-03-06T10:03:00.000-08:00

Quote of the day, from a weird source:

Americans never stop thinking of the good things they have not got, Tocqueville wrote. No one could work harder to be happy than Americans, until finally, "Death steps in… and stops him before he has grown tired of this futile pursuit of that complete felicity which always escapes him."

2006-03-03T14:03:00.000-08:00

Quote of the day:

"Clear thinking requires courage rather than intelligence." ~Thomas Szasz

2006-03-02T17:12:00.000-08:00

So as you know from my earlier post, I've been reading We the Living.

I don't know why I'm enjoying it so much. Novels about Soviet Russia are kind of a downer, and this one is no exception. And while I do, as I said, enjoy Ayn Rand novels, I haven't gotten this wrapped up in one since I was in high school.

I should explain that I've already read the book. I've always loved going back and rereading books I enjoyed before . . . it's like slipping into your favorite pair of comfy old jeans.

And that's part of why I'm enjoying the book. It's like being eighteen again, swept up in that stark, sweeping story, picturing myself in heroic defiance of the Soviet boot. But now it's a little bittersweet, because I know that I'm just not a very defiant person. If I am ever confronted with oppression, despite my political convictions it will take mental discipline and an iron will to stand against . . . not just the state, but all the people around me that I want to agree with. It is only my inherent suspicion of groups agreeing with each other that could save me.

Anyway, that's not the only reason I'm enjoying it. There's something about the passion of it that seems to be reaching into my soul right now. I hurry down the gray winter streets, my body shivering in my thin coat and my boots slipping on the slush, and I am a little glad for my coldness, because it makes me feel for a moment like Kira rushing through the streets of Leningrad. All the life in the book is thrown into sharp relief, and I feel like a little high drama these days. It makes you feel like even if everything turns out sad, it's all right, as long as one has taken a heroic stand for life.

Quote of the day:

The orchestra had stopped playing.

"Andrei, ask them to play soemthing for me. Something I like. I'ts called the 'Song of Broken Glass'."

He watched her as the music burst out again, splattering sparks of sound. Itwas the gayest music he had ever heard; and he had never seen her look sad; but she sat, motionless, staring helplessly, her eyes forlorn, bewildered.

"It's very beautiful, this music, Kira," he whispered, "why do you look like that?"

"It's something I liked . . . long ago . . . when I was a child . . . Andrei, did you ever feel as if something had been promised to you in your childhood, and you look at yourself and you think 'I didn't know, then, that this is what would happen to me'--and it's strange, and funny, and a little sad?"

There's a quote from the bible: "Boast not thyself of tomorrow, for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth" (Proverbs 27:1). For some reason, while I was walking down the street today, thinking about the book, I thought of the Great Depression and 9/11. I mean, imagine you were a guy opening a little business--a grocery store, say--in 1927. You lie awake at night worrying, planning for every contingency, mapping out everything that could possibly go wrong, and developing a contingency plan for it.

Then the stock market crashes, and the banks crash, and the government utterly fucks up its economic policy, which causes the stock market crash to turn into maybe the worst economic disaster in American history. And you lose your business anyway, for something that you couldnt possibly have foreseen, and all your worrying was useless.

It's not that I think that planning is useless. I'm a worryer and a planner. But don't most of us spend too much time worrying, looking for guarantees that whatever we do will turn out right? I had everything perfectly planned out before 9/11, and then two planes crashed into the twin towers and I realized I hated my job and didn't love my boyfriend, and all those exquisite plans were for nought.

We're slaves to guarantees, we nice college-educated Americans. We don't want to do anything without some signed piece of paper from fate notifying us that it is the perfect Right Thing to Do. Often we think we've got those pieces of paper . . . our diploma, our marriage license, the deed to our house . . . but as a defense against fate, those pieces of paper are the equivalent of a realistic-looking toy gun: they won't do us any good at all if we come into contact with the enemy. All we really have is our will, and our thoughts, and whatever joy we can wrench out of the world. And too often, the search for guarantees gets in the way of those essentials.

2006-02-28T16:28:00.000-08:00

It's cold and my apartment smells like polyurethane because of the shelves I've been staining and now I have to walk out into the cold and freeze my nose and my hands and my cheeks while I look for the perfect dessert with which to bid farewell to sweets as I embark upon my Lenten fast. And for whatever reason, I am filled with the love of the universe tonight.

2006-02-28T14:15:00.000-08:00

So now that I'm dating again, I can start thinking about romance . . . of how I want Him to be. How's this for an opening?

It was long past midnight when she turned suddenly into a street that seemed alive in the heart of a dead city. She saw yellow, curtained squares of light breaking stern, bare walls, squares of light on the bare sidewalk at glass entrance doors, dark roofs, far away, that seemed to meet in the black sky over that narrow crack of stone and light.

Kira stopped. A gramophone was playing. The sound burst into the silence from a blazing window. It was "The Song of Broken Glass".

It was the song of a nameless hope that frightened her, for it promosed so much, and she could not tell what it promised. She could not even say that it was a promise; it was an emotion, almost of pain, that went through her whole body.

Quick, fine notes exploded, as if the trembling chords could not hold them, as if a pair of defiant legs were kicking crystal goblets. And, in the gaps of ragged clouds above, the dark sky was sprinkled with a luminous powder that looked like splinters of broken glass.

The music ended in someone's loud laughter. A naked arm pulled a curtain over the window.

Then Kira noticed that she was not alone. She saw women with lips painted scarlet on faces powdered snow white, with red kerchiefs and short skirts, and legs squeezed by high shoes laced too tightly. She saw a man taking a woman's arm and disappearing through a glass door.

She understood where she was. With a jerk, she started away, hurriedly, nervously toward the nearest corner.

And then she stopped.

He was tall; his collar was raised; a cap was pulled over his eyes. His mouth, calm, severe, contemptuous, was that of an ancient chieftan who could order men to die, and his eyes were such as could watch it.

Kira leaned against a lamp post, looking straight at his face, and smiled. She did not think; she smiled, stunned, without realizing that she was hoping he would know her as she knew him.

He stopped and looked at her. "Good evening," he said.

And Kira who believed in miracles said: "Good evening."

He stepped closer and looked at her with narrowed eyes, smiling. But the corners of his mouth did not go up when he smiled; they went down, raising his upper lip into a scornful arc.

"Lonely?" he asked.

"Terribly--and for such a long time," she answered simply.

"Well, come on."

"Yes."

He took her arm and she followed him. He said: "We have to hurry. I want to get out of this crowded street."

"So do I."

"I must warn you not to ask any questions."

"I have no questions to ask."

She looked at the unbelievable lines of his face. She touched timidly, incredulously, the long fingers of the hand that held her arm.

"Why are you looking at me like that?" he asked. But she did not answer. He said: "I'm afraid I'm not a very cheerful companion tonight."

"Can I help you?"

"Well, that's what you're here for." He stopped suddenly. "What's the price," he asked. "I haven't much."

Kira looked at him and understood why he had approached her. She stood looking silently into his eyes. When she spoke, her voice had lost its tremulous reverance; it was calm and firm. She said: "It won't be much."

"Where do we go?"

"I passed a little garden around the corner. Let's go there for a while."

"Any militia-men around?"

"No."

They sat on the steps of an abandoned residence. Trees shielded them from a street light, and their faces and the wall behind them were dotted, checkered, sliced with shivering splinters of light. Over their heads were rows of empty windows on bare granite. The mansion bore an unhealed scar above its entrance door from where the owner's coat of arms had been torn. HTe garden fence had been broken through and its tall iron spikes bent toward the ground, like lances lowered in a grave salute.

"Take your cap off," said Kira.

"What for?"

"I want to look at you."

"Sent to search for someone?"

"No. Sent by whom?"

He did not answer and took off his cap. Her face was a mirror for the beauty of his. Her face reflected no admiration, but an incredulous, reverent awe. All she said was "Do you always go around with your coat shoulder torn?"

"That's all I have left. Do you always stare at people as if your eyes would burst?"

"Sometimes."

"I wouldn't if I were you. The less you see of them the better off you are. Unless you have strong nerves and a strong stomach."

"I have."

"And strong legs?"

His two fingers were held straight while his fingertips threw her skirt up, high above her knees, lightly contemptuously. Her hand grasped the stone steps. She did not pull her skirt down. She forced herself to sit wihtout movement, without breath, frozen to teh steps. He looked at her; his eyes moved up and down, but hte corners of his lips moved only downward.

She whispered obediently, without looking at him: "And strong legs."

"Well, if you have strong legs, then--run."

"From you?"

"No. From all people. But forget it. Pull your skirt down. Aren't you cold?"

"No." But she pulled the skirt down.

"Don't pay any attention to what I say," he told her. "Have you anything to drink at your place?"

"Oh . . . yes."

"I warn you I'm going to drink like a sponge tonight."

"Why tonight?"

"That's my habit."

"It isn't."

"How do you know?"

"I know it isn't."

"What else do you know about me?"

"I know that you're very tired."

"I am. I've walked all night."

"Why?"

"I thought I told you not to ask any questions."

He looked at the girl who sat pressed tightly against the wall. He saw only one gray eye, quiet and steady, and above it--one lock of hair; the white wrist of a hand held in a black pocket; the black, ribbed stockings on legs pressed tightly together. In the darkness, he guessed a patch of long, narrow mouth, the dark huddle of a slender body trembling a little. His fingers closed around the black stocking. She did not move. He leaned closer to the dark mouth and whispered: "Stop staring at me as if I were something unusual. I want to drink. I want a woman like you. I want to go down, as far down as you can drag me."

She said: "You know, you're very much afraid that you can't be dragged down."

His hand left her stocking. He looked at her a littl closer and asked suddenly: "How long have you been in this business?"

"Oh . . . not very long."

"I thought so."

"I'm sorry. I've tried my best."

"Tried what?"

"Tried to act experienced."

"You little fool. Why should you? I'd rather have you as you are, with these strange eyes that see too much . . . what led you into . . . this?"

"A man."

"Was he worth that?"

"Yes."

"What an appetite!"

"For what?"

"For life."

"If one loses one's appetite, why still sit at the table?"

He laughed. His laughter rolled into the empty windows above them, as cold and empty as the windows. "Perhpas to collect under the table a few little crumbs of refuse--like you--that can still be amusing . . . Take your hat off."

She took off her tam. Against the gray stone her tangled hair and the light tangled in the leaves, glittered like warm silk. He ran his fingers through her hair and jerked her head back so violently that it hurt her. "Did you love that man?" he asked.

"What man?"

"The one who led you into this."

"Did I . . . " She was suddenly confused, surprised by the unexpected thought. "No. I didn't love him."

"That's good."

"Have you . . . ever . . . " She began a question and found that she could not finish it.

"They say I have no feeling for anyone but myself," he answered, "and not much of that."

"Who said it?"

"A person that didn't like me. I know many people that don't like me."

"That's good."

"But I've never known one who said it was good."

"Yes, you've known one."

"And can you tell me who that is?"

"Yourself."

He bent toward her again, his eyes searching the darkness, then moved away and shrugged: "You're wrong. I'm nothing like what I think you think I am. I've always wanted to be a Soviet clerk who sells soap and smiles at the customers."

She said: "You're so very unhappy."

His face was so close she could feel his breath on her lips. "Who asked you for sympathy? I suppose you think you can make me like you? Well, don't fool yourself. I don't give a damn what I think of you and less what you think of me. I'm just like any other man you've had in your bed--and like you will have."

She said "You mean you would like to be like any other man. And you would like to think that there haven't been any other men--in my bed."

He looked at her silently. He asked abruptly: Are you a . . . street woman?"

She answered calmly: "No."

He jumped to his feet. "Who are you, then?"

"Sit down."

"Answer."

"I'm a respectable little girl who studies at the Technological Institute, whose parents would throw her out of the house if they knew she had talked to a strange man on the street."

He looked down at her; she sat on the steps at his feet, looking up at his face. He saw no fear and no appeal in her eyes, only an insolent calm. He asked: "Why did you do it?"

"I wanted to know you."

"Why?"

"I liked your face."

"You little fool! If I were someone else, I might have . . . acted differently."

"But I knew you were not someone else."

"Don't you know that such things are not being done?"

"I don't care."

He smiled suddenly. He asked: "Want a confession from me?"

"Yes."

"This is the first time I've ever tried to . . . buy a woman."

"Why did you try it tonight?"

"I didn't care. I've walked for hours. There isn't a house in this city that I can enter tonight."

"Why?"

"Don't ask questions. I couldn't make myself approach one of . . . of those women. But you--I liked your strange smile. What were you doing on such a street at such an hour?"

"I quarreled with someone and I had no carfare and I went home alone--and lost my way."

"Well, thank you for a most unusual evening. This will be a rare memory to take with me of my last night in the city."

"Your--last night?"

"I'm going away at dawn."

"When are you coming back?"

"Never--I hope."

She got up slowly. She stood facing him. She asked: "Who are you?"

"Even if I trust you, I can't tell you that."

"I can't let you go away forever."

"Well, I would like to see you again. I'm not going far. I may be back in town."

"I'll give you my address."

"Don't. You're not living alone. I can't enter anyone's house."

"Can I come to yours?"

"I haven't any."

"But then . . . "

"Let's say that we'll meet here again--in a month. Then if I'm still alive, if I can still enter the city, I'll be waiting here for you."

"I'll come."

"November tenth. But let's make it in dalight. At three o'clock in the afternoon. On these steps."

"Yes."

"Well, it's as crazy as our whole acquaintance. And now it's time for you to go home. You shouldn't be out at this hour."

"But where will you go?"

"I'll walk until dawn. It's only a few more hours. Come on."

She did not argue. He took her arm. She followed. They stepped over the bowed lances of the broken fence. The street was deserted. A cab driver on a distant corner raised his head at the sound of their steps. He signaled the cab. Four horseshoes struck forward, shattering the silence."

"What's your name?" she asked.

"Leo. And yours?"

"Kira."

The cab approached. He handed the driver a bill. "Tell him where you want to go," he said.

"Good-bye," said Kira, "--for a month."

"If I'm still alive," he answered, "--and if I don't forget."

She climbed to the seat, kneeling and facing the back of the carriage. As it slowly started away, her hatless hair in the wind, she watched the man who stook looking after her.

When the cab turned a corner, she remained kneeling, but her head dropped. Her hand lay on the seat, helpless, palm up; and she could feel the blood beating in her fingers.

That's from Ayn Rand's We, the Living. (Surprised? Not everything she wrote was A Sermon with A Cast.) It strikes that shivery romantic place in my heart, even though I don't think I'd want a man whose mouth "was that of an ancient chieftan who could order men to die, and his eyes were such as could watch it".

Oh, yes . . . it should be that out of the night could step someone to whom you say, yes, I know you, and I love all of those things that they despise. I see your secret heart, and it is so beautiful that no one has been able to comprehend its beauty before. "I knew that you were not someone else."

It should be that we have so much courage, we can say frankly I like you, I want you, without hesitating to see what they will say in return.

It should be that we exult in ourselves, and someone else, enough to let them look at our bare legs without fear.

It should be that a woman can be strong enough to steer her own course through the mobs of people demanding she change . . . and meet a man even stronger than she is, one worthy of changing course for.

Ayn Rand's sexuality was . . . complicated. Or actually, it wasn't very complicated; she was an extremely dominant woman who wanted to meet a man even more dominant than she was. I remember clearly the first time I read her description of the heroine of Atlas Shrugged in an evening dress:

"The black dress seemed excessively revealing—because it was astonishing to discover that the lines of her shoulder were fragile and beautiful, and that the diamond band on the wrist of her naked arm gave her the most feminine of all aspects: the look of being chained".

Whoa, thought I. But it lessened the shock of The Fountainhead, where the hero kicks things off by raping the heroine. (Note: I'm not an objectivist. But I dated one once. And I still love to take her books to the beach.) Her ideal was the superwoman who is conquered by superman; "For a woman qua woman," she said, "the essence of femininity is hero worship—the desire to look up to man". I'm not sure that she's wrong . . . I don't know any women who want to date men who are dumber or less ambitious than they are. At our hearts, we want a dragonslayer. Ayn Rand's fantasies are just a bit more . . . violent than most.

It's not exactly an uncommon fantasy for women--or men. I think almost all women want a man who could conquer them, even if he doesn't. And I have to say, that that moment where he grabs you for some reason, and you realize that even if you wanted him to let go, you have no power to make him . . . that's one of the sexiest moments that passes between a couple. Also a little scary, especially if you don't know him very well. But if it weren't so scary, it wouldn't be so sexy.

Ayn spent her whole life looking for her superman, the one who would feel the way she described:

Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life. Show me the woman he sleeps with and I will tell you his valuation of himself..... The man who is proudly certain of his own value, will want the highest type of woman he can find, the woman he admires, the strongest, the hardest to conquer--because only the possession of a heroine will give him the sense of an achievement, not the possession of a brainless slut.

Alas, she wasn't that pretty, and she was kind of old before she was a famous writer, and the man she expected to fill the role dumped her for someone younger and prettier and dumber.

Ayn Rand's mistake, I think, was believing that her heroic vision was enough. It's a fantasy . . . and I could construct a fantasy which contained none of those noirish elements of silence and knowing, lust and power, and would be just as powerfully romantic. She never does, though; her heroes and heroines are as estranged and embattled as they are attracted, which is not very realistic, and ultimately more than a bit sad. Probably there aren't any supermen out there . . . though I've been surprised by what lurks below the surface. But still . . . I'm glad I read this passage today.

2006-02-28T10:44:00.000-08:00

I’ve come across upon this site before, but today when I stumbled upon it, I found this post on the Shroud of Turin. Basically, this guy is betting that by 2012, science will not have explained the Shroud’s peculiarities:

In recent years, some theoretical physicists (and some highly polemic authors) have advanced the possibility that a dematerializing body formed the images. Such a method, some argue, would meet the image properties. But such a method would defy the laws of physics, as we understand them. Considering Einstein’s law about the conversion of matter into energy – and what else could a bodily dematerialization be – the resulting explosion would leave us without a Shroud to wonder about and a crater in the Middle East the size of ancient Jerusalem.

I am betting that an image formation explanation will not be forthcoming in the years ahead, at least not one that meets the criteria and conforms to the laws of physics. It may be that a perfectly acceptable naturalistic process will be found, one not thought of yet. It may be some yet unknown artistic method will be discovered. But short of an answer, for as long as it may be that there is no answer, people will be able to speculate about the possibility of a miracle – a miracle being the plausible alternative to a naturalistic or artistic method.

I’d bet with him, even though I think the Shroud was probably a 13^th or 14^th century creation. 2012 is only six years away. By then I doubt we’ll have found a cure for cancer or a decent low-calorie sweetener, things that have a lot more energy focused on them than the Shroud does. So even if the Shroud is an easier problem to solve, it’s probably safe to bet that no one will have resolved the issue by 2012.

Part of me wonders why bother testing it at all. I mean, of all the questions in the world, why is “Is the Shroud of Turin real?” an important one to ask?

For secularists, I mean. None of them think that the answer will be “yes”—and even if it was, all that science could prove is that the cloth does, in fact, date from the first century AD. It can’t tell us whether or not it belonged to Jesus, much less answer the question everyone’s really wondering about—to wit: is there a loving, somewhat anthropomorphic God who is so just that He sends sinners to Hell, but who loves His creations so much that He gave them an out by conceiving a Son on the Virgin Mary so that he could be crucified in atonement for our sins? And was that Son, in fact, resurrected after being dead for three days?

From a secularist’s point of view, I can’t see that believing in the divinity of Jesus is hurting Christians so much that we should take strenuous action to put an end to it, which would seem to be the most that an investigation should hope for . . . and yet, even if the Shroud were convincingly proven to be a fake, that would be unlikely to shake the faith of a single person who feels he has encountered a living God in his prayers.

Not that I’m saying secularists should support teaching Creationism in schools or anything. But Darwin was searching for an important truth: how did we get the way we are? This is a worthy quest, the search for the fundamentals of human existence. Shroud research is a scientific cul-de-sac; the questions it asks just don’t strike me as very interesting or important, nor do they lead anywhere more significant. Secularists or believers who think that validating their view of the Shroud will somehow provide evidence for their theological beliefs are deluding themselves.

On the other hand, I was watching a cooking show the other day—one I like very much—and marveling that this clearly intelligent, funny, interesting guy was devoting his life to teaching people to poach fish and so forth in half-hour increments. For a moment, this seemed to me like an extravagant waste of one’s precious days. But then I thought, good food is one of the truly great pleasures of life. And this guy is teaching people how to make it. That’s pretty major, really. So who am I to say that the Shroud people are wasting their time?

2006-02-28T10:43:00.000-08:00

Song of the day is "Galileo" by the Indigo Girls. I'm feeling so very folk rock today, you see.

I offer thanks to those before me
That’s all I’ve got to say
’cause maybe you squandered big bucks in your lifetime
Now I have to pay
But then again it feels like some sort of inspiration
To let the next life off the hook
But she’ll say look what I had to overcome from my last life
I think I’ll write a book

How long till my soul gets it right
Can any human being ever reach the highest light
Except for galileo God rest his soul
(except for the resting soul of galileo)
King of night vision, king of insight

2006-02-28T10:39:00.000-08:00

What do I miss most about being in a relationship?

Sex? Oh, yes, I miss sex . . . especially since my ex and I had the best sex of our lives after we broke up. This morning in the bathtub I realised that it will probably be months before I have sex again. This thought does not make me happy.

Someone to cook for? Curiously not . . . I don't have much of an urge to cook these days. I like to cook for company--once every few months. But the raging domestic urges that I had when we were living together have passed as quickly as they came on. I don't want to cook, clean, shop for housewares, or any of that other stuff that you do when you're ostentatiously basking in couplehood†. It's not because I'm alone . . . I don't particularly want to do those things with my next boyfriend either. I want to write novels and go skydiving. And I can't miss the skydiving, because we never actually did it.

I do regret that we didn't have enough adventures, something I think was my fault. We spent too much time in Bed, Bath and Beyond, and not nearly enough time trying stuff we'd never done before. I really regret that I can only carry that lesson forward into my next relationship, instead of fixing it in my last one.

Reading aloud to each other . . . I miss that a lot. I tried reading Dickens aloud to my mother the other day, and she clearly wished I would stop. So I did.

Cuddling? Well, yes, cuddling was very nice. On the other hand, now I'm allowed to eat in bed.

Right now what I really miss is talking. I was reading this New Yorker article, and I had an idea about happiness, one that I'll try to blog later. It was a good idea, an idea that I haven't seen anywhere else before*. And I have no one to tell it to.

† It's weird, actually, how many of the things I did that drove him nuts when we were going out I don't want to do any more. It's not like I'm not doing them because he doesn't like them; I would be basking in QVC and Bridezillas, home cookery and towel racks, except that I no longer have any urge to spend time on them. I've also become more pro-Palestinian . . . but for this, I think I at least have an explanation. I suspect it's because I no longer feel that I am fighting his unstated, but implacable, pressure to agree with him unquestioningly. I don't even agree with myself without significant hesitation.

* I dont want to overhype the coolness of this idea. I didn't discover unified field theory or anything. It's really just a subtle variation on things that other people have been saying. But still, it's all mine, 100% homemade, and I'm very proud of it.

2006-02-27T11:18:00.000-08:00

Hee!

2006-02-26T17:34:00.000-08:00

Hmmmm . . .

What do you think the odds are that I'm a figment of Scott Adams' imagination? I mean, I don't feel like a figment. But I wouldn't, would I? Could all the people in my dreams have dreams and passions of their own?

2006-02-26T08:49:00.000-08:00

Thought for the day:

"The world has never had a good definition of the word 'liberty.' The American people just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty. But in using the same word, we do not all mean the same thing.

"What constitutes the bulwark of our liberty and independence? It is not our frowning battlements, our bristling seacoasts — these are not our reliance against tyranny. Our reliance is in the love of liberty, which God has planted in our bosom. Our defence is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men in all lands, everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own door.

"At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow?

"Never.

"All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, could not, by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then, is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer that if it ever reach us, it must spring from amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we ourselves must be the authors and finishers.

"As a nation of free men, we must live through our times or die by suicide. Let reverence for the law be breathed by every American mother to the lisping babe that prattles on her lap; let it be taught in the schools, in the seminaries and in the colleges; let it be written in primers, in spelling books and almanacs; let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls and enforced in courts of justice; and in short, let it become the political religion of the nation. And let the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay, of all sexes and tongues and colors and conditions, sacrifice unceasingly at its altar. And let us strive to deserve, as far as mortals may, the continued care of Divine Providence, trusting that in future national emergencies, He will not fail to provide us the instruments of safety and security.

"Let us not be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the government, nor of dungeons to ourselves.

"Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it."

2006-02-24T10:24:00.000-08:00

Samantha continues reading Dickens . . .

Actually, I'm well past this passage now, but it's so good that I'm returning to it, to give it to you. I shan't offer any meaningful literary or philisophical commentary (she said, seeming to betray a touching belief that she had done so in the past) . . . just pure, elegant prose for your delectation:

Tellson's Bank by Temple Bar was an old-fashioned place, even in the year one thousand seven hundred and eighty. It was very small, very dark, very ugly, very incommodious. It was an old-fashioned place, moreover, in the moral attribute that the partners in the House were proud of its smallness, proud of its incommodiousness. They were even boastful of its eminence in these particulars, and were fired by an express conviction that, if it were less objectionable, it would be less respectable. This was no passive belief, but an active weapon which they flashed at more convenient places of business. Tellson's (they said) wanted no elbow room, Tellson's wanted no light, Tellson's wanted no embellishment. Noakes and Co's might, or Snooks' Brothers might, but Tellson's, thank Heaven!--

Any one of these partners would have disinherited his son on the question of rebuilding Tellson's. In this respect the House was much on a par with the Country; which did very often disinherit its sons for suggesting improvements in laws and customs that had long been highly objectionable, but were only the more respectable.

Thus it had come to pass, that Tellson's was the triumphant perfection of inconvenience. After bursting open a door of idiotic obstinacy with a weak rattle in its throat, you fell into Tellson's down two steps, and came to your senses in a miserable little shop, with two little counters, where the oldest of men made your cheque shake as if the wind rustled it, while they examined the signature by the dingiest of windows, which were always under a shower-bath of mud from Fleet-street, and which were made the dingier by their own iron bars proper, and the heavy shadow of Temple Bar. If your business necessitated your seeing "the House", you were put into a species of Condemned Hold at the back, where you meditated on a misspent life, until hte House came with its hands in its pockets, and you could hardly blink at it in the dismal twilight. Your money came out of, or went into, wormy old wooden drawers, particles of which flew up your nose and down your throat when they were opened and shut. Your bank-notes had a musty odour, as if they were fast decomposing into rags again. Your plate was stowed away among the neighbouring cesspools, and evil communications corrupted its good polish in a day or two. Your deeds got into extemporised strong-rooms made of kitchens and sculleries, and fretted all the fat out of their parchments into the banking-house air. . . .

Cramped in all kinds of dim cupboards and hutches at Tellson's, the oldest of men carried on the business gravely. When they took a young man into Tellson's London house, they hid him somewhere until he was old. They kept him in a dark place, like a cheese, until he had the full Tellson flavour and blue-mould upon him. Then only was he permitted to be seen, spectacularly poring over large books, and casting his breeches and gaiters into the general weight of the establishment.

2006-02-24T09:23:00.000-08:00

More fun Olympics commentary from Slate:

Many shameful things have transpired in northern Italy in the week since you mingled ridicule with sympathy—but, primarily, further ridicule—in this space while writing about Lindsey Jacobellis. Here are my favorites:
Italian cops raided Austria's cross-country skiers and biathletes on suspicion of blood doping, doubtlessly giving many local criminals a good chuckle. On Wednesday, the skier Bode Miller twisted his ankle while playing basketball. The American team's Alpine director told the AP that he had no problem with the hoops game; still, this turn of events suggests that the downhill blowhard is not so much a "jerk," or, as Dana Stevens suggested, a "douche bag," as a garden-variety "tool." The speed skaters Chad Hedrick and Shani Davis have engaged in a spat so protracted and so marked by little de- and re-escalations of tension that it came to look like they were flirting. The ice-dancing community indicated a taste in costumes that ran, to put it charitably, toward the tawdry.
The women of figure skating are far more modest. In fact, they're rarified creatures, no mere "women." Last night, settling in to watch the main event, I noticed for the first time that the highlight of the Winter Olympics is called the "ladies' free skate." Nobody's talking about "gentlemen's bobsled" or "ladies' hockey." Can you tell me what gives?

2006-02-24T08:37:00.000-08:00

Thought for the day comes from Daniel Gilbert, who is writing a book about happiness:

You probably think it would be good if you could feel perfectly happy at every moment of your life. But we have a word for animals that cannot feel distress, anxiety, fear and pain. That word is "extinct". Negative thoughts and emotions have important roles to play in our lives because when people think about how terribly wrong things might go, they often take actions to make sure those things go terribly right. Just as we manipulate our children and our employees by threatening them with dire consequences, so too do we minupulate ourselves by imagining dire consequences. Sure, people can be so anxious that their anxiety is debilitating, but that's the extreme case. For most of us, anxiety serves a purpose. it is what keeps you from touching a hot stove, committing adultery, or sending you nine-year-old to the rough part of town one night for a loaf of bread. If someone could offer you a pill that would make you permanently happy, you would be well advised to run fast and run far. Emotion is a compass that tells us what to do, and a compass that is perpetually stuck on NORTH is worthless.

But is this really true? I'm reminded of a big, dorm-room-bull-session style argument I once participated in on that age old subject: "Should drugs be legalised?" My social circle being what it is, the consensus was "damn straight!", but there was some vehement opposition. One girl got pretty hysterical listing all of the terrible things that drugs had caused someone she knew to do: his family cut him off, he lost his job, he screwed up his body in a car accident and several overdoses . . .

"But that's not proof that drugs are bad," pointed out one graduate student in philosophy. "That might be proof that drugs are so good that they're worth losing your family and sleeping on the street."

The author doesn't really say why we shouldn't want to send our nine-year-old into the slums. He seems to be accepting that the goal of human life is to be happy (most of the time)--and yet, if we had a magic happy pill, it wouldn't do us any harm to put our children in harm's way, because even if they died, it wouldn't make us unhappy. It might discommode the nine-year-old, but we could give him a magic happy pill too, and then it would be no skin off his back. Of course, a creature with no fears would probably die pretty quickly, but he'd die happy, which is not to be sneezed at.

The real answer, of course, is that there are things more important than being happy. I can't wait to find them.

2006-02-22T13:25:00.000-08:00

The previous post was supposed to be a lead in for this article, because it has this great description of ski jumping:

Ski jumping is like competitive being-shot-from-a-cannon. The act itself is a simple yet grand aesthetic gesture, harkening back to Icarus and the Wright brothers. As competition, it turns on the grand gesture's really boring technical aspects: waiting for the right wind gust, holding form in flight, and the quality of your "telemark" landing (parallel skis, no more than two ski widths apart, one foot ahead of the other).

Then I got sidetracked into a lyrical exegis of the wonders of curling. I know: you are even now keeling over from the shock. If I ever write an autobiography, it will be titled one of three things:

1. A temporary breakdown in communications
2. Suddenly, and for no apparent reason. . .
3. Then I got sidetracked: the Samantha Yeager story

Readers are invited to submit their own suggestions, as long as they aren't pornographic. Samantha Yeager doesn't play blue. I mean, unless it's tasteful, and integral to the plotline.

2006-02-22T11:25:00.000-08:00

This Olympic season, I find I've become absurdly interested in curling. I don't mean that I've become interested in the sense that I've learned the rules; in fact, I somehow feel that learning the rules would spoil it. But I've been watching quite a lot of curling (even-GASP!-when the US isn't playing), and greatly enjoying it. There's something about the intensity of the players as they line up their shots, the furious action of the curlers sweeping the ice in front of the rock, and the satisfying THWACK! of rock-against-rock that floats free from any concerns about scoring. It is enough that the players themselves are very concerned--albeit in an aggressively nice, Canadian sort of way. I quite enjoy hearing the commentary of the learned former players on MSNBC, who say things like "That's a great shot. Just inside the box, and now that they have the hammer, there's a real possibility of going three in." It's like the way I felt as a child, eavesdropping on adult conversations where I understood all the individual words, but couldn't make sense of the way they'd been put together. It gave me the delicious feeling that there were giant mysteries out there, a world full of secret knowlege and code words and knowing glances between the illuminati, to which I would one day be privy. Now that I am an adult, I want to leave some of those secrets unexplored, just so that they will always still be out there, waiting.

All throughout the Winter Olympics, I've enjoyed the sense that I was watching something that was superficially beautiful, but also contained tiny technical variations too subtle for me to see, but overwhelmingly important to the judges, those all-seeing demigods too important to be shown on camera and spoken of only in hushed and reverent tones. So much competence in the world! I suppose I could be depressed, that people can spend ten or twenty of their limited years trying to perfect the art of jumping on ice, but I find it sort of inspiring. We float on an ocean of such little competencies, from the guy who built a slightly better garage door opener, to the guy figuring out how to deliver your pizza just a little bit faster and hotter. And the person who learns to leap higher and quicker shows us something inspiring.

A few weekends ago, I was driving back to my city from a friend's baby shower a few hours away, and it occurred to me that someday soon, we probably won't use mirrors in our cars. There will be some sort of high tech device that shows you what's happening to the sides and back of you, much better and more safely than rearview/sideview mirrors can. No more blind spots. And someday we'll be trying to explain to our grandchildren that when we drove, we didn't have radar; instead we used these mirrors, which we glued to the sides of our vehicles and adjusted every time we got into the car so that we could see behind us. And it will sound, to them, as quaint and ridiculous as cranking up your car to make it start. There's granny now, in her leather driving helmet and goggles, checking her mirrors before she starts out on the long trip to town!

To bring this all back to curling with one of those deft, yet slightly inept transitions that leaves readers faintly wondering if they missed something . . . well, that is one of the great charms of curling. I mean, they have these fancy tools now, like the bionic curling broom, that they train with. But through all the ever-so-precise commentary about hog lines and hacks, skips and takeouts, skips and pebblers, you can still see the sport as it started: a couple of drunk Canadians shoving rocks down the ice towards a makeshift target. And some friends skidded out onto the ice, beer in hand, and tried to help things along . . . and someone said "you can't touch the rock!" . . . so an enterprising soul put down his beer and went home to get his wife's broom to sweep away the snow and ice debris in front of the rock, and when his opponent protested, he said smugly "I'm not touching the rock!"

Their kids formalised the rules. And their kids went to the Olympics. But, maybe because it's Canadian, they still managed to keep most of the homespun charm of a bunch of friends making up a new contest in order to pass some time on a cold winter day. None of the Canadians I know are curlers, but I have the feeling that if it didn't already exist, they'd be busy right now inventing it.

It's kinda nice, that's all.

2006-02-22T10:25:00.000-08:00

Samantha continues to read Dickens . . .

Proceeded onto this passage at lunch. Funny to think that the description once gave readers the amused jolt of recognizing something they'd seen often:

A large cask of wine had been dropped and broken in the street. The accident had happened in gettin git out of a cart; the cask had tumbled out with a run, the hoops had burst, and it lay on the stone just outside the door of the wine-shop, shattered like a walnut-shell.

All the people within reach had suspendded their business, or their idleness, to run to the spot and drink the wine. The rough, irregular stones of the street, pointing every way, and designed, one might have thought, expressly to lame all living creatures that approached them, had dammed it into little pools; these were surrounded, each by its own jostling group or crowd, according to its size. Some men kneeled down, made scoops of their two hands joined, and sipped, or tried to help women, who bent over their shoulders, to sip, before the wine had all run out between their fingers. Others, men and women, dipped in the puddles with little mugs of mutilated earthenware, or even with handkerchiefs from women's heads, which were squeezed dry into infants' mouths; others made small mud-embankments, to stem the wine as it ran; others, directed by lookers-on up at high windows, darted here and there, to cut off little streams of wine that started away in new directions; others devoted themselves to the sodden and lee-dyed pieces of the cask, licking and even champing the moister wine-rotted fragments with eager relish. There was no drainage to carry off the wine, and not only did it all get takene up, but so much mud got taken up along with it, that there might have been a scavenger in the street, if anybody acquainted with it could have believed in such a miraculous presence.

A Tale of Two Cities was written in 1859. There was little appreciable difference between the filthy streets of the London slums then, and the wretched back streets of Paris in 1775; he could write that description with at least as much confidence as we could describe driving along a highway in 1960. More, maybe, since I have no idea what automobile amenities that I take for granted were missing in 1960. Except airbags and antilock brakes. I'm pretty sure they didn't have those.

2006-02-22T09:45:00.000-08:00

Thought for the day: trust your gut . . . but not too much:

Something recently made me think back to an undergraduate physics lab that I once had to do. This was elementary optics, so we had the standard collection of lenses on a beaten-up optical bench as we did our Newtonian thing. There would be little reason for me to remember it if it hadn't been for the comment of one of my lab partners.

We were setting up another phase of the experiment, and the instructions said for us to put the lenses in a set configuration and see if we got such-and-such effect. "That can't be right", this guy said, moving them to a different spot that he thought would work better. They didn't, and we ended up doing it the way the lab manual had laid out. But I've returned to that scene several times over the last twenty-five years, trying to figure out what bothered me about his response.

After all, a good researcher shouldn't just take someone else's word for everything, right? And if you have a hypothesis, and can test it, you should go ahead and do it, right? On the face of it, my old partner's attitude towards our lab that day shouldn't have gotten on my nerves, but it did. There was something wrong about it, but I kept trying to work out what it was - in a way that didn't put me on the just-follow-the-lab-book side of the argument, where I didn't want to be.

It finally dawned on me. My problem with the guy wasn't that he didn't trust the lab manual. It was that he trusted himself way too much. It would have been one thing to try what was in the book, then say "I wonder what happens if you move this lens out here?" That would actually be a good sign. But the statement "That can't be right"isn't one, especially not from an undergrad doing an optical demonstration whose results have been known for three hundred years.

Now, of course, I have a lot more room to maneuver as a scientist. Most of the experiments I run are things that no one has ever done before, not on these particular molecules in this particular way. I'm pretty sure I know what's going to happen, but I get surprised a lot. And when it comes to the effect of my compounds on cells and animals, I get surprised all the time.

But it's surprisingly easy to forget how little I know. After sixteen-plus years doing this, I have to watch my tendency to talk to younger colleagues as if I know what's going to happen with their ideas. I don't. I have my experience to draw on, of course, which makes me say things like "Are you sure you want to put a napthyl in that molecule?" or "Cyclohexyl groups are a metabolism magnet - that's going to get torn up". I'd say that a good solid majority of the time, those two statements are correct. But once in a while they're not, and most of the time I don't have as much evidence to back up my prejudices as I do with those two examples.

So now I know why I've never forgotten the guy who said "That can't be right". I've been trying, all this time, to keep from turning into him. The struggle continues.

2006-02-22T08:42:00.000-08:00

Good question I never wondered about: how do the Chinese type, when their written language contains thousands of characters?

2006-02-22T07:55:00.000-08:00

I'm finally reading A Tale of Two Cities. I know the first and last lines, the play, the movie . . . but I've never read the book. I'm only in the early pages yet, wading into that lovely, exuberant, paid-by-the-word ocean of prose, feeling little wavelets of excruciatingly exact observation lap at my feet. Like this:

A wonderful fact ot reflect upon, that every human creature is consituted to be that profound secret and mystery to eery toher. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I look into the ddepths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other things submerged. It was appointed that the book should shut with a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page. It was appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on the shore. My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in that individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life's end. In any of the burial places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?

The pages of my copy of the book are yellowed, so I must have had it for quite a while; I suspect it is something I was supposed to have read in college. But with passages like that, I'm glad I didn't. At nineteen, I would have thought that passage very profound . . . but I would have gotten only the sound of it. The meaning would have passed me by, as if it were written in another language. At nineteen, you are far too engrossed with yourself to understand such a thing; the boundary between your ego and the universe seems very thin, as if the whole of the world were actually only an extension of your mind (and in a sense you're perfectly right, I suppose). The inability to really know the thoughts of others is only maddening, not tragic; you think you want to learn their deepest thoughts, but in truth all you really long for is to know whether they will give you what you want.

It's only later, when people do things that you would never have expected, and you realize that someone you thought you knew perfectly was in fact almost exactly unlike what you thought they were, that it comes to seem tragic. Most people don't surprise you, of course, but the few that do make you wonder about the rest. One of my ex-boyfriends, who had been perfectly nice to me, turned around and was absolutely vile and rotten to the next girl he dated. I still don't know how I could date someone for over a year, and never suspect that the potential to be such a heartless and selfish and cruel cad was there . . . as it must have been, because people just don't change that much. Then you realize that you are going to die, and no one will truly know this protean, but coherent, thing that you think of as your self. They will perceive some of it, and too often the bits that you don't like, the ones that you think are well protected from prying eyes. But it will never be as true as the self we know.

It's like singing; when we sing, our voice sounds pure and lovely to our own ears, because we hear ourselves by bone conduction, rather than soundwaves borne through the air. That's why it's always such a shock to tape yourself, and hear some stuffy, twangy stranger squeaking out at us from the speakers. I suspect that if we could tape our souls, the way they are heard by others, we would be equally disappointed in what we heard. But you only know this when the swollen ego that obscures our youthful vision shrinks enough to let you start to see other people as separate, and unique, and terribly frail.

That's tragic. But it's tragic in the sense of being terrible, and wonderful. Because the separateness is what lets things emerge that are more than what we could have done, or imagined, alone. It's why relationships are better than fantasies, people are better than stories, and other people's stories are more satisfying to some part of the soul than our own: because other people do things that we could never have imagined. And we do the same for them. And all those imaginations building on each other, and trading ideas, and saying funny things, and falling in love, together build a thing that is far more dazzling than the finest human soul is alone.