eat your emeralds

Kerala Backwaters

2011-11-28T07:26:00.000-05:00

So my last message - wherein I complained about booking a train ticket and the post office - was written from Fort Cochin, a former Portuguese colony on the south-western coast of India. It's right below Goa, which is where I am now (just overnight, on my way to Hampi).

Kerala has become a popular tourist destination because of the backwaters. I went on a one-day cruise and the pictures turned out so well it was painful to pick just a couple. It was seriously jaw-dropping scenery.

Otherwise, it was a pretty quiet stay. Kochi/Fort Cochin is a nice place to relax and chill out for a while. Lots of Western-style cafes, Western-style food, that sort of thing. Pasta salads, gaspacho. I found a place to get amazing banana cream pies and kept going back.

I also got an ayurvedic massage which was...interesting. Ayurvedic massage appears to be about oils and scents as much as anything else. Oils that remove toxins, maybe? All I know is that my massage consisted of lying down on a wooden table while two ladies rubbed oil all over me while wearing nothing but a tiny little loincloth. They started with my head, which was nice - a nice scalp rub, but with oil - but then moved onto my chest, which was weird. Hard to compartmentalize, shall I say? Because they weren't doing that sort of deep-tissue kneading that I associate with massage. They were just rubbing the oil around. It was a full body massage so they moved along to the different parts. Arms. Legs. Back. No room for prudery at all, but I admit that by the end I was pretty relaxed. I'd just come back from the train station, too, so that's no small feat.

The oil smelled a bit like tamarind. Somewhere along the way I've sampled a tamarind fruit straight from the tree and it has a sort of citrus bite that smelled right. But I'm not sure. After the massage I got into a steam box for fifteen minutes...which just reminded me of I Love Lucy. Anyone else remember that episode? Where Lucy gets into that weight-loss box that's supposed to steam away all her fat and then disasters ensue? That was weird too, though less so than the massage.

Ok, I'm going to go hunt down dinner before it's totally dark out.

Argh.

2011-11-25T07:46:00.000-05:00

Showed up at the Post Office yesterday. I had a big white box with a print I'm sending home and a small shopping bag. Waited for twenty minutes to get to the front of the line.

The guy behind the counter looks at my box and my bag and says, "You can't send a box like that. You have to have it covered in white cloth."

Me: "Ok. How do I do that?"
Post Office Guy: "Take it to a tailor."
Me: "What about this bag? Do you sell boxes?"
Post Office Guy: "Yes. I'll go get one."

...ten minutes pass...

Post Office Guy: "We're out of boxes. Ask the tailor."

I go to the tailor. They find a box. I put my small items in and wait half an hour for them to sew up the two boxes. They give me a marker and I add my address. I go back to the Post Office and wait in line for another twenty minutes.

Me: "I'd like to send these two parcels, wrapped in white cloth."
Post Office Guy: "Your 'from' address needs to be in India."
Me: "I don't have an Indian address."
Post Office Guy: "Do you have any Indian friends?"
Me: "No."
Post Office Guy: "Talk to that lady."
Me: "Okay."
That Lady: "Just put an Indian address."
Me: "But I don't want these items returned to India if there is a problem."
That Lady: "The rule is that the address is from India."

I put the address of my hotel. I wait another twenty minutes in line. I send my parcels.

That was yesterday. Today I tried to figure out how to get from here in Kochi to Hampi. I approached the receptionist at my hotel, which is also supposed to function as a travel agency.

Me: "Can you help me book a ticket from here to Hampi?"
Receptionist: "This month?"
Me: "Yes."
Receptionist: "There are no tickets. Go to the train station."

Okay. I get into a rickshaw and go to the train station. I find the main ticket window at the station. I wait in line until I get to the teller.

Me: "I would like to book a ticket to Hampi."
Teller: "Talk to that other teller."
Me: "Okay."

I wait in line.

Me: "I would like to book a ticket to Hampi."
Other Teller: "Go to the reservation office across the street."
Me: "Okay."

I go to the reservation office across the street. I wait in line until I get to the teller.

Me: "I would like to book a ticket to Hampi."
New Teller: "You have to go to Bangalore first."
Me: "Okay."
New Teller: "What date?"
Me: "As soon as you can get me into an AC car."

The teller searched around on her computer.

New Teller: "You can go on the 30th."
Me: "Okay. Now what about going from Bangalore to Hampi?"
New Teller: "Go find a reservation form. They're at window number nine."
Me: "Okay."

I go to window number nine. I get a reservation form. I fill out my personal info and wait in line again.

Me: "Here's my form."
New Teller: "You didn't fill it out."
Me: "I need your help to know which trains I want, and which dates. I thought you said I could get a seat to Bangalore on the 30th."

The teller searched around in her computer for a bit.

New Teller: "Yes, Bangalore on the 30th."
Me: "So what about going from Bangalore to Hampi?"
New Teller: "Go talk to the people at the inquiry office."
Me: "Why do I have to go talk to the people at the inquiry office?"

The teller shrugged and stopped answering my questions. This is a skill anyone who is in India picks up (I do it to rickshaw drivers and shopkeepers all the time. They say, "Just look!" and I pretend I didn't hear). So I go to the inquiry office. Guess what comes next? Guess. No. Really. Guess. This is an easy one. I waited in line for a while.

Me: "I need to go from here to Hampi."
Inquiry Office Guy: "There are no tickets."
Me: "Ever?"
Inquiry Office Guy: "No tickets."
Me: "There must be tickets available at some point. When's the soonest I can go?"
Inquiry Office Guy: "You can buy a waiting list ticket."
Me: "Waiting list tickets are worthless. I want a confirmed seat."
Inquiry Office Guy: "No tickets."

At this point, all the other people waiting in line jumped into the conversation. They babbled on for a while saying things that I did not understand.

Guy Behind Me In Line: "You need to talk to the teller at the main station."
Me: "I have already been there. They sent me here."
Guy Behind Me In Line: "You should talk to the teller at the ticket window."
Me: "She sent me to this guy."

Further discussion with the Inquiry Office Guy ensues.

Guy Behind Me In Line: "You should go to the next office over, to talk to the area manager."
Me: "There's another office?"
GBMIL: "Yes, I'll show you."

We go to the next office over. We find a room where a bunch of people all listen to GBMIL explain that I need to get a train and then finally a lady says to me:

Lady: "You should come back tomorrow."
Me: "Tomorrow?"
Lady: "Take your chance tomorrow. Then if you don't get a ticket, the morning after that."
Me: "I don't want to keep coming to the train station every morning. I'd like to know how to get a confirmed ticket to Hampi."

More consultation.

Dude: "Well, we can't get you a confirmed ticket, but if you buy a not-confirmed ticket we promise that tomorrow we'll make it a confirmed ticket."
Me: "To Hampi?"
Dude: "No, to Bangalore."
Me: "But I'm going to Hampi."
Dude: "We can't help you with that ticket. We can only help you with a ticket to Bangalore. You'd have to get off the train and go find someone else to help you there."

I imagined repeating the rigamarole I'd just been through in Bangalore and started thinking to myself that there had to be a better way. A bus maybe. I don't know. Anything. So I left the train station and took a rickshaw back to the tourist part of town. I went to about ten different travel agencies. All of them with big signs in their windows saying, "TRAIN! BUS! CAR! FLIGHT!" I said, "I need to get to Hampi," to each one. They all replied, "Take the train." I said, "There are no tickets. Is there another way?" They all said, "No."

At that point I went to lie down for a while. I'd had enough. Tomorrow I'm going to see what else I can think of. I need to get out of here and apparently that's going to be hard. It's stuff like this that keeps people on the beaten path...try to step away from it and the hassles multiply so fast. Hampi isn't even that far off the beaten path. Far enough though.

Seriously. India needs to buy more trains.

A Shimmer of Bubbles

2011-11-17T04:28:00.000-05:00

I've just come back from a week on the Andaman Islands - all of which I spent on Havelock Island, where the best scuba diving in India is to be found. These islands are far off the eastern coast of India, sort of equadistant from India and Thailand, and they're more or less little tropical paradises. I don't know if you can see in this picture, but there are hundreds of purple trumpet flowers blooming in in the carpet of greenery bordering that white powdery beach, next to the clear turquoise sea:

But I spent most of my time under the water, like this:

Scuba diving. The first day I did a refresher course, since I've only done a handful of dives and none in the past few years, in shallow water that looked like a coral graveyard - all the coral gray and shattered, the whole landscape colorless. Apparently about a year and a half there was a massive, two-month-long heat wave during the hottest months of the year. All the divemasters had left the islands, closing up shop during the low season, and when they came back the coral was dead. Two months of unbroken heat had warmed the ocean enough to kill it.

I didn't want to spend a week staring at dead coral so I did the Advanced Open Water course, which dook me immediately down into the deeper waters, up to 100 feet, where the water had stayed cool during the heat wave and there was plenty to see. Like this, from Dixon's Point:

Or this school of Moorish Idols:

Or how about this lionfish:

After each dive, we'd sit down and list the fish we'd saw in our logbooks and it would fill a whole page, and we'd still not even begin to cover what we'd seen. Huge schools of barracuda. Giant moray eels. We swam up to one poking his head out into the water, little tiny orange fish swimming in and out of his open mouth. Seven foot long white-tipped sharks, which we chased around the sea floor for about ten minutes. Angelfish, anemonefish, butterflyfish, pipefish...pustular varicose slugs and harlequin shrimp. Fans of purple coral. We'd be swimming in the middle of five or six schools of fish at any given moment. It was amazing.

I spent five days diving. The dive days went like this: wake up at six in the morning, eat breakfast, tug on a wetsuit and get on a boat sometime around seven am. Take the boat out into the blue blue water, sea spray on either side and wind in our hair, for half an hour, an hour, until we arrived at the dive site. Put on the rest of the scuba gear, which is clunky and heavy. Jump in the water. We tended to have pretty strong currents so the descent and ascent were always the hardest part, stretched out like little underwater supermen while holding onto an anchor line and pulling ourselves down foot by foot. Then we'd get far enough down for the current to die off and we'd have fifteen, twenty minutes to really look around and enjoy the sights before we had to ascend again.

Another hour in the boat, to get rid of all the nitrogen we'd built up from the first dive, and then we'd go down for the second. Same deal as before. At the end of it, despite the fact that we'd mostly been sitting around on a boat and like, flipping our fins every second or two, we'd all be exhausted. I usually went to bed at eight or eight-thirty, too tired to talk or see straight.

I did one night dive but there was strong current at the site and it was a shallow dive, so there wasn't a whole lot to see. Sea snakes and crabs. Well. One gigantic hermit crab that filled a whole conch shell, which was kind of cool, and the terror of it was interesting. A lot of people are very calm about these things but I had to force myself into the pitch-dark water with only a single flashlight to see by. On the way up, near the surface, the three of us turned our flashlights off and waved our fins, making all the plankton flouresce, little firefly glows, which almost made up for the fact that they were stinging plankton and I have little red lashes all over my arms and legs from swimming past them.

Havelock Island also boasts a beach that's in the running for "most beautiful beach in Asia" and I spent my one day above water there. It was pretty nice, I admit:

stupid red tape

2011-11-08T21:24:00.000-05:00

I'm at the Calcutta International Airport. It looks kind of like a small regional airport in a town you've never heard of. I'm going to the Andaman Islands, so I have to fly, and I admit I'd begun looking forward to my flight as an isolated incident of luxury travel against a sea of more or less inconvenient train rides.

I will never, ever let my expectations run away with me like that again.

My flight leaves at 8:30am. I'm paranoid, so I arrived at the airport at around 5:45am (it's no coincidence that I'm cranky - third day in a row that I've had to get up early for the sake of onward travel). Indians seem to be even more afraid of terrorism than Americans, probably because they have more incidents than we do, and like Americans they've responded with a whole lot of mostly ridiculous red tape.

Example number one: I have a multiple-entry visa but I can't leave the country. If I cross the border into any other country (I'd hoped to visit Nepal), I have to wait two months before I re-enter India. No thanks.

Example number two: I showed up at the airport to check-in only to be told by a gun-toting soldier at the sliding glass entry doors that I couldn't enter the airport without a printed ticket. The GoAir ticket counter sits inside these glass doors, thus, I couldn't go check-in to get a printout or ticket. I booted up my computer and used my USB dongle to call up the e-ticket I'd been sent via email but the soldiers all said no, no, that didn't count. Upon further questioning it became clear that if I could print out the screen I was showing them, it would count. But just looking at my email wouldn't suffice.

So I asked around more and discovered that the domestic terminal of the airport has an internet cafe, where I could call up my ticket and print it out. I hike all the way to the domestic terminal, where I find out that the same security measures that kept me out of the international terminal remain in place: I can't get in without a printed ticket. However, says the new gun-toting soldier, I could go buy a visitor's pass, and that would let me in.

So I find the "airport manager's" office, where I pay 30 rupees (about $0.75) for a visitor's pass. This is not striking me as fancy security but I don't care, I just want to get a printout of my ticket before my plane takes off.

I roll my luggage back to the main entry and show the soldier my pass. He nods but then tells me that I can't bring my luggage inside the airport. This is annoying but, at this point, more logical than any of the other hassles I've had to deal with. I start to chain my luggage to a guard rail when a pair of soldiers approach and tell me that I can't leave my luggage outside. I have to give it to someone. I point out that I'm alone and have nobody to give my luggage to and they shrug.

I go back to the airport manager's office and talk to the woman who sold me the visitor's pass. I look, at that point, like I'm about to panic and the woman is very kind. She gets up, goes to the main entryway, and convinces the soldiers to let me inside with my luggage. I feel equal amounts of gratitude and frustration: I am pleased for myself and the increased likelihood of catching my flight; I am displeased by the fact that their security measures are so flimsy. If there's one thing worse than inconveniencing lots of people for a good reason, it would be inconveniencing lots of people for no reason.

I print out my ticket. The exact same page that I showed the first gun-toting soldier. I wheel my way out of the domestic terminal back to the international terminal. I show the gun-toting soldier my printout. He waves me through (he does not, by the way, have to collect the printouts). I check in.

I haven't even gotten on the plane yet, people. I still have to get to the Andaman Islands, get some sort of a permit on arrival (it's a restricted territory), and then find and take a government ferry to Havelock Island. I am not looking forward to the rest of the day.

A quick coda: After checking in, I had plenty of time to spare (that's the upside of being paranoid) and I wanted to grab a coffee. There's one chain of stores here called "Cafe Coffee Day" that brews a decent espresso and I saw one in front of the domestic terminal. But when I try to leave the airport, I can't. The gun-toting soldiers won't let me. No going in and out.

I say I just want to go grab a coffee and come back, and they reply that I should try the coffee shop deeper in the international section of the airport, past immigration. I say, "Oh, ok," and get in line, only to remember my first example of stupid red tape: if I leave the country, I can't get back in. Given everything I know of India, walking upstairs to get a cup of coffee would count as leaving the country and I'd be stuck, my trip brought to a premature end. I decided I didn't need breakfast that badly.

Khajuraho

2011-11-07T00:03:00.000-05:00

Khajuraho is probably my favorite of the places I've visited in India. It was clean, peaceful, and the temples - famous for their erotic carvings - are well-tended and more exquisite than I had expected, a true feast for the eyes.

I took pictures of some sculptures for their sheer brazen raciness, but these were my favorite scenes.

Orchha

2011-11-06T03:42:00.001-05:00

Just pictures this time. I spent three days in Orchha - a little one-road town between Gwalior and Khajuraho, sleepy and charming and full of tourists. Plugged my earbuds in and wandered around, which was a lot of fun, and spent a whole day sitting by the river reading. I wondered at the time if that was the best way to spend a whole day here, but, in retrospect, it absolutely was. The only downside were the two guys who sat on a rail across from me for several hours, trying to peek up my skirt, but they did give up and go away eventually.

I have since learned, at my vist to the Darjeeling zoo, that this is an Alexandrine parakeet. I also saw (and took pictures of) the much rarer white vulture which inhabits the fort.

Trains

2011-11-01T05:42:00.002-04:00

If there is one thing I have learned about the Indian rail system, it's this: book in advance. The country is densely gridded with tracks, but there aren't nearly as many trains as there are people wanting to get on them.

My first trip took me between Delhi and Gwalior. I bought a waitlisted ticket, 11 on the list, and actually got a seat. I've since realized that most waitlisted tickets aren't worth the paper that they're printed on. And it was in 1st class ("AC class"), so I had a whole berth to myself in a nice quiet car. I really had no idea how lucky I was.

I took a short hop on the unreserved seats between Orchha and Khajuraho. Those are the cars you see in movies sometimes, with twenty faces bobbing at every open, barred window and five or six people crammed into the little vestibule, probably standing on a sack of onions. I'd attached myself to a pair of French tourists that I've since crossed paths with in Varanasi and Darjeeling, and we found an ally who bullied the other passengers into making room for us. For a short, three hour trip, it wasn't so bad.

For a long, twelve-hour trip, however, it was torture. Because I tried to book a train between Khajuraho and Varanasi and, after my earlier experience, took a chance with a waitlisted ticket. It was cancelled, there were no seats in any of the other cars, and I ended up in the unreserved cars again. Alone this time. I made half the journey in the "family" car, with women and children who were pretty nice, actually. One of the women moved her baby from where it spawled on the seat so I could sit down, and if I was surrounded by twelve people in a space meant to hold six, well, at least they were nice, polite people. But then I had to transfer in Allahabad and I got into a general seating car where I sat clutching my purse, surrounded by men, feeling prickly and uncomfortable for four more hours. I didn't eat or drink the whole time, from sunup past sundown, and the whole experience was pretty hellish.

After that, I decided I'd learned my lesson. I went back to the station at Varanasi the next morning and booked as many onward tickets as I could. When I arrived at the station for my trip to Darjeeling I was feeling pretty smug about it, too, thinking that I'd get on a 9pm train, have a nice sleep in my 3AC berth, and wake up in time to freshen up before the train rolled to a stop in New Jalpaiguri, from where I'd have to catch a shared jeep the remaining distance north to Darjeeling.

So, naturally, the train was late. Not just my train, either. The whole station filled up with people who laid out blankets and filled up the main booking hall and every waiting area, sleeping and chatting away the hours. I'd see people tucked against walls, blanketed from head to toes, looking like corpses. At first the enquiry agents made some attempt to keep everyone posted about the delays, but eventually it got late and they abandoned their posts.

I hooked up with a few other tourists so we could all pool information. We settled down in the first class waiting room, which was definitely the nicest place to wait in the station, but that wasn't saying much. It was pretty grubby, attached to a pair of bathrooms that sent out a nice reek every time anyone opened the door - the sink was broken, so no water, and actually, one of the bathrooms wasn't so much a bathroom as a shower that had been rather sloppily converted to its present use - and a pair of rats that would peek out into the waiting room every minute or two through a convenient notch in the bottom of the bathroom door. They'd creep into the room, someone would wave something or slap their feet against the floor to send the rats scurrying in another direction, and the process would repeat with until the rats retreated to the bathroom to regroup for their next attempt.

I spent six hours in that room.

I've been keeping pretty early hours - traveling alone, as a woman, I'd be unwise to dive into the nightlife - so as the clock crept toward midnight I was having a hard time keeping my eyes open. A couple of the other tourists fell asleep but a few of us had to remain awake because the only updates we were getting about the trains were through overhead announcements, tinny and hard to understand. The only thing any of us could ever really decipher from these announcements were the train numbers, a series of four or five digits, and so we had to keep one ear on this constant staticky babble, listening for numbers amidst a stream of indecipherable words, waiting to recognize the code that meant our train was about to arrive.

As a final note about the Mughal Sarai train station: all of the ads on the walls were for undershirts. So if I were, say, trotting between the waiting room and the enquiry office I'd see the rats, then these pictures of men in wifebeaters, one brand after another, then hundreds of people all asleep in the main hall, then this board telling me my train had been delayed yet again.

So yeah. The train finally arrived at two-thirty in the morning. It racked up a few extra hours of delay en route and dropped us in New Jalpaiguri at 8pm instead of 1:30. We stumbled into Siliguri and had to pay through the nose to get a pair of teenagers - literally, they were both under 18 - to drive us up the steep, twisting roads, in the dark, to Darjeeling.

I spent all of yesterday recovering. Today too, to be honest. Luckily, the weather here is bad, cloudy and rainy. On a clear day, there are points nearby from where you can see Everest. Until the weather changes, though, I'm not missing anything. As far as I can tell, there are no mountains here at all. Just fog.

Varanasi (I am a scaredy cat)

2011-10-27T11:51:00.002-04:00

I had the craziest day today. I wanted to catch up with Orchha and Khajuraho before moving on to Varanasi - both Orchha and Khajuraho are lovely, lovely places - but I need to write this down before I forget it, because I think I just about ran the gamut of human emotions today.

I woke up at dawn to take a boat ride on the Ganges, up and down the ghats. That's the number one tourist activity here. Take a look at the photos and you can see why.

Everything about this city batters at the senses. There are some scenes, like the ones above, that are peaceful and surreal. Others, like the one at the top, that hint at the city's battered grandeur. And then there's the chaos...

And the filth...

And yes, that is a boy with a kite in the foreground. Because the image wasn't heartbreaking enough without a boy and a kite, was it?

Also, please imagine brushing your teeth with that water. Because that happens. You're welcome.

You know what else I saw? A dead baby. Varanasi is all about death. Apparently the belief is that people who die here ascend straight to the Hindu equivalent of heaven, so people come here to die. Most of the people who die here are cremated on the ghats. But some - including children, pregnant women, lepers, holy men, and people who die from snakebite - are wrapped in their shrouds and given to the river whole. Today I saw a family rowing a shrouded little baby out into the river.

We rowed past the burning ghats as well, where the bodies are burnt. What struck me, drifting by and later on foot, wasn't the pyres. It was the gigantic piles of wood. Huge piles of wood, several stories high, surround the steps where the bodies are burnt on all sides and in stacks down the street. Because there are today's bodies, and tomorrow's, and the day after tomorrow's...and they'll all need wood to burn.

So after my sunrise boat excursion, I did a few more touristy things. I went to the train station to book some onward tickets. I went to a cafe/shop to buy some gifts. And then I decided I'd finish off the day by walking the ghats from end to end, or, at least, as far as I could go before my feet started hurting. I did that too, and it was nice, more battering of the senses. Here's another photo from the walk:

Kind of more of the same, right? Boats, misty city, people bathing, but this time with cows! Speaking of the cows, they were kind of uppity today. That was the first odd thing. I've seen so many cows over the past month and they're always so placid. They stand around nosing through the trash or chomping on weeds, maybe lying in the middle of the road. Up until today, the cows I saw were mostly stationary. Sometimes they ambled. I didn't hear one moo until today, when all the cows woke up and started acting lively: trotting, grunting, and, in one case, charging. These things have horns! They are gigantic! It's scary when a cow trots your way.

So I get to the end of the ghats and I decided I'd walk back to my hotel a different way, via the streets. But the streets are narrow and winding and I lost my sense of direction pretty quickly. That's when the dogs attacked.

I have been repeatedly amazed by how sweet-natured the street dogs here are. They're more polite than most of the dogs I see in the states who have owners and some training. It's gotten to the point where I don't notice the street dogs, or, when I do, I just feel sort of happy and sympathetic towards them. But rabies is common in India and when I turned down an alley and three dogs started barking and chasing me, I remembered the lay of the land right quick. I was backing away and using my purse as a barrier and seeing my life flash in front of my eyes when some random stranger stepped in to call the dogs off. (Just to be clear: none of them touched me, not even a little bit, or else this would be a very different story).

I was light-headed for about half an hour after that. Rabies is terrifying and I was terrified. So I was sort of getting lost and the sun was heading towards the western horizon and I was light-headed with terror. I tried asking a few people which way to the ghats, thinking at least I'd get my sense of direction back if I could find the river, but I just wound deeper into this warren of streets. The women and children vanished as it got darker. Instead, these aggressive young men zoomed up and down the little alleyways on motorbikes, hooting and hollering and going way, way too fast. One biker clipped my camera, another jeered when I had to leap to get out of his way and barely saved my toes from a crushing.

Finally I emptied out on an actual, car-carrying asphalt road. I was tired and kind of miserable so I nabbed the first rickshaw I saw. It was a cycle rickshaw, which was already bad news - perching behind a guy on a bicycle while he plays chicken with a bunch of cars is not fun. But, really, I wanted to go back to tourist land. I wanted hotels and restaurants and cheap jewelry stores and chai shops.

Instead, the rickshaw driver drove me right into the middle of a parade. With people in fuzzy red hats and a band and lots of angry cops who all yelled at him and made him turn around. So the poor driver is trying to turn around while half-a-dozen people shout at him and then someone let off a really, really loud firecracker. I screamed and clapped my hands over my ears, the rickshaw driver took off, and we careened into a horde of those testosterone-crazed motorcyclists that I'd been dodging on foot for the past hour, all of them wearing identical orange turbans. Hundreds of them.

At that point I just ducked and covered my face. I didn't want to know what would happen next.

But all that happened is that the rickshaw driver plowed his way through amidst much catcalling. The first few roads he tried were all blocked, thanks to the parade, and jammed up with confused drivers, and periodically trails of those orange-turbaned motorcyclists would force their way through, all of them howling. Once we got onto free-flowing roads there were long long lines of people all waiting for...something...going on for ten or twelve blocks, and police cars all over.

Eventually the rickshaw driver dropped me back in tourist land and then, because I was a terrified puddle of spineless goo, bulled me into paying him WAY too much (by which I mean, I paid him $2 when I should have paid him $0.50). I found a nice, quiet place to have dinner and that was that.

Let's see how long it takes me before I decide to wander off an explore a new city on foot again, hmm? Might be a while.

Gwalior

2011-10-23T12:16:00.004-04:00

I got down from the mountains with one priority: go someplace warm. I'd originally intended to hang around up north for a while, making my way east through the mountains, but the way things work at the budget hotels around here you get like, one blanket on a thin hard mattress and that wasn't going to erase my memory of chattering the night away with icy feet in the Himalayas.

There's also a sort of general consensus that the far-north cities are "over". I met a girl in Dharamsala who said she'd originally gone to Leh - a city even farther to the north, at a higher altitude, with more dramatic mountains - who left because Leh was "over." And then, when I was in Manali, a lot of the shopkeepers and restauranteurs all said that they were only going to stay open for a few more days, because Manali was about to be "over". More than one of them put it like this: "Now that Goa has started, Manali is over."

I thought this was pretty hilarious - this town is over! - but it's just a fact of the changing seasons: the northern hill stations are most popular when the weather down south is unbearably hot. Now that the south is cooling down and winter is on its way to the mountains, the tourist season is winding down.

So I decided to make my way to Khajuraho. In order to do that, I took another all night bus south - my third all night bus, ugh - to Delhi, where I spent a few unpleasant hours in the massive, hectic New Delhi train station before catching a train to Gwalior. I get pretty nervous when I'm moving from place to place because I know I'm at my most vulnerable, carrying all my valuables, weighted down, slow and uncertain. I got harassed a bit in the train station but the worst moment came towards the end, after I'd been wandering up and down the track for twenty minutes trying to figure out where my car would be once my train rolled into the station.

I ran into a pair of British girls who were in the car right next to mine, so I decided to stick close to them. But they had just arrived in the country and hadn't yet learned that it doesn't always pay to be friendly here. This old dude, dressed in white with a big old beard and a toothy smile, started chatting up the British girls. And they chatted back, cheerful and laughing and hand-gesturing all over the place. This attracted attention, which is to say it attracted a crowd of male onlookers. They surrounded us three deep, to the point where the British girls finally started to get nervous. I'd been reading in my Kindle but I looked up, shooed all the men away (literally: I waved at them and said SHOO) and then abandoned the British girls, because that was not my idea of fun.

Anyhow. The train was calm and pleasant. I had a hard time figuring out where we were stopping and the other passengers in my car were really nice. They noticed how nervous I got every time the train slowed down and finally they were like, "We'll tell you when we get to Gwalior! We promise!" And then they were like, "Ok, Gwalior in three stops," "Gwalior in two stops," "Get ready, it's the next stop." So that was nice.

I stayed in Gwalior long enough to rest up, see a couple of the major sights, and move on. The city has a big hill fort, most of which is underground and infested by bats. Thousands and thousands of bats. It's a magnificent structure that has become very creepy and very, very smelly.

For example. Check out the photo on the left. Once upon a time, it was a sumptuously decorated chamber where the maharajah's many wives whiled away the afternoons on swings that hung between those thick pillars. Later, the room was converted into a prison and the hooks for the swings were used to string up prisoners. Guess which use the room seems better suited to today?

The above-ground parts of the fort were easier to appreciate.

Here's a temple...

Some goats eating offerings at a shrine:

Me on one of the balconies, overlooking a small palace:

My other stop in Gwalior was the Jai Vilas Palace, basically a glorified storage facility for the family that owns it. The "exhibits" are just things they don't use anymore, like a big baby stroller shaped like a swan, or a table and chair set carved of wood that's too heavy to use but too valuable to throw away. My favorite thing was a miniature choo-choo train they'd laid out in their massive dining hall that carried bottles of champagne up and down the table. Here's a picture of the biggest attraction, an assembly hall that contains two three-ton chandeliers! And the largest hand-woven rug in Asia! Cuz bigger is better!

I found the place about as wonderfully absurd as I'd hoped to, but I'm pretty sure that's not the effect the family is really going for by opening their home up as a "museum"

I think I'll save Orchha and Khajuraho (my favorite place in India so far) for later.

Trekking

2011-10-17T09:34:00.000-04:00

So I signed onto a three-day trek through the Himalayas, circling around the small city of Manali. I didn't ask too many questions before setting off, which was a mistake - I didn't realize, for example, that the plan was, "For two days you will hike up a really steep mountain, and then in one day you will hike all the way back down the really steep mountain." No flat terrain in sight; my calves are still killing me.

Here are some pictures from the first day, on the way up:

We camped at around 14,000 feet altitude, both nights. It was pretty warm during the day (you can see my wearing a t-shirt above), but got cold fast. Insanely cold. We had porters and horses carrying all the heavy stuff, but had to set up our own tents and such. The porters laid out a tarp and then tossed a dozen sleeping bags on it and said, "Two each!" and we were all like, "What? Two sleeping bags? Who needs two sleeping bags?"

I could have used three.

I went to bed that night with one sleeping bag tucked into the other, wearing a full set of long underwear, wool socks, and a thick fleece, but I was still too cold to sleep. I just lay there all night with my teeth chattering, waiting for the sun to come up again.

Here's that camp:

Day two was more uphill, but with the addition of scary shale slopes. Honestly, if we hadn't been a day in, I probably would have turned around here because, seriously, this is not a trail:

It's a rock slide waiting to happen. I crawled through most of this terrain at a snail's pace, irritating the other hikers, but I was terrified. At one point I sat down next to one of our guides. I think his name was Mani but we all called him Money; he was a cool little Nepalese kid who wore killer white sunglasses and, get this, sandals at night. He was that hardcore. Anyhow. I said, "This looks like a rock slide waiting to happen," and he said, "Yeah, we get a lot of avalanches here."

Grrreeat.

Here's our camp for the second night:

And some of the wonderful views from Camp #2:

Bizarrely enough the third day - the downhill - was the worst. I didn't get winded the way I did on the uphill slopes, but that contributed to the problem. I just forced my muscles to carry my legs forward long after they were shot, trying to keep up with the other hikers. I admit to being the slowest person on the trek in general; there was a fifty-eight year old Spaniard who could have run circles around me.

Anyhow, the point is, the downhill was really steep and we had to descend at a rapid pace. By the time we reached the finale, the village of Vashisht, my knees were killing me. Imagine going down a really steep set of stairs, with half the steps taller than is comfortable, for five hours straight and you might get an idea of how I felt. I hobbled around like an old lady for days.

But no regrets. I saw some seriously beautiful scenery, and I tested myself. Both good things.

Manali

2011-10-07T11:07:00.000-04:00

Today I hiked down Old Manali’s single, half-paved road to the bridge over the river that separates the old and new parts of the city. Going uphill again, I passed a park full of the tall trees that cloak the hills in these parts – massive pine trees that give the whole area the look of a fantasy movie, a landscape subtly stretched beyond the limits of reality.

I was headed for the shops. I figured that was about all I could handle with my cold. Manali is in the far north, tucked into the Himalayas, and known for its woolen goods. I ended up buying a pashmina shawl for my mom, cornflower blue and light as though it had been woven from cotton candy or spiderwebs, and – for half the price – a silk and pashmina shawl for myself. Mine is a mellow Bordeaux color, so thin and soft my fingers feel rough and uncouth by comparison whenever I touch it, but I draped it around my shoulders anyhow. The slide of cloth against my neck is delicious, and as the weather cooled and rain threatened during the afternoon, it kept me pretty warm.

I started back towards my hotel, more energetic than I’d expected to feel after hoofing it all that way. I ended up stopping at one of the town’s fancier cafes for a salad and a tall glass of plum-ginger juice. Salad and ice cubes are dangerous for travelers, but look at the picture and tell me you wouldn’t have succumbed (the apples are local):

Manali is a prime honeymoon destination for Indians, and when you’re sitting in a beautiful garden with a bright green lawn surrounded by full-blown roses while snow-capped mountains loom in the distance, it’s easy to understand why. The contrast is magical.

Fortified by lunch, I detoured up to the Hadimba temple. It’s a seventeenth century temple dedicated to the goddess Hadimba – don’t ask me to explain who she is – and my visit there was nothing I would have predicted.

The building itself is plain, a pagoda shape constructed of dark wooden beams and white plaster, its roof clad in timber shingles. At first, the only ornamentation I could see were the ring of antlers fastened just under the overhanging roof.

A long line of people snaked out from the doorway, so I did a circuit of the temple before deciding if I wanted to get in line myself. Pollen rained down from the trees, turning the air green. Halfway around a pack of young men stopped me and asked if I’d take a picture with them. This has happened to me surprisingly often since I arrived in India; I got through months in Morocco and Egypt without ever feeling very weird about being white, or blonde, but it’s impossible here. Once I agreed to take a picture with the young men a whole bunch of other people approached me. I ended up standing around while little crowd swirled around me, people taking turns standing at my side and mugging for the camera – including a lawyer from Calcutta, who insisted that I converse in turn with each of his three children, two daughters and a son, to practice their English before they gathered around me for a big family photo.

Next to a temple! A sixteenth century temple!

Finally I got in line, made my way up to the front and clambered through the small door into a dark, almost empty space thick with smoke from an open fire. The devout crept down a small ramp to a little shrine, laid down their offerings, and left. I couldn’t tell if the shrine contained anything of note; I just saw the candles and the rupee bills and a sort of dark carved rock. I stepped aside, uneasy about getting any closer. I didn’t feel like I’d come to a tourist destination at all, and I didn’t want to intrude any further.

This cute little dog followed me home from the temple. I’ve seen street dogs everywhere I go. They tend to be starving and scruffy and at night they’ll bark and howl and fight. Some of them are injured. Some of them are tiny, adorable little puppies. In any case, India has the highest incidence of rabies infection in the world and I avoid them…until this adorable creature followed me down the hill. Pale and scruffy like all the others, but what manners! It walked at my heel for almost two miles, stopped when I stopped, sat and waited patiently with me when I hugged walls or signposts while cars zoomed past. I’d started to formulate a plan, thinking I’d find a vet, find out if the dog had rabies, get it a bunch of vaccinations, name it Kiddo and find a way to bring it home with me when it saw a pair of tourists walking by in the opposite direction and started tagging after them instead of me.

2011-10-06T09:38:00.000-04:00

See that? Three layers: bottom layer honey, middle layer strips of ginger, top layer hot water with lemon juice squeezed in. With a teabag on the side.

I've had about five of those today.

I decided to move east from Dharamsala/McLeod-Ganj to Manali last night. Easy enough to do: I booked a ticket on the bus leaving that evening, packed up and checked out of my hotel, and voila. The bus left early and the drivers sped over the bumpy roads, tipping and tilting the bus around each hairpin turn. It was horrible. I heard something electronic crunch about a quarter of the way through and spent the rest of the trip clutching my purse and cursing the driver. At one point another passenger was literally flung from her seat onto the floor, where she cut her leg on a piece of rusty metal.

The bus was scheduled to drop us in Manali around six in the morning. Instead, thanks to the reckless driving, we arrived at four in the morning. It is not good to arrive in a new town at four in the morning! We all stumbled off the bus, bleary eyed and rattled, only to find a hotelier waiting with a minivan and an offer we couldn't refuse: go with them, or sit around in the dark at the bus station until the rickshaw drivers woke up and arrived on scene.

So we piled into the minivan and looked back with sorrow at the pair of French girls who remained behind in the pitch-black parkling lot, unwilling to be conned. The hotel turned out to be out of the way, a five minute walk on little dirt footpaths away from Old Manali's tiny little main road, and nice enough, but the whole episode left a foul taste in my mouth. I suspect the hotelier had made some sort of arrangement between the speeding bus driver.

I ended up splitting the cost of a room with the poor girl who'd cut her leg on the bus for the remainder of the night (my share added up to about $3), dragging myself out of bed again at 8:30 and finding a different hotel. I imagine inertia was supposed to keep me in place, justifying the hotelier's time and effort, which is why I was so prompt about leaving.

I'd been developing a mild cold in Dharamsala and the miserable, sleepless bus ride made it worse so I've been nursing my sore throat with the delicious concoction pictured above. It's available almost everywhere here.

Below is the view from Manali - the mountains are getting bigger and look at those trees!

The Dalai Lama

2011-10-04T03:31:00.002-04:00

I've been in Dharamsala for a few days now - or, actually, McLeod-Ganj, which sounds much less romantic so I can't blame people for referring to the town by the name of its big sister. It's the site of the Dalai Lama's home since he went into exile, the current epicenter of Tibetan Buddhism, and as a result the town feels a lot like a cross between...well, between a small Himalayan village and the student union of a particularly hippy-ish university.

My arrival was lucky, since the Dalai Lama was in residence and giving a series of lectures at the temple. I attended one...well, I snuck into one, anyhow. I read the signs explaining how to register for entrance and went about assembling the necessary items: passport photos for security, an FM radio so I could hear the instant translation of his lecture, a safe place to leave my camera behind. But when I showed up bright and early at security I was told that registration had closed. Too bad for me.

Disappointed, I turned around to head home and figure out what else I might want to do here when this long-haired Russian dude pulled me to the side of the road. He was sitting on a little bench drinking masala tea with a monk. There are lots of monks here. For some reason, the Russian dude was determined to get me into the lecture and he devised a brilliant scheme: I'd head back up to security with the monk, who would announce that I was his wife, and then they'd have to let me in!

I'm not sure who was more embarrassed by this suggestion, the monk or myself, but the remarkable thing is that we actually tried it.

It didn't work.

But Russian Dude was not deterred. He led me back around the temple, away from security, and then up a series of staircases and rickety little ladders until we'd snuck into the audience hall from another direction. This felt sort of wrong and, furthermore, was kind of depressing - those poor security guys at the gate were confiscating Swiss Army knives from all the visitors and for what?

Anyhow, the temple looks a lot like a public school building. Not fancy at all. Which is nice, in a way; a show of humility and simplicity, no concern for worldly goods. And I saw the Dalai Lama as he passed into the main hall where he'd speak, preceded by incense and surrounded by devoted believers who pressed their palms together and bowed in his presence. It was the sort of thing that reminds you that Buddhism isn't just a philosophy or a spiritual practice; it's a religion.

The lecture itself wasn't anything new or revelatory. Compassion, non-violence, emptiness, the non-existence of things. Maybe if I were more invested in the philosophy I'd have a comment on the nuances. Instead I felt a lot like I was listening to a primer on Structuralism (if things are interdependent for existence, they have no existence of their own, they are not real...)

As the lecture wound to a close, someone unwound a long strip of yellow cloth along the railing of the staircase leading down and out of the temple. They tied the ends, tying the sleeve to the rail, the Dalai Lama walked down the staircase, someone rolled up the yellow cloth and the morning session was over.

Delhi

2011-10-02T04:13:00.003-04:00

I don't have anything smart to say about Delhi so instead I'm going to go for the chuckles.

(1) I packed a little bottle of iced-tea flavoring to add to bottles of water. This made me feel really clever and when, upon arrival at my hotel, I was presented with a bottle of cold water I triumphantly unwrapped the flavoring and squirted it in. Unfortunately, the flavoring tasted awful and later that night I had to brush my teeth with iced tea. Not a success.

(2) I woke up early the next morning, courtesy of jet lag, and ventured out into the city. I took the metro three stations on my own! I felt so proud! I presented my token, let some ladies feel me up behind a ratty curtain and correctly read the signs telling me which direction to go and where to exit. It's amazing how venturing abroad makes even the smallest accomplishments feel huge.

(3) After wading through waves of irritating, harassing touts I arrived at the state tourism office at 9am, ready to schedule myself a spot on a daily bus tour of the city. Delhi is so big that I wanted a general lay of the land. The dour, droopy-eyed concierge assured me that the bus tour, scheduled to begin at 9am, no, 10am, no, 9:30 am, and touring only New Delhi, no, lasting all day and covering all the major sights in Old and New Delhi, was completely booked. After scolding me for not having booked my bus tour weeks in advance, he asked me if I wanted to take a car tour instead?

(4) I declined the concierge's kind offer and took an auto-rickshaw to the Red Fort. The Red Fort was gorgeous and epic and a wonder to behold. But I left to hoof it around Old Delhi and within the space of an hour I'd burned myself red as a beet (forgot to put on sunscreen!), overheated and exhausted myself. I headed back to my hotel to take a nap at about 3 in the afternoon and then slept until four the next morning, when I woke up and immediately booked myself on a bus to Dharamsala.

(5) I've heard the buses that wind north through the Himalayas are terrifying, but I was never nervous about our driver's competence. What did totally freak me out were the bumpy roads. I'd lean my head back against the headrest to doze off and a few minutes later one of the bumps in the road would knock my forehead against the window pretty hard, I'd wake up, and my hair would have been teased into a bee-hive at the back of my head from all the bumping. So I'd finger-comb my hair smooth again and then doze off until the next pothole had me repeating the process. By the time I got off the plane, my hair felt stiff and crunchy as though I'd been swimming in the ocean - the accumulation of the day's sweat. Ugh.

Delhi totally kicked my butt; maybe by the time I return there at the end of my stay I'll be able to handle the chaos, the harassment, the heat and the dirt. It will be interesting to use my first experience of the city as a benchmark. So far Dharamsala has been divine, and I'll finish this post with a picture of my view over breakfast, after I checked into my hotel and ventured out for a bite on a nearby terrace:

Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality, by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha

2010-07-25T19:28:00.004-04:00

I picked up this book after I read about it in Dan Savage's July 7, 2010 column. I've been a big fan of Dan Savage for years now, and when I read what he had to say about Sex at Dawn I dropped everything and started reading. So in case you feel the same way, here's a quote:

"Sex At Dawn is the single most important book about human sexuality since Alfred Kinsey unleashed Sexual Behavior In The Human Male on the American public in 1948. Want to understand why men married to supermodels cheat? Why so many marriages are sexless? Why paternity tests often reveal that the 'father' isn’t? Read Sex At Dawn."

It really is pretty awesome. It's fun to read, and very well-researched. As a former anthroplogy major, I felt like I was in familiar territory, and I appreciated that when the authors couldn't discuss a subject in-depth they always cited multiple more comprehensive sources. This is important, and I mention it first because so many of their claims are pretty incendiary.

Their basic thesis is as follows: most of human evolution took place in pre-historic, non-agrarian societies. The standard narratives about human sexuality - about men who try to spread their genes by sleeping around, and women who try to secure the protection of a single male - simply don't fit with what we know about pre-historic lifestyles. By investigating the sexual habits of our closest genetic relatives (chimpanzees and bonobos) and also by analyzing human hunter-gatherer societies past and present with a fresh eye, we can come to a better understanding of contemporary sexual behavior.

Basically: Why do we cling to the idea that human beings evolved to engage in a perpetual "war of the sexes," with men and women in a state of mutual exploitation? Is there a way of understanding our sexual urges as adaptive and useful, rather than unnatural and dysfunctional?

And the answer to that last question is: well, yeah, there is. Unfortunately, it's an answer a lot of people won't like very much. For the vast majority of human history, we lived in small, nomadic groups where multi-partner mating was common. Women are built to accomodate multiple partners at once (sperm competition); men are built to seek variety (exogamy, avoid incest). Monogamy is not a natural state. And however we behave now, our bodies are still tuned to the old dance.

The authors support their claims with mountains of evidence. They compare the size and shape of male genitalia among chimps, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans, and gibbons. They describe behavioral experiments involving farm animals. They discuss Jane Goodall's fieldwork with chimps in Gombe. They turn to fieldwork on modern hunter-gatherer cultures from around the world, in the Amazon basin, China, and Africa. They mine accounts of early European explorers, from the first English settlers in Australia to Darwin. They give Hobbes a thorough beat-down. They talk about declining testosterone levels, Calvin Coolidge, and the smelly t-shirt experiment.

Personally, I was convinced. And I really do believe, like the authors do, that understanding and accepting our biological make-up can make us happier, healthier, and more peaceful people. I very highly recommend this book. As Dan Savage says: even if you are unwavering in your support of monogamy, at least make the effort to understand why it's such hard work.

The Daily Show

2010-07-07T16:27:00.002-04:00

Last week - on June 29, 2010 - Asit kindly let me tag along with him to a taping of The Daily Show. It's the first time I've ever gone to see a TV show recorded and it was a pretty interesting experience, though most of the comments I'd make fall in line with general chatter I've heard about what happens when you get too close to the magic of modern media.

Here's the door into the theater (the sign reads: Abandon News, All Ye Who Enter Here - gotta love the Dante reference):

And here are our fancy, high-security tickets into the taping:

They say 25 and 26 but I think they really meant 125 and 126, or 225 and 226...whatever the number, we still got inside. We had reserved spots but they overbook every show so if you want in, you have to show up early and wait around. I think we waited for about 2 hours.

We were shown into the theater probably half an hour before taping started. We settled down and then the self-described "warm up monkey" came out to loosen up our laughing muscles and also warn us that, as the show's only laugh track, it was our solemn duty to laugh loud and often. The price of entry, as it were, given that admittance was otherwise free.

If you watch The Daily Show, you know that Jon Stewart makes a habit of chatting up his audience before the show starts. The chatting up is pretty carefully timed - I think it lasts about two minutes - he came out when the warm-up monkey was done and took a few questions. It's a neat way of going a little above and beyond, being generous with his audience, but also, I think, a way for him to warm himself up. Our first question was about his favorite cheese, so we mostly got a long monologue on the subject of cheese. His favorites are semi-soft, and he thinks jack cheese should not be loaded up with foreign objects like pepper.

The thing I noticed most, once taping got started, was how obvious it was that Jon Stewart is acting. Watching on TV, his manners and gestures always seem very natural to me - of course I know that he's acting, and the shows are very obviously scripted and carefully constructed, but I've always had the impression that I'm watching Jon Stewart more or less be himself. And maybe that's true, or maybe that's not - clearly I'm not qualified to judge, since I have no standard of comparison - but sitting in the live audience, it was very obvious that his constant gesturing, raised voice, and focused intensity are unnatural. That it's not at all like having a conversation with a normal person, not on TV, where arm-windmilling and mugging for the camera would be disconcerting instead of hilarious.

I've heard actors say that before, that taking up space and moving your body on and off the stage are different things, and complain that non-actors lack affect. We don't choreograph our thoughts and emotions with our bodies, or at least we don't do so intentionally. The result is that "normal" body language looks very dull and wooden on TV, I think.

Other than that, the taping was pretty quick - not surprisingly, it lasted exactly as long as the show does - there wasn't much delay as people or props were ushered on and off the set, or cameras were moved about. The guest was Helen Mirren, which I found terribly exciting. She was gracious and gorgeous, and she looked like a breath of fresh air in a sleek black sheath with a little tie-front white shrug on. The interview, however, seemed pretty stiff to me, and she didn't linger once it was over.

So there you go, a little run down of being an audience member at The Daily Show. It'd be interesting to check out a few other live tapings, just to make the comparison, and it was interesting to see the set - it looks just like it does on TV, but somehow less impressive. Definitely a fun thing to do, and I recommend it to anyone who has the opportunity to attend.

I Am Love

2010-07-01T13:34:00.005-04:00

I Am Love is an odd movie. It's full of things that ought not to work. I kept thinking things like, "Oh no, not another movie about falling in love through the erotic powers of food," or "Really? A lesbian subplot featuring prurient close-ups of hot girls kissing?" and "That twist at the end, so cheap."

There's more, too. It's shot oddly - there are outdoor night-scenes that are very poorly lit, so that all the actors are dim and grey; there are lengthy close-ups of rain on statues and multiple flat, disposable-camera style shots of buildings passing by from the window of a car. The movie is lulling, a slow burn rather than a firecracker. Especially at first, it's hard to really get a grip on what's going on - all the characters are self-controlled, not particularly emotive, and it's a game of reading into their non-reactions as events unfurl.

But it does work, despite all of the elements that would sink a lesser movie. Because all of the twists and turns that would have evolved into high drama in another film are dulled or blunted here, I Am Love is a film all about subterranean, core-deep tectonic shifts that slowly build up pressure until finally, as the movie nears its conclusion, the cracks that begin to visibly split the family apart really do feel like earthquakes.

After I walked out of the theater, while I was hashing out my thoughts with my cousin, who'd accompanied me, and then later as I read through a few reviews, I realized exactly how well-balanced the movie is. My cousin asked if I thought it was a movie that glamorized adultery and leaving one's family to pursue the thrill of true love. And I answered: no, I didn't get that sense at all. That was what Tilda's character did, yes, but it didn't seem like a victory or a prescription; and there's another sub-plot, about a son who finds a nice girl and settles down with her, who seems perfectly happy to do the expected thing, that's presented with the same lack of judgment.

And the things that stuck me most, which seem to strike everyone the most, are all self-consciously quiet. A scene when Tilda asks her housekeeper to have dinner with her while they're both doing chores in the laundry room. A shot when Tilda's character laughs, a rare occurance, while sitting on the toilet. A tense, absolutely perfect moment between Tilda and her husband near the conclusion, when a scene ready-made to overflow with sturm and drang instead went the way of a silent but shocking nuclear explosion. The movie is full of scenes that illustrate the power of understatement.

Final note: I just re-read the New Yorker's review of the film (Second Helpings) - it's utterly glowing, beginning with the strict admonition to see the movie in theaters rather than waiting for it to come out on DVD. The only thing that the author, Anthony Lane, complains about is the scene where Tilda's lover gives her oral sex. It cuts between the coupling and shots of insects going about their business, and he's right that this is not exactly a fresh metaphor - but the whole movie is like that, full of cliched imagery that still somehow works. In the same paragraph, even, Lane gushingly describes the film's metaphorical use of the changing seasons, from winter to spring. If he's willing to enthuse about the weather, his excuse about the bees doesn't hold water. When I watched the sex scene, I remember thinking about This Film Not Yet Rated, which argues very strongly that the ratings board penalizes movies that show female pleasure and in particular oral sex on women. Even at the time, I was surprised and delighted to see a filmmaker so clearly and unapologetically go there. Shame on you, New Yorker critic, for jumping on the bandwagon and telling us that scenes of cunnilingus are unnecessary. The truth is precisely the opposite.

Brooklyn Photos

2010-06-21T13:26:00.002-04:00

Kids playing in front of the Brooklyn Museum of Art; they're leaning over a fountain

Koi feeding frenzy at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens

Witty graffiti. I love this kind of conversational graffiti - like person who wrote it is trying to make a little offhand comment to all the other people in the subway. It brings New Yorkers together. This one's an ad for vodka. The text reads, "Our ambassador Paul tried it. And he was all 'This is so good I would bathe in it.' So being the marketing guys at 42Below, we let him. Is that so wrong?" So the grafitti artist wrote, "It is if your vodka 'is so good'."

In the Company of Writers by Charles Scribner Jr.

2010-06-10T14:29:00.001-04:00

In the Company of Writers is, more or less, a publishing memoir. The author, one in a long line of Charles Scribners, helmed Scribners during a pretty fascinating, transitional period in the industry - and in his own company. He took over at the tail end of the Max Perkins era, when Scribners was a powerhouse of major voices in literature (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, etc.), and stayed on through the company's merger with Macmillan, when Scribners became an imprint of a major conglomerate instead of an independent company.

He's so matter-of-fact about the position of privilege he was born into that it's impossible to resent him for it, and he didn't squander his advantages - he had an excellent education, for example, and so he became a student of Latin and Greek, was passionate about the history of science, and had an active life of the mind well into his twilight years. He seems - and, really, it's impossible to know the truth through the text - but he seems like a true gentleman, in the best sense of the word. And he describes his years at Scribners, working with authors like Hemingway, coping with the paperback revolution, and just generally staying afloat, with appealing candor. There are some great little anecdotes, too.

Either because the author himself was influenced stylistically by his authors, or because much of the book was crafted out of an oral history (Scribner was too old to undertake a memoir on his own, so he told his story and let someone else do the writing), or thanks to the intermediary who translated Scribner's speech into text, the book is gorgeously written and gives a stylistic nod to Hemingway. Before I read Hemingway, I really resented the overwhelming influence he has exerted on American writers. Now that I've read Hemingway, I wish more people would write like him. I guess that's how it goes sometimes. So the prose here is gorgeous, and it's a pretty quick, easy read.

I really liked this book. It captures a time and a place, and it seems really wise to me.

Hubris

2010-06-08T19:05:00.003-04:00

The New York Times has these ads running around town right now. I know people who find the NYT motto "All the news that's fit to print" unbearably arrogant, but as a mission statement I think it's excellent. It's ambitious and bold and...oh yeah...it's about their desire to cover the news.

These ads, on the other hand, are just narcissism. As though, for some reason, the New York Times wants to position itself as the Paris Hilton of news organizations.

Wouldn't it be nice.

2010-06-04T17:39:00.003-04:00

I was chatting about the new Sex & the City movie, and how I don't plan on seeing it. I was a fan of the TV show, not a huge fan but I made a point of watching new episodes when they came out. I liked the love letter to New York, I liked the idea that people could be friends even when they were so different, I liked the clothes, I liked that all the girls met each new romantic adventure with hope, though the shows contained no shortage of disappointment and frustration and heartbreak.

The new movie has been so widely and thoroughly panned that I don't need to describe, here, why I don't plan on seeing it. But during this little chat I did think of something that would have made a 2nd Sex and the City movie watchable, justifiable, and interesting. What if it had been a movie where those 4 well-heeled, materialistic girls...were poor? What if some of them suffered a lot during the economic downturn, but others didn't...would the friendship endure, and how? What if Big didn't work for a year and a half - would Carrie still find him so utterly hot?

It would have been nice to see a movie about a friendship that lasts through disasters and disparities of that magnitude. And I bet it could have been fun and inspiring as well.

It was suggested to me that there were probably a lot of other potential plots that could have resulted in a better movie than the one we got. No doubt. Any other ideas?

Can you believe this is a Dunkin Donuts? It is.

2010-06-02T18:25:00.004-04:00

In Carroll Gardens, on Court Street.

West 70th, Looking North

2010-05-18T17:18:00.004-04:00

Batavia's Graveyard by Mike Dash

2010-05-18T11:53:00.004-04:00

I picked up Batavia's Graveyard on a whim. I was thinking to myself, "I sure would like to read a book that's just like Nathaniel Philbrick's Heart of the Sea, only different," and, luckily enough, the publishing industry is geared to meet exactly such copycat demands.

Batavia's Graveyard is a narrative, non-fiction account of a mutiny/shipwreck/mass murder (in that order) that took place off the coast of Australia in 1629. That's a pretty wild cocktail of disaster and crime, and the book started out exactly as colorful and bizarre as I had hoped. The author sets the scene in the Netherlands before taking us out to sea, and follows the early career of the man who would later mastermind the mass murder, Jeronimus Cornelisz. Cornelisz came from a prosperous family and started out his career as an apothecary, a respectable and lucrative profession, but a series of disasters reduced him to a state of utter desperation - the usual reason to risk a life at sea. The series of disasters included the gruesome syphalitic death of his newborn child, and during the lead-up to this tragedy Dash explains that while Cornelisz's wife was pregnant, "for a month or more before the birth, as was common at the time...[he] paid an old woman named Maijcke van den Broecke to suckle his wife's breasts in order to stimulate the flow of milk." That image alone convinced me I'd picked the right book. How wonderfully bizarre!

So Dash shifts us from a colorful account of life in the Netherlands during the early 17th century to an equally colorful account of life at sea in the early 17th century, especially the workings of the Dutch East India Company (it was a lot like the British East India Company, only Dutch). He introduces us to all the key players in the upcoming drama, and the friction that ultimately festered into near-mutiny. The mutiny never quite happened, however, because the ship - the Batavia - wrecked on a coral reef before the ringleaders pulled the trigger.

Most of the 300 people aboard the Batavia ended up on a barren little archipelago off the coast of Australia, with no water and limited supplies. A single seaworthy longboat embarked on the 900 mile journey to Java, the nearest Dutch port; if all went well, and the little longboat didn't sink on the way, the castaways could expect help in two or three months, give or take.

Those are pretty dim prospects. While the initial plan was to ration supplies, pray for rain, and wait it out, Jeronimus Cornelisz preferred a different strategy. He calculated that with the supplies they'd salvaged from the Batavia and the resources available on their little island, they'd be lucky to last a month. There were too many mouths to feed, and by trying to keep everyone alive they'd only doom themselves to a slow death by starvation. Far better, he reckoned, to thin the ranks. Killing some people at the outset would allow the remainder to survive. Cornelisz wanted to reduce the number of castaways from 200+ to about 40% of that number, and he set about making it happen.

The problem - the tragedy, I guess - is that Cornelisz decided on his plan, and set about executing it, before he thoroughly investigated the available resources. They'd shipwrecked on a coral reef that surrounded a small archipelago. None of the islands on the archipelago were resource rich, and none seemed to have water...but careful exploration did ultimately reveal that one of the nearby islands contained both shallow wells and wildlife. Because Cornelisz's method was a variation on "divide and conquer," the people who scouted that resource-rich island had already been the victim of the "divide" portion of Cornelisz's plan, and couldn't communicate their discovery to the rest of the castaways.

On the one hand, those wells and wallabys might have made the difference for everyone - on the other hand, the thirty or so people caught on that island nearly exhausted both, so there's no knowing if portioning out the water and meat to a group of 200 people would have been sufficient.

Meanwhile, Cornelisz was elbow-deep in blood. Once he'd committed to his plan, it took on a life of its own - the willing participants developed a taste for murder and tyranny. At first, they killed out of a perceived necessity; before long, they murdered out of boredom and spite. All in all, more than 120 people were killed, including women, children, and even babies - especially babies, and the sick, as they were considered a waste of resources.

The problem is that Dash over-dramatizes. The sub-title for Batavia's Graveyard kind of hints at what I mean; the full title is Batavia's Graveyard: The True Story of the Mad Heretic Who Led History's Bloodiest Mutiny. Frankly, I don't think it's entirely mad to opt to save some rather than lose everyone; and I understand fully how once such a plan is set in motion it's hard to stop. Especially when the buy-in was murder, because once they stop they've admitted that they were wrong and can't justify the horrible things they did. Who would choose that kind of anguish? And even more especially when the stakes were so high. These people had to choose between slow starvation with a slim hope of rescue, or murder and exile - because they understood, correctly, that if they survived to be rescued their rescuers would become the next threat. There was no middle route.

I guess what I'm really saying here is - Dash has a point of view, and he wants to describe this mass-murder as an example of an evil genius at work, a true psychopath revealing his true colors when given the opportunity. He's got a pretty limited amount of material to work with - just the records of the episode that survivors later provided to the Dutch East India Company - which means that there are a lot of blank spots, a lot of "perhaps this happened" or "maybe this is why" or "here's my best guess." Considering those blank spots, I would have liked to see a more nuanced story - Dash claims, for example, that Cornelisz heartlessly abandoned his wife after his baby died. But he has no evidence that Cornelisz planned to cut her off or stop supporting her; he didn't survive to develop a track record. But saying he was heartless supports the story that Cornelisz started, and remained, a psychopath. I think a proper character study requires a bit more evidence, and I think that Dash decided to amp up the drama specifically because the dearth of evidence wasn't exciting enough.

The castaways were ultimately rescued, three or four months after they were stranded. The rescuers made it to Java after about a month, crammed together in their longboat, and returned on a more seaworthy vessel to search for survivors of the wreck. They were back in the general vicinity of the Batavia about three months after the wreck, but it took another month of zigzagging around to find the precise location. When they arrived, they found the splinter group first - 30 or so soldiers that Cornelisz separated from the herd first thing, who were on the island with the water and resources. Those were the lucky ones. Of the remainder, 120-some were dead. Only six people who hadn't joined Cornelisz survived to see the rescue ship. A half dozen of the ringleaders were hung on the spot, and several more suffered a similar fate either in transit or upon their return to Java. The horror of the Batavia story, I think, is the damned if you do, damned if you don't aspect of it.

In short - Batavia's Graveyard was pretty good, but because it opted for easy condemnation over nuance, it didn't quite soar for me.

Two Views of Central Park

2010-05-11T12:49:00.001-04:00

Central Park from the Green

Central Park South, view from the Mandarin Oriental above Columbus Circle

Pest Control

2010-05-07T21:54:00.001-04:00

You know what would be a great way to get rid of cockroaches in the city? Subsidized dishwashers.

Just think about it for a second. Cockroaches are abundant here because there's plenty for them to eat. There's plenty for them to eat because there are a lot of tired, less-than-meticulous people who let dirty dishes pile up in their sinks.

If the city subsidized the cost of dishwashers, and strongly encouraged every apartment in the city to have one installed, those tired, less-than-meticulous people would do their dishes more often, the cockroaches wouldn't have so much to eat, and their numbers would diminish. Not disappear - but I bet we'd cut down the problem.

This is one of those ideas that would make people angry because, you know, why should the city government help people purchase luxury items like dishwashers? But there's a good answer: it would save the city, and all the landlords and homeowners, a lot of money in the long run. Right now the city Health Department has more than 80 full time employees who do nothing but pest control...although apparently they're cutting the number in half for next year. And that's not to mention all the money spent on pest control services.

What makes this idea even better is that it would be popular. Who doesn't want a dishwasher? They make life a lot easier.

A Word About Efficiency

2010-05-04T14:30:00.003-04:00

I've been saying this a lot lately, which means I feel compelled to share, so I might as well run with it and share with the whole internet.

I abandoned the gym for a martial arts studio about a year ago now. I love gyms. Now that I'm back in New York City, whenever I walk past an Equinox the smell pouring out from the vents fills me with pleasant nostalgia. I did a lot of good work within the confines of a gym: I did my first push-up, and I did my first set of 10 push-ups, ran a mile without stopping for breath, and then two and three miles. I was not a sporty child, so I discovered exercise as an adult and gyms are welcoming, no-pressure locations where you can explore as you like and nobody bothers you. That's a good situation for a beginner. Most gyms have classes, and those classes tend to be set up so that people of all fitness levels can join in. Another really great thing for a beginner.

I had years where I worked out constantly, and I had years where I worked out less. That's fine. Motivation waxes and wanes, and I'm in it for the long haul: rather than flog myself about low-intensity phases, I simply made sure that exercise was always a part of my routine, so that when I built up more motivation I'd only have to modify an established habit, not start from scratch.

I loved getting strong. But plateauing is really boring. I love being in shape, but I got to the point where I questioned my reasons for going to the gym and they came up lacking. I was going to the gym to look good. Now, I think it's important to take care of your appearance - and I think the best thing anyone can do for their own looks is work out. It's better than makeup and clothes combined, by a long shot. Even diet. A diet doesn't give you a healthy glow, but exercise does. A diet will slim you down, but exercise will improve the figure you have, smooth and tone, give you added grace and bounce.

But looking good...it's not a powerful enough motivation. If your self-esteem is high enough, looking good just feels like a perk - icing on the cake. And if your self-esteem is low enough, you'll never really be satisfied with how you look, so the reward will never be satisfying enough. And if you're somewhere in-between, nice and centered, well, that's worst of all: at that point, spending 8-10 hours a week at the gym seems ridiculously vain. For the first few years I was making so much progress, really developing an understanding of what my body could do and learning a lot in the process. But eventually, I got to thinking that strength training and running on a treadmill were empty exercises, and they kept my focus on what other people thought of my body, not on how I felt about myself.

I decided to make a change.

So that's when I got into martial arts. And it makes all the difference. Is it as efficient as the gym? Absolutely not. If I spent as much time working out at the gym as I spend doing jiu jitsu right now, I'd weigh less, I'd be stronger and more toned - I'd look better. No doubt about it. But for the year plus before I switched to martial arts, I was only going to the gym 2-4 times a week; I worked out for an hour each visit; that added up to, yep, 2-4 hours of exercise per week. That's better than nothing, but it's not really enough. These days, I'm at my martial arts studio for at least 4 hours per week, and usually 8, sometimes more. I've more than doubled the total amount of time I spend working out. The results are a hell of a lot better than they were when I was going to the gym for 2-4 hours, I'm having a lot more fun while I'm there, and I'm finding fitness exciting, and totally engaging - it's mentally and physically challenging for me. It's progressive. There's no plateau. A decade down the line, I will still have more to learn.

Here's where gyms win out over every other outlet: efficiency and convenience. That's it. Those are real advantages. And there are people who put "efficiency" and "convenience" at the top of their "must-have" lists, not just theoretically but in practice, too. So they sign up at a gym and they go. But most people will find that "efficiency" and "convenience" just aren't enough to get them out of the house after a long day at work, running, sweating, pushing themselves so hard that their muscles start breaking down and have to knit themselves back together. Because that's the other thing that a lot of people don't appreciate about the gym: it's not enough just to go. If you want those results, and you want them efficiently, you have to make every minute count. You have to embrace the pain.

Strength training works. And it hurts. Two true things.

So here's my point. Say you think exercise is important. Say you go to the gym, but not as much as you want to, or think you should. Say you're not getting the results you want, or you remember a time when the gym felt way more important than it does to you right now.

You probably don't belong at a gym.

I'm not saying you belong in a martial arts studio. I'm saying you belong at the place where you'll find yourself engaged, having fun, and working out at the same time. Maybe that's a traditional sport like basketball or tennis. Maybe it's yoga or dance. Either way, if you trade efficiency for something that you're truly passionate about...you're a lot more likely to succeed. Find the place that renews you. Find the place that feels like the awesomer, more productive equivalent of relaxing in front of the television. Find the activity that you look forward to, that offers a good social atmosphere and really enriches your life.

Efficiency is great, but results are better. Don't settle. Don't get complacent. Demand more from yourself, more from your body, and more from your fitness routine.

In Youth Is Pleasure, by Denton Welch

2010-04-28T14:00:00.002-04:00

In Youth Is Pleasure may or may not be a misleading title. It's one of the most atmospheric books I've ever read - in fact, it is nearly 100% atmosphere - and In Youth Is Pleasure is one of the most atmospheric book titles I've ever run across, tender and bittersweet as the book itself. On the other hand, the title might suggest hedonism, an indulgent tour through the pleasures of youth. In Youth Is Pleasure is anxious, fraught, above all teeming - it contains not a hint of that luxe, calme et volupté which, now that I think of it, might be the hallmark of a somewhat riper age.

In any case, it is the brief tale of a fifteen year old boy - Orvil - on vacation from boarding school. He's young, weedy, dreamy, a little feminine - the sort of boy who suffers a lot in an all-male boarding school, and doesn't feel much more comfortable in the bosom of his family. His mother is dead, his father is a gruff, successful businessman who doesn't have much patience for Orvil's odd fancies, and his two brothers are hale and hearty near-adults who find Orvil mystifying.

You might guess that In Youth Is Pleasure is a sexual awakening - after all, Orvil is the right age for it and that seems to be what young people do on vacation in literary novels (Bonjour Tristesse is an obvious parallel - and, on the film side, so is Fat Girl) - and in a way, that's an accurate statement. But it's a sexual awakening without any sex. There's no flirting, no fumbling, no one object of his desires. What we get is Orvil's state of mind - so highly sensitized that the whole world seems to throb and ache around him. He's alone in a luxurious, bucolic setting and every gravel path, river canoe, and empty ballroom is a blank space he can populate with his odd imaginings. Like I said before, this is a book that is all atmosphere - there is no story to speak of, no real character development, I don't even think there's a message. It's pure slice of life - and, as such, it's absolutely brilliant. I don't think I've read another book that captures so pitch-perfectly the awful, exquisite feeling of being a teenager.

It's a lovely book, easy to read, and the period detail is remarkable as well - early 20th century upper-class England on holiday (as Orvil is driving away from his hated boarding school in his father's big black Daimler: "'I did not need so large a car for my Escape,' he thought, 'but Magic would never niggle, never send a Baby Austin.'") It's fairly quotable, and Orvil has an occasionally cruel, acid sense of humor which is the only thing that saves him from being a complete sissy (while dining at the hotel, he sits next to an old woman and observes to himself, "On one of her fingers she wore a half-hoop of very large diamonds; the sort of ring that harmonizes with white suites of bedroom furniture, wreaths of composition roses, inset panels of cane-work, silver shoe-horns and button-hooks, and Reynolds's angel faces on the oxidized lids of powder-pots.") On the other hand, without the forward momentum of a plot or a point, it takes a bit of patience to push through. I'd put it down, then have to remind myself to pick it back up. With that caveat, I recommend it highly.

5 Ways The Google Book Settlement Will Change The Future of Reading

2010-04-03T04:19:00.003-04:00

5 Ways The Google Book Settlement Will Change The Future Of Reading

If you care about the future of books, you need to understand the Google Book Settlement. It's a complicated legal document, but we've talked to some of its architects, detractors, and defenders - and break it all down for you...[link]

Really interesting article. Follow the link for the full text.

Makes me sad to think these rebellious game-changers I've admired might be mutating into tyrants...Apple's tyrannical control over the App Store and increasing animosity towards Google (rumors even have Apple jumping into bed with Microsoft in order to deal with the threat posed by Google...), and now the sinister side of Google's attempt to bring books to the many.

Jiu-jitsu no-gi worlds

2010-01-28T21:56:00.002-05:00

This was in November, I think? I went just to check it out. Jiu-jitsu is a great sport for heterosexual men, as you can see.

Debt to Pleasure, by John Lanchester

2010-01-28T20:58:00.001-05:00

This book was suggested to me by a friend, and something that she said when she described it has stuck in my mind: she said it's a great book to recommend. Everybody she gives it to likes it. It's very smart, very fun, very easy to read - people who read Debt to Pleasure will think, "Ah, my friend is good at recommending books."

The critics do not stint with their praise: they call it dazzling, a tour de force, seductive, diverting, gorgeous, elegant, fun, flawless. If you read between the lines of all this praise, the book's central problem becomes apparent: for all its many, many virtues it's not transformative. It won't change literature, and it won't change your outlook on life. And the thing is, Debt to Pleasure is such a good book that it's really a shame it isn't a great book. Or maybe I should say: it's great, but it's not Great.

The blurb from The New Yorker on the back cover of the book reads: "Lanchester has written a novel masquerading as an essay masquerading as a cookbook, and it somehow manages to combine the virtues of all three." The best thing about this summary is that it hints at how marvelous Debt to Pleasure is without giving away any spoilers. Debt to Pleasure has a doozy of a twist at the end - the kind of twist that, once you've read it, makes it kind of hard to talk about the plot without giving something away.

It really is ridiculously clever. I know when I first picked it up, I double checked two or three times to make sure I was reading a novel, not a memoir, and when I gave it to my mom (she loved it, of course) she asked me, about halfway through, if she was reading an autobiography. The narrator's voice is that convincing.

I would happily buy a few dozen copies of Debt to Pleasure and hand them out to all my friends, but it's not a book that means something to me. I heartily recommend it. You will love it. You will probably find yourself recommending it to others. In that sense, Debt to Pleasure is kind of like a communicable disease.

But I wonder what I'll think about it five years from now, or if I'll think of it at all. And I say that honestly: I wonder. Apparently when Tristram Shandy was first published a lot of people thought it was too silly to stand the test of time. It's true that Tristram Shandy is silly, but it's still being read, what, 250 years after its initial date of publication? And for good reason. So who knows.

Kindle

2010-01-28T19:22:00.013-05:00

I got a new Kindle for my birthday. I loved my first generation Kindle, but not for its appearance. This one, however, is pretty enough to bling out. What you see above: custom designed Gelaskin and a padded case from Lollington on Etsy.

So far, I love my new Kindle although the user interface is different and I miss the Gen1 content manager. I bought it when the hype about the then-unnamed iPad was at a fever pitch, and a part of me wondered if I'd regret buying a new Kindle when (according to rumor, at least) Apple was so heavily pregnant with the Messiah of ereaders.

The answer? Nope, no regrets. I read books, and the matte, electronic ink screens of ereaders from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Sony et al is much better for sustained, long-form reading than a full-color, backlit LED. If my media of choice were magazines, newspapers, and blogs I'd probably prefer the iPad. For a lot of people, that's what they consume and that's what they should buy.

I say this a lot but maybe I haven't said it here: when I first bought my Kindle, I thought I'd only use it for trashy novels. Books that I didn't want to keep and cherish, books I didn't want to display on my shelves, books whose covers I didn't feel like exposing on the subway to judgy, judgy strangers.

I have been seriously surprised to discover how much I prefer it to a paper copy. It always fits in my purse. The screen always flickers on to just the right page. It's always the same weight, whether I'm reading a novella or a doorstop. I can hold it, and turn pages, with one hand. I can buy books while waiting to board my flight at an airport. I can buy a new release without making a sidetrip to the bookstore. I love getting book samples, and being able to read them at my leisure - instead of hunting for an empty chair at a bookstore (they are always all occupied), or sitting on the floor (I think this bothers other people more than it bothers me, but a lot of other people getting a little bothered does add up). I don't have to worry about cracking the spine or bending the cover while reading those first few pages, and the samples usually include a full chapter or more - I'd feel guilty reading that far into an unpurchased book at a bookstore. I love having 10 or 15 samples in my menu, so when I finish a book I can instantly dip into another - exactly the book I'm in the mood for at that exact moment in time (you know how sometimes you put a movie on your Netflix queue because you can't wait to watch it, but when it arrives the next day you are inexplicably in the mood for a different kind of film? You ordered a comedy and want a drama; you ordered a thriller and feel like a rom-com, etc., and then it's just not as fun to watch the movie you couldn't wait to see the night before. Like that, but with books, and instant gratification). I love being able to juggle multiple books at once - something I never used to do (this may not be a positive side-effect, but I like it).

I've dabbled in bookbinding. I take pleasure in a well-designed cover, a well-chosen font, a layout that gives the text just enough room to breathe. I enjoy books as objects. But I don't fetishize them. I don't read for the experience of holding a pretty paper product. I read for the content, and when I weigh up all the pros and cons there's no doubt about it: reading on the Kindle is just plain better.

So that's that. Now I read everything I can on the Kindle. I read Middlemarch on my Kindle. I read The Great Deluge on my Kindle. I read Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy on my Kindle. Given the choice, I will pick the Kindle every time.

Brown sugar pecan cupcakes with caramel frosting

2010-01-28T17:57:00.002-05:00

They tasted so much better than they looked.

NYT article on AOL-Time Warner Merger

2010-01-11T21:03:00.001-05:00

It's no secret that I think about 80% of the New York Times is crap, but they do some really fantastic pieces sometimes. I'm not the biggest business journalism afficionado, but even I found How the AOL-Time Warner Merger Went So Wrong fascinating.

As long as I'm doing a shout out to the Times, here's another one: Who Knew I Was Not the Father?

Yikes.

2010-01-11T16:39:00.009-05:00

According to an article in The Business Insider...

it costs the [New York] Times about twice as much money to print and deliver the newspaper over a year as it would cost to send each of its subscribers a brand new Amazon Kindle instead.

Here's how we did the math:

According to the Times's Q308 10-Q, the company spends $63 million per quarter on raw materials and $148 million on wages and benefits. We've heard the wages and benefits for just the newsroom are about $200 million per year.

After multiplying the quarterly costs by four and subtracting that $200 million out, a rough estimate for the Times's delivery costs would be $644 million per year.

The Kindle retails for $359. In a recent open letter, Times spokesperson Catherine Mathis wrote: "We have 830,000 loyal readers who have subscribed to The New York Times for more than two years." Multiply those numbers together and you get $297 million -- a little less than half as much as $644 million.

And here's the thing: a source with knowledge of the real numbers tells us we're so low in our estimate of the Times's printing costrs that we're not even in the ballpark.

Read the full article here. Although, as I'm looking at it...the Kindle retails for $259 not $359. I know because I just bought a new one. I wonder if any of the other figures are off. Hmmmmm.

Anyhow, a quick note about the slew of book reviews that I posted a week or so ago. I've been taking notes about books I read for a really long time, more systematically as time goes by, but these proto-reviews are scattered all over the place.

A lot of them are really old, and some are probably incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't just finished reading the book in question. Not really written for an audience, which means, ultimately, that they're less useful to me - the person they were written for - years down the road. Live and learn I guess.

Anyhow, my memories of these books aren't fresh so I'm not mucking up the old reviews, just copying them out.

There are so many more to hunt down...but I think a catalogue will be kind of interesting. I'm surprised, for example, that the first reviews I wrote of Sebald's books weren't glowing - he's become one of my favorite authors. In general, the proportion of negative reviews is surprising to me.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

2009-12-31T20:34:00.008-05:00

The Hunger Games is a young adult book, the first in a trilogy (books one and two have been published, book three is expected in 2010). I recommend it to anyone who has even the slightest, tiniest, vaguest interest in YA literature. If normally you avoid YA books like the plague but you loved Harry Potter, give The Hunger Games a try. Not because they are at all similar. They aren't. Just because if you can approach one children's book with an open mind, there's reason to believe you could do it again. If you thought Harry Potter was silly...well, that's one thing The Hunger Games isn't. It's a grim sandwich, with a side of more grim, and an icy glass of grim to wash it all down with. And that's only a slight exaggeration.

So far I've convinced two people to read it, and they both loved it. One of them told me - and I quote - that it's the best thing she's read since East of Eden (she read East of Eden about a year ago, not, like, three weeks ago).

The book is set in a post-apocalyptic dystopian future, in a country called Panem. Panem is in North America, what used to be the United States, but history doesn't reach that far back anymore. Power and plenty are concentrated in the Capitol, the seat of government, while citizens in the twelve outlying districts are worked to the bone, denied the most basic freedoms, and forced to participate in the yearly Hunger Games.

The Hunger Games seamlessly marry punishment and entertainment. Every year, two young people between the ages of 12 and 18 are selected from each of the twelve outlying districts by lottery and forced to compete in a battle to the death. Twenty-four contestants - called Tributes - enter the arena, but only one will leave it alive. The event is tarted up with a lot of pageantry, taped and broadcast in an edited form over the state-controlled TV station. The arena where they compete changes every year - sometimes it's a desert, sometimes a jungle, sometimes a waterworld. The Tributes don't find out what the arena will look like until they enter it, and those who refuse to participate in the bloodbath don't get very far - the Gamemakers can engineer environmental disasters, like a blistering volcano, to get rid of people who won't play along.

Like I said, pretty grim. And yet - this is part of the book's insidious charm - it's a lot of fun to read. The pacing of the book is amazing, and the protagonist grabbed my heart and ran away with it from the first page. Collins tricks the reader into participating in exactly the behavior the book is engineered to condemn...no, it's not original, but the technique is put to good use here.

Collins eases us into the story. We start reading about Katniss, a girl-child who keeps her family from starving by illegally hunting game and trading it on the black market for bare necessities. It's a hard-scrabble life, but it's not all bleak: she spends her days wandering the woods with her handsome friend Gale, and evenings with her sweet, 12 year old sister Prim.

But as a reader, you know things are going to change, so even these early passages have an edge of menace. The yearly lottery arrives, and Katniss ends up in the games. She's sent to the Capitol to prepare, but her visit there is full of fun and luxury. She eats fine food, she marvels at advanced technology she's never seen before, she meets her stylist. The sharp, menacing atmosphere thickens - but so does the crazy, unreal showmanship of it all.

And then the Hunger Games start. I got to like Katniss so much that the idea of seeing her hurt, or being right there with her on the page as she hurt someone else, became almost unbearable. Of course, both of my fears came true. But Collins kept pulling me along, interspersing scenes of real horror with calmer, sweeter interludes. I had time to catch my breath and brace myself before the next onslaught, much like Katniss does. The tension ratchets up steadily, page by page, while the progress of the Games sends the reader veering about wildly on an emotional roller coaster, full of highs and lows.

The book is great because it's got so much more to offer than a heart-in-your-throat adrenaline rush. There's the political aspect, especially the government's media savvy. It's like Soviet propaganda if it were re-tooled by a bunch of Hollywood marketing execs. And the experience of the Tributes is an obvious commentary on reality TV. Not only does Katniss doubt everyone around her, she can't trust her own feelings: is she brave, or is she faking it for the camera? Does she care about her allies in the arena, or does she just want them to think she cares? She doesn't know, and the confusion does real damage to her sense of who she is.

The Hunger Games is a thought-provoking book wrapped up in a gripping adventure story. I couldn't put it down once I'd started, and I've had some great discussions about it since. In short, read it.

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne

2009-12-31T04:10:00.004-05:00

I had a relationship with Tristram Shandy. First I fell in love. We had a lengthy honeymoon period, during which I gushed about it to anybody who would listen. After the honeymoon ended, we settled into a comfortable companionship. Then...I have to admit it...things started to go sour. The same qualities that once dazzled me began to seem tired, I stopped laughing at all its jokes, I no longer looked forward to a future together. And then I turned the final page and our relationship was over - not a moment too soon.

I'm not sure I have ever started out so enthusiastic about a book, and finished so tepid. I was ready to clear out a spot on my top ten list - I don't actually have a top ten list, but there are books that would probably be on it if I ever did make one - because it seemed like such a tour de force. Endlessly imaginative, brilliant, Rabelaisian, absolutely hilarious. Like a magician pulling rabbits from his hat, or a star quarterback nimbly dodging past all the competition, it's a show of pure virtuosity.

If you don't quite know what Tristram Shandy is - it's an 18th century novel written by Laurence Sterne pretending to be a memoir written by the eponymous Tristram Shandy. Tristram starts at the beginning - the day of his birth - and it's well past the halfway point in the novel before he's finished being born. Every time he tries to progress through the story of his life, he's drawn farther into the past. His uncle Toby was present on his birthday, and in the process of introducing him Tristram gives us his whole life story. But he can't stick to his digressions either. Tristram tries to write about Toby and ends up discussing the minutiae of siege warfare (shades of Sebald's Austerlitz there - I'm sure the connection is intentional, and it kind of made me want to reread Austerlitz).

It's great. It's great, it's done perfectly, and it's fun to read. It carried me through the first two-thirds of the book in a state of sheer euphoria, and then I crashed. Partly because a couple of the digressions left me honestly confused (The whole trip to France? Can someone explain this to me?), but mostly because I started to wonder if the sheer fecundity of the book was a mirage, if Sterne had whipped up a one-trick pony and ridden it a little too long. I have to admit that once you've figured out his schtick it's kind of predictable.

And the conclusion was pretty unsatisfying. It just sort of...ends. The final section seemed like a meandering, tepid fade-out. And it leaves us with so many unanswered questions. We never really learn anything about Tristram, beyond a few tantalizing hints. I could believe that Sterne intentionally leaves the reader unsatisfied...but, well, I was still unsatisfied.

Anyhow, a few of my favorite quotations:

"Have not the wisest men in all ages, not excepting Solomon himself, -- have they not had their Hobby-Horses;--their running horses,--their coins and their cockle-shells, their drums and their trumpets, their fiddles, their pallets, --their maggots and their butterflies?

"brisk trotting and slow argumentation, like wit and judgment, were two incompatible movements"

"When to gratify a private appetite, it is once resolved upon, that an innocent and an helpless creature shall be sacrificed, 'tis an easy matter to pick up sticks enough from any thicket where it has strayed, to make a fire to offer it up with"

"the thin juice of a man's understanding"

"Shall we be destined to the days of eternity, on holy-days, as well as working-days, to be shewing the relicks of learning, as monks do the relicks of their saints--without working one--one single miracle with them?"

"The ancient Goths of Germany, who (the learned Cluverius is positive) were first seated in teh country between the Vistula and the Oder, and who afterwards incorporated the Herculi, the Bugians, and some other Vandallick clans to 'em-- had all of them a wise custom of debating every thing of importance to their state, twice, that is,--once drunk, and once sober:-- Drunk---that their councils might not want vigour;-- and sober--that they might not want discretion"

This is a sort of quintessential Shandyism, where the author addresses the reader directly: "To conceive this right,-- call for pen and ink--here's paper ready to your hand.--Sit down, Sir, paint her to your own mind--as like your mistress as you can--as unlike your wife as your conscience will let you--'tis all one to me"

"That of all the several ways of beginning a book which are now in practice throughout the known world, I am confident my own way of doing it is the best--I'm sure it is the most religious--for I begin with writing the first sentence--and trusting to Almighty God for the second"

"I have been the continual sport of what the world calls Fortune; and though I will not wrong her by saying, She has ever made me feel the weight of any great or signal evil;--yet with all the good temper in the world I affirm it of her, that in every stage of my life, and at every turn and corner where she could get fairly at me, the ungracious duchess has pelted me with a set of as pitiful misadventures and cross accidents as ever small Hero sustained."

The Good Apprentice by Iris Murdoch

2009-12-25T04:31:00.001-05:00

I'm a bit conflicted. It was a good book. Really and thoroughly good. It did many wonderful things; working simple discussions of ideas into the plot; fleshing out these ideas through the actions taking place in the plot; mixing a hint of fantasy and unreality in with a cool, clear view of the world.

However, at some level it didn't pass muster. The language was adroit, apt, everywhere clear and enjoyable, but lacked a certain sparkle. It wasn't phenomenal. Most of all, somehow despite the fact that the book did such a good job of wedding the extraordinary with the banal, the realm of absolute morality with a very familiar day-to-day, I felt that it never quite took flight. There was something heavily earthbound about it.

Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald

2009-12-25T03:26:00.001-05:00

Sebald is like a pillow. Or a breath.

Somehow, despite the fact that his language is so specialized, so apt, like a finger touching the exact spot you've been looking for on a map, the book is like a laying-over or a net, something that surrounds but doesn't quite touch the solid center of meaning or feeling.

There's a tremendous amount of delicacy about his writing for this reason, so that his use of language, in its precision, never seems blunt or hard like a weapon or machine, but rather fragile and almost anxious.

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

2009-12-25T02:48:00.002-05:00

The book is set in an unprepossessing village town named Stockyard, its protagonists cling by the skin of their teeth to their nobility, most of the characters in the book are totally insufferable, and aside from the murder and the fatal trial, nothing particularly extaordinary happens. And yet, after I finished the book, I found myself thinking, "Oh! That's the way to live! What passion!"

A second later, I was horrified at myself. No, that is most decidedly not the way to live.

I loved when Katya comes to visit Mitya in prison (after Katya has, during a hysterical fit at Mitya's trial, offered up the evidence that condemns him) and Mitya says, "do you know, five days ago, that same evening, I loved you...when you fell down and were carried out." And why? When Katya is condemning Mitya, once her fiancée, Dostoevsky writes,

"Oh, of course, such an avowal is only possible once in a lifetime - at the hour of death, for instance, on the way to the scaffold! But it was in Katya's character, and it was such a moment in her life. It was the same impetuous Katya who had thrown herself on the mercy of a young profligate to save her father, the same Katya who had just before, in her pride and chastity, sacrificed herself and her maidenly modesty before all these people, telling of Mitya's generous conduct, in the hope of softening his fate a little. And now, again, she sacrificed herself, but this time it was for another, and perhaps only now - perhaps only at this moment - she felt and knew how dear that other was to her!"

There are a lot of books that show the epic of the everyday; the great upheavals that explode all around us while we walk down the street. Maybe the virtue of Dostoevsky is that he is pitiless, but writes with great love.

You can't help but admire Katya, even as you hate her. Just like you can't help but admire Mitya, even though you'd normally hate him.

Dostoevsky abolishes the whole notion of justice, by making human justice impossible and leaving only the possibility of divine justice. And this is why, in The Brothers Karamazov, nobody is wrong, but nobody is right, either. Or - and this is also possible - everybody is wrong.

There are certainly despicable characters to contend with. Rakitin and Fyodor Pavolovich. But they are comparatively minor. Aloysha is the only character who is wholly admirable - but he's also something of a shadow compared to the more forceful characters - from Ivan and Dimitri to Grushenka and Katya. He is almost a blank space; the empty box of a confessional, or the envelope that secures a message as it passes from hand to hand. And then there's the fact that Aloysha is so childlike. Aloysha is pure because he has not lived. I don't think that anyone who has done much living in Dostoevsky can remain pure. On the other hand, there are many who don't do much living and still aren't pure.

The reader is even roped into sympathizing with the prosecuting attorney, who is so meticulous and sincere. Even amidst such a miscarriage of justice, you can't hate anyone, or blame anyone. You can only grieve.

I was really glad when Aloysha gave a speech at the end. I'd been waiting for him to really say something since the book began. The sweetness of it warmed my heart.

"And even if we are occupied with most important things, if we attain to honor or fall to great misfortune - still let us always remember how good it was once here, when we were all together, united by a good and kind feeling which made us, for the time we were loving that poor boy, better perhaps than we are....

"You must know that there is nothing higher or stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home....

"...the cruelest and most mocking of us - if we do indeed become so - will not dare to laugh inwardly at having been skind and good at this moment! What's more, perhaps, that one memory may keep him from great evil and he will reflect and say, 'Yes, I was good and brave and honest then!' Let him laugh to himself, that's no matter, a man often laughs at what's good and kind. That's only from thoughtlessness. but I assure you, oys, that as he laughs he will say at once in his heart, 'No, I do wrong to laugh, for that's not a thing to laugh at.'"

The Passion of Michel Foucault, by James Miller

2009-12-25T02:37:00.002-05:00

An excellent biography and cultural history that sets Foucault's philosophy into the context of his life, and his life into the context of his times. The result is a particularly illuminating description of the second half of the twentieth century. Miller considers Foucault in relation to his influences (Sade, Artaud, Bataille, and especially Nietzsche), his love/hate relationship with Sartre, his relationship with his philosophical peers (Derrida, Barthes, Chomsky, Habermas, Deleuze, etc.), and his history of political engagement, especially during May '68 and the Iranian Revolution.

But the main focus of the book is the integration of biography and philosophy, with particular emphasis on Foucault's sexuality - his interest in S&M and his homosexuality - in relations to his interest in marginalized groups and violence. Foucault's death from AIDS and his frequent presence in the gay bathhouses of San Francisco is one of the key points of the text, particularly the possibility that he engaged in unprotected sex while aware that he was dying, and probably aware that he was dying from AIDS. His experimentation with drugs - marijuana, LSD and opium - also receives a fair bit of attention.

The book gives the impression that Foucault was prone to histrionics in his writing, always a bit overwrought and dire.

The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald

2009-12-25T02:36:00.001-05:00

The strange thing about Sebald is the double voice I hear when I read it; there is the voice of the text - so clean and precise - and then a second, which is warm and fuzzy - the voice of an older man. I've never read a book that I imagined so strongly as sound.

I love the way that Sebald writes. Somehow his concrete descriptions swallow the metaphors and imagery, so that no matter how extraordinary they are I read them as muted, the tone smooth, sort of damp. Like here: "He said that he could see things then with the greatest clarity, as one sees them in dreams, things he had not thought he still had within him, doubtless because he himself was small, but also because the shelves reached all the four meters up to the ceiling. The light in the emporium, coming through the small transom windows let into the tops of the display window backboards, was dim even on the brightest of days..."

Here's another: "ever since I had once visited Munich I had felt nothing to be so unambiguously linked to the word city as the presence of heaps of rubble fire-scorched walls, and the gaps of windows through which one could see the vacant air."

The blurb on the back of the book says that Sebald had a "quarrel" with Proust (I can only assume that the word quarrel is meant to signify respectful disagreement - although, actually, it occurs to me that Proust would have had different feelings about memory if he'd had the kind of memories that Sebald writes about) and I have a note scrawled on page 141 of my book: "the quarrel is this: for Proust, memory brings completion, wholeness. Sebald seems to see memory as destructive - almost an active force. His precision may be an attempt to subdue memory, to tame it, order it, make it unnatural and foreign."

The book is really haunting. Of course, not unlike Proust, it's an excavation - a search for lost time - an attempt to attach images, places, names to stories told by dead and dying friends. To fill out details and gaps. But everywhere, the people Sebald meets are passionately dedicated to the destruction of the past. Destroying themselves (it's a book full of suicides), destroying the houses that sheltered the horrors. But it doesn't do them any good, they can't escape. They surround themselves with debris, like Ferber haunting the periphery of the rotting asylum, or the doctor eating the fruits of the abandoned garden.

The conclusion, at the end, is that the only thing worse than remembering is willing forgetfulness ("I felt increasingly that the mental impoverishment and lack of memory that marked the Germans, and the efficiency with which they had cleaned everything up, were beginning to affect my head and my nerves").

If you do not remember, you are contemptible...but if you do, you are doomed.

Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco

2009-12-25T02:12:00.001-05:00

Foucault's Pendulum combines the worst qualities of chi-chi French films with the worst qualities of low-budget slasher flicks. On the one hand, it takes a long time to go nowhere. On the other hand, it's like putting that clichéd scene where the girl goes down alone into the dark basement wearing high heels on endless repeat. You want to smack her upside the head and say, "If you don't want to die, down't go down there, stupid!"...Advice that the protagonists of Foucault's Pendulum could use.

The book explores the possibility that one or another of the secret societies generally believed to be mythical (or extinct) are, in fact, real and very powerful indeed. Is it the Templars, the Rosicrucians, the Jesuits, the Jews? Did they control all of history? A handful of bookish nerds at a publishing house dedicate much, much too much of their time rifling through crackpot occultist books looking for answers.

The narrator, Casaubon, is dull and hard to like. His posse of cowardly friends ditto. His girlfriends are interchangeable, their characters undeveloped. All the women in the novel, for that matter, are one dimensional stereotypes. The enemy, the Templars or the Illuminati or whoever, are ridiculous.

The reader is reminded periodically throughout the novel that the protagonists' attempts to get to the heart of the secret society are foolish, that their discoveries are tripe, and that they, the bookish nerds, are insane. Call me crazy, but giving away the surprise ending before the tension has started to build is not the best move.

Eco's obsession with list-making makes sense in the medieval-set thriller In the Name of the Rose. Here, it's just annoying. Adding the diary entries of Belbo, the editor who can't write well and knows it, into the text of the novel is tedious. Most of all, the book is boring and has no real payoff. It's more than half over before the plot kicks in, long after I stopped caring.

What a waste of some great one-liners.

NB: I wish I could go back and explain some of my damning comments a little better, backing them up with an example or two, or a bit of plot summary. Unfortunately, I have no memory of reading Foucault's Pendulum, and this is all I wrote at the time.

I now know that Casaubon is the name of a particularly repulsive character in George Eliot's Middlemarch. Yet I don't like Foucault's Pendulum any more than I did before. Curious.

Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy

2009-12-25T01:49:00.080-05:00

One sentence review of Anna Karenina: Tolstoy is sending God a job application, in case he's looking for a replacement. Thanks, Tolstoy.

Full review: When Anna jumped in front of the train, I was relieved. I'd been waiting for her to die ever since the race when Vronsky killed his horse. When I turned the last page, I felt more like I'd faithfully accomplished a painful duty than like I was saying farewell to a beloved friend.

I find Tolstoy to be smug and self-satisfied to the extreme. Tolstoy and Anna Karenina were recommended to me left and right; I was told that Tolstoy really understood women, and sympathized with their tragedy - I was told that there is a special term for his kind treatment of these tragic characters, "Toylstoyan pity." And I think the term couldn't be more apt - because this is the ugly kind of pity. The sort that slyly places the pity-er in a position of superiority. The pity-er gets to enjoy being better off than the pitied person and self-consciously meritorious about his/her bleeding heart. Such a bargain.

I was constantly aware of Tolstoy's craft, of the author pulling the puppet strings behind the scenes. Their behavior frequently struck me as unnatural and artificial, and I could only make sense of it as the the author showing off. He says: see, this horse that Vronsky kills, - this horse is Anna! He says: see, this ill-fated love affair of Anna's has a foil in the lawful union of Levin and Kitty, such good and loving souls! He says: see, Anna and Stiva are brother and sister, and they make parallel choices throughout the novel! He says, over and over again: look at how brilliant I am, with my parallel plotlines and foreshadowing!

I think that Tolstoy is convinced his characters deserve what they get - Stiva deserves financial ruin and disrespect, Anna deserves death, Vronsky deserves pity and death, and Levin and Kitty deserve a happy life in the country. Tolstoy is happy with himself for having grasped and described human nature, content in his ability to properly penalize or reward the actions and motivations of mankind, summarized so neatly in his characters.

I kept that that every time Levin appeared in the book it was Tolstoy chortling, "Here's the way to go! If only you others would follow suit!" Indeed, Tolstoy, if only we could all be more like you. Thanks for letting us know.

W by Georges Perec

2009-12-25T01:45:00.000-05:00

The chapters in W alternate between a fiction about an imaginary island called W., devoted entirely to sport, and chapters giving an autobiographical account of Perec's childhood during WWII. Both stories are told in a very crisp, matter-of-fact tone, but the contrast between the two is striking. We read about young Perec's shuffling about and hiding and the death of his parents, though not from his own point of view. Meanwhile, it becomes increasingly clear that life on sport-loving W. is a sort of filtered reflection of the concentration camps (it's a bit like Plato's Republic, too). And because the actual details of life on W. are new, the horror and disgust they provoke is fresh. So although the tone throughout is emotionally detached, the two stories operate like a chemical reaction - while each is neutral in isolation, the combination of the two unnerving and horrific.

W is an experimental novel, but it's not cold or empty; the language is very simple and it was a pleasure to read, went very quickly.

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

2009-12-25T01:13:00.001-05:00

I have never read a book so long that I hated so much. The more I read, the more I hated it, and then I hated it because it would not end.

A lot of the ideas in it ought to appeal to me - the enmeshing of disease and love, the fleshly-spiritual cross currents, the discursive style - but I was totally unmoved.

I hated every last character in the book, and that didn't help; but many of Proust's characters are unlikable, and I love Proust. I think the difference is that in the end, though Marcel can't respect people like the Verdurins, they nonetheless become heroic...they become larger than life. I felt like all the people, all the events in the Magic Mountain, shrunk into dust bunnies, filth on the floor, something meaningless and a little repulsive.

I hated the endless descriptions of the natural environment. I hated the endless philosophical debates between Settembrini and anyone. I hated Hans Castorp. I hated the endless repetition. I do not know how many hundreds of times I read about the "excellent lounge chairs" or the "hearty meals" at the Sanatorium. I was reminded countless times how and when the patients wrapped themselves in blankets. Eventually, every time I saw those details, I would be infuriated.

The only thing I liked about the whole book was Clavdia Chauchat. She was magnificent. I loved the way that Mann described her body, her movements, her hands, her eyes. I loved her dialogue, her sly and suggestive slink. I loved her name, and I love that she cruelly rejected Hans Castorp, because I would have, too.

NB: It's a few years now since I wrote this, and I have to say that there is at least one thing about The Magic Mountain that I recall with great pleasure. Hans Castorp - a worthless sniveler if ever there was one - gets his clumsy mitts on an X-Ray of Clavdia Chauchat. Of her chest I think? He finds it profoundly erotic.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer

2009-12-25T00:50:00.001-05:00

I really loved Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is structured very similarly, splicing together a contemporary narrative with another story set in the past, making the reader privy to both and to the richness of the connections between the two while the present-day characters in the book are deprived that knowledge.

In both cases, there's a search: in Everything is Illuminated, Safran Foer is looking for the place where his family is from. In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, a boy is looking for a lock to fit a mysterious key. In both cases, the reader finds the journey (and even the eventual conclusion) to be satisfying while the seeker himself is frustrated. In both cases, the style of writing is very similar - the narratives set in the past have the same frantic rhythm, the same delicate shades of magical realism, the same explosions of vivid prose.

Basically, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a very different book, but pressed in the same mould as its predecessor. That's a little disappointing. I had hoped Safran Foer had more potential to grow as an author.

I imagine I was seeing a very strong influence from two other writers. Martin Amis, and in particular his book Time's Arrow, and W.G. Sebald. Amis' book Time's Arrow is set during WWII and its trick is that time progresses backwards through the novel - it's not the telling of the narrative that's scrambled, it's the events themselves, reversing cause and effect. One of Sebald's quirks as an author is his use of photographs. Foer doesn't copy any phrase or image, but he uses their tricks without modification, and they still have the tone and function of their sources. They fit, but feel borrowed, like they still belong to someone else.

Now, both Amis and Sebald have a very similar interest in urban, contemporary Jewish identity and WWII/Holocaust narratives. Foer falls into the same category. It makes sense that there's a connection, that Foer would find those other authors intruding on his own creation, but he is putting himself in danger of being overwhelmed by their inventions.

But I'm circling the book itself. It's a really beautiful novel. I didn't snap it up originally because I had heard that it was written from the perspective of a 10 year old boy, and I heard that it was about September 11, and I imagined a trainwreck. I had heard true, on both counts, but it's no trainwreck. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is full of details that are delightful, charming, funny; the boy is precocious and sweet, and his running commentary is never simple or dull. His dad died in the World Trade Center, and 9-11 is not a political event in the book. It returns 9/11 to what it was before it was co-opted by Bush et al, and I have to admit that it's been hard to remember the tragedy itself with all the baggage it's been carrying for so long now. So Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a good reminder.

Nana, by Emile Zola

2009-12-25T00:44:00.021-05:00

I ended up feeling pretty disgusted by Zola after finishing Nana. The only other book of Zola's that I've read was La Curée - I read it during my semester abroad in Paris. I don't remember the narrative arc exactly, but it's about an aristocratic woman who marries into the nouveau riche of real estate speculators during Haussmanization. The woman - so went hte professor - stands in for the old Paris and so while developers mutilate the old city, the same thing happens to her.

Nana is a sort of opposite plot. She is born a petite bourgeoise, becomes a prostitute, and slowly rises up through the theater to become a wealthy, coveted courtesan. The book is amazing, fabulously written and rich and brutal..but nearly every character is corrupt, perverted, sick, and Zola describes Nana as the fly that passes the disease around. She becomes a kind of Dorian Gray - a beautiful, desirable creature who absorbs all the filth around her and is ultimately destroyed by it.

At the beginning, I really liked Nana. She was stupid but kind, unaffected, charming. But she plays all of her cards wrong and burns her bridges - falling in love with a man who beats her, spending extravagantly and always beyond her means, embarrassing her patrons. In the process she becomes crass, unkind, repulsive. Of course she finally catches a horrible disease and dies, disfigured, her life of vice written all over her beautiful body. An by that time there was some satisfaction in her death, some release.

But I hated Zola for writing these books where women, as symbols, suffer and die to pay for - or just embody - the sins of all.

Crystal Lake

2009-10-12T22:21:00.002-04:00

It was snowy on the hike up to the lake...

And we found an ugly little snowman....

And ate lunch on a rock by the water, enjoying the view.

Manzanar War Relocation Center

2009-10-12T22:08:00.001-04:00

Visited the Manzanar War Relocation Center over the weekend - the site of one of the internment camps where Japanese-Americans were sent to live during World War II. It's a national historic site now, and the central building has been transformed into a really excellent museum:

The exhibits are designed to evoke a pretty complex cocktail of emotions. It starts out more or less how you'd expect: with an overview of American racism against the Japanese, the panic and anti-Japanese sentiment that followed in the wake of Pearl Harbor, the trauma the inhabitants felt at being forced to abandon all their worldly goods, their homes and businesses, at being downgraded from "citizen" to "suspect."

But the museum is mostly concerned with life at the Relocation Center, and that is bittersweet: composed first of the indignities the inhabitants suffered, and then their triumph over those limitations. The exhibits highlight their strength, resilience, creativity - the vibrancy of the culture that developed at Manzanar, despite all obstacles. Residents hated the bland, Western cafeteria food - so they planted gardens and grew fresh produce with which to prepare more appetizing dishes. They hated their army issue cots and hay mattresses - so they learned to build furniture from fruit crates. They organized schools, clubs, sports teams...this is a picture of a home plate for the WRC's baseball diamond, made of bark:

It's a wonderful museum, and it hits all the right notes. It's a reminder of a shameful act, a moment in our history when America failed. But it doesn't dehumanize or overpower the story of the Japanese interned there, whose stories are inspiring.

San Diego Botanical Gardens

2009-10-12T21:43:00.003-04:00

Went to the San Diego Botanical Gardens in Balboa Park a couple of weeks back. They're not large, but they're very friendly: I liked the display of hot peppers, with at least a dozen potted plants each sprouting a different species of pepper, as well as other edibles: mint and basil plants visitors are encouraged to touch and smell, coffee and cardamom. Lots of colorful leaves, pretty flowers, and lovely shade on a hot afternoon.

True statement: I am a top 1000 reviewer on Amazon.com.

2009-10-12T18:50:00.015-04:00

I mostly review the pulp novels that I'm addicted to, so no linky link - names changed to protect the guilty and all that.

For anyone curious about how to achieve this august title, or interested in improving their own rank, I am going to share my tips and tricks.

Everything I'm about to say can be summed up in one simple sentence: The more people who see your review, the more positive votes you will get. Let's take a closer look at how to make that happen.

#1 - Be the first to review something. New products get the most traffic, which translates to more readers, which translates to more votes. But that's not all. If you get your review in first, your review will start out on the main product page. The more positive votes you get, the more likely your review is to stay on the front page - later reviews, even if they are much better than yours, will be posted straight to the "see all ## customer reviews" page. Fewer people click through, so fewer people vote. If a product is popular, that great review will be buried under newer reviews. The early lead turns into a nearly insurmountable advantage.

#2 - Leave positive reviews. This is sad but true: the bar is set much lower for positive reviews. 4 or 5 stars and a couple of sentences declaring that a book is "Wonderful! The best book I ever read! You will love it!" will probably do better than a thoughtful critical review. A really well-written positive review is ranking gold.

By contrast, negative reviews collect "unhelpful" votes no matter how great they are. Positive reviews that contain a whiff of criticism are more likely to get negative votes too. I think this is because the people most likely to visit a product page are fans, and a lot of fans don't take kindly to opposing opinions.

It's important to write negative reviews, but hard to rank with them. A negative review generally won't collect "helpful" votes unless it is well-written. The more entertaining a negative review is, the better. And the more balanced it is - acknowledging the book's positive points, or exhibiting a solid understanding of the genre in which it belongs - the better.

Beware. Amazon will knock negative reviews off of the main product page. There are rumors that Amazon will delete 1 and 2 star reviews, and whether or not this is true a 1 or 2 star review is much, much more likely to be delayed while the censors vet it or just plain rejected.

#3 - Game the system. I recently reviewed a book that had been out for only a couple of days, but long enough to collect 3-4 glowing, 5-star reviews. I knew my review would bypass the main product page completely, and since I had a few problems with the book I knew my review wouldn't get bumped up for propaganda purposes. So I tried something different.

After the main product page, the next place where a review can be featured is the "most helpful..." section at the top of the product's review page. There's a box at the top, split in half. On the left side is the "most helpful positive review" and on the right side is the "most helpful negative review." The "most helpful negative review" will generally also be the most laudatory negative review. It's usually a 3 star review, the highest rating that is categorized as negative.

The review I had written was pretty critical for a 4 star review, but pretty positive for a 3 star review. I selected 3 stars, and voila: my review was almost instantly selected as the "most helpful critical review," and was stickied on the main review page - where it wouldn't just get buried by more recent reviews.

#3 - Review popular titles. The more popular an author is, the more widely publicized the book, the more people will visit the product site, the more votes you will get. Being the first to review a best-seller is the reviewer equivalent of winning the jackpot. But it's hard, since people who have ARCs (advanced reading copies) will be posting reviews - often before the release date - and even if reviews are closed until the date of release, you can bet that several reviews will go up within the first hour. The more popular the title, the more you have to concern yourself with timing.

The opposing strategy is:

#4 - Be the only/obviously best reviewer for less popular titles. It's not as effective as #3, but it's easier and more reliable.

What to write?

A few points about what makes a good review:

To summarize or not to summarize? This might be superstition on my part, but I find books are more likely to be featured on the main page if they include at least a little plot summary.

Include detail, but don't spoil. It's bad manners to put spoilers in a review, but a good review must be specific. If I'm criticizing something, especially, I want to include an example - but I'll try to pick one from the first 50 pages of the book. I want to let the reader know that I'm choosing my example carefully, too, so they don't leave angry comments. Like so: "Silly Pulp Novel is full of plotholes you could drive a truck through, starting in Chapter 1 when..."

It helps to be authoritative... If you know a lot about the subject of the book, if you are very familiar with the author, the period, the genre, etc., and you can speak authoritatively about a book, that's a good thing.

...and friendly. Part of the reason why Amazon reviews are popular is that they're not written by professionals - it's fine to be opinionated, informal, even emotional. A good review makes you feel pallsy with the author, like you just had a nice chat.

It's important to note that while you can strategize to get your review onto the main page, its placement there is not set in stone. Reviews that get lots of positive votes will move up to the main product page, displacing what's already there, and I've seen my own reviews get preference over unranked reviewer submissions when there were no votes involved.

My personal suspicion is that there is some real human involvement in review placement - I've seen reviews move on or off the main page for reasons database technology alone can't explain. My further suspicion, for which I have no evidence at all, is that Amazon is fairly responsive to author/agent/publisher requests - "Please feature this review, please don't feature that one." With 10%+ of all books being sold via Amazon.com, it would be very frustrating for the publishers not to have any control over what appears on the product page - and that would be a fair compromise.

for funsies

2009-10-08T20:34:00.005-04:00

I found this at the top of Panorama Hill, north of Mammoth. Just to clarify: that means I found it at the end of a trail, in the middle of nowhere. It was stuck in a bush.

It's on a plastic card - the back of it, as you can almost see, is a realty sign - because the author wanted it to last through the harsh, backcountry weather. Full of foresight, this fella.

This one made me laugh because of the weird quotation marks around the trout's thought bubble. Why is only "Thanks" in quotes? Why put quotes inside of a thought bubble at all? Why put only half of a thought in quotes? Is it insincere? Is it more sincere?

Bike Night & Bible Study. Only in Orange County:

A Good Idea

2009-10-08T14:08:00.003-04:00

A trio of deviled eggs, served as an appetizer at a gourmet diner style restaurant, where each deviled egg was infused with a different flavor (I'm thinking something like truffles, hot pepper, anchovies, capers, etc...)

Would be a humorous nod to those trios of creme brulee that were everywhere for a while.

Fountain Pens

2009-10-08T02:16:00.011-04:00

I just discovered d*i*y planner. It's a great site devoted to organization, writ large, and more particularly to organizational tools...day planners, notebooks, books and such. It's got me all excited planning out the perfect 2010 organizer. Which, naturally, had me fiddling around with all of my fountain pens and fountain pen ink.

My favorite source for fountain pen info, which pens are good/popular and where to buy them, is the Fountain Pen Network.

My favorite fountain pen is my Pelikan m150:

It's not a very expensive pen - about $50 - and it writes beautifully. Which is to say: it starts writing the second I put the nib to paper, the line it produces is even and fine, I can write for a month or more on a single fill of ink, it doesn't skip or bleed.

It's the kind of pen that will convince you that fountain pens are not only prettier but more practical than disposable pens.

The only "bad" think about the Pelikan m150 is that it only takes bottled ink - no cartridges. The more I use fountain pens, the clearer it is to me that this is the way to go (because you have to draw the ink up through the nib, it's not dry when you start writing; there's more volume in the barrel for ink than in a cartridge, so fewer refills), but when I was starting out I preferred cartridges.

My favorite pen that takes cartridges? The Namiki Vanishing Point:

It's got a retractable point, it produces a very fine and precise line, it's reliable and attractive. It only takes Namiki cartridges, which aren't hard to find, but does restrict the colors of ink available.

The best part about using a fountain pen is the incredible variety of inks. I like to use unusual colors - J. Herbin's Poussiere de Lune is one of my favorites - the delicacy of the color is impossible to find in any disposable pen, anywhere, let alone the wonderful shading.

But since most people tend to black and blue for professional writing, there are literally hundreds of different shades of black and blue ink. This review of Diamine inks - just one brand, and a very good one - samples fourteen blues and three blacks. The color might be lighter or darker, more or less solid.

Noodler's, one of the best ink companies out there, makes "bulletproof" inks - inks that are not only waterproof but resist UV light, UV light wands, bleaches, alcohols, solvents, petrochemicals, oven cleaners, carpet cleaners, and carpet stain lifters. They've just come out with a new line of forgery-proof inks, whatever that means.

And there are great in-between choices for people who want to write in a color that's dark and serious, but not necessarily black or blue - like Private Reserve Avacado [sic], pictured to the right, or Black Cherry.

If you write often, and get hand cramps, fountain pens are the way to go. Unlike with ball point pens, you don't have to press the nib into paper to make the ink flow. It's a lighter and less muscular way to write.

The truth is, anything you can do with regular pens you can do better with fountain pens. And while it's an expensive hobby if you want to buy lots of fancy pens, it can be very economical too. If you settle on a single low-to-mid range pen ($5-$50), and bottled Noodler's, fountain pens are cheaper than gel pens, and competitive with ball points. Of course, it takes a fair bit of willpower not to be seduced by the lure of pretty pens.

Eastern Sierra

2009-08-25T20:36:00.003-04:00

Marisa, who kindly came to visit:

The view of Mono Lake from the Woah Nelly Deli, the only gourmet restaurant located inside a Mobil gas station. The vegetarian offerings were slim (well...kind of slim: I had a delicious garden salad with a tart balsamic dressing, a fresh mango margarita, and a lemon cheesecake) while Marisa ate a fish taco with ginger slaw. Anyone driving through the eastern entrance/exit to Yosemite should plan on stopping for a meal.

Rainbow falls:

The burnt trees around Rainbow Falls, almost twenty years after the "Rainbow Fire" swept through the region:

2009-08-14T20:55:00.008-04:00

Is this meant to be a double entendre?

Not sure if the print here is entirely legible...it says, "Garden of Peace & Love" and then in much smaller font, "(and Forgiveness)". I guess forgiveness just isn't as important?

It almost takes away the fun, and ridiculousness, of this window display to pick it apart. The store sells eco-friendly furniture, and I'm guessing that the message here is something along the lines of, "Activism via consumerism is not only possible - it's sexy!"

Whatever is going on here should probably not be taking place in public. Keep looking.

Last two photos included just because they're pretty:

and, yep, even more bruises....

2009-08-05T03:07:00.004-04:00

Last batch on my arms - one turned out speckled...

...the other one splotchy.

But my arms have been clearing up lately - kind of - and now all the damage is on my legs:

More bruises

2009-07-15T13:37:00.007-04:00

Check out the one at the end, which is clearly a set of fingerprints. And I've got a good one coming in right now on my shin, very tender to the touch but no color yet, so more soon...

Bruno

2009-07-13T15:25:00.007-04:00

This movie is one of two things: a failure, or a product of homophobia. I'm not really sure which.

I started from the assumption that Bruno was cut from the same mould as Borat - that Cohen was adopting an absurd persona in order to elicit funny/damning reactions from ordinary citizens. The state of homophobia in America today + laughs.

But Bruno doesn't get much of a reaction from anyone. Most people respond to his pranks with a stony, "I'll just pretend this isn't happening," impassiveness. When Bruno arranges an interview with Ron Paul, only to corner him in a hotel bedroom and attempt a clumsy seduction, Ron Paul stares fixedly at a newspaper and refuses to take the bait.

The set-up, where Ron Paul tries to behave professionally while Bruno does everything he can to prevent it, is similar to an incident that took place last week...at the Ultimate Fighting Championship. One of the fighters, "Rampage" Jackson, started dry humping a reporter, Heather Nichols, during an interview.

Here's the video if you want to see it (and if I'm able to embed it):

Rampage Dry Humps Cagepotato Reporter - Watch more Funny Videos

The interview sparked a lot of controversy, but even in the UFC - a testosterone-drenched, hyper-macho sport organization - there's no question that Rampage's behavior was inappropriate, and is generally described as what it was: sexual harassment.

On the other hand, I also think Nichols has gauged her audience well by being a good sport about it. In an interview Nichols did over at Sports Illustrated about the incident, she maintains a positive attitude but doesn't hesitate to call a spade a spade:

Jimmy Traina: What did you think when Rampage started, um, getting frisky? Did you think it was funny or did you take offense?

Nichols: At first I was just shocked when he grabbed me, and all I could think was, "Oh my gosh, what is he doing?!" Then I tried to play along a little bit because I knew he was trying to be funny, but after about the first 5-10 seconds, it was just plain awkward. I kept thinking, "What should I do? Knee him? Keep going?" So I decided to keep asking questions, assuming he would stop if I did that. So I asked another question, and he kept going. I asked ANOTHER question, and he kept going. At this point I was just freaking out, but still trying to be a professional and ask all the questions I was assigned to ask, and this has been interpreted by some viewers as me liking it and egging him on. This was definitely not the case. I was hired to do a job, which was to interview Rampage, so I decided to put up with his shenanigans and finish the interview.

Traina: Has he apologized since then?

Nichols: No, not at all. He was very, very pleased with himself.

You know what's funny about this interview? If you changed "Nichols" to "Ron Paul" and "Rampage" to "Bruno", the whole thing would still make sense. And Rampage's attitude, which is so clear, sheds an interesting light on Sacha Baron Cohen's prank - Rampage is opportunistic and smug, taking advantage of Nichols' good will (and fear for her livelihood) in order to demean her.

What Nichols should have done - and probably would have done, if the balance of power had been different - is something like what Ron Paul did in Bruno: when she decided that the prank had gone too far, she would have said "Enough," she would have walked out, and she would have been openly angry about it.

Some of the "ordinary citizens" in the movie are clearly homophobic - the hunters that Bruno camps with, for example, or the swingers at the party he crashes. But there is not enough shame about homophobia for its mere existence to trigger a gotcha moment. And the hunters and swingers, like Ron Paul, are very restrained in their responses to Bruno's antics - they seem positively dignified in comparison.

So, ultimately, the more Bruno tries to humiliate his victims the better they look. While Bruno's character is increasingly charmless, the homophobes in the movie appear to be reasonable, polite, and tolerant. If Bruno is an attempt to expose American homophobia, it's a failure.

You know who really looks bad in this movie? Bruno himself. He's narcissistic, superficial, stupid, and insensitive. He doesn't have anything like Borat's naivete, no characteristic that makes his bad qualities forgivable. I think the nation of Kazakhstan registered an official protest about the character of Borat, and how badly it misrepresented the nation; as valid as their complaint was, Borat was so clearly a foil, an ends-justify-the-means vehicle of cultural criticism.

I don't think that can be said about Bruno, and as a result the offensiveness of the character itself remains front and center. Not offensive because Bruno is flamboyantly gay. Offensive because Bruno consistently refers to his anus as his "Auschwitz" and makes flattering comments about Hitler. Since Bruno saves his most provocatively anti-semitic comments for the staged portions of the movie, not the documentary portions, and given that Cohen himself is a committed Jew, what is the reason for that?

Why is the character, who treats every other person in the movie with the level of consideration granted to his adopted child/accessory, "O.J.", conceived as a borderline sociopath?

It really seems to me that the object of Cohen's animosity here isn't the torpid, complacently sinister American public - it's the character he inhabits, Bruno. And as such, the movie is itself an example of homophobia, not a strike against it.

Plus - last but not least - it's not funny. I think I laughed a couple of times while I watched it. A total waste of time.

Maybe the best thing about summer

2009-07-07T18:07:00.005-04:00

I was on the way back to the kitchen with a tomato I'd just picked and wondered why the scent isn't used more often in perfume. It's sharp, like a citrus, sweet, a little spicy, very fresh. A little like basil or grapefruit, but also grassy. It would probably be hard to place, and blend well with other odors. I'd wear it.

4th of July

2009-07-07T17:14:00.016-04:00

I spent 4th of July weekend down in Coronado. It's an island the way Manhattan is an island - which is to say, only technically. Coronado is separated from San Diego by a thin strip of ocean, and connected to the mainland by a single bridge. It's a gorgeous, charming little beach town, famous because Some Like It Hot was filmed there, mostly in and around the Hotel del Coronado:

That's the hotel exterior. It was built in 1888 and felt a little schizophrenic to me - the exterior is so white and airy, but the interior is all heavy dark wood - very dreary and oppressive on a bright July day. Wonderful to view from the distance, or lounge in front of - but when I went inside a couple of times, I wanted to turn right back around and get out as fast as possible.

I was with my cousin Tasha and a friend of hers who is working on a professional photography portfolio, and the interior shots we got are all more suited to a self-important East Coast lakeside villa than a California resort.

Tasha and I:

Just Tasha:

Luckily we didn't spend much time inside. Mostly we did what any self-respecting Californian would do on the 4th of July - we hung out on the beach and strolled the main drag.

This is just a side street but you can see downtown San Diego in the background:

The beach, which is endless and gorgeous:

And me, on the rocks:
Bizarrely enough I heard of Coronado for the first time in New York City - when someone mentioned the hotel as an historic landmark. I've seen Some Like It Hot, too - I guess I just never connected the dots.

In any case, I jumped at the chance to visit and wasn't disappointed. Aside from the fantastic setting, I got some great candid shots while fooling around on Tasha's laptop:

And enjoyed an amazing, improptu Tchaikovsky violin concert. Apparently her grandfather is a musician, a composer, conductor, and performer, and he pulled out a 300 year old Italian violin and performed a few pieces from memory.

apparently the person who made this image couldn't spell...

2009-07-01T15:21:00.003-04:00

But I understand the sentiment.

2009-07-01T14:36:00.006-04:00

So a couple of months back, I rented this movie:

It's a gruesome Swedish movie about a young boy and his vaguely romantic relationship with an ancient vampire who looks like a young girl. The vampire girl, Eli, is hard to romanticize - she butchers humans without much remorse, keeps a human slave and treats him poorly, and generally does a bad job of seeming human enough to like or sympathize with.

But she develops a soft spot for little Oscar, a sweet kid who's tired of letting the local bullies beat him up on a daily basis. Her lesson to him is, more or less, that if he wants to avoid the daily shake-downs, he'll have to beat them at their own game. He'll have to hit them back, hard enough to send them seeking greener pastures.

I thought the movie was ok, but it's grown on me with time. I like that effect, partly because it seems like such a disaster from a commercial standpoint. There's something appealing about a virtue that is hard to exploit for cash.

So it turns out I had a hard time forgetting this movie, and it's partly what inspired me to start taking martial arts classes. I've been doing strength training for a while now, with more or less intensity, but there comes a point where it's not enough just to be strong. I wanted to do something with the muscles I've been developing, and Let The Right One In was percolating through my brain at just the right time.

So I started taking mixed martial arts classes. Mostly kickboxing and jiu jitsu so far. Every class beats home a similar lesson. I find it very natural to try to escape from a sticky situation - squirm out of a choke hold or avoid an arm bar - but have a much harder time taking the next step, to go on he offensive myself. But the fight isn't over until someone wins or loses. So the only way not to lose is to win. I guess this is obvious, but it's been a bit of a revelation to me.

Aside from a few little nuggets of wisdom, I'm mostly collecting bruises. Great big ugly ones that bloom in all the colors of a radioactive swamp and make me look like a battered woman. I'm kind of proud, so take a look:

This one was the biggest and ugliest. Unfortunately, I didn't take a picture until it was past its prime. Try to imagine what it would look like with more purple, red, green, and yellow.

This is the best one I've got going right now:

And this one is on the inside of my knee:

More to come, I'm sure!

logical fallacies, no more analogies

2009-06-29T13:21:00.004-04:00

It's come to my attention recently that analogies are considered logical fallacies. I was looking for a bit more information on the subject - all analogies? Some analogies? Is there a Latin term for it? - and came across The Fallacy Files instead.

According to the site, only weak analogies are logical fallacies. This wasn't really the answer I was hoping for, at least not without a reliable way to determine whether a given analogy is strong or weak.

I've decided to err on the side of caution. I'm not going to use analogies at all, at least for a while. I suspect they have no real place in logical discussion - as a literary tool, ok, or a teaching tool, but not to lever an argument in one direction or another.

And in the meanwhile, click through this link for a nifty diagram of logical fallacies, with lots of nifty, colorful names - like the Tu Quoque (so little known that it's certain to derail an argument, if cited), or the Hot Hand Fallacy (with a name like that, doesn't it deserve a test drive?).

Tom Jones, by Henry Fielding

2009-06-04T13:09:00.010-04:00

Tom Jones is one of the rare classics that I would recommend to the average reader. Or the above-average reader, maybe - not someone who survives on a diet of John Grisham and Stephanie Meyer (which, though, yeah, the Twilight series is awful...her adult novel, The Host? Pretty interesting), but someone who picks up on buzz about fancy new authors and likes to read the current literary sensation (I am not going to get sidetracked by a rant about how much I hate Zadie Smith or Michael Chabon again, but, suffice to say, they are responsible for my general contempt for current literary sensations, however unwarranted).

I need a new paragraph after all those parentheses. See, I'd recommend Tom Jones to someone who can be spurred to pick up novels that require a little bit of effort to get through, who will be patient with crap because it's the current literary sensation, but still need books to have a strong plot, really need that plot to keep moving, and don't tolerate wacky modern trickery. That kind of above-average reader.

Moving on, before I incriminate myself with any more vaguely insulting commentary. The thing about Tom Jones is that it is fun. It's a light-hearted, delightful, comic novel. At the same time it's wickedly smart, full of intellectual games. I picked it up after Middlemarch and it was the perfect palate cleanser, elegant and fizzy like champagne.

The plot of Tom Jones is pretty simple: the eponymous protagonist, Tom Jones, is a bastard baby adopted by a wealthy squire as an act of charity. The squire, Allworthy, lives up to his name: he's wise, just, and compassionate. He has no children of his own, and raises Tom along with a nephew. He treats both children as equals, though the whole community mocks him for doing so.

The two boys couldn't be more different. Tom is good at heart, but totally lacking in self-control. He gets into fistfights, he's kind of a player, he speaks his mind when it would be wiser to keep quiet. He's a troublemaker, a handful, a scoundrel. While the book is about abandoning youthful folly in favor of maturity and wisdom, the author doesn't spoil the fun of all that misbehavior - the energy and gusto with which Tom throws himself into sin is ultimately to his credit. I was reminded of Rabelais a bit (not surprising since Fielding refers to Rabelais with some reverence in Tom Jones).

Tom has a rival and a true love. The rival is Blifil, the squire's nephew, who couldn't be more different from Tom: he seems like an angel, but is rotten to the core. Blifil resents Tom's popularity with his family, and schemes to remove Tom from his uncle's affections (and, more importantly, his will).

The true love is Sophia, the girl next door. She's the perfect woman, beautiful and good and feminine and rich. Sophia is in love with Tom, but knows her father would never allow her to marry a bastard, no matter how well brought up. She accepts her fate like a dutiful daughter...until she is betrothed to Blifil. Sophia sees Blifil for what he truly is, and she loathes him. She refuses the match, her father puts his foot down, and Sophia decides to run away.

So while all of this is going on - a whole series of madcap adventures, sudden turnabouts, and unlikely coincidences - Fielding inserts little introductory chapters that break up the story, written from the author's perspective. He alternately explains why he's written the book as it is and insists that he's relating a true biography compiled through endless research; he speaks directly to his critics, telling them how he expects them to respond to various events in the novel, and answering the criticisms before they can be made; and he addresses his readers in a teasing, friendly way, sometimes giving instructions on when and how to imagine events that he does not describe.

Here's an example: "As this is one of those deep observations which very few readers can be supposed capable of making themselves, I have thought proper to lend them my assistance; but this is a favour rarely to be expected in the course of my work. Indeed, I shall seldom or never so indulge him, unless in such instances as this, where nothing but the inspiration with which we writers are gifted can possibly enable anyone to make the discovery."

Because of the introductory chapters spliced into the novel, reading Tom Jones was like watching a magician at his act, showily insisting that there is no trick right before performing it, delivering his patter to distract the audience from a sleight of hand. In fact, I started to wonder how the 20th century authors who have staked their reputations on playing with the structure of the novel - cleverly breaking the fourth wall, toying with the possibility of truth in fiction, etc. - could hold their heads up, because apparently it's all been done before. And, just to give a hint about what's next, it's been even more shocking, and disillusioning, to read The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.

The upshot is that I'm kind of in love with the 18th century, and can't wait to find out what else I've been missing out on. Why have I ignored English literature for so long? This stuff is great.

Middlemarch, by George Eliot

2009-05-26T18:53:00.006-04:00

I decided it was time for me to read Middlemarch, because I want to work my way through the classics and I was feeling very patient. I didn't expect to enjoy it. I usually don't like books with a lot of plot (I prefer endless digressions or simplicity) and I was sure this sprawling Victorian novel would be chock full of plot. Lots of characters, all doing things.

To my own surprise, I absolutely loved Middlemarch. I thought Eliot's writing was glorious, rich but clean. There was a huge cast of characters, but their stories were simpler than I expected them to be. It had weight, it was satisfying, it clarified thoughts I'd already had and made me rethink others. It was also complete, fully evolved. The book was more contemplative than I expected it to be, and incredibly insightful.

Not surprisingly, Middlemarch was a slow starter. It took a while to set the scene, introduce the dozen or so principal characters, and convince me to invest in their fates. But I think it was a slow starter for another reason as well: the book wasn't about how characters arrived at turning points, but, rather, what happened to them afterwards. Events that often mark the end of a novel - a marriage, a death - take place fairly early on here. It's not about courtship, it's about marriage. Not about committing a crime, but how a crime buried in the past continues to haunt the present.

It was very much a book about what happens after the happily ever after, and the picture Eliot paints is pretty ugly. In some ways, Eliot struck me as a more mature, much much subtler version of Dickens - because I think both authors have acquired a fairly anodyne reputation, which neither deserves.

Middlemarch didn't have the high drama or pandering that you find in Dickens, and Eliot's assessment of human nature is nuanced and sometimes brutal. Yet there is a grace and generosity about the way she writes that prevents the novel from being cynical. Eliot is also pretty quotable - here's one germane to the current subject: "Some gentlemen have made an amazing figure in literature by general discontent with the universe as a trap of dulness into which their great souls have fallen by mistake; but the sense of a stupendous self and an insignificant world may have it's consolations."

I recommend Middlemarch wholeheartedly, with the proviso that it requires a committed reader. It's pretty long. It's also the best book that I've ever read that was written by a woman. To my shame - if shame is the right word - up until now the constellation of authors that had most deeply impressed and moved me were all male. It feels pretty good to see that change.

More favorite little snippets:

A woman speaking: "Sorrow comes in so many ways. Two years ago I had no notion of that - I mean of the unexpected way in which trouble comes, and ties our hands, and makes us silent when we long to speak. I used to despise women a little bit for not shaping their lives more, and doing better things. I was very fond of doing as I liked, but I have almost given it up."

"He was at present too ill acquainted with disaster to enter into the pathos of a lot where everything is below the level of tragedy except the passionate egoism of the sufferer."

"It is very difficult to be learned; it seems as if people were worn out on the way to great thoughts, and can never enjoy them because they are too tired."

"We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, "Oh, nothing!" Pride helps us, and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts - not to hurt others."

"it seemed to him as if he were beholding in a magic panorama a future where he himself was sliding into that pleasureless yielding to the small solicitations of circumstance, which is a commoner history of perdition than any single momentous bargain. We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into inspid misdoing and shabby achievement."

W by Georges Perec

2009-01-25T01:36:00.001-05:00

The chapters in W alternate between a fiction about an imaginary island called W., devoted entirely to sport, and chapters giving an autobiographical account of Perec's childhood during WWII. Both stories are told in a very crisp, matter-of-fact tone, but the contrast between the two is striking. Young Perec's shuffling about and hiding, the death of his parents, is described with an almost disturbing emotional distance. All the emotion that's lacking in those chapters is poured into the ones about W, as it becomes increasingly evident that life on the island is a sort of filtered reflection of the concentration camps (it's a bit like Plato's Republic, too). And because the actual details of life on W. are new, the horror and disgust they provoke is fresh. The combination works like a chemical reaction - there is something unnerving and increasingly horrific that seems to hover between the stories. It's very effective.

W is an experimental novel, but it's not cold or empty; the language is very simple and it was a pleasure to read, went very quickly.

New Year's Eve at the Happiest Place on Earth

2009-01-01T16:10:00.004-05:00

I'd forgotten how crowded Disneyland can be on New Year's Eve - it was a bit of a nightmare. But we fought through the crowds to get on the rides and had a great time.

my friend just told me about this guy, Hitler?

2009-01-01T15:42:00.003-05:00

I was talking to a tween girl a couple of days ago, the daughter of a handyman my parents work with frequently. We were talking about things she might be interested in doing in the area and that's what she said:

"My friend just told me about this guy, Hitler? He killed a lot of Jews."

I didn't really know what to do - I just froze - but it turns out the girl wanted to go to the Museum of Tolerance. Apparently her friend had just been, had told her it was fun, and now she wanted to go too.

So I guess the museum is doing its job by engaging children, and getting the word of mouth out where it's needed most, but it was a completely surreal experience. It was so strange to hear this girl say the name Hitler in a neutral way - just an insignificant historical character, not automatically weighed down with the worst crimes of the 20th century.

But frankly, I felt like I was getting a glimpse of the future - a future where people are not automatically expected to know who Hitler is - and that's not a comfortable thought.

ah-hem

2008-12-08T14:23:00.003-05:00

Culture11 just published my article on the South Seas Bubble. The subject, one of the world's first stock market crashes in 1720 England, is hopefully fascinating enough to compensate for my rookie writing.

Many thanks go to Conor for the opportunity, and for help with editing. I'm pretty excited about writing more, and better.

Oh, and anyone with any great ideas for articles...I'm listening...

celeb sighting

2008-12-07T02:52:00.002-05:00

He was eating dinner at the same restaurant I was, but I didn't notice until he walked outside to smoke a cigarette and stood right by the window where I was seated.

I was surprised someone as famous as Philip Seymour Hoffman felt comfortable standing around on a busy street for 5-10 minutes, but nobody bothered him.

We're a well-trained city I guess.

Mammoth Cave National Park

2008-12-06T23:22:00.007-05:00

moving on

2008-11-17T13:10:00.010-05:00

A couple of weeks ago I went to the Catherine Opie show at the Guggeneheim with Diana, and then yesterday...

To the William Eggleston show at the Whitney with Prue.

I'm learning how to go to museums just for pleasure. To tell the truth, it took me a long time, but I'm finally getting the hang of it. It's a very different experience - in some ways diminished, in others enhanced. Without a sense of duty motivating me I want different things from art - I want to be engaged, I want to be entertained, I want to enjoy the experience of looking. I don't feel the need to persevere when I'm bored.
I'm tempted to ramble on now - about persevering through boredom. That's what separates the professionals from the amateurs isn't it?

Instead, I'll just say that I enjoyed both the Opie and the Eggleston exhibits. And that last night, I made baked apples and they turned out really well. I cored the apples and plugged the base of the hole with chopped raisins, then filled up the rest with brown sugar and cinnamon and butter. Baked the apples for half an hour and they turned out perfectly. Baking apples is easy and nothing to brag about but I came up with the chopped raisin plug myself and was kind of proud so I'm mentioning it now.

2008-11-07T13:11:00.004-05:00

My Halloween costume. It's not much of a costume, I admit. What you can't see is that I had on little fake fangs on. I learned something interesting from my experiment with fangs: vampires, if they existed, would have a really hard time wearing lipstick. Because my lipstick kept rubbing off on my fangs. It was not cool.

Also: yay classic ghost costume.

Salome

2008-11-06T22:22:00.009-05:00

So I just saw the weirdest opera ever. Richard Strauss' Salome, at the Met. I don't know about you, but personally, I just don't associate "The Metropolitan Opera" and "Weird". Avant-garde? Sometimes. Abstract? Sure. Gaudy, over-the-top, and spectacular? That's more like it. But this one was weird. And disgusting.

There's not a whole lot of story here. Salome is a spoiled brat, and she's lingering outside at a big party at her stepfather's palace when she hears John the Baptist ranting and railing from inside his oubliette. The soldiers guarding the oubliette have been ordered not to let anyone speak to John the Baptist, let alone pull him out of his little prison, but with a bit of bump-and-grind Salome convinces the guy in charge that he can bend the rules just this once.

Here's the weirdest thing about Salome. It's that Salome herself, history's ultimate femme fatale, isn't the least seductive. And I don't mean this as a slam against the opera singer, either; the choreography is so awkward it has to be intentional. She doesn't dance; she jerks around, she squats, she humps the props. She doesn't seduce the solider; she flashes some flesh in a cheap, vulgar way and he just can't resist. If that weren't bad enough, there's something childish about her mannerisms which makes the choreography that much more repulsive.

So out pops John the Baptist. He's not in a good mood. The one really fun part of the opera comes next: Salome tells John that he has beautiful white skin and asks if she can touch it. John says no, you skanky ho, you can't touch my white skin. And then Salome declares that actually, his skin is digusting and ugly and she doesn't want to touch it. She starts again on his beautiful red lips, but John's still having none of it, so Salome declares that actually, she never wanted to touch his ugly red lips anyhow. Etc. That was cute.

Eventually spoiled little Salome gets tired of John and sends him back to his oubliette. Then her stepfather, the tetrarch, shows up. He's got a crush on Salome; his wife, in tow, keeps telling him how inappropriate this is. She's wasting her breath. The tetrarch asks Salome to dance for him, and after several refusals he resorts to bribery: if she dances for him, he'll give her anything she asks for, absolutely anything. Salome agrees.

Salome has already established her credentials as a provocatrice at this point. She did a little octopus dance with the soldier to convince him to unearth John the Baptist, wearing a slinky silver cocktail dress, but this time we expect more. We expect her to pull out all the stops for the Dance of the Seven Veils. How's that possible? With a strip tease of course!

No. Seriously.

And yeah, she takes off the bloomers too.

Interesting, huh? And while Salome gets nakeder, she's still jerking around on stage in this deeply unappealing, awkward way that makes her look like she's having convulsions. Or doing aerobics. Convulsive aerobics. It's bad. And weird.

So she finishes her dance and the tetrarch is delighted. He immediately starts offering her all the riches of his kingdom. Clearly, he is insane, because these days most guys working minimum wage can afford a classier routine. But fine, Salome's horrid striptease is worth diamonds, emeralds, rubies, and other such magnificence.

But Salome refuses it all. She just wants John the Baptist's head on a silver platter.

Now, you might be thinking the worst is over. You might be thinking that surely an opera at the Met can't get more risque than an opera singer just past her prime stripping down to the buff on stage. You might be thinking it can't get much grosser than those aerobic convulsions. I sure did.

You would be wrong.

Because once Salome gets John the Baptist's head, she kisses it. And not just a little peck on the lips, either. She drops to the floor and rolls around with the head, locked in a passionate embrace with it. She's singing this thoroughly psychotic song about how she finally gets to touch his white skin and kiss his red lips, as though she can't tell the difference between a live person and a severed head. Truly, all the previous uncomfortable moments in the opera combined are less uncomfortable than this one.

The end.

Conclusion: wtf?

Equus

2008-11-06T21:47:00.007-05:00

I went to see Equus a couple of weeks ago. I knew nothing about Equus the play - nothing about the playwright - I only knew that Daniel Radcliffe, little Harry Potter, was in it and at some point, he would prance around on stage naked.

Now, it's true: it's severely creepy for a 27 year old woman to be leering at naked 19 year olds, especially tiny, young-looking naked 19 year olds like Daniel Radcliffe. I guess there's no getting around it. And although I wasn't attending in order to ogle him - for pure ogling potential I'm sure I could have found something better - my motives were essentially perverse. I just wanted to see Bad Harry Potter, the same way spending four years at a Catholic high school makes me giggle at tasteless jokes about Jesus.

Actually, I just looked up perverse and here's the number one definition: willfully determined or disposed to go counter to what is expected or desired; contrary. So I guess guess perverse really sums it up.

Here are some observations about my perverse excursion:

1. There's been so much press about the nude scene, but it's short, the stage is dark, and Daniel Radcliffe is not facing the audience for most of it. Forget about the nude scene. What about the scenes when Daniel Radcliffe is twining himself around strapping young men wearing horse-heads and showering them with big, open-mouthed kisses? If you ask me, those were much weirder.

2. I didn't bother to find out what it was about before I showed up and, hey, it's kind of depressing and intense. Go figure. The playwright said his goal was to try to make sense of a senseless crime - something he heard about, although he never did track down the real event, if it ever occured. Namely, a teenage boy who blinded six horses at a stable where he had been working, by stabbing them in the eyes. He comes up with a fairly elegant, and inspiring, answer; too elegant, and too inspiring, if you ask me. Or maybe I just don't care if there's some sort of indomitable spirit motivating animal torturers; nothing good comes of it, after all.

3. Sure, I bought the ticket for silly, gimmicky reasons. But I didn't go see a silly gimmick; I saw a great play. I walked in with a snicker and walk out enlightened and thoughtful. What's the lesson there? That sometimes even your worst instincts can send you off on worthwhile journeys? Maybe that's not a good lesson.

4. I got two Harry Potter actors for the price of one: the main character, the child psychologist treating Daniel Radcliffe, was also the guy who plays Uncle Vernon in the films. He did a truly fantastic job, really great.

5. On the other hand, he also kind of reminded me of what Albus Dumbledore would be like, if he were a 20th century child psychologist treating severely disturbed teenage boys. Harry Potter Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest?

6. Captain Janeway had a role too. She has nice calves.

Ulysses

2008-10-16T13:46:00.003-04:00

So I finally finished Ulysses. It took about two years, although I put the book down and let it gather dust for half of that.

I've never had a reading experience quite like this one. When I'd pick up Ulysses, I'd be immediately engaged by the text. On one occasion, I missed my subway stop - and traveled a fair way into Queens, where I had no desire to be - because I was too busy reading to keep track of where I was. But, at the same time, after I put the book down I never wanted to pick it up again. I felt no desire to find out what would happen next.

I fell in love with Joyce's language, but I detested him at the same time. It's the first book I've ever read where if I didn't seek out reading guides - chapter synopses just to know what had happened; explanations of the references and style shifts to appreciate the bells and whistles - I'd be completely lost. Who reads this, without help, and finds it satisfying? Anyone? There must be some people, of course, but I don't think I've ever met one. The people I've met who loved Ulysses all read as part of a college course, with a professor to guide them through.

And, you know, that's pathetic. It's loathsome. I love it when a book rewards study and deep attention, but it should be able to stand on its own during a first read-through as well. It's the literary equivalent of being a chair with three legs - if it topples without props, it's a flawed structure.

But the language is incredible. I thought it just crackled with vitality, like a live wire. Words feel solid and heavy, sort of sticking in my mouth and forming shapes on my tongue even when I read silently. There's so much humor, so much music, so much pure curiosity. As angry and resentful as I could be while reading, I couldn't for one second deny that it was magnificent - because individual sentences or paragraphs or pages would just be staggeringly beautiful.

But in a way, this wasn't fair at all. I started reading Ulysses knowing that I wasn't a Joyce person. I was ready to have my mind changed, but it's kind of lame to start any project with a sneer on your lips. And I did. What I gained from reading Ulysses, as much as anything, is the right to not like James Joyce, and to say so without having some convert immediately tell me: "Oh, you'd change your mind if you just read Ulysses." Well, no, as it turns out, I wouldn't.

I'd been thinking of starting Middlemarch but I think I need a slightly longer break before embarking on another project book.

books

2008-06-17T11:02:00.004-04:00

So I just returned from Italy - pictures to come, but at the moment I'm pleased to say that I finally finished Robert Fisk's The Great War for Civilization and then, as an added bonus, managed to read all of Standard Operating Procedure on the flight back home. Who knew it would be so hard to put down?

The good parts of The Great War for Civilization so far outweigh the bad parts that I can still recommend it wholeheartedly. It feels a little slapdash at times, and the quality is not consistent, but I've come out of it with a much better, much more thorough understanding of a number of conflicts that are often mentioned and rarely explained: the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iran-Iraq war, the war in Algeria, the Armenian genocide, and the first war in Iraq - Desert Storm. All of these really add up to a much better understanding of what's going on in Iraq right now.

For example, here is some information I would have liked to see explained clearly and briefly before:

Iraq is a majority Shi'i state.
Iran is a Shi'i state.
Saddam Hussein belonged to Iraq's Sunni minority.
Saddam Hussein was a relatively secular dictator, but he heavily favored the minority Sunni population and violently repressed the Shi'i majority.
The United States supported Saddam Hussein because his oppression of Iraq's Shi'i majority helped contain Iran. The enemy of our enemy was our friend - and Saddam Hussain was an enemy to Iran.
Now we want democratic elections in Iraq.
The Shi'i majority never had a chance to develop home-grown political parties and leadership
Shi'i political parties and leadership in Iraq were developed in Iran.
Iran has shown great willingness to extend its influence through the support of Shi'i political parties abroad - see: Lebanon.
The United States still hates Iran.
Conclusion: the US is going to have a hard time accepting democracy in Iraq.

When you really piece it all together, the cause and effect is so clear. And the more information you have, the clearer it becomes.

Maybe I could have read a handful of different books to get all the same information - but it was nice to have one big book as a starting point. And maybe I could have read something that was a little more measured or restrained in tone - but The Great War for Civilization is actually an enjoyable read, and in a book that is so long and so depressing that counts for a lot.

Standard Operating Procedure was in many ways a corrective to The Great War for Civilization. Every word was carefully chosen and the authors, Gourevitch and Morris, work hard to be dispassionate, even-handed, and give the soldiers of Abu Ghraib the chance to tell their own story without interference. At first I wished for a bit more context - I wanted to hear more about the whole conflict, and not just the prison - but by the end I was grateful that the book is so focused. It's not about the Middle East - it's about the United States - and the context is correctly a military one.

I think it would be a shame to spoil the book - and I also think it would be incredibly difficult. It has to be read to be believed. All I will say is that having read Standard Operating Procedure, I will never think about Abu Ghraib in the same way again.

dear reader, I cried

2008-06-06T16:48:00.002-04:00

J.K. Rowling's commencement speech at Harvard: The first thing I would like to say is...

I just love her so much.

more politics, apparently

2008-06-06T14:53:00.003-04:00

When I read this article, "Revealed: Secret plan to keep Iraq under US control," about the US trying to cinch a deal to set up 50 permanent bases in Iraq and ensure that American troops would remain immune from Iraqi law, I wasn't surprised. Same 'ol, same 'ol.

Then I read this article, "US issues threat to Iraq's $50 billion foreign reserves in military deal" and I have to say...I was surprised. Not just that we're using incredibly unfair ultimatums to force Iraq to accept the agreement described in the first article; that's pretty low. I almost thought it was worse that the US Treasury vetoed an Iraqi attempt to switch their assets from dollars to euros, "because it would show lack of confidence in the dollar." Proper stewards don't squander the resources they have commited to protect, and certainly not from such pure self-interest.

The Independent is my new favorite paper.

Newsflash

2008-05-20T15:29:00.004-04:00

Philip Gourevitch's new book about Abu Ghraib, Standard Operating Procedure, is finally out in stores. His last book, We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families, is one of my favorite books of all time - not just as a work of journalism but as an investigation into the nature of evil.

I'm copying and pasting Amazon's description of the book, and their mini-blurb about the authors:

Standard Operating Procedure is a war story that takes its place among the classics. It is the story of American soldiers who were sent to Iraq as liberators only to find themselves working as jailers in Saddam Hussein’s old dungeons, responsible for implementing the sort of policy they were supposed to be fighting against. It is the story of a defining moment in the war, and a defining moment in our understanding of ourselves—the story of the infamous Abu Ghraib photographs of prisoner abuse, as seen through the eyes, and told through the voices, of the soldiers who took them and appeared in them. It is the story of how those soldiers were at once the instruments of a great injustice and the victims of a great injustice.

In a tradition of moral and political reckoning, and all-powerful story-telling, that runs from Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Grand Inquisitor to Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, Philip Gourevitch has written a relentlessly surprising and perceptive account of the front lines of the war on terror. Drawing on more than two hundred hours of Errol Morris’s startlingly frank and intimate interviews with the soldier-photographers who gave us what have become the iconic images of the Iraq war, Standard Operating Procedure is a book that makes you see, and makes you feel, and above all makes you think about what it means to be human. It is an utterly original book that stands to endure as essential reading long after the current war in Iraq passes from the headlines—a work of searing power from two of our finest masters of nonfiction, working at the peak of their powers.

__

Philip Gourevitch is the award-winning author of We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda and A Cold Case. He is the editor of The Paris Review and a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker.

Errol Morris is a world-renowned filmmaker-the Academy Award-winning director of The Fog of War and the recipient of a MacArthur genius award. His other films include Mr. Death, Fast Cheap & Out of Control, A Brief History of Time, and The Thin Blue Line.

I'm still only halfway through The Great War for Civilization, but I may have to set it aside for a while. This is going to be the book of the summer, if not the year.

mashmallows

2008-05-05T10:34:00.003-04:00

I've been a vegetarian for 13 years now, and one of the things I've missed the most was marshmallows. No marshmallows in hot chocolate, no smores, no Rice Krispy Treats. Those are some seriously comforting comfort foods.

I find it hardest not to eat things that have meat products, but don't resemble meat in any way - meat doesn't really look like food to me anymore, or trigger hunger pains. But skittles and jello and marshmallows look so harmless and delicious.

Well, Whole Foods - at least the one by my work - has just started carrying vegan marshmallows. There's been a gourmet marshmallow craze lately and I'd been hoping that someone would cook something up for the niche market of vegetarians, and it's finally happened.

I can't compare them to proper marshmallows - it's been too long since I've had one - but they have that powdery outside that I remember, they are soft and sticky but not gooey and don't dissolve quickly in hot chocolate. Exactly what I'd been missing.

I've been having hot chocolate with a marshmallow in it almost every day for the past couple of weeks. It's just been such a treat.

If you're interested...

2008-05-05T10:15:00.003-04:00

Broadsheet at Salon.com has been one of my favorite daily reads for a while - short, bloggy articles about women's issues in the news, whatever they may be. One of those articles pointed me today to Letters from Johns, and its companion site Letters from Working Girls.

I've been reading some of the letters from Johns, and they are pretty fascinating.

Huh.

2008-04-28T18:11:00.002-04:00

I just came across this - A review George Orwell wrote of Hitler's Mein Kampf in 1940. It's worth reading.

Oh, so this is what we're fighting for

2008-04-25T10:30:00.012-04:00

Hey everyone.

Check out this article from Men's News Daily, "Saving Our Young Men." If you do, make sure to read the comments.

The article is a tirade about how (white) men get the shaft, while women have it too easy. The most interesting thing about it is that the author appears to be completely unaware of the irony: he is championing the cause of men using the traditionally feminine tactics of whining and childish petulance.

Women know - or should know - that they traditionally only had access to these tactics because they are, how you say?, ineffective.

The article itself is...sad, pathetic, easy to dismiss. But the comments. The comments are incredible. Aside from the fact that they are also whiny and complainy and not very manly, every last paragraph is drenched in an intense hatred of women.

Fundamentally, the problem that these men seem to have is that they want all the perks of masculine power and dominance without having to develop the qualities that guaranteed it.

Consider this paragraph, written by the distinguished "metalman":

"Women love to complain about equality, and once they get it, they shout their grrrlll power and independence to the hills. The minute they start earning their big paychecks, they never let you forget it. But time and again, when the bills come, these same women suddenly become mute and helpless. Whenever an unexpected big expense arises, it's the man who picks up the slack. When money gets tight, it's the man who's expected to put in the extra hours. When it's raining heavily, it's the man who's expected to park the car five blocks from the restaurant so that his woman can sit all safe and dry inside the restaurant sipping her cosmopolitan while schmucko walks in a downpour."

You know what he's describing there? He's describing a situation in which the man has all the power. Why does he have all the power? Because he has all the responsibility - he takes the tough jobs and he watches the bottom line. The woman is enjoying an imagined independence - she's got a safety net in case her man leaves, that's all. The truth is, being in charge and having power really sucks, if you're doing a half-decent job at it. Independence is hardship. Freedom is hardship. That's why so many enlightened women are running headlong into the golden cages of stay-at-home mom-dom. Not to speak of Americans who are willing to trade civil liberties for security on a grand scale.

I don't know whether "metalman" wants to be a tyrant (which would make his life easier), or if he just doesn't want the responsibility of being in charge - of taking the traditionally masculine role. What I do know is that he's complaining about doing the right thing.

There really is a crisis of masculinity, but this spineless, sniveling attitude is an example of it - not the solution.

cool.

2008-04-21T10:06:00.004-04:00

My cousin is the tall young man with curly-ish hair in this new Volvo commercial: link

Read This Book: Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East

2008-04-18T14:18:00.005-04:00

I'm only about a quarter of the way through it, but I can't wait until I finish to sing the praises of this truly excellent modern history. I adored Fisk's first book, Pity the Nation - the best history we have of the civil war in Lebanon, by a reporter who speaks fluent Arabic and has lived in Beirut for the past thirty years or so. It helped me understand the political situation in the Near East - which is quite an accomplishment, given how complicated the situation is.

The Great War for Civilization is a much more ambitious project. It attempts to cover all the important things that have happened in the Middle East over the past thirty years or so - it's less heartfelt, since Fisk is no longer writing about his backyard, but more enlightening. Ever wondered what happened in that way-back war in Afghanistan when Bin Laden and the US were over there fighting the Russians? Or what the Iranian revolution was all about, and what part the US played in it? Or why Iran and Iraq were at war, and why the US was best buds with Saddam Hussein one minute and out for blood the next? Well, all these questions and more are answered. And, I repeat: I'm only one quarter of the way through it!

Amazingly enough, not only is this book enlightening, it's hard to put down. It's compelling, it's fun to read, it pulls you in. And I recommend it wholeheartedly to anyone who has even the faintest interest in what's going on in the Middle East.

Beware of Pity, by Stephan Zweig

2008-03-24T11:34:00.006-04:00

I knew that I would love Beware of Pity before I picked it up. It was a no-brainer, meant for me like candy for children or porn for teenage boys. It pushed all my buttons, to wit: it is set just before World War I (two of my favorite books of all time, Remembrance of Things Past and The Man Without Qualities also date from this period), it's very talky, and - as announced by the title - its message is counter-intuitive.

Of course, the inevitable happened and I absolutely adored Beware of Pity. Between this and Stuff White People Like, it's becoming painfully clear that I'm a very predictable sort of person.

Anyhow, I recommend the book very highly to anyone who likes good books - especially lovers of the above-mentioned titles, or W.G. Sebald. It's a fantastic story, mordant but not too dark, and the new translation just published by New York Review Books is a real pleasure to read.

ouch.

2008-03-14T17:08:00.003-04:00

Melinda just told me about this website, Stuff White People Like. She was like, "Ha ha, it's so funny, I guess I'm not white!" Well...I just took a look, and it turns out I am 100% white. I am whiter than white. I feel kind of ashamed, but according to the site that just makes me whiter....

Anyhow, it's absolutely hilarious. Check it out.

Internet slang.

2008-02-29T16:26:00.003-05:00

I was reading Le Monde online today, and I noticed in a sidebar for comments that a reader had been writing, "blah blah blah 2 blah blah blah 2" - and at first, I kept reading this '2' as I would an English '2,' i.e. as 'to'...but this was obviously wrong, so I stopped, sounded out "deux" in my head, and realized: 2 = de.

I know it's not rocket science but I felt a little proud of myself.

Make a list.

2008-02-26T21:27:00.004-05:00

How many bad things can you say about our country based only on the title of a book I passed in B&N today: Cancer on $5 a Day.

(Note: I just looked the book up on Amazon and it appears that it falls into the category of humor rather than self help. Does that make it better or worse?)

Dear All You Novel Writers Out There,

2008-02-26T16:31:00.006-05:00

Do not begin your novel by describing the weather. I don't know why so many of you seem to think that grandiose descriptions of seasonal environmental effects (new grass, falling leaves, snow, rain, etc.) make a compelling first line.

In case you haven't heard, the weather is boring. Although you may later have the opportunity to share your uniquely special wonderment at the beauty of nature, please save it for your saggy middle - I'm sure it needs some shoring up anyhow.

The first line of your novel should draw us into the story. It should set the tone, give us an idea of what's to come. Is your book about the weather? I didn't think so. When you start with something bland and irrelevant, the reader draws certain conclusions.

Thank you,
A Sad, Sad Reader of Unpublished Fiction.

The Star Copy Style

2008-02-14T10:52:00.004-05:00

I'm looking at the style sheet for the Kansas City Star where Hemingway earned his writing chops. To the surprise of no one, here's the first paragraph:

Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative.

But there are all kinds of other interesting instructions, like:

Never use old slang. Such words as stunt, cut out, got his goat, come across, sit up and take notice, put one over, have no place after their use becomes common. Slang to be enjoyable must be fresh.

"He was ill in February," not "He was ill during febraury." During February would mean every fraction of a second of the month's time. A body may deliberate during the day, but that means no recess was taken in the entire period.

"He suffered a broken leg in a fall," not "he broke his leg in a fall." He didn't break the leg, the fall did. Say a leg, not his leg, because presumably the man has two legs.

Bodies are not shipped or sent - say "The burial will be in Ottumwa, Ia."

"Several persons were in the room," not "several people." The people of Kansas City" is correct.

"The execution of the death sentence," not "the execution of the man."

"The building was partly insured," not "partially instured."

A long quotation without introducing the speaker is a poor lead especially and is bad at any time. Break into the quotation as soon as you can, thus: "I should prefer," the speaker said, "to let the reader know who I am as soon as possible."

"He was made unconscious," not "he was rendered unconscious."

A man marries a woman; she is married to him.

He died of heart disease, not heart failure - everybody dies of "heart failure."

The words donate and donation are barred from the columns of The Star. Use give or contribute. The use of raise, in the sense of obtaining money, has been forced into usage where no other word seems to do as well. But raise is not a noun.

In most cases, desire is preferable to want.

Each other applies to two, one another to three or more.

If is used to introduce a suppositional clause, as: I shall not go if it rains. It is incorrect to say: I do not know if I can go. The correct form is whether: I do not know whether I can go.

Both simplicity and good taste suggest house rather than residence, and lives rather than resides.

A Woman of the Name of Mary Jones - Disrespect is attached to the individual in such sentences. Avoid it. Never use it even in referring to street walkers.

Admittance and Admission - Admittance is better than admission in relation to admittance fees and admittance to places, lodges, etc.

Some of these instructions sound a little antiquated, but I've been reading The Nick Adams Stories and am continually struck by how fresh Hemingway's language remains. I bet in practice these rules would still work, without striking a false note.

joke.

2008-02-13T21:40:00.004-05:00

A father said to his son, "You know, when Abraham Lincoln was your age he was studying books by the firelight." The son replied to his father, "When Abraham Lincoln was your age, he was president."

Vegan fashion is finally coming into fashion

2008-02-05T12:06:00.001-05:00

Stella McCartney and LeSportSac collaborate on vegan handbags, luggage, and accessories.

Natalie Portman designs vegan shoes.

Drool.

Photos from Kilimanjaro trip

2008-01-05T10:28:00.001-05:00

kenya and tanzania

click to visit the album

Roof of Africa

2007-12-29T09:23:00.001-05:00

My mom and I both made it to the top of Kilimanjaro, to the highest peak in Africa. We made it despite the fact that it was gruelingly hard, the weather was punishing (snow and hail and rain nonstop, although our nighttime ascent to the summit was clear), and we were suffering from altitude sickness. But we kept going, and we got to the top, and then we limped back down to the base camp and vowed to avoid mountains for a while.

Meat causes cancer

2007-12-11T17:39:00.002-05:00

As long as I'm on my high horse, did anybody else hear this story on NPR this morning? About how eating meat causes cancer?

Circumcision is anti-sex.

2007-12-11T17:04:00.001-05:00

This article in The New York Times led me to this study, Fine touch pressure thresholds in the adult penis.

The relevant conclusions?

The glans of the circumcised penis is less sensitive to fine touch than the glans of the uncircumcised penis. The transitional region from the external to the internal prepuce is the most sensitive region of the uncircumcised penis and more sensitive than the most sensitive region of the circumcised penis. Circumcision ablates the most sensitive parts of the penis.

Oh yeah, and this:

Whether the penis is circumcised or not might also affect coitus. For women, having a male partner with a foreskin increased the duration and comfort of coitus and increased the likelihood of achieving single and multiple orgasms