Missed Connections and the Modern Novel

I lied, this isn't really about the Modern Novel. But have you read any missed connections lately? They're for real. Some read like the fiercest, most elliptical short stories, some reach in and rattle you with the power of pure epic. They remind me of a point made in a recent New Yorker article by Adam Gopnik: that sometimes a mediocre movie can take on the weight of a serious novel when combined with the "Making of the Movie" section available on DVD. In these cases, the substance of the actual movie may not be as powerful on its own as when taken with the circumstances of its creation.

Likewise, it's not just the fact that someone had the experience described in a posting -- seeing the long-legged woman at the grocery store, realizing they have the same taste in low-fat dairy products when they retrieve a lime yogurt that has slipped from her cart, locking eyes as they return it to her at the checkout line -- but the whole premise of the missed connections page in the first place that is so deeply evocative. It suggests not only that they were attracted to this gangly shopper in the moment, but that they thought of her on the way home, recalling her features as they unpacked the peppers and apples and sliced bread from their bag, hesitating over the meaning of that gaze, wondering at the popularity of citrus-flavored yogurt, until they finally sat down, alone, to try to piece together the few details of the encounter with enough precision and grace to conjure this stranger out of the void behind the computer screen and into their presence.

Or maybe that isn't how it happened at all, but the point is that good fiction evokes a space past the bounds of the land it describes. And missed connections may feature bad writing at times but it always makes for good stories.

Which is why it's the beating heart of the romantic comedy I concocted at dinner the other night. Before you stop reading, you cynical reader, I'd like to explain why I think romantic comedies deserve our time in this posting. I recogize that the very idea of the genre is a bit redundant by some standards (perhaps the least of its problems) -- to Shakespeare or Austen, a comedy was by definition a work that ended in marriage. Although modern-day pairs may not end up at the altar, our sense of convention is no less stringent. And it is this adherence to a strict form that make these movies both boring (because predictible) and revealing (of our idea and/or ideology of romance).

So, in my movie, there's a dapper man, stylish, charming, well-heeled, well-educated, and of course well-off, who's admired from afar by a rather mousy woman. She is plain by Hollywood standards, which is to say only plainly dressed -- she has the large eyes and pouty smile that amount to star potential. She doesn't know him well; maybe she's only met him a few times at a friend's house, or bumped into him in the marble lobby of the midtown office building where they both work. But she knows enough to be smitten. He, on the other hand, has no idea who she is. Although he has met her, he hasn't noticed her. One day, as he's getting off a train or sitting down to a meal or waiting online at a store, he sees someone he does notice: a gazelle, bewitching. Before he can approach her, or even see her whole face, she's off. That's how fantasy women move, without pause. Captivated, he returns home and posts a missed connection which the other woman, the mousy one, reads, somehow recognizing him in some quirk of style or vocabulary. In a moment of daring, she responds, goes to meet him in as glamorous a guise as possible, and wins his heart.

Since no one is rewarded for lying, she must ultimately come clean, and since both of them must be flawed in order for the relationship to be balanced, he will do something wrong, too [insert vague misdeed here]. Perhaps he will be punished for his fixation on the fantastic that blinds him to the beauty in the real. After a brief spat, he will forgive her ruse, and she his shortcomings. He will be transformed by her pure love and become a better person who pays attention to everyone regardless of their class or status; she will gain the confidence she lacked and come to believe she is the fashionable face she puts forward. The mystery woman will turn out to be a horrible pill, conceited, vapid, bitter, and no one will care that she ends up alone.

What does all this tell us about our received definition of romance?

If love is being seen for who you truly are and embraced anyway, then romance is manipulating that vision. It is the art of impersonating your own aura, dressing up as yourself, playing the beloved. Romance is locking eyes and looking away, writing a love letter to someone you've never met and sending it to lots of people you don't know, leaving your slipper behind but not your number. It's putting out just enough of yourself to be recognized but not enough to be identified, inviting the other to find you. It is the temperature at which the individual barely begins to melt into our collective fantasy.

Push and Pull

I am knitting a scarf like a net. The dark blue yarn is pale in places as light streaking the underside of a lake; it is only by turning it that you notice the change is not an effect but the dye of the wool itself.

The pattern is simple: purl-two-together, yarn over, repeat; the result is a mesh of slants and gaps. If you picture knitted fabric as an enormous matrix, then the simplest formula for creating a new row is to make one new stitch out of each existing stitch. My pattern alternates between subtraction and addition, so the total number of stitches remains constant from row to row but their spacing is not even across each row.

The subtraction occurs when two stitches in the old row are combined (knitted together) to form a single stitch in the new row. Likewise, a stitch can be created out of new yarn without corresponding to any stitch in the previous row. Knitting stitches together draws the yarn diagonally into a dense knot and adding stitches opens a hollow. Hence, the net.

As I knit my net, I imagine each stitch, each strand, is a person. Now they lean towards each other, now away. Now they embrace, now sulk. They are knotted together and still they shy, still they turn, still they cling. Like I said, it is a simple pattern.

The Truth of Human Experience

It has recently come to my attention that I'm not really much of a blogger. "Blog writing is id writing—grandiose, dreamy, private, free-associative, infantile, sexy, petty, dirty," writes Sarah Boxer in an article in the NY Review of Books. Almost none of these adjectives could be used to describe my blog, but then again I've never been much for id. My own is a bit like this dog: put-upon, aggravated, squeezed into a costume that doesn't really fit for the dubious amusement of someone else.

I didn't start this log to express myself or define myself or to rant or whine or vent; I didn't start it to titillate or to provide the constant window into my consciousness that I'm sure no one wants because most of my consciousness is sort of like the fight between the dog in the chair and the photographer. I started it to practice an entirely different kind of writing, namely, the personal essay, in a space I thought would be more encouraging than the notebooks I have always filled and rarely gone back to read. It's public enough to be motivating, anonymous enough to be safe. Like therapy.

But I can't help noticing just how much writing is out there, most of it not only recent but instant, new information becoming available every minute, a steady current within the ever-roaring stream of opinion and critique. Why add my voice to the river of others? Or, more to the point, what makes writing worth reading to someone who didn't write it?

This is the train of thought that led me to start throwing around this rather weighty phrase "The Truth of Human Experience." I like how it scans; the rhythm is right. I wonder if maybe I've heard it somewhere before. It sounds a bit like something I would have railed against in college, and I'm not sure I quite believe in it now. I certainly don't use it to imply that the human experience is singular or in any way reducible to a clutch of morals, or that meaning can be extracted like syrup from the business of living. Instead, I like to picture an ore the earth is rich with, that runs in veins beneath mountains waiting for someone with a pick-ax and a stick of dynamite to take on the backbreaking task of hauling it out into the light. It would be crude, craggly, no two chunks the same, each heavy as a soaked collie. Still, it could power factories, light cities for days.

Anyway, that's what I'm looking for. I'll let you know what I find.