Did Anyone Else Know that Dickens is Funny?

I was turned off to Dickens early. I read "Great Expectations" in 8th or 9th grade and frankly I didn't get it. I mean, I got it -- class differences, abandonment, unrequited love, old wedding cake...I saw the movie when it came out and I got Ethan Hawke & Gwyneth Paltrow and all those lovely green subway seats...but I didn't get it. I thought it was dull. And besides, I was busy worrying about all kinds of other things, like what exactly I would have said to Kurt Cobain had I met him backstage at a concert and where I could buy black lipstick before Tuesday or whether I could just mix eye shadow and chapstick instead.

Then last year, when I was still waiting to hear back from law schools, two of my best friends bought me "Bleak House" for the holidays. I was apprehensive. It was long. And I feared it would be dull. And that it would lead to a sort of sinking disheartenment with the law -- something I still didn't know very much about -- before I had even started school. So I thanked them and put it on the shelf and went back to reading the New Yorker.

BUT. I finally started it this fall. And it's hysterical. And now I get it -- I get Dickens. He's funny. I mean, and also a great writer, master prose stylist, etc. But just fucking hysterical. And I don't even mind that the butt of the joke is often the British legal system. After all I'm not planning to work in a 19th-century Court of Chancery. If you can't laugh at Chancery, who can you laugh at?

My favorite sections by far are the descriptions of the lawyer, Mr. Tulkinghorn, who is introduced as follows: "The old gentleman is rusty to look at, but is reputed to have made good thrift out of aristocratic marriage settlements and aristocratic wills, and to be very rich. He is surrounded by a mysterious halo of family confidences; of which he is known to be the silent depository. There are noble Mausoleums rooted for centuries in retired glades of parks, among the growing timber and the fern, which perhaps hold fewer noble secrets than walk abroad among men, shut up in the breast of Mr. Tulkinghorn. He is of what is called the old school -- a phrase generally meaning any school that seems never to have been young -- and wears knee breeches tied with ribbons, and gaiters or stockings. One peculiarity of his black clothes, and of his black stockings, be they silk or worsted, is, that they never shine. Mute, close, irresponsive to any glancing light, his dress is like himself."

Just phenomenal. All of which has led me to start making some pretty inane dinner-table conversation with Luke, along the lines of: "Did you know that Dickens was funny?" To which, as a PhD candidate studying the Victorian Novel, he has no choice but to reply: "Yes, literary scholarship has progressed far enough that we can now confirm that Dickens is, in fact, funny." At least, my inanity would deserve such a dry response. Luke is usually too sweet to supply one.

But who cares. I have 800 pages left and I'm excited about it.

Why Didn't Ian McEwan Just Become a Scientist?

Ian McEwan's recent New Yorker story, "The Use of Poetry," is all about a British physics major in the 1960s who seduces his first wife after a week-long crash course in Milton. That it only takes him 7 days of reading before he can seductively quote and converse about the poet fills him with a certain disdain for the humanities. (In case you're wondering, the "use" of poetry is that it helps you meet chicks. That part might be true.)

Of his protagonist, McEwan writes: "His Milton week made him suspect a monstrous bluff. The reading was a slog, but he encountered nothing that could remotely be construed as an intellectual challenge, nothing on the scale of difficulty he encountered daily in his course...He and his lot were at lectures and lab work nine till five every day, attempting to grasp some of the hardest things ever thoughts. The arts people fell out of bed at midday for their two tutorials a week. He suspected that there was nothing they talked about at those meetings that anyone with half a brain could fail to understand. He had read four of the best essays on Milton. He knew. And yet they passed themselves off as his superior, these lie-abeds, and he had let them intimidate him."

So that was sort of a long quote. But seriously, what is the deal with Ian McEwan's total persistent hang-up about not being a scientist? He is one of the leading fiction writers of his whole generation and he's good and his novels sell and I understand being fascinated by science but his preoccupation seems to go deeper than intellectual curiosity or admiration. Like he has this need to constantly compare the very nature of the humanities and the sciences as if there were some crucial difference or shimmering similarity that, if only he could locate and embody in a character, would set him free forever.

Well, I am tired of this fight. If I had the sciences and the humanities in a room with me right now, I would say exactly what you would say to two-year-old cousins: you are each special in your own way; there is no need to fight over who is more special. No one is more special. Now go play outside.

My Favorite (Legal) Words

Just a smattering:

feoffment
escheats
untenantability
consanguinity
tortfeasor

It doesn't even matter what these words mean. They are just fun to say.

And on that note, there are some phrases I like because by virtue of word order they just sound so old and dusty, and you can almost hear the quill pen scratching in the background:

subject to a condition subsequent
within 21 years of a life in being
an action for trespass on the case

OK, so all those are from property...maybe property law is just really old...

The Article I Wish I had Time to Write

This might be the first of a whole series of posts that could be subtitled "if I had time." It goes like this:

If I had time, I would love to write a law review article about asylum & narrative. This is because the central piece of an asylee's application is a declaration describing the persecution they suffered in their home country. This might seem to be a reasonable request on the part of the U.S. Government -- after all, your life story is free and when everything else has been taken from you, it is likely to remain.

Or is it?

The irony or tension here is that many if not most asylees suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, which is what happens when you are persecuted and/or tortured. One of the main effects this has is to disrupt the coherence of your past and even yourself, and part of the healing process is taking the fragments of traumatic experience and assembling them back into a narrative that allows you to move forward.

So you can look at the asylum process in a very positive way -- that lawyers are facilitating healing in the form of narrative reconstitution. Or you can look it in a more cynical way that SOMEHOW the Government has contrived to ask for the one thing that may be impossible to give.

I would love to write this article but obviously I can't due to the fact that I am spending all my time trying to collect the various springs and moving parts that keep popping out of my brain. BUT if I had time...

Actually, if I had time I would probably start by doing laundry and taking a seven-hour nap...but that is a topic for another post.

I hope you weren't expecting too much...

...from my first post in almost 7 months, which also happens to my first post-law school post...

because here's what I have to say: the other night I dreamed that I slept through my contracts class two days in a row. not that I went to class and fell asleep, but that I took a nap before class and just slept right through it.

this sounds like a typical anxiety dream except that a) my anxiety dreams are usually about forgetting to wear shoes to important events, and b) I am pretty sure this is related to the time last week when I fell asleep on BART and woke up at the airport (ask me about it! it's a good story).

but the real reason I think this is worth sharing is the mise-en-abyme effect of dreaming about sleeping. in my dreamt nap, what was I dreaming about? and what about the idea that maybe the self you think is a dream is awake and dreaming the self you think is awake -- are those two selves now interchangeable for me?

and furthermore, is my subconscious really that unimaginative that all it can generate is a copy of what I'm already doing? am I that nap-starved? is this the best my fantasy glands can do?

Mad, Mad World

The AMC series "Mad Men" seems to have gotten lodged in our collective simile gland -- or at least that of the New Yorker writers. Two separate and unrelated articles in the April 27th issue (wow, I am way behind in posting this) make reference to the world of pencil skirts and martini lunches.

First, in a piece on the rising use of "neuroenhancers" -- drugs like Ritalin or Aderall that were developed to help the clinically restless but are increasingly being used by healthy people to gain a mental edge -- Margaret Talbot likens modern pharmaceutical aids to those used in the past: "My college friends and I wrote term papers with the sweaty-palmed assistance of NoDoz tablets. And, before smoking bans, entire office cultures chugged along on a collective nicotine buzz -- at least if "Mad Men" is to be believed" (p 42).

Then, writing on the decline of GM, Chrysler, and Ford, Peter J. Boyer describes a visit to the showy GM Technology Center in Warren, Michigan. "The chief designer's office is like something from the set of 'Mad Men,' with rolled-wood panelling, built-in sofas, and a glass-topped coffee table that can be raised and lowered by push-button command" (p 55).

Is it just the sleek aesthetic of the show that we find so captivating? Or is it something else -- something about the image it projects of American cultural ascendance and material plenty, an image that has become increasingly problematic amidst the rising intensity of consumer culture and the precipitous decent of the market?

I think this entry took me so long to write because the emotions that Mad Men evokes in me -- and I think in the audience the show is aimed at -- are so contradictory -- smug superiority over its restrictive mores and undisguised intolerance, envy of its unapologetic self-indulgence, and sheer wonder at the lack of irony and cynicism on display.

"Light is constant, we just turn over in it." That is from Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. Maybe it's a platitude but I think it's tremendously comforting to imagine all our restlessness, our tossing & turning, is just that: ours; and not some darkness descended upon the land. See, the sun is even now shining outside, just beyond the curtain.

Easter

Most of the time I don't think much about flowers. I am pleased with the daffodils we've been given lately, they seem happy. And the various specimens we've potted around the house are lovely, especially when we remember to water them. But otherwise, they just don't occur to me much.

Except after a run. Then they start to seem truly alarming. I saw a hosta near Buena Vista park the other day whose leaves were striped so tightly with ribbons of lighter and darker green they looked like pulled taffy, shined sugar. Or the California poppies this morning, tipped up like cups of gold. So bright I had to look away. Even the grass on the swell of Corona Heights seemed unusually clear and sharp.

It's possible I need to drink more water when I run...

It's just a little crush

I used to worry that maybe I liked books more than they liked me. That they were just flirting while I was falling hard, allowing me no more than a glimpse of the odd beauty coiled in an unexpected phrase, enough to keep me panting behind, while secretly going all the way with the hipster girl up the block, the one with the polka head band and the yellow lunch box.

It felt like I needed to read them more than they needed to be read by me. There are plenty of readers out there and some books, some of the classics, have been read so many times I wonder if they're just tired of it. But I would have been stranded without their company -- on the BART, on the muni, out for coffee, over breakfast on Saturday, in the afternoon on Sunday, after dinner, before bed. Stranded in my own head with only the things I've seen and done and heard to keep my mind off my mind.

I held them close.

I introduced them to my friends, set them up with articles and essays I thought they might click with.

I alphabetized them, made lists of their titles, quoted their epigraphs.

For a while, I even thought I was ready to make a real commitment. I wondered aloud in their presence about becoming an English professor, a journalist, a book reviewer, even an editor. I looked to them for encouragement. I fanned their pages. Nothing.

I guess I worry that I'll lose them, that one day I'll turn to the faded blue bookshelf in the bedroom and find nothing of comfort, of beauty, of weight. Like that episode of the Twilight Zone where the poor book-loving bank clerk finds himself half-blind and alone, forever. Even though he's surrounded by books, he has no way of reaching them. They're lost to him.

It might seem odd to talk about books so stubbornly as if they were people. But then I consider the attachment I feel, the fear of loss. The way I talk about characters and wonder about them and worry about them; they are the people I spend the most time with. And, just like a person, as soon as I stepped back and gave them room to breathe, they were there. They returned to me in waves: Paul Madonna, Alison Bechdel, Roddy Doyle. E.M. Forster and Ford Madox Ford. c.d. wright. Luke asked me to read Anne Carson out loud. Zadie Smith had a piece in the NYR.

I still don't know if we'll ever go steady, books and I, if we'll make a real go of it. But I know they love me, even if they can't say it. And that's enough for now.

There are many times when I wish I could do Job's voice

on Arrested Development when he says "Come on!" I've tried but I just sound squeaky and silly in a stupid way, not a funny way.

Like for example, there were several individuals using snorkling masks and breathing tubes at the public pool the other day. I mean really, folks, it's not the Great Barrier Reef. In fact, I think the decreased visibility provided by my fogged up goggles usually makes the experience a little better.

But I can't do the voice so this kind of comment is not really so impactful.

The newest installment of The Book Club, in which The Bunny trashes Twilight...

I did not do a great job of packing books to bring with me on a two-week trip to Israel. Distributed between my backpack and my duffle bag so as to cause minimum damage to the back muscles I have already destroyed by carrying bags of groceries up 16th street were:

• one book of short stories by Dave Eggers (contemporary, cold)
  

• two books by Ian McEwan (who, boy, if you thought he was just a nice Englishman who likes hiking, you were wrong, he's way creepy)
  


• one book by Michael Chabon (which actually would have been fun but I never got to it)
  


• one book by Primo Levi, in French, about the Holocaust (I mean, really)
  


• one book by Jonathan Franzen (that also would have been fun but was so long I couldn't get up the nerve to start it)
  

This doesn't even include the page-turners (=sarcasm) by Jim Crace and John McPhee that I was gonna bring but then decided not to at the last minute and left in NYC. Looking at this list, one notices a distinctive lack of what might be called "vacation reading." So I was pretty vulnerable to the lures of easy entertainment when I arrived at the bookstore next to our gate in JFK, with a twelve-hour plane ride and countless bus trip ahead and glossy paperbacks all around.

I had already heard about Twilight from friends, including my virtual friend Slate. I knew it was about vampires and teenage love and was written by a Mormon woman and had some sort of abstinence agenda to push but was also rife with sexual tension. So in the interest of cultural studies and also supporting the rights of the undead, especially their right to be fiendishly attractive, I bought it. It only took a few minutes to rationalize. Overall, I was quite pleased with myself.

Until I read it.

I was prepared for the unpleasant "men feel urges that they can't control without the help of women" message and the tired "he seems like a bad boy but that's just because you don't know him like I do" fanstasy and the altogether disturbing "I love him because he might hurt me" subtext. I was prepared to be fascinated, offended, appalled. But I wasn't prepared for a main character with no personality traits other than being utterly self-sacrificing, unrealistically clumsy, and hopelessly in love (which doesn't really count as a personality trait). And I certainly wasn't prepared to be bored.

My anger reached its pinnacle while reading the "preface" to the second book in the series, which the publisher thoughtfully appended to the end of the first text. This installment begins with Bella's 18th birthday, meaning that she is now technically a year older than Edward who is only 17 in human years, although ~100 in vampire years. This difference in age fills Bella with a sense of her own mortality and the bitter knowledge that she will age and grow while Edward will remain in the body of a gorgeous 17-year-old forever. She feels sad and anxious and resists celebrating her birthday with all her effort.

The utter absurdity and injustice of the fact that an 18-year-old girl would already be concerned about how the aging process will make her unappealing to her partner -- who is, of course, immune to aging and will be desirable for all of eternity -- is really too much to bear. It's almost too upsetting to bother complaining about. It makes me wish that Lyra Belacqua could move not only between worlds but between young adult science fiction series and show Bella what it means to be the heroine of an epic...

Taste Test

A few months ago I participated in a beer-tasting at a friend's house. In spite of my general proximity to beer -- what with the carboys in the closet that hang out and ferment and sometimes spit up on my jacket -- you'd think I'd know a lot more about how it's supposed to taste and the proper terminology used to describe said taste. But the technical language -- the top notes and bottom notes, the acidity and astringency, and even the comparisons to other familiar substances like grass, flowers, and grains -- doesn't help fill in any of the blanks for me.

So I have developed my own language for talking about beer, one that I think is more evocative and also more fun, if somewhat less scientific. Below are my tasting notes from that night.

1. Dry, bitter. Pale ale? Like being stuck in a conversation with someone you don't want to talk to at a party.

2. Bright, edgy, toothy. Like biting your tongue in the same spot twice.

3. Vaguely sour, fruity, round. Like hanging out in your best friend's basement on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

4. Light, sweet, bubbly. Like wearing a sundress.

5. Light, plain, simple. Like someone you don't want your friends to meet.

6. Yuck. Bready, bunrt. Like wearing a coat that's too warm.

7. Bitter, full, real, honest. Like making a great point.

8. Gingerbread! Like a fake smile.

9. Strong, dark, syrupy. Like getting caught in a storm.

10. Soda-pop. Like wearing a skirt that flies from your hips out when you spin.

11. Strong, spicy, saucy. Like slapping someone across the face, playfully.

My notes indicate that #7 was my favorite...now, if only I could figure out which beer that corresponds to...

Edward Ashburnham is soooooooooooooo dreamy

I'd like to leave off the week with this lovely bit of description from Ford Madox Ford. Although I wouldn't normally be so bold as to write about a book I haven't finished yet, I am feeling very strongly about "The Good Soldier" right now so I think I'll make it through. Plus, this is too delicious to resist.

Let me just say that I think for me these two short lines somehow sum up what's great about Modernist writing (sort of a tall order). They let just a little bit of instability into what would ordinarily be a throwaway line about yet another pair of baby blues. They show how tightly bound together language and experience are, and how reference is not a given -- just when you think you know what someone is pointing to it shifts out of range.

Or maybe I just have a thing for blue eyes?

"I had forgotten about his eyes. They were as blue as the sides of a certain type of box of matches." -p. 26

OK, that's all.

Have a good weekend!

A Writer's Guide to New Year's Resolutions

New Year's resolutions are a species of list which is why I love them. Many people don't, I think because they view them as actual things they're supposed to accomplish instead of just a writing exercise. But, like the facebook status update, I think making resolutions is a kind of Trojan horse that can be used to smuggle scraps of poetry into everyday life.

The perfect number of resolutions is the same as the number of witches or princes or guesses in any good fairy tale: three. So there's one clue already -- resolutions are related to fairy tales in their balance and structure, and the way they help us tie our goals and anxieties up with a nice, big bow.

And just as fairy tales establish a sense of balance by teetering between extremes, it's important to craft a set of resolutions that covers the spectrum from the transcendental to the mundane. Each pole helps put the other in perspective. The best example of this is the parting advice my mother gave to me my freshman year of college, right before driving away: "Whatever happens, just listen to your heart...and take your vitamins."

I think that some of the difficulty lies with the word "resolve" itself, which means several things at once, including (according to the OED Online, which if you have a San Francisco public library card you get FREE access to, hello, is that not amazing?):

• To determine or decide upon (a course of action, etc.)
• To cause (a discord) to pass into a concord
  
• To decide, determine, settle (a doubtful point)
• To disintegrate; to break up or separate into constituent or elementary parts
  

Resolving "resolve" into the different aspects of its meaning -- teasing apart its threads to better understand the whole cloth -- suggests how resolutions should be approached. They are not unified, impenetrable objects that we must either take in their entirety or abandon altogether. They are not bricks or cars or things that can be thrown across a room. They're not buildings that we can choose to enter or to not enter.

They're more like a fine rain slowly soaking into your sneakers or a jar of honey you can't quite empty. Viscous, grainy. Coffee grounds clinging to the inside of the pot. You have to take them apart and then put yourself together around them and you can't expect that when they're done they'll look the same as they did at the beginning.

Really, they're just a chance to express yourself in a different way, to take all the angst that oozes out from the space between who you are and who you want to be and put it into a form that is acceptable to share at happy hour or the office. They can be rhetorical figures, metaphors or something else -- just images, maybe.

And if your resolution is to write more this year? They're the best place to start.

If my blog were a character in a John Hughes movie...

...it would totally be the Ally Sheedy character who shakes out her own dandruff over the picture she's drawing in order to represent snow. I don't even remember the name of her character even though I majored in The Breakfast Club in college, probably because I've been standing too close to the microwave all these years even though it's one of the many things on my to-not-do list...

What is Ally Sheedy even up to these days?

Look how cool she is:

I actually may be too old to still be writing poems

"We should be a statue somewhere"
I said, long ago, at the beginning,
in the year of the kiss
when my eyes saw so quickly
that the wave of a hand
seemed as slow as moss swallowing stone.
Now I see that a couple is an outpost,
a crop of purple between the rocks,
a bloom beneath the heat,
bright against the sandy hills,
and we are no monument
but quick shimmering things,
tattered, clinging to the side of the slope.

***

At the end of each day we gather the hours
emptied and stacked like cardboard boxes under the sink
and tear them up and fold them into the bricks
of the walls we are building.
Rooms have sprung up around us where before there was only grass, sky.
A thicket of stone.
At night I walk the corridors.
Whether I am keeping watch or just keeping busy
is hard to say.
Sometimes I think we are under siege
but then it is only the rain, a bird that is lost and calling out, a cloud
sliced open by the sun.

And besides it is a beautiful day out.