Harsher Even

"That year a captain got bumped from the lineup...Bam Slokum, til then but a middling six-grade player, had grown four inches taller and ten times as dominant. He came off the bench of the JV B-team to play A-team on varsity as a starting point-guard, and went on to break, in the eight weeks following, three [school] and two conference scoring-records. The captain Bam replaced was called Gregory Gumm, and to get Gummed became slang that for [one clique] was fighting words harsher even than any phrase it might have euphemized."

The Instructions, Adam Levin, p. 237

The insight in this passage is slipped into a stunningly slight clause that weighs a certain kind of word -- a term of art, a piece of jargon, an inside joke -- that is to say a word tethered to the felt world only by the most accidental and anarchic bridge of shared experience -- against another kind of word, a word whose bare sounds are so brutal, so evocative of some brutal fact out in the world, that they must be sanded down somehow or cloaked in other, unrelated sounds. Euphemism is the sand-paper, the cloak.

But Levin's passage reminds us that words are not airtight containers in which we store little bits of the world, but rather soaking strips of plaster that we layer over it trying to capture its hollows and contours. A word will eventually, inevitably take on the shape of what it means. And if it means something mean enough, then over time its consonants will come to prick like pins and its vowels seep like acid.

Failure to Communicate

I knew Blue Valentine would be hard to watch but I didn't realize why. Yes, the tang of the characters' disappointment -- in themselves, in their lives, in the world -- was sour like a mid-morning coating of early morning coffee on the tongue, and their efforts to break even each month without being broken were sobering. Yes, there were a few punches thrown and a few scenes in which a woman's body was treated with utter disregard.

But what made me turn away, what made me turn to Luke and say "Let's not watch this, I think I'm done for the night," was when the two fought not with but at one another. It takes courage to show, on screen, the way that people really talk. And the way they do not listen.

I am thinking in particular of the two climactic moments, the first in the hotel room and the second in the hospital where Cindy works, and the way that the characters apply their voices to each moment in layers, tinted foils accumulating to dim the chance they might actually hear one another. When one of them risks saying something that might possibly convey what they are feeling, the threat of the truth scares the other into disengaging completely. There are no devastating quips, no dead-eyed stares that say more than a quip ever could, no punch-lines. Just two people, increasingly isolated within their moats of sound.

I recently started reading National BestSeller "The Time Traveler's Wife" by Audrey Niffenegger (OK, so I'm a little late to the party...). I am up to page 280 -- specifically, right at the section break that follows their marriage (newsflash: they get married -- so not a spoiler, even for the characters). But I'm afraid I don't get it; that is, I don't feel compelled to read the second half of the book. On its own, this feeling is by no means unusual. I'm a big proponent of not finishing books that do not, of their own force, demand to be finished. There is too little life to spend any of it on dull prose. This time, though, I'm wondering if I'm missing something because it seems like everyone and their great-aunt adored this book. I did a quick search for reviews and turned up almost exclusively positive pieces (in addition to this interesting blogpost by someone who compares the covers of different editions), which actually surprised me a bit.

Part of the problem is the -- perhaps inherent -- lack of suspense: in every scene, at least one of the characters seems to know what will happen. And the usual source of tension in romantic fiction -- the petal-pulling see-sawing she-loves-me-she-loves-me-not -- is entirely absent. At least in the first half of the book, there is no doubt ever that the two main characters are in love and always will be. Although there are hints that their married life is not hitch-free, those hints do not amount to actual dramatic tension. And the scenes that I suspect are supposed to generate a little thrill of danger -- when Clare's little sister reveals that Henry looks like a naked intruder from her childhood, or when Henry disappears during the wedding -- unfold without any actual sense of risk or danger, leaving me wondering what is really at stake for these characters.

The other problem is the voicing. The novel is recounted alternately by Henry (whose age varies in non-linear fashion) and Clare, at times as if the two are in dialogue. The narrative voice, however, never changes. Sometimes I have to look to the start of a section to remember who is speaking. This seems like a major flaw -- why use different narrators if they all sound the same?

I do find somewhat poignant the way that time's passage is used to comment on the shapes and colors of romantic love. When Henry meets Clare for his first time, she already knows him (and knows she will marry him), which is a nice metaphor for getting at the feeling of instant familiarity or sudden intimacy that many people experience when falling in love (sample sentence: " 'I can reach into him and touch time...he loves me. We're married because...we're part of each other...' I falter. 'It's happened already. All at once.' "). Maybe it would be better to read the whole book as an extended reflection on the way that couples in love are always circling back to and immersing themselves in their memories of one another, so that those memories do not remain in the past but are interleaved throughout one's experience of the present and the future. And then there's the way that the time travel intersects with ideas about gender, for example that Clare is the gentle feminine force who will help coax the man she desires out of the boy she has -- not necessarily an idea that makes me want to jump up and down, but certainly a powerful social theme.

But all of that is not enough to propel me on to page 281.

So, readers, tell me -- what is it that I'm failing to see?

Lay awake this morning (Tuesday)

Listening to the pigeons fuck on the fire escape or wherever it is on the other side of the window they rendez-vous --

I've never actually seen them but once in High School Petra told me that was the sound they made,

The sound I heard this morning through the windows and the rain-soaked light and the butter colored curtains.

This is the week before I start work

The morning after the night we went to walk around Bernal Hill in the wind

Whipping so hard it knocked words out from between our teeth

And several years after I began to try and fail to write a poem called "Darwin's Pigeons"

A poem to explain what exactly was so special about those birds

That he saw within their "carunculated skin" and "elongated eyelids," their "enormously developed" crops and "short conical" beaks,

The very mechanism of life

Saw them the way we would all like to be seen

In time, in series, in slow circles elaborating a single dropped rock

Their very features evidence that even

The gestures we do not intend have meaning.

Consider This

From footnote #13 in a 2006 article by Mark Danner on the ongoing war in Iraq: "The current rate of killing of one hundred Iraqis a day would be the equivalent, adjusting for population, of 1,100 Americans a day, or 33,000 dead a month. (In the decade-long Vietnam War, about 58,000 Americans died.)"

Still Life with Sound

One of my favorite modern composers, Knut Nystedt, wrote the piece "Immortal Bach." It is a Bach chorale, sung once straight, and then the second time around in several parts all at different tempos and all radically decelerated. What I love about this piece is that it takes the quintessence -- the paradigmatic example -- of a phrase, a moving line, a living arch of sound and breaks it into a series of unmoving vistas. It's like watching a movie by taking the film out of the canister and looking at each individual frame, one by one, like witnessing the settle and seep of paint on a canvas.

The novel about the Russian spies caught in 2010 in Montclair, New Jersey, would open in the same way as practically every article about them: with a glossy still of life in a leafy suburb. The first chapter would be short, its lacquered narrative remarkable only for the impenetrability of its slick shell -- until the last paragraph of the last page when the finest fragment of the truth about what was going on would start to emerge. The back story -- how the spies were selected, hired, trained, relocated -- would unfold over the next few chapters by means of the stock exposition devices (writing in a journal, reminiscing to oneself, unjustified flashback, recounting a story to a small child, reliving the past with a friend) so by the middle of the book, the reader's knowledge would be current.

And then the second half of the book would mine the most fascinating territory in the realm of the spy novel: how do you hold onto an internal sense of who you are when it is at odds with your conduct? How do you prevent yourself from relating to or identifying with the culture that surrounds you? As the Telegraph reported after the fact, "Moscow appeared concerned that the Murphys might be embracing suburban life a little too enthusiastically. In 2009, there was a dispute over who should own their Montclair house, with the Murphys protesting that owning it was 'convenient' and a 'natural progression of our prolonged stay here' and should not be seen as any 'deviation from the original purpose of our mission.'" It is hard to argue with the idea that if you are trying to infiltrate American culture in any meaningful way, fully engaging with the ever-present trope of home ownership is a must. Consider this statement from a response piece by a NY Times editor who nearly bought the house next door to the Murphys: "We almost talked ourselves into it, but a subsequent visit convinced us that the house just wasn’t the one. We wanted a fourth bedroom for guests, the sloped backyard wasn’t fit for play and a tiny detail about the dining room that proved the last straw: the china cabinet wouldn’t fit. . . . Instead, we bought a bigger house nearby." Just who is putting on whom?

Instead of presenting the final scenes directly -- the dramatic entrance of the FBI into the dreamy neighborhood, the carefully staged hand-off on the Vienna air strip -- the last chapter would consist entirely of reaction shots. It would have to open with a string of headlines, perhaps even a full article excerpted from a local newspaper, followed by scenes of the neighbors coming together to discuss what had happened and make sense of it. Again from the Telegraph, "Mr. Fonkalsrud said: 'I'd rather have Russian spies as neighbours than a paedophile. The Murphys were true suburbanites. They seemed to genuinely love their kids and I think they probably enjoyed their American life here.'" Mr. Fonkalsrud's voice here is that of the liberal humanist, reminding us that even spies have families and the need for community and the innate god-given ability to enjoy soccer games and barbecues and deck chairs.

I guess that last sentence reveals the tension at the heart of my own view of the situation -- would my novel end on the tone of Thomas Friedman's op-ed? (Sample sentence: "Everything the Russians should want from us — the true source of our strength — doesn’t require a sleeper cell to penetrate. All it requires is a tourist guide to Washington, D.C., which you can buy for under $10.") Or would it be more like American Beauty? Would it be a celebration of American consumerist culture as infinitely irresistible? Or a satire of that culture's perpetual slide toward self-celebration?

In the last chapter, the narrative voice from the beginning would return, smooth and serene, but would likely seem sinister after such a systematic undermining of the possibility of serenity. It would be hard to fight the urge to lay the ground for a sequel, or at least to suggest that nothing is ever as it seems, but fight that urge I would because I don't think that's the moral of this story at all.

There would probably be a coda about the family's return to Russia -- brief and grim, a bluish gray departure from the golds and greens of the earlier chapters, it would contain only the barest suggestion of the many worlds that lie beyond our own.

wondering

how do you think the new nytimes paywall will affect their headlines? will they be flashier? grabbier? and how will it affect reader behavior? will people end up reading fewer than their allotted articles because they are hoarding their reads? will they read trashier pieces? more serious ones? will they forward them around less?

i would love to hear your thoughts on this evolving legal economy of reading the news.

Creativity

A few weeks ago, the WSJ (one of my new favorite publications...it's a long story) ran a piece about measuring and enhancing creativity in children (see: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704694004576019462107929014.html). Less interesting than the typical sounding of the death-knell of the American psyche are the examples of creative thinking in the form of samples and questions and answers from the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking -- a standardized test that is used to measure creativity (I'll let you tease apart those contradictions on your own). Based on the sample answers provided below, it seems that the standard or non-creative responses are too literal: when presented with an image, it is too easy or obvious to assume that it directly represents something that it looks like. A creative answer instead looks at each image and considers the causes of which it might be an effect, as well as the intention behind it for example whether it is the product of error, misunderstanding, or confusion. The creative responses, in other words, build a story around each object and make sense of it in the context of a larger narrative, while the standard responses see only discrete projections of static objects.

Creativity Test

Examples of creativity-test answers from students in fourth through sixth grades

TASK ONE: List all the things this figure could represent.

COMMON IDEAS
--A tornado
--Hair
--A squiggle

ORIGINAL IDEAS
--Path of a dizzy bug
--A straight line poorly drawn

TASK TWO: List all the things this figure could represent.

COMMON IDEAS
--The letter "T"
--Blocks in a row

ORIGINAL IDEAS
--Bases in some new game
--Stones in an anti-gravity statue

The pace of youth is so dazzlingly hurtlingly accelerated it can render the background of youth -- the world and all the people in it -- seemingly static. This is an illusion, like the gentle list backward of the platform when the train starts. I don't know when the air around me became so viscous -- sometime in the past few years, I think. But now, back home, I perceive -- as if by means of a new sense -- the tracks that time has trailed through everything around me, the distance that we have all come, the subtle constant motion away from and then towards.

Get Rich Quicker

Officially open for business, my new carding venture: for a small fee, I will select, design, and/or write your cards for holidays, birthdays, special occasions, or just to let that special someone know you're thinking of them.

Prices may vary. Void where prohibited.

Sentences I have loved

A few doozies from the past few months:

"I like women from countries that have sustained political turmoil. Western culture seems to forge women that are valueless and inane."

That's from what is alleged to be Julian Assange's okcupid profile which now you need to sign in to be able to see. If it really is his profile, this seems a wee bit hypocritical to me. Isn't he supposed to be all about transparency?? But really, what can you expect from someone charming enough to write the above sentences in his quest for love?

"'If there was anyone who kept their calm, it was certainly me,' Mr. Sarkozy added."

From an NY Times article. It doesn't really matter what it was about.

"As a 16-year-old girl in the company of three adult men she was the least likely of the four to be carrying one, let alone two, heavy handguns. It is far more probable that she relied on the pocketknife found in her brassiere for any necessary self-protection."

This is from a 1979 Supreme Court case -- Ulster County v. Allen. I just think it's badass.

Commuting

6:50 am

Last night I rode the bus home and thought --

so dark and yet

so early, only 4:47 pm and already someone has pricked the skin

of the balloon of the sky and the light

has gone rushing out like air and the city

of San Francisco, Coit Tower, the TransAmerica pyramid, the Embarcadero Center

and all the blocky fortresses of capital with bay views

are zipping up their suits of silhouette.

But now the risen bits of sun are pooling on the bay's rim

and spilling out beneath the stuttering bits of cloud

and filling in the gaps between the interlocking fingers of highway on the east end of the Bay Bridge

where the 80 and the 880 and the 580 loop and ribbon

and a light that is one of the colors of the scarf I'm knitting with yarn remaining from a hat

edges up and over to shade the clouds on the other side of the Bridge

and I wonder whether this patchwork of vapor, this fragmented fog

always hanging over us is a mirror

or a screen.

On Internal Tension and the Word "About"

"About" means "concerned with" as in "this article is about the war in Iraq." Used in this way it refers to the central point of something, its gist, its core. Whatever meaning beats at its heart.

But "about" also means "near," "close to," "approximately," as in "it was about 6:30 am when the sun rose on one side of the Bay Bridge."

And it means "all around" as in "there were flowers planted all about the castle."

On in near around at the center of. Is there any preposition that "about" does not contain?

Sometimes I feel sad and my sadness is not "about" anything. This might sound strange unless you think of moods being like the weather -- the sun does not rise "about" anything -- it just rises. Or unless you think about the other meanings of "about" -- the sun rises and casts its light all about the city.

Stop Apologizing: A Manifesto to the Women in My Life

Dear All the Women in My Life:

Please stop apologizing, at least to me. You have done nothing wrong, you are lovely: you are talented, radiant, smart. You read articles and make tarts from scratch and ride bicycles, sometimes down mountains. I admire your courage and grace and insight.

But lately, I have been troubled not only by specific acts of self-deprecation but by the persistence of the reflex-apology, especially when I am on the other end of it. Women—and I don’t just mean in general, or all women, but many women whom I personally know and regularly speak with—apologize with disturbing frequency and for the smallest of acts. Women apologize for being early, for being hungry, for being busy, for asking me questions that I am being paid by the University of California to answer for them, for being confused, for disagreeing with me or with other people, for being wrong, for being right, for being tired, for thinking something is interesting, for not having read something that is being discussed, or worked hard enough, or stayed up late enough, or cared enough, or known ahead of time what could only have been learned through experience.

Some might argue that the casually tossed off “I’m sorry” does not really literally mean that the speaker is sorry, but is instead a sentence ornament like “How are you?” or “I’m fine.” That it is akin to the placeholder “like”: a structural element devoid of independent meaning. But I disagree on both counts, since the prevalence of both ungrammatical “like” and “I’m sorry” seems symptomatic of a general tendency to qualify not only our statements but ourselves. And dismissing this as mere syntax, a grammatical tic, only reveals how deeply our self-editing instinct is embedded.

Please consider this a blanket absolution. At least as far as I am concerned you are all forgiven.

Ever,

B.

More on Annie Dillard

Just something to think about:

"Nor presumably does baitfish consider itself baitfish."

I am about to spoil a big part of Annie Dillard's "The Maytrees," so if that book is on your list, read no further!

About a third of the way into the book, which is thick with rhyme, assonance, and alliteration (see, e.g., "He saw the tide line -- shell bits and turnip parings, paper, fish racks, shark cartilage, culch" or "Even the mudflat was matte"), Toby Maytree leaves his wife Lou. They had been very much in love and his departure is a shock that the characters spend the rest of the book absorbing. Lou copes by climbing a monument in town with broad views of "flat sky, flat sea, and flat land" of Cape Cod. High up in the salty air, surveying the scraped world below her, Lou begins to learn to let go.

"For one minute by her watch, she imagined liking Maytree impartially. For only one minute by her watch she saw him for himself. That day, having let go one degree of arc only, for one minute, she sighted relief. Here was something she could do. She could climb the monument every day and work on herself as a task."

Thirty pages later, her son Pete, a fisherman, has a similar desire to ascend out of emotional turmoil into cool recollection.

"Could he surmount his trash-ditch thoughts and work above them? Could he let them come and go without bias, minnows schooling about his feet? Simply slosh through them and let the waves wash over? He could build on the mainmast a crow's nest. With his life, with his mind, he would build him a crow's nest, rope by rope and plank by plank for as long as it took."

Lou's actual monument has become a monument of the mind -- a way of being apart, above, out of the wrack and wreckage of investment and disappointment. Lou, heaving herself up actual steps, realizes the distance she is covering and the immensity of her task. She is quitting Toby like a drug and can only stand to do so for a minute at a time. Pete, too, recognizes the paintstaking nature of the work of self-removal. Rope by rope. Plank by plank. For as long as it takes.

The Garden & The Window

L started teaching last week, which I am tremendously excited about. The first topic he tackled was close reading and he introduced it with a metaphor: imagine that the text you are reading is a garden you are looking at through a window. You can look through the window at the flowers and notice their colors, their crowns of petals, the sunlight tracing each blade of grass. Maybe there is a bench in the garden. Who is it for? When was it built? Or you can shift the angle of your gaze and focus on the window itself. Is the glass smudged? How wide are its panes? Can you see your own reflection in it?

Most people when they read look at the garden: the flowers are the characters whose lives we admire and watch grow. It is lovely to look at a garden; we may feel many things. Students and scholars of literature when they read must learn to look at the window: how does the depth and texture of the language through which we read shape our view of the world on the other side?

Learning to see the window takes time -- even learning to care about the window takes time. After all, the garden is so beautiful. And sometimes looking at the window seems silly. Isn't transparency in a window's very nature -- its sole defining feature? Do we do a window a disservice by refusing to look past it?

But over time, the glass' grain emerges. It becomes possible to see within it a bank, a thread where a core of liquid cooled, and the scarce scratches scored by beads of sand colliding. The garden may be pretty but the window is epic, ancient, the site of revolutionary encounters between irrepressible forces.

It is only after the window has occupied you for so long and with such intensity that you have ceased entirely even to wonder about the garden that you make a most surprising discovery: there is no garden there at all -- whether it has disappeared or whether it never existed in the first place is a question for experts beyond your level.

What L didn't tell his students is that if you look at the window long enough, one day it will be the only thing you can see.

After God, there is no more skilled practitioner of parataxis than Joan Didion. "Miami" opens by juxtaposing two short lists of the possessions with which recently deposed presidents have fled Cuba. Didion does not use parataxis merely for effect, though effective it is at evoking both dislocation and intimacy -- dislocation because the austere use of coordinating conjunctions tends to leave the reader adrift in a haze of objects and social conventions whose relationships to one another and to the author are neither accessible nor transparent, and intimacy because of the presumption that they are (both accessible and transparent; in other words, that Didion and the reader are on the same page).

So, for example: "The rain that day had been blowing the bits of colored glass and mirror strung from the tree in the Malaga courtyard and splashing from the eaves overhanging our table and we had been talking in a general way about action of the Left and action of the Right and Carlos Luis had said that he had come to wonder if silence was not the only moral political response." You can almost hear the chills running down Hemingway's spine.

No, parataxis is not just a syntactic conceit but the logic by which Didion's pieces unfold. She does not seek to set us adrift; we are adrift. She just wants to make sure we don't forget that the horizon won't get any closer, no matter how fast we paddle.

Central to her project are three recurring devices: one is the dis-editing or disaggregation of a popular narrative so as to reveal all the material left on the cutting room floor; another is the identification of the social cues and codes from which the kind of narratives she takes apart are assembled; and the third is the use of quotation marks around otherwise unremarkable bits of dialogue to distance the reader from the tropes of everyday life so she (the reader) can begin to look at them critically.

Here is an example of all three: "That the [Miami] Herald should have run, on the 1985 anniversary of the Bay of Pigs, a story about Canadian and Italian tourists vacationing on what had been the invasion beaches...was, in this view, not just a minor historical irony, not just an arguably insensitive attempt to find a news peg for a twenty-four-year-old annual story, but a calculated affront to the Cuban community, 'a slap,' I was repeatedly told, 'in the face.'"

Syntactically innovative and lexically precise, her sentences may also be the best crafted of any I have ever read. (Except for L's, he wanted me to add. He also points out that this excerpt is not paratactic, which is true. It was selected to do different work in this post.)

Adding to the distance and alienation and also the intimacy is the fact that Didion never quotes herself, only other people. When she figures in her own scenes, she is always listening or taking notes or watching. The only voices we hear are those from which we are being critically distanced, and the author herself seems to reach us across a span of silence. No one, the reader is tempted to believe, has heard her voice but me.

i have now read all the words in "infinite jest"

but the term "finished" in no way applies to my relationship with the book.