Last night, I found myself at a bar, arguing with a writer I’d just been introduced to. Given our personalities, we were bound to find something to disagree on, but the topic that we disagreed on first was the work of Ben Marcus, a Brown MFA, currently teaching at Columbia, who’s known (or, in most circles, avoided) for his experimental, aka ‘difficult,’ fiction. The real worth of writing, the writer argued, needs to be judged on its ability to communicate, and Ben Marcus, simply, is opaque.

I asked him if he didn’t think Marcus’s work communicated a feeling of unease or disorientation.

Yes, he said, but what’s the worth in that?

(I was feeling aggressive — and aggression, being rare for me, gives me the impression of adventure. So, I pressed on:) If you admit that Marcus does communicate something, I’ve got to wonder if you care more about what’s being communicated than the success of communication — which is a different argument than the one that you were just making.

Maybe, yes, he’s communicating something, the writer said. But what I meant was that he doesn’t engage with the world. That’s what good fiction does.

The world? I laughed. What’s the world?

Talk about relativist, he said. Talk about abstract. The world is … what it isn’t is someone like DeLillo or David Foster Wallace or Ben Marcus going on about the difference between brown and white cardboard for ten pages.

Brown and white cardboard are still part of the world. Everything is part of the world, I said. And when I hear people use that word, I wonder if they’re claiming what they think matters most in the world is the world.

(The argument continued, and I went home later than I meant to.)

————————————————————————————————————————-

I still don’t have bookshelves in my apartment. Right now, I’m sitting in my living room, looking at the twenty-three moving boxes that hold my books. In my world, there’s not much else besides cardboard.

Since I leave clothes on the floor, and rarely remember to wash dishes, and haven’t made a bed in years, my boyfriend’s made it clear he doesn’t want me unpacking 400-something books without a place to put them. But when he’s not looking, I slice the packing tape with a kitchen knife, hoping the box I’ve chosen randomly has the book I’m missing. Everyday, I think of a new book to miss. And, lately — since last week — I’ve been missing Derrida — the writer who, in college, more than any other writer, I counted as my own.

————————————————————————————-

The writer at the bar claimed I was being too abstract when I asked him what he meant when he said “the world.” But I think he’s got it backwards. Words and phrases like “communication” or “the world” are hopelessly abstract, and a question shouldn’t be called abstract for pointing that out and demanding definitions.

What Derrida’s texts encourage is a lack of complacency with abstractions, and the values hidden in them. Some may call poststructuralistm Anti-Humanist because it points out that words like “universal” and “human” are often political, cultural, and — to my mind — manipulative — undermining people’s right to disagreement by claiming a Truth that only the immoral or elitist among us could ever wish to reexamine.

Derrida’s texts may be difficult to follow — what can you say clearly when you’re interoggating the accepted clarity of abstract concepts? — but the questioning he inspires is also very simple. A playwright could turn him into a modern-day Socrates — disorienting his companions with simple questions that point out tautologies and find the fracture lines in arguments.

—————————————————

I was never studious enough to become an academic. And, due to vanity or its opposite, I prefer critiquing my own thoughts to critiquing others’ (even if, in the long run, others’ thoughts might sharpen self-critique). So, I’m sure that I had classmates who read more Derrida than I did, and understood him better, too. But, like children pick favorite numbers and favorite colors — as if numbers and colors could inspire a natural alliegance — I picked Derrida as “my” contemporary thinker. The choice was only partly intellectual; it was largely autobiographical.

Continue reading "Presence vs. Derrida"

I couldn’t fall asleep last night.
Until 5 am, I was awake with nausea — sickened by a cigarette, I think (even though the air outside felt cold and cleansing when I smoked it).
I tried to stay in bed, which is what my boyfriend recommends when I complain about insomnia. But the air inside still smelled of the pasta I burned over the weekend (instead of watching the pot, I was writing a post — cut short by the smoke alarm — about how I hate being so irresponsible).

Continue reading "(While You Were Sleeping)"

It’s too bad that, when it comes to writing fiction, I try to use words most people know. As Forthright’s Phronistery: Obscure Words and Vocabulary Resources proves, some of English’s most unusual words are not only helpful, but beautiful
…Maybe I should just become a poet.

Here, my favorite unusual words that begin with the letter “U”:

ucalegon:

neighbour whose house is on fire

ughten:

morning twilight

ullage:

quantity by which vessel is under full capacity

ullagone:

cry of lamentation; funeral lament

uloid:

like a scar

ulosis:

formation of a scar

ultracrepidate:

to criticize beyond sphere of one’s knowledge

umbel:

mass of flowers springing from a single center

umbiliciform:

shaped like a navel

unasinous:

being equally stupid

unbosom:

to pour out; to tell freely

underwit:

inferior wit; half-wit

ungual:

of or bearing a claw, hoof, or talon

unifilar:

having only one thread or wire

univocalic:

having only one vowel; written passage using only one vowel

unseel:

to unsew the eyes of

upspeak:

to begin to speak

uranophobia:

fear of heaven

usageaster:

self-appointed and conservative language usage expert

uvelloid:

resembling a small cluster of grapes

After the physical exertion of moving, my hands refuse to appeal the law of gravity. They can rest on keys like tired marionettes, and maybe play the board like boggle (sewer, serf, assert), but most posts today will have to be telepathic. (Post subjects might include: hating the bagpiper across the street from me; my boyfriend’s turtle and its vulgar voyeurism; how long before my unshowered hair solicits spare change on street corners.)

Vacat(ion)ing
My relationship to travel is a lot like a manic-depressive’s relationship to life. Sometimes, alone on flights between Iowa and NYC or NYC and LA, I feel shock at my self’s ability to transcend geography, and the shock turns into self-important productivity. I fill my carry-on journals with story ideas and drawings and elaborate lists of life ambitions; and I feel a (fleeting) affinity with the terms used when discussing travel: direction, destination, “taking off,” flight.

But lately, when traveling, I think of Brian Fawcett’s short story “Soul Walker,” which explains the dreariness of airports and the discontent of travelers in terms of the soul’s velocity: while our bodies can travel at the speed at flight, our souls, unprepared by evolution for technology, follow by foot. And so, airports are the site of spiritual zombies, travelers whose souls haven’t yet caught up with them.

By that theory, my soul would have had to walk from Iowa to NYC in three days, and swim from NYC to Italy and back again within seventeen. By foot, it would probably now be approaching Ohio. And I imagine that, like a slow computer, it mindlessly carries out each command (assigned by impatient mouse-clicking) in order, passing me by in NYC on its way to Italy.

Home, Sweet Modem
“Soul Walker” argues that souls are inimical to technology, but if I felt my soul was left behind in Italy, it was, in part, because my laptop was left behind in New York City. The feelings that accompanied journal-writing before my first computer — privacy, relief, the heat of language, the calm of organized ideas — cohered and intensified once I had the ability to not only house my thoughts, but house my journals; a computer centralized my writing and a young feeling of selfhood.

Continue reading "homepages: travel journal, 8.22.04"

Sorry about the sporadic posting—I thought Nathalie was coming back to town earlier than she was, and I figured people would rather hear from the lady of the house. But I think I screwed up the dates. Anyway.

The latest entry on Impeccable Jones, my friend Pete’s blog, features some great links for Scrabble buffs like myself. For background: here in IC there’s not often a whole lot to do, so we spend a lot of time at bars. But I am a) not a big drinker, and b) have the attention span of a gnat, so I’ve developed some new habits and refreshed some old ones: namely, pool, poker, and Scrabble.

I’ve loved Scrabble ever since my dad and grandfather refused to let me play in their intensely competitive games. Poker, on the other hand, is a new thing for me. Fortuitously enough, the past year or so has brought two very fine books on both topics: Word Freak by Stephan Fatsis, and Positively Fifth Street by James McManus, and I lifted my semi-ban on non-fiction to read them within a week of each other.

The books are surprisingly similar. Both involve a reporter assigned to a story on a topic in which he has a certain but limited personal interest (although in McManus’s case, I suspect he downplayed his skills somewhat), with the reporter becoming obsessed with the world he’s entered and wanting to become a part of it. Fatsis joined a Scrabble league and spent a great deal of time trying to improve his national ranking; McManus used the money Harper’s paid him for the story to enter satellite tournaments to eventually land in the World Series of Poker.

Continue reading "some thoughts on obsessive hobbies [guest poster]"

I have a profound obsession with names. Although I don’t intend to become pregnant anytime this decade, I am constantly collecting potential names for my theoretical progeny, and I’m crestfallen whenever one of them becomes fashionable. I watch the trends studiously, and always try to guess people’s names based on appearance. My preferred method of avoiding writing involves poring over baby name books and the lists of most popular names from the last century, ostensibly to find the perfect names for my characters. The process of naming my characters, in fact, affords me vastly more pleasure than the actual writing. I can’t explain this obsession, and I expect it’s probably a kind of sickness, but there it is.

Maud directs our attention to McSweeney’s, where we can find a pair of humorous name-related pieces by Stephany Aulenback. Re: “Words That Would Make Nice Names for Babies, if it Weren’t for Their Unsuitable Meanings,” I know someone who thinks Diarrhea is a beautiful name for a girl.

So, tomorrow I leave for Italy, and I’ll be leaving this blog in the writerly, but capable, hands of two fellow graduates from my MFA program.

Originally, I planned to post from Italy as well. But a tripping incident earlier today smashed my laptop, and I’ve been up all night alternating between the roles of doctor and wife — trying to shock the operating system back to life with reinstalls, disk repairs, and UNIX commands — or nervously smoking outside, knowing that new information won’t show up on the screen for some time.

Tomorrow’s my last day in Iowa and, today, Sam and I are loading up a truck, snorting lines of No-Doz, and throwing a big party for all the other chumps departing for the coasts.

So: I probably won’t be posting for some days. It would be awesome if our rental truck had a modem, but it doesn’t.

In the meantime, please check out my blogroll, to which I’ve been adding lots of sites.

I’ll be on the East Coast, starting tomorrow, for a week. Instead of writing a mass email, trying to guess who’ll be nearby, I thought I’d post news of my trip here, and hope that people who want to see me write or call.
(It’s the more selfish way of doing things, I know. But this way, I don’t have to create twenty new hotmail accounts to assure the real recipients I have other friends, too.)

I’ve been on the sleep schedule from hell, so start expecting my posts later — much later — in the day. Thanks.

3:14 am; I’m on an inflatable mattress that responds to my body with the enthusiastic antagonism of a moon jump.

And I’m sipping Diet Coke with lime, which I would never buy. Fake sugar tastes like tin. I want a cigarette, but

Mainly, this, mainly now: I want to apologize, to my shackload of readers, for my absence. I’m away from home, but I’ve located an internet connection. And so: normal posts soon, with no more mention of MFAs, no insomni-manic ramblings, and no no nooo apologies. Sleeping as I type,

love,
N.

1. I’ve never dated someone who’s known how to ____________ .
2. Though I’m supposed to, I rarely ___________ and never ___________.
3. I lied when I told my parents I ____________________ .
4. I’m usually _______________ than my friends.
5. I’m perversely attracted to people who _____________ .
6. I try not to say anything about it, but I just don’t think ___________ is/are right.
7. I try not to tell people I’ve never __________________ .
8. I plan to ___________ before my __________ next see/sees me.
9. What the fuck ever happened to ____________ ?

Complete the sentences in the comments. Preserve anonymity if it helps honesty.

As far as I know, I’m only allergic to two things: cat dander, and Los Angeles. In Iowa City, I can smoke 3 packs of Reds a day; take speed instead of meals; sleep under a compacted sheet of dust-slash-dust-mites; brew new organisms in my sink’s unwashed pots and pans; and, still, never have to buy Claritin or Puffs.

But, coming home to Los Angeles, I surround my bed with snowcaps of used kleenex by Day 1.02. In my mother’s house, I eat better, smoke less, and remember what vacuumed carpets look like. But I spend most of my time drowsy and in bed, clutching dampened tissue like a lover’s hand.

I’m a jack-ass jackass for not posting more.

I’m finally feeling brave enough to link to my newest blog, simply called Another. Initially, it was meant to be a diary, a dumping grounds for posts that felt too personal and self-indulgent to inflict on this Cup’s readership. But the new blog changed genres and became something more specific when I realized that the only posts I’m hesitant to put here are the ones dealing with depression; and so, Another became a “literary” mental health blog, focusing on the relationship between writing and depression, but also linking to abstracts of clinical studies, essays about therapy, and reviews of recent and relevent books.

Some posts that may (or may not) appeal to this Cup’s readers include

• a long essay about the rhetoric we use when linking creativity and mental illness. The essay is partly a response to the latest spate of articles on James Kaufman’s silly paper, “The Cost of the Muse: Poets Die Young.”
  
• an account of my changing relationship to writing, titled I Married Language (And Now She Doesn’t Want to Fuck Me).
  
• an excerpt from Chase Twichell’s essay, “Toys in the Attic: An Ars Poetica Under the Influence,” in which Twichell discusses the subtle effects that depression and anti-depressants can have on the writing process.
  
• a series of reflections on memory, memoir, and emotion. (“When I write about the past, I don’t preserve it; I lose it; I experience autobiography as sacrifice.”)

Margo Jefferson writes on quote collectors and collections for the New York Times:

Unreliable or omniscient, I would be the narrator in control.

So I kept notebooks of quotations. Lots of people do. Reading them over lets you scan your own temperament. The words of writers you admire provide a trustworthy language for your desires and for how you’ll feel when life ambushes them. They relieve you from being brave enough to say what feels unsayable. Notebooks like this are an informal history of your reading. If you forage through books instead of reading one at a time, the order of entries can look random. Rereading reveals — or imposes — a structure, a map of associations.

From the age of fourteen to seventeen, I was an avid quote collector. So, after reading Jefferson’s article, I entered, folder by folder, the bowels of my hard drive, launched OS 9, and spent some time with a rarely visited, but very familiar, quote collection. Here, the quotes that I loved in my most formative years (and still love in what I hope to God are my least formative years):

Beauty

People say sometimes that Beauty is only superficial. That may be so. But at least it is not so superficial as Thought is. To me, Beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.
—Oscar Wilde, Portrait of Dorian Gray

California

Nothing is wrong with California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn’t cure.
— Ross MacDonald

(Note to readers: my high school was near the California shore.)

Change

I cannot escape the objection that there is no state of mind, however simple, that does not change every moment.
— Henri Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics

Continue reading ""It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations." — Churchill"

I slept all day and, somewhere in those 14 hours, my cell phone registered a “missed call” from my apartment’s land line. Should I be worried?

Because this image makes it feel like my rib cage is clawing at my heart.

I left New York at 6 am, having only slept an hour — the night before that, three. And as the plane crossed half the country, sinking and rising in slow cycles, I fell into dreams, and was lifted from them by new altitude. In my dreams, I woke up to the plane setting down in Iowa, but I couldn’t move, so limp from fatigue. And then I’d rise from the dream as the plane ascended, and descend into dreams of waking as it fell.
When we finally landed, stairs were wheeled up to the plane. I walked down them (—like a president greeting a crowd, except I swayed with nine days’ worth of clothes and books in carry-ons—) and I thought I’d trip. And I struggled hard to keep my balance against the morning light (— the anticipation of a crowd, I thought, not much different than my count-down, taken step by step, to level ground).
I could see, from the plane’s window and then again, outside the airport, that Iowa had finally won its spring. But it wasn’t a pleasant spring. The cornfields were dry and, since the land was flat, they looked like sand, and desert. I took an airport shuttle home, hoping, for my body’s sake, that the monotony of fields was a fair compromise between the the nill of sleep and my short-term need to stay awake.
And now I’m home. And, as sad as this sounds, home partly means my own computer — my email, weblog, cable modem — which domesticate my apartment like pets do, waiting to be attended to when I come in from trips.

I’ve been feeling guilty about not writing more, or better, posts while in NY. It’s not that I’m worried about my readers (-you-), but that I hate thoughts and ideas going to waste — not being properly stored (in my weblog, my internet refrigerator). There’s lots of things I did in NY that I want to post about — and god no, not as journals. I might nap now, but I want to put up my thoughts on the Whitney Biennial, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and some books I’m reading. And I’ve bookmarked dozens of sites that I should sort through, discarding the links that other sites have used, and hoping some remain for blogging. So, this post means to say I’m back, and my weblog will, again, have links and commentary, and I hope you’ll relapse into the habit of reading it.

(Ok: now to my bed, for napping.)

No blogging for now.

I’ll be in NYC March 11 - 20. Despite a long roster of social phobias, I’d love to finally meet some fellow bloggers.

Maud, covering a profile of Jeanette Winterson, writes, “Naturally I honed in on the most vital information in the interview—namely, that Winterson’s exactly my height”:

“I’m five foot tall, how scary can I be?” she asks. “Sometimes you do wonder that people have this image of you as somebody who’s going to arrive on a 1300cc Harley.”

Stranger yet, for me, is that Winterson and Maud are exactly my height.
And yes, this is my admission that I’ve been lying for the past twelve years. I’m not 5’1”. Still, don’t think this means I’ll take off my platform shoes in public.

My moods, their ups and downs, become obvious when I look at my changing relationship to books. At my best, I’m reading them. At my worst, I’m avoiding them. Usually, depressed but optimistic, I’m buying them; I can easily mistake buying them for possessing them, assign their physical presence intellectual effects. It’s a parody of consumerism, or maybe consumerism perfected: I’ve turned the self-as-art of dandyism into a self-as-acquisitions. And, of course, this is the fake change that depressives love best.

Someone, in the comments on a recent post, encouraged me to start reviewing the books I read. I’d love to, except that, even when I read the books I buy, I rarely finish them. Here’s a list of the books discarded around my apartment. I won’t even bother with the book shelves.

Partly read, with length of time since last read
office floor: Milan Kundera’s Ignorance (4 months), Rick Moody’s The Black Veil (3 months), (ed.) Leila Sebbar’s An Algerian Childhood (1 year), Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (repeated efforts to read first chapter and convince myself I like it every 6 months), Gary Lutz’ Stories in the Worst Way (7 months), Alice Flaherty’s The Midnight Disease (1 month)
living room floor: George Vaillant’s The Wisdom of the Ego (3 weeks), Michel de Montaigne’s The Complete Essays (1 month)
bedroom floor: Jean Rhys’ Good Morning, Midnight (3 weeks), Kate Moses’ Wintering (1 year), Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1 year), Jorge Borges’ Other Inquisitions (1 year), Richard Schechner’s Performance Studies (1 month), Richard Klein’s Cigarettes are Sublime (2 weeks)

Unread, and when bought
office floor: Armand Marie Leroi’s Mutants (4 months ago), Sudden Fiction: American Short Stories (on sale for $2 — last week), Daniel Amen’s Healing ADD (last week), Edward Hallowell and John Ratey’s Driven to Distraction (last week), Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine (last week)
desk: P. Mansell Jones’ French Introspectives: From Montaigne to André Gide (4 months ago)
living room floor: latest issue of Fence (2 weeks ago), Jennifer Vanderbes’ Easter Island (1 month ago), Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex (5 months ago), J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello (5 months ago)
bedroom floor: Fault Lines: Stories of Divorce (2 weeks ago), Paul Auster’s Oracle Night (1 month ago), Slavoj Zizek’s Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (4 months ago)

currently reading
Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (re-reading), John Haskell’s I am not Jackson Pollock., Deborah Levy’s Pillow Talk in Europe

I’m sorry I haven’t been posting much lately. I’m trying out a new medication, and the side effects have been grueling. On the up side, I learned a new word today: asthenia, an abnormal loss of strength.
More later.

Some bloggers asked why I didn’t include a photo of myself in my round-up. So, despite my better instincts, I’ll point out that in this blog’s first year, I posted many. And, the year after, I showed off a new monocle with this, a picture that’s so easy to make fun you shouldn’t even try. (Just Don’t. Please.)

From a Nerve personal essay about being a baaaad girlfriend:

He thumbs through the New Yorker to some article about SUVs that he was telling me about earlier. He is the youngest person ever to have a subscription to the New Yorker. It’s not normal.

Where’s Nerve finding these personal essayists? Dude, if people are talking to me I won’t even acknowledge them if they don’t have a NYer subscription. So back to my first question: Appalachia? New Jersey?

And, from The Observer’s engagement column:

But when he noticed the profile of the nubile, chestnut-haired Ms. Birns, his interest was piqued, and he composed a mash note about his love for music, etc. “He didn’t have any typos in his e-mail, so I figured he must have reread it and therefore really was interested,” Ms. Birns said. Ah, millennial romance!

…The couple reached a major milestone when she got stuck at his apartment in Murray Hill during a February blizzard, sans makeup or deodorant. “I had nothing that could make a girl feel comfortable, and I realized with him, it didn’t matter,” she said. She moved in for good shortly thereafter.…

…He proposed by a hot tub when they were vacationing in Puerto Rico, handing over a filigreed white-gold ring containing three square diamonds.

Amanda Birns, by the way, is 23. Mark Roth is 25. So, some comments. 1. People my age vacation? Seriously? 2. I often don’t go out of my apartment for days at a time. My boyfriend would be lucky to expect a showered girlfriend during this time, let alone a made-up girlfriend with armpits fragrancing the room with baby powder. That shit’s reserved for, like, date no. one. 3. I require a boyfriend who will make fun of people who write typos (unconscious stupidity! ha ha ha!), not one who simply doesn’t make them. Fuckheads. Puerto Rico.

Some bloggers can make their shitty lives sound funny — intellectually hygienic, semantically consumable. But some lives have a stench that words can’t hide; or, while some bloggers have words like quilted, ripply two-ply, others only have access to sad, ass-rashing, trice-recycled half-ply, which won’t do the mess no good.

For example, I started this list as a set of groundrules and warnings for people trying to get in touch with me. At first, I thought it could be witty. But, the more I wrote, the more it seemed just sad.

Groundrules and Warnings for People Trying to Get in Touch with Me

Continue reading "some warnings and groundrules"

DISCUSSED: comfort reading, middle school narcissism, hypochondria, hypergraphia in The Midnight Disease, ex-boyfriends’ mental issues, the mind/body divide

Earlier this week, some of my favorite bloggers posted lists of their top “comfort reads.” Given the rate at which I buy books, three times the rate at which I read them, I rarely allow myself to revisit old books; so, I don’t have “comfort books” so much as I have a “comfort genre.”
That genre: psychological, psychiatric, or neurological studies of writers and the writing process. I first started reading these books when I was thirteen, and I can track changes in my personality by my choices within the genre.

Continue reading "on the mind: the comforts of hypochondria"

I’ve always been suspicious of the term “writer’s block.” It’s used so casually in articles and conversations, as if it were an objective condition, a word with steady weight and obvious meaning. But does it mean procrastination, a habit as unwilled and paralyzing as depression? Or, a mind-blankness, bleakness, a dearth of ideas and stories? Or, as is often the case for me, an inability, that can last hours, days, weeks, to piece words into sense-making sentences and paragraphs?
Tomorrow, I have a short film review due. Yesterday, I wrote up an outline that made perfect sense, and the day before yesterday I defended my view of the film to a friend. But today I’ve forgotten first grade grammar and most of my vocabulary and whatever’s left of my style. If you think I’m kidding, I’m really not. Here’s one of the discarded first paragraphs I wrote earlier today; it could be the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest’s first nonfiction winner:

Critics often accuse postmodern thought of a repetitive and hyperactive un-productivity, too critical to be constructive, and too detached, or delusional, to be useful—like a OCD housewife vacuuming a carpet she’s convinced is a trompe l’oeil painted in dust over a hardwood floor. To a postmodernist, depth is an illusion that always gives way to surface.

A friend of Spalding Gray recently recounted to me Gray’s battle with depression, which culminated in electroshock therapy. (Here’s a quick online summary of Gray’s battle.) The other people with me at the time were surprised to learn electroshock, or electroconvulsive, therapy still exists; maybe they’d recently read The Bell Jar (“Then something bent down and took hold of me and shook me like the end of the world. Whee-ee-ee-ee-ee, it shrilled, through an air crackling with blue light, and with each flash a great jolt drubbed me till I thought my bones would break and the sap fly out of me like a split plant.”), or they associated ECT with lobotomies: relics of a deluded and regrettably experimental era. ECT, though, is still used, often as a last resort for depression (esp. the catatonic variety) or prolonged episodes of mania.

Continue reading "shrink rap sheet"

Terry Teachout links to Joseph Epstein’s essay “Funny, But I Do Look Jewish.”

FUNNY, BUT I DO LOOK JEWISH, at least to myself, and more and more so as the years go by. I’m fairly sure I didn’t always look Jewish, not when I was a boy, or possibly even when a young man, though I have always carried around my undeniably Jewish name, which was certainly clue enough. But today, gazing at my face in the mirror, I say to myself, yes, no question about it, this is a very Jewish-looking gent.
The article “Types, Anthropological” in the old “Jewish Encyclopedia” (1901-1906), written at a time when the Jews were anthropologically still considered a race, notes that “persons who do not have the Jewish expression in their youth acquire it more and more as they grow from middle to old age.”

I have a strange — and that’s to say, probably typical — relationship to my Jewishness. Among other Jews, I’m quick to proclaim myself one; among non-Jews, I never mention it. But my appearance’s ability to imply my heritage betrays both impulses. In Iowa, people look at my dark wavy hair and say, “You could be Jewish!,” meaning, “If there were Jews in this city, you would be one of them.” In cities or schools full of Jews — Beverly Hills, Brown University, NYC — people say “But you don’t look…” and point to my nose, straight with a ski-slope tip. (Also, my last name is Sephardic; no trace of the Ashkenazi -bloom or -man or -stein.)
The result is that I feel, no matter where I go, that I look Other. And am Other. I’m not quite a Jew: I never had a bat mitzvah or ate Jewish food at home; my mother’s ancestors were soldiers in the Civil War, not recent Eastern European immigrants; and my family, inflated with stepparents and adoptions, includes so many religions that the only holiday it makes sense to celebrate is a commercialized Christmas. But I’m also very much a Jew, at least in terms of its stereotypes: I’m bookish, sickly, and very paranoid about future waves of anti-semitism. But, most importantly, I have the correct attitude towards categories: an attitude of tension, ambiguity, Otherness. For, what does it mean to be Jewish when Jewishness is not an ethnicity? When, given the growing amount of non-practicing Jews, it isn’t always a religion? And when, among many, it is absolutely not a heritage? Jewishness becomes this: to NOT be what others are, to categorize oneself in terms of absence rather than presence, alienation rather than inclusion.
Reading Epstein’s essay, I was waiting for him to come to the same conclusion and finally, at its end, he does:

Jews come in all shapes and sizes, tastes and temperaments. They can be garish and vulgar, pushy and wild, sensitive and cerebral, artistic and conservative, but they are rarely dull, except of course when trying to pass themselves off as something other than Jewish. Sometimes I think I can have had no better luck than to have been born Jewish, even though I am in my religious belief a pious agnostic and far from a sedulous practitioner of the Jewish religion. At other, rarer times, the complication of being Jewish seems heavy, or “fraught,” as is nowadays said, and what it is fraught with, I believe, is the feeling of never quite feeling altogether at home anywhere.
“What are you doing here?” is a question that plays somewhere in the back of every Jewish person in whatever country he or she takes up residence. (“A Jew,” André Aciman remarks “is always someone about whom one asked: Why on earth isn’t he where he belongs?”)

In response to the posts at Old Hag, some things that make me cry:

-Disney’s animated films. No other genre features so many killed-off parents. Claiming to be happy family fare, Disney singlehandedly introduces children to the concepts of mourning and loss. Best example, of course: the death of Bambi’s mother. My young brain quickly learned a Pavlovian response to these films, and even at 17, watching the Michael Bolton-soundtracked Hercules, I cried and cried, and not because the music was so bad.
-The end of the movie adaptation of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. It was, by most standards, an awful film, but I cried so hard that I had to write a long essay for myself explaining the film’s emotional effect. I was also very high. (If someone offers me money, I’ll find and post the essay.)
-The Magnetic Fields’ “Papa Was A Rodeo.” Slaughters my heart.
-Skipping two days of my antidepressants.
-Thinking back to my first cat, Lucky. Lucky died of cancer but I didn’t know that until years later. When my mother picked me up from school and told me Lucky had died, she said the doctors said Lucky died of “a broken heart.”

Sometime soon, I’l put up Halloween pics.

I finally updated to OS X, and I feel like I’ve moved into a new apartment: I’ve set up my bed, but I haven’t found my sheets, and I’m sleeping on the mattress with a pillow and a blanket comprised of three sweaters. I wander from room to room and sometimes sit down on unpacked boxes and wonder, where am I?

I think I may be smoking too much. And the moment I write this, I think of how I want a cigarette, and now one’s in my mouth. I’ve been chain-smoking for four days, reaching for one whenever I want to mimic interaction with my environment. I can’t clean the dirty dishes, brush off the ash that’s fallen on my bed, find my trash bags to clean my living room floor. But I can slowly fill my apartment with smoke filtered in my lungs.
My remedies to problems have always been the problems I hope to remedy. (Is that the structure of addiction?)

Continue reading "late october is always hard for me"

1. From a Publishers Lunch email: “Authors Guild dues are $90 for the first year and follow a sliding scale after that based on your writing income (most members continue to pay $90 per year).” Oooh. Sad.

2. I signed up withmyspace.com to see how it compares to Friendster. Seems like it has more features, but is also more cheesy. Profiles require taglines; I hate taglines.

3. I’d sort of like to write an interview or article on “Vera Little” (pseudonym). From one of her many sites: “I am a multimedia designer, animator, and a doll-maker. I am a finger and leg amputee. I have an affinity for oddities and a tendency to accumulate things. I live with Max in an old factory in Boston.” Some “Vera Little” places to go to: News, Leg Journal (very interesting), Animation, Links, Live Journal.

Everyday, I eat my first meal — I’m hesitant to call it breakfast, because I sometimes get out of bed at 3 — at a local diner, where I know the menu by heart and have decided on my meal before I get there. I left the house at around 9 today, and, while walking, settled on pancakes with strawberries (microwaved, but still frozen in the centers) and sausage patties. But Wesley Clark decided to use my diner for a morning meet-and-greet before his speech later today at the University, and the crowd spilled out onto the street: posters, film crews, no strawberries for Nathalie.
So, for breakfast, I had to go to my diner’s neighboring diner, which is run by an old fat blond and a hunchback. A couple small dead flies are stuck to the tape on the window’s display menu. The blond wears, depending on the day, a pink or purple short-jumpsuit, which exposes bulging varicose veins and induces a deep wedgie. The glasses always have orange food-like flakes stuck to them and the entire place smells of rotten meat. I kept looking at the hunchback, thinking, deformity kills appetite. Don’t they know that?

-onion rings
-clean towels
-Sam
-altoids tangerine sours
-acceptance letters
-fresh lobster and butter
-magazine subscriptions
-Hannah and Her Sisters
-8 1/2
-good-looking dogs
-writers’ autobiographies
-writers’ interviews
-not running out of kleenex
-club soda
-sex daydreams
-arm warmers
-fried bananas
-cigars
-girls in drag
-boys in ties
-wireless networks
-personal libraries
-pens that aren’t running out of ink
-soft hair
-believing I can write a novel
-cigarettes accompanied by music
-kisses that take me by surprise
-Edmund White, sometimes
-when I smile and can’t help it
-a day writing a paragraph
-finally wanting to wake up in the morning
-walks
-a sense of self on airplanes, in airports
-Reel Around the Fountain
-newly discovered family albums
-Japanese noodles
-school supply shopping in elementary and middle school
-my mother playing guitar
-balconies
-sleeping when sick
-music when sick
-pajamas
-long letters
-alcohol, sometimes
-middle school karaoke
-nighttime car rides followed by sex
-beaches at night
-Sam
-my two ugly dogs
-conversations with, among others, SS, TM, JG, GL, ES, CD
-my mother’s fully stocked fridge
-fiction that makes me jog around the kitchen island with excitement
-Sam
-graphic design
-best friends who unexpectedly wink at me
-wearing ex-boyfriends’ socks, usually nicer than my own
-elaborate lists, esp. of ambitions
-bookstores
-new computers
-a boyfriend tying my tie
-my scanner
-having EU citizenship
-iTunes playlists
-hotel brunch
-people that aren’t horrible at neighboring tables in restaurants
-proper ashtrays (not bottles, boxes, sinks)
-parks
-art books
-Sam’s nose
-film trailers
-diners
-parmesan cheese
-11:11
-costume jewelry

Screw the sophistication of monocles and the glamour of tophats. This should be my new Fall look.

Yesterday morning, after another night of insomnia, I tried to decide what it meant that for each 72 hour period, I’d slept five hours. Perhaps I was witnessing the beginnings of FFI.

ABSTRACT - D T Max reports on case of Italian family afflicted with fatal familial insomnia, genetic disease that was not formally identified until 1986; FFI, as disease is known, is astonishingly rare; sometime in their 50’s, half the members of aristocratic Giacomo family of Venice die of insomnia; in their search to understand their obscure gothic affliction, they inadvertently helped explain cause of mad cow disease; Elisabetta Roiter loes a family member to FFI about every three years; photos of Roiter, with her husband, and Prof Elio Lugaresi, who saw a connection between fatal insomnia and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (L) (Special issue of Magazine, The Cure Hunters)

Given that my life has always felt like an obscure gothic affliction, FFI seems highly plausible, though I’m not Italian.
Also likely: I’m manic-depressive and I’m scared of sleep. Can people be scared of sleep like they’re scared of big mangy dogs or rollercoasters? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. It’s called hypnophobia or somniphobia.
Some fears that I, however, don’t have are:
Anatidaephobia - Fear that somewhere, somehow, a duck is watching you
Arachibutyrophobia - Fear of getting peanut butter stuck to the roof of your mouth
Automatonophobia - Fear of ventriloquist’s dummies, animatronic creatures, wax statues - anything that falsly represents a sentient being
Bromidrosiphobia - Fear of body smells (also known as Osphresiophobia)
Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia - Fear of long words
Ithyphallophobia - Fear of seeing, thinking about or having an erect penis
antophobia - Fear of everything
Linonaphobia - Fear of string
Nephophobia - Fear of clouds
Phronemophobia - Fear of thinking
Selenophobia - Fear of the moon
Verbaphobia - Fear of words

Fears I might have:
Phobophobia - Fear of fear
Syngenesophobia - Fear of relatives
Theatrophobia - Fear of theaters

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

I’ve been looking for a tophat (like the one in my “about me” drawing) to add to my pretentious collection of monocles and pocket watches. I was envisioning a black stovepipe hat, but at a hat shop, I fell for a casual brown “smashed felt” top hat; here’s some pictures of my new and happy purchase.

I went to bed at 8 am, and flopped back and forth, awake — until 10 am, when each flop landed me in a new dream. In one dream, I dreamt of Shannon Williams, the Berkeley teacher arrested for prostitution. “I feel like a gay teacher must have felt 20 years ago after being outed,” Williams said in a news article I read sometime around 6 am. “I feel that prostitution laws are dinosaurs. That they’re similar to sodomy laws, and they will eventually be repealed.” In my dream, Williams pleaded her case to the public by setting up a personal installation and scrapbook in an empty dorm room. I visited the room, and flipped through her personal drawings of the prostitution act she was arrested for. But it quickly became clear from the drawings that she didn’t have sex with a man, but with a goat; in a childish hand, she had drawn elaborate and shameless pictures of the positions they took throughout the night. I was horrified that the pursuit of pleasure could have no boundaries, that hooves could be as serviceable as men, and I wanted to leave the room immediately. But then, I looked around and realized I had moved into the room; it was filled with my art supplies and clothing. I tried to grab as many items as I could, thinking I could move out in four or five trips; but laziness kicked in, and it felt easier to wake up than move out. My subsconscious said, it’s never good to leave so many personal belongings in a bad dream; you’ll feel better if you go back and remove them. But I didn’t want to see the goat drawings again (and by the way, how could a goat pay for sex?), so I said, screw it and got out of bed.

I rarely post journals, in part because I assume people come here for the links, and I don’t want finding those links to be like wading through a private sewer in a PVC suit and galoshes.
But, today’s the first day of the new schoolyear, always a day of news. So here’s some life updates, with many links thrown in the sewage:

-I’ve already skipped around my apartment twice. I got into Edward Carey’s fiction workshop. Link goes to Edward Carey’s thoughts on being both an artist and a writer. Here’s another link, an interview, in which the interviewer asks, “Is there something about downtrodden, socially rejected, and supremely bizarre people that invites your observation and veneration?” I wanted to get into Carey’s workshop because his answer, of course, is yes. Or, to quote in full:

Yes, they stand apart from the world and look at it in an entirely different way; sometimes they complicate life, and sometimes they simplify it. They just have a very different way of doing things, and the more different they do something the more they make you think about the ordinary way of doing it—and to consider it in a fresh light. I can remember reading a truly wonderful essay by Diane Arbus, in which she discusses those people that stand apart from everyone else, and being painfully moved by it. I haven’t forgotten it, or her astonishing photographs.

Here, by the way, is an overview of photographer Diane Arbus’s life. Here’s a gallery, and here’s another. And a quote by Diane Arbus on her photographs of freaks: “Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks are born with their trauma. They’ve already passed it. They’re Aristocrats.”

-As my students know, I’m not a very responsible teacher; I take too long getting back students’ assignments. My MFA program, with a logic so perverse it could only come from writers, recently rewarded this irresponsibility by putting me on scholarship; I no longer have to teach for money, and if I’m not teaching I can’t screw up as a teacher.

-Some of the authors giving readings this semester: Dave Eggers, Annie Proulx, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Letham, and, oh joy, yes, yes, Lorrie Moore. The oh joy, yes, yes, means I’m excited.

My days without internet access have made me productive. I’ve been writing for about five hours a day, and reading a book a day, except for yesterday and today, when I wrote for more than five hours (yesterday) or finally got a cable modem (today).

Recently finished books:

	Observatory Mansions, Edward Carey A perfect example of self-contained logic. It’s unfortunate, though, that the narrator of my novel also wears cotton gloves; if Carey’s my workshop teacher this upcoming semester, I’ll be embarrassed to show him my summer’s work.
	Rapture, Susan Minot The back-story alternates between two points of view, both jumping back and forth in time. The result, meant to illustrate emotional fickleness, instead feels unfocused and, in its appraisal of romantic relations, pessimistic for literary effect. Much better is Minot’s similarly themed Evening or her debut story collection, Lust & Other Stories.
	Who Will Run The Frog Hospital?, Lorrie Moore Lorrie Moore’s first novel makes her short stories seem, in comparison, miracles. Here we have two young female friends, playing out archetypal roles with little flair. The narrator: underdeveloped, smart, leaves her hometown for cosmopolitan pursuits, etc.. Her friend, the focus of her narrative and binary counterpart: well-developed, pretty, with a bad-boy boyfriend. She never leaves the hometown. Blah blah blah.
	The Dictionary of Failed Relationships, ed. Meredith Broussard Stories by youngish women writers. Among the standouts: Heidi Julavitz (editor of The Believer), Susan Minot, Shelley Jackson, Erika Krouse, and Amy Sohn. Some of the other authors’ stories, though, probably count as chick-lit.
	April Witch, Majgull Axelsson Barfo. The story of four women, three of them foster sisters. The sisters are plotted onto one simplistic axis (promiscuous and unconventional <---->conventional and prudish) and, even after 400 pages, that’s what counts as characterization. At the airport, my luggage was five lbs overweight, so I threw the book out.
	The Art Lover, Carole Maso I am an endless admirer of Maso’s formal techniques. But her characters and her nonfiction self are always elitist artists/geniuses who feel no irony in self-romanticization. Art is reified, and since Maso makes it obvious that she is an artist, reading her is sometimes like watching self-applied cunnilingus. (Maso was one of my thesis readers at Brown, and was always encouraging, though in a way that seemed to be shirking the responsibility of close reading and critique.)

Much liked, but not yet finished:

Notable American Women, Ben Marcus “Calling a novel ‘The Corrections as imagined by Samuel Beckett’ may seem glib, but glibness should be regarded as a tribute to the disarmingly brilliant Notable American Women. A bizarre work of experimental fiction by first-time novelist Ben Marcus, Women tells the somewhat straightforward story of a young boy (named ‘Ben Marcus’) whose parents subscribe to a child-rearing technique governed by various forms of ‘behavior water’ and peculiar language experiments.” —Onion AV Club

The Melancholy of Anatomy, Shelley Jackson “In these 13 well-wrought, mind-bending stories, grouped by the four medieval physiological humors, people interact with bodily parts, products, and processes, often at their peril. “—Booklist

Just beginning:

I just realized this list is very Brown-centric (I did my BA there). Matt Derby and Ben Marcus are Brown MFA grads and recent teachers there. Shelley Jackson, too, has a Brown MFA. Susan Minot did her undergrad at Brown, and Carole Maso is a current Brown professor.

I’m at the one public internet kiosk in Iowa City, which is filthier than flies on shit. I won’t have internet for another ten days, so updates will depend on my immune system’s reaction to this keyboard.
In the meantime, I suggest picking up and reading the July issue of The Believer. It’s what’s been keeping me company in my new, strange, empty apartment.

July 24 - July 29: flying back to Iowa to pack and move out of my apartment.
July 29 - Aug. 5: returning to NY.
Aug.5: returning to Iowa, and moving in to my new place.

Updates will be spotty. But, if you want to get in touch, I’ll still have email. I bought a new cell phone, too, but I don’t have anyone’s numbers; I lost my old phone a while ago, and all my friends’ numbers were on it. If you’re reading this, and you’re a friend, and we haven’t been in touch in the last few days, please email me your number. Thanks, thanks.

My parents bred me from birth to consider myself sophisticated — to hand-paint with complementary colors, read the Iliad straight out of preschool, and know the ingredients in a dish by taste. But the truth has always been, my taste in food is suspect: I don’t like olives, wine, dark chocolate, (bad, or good) coffee and most salads. Cause for familial shame—-until last night, when I learned that my dislikes match up exactly with those of a supertaster, a person born with more taste buds than most. “Those with more taste buds are more likely to become professional chefs or wine tasters. [And] now there is a taste bud test people can do at home…”

On a Mac running IE 5.2, it takes Hotmail a minute to delete each message. I don’t know if it’s MSN’s ploy to get me to switch over to Windows, or spam-sponsored encouragement to read all my messages. Lately, I’ve been biding the time it takes to delete them with a small guessing game: based on the subject line, what the hell’s the product?

Here, you try:

1. How is it applied?
2. Do you need help? Guaranteed!
3. Tickets arrived
4. Stop this today

Answers:

Continue reading "spam quiz"

My mom’s in town for her birthday, so I won’t be posting [for the rest of] today and tomorrow. In the meantime, a question and a link.
The question: I need a new cell phone. Recommendations? Advice? I’m on a Sprint family plan (and please don’t recommend I change plans; I like having my mom pay my bill…happy birthday, mom!).
The link, to tide you over: Let the Eagles Soar, an oldie but goodie. I laugh until I cry until I collapse onto the floor.

that I’m not updating my blog. Know that in NY, I’ve arranged for a cable model. So, on June 2 or 3, I’ll resume updating at the rate you’ve come to expect (more than this).

1. My hotmail address is no longer working. I have no idea why.

2. I’ve been *#$^& sick. Slept all day for three days straight.

3. I haven’t checked my voice mail in days. I know people are trying to get in touch. I’m so @**$*#)!@ sorry.

Trapped in LA w/out internet. I’ll try my best to post soon.

NY: May 14 - 20
LA: May 20 - June 2
NY: June 2 - July 24

I’ll still be on the web, but my posts may be less frequent.

I’m leaving for New York in less than a week, and tonight I’ve begun my digital packing. I’m spring-cleaning my IE favorites folder, which requires time; while my apartment is the tenth level of hell in Dante’s unabridged Inferno, my favorites folder is immaculately organized, with folders ranging from “anti-capri pants” to “philosophy blogs” to “ugly stereos.” The goal for tonight: go through all the folders relevant to my novel, and make web archives of all the sites I’ll need when writing my novel this summer, without broadband internet access.
As I’m doing this, I’m also listening to music, selecting what songs, from my 15 gig iTunes library, will go on my 5 gig iPod. I’m not going to waste packing space on CDs.
It’s hard work. I feel like I’m writing a crappy semiotics paper at 4 am, five hours before its deadline: nauseated by coffee, headachy with stress, and getting leg cramps from sitting still.

The regularly scheduled program is being interrupted by a tornado warning.

It’s 4 am, my apartment is filled with smoke, and if I don’t flap the smoke away from the fire alarm with a blanket, the alarm’s going to go shrill again and wake my neighbors. A quick flashback: at 3:30 am, I couldn’t fall asleep, so I got up and decided to draw myself a bath. I lit a couple candles, set them on the edge of the tub (as I always do), and browsed the internet while the bath was running. Three minutes later, I hear a loud snap, and check in on the bath. One of the candle’s glass casings is broken, and the candle’s top surface is on fire like a lit pan of oil. Now, I’d read as a child that water can actually aggravate fires, but the bath was still running, and it was too easy to splash some wetness in the candle’s direction. The candle’s flame paused, cackled, and jumped two feet in the air. Now, the fire alarm was screaming, and smoke was clouding my vision, and I went running. I got my fire extinguisher and sprayed the mother fucker out of existence, and I now have a bathroom that looks like a lunar landscape: mountains of white powder everywhere.

The candle-culprit, by the way, was one of those candles that’s made out of gel, not wax. They’re manufactured by Identity and look like this:

I wouldn’t trust them.

I’m getting bored with my blog these days. Linking to what other people link to, hoping that my readers don’t read the exact combination of blogs that I do. While I’ll still post daily random links, I want to make this blog more useful: for myself and hopefully, by some logic that’s too hazy to articulate, for others. I don’t, though, want to make this a journal blog; when I go blog-hunting and see a page of text without links, I immediately hit the back button. But I want to add more commentary, and, since I’m not a scholar, my commentary will be somewhat autobiographical. If this new style doesn’t entertain, write me, and I’ll change back; or, more likely, if this new style clashes with my laziness, I’ll change and blame it on your emails.

Bar Mi