Gogolgirl

I do believe my friends

2009-12-03T17:08:00.006-05:00

that I may be returning to Gogolgirl. A quick read-through of old posts (right, I don't have anything else to do now) has convinced me that I've used far too many adjectives in my writing here. I must refine that! Those books over on the side are old and I'm not reading them anymore. Christ, there is so much to do.

Elsewhere

2009-08-23T08:56:00.000-04:00

I've decided to blog elsewhere for the time being, as there are things I want to write about/through that I don't feel totally free expressing in this space. Blogs do this, I suppose. Move and change, and become something different than when one started out...

Exam

2009-08-20T20:14:00.014-04:00

I'd like to take a moment to celebrate surviving the written portion of my PhD comprehensive exam. I was terrified of taking it, not only because I knew I wasn't fully prepared, but because my emotions have been so intense lately that I really thought I might dissolve at any point into a puddle of anxious self loathing and sadness. And yet somehow I walked myself through all the fear and dread and negative thoughts and sat in front of the computer for four hours and answered the questions. And pretty much remembered to talk to myself kindly.

There were friends encouraging me beforehand and friends congratulating me after. A lot of who knew how horrible I was feeling and how hard this was for me. I am incredibly grateful for them, much more than they know.

And now I intend to focus my tired brain on chocolate, wine, and TV...

Library porn

2009-08-13T20:11:00.003-04:00

I love these photographs, mostly because of the way they convey the distinct beauty and personality of each space so immediately. And OMG, the Real Gabinete Portugues De Leitura Rio de Janeiro! So Spanish Baroque-feeling! So incredibly hot!

Dust

2009-08-11T10:54:00.008-04:00

This article on the Perseid meteor shower is totally dorky, but good at explaining the different ways meteoroids collide with Earth's atmosphere.

This opinion piece in the NYT is not bad. I like the idea of dust telling stories.

(On another note, it was exactly a year ago today that I got on a plane and returned to the East Coast from Oakland. In the interim I've been neglecting Gogolgirl terribly, but I think I might start hanging out here again for a little while as I try to work through some things.

Even if blogging now seems so... retro.)

Someone told me recently

2009-01-31T18:33:00.009-05:00

that it is unfair to update my blog without writing a new post. I haven't been here in a long while, so long that it feels strange to drop in like this. Like with a friend you haven't seen in ages, like maybe I needed an invitation. Gogolgirl definitely needs some re-envisioning in light of my curtailed free time -- and a brain that's mostly taken up with graduate classes and teaching. Had I purchased a camera over winter break as I'd intended, I would give a shot at populating this space with images. It's still a good idea, I think, but the camera has to wait until summer.

However, perhaps now that I've broken the silence, I'll come back again soon and do a little writing. I'm not quite clear what I'll write about (paper ideas? french translations? medieval reliquaries? my thoughts about what should happen to each of the characters on LOST?) but I'm also not quite ready to abandon ol' G.g. just yet.

Oh, and how are you, my two dear readers? I've missed you.

Objects and Things

2008-12-01T12:04:00.003-05:00

"The testimony of objects, in other words, brings into the present not just what was lost but the tangible presence of loss, loss in the form of a thing. The recovery of history and its evidence is an imaginative and performative act. This is a fact often lost in the empirical presumptions of museums. The objects are not whole ("this is all that's left") and have lost the context in which they were used. Once staged -- in the theater or the museum -- they are no longer identical to themselves."

"Presenting Objects, Presenting Things," Alice Rayner

The city I hate and adore!

2008-10-08T17:25:00.009-04:00

While others do their bloggerly duties, I have only lyrics to offer. Oh, there are posts in the works: a puppet review, an essay about my family's farm house in the wilds of northern PA, responses to the reading I've done lately. But I am too, too busy at the moment. Finishing and beginning. Writing fast. Grading slowly...

Autumn in New York
Why does it seem so inviting?
Autumn in New York
It spells the thrill of first nighting.

Glittering crowds and shimmering clouds
In canyons of steel,
They're making me feel
I'm home.

It's Autumn in New York
That brings the promise of new love.
Autumn in New York
Is often mingled with pain.

Dreamers with empty hands
May sigh for exotic lands
It's Autumn in New York
It's good to live it again.

Desire, Porter style

2008-09-30T12:28:00.006-04:00

I'd like to make a tour of you
The eyes, the arms, the mouth of you
The East, West, North and South of you
I'd love to gain complete control of you
and handle even the heart and soul of you

(You'll have to forgive me if I randomly post song lyrics. I am beginning a torrid love affair with the poets of Tin Pan Alley.)

Another year

2008-09-29T20:41:00.010-04:00

All in all, not too damn bad. Low-key, but happy. A few drinks with some of the nicest "cool kids" around. Randomly bumping into and having coffee with an old friend. Lots of messages from people I love.

Here's to a year of small, intimate celebrations. Of lovely little fireworks. Of tiny deaths. Of new frontiers.

Fashion and Academia

2008-09-21T23:28:00.003-04:00

Perfect together?

(The rest of the magazine this week is rather interesting as well.)

Procrastination

2008-09-20T17:06:00.007-04:00

Some of my very ugly habits are starting to rear their unattractive heads. I didn't have any delusions that writing magically would become effortless upon returning to the PhD. And I keep reminding myself that I do in fact know how best to proceed: in small bits, writing really, really rough drafts at first, only editing once I've filled at least a few pages with words. However, I still have a few leftover things to finish up and my self-imposed deadlines loom. And for some reason, all the rotten forces of self-sabotage seem to be attacking at once. They are a particularly sneaky and evil little army.

I'm ok with the idea that there will be some pain involved in getting this degree. I've (for the most part) decided that it's worth it. And I suppose it helps to be able to write about writing here and know that you, dear reader, are listening. Perhaps, for the time being, this blog will become a space for me to work on/work out my continued issues with writing. That sounds a bit dreary, but then again, it's my blog after all. Y'all* will just have to deal.

*I, despite never having had a southern accent, nor residing in the South, nor spending any significant period of time there except for the one week my family went to Myrtle Beach, SC for vacation when I was twelve -- I, the consummate Northerner, for some unknown reason addressed one of my classes as "y'all" the other day. It was the class I'm particularly fond of and so I'm assuming I meant it as a term of endearment.

Was I the moth or flame...?

2008-09-17T22:38:00.004-04:00

Dear Ira,

Your slangy, modernist brilliance is more than worthy of a semester paper, one that might trace the influences of immigrant theater, vaudeville, and Russian Formalism in your work.

Love,
G.

Where we are

2008-09-14T16:27:00.008-04:00

I didn't realize when I read In the Eye of the Sun at the end of July that it would stay with me this way. I didn't realize on that warm evening in Los Angeles when I swept slightly tipsily through the used bookstore on Franklin Avenue that the huge book I'd grab --because I knew the author's work, because it was a big fat novel and I can't resist them -- I didn't realize that this book would become a sort of primer for the coming year. As I struggle to do my work, to focus on the task at hand; as I learn to live alone for a time; as little wars are waged in my heart and I seek to make sense of my and others' positions. As I try to have compassion, to be logical and ethical, while often feeling only burning selfishness and blatant, implacable desire.

Of course, how could I not relate to Asya? A women whose understanding of the world is filtered through what she's learned from novels. Who worries that certain actions mean she's forever parted company with Dorothea. Obviously, we are not the same. Soueif is brilliant at situating Asya's story in specific political and historical moments, compelling in their own right, and her struggle is so much about creating an identity betwixt cultures, between the the conflicting pulls of home and elsewhere.

But my first impulse after finishing the novel was that I wanted to talk about the characters. Of course, it now seems that what I really wanted to do was talk about myself and those around me.

Where I fit

2008-09-06T15:18:00.008-04:00

It's funny how sometimes, sometimes, when you wonder aloud about things, an answer comes quickly. I just found out about an interdisciplinary course that's being offered this semester by a visiting professor. It slightly overlaps with a course I'm already taking (because that course runs overtime) but I'm going to try to talk my way in regardless.

“In this workshop on literary journalism we will explore how nonfiction and fiction can resemble each other yet remain distinct. We will take as our models both journalists (like John McPhee, Jane Kramer, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion) who have reached beyond conventional news style to make their writing as compelling and graceful as that of the best novelists and novelists whose work contains significant journalistic elements (like Tolstoy, Emile Zola, Charles Dickens, Hemingway, John Fowles). Participants will read and analyze such writers, seek to understand the essential elements of their storytelling, and then undertake a few short writing exercises as well as one long article attempting to emulate the best stylists in the field, while at the same time developing their own distinctive voices. The aim is to practice the form of journalism used in magazines like Harpers, The New Yorker and The Atlantic, and book-length works of literary journalism.”

Resume pause.

Vacillating

2008-09-05T20:55:00.011-04:00

I've twice published a post, and twice taken it down. I don't want this blog devolving into some sort of cryptic personal journal. There are so many things on my mind, and so much work to do, and I'm not sure where Gogolgirl fits in. Certain threads run through this space, some that unravel and then reknot themselves. Emotions appear and disappear, present themselves and hide. If you follow closely, you'll catch hints. And hit dead-ends. Underneath it all, like hidden water: a secret.

This is an inbetween space. I started it when I began thinking about leaving my graduate program. Now I've returned.

Perhaps it's time for some reinvention. I'm not sure where this part of me goes at the moment. The writer I am here, the novel reader, the thinker... I'm not sure how she fits back into academia.

Anyway, there will be a pause. Dear reader, I am still here. I am just adapting.

Reasons it's good to be back

2008-08-26T18:38:00.000-04:00

It looks like I'm going to be spending a lot of time at the 92nd Street Y this year.

(For the record, I've always though "The Grand Inquisitor" chapter would make the best theatrical adaptation. Like, since college.)

the known and familiar behaviour of the other

2008-08-25T19:52:00.000-04:00

I just turned on some music and the person upstairs dropped something on the floor. Exactly like they've always done.

Oh, dearest upstairs neighbor I've never met and who may be two or three people for all I know. I realize you disapprove of every single album I own. But right now I love you for dropping whatever it is you drop. It sometimes sounds like a shoe, at other times like loose change. Occasionally I would imagine a single strand of pearls releasing itself from your neck and a shower of pale beads cascading to the floor.

Often, you decide to rearrange your furniture as if prompted by the opening strains of "Oxford Comma." Sometimes the things you drop sound dangerously heavy and I worry.

But then, wanting to be closer to you, wanting to revel in this strange, small homecoming, I turn the music up...

Rereading

2008-08-22T10:15:00.000-04:00

All my life I have loved travelling at night, with a companion, each of us discussing and sharing the known and familiar behaviour of the other. It's like a villanelle, this inclination of going back to events in our past, the way the villanelle's form refuses to move forward in linear development, circling instead at those familiar moments of emotion. Only the rereading counts, Nabokov said. So the strange form of that belfry, turning onto itself again and again, felt familiar to me. For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.

-Divisadero, Michael Ondaatje

Fooling around

2008-08-18T23:46:00.000-04:00

I picked up a few men to take to bed with me tonight. Flaubert, Thackeray, Ondaatje, Murakami. There's nothing for me to read at my mother's house (I am sorry, Jennifer Weiner, but I cannot finish your novel) and all my books are either en route across this wide country or in my apartment in New York, which I don't move back into until Sunday. I was looking for some women too, but I only had five minutes in the bookstore and this is what I grabbed. An orgy of novels before I have to give them up for months? Perhaps. Or maybe a key to staying sane(r) this semester is to not deprive myself of the sweet voice of fiction before sleep.

I have one week to finish the papers and two days to prepare for teaching. I am nuts. However, I just might pull it off. I do think, in fact, that going back to graduate school is indeed what I want, even if I've gone about it in the most unstructured of ways.

Please cross your fingers for me or send me vibes or do whatever you do.

In case you were wondering

2008-08-06T16:20:00.000-04:00

if a girl can bite her lip, pull out her hair, pace the apartment and occasionally collapse into a heap of nervous sobs all while writing a paper on phenomenology, well....

She can.

And once in a while she'll send a book or pencil hurling across the room just for effect.

My new hat and I...

2008-07-21T14:11:00.000-04:00

took a vacation. The bf came too. The cats, sadly, had to stay home.

We three went to the Sierra Nevadas. On the first rather inauspicious night, I was attacked by bedbugs (yup, they're everywhere) and we had to sleep in the car. On the second day I was scared shitless by the steepest, windingest, no guardrailiest road I've ever encountered. Sheer 4,000 ft. drops. Gorgeous views I was far too nervous to fully appreciate.

But by the third day, things got better. I walked around the largest tree on earth. I stood beneath a waterfall. I stumbled upon a lush meadow. I recognized my boundaries and declined to climb up a huge rock overhanging the mountains. We cooled off in a pristine, placid swimming hole in the Kaweah river. My hat provided nice shade.

After a few more sweltering hours of driving and a long ferry ride, we indulged in a little oceanside camping at Two Harbors on Santa Catalina Island. Kayaked around some pretty cliffs and caves and watched bright orange garabaldi glide amid the underwater gardens in the clear, cool water beneath us.

Lastly, we did LA. Tar pits, Farmers Market, Hollywood, Venice Beach, Los Feliz. I finally saw the fantastic and long-anticipated puppet exhibition at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. And Japanese painting at LACMA. Sat next to this guy, and his dog, at dinner. Watched Hellboy II in Grauman's Chinese Theater. I even went shopping in Beverly Hills (okay so it was for tea, but it still felt luxurious)!

Finally, we drove back through the searing, dusty, agricultural San Joaquim valley to chilly temperatures here in the East Bay. This morning I made myself some organic Yunnan tea blended with French Provençal lavendar and bergamot, I'm now washing and drying all of our clothing and bags on hot hot hot, and I'm ready to write furiously.

Because I'll be returning to the East Coast in a few weeks...

And in this corner...

2008-06-19T16:32:00.000-04:00

It seems to be a habit of mine to say a long, heartfelt goodbye and fairly soon after give in to the temptation of a little postscript.

This one is just to say that I'm beginning, for possibly the fifth time, George Steiner's Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. The flagrant binarism of the title alone is shocking, isn't it? But what a lovely promise: to spend 368 pages (including bibliography and index) meditating on the differences between the God of T. and the God of D. It's absolutely everything my old-fashioned, Russian author-loving, metaphysical heart could desire.

The thing is, I've started this book many times before and never finished. I'm afraid to, honestly. I've built it up so far in my head that whatever it turns out to be could only be a disappointment, right? Maybe I shouldn't read it. (Unless I can somehow claim it's a work of reader-response criticism: "a reader's response, his preference between a Tolstoy and a Dostoevsky (a Corneille and a Racine, a Broch and a Musil) will point to, will enlist his own philosophy of life or lack thereof.... What is entailed by the greater trust we invest in the one rather than the other, neutrality being, I believe, factitious if not impossible.")

Leaving aside Steiner's sweeping delegation of each individual reader to one of two teams (of course, I'd be batting for D., but still), I came across a nugget in the preface to the Second Edition. Steiner goes on as usual about the limited shelf life of criticism (criticism needs refridgeration, literature is like canned goods -- this is my analogy, not his) and then talks a little about his critical influences. Focusing on the "New Critics," by whom he was shaped but ultimately found limiting, he writes approvingly of their quest to be "poet-critics" whose project "must itself seduce by complexity of nuance and rhetoric."

Criticism that seduces. Arguments that draw you in gradually, then slyly make you wait. Arguments built not only on discursive structures but also in the subtlety of phrasing. That pointedly leave a little to the imagination while promising the most pleasurable of resolutions.

Criticism that makes you work a little but ends with a very sweet reward.

It's something I'd been aiming for in my critical writing, something that I'd sensed was necessary -- this artfulness, this poetry -- but I hadn't seen it written about in quite this way before. It's not that I want to be a New Critic or anything (god forbid!)...

I just want to seduce you with my mind ;-)

*******

(and also, apparently, with my spelling mistakes)

A Hiatus

2008-06-09T20:56:00.000-04:00

A kind of summer vacation, if you will. See, I have these papers I have to write if I want to go back to my Ph.D. program. And although it doesn't seem like I post very much here to begin with, I've been spending way too much time on the internet. And right now I have very little time to waste.

Beyond the papers, though, there are other things I have to sort out before I go back to NYC. Some difficult things. Some logistical things. Not necessarily things I can or want to blog about, but stuff that requires emotional energy. So: a little time off. To think and write and make decisions offline.

Anyway, I hope you'll keep in mind that Gogolgirl loves you and that when she's not spending time eating this, she'll be working very hard.

And missing you, of course.

Reviewing in typically self-indulgent style

2008-06-08T14:49:00.000-04:00

Last night, the boyfriend and I watched Noah Baumbach's Kicking and Screaming. We moved the TV into the bedroom, so for the first time since we've been in CA we were both able to stretch out comfortably. Movie watching on the little red toy couch had devolved into cramped, tangled affair, with me absurdly complaining of arthritic knees and the boyfriend constantly shifting his torso accompanied by exaggerated expressions of pain. Add to this two cats who insist on clinging to stationary human body parts against all attempts to detach them. We were a severely disgruntled pile of limbs and fur.

Movie watching on the bed, in contrast, is luxurious. Even the cats seem happier.

Kicking and Screaming, if it's not obvious, was my Netflix choice. The bf prefers obscure foreign documentaries on depressing subjects or Sam Peckinpah westerns. I, on the other hand, am drawn to flimsy, self-conscious indie flicks the way I'm drawn to Vintage paperbacks. It's a kind of shallow solipsism that I'm certainly not proud of, but what can I do? We all have our guilty pleasures.

Very briefly: The film was made in 1995. It involves a group of (male) friends who've just graduated from college and are having a difficult time making the transition to the post-college world. In the first scene we learn that the main character, Grover, was looking forward to moving to Brooklyn with his girlfriend, but she's unexpectedly landed some kind of writing fellowship in Prague and plans to abandon him for a European adventure. The nerdy-neurotic/sexual escapades of the friends and their witty verbal exchanges are intersperced with flashbacks to the couple's senior-year courtship, now sadly cut off. The guys lope through the next 12 months, still living together near campus, still immersed in the cycle and structure of the academic year, repeatedly attempting to extricate themselves and eek out new identites and repeatedly failing. Or almost failing. On the whole, the film was mildly funny, a tad too long, and otherwise pretty innocuous and enjoyable.

Still. It took me back.

I graduated from college in (gasp. choke.) 1996. I took off for my own European adventure not long afterwards, and returned close to Thanskgiving, full of culture and grand ideas and perfectly primed to make an emotional mess of my romantic life. Which I did, stunningly. I didn't so much lope through that first year out as I barrelled, like a woefully misguided freight train. A curiously malleable and lightweight freight train. A freight train who spent most of the time with her head in a book or sleeping with the wrong person. Possibly on occasion doing both at the same time.

Honestly, the uncanny thing about the movie, perhaps the thing that brought that post-college year back so vividly, is how Grover keeps telling everyone that his ex-girlfriend is in Czechoslovakia so that his father finally has to inform him that actually it's the Czech Republic. The Czech Republic and Slovakia. Two separate countries. I'd done exactly the same thing when I was telling people about my upcoming trip, describing how I'd be going from France to Hungary and then to Czechoslovakia. Until a brand new friend corrected me, in an abrubt way that made me laugh. It was perhaps one of the first things he said to me and I was just slightly taken aback. But I liked that, to him, precision mattered. It mattered to me too.

And then, in the end, I didn't make it to the Czech Republic after all. I got terribly homesick in Budapest, started running low on cash, and after repeatedly annoying the intimidating Hungarian ticket agent by buying and returning a ticket back to the States, twice, I finally got on a plane and flew home. To get a job and mess up my life a little. The Czech Republic and I... it simply wasn't our time, I suppose. Kind of like Grover's spontaneous and grand attempt to talk his way onto a flight to Prague at the end of the film, only to realize he doesn't have his passport. Just not meant to work out.

***************

And yet, Czech Republic, you've remained near to my heart over all these years. It's more than a little mysterious, really. This steadfastness. Despite our distance now, at times I feel so incredibly close it unnerves me. I long for you with abandon.

My life is rife with uncertainty

2008-06-05T14:27:00.001-04:00

For example, I'm not sure which is more quintessentially French: escargot or Opération escargot.

And I'm not sure which gets me more excited: this critical review of the works of religious thinker/historian Michel de Certeau or this.

How 'bout you?

Sunday (Meditations on) Style

2008-05-25T22:31:00.000-04:00

In which I foist another old (and luckily, short) paper on you in lieu of writing a new post. Because I can. And because I have lots of them hanging around.

I'm dredging up this one because I've been thinking a lot over the past few days about the ethical implications and possibilities of style. And about the sensuous, intoxicating, dangerous potential of language. Asking myself where my responsibilities lie.

Here's some purely old-fashioned, texual criticism of Samuel Beckett's Endgame that also begins to suggest larger questions about our complicity as pleasure-seeking readers. If I were writing this paper now, instead of in my first semester of graduate school, I'd certainly have thrown in some reference to Barthes's The Pleasure of the Text.

And yes, I know in this essay I'm grouping all readers under the umbrella of an unindividualized, universalizing "we." I'm sure the upcoming weeks of reader-response theory will rid me of any such tendencies. I'm letting the paper stand in all its gaps and inadequacies.

(For the record, I'm also sort of involved in a project of looking back on where my proclivities and inclinations have led me so far in grad school as I attempt to make a big move forward. Trying to return to myself as a thinker, ground myself in a way, as I have a strange feeling that certain doors are soon to be burst wide open.)

*****************************

Words and Pleasure in Samuel Beckett's Endgame

Although I am certainly not unique in my approach, there is not an overwhelming amount of commentary on the nature and function of language in Samuel Beckett's Endgame. This perhaps could be attributed to some of the popular critical notions about Beckett's relationship to language. In her essay "Words About Words: Beckett and Language," Dina Sherzer outlines common approaches to the subject, including "that Beckett distrusts language, that he thinks that language is inadequate, and that in his works he demonstrates the bankruptcy and the nullity of language." And indeed, Martin Esslin, in The Theatre of the Absurd, has pointed to this mistrust of language as a defining aesthetic factor for Beckett and his contemporaries: the poetic image which is physicalized on the stage; the intuitive, rather than discursive, vision of reality which the absurdist playwrights attempt to communicate is for Esslin a result of their belief that language can no longer express anything about the human condition. As Sherzer explains, this attitude is indeed partly true for Beckett and she posits a possible influence of the German philosopher Fritz Mauthner, "who repeatedly discussed the vanity of words and the impossibility of knowledge through language."

And if we look within Endgame, we can certainly find an apt example of this viewpoint in Clov's final monologue: "I ask the words that remain -- sleeping, waking, morning, evening. They have nothing to say." Or earlier on: "I use the words you taught me. If they don’t mean anything anymore, teach me others. Or let me be silent." It's also significant that Beckett is an Irish, English-speaking author who began to write in French precisely because he perceived that in the French language he had no style. Among other things, this seems to indicate a suspicion of language, as if one's style, the way one wears language, has the potential to obscure or obfuscate the thing that needs to be said.

But, as Sherzer also points out -- and what I think we can find from looking closely at some examples from Endgame -- Beckett's relationship to language is not quite that one-sided. And indeed, when approaching the work of a writer who began -- and continued -- as a novelist, who spent years teaching language and literature, and who was the protégé and friend of no less that James Joyce -- that dizzying inventor of words -- it does seem hard to believe that such a relationship would be very easy to categorize as one thing or another, or so seemingly dismissive as some critics have suggested. Within Endgame itself, there appears a remarkable amount of linguistic play, poetry, and discourse on language. In this paper I propose to touch upon a very small corner of the play's textual landscape, exploring a few landmarks that have emerged abruptly and stunningly in my reading of the play -- expressions and, more specifically, single words that seem to me to rise up from the flatness like plateaus, and from which I think we might gain access to potentially new vistas.

Paul Lawley, in his essay "Symbolic Structure and Creative Obligation in Endgame" describes the textual landscape of the play as "grey." But he finds that when the characters are describing worlds beyond their own, worlds from the past or worlds of a wishful, imaginative elsewhere, they use single words of description (like "Ardennes", "the road to Sedan", "Lake Como" -- or in Hamm's case "Flora! Pomona! Ceres!"), which, like tiny bulbs or candles, light the text with a "mytho-poetic" glow. I propose that a similar effect is taking place in certain instances when Hamm and Clov make reference to their births, or their beginnings (which could also be considered a foreign territory in this land of endings). There is a slight shift we feel in the use of certain words, a strangeness, a very precise and subtle difference in the air, which has some profound effects.

The first instance I'll mention is Hamm's line: "Something dripping in my head, ever since the fontanelles." Hamm is speaking of the duration of the dripping of what he calls the heart (also at one point a vein, or a little artery) in his head, which he has experienced, ostensibly, since he was an infant. There seems to be a Formalist objective to Beckett's use of the word "fontanelles": it's a surprise, a tiny little shock that jolts us slightly. Beckett could very easily have written "ever since I was a baby," "or ever since I was young," and have kept very much in the "style-less" tone of the dialogue. But he uses instead this evocative and strange (and yet, achingly specific) word which appears to come out of nowhere.

Fontanelles, of course, are the fibrous membranes that connect the bones of the skull in a small infant. During childbirth, the fontanelles allow the bones of the head to overlap their edges so it can pass through the birth canal without compressing and damaging the baby's brain. These bones ultimately fuse together once a child reaches between a year and a year and a half of age. Beckett's word choice here is rich and suggestive and avoids the cliché, "ever since I was young," which would barely register to an English-speaking audience, using instead a word from which immediately blooms images of fragility, vulnerability, tenuousness, smallness. Who hasn't been warned as a child, when holding, or playing, with a baby, to be careful of the "soft-spot:" the tiny, pulsing, downy indentation that seems to mark a being not yet fully-formed, a mind not yet sealed and determined and all the more vulnerable for it. It is a word firmly connected to the body, to birth, to growth. My illustrated Oxford English Dictionary includes with the definition of "fontanel" a diagram of a baby's skull, the bones and the membranes labeled; it's a tiny, peaceful-looking, semi-transparent head floating unattached to any body.

(And there are a number of critics who have read Endgame as happening inside a skull, perhaps inside the head of Hamm: the set design, with its two small windows placed up high (two eye sockets), is seen to support this reading. The play thus becomes the internal drama of a man who is dying, ending. "Fontanelles," then, could be read as a time before the skull had closed, before Hamm had become trapped within his own mind.)

Lawley speaks of an "echo principle" in Engame, a concept which he derives from Beckett's own comments on the play: "There are no accidents in Fin de partie. Everything is based on analogy and repetition." Hamm's "ever since the fontanelles" is a kind of echo of a line Clov speaks earlier in the play. In that scene, Hamm tells him "I thought I told you to be off," and Clov responds, "I'm trying." The stage directions indicate that Clov then goes to the door and halts, and says, "Ever since I was whelped."

In this instance, the expected "Ever since I was born" (Clov has been trying to leave Hamm every since he [Clov] was born) is replaced by something stranger, unanticipated, and again, highly evocative. It is dogs that are whelped: tiny, squirming puppies emerging bloody and squealing. When used to describe the birth of a human being, it has highly derogative connotations emphasizing the bestial aspects of procreation. This word prefigures Hamm's "fontanelles" in its specificity and its evocation of a kind of beginning, of birth. And in its specificity, it lies in stark contrast to other lines spoken by Hamm and Clov. For example, Hamm implores Clov "What's happening?" and Clov replies "Something is taking its course." This line is ominous, almost chilling in its vagueness. Or Hamm, struggling to describe to Clov what has gone on for too long: "This…this…thing." The characters thus seem to be able to use words quite pointedly at certain times, to describe specific events; at others, words utterly fail them as they attempt to grasp the mysterious and the immense.

Hamm, I think it is useful to point out, is an author as well as an actor. As he tells his story, and the story of the vassal who comes to him imploring for shelter for himself and his son, Hamm frequently edits. For example: "You prayed -- (Pause. He corrects himself.) You CRIED for night; it comes -- (Pause. He corrects himself.) It FALLS: now cry in darkness." He also takes much pleasure in the well-placed word, the finely-turned phrase: "You cried for night; it falls: now cry in darkness. (Pause.) Nicely put, that." In a similar way, I'd like to suggest that in the pauses after the phrases "…ever since the fontanelles" or "Ever since I was whelped," in the way Beckett frames them within the text, there is the sense that we can almost hear Beckett's own, reflexive, "Nicely put, that." These words certainly give us a sense of pleasure in their strangeness and aptness, a pleasure of which it is highly doubtful Beckett was unaware, or to which immune.

But there is another side to this pleasure in the well-chosen word. Take the exchange between Hamm and Clov as Hamm searches for the right word to describe the landscape outside:

HAMM: Nothing stirs. All is --
CLOV: Zer--
HAMM: (violently) Wait till you're spoken to!
(Normal voice.)
All is…all is…all is what?
(Violently.)
All is what?
CLOV: What all is? In a word? Is that what your want to know? Just a moment.
(He turns the telescope on the without, looks, lowers the telescope turns toward Hamm.)
Corpsed.
(Pause.)
Well? Content?

There is pleasure, contentment, that Clov, perhaps Hamm, and of course, we -- the audience or the reader -- get from this utterly specific, redolent, and strange word. Beckett gives us a full pause so that it can be fully absorbed. It seems to convey everything we know of misery, waste, loss, and decay within the single heart-beat of its one elegant syllable. But should we be taking pleasure in such a finely-wrought description? Are we not acting in the same manner as Hamm, who in telling his pitiful story of cruelty and degradation is above all finding pleasure in the way it is told? Lawley points out in his essay that Hamm's values are "aesthetic rather than ethical." I think we can see Beckett using words within Endgame to subtly challenge us to face our (and perhaps his) complicity with Hamm. What does it mean to enjoy the perfectly-formed description of something wretched and debased? And what does it mean to author it?

The birth of a dying star

2008-05-23T15:40:00.000-04:00

Bad Astronomy has a great, informative post on the first observation of a supernova in real time. Of course, "real time" to astronomers in this case means an event that happened about 84 million years ago.

I'd like to be able to say something profound about this discovery. In my twenties, I labored an entire summer to write a play that used the death of stars as a metaphor for the human condition. Now in my thirties, lazier and more humble, I am content to say:

Wow.

(I also recently spent an entire summer following the show Rockstar Supernova, so that gives you another idea of how I've matured.)

Only the Russians can comfort me

2008-05-18T20:00:00.000-04:00

There's a lovely translation of a poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko up at Languor Management. I'm copying it here because it was the best thing about my bread factory Sunday.

Waiting

My love will come,
Will throw open her arms and fold me within them,
Will understand my fears, note my changes.
In from the pouring dark, from the pitch night
Without stopping to slam the taxi door
She’ll run upstairs, across the rotting porch,
Burning with love and love’s happiness,
She’ll run dripping upstairs, she won’t knock,
Will take my head in her hands,
And when she flings her coat on a chair,
It will slip to the floor in a blue heap.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko (translated by Kevin Kinsella)

A post with endnotes

2008-05-14T01:00:00.000-04:00

The promised (threatened?) long post on puppets. Specifically, a paper I presented at last summer's Association for Theater in Higher Education Annual Conference.

Largely a production review, it's also about looking at puppet bodies and how the materiality of those bodies can effect the viewer. I obviously have a lot more thinking on the subject to look forward to, but this paper is a working out of some initial ideas and functions somewhat as a companion piece to my post on Bread and Puppet last year.

*********************
Hiroshima Maiden: Looking at War, Through the Lens of Puppetry

A few years ago, an exhibition of photographs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York included images of the bodies of survivors of the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Walking through the gallery, one photograph struck me with particular force: a close-up in black and white of the hardened scars covering an elderly man's back, formed exactly in the pattern of a leaf. He was facing away from the camera, his wife in the background tenderly bathing his skin. The photograph was beautiful, breathtaking. As I was looking at this image I remembered a quote of James Baldwin's from The Evidence of Things Not Seen: "From afar, one may imagine that one perceives that pattern. And one may. But, as one is not challenged -- or, more precisely, menaced -- by the details, the pattern may be nothing more than something one imagines oneself to be able to remember." Baldwin used these lines to describe his attempt to understand and write about the Atlanta child murders, and his feeling that it would be necessary to physically travel back to the United States from his home in France in order to do so. They had nothing to do with Hiroshima; nevertheless, his words seemed so appropriate to the image I was seeing.

After coming home from the exhibition and wrestling with my response to the photograph, I was moved almost inexplicably to write a poem in which I imagined I was the elderly man's wife. I was trying hard to envision what it would be like to get up close to that pain, to sleep in bed with those scars next to me -- not just to see, but to touch, the pattern. To be menaced by the sensory details. In the poem, I imagined that the man's wife has a dream in which she is suddenly very small and walking along the man's back, through a landscape of hills and valleys that is comprised of his knotted flesh. She becomes frightened because she can't find her way -- this world is foreign to her and too vast to comprehend in full.

I recount the story of writing the poem only because I think it points to what is most important and compelling about Dan Hurlin's Hiroshima Maiden, a puppet play about the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and its victims. The play is in large part a meditation on the act of looking and its consequences, as well as the difficulty of imagining another's perspective. Through the use of puppets and performing objects (and the attendant ability to play with size and scale), Hurlin helps the audience to grapple with issues of modern warfare and gives it the ability to look at war's effect on the body in a distanced and thoughtful way, overcoming fear or repugnance and creating room for genuine empathy and emotion. Although it might seem paradoxical, Hiroshima Maiden's performing objects also create a physical landscape that allows the audience to get up close and see the details it might otherwise be too far away -- or too rooted in its own perspective -- to perceive.

Historical Background

The "Hiroshima Maidens" were 25 young women who had been severely burned and disfigured by the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and were brought to the United States ten years later to undergo reconstructive plastic surgery. It was a project conceived by the Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto, a Methodist minister living in Hiroshima during the seven-year U.S. occupation of Japan that followed the end of WWII. He had witnessed first-hand the extreme suffering of these women, who were hidden from public view by their families. Historian David Serlin writes in the Hiroshima Maiden program:

according to Buddhist and Shinto beliefs, their scars were thought to be the result of some crime committed by the family's ancestors, rather than understood as the effects of atomic warfare. The young women became know locally as Tanimoto's 'Keloid Girls,' an awkward term of endearment that referred to the hard pieces of scar tissue that formed on their bodies after their radiation burns.(1)

While the women themselves were hidden from sight in Japan, images of the wounded survivors -- called hibakusha, or "bomb-effected" -- were suppressed in the United States. Serlin explains that until the mid-1950s, the "U.S. State Department made sure that all images of atomic survivors were immaculately scrubbed from the popular media."(2) The fear was that these images would incite anti-nuclear protests at home, compromising the United States' ability to proliferate nuclear weapons and thus jeopardizing its response to the Cold War Communist threat. Amazingly, once in the United States, Reverend Tanimoto and two of the young women appeared on the popular television show This is Your Life, in an episode that also featured Captain Robert Lewis, one of the pilots of the Enola Gay. Tanimoto came face to face with Lewis, but the women remained hidden behind a screen; this was done, said the host, in order "to avoid them any embarrassment."(3) According to an interview with Dan Hurlin in the New York Times, it was this show that inspired Hiroshima Maiden. "I started to think about cultural reconciliation. It was never really clear to me how countries -- Germany, for instance -- can collectively face their past."(4)

The highly-publicized presence in the United States of victims of the nuclear attack did little to force Americans to confront the results of their government's actions. As Serlin notes, the women came to an America that was just beginning to latch on to the idea of surgery for beautification, and "as more and more Americans saw the Maidens' injuries as physical features that could be fixed, this deflected attention away from the political context in which their injuries first appeared."(5) Because the public made little distinction between reconstructive surgery undergone to lessen suffering and plastic surgery elected to heighten beauty, the root cause of the women's scars was obscured. The trip came to be regarded as an opportunity for the "Disfigured Jap Girls to Get Facelifting" and to see "what America is really like."(6) As Susan Sontag remarked almost fifty years later in Regarding the Pain of Others, the public still has yet to look squarely at the U.S. decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She asks:

Which atrocities from the past do we think we are obliged to revisit? Probably, if we are Americans, we think that it would be morbid to go out of our way to look at pictures of burnt victims of atomic bombing. The acknowledgment of the American use of disproportionate firepower in war (in violation of one of the cardinal laws of war) is very much not a national project. A museum devoted to the history of America's wars that fairly presented the arguments for and against using the atomic bomb in 1945 on the Japanese cities, with photographic evidence that showed what those weapons did, would be regarded -- now more than ever -- as a most unpatriotic enterprise.(7)

Sontag's book, exemplary in its examination of how we look at photographs of war and war's victims, informs much of my thinking on the production.

Hiroshima and Puppets

Hurlin's production focuses on the experience of only one of the Maidens who came to the United States for treatment -- Michiko -- and tells her story with performing objects and bunraku-inspired puppets: realistic, three-foot tall figures with large, detailed faces, each manipulated by two to three black-clad puppet operators. The cast of puppeteers is comprised of both westerners and non-westerners (two of the puppeteers are originally from Japan), and live musicians provide an accompaniment to the action, as in the bunraku tradition -- choices that seem to acknowledge the tremendous influence of the revered Japanese art on contemporary Western puppetry.(8) It is through the performing objects that Hurlin is able to provoke the deepest exploration of how we look at the suffering of others.

The play opens with a shadow image of a young boy, kneeling beside an anthill with a magnifying glass. The audience is shown a close-up of what the boy sees: ants. The glass, amplifying the rays of the sun, begins to scorch the earth and a delicate plume of smoke rises. It is a humorous moment at first, conveying the precocious curiosity of a young boy as well as the ruthlessness of his youthful scientific pursuits.

A moment later the audience sees a pilot, a puppet in the bunraku style, kneeling to pray and watching the clock. He notices something on the floor, and through another close-up, it is revealed to be a tiny puppet ant. A toy plane on a stick flies amid rows of blue fabric (their laundry-like appearance evoking a comforting everydayness that belies the event to come) and hovers over an elaborately framed image of the Japanese islands. It slowly drops a black, pea-sized object, almost too minuscule for the audience to make out. Suddenly, the islands break into pieces, and tiny dots spill out. Another close-up, and this time the screen gives us an image of the ground, revealing first the bodies of ants, and then, ant-sized human forms -- tiny people all lying folded in various poses of collapse. One of those "ants," we discover, is a young woman in a red dress -- Michiko -- who has managed to survive the atomic blast and now, after emerging from behind the screen, is frantically running for her life. The puppets and performing objects allow a filmic manipulation of size and scale; Michiko's appearance from behind the close up of bodies brings our understanding of the effect of the bomb from the general and the distanced (the tiny ants), to the particular and the detailed: a single bunraku puppet. Later we will see her face break into pieces, mirroring the previous image of the islands falling apart.

After Michiko's appearance, the action cuts to an actor (Dawn Akemi Saito) who begins to speak. Here, Hurlin is utilizing another convention of bunraku: the tayu, or narrator, who in this production, rather than providing voices for the puppets on the stage, works in counterpoint to the main action. The tayu describes the thoughts of a young American boy, Michiko's contemporary. The boy spends a lot of time watching TV and deploring the embarrassing antics of Lucy Ricardo, and he suffers paroxysms of shame when he accidentally wets his pants during the rehearsal of a school play. Hurlin's inclusion of the boy's story points to the struggle with perspective and scale that is at center of Hiroshima Maiden.

Michiko's muteness, in contrast to the verbosity of the young American boy (in the St. Ann's Warehouse production the tayu was a woman of Asian descent) was criticized in at least one review of the production as a regrettable manifestation of Orientalism.(9) While this is an important issue to address in greater depth, I think that Hurlin's incorporation of the tayu is ultimately meant to problematize the issue of identification, helping American audience members to become aware of their positions as Western spectators. The tayu as used in Hiroshima Maiden both elides and separates the experience of East and West: while it achieves a merging of the young American boy's voice with the Japanese tradition, the voice remains separate from the action of the puppets and objects, which are visually and materially articulate in their own right. Further, while listening to the tayu, the audience must evaluate what it hears against what it sees. It is asked to compare the boy's disaster of wetting his pants to the disaster of an atomic attack. Can the boy's shame at his accident teach him something about Michiko's experience? Can one who has not experienced the devastation of an event comparable to Hiroshima see it, or understand it, in the same way as one who has? Hurlin's spoken text attempts to makes connections between Michiko's experience and that of the young American boy, but in the presentation of their stories Michiko and the boy remain distinctly opposed.

Throughout the production, Hurlin repeatedly brings the audience's attention to its own act of looking. The audience must strain to see something small on stage, then it is shown close up. Performers carry long sticks with arrows that direct the audience's gaze from one character to another, often times competing for attention in a scramble and then gracefully floating off course. Frames are brought on stage, a bulb flashes, and instantly a moment becomes an image, one that could appear on the cover of a magazine. In a particularly skillful and thrilling scene, a physical confrontation between a government official concerned with censoring images of the Maidens and an American photographer is tilted so that the audience seems to be viewing it from above -- as they both struggle to grasp hold of a camera, it flies up into the air in slow motion, capturing a picture of the audience in mid-flight.

Hurlin uses performing objects to make the act of seeing material and observable. At one point the young American boy remarks on the slipperiness of looking, how difficult the movement of sight is to pin down. "A glance happens in the air," he says. But through the use of spring-y cords resembling dotted lines that are stretched from one puppet to another, Hurlin seeks to chart the trajectory of a look, allowing the audience to explicitly see the transaction between characters. Hiroshima Maiden makes glances material, letting us observe sight.

One of the most effective devices in Hiroshima Maiden is the reoccurring screen labeled "Area of Detail" that repeatedly provides the audience with a close-up of small objects seen from the puppet's perspective. With this screen, Hurlin creates stunning moments. The ants scorched by the boy in the first scene are later mirrored by the "ants" killed by the atomic bomb. Tiny mushrooms Michiko sees sprouting on her floor when enlarged bear an uncanny resemblance to mushroom clouds. The screen also sets up a connection between seeing and identification: the audience stops looking at the puppet characters for a moment to look with them at small details of their environment instead, literally seeing things through their eyes.

In perhaps the most lyrical and moving scene in Hiroshima Maiden, a single puppeteer comes onstage with a box, from which he pulls a blue, puppet-sized kimono and a small gold fan. The kimono is hung across his arm, becoming a body, and another puppeteer brings him a large, white, wooden egg, which becomes a head. The puppeteer begins to dance and four more soon join him. Moving in unison, fans fluttering, kimonos flowing from their arms, and the graceful wooden heads positioned above. Almost imperceptibly, another black-clad puppeteer enters and switches the smooth, intact head of one of the "puppets" for a cracked one. Each of the other heads is eventually replaced by broken ones. The puppets continue their dance with destroyed heads. This macabre moment highlights the ability to create a kind of "poetry of space" with objects, which in this case reflects back on the fragility of our bodies and the destructiveness of war. The puppet becomes a physicalized metaphor, its head cracking like an egg.

A head is not an egg, though, and the thought of a real head shattering like one is gruesome and terrible. And a keloid scar, for that matter -- hard, twisted, and disfiguring -- would not look like the delicate red stain on the puppet Michiko’s face. But while this aestheticization of human injuries could be seen as problematic and distasteful, the very fact that the puppets are material helps to counteract the tendency to get fully lost or take unexamined pleasure in the images represented.

For example, in another scene Michiko, trying to hide her face, makes a frantic movement across the stage, and the sound of her body against the floor demonstrates that she is clearly made of wood, not flesh. For all their realistic and expressive capabilities, the puppets remind the audience at the same time that they are not real. The realization of the puppet's materiality sets up a distinction between puppet and flesh, similar to what one critic of traditional bunraku described as the "contrast between the living flesh of the head puppeteer's face and the lifeless wooden face of the puppet."(10)

The audience is again reminded of the materiality of the puppets in a scene where Michiko witnesses the rebuilding of a section of Hiroshima. Wooden houses are placed side by side, filling up a flattened street. Soon, a prosthetic foot joins the landscape; then a wooden arm with a hook, then a hand, then a leg. Finally, Michiko is shown a box of prosthetic wooden eyeballs, which roll eerily about. Of course, these are all materials that could be used to build and repair a puppet, but could never truly replace the loss of limbs, flesh, or blood. The puppet bodies seem to bring into relief the precious and irreplaceable nature of real bodies, and the permanent damage war does to them.

Hurlin said in an interview around the time of the play's premier:

I actually think puppets are more human that humans when they're onstage. Because if you see an actor rub his nose you don't think anything about it, you just think "Oh well, you know, he had an itch." But if you see a puppet rub its nose, immediately your mind goes, "Oh, I know what that is; I've done that before." And so, in some ways, puppets are really... they're like magnified mirrors: they show us ourselves, I think, more clearly.(11)

A Formalist distancing is at work in Hiroshima Maiden, which can also be likened to Brecht's verfremdungseffekt in that it turns "an object from something ordinary and immediately accessible" -- i.e. the human body on stage -- "into something peculiar, striking, and unexpected"(12) -- the formalized, stylized puppet body. Because of the "strangeness" of what is presented onstage, the audience is jolted out of complacency and the act of looking is infused with a new energy. The puppet body is striking precisely because it is not real flesh, and at the same time it reflects our fleshly bodies back to us with greater force and clarity.

The final scene of Hiroshima Maiden was imagined by Hurlin: Captain Robert Lewis and Michiko come face to face. While this never happened in real life, it seems fitting that it happens in the puppet world. The puppeteers hold up a taut length of cord that stretches from Michiko's eyes to the pilot's eyes, in effect locking them, and the puppets circle one another as if bound by a centrifugal force. Sontag writes that, "the other, even when not an enemy, is regarded only as someone to be seen, not someone (like us) who also sees."(13) At the end of Hiroshima Maiden, Lewis is given the opportunity, finally, of encountering one of the survivors of the bomb he dropped. But more importantly, the audience watches as Michiko looks back. *

Bibliography:

Anan, Nobuko. "Review of Hiroshima Maiden, written and directed by Dan Hurlin, Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theatre, Los Angeles." Theatre Journal 58.4 (December 2006): 690-692.

Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Theater: The Development of an Aesthetic. Edited and translated by John Willett. London: Methuen, 1986. p. 143

Hurlin, Dan. "Hiroshima Maiden." Play: A Journal of Plays 2 (2004): 263-282.

Michelle, Karen. "'Hiroshima Maidens' and a Return to New York" (includes an interview with Dan Hurlin). Weekend Edition, NPR, January 17, 2004.

Rakoff, David. "Hiroshima Bomber and Victims: This is Your (Puppet's) Life." New York Times, January 11, 2004.

Staub, Nancy L. "Bunraku: A Contemporary Western Fascination." In The Language of the Puppet, edited by Laurence R. Kominz and Mark Levenson. Second Printing. Vancouver: Pacific Puppetry Center Press, 1998. 47-52.

Serlin, David. "Program Notes." Program to Hiroshima Maiden, dir. Dan Hurlin. Presented by Arts at St. Ann's, St. Ann's Warehouse, Brooklyn, New York, January 14-February 1, 2004.
Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador, 2003.

Ueno, Michiko. "An Introduction to the Art of Bunraku." In The Language of the Puppet, edited by Laurence R. Kominz and Mark Levenson. Second Printing. Vancouver: Pacific Puppetry Center Press, 1998. 53-55.

Notes:
1. Serlin, "Program Notes."
2. Ibid.
3. Michelle, "Hiroshima Maidens."
4. Rakoff, "Hiroshima Bomber and Victims."
5. Serlin, "Program Notes."
6. Ibid.
7. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 93-94.
8. See Staub, "Bunraku: A Contemporary Western Fascination," 47-52.
9. Anan, "Review of Hiroshima Maiden," 690-692. The reviewer saw a production at the CalArts Theatre in Los Angeles in which Hurlin himself took on the tayu's role.
10. Staub, "Bunraku: A Contemporary Western Fascination.," 51.
11. Michelle, "Hiroshima Maidens."
12. Brecht, Brecht on Theater, 143.
13. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 72.

Happy belated blogoversary to me...

2008-05-09T15:41:00.000-04:00

My "blogoversary" (yes, I insist on calling it that!) passed and I didn't even celebrate. I've been fooling around at Gogolgirl for over a year now. I think it's time to go public. The blog could use a few more comments.

Besides, I have to admit: I'm pretty lonely out here on the West Coast. Last night, before falling asleep, I kept picturing the view from our apartment in New York, the dirty courtyard with its line of garbage bins framed by the cracked white paint of the window sill. The noise of the neighborhood kids outside. Dusk. Haze. The overripe smell of summertime Queens.

I felt as if my heart might break.

(But don't worry about me too much, dear reader. I'm mostly fixated on training my lazy self to get up early enough to read for an hour and a half before work. Every night I have the best of intentions and every morning... well, let's just say the warm pillows and blankets always, always win.)

I haven't written about my bread factory job either. I will.

In the meantime, I continue to devour literature in some crazy/futile attempt to figure out myself, my life:

Excerpts from Rivka Galchen's new book Atmospheric Disturbances are published at Nextbook. I'm hooked. Her style is reminiscent of Murakami and Ishiguro: funny, lucid, haunting.

Minna Proctor's essay about her divorce, her mother's death, and the birth of her child simply floored me.

Or I'll Forget

2008-05-06T23:35:00.000-04:00

I have to jot these down somewhere:

Starting Out in the Evening -- Brian Morton

The Man Who Loved Children -- Christina Stead

It feels like I'm reading ever so slowly right now. I'm fighting against laziness, against dispiritedness. Lying in bed this morning, my day off, all sorts of juicy ideas and plans formed themselves in my head. For my papers, the blog. Then the reality of the day. Writing pains. Evasions and flagellations.

Yet, I've resolved to struggle with myself until my mind is bloody and sore. I'm writing about the religious performances of medieval monks, so it's all part of the mood.

I think it's about time for a long post on puppets.

And another episode of Deadwood.

10 Memorable Books That Never Existed

2008-04-27T00:12:00.000-04:00

(THE BOOK OF LISTS gets all postmodern on your ass...)

1. The Curious Experience of the Patterson Family on the Island of Uffa, by John H. Watson, M.D. (late of the British Army Medical Department)

A Sherlock Holmes exploit mentioned by Dr. Watson but never set down on paper.

2. Hansard's Guide to Refreshing Sleep (19 vols.)

One of the dummy works which seems to be displayed on bookshelves in the home of Charles Dickens at Gad's Hill. The spines of these make-believe books were used to mask some woodwork that the great novelist chose to cover up.

3. Mad Trist, by Sir Launcelot Canning

One of the nonexistent books mentioned to build up the atmosphere of mystery and menace in the story "Fall of the House of Usher," by Edgar Allan Poe, who died in 1849.

4. Memoirs, by The Hon. Galahad Threepwood

The title of a nonexistent autobiography to be found in the numerous novels of P. G. Wodehouse.

5. Modern Warfare, by General Tom Thumb

Another nonbook that looked like a real book and was used to decorate a portion of Charles Dickens's personal library.

6. Necronomicon, by Abdul Alhazared (the mad Arab)

A "blasphemous" and "fobidden" work referred to several time in the fantasy and horror tales of H. P. Lovecraft, who died in 1937. This nonexistent book was described as "the ghastly soul symbol of the forbidden corpse-eating cult of inaccessible Leng in Central Asia."

7. On Polishing Off the Canonical Hours (40 vols.) by Master Greedyguts

A satire on the clergy who slighted their rituals and observances. One of the many imaginary works found in the library of the Abbey of St. Victor by Pantagruel, the fictional character created by François Rabelais, who died in 1553.

8. A Practical Handbook of Bee Culture, by Sherlock Holmes

An invaluable, in nonexistent, contribution to human knowledge by the master detective.

9. The Seven Minutes, by J J Jadway (Paris: Étoile Press)

This 171-page most-banned novel in history was a figment of novelist Irving Wallace's imagination in his real book, also called The Seven Minutes. The contents of the nonexistent book, according to Wallace, consisted of "the thoughts in one woman's head during seven minutes of copulation with an unnamed man."

10. Upon the Distinction Between the Ashes of the Various Tobaccos, by Sherlock Holmes

This distinctive monograph by the distinguished detective was probably published between 1880 and 1890. It was Holmes's faithful companion, Dr. John H. Watson, who first spoke of it.

***********
Can you think of more? Tell me! Notice that THE BOOKS OF LISTS makes no distinction between titles mentioned in fictional works, and, as in the case of Dickens, actual physical objects created to be clever or to hide things.

Perhaps now is a good time to declare my intention to recreate THE BOOK OF LISTS exactly as David Wallechinsky, Irving Wallace, and Amy Wallace wrote it? I mean, c'mon Borges, anybody could channel Cervantes for a time, but try cycling back to 1977 and becoming not only one, but three authors/editors. On the plus side, think of all the supercool '70s fashion I'd get to wear.

Coming soon: 10 Real People Who Inspired Great Characters in Fiction, and 15 People Who Became Words!

Envelope King

2008-04-16T00:35:00.000-04:00

My friend Joel, and his friend Ben, have a show in Philadelphia! Shall I casually mention here that I have an early, original Chartkoff around the apartment in NY, on an envelope that contained a card for some bygone birthday of mine? Now I'm wondering: how much I can get for it?

There are lots of words in Joel's drawings, which I love. The words are tiny and not so obvious, but language definitely undergirds his fantastical structures.

Yay, Joel! I'm sorry I haven't called you yet.

Lists. Life.

2008-04-11T22:39:00.000-04:00

About a month or so ago, two boxes full of books mysteriously appeared on the path behind our apartment. I was far too lazy and cynical to deign to have a look. "There's probably nothing good in there, or if there was, it's alreay been picked over. People only get rid of clunkers, or Tom Clancy novels." The boyfriend, however, enthusiastically walked the ten or so yards to check it out, and came back with... nothing very good. Except for a Penguin Classics edition of Voltaire's Candide, and the #1 bestseller of 1977: The People's Almanac presents THE BOOK OF LISTS, by David Wallechinsky, Irving Wallace, and Amy Wallace.

Boyfriend and I have been reading Candide together before bed. Really, what usually happens is that he starts reading to me, I doze off, and then the next night we're at Chapter XVI: "The adventures of our two travellers with two girls and two monkeys, and what happened to them amongst the savage Oreillons," and I'm totally lost. And we have to go back and reread the chapter before. And I fall asleep. It's a slim volume, but we'll probably be at it for a while.

Now that I've gotten my hands on it, I realize that THE BOOK OF LISTS is way too stimulating for bedtime reading. The titles alone are enough to get my heart racing: 8 Remarkable Escapes from Devil's Island; 10 Lethal or Incapacitating Durgs Stored by the CIA; 10 Birds That Could Not or Cannot Fly; 15 Prehistoric Things Alive Today; 15 Most Dangerous Airlines; 8 People Who Have Taken Heroin (famous people, that is, not just a list of random kids in Seattle); 8 Cases of Spontaneous Combustion; 8 Celebrities Who Have Had Vasectomies; The 10 Most Common Methods of Suicide; and, one of my faves: 15 Famous Events That Happened in the Bathtub.

The lists are arranged by topic: Chapter 11,"The Literary Life," includes 15 Authors Who Wrote Best-Sellers in Prison and 10 Memorable Books That Never Existed. Looking for 10 Eyewitness Accounts of Levitation? Find it in Chapter 19, breezily entitled "Ah, Sweet Mysteries of Life." As if this wasn't enough, intersperced are subjective lists from notable personages, like Jeane Dixon's 10 Greatest Psychics of All Time, Dr. Margaret Mead's 10 Best Anthropology Books or Studies, Arthur Koestler's 10 Favorite Dinner Guests From All History, and Clifford Irving's 10 Best Forgers of All Time. I'm dizzy already, assiduously mining the contents for choice nuggets to share here with you. From the year my brother was born.

THE BOOK OF LISTS has actually inspired us to start our own list, called "Things in the Road, 2008." A compilation of things we've heard reported to be on various roads in the Bay Area via the KQED traffic report. So far:

a rooster
something dumped from a truck
a body
baked goods
a swarm of bees
buckets
a chair
rolls of insulation

It's a casual, non-scientific sort of list; we add to it when hear something good.

In other news: I have a interview for a job at this place.

In yet other news: I've cooked the rice, boyfriend is chopping and stir-frying the vegetables. As I type, I whisper: what am I telling myself that isn't true? Or: what is the truth I'm not telling?

Books, Bodies, Stage

2008-04-09T21:35:00.000-04:00

I'm on a quest for pre mid-20th-century images of naked or undressed women -- women en déshabillé -- reading, or just lounging with books in the vicinity. (And if there also happens to be another version where she's making tea, that's even better!)

For thrills, check out this essay by William B. Warner of UC Santa Barbara. Here's his analysis of the two paintings above:

For critics of early modern novel reading were not just concerned about mimicry of a novel’s action; they were also alarmed about the perverse displacement by which the reader, through the repetitive effects of absorptive reading for pleasure, conducted in freedom and solitude, (in other words in the sort of autonomous erotic reverie the rococo encourages) might become a compulsively reading body. In a painting entitled "Reclining Nude" (figure 18; 1751; Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz Museum), Boucher uses another of Louis XV's mistresses, Louise O'Murphy as a model. Here, the open book to the left of the nude woman reclining on the couch suggests that the equivocal potential of reading novels for pleasure arises in part from a shift in location: one may read these books in the intimate undress of the boudoir. The novel in this setting functions as a stimulant, like tea in the samovar, which has replaced the novel in this rendering of the same model in the same pose in a painting of the same title (figure 19; 1752; Munich, Alte Pinokotk).

Writing about writing about sex (and gender)

2008-03-18T00:57:00.000-04:00

It's not like I'm, um, obsessed with sex or anything. I just lust after the well-written critical review.

Also in this month's Bookslut, an interview with Kate Kolby about her long poem, Unbecoming Behavior, a "revisionist biography of Jane Bowles."

Without going into theory, it was performance that I was interested in -- different kinds of performance and how they relate to both biological and constructed categories of identity. There are several referential layers of performance and theater in the poem. I’ve spent a lot of time on stages in my life, and I put in some of the residuals.

TV! About books! On the internet!

2008-03-17T16:11:00.000-04:00

Titlepage. tv!

Now I'll get even less work done.

Chanced upon

2008-03-14T20:42:00.000-04:00

-Kenzaburo Oe talks about writing first drafts in the midst of his family and the influence of Edward Said on his work. (Via Maud.)

-I'm particularly enamoured with Jill Alexander Essbaum’s “On Reading Poorly Transcribed Erotica”: “She stood before him wearing only pantries / and he groped for her Volvo under the gauze.” But seriously, writing about sex is hard.

-I'll get to see puppets while I'm on the East Coast! Lots of them.

-Finally, I have to thank the esteemed scholars on the medieval religion listserv to which I subscribe for getting me through the dark times. Short of funny poems about sex, nothing makes me smile so much as a pair of wacky Norwegians. (Also amusing is the heated debate over the English translation of this sketch in the comments section.)

I am that lesser god

2008-03-13T12:08:00.000-04:00

I suppose that much of the purpose of this year-off is to help me figure out what kind of a writer I am. I suppose this blog is meant to facilitate that as well; here, I have the luxury of writing absolutely anything I want. Perhaps I already knew that I'm a critic. But perhaps part of me has been holding out hope that there's a brilliant, still nascent, storyteller within me: a George Eliot, a Philip Pullman, even a writer of novels-in-miniature like Alice Munro -- a writer who envisions soaring plot structures, who sculpts out of thin air nicely detailed, resonating characters to move about on her sturdy scaffolding. Or a writer with an uncanny percipience about our emotional lives, who reveals the inner life with such simplicity and ease it's like turning a sock inside out. But a revelation so thrilling, so devastating, it's also like turning our insides -- our lovely, bloody viscera -- out, with a single sweep of the knife.

Yet when I look over this little blog-in-progress, the best writing I've done so far was inspired by something I read or I watched. Part of this may be the habit of four years of graduate school. But I cannot escape the fact that I think, I process, as I read. It's almost as if I need another voice -- even if it's one on the page -- I need someone talking to me, in order to create. I think in dialogue, usually with the written word.

This doesn't seem so remarkable when I remember that much of my artistic and intellectual life has been shaped by the theater, a place where (certain playwrights withstanding) one almost always works collaboratively, taking what someone else has made and translating it, rethinking and revising. Remembering this makes me less unhappy that I can't quite create out of thin air. I say with pride that I am a lesser god. A critic.

George Steiner writes in Language and Silence: "The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men's genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T. S. Eliot propaganda. Is there anyone but Sainte-Beuve who belong to literature purely as a critic? It is not criticism that makes the language live."

I'll take that last sentence as a challenge. Can I write criticism that makes the language live? I suspect G.S. himself thinks he did just that.

In other news: I've been reading Naguib Mahfouz's Palace Walk, slowly. Mostly at bedtime, as my days are filled with job searches and phenomenology. The slow read meshes well with the meandering pace of his prose; I am dipping in and out of his detailed world, letting myself be suffused with the kind of pleasure of identification Hélène Cixous describes in La Jeune Née: "One never reads except by identification. But what kind? When I say identification, I do not say loss of self. I become, I inhabit. I enter. Inhabiting someone at that moment I can feel myself traversed by that person's initiatives and actions." Moving from one character to the next, entering and being entered. Peeking down at the street from behind the latticework with the women, roaming the city with the men, glancing up at shadows of forms on the balcony. Sometimes hovering above it all, surveying the scene, drinking its scent and noise.

In yet other news: I sent an email to my doctoral program today, replying to a question about whether I'd be returning in the fall...

Getting naked with my boyfriend... and my best friend...

2008-03-12T14:47:00.000-04:00

A lovely extended weekend was had by my little crew here in the Bay Area, a place I have to admit I'm loving way more than I thought I could. It started with tasty Lanesplitter pizza and dancing at The White Horse Inn, possibly the second-oldest gay bar in the U.S.

Then, automatons and penny peepshows at the Musee Mechanique, including my favorite, pictured here. Feed it a dime and look through the viewfinder, and a little plastic doll in a seersucker suit appears, with a painting of a harem pasted behind him. Apparently, married women (represented by that quintessential everywoman, Virginia Woolf??) cannot avoid that their husbands will want to keep concubines. Hmm. Probably true.

Then it was on to Harbin Hot Springs and some clothing- optional relaxation. Best friend, boyfriend, and I all lying naked in the sun, warming our skin and listening to the birds. Moving between the sauna, the hot pool, and the cold plunge. A really sensual and blissful experience, made even better by the fact that boyfriend and best friend were so cool and nonchalant about the whole thing. Also enjoyable: making fun of the other wacky naked folks on the drive home.

Later, green tea in the Hagiwara Japanese Tea Garden and a stroll throught the Haight. And more outdoor exploring at the Tilden Regional Park Botanic Garden and Sibley Volcanic Regional Preserve.

Oh, I know I have to say it: I'm sorry for slighting you, Bay Area. You're closer to my heart than ever.

If you can't be with the one you love...

2008-03-04T23:06:00.000-05:00

I'm feeling bad about my attitude towards the Bay Area. Nothing it can do is good enough for me -- it's always getting compared, unfavorably, to New York. The pizza's bad, there's not enough theater, it's too spread out, suburban, engendering feelings of isolation. It's lacking NY's edge, its je ne sais quoi. Poor Bay Area. If only I loved you like I do NY.

But I'm trying. In the spirit of appreciating the one you're with, I'm proposing an occasional segment (is this the right word or do I listen to too much NPR?) in which I extol the virtues of the Bay Area. Or at least talk about some of the good stuff I'm getting to experience while living here. And there's quite a lot.

First up is: The Women's Community Clinic.

Totally free. Really -- it's absolutely free for women without insurance or with limited coverage. I called two months ago, in desperation, suffering from a UTI that made peeing feel like a particularly stinging and all too frequently recurring punishment from God. They saw me the very next day. After dutifully straining to pee in the cup, and a long wait, the hip young woman doctor gave me the antibiotics and even threw in some muscle relaxers that turned my pee orange but allowed me to sleep through the night for the first time in weeks.

I went back a few days ago for an annual exam (there's a couple-month waiting list for these, but if you have particular concerns or health issues they can often get you in faster), and everyone was just as kind and friendly as before. I felt oh so SF-progressive as I perused the posters for tantric yoga workshops and birthing retreats on the bulletin board. And I got to take home a goody bag! I'd tell you more about how the boyfriend and I have been enjoying these goodies, but the rest of this paragraph has been edited to conform to my own advice.

Maybe it's the special extras like this that makes the Women's Community Clinic so lovely to me.

And that it operates under the "revolutionary" concept of free healthcare for those who need it.

Couches, and other little reasons to be happy

2008-02-29T21:26:00.000-05:00

There's a new warmth in the air here; a summer-time humidity behind the chill that lingers even as dusk descends.

My brother's here to visit, and my best friend will be, again!, next week.

And... we have a couch! Granted, it's more like a toy couch, really. A long-lost relative of the toy car, a tiny red Ford Festiva that I drove about in, perilously, for four years, making countless journeys from NY to Philadelphia on the New Jersey Turnpike. Zipping by the tractor-trailers in what must have been a vehicle ten times smaller, if not more. Like riding a bike on the freeway.

Now I'm the lucky owner of a little red toy couch. But it's comfy, and most importantly, it fit through the door -- unlike its predecessor, an unfortunate, big, fluffy, blue couch that was banished to the basement.

Like the little toy car, the little toy couch was CHEAP. But unlike with the toy car, one doesn't feel the need to strap on a helmet.

Puppets united forever

2008-02-27T17:14:00.000-05:00

Puppetmastaz, an all-puppet hip-hop group from Germany:

The images in this video need some serious unpacking; for example, what to make of the dancing women as large marionettes, then as small figures stuck in what looks like a little green inflatable wrestling ring. But for now I'll simply juxtapose them (weirdly, I know) with these quotes from Bachelard:

"But sometimes the transactions between small and large multiply, have repercussions. Then, when a familiar image grows to the dimension of the sky, one is suddenly struck by the impression that, correlatively, familiar objects become miniatures of a world. Macrocosm and microcosm are correlated.... In reality, as we shall see later, especially when we examine images of immenseness, tiny and immense are compatible. A poet is always ready to see large and small.... If a poet looks through a microscope or a telescope, he always sees the same thing."

Btw, I found Puppetmastaz through Pupcrit, a puppet criticism listserv. I've endured endless teasing from the boyfriend about being on this list (it amuses him to no end that such a thing exists), and honestly, there's not too much of what I'd call "criticism" happening there. But occasionally someone will point you to something interesting. In this case, it was Mathieu René, a puppeteer from Montreal.

Um, yeah, watching videos on YouTube is relevant to my research

2008-02-25T18:35:00.000-05:00

Beck did a whole tour with them, Lily Allen has one playing her li'le brother Alfie, and I just recently saw this video from my beloved Beth Orton:

(I'm kind of partial to the rabbit puppet, but then I've always had a thing for drummers.)

And for good measure, check out the performing objects in what I think should be renamed "Beth meets Bachelard."

Bachelard on "like" and "as"

2008-02-24T22:40:00.000-05:00

Because nothing makes a blog more interesting to potential readers than thoughts on grammar pulled from the writings of an obscure French phenomenologist. I do wonder, though, what words he was referring to in the orginal French, as I've always thought "comme" can be translated as both.

"But a phenomenologist's projects are more ambitious: he wants to live as the great dreamers of images lived before him. And since I have underlined certain words, I shall ask the reader to note that the word as is stronger than the word like, which as it happens, would omit a phenomenological nuance. The word like imitates whereas the word as implies that one becomes the person who dreams the daydream."

Wardrobes

2008-02-23T00:56:00.000-05:00

"Wardrobes with their shelves, desks with their drawers, and chests with their false bottoms are veritable organs of the secret psychological life. Indeed, without these 'objects' and a few others in equally high favor, our intimate life would lack a model of intimacy. They are hybrid objects, subject objects. Like us, through us and for us, they have a quality of intimacy.

... But the real wardrobe is not an everyday piece of furniture. It is not opened every day, and so, like a heart that confides in no one, the key is not on the door.

... If we give objects the friendship they should have, we do not open a wardrobe without a slight start. Beneath its russet wood, a wardrobe is a very white almond. To open it, is to experience an event of whiteness."

- The Poetics of Space

This passage could be criticized for its relentless universalizing, its reinforcing of a stable subject, to say nothing of what might be made of an "event of whiteness." But for all its faults, phenomenology is a theory of poets -- or would-be poets. So I can't help but savor the language. And quote it here for you.

Melancholy Styles

2008-02-22T13:47:00.000-05:00

Sometimes a girl feels ~~like~~ she's said too much.

Sometimes a girl feels as if she's said too much.

(From Chapter IV: Words and Expressions Commonly Misused)

Like. Not to be used for the conjunction as. Like governs nouns and pronouns; before phrases and clauses the equivalent word is as.

We spent the evening like in the old days. / We spent the evening as in the old days.
Chloë smells good, like a pretty girl should. / Chloë smells good, as a pretty girl should.

The use of like for as has its defenders; they argue that any usage that achieves currency becomes valid automatically. This, they say, is the way the language is formed. It is and it isn't. An expression sometimes merely enjoys a vogue, much as an article of apparel does. Like has long been widely misused by the illiterate; lately it has been taken up by the knowing and the well-informed, who find it catchy, or liberating, and who use it as though they were slumming. If every word or device that achieved currency were immediately authenticated, simply on the ground of popularity, the language would be as chaotic as a ball game with no foul lines. For the student, perhaps the most useful things to know about like is that most carefuly edited publications regard its use before phrases and clauses as simple error.

(Oh, S&W, your attempt to keep the reins on the English language is poignant, really. And, like, so futile. But I love you anyway. Even though you're sexist as all hell.)

"What did you expect?"

2008-02-20T02:18:00.000-05:00

I didn't expect the fog, lingering in the morning over the bay, erasing the water, hovering against an invisible wall at the shoreline. I didn't expect a winter that looks and feels like fall, then like late spring. I didn't expect the chill. Or the bad takeout. Or the ants that invade when it rains. I didn't expect to stumble upon a dear old friend.

I didn't expect the fierceness and majesty of the Pacific.

And I didn't expect to miss New York like this.

**************

In other news, I've been sacked! The nerve!

Sunday... Excerpts

2008-02-11T00:36:00.000-05:00

From Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space (translated by Maria Jolas):

But over and beyond our memories, the house we were born in is physically inscribed in us. It is a group of organic habits. After twenty years, in spite of all the other anonymous stairways, we would recapture the reflexes of the "first stairway," we would not stumble on that rather high step. The house's entire being would open up, faithful to our own being. We would push the door that creaks with the same gesture, we would find our way in the dark to the distant attic. The feel of the tiniest latch has remained in our hands.

The successive houses in which we have lived have no doubt made our gestures commonplace. But we are very surprised, when we return to the old house, after an odyssey of many years, to find that the most delicate gestures, the earliest gestures suddenly come alive, are still faultless. In short, the house we were born in has engraved within us the hierarchy or the various functions of inhabiting. We are the diagram of the functions of inhabiting that particular house, and all the other houses are but variations on a fundamental theme. The word habit is too worn a word to express this passionate liaison of our bodies, which do not forget, with an unforgettable house.

Commentary forthcoming (as I get a better handle on phenomenology...)

Sunday Styles

2008-01-21T00:14:00.000-05:00

I like to joke occasionally about how in college I spent four years running around a dilapidated classroom like a moron, pretending to be various barnyard and jungle animals. Sadly, this is not entirely untrue. I went to an "acting school" that was housed in a condemned building, and "movement class" (the scare quotes ARE intended!) seemed for the most part to consist of scampering about in loose-fitting clothing while our "teacher" yelled instructions like: "You're walking on air. Now you're made of lead. Now you're underwater..." and we dutifully attempted to move our bodies to accomodate whatever law of physics was being reevaluated at the moment.

Nevertheless, I learned many valuable things in acting school. Many of those things were about myself. For instance, I learned from one acting teacher that I should cultivate more mystery in my everyday life (I was an annoyingly earnest, honest, romantic young thing back then, so this makes some sense). One of the ways she suggested I do this was to go into department stores and talk to the sales staff in foreign accents. She also intimated that there was no need to reveal everything, that I should have some secrets. I had no significant secrets at the time, but the idea of having them seemed glamourous and also terribly far outside my league.

S&W suggest something similiar for our prose:

11. Do not explain too much.

It is seldom advisable to tell all. Be sparing, for instance, in the use of adverbs after "he said," "she replied," and the like: "he said consolingly"; "she replied grumblingly." Let the conversation itself disclose the speaker's manner or condition. Dialogue heavily weighted with adverbs after the attributive verb is cluttery and annoying. Inexperienced writers not only overwork their adverbs, but load their attributives with explanatory verbs: "he consoled," "she congratulated." They do this, apparently, in the belief that the word said is always in need of support, or because they have been told to do it by experts in the art of bad writing.

(Is anyone else struck by the marvelous word "cluttery" here?)

Ch-ch-changes; or: why the hell not have Thursday Styles once in a while?

2008-01-17T15:41:00.000-05:00

I've been pretty quiet the past few weeks.

I've been thinking.

Spent time with my best friend, who came to visit last weekend all the way from Philadelphia. We drove down the winding-est street in San Francisco, walked through a forest of the tallest trees on earth. (It was superlative!) We talked. She gives honest, smart, heartfelt advice, which it turns out was just what I needed.

And I've been reading Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird and falling in love with her. Thanking her a million times in my head. Mostly for not concealing any of her messiness. And for demonstrating that one can take a good, hard look at one's mess, with reverence, and then describe it, engage with it, in stunning prose.

For simply admitting, with her inimitable, earthy grace, that she's messy, fucked-up.

Things with me are messy. They just are. There's a lot of tidying up I need to do. And then there's this kind of permanent disorganization, this "I wish I had a truckload of funky Swiss-designed wardrobes and sleek dresser drawers to pile all this stuff in, but even then it would be utterly unsortable." There are some things one doesn't put away into drawers, ever, some tangled things that never get sorted properly.

Mismatched socks that one just resolves to incorporate into one's daily landscape, because the only other option is to throw them out.

Happily, all this thinking I've been doing these past few weeks has resulted in a profound (if I may be excused the hyperbole), deep-seated clarity. I said something very important to someone I love, something I was scared to say. Something I recognized as the truth but that left me vulnerable, exposing a tender and sheltered place. And it was liberating. Regardless of the outcome, I feel both stronger and lighter.

I've made a plan for writing my thesis and finishing my incomplete papers, a realistic one (and although its realisticness has not prevented me from abandoning it twice already this week, this has more to do with being off of my thyroid medication than lack of committment; see "tidying up I need to do" above). Another realization: I do not want to let my anxieties over writing, over something I rationally know I do quite well, to force me to compromise my goals or to cancel out four years of good, hard academic work.

So I'm in the midst of making a few modest adjustments for 2008. I have the feeling it's going to be a great year -- a miraculous one, even -- but I have lots to do. Sadly, I'll be here less often, for the most part only on Sundays. But that's OK. I know you two will get by.

And of course I can't promise to always have gems like this, but I'll do my best:

(From Chapter IV: Words and Expressions Commonly Misused)

Clever. Note that this word means one thing when applied to men, another when applied to horses. A clever horse is a good-natured one, not an ingenious one.

Sunday, Corporate Style

2007-12-31T01:02:00.000-05:00

About a week ago I started my first corporate job in over ten years. At a brokerage firm. In the accounting department. A job that starts at 7 AM. My title: Junior Accounting Clerk.

I'm not kidding.

While the above might sound hideous, for a number of reasons I really don't mind it. I decided before I moved that I didn't care what kind of a job I would get in California as it would only be temporary (I know, famous last words). Besides, the job pays well. The people seem nice. I have basically no responsibilities beyond proofreading tedious letters about tax forms and making photocopies. This leaves my mind free to concentrate on completing the academic work outstanding from last year, which is why I took a year off and ostensibly why I'm in CA in the first place (because for some reason it wasn't enough simply to take a break from graduate school, I also had to move 3000 miles away).

This is not to say I haven't had a few low moments whilst standing in front of the copier. Moments in which I've had to repeat to myself: "This job does not define you. This job does not define you." Moments in which I've pretended I'm an intellectual selflessly throwing her lot in with the workers à la Simone Weil just to make myself feel better.

Moments I've stared at a memo taped to the copyroom wall, the last line of which reads,

"And when in doubt... ESCALATE!"

and thought: I'm in enemy territory here. I'm in the land where nouns are forced, against their will, to become verbs. A place where words mysteriously lose their meanings, only to gain new ones that are twisted, evil, and wrong.

I'm where people end emails with the phrase: "Thanks in advance for that."

(Excerpted from) 21. Prefer the standard to the offbeat.

Another segment of society that has constructed a language of its own is business. The businessman says that ink erasers are in short supply, that he has updated the next shipment of these erasers, and that he will finalize his recommendations at the next meeting of the board. He is speaking a language that is familiar and dear to him. Its portentous nouns and verbs invest ordinary events with high adventure; the executive walks among ink erasers, caparisoned like a knight. We should tolerate him -- every man of spirit wants to ride a white horse. The only question is whether his vocabulary is helpful to ordinary prose. Usually, the same ideas can be expressed less formidably, if one makes the effort. A good many of the special words of business seem designed more to express the user's dreams than to express his precise meaning. Not all such words, of course, can be dismissed summarily; indeed, no word in the language can be dismissed offhand by anyone who has a healthy curiosity. Update isn't a bad word; in the right setting it is useful. In the wrong setting, though, it is destructive, and the trouble with adopting coinages too quickly is that they will bedevil one by insinuating themselves where they do not belong. This may sound like rhetorical snobbery, or plain stuffiness; but the writer will discover, in the course of his work, that the setting of a word is just as restrictive as the setting of a jewel. The general rule here is to prefer the standard. Finalize, for instance, is not standard; it is special, and it is a peculiarly fuzzy and silly word. Does it mean "terminate," or does it mean "put into final form"? One can't be sure, really, what it means, and one gets the impression that the person using it doesn't know, either, and doesn't want to know.

I wonder: will I be finalized if I tape this rule to the copyroom wall?

Merry Christmas!

2007-12-25T00:45:00.001-05:00

Especially to those I love and miss on the East Coast. Christmas is CA is great, but it's just not the same without you.

A (fast and dirty) Sunday Styles...

2007-12-24T01:10:00.000-05:00

...that reveals both the empassioned stringency and true geeky humor of S&W.

8. Avoid the use of qualifiers.

Rather, very, little, pretty -- these are the leeches that infest the pond of prose, sucking the blood of words. The constant use of the adjective little (except to indicate size) is particularly debilitating; we should all try to do a little better, we should all be very watchful of this rule, for it is a rather important one and we are pretty sure to violate it now and then.

Better late than never...

2007-12-20T02:00:00.000-05:00

Ugh. It's difficult enough for me to keep up with current cultural events, let alone to try to post about them on Gogolgirl. For example, I've been wanting for weeks to write about the release of the film version of Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass, or rather to use the release to talk about the books (including the rest of the His Dark Materials trilogy) and compare them to another book for "Young Adults" that I read recently, Markus Zusak's The Book Thief. That post is coming.

First, here's a taste of what some Christian critics (albeit, the relatively more rational ones) have been saying about the film. Although I have no moral objections whatsoever to the books or the film (only aesthetic and critical comments to make later), I do think it's interesting to delve a little deeper into debates such as these. If only to be able to articulate one's own position more clearly. I also have to admit to some lingering fascination with the evangelical Christian worldview, as I was a confessed and practicing born-again Christian during my college years. I "fell away," as they say, but there's still something that keeps me riveted, intrigued. And bothered.

So, for those who are interested:

Peter T. Chattaway's review in Christianity Today

A Christian film reviewer, Jeffrey Overstreet, answers questions about the film.

Alan Jacobs criticizes Pullman's sentimental binaries in this reprinted essay about the books from 2000.

And some other talk about the film:

BBC News article about Pullman's response to his (religious) critics.

"Religious controversy aside, this lavish adaptation of Philip Pullman's book is its own kind of hell."

And an enthusiastic review in one of my new hometown's papers.

My problem with most of the writing on the film I've come across (perhaps Alan Jacob's essay aside) is that the question of whether the books are "anti-Christian" or "anti-religion" never seems to evolve into a more nuanced analysis of what kind of understanding of the universe Pullman is actually exploring/promoting. To my view, there is a distinct and compelling metaphysics that he's investigating. It's flawed and contradictory, but with surprisingly Christian resonances.

So, I'm working on a post in which we, together, you and I, will endeavor to think about kids, death, and the cosmos through the Pullman trilogy and Zusak's The Book Thief. Stay tuned: it's gonna be great. And just in time for the holidays!

(A rather interrogatory) Sunday Styles

2007-12-16T21:54:00.001-05:00

A rule that reminds us that good writing used to be a more muscular affair, one in which the physical shape and texture of the manuscript were transformed with revision. In which our hands experienced the chill heft of the scissors, our fingers struggled with slivers of paper and tape. Do we in fact revise much more now in the era of easy backspace and delete? And are we therefore better writers? Or are there exquisite sentences and structures, never-to-be-born, that our prose suffers the lack of?

If writing is a form of thinking, as S&W claim, how does our thinking change when we are able to erase and replace our words in an instant? Are we simply faster? Or have we lost something significant? A larger contemplation, a deeper committment. Or rather are we freer and more precise in our expression? Does the manner in which many of us write today (at a computer screen, with a word-processing program) necessarily render our thinking more mutable and open-ended because it is physically less burdensome for us to revise our thoughts? Does our sense of alterability vary with the way we write?

Finally: do you (anyone?) still revise and rewrite this way?

5. Revise and rewrite.

Revising is part of writing. Few writers are so expert that they can produce what they are after on the first try. Quite often the writer will discover, on examining the completed work, that there are serious flaws in the arrangement of the material, calling for transpositions. When this is the case, he can save himself much labor and time by using scissors on his manuscript, cutting it to pieces and fitting the pieces together in a better order. If the work merely needs shortening, a pencil in the most useful tool; but if it needs rearranging, or stirring up, scissors should be brought into play. Do not be afraid to seize whatever you have written and cut it to ribbons; it can always be restored to its original condition in the morning, if that course seems best. Remember, it is no sign of weakness or defeat that your manuscript ends up in need of major surgery. This is a common occurence in all writing, and among the best writers.

(I do get a kick out of the reassurance that it is no sign of weakness if my manuscript is not perfect at first-go. Happens to the best of us, pal.)

What does this cat have to do with writing, religion, and/or puppets?

2007-12-14T02:28:00.000-05:00

Nothing. Nothing at all.

Sunday Styles

2007-12-09T19:32:00.000-05:00

Proposed as weekly entry in which we turn to the pithy wisdom and benevolent rigor of Mssrs. Strunk, Jr. and White to refine our prose. (Even if we find their style a tad bit, um, sexist. Even in the third edition.) You can find the original, even pithier, 1918 edition here.

1. Place yourself in the background.

Write in a way that draws the reader's attention to the sense and substance of the writing, rather than to the mood and temper of the author. If the writing is solid and good, the mood and temper of the writer will eventually be revealed, and not at the expense of the work. Therefore, the first piece of advice is this: to achieve style, begin by affecting none -- that is, place yourself in the background. A careful and honest writer does not need to worry about style. As he becomes proficient in the use of the language, his style will emerge, because he himself will emerge, and when this happens he will find it increasingly easy to break through the barriers that separate him from other minds, other hearts -- which is, of course, the purpose of writing, as well as its principal reward. Fortunately, the act of composition, or creation, disciplines the mind; writing is one way to go about thinking, and the practice and habit of writing not only drain the mind but supply it too.

In other news: there IS good pizza in California! It's New York-style, of course.

Endings and Beginnings

2007-12-07T19:48:00.000-05:00

A few days ago I found out that the author and critic Elizabeth Hardwick had died. A founder of The New York Review of Books and a fierce excoriator of mediocre book-reviewing, she was 91. Had she passed away a year ago, I would have scarcely noted it. But this summer I got to know her, intimately. Susan Sontag introduced us.

That is to say: at the beginning of the summer I finally got around to reading Where the Stress Falls, a collection of Sontag's essays that had been sitting on my bookshelf for some time. For a few years, in fact. In fact, I remember quite clearly when I bought it: it was a gray, wintry, late afternoon and I was hanging around a little bookstore in West Philadelphia waiting to meet an old friend when he got off of work. I was visiting from New York, home for the holidays after my first semester in graduate school. We would have tea, as usual, and this old friend -- whom I was convinced I was still just a wee tiny bit in love with -- would tell me he was getting married.

But I digress. In the eponymous essay of the collection, Sontag introduces us to some of her beloved authors, specifically those who've penned books of a certain kind: the first-person narrative, the novel semi-autobiographical -- or novels which by all accounts look and behave as such. Not memoirs. No, novels. With narrators who excavate, construct, and offer up memories; who observe, report; narrators who stand apart from their stories yet still quite near to them, positioning themselves, precariously, just within the borders of their fictive world. Peeking over the fence at us. Hardwick's novel, Sleepless Nights, was among these.

Thus I made her acquaintance. Because what Sontag did so well in the essay was to introduce. She sought to get us talking. "I'd like you to meet Elizabeth Hardwick. She's written this important book," (if it was important to Sontag then it was Important), "and here is some exquisite description and analysis of her style. But now I shall let her speak to you herself." And so she included generous, well-chosen quotes that had the effect of making me feel both that I did in fact know Elizabeth Hardwick and that I must read her again at my earliest opportunity. I must get to know her more deeply. A few days later, I'd gone to the NYPL and snatched Sleepless Nights off the shelf. Then, The Ghostly Lover. Then, Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature (Joan Didion's written an introduction to it that you can read here). I'm still aching to get my hands on more of her criticism.

And so in remembrance, I reprint here a long passage from my introduction to Hardwick. Sontag's essay is, after all, also about beginnings and endings. What better way to observe both?

"Actually, secretiveness -- which might be called reticence, or discretion, or withholding -- is essential to keeping these anomalous works of fiction from tipping over into autobiography or memoir. You can use your life, but only a little, and at an oblique angle. We know that narrator of Sleepless Nights draws on a real life. Kentucky is the birthplace of the writer named Elizabeth Hardwick, who did meet Billie Holliday soon after coming to live in Manhattan in the 1940s, did spend a year in Holland in the early 1950s, did have a great friend named M--, did live in Boston, has had a house in Maine, has lived for many years on the West Side of Manhattan, and so on. All this figures in her novel, as glimpses -- the telling designed as much to conceal, to put readers off the track, as to reveal.

To edit your life is to save it, for fiction, for yourself. Being identified with your life as others see it may mean that you come eventually to see it that way, too. The can only be a hindrance to memory (and, presumably, to invention).

There is more freedom to be elliptical and to abridge when the memories are not set down in chronological order. The memories -- fragments of memories, transformed -- emerge as chains of luxuriant notations that wind around, and conceal, the kernel of story. And Hardwick's art of acute compression and decentering is simply too fast-paced to tell only a single story at a time; too fast, sometimes, to relate any story at all, especially where one is expected. For instance, there is much about marriage, notably a long-running soap opera starring the philandering husband in a Dutch couple, friends of the narrator and her then husband when they lived in Holland. Her own marriage is announced thus on the fifth page: "I was then a 'we'... Husband-wife: not a new move to be discovered in that strong classical tradition." The ensuing silence about the "we" -- a declaration of independence that has to be intrinsic to the fashioning of the authoritative, questioning "I" capable of writing Sleepless Nights -- lasts until a sentence some fifty pages later: "I am alone here in New York, no long a we. Years, decades even, have passed." Maybe books devoted to exalted standards of prose will always be reproached for not telling readers enough.

But it's not an autobiography, not even of this "Elizabeth," who is made out of materials harvested from, but not identical with, Elizabeth Hardwick. It's about what Elizabeth saw, what she thought about others. Its power is linked with its refusals, and its distinctive palette of sympathies. Her assessments of long-term sufferers in lousy marriages are pitiless, but she is kind to Main Street, touched by inept wrongdoers and class traitors and self-important failures. Memory conjures up a procession of injured souls: foolish, deceiving, needy men, some briefly lovers, who have been much indulged (by themselves and by women) and come to no good end, and humble, courteous, simple women in archaic roles who have known only hard times and been indulged by nobody. There are desperately loving evocations of the narrator's mother, and several meanderingly sustained, Melanctha-like portraits of women who are invoked like muses:

When I think of cleaning women with unfair diseases I think of you, Josette. When I must iron or use a heavy pot for cooking, I think of you, Ida. When I think of deafness, heart disease and languages I cannot speak, I think of you, Angela. Great washtubs full of sheets remind me of more than one.

The work of memory, this memory, is choosing, most emphatically, to think about women, especially women serving out lives of hard labor, whom exquisitely written books customarily ignore. Justice requires that they be remembered. Pictured. Summoned to the feast of the imagination and of language.

Of course, you summon ghosts at your peril. The sufferings of others can bleed into your soul. You try to protect yourself. Memory is inventive. Memory is a performance. Memory invites itself, and is hard to turn away. Hence the ravishing insight that gives the book its title: that remembering is intimately connected with insomnia. Memories are what make it hard for you to sleep. Memories procreate. And the uninvited memories always seem to the point. (As in fiction: whatever is included is connected.) The boldness and virtuosity of Hardwick's associativeness intoxicate.

On the last page, in the peroration with which Sleepless Nights concludes, the narrator observes, in a final summative delirium:

Mother, the reading glasses and the assignation near the clammy faces, so gray, of the intense church ladies. And then a lifetime with its mound of men climbing on and off.

The torment of personal relations. Nothing new there except in the disguise, and in the escape on the wings of adjectives. Sweet to be pierced by daggers at the end of paragraphs.

Nothing new except language, the ever found. Cauterizing the torment of personal relations with hot lexical choices, jumpy punctuation, mercurial sentence rhythms. Devising more subtle, more engorged ways of knowing, of sympathizing, of keeping at bay. It's a matter of adjectives. It's where the stress falls."

******

Little did I realize, but Hardwick may have been inhabiting my blog unawares, in the shape of a minor mystery. Scroll to the bottom for the revelation.

Reading a short story by Murakami is like...

2007-12-05T13:54:00.000-05:00

...undressing your lover for the first time. You marvel at her luminous skin, the fluid way her limbs part for you. Her compact body is complex yet all of a piece. She speaks to you in seductive, yet strangely comforting, tones.

Then one of three things happen:

1. You turn her over, gently, and discover an out-of-place appendage or, perhaps, a little transistor embedded in her flesh. You think, but you're not quite sure, that a tiny voice is emanating from that curious spot -- a voice you can't quite place, but which you suspect might be that of someone you once knew. In college.

2. She suddently vanishes. Into thin air. You spend months searching for her, convinced several times that you've caught sight of her near a train station or a bus depot, only to be mistaken. You are consumed by longing, regret.

3. You begin to make love, and your lover's body, still small beneath your hands, at the same time begins to expand, to reach out and engulf you, resonating and vibrating with such sad but delicious meanings. They wash over you in shivering waves.

*******

Afterwards, a coda: you sip tea, perhaps smoke a cigarette, pause and reflect. Although hungry, thinking about spaghetti maybe, you are still. Satisfied.

On funniness (or the lack thereof)

2007-12-04T11:34:00.000-05:00

For days I've been imagining my friend Joel's response to my fledgling blog (again, an old friend, whose musical stylings can be found here.)

"It's not very funny."

This is said in a low, slightly grumbling, slightly congested voice, drawling on the syllables. An official pronouncement. Joel is convinced that human experience is rendered most profound in the genre of comedy.

And for some reason, his imaginary pronouncement has been plaguing me, causing all sorts of self-doubt. "Is Gogolgirl too serious?" "If I make it funnier, will more people read it?" (I'm not quite sure how one gets people to read one's blog, besides bribing them, but writing hilarious posts must be one way.)

Or, as I peruse the countless other blogs on the web: "How can I effect this smart, breezy style that causes me to feel that the owner of this blog is a charming conversationalist who I'd be lucky to meet in real life and must make the world so kooky and fun for those he/she spends his/her days with?" I mean, the topics I've chosen to explore on Gogolgirl are inherently kind of serious, but shouldn't I still try to be funny?

I mean, I am funny sometimes, right?

Hoping for proof, and for something funny I could offer up here, I turned to the person whose days I make so kooky and fun. The boyfriend.

Me (folding laundry): So, what's the funniest thing I've ever said to you?

The boyfriend (watching me fold laundry): The funniest thing you've ever said? I don't know. There are so many funny things that I can't really remember them. Plus, you don't know this, but I have a sort of habit of not acknowledging when you say or do something incredibly funny, so that makes them harder to recall.

Me: What?

The boyfriend: It's a male thing. Part of my quest for power and domination. You do these really funny things and I just act like it's no big deal, like everything is normal.

Me: Um, are you saying that you're threatened by my funniness? Like you're afraid that my funniness might overshadow yours? Or are you saying that you can't fully acknowledge my funniness because if you did it would just blow your mind? Are you saying that my funniness is comparable to the brilliance of the the sun in that it would scorch your eyes if you dared to look at it directly?

The boyfriend: Something like that.

Me: Well, that's nice, but think harder. What's the funniest thing I've ever said?

The boyfriend: Like I said, I have this habit and it's hard to remember, but OK. OK: the funniest thing ever is probably when you did that dance with the pepperoni in the supermarket.

Me: That's not something I said.

The boyfriend: No, but it was really funny.

Me: But what about the time I came out of the bathroom and asked you if you thought that when Knut Hamsun's friends got together they said things like, "That Hamsun, he's such a (k)nut!"?

The boyfriend: Nooo, that was embarrassing.

Me: OK, well how about when we'd just arrived here and we drove past Bakesale Betty's and saw the ironing boards people were eating on and you said "That's ridiculous, but I wonder what kind of food they make there," and I said "Probably something starchy"?

The boyfriend: Yeah, that was clever, but the pepperoni was still funnier.

Me: What about when we were having that argument and I yelled: "You're forcing me to play devil's advocate for the existence of God!" I mean, really, I should be writing for Woody Allen or something.

The boyfriend: You were pretty frustrated then, huh? Sorry, the pepperoni wins hands-down. I know you want the funniest thing to be something you said so you can feel like your funniness is more intellectual somehow. But you should be pleased: the pepperoni incident transcends discursive thought and moves you into the realm of ineffable comedic genius.

Okay, dear reader, the boyfriend didn't actually say the words "ineffable comedic genius." Or even the phrase "the pepperoni incident transcends discursive thought." But rest assured he did say something to that effect.

And you must know that if I could translate the spirit of the pepperoni dance into words (and it had a joyous spirit indeed!) or infuse that sort of raucous hilarity into this blog, I would. Perhaps I will someday achieve this masterly feat of transfiguration. You'll just have to keep reading to find out.

If you do, I promise you'll find that upcoming posts will have less to do with me, and more to do with writing, religion, and puppets.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In the meantime, you'd do well to read this beloved (and funny! the best kind of funny!) fairy tale by the Grimm brothers, "The Mouse, the Bird, and the Sausage," and try to remember:

"Whoever is too well off always wants to try something different!"

And if you're a sausage, try not to go traveling about with forged letters upon your person.

Old friends are the best kind (although new friends aren't bad, either).

2007-12-02T22:00:00.000-05:00

It's remarkable how much one's mood can change after a call from an old friend. I'm reminded these past few weeks, as I struggle to adjust to my new surroundings, how lucky I am to have old friends. Really old friends, who I somehow manage to find -- and re-find -- again and again.

I've known my friend Steph for 20 years. Since we were twelve. Twelve. In seventh grade we shared some gum during our middle school drama club's annual field trip to the Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope, PA. We must have been given time to wander around on our own, because I remember setting off alone together, walking past countless antique stores and novelty shops, carrying on an intense conversation. Do all great friendships start this way? One is almost swept away, revelling in the sympathetic response, the brilliant new spark of awareness and understanding. We chewed gum furiously and talked, for some reason, about our grandfathers: how it was hard to feel close to them, how we didn't see them in quite the same way as we saw our fathers. We loved them, but we couldn't imagine telling them that. They were so quiet and self-contained, strong and reticent. So foreign to us.

It was difficult to talk about, somehow -- difficult and a little daring. We were just hitting puberty, becoming teenagers, women. But still very young, still locating our identities largely within our families, still struggling to understand how we fit there as we were at the same time beginning to define ourselves, and to be defined, in terms of the outside world.

And that's all it took. Some bright green gum and a conversation about pop-pops. I think we might have been slightly abashed after that first talk, wondering if we'd revealed too much that was peculiar, weird. We probably laughed at ourselves a little, the way self-conscious, self aware twelve-year-olds do. But something stuck.

Twenty years later, her call lifted me from an a Sunday morning funk that was threatening to overwhelm. Amazing.

Haruki Murakami writes about the beginning of a slightly different sort of friendship in "Man-Eating Cats," so far my favorite story in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman.

"We went to a small bar and had a few drinks. I can't recall exactly what we talked about, but we found a million topics and could have talked forever. With a laserlike clarity I could grasp everything she wanted to say. And things I couldn't explain well to anyone else came across to her with an exactness that took me by surprise. We were both married, with no major complaints about our married lives. We loved our spouses and respected them. Still, this was on the order of a minor miracle--running across someone you express your feelings to so clearly, so completely. Most people go their entire lives without meeting a person like that. It would have been a mistake to label this 'love.' It was more like total empathy."

(Translated by Philip Gabriel.)

The (Big!) Window

2007-11-29T01:05:00.000-05:00

It's in the living room of the new apartment in CA, and it looks out over a path that runs behind our little building. On one end of the path is a playground, a really nice one with tables shaped like lily pads and a super-fun-looking jungle gym, where tons of kids and parents congregate each day. At the other end, on Sundays: a farmers' market, all year round. All year round. It's California!

When the window's open, the noise from outside is a charming admixture of children's yells and shouts and the muted roar of traffic rumbling off the freeway. People are walking by, constantly, many with strollers, occasionally the lone traveler on a bike. Today there was a young couple, very young, with two small children lingering behind. Did the kids really belong to them? They were holding hands, laughing; then she broke away to look at him, walking backwards, smiling... moving her hands and brushing the hair from her eyes. "They're way too in love to be married," I thought. Too much advertising of passion. Was it for my benefit? The window IS shaped like a procenium arch, and has curtains.

How long has it been since I've lived in a place with curtains? CA's so different! The pizza's horrible, I'm having nightmares about earthquakes, our little house seems to lack any insulation. However, it's gorgeous here. Our neighborhood smells good (I suspect it's all the pretty trees and plants). The people are terribly nice and there's a cafe that sells the most divine hot chocolate around the corner.

Gogolgirl has indeed transplated herself (and boyfriend and cats) to the West Coast for a while. But I'll still be here, with what I hope will be more frequent, if less writerly, posts in the coming months. Less writerly, but more about writing.

As for writerly, please read Joan Didion on leaving New York.

"That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every word, all of it."

Before...

2007-09-01T17:46:00.000-04:00

I've written in my description about myself that "I'm a writer who finds writing excruciating." This is absolutely true. It (writing) is at the same time one of most important and meaningful things to me in life, which in a way seems sad and in another way is quite lovely. Crafting a well-made sentence might not have much of a bettering effect on this fucked-up world, but it is certainly a pleasure surpassed by few others for me. And finding pleasure in creation is a gift, a blessing.

But also, often, excruciating.

And so I envision Gogolgirl as a place where I can attempt to ease the pain of writing and increase the pleasure. And also, where I can write whatever the hell I want, unfettered by the requirements of classes or trends in thinking in the academy or the Chicago Manual of Style. Even unfettered by the need to find, right away at least, a consistent style.

Thus: a (highly uneven, slightly experimental) blog entry on Richard Linklater's films Before Sunrise and Before Sunset.

I've had to do all this prefacing as it feels a bit indulgent to be writing about them. They are, in the end, movies, right? Not much more than pure entertainment, on par with passably good T.V. A guilty pleasure of sorts and not the type of serious and important work I envision as an appropriate subject for extended rumination. But again, who the hell am I? And who the hell cares what I write about for my one or two readers? Neither of you care, do you?

I shall write about what I like. And I like -- or at least am intrigued by the problems posed by --these, um, movies. Not long ago I watched them together, back-to-back, which I suggest everyone do. If only for the experience -- in the time it takes you to pull one DVD out of the machine and pop the next in -- of the actors/characters aging nine years. It's marvelous and upsetting. I should probably note at this point that I orginally saw Before Sunrise when it was first released, when I was roughly the same age as the characters. And that I saw Before Sunset on DVD about a year or so ago, so that about the same amount of time had passed for me as had in fictional (which is also to say, real) time. Therefore, if my comments below seem to transform/degrade/enlarge into personal reflections on the mystery of time passing, you will understand. Or will try to.

The Characters Get Older

It is rare, I suppose, to be able to bring up a moment or a small piece of one's past and be able to look at it at the same time one is registering all the changes one has gone through. To hold both the past and the present self simultaneously in one's mind. Although the idea of carrying around the past, usually as sorrowful baggage, is so elemental to human experience, I am struck by how much is lost at the same time. It must seep out, unnoticed, through a little tear in bag's lining.

Maybe I'm thinking about all the tiny transformations, the subtle differences, between then and now. How one is very much the same and yet not quite. One is slightly thinner, perhaps. One doesn't move one's head in that distinct way -- or rather, not quite the same exact way. One still does this _________ (insert some beloved characteristic here) but does it more fluidly, less ostentatiously. One doesn't do this _________, and one has quite forgotten, forgotten one ever did it. We've both forgotten.

Between then and now there's been such a nuanced unfolding, such a towering collection of moments of decision, questioning, resignation, committment. And yet I am the same. And yet, I am older. I have, irrevocably and unmistakably, changed. As have you.

Then and Now

Celine -- the lovely French girl -- is, in the first film, lovely, French, a little melancholy, with a beautiful face like the moon. We find her in Before Sunset thinner (she was strong and round in the first film, wearing a long dress.) Now she's more fashionable, smart even. Leaner, sharper, she talks faster, is more critical, less patient. And slightly neurotic. But sympathetically, adorably so -- this is an American movie, after all. She's also a little angry.

Jesse, the American, is thinner too. A few lines on the face. His suave boyishness has been replaced by a kind of expectant nervousness, like he's playing the part of the man he wanted to grow up to be -- playing it well, in fact -- but conscious that at any moment someone might accuse him of being a fraud. And he knows he'd have to contend with the uncontrollable need to punch this person. While Celine is harder, he appears fragile -- in a reckless, aggressive way.

Both of them talk about sex more frankly; both have more to hide.

Life vs. "The Movies"

What makes the second movie work so well, in the way that it works, what makes it the consumate guilty pleasure, is that it combines realistic transformations in the characters with terribly implausible circumstances. Celine and Jesse re-emerge in each others' lives after nine years still experiencing the same undeniable attraction. Celine has been unhappy in all her subsequent relationships, and her current boyfriend, a photojournalist, is conveniently away much of the time. Jesse is married with a child, but the marriage is of course a formality at this point, he never really loved his wife (frankly she sounds like a bore) and he's now just sticking around for the kid.

The romantic fantasy. A compelling one indeed, but one wonders how much richer the movie could be if the circumstances were not so straightforward. If the questions were harder. If there was some ambivalence, beyond the wariness involved in beginning a new relationship when one is older and knows firsthand how they can turn out. What if Jesse still loved his wife? What if Celine wasn't quite sure of her feelings for Jesse, suspicious that her emotional ties to the past were unhealthy, a symptom of weakness? What if there were any number of the inextricable complications one might meet in real life?

But that moment. That moment at the very end of Before Sunset, as Celine dances for Jesse: she's charming, sexy, brilliant -- performing for him, teasing him. She's mimicing a jazz performer she's seen, so she's not quite herself. She demonstrates how the singer moved her "cute, big ass" at the same time she's turning herself around for him, letting him get a good look at her. He sits back, grinning, and takes her all in. The long conversation, the emotional feints and retreats of the past two hours spent wandering around Paris (the characters and the city shot lovingly, with a suffused, almost tender light, as if its job were to cradle these two complicated souls during this most complicated and important of meetings), the hesistant, awkward attempts at honesty: it's all coming to a head at this point. They both understand this, and thus Celine's performance helps to both move things to a point of decision and to protect her, them, from its fallout.

The conversation ceases for a minute and it's simply her body moving for him, calling to him.

And when she tells him, in the singer's voice, that he's going to miss his plane, he says: "I know." He doesn't care. Really, one can't help wanting that moment. One can't help wanting it, and after getting it, rewinding and watching again.

At least I couldn't.

Dreaming

2007-06-26T18:11:00.000-04:00

I've been having strange, troubling, very vivid dreams lately. I've always had long, complex dreams since childhood, but they've been much more turbulent the past few weeks. I've also been sleepwalking, falling asleep in bed with the boyfriend and waking up on the couch with the cats. Once or twice I've caught myself, waking up as I'm walking out to the living room, and there's a foggy, unbalanced, somewhat terrifying moment during which I don't remember where I am or why I'm standing there.

In the spirit of my restless unconscious, here's a quote from The Idiot, a book I recently had the incomparable pleasure of re-reading. (When this passage begins Prince Myshkin has just read Nastasya Filippovna's letters to Aglaia, which Dostoevsky says "were like a dream.") Here he captures the sensation, once one awakes, of not fully understanding something critical that happened in a dream. I often wake up with such strong emotions after dreaming, but they never seem commensurate to the things I remember taking place. It's like a kind of crazy dramaturgy, in which the action has very little to do with the effect it creates.

The italics, by the way, are mine.

Sometimes one dreams strange, impossible and incredible dreams; on awakening you remember them and are amazed at a strange fact. You remember first of all that your reason did not desert you throughout the dream; you remember that even though you acted very cunningly and logically throughout the long, long time, while you were surrounded by murderers who deceived you, hid their intentions, behaved amicable to you while they had a weapon in readiness, and were only waiting for some signal; you remember how cleverly you deceived them at last, hiding from them; then you guessed that they'd seen through your deception and were only pretending not to know where you were hidden; but you were sly then and deceived them again; all this you remember clearly. But how was it that you could at the same time reconcile your reason to the obvious absurdities and impossibilities with which your dream was overflowing? One of your murderers turned into a woman before your eyes, and the woman into a little, sly, loathsome dwarf -- and you accepted it all at once as an accomplished fact, almost without the slightest surprise, at the very time when, on another side, your reason was at its highest tension and showed extraordinary power, cunning, sagacity, and logic? And why, too, on waking up and fully returning to reality, do you feel almost every time, and sometimes with extraordinary intensity, that you have left something unexplained behind with the dream? You laugh at the absurdities of your dream, and at the same time you feel that interwoven with those absurdities some thought lies hidden, and a thought that is real, something belonging to your actual life, something that exists and has always existed in your heart. It's as though something new, prophetic, that you were awaiting, has been told you in your dream. Your impression is vivid, it may be joyful or agonising, but what it is, and what was said to you, you cannot understand or recall.

Aesthetically Unassailable

2007-06-26T13:27:00.000-04:00

My blog hasn't exactly gotten off to a raging start, due to laziness and general uninspired-ness the past couple of months. But here's a doozy of a post. It aspires to be an analysis of the NYC anti-Vietnam processsions designed by the Bread and Puppet Theatre, focusing on ten pictures of the marches taken from Stephan Brecht's monumental book on the company (see the pics above). It delves into a number of topics near and dear to me, including the connections between aesthetics, religion, and politics, and the moral dimensions of art-making, all of which I hope to explore further on Gogolgirl.

With this post, I also hope to give an idea of why the oversized, paper-mache puppet has become so popular in all sorts of marches. B&P were the originators of this aesthetic, heavily influencing those that followed -- and they continue to hold workshops for groups that want to build protest puppets. I'll leave for another post the question of whether or not these puppets, now that their style is ubiquitous, can still be politically effective. (Note: I wanted to intersperce text and pictures but I can't figure out how to do that with Blogger. So all pictures can be found above, in the order they're addressed below. Scrolling up and down is a drag, I know, but at least you can double-click on them to make them larger and get a better sense of the detail.)

As I began to try to focus my thinking on this subject, I was particularly struck by a phrase used by Kelly Morris in Tulane Drama Review (TDR, now The Drama Review) to describe B&P at Emory University during a mass strike march on campus. Morris claims they "effectively disarm[ed] administrative opposition by being aesthetically unassailable." I find this idea intriguing, and want to suggest ways Schumann's puppets and masks achieved this "aesthetic unassailability" and how this contributed to the protest movement in New York.

First, some background on Bread and Puppet's protest activity:

As mentioned above, Stefan Brecht (Bertolt Brecht's son) has written an exhaustive two-tome study of Bread and Puppet that, among its many chapters, chronicles the company's protest activity in minute detail in the 1960's. S. Brecht documents that Schumann and his puppets probably began marching in 1964 and that between 1964 and 1967 the company was intensely involved in the anti-war movement's protests and parades. This corresponds to the escalation of U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, but comes before anti-war sentiment reached its apex in the later years. Francoise Kourilsky, in her book on Bread and Puppet, quotes a 1966 Stanford study that found that 61% of the U.S. population approved of the government's actions in Vietnam, 29% disapproved, and 10% had no opinion.

Schumann's involvement in the outdoor protests seems to slacken as the movement becomes more popular, but his commitment does not wane and is forcefully present in indoor works such as Fire, although the kind of audience he reaches with these works is by necessity somewhat different. Taking place in a smaller, restricted space, audiences must come to the indoor event rather than the event finding them -- although this arrangement probably allowed for a more sophisticated exploration of the issues and perhaps a more profound experience on the part of the spectators.

Pictures 1, 2, and 3:

The first pictures are from two marches took place under the aegis of the larger peace movement -- these in particular took place on 5th Avenue, organized by the Fifth Avenue Peace Parade Committee, which S. Brecht describes as a "coalition of traditional pacifist and civil rights groups." In the first parades, what is most striking is Schumann's use of two oversized puppets: the first called Uncle Fatso, who bore a resemblance to Lyndon Johnson, Uncle Sam, and, as Schumann describes, "everyone's uncle that no one likes." Uncle Fatso was seen leading a bound Christ figure, who bore a placard around his neck labeled "Vietnam." These are images from the first 5th Avenue anti-war parade in October of 1965.

Of course one immediately gets the impression of a gluttonous, belligerent, ultra-American figure with the stately, delicate, sorrowful Jesus/Vietnam in tow. It is striking the use of such a dominant, resonant religious icon to represent Vietnam -- much the same idea is repeated in a later protest that takes place in front of St. Patrick's Cathedral. I like this second picture (actually from a later march) of Uncle Fatso because he seems so at home in the city; he appears to rise up, imposing and brutal, like the rest of the architecture, while there is a strangeness and otherworldly quality to the Christ figure that makes it stand out prominently against the urban setting. Kourilsky describes what came after these two puppets in the Bread and Puppet procession (this is my translation from the French):

The 'yellow ones' (that's the dominant color of the sackcloth the disciples were dressed in) were followed by gray soldiers with a primitive look whose own masks spoke of the inhuman -- head and helmet sculpted together -- expressing a cruelty that is sinister, blind. (In the Easter or Christmas stories and in The Cry of the People for Meat, they play the soldiers of Herod). Behind, men dressed in black wearing death masks walked together singing the Marine hymn. Three or four giant effigies of women in gray dresses, pain inscribed upon their faces, holding in their arms their dead babies, finished the procession.

Note that there were no banners or signs used in the march, except for the "Vietnam" sign, and no sounds, apart from the Marine hymn. S. Brecht posits that the two parts of the procession "visually conveyed something like the two parts of the verbal slogan carried in the earlier parades, 'We protest U.S. bombing of North Vietnam/U.S. support of military dictatorship in Southern Vietnam.'" While this is quite a literal reading, what it vital in this idea is that, indeed, it is the images that speak, unaided by the chanting of slogans or carrying of signs. Schumann, in fact, did not let those marching with him carry signs at all. During this march the group was attacked by some right-wing hecklers who, while previously peaceful, became enraged by the images, destroyed Uncle Fatso, and gouged the eye and nose of the captive Vietnam Christ.

Pictures 4, 5, and 6:

These next images are from the 5th Avenue parade the following March, in 1966. Uncle Fatso and the Vietnam Christ do not appear in this parade; rather, the central focus in on a line of Vietnamese women, blindfolded and tied together, who are being menaced by an ominous airplane-like creature with sharp teeth. S. Brecht's book provides a description of the procession published in the National Guardian:

The Bread and Puppet Theatre provided its customary dramatic contingent. Leading were marchers draped in white sheets topped by 2-ft.-high paper-maché masks representing Vietnamese woman prisoners being kept in line by black-clad men with death-masks playing a weird cacophony on contrived instruments. The men hoisted aloft a 10-ft.-long plane resembling a prehistoric fish. They were followed by a procession of white-draped mourners.

The plane would intermittently swoop down upon the Vietnamese woman and they would slowly fold over together like reeds, bending under its attack. This action was repeated again and again throughout the parade. Kourilsky writes that the tall Vietnamese women were followed by an unmasked woman playing the flute and three rows of women in white with Vietnamese masks who sang or chanted one single high note. There are examples of these particular masks in the next picture.

Note resemblance to the Vietnam Christ: tall, placid, large hands.

Picture 7:

Memorial Day 1966, in which Bread and Puppet joined with Veterans and Reservists to End the War in Vietnam to march from Columbus Circle to Rockefeller Plaza. A much smaller march, but it shows the masks that Schumann also used in Fire. (Note: while these are meant to be masks of Vietnamese women, Schumann used a cast taken from the face of a young Chinese woman. There are lots of important questions this raises about the [literal] construction of race -- and gender -- by puppeteers, but I'll have to come back to that in a later post.) S. Brecht notes that this procession is again in two parts -- Schumann is again translating the sentence or slogan he wishes to get across into a visual language.

Pictures 8, 9, and 10:

This is Christmas of 1966 and a protest that was carried out solely by a small contingent of the Bread and Puppet Theatre in front of St. Patrick's Cathedral. It's very different from the other marches in comprising more of a personal response on the part of B&P to the blessing Cardinal Spellman of St. Patrick's had recently given to U.S. soldiers at a naval base in the Philippines. Spellman puportedly told them men that "you are not only serving your country, but you are serving God, because you are defending the cause of righteousness, the cause of civilization, and God's cause." For obvious reasons this did not sit well with Schumann and he and a few others arrived in front of the church to perform a silent vigil in masks and costume. The police forced them to leave, citing an archaic section of the penal code which forbade assemblies of three or more persons with concealed faces except when proceeding to or from a masked ball. So Schumann and company left, but soon returned with their masks on sticks and signs identifying their characters.

The flavor of the vigil is immediately altered; without the masks, it becomes more about Bread and Puppet as protestors. Also, with the signs, they are relying more heavily on language to convey their point. Notice the doll made to look like a baby burnt by napalm (they wanted to deliver it to the Cardinal). Again, there is the use of iconic religious figures to get across their message -- a distinct reclaiming of the figures for the "other side."

Summing up:

The Bread and Puppet's images confronted and questioned the right-wing or mainstream sense of moral superiority while at the same time tapping into the moral imagination and exploiting the religious iconography of many average Americans (for example the suffering Vietnamese Christ and the napalmed Christ child). His puppets and masks also offered a simple story: suffering women -- ungainly, tenuous embodiments of innocence -- menaced by American power. S. Brecht suggests that this manifestation of the anti-war message reflects some sexism on the part of Schumann; Kourilsky believes that it reflects Schumann's idealization of Vietnamese society as the pure ideal, a lost paradise -- not an historic people, but the representation of an eternal goodness; a goodness that is always defenseless, always long-suffering.

While both these critiques are valid, Bread and Puppet nevertheless stood apart in its sustained concentration on the issue. As Schumann says in a contemporaneous inteview with Richard Schechner published in TDR:

On the street you come across only if you have your mind on What Has To Be Done. Everything should be focused, and everything will become awkward and lame if your guts aren't in what you're saying. Just look at the Peace Marches. Hippies happily singing while carrying photos of burnt children. People running around with coffee and sandwiches. But carrying pictures of burnt children is something very hard to do, something very heavy. And unless you know that you don't get your message across. Most of our street performances taught us how to concentrate, how to get across. We learned how to make large crowds stop drinking cokes and start to listen.

In other words, the energy and focus of the puppeteers must remain squarely on the puppets and objects -- on the conveyers of the message and the message itself.

The use of mask also requires restraint and precision in the actors. One B&P puppeteer is quoted by S. Brecht as saying

when the mask is there, the face has become more that ever the point of focus for everything, so that an actor who really digests that point in his body will de-emphasize, except for very specific accents and functions, the usages of the rest of this body and put the total emphasis on the face. This means that the slightest movement of the mask is charged with concentrated significance.

This might be another reason for the Bread and Puppet's effectiveness; this restraint must have infused the atmosphere around them, lending a clarity of purpose and composure to their actions that might have been lacking in the movements and attitudes of other protestors.

And finally, a scholarly conclusion referencing Artaud and Brecht (Bertolt):

Returning to the initial question, I want to suggest that within the Bread and Puppet aesthetic there is a blending of the theaters of both Artaud and Brecht (this has been suggested by others as well -- Kourilsky brings it up her book, but decides that the aims of Schumann's theater are in fact closer to those of Artaud). I think, in conclusion, that looking briefly at this co-mingling will be helpful in talking about what Schumann, in his protests, wanted to and did achieve.

Schumann stated that he wanted "to work directly into and out of the interior of people" --which he describes as a "demonic thing" -- and "evoke a direct emotional response to what is happening." One can see from these photographs that, even within the boundaries of the protest parade, Schumann was able to achieve Artaud's "poetry of space." He presented a theater that was non-verbal, which spoke through the use of unconventional images and sounds, and which had elements both corporeal and spiritual. In his eschewal of slogans and signs there is an attempt to communicate beyond a language which had become repetitive and stale.

But it's clear that Bread and Puppet did not seek to inflict emotional violence upon the spectator. On the contrary, Schumann is quoted in Kourilsky as saying that "it is neither necessary to brutalize people, nor look for their approval, but simply to present them with a problem that they recognize as a problem of their own." And later: "Puppeteers must learn to speak very slowly, touching people with precaution in order to move them." This suggests a method that seeks to inspire reflection, a theatre that aspires to elicit conscious thought and consideration.

Schumann also states that "alienation is automatic with puppets." In one sense, the puppets absorb any possible identification on the part of the spectator with the puppeteers. S. Brecht writes of the puppet parade that "unlike the folk singers, it did not sell the artist's personality -- it had an impersonal form -- unlike the other theaters it did not represent individuals, dispensed with psychology, did not illustrate the issues but allegorically denoted them." The identities of the marchers were at many times totally obscured by masks and material, or at others overshadowed by the puppets. The message, as he later points out, came from the images, not the imagers.

Alienation is at work within the puppet and mask creations themselves as well. As Elin Diamond has pointed out, "verfremdungseffekt...challenges the mimetic property of acting that semioticians call iconicity, the fact that the performer's body conventionally resembles the object (or character) to which it refers." Bread and Puppet's masks and figures do not conventionally resemble human beings. They are strange (in a Formalist sense), their proportions are off-kilter, their size is disconcerting, their features exaggerated, stretched or flattened, their color shocking: a deathly white, a stark gray. Their bodies resemble ours, and yet they are rougher, larger, obviously made of material and paper-maché and paste, not bones and blood. Their movements, as Schumann explains, are "simple and uncomplicated -- there isn't so much detail, and so there seems to be increased size and power." They do not posses most of our joints, and therefore lack our fluidity of movement. In this way, the puppets and masks foreground the idea of humanity as lived in the body. They allow us to step back and observe ourselves. The burnt child made of plastic and fabric, in all the ways it looks fake and stiff, forces us to reflect on the fate of those made of flesh. The large hands guide us back to our own, smaller hands. These inanimate objects seems to question how we, in our bodies, are behaving towards other living, breathing bodies. In another sense, Schumann's puppets seem like aliens -- strange creatures who act out our own stories, our own misdeeds, again and again, hoping we will see something in their unfamiliar way of telling that we cannot see as we act our stories ourselves.

Aesthetically unassailable, indeed.

"Do you like the novel DEAD SOULS?

2007-05-04T00:04:00.000-04:00

I like Tolstoy too but Gogol is necessary along with the light."

-Flannery O'Connor