pear popsicle

does everyone do this?

2010-07-10T13:11:00.000-07:00

I almost never listen to the radio. When I do, it's almost always NPR. I used to be a good NPR listener, back when I was a commuter; I drove at least an hour a day, just enough to keep up on what my local station thought I should know. Now I walk or bike almost everywhere I go, and as a result, the radio has almost completely left my life. When I do drive, I usually listen to cds.

Except when I go visit my parents.

The minute I get behind the wheel of my dad's truck, I'm all over the radio, and in a way that diverges completely from my usual habits. Everything I'd usually avoid becomes immediately desirable: the country station, the classic rock station, the "hot hits of the '80s, '90s, and today." I've attributed this before to the ridiculousness of my dad's truck, but yesterday I got a text message from a friend that's making me rethink the question. She's home visiting her parents, and she was driving around in her mom's car, listening to christian rock.

It's not a form of regression, because these aren't the stations we loved as teenagers, they're the ones we rejected. So what is it? And why is it so pleasurable?

historiography of/on/around this internet

2009-04-28T09:11:00.000-07:00

“my dream is a version of the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality, that recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of human being, and that understands human life is embedded in a material world of great complexity, one on which we depend for our continued survival.” (5)

In describing her vision of the future relations between information, theory, and theorists in terms of fantasy, seduction, and dreams, N. Katherine Hayles taps into an undercurrent of aspirational idealism that is as palpable in many contemporary examinations of the twentieth century’s evolving theories of information as in the documents and practices of the time. Most obvious in the work of futurists like Ray Kurzweil, who describes, in glowing terms, the possibility that “information-based technologies will encompass all human knowledge and proficiency, ultimately including the … emotional and moral intelligence of the human brain itself” (8) this tendency to romanticize the disembodied flow of information is also apparent within more intellectual histories. An emphasis on diffuse yet interconnected systems of information and collaboration can lead to a sensitive history that avoids valorizing a few great men at the expense of those around them, but it can also lead to a masked enactment of that very mistake.

In histories of the information age, two kinds of information sharing systems are foregrounded: the newly-invented media themselves (e.g. radio, television, and the internet), and the structure of relationships that led to their invention and dissemination. As Thomas Streeter reminds us in his history of American radio broadcasting, “the electronic media did not fall from the sky or emerge fully formed from a test tube; they are the product of knowledgeable people doing things in a concerted, organized way, with certain purposes in mind” (7). His formulation carefully acknowledges both the people and their collaboration, avoiding the trap that Hayles cautions against in her description of the “posthuman.” She uses this term as a kind of shorthand for a point of view that “privileges informational pattern over material instantiation” (2), one she locates both in theories of cybernetics and in the literary and historical documents that surround those theories. Within the historical documents, “informational pattern” may refer to the networks of theoreticians and inventors who create the media, and “material instantiation” to the individual actors within those networks.

Extrapolated into the future dystopian world of Craig Baldwin’s “Spectres of the Spectrum,” that network of innovators, experimenters, programmers, and who-knows-who-else becomes a shadowy, ill-defined enemy, a media conspiracy called the “New Electromagnetic Order” that threatens to destroy the possibility of memory. In Baldwin’s vision of the future, embodied individualism is literally destroyed by this emphasis on interconnection; information sharing leads not to productive diversity, but to assimilation. Kurzweil’s singularity is Baldwin’s nightmare. In his version of the past, eccentric inventors like Nikola Tesla are portrayed as the naïve victims of a military-industrial complex that sought to assimilate their insights and inventions while denying them either formal or financial recognition. Here, this particular kind of inter-institutional information sharing is understood as a problematic necessity, contributing to a dominant hegemony rather than preventing it.

In competing histories of that same past, the collaboration between academic institutions, businesses, and the government is figured in much more utopian terms, as a kind of open-source ideal. In Why The American Century?, Olivier Zunz writes about an “institutional matrix of sponsoring universities, professional associations, churches, corporations, state and local governments, foundations, labor unions, and others” (26), a “diffuse national research establishment,” and a “radio empire connecting science, business, and the military,” as democratizing, practical influences that “defined new possibilities” and “stood in the way of special agendas” (17-19). Even the loaded phrase “military-industrial complex,” though used only twice in the entire history, is given unusually positive connotations, described as an institution that “Americans naturally credited … for serving democracy” (166).The individuals that Baldwin celebrates disappear into the institutions that sponsored them, as in Zunz’s brief history of radio, which lauds the Navy’s influence in the development of the medium, and among private-sector innovators, names only David Sarnoff, the former head of RCA whose rapid rise up the industrial ladder can be perhaps attributed more to his people skills than his technical ones. Though the informational pattern is the focus of Zunz’s analysis, one charismatic man is still credited with having created and maintained each instance of that pattern.

A single charismatic man also lies at the center of Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture, a book that attempts to write equally about “[Stewart] Brand’s unique individual talents, the networking tactics he employed, and the increasing influence of the networks he helped build” (8). Though Turner argues that the “flourishing of nonhierarchical, interdisciplinary collaboration” he chronicles was first conceived within “a fabric of military-industrial-academic collaborations that has persisted to this day” (18), his primary focus is on the countercultural movements that spawned first the Whole Earth Catalog and then various online and business communities, culminating in Wired Magazine. These he describes as intentional communities, hand-picked groups of cultural figures that grew not out of an organic process of information exchange and cross-pollination, but out of the mind of one man: Stewart Brand. Though Turner nods to the fact that this emphasis on the network can function perversely as a hero-making rhetorical move, where “those who could most successfully depict themselves as aligned with the forces of information could also claim to be models of those forces” (260), this does not prevent him from being captivated both by Brand’s idealistic rhetoric and by the force of his singular personality.

Each of these histories struggles with the tension between historicizing the disembodied flow of information and recognizing the embodied persons who produce, transmit, engage, and utilize that information. Other writers, such as Lawrence Lessig, have focused on the material networks over which that information is transmitted, bringing physicality into their histories not by focusing on specific persons, but by focusing on the technical structures of information flow. Still, Lessig’s own cult of personality should not be ignored; within the community of those concerned with the future of the internet and copyright, he is undoubtedly more famous than most of the people he writes about. Like Stewart Brand, Lessig operates as a figurehead for a diffuse network of thinkers, capitalizing on his own personal charm and intelligence in an attempt to promote information systems that de-emphasize the individual. The paradox here is palpable, and potentially inescapable. Yet Hayles’s sense that we must attend to the complexity of embodiment is instructive here. Rather than understanding this as an imperative to isolate the individual from whom the rhetoric issues or who best embodies the ideals of a movement, we might take it as an enjoinder to attend to the multiplicity of ways in which the ideals are embodied, experiences ranging from active participants in these intellectual exchanges to the outliers who benefit from them.

dear readers

2009-02-11T18:44:00.000-08:00

I started this blog sometime in early 2008 (or maybe 2007, i'm not sure), because I needed a space in which I could talk about books. Being in grad school has made it not only redundant but also impossible; I could post the things I write for school here, but I really don't have the time or mental energy to write anything else, and I doubt my three readers have any interest in those things anyway. So I'm moving on, at least for now.

This should be more fun for you to read anyway.

I may post a link or two here from time to time (although don't hold your breath), but primary blogging activity will all happen in letter form. At least until graduation, which happens sometime in June. We'll see what happens after that.

2008-11-23T19:00:00.000-08:00

oh, yes.

hell yes. of course we can.

2008-11-06T16:37:00.000-08:00

Tuesday night, at Jimmy’s, it felt like this. It was all jumping and yelling and crying and hugging and then me getting really drunk and emphatic about things. The crazy thing is: it still feels like that.

This morning, a man I don’t know greeted me on the street. People are friendly in the midwest. This happens a lot. But this time, he didn’t say “Hi.” He didn’t mumble “How’s it going?” He just looked right at me and said “Yes we can.”

My feelings are complicated, to be sure, by the defeat of Prop 8 in California. It breaks my heart in a way that's made all the more personally crushing for its resonance with my first political experiences, working (just barely unsuccessfully) to attempt to add GLBTQ folks to Maine's nondiscrimination law. But all the same, it feels good around here. Really, really good.

(And now I'm going to go back to your regularly scheduled never updating my blog ever.)

it's not what's in your pants that counts

2008-09-03T09:57:00.000-07:00

Sure, Sarah Palin makes Edna St. Vincent Millay look like Mary Wollstonecraft, but (despite having a vagina) she’s not really the vice-presidential candidate who matters when it comes to feminism. Joe Biden didn’t just vote for the Violence Against Women Act, he wrote it.

one of the boys

2008-09-02T23:30:00.000-07:00

Edna St. Vincent Millay never described herself as a feminist, and the truth is that she said some pretty awful things about her sex. That said, she let her husband handle the housekeeping, and she never shied away from anything just because it was considered unwomanly. Thanks to her undeniable poetic talent, her strikingly expressive voice, and her unusual beauty, she was able to live a life that was impossible for most women at the time. The darling of not just the literary community but the whole country, she was celebrated as much for her girlish appeal as for her strong and individual writing, but in truth it was the contrast between the two that made her so irresistible.

A lush and a womanizer, living off money borrowed from her publisher and cuckolding husband with a wide assortment of lovers, even moving out of her home to live with a poet many years her junior, she spent the last years of her life in a state we’d decry in a man. But there’s something all too appealing about a woman who embraces her vices, who grasps wholeheartedly all the privilege her talent and circumstances afford her, who lives, and it’s hard to phrase this any other way, like a man. She was a pretty and brilliant bad girl, the kind of character you can’t take your eyes off, equal parts seductive and heartbreaking.

Heartbreaking not just because her story ends in tragedy, not just because she dies beloved but broke, addicted to opiates and drink, but also because of the first two things I mentioned. Despite being an inspiration to many young women and a hardworking advocate for young, gifted poets, she didn’t learn from her own example. Or perhaps she simply didn’t want to admit the fact that her clothes were discussed as much as her books, or that her libertine ways helped feed the national fascination that helped sell those books. It’s all conjecture, of course, but it’s hard not to imagine that being the subject of such constant examination must have been exhausting, must have made her realize the contrast between coverage of her life and work and that of her contemporaries. But she, so daring, so flirtatious, so ahead of her time, and so direct in so much of her correspondence, never told the world that more was required of her simply because she was a woman.

If it’s not obvious, I just finished reading her biography. The year it came out, everyone and their sister gave me a copy, because apparently it was the perfect gift for me. Despite the near-unanimity of the gift, it took me a while to get around to reading it. Instead, I dutifully thanked them, returned the extra copies, and shelved one copy to read later. Seven years later, I finally read it, and though I’m not generally into biographies, it actually was a pretty damn good gift. If you don’t know me (and if that’s the case, seriously, what are you doing reading my blog? You’re probably the first.), you may not be aware how easy it is for me to identify with a pretty, young, outspoken poet who grew up in Maine and likes to cause trouble. But it’s very easy, and that’s why I’ll treat her life as both an inspiration and a cautionary tale. The moral: speak up. Even more.

portland, portland, chicago

2008-08-14T21:42:00.000-07:00

A city of books and bridges, roses and almost ripe tomatoes, turning from green to gold to orange to a bright sweet red I won’t get to see. I’m not (and if I’ve seen you in the past week, I’ve told you this) a crier, but Portland’s a hard city to leave, and it’s hard for me to tell if it’s worse this time than when I moved away from that other city with the same name, but I can tell this much: it’s wrenching.

It’s not just the people, nor the restaurants and shoe shops, the famous bookstore or my favorite grocery store; it’s not anything I can define or describe, just the last eight years of my life. But this isn’t really a personal blog, so I won’t go on for long. I’m reading Nicholson Baker, and he writes about himself in a way that’s more compelling than my own self-description could ever be. It makes me want to try, but I do think it’s dangerous to dip too far into that sort of blogging. It’s just not the kind of thing a girl like me ought to do.

Last time I was in Maine, I spent the night at a lakeside cottage, playing Scrabble and drinking wine and eating pasta tossed with olive oil and mushrooms gathered from the neighbors’ yard. In the morning, we swam in the lake between turns of a slow and lazy Scrabble game, and talked about local politics. At some point my hostess made passing reference to a friend of hers who lived nearby, a man she’d just seen at town meeting, her friend Nick Baker. And then she asked me if I’d ever read any of his stuff. I was so starstruck that I think I actually gasped. Audibly.

I realized less than halfway through the book I read before this one (Elizabeth Hand’s Saffron and Brimstone), that its author is from Maine, too. Though I do admit that sometimes, due to a perverse kind of home state pride, I seek out Maine writers, this was just a happy accident. I’d like to ascribe this to some kind of regional magic, some brilliance imbued upon Maine residents by the rocky coast and nasty weather, or some unconscious kinship that makes me pick these books by instinct, but I can’t. All I can say is that it is an indisputably nice thing. And maybe, a few years from now, I’ll find an abundance of Oregonians popping up on my bookshelf. It’s hard to say.

thirteenth september, nineteen forty

2008-07-28T18:19:00.000-07:00

“In the case of liquor--the stuff doesn’t taste good, it has no real attraction whatever except for the oblivion which comes to those poor devils who do not have the guts to face their own reality. And the feeling afterwards is a little worse than anything you have experienced, once you have been properly “plastered” and develop a real honest-to-God hangover.”

My great-grandfather’s well-meaning warning didn’t work on his son, any better than his similar injunctions against smoking and sex did, at least in the long run. I suppose my grandfather may have made it through his years at Amherst unscathed by those delightful vices, but in truth, I doubt it. He wasn’t exactly the type to listen to that sort of warning. Plus, there’s a clear flaw in the premise: liquor tastes damn good.

But this is all digression. Packing up some old papers to move today, I came across this packed of letters, all from the fall of 1940 and spring of 1941, sent by my great-grandfather to my grandfather. So I started reading. After my old Hum notes they were fascinating, after the crazy lists an ex-boyfriend used to write for me in Genetics class, they were pretty dry. But plenty compelling either way, because even the most mundane questions gain a certain gravity in this particular context, and the personality conflicts are so clear from this distance.

The real morals here have, of course, nothing to do with drink or smoke or “very innocent-looking, sweetly appealing filthy harpies.” Instead, they are pretty simple: letters are worth saving, and fathers are always awkward about telling you how thrilled they are with you.

poets laureate

2008-07-20T17:49:00.001-07:00

Watching Kay Ryan talk, I get the sense our new poet laureate would be a lot of fun to hang out with.

There's also a video of Louise Glück, which opens with her admitting to a problem that I share: the sense that because I want to do something, everyone else must want to do the same. Of course everyone wants to be a poet, because it is such a wonderful, fulfilling, necessary thing to be. Of course everyone wants to study the writers that I love, because they are so endlessly fascinating. I've gotten better about this over the last few years, to the point where I do recognize that there are people for whom the avant-garde holds no charm, who wouldn't want to spend all their time reading, and who even think i'm the nutty one. But it's still nice to hear someone I respect so much describe my problem so precisely.

orangedrink

2008-06-20T10:07:00.000-07:00

I want to do this to everything I write from now on. Click the image to see it bigger and try it yourself.

cover art

2008-06-19T15:47:00.001-07:00

There are even more now. Always a sucker for interesting cover art, I was pretty much delighted when I found this collection of fake book covers a month or two ago (maybe via Maud Newton? I'm not sure), and am delighted again to have revisited it (via Bookslut this time, for sure) today.

Of course the covers are by turns gorgeous and silly and wonderful, but I think the thing I like most about them is the fact that they (by virtue of being imitations but not quite parodies or even derivative works) do such a wonderful job of illustrating and commenting on the conventions of cover art.

Only sort of related: There's nothing quite like finding a blog you love long after its owner has stopped updating. Judge a book is gorgeous, but I'm pretty sure it's over.

the future is now

2008-06-11T11:28:00.000-07:00

"Tang is futurist orange. Tang is orange designed by astronauts. Tang is from a time when we all thought we’d be wearing unitards and eating freeze-dried soy extrudate by now. Tang is Eisenhower food. It goes very well with jello salads and a scoop of cottage cheese on a lettuce leaf with a ring of pineapple. Tang represents that pure thought that food is safer and better for you if no part of it ever touches dirt."

That's from an email my mom sent me a while ago. That kind of brilliance is just one more reason that I'm entirely comfortable with the inevitable fact that I'm going to grow up someday and be just like my mother.

delightful things happen

2008-04-18T12:23:00.001-07:00

I just (last night) finished reading Kelly Link's Stranger Things Happen, and, having fallen quite a bit in love with it, was thinking about ordering another of her books today, and investigating Small Beer Press a little further.

I hadn't gotten around to it yet when I found this link (on bookslut) to a free download of a whole book from Small Beer Press. Nicely timed, magic internets.

Also, it turns out you can download the Kelly Link book, too. And you should. Because it's excellent.

clueless

2008-04-15T09:36:00.000-07:00

Yet another reason to love xkcd.

Found this on Feministe this morning, which is a lovely example of the way that all my favorite corners of the internet connect.

While reading through the post, I kept trying to think of major moneymaking films coming out in the next year that might reinforce or undermine the statistics. The only one I could think of off the top of my head (and I admit, I don't really follow mainstream movies) is the Sex and the City movie. And while I'm not really a fan of the show, it did make me pause and consider the fact that (despite its many, many flaws), it is pretty damn cool that a show primarily about the friendship between women was so successful and has spawned one of the year's most anticipated movies.

I'd like to think it's progress, but I'll wait to pass judgment until the thing is out. After all, there's probably still time for Hollywood to find a male lead to shoehorn into top billing.

anne carson, jane kenyon, audre lorde, et al

2008-04-14T11:37:00.000-07:00

Seriously, not even Emily Dickinson?

stop word

2008-04-03T10:39:00.000-07:00

Governmental use of misleading language to obfuscate the available information isn't really news any more, I suppose. Still, this breaks my heart. When a search for "abortion" in a government-funded database devoted to information about reproductive health returns no results, something is wrong. And my problem here is not just the moral one, though that's, needless to say, large. It's also a problem of efficiency and design. They haven't removed the information, presumably in order to avoid being accused of censorship. But they have made it much, much harder to find.

Sure, you can search for "unwanted pregnancy" or, (as the representative from the database suggests) "Fertility Control, Postconception," but these are not the terms people use. A good search engine is responsive to both vernacular and specialized terms, providing results that allow the user to learn the more specialized terms as their research progresses. Now, to use POPLINE, you have to know in advance.

Turning to their handy "Keyword Guide" won't help you either, because Abortion, Abortion Law, and Abortion Rate are all still misleadingly listed as keywords.

his name is my name, too.

2008-04-01T14:14:00.001-07:00

The other day, one of my co-workers asked me to forge her husband's signature on a banking document. After all, he's all the way across town, and she'd do it, but my writing is slantier.

This is better.

imagine me an aging spinster

2008-03-20T11:30:00.000-07:00

Miss Blake
remembered, today
that she used to write poems
and it was good.

swoon (not like lovecraft in brooklyn)

2008-03-03T12:05:00.000-08:00

I've been a little bit in love with Colson Whitehead ever since I read The Intuitionist, and only became more so after I saw him read at Wordstock. He's just really very good at what he does. Further proof appeared over the weekend, in his NYT article attempting to debunk all our generation's endlessly romantic myths about writing in Brooklyn.

again, just a link

2008-02-28T11:46:00.000-08:00

but one that provides plenty of gorgeousness.

two days late

2008-02-20T16:53:00.000-08:00

breaking the blog silence with a sad update: Alain Robbe-Grillet died on Monday.

more of substance soon, I promise.

collector of books

2007-12-03T11:45:00.000-08:00

I was fifteen years old when I saw Joyce Carol Oates read; she came to my summer camp (an academic one), and read to an auditorium full of precocious teenagers. Hearing her read the title story from Collector of Hearts sparked a full-blown obsession with her work. I had read "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" in classes before, and knew in a sort of offhand way that I liked her work, but the reading started me on the inevitably strange and wonderful journey of reading every single one of her books that I could get my hands on.

Though I am a completist, it soon became clear that I couldn't read them all, not least because I lived in a small town in Maine, and couldn't physically get them all. Even now, though, with Powell's just a few blocks away, I can't read them all. It's not that she has written too many books (what would that even mean?), just that there are so many books in the world and there is never enough time to read.

false start

2007-11-17T18:51:00.000-08:00

Having been raised in a household where Joyce was considered canon and books a necessity easily on par with food, it is perhaps as unsurprising that my literary tastes tend toward the unusual as it is that my appetite for literature is voracious.

not quite fiction

2007-11-08T11:36:00.000-08:00

This is the danger of commuting: one day you wake up and you're five miles down the road. You're in the right place, in the right gear, going the right speed, and you have no idea how you got there. Equally unclear is what you've been thinking about along the way, and what would have happened had a cat leapt out in front of your car.

This morning, I could reconstruct some of it. I was thinking about stockings, about how I can't wear them without destroying them, and how some people seem to be able to keep them for years. I remember looking down at my legs and wondering how much of the day would go by before the telltale skin would begin to show, and the ladders would start climbing up my leg. I don't remember my estimate, but the first one started even before lunchtime.

Suffice it to say, it was not an auspicious morning.

memes

2007-11-01T15:30:00.000-07:00

Published in 1986, Ghost Dance was Carole Maso's first novel. I know this not just because all the reviews talk about it, but because I wrote my thesis on another of Maso's books, and that involved doing quite a bit of research about her and her bibliography. That's why I was really puzzled when I came across this.

After a little bit (okay, a lot) of googling, I reached two not-very startling conclusions. One is that misinformation spreads a lot faster these days, thanks to the miracles of the internet, and the second is that it's always worth double-checking your databases. Data entry is a tricky business, easily mismanaged by those clumsy human fingers we all have.

I noticed, first of all, that while 27 Amazon sellers wanted me to purchase this book, none of them had entered any supplementary information about it. Odd. Nobody on LibraryThing owned a copy of the book, either. None of the Bookfinder or Alibris sellers knew much about it, either. And it was at Alibris that things became clear, because I finally searched by title instead of author. And noticed the ISBN problem.

seriously, what the eff?

2007-10-18T13:40:00.000-07:00

As a small and unassuming girl who swears both frequently and creatively, I am astonished by how often the people who hear me swear are astonished. I know several people who have said to me, with awe in their voices "I've never heard you swear before!" and who have then said the exact same thing to me a few weeks later. And again, later. They're rarely right, but something about my appearance leads to the impression that I'm far more mild-mannered than I am.

Reading Steven Pinker's excellent article about cursing, I couldn't help but wonder if the problem is simply a disconnect in their minds caused by the fact that I am not just clean and blonde and pretty, but also very good at performing my femininity. In other words: girls don't shit. But we do! And we piss and fuck and use the most remarkable language when we get cut off in traffic or stub our beautifully-shod toes. And as I read along, I felt sure that Mr. Pinker understood all of this. Until:

Men swear more, on average, and many taboo sexual terms are felt to be especially demeaning to women-- hence the old prohibition of swearing "in mixed company."

A sex difference in tolerance for sexual language may seem like a throwback to Victorian daintiness. But an unanticipated consequence of the second wave of feminism in the 1970s was a revived sense of offense at swearing, the linguistic companion to the campaign against pornography.

Apparently, we're all prudes: either Dworkinites or Victorian throwbacks. And in two relatively short paragraphs, he almost managed to ruin the whole article for me, relying on lazy (and nonsense) evolutionary psychology arguments about how women have so little to gain from sex and are thus uncomfortable with even discussing it. Nowhere else in the article does he fail to consider the ways in which social structures influence our usage and understanding of language, so the misstep here is puzzling.

so, so many

2007-10-09T14:38:00.000-07:00

A gift from my afternoon gmail inbox: it's not quite an infinity of poems, but it's damn close. I have a copy of the Oulipo Compendium, which he took this translation from, and there's something wonderful about leafing through it and using some agency in combining (composing? not quite)the lines, but this web version has a certain automatic charm of its own.

And of course, I'd love to own one of these. But that's not likely to happen any time soon.

one word

2007-09-25T12:56:00.000-07:00

I used to write poems that reveled in brevity, poems that maxed out at three lines, three short lines, even. They weren't easy to write, unless they came to me entirely whole, already created out of the ether. Those were lovely, to be sure, but the majority of them were heavily polished little gems, careful creations masquerading as feats of inspiration.

Sometimes, the titles were longer than the poems. Other times, the titles were the only things shorter. Sometimes, they just had numbers. Lately, I can't write like that, but this delightful post (found via Bookslut) about short poems reminds me of how satisfying it was.

Last night, we were talking about The Fear of Losing Eurydice and AVA, because I'm re-reading the first and always thinking about the latter, and because there is a resonance between them that I was trying to explain. I think it boils down to this: each sentence in each book is as dense and vivid and carefully self-contained as one of these poems. Even in Eurydice, where they're not set apart visually, each sentence is a separate revelation, a discrete and lovely work that is linked thematically but not grammatically to the surrounding text.

Last night, I said they were similar "flights of language," a phrase I meant to reference the irresistibly infectious quality of flights of fancy, but also the delicious experience of flights of wine: words that take wing, and words that allow you to taste a range of ideas and images. Each word a rare bird.

password

2007-09-20T16:15:00.001-07:00

via Maud Newton, a list that reminds me overwhelmingly of one of the best scenes in Hackers. I don't think there's any overlap between the two lists (what are the passwords: god, sex, love, power, password and the user's own name?), but the idea is essentially the same. Humans are a remarkably predictable breed.

eurydice, lost

2007-09-12T11:16:00.001-07:00

Julieta Campos died a few days ago. Searching online, I've been able to find only one English language obituary. It's short, and I hope that's because I missed the longer ones; maybe they've all disappeared since last week. This is probably not a reasonable hope, but I'm holding on to it, regardless.

I'll re-read The Fear of Losing Eurydice soon, and I'll write more about it then.

In the meantime, an interview.

fashion

2007-09-06T10:08:00.000-07:00

I couldn't love this more.

More about why I love it: it seems like a commentary on fact and permanence, and the ways in which we transmit information. back in the day, a sweater was something that took weeks to knit, a handmade object that had a certain metaphorical, personal weight to it. similarly, a newspaper had a certain once-a-day heft. to me, this is project all about trying to lend that permanence and personal-ness to a modern machine-knitted sweater, and also to the ever-changing constantly-being-reported-and-updated news of today.

If the above seems ungrammatical or out of context, it's from an email. Don't judge me for the incredible number of hyphens. Apparently, I was in a hyphen-heavy kind of mood.

(found on CRAFT:)

startling

2007-09-05T10:15:00.000-07:00

If I told you the book I'm reading included a scene of attempted self-castration, I suspect you'd conclude that I was reading someone like Chuck Palahniuk, someone who would write about the heat of the blood, the snap of the tendons (are there even tendons in there? I don't know, but it sounds plausible), the sudden excess of liquid, and the undeniable sexuality of the whole experience. It would be the kind of scene that causes girls to faint in the subway.

In this case, though, it's not. It's a quiet scene, as ambiguous as anything of its kind can be. The narrator slips off into the bathtub, razor in hand, and we're told of blood, of pain, and of his eventual faint. Nothing is explicit, and it's not until a few pages later that the reader is entirely, finally convinced that their suspicious were correct, and this confirmation comes only in the form of unscarred wrists. Regardless, this particular moment of mutilation feels entirely necessary, a silent and bloody means of further subsuming the terror of sexuality.

The book? The Seraglio, by James Merrill. Published in 1957, the first of the only two novels he ever published. He's well known as a poet, but wrote the two novels when he was relatively young; neither one is anything like what you'd expect, and both are quite remarkable. Truth be told, I liked the other better, and apparently I'm not the only one. It's still in print.

the bittersweet

2007-08-29T11:47:00.000-07:00

the sweet, first: Maud Newton used the little blurb I wrote for her about Casco Bay Books, despite the fact that I totally failed to make good on my plans to write something longer and better, as well as my plans to ask her to link to me here if she was going to link to me anywhere.

the bitter: For the first time in years, my vacation to Maine was so whirlwind that I didn't make it to the store. Turns out, though, that I would have been even more sad if I had gotten there. Apparently, my favorite book store in the world is no more.

in french, the word for vacation is always plural

2007-08-22T11:10:00.000-07:00

What I read on my summer vacation:

Oh, man, do I have a crush on Scarlett Thomas. I've already blogged about reading PopCo, and I plan to write something soon about The End of Mr. Y, but for vacation, I turned to her genre fiction. Dead Clever was perfect airplane reading, almost good enough to make up for being stuck in the middle seat on a red eye.

Originally published under the pseudonym of Sally Mara, We Always Treat Women Too Well isn't one of Queneau's more famous books, but I had been wanting to read it for a while. Every bit as smutty and violent as the pulp novels it satirizes, it's also ridiculously funny, and at times startlingly disgusting. In short, awesome.

Lots of Josephine Tey: Brat Farrar, The Man in the Queue, and To Love and Be Wise. As I told my mom, I only read mysteries when I'm on vacation. In response, she handed me a pile of these old paperbacks, culled from yard sales and sidewalk book stalls. She's a good mom.

Amazon has been recommending Snow, by Orhan Pamuk, to me for months. They were kind of right. I can't deny that it's a good book, smart, beautifully written and thought provoking, but, all the same, it's not really my thing.

Reading mysteries on vacation is all very well, but reading mysteries in French makes you look so much smarter. Plus, having a glossary in the back makes it easier. Hence, my dad's old copy of Tournants Dangereux, by Georges Simenon.

Last but not least, Shelley Jackson's Half Life made the plane ride back feel almost short. I saw her read from it a few months ago, and have been wanting to read it ever since. Thanks to a late birthday present, I finally go to. Now I want to read it again. Her writing is so dense and vivid and weird and wonderful; it's the kind of thing you just want to immerse yourself in.

(Next up, books I got on my summer vacation, but haven't yet read.)

cinematic

2007-08-07T15:04:00.000-07:00

For the last few days, I've been reading One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. It's an amazing book, and I’m embarrassed that I hadn't read it before, especially now that I'm (like Mr. Kesey) an Oregonian. Of course, I've seen the film, which is a classic— I think I first saw it in a high school film class, where I watched intently, trying to pay attention to every detail. I've seen it once or twice since then, as well, so it's pretty well burned into my brain. Turns out, I remember it even better than I realized.

Maybe this is common, maybe it's nothing revolutionary or even surprising, but it's very strange to me to read a book and have Jack Nicholson cavorting around in my head, and to have my understanding of the ward's layout already fixed, even before I've finished the first (short) chapter. It's kind of neat, sure, but even more than that, it's distracting. It's harder to pay attention to the language, and I don't feel like my understanding of the book is evolving in the same way it does with a story I've never heard before.

I don't watch a lot of movies, and I do read a lot of books, so it's possible that this is truly the first time I've encountered the movie before the book. I can't think of another pair that I've experienced in this order, and this is certainly the first time I've had the two intertwine in this way, which makes me wonder. Does this happen to people all the time?

break 'em

2007-08-01T15:40:00.000-07:00

I would say that Bookslut always makes me happy, but there was a review one time that made me so angry I had to send them an email. Later that day, Jessa Crispin herself (!) wrote back, with the perfect response. She hadn’t liked the offensive phrase either, but doesn’t believe in censoring her columnists. The result was, luckily, wonderful, but there was a moment or two there when I was displeased. Hence, they mostly make me happy, where mostly is a value of just slightly more than ninety-nine percent of the time.

At the moment, though, I couldn’t love the site more, thanks to a wonderful feature on the dangers of over-specialization, a feature that urges us all to diversify our written works, and does so in a way that can’t have been calculated just to appeal to me particularly, but works as well as if it had been. Ah, the well-crafted call to be more like Carole Maso. It gets me every time.

shhh

2007-07-30T12:16:00.000-07:00

On Sunday, I went on a library adventure, seeking out the Itinerant Librarian to become a member of her traveling library. Despite my initial confusion regarding the location (the bookstore where she was set up is at 8 NE Killingsworth, not NE 8th and Killingsworth, and I drove around the latter a few times), I was successful, and am now an official, card-carrying member of the library (luckily, my hairstyle was deemed inoffensive). I also got to read some wonderful poetry, including books by bill bissett and Suzanne Stein.

Most importantly, though, I remembered how much I like libraries. When I was a kid, I spent hours at the library every week, and when I was in college, I spent hours there every day. Now, I rarely venture into one, but visiting this briefcase-sized library reminded me that I should visit those more permanent institutions with more frequency. There's something rather magical about the presence of books that you absolutely cannot own, and about a space policed by a librarian (whether s/he rules with bylaws or bye-bye laws). Yes, the whole thing made me very happy.

aww

2007-07-25T15:47:00.000-07:00

sometimes xkcd is too dorky for me, but other times it's just right.

binge and purge

2007-07-25T12:36:00.000-07:00

If you've ever been to my room, you've probably said it. Everyone does. They open the door, their eyes widen, and they say "Oh, you've got a lot of books." Usually, if they're someone I'm fond of, they say it with a reverence in their voice, a kind of delighted awe that trails off into an excited perusal of the shelves, a quiet inspection of just which ones I do have. Sometimes, and this is rare, they're surprised, even a little bit taken aback. Those people aren't generally invited back.

Those people, though, may have a point. At the moment, I have five bookcases in my room, all overfull, all tightly packed and stacked and some of them with even more books on top. I also have several piles of books on my reading chair, and a few more books on the floor. In an attempt to reduce clutter and keep all of the books contained in shelves, I'm trying to get rid of a few. It's hard.

My current rule is that I have to get rid of something every day. It doesn't have to be a book (because I have lots of other clutter, too), but it's good if it is. I'm not sure I'll ever do quite as well as this anonymous academic, though.

pine

2007-07-11T11:59:00.000-07:00

We sat in a tree, all arms and legs and branches, your hand on my ankle and my hands on the slowly peeling bark. Everything you said to me was cruel, but that didn't stop me from listening intently, absorbing every word carefully, inhaling the smell of the hardening sap along with an intense feeling that I would never be old enough to understand all the things you knew so instinctively. Not only were you older, but your mother was sick, a fact which lent you an unimaginable authority over the rest of us. Your mother was sick and your father was dead, while the best the rest of us could boast were a few assorted parental divorces, a dead pet here or there. We knew nothing of suffering.

[I'm not ever sure why I write so much in the second person. I'm sure your average armchair psychologist could make something out of it, but for now, I'll just assume I like the way it sounds. There's something delightfully intimate about the direct address, and I hate making up names for characters.]

speak, memory

2007-07-06T09:20:00.000-07:00

Wednesday morning, I finished Mauve Desert [verdict: awesome; now I want to read it in French], and started Reading Lolita in Tehran. It seemed like a good palate cleanser between bouts of the avant-garde, and certainly appropriate to read on the fourth of July. I had also recently been reminded of it by M. Bérubé's summary of some of the controversy surrounding the book, and was intrigued enough to pull it off the shelf.

It was given to me as a gift some time ago (Christmas? My last birthday? I'm not sure.), and it seems, on the surface of it, like a book I'd like a lot. It's literary, feminist, and political, a memoir about the personal and political implications of the ways in which women can relate not just to each other, but also to books. But my disinterest in the book hinges on one single word in that sentence: memoir. It is not a scholarly text, and those who criticize it for its simplicity, readability, or careful plotting miss the point. This is pop politics, pop literature, pop feminism; it's not a carefully disguised attempt to provoke or calm anti-Iran sentiment, rather it is the story of one woman's life in Iran.

When memoirs succeed, it is because they describe lives that are unlike the readers', lives that intrigue, challenge, and surprise. A memoir should leave the reader with more questions than answers, more impetus than satisfaction. Nafisi's book is lovely, interesting, and it details a life full of literature, subversion, and unrest. It raises important questions, and whatever its agenda, I think that's valuable. That said, it has made me think more about the nature of the memoir than about anything else, and I can't help but wonder why a woman who has invested so much of herself into fiction has chosen to write not a novel, but a memoir.

She seems to be attempting to situate this book somewhere between fiction and a persuasive and personal essay, and I end up wishing she'd written either one or the other. Certainly I'm oversimplifying the above, and perhaps this is simply because I'm someone who doesn't understand the essential truthiness of the genre, but memoirs just don't do it for me. The exceptions to the rule are few, but they do, of course, include the book from which this post steals its title.

triumph

2007-06-29T11:31:00.000-07:00

Last night, I ate lettuce, sugar snap peas, and zucchini, all fresh-picked, straight from my backyard garden.

Today, I read this.

Soon, there will be tomatoes. Lots of them.

the story of my life

2007-06-26T10:18:00.000-07:00

read it and weep.

(and then write your own)

mauve

2007-06-25T09:16:00.000-07:00

It's about translation, about language, both written and spoken, read and heard. It's about rereading, rephrasing, rewriting, and reimagining. It's also about sex, about skin (on skin), about adolescence and about the frailties of aging, about explosion, death, surprise, and dull, extended aches. It's about the desert, about driving through the night, and about the tensions between desire and maintenance, passion and fear. In the book, a girl drives her mother's car, meets a woman, watches her die. Then, a woman works to translate the book you've just read. Then you read the translation, which is both very much different and exactly the same.

Oh yeah, and the copy I'm reading is in English, translated from the French. Which just adds another layer of complication to all of this, because you can feel the language barrier sometimes, notice that the sentences were constructed with a different kind of grammar.

I can't remember when the last time was that I was able to give a clear, concise answer to the question: "What's that book about?" Any book can fit into that question, but now I'm talking about this one.

a provocative novel

2007-06-16T17:17:00.001-07:00

a provocative novel
Originally uploaded by dizymsliz

I bought this a few weeks ago at Powell's, both because of the title (and with that subtitle, who could resist?), and because I've been wanting to read something of Shirley Jackson's for a while now.

A rainy saturday seemed like the perfect time to immerse myself in its awesomeness, and while I was right about that, my suspicion that the book was actually about me was not as thoroughly confirmed.

live birth

2007-06-07T10:26:00.000-07:00

There is a reader board on the way to my work that changes every week. This week, it reads:

If fish is brain food you better eat a whale!

If I were the type to leave passive aggressive notes, I would probably take the time to stop and let these people know that not only is their understanding of basic grammar pretty shaky, eating whale isn't really going to help anything, because whales aren't fish.

burn, baby, burn

2007-06-05T11:34:00.001-07:00

Sometimes it's hard to explain why authorial intent isn't actually a useful component of the study of literature, why we think more about the text itself than the biography or opinions of the person who wrote it, why we don't just believe the author about what the book means, what its many messages are. It's hard to explain that intention and context aren't everything, and that a text can take on a life and a meaning of its own, one mediated by history and context and, yes, the reader.

Luckily, Ray Bradbury can explain why an author's conception of their own book may not always be accurate. Fahrenheit 451, you see, isn't about government censorship.

(Relatedly and entertainingly, one of the informants in the book might as well share my name: the next-door neighbor is identified only as Mrs. L. Blake.)

genre fiction

2007-06-04T15:30:00.000-07:00

Quirky, solitary, code-obsessed narrator finds herself in a wholly constructed artificial world, one where individuality seems increasingly impossible and relationships are all suspicious. It's hard to know what's real and what's created, ideated, an experiment being performed by the overarching corporation or an act of systemic sabotage being perpetuated by someone working from within that very system.

Themes include: computers, games, video games, game theory, cryptography, cryptanalysis, networks, branding, marketing, advertising, identity, subversion, falsehood.

If this is cyberpunk, though, and I think it is (the Neuromancer reference sealed it for me), it's vegan cyberpunk, homeopathic, back-to-the-land cyberpunk. The artificial world isn't a virtual one, and the mysterious coded messages arrive on paper. That isn't to say it's a throwback to another time; the absence of technology doesn't preclude the discussion or consideration of technology. I'm not sure that description sounds very appealing, but PopCo itself is really interesting for such a fast, light read. I have more to say about this, but blogs are not academic papers. Right?

awesome

2007-05-29T11:40:00.000-07:00

If i was organized enough to put together a sidebar list of blogs I read, I'd add this right now. Because it is my new favoritest blog ever.

at sea

2007-05-10T11:58:00.000-07:00

The first two times I tried to start Billy Budd, I couldn't do it. I was too distracted or too tired, it was too difficult to find my way through each sentence, unraveling and detangling Melville's intricate structures and infinite digressions.

Last night, though, was the opposite. Smooth sailing, if you'll pardon the terrible, terrible pun. Melville's sentences are complicated, thorny, and carefully composed, but they are also intensely readable, personal, and personable. He writes like someone I'd love to talk to, with a mind as antsy and encyclopedic as the most self-conscious of postmodernists, but with a rhythm and an ease that make his work compulsively readable.

I'm less than 30 pages in, but the whole thing already makes me awfully happy. Also, the Signet Classics edition I have has the best cover art ever.

green mercedes

2007-05-03T11:34:00.000-07:00

she's more than
a little bit nuts, the woman,
the artist (you say that
with a certain tone in your
voice), but she has the best
hair you've ever seen,
and she drew a beautiful
picture of your cat
the day before he died.

drunk

2007-05-02T10:03:00.000-07:00

File under "things I'll never be awesome enough to actually say, but am still proud to have thought of."

Three sheets to the wind? I was the fucking Pequod in a goddamn typhoon!

(and no, I'm not drunk right now.)

descent

2007-05-01T16:23:00.000-07:00

Turns out, Going Down is a very direct (if unexpected) ancestor of Reader's Block and all the not-quite-novels that followed. It's morbid and achingly intellectual, a trip through a kind of art-historical catalog of the dead, the maimed, and the crazy.

It's also very definitely a novel, a thriller, even, if you believe the jacket copy. Though I can't deny that it contains plenty of sex and death and intrigue (and, as Mr. Vonnegut points out on the cover, it does leave one rather woozy), I'm not sure yet that I'd quite go so far as to call it a thriller, but I still have a few pages to go.

an unexpected bard

2007-04-10T12:34:00.000-07:00

Amid my dreams of paper and paragraphs, I made a surprising discovery last night. It wasn't Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, Edward de Vere, or even the Queen herself who wrote all those sonnets and all those plays. Shakespeare, as it turns out, was actually Camille Paglia.

Note to self: more sleep, less studying.

an obsession, the color green

2007-04-02T17:56:00.000-07:00

It started as a system, a genuine way to keep track of things. A way to ensure that you had a firm grasp on what you had worn the last time you had seen someone, and a way to ensure that you wouldn't repeat yourself too often. The fear was that, being someone who considered one's friends' preferences when choosing clothes, one would remember that Lucinda liked green, and so wear the green sweater when going to see Lucinda.

While this may not seem like something to fear, it's important to consider the possibility of repetition, or coming to that same conclusion over and over again, so that one wore the sweater every time on saw Lucinda. The resultant (feared!) tragedy, of course, being that Lucinda would not assume that the sweater indicated a shared interest in all things emerald, but rather that it indicated a limited wardrobe, possibly that you even only had the one sweater.

an american pastime (pastoral?)

2007-03-19T13:00:00.000-07:00

Dream world: An Americana class (lit & song) taught by Don DeLillo and Tom Waits, the latter at a piano, the prior at a podium. The auditorium packed with students, and I’m stuck with a broken seat, warned of its danger by my childhood nemesis, sitting beside it. "Thanks," I whisper, and perch on the floor. The lecture is amazing.

Real world, precipitating events: Falling asleep reading DeLillo, thinking about how he weaves reality into Underworld; it’s not exactly deft, that’s just the word that pairs with weave. To expand, it’s well done, but almost a cheap trick, the way the drama pulls us along not because we wonder what will happen, but because we know. The Giants will win the pennant, and the world will explode with joy and wonder and defeat, all at once. A little boy will steal a baseball, and a bomb will drop.

He wrote (all this, in 1997) about the building of the World Trade Center, the way the towers felt joined and inevitable, about a plane flying past. It’s in these scarce and scattered moments that the trick is revealed, all the more because he was unaware of it. They read as something more final, more important, more clearly implicating all of us in their collapse, than they could possibly have felt or been at the time.

TV world, an aside: I don’t follow baseball, and I never would have read the opening pages of this book this way were it not for Aaron Sorkin’s Sports Night.

research methods

2007-03-16T10:37:00.000-07:00

I wrote briefly about Baudrillard being consumed and recreated by his own image, but someone else did it much, much better.

See here: http://insidehighered.com/views/2007/03/14/mclemee

twenty three

2007-03-13T23:56:00.000-07:00

We had a 23 hour day this week, and I can't even use that as an excuse. The thing is, I'm just not used to this. This little experiment is lending me great respect for some bloggers I already admired, the ones who create multiple posts per day, each post not just smart and insightful, but also lengthy.

Part of the problem is that I do most of my writing during the only time of day when I can't actually count it as writing, can't record it into any medium at all, the only time when both my hands are too busy to even activate a strategic tape recorder: during my daily commute. As I drive, the words move around in my head, shaping sentences, lines, and ideas that rarely ever make it to screen or paper. I'm not distracted, and I'm not engaged with anybody else's words; there's not even anyone else to talk to, so I have to work. I have to write.

I've never had a job that didn't require a significant commute, and suddenly that seems like a good thing.

hyperreality

2007-03-09T11:55:00.000-08:00

A few days late, but maybe worth writing anyway; Baudrillard no longer exists. He is dead, and can no longer represent himself. His works survive, but are outnumbered by the many readings and misreadings of them, along with obituaries that stridently name-check popular films while ignoring the works themselves.

Heartbreaking, yes, but it's hard not to get the sense that he would take some certain satisfaction in the inevitable fact of his identity being subsumed to an image created by information overload, by the sheer volume of words produced by reporters and professors and even by audience-less bloggers such as myself.

goddamn

2007-03-05T11:42:00.000-08:00

It doesn't even seem possible, let alone probable. A new library is opening, but it may remain open less than six weeks. Others will close with a little less fanfare, but no less heartbreak. There's no money to keep them running.

Oh, Oregon; whatever shall we do?

one song

2007-03-02T10:53:00.000-08:00

A white wall, two sky-blue figures, and some interesting (if oddly-laid out) copy: We are one song. The figures were holding hands, and the letters skittered across the side of the building, with strange spacing and lots of emptiness between them. Clearly, it was an ad for something, but it wasn't clear what it was for. I puzzled over it, then gradually let it fade into the scenery. When you drive by something every morning, it loses its mystery pretty quickly.

Then it changed. More figures appeared, along with a logo and more letters that filled in some of those large white spaces. We are connected and strong. Another week went by, and when I looked up this morning, the sentence had filled out even more: We are all connected and millions strong.

It's an ad for a local hospital (and yes, the colors should give away which one), and I like it. It's simple and clever, and it takes advantage of the way we tend to ignore the static highway-side scenery while we commute. That said, the sentiment seems more appropriate for arguing against privatized health care than for it; we need a more inclusive system so that this ad's message can ring true, so that we can all be connected and strong, so that healthcare is no longer a luxury limited to the lucky few.

delicious

2007-02-28T17:58:00.000-08:00

I once wrote an essay about recurrence, about longing and heartbreak, and saccharine pleasures and the deliciousness of denying them; I wrote about death and separation and the ways we try to fool ourselves into believing we’re not sad. We were asked to write about what we believed in, and I wrote about the engine of my car and the fact that whenever someone was about to break my heart, they gave me a popsicle.

I don’t have a copy of that essay any more, but I still do have a friend or two who remembers it, fondly. They remember it as the popsicle essay, just like they remember the poem I wrote a few years later as the one about pears. It’s about love, lust, and licking someone else’s fingers, but it’s the pears that shine through, even for the girl I know who remembers it, alternately, as the poem about peaches and “that one with the plums.”

The important thing to glean from all of this? Images are powerful, but, as it says above: this is not a food blog. Don’t be fooled by the name.