The French Exit

"Woody amber" vs. amber vs. amber that happens to be woody

2012-01-25T17:30:00.000-05:00

I am not a chemist or a perfumer, so probably not the best person to write this post, but it doesn't seem to have been satisfactorily answered elsewhere on the Internet, so here goes: What's the difference between "woody amber," "amber" and an "amber" that happens to be "woody"?

"Woody amber" is a term used to describe a class of synthetic molecules with a sharp smell sometimes described as being reminiscent of rubbing alcohol. Woody ambers, like synthetic musks and other large aromachemicals, tend to be perceived differently by different noses. Some people are completely anosmic to them, others are highly sensitive. People who are sensitive to woody ambers usually describe them in auditory (high-pitched, screechy) or tactile (spiky, abrasive) terms. Molecules that fall into the "woody amber" category include Karanal and Ambrocenide. They are sometimes simply called synthetic ambers or synthetic ambergris. (Amber and ambergris are also different things; woody amber materials are usually considered to be a substitute for ambergris, not the amber accord described below.) Aside from having a smell of their own, woody ambers are often used as intensifiers to make other materials more diffusive and longer-lasting.

"Amber" is a much older term used to describe an accord (familiar blend of notes) rather than a single note or material, usually a combination of vanilla, resins and/or balsams.

The confusion, naturally, arises from the fact that "woody" is also an adjective that means what it sounds like: smelling like wood. And a perfume with a natural amber accord could also easily be woody (including cedar or sandalwood, for example), leading people to describe it as a "woody amber." But an amber with woody notes is not the same as a "woody amber note." Both valid descriptions, but they mean different things.

Perfume is stupid sometimes.

Interestingly, I don't see this term used often by women perfume bloggers, but it's used all the time in the Basenotes community, perhaps because woody amber materials are more commonly used in men's fragrances. Here's what one Basenotes writer had to say about them:

Honestly, I don’t like Chrome. But it’s a perfect, easily available example of a textbook “woody amber” scent, so I think I need to put it on here for historical significance and as a useful reference.

If you think about it, even esoteric groundbreakers like A*Men and Le Male are grounded in traditional perfumery, using age-old notes like patchouli and lavender in interesting new ways. Even Green Irish Tweed, with its game-changing hyper-synthetic Allyl Amyl Glycolate/Dihydromyrcenol/Ambrox aquatic mix, was grounded with traditional chypre ingredients.

What Chrome did was to take Creed’s legendary aquatic chemical mix and take it to its extreme. By topping this mix with a lavender overdose and a bunch of other synthetics, they created a distinct smell, the polar opposite of traditional perfumes. Aside from some lemon in the topnotes, Chrome doesn’t smell like anything classic. Instead, it’s more of a chemical buzz than an identifiable smell. Some compare this smell to ammonia or lemon-scented Windex. To others, it’s the smell of an over-heated swimming pool, its chlorine fumes hanging heavy in the humid air. It’s also known for smelling like super-saturated rubbing alcohol or the smell of hot metal or flint. Many people don’t even think of this mix as an intentional accord, thinking of it simply as “that men’s cologne smell” or “that smell that makes me sneeze”. However you perceive it, this is what’s known as “woody amber.” This, of course, is a terribly misleading term, because it doesn’t smell like wood or amber. It’s also generally not included in note lists (though some scents lately have called it amberwood, which I think is a name they’re trying to call this mixture now), so it’s very rarely discussed, leaving it as a weird elephant in the room of men’s scents.

More than any other mix of notes, this “woody amber” mix has come to define modern mass-market men’s perfumery. Sometimes, it’s an artful metallic buzz (like in Terre d’Hermes), while other times it’s combined with pepper and sweet citrus or fruit to give a masculine hum to otherwise too-sweet topnotes. But, most commonly, it’s a familiar base to hundreds of unremarkable modern men’s scents.

So, in the interest of informed discussion, I urge everyone to go out and spray some Chrome and really get to know its weird smell so you’ll fully know “woody amber.”

A photograph within a photo

2012-01-21T18:37:00.000-05:00

On organization called Tamms Year Ten is trying to change conditions at the Tamms supermax prison in Illinois. One of their projects involves soliciting requests for photographs and drawings from male prisoners kept in solitary confinement. The February issue of Harper's includes some of the inmates' requests:

I would love a photograph of a woman sitting by a lake fishing, with an empty chair next to her, with a cooler of beer. And have a Harley-Davidson motorcycle in the background! I'd prefer the photographer take the photo from a boat out in the lake! Also, I'd prefer a woman that's over forty!

A photograph within a photo of me + the lakefront. A photograph within a photo of me + Navy Pier. A photograph within a photo of me + wild lions. A photograph within a photo of me + wild wolves. A photograph within a photo of me + Chinese dragon, for next Christmas mailing of cards. Please place me in the right, upper corner of the photos within a photo + make copies of them.

A gray & white (mix) "warmblood" horse(s) in an outdoor environment -- shown in action, such as rearing up or jumping or climbing. I'd like the photo to convey freedom, strength, and the wisdom of nature. If possible, taken in a cold environment so that clouds of hot breath can be seen.

At sixty-six years of age I try to use a little humor: I want a picture of a trash can with the lid half off and two eyes peeking out as the trash can rolls down the hill toward an incinerator with the caption: I seem to be picking up speed I must be headed toward a bright future.

Something I find interesting: It's easy to imagine a talented photographer or artist fulfilling these requests to complete satisfaction. However, if I imagine an equally specific request for a poem or even a novel, it seems that the written work would almost always disappoint.

The saddest songs of all time

2012-01-19T20:03:00.000-05:00

These two songs are currently in a dead-lock tie for the saddest song I've ever heard. Notice the common theme: utter and complete subjugation/desperation ("I'll do anything for you"/"I would be anything that you wanted me to be").

"For the Widows in Paradise, For the Fatherless in Ypsilanti" by Sufjan Stevens

"A Favor" by Okkervil River (more on this in an upcoming Coldfront feature)

Same goes for this forever runner-up: "Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want" by The Smiths

Give me your tired, your poor, your most wretched songs of all time.

Things you are probably doing wrong

2012-01-18T13:57:00.000-05:00

I'm fascinated by common misconceptions of any type, like how so many people think blood is blue until you get cut and the air instantly oxygenates it (totally believed this for decades; I think they actually teach it in high-school science classes). Now I'm trying to think of a list of common products or tools that everyone uses incorrectly. Here's what I've got so far:

Deodorant: You've heard me bang this dead drum before, but it bears repeating: You're supposed to put it on at night!
Aluminum Foil: ~~Apparently you're supposed to use the dull side for some tasks and the shiny side for others.~~ Never mind, the current consensus is it doesn't really matter. Anyway, most people don't set up the box correctly. Yes, there is a correct way to set up the box so the foil doesn't come flying out (same goes for plastic wrap). Full credit to John for being the one to figure that out.
Monopoly: I've been playing Monopoly wrong my entire life. Maybe this is why I hate it.

Aaaaand that's all I've got. That's where you, Dear Reader, come in. So enlighten me, please, what am I doing wrong?

P.S. Just in case you haven't heard my favorite Saran wrap joke, it goes like this: Guy walks into a psychiatrist's office, completely naked except for a layer of Saran wrap. The doctor says, "I can clearly see you're nuts."

P.P.S. Just in case you haven't listened to Bossypants "on tape," here's a good joke from the audiobook (maybe the real book too?): Two peanuts are walking down the street, and one of them's a salted. (According to @excitedstoat, the actual source is Monty Python, or at least it's the older of the two.)

Abandonment

2012-01-17T23:53:00.000-05:00

My computer's all backed up. Sheesh.

Here are a bunch of bits from a file titled "Unfinished," unopened since 2009 (until just now).

***

WAITING FOR SOMETHING ONCE

I read an index of first lines. Still the “way in” eludes me.

Why do I feel that I can picture, like a memory, the moment my father quit smoking? My mother was pregnant. He was standing in the snow.

My friend’s wife is having twins. But you’re just a kid, I thought, though he’s older than me.

Once my medical history was “unremarkable”—not just not remarkable, but unable to be remarked upon. Now my heart skitters up at the littlest thing: footfall downstairs. Raccoon in a tree.

Now I’m approaching the decade when I’ll find out if I have my mother’s debilitating disease. My feelings about this are unfeelings. I don’t allow myself to have them. What is she eliding to spare me? Not the pain, at least.

Everything that happens will seem like the first sign. At a party, I keep hearing my name—or was it just “at least a,” as in, I think about smoking at least a hundred times a day. On the street, the bus, I recognize everyone.

***

In the slow-motion chase scene, when the cheetahfinally bites into the antelope’s neck, it’s seductive, even erotic—she goesdown so gently. The children all gasp: It’s the cute & the sublime mixed upon one screen. They don’t know who to root for, nature as a whole or the babyanimal?

[I wrote this bit after seeing that nature documentary put out by Disney.]

***

He is nonplussed
when I say probably we’re living in a simulation—

someone did the math.
But that’s exactly how he would act,

if he were a projection of a conscious being.
The Harvard Museum of Natural History

dematerializes behind me; the sidewalk
appears, the grass unseasonably green.

Do grasshoppers really have butterfly wings?
Or is this an embellished version

of the world as it was? Unreliable memory …
The museum is boring

[As good a place to end as any. I'm 99% sure I was trying to be funny. Note to self: Never try to be funny in a poem.]

***

[I also found this very old exercise-type poem I have no recollection of writing in which every line ends with the word "fish." D.H. Lawrence and I really are kindred spirits!]

THE FISH

He didn’t want to be the fish

so much as the shadow beneath the fish.

Shadowing the fish.

Learning from the fish

what it’s like to be a fish,

or something like a fish:

a one-dimensional fish,

an epiphenomenal fish.

He had gone to the pond to look at the fish

and found that he could not stop looking at the fish.

There was something very powerful about the fish.

Especially this particular fish—

the leader of the fish.

It possessed a power that the other fish

did not, and that he did not, not being a fish.

He would never be a fish,

could never even hope to be the shadow of a fish,

much less this most powerful fish.

He was practically the opposite of fish:

it felt that way, standing there above the fish

and looking down at them the way one looks at fish.

Embodiment of everything that isn’t fish.

No overlap or intersection between him and fish.

As black to white, as death to life, him to fish.

And in this way, in awe of the fish,

humbled before the fish,

transformed by the fish,

destroyed by the fish,

he came to want to kill the fish.

[Ridiculish.]

Capital my dear fellow

2012-01-17T19:42:00.000-05:00

There's a burnt out blotch on the LED screen of my laptop, which is about a year old. Sucks because I specifically bought an ASUS because I heard they were one of the more reliable brands (though to be honest I previously always owned Dells and they all lasted for years and gave me no problems, go figure). I've been putting off taking it in, even though it's under warranty, because I wasn't sure how long I'd have to be without it. I can use my work laptop, but it's tiny and clunky and I DO NOT PREFER IT. Also, for a while there I was working on My New Project (Operation YA Novel) every night and didn't want to break my stride. But then I didn't work on it at all for like six days so I figured I might as well take the thing in. Drove to Best Buy after work and they put the fear in me SO BAD I drove back home to back everything up AGAIN. The important stuff has been recently backed up "in the cloud" (Gmail/Dropbox) and older files (most of my music and pictures, archived writing, etc.) are on an external hard drive and probably at least one portable jump drive too. Still, the guy made it sound like it's likelier than not that they'll either wipe the entire hard drive or just send me a new computer. They offered to back it up for me there -- for a hundred bucks! And I actually considered it, so I wouldn't have to turn around and make another trip, which officially makes me a dick, especially because after reluctantly taking my laptop back, I went into the DSW next door and spent almost $200 on new running shoes (which, to be fair, I have needed for literally four years) and three pairs of black heels (which, to be fair, I really need one pair of, and two of them were on clearance). Ugh, LIFE, you know?

Why does no one love Mates of State as much as me? John actively hates them, as in refuses to listen to them in the car, which is true for me of Tom Waits. There are probably only 20-30 albums that we both genuinely love. SO MUCH FOR COMPATIBILITY.

I want to watch every movie I ever had on VHS, in a row.

Jobz

2012-01-13T16:10:00.003-05:00

Dear readers, my company is looking to hire a senior software engineer and a technical lead. If any of you live in the Boston area, have 3-7 years of coding experience, and are looking for work, backchannel me.

The 34 most annoying things you have to do in the kitchen

2012-01-11T14:54:00.000-05:00

I cook almost every day, usually multiple meals per day. I love cooking, but these are the things that make me wish I lived in a slave state, in order of most to least abominable:

Picking bits of eggshell out of the egg white (this might top the list of most annoying things, period)
Squeezing the water out of frozen spinach (I don't think I will ever do this again, in fact. Fuck you frozen spinach.)
Preparing fresh artichokes (Fake out! I've never even done this because I just can't deal)
Cleaning the stove after you've boiled over the rice
Cleaning a burnt pan
Greasing and flouring a cake pan (thank god I never have to do this again)
Getting the corn silk off an ear of corn
Peeling and chopping ginger
Getting the bones out of salmon
Flipping a frittata
Washing a mesh strainer by hand
Washing a box grater by hand, assuming you've used it to grate cheese
Cleaning a blender
Washing dishes in a glove that has a slit in in, from the mesh strainer, box grater or blender no doubt
Washing and drying lettuce (I don't have a salad spinner)
Getting a pan you rarely use out of its inaccessible corner, and putting it back up again (tie)
Chopping jalapenos and other foods that contain hazardous chemicals
Peeling apples for applesauce (I feel like this gives me arthritis, or reminds me I have it)
Peeling peaches
Peeling/cutting raw winter squash
Salting and draining something in the sink before you can even start cooking with it (thank god I don't eat eggplant anymore)
Trimming brussels sprouts
Pitting olives
Chopping carrots
Cleaning mushrooms
Peeling garlic
Peeling hard-boiled eggs that aren't ready to be peeled
Pureeing soup in multiple batches (Actually doing anything in multiple batches. Batches must die!)
Picking herbs off the stems
Chopping raw bacon (and everything associated with opening the package and wrapping the rest of the bacon back up, which gets slimy grease all over everything)
Refilling the pepper mill
Making coffee and all associated activities (John did this for years, but he stopped drinking coffee recently, so if I want any it's all on me)
Moving the racks in the oven when it's already preheated
Unloading the dishwasher

God, cooking sucks.

Also, making this list has forced me to realize that vegetables bring more suffering into the world than meat.

The Jelly Belly Game

2012-01-08T14:59:00.000-05:00

We invented a little game last night. You'll need a bag of Jelly Belly jelly beans in assorted flavors (the only reason you would have this is if someone put a bag in your stocking). Dump them in a bowl. One player reaches into the bowl and chooses a bean without looking. He or she then shows it to the other participating players, who compare its coloring to the key on the back of the Jelly Belly bag. The first player then eats the bean and tries to guess its flavor. Without the suggestive power of the coloring, this is often surprisingly hard to do.

Also, we watched a funny little movie called Happy Accidents. It's a romantic comedy with a time travel element!

I can feel it, two ways

2012-01-06T22:53:00.001-05:00

Fishes ain't shit

2012-01-06T10:12:00.000-05:00

I didn't even know D.H. Lawrence wrote poetry until a couple of years ago when John recited the following poem to me, though his version was a bit different (he ended it with an exclamation point, a definite improvement):

LITTLE FISH

The tiny little fish enjoy themselves
in the sea.
Quick little splinters of life,
their little lives are fun to them
in the sea.

I was searching around online for that yesterday, and found the below, which may be the funniest poem I've ever read. It's kind of magical in that it keeps getting more and more ridiculous, in ways you couldn't possibly anticipate. As such, it beats most poetry at its own game. According to @excitedstoat, D.H. Lawrence and I are "kinda-kindred spirits," though thankfully I have a "more favorable savant-to-idiot" ratio. What can I say? I'm flattergasted.

Witness "Fish":

FISH

Fish, oh Fish,
So little matters!

Whether the waters rise and cover the earth
Or whether the waters wilt in the hollow places,
All one to you.

Aqueous, subaqueous,
Submerged
And wave-thrilled.

As the waters roll
Roll you.
The waters wash,
You wash in oneness
And never emerge.

Never know,
Never grasp.

Your life a sluice of sensation along your sides,
A flush at the flails of your fins, down the whorl of your tail.
And water wetly on fire in the grates of your gills;
Fixed water-eyes.

Even snakes lie together.

But oh, fish, that rock in water.
You lie only with the waters;
One touch.

No fingers, no hands and feet, no lips;
No tender muzzles,
No wistful bellies,
No loins of desire,
None.

You and the naked element.
Sway-wave.
Curvetting bits of tin in the evening light.

Who is it ejects his sperm to the naked flood?
In the wave-mother?
Who swims enwombed?
Who lies with the waters of his silent passion, womb-element?
—Fish in the waters under the earth.

What price his bread upon the waters?

Himself all silvery himself
In the element
No more.

Nothing more.

Himself,
And the element.
Food, of course!
Water-eager eyes,
Mouth-gate open
And strong spine urging, driving;
And desirous belly gulping.

Fear also!He knows fear!
Water-eyes craning,
A rush that almost screams,
Almost fish-voice
As the pike comes…
Then gay fear, that turns the tail sprightly, from a shadow.

Food, and fear, and joie de vivre.
Without love.

The other way about:
Joie de vivre, and fear, and food,
All without love.

Quelle joie de vivre
Dans I’eau!
Slowly to gape through the waters,
Alone with the element;
To sink, and rise, and go to sleep with the waters;
To speak endless inaudible wavelets into the wave;
To breathe from the flood at the gills,
Fish-blood slowly running next to the flood, extracting fish- fire;
To have the element under one, like a lover;
And to spring away with a curvetting click in the air,
Provocative.
Dropping back with a slap on the face of the flood.
And merging oneself!

To be a fish !

So utterly without misgiving
To be a fish
In the waters.

Loveless, and so lively!
Born before God was love,
Or life knew loving.
Beautifully beforehand with it all.

Admitted, they swarm in companies,
Fishes.
They drive in shoals.
But soundless, and out of contact.
They exchange no word, no spasm, not even anger.
Not one touch.
Many suspended together, forever apart.
Each one alone with the waters, upon one wave with the rest.

A magnetism in the water between them only.

I saw a water-serpent swim across the Anapo,
And I said to my heart, look, look at him!
With his head up, steering like a bird!
He’s a rare one, but he belongs…

But sitting in a boat on the Zeller lake
And watching the fishes in the breathing waters
Lift and swim and go their way—
I said to my heart, who are these?
And my heart couldn’t own them…
A slim young pike, with smart fins
And grey-striped suit, a young cub of a pike
Slouching along away below, half out of sight,
Like a lout on an obscure pavement…

Aha, there’s somebody in the know!

But watching closer
That motionless deadly motion,
That unnatural barrel body, that long ghoul nose,…
I left off hailing him.

I had made a mistake, I didn’t know him,
This grey, monotonous soul in the water,
This intense individual in shadow,
Fish-alive.

I didn’t know his God,
I didn’t know his God.

Which is perhaps the last admission that life has to wring out of us.

I saw, dimly,
Once a big pike rush.
And small fish fly like splinters.
And I said to my heart, there are limits
To you, my heart;
And to the one God.
Fish are beyond me.

Other Gods
Beyond my range… gods beyond my God.
They are beyond me, are fishes.
I stand at the pale of my being
And look beyond, and see
Fish, in the outerwards,
As one stands on a bank and looks in.
I have waited with a long rod
And suddenly pulled a gold-and-greenish, lucent fish from below,
And had him fly like a halo round my head,
Lunging in the air on the line.

Unhooked his gorping, water-horny mouth.
And seen his horror-tilted eye,
His red-gold, water-precious, mirror-flat bright eye;
And felt him beat in my hand, with his mucous, leaping life-throb.

And my heart accused itself
Thinking: I am not the measure of creation.
This is beyond me, this fish.
His God stands outside my God.

And the gold-and-green pure lacquer-mucus comes off in my hand.
And the red-gold mirror-eye stares and dies,
And the water-suave contour dims.

But not before I have had to know
He was born in front of my sunrise.
Before my day.

He outstarts me.
And I, a many-fingered horror of daylight to him,
Have made him die.

Fishes,
With their gold, red eyes, and green-pure gleam, and under-gold.
And their pre-world loneliness,
And more-than-lovelessness.
And white meat;
They move in other circles.

Outsiders.
Water-wayfarers.
Things of one element.
Aqueous,
Each by itself.

Cats, and the Neapolitans,
Sulphur sun-beasts.
Thirst for fish as for more-than-water;
Water-alive
To quench their over-sulphureous lusts.

But I, I only wonder
And don’t know.
I don’t know fishes.

In the beginning
Jesus was called The Fish.
And in the end.

I mean, wow, right? I think my favorite line is "I don't know fishes," but there's so much gold (and red-gold, and under-gold) in here, from "Who is it ejects his sperm to the naked flood? / In the wave-mother?" to "Food, and fear, and joie de vivre" to "Quelle joie de vivre / Dans l’eau!" to "pre-world loneliness / And more-than-lovelessness, / And white meat." He truly is an idiot savant. I'm not kidding when I say I learned a lot from this poem (about poems, not fishes). Also, there should be a perfume called Joie de Vivre dans L'eau.

Anyone here a fan of his novels? I think I tried to read Lady Chatterly's Lover when I was like 10, but stopped when it had less sex than I had imagined.

A few other things I have liked recently:

The first two episodes of Downton Abbey (yep, hopping on that train)
This dialogue of a bad date by Chris O. Cook, possibly my favorite blogger of the year ("Date: Then why do you know what ruching means? Me: Well, I’m an English teacher, so I guess I know what it means because it’s a word.")
Liz Hildreth's resolutions ("Sometimes in the middle of the night, I wake up and I can’t go back to sleep and my head is racing with revelations about all the ways in which I’ve neglected the people I love, and all these ideas for changes I could make to be a better person, and I want to start writing letters to people and apologizing and telling them my great plans for redemption, but when I finally fall back to sleep, and I get up in the morning, I can’t call up the same intensity of feeling. I just feel like, 'Whatever, they probably deserved it.' Or 'Who am I, some spiritual leader? I don’t have the energy to change, I just want to write a poem.'")
Joan Chandler in Rope, who nails her first scene despite having to deliver the sexist line "I never know when I'm being funny"
Oh! And the scene in Carnal Knowledge where the camera stays square on Candice Bergen laughing her face off for like five minutes. I wish I could find it on YouTube.

Perfume hunting

2012-01-02T18:11:00.002-05:00

Every now and then I remember that the best way to find vintage perfumes is in the real world, not online. When you try to buy, say, pre-reformulation Egoiste on eBay, you're competing with a bunch of other perfume crazies who know how much it's worth, so unless you're extremely lucky or persistent you have to pay top-dollar. On the other hand, if you run across an old bottle of perfume at an estate sale or something like that, it's likely that the person selling it has no idea how much it's worth. In fact they probably think it's worth less than it was new, which, in some cases, is the opposite of the truth. So, on these rare occasions, like once a year, I get it in my head to search Craig's List to see if anyone's selling a bunch of old perfume at a garage sale or whatnot.

The last time I did this, I ended up getting vintage bottles of Eau de Joy, Hermes Caleche, and Shalimar Eau de Cologne for $50. The Joy I sometimes wear. The Caleche I swapped away. The Shalimar I still have, but the bottle is sealed. I'll probably sell it at some point. It looks like the oldest of the bunch by far. Today, I did the search again, and saw that someone near my apartment was selling a handful of perfumes, including a "huge" bottle of Yves Saint Laurent Y. From the picture, it was hard to tell what all the other bottles were, but I could see Aramis and Fendi among them. Y is a green chypre, meaning it's almost certainly been reformulated for the worse in the recent past. Aramis is a leather fragrance. Fendi is discontinued. She was selling the whole lot for $50. I figured if the Y and Fendi were in good condition, it would be well worth the cost and the trip, so I made an appointment.

We met in the lobby of the woman's high-rise. I asked if the perfumes were hers. She said yes, but she was moving and only wanted to keep a couple. She pulled them out of a grocery bag and lined them up on a table. I laughed. The bottle of Y was beyond huge. It must have been a display factice -- it looked like about 1,000 ml. The cap was broken so she'd corked the bottle. I was worried about the condition but it smells fantastic. Ditto for the Fendi (which is similar to Theorema, but much brighter in color, more floral, and a little fruity ... kind of carnation pumpkin pie, with a leather undertone) and the Aramis, which looks newer but not brand new, and will smell terrific on John. I also got a little spray mini of Amarige. I left three bottles behind (Caesars Woman and two things I'd never heard of) and gave her $45 for the rest. Pretty good haul!

I am now the proud owner of a truly obscene amount of YSL Y of uncertain vintage. Here's Luca Turin's description of it:

This is the archetypal green chypre, fresh, scrubbed, prim and proper, made of excellent raw materials, with the slightly screechy feel of silk-clad thighs rubbing together. If this were an actress, it would be Danielle Darrieux. If it were a wine it would be a Chablis. If it were a car it would be a vanilla-yellow convertible Citroen DS. If it were a piece of music it would be the theme of Les Parapluies de Cherbourg.

Chypre lovers, please let me know you'd like a taste.

Weirdest thing happened

2011-12-24T13:12:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I was awoken in the morning by the sound of the doorbell, which chimes in the hallway right outside my childhood bedroom. It dinged once, then again after a pause, then three or four more times, and so on, until it became evident that whoever was there was not going away. In my sleepy haze, I started to wonder if my parents had somehow gotten locked outside, so I got up to see what was the matter. Instead, they'd been occupied or undressed or some such, but my dad finally made it to the door, and it was some neighborhood kid, offering to clean up our front courtyard (it had snowed, maybe half an inch and was already melting; we turned him down).

Then last night around 2 am, I woke up to the same sound: the doorbell ringing in sporadic bursts. At first I thought it must be the same kid, returning to further terrorize us. Every time I thought surely he was going away, it would ring again. I was lying there awake thinking someone would have to answer it and get his parents' names so we could call and tell them to keep a tighter rein on their kid, when I heard my parents and John conferring in the front hall about what to do or not to do. John had still been up, night-owling on the other side of the house with a book, so a light had been on. There was no one visible through the peephole, but John peered out the big window in our dining room, which faces the courtyard, and said, "There's a woman out there!" She was hiding in the shadows near the door.

At this point I was fairly terrified. Remember that old story about the guy who's being followed by someone who keeps flashing their brights? And finally it's revealed that someone was hiding in the backseat with a weapon? I'm thinking one of two things is true: this woman is a psycho killer, or she's hiding from a psycho killer, and if we open the door he's going to get us too. I'm not at my most rational in the middle of the night, wearing pajamas and no contacts. But no one else wants to open the door either. She sees that John sees her, but she won't step out in the light or shout that she wants to be let in. It's freezing out there by the way, and she's just wearing a sweater. So finally we call the police, and tell them there's a woman outside our door and we're not sure if she needs help or we do. After about five minutes, she's still periodically ringing the doorbell frantically, so we call back in an effort to up the urgency. Within two minutes of that, two cop cars pulled up.

We spent the next hour sort of watching the scene unfold. One of the cops came to our door and said that she was hiding from her husband, and that she wanted us to call the cops. So, I guess, we did the right thing? We think her husband may have been driving down the street in his truck with the lights off, looking for her, but we didn't see the truck until the lights on the police cars lit up the street. It looked like the cops tried to facilitate a reconciliation, but ended up arresting the guy. The cops eventually escorted her back home. It didn't take very long; they live right down the street, but we're not sure which house.

I never got a good look at her; John thought she looked young, 25 or 30. The whole time the cops were here, she was just standing under a tree across the street, waiting, in the cold. My dad says "Nothing good ever happens at 2 am." Isn't it scary to think that you might need help at 2 am, and the nearest potential savior might be too scared to help you?

Review of The French Exit

2011-12-21T13:04:00.000-05:00

Hello, hello, from El Paso, Texas. There's a very lovely new review of The French Exit in MAKE Mag, which was such a nice surprise, since I kind of figured there would be no more reviews, the book being well over a year old now. A bit from the review:

Like the title, many of these poems employ a sly brand of humor to temper the painfulness of goodbyes, though Gabbert’s cleverness and wit belie the seriousness of her project; at its heart, this collection is a relentless examination of exits and all that comes after them—memory, nostalgia, longing, questioning, regret. But close examinations of such hazy realms prove necessarily difficult for this poet, and so like the cover-woman’s face, many of Gabbert’s poems have a certain pixellated quality—she zooms in so close that things lose their meanings ....

And because Gabbert strikes such a perfect balance between heart and head, between cleverness and earnestness, between language that demonstrates its own fallibility and language that is surprisingly, perfectly precise—this book, too, amounts to a great deal. Contrary to the quick, clean getaway implied by its title, The French Exit is a kind of quantum goodbye, a gnomon of a book the very presence of which is defined by all the exits it keeps trying—and charmingly fails—to make.

Isn't that wonderful? Thank you to Ali Shapiro and MAKE Mag for the review.

Juvenilia

2011-12-16T19:45:00.000-05:00

This was the first poem I wrote that made me feel like a Real Poet, something like 10 or 12 years ago:

THE FALL

It was long since morning
but the city was quiet, whited,
and I was starting to think

in words again. Long
lines got longer. I chased you
to the park, tread worn

off my shoes. I tripped
behind you, bounding,
my heart skipping,

clenching like a fist
to hold you in. And Igasped
through the freezing

air, How can it be so
bright and so cold?

Remember where
you kissed me on the shin, we sat
and waited on the bleeding,

our jackets getting wet,
and stared into the trees.
That wasn’t a blackbird,

just a black bird.
ButI couldn’t tell you no.
And you were covered in

crystals, the smallest snow.

I recognize some of this as sentimental or cliched now (hearts are always fists, aren't they?) -- and the line breaks somewhat inscrutable -- but I do still like that linguistic flourish of the blackbird versus the black bird. That's very me. I also still remember that one of the girls in my college workshop said it "breathes," and she "loves poems that breathe."

I had to dig through my MFA thesis to find that. I also found this one that I still like, though again, the sentimentality alert is at orange.

ON THE BRIDGE

I was crossing the Harvard bridge, sun low and beaming,
when I remembered my dream—not the plot,
but a still frame from it: standing on a kind of plank
about two stories up, with the explosion behind me,
blooming out white and expansive like a nuclear rose.
I know I have to jump to the concrete below
but I hesitate, imagining the sound of my knees breaking,
though the scorching air shoves at my back.

I stopped halfway across the bridge, and wondered
what I’m dreading. One end of a long, slender ribbon
from an audio tape someone had torn apart
was caught on the railing. It waved out shimmering
over the river, like a streamer thrown off the deck
of a departing ship, trying to kiss the shore goodbye.

Kitten jokes

2011-12-15T10:24:00.000-05:00

What was the kitten's favorite movie?
Apocalypse Meow (big Coppola fan)

What's the kitten's favorite candy?
Meow & Laters -- the grape kind

What kind of ailment befell the kitten?
A cute rhinitis

What was the kitten's best subject in school?
Fuzzy math

What's the kitten's favorite 80s song?
Careless Whisker

Who's crazier:

2011-12-13T13:02:00.000-05:00

The guy who walked a tight rope between the Twin Towers on a windy day:

Or the guy who parachuted from space?

That's Philippe Petit and Joe Kittinger, respectively. Kittinger started way higher up, and had farther to fall if his parachute failed. I mean, he had farther to fall either way, but it would have been a long time to face his own death. Still, if I had to do one or the other, I'd pick the parachute, no question. The tight rope thing? That's just fucking crazy.

Joan Didion on Woody Allen

2011-12-12T15:12:00.001-05:00

Manhattan is one of my favorite movies, but I still expected to enjoy on some level Joan Didion's 1979 pan of the movie from the New York Review of Books (you can read the whole thing online), to which I saw several references today, thanks to a Slate piece on dismissive replies by literary heavyweights. Instead I find it surprisingly petty; she seems to willfully misread Woody Allen throughout:

It was a summer in which the more hopeful members of the society wanted roller skates, and stood in line to see Woody Allen’s Manhattan, a picture in which, toward the end, the Woody Allen character makes a list of reasons to stay alive. “Groucho Marx” is one reason, and “Willie Mays” is another. The second movement of Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony. Louis Armstrong’s “Potato Head Blues.” Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education. This list is modishly eclectic, a trace wry, definitely OK with real linen; and notable, as raisons d’être go, in that every experience it evokes is essentially passive. This list of Woody Allen’s is the ultimate consumer report, and the extent to which it has been quoted approvingly suggests a new class in America, a subworld of people rigid with apprehension that they will die wearing the wrong sneaker, naming the wrong symphony, preferring Madame Bovary.

This is an interesting point to be sure, but I'm not 100% convinced by Didion's apparent contention that this "new class" is defined only by a fear of liking the wrong thing. The class in question seems to be artists and wannabe artists or general art-obsessives, people who define themselves through aesthetics rather than, say, a sport or an active hobby like cooking. But so what? The ultimate reason to stay alive is programmed in our DNA. Any other reason is what we tell ourselves and others in order to appear interesting or unselfish. What if the list included "active" items like skiing and making bread? Is that really any less bougie? Ask someone dying of malaria what they want to live for, what if they say "to see the sun rise another day," are you going to point out that watching the sunrise is passive?

When Natalie Gittelson of The New York Times Magazine recently asked Woody Allen how his own analysis was going after twenty-two years, he answered this way: “It’s very slow…but an hour a day, talking about your emotions, hopes, angers, disappointments, with someone who’s trained to evaluate this material—over a period of years, you’re bound to get more in touch with feelings than someone who makes no effort.”

Well, yes and (apparently) no. Over a period of twenty-two years “you’re bound” only to get older, barring nasty surprises. This notion of oneself as a kind of continuing career—something to work at, work on, “make an effort” for and subject to an hour a day of emotional Nautilus training, all in the interests not of attaining grace but of improving one’s “relationships”—is fairly recent in the world, at least in the world not inhabited entirely by adolescents.

I'm not sure what her point is here either. Analysis is a recent phenomenon, yes, but so are movies and tiramisu. Again, so what? Analysis exists to address "first-world problems," of which America, fortunately or unfortunately, has plenty.

These faux adults of Woody Allen’s have dinner at Elaine’s, and argue art versus ethics.

I eat dinner and talk about art and ethics, I just don't get paid six figures to do so. Didion's life actually feels just as "faux" to me as anyone in a Woody Allen movie (movies are "fiction" by the way, so of course the characters are faux): sitting around writing all day in the same room as her husband, writing movie scripts, drinking scotch in glamorous Bohemian dresses etc.

In Manhattan [Diane Keaton] is a magazine writer, and we actually see her typing once, on a novelization, and talking on the telephone to “Harvey,” who, given the counterfeit “insider” shine to the dialogue, we are meant to understand is Harvey Shapiro, the editor of The New York Times Book Review. (Similarly, we are meant to know that the “Jack and Anjelica” to whom Paul Simon refers in Annie Hall are Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Huston, and to feel somehow flattered by our inclusion in this little joke on those who fail to get it.)

Or maybe we're supposed to laugh at how pretentious the comment is? Annie Hall is after all a comedy. This seems to operate in the same way as the scene in Manhattan where Diane Keaton talks about "the academy of the overrated" and we're meant to understand her as insufferable. Also I never knew who "Harvey" was and don't feel I missed anything by not knowing; it just sounds like the name of an editor.

Surely Joan Didion isn't entirely humorless, so can someone explain to me what her problem is here? Woody Allen has of course created his share of shit but I think Manhattan and Annie Hall represent a peak in his career (late 70s through mid-80s) when he transcended screwball comedy without becoming unbearably pretentious. (I'd put Hannah and Her Sisters in the same category.)

Art in America

2011-12-12T13:36:00.000-05:00

When we moved to Denver we went on a little rampage of purchasing memberships to all the museums and to the Botanical Gardens (usually, if you're going to go to a museum more than twice per year this makes sense). One of the perks of our Denver Art Museum membership was a $20 deal for an annual subscription to both Art in America and Artforum, so we pounced on it. I initially assumed that these are the kind of magazines you don't read per se, but keep on the coffee table for guests and flip through now & then like picture books. In fact I find the prose pretty readable, even accessible, though it's interesting to see what knowledge is taken as a given. Like poetry, the visual arts constitute a subculture and insider references abound.

Just for fun here are some excerpts from the December 2011 issue of Art in America:

It almost goes without saying that art openings and booze go hand in hand, especially during schmoozy events like this month's Art Basel Miami Beach. And Austrian prankster Erwin Wurm is making sure of that with his new exhibition, "Beauty Business," at the Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach. Known for his humorous works, such as his "One-Minute Sculptures" that have participants strike ridiculous poses with props, Wurm has created a series of "Drinking Sculptures," which he says are completed when the participants are drunk. Bay Area conceptualist Tom Marioni was on to something similar with his 1970 performance piece The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends Is the Highest Form of Art (ongoing), though he mercifully doesn't require such excess.

From an obituary on Richard Hamilton by Gillian Forrester (as an example of the aforementioned insider references, the first paragraph uses the acronym "YBAs," which I correctly guessed stands for "Young British Artists"):

He was a founding member, in 1952, of the Independent Group of painters, sculptors, architects, and critics, who met regularly at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts to discuss science, technology, mass media, consumerism and critical theory, issues that were to preoccupy Hamilton for the remainder of his life. He collaborated with John McHale and John Voelcker on an installation for "This is Tomorrow," the seminal 1956 exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, for which he made his influential collage Just what is it that makes today's home so different, so appealing? [see above] It remains, for better or worse, his best-known work.

The following year Hamilton produced his celebrated list of the defining characteristics of Pop: "Popular (designed for a mass audience); Transient (short term solution); Expendable (easily forgotten); Low Cost; Mass Produced; Young (aimed at youth); Witty; Sexy; Gimmicky; Glamorous; Big business."

From "Denial" by Mark Handforth (part of a series called "Muse" which I take to be artists writing about an important influence):

There's a firmly rooted belief in British art schools -- and I really do believe this -- that their project is not only to produce traditional artists. It's also to foster musicians, rock 'n' rollers like Bryan Ferry, graphic designers and so on. The schools produce a wider world of people who make the planet worth living on -- artists who are non-artists, if you like.

Are there hobby or trade magazines you like to read that have nothing to do with what you "do"? I assume Architectural Digest exists mostly for this reason; architects don't read it, do they?

New issue of Open Letters

2011-12-01T09:59:00.001-05:00

I've got two little things in the December issue of Open Letters. First up, my latest perfume column: "On the Scent: A Dip in the Mainstream," in which I review stuff you can get at big chain stores for under $100 a pop. I talk a little about the problems with mainstream perfumes:

New mainstream releases tend to suffer from a tedious adherence to trends (we’ve been stuck in a cycle of thin fruity florals, super-clean musky florals, and Angel-esque fruity-patchouli numbers for a good decade now) as well as a certain cheapness that belies their price tags. This cheapness usually manifests as a bare minimum, or complete lack, of natural materials, which give body and complexity to perfume. Simple, mostly synthetic formulas can smell pleasant at first, but get boring very quickly, since they don’t offer all that much more than the fragrance in your $10 shampoo.

Also problematic is the fact that even if you are looking for something in particular – say you’ve set your fancy on a green floral – the sales assistants often can’t guide you to something that properly fits this description. It’s not entirely their fault – they’re encouraged if not forced by management to push the newer releases, so they’ve got to find something relatively green among this season’s batch of fruity florals; they can’t or don’t think to show you perfectly serviceable green florals of decades past, such as Chanel Cristalle or Estee Lauder Alliage. “Green” simply isn’t in these days.

Nonetheless, there were some solid releases in the past couple of years. You'll find reviews of scents including Bottega Veneta, Cartier Baiser Vole, Tom Ford Violet Blonde, and Diane.

Also, I contributed to the "Our Year in Reading" feature (Part 1, Part 2) along with the other contributing editors (including John Cotter, Steve Donoghue, Adam Golaski, Lisa Peet, and Sam Sacks). I wrote about the most memorable novels I read this year:

In 2010, my hands-down favorite reads were Howards End by E.M Forster and A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes. This year, I only managed to cross one classic off my list: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. I started this book about a month before moving 2,000 miles across the country, and what with the packing and unpacking and everything in between, I might not have finished it, were it not for Mick, surely one of the best young female characters in all of American literature. This novel starts off feeling like linked stories, until you realize the chapters are cycling through a handful of major characters, all misfits in a small Southern town. Each has an interesting story, but I fell completely for Mick, a fierce, protective tomboy with a secret passion for music. Struggling against hate and poverty, she eventually succumbs, unwillingly and almost unknowingly, to the banal horror of an ordinary life. The fifth chapter in Part 2, in which Mick’s little brother runs away, is twenty pages of utter perfection, a self-contained wonder I’ll keep coming back to.

To read about some of the great poetry books I read this year, see here and here.

The issue also includes cool art by Pattie Lee Becker (the above is her print "Ramona's Bright Idea") and lots of good book reviews as always. Go read!

Because I hate being mischaracterized

2011-11-30T13:26:00.001-05:00

I'll respond here to a comment that Johannes Goransson left on Uncanny Valley, addressing me:

The fact that Elisa rejects [surrealism] as essentially "privileged" is exactly the kind of dimissal I am interested in: because it's essentially the kind of rhetoric by which ART ITSELF is often dismissed

I don't reject surrealism. I love many surrealist poets. (Kathleen and I spent a while translating Max Jacob's Le Cornet Des.) I don't think the fact that something is privileged makes it bad or worthless as art. Classical music is about as privileged as it gets, I don't reject that either. Most of my hobbies are hopelessly bourgeois, and I think it's OK to acknowledge that. (I draw the line at skiing.)

I do think "surrealist," like "experimental," is a "problematic" term that gets used sloppily. As I wrote in a previous post, "Now that discursive, associative, free-verse lyric poetry is pretty much the norm, it feels like elements of surrealism (the definition is 'Pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought') are pervasive." Also: I feel "surrealist staples such as dream logic, collage, collaboration, tragicomic approaches to human existence, and inventive syntax" are present in my own poetry, which has never to my knowledge been called surreal. Why? IDK, you tell me.

Elisa's comment that surrealism doesn't have anything "substantial" is standard expression of this rhetoric/ideology

I have no such ideology. My original comment was: "Unsubstantiated theory: Surrealism is what you write when you have nothing of substance to say." That "Unsubstantiated theory" preface should have been a tip-off that I was just bullshitting. Anyway, I think you can make great art without having "anything of substance to say." For example, I love and have taught Nathan Austin's book Survey Says as an example of conceptual poetry. It's the form alone that's interesting in this book; the text is found (it consists entirely of answers from Family Feud; the poetry is in the systematic arrangement). In conceptual art, the content is usually backgrounded. Most of the time, if you want people to focus on your message, you background the medium.

I think Johannes Goransson is one of the most interesting poets, translators, editors and bloggers in U.S. poetry, but I also think he's a little on the combative side. I am not the enemy, yo.

Update: Johannes reposted his comment on Montevidayo and called it his "usual schtick" [sic], which probably explains why I felt he was talking past me.

I just said on Twitter "Let's disagree to agree." Meaning I'm only arguing here because I don't think we need to argue.

I, too, dislike Mondays

2011-11-28T14:47:00.001-05:00

Arielle Weinberg of Scents of Self recently 1) sent me a bagful of Bond No. 9 samples (I'm wearing the deliciously outre Broadway Nite today) and 2) interviewed me about perfume and such on her blog. Thank you Ari!
Because the weather in Denver is frequently beautiful, we ate our Thanksgiving dinner outside in late afternoon sunshine, and after dinner we played games. John claims to have discovered the secret to Balderdash: picture a completely different word. Otherwise your definition will be too plausible, and the real one usually isn't.
A fun variation on Balderdash AKA Dictionary that I learned in grad school: the quotation game. Use a copy of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, and instead of providing a word, provide the first few words of a (less familiar) quotation; players supply the rest, and, as in Balderdash, vote for the version they think is real.
Been listening to (for some reason this song reminds me of the ends of '80s movies, all triumph and emotion, see The Breakfast Club and Teen Wolf):

More creamy comfort food for you to make! This soup, adapted from here, tastes more like potato soup than cauliflower, but I prefer the texture to potato soup, which tends to be grainy. It also reminds me of clam chowder, which also gives me texture issues (chewy clams).

Chowdery Cauliflower Soup

1/2 pound bacon, chopped
1 onion, chopped
2 leeks, cleaned well and chopped
1 head of cauliflower, chopped into small florets
4 cups chicken stock
4 oz. cream cheese, cut into chunks
2-4 tablespoons thinly sliced green onions or chives
salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
1/2 cup shredded cheddar cheese

In a large saucepan over medium heat, cook bacon pieces until crisp. Using a slotted spoon, remove bacon to a paper-towel-lined plate and set aside.Add onion and leeks to saucepan and cook, stirring occasionally, over medium-low heat until softened and lightly browned, about 10 minutes. Turn up the heat, add cauliflower and chicken stock and stir, scraping up the browned bits from the bottom of the pan. When liquid comes to a boil, reduce heat, and simmer until cauliflower is tender enough to mash, 15-20 minutes.Add the cream cheese and mash the cauliflower with a potato masher or blend with an immersion blender. (I mashed it until chunky and then pureed half in a blender.)Stir in 2/3 to 3/4 of the bacon and green onions, saving the rest for garnish. Season to taste with salt and pepper.Serve hot soup garnished with shredded cheddar cheese, bacon pieces, and chopped chives.

Straw feminists

2011-11-25T14:06:00.001-05:00

This is a good take-down of the standard treatment of feminism in media, where feminists are painted to be irrational, man-hating extremists in a world where equality has already been achieved, warping the term so women refuse to be associated with it.

Thanks to Dan Boehl for the pointer.

Things I wish I'd written

2011-11-22T16:38:00.001-05:00

I recently came into a lot of good poetry books. I only had to buy one of them (I ordered Beauty Was the Case that They Gave Me by Mark Leidner during SPD's "Editors' Picks" sale), the rest were either gifted by the author or came to us as review copies. This is one of the benefits of knowing poets (though trust me, it's not all sunshine and rainbows; as Matthew Simmons once said, "Hell is author people."). And it's a funny thing about poets; you can know one by name or their work only for years, and come to think of them as a kind of distant celebrity, and if you are ever in the same city as that poet for more than three days you will probably become friends (assuming less than a 20-year age difference).

Anyway, here are some bits I liked from my recent reading. From Snip Snip! by Tina Brown Celona:

How can you let
Them see what you
Think you look like?
What you think it is
OK to look like?

That's almost the entirety of a very short poem called "Snack." This is the last stanza of a longer prose poem called "Event Diary":

There's a field full of nasturtiums and a ratty columbine and the headlight crashes down the trash chute to land in a quivering pile of filaments and Tic Tacs. I light a little pyre in the yard and wander around aimlessly thinking about things. Then I realize the things are actually thinking about me.

The last sentence in both cases strikes me as a kind of move or variation on a move. The second one is obviously a reversal (of both syntax and expectation); the first is not exactly but it has a similar effect, taking the words and ideas and rearranging them slightly to get at a different meaning (you could call it a "pushed idea"). This kind of move is often a good way to end a poem because it sounds good even if you don't think about it too hard. The trick is to do it so it still works if you do bother to think. In "Snack," it's interesting because even the first version is not what you expect (the more obvious "what you look like").

Here's another move from Amy King's new book, I Want to Make You Safe from Litmus Press. This book is full of very good titles which would make John Ashbery proud (or did make him proud; he blurbed it). Though I want to highlight a particular stanza, and the transition to that stanza, I'm going to go ahead and type up the whole poem here because, as usual, context matters. Hopefully Amy and her editors won't mind but if they do, well, I'll take it down or get a lawyer. Anyway:

THE STRANGE POWER OF LYING TO YOURSELF

The absence of casual banter does not require a missing
connection, if only the triangles of our bodies would intersect
where the pupil's eye returns
our stare. We shook hands in the language we meant
to speak, until God's mischief caught
us unaware. We couldn't quite sweep the wallets free
of our museums by then. We let salt
water calm leftover wounds,
we gave honorably in the halls of sailors land-buried,

So much so, I envy the rice to consume sturdy husks
and an ache that sits between pacifists, big as the Loch Ness,
as invisible and paradise -- we pat the head, "There there is
nowhere" -- have sex dreams of not quite climactic
proportions, and awaken never quite anywhere.

I don't know. A bunch of things. The mail, a bi-racial couple,
songs about a boyfriend who doesn't understand, Thai people
gathered, mostly transsexual, sushi for the masses, bacterial
moments of half-crazed drunk when no one touches
your bag or wallet across the bar, a lovely candle refusing
to flicker, one wind, one shirt, one sky teeters
fireflies asleep between paperbacks,
their names that SOS me,
a painter's bird red as plumes,
a bodily silence in dead-layered flesh,
and a hole, among other things, as I am a learning actress.

I dreamt myself awake to see the face in her shoes, she
who will carry this parcel world
on its wire waltz in brown paper creased?
Submission is the only window
we can take
the dead moth asleep between us,
you who fingers its arched back, a spinal keyboard,
and sound out the words, "He's dead" before
we reach for the needle
that will sew the coffin shut.

The part I want to focus is on is the third stanza. As far as I'm concerned, the rest of the poem is basically throwaway, in that it didn't grab my attention, but nor did it bore me or push me away: it exists in order to let the third stanza happen, and the third stanza to me is breath-taking, magical. (I'm actually not sure if this poem has three stanzas or four due to a page break after "actress." If four, I like the final stanza too, especially the broken, nearly unparsable syntax.)

The thing is, you couldn't just start the poem with the third stanza; it partly works because those two staccato lines ("I don't know. A bunch of things.") interrupt the wordier flow of what's come before, and what they precede is an outpour. It's like you can see the poet breaking down, losing control -- she wants to put everything in, to show you everything, and the carefully crafted, subject-verb-object sentence with dependent clauses aplenty can no longer contain all these elements. Those monosyllabic lines mark a sudden shift in tone/style from erudite to something I'm hereby dubbing tragicasual -- it's not funny or absurd exactly but it is loose, unstudied, and yet the whole list that follows seems imbued with emotion and profundity. That is so hard to do! A rambling list is a common move, but this list strikes the ideal balance between meaning and randomness -- just as it starts to lose me in its mess, it wins me back with that "SOS me," a reminder that this person is (like all poets) lost and lonely. "I don't know." IDK. The moment you can't explain, that's what I'm looking for in poetry. Beyond sense. Coherent enough.

I'm also reading books by Jeff Alessandrelli and Joshua Ware and will say more when I've spent more time with them.

P.S. Please refrain from leaving comments of the unsubstantial "This poem didn't do anything for me" sort, nothing is more tiresome.

If anything it gets worse

2011-11-21T13:33:00.001-05:00

I finally finished The Unconsoled. Apparently there are very few online reviews of it (didn't we have the Internet in 1995?), so people keep commenting on this one five-year-old blog post about it. This comment made me laugh and laugh:

I found the film Remains of the Day so boring that I haven't bothered to read the novel. The first book i read by Kazuo was 'When we were Orphans' and although I enjoyed the book I was disappointed with the ending. His memory was so unrealistic and unbalanced that I expected him to spend his final days in the country in an aslyum not in a rose covered cottage.I loved 'Never Let Me Go. I was looking forward to reading more. It was really brilliant! The kind of book I am sorry to finish and feel at a loss without. But then came 'The Unconsoled'. My friend said, 'it is readd a great book, very enjoyable'!!! A hundred pages into I called her, 'Does this continue like this or is there some revelation about what is happening? It is driving me MAD. Is he a in the middle of a breakdown? Are these people real? Are they all inmates of a lunatic aslyum that he calls the hotel? Is Stephan himself? Are there many versions of himself? Is Boris really a child and his child? What the hell is going on?? Is there ever a concert? Is he really a pianist?? AHHHH!!!She sai, 'If anything it gets worse, but I really loved it.'I did what I have never done before in my life I skipped pages and scanned it to the end and read the final three chapters, more madness, legless drunk with an ironing board!!! breakfast obsession everywhere, LET ME OUT!!!All you insane fans may you all be locked up and enjoy your madness together!!!

I also found someone who theorizes that Ryder has dementia, which makes a lot of sense. Now the party of deciding what to read next. Maybe The Member of the Wedding?

I made this mac 'n' cheese last night, with the following alterations:

Ricotta instead of cottage cheese
Dijon mustard instead of mustard powder
I threw in several handfuls of baby kale when I stirred it all together
I of course used my favorite gluten-free pasta (which I can't find here and have to order in bulk from Amazon, like a boss)
I cooked the pasta first and only baked it for half an hour

Results: tasty. Really, it's hard to screw up mac 'n' cheese as long you use tons of cheese.

The bluest eyes in Texas

2011-11-18T11:42:00.001-05:00

Justin Marks edited an all-poetry issue of Barrelhouse. It contains poems by some of my favorites: Ana Bozicevic and Heather Green (translations of Tzara).

I did something really stupid yesterday. I started running the kitchen sink to soak something, then I got in the shower. When I turned the shower off I thought, "Why do I still hear water running?" You guessed it, it was running all over the kitchen floor.

Today is John's birthday. Just call him Old Blue Eyes.

I watched one of my favorite movies this week, High Society. It sounds like a stoner movie (a la Half-Baked), but it's actually a remake of Philadelphia Story with musical numbers (written by Cole Porter). I'm not sure I can explain why I love this movie so much, but it probably has something to do with Grace Kelly's arms.

Is that not the most fabulous dress you've ever seen?

Speaking of blue eyes. I don't understand why people get wound up about Ryan Gosling. It's like they've never seen Paul Newman.

Misc. you much

2011-11-15T14:03:00.001-05:00

I had a really good time in Lincoln this weekend. Getting brunch with hungover people is one of my favorite things to do. There's something about being underslept and then drinking a lot of coffee that makes me giddy.
I've been reading The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro for a couple of months. It's one of the weirdest novels I've ever read. I keep asking people on Twitter about this book but no one will "engage" with me on it. It (the book, not Twitter) makes me feel sort of terrible: the tone and progression exactly mirror one of those endless and incredibly frustrating anxiety dreams where you can't get where you need to go and you're unprepared in any case for what you'll have to do when you get there.
Clifford Irving, the guy who wrote the fake autobiography of Howard Hughes, lives in Colorado and according to one report is a yoga teacher. He sounds like a real pompous ass:

I always found the Hughes hoax fascinating. Irving is over it.

"It's a subject I avoid because it bores me," he says. "I live a very quiet and secluded life. But it was a fun event in my life."

What about the 17 months he spent in jail after being convicted of fraud?

"I survived that," he says. "It was an interesting experience."

He also returned the $765,000 advance to his publishers.

I talked with an Aspen man who read the book, and he liked it quite a lot. He thinks Hughes, who died in 1976, should have gone along with it.

"I gave him a better life than he had," Irving says.

I must have been in my late teens before I figured out Howard Hughes and Hugh Hefner were two different guys.

2011-11-09T21:49:00.000-05:00

John Gallaher recently did a post of "ten-second books" (four-line poems consisting of the first two lines of the first poem and last two lines of the last poem from a book of poetry). Here's the ten-second version of That Tiny Insane Voluptuous (my collaborative book with Kathleen Rooney):

Where did I leave my bracelet? Imagine
a world without wrists, is my next thought.
Forget what I said before. This is
all I've got. There isn't anymore.

Here's the ten-second version of The French Exit:

It starts here, where you begin
remembering. (How else could it begin?)
(If he's mine,
why can't I keep him?)

I love when it forms a semi-coherent "poem," but what especially surprised me was that my first and last couplets both contains parentheses. I don't think of myself as a very parenthetical poet, though I do love a dash.

Richard Feynman on the female mind

2011-11-07T13:01:00.000-05:00

From a talk given in 1966 at the National Science Teachers Association:

When I was at Cornell, I was rather fascinated by the student body, which seems to me was a dilute mixture of some sensible people in a big mass of dumb people studying home economics, etc. including lots of girls. I used to sit in the cafeteria with the students and eat and try to overhear their conversations and see if there was one intelligent word coming out. You can imagine my surprise when I discovered a tremendous thing, it seemed to me.

I listened to a conversation between two girls, and one was explaining that if you want to make a straight line, you see, you go over a certain number to the right for each row you go up--that is, if you go over each time the same amount when you go up a row, you make a straight line--a deep principle of analytic geometry! It went on. I was rather amazed. I didn't realize the female mind was capable of understanding analytic geometry.

She went on and said, "Suppose you have another line coming in from the other side, and you want to figure out where they are going to intersect. Suppose on one line you go over two to the right for every one you go up, and the other line goes over three to the right for every one that it goes up, and they start twenty steps apart," etc.--I was flabbergasted. She figured out where the intersection was. It turned out that one girl was explaining to the other how to knit argyle socks. I, therefore, did learn a lesson: The female mind is capable of understanding analytic geometry. Those people who have for years been insisting (in the face of all obvious evidence to the contrary) that the male and female are equally capable of rational thought may have something. The difficulty may just be that we have never yet discovered a way to communicate with the female mind. If it is done in the right way, you may be able to get something out of it.

Misunderstood isms I have known

2011-11-04T12:40:00.000-04:00

Sady Doyle asks, "Why Are Youngsters Afraid of the Word ‘Feminist’?" Then she answers her own question in the subhead: "[Because] Young women (and men) are too busy fighting sexism." She argues that young people reject the word feminism for legitimate reasons (because everyone ignores feminists, because feminism is racist, because men can't be feminists) and older feminists do too much fist-shaking and complaining. I appreciate that she's playing devil's advocate here, but I'm not convinced. John recently asked a class of young women if any of them identified as feminists, and not one of them did. Asked their reasons, they mostly cited the following:

"Feminists" are radical. We're not radical; we shave our legs and wear makeup; we don't burn bras. (John pointed out that rumors of "bra burning" are greatly exaggerated.)
"Feminists" think they're better than men.
"Feminists" were fighting for equality, and haven't we achieved all that?

I still think most people reject feminism because they don't understand what it is.

Also in XX news: Robert Alan Wendeborn asks, "Do Women Writers Care About Surrealism?" He's referring to a post on Montevidayo, in which commenters attempt to create a list of American surrealists or neo-surrealists, a list mostly devoid of women. I threw out a few theories:

"Surrealism" is meaningful as a name for a movement that took place in the '20s. I'm not sure if it's particularly meaningful now, except when applied to a large handful of writers who are always referred to as surrealist, such as James Tate, Russel Edson and their imitators/inheritors (see Zach Schomburg). But surrealist writing stood in much starker contrast to its context when it began as a movement. Now that discursive, associative, free-verse lyric poetry is pretty much the norm, it feels like elements of surrealism (the definition is "Pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought") are pervasive. (It's a continuum, of course; Mary Oliver and Michael Ryan make little if any reference to the "surreal.") However, people only seem to use the word "surrealism" to apply to a narrow slice of what's being written, and it's usually applied to men. Maybe women are writing "surrealist" poetry, it's just not recognized as such because the tradition is male-dominated.
Although surrealism, Dada, and the theater of the absurd (later but related) were partly a response to/rejection of bourgeois values, surrealism now feels as bourgeois as anything. I don't associate surrealism with a poetry of oppression or revolution or protest. I associate it with privilege. This isn't to say I don't like surrealist poetry; I do. But more often than not I read it for amusement. (Maybe Max Jacob and Ionesco were revolutionary at the time, but now it just reads as droll.) Maybe women are less likely than men to be satisfied with being amusing (since, you know, we got oppression).
That definition above is actually just the first half. The second half (from Breton's manifesto): "Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation" (or, in another translation, "Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern"). Certainly most poetry that gets the "surrealist" label slapped on it does not meet this criteria. Charles Simic and Dean Young do not write in a vacuum of reason or without aesthetic concern.

So what does "surrealism" mean now, and are women writing it or not?

A poem from "Snip Snip!" by Tina Brown Celona

2011-11-03T16:24:00.000-04:00

Upon arriving in Denver I had some "starter friends," but I've made a few new ones too, among them the poet Tina Brown Celona, who gave me a copy of her book Snip Snip! last night (I already owned The Real Moon of Poetry and Other Poems). I heard Tina read from Snip Snip years ago in Cambridge, at a weird little bar called PA's Lounge, which has a drop ceiling, middle-school-cafeteria-style.

This poem cracked me up:

SUNDAY MORNING CUNT POEM

I wrote a book of contiguous poems then mixed them up so they were out of order. They were poems about my cunt, language, Nature, war, and all of them were marked with drama.

With the cunt poems I could have orgasms during sex. I had long, luxurious hair, which I wrapped around my throat like a scarf. You could say I was "released from my prison." My therapist was no longer busy.

We started a business called Ethical Donuts. It was actually a kind of juice bar where you could go and read poems or listen to someone reading poems. If nobody felt like reading poems we would turn on a tape of someone reading poems, usually one of our friends, but sometimes a big star of poetry. Of course, we sold donuts.

In my dream we were hitchhiking to Iowa City, but later when I looked at myself my cheeks were pink and so were my labia. Like a bird I discovered I had wings. I flew higher and higher, but when I got near the sun the wax melted and I fell into a poem by Auden. It was then that I wrote the poem "The Enormous Cock."

For a while I hushed. Then I started up again about my cunt. Some said it was a vicious swipe at feminism. Others said it was a vicious feminist swipe. It was the only word I knew.

I love this version ...

2011-11-02T23:32:00.002-04:00

of "Don't You Want Me." It kind of chokes me up.

Rocky Votolato and Matt Pond PA cover The Human League

I'm pretty picky about covers. I love them, but they have to be substantially different from the original or it's just karaoke. Some of my favorites are the Snake River Conspiracy version of "How Soon Is Now" and Tori Amos's cover of The Cure's "Love Song," both of which are probably better than the original. Oh! And Ryan Adam's cover of "Wonderwall," of course, which I've blogged about before. What are your favorite covers?

Clean Part

2011-10-31T10:43:00.000-04:00

I'm reading in the Clean Part Reading Series in Lincoln, Nebraska on November 12 with the lovely Lily Brown. Lily and I both have distinctive noses. Here's info from the Clean Part blog:

On Saturday, November 12, please join us at 7 pm to hear Lily Brown and Elisa Gabbert read for The Clean Part. Free and open to the public, drop by Drift Station Gallery, located at 1746 N Street in downtown Lincoln (corner of 18th St), to hear some wonderful poetry and win some November-ish raffle prizes! See you soon!

Lily Brown’s first book, Rust or Go Missing, is available from Cleveland State University Poetry Center. Recent poems are out or forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Catch Up, Transom, and 6x6. She is from Massachusetts, but currently lives in Athens, GA.

Elisa Gabbert is the author of two collections of poetry: The French Exit (Birds LLC, 2010) and Thanks for Sending the Engine, a chapbook (Kitchen Press, 2007). Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Another Chicago Magazine, The Awl, Denver Quarterly, Sentence and other journals. Her nonfiction has appeared in Mantis, Open Letters Monthly, and The Monkey & The Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics. She lives in Denver and blogs at The French Exit.

Here's a video of Lily reading one of my favorite poems of hers, "Leaf at the End."

And -- what the hell? -- here's me (or rather my doppelganger, Elissa) reading a poem, "Walks Are Useless II."

Pastiche

2011-10-27T17:17:00.000-04:00

There's been a trend going on for a while of extreme fast food in which one type of greasy sandwich is embedded in another. People think the interesting thing about wave-particle duality is that light can act like a particle. But what most Scrabble players don't realize is that the highest-scoring move is frequently not the biggest word, but a play involving multiple shorter words. In my mind, it's a sudden shift to a different worldview, as palpable as suddenly getting a foot taller.

Why is camouflage moving backwards, becoming lower-res? Nobody knows how homing pigeons work. If you were an American girl of the middle class persuasion in 1988, you probably wanted to be either Stacy Ferguson or Jennifer Connelly from The Labyrinth. I think the decade was defined by 9/11, but what were the ramifications of that, aside from fear and jingoism? A little cross-contamination is inevitable in restaurants, but at the end of the week/month/life, you've eaten a lot fewer dead animals. Anyway, coherence isn't really crucial in a pop song. It's not like they ever start packing people into the aisles.

Do some people really believe that everything is about sex? Of course this bias trickles down and bleeds into the articles in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. You know when you get a girl crush? The theory compared first-person games to being on drugs, wherein things that appear simple are actually quite difficult. I mean that is classic freshman overactive anxiety of influence right there. There are no happy short stories. What right have you to go and die?

It's true: northern hipsters have started a pro-littering campaign. Ashbery is a living contemporary writer! Apparently it's a staple at Midwestern potlucks; it belongs there right alongside the tater tot hotdish. I don't know the context, but doesn't this violate the basic rule of logic that for any given property A, a thing cannot be both A and not A? The "neg" is overrated, and arguably can't even be classed as flirtation. This will henceforth serve as my go-to example of a bad poem.

Unlikeable characters vs. annoying characters

2011-10-24T20:15:00.000-04:00

Last week on a flight back to Boston I devoured a novel, front to back, before we even landed. It's the ideal plane reading experience, but almost never works out for me. Either I'm not really that into the book I've brought and end up watching the terrible in-flight movie (which usually makes me cry), reading a trash mag and/or sleeping; or I'm into it but the flight's too short (which happened with The House of Mirth; I actually wished we could taxi longer).

This book -- True Things About Me by Deborah Kay Davies -- is narrated by an "unlikeable character." As I've said before, characters aren't your friends, and I like unlikeable characters. (I also like spelling "unlikeable" with two e's, though Blogger disagrees.) In some ways, the novel is similar to Veronica by Mary Gaitskill. Both narrators are sort of flimsy, flaky, passive women who get trampled on because they don't have the self-respect to stop it (or they actively like being treated like shit, however you want to put it). But I liked True Things About Me and I didn't like Veronica (wow, that was one of my first blog posts). Why? I think it's because the narrator in Veronica is more than unlikeable: She's annoying. She's humorless, and she's always lapsing into dull little monologues like this:

I wanted something to happen, but I didn't know what. I didn't have the ambition to be an important person or a star. My ambition was to live like music. I didn't think of it that way, but that's what I wanted; it seemed like that's what everybody wanted. I remember people walking around like they were wrapped in an invisible gauze of songs, one running into the next--songs about sex, pain, injustice, love, triumph, each song bursting with ideal characters that popped out and fell back as the person walked around the street or rode the bus.

Or this:

I was proud, too; I knew I was doing something hard. Sometimes I was even happy. But another world was still with me, glowing and rippling like a dream of heaven deeper than the ocean. I could be studying or watching TV or unloading clothes from the washing machine when a memory would come like a heavy wave of dream rolling into life and threatening to break it open.

It's like, Shut up, lady. The narrator of TTAM, on the other hand (I can't remember her name, maybe it's never given?), may be basically a "stupid bitch," but she thinks in crisp, nuanced, observant, funny sentences even though the scenes being described are fuzzy, because she's essentially confused and unwell and delusional:

I went off to the loo, but really I was bored with the whole loo thing. It was like I was spending all my life in there. Still, I felt it was my space. There was someone in a cubicle, so I had to wait until they had done everything they had to do, which took ages. To pass the time I swished my hands around in a basin of cold water. Eventually the slow woman came out, adjusting her skirt, which is always so irritating. As she washed her hands, she looked at my bluish fingers floating in the water, and then at me in the mirror. Are you all right? she asked. Why? I said. Are you? What were you doing in there? Writing a love letter?

As the novel goes on you watch her alienate all the kind and decent people in her life, who make her feel guilty for being involved with a complete asshole, until you feel completely alienated and frustrated yourself. It's a strange effect. Can you like a book that totally pisses you off? Yes, you can, as long as it makes you angry for the right reasons.

John reviewed True Things About Me in Open Letters earlier this year: "it’s a tribute to Davies that she makes such an unlikely descent read so plausibly. This is largely because even as her narrator sees and does sad and fearful things, she never loses her sense of humor about herself."

William Gass on Elizabeth Bishop

2011-10-20T11:18:00.001-04:00

I wrote a guest post for the Grub Street blog about William Gass, Elizabeth Bishop, and the purpose of criticism:

Certain writers are simply unassailable – their renown is such that the quality of their writing is never questioned. If you don’t care for Shakespeare, you put it that way – you don’t say that Shakespeare is bad.

Elizabeth Bishop is one of these poets. While I’ve never cared for her (I hate sestinas, I hate description, and I hate her most famous line: “Write it”), I never questioned her talent, either – I assumed I hadn’t given it the proper chance. I did begin to feel a more certain distaste for her in recent years when I realized she was something of a misogynist ...

I highly recommend the Gass essay I refer to in the post, if you have access to Harper's.

More meh marriage journalism: On "All the Single Ladies" by Kate Bolick

2011-10-11T12:28:00.000-04:00

Following up on marriage, or lack thereof, I just saw this article in The Atlantic by Kate Bolick, "All the Single Ladies," covering the same topic, i.e., why she and many of her friends haven't gotten married (yet?). Although Bolick makes some of the same points I do (for example: "For thousands of years, marriage had been a primarily economic and political contract between two people, negotiated and policed by their families, church, and community" and "when I asked if they wanted to get married when they grew up, and if so, at what age, to a one they answered 'yes' and '27 or 28.'"), I was disappointed by the subtly anti-feminist and conservative rhetoric throughout the piece, including a generalized assumption that the women's movement is over, having achieved all it was meant to achieve. Here are some excerpts to illustrate my point:

"In 2008, women still earned just 77 cents to the male dollar—but that figure doesn’t account for the difference in hours worked, or the fact that women tend to choose lower-paying fields like nursing or education."

This is the standard conservative response to the assertion that women still don't receive equal pay for equal work. It's a bullshit response. Fields that women "tend" to choose are lower-paying because they are dominated by women; women are also encouraged if not forced to go into these fields, being told repeatedly that they're not suited to more demanding, higher-paying work. (I just heard that when young children are asked what they want to be when they grow up, an equal number of boys and girls say they want to be president; asked again as teens, only boys give this answer. Girls have had the chance to notice that few women occupy positions of true power.)

"But while the rise of women has been good for everyone, the decline of males has obviously been bad news for men—and bad news for marriage. For all the changes the institution has undergone, American women as a whole have never been confronted with such a radically shrinking pool of what are traditionally considered to be 'marriageable' men—those who are better educated and earn more than they do. So women are now contending with what we might call the new scarcity."

I'm sorry, but why do women have to marry men who are better educated and earn more than they do? Wasn't the point of feminism for us to have equal rights and opportunities? Not just better than in the past while still inferior to men? I expected Bolick to go on to contradict this assumption about what makes men "marriageable," but instead she reinforces it:"the new scarcity disrupts what economists call the 'marriage market' in a way that in fact narrows the available choices, making a good man harder to find than ever." Really? A "good man" is one that makes more money than us? (By the way, that's still most men!)

"In societies where men heavily outnumber women—in what’s known as a 'high-sex-ratio society'—women are valued and treated with deference and respect and use their high dyadic power to create loving, committed bonds with their partners and raise families. Rates of illegitimacy and divorce are low. Women’s traditional roles as mothers and homemakers are held in high esteem. In such situations, however, men also use the power of their greater numbers to limit women’s economic and political strength, and female literacy and labor-force participation drop.One might hope that in low-sex-ratio societies—where women outnumber men—women would have the social and sexual advantage. (After all, didn’t the mythical all-female nation of Amazons capture men and keep them as their sex slaves?) But that’s not what happens: instead, when confronted with a surplus of women, men become promiscuous and unwilling to commit to a monogamous relationship. (Which, I suppose, might explain the Amazons’ need to keep men in slave quarters.) In societies with too many women, the theory holds, fewer people marry, and those who do marry do so later in life."

Emphases mine. This is subtle, but given the context I couldn't help but noticing Bolick's non-neutral language. A high male-to-female ratio is empowering to men; the reverse ratio is "too many women." Notice how in both situations, men are the ones with agency. We're talking about a ratio of "50.8 percent females and 49.2 percent males," not an enormous surplus. The only ways I know of to achieve a more "ideal" ratio with less of a surplus of women is to kill a bunch of men off in a war or drown first children if they happen to be girls.

Here's a part I agree with, but she's quoting another author:

"This marriage myth—'matrimania,' [Bella] DePaulo calls it—proclaims that the only route to happiness is finding and keeping one all-purpose, all-important partner who can meet our every emotional and social need. Those who don’t have this are pitied. Those who don’t want it are seen as threatening."

Bolick's article seems to be about the cultural assumption that everyone wants to get married. But Bolick never really questions this assumption. When she talks about single women, she doesn't just mean unmarried, she means unattached. She hasn't discovered that she doesn't want to get married; she just "hasn't found the right person yet."

P.S. I blogged about marriage journalism in The Atlantic and Time back in 2009 in "Did you ask for the happy ending?"

Why I don't want to get married

2011-10-06T21:25:00.002-04:00

It's hard to have principles. It's hard in general, but it's especially hard to live by them, honestly, without hypocrisy, when you're living in (and therefore benefiting from) a society that pretty much laughs at your silly principles. There have been a couple of times recently when circumstances forced me to throw out my principles. I guess this happens more as you get older, huh? Principles are wasted on the young?

Here's something you may or may not have known about me: I don't want to get married. I almost said "I don't believe in marriage" but that isn't accurate. I guess my feelings about marriage are somewhat analogous to my feelings about eating meat: I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with it, but the way we currently engage in it, at a national and probably a global level, is ... what's the word? Not the dreaded "problematic." But not good. Not good enough, not by my standards.

I don't begrudge or judge other people's marriages as a rule, so please don't feel implicated or defensive if you happen to be married. But these are my feelings about marriage in general, in no particular order:

This has nothing to do with gay marriage. Some people deny themselves marriage as an act of protest, and I commend that. I support gay rights across the board. But the issue is irrelevant to my stance on marriage.
Most people believe they want to get married, but, as John said earlier today, "People don't know what they want." The societal pressure to get married, the overwhelming messaging from above and all sides that getting married is what you're supposed to do, clouds and warps your actual wants/needs/goals. When people express doubts about marriage, they are stamped out with "cold feet" rhetoric or the "You just haven't met the right person" line. Being permanently unmarried is still considered a flaw or at best eccentric.
I'm not religious, so I feel zero pressure or guilt to get married on those grounds. I think this probably influences a lot of people's decision to get married.
I believe women, especially, are disinclined to question any doubts they might have about marriage. Society/media/etc. make a couple of things about women very clear, and those are that you're supposed to be attractive and you're supposed to get married. Well, I guess you're also supposed to have kids. Everything else is kind of optional. For many years I too assumed that I wanted to get married.
I believe that many women (not all) very much want a wedding (again, it's what you're supposed to want). You have to get married if you want a wedding. I believe many parents want a wedding, too. I don't have any particular fondness for weddings (seeing as they fall under the rubric of ritual/tradition) and don't want one myself. It's amazing, really, how much this clarifies things. I wonder how many marriages would never have materialized if they weren't inextricably tied to a wedding.
Historically, I think most people have gotten married not for love but to better their situation in one way or another. In many countries this is still the norm.
I believe in long-term monogamous relationships (if both parties are willing). I think the benefits outweigh the costs, and if two people want to be together exclusively, they should try to make it work for as long as it can work. I don't believe that long-term monogamous relationships are only possible under the bond of marriage.
I am currently involved in a happy monogamous relationship of 5+ years. We have lived together for 4+ years. We have been through a lot, there have been some rough patches and close calls, but we've never broken up and we're still in love. We can't imagine life without the other. For all intents and purposes, we live like a married couple.
Life is unpredictable. When you marry someone, you're not just saying you trust them to want to be with you forever, you're saying you trust yourself to want to be with them forever. When my first long-term relationship ended, after almost six years, I realized how much people can change over five years, to say nothing of ten, twenty, thirty, and so on. I know what I want now, but I don't know what I'll want for the rest of my life. I can't say that about anyone else either. Relationship security is important to me, but not so important that I want someone to sign a contract. (Remember, for me it would just be a contract, because I have no interest in marriage as a religious ceremony.)
The fewer legal complications in my life, the fewer contractual obligations, the cleaner I feel.
Kids are a complication of their own. If/when I have kids, the benefits of marriage may in fact outweigh the costs.

Here's the thing. I may end up getting married anyway. In the interest of privacy, I won't get into why here, but I will say that John feels much as I do about marriage in principle. But, society being its overbearing self, we may have to get married anyway.

Sucks, doesn't it?

Desperation

2011-10-05T22:35:00.000-04:00

Anybody have any homegrown treatments for tinnitus? Anecdotal evidence accepted, no FDA approval required.

Smells like last century

2011-10-03T16:10:00.000-04:00

As promised, here is the link to my latest perfume column, On the Scent: A Certain Vintage, on the smells of yesteryear, including discontinued gems like L'Arte di Gucci and Fendi Theorema as well as older versions of living classics like Joy and Diorella. Here's an excerpt:

To the perfume lover, vintage perfumes are a dangerous draw. There is reason to worry that after falling down the vintage rabbit hole, one may never want to return to the above-ground mall.That’s because they really don’t make ‘em like this anymore – many of the ingredients common in vintage perfumes are no longer in use due to reduced availability, ecological or health concerns, prohibitive costs, changing tastes, or some combination of the above. So if you like what you smell in vintage perfumery – real oakmoss in chypres, natural ambergris and civet, unctuous musks, a high percentage of natural floral absolutes – it may be difficult to accept what’s being manufactured today.

The threat, then, is that you’ll fall head over heels in love with something in very limited availability. Let’s say you’re smitten with a bottle of Chanel No. 5 parfum from the ‘50s. Once it’s gone, there’s no guarantee that you’ll ever find the same vintage again, or that, if you do, it will be in the same condition or remotely affordable...

Read the rest!

Little stories

2011-09-29T20:04:00.000-04:00

My ex used to wear his t-shirts inside-out about half the time. Why? Because they'd get inverted when he took them off, and he couldn't be bothered to flip them outside-in again after washing them. I thought this made perfect sense: They were mostly cheapo logo shirts he'd gotten free one way or another, so it's not like they really looked better the right way. (His boss once said to him, all clandestine stage-whisper, "Your shirt's inside out!" and he was like, "Uh, I know, dude," and she backs up and goes, "Oh. It's a statement.") That was the explanation anyway. But one day, I caught him turning one of his shirts inside-out before he put it on.
I watched My Brilliant Career a few days ago, and was surprised (disappointed? dismayed?) to see it's basically the exact same story as Anne of Green Gables, a miniseries I have loved beyond reason since I was a little girl. The similarities are not superficial. They're both about a clever, plain, outspoken girl from a poor family who hates her life until she's swept away to a more idyllic and privileged world, but continues to battle social mores and gender stereotypes. Both characters want to be someone important (a writer or some kind of artist) but are continually pushed to focus on marrying well instead. They both fall in love with someone who is clearly perfect for them, but deny themselves the pleasure of a happy relationship, believing a woman must choose love or a career. They both work as teachers for unruly, disrespectful students. They both turn down proposals and eventually write a book. Though one takes place in Canada and the other in Australia, they depict the same time slice and the sets and costumes are strikingly similar. There are even scenes and lines that are almost identical. The whole while I was watching MBC, I assumed they had either the same director or writer. In fact they don't share any crew, and, especially puzzling, they are both based on books (by different authors). I'm forced to conclude that the miniseries is more "faithful" to My Brilliant Career, which came first and must have been influential, than it is to the Anne books (which I've never read). Oh well. I'm glad I saw the miniseries first, because, unconscious plagiarism or no unconscious plagiarism, I think it's a better film. (To be fair, both books probably reference Little Women.)
I have a new perfume column going up on Saturday, but I won't be here to link to it. I'm flying to Baltimore tomorrow for a wedding. I will throw up a link when I get back! (Metaphorically. I hope not to vomit any sausages.)
Micro-reviews of some things I have sniffed lately:

Bond No. 9 I <3 NY, pink version: Blueberry Pop-Tarts!
Bond No. 9 I <3 NY, black version: Brown sugar & cinnamon Pop-Tarts!
Angel EDT: Basically the same formula as La Rose Angel AFAICT
Elie Saab: Total cross between Narciso Rodriguez for Her and Alien
Prada Candy: Like all Prada scents, instant drydown, of the ethylmaltol + benzoin variety

New launches that might be good/interesting and require further sniffing: Cartier Baiser Vole, Bottega Veneta, Diane.

The smell multiverse

2011-09-28T13:44:00.001-04:00

Just saw this interesting video, a talk by a woman (Nicola Twilley) who created a scratch-and-sniff map of New York. In it, she talks about the ways different demographics respond to scents. For example, Asians like the smell of rose and orange peel more than white people, who prefer eugenol. Everyone likes vanilla. Men like the smell of guaiacyl acetate, a woody-smoky smell, and women like cis-3-hexanol, the smell of cut grass. (So, she suggests, women should wear smoky scents and men should wear grassy ones, assuming they're heterosexual that is.) She also notes that almost everyone is anosmic to at least one thing, meaning they can't smell it all.

Nicola Twilley at Gel 2011 from Gel Conference on Vimeo.

So far so good, and Twilley admits she is not a scientist, but she goes too far in concluding that "we all live in a separate smell universe" -- she says that we all see the same colors and hear the same sounds, but we don't smell the same smells. I think this is sloppy. The research she's referring to doesn't suggest that we experience different smells, it just speaks to different preferences. You'd find preferences for different colors and tones among different demographics and cultures too. If we can assume that everyone experiences a certain wavelength the same way, leaving associations and baggage aside, we can assume the same for smellable molecules. (There are holes in everyone's visual and auditory capabilities too.)

Her two big examples don't help her argument much: She says that some people in the perfume industry describe eugenol as sweet and carnation-like, while others describe it as spicy, like clove. "How can this be?" she wonders. Here's how: eugenol smells both sweet and spicy, as cloves do -- and carnations smell like cloves. They are not different descriptions, they're just both incomplete. Most people need training/experience to both recognize and accurately describe smells out of context. She also says that she has a selective anosmia to Galaxolide, a synthetic musk. In truth most people are anosmic to some types of musk because they're very large molecules (the effective equivalent, I suppose, of very high-pitched tones, which not everyone can hear). But it would be wrong to assume everyone's selective anosmias are totally different, like your neighbor on one side can't smell bacon and the one on the other can't smell garbage. Evidence suggests that most of the smells people are anosmic (or hypersensitive) to were created by humans.

Recent readings, vulgarity & excess edition

2011-09-27T16:22:00.000-04:00

Trouble in Mind by Lucie Brock-Broido, who may be the queen of garish, costumey excess. No one can tell me she isn't trying to be funny, a little bit: Check out the first two lines of "Basic Poem in a Basic Tongue":

Here is the maudlin petty bourgeoisie of ruin.

A sullen pity-craft before the fallows of Allhallowmas.

Ha, right? Also Felt by Alice Fulton. This is from "Close" (on Joan Mitchell's White Territory):

I saw she used a bit of knife
and left some gesso showing through,
a home for lessness that--
think of anorexia--
is a form of excess.

While painting, she could get no farther away
than arm's length.
While seeing parts of the whole,
she let the indigenous breathe
and leave a note.
She dismantled ground and figure
till the fathoms were ambiguous--
a sentence left unfinished
because everyone knows what's meant,
which only happens between friends.
The lack of that empathy embitters,
let me tell you.

Also The Public Gardens by Linda Norton, a lovely woman we met at a performance on Friday. Refreshingly, she did not read from the book but gave a talk and showed us some photo collages. It contains both poems and prose, or poems and "history" as the subtitle claims, history in the form of journals. I love reading journals, it feels illicit even when it isn't. From "Brooklyn Journals":

August 23, 1987

Since Joey died--an inability to believe I have a future--a feeling that it is vulgar to go on--to think that I could have time--when that was denied him. My mother says, "Linda, you are smart, but Joey--he was brilliant." While he was alive she found his intelligence and his homosexuality so--queer. Now his intelligence is invoked to put me in my place. He grows larger and larger in death while I disappear.

Listening to Ellington's "Sacred Mass" and remembering the nurse on the graveyard shift at Lenox Hill last year--coming in to keep me company as I sat next to the bed and looked at him and listened to the respirator breathing him--that's what it seemed like. He was brain dead, but the respirator was alive.

There were other men dying of AIDS on that ward, many of them alone, and none as handsome and young as my brother.

The nurse took her mask off and sighed, and pushed my brother's hair off his forehead, and told me that this was the bed where Duke Ellington had died.

My brother would have loved to know that.

No, he would have hated to know that, as he hated everything the last year of his life, spitting at people, even biting my father to try to infect him (he went home, to blame or beg, and my father threw him out; as my parents threw us all out, one after another). He was trying to leave his goofy older boyfriend, but there was nowhere else to go--he'd lost his job after he threw one of his tantrums at work--the job he loved, editing guides to the national parks. [...]

"Never for less than one day in my life have I been less than completely happy."

You would not understand what Joseph had meant if you had met him the last year of his life.

But I know what he meant.

The New Confessional: Post-Confession/Conceptual Confession

2011-09-22T22:42:00.002-04:00

Two poets I like have interesting things to say about a new kind of confessional poetry. In both cases, they happened to be talking about my poetry, so yeah, it's kind of interesting by default to me, but I like to think these ideas are compelling in a general sense. I cut my teeth (god, I hate expressions) on confessional poetry (Anne Sexton, John Berryman) so I do see myself as being influenced by, or an extension of, this school.

Here's Leigh Stein (I think she wrote this in a comment somewhere; this was quite a while ago but I copied and saved it for future reference):

"To me, 'confessional' writing suggests a vulnerability. It isn’t just telling the truth, reporting the facts. Like watching a striptease vs. going to a nude beach. I haven’t read enough contemporary memoirs by female authors to comment on that vein, but I know in poetry I go for what I would call a post-confessional slant…the truth, but disguised by lots of false threads and humor and smoke and mirrors. I think Ellen Kennedy, Elisa Gabbert, and Dorothea Lasky do this well."

And here's Heather June Gibbons, in a personal email (I hope she won't mind):

"I appreciate the poem's willingness to make potentially unflattering, difficult observations. A kind of new bent on confessionalism, perhaps? But conceptually-driven as opposed to ego-driven, a sort of conceptual confession."

I like these theories. If asked to describe my own work, and its relationship to the self and the truth, I would have cooked up something similar (I'm in there, my ideas, my feelings, my memories, but I only include any element insofar as I find it interesting, so true things that aren't interesting get left out, while interesting things that aren't true take their place), but I wouldn't have thought to characterize this mode as a variation on confessional poetry. Thanks to Leigh and Heather for the catchy branding!

Charles on Fire

2011-09-20T15:21:00.001-04:00

I have always liked this James Merrill poem (in truth, the only one I ever remember he wrote). I remember it for the name, and for the story, but upon rereading always find I like the lines as well.

Charles on Fire

Another evening we sprawled about discussing
Appearances. And it was the consensus
That while uncommon physical good looks
Continued to launch one, as before, in life
(Among its vaporous eddies and false claims),
Still, as one of us said into his beard,
"Without your intellectual and spiritual
Values, man, you are sunk." No one but squared
The shoulders of their own unloveliness.
Long-suffering Charles, having cooked and served the meal,
Now brought out little tumblers finely etched
He filled with amber liquor and then passed.
"Say," said the same young man, "in Paris, France,
They do it this way"--bounding to his feet
And touching a lit match to our host's full glass.
A blue flame, gentle, beautiful, came, went
Above the surface. In a hush that fell
We heard the vessel crack. The contents drained
As who should step down from a crystal coach.
Steward of spirits, Charles's glistening hand
All at once gloved itself in eeriness.
The moment passed. He made two quick sweeps and
Was flesh again. "It couldn't matter less,"
He said, but with a shocked, unconscious glance
Into the mirror. Finding nothing changed,
He filled a fresh glass and sank down among us.

Why do people apologize?

2011-09-16T19:16:00.000-04:00

I'm sort of known for not being big on apologies. It's not that I don't like to admit/vocalize it when I've done something wrong, it's that most of the time, I'm not really convinced that I've done something wrong, so it feels hollow, and I hate empty gestures. Also, even when I think that I've been wronged, I'm not super impressed with apologies. If it's a small transgression, I'd rather the person just acknowledge that it bothered me and try not to do it again. (Doesn't it seem like effusive apologizers are often the worst repeat offenders?) If it's a big transgression, apologies are beside the point: You fucked up bad, game over, etc.

It's not that I never feel sorry, it's just that my moral compass doesn't shift around all that much. I mean, I think about what I'm going to do or say before I do or say it (or, you know, have the illusion that I do; let's not turn this into an argument about free will), and apply said moral compass before the fact. Most of the time, if something reads WRONG, I don't do it in the first place. That way, I minimize both guilt and regret (feelings I despise). Obviously, other people in my life may disagree with the settings; they may feel I've done wrong by their lights and demand apologies, but saying "I'm sorry" when I don't believe I've done anything wrong by my own lights has never sat well with me. Also obviously, sometimes I recognize that something is wrong and do it anyway, or I don't apply much forethought at all (in moments of high emotion or compromised sobriety, say).

But most, less robotic people say "I'm sorry" now and again. And my thinking is that, in order to feel genuine regret for your actions, one or the other of these has to be true:

Your own system of "right" and "wrong" varies from moment to moment or day to day. Yesterday, what you did didn't feel wrong, but today it does.
Your system of right and wrong doesn't vary much, but you semi-frequently ignore your own morals; in other words, you knew what you did yesterday was wrong when you did it, but you did it anyway.

So what I'm wondering is, which is more true for most people? If you, reader, are given to occasional apologies, which feels more true for you?

Take my monkey, please

2011-09-16T13:49:00.000-04:00

Some of you may know that John has an addiction to books. His literary acquisitiveness puts even my perfume buying habits to shame. However, the hassle and cost of packing, moving and unpacking our enormous library managed to quell his appetites for a couple of weeks.

The first book he brought home since we arrived in CO was His Monkey Wife by John Collier. I assumed this was a goof, since "Monkey" (and variations thereof) is one of his many pet names for me. But apparently this 1930 novel is considered something of a classic; it's introduced by Paul Theroux and blurbed by Anthony Burgess as "a wayward masterpiece."

The prose is surprisingly artful and ornate; here are a few example sentences from the first ten pages:

The tall trees on the edge of the clearing have here and there, it seems, lifted their skirts of scrub, giving us the same sickening drop from our expectations as shop-window ladies do, when their dresses are opened at back or placket, and we see only wire and emptiness.

Sitting on the wide verandah, however, almost alone, his personality expands naively, and something quite poetic appears in the twilight of that hour and of his nature, like the sweet but inconsiderable bloom on a ragged nocturnal weed.

And, in reference to Emily, the "monkey wife" in question, Mr. Fatigay's devoted chimp:

What seeds lay latent in her of qualities with such a claim, sprouted only under the sunshine of Mr. Fatigay's smiles, and the gentle warm monotonous rain of the evening monologues, in which, when work was done, he expressed his hopes, dreams, ambitions to the friendly dumbness by his side.

Methinks "the friendly dumbness" is a good alternative to "my other half."

We were especially delighted by the following passage:

She was, after all, a schoolmaster's pet, and on the frequent occasions on which she had accompanied him to the schoolroom, she had seen enough pictures of cats with the letters C A T printed beside them. Is it so hard to understand how she came to a comprehension of the function of books, and even, perhaps, of the abstracter functions of language? Our scientists may think so, who have chosen to measure the intelligence of the chimpanzee solely by its reaction to a banana. They suspend the delicacy from the ceiling of a cage, and assess the subject's mentality in terms of the number of boxes he or she will pile one upon another in order to secure it, failing to see that nothing is revealed except the value which that particular chimp chooses to set upon the fruit. And, beyond a certain low limit, this surely is in inverse ratio to intelligence. What boy of ten would not pile up a dozen boxes in an attempt to climb within reach of it? How many would Einstein clamber upon? And how many less would Shakespeare? Emily, though a fruitarian by instinct, would have disdained an eagerness capable of more than two and a jump.

Don't squeeze me in!

2011-09-14T13:02:00.012-04:00

That's what my beautiful friend Rebecca said to a cute guy in the library from her vantage in the expandable stacks.

Here's an interesting article from The Atlantic about the middle class squeeze. Lots of compelling sentences:

You could say that everything is getting cheaper except for almost everything you need. We need places to live, energy to move, education to move up, and insurance to stay healthy. The productivity revolution isn't doing much to make those things more affordable.

Even after decades of building up and building out, homes and apartments are still prohibitively expensive in our most productive cities. Adjusted for inflation, home energy costs doubled between 1967 and 2003, and continued to rise in the last ten years. The cost of medical insurance is growing faster than wages. Tuition and higher education fees are growing even faster....

The reason why toasters are cheap and health insurance is not is that the productivity gains that made toasters -- not to mention computers, media*, durable goods, food, and clothes -- more affordable are not spilling over into health care. The next chart from McKinsey tells the story: More than half of total productivity growth comes from computers and information technology. Practically zero comes from health care and education. In fact, one reason why heath and education are adding the most jobs today is that employers can't meet new demand with technology or offshoring. They have to keep hiring people.

Health care isn't cost-effective because .... well, there are so many reasons. But perhaps the most important reason is that there are not clear incentives to make it more cost-effective....

From 1970 to 2010, real GDP doubled while real earnings fell by 28 percent. Two labor trends helped to offset this reversal. First, and very happily, women stormed into the workforce and supported their families with income. Second, and less joyously, everybody worked much harder. The typical two-parent family worked 26 percent more hours in 2010 than in 1975 but the middle class still feels incredibly squeezed.

Remember when we talked about the tropes of '80s commercials? Because John is writing a novel that's set in the '80s, he's been picking up old magazines here and there as a form of research. The ads in these magazines are fascinating. You'll see things like a full-page or even full-spread ad for a "slim-line" telephone (with a number pad right on the receiver!) or other shitty electronics, clearly marketed to a middle-aged middle class. They're weird for (at least) two reasons:

There is so much damn text in these ads. You're basically expected to read a short story to get the gist.
Electronics are generally marketed to a much younger demographic now. It seems like adults copy their kids when deciding what kind of phone, etc. to buy.

Other weird things:

As previously noted, there was more of a blue-collar (but white) presence in advertisements in the '80s. Perhaps now it is assumed that blue-collar whites have no buying power and are not worth targeting? (Additionally, perhaps, it's assumed that blue-collar whites don't read magazines?)
It feels like half the ad space in, say, an old LIFE magazine are devoted to booze and cigarette ads. These ads are hilarious: They all deliver a "You deserve it!" message. The cigarette ads depict stuff like a sweaty dancer having a smoke in the studio after ballet class. You've earned it! The booze ads show middle-aged, middle-class white people in sweaters sitting around in groups laughing while they drink brandy and obscure liqueurs on the rocks. Stuff like Midori and Galliano. You deserve it! Again, booze ads these days are mostly targeted at college students and 20-somethings it seems: what to drink when you're hitting da clubz (probably vodka).

Check this one out (click to enlarge):

"When you're feeling a bit bored by your usual -- try it on the rocks. If you're more bored than usual -- try it in a snifter. Of course, when you raise your glass, you'll also raise a few eyebrows. But surely you've done that before." Really? Did this ad convince anyone tequila is a classy alternative to scotch? In another ad there's a guy with the exact same haircut and smug expression saying, "Bourbon? No thanks. I've switched to Gold Rum and soda. It's smooth, it's light."

More weird crap from 1980s print alcohol ads:

"A Harvey Wallbanger is more than just a gold-plated screwdriver. It's the party drink of the decade."
"When I play, I strive for the highest quality in my performance. I look for the same standards in my vodka." (Attributed to Pinchas Zukerman in a Smirnoff ad.)
"First there was light. Followed soon thereafter by man and woman, a.k.a Adam and Eve. Then came the business with the apple, and before you could say, 'You snake in the grass,' five zillion years went by. But all wasn't for naught, because that fateful faux pas not only altered the history of haberdashery but also inspired the creation of DeKuyper Original Apple Barrel Schnapps."
"When you go south with Avocados [sic] and Jose Cuervo almost anything can happen. And usually does."

Unrelated: Here's an unexpectedly dire caption below a cuddly animal photo in the September 1984 issue of LIFE (featuring Michael Jackson on the cover): "At dawn a lioness nuzzles a cub whose mother, along with the rest of the pride, is gnawing on a wildebeest carcass nearby." "Gnawing on a wildebeest carcass nearby" is my new away message.

Bonus sexist caption on a New Yorker-style cartoon in a 1984 issue of Playboy (showing a woman holding a newspaper next to a man in an armchair with his head in his hands): "Sam, you must read this article! A study has shown that some people suffer from depression as a reaction to other people's telling them what to do." (Speaking of captions, I enjoyed this article about the hordes of celebrities trying to crack the New Yorker's weekly caption contest.)

Sundries

2011-09-11T23:00:00.006-04:00

What I've been ...

Reading: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. I believe someone recommended this back when I was looking for non-YA novels with smart young characters. I do like the Mick character very much; she's a tomboy with a passion for music. I also started The Unconsoled a while back, but I'm not good at reading multiple novels at once. On Friday I got myself a Denver Public Library card and checked out some Alice Fulton books, one poetry and one nonfiction.

Eating: Colorado peaches. New Mexico green chiles (and salsa made thereof). Boiled kale as an all-purpose vegetable (on pizza, in fried rice and scrambled eggs, etc.). Flax seed oil (trying to be one of those people). Salami (one of those meat products that tastes how I remember it tasting, rather than a gamier version of itself).

Drinking: On Friday, after an opening at the MCA (a weird minimalist installation involving yarn; we thought it would have been improved by the addition of live kittens), I ordered a wine flight of California reds at this place. It was the same price as a single glass of wine, but they basically brought me three full glasses of wine. They were delicious, especially the Michael David Petite Petit, so I finished them, and ended up fairly wasted. Damn elevation! Also, Campari and soda. And I just bought a big bottle of Polish potato vodka at the awesome local liquor store, Argonaut. (I keep vodka in the freezer, natch.)

Doing: Hiking a bit: we went to Lost Lake outside Nederland, CO, yesterday, which was a delight. (Yes, there was snow on them thar hills.) Shopping too much (post-move, I've lifted the self-inflicted moratorium on buying things I don't need). Today I bought a dress that looks like TV static. Playing Rock Band at Kevin & Katie's in Lafayette. Limited song choice, but I had much fun on "Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before" and "Love Is a Battlefield."

Vanity Update: My hair and skin look way better out there. Hair is sort of a who cares, but I can't get over the difference in my skin. I look three years younger! Hallelujah. I hope it lasts.

Definitions of poetry, continued

2011-08-31T13:51:00.004-04:00

I had been meaning to collect these. This is Rimbaud, via John Gallaher:

I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, and keeps only their quintessences. This is an unspeakable torture during which he needs all his faith and superhuman strength, and during which he becomes the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed – and the great learned one! – among men. – For he arrives at the unknown! Because he has cultivated his own soul – which was rich to begin with – more than any other man! He reaches the unknown; and even if, crazed, he ends up by losing the understanding of his visions, at least he has seen them! Let him die charging through those unutterable, unnameable things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin from the horizons where he has succumbed!

I'm changing the title of my blogroll to "Other Horrible Workers."

Causes vs. Treatments

2011-08-31T12:49:00.006-04:00

Recently I was telling someone the story of how I figured out (slowly) which foods make me sick. When I talked to doctors about the problems I was having (i.e., feeling terrible every time I ate), I found it odd that none of them suggested possible causes. Instead, they suggested possible treatments (almost invariably the suggested treatment was "eat more fiber," the standard recommendation if you have irritable bowel syndrome).

A year or so ago, [redacted] thought he had restless leg syndrome. He talked to a psychiatrist about the symptoms (insomnia coupled with an urge to move or kick his legs when he'd lie down in bed) and the doctor said yes, that sounds like restless leg syndrome and prescribed an anti-anxiety medication for it, to be taken before bedtime. It helped but only somewhat. [Redacted] had noticed that the RLS cropped up around the same time that he had started running, and thought they might be somehow connected. Eventually it dawned on him that it wasn't the running itself, but the fact that he used an inhaler before he ran (since running aggravates his asthma). Inhalers contain stimulants. He stopped hitting the inhaler, and the RLS went away.

"Restless leg syndrome" turned out to be the equivalent of my IBS "diagnosis." Be wary of diagnoses that include the word "syndrome." Your nebulous syndrome may have a direct cause.

2011-08-30T18:43:00.005-04:00

From "Questions on Nature" by Adelard of Bath, written in the early twelfth century (via The Portable Medieval Reader, eds. James Bruce Ross and Mary Martin McLaughlin, Penguin):

A certain nephew of mine who had come along with the others, being more involved in the causes of things than able to explain them, asked me to relate something new from my Arab studies. When the others agreed I had the following discussion with him, which I know was profitable to its hearers, but I do not know if it was pleasant. For this generation has a gigantic vice, that it considers nothing discovered by moderns worthy of being accepted. Thus it is usual that if I should wish to make public my own discovery, I should attribute it to another, saying, "This person says it, not I." Therefore, lest I should be altogether unheard, I say that a certain lord discovered my ideas, not I. But enough of this. Now, since it is fitting that I should say something at the request of my friends, I wish to be more certain that it is rightly said by having you [Bishop Richard of Bayeux, to whom this work is dedicated] consider it. For nothing in the liberal arts is so well discussed that it can not shine more splendidly through you. Be present, then, in spirit! For in order to present things succinctly, I set down the chapter headings first. Then I shall reply to my nephew on the causes of things.

(What follows is a selection of those chapter headings.)

Why certain beasts chew the cud, and certain others not at all.
Why certain animals have a stomach, and others do not.
Why men are not born with horns or other weapons.
Why those who have good intelligence are lacking in memory and vice versa.
Why the nose is located above the mouth.
What opinions should be held concerning vision.
Why the fingers were made unequal.
Why women, if they are more frigid than men, are more wanton in desire.
Why men universally die.
If the sphere of the earth were perforated, where a stone thrown into it would fall.
How springs burst forth on a mountain top.
Whether there may be other true springs.
Whence the winds arise.
Whether the stars fall, as they seem to fall.
What food the stars eat, if they are animals.

What I learned from my half-assed project

2011-08-29T09:32:00.003-04:00

Not all that much, though I found all the interviews interesting. (Obviously, my tiny sample size limits real conclusions.) But anyway:

I was willing to entertain the possibility that men get harassed too. Seems like they do sometimes, but mostly by other men. In other words, men are kind of a threat to everybody. Of course this is a power thing. Situations in which women have more power than men are relatively rare.
My current social group, which consists overwhelmingly of writers, is overwhelmingly white. I definitely don't think only white men are attractive, but it was hard to think of non-white people that I knew well enough to ask. This was not true of my crowds in high school or college, which were more diverse both superficially (along lines of race, income, etc.) and in terms of interests.
I'm still trying to decide whether I should bother answering the questions myself. (Beyond "Duh, frequently," etc.) I didn't ask women in the first place because I already know the answers.
Perhaps the most eye-opening insight for me was this comment from Sarang, in response to my questioning why nerdy introverted guys (often the people in the room I'm most inclined to pursue friendship or conversation with) are as likely as not to avoid me (emphases mine):
There are various reasons one might want to avoid having to deal with friendly attractive women at work: (1) They might be trying to mock you. (2) They might be of the kind that are _into nerds_ -- which, for any sufficiently self-loathing nerd, is a turn-off (qua confirmation of one's own nerdiness). (3) It is bad to get into situations where you end up embarrassing yourself, by mistaking politeness for friendliness or friendliness for attraction. (4) Attractive people are alien and often irritating in the way they interact with the world. On average they tend to be entitled and show-offy compared with others. To the extent that you have no real intention of trying to sleep with someone, attractiveness is arguably a mild net negative.
This makes so much sense I can't believe it never occurred to me. I also think "Mild net negative!" is a good thing to shout out when someone attractive walks in the room.
We now return to our regular programming.

Brief Interviews with Attractive Men, Part 5

2011-08-28T13:17:00.003-04:00

This is probably the last one of these I'll post. Minimal insights coming shortly.

Matt Rasmussen

How often are you the recipient of unwanted sexual advances?

I’d have to say not very often at all. It happened more often in college and when I used to go out to bars more, although even then, it didn’t occur frequently. Also, I don’t work in an office setting and I spend most of my time at home, so I’m not “out and about” much except with friends and family.

To the larger question, I would propose that attractive men get hit on far less than attractive women. I think women can read men better than guys can read women. I’m not a real flirty person and it seems women (the few who might be attracted to me) pick up on the fact that I’m married and not interested. Most guys however aren’t really very skilled at reading the “not interested” signs, whatever they may be. I’m not buying into the guys-are-huge-idiots beer commercial psychology or the myth that beautiful, successful women have obviously flirted/slept their way to success, but the power of sex (whatever that might be, probably a Prince song) or attraction, whatever you want to call it, is used for many reasons. Things like beer ads and contemporary female country stars are easy to interpret, but an attractive co-worker’s glance is much more complex. Misinterpretation abounds. I’m sure this happens for both men and women, but men just seem to act on their misinterpretations more. Why? Maybe it’s the male-as-aggressor role from the traditional dating/courting system that survived the sexual revolution or the woman-as-object ideal present in a patriarchal society. Or maybe evolution is to blame here. Maybe its because men are big dumbasses who like beer and hot chicks and like… beer and stuff. I don’t know.

What do you do when someone you’re not interested in (sexually) is interested in you (sexually)? How do you deflect the attention, if you do?

This is difficult because I haven’t had to do it in a long time and because I think it varies from situation to situation. I mean, I don’t have a “go to” shut-down button because I don’t need one. Now, I would probably start talking about my wife and child and make sure in the future I didn’t give that person any signals that could be interpreted as sexual/romantic interest. This is very vague, I know. If none of this works, then I’d probably avoid the person as much as possible. If that didn’t work, I’d probably get a face transplant and change my name to Terry Paragraph and host a show on public access television called Topic Sentence.

Have you ever experienced anything you’d describe as harassment?

I’ve had my butt grabbed by both women and men (who hasn’t), but I can’t say that I’ve ever been the victim of sexual harassment. I’ve never felt intimidated or made to believe I would benefit somehow from a sexual encounter with somebody. I’ve been made uncomfortable before in a casual setting, but never in a professional situation.

That’s not to say that it doesn’t exist, because I’ve had male friends who have experienced what I’d consider sexual harassment. I doubt they’d describe it as that and there was never any physical harassment (that I know of). Most of it occurred via text message and email.

What is your advice for a woman who finds herself the recipient of unwanted sexual attention or advances?

Try to be as clear as possible that you are not interested while also being kind about it (if that’s possible). You think he “got it,” but he probably didn’t. Attention is a difficult thing to turn away, but if it is truly unwanted then you need to let him know. Be sure its clear that you are not interested, as many dudes will keep at it if you give them any hope at all. Don’t do the “I totally find you attractive, but I’m seeing someone else” thing just to let him down easy. This creates a tiny window he thinks he can crawl into. Also, if alcohol is involved, you need to be more direct. The more alcohol he has consumed, the more overt you need to be. If he’s drunk and hitting on you and won’t give up, you probably need to draw him a map to Fuckoffville (I believe it’s in Wisconsin).

Image via Hee Jin Kang

Currently reading

2011-08-24T14:27:00.005-04:00

It Is Especially Dangerous to Be Conscious of Oneself, a chapbook by Jeff Alessandrelli of Lincoln and, prior to that, Reno. I see shades of Rohrer and Ruefle ... here's the title poem:

Then we enter a low, ponderous country
where the clouds are a series of disparate thoughts
and the rain they insist on reasoning with
a celebration of their hectic musings.
The men are watering the streets anyways.
Luminous, just-fresh, the concrete sparkles;
gum stains and spit stains and every veritable crack.
Do they still call mirrors looking glasses anymore?
Those type of tempered thoughts.
Yo I'm lazy but I'm crazy too
You never know what I definitely might do
threatens the radio, mass-eyed and alert.
Up ahead the mirage is steady and punctual.
We're waiting for a war to begin
or a delectable sweet to eat after lunch.

Further adventures in objectification

2011-08-24T10:35:00.003-04:00

Also while in Chicago, Kathy, Martin, John, and I tried to figure out who the hottest male writer of all time is. I think it comes down to a tie between Sir Walter Raleigh and Nathaniel Hawthorne, what do you think? Dashing!

Trippin'

2011-08-23T23:28:00.019-04:00

Why hello there! I was gone for a bit, did you notice? Here are some pics from our trip out West.

Taco night, Part 1, with Josh and Sarah in Western Mass.

Somewhere in Ohio. (OH. My. God.)

Three blind mice in a weird taxidermy and curiosity shop in Andersonville.

Taco night, Part 2, with Kathy and Martin in Chicago.

When we arrived in Boulder on Friday evening, there was a sudden rain shower and then, no joke, an enormous double rainbow arched all the way across the sky. It's hard to tell in the picture, but it was huge and glowing crazy bright.

Katie and li'l Zoe at an art opening in Boulder.

Our apartment isn't all set up yet, but here be the wall of books.

What have y'all been up to?

Maneuver X: Still Hot

2011-08-12T19:54:00.005-04:00

Miley takes a page from Tiffany's book:

This song is to the 00s what "I Want it That Way" was to the 90s: pop-fucking-perfection.

(I prefer the BSB for karaoke, it's more in my vocal range.)

See you in Denver.

I Think We're Alone Now

2011-08-09T13:54:00.004-04:00

When I was in second grade I thought pushing your hair up on one side with your hand was pretty much the sexiest, coolest thing a girl could do (followed closely by letting your shirt or jacket fall off one shoulder). I'm pretty sure this video is why:

While you're counting how many times Tiffany performs Maneuver X, keep your eyes peeled for the man whose dancing has dislodged his comb-over. Just one of many inclusions that make little to no sense.

Fun with symmetry

2011-08-07T09:28:00.006-04:00

So after the discussion in the comments yesterday about symmetry, I was playing around with a site called PicHacks where you can upload a photo and get back left-symmetrical and right-symmetrical versions. It's hard to find a completely front-facing photo and to get it to split exactly down the center, but one photo came pretty close -- the right-side image looked pretty much like me but with a slightly wider nose (leading me to believe the line of symmetry was slightly off-center), but the left-side image is quite eerie:

I look like an Icelandic version of Sissy Spacek, no?

Or, according to my friend Kate, a gelfling:

Some notes on attraction, sex, and power

2011-08-05T12:42:00.003-04:00

I knew someone would suggest that interviewing "attractive men" is sexist or objectifying. I considered this possibility but quickly dismissed it. Acknowledging attractiveness isn't objectifying, anymore than acknowledging race is racist. I don't believe in pretending we don't notice superficial facts about the way people look.
Attractiveness is subjective, but not entirely. If you ask a thousand people to rate a bunch of faces on a scale of 1 to 10, some of those faces will have higher average scores than others. If a face has an average score of 8, it's fair to say that most people would agree that face is attractive. (Of course all 8's are not the same.) I'm not doing a scientific study, so I didn't ask a thousand people to rate my friends' faces. I'm just guessing.
I absolutely do not think that "attractive" people are more likely to experience sexual harassment/assault.
My survey wasn't designed to investigate sexual harassment/assault. I was more broadly curious about noncriminal activity and day-to-day social navigation. Was that not clear?
As a woman, I feel that a) my looks are constantly being evaluated (most of the time I don't think about it, it's just background radiation), and b) social relationships I think of as perfectly platonic often turn out not to be (in other words a friend/acquaintance/colleague/etc. comes on to me). I would not categorize the vast majority of these situations as harassment, just variously awkward and uncomfortable.
I have no idea if these (socio-sexual?) situations arise because I'm a woman, attractive, both or neither (though I certainly have assumptions), hence the inclination to change one variable, for starters. I also thought the title (a play on Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, of course) was catchy. I also thought it would freak men out to have their looks foregrounded. One commenter who in the past theorized that I have more male readers than female readers because I'm "vulpine" ("In real life (i.e., physical, non-electronic), your vast audience of immature poetry blog trolls, myself included, would be thrilled to get the time of day from a smart pretty girl who probably smells nice") commented that the title of the series "implies that there is some accepted standard of human beauty." He also accused me of "looks-ism." What I take from this is that women are expected to be evaluated on the basis of their looks; men are not.
"In real life" I often pursue friendships with stereotypically nerdy, intellectual, introverted/non-aggressive men. They often seem like the most interesting people in, say, an office environment. (It's semi-hard for me to make friends at work because my "real life" interests are obscure and snobby.) Frequently, these "nerdy" men whose (platonic) company I find appealing are not "thrilled to get the time of day" from me. On the contrary they often studiously avoid eye contact and conversation or ignore me entirely. Not always, but it's a pattern. Why is that, I wonder? Do they think I'm going to make fun of them or something?

Brief Interviews with Attractive Men, Part 4

2011-08-04T12:09:00.004-04:00

Brian Pera

How often are you the recipient of unwanted sexual advances?

Almost never. Part of it is that I don't really go out. Maybe that's not part of it, because whenever I have gone out I feel totally invisible. I don't even feel that weird heat a woman friend once told me happens between men and women when there's something there and something clicks or somebody turns "it" on. People, always women, tell me I'm attractive and that other people think so, like there are legions of them lusting after me out there, but I just never sense or see it and feel pretty alone out and about. Sometimes in the past, walking down the street with women, I was told that people were turning to stare at me, but I never noticed, and really almost everywhere I've been - here or abroad - I've gotten zero advances at all. I don't even know the difference between wanted and unwanted. I wouldn't mind sexual advances from a guy but can't remember ever getting anything remotely like them. Any unwanted sexual advances have been from women. Usually I kind of pick up on the fact that they're attracted to me in the way straight women can find themselves attracted to gay guys, and it makes me really uncomfortable, because I'd really just rather sit and watch Toddlers and Tiaras with them. I showed a film in Greece a few years ago, which wasn't a typical gay movie but was clearly made by a gay guy and dealt with things from his/my perspective, and it was a straight festival, and after the screening, outside the theater, something like five women surrounded me with looks on their faces that made me very depressed, because I thought, how sweet, where are the guys? And I also thought, okay so here is yet another example of my artistic intentions playing cupid with the wrong gender.

What do you do when someone you’re not interested in (sexually) is interested in you (sexually)? How do you deflect the attention, if you do?

I ignore it. A woman friend was sitting on the couch with me once last year. I was horizontal, on my side. She sat very close. Kind of against my groin. I was like, I guess I should have a boner, just to make her feel better. It was awkward. Nothing was spoken but I knew I was supposed to have a boner, and that what I wanted, men, was pretty irrelevant.

Have you ever experienced anything you’d describe as harassment?

When I was younger, probably about 19, I went to an antique store and the guy who worked there bent down to show me a cupboard, rubbing against my crotch. Another time, about fifteen years ago, I was in rural Arkansas and stopped at a crap antique store along the highway, and the guy was asking me all kinds of questions, and I thought, uh oh, and then another guy, who was clearly his partner, entered, and said they had more stuff out back, up the hill, in another house. I thought, this could be weird, but I went, because I've always been curious about weird and how far things will go before they're so weird they stop being ambiguous in any way. Also I thought, there might be something really good out there. When we got to the house it barely had existing walls and certainly had nothing in the way of antiques, unless you consider broken down crates antiques, and it was no longer ambiguous, and I thought, now we're in this strange, secret situation together, and I could probably write about this later. "Do you swing?" the guy abruptly asked me, as we were standing there. Only in Arkansas, I thought. I was a very curious person back then and often unwanted and wanted were sort of inter-related to me: It was all part of experience and getting beyond my hang-ups and figuring out what my limits truly were, and about seeing people when the world wasn't looking at them, so I sometimes ended up in situations like this. I also gradually realized that I pretty much never wanted sex, not really, so it was all eventually kind of unwanted in a way and I was just trying not to be as boring as I felt when I was growing up, using these experiences as stepping stones out of my upbringing. I wasn't interested in leaving a bread crumb trail to find my way back. Years ago, living in Memphis, a guy who often came in with his "girlfriend" where I worked showed up at my place down the street, and got pretty aggressive. I did get enough of that in my twenties, because I looked like fantasies some older men had of young, stupid, and innocent. In the back of my mind I always observed this from a cool distance, fascinated by their projections, because I was pretty much born 80 years old and far from innocent. More like deeply misanthropic. So these unwanted things were often followed through to their conclusions because I thought they told me a lot about how people wanted to view me.

What is your advice for a woman who finds herself the recipient of unwanted sexual attention or advances?

Oh who knows. I love to give advice but I have no clue. Sex and attraction are way too complicated for any platitudes I might come up with to make it seem like I have a handle on them. Sometimes I wonder what a woman would have done in that rural Arkansas antique store, or what I would have done had I been one.

Ed. note: Brian's unspoken advice seems to be to avoid antique stores.

Brief Interviews with Attractive Men, Part 3

2011-08-02T20:02:00.000-04:00

Danny Telgarsky

How often are you the recipient of unwanted sexual advances?

I would say at least once a week, BUT, I think it's probably because I don't realize how much of a vibe I'm giving off when I communicate, I'm so used to flirting in my general day to day conversations that I hardly notice it anymore.

What do you do when someone you’re not interested in (sexually) is interested in you (sexually)? How do you deflect the attention, if you do?

I find that if the person is bold enough, I have a hard time deflecting, because A) I like the attention and B) I have a hard time with letting people down and hurting their feelings.

Have you ever experienced anything you’d describe as harassment?

It's hard to say that I've been harassed, given the nature of my last two answers, however, I have definitely had to put up with MEN coming on too strong; again, I like the attention, but for the most part I'm truly not interested in that avenue, and I do get annoyed, not because I'm offended, I just get pissed that the point of the flirtation is designed to make me uncomfortable for amusement (gay guys are relentless sometimes, too!).

What is your advice for a woman who finds herself the recipient of unwanted sexual attention or advances?

After the first unsuccessful shutdown, my advice would be to be as clear as possible without any room for error. Don't beat around the bush, don't be nice, don't spare anyone's feelings, kill it and move on. Tell the person that you absolutely aren't interested.

Brief Interviews with Attractive Men, Part 2

2011-08-02T16:47:00.007-04:00

Jack Loftus

How often are you the recipient of unwanted sexual advances?

Rarely. I was grabbed in the butt in a bar once, but the girl (a complete stranger) was obviously intoxicated. I think I laughed. Girls do not whistle at me from their construction sites, nor do they give me elevator eyes when I enter the room. That said, I've caught a few female coworkers glancing down at my crotch area in the halls here at the office, in passing, but I always strike that off as typical avoiding-eye-contact New Englander behavior. It never really bothers me. I dress up for work, I take care of myself, etc...I suppose some deep, vain part of me wants a little of this attention? Guilty as charged.

What do you do when someone you’re not interested in (sexually) is interested in you (sexually)? How do you deflect the attention, if you do?

I'm pretty outgoing and polite by nature (thanks, mom and dad), so I treat them as I would any other acquaintance (i.e. non-friend). I involve them in a group conversation. I treat them with respect. If they get out of hand (not that I can remember that happening), I'd probably just walk away.

Have you ever experienced anything you’d describe as harassment?

I really can't say that I have, which is why I usually steer clear of dishing out advice during sexual harassment discussions.

What is your advice for a woman who finds herself the recipient of unwanted sexual attention or advances?

Fight the urge to say nothing. Fight the urge to blame yourself or to say "next time I'll complain" ("it was what I was wearing!"). All will happen. Ignore that little voice that says it'd be more trouble than it's worth to file a complaint with a boss or an authority. Close your eyes, count to ten and pick up that phone or walk into that office. You think you're the first person this asshole has harassed? Or the last? It's more selfish to stay silent.

Brief Interviews with Attractive Men, Part 1

2011-07-31T09:37:00.004-04:00

This is the first in a series of interviews I'll be posting with men about their experiences with unwanted sexual attention and advances. I was curious if the experience of an attractive man is anything like that of a woman, and how men approach these situations.

My first respondent, below, asked that his answers be kept anonymous.

How often are you the recipient of unwanted sexual advances?

Generally, only when I'm in a gay bar or at a gay event. It doesn't happen every time I go out, but it happens often enough that my boyfriend and I are wary of it when we do go out.

What do you do when someone you’re not interested in (sexually) is interested in you (sexually)? How do you deflect the attention, if you do?

My first defense is to pretend it isn't happening, since a lot of initial flirtation is innuendo. If that doesn't work, I pointedly don't respond. If those two things don't work, I generally find an excuse to leave the conversation or even the place. I once attended a gay networking event with a friend and we were just chatting with each other. A guy came over and said, "My friend thinks you're cute. Come over and say hi." I said I was flattered but not interested. The guy continued to repeat, over and over, "C'mon! Just come say hi" for--no joke--fifteen minutes, using various strategies to encourage me, even after I told him I had a boyfriend and even, finally, just a stern "No." He finally said, "Look, I'm going to walk over there and sit down. You can just follow me." I couldn't believe it! Even when I am straightforward, it doesn't seem to deter people. I had another guy chat with me in a bar when I had just moved to a new city and my partner still lived elsewhere. I explained to him my situation, but that I was looking for friends. After a twenty minute conversation, he looked me in the eye and said, "You WILL be my boyfriend." It was very surreal and uncomfortable.

Have you ever experienced anything you’d describe as harassment?

I worked at a booth at a Pride event one fall. I went to the bathroom and was on my way back when two young guys--around 19--approached me from the other direction. They were staring at me and I tried not to make eye contact with them. As soon as they passed me, the one closest to me grabbed my dick. I couldn't believe it! I was horrified. Is that supposed to be flattering? I've also had guys (try to) unbutton my shirts, and one very awkward encounter when a person I thought was a friend came to visit me, only to discover he'd been plotting to get me to spend the night with him in his hotel room while he was in town. I've had strangers come up to me and ask me if I'm a bottom--no other conversation involved. Once this happened while I was walking my dog in my apartment complex! I'd say most of the attention I receive from men is received as a form of harassment. I rarely have guys strike up conversations with me, and I NEVER get asked out on dates. Ever. Men regard me as an object and they are wholly uninterested in anything below the surface.

What is your advice for a woman who finds herself the recipient of unwanted sexual attention or advances?

I wish I knew. I could use some advice myself. If I was bolder, I would tell a lot more people to fuck off. I can't imagine what it must be like for women since the pool of potential assholes is so much bigger.

More stupid literary jokes

2011-07-27T19:07:00.006-04:00

Q: What's Emily Dickinson's favorite reindeer?

A: Dasher!

Q: What's her favorite dwarf?

A: Bashful?

Knock knock.
Who's there?

Jane Eyre.

Jane who?

Jane Eyre!

I know you're here, what's your last name!

And anti-jokes (maybe these are all anti-jokes):

Q: Why did Jane Eyre cross the road?

A: I don't know, I haven't read it.

Q: What did Emily Dickinson say to the hot dog vendor?

A: Do you have any Tofu Pups?

Truly tasteless literary jokes:

Q: Why did Sylvia Plath kill herself?

A: To get to the other side.

Introduction to Linguistics

2011-07-26T11:41:00.005-04:00

The first thing you need to know about linguistics is that there are a few competing schools of thought. Generative linguistics is the dominant school of thought in the U.S. (though not Europe), or was, at least, 10 years ago when I was in college. Generative linguistics is a theory espoused by Noam Chomsky. It's hard for me to explain without using pejorative terms so I'll defer to Wikipedia:

Chomsky's approach is characterized by the use of transformational grammar – a theory that has changed greatly since it was first promulgated by Chomsky in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures – and by the assertion of a strong linguistic nativism (and therefore an assertion that some set of fundamental characteristics of all human languages must be the same).

With "nativism" comes the idea that there is a specific "module" in the brain devoted to language, which all humans have (and which other animals do not). (See Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct, which argues that the human brain is "hard-wired" for language.)

In contrast, functional linguistics posits that language evolved to serve a function (e.g., humans need ways to describe objects, so they invented nouns; they need ways to describe actions, so they invented verbs). Cognitive linguistics is similar and bases the study of language on the concepts that underlie its forms. Both functional and cognitive linguists reject the idea of an autonomous language module in the mind.

Below I'll outline some of the major subdisciplines of linguistics. Caveats: 1) I studied functional/cognitive linguistics and think generative linguistics is dumb. 2) Much of this may have changed in the past decade; I haven't kept up with the field.

LING 101

The first things you learn in an introductory linguistics course are basic phonology and morphology.

Phonology is the study of phonemes, which are the fundamental units of the phonetic alphabet, the smallest units of sound that can be used to distinguish meaning. These do not correspond perfectly to the regular alphabet – for example, a hard C and a hard K are not two different phonemes, but a soft C (AKA an unvoiced S) and a hard K are. Generally in LING 101 (actually it was LING 200 at Rice) you learn the international phonetic alphabet and how to represent English words with it. You also learn about minimal pairs, which are used to help identify phonemes in a language. For example, "lass" and "lash" constitute a minimal pair, because the only difference is the final sound, indicating that an unvoiced S and the SH sound (a voiceless palato-alveolar fricative) are understood by English speakers to be distinct sounds, and can therefore be used to distinguish between two different words. In contrast, an aspirated p and an unaspirated p (aspiration is the little puff of air you emit from your mouth if you make the p sound at the beginning of a word) are in free variation, meaning that whether you aspirate the p at the end of "nap" or not, it still means "nap."

Morphology is the study of morphemes, the smallest units of meaning in a language. These are the chunks that we build words with. Some words are morphemes (e.g., dog.) Affixes are also morphemes. The word "nondogs" contains three morphemes, non-, dog, and –s.

Phonetics

Phonetics is the study of the physical sounds of speech, and in my memory it involved making recordings of speech and analyzing the wave forms in a lab. Dullsville.

Historical (Diachronic) vs. Synchronic Linguistics

Diachronic linguistics is the study of languages across time (for example, how has English changed since the Norman invasion or the Great Vowel Shift?). Synchronic linguistics looks at the properties of language in a given time slice, generally the present.

Prescriptive vs. Descriptive

Y'all know what this is. Linguistics aims to describe language in use, not prescribe rules to govern language.

Syntax

The study of the way sentences are built (also known as grammar). One of the most basic ways to describe a language syntactically is by word order. English is an SVO language (subject-verb-object), e.g., "Sally walks the dog." Most languages in the world are SOV or SVO. Some languages put the verb first; very few languages put the object first.

Semantics

The study of meaning in language. Semantics involves sitting around picking apart the differences between, say, "scurry" and "scamper." I find this shit endlessly interesting and almost went to Berkeley for grad school to study this further, so when people complain that a conversation is devolving into "quibbling over semantics," I take offense. Semantics isn't boring!

Sociolinguistics

The study of social effects on language, including regional and class differences (in phonetics, syntax, etc.) and slang.

Other subfields include pragmatics, etymology, conversation analysis, anthropological linguistics, neurolinguistics, computational linguistics, corpus linguistics, language acquisition, etc.

What did you study in college? How would you describe it in 500 words?

*This post was commissioned by Christen Enos.

Things that happened this weekend

2011-07-25T15:59:00.004-04:00

I learned an excellent medical term, mal de debarquement -- basically, land sickness. My friend Walt recently experienced it following a cruise. Dibs on this title for a poetry book. (I love French terms for illness, e.g., grand mal and petite mal, which can fairly be translated as "big bad" and "little bad.")
I packed up about 2/3 of my perfume collection. I'm going to try to wear samples over the next few weeks so I have fewer to transport.
I ate a hot dog and a slider-sized cheeseburger, both sans le bun of course. The last time I consumed either foodstuff was probably 2004. (As an update to this post, I'm becoming inured to the taste/texture of meat.)
Coming soon, by request: an Introduction to Linguistics post. 'Twill probably be half-assed and out of date. (I'll accept crowdsourced corrections.)

Jane Eyre Jokes

2011-07-24T11:10:00.004-04:00

Q: How did Jane Eyre get the chicken across the road?

A: Reader, she carried him.

Q: How did Jane Eyre get the chicken across the river?

A: Reader, she ferried him.

Q: What did she do with the chicken when he died?

A: Reader, she buried him. (Alternate answer: Reader, she marinated him.)

My grandmother used to have a book of elephant jokes, which were apparently big in the '60s. Maybe I'll write a book of Jane Eyre jokes.

Ralph Waldo, do shut up

2011-07-19T15:40:00.006-04:00

Tyler Cowen writes, "Emerson did not care for Jane Austen," quoting his notebooks:

I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen’s novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched & narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer in both the stories I have read, “Persuasion”, and “Pride & Prejudice”, is marriageableness; all that interests any character introduced is still this one, has he or she money to marry with, & conditions conforming? ‘Tis “the nympholepsy of a fond despair”, say rather, of an English boarding-house. Suicide is more respectable.

But "marriageableness" was the "one problem" for women in English society. Marrying well was the only way to attain a modicum of power. To my mind her stories are about women of agency maneuvering within this very limiting environment to the best of their ability (see also Gone with the Wind).

In Google Reader, Matt Walker commented, "his statement actually sounds pretty feminist, no?" Eh, no. This is the same line of thinking that leads men to trash books by women not on the grounds that they are written by women but because the content is silly and womanly (to quote V.S. Naipual, "feminine tosh"). Oh, if only women would stick to writing about important man issues, we'd have no problem with them dabbling in the finer arts.

Anyway, where's the wit in Emerson? Unless he was joking about that whole transparent eyeball thing.

By the way, I've never read Austen, but feel compelled to defend her against nitwit arguments anyway.

What happens to a dream deferred?

2011-07-16T09:07:00.005-04:00

My Yahoo email account, which I keep around as a spam filter, was recently upgraded, and somehow an email from August 2003 was recovered and showed up in my drafts folder. Here's what it said:

I had a kissing dream last night--I was kissing Tom Hanks! I don't know if it was directly him or if he was playing someone else. I was in his car, which was a Buick or something, and we had just gotten haircuts so there were all these little snips of hair stuck to the upholstery on the seats, mingling together, and he pointed at it and said it was a sign that we were sexually compatible.

I also dreamt I had to trek across the country largely on foot to meet my family at this Mexican restaurant in El Paso called The Riviera.

Are you really bored by other people's dreams?

That last question was part of the email, but feel free to answer it. (There are no rhetorical questions, just rhetorical answers.) I sure am. Bored, that is.

P.S. I'm sure many of you have noticed that I went ahead and got on the Google+, though I haven't posted or shared anything yet. Why is it I find Facebook and Google+ boring but continue to enjoy Twitter and blogs? It's not immediately apparent to me. But a few things seem to be true:

Though Google+ is ostensibly more private, I feel more freedom to say whatever I want on Twitter, because I assume few people are actually paying attention. I assume my blabbing will largely get lost in the noise.
I associate Twitter with jokes and chatter and Facebook et al. with signaling and self-promotion. Of course you can use Twitter for self-promotion too, but I don't follow people who use it that way. Maybe I feel more freedom to follow only who I want to on Twitter?
I do like that strangers can follow you on Google+: that's one of the reasons I prefer blogging/microblogging to Facebook. When I'm online, I don't only want to talk to my friends.

Bastille Day Special

2011-07-14T15:12:00.002-04:00

My illustrious publishers are offering an awesome special right now. Here's the scoop:

Bastille Day Special Offer: To honor the 2 most important things to ever happen to FRANCE, independence in 1789 and publication of THE FRENCH EXIT by Elisa Gabbert in 2010, for the next 24 hours Birds, LLC is giving away any Birds book of your choice FREE with a purchase of THE FRENCH EXIT! Storm it now! Let us know what free book you'd like by sending an email to editor@birdsllc.com. The Birds love you.

Go go go!

Three good books

2011-07-13T20:27:00.005-04:00

A little while back I had the pleasure and honor of judging Grub Street's poetry book award (a prize for non-first books published by poets living outside of New England). The winners have been notified, so I finally get to tell you who won. Below are the blurbs I wrote for the winner, Frances McCue, and the two finalists. I really loved these books and I hope you'll go out and read them.

The Bled, by Frances McCue

An uncultivated wasteland; the hinterland behind a fertile populated area – the “bled” in which these poems take place is Marrakesh, where Frances McCue found great happiness and suffered crippling loss. While living in Morocco, the poet’s husband died unexpectedly, and The Bled is a brief and beautiful collection of elegiac love poems born of the event, poems about a mother and daughter suddenly missing their third: “‘If I had to pick one of you,’ my daughter says, / ‘I’d pick you.’ And that’s good, I guess, / because I’m the one she has left.” The Bled is moving and tragic, yes, but doesn’t rely on automatic pathos to impress – it is also wonderful poetry. McCue’s voice is sure and devoid of clichés, her language deft, exact, and lovely, as when she describes the bled: “One could see the frozen, scalded acre, / flashed with heat and cold, the brick-chunked / rocks on the cusp of sand, the not-so-far Sahara. // We live here.” And the difficulty of reconciling memory with death: “Hands, your hands were your hands. / And the cheeks, they were your cheeks. / Still now, they are not. I press your hands, / wipe your cheek, set your skin in my palm. / It would rot away, it would not keep.” And the desire to follow, to have been the one (“Today, I go to the cemetery / and lie upon the grave. / When I tip my head back / it was as if I tipped your head back”), the complete identification with the dead (“Since your face is looking at the sky, / your eyes filming in, losing their sheen, / I don’t see. I don’t see”). McCue’s The Bled joins Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking and Tess Gallagher's Moon Crossing Bridge among fierce, gorgeous books about marriage and grief.

Skin, Inc., by Thomas Sayers Ellis

Someone is writing overtly and well about race in America, and it is Thomas Sayers Ellis. Though at turns rightfully angry and angering, Skin, Inc. is also very funny, very wise, and very restrained. By including bits of rejection notes, whether real, amalgamated or fictionalized, that deem the author’s work too political, or fault it for “explicitly addressing the subject of writing” and “the politics of the writing scene,” Ellis reminds us poetry is not a kind of decoration we apply to content, but the very shape of what we have to say. Ellis’s poetry is his subject, and for a black man (as for a woman), all politics are identity politics. These poems make one aware of how much is wasted in a typical line of poetry – each of Ellis’s lines is taut and torqued with meaning, meaning driven by sound and inseparable from sound: “I no longer write / white writing // yet white writing / won’t stop writing me.” See also “The Obama Hour”: “Finally, one of us is properly / positioned to run. By ‘us’ I mean Black, / by ‘positioned’ I mean White / and by ‘run’ I mean Race and its varied speeds of darkness…” For once, “relevance” in poetry doesn’t feel sanctimonious, it just feels like listening to someone who knows more of the story than you, and you want to hear him tell it. Skin, Inc. is poetry with a purpose and a point of view and all the music you could ask for: “Many of the images melt / while others appear to rumor, ghetto-fashion, into one another … I like it when range finder, breathing plastic / and messy rainbows collide.”

Ghost Fargo, by Paula Cisewski

In Paula Cisewski’s Fargo, every night is karaoke night and the past (a saltwater sea? a beet field?) is always in our midst, just beneath the surface like a pentimento showing through. The speaker of these wry poems is both searching for something and trying to escape, and though the ghost of an absent brother haunts their space, the poems eschew any melodrama (“Let’s not / train our grief to resemble a parlor trick”); what moves Ghost Fargo forward is not sadness but a kind of restless, melancholy wit with an endearingly awkward self-awareness, like a young woman starting to realize she’s attractive. Cisewski’s poetry is quick-moving and full of surprise, seeming always to learn what it wants to say at the same time as the reader: “No one admits when they’re dead. / It’s like hide and seek – / Like backwards hide and seek // Everybody’s ‘it.’ Nobody has to search / to keep discovering and / discovering what.” I delighted in the logic of the quirky, questioning mind behind this book:

Do I want to
illuminate the past

in a town that still calls
itself Fargo? What does

“illuminate the past” mean?
That an evergreen

triples for me? A flashlight?
If it means “memory,” we

might be screwed,
because memory is like

being enclosed in parentheses
wherein even the illuminated

trees are fake. Look, I’ve invented
a forest from one tree

and no one believes me. As if I speak
in imaginary trees! Dead trees!

In fact Paula Cisewski is easy to like and easy to believe.

Recent acquisitions

2011-07-09T20:03:00.008-04:00

New sniffs! I acquired all of the below through swaps, as I'm on strict self-enforced lockdown when it comes to perfume purchases. I feel guilty enough for buying two new dresses in the past week.

Chinatown: The Bond No. 9 line is mostly overwhelming and overpriced, but there are a few among them I really like, notably Broadway Nite (which is almost unwearably loud but fabulous as art), Saks Fifth Avenue for Her and this one. Chinatown is categorized as a chypre but what I get is fruity patchouli gourmand, one of my favorite genres (see Belle en Rykiel, A*Men Pure Malt, L de Lolita Lempicka, etc.). I'm always surprised how well patchouli works in the heat. This has a peach fuzz quality to it, and unlike, say, Angel, feels somehow cool and refined as opposed to trashy and over the top, like you could actually wear it to work without irony. Plus, the volume level is perfect.

Wazamba: I just reviewed this one. It's basically incense with a gummi bear note. What's not to like?!

Cuir Mauresque: Whenever someone I know is in the market for perfume, I suggest they check out the Serge Lutens line, because almost everybody falls in love with one or another of them, and they're actually a pretty good value for niche. I, however, have never truly fallen in love with one. I like almost all of them, and would happily wear them if I came into a bottle (as I just did), but none of them really make me swoon. This one is a nicely done leather with soft spices -- like many Lutenses, better dabbed than sprayed. I love leathers and I'm happy to have it in the collection, though it doesn't hold a candle to Calice Becker's Cuir de Lancome.

Putain des Palaces: If you like conceptual poetry, you'll love conceptual perfumery! The name means Hotel Hooker and by a different name it really wouldn't smell as sweet, because you sort of have to get the joke to appreciate it. It's a brash, sweet, creamy, somewhat cheap-smelling floral accord layered on top of a skanky base -- supposedly leather, but what I get of it is almost entirely musk, the naughty type of musk found in Muscs Koublai Kahn. Thinly veiled ho, get it? Amusing and pleasant if you like filthy musk, which I do.

Vamp a NY: I've wanted to try this all-natural tuberose perfume by Olivia Giacobetti (author of the delicious Phikosykos) for a long time, and got a large sample in one of the above swaps. Unfortunately, the slight bubblegum facet of tuberose absolute is played up to the hilt here. It had me hallucinating that pink powder that gets on your fingers when you unwrap a piece of gum. More pleasant in the drydown, but this is one of the few tuberose compositions I've tried that didn't work for me, at least on the first test.

Magical Moon: I like the Hanae Mori line for what it is, mainstream stuff that veers young and sweet but done well. This one opens very complicated and peppery (as in capsicum!), then smears out to a rosy incense-wood-patchouli thing, reminiscent of Secret Obsession. It's really rather strange, with hints of bug spray and Flintstones vitamins, but basically in a good way. Better weird than boring, always.

How they talk in Alabama

2011-07-08T20:45:00.006-04:00

The hashtag #butyouuglythough is trending right now on Twitter. I don't know which is trashier, the double conjunction, the missing verb or the sentiment. Oh Twitter! Anyway, it reminds me of a funny story. When we were in Alabama, John and I drove out to see these crazy river lilies with Mathias and Julia (our soon-to-be near-neighbors), which trip turned into rather a debacle involving multiple wrong turns and a flat tire (no matter: enjoyment of adversity is a sign of genius). On the way back, we stopped at a gas station to buy rehydrating beverages and junk food, and after purchasing two packs of wacky-flavored Starburst and an enormous bottle of water, I went outside and stood in the heat swallowing big lugs of the latter. Meanwhile some local yokel pulls up to get some gas and I wander out of the way. We then proceed to have this bizarre interaction:

Him [slowly]: It took you a while to move outta the way.
Me [slowly]: Sorry.
Him: I thought I was gonna run you over.
Me [shrugging]: I feel OK.
Him [after a pause]: You sexy though.

Isn't that pretty much the best way to end an uncomfortable conversation? Like say you have to deliver some bad news, e.g., "The rent is going up by $50 a month" or "Dude, you left chunks all over the dishes," adding "You sexy though!" provides closure and softens the blow. Let's bring it into circulation.

Why publish? A response to Mike Meginnis

2011-07-06T12:28:00.005-04:00

Last week, Mike Meginnis of Uncanny Valley blogged about a recent happening that I missed while traveling: Fugue Magazine published an issue with footnotes inserted into all the writers' pieces. The footnotes were not written by the authors, but by Michael Martone, and the writers weren't asked for approval or otherwise informed this would be happening. It was presumably meant to be taken as a playful surprise; instead, at least some of the authors were pretty pissed. Mike links to a post by Sean Lovelace on HTML Giant covering the same topic, as well as a letter to the editors of Fugue by Lia Purpura, expressing her disappointment/dismay/outrage/etc.

Mike Meginnis is a writer and video game nerd with unconventional, unpopular opinions and I rarely disagree with him, when I know what he's talking about. But I find myself disagreeing with Mike's take on this issue, or at least quibbling with it. First, let me say that I have an irrational bias against Fugue because they once rejected a batch of poems so fast it was hard to believe they hadn't sent the rejection before the poems actually arrived.

Here are some of Mike's points, and my responses:

"As an editor, I expect a lot of deference when it comes to deciding how to package and present my authors' work. For instance, if I think a certain font is best for a story, and I make the story that font, I will think it is pretty stupid for the author to say, 'Dude, I am pissed about that font. Put it back in Times New Roman.' If I want a certain piece to have different margins than the others, I want to be able to do that."

This is an unusually strawmanny argument from Meginnis. There's a distinct difference between changing the font or layout of a piece and inserting new content into it (or removing content without asking, or changing the order of the content). I also think you get more leniency here with prose than poetry. I recently had an experience with an editor who wanted to right-justify half the poems in an issue. The font is usually not an element of the poem, but the margins are, and you can't just change them to mix it up visually. It would be the equivalent of an editor changing all the paragraph breaks in a story, not for semantic reasons but to better fit the layout of the page. Adding footnotes strikes me as one of the most disruptive ways you could alter a piece of prose while keeping the original text intact, up there with inserting subheads.

"It is widely accepted that editors can and will change our writing in a number of rather important ways."

True, but usually editors have the courtesy to run changes by the authors prior to publishing.

"I wouldn't publish with someone if I didn't want them to change my writing, to make it better. If it were already perfect in its little Word document, I would leave it there. I publish a piece because it is not perfect, because it needs to be improved, because I think the process of publication will improve it ... Ultimately whether Fugue was right or wrong isn't that important to me. The principle here is this: If you don't want your work changed, why do you publish with other people? If you need total control, why not self-publish?"

This is an interesting and very literal interpretation of the concept of an "editor." (In the literary world, many editors' work is 90%+ curatorial.) I sort of admire this approach to publishing, but I also think it's kind of naive. (Or, I admire it because it's naive.) Most people publish not because they want their work to be better, but because they want it to be validated by a third party and then exposed to a larger audience. This is also why most people don't self-publish: both validation and potential audience tend to be greatly reduced. Of course there are exceptions, but it's more work to find an audience when you don't have an established publicity department, and without the built-in reputation of an established press, you're fighting the biases of the many people who believe gatekeepers exist for a reason.

The Birds LLC model entails a close writer-editor relationship, and the goal of the process from both ends is to produce a better book. Working on The French Exit with Birds was a great experience, because the editors knew me and my work well, and vice versa, and I trusted them completely. But when it comes to publishing single poems, I'm more averse to heavy editing, because that mutual trust and experience usually isn't there. Like Mike, I try to be accommodating when editors make requests, but I have refused requests if I felt they didn't improve the work, and I think it's fair to insist at least upon the opportunity for refusal.

Rocky Mountain Hi

2011-07-01T10:21:00.003-04:00

Hi guys! I'm back. Did you notice I went away? I've got some news: I'm moving to Denver! This weekend I flew down to El Paso for the wedding of my best friend in junior high and high school, then drove up to Denver with my parents and found an apartment. I absolutely love it, and it's hundreds of dollars cheaper per month than our current place. YAYZ. We'll be there by the end of August. Come see us in the West?

Also, my latest perfume column is up. It's called "Materialism" because I focused on three common materials, labdanum, vetiver and galbanum. Here's an excerpt:

Describing a perfume is a lot like describing a wine – to the uninitiated outsider, the descriptions often sound like bullshit. It seems implausible at first that anyone could pick out “aldehydes,” “jasmine,” “rose,” and “musk” in what strikes you as a singular, whole scent. Similarly, it’s hard to believe a wine could taste like hay or butterscotch or cedar, until you try a wine that, due to whatever whims of earth and weather, tastes exactly as though it was barreled in a cedar chest. From that point forward you’re able to pick up hints of cedar in the occasional wine, because they’ll remind of you the first.

The same is true of perfumes. You learn to smell individual “notes” by sampling an array of perfumes that purport to contain a note – and by doing a kind of mental subtraction to strip away the rest – or by smelling perfumes that showcase that note. (For floral notes, these are known as soliflores.) Once you realize, “Oh, that’s what orange blossom (or galbanum or castoreum) smells like,” you’re able to recognize its character in complex compositions and in smaller concentrations...

Go read it! And the rest of the July issue! Go!

What the hell is up with A Pale View of Hills

2011-06-22T10:59:00.005-04:00

OK, I finished A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro last night, and am completely disturbed. I need to talk about it. If you haven't read this book and plan to in the future, click away, click away. This post will be full of spoilers. If you have read the book, please chip in.

I started to provide a plot summary, but stopped because I'm really directing this at people who have read the novel. You can find one here. What I want to talk about are the two main interpretations of the novel. There are more than two ways to read A Pale View of Hills, but these are the two basic branches, I think, with variations.

Interpretation 1: Etsuko is Sachiko; Keiko is Mariko. Etsuko is unwilling to accept her past behavior (Sachiko is a terrible mother and frequently leaves her daughter alone for hours at a time, allowing her to wander around by herself even though there has been a spate of child murders in the area; she also hasn't enrolled Mariko in school, and plans to take the child against her will to America with her boyfriend, whom Mariko hates), so she invents a "friend" to project her disapproval onto. This explains the parallels in Etsuko's and Sachiko's lives: Both leave Japan with a daughter for an English-speaking country (though in fact it's unclear in the novel whether Etsuko ever makes it to America). Mariko is a lonely, unhappy child who doesn't want to leave Japan; Keiko is described similarly and never adjusts to life in England, hence her withdrawal and eventual suicide. As far as I can tell, this is the more common interpretation of the novel.

Interpretation 2: Etsuko is the child murderer. She murders Mariko, among other children, but has blocked it out. Her method is hanging, which calls into question whether Keiko in fact committed suicide or was murdered.

I favor the second interpretation, for these reasons: Etsuko repeatedly expresses concern for Mariko's whereabouts and well-being. The child is wont to run off, and Etsuko goes out looking for her on several occassions, though Sachiko always says there is nothing to worry about. On one occasion, she has gotten a rope caught around her ankle when she finds Mariko, and Mariko appears afraid of her. Later, in the crucial scene where Etsuko finds her by the river and speaks to her as though she were Sachiko (saying, "If you don't like it in America, we can come back" -- leading many readers to believe that Etsuko is Sachiko), she is again suddenly holding a rope. The child asks why she is holding it, and she says again that it just got caught around her ankle, and that she's not going to hurt the child. In the memory, Mariko runs away, but in Interpretation 2, Etsuko in fact kills the child. This explains her premonition earlier that day, and her recurring dreams, in England, of a little girl "swinging" (not on a swing, but by a rope). Etsuko has merely confused Mariko with her own daughter Keiko, since she would later have a similar conversation, convincing her to move to England. The stuff about the child murders and the rope doesn't make sense if Mariko is Keiko, because Keiko doesn't die until much later.

A third interpretation, I suppose, is that Etsuko is both the child murderer and Sachiko, and that she killed her first daughter and had another while still in Japan. Or, in a fourth version, she is both the child murderer and Sachiko, but doesn't succeed in killing Mariko/Keiko, although she has killed other children in the past. Or, fifth, she is not the murderer at large, but she does have a "killer inside" and considers killing Mariko/Keiko, but does not succeed, in which case the vision of Mariko hanging is more of a wish than a memory, though in fact she does hang herself many years later.

Also entirely possible: The story is intentionally ambiguous, all interpretations being valid.

For those who have read it, what do you think?

The Lately Game

2011-06-21T20:10:00.006-04:00

What I've been reading: I finally finished Special Topics in Calamity Physics last week. Although, after 500 pages, I had become marginally attached to the implausible characters, I'm glad that "chapter" in my life is over. Now I'm reading A Pale View of Hills, by Kazuo Ishiguro, which is the perfect antidote: utterly clean, spare, with Ishiguro's trademark perfect pacing and sense of foreboding. With STICP, I wanted to know what was going to happen, but in a cheap way, like when you get sucked into a bad TV show. APVOH is suspenseful in a more intellectual way. Either way I realize I'm being manipulated by plot lines, but I appreciate the more subtle form of seduction.

What I've been watching: The Voice (on Hulu, not live, no spoilers). Last night I watched All About Eve. This weekend, I was hanging out with a group who all wanted to see some nouveau horror flick at the Brattle, and I don't really do horror, indie or no, so I went and saw The Art of Getting By instead. This was interesting: it's a teen movie, not a comedy but a straight romance, and clearly marketed to hipster types. It was like, sponsored by Urban Outfitters. It's predictable on every possible level (there's even a scene where you know, from the beginning, that the protagonist is going to vomit on somebody's shoes before it's over; turns out it's his own shoes), but I still kind of liked it. Who doesn't like watching pretty people walk around New York?

What I've been eating: Not much. I finally bit the bullet and admitted to myself that I've developed a variable intolerance to nightshades. I figured out a while ago that eggplant was a no-go, but that was no major tragedy. I like eggplant, but it was hardly a staple of my diet. Much, much harder was admitting that tomatoes are problematic, particularly in condensed form, as in sundried tomatoes or a thick sauce (the latter being their most delicious incarnation). See also potatoes, again to varying degrees. See also peppers, all forms.

I've felt sick many times after eating, say, lasagna or enchiladas, but convinced myself that gluten must have gotten in there somehow. But in my heart I knew there wasn't any, because I made them myself. In fact I think gluten is just a subset of the things that make me sick. I was carrying around a list of problematic foods in my head, and I believed they were all unrelated. (What does gluten have to do with eggplant or tofu or sundried tomatoes?) Then at some point I ran across a list of foods that contain high amounts of lectin, and there were all those seemingly unrelated foods: all grains, not just gluten grains (I gave up on oats, quinoa, sorghum, etc. months ago); nightshades (eggplant, potatoes, peppers, and tomatoes); and legumes, especially soybeans. Tofu has been on my shit list for a long time too, taking all fake meat off the table. (Quorn is made from a fungus, but almost all the Quorn products contain some gluten too.)

The other night, I had a reaction from eating peanut sauce (peanuts are a legume); this has forced me to contend with the lectin theory. Now, I seem to more or less tolerate some of the items on the lectin list, but if I suck it up and stop basing meals around nightshades, that wipes out most of my favorite vegetarian meals (i.e., anything with tomato sauce, and most Mexican food: enchilada sauce, whether red or green, is pretty much lectin city). So I'm trying to figure out if it's even worth trying to further restrict my diet, to see if that gets me 100% back to normal, as in feeling as good as I did before the onset of gluten intolerance. Cutting out gluten got me 80-85% of the way there, but I've never been able to figure out what was causing the remaining 15% of the trouble, if not simple cross-contamination.

Anyway, in an effort to at least cut back on the nightshades (and eat something other than gummi candy), I've been eating non-vegetarian meals, such as a variation on this kimchi fried rice (with more vegetables and the eggs scrambled in), seared tuna steaks with chimichurri sauce (I had been craving tuna steaks forever but held off until they fell under $20 a pound, which happened on Father's Day), and sushi salad, which I made up. Recipe below. All ingredient amounts are approximate/to taste.

Sushi Salad

Sushi rice, cooked and cooled
Smoked salmon
Asparagus, cooked and cooled
Cucumber
Avocado
Pickled ginger
Nori (toasted seaweed)
Cilantro (optional)
Rice vinegar
Soy sauce
Sugar
Oil
Salt & pepper

Chop or tear everything into bite-size pieces and throw in a big bowl with the rice. Make a vinaigrette with rice vinegar, salt, pepper, a good dash of sugar (the rice in sushi is slightly sweet), a small splash of soy (you don't want to turn the whole dish brown) and oil. I used olive because that's the only kind of oil we had around, but use peanut oil or something if you're a purist. Toss the vinaigrette with the other ingredients. Voila, it's Nippon in a bowl.

B.T. Dubbs, so far I have no problems with soy sauce, provided it's the wheat-free kind, probably because it's fermented and consumed in small quantities.

Going down?

2011-06-16T19:43:00.006-04:00

Where my girls at? Lately it seems like most of my regular commenters are men (or, at least, they have adopted male pseudonyms). I love and value each and every comment and commenter here regardless of gender, so please do not think I want you, my man readers, to comment less. I'm just wondering: Where my girls at? My Jens, my Farrahs, my Heathers, my Darcies, my Danielles, my Beccas, my Kirstens, my Shannas ...
Remember that whole Wikipedia thing? Gregory Kohs just published a followup article to the news that Wikipedia's editors were largely male. Apparently, since Wikimedia Foundation executive director Sue Gardner announced her goal to increase the percentage of women contributing to the site, the ratio has shifted even more toward men. The unfortunate title is "Number of women going down on Wikipedia." As Shamus McGillicuddy (the most Irish person I know) commented when I shared the story in Google Reader, "If you Google this headline, the first 4 results are the actual article, reposted on several blogs. The fifth result is the 'oral sex' entry on Wikipedia."
There's this fantastic smell always wafting out of the Hugo Boss store in the Copley Mall. It smells like a fancy luggage store or the inside of a really expensive car that is rarely driven, like sweet leather. I finally went in there to ask what it is. It is not any of the scents that they sell (which makes sense, because the Hugo Boss line of fragrance rather sucks), but a secret, proprietary scent they pump into the air of all their stores. Damn! I wanted to buy it. I guess I'll have to open up a Hugo Boss franchise.
There's a review of The French Exit in the new issue of Redivider, which I didn't know until I flipped through the issue at my reading last night. Says Emily Thomas, "Elisa Gabbert makes dream poems sexy again." Thank you Emily Thomas!
OK, back to The Voice. (Have you noticed that Carson Daly is turning into Dick Clark?)

UPDATE: Just realized I forgot to include the link to the Wikipedia article. Duh. It's there now.

Fashion tips for the major genders

2011-06-14T19:57:00.006-04:00

Seeing as how I'm bleeding style from my tear ducts over here, I figured it was about time I share some of this endless wisdom with y'all. I can't use it all myself. If you have any fashion questions, leave 'em in the comments and I will happily address your concerns, advice column style.

For the gents

Stop wearing t-shirts under your open-collar shirts. This is my #1 tip for looking more like a grownup and less like a d-bag. Are you ashamed of the little notch of skin at the base of your neck? The whole point of a collared shirt without a tie is to show a bit of skin, which looks relaxed and therefore sexy. By covering that skin up with a t-shirt, you're basically saying, "No thanks, I don't care for sex." Sometimes the t-shirt thing can look OK in a hipster kind of way, like if it's a bright red tee under a western shirt or something, but even then it would probably look better without.

Don't wear socks with shorts. I think shorts can look pretty sharp on a man if you have a reasonable physique, but for Christ's sake don't ruin it by wearing them with socks and sneaks. If it's hot enough for shorts, it's hot enough for flip-flops (or some sort of slip-on).

When it comes to layering shirts under sweaters: A shawl-collar sweater looks infinitely better with a dress shirt than a crewneck. A crewneck sweater on the other hand looks better with a crewneck underneath. Like likes like, except with a v-neck sweater you can go either way.

For the ladies

Try wearing a shirt over a maxi dress. The point is not to make it look like you got a new skirt, so it works best if the shirt and the dress have different necklines. For example you could wear a scoopneck top over a halter dress or a tank top over a racerback dress, etc. This is one of my favorite tricks lately, especially for work and travel because a) long skirts are hell of comfortable, b) it looks summery but is not too cold in air conditioned conditions and c) is a little more covered up around the torso, so I don't have to worry about slouching wrong and giving someone a sideshow.

Buy an LBD (little black dress) in a jersey fabric, preferably with some kind of embellishment like ruffles or an asymmetrical neckline. It will be comfortable and easy to throw on when you don't feel like trying too hard, but looks fancier than it is, and can be dressed up or down easily. It's also all-season: wear it with tights and a cardigan in winter, with sandals and a denim jacket in summer.

Buy some cropped pants. They take 10 pounds off (or something, I don't know, this isn't an exact science like gluten-free baking). Cropped pants make you look skinnier because they show off the thinnest part of your leg. If you hate your ankles, obviously, ignore this one.

Unisex

If you're not all that adventurous, just buy distinctive, colorful accessories (glasses, hats, scarves, shoes), wear them with your regular clothes and everyone will think you are adorable.

Colors can be neutrals. Which is to say, don't automatically buy everything in black or brown because you think it goes with everything. Deep red or navy goes with almost everything, especially if everything else you own isn't brown or black. Charcoal gray and olive green are other good neutrals. I'm thinking especially of coats, shoes and bags but also belts and even pants which you want to be able to wear with lots of different shirts.

Don't buy the same item in multiple colors/patterns. This may go against popular opinion, but I maintain: a) You'll end up loving one more anyway, and b) you're not fooling anyone. Instead figure out what you like about the thing (the cut? the fabric?) and look for similar but not identical items.

Do my stylish readers have any additional tips/brilliant ideas to share?

Art Class

2011-06-13T08:52:00.005-04:00

I'm reading at the launch for the Spring/Summer issue of Redivider this Wednesday, June 15, 7 pm at Sweetwater Tavern (in the alley by Emerson, across from the Common). Also reading is Steve Himmer, author of The Bee-Loud Glade. Come say hi! Buy my book and/or me a drink!
Some people rabidly oppose the idea of a guilty pleasure, arguing that no one should feel guilty about what they like. I am not one of those people. Most TV I watch falls under the "guilty pleasure" rubric; if I'm going to bother, I generally want my TV to be mindless and trashy (see Gossip Girl, America's Next Top Model). House is an exception; I actually think House is well-written and -acted for the most part. I also occasionally like to watch stupid romantic comedies, but the pleasure I get from them is almost voyeuristic: I basically just want to look at pretty people in good clothes go on dates. There has to be a distinction between this primitive kind of pleasure and what I would get from something that actually makes me think, and that's what the term "guilty pleasure" is for.
I was thinking about this because last week in the gym I watched part of a rom-com called Because I Said So (tragically, my gym no longer appears to subscribe to the Food Network), which was so atrocious it refused to be enjoyed on even this base level. The scene where Diane Keaton follows her daughter on the freeway, yelling at and kicking her GPS while her dog watches mournfully from the backseat, is a travesty. How could Hollywood do that to Diane Keaton? How could she let Hollywood do that to her? Wake me up when someone makes a real movie.
Oh, also: I saw that Herzog film about cave paintings. I won't even get into the unnecessary Herzogisms. The truly crazy thing is, why should it be that the art the happens to survive 30,000+ years was by a guy who was like, really good at drawing? It's frankly amazing. You see this ancient cave art, and you're not like, Wow, this connects us to primitive man, you're like, DAMN that is a good horse!

He bills me, he bills me not

2011-06-11T13:00:00.003-04:00

The woman who wrote the Truly Tasteless Jokes books ("writing" a joke book is more of an editorial job) used the punny nom de plume Blanche Knott. I relayed this to John and he realized that Bill Knott has, consciously or unconsciously, been acting out his name in his later years: He gives his poetry away for free.

Our crappy health care system gave me depression

2011-06-08T12:14:00.006-04:00

Yesterday I was tweeting a little about this fascinating article in the New York Review of Books about antidepressants. Understandably, this is a touchy subject for a lot of people; if you're not on or have never been on antidepressants yourself, chances are someone very close to you is, and it's uncomfortable to consider the possibility that their effectiveness is overstated. The question is not, however, whether they are completely worthless (they do have a positive effect), but how and why they work, because there's mounting evidence that they don't work as well as previously believed or for the purported reasons.

There's a section in the article about a classic correlation vs. causation mistake: Early researchers noticed that drugs like Zoloft increased levels of seratonin in the brain, so it was assumed that depression is caused by low seratonin levels, but this is a big leap and new research suggests we were totally wrong:

As Carlat puts it, “By this same logic one could argue that the cause of all pain conditions is a deficiency of opiates, since narcotic pain medications activate opiate receptors in the brain.” Or similarly, one could argue that fevers are caused by too little aspirin.

What's really scary is not the fact that antidepressants work only marginally better than placebos (which I've been hearing on and off for years), but the general corruption of drug companies:

If two trials show that the drug is more effective than a placebo, the drug is generally approved. But companies may sponsor as many trials as they like, most of which could be negative—that is, fail to show effectiveness. All they need is two positive ones. (The results of trials of the same drug can differ for many reasons, including the way the trial is designed and conducted, its size, and the types of patients studied.)

For obvious reasons, drug companies make very sure that their positive studies are published in medical journals and doctors know about them, while the negative ones often languish unseen within the FDA, which regards them as proprietary and therefore confidential. This practice greatly biases the medical literature, medical education, and treatment decisions.

Kirsch and his colleagues used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain FDA reviews of all placebo-controlled clinical trials, whether positive or negative, submitted for the initial approval of the six most widely used antidepressant drugs approved between 1987 and 1999—Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Celexa, Serzone, and Effexor. This was a better data set than the one used in his previous study, not only because it included negative studies but because the FDA sets uniform quality standards for the trials it reviews and not all of the published research in Kirsch’s earlier study had been submitted to the FDA as part of a drug approval application.

Altogether, there were forty-two trials of the six drugs. Most of them were negative.

Scarier yet is the fact that antidepressants can have lasting effects on the brain:

When, for example, an SSRI antidepressant like Celexa increases serotonin levels in synapses, it stimulates compensatory changes through a process called negative feedback. In response to the high levels of serotonin, the neurons that secrete it (presynaptic neurons) release less of it, and the postsynaptic neurons become desensitized to it. In effect, the brain is trying to nullify the drug’s effects. The same is true for drugs that block neurotransmitters, except in reverse ... Getting off the drugs is exceedingly difficult, according to Whitaker, because when they are withdrawn the compensatory mechanisms are left unopposed. When Celexa is withdrawn, serotonin levels fall precipitously because the presynaptic neurons are not releasing normal amounts and the postsynaptic neurons no longer have enough receptors for it. Similarly, when an antipsychotic is withdrawn, dopamine levels may skyrocket. The symptoms produced by withdrawing psychoactive drugs are often confused with relapses of the original disorder, which can lead psychiatrists to resume drug treatment, perhaps at higher doses.

Some thoughts:

I'm not trying to convince anyone to go off antidepressants. "It's complicated." I know a lot of people who take them. I've also seen antidepressant withdrawal firsthand and it isn't pretty.
A friend of mine who shall remain anonymous recently remarked that among a group of close friends, the ones on antidepressants are all doing well in terms of their careers and general life progress, while the ones who are not are semi-flailing. I wondered at the time if this might be a correlation effect, similar to what's been demonstrated through carefully controlled studies with multivitamins: The act of taking vitamins doesn't seem to actually improve health, but being the type of person who takes vitamins does. I wonder if being the type of person who would seek out therapy/elect to take antidepressants helps alleviate depression (it demonstrates self-awareness and a proactive stance toward your happiness)?
You've heard me bang my drum about saturated fat and salt intake before (like Stephan Guyenet I think America has been getting nutrition totally wrong for 30-40 years) but there's a bunch of other "common sense" health stuff that we all do blindly even though there's no convincing evidence to support it. Recently I read that it's actually unclear whether we should try to reduce a fever (it's your body trying to kill off an infection). Unless it's high enough to cause brain damage, some people think it's better to let the fever run its course. But there's never been a controlled trial to determine which is better. Some researchers once initiated a trial in which hospital patients with fevers were either treated with fever reducers or allowed to remain febrile. But midway through the trial, some number of the patients who were treated for fevers died. So the researchers panicked and stopped the trial! The upshot of course is that we keep on treating fevers. Now what kind of sense does that make?
There was an interesting article in a recent issue of Rice Magazine (my alumni magazine!) about the burgeoning field of "health economists," who research why health care costs are skyrocketing in the U.S. without actually improving outcomes. (Sometimes-nutjob Robin Hanson is also interested in this topic.) Key quote: "Costs continue to rise because doctors and hospitals are rewarded for performing more services, not for improving patient health." (You can read the article online here. Click the image and navigate through the magazine; you can click it again to zoom to full screen.) Am I the only one who finds this stuff endlessly fascinating/enraging?

Jokes

2011-06-06T11:31:00.004-04:00

I have nothing to blog about lately. I feel disturbed, why do I have no thoughts/ideas? Sorry guys. Instead of anything substantial or interesting, here are some silly/offensive jokes. This is one of the cutest jokes I've ever heard:

A pirate walks into a bar with a steering wheel attached to his crotch. The bartender says, "That looks painful. Does it hurt?" The pirate says, "Arrrggh, it's driving me nuts."

Isn't that cute? You have to do the pirate voice, obvs.

Here's one I made up. (SPOILER ALERT: blasphemy, etc.)

Q: How come nobody knew Jesus was gay?
A: Because he had a beard.

Probably I am not the first to think of that joke.

Making up jokes is one of my favorite car games. It's best to focus on a certain genre, e.g., anatomy puns or hinky-pinkies, which are riddles with rhyming answers like "sultry poultry" (fill in your own question). Lately John and I have been focusing on pickle jokes.

Q: Why didn't the pickle succeed in any one area?
A: He was just a dill-ettante.

Q: Which pop star do pickles love most?
A: Britney Spears.

Please leave your favorite pickle/pirate/Jesus jokes in the comments.

Rent Day

2011-05-31T13:36:00.004-04:00

Kathy and I have a poem in the new issue of Salt Hill, which you can preview online. Other excellent people in the issue include Christopher Salerno and Absent alumni Simeon Berry and Lily Ladewig.
I went to Alabama for the first time this weekend, in order to see my wonderful friend Heather Green (the poet, not the porn star) get married. Other things I saw there: Jessica Smith and her beautiful monkey-child, rare Cahaba lilies, pimento cheese, and the remains of a Hobby Lobby, reduced by tornado into a parking-lot-size pile of rubble. It (the state, not the destruction) was more beautiful than anticipated.
SOTD: Jolie Madame.
A joke: Q: How many therapists does it take to change a light bulb? A: One, but it has to want to change.

The Poetics of Meatspace

2011-05-23T12:27:00.003-04:00

There's a very persuasive, enveloping mythology around meat in this country. Most people seem to believe that vegetarians are only able to remain vegetarian through an extreme force of will, and that, if/when they go back to eating meat, it will seem insanely, irresistibly delicious, and they'll realize they were deluding themselves into believing they could live without the magic of meat, etc.

Neither holds true for me. About six years ago I decided to cut back on my meat eating, for ethical reasons, but ended up giving it up entirely, because I stopped wanting it. It was easy to do without. I'm gradually adding some meat back into my diet (this time for health reasons; now that grains and soy are a problem it's no longer easy to live without meat), and for the most part I find it less than delicious -- certainly way less delicious than I remembered it being. I used to think meat had a pretty neutral taste (the way vegetarians think of tofu, though tofu also has its own taste). Now I think it tastes like what it is: muscles and blood. After I swallow a bite of meat the metallic tinge reminds me of having a cut in my mouth. (This isn't true of bacon, of course, because bacon is salted and smoked within an inch of its life/death and is mostly fat anyway, not flesh. It's true that bacon is the most vegetarian-friendly meat for this reason: it tastes the least like meat.)

I'm curious: If you have returned to eating meat after an extended period without it, what was your adjustment period like, if there was one? Did meat taste like you remembered it? Better? Worse? If different/worse, did it ever go back to seeming normal?

Expert's Fallacy

2011-05-18T09:05:00.005-04:00

With most art, including music, poetry and all visual art, I sometimes listen/read/watch and think, "OK, this just isn't my thing." With prose, though, I pretty always feel like I can definitively say whether it's good or not. What is that? I told John about this and he said he feels the same about both poetry and prose. I wonder if this is some kind of Expert's Fallacy, whereby when you've experienced enough of some genre, you come to believe you can act as a definitive arbiter of taste. (It's possible John has read more poetry than me; he's probably read more prose too, but it doesn't matter because we've both crossed the necessary threshold.) Come to think of it, I feel the same way about film: entirely confident in my ability to deem it good or bad. Of course almost everyone is an "expert" in film. It's practically our national pastime.

I once dated a guy for a while that I knew I would eventually stop seeing; he was very smart and very attractive but we just weren't compatible in any deep kind of way, which I think came down to his essential lack of weirdness. But almost every time we went out, we had just good enough a time that I put off ending it. (I say "almost" because there was eventually a final date when he managed to actively annoy me, pushing me over into sayonara mode.) I'm reading a book like that right now. It's not very good, but it's just entertaining enough that I haven't been moved to abandon and find a replacement read yet.

Kognitive Koncepts

2011-05-13T14:28:00.000-04:00

This is the most condensed source of interesting ideas, spanning multiple disciplines and all described succinctly and for the layman, that I've read in a long time. It's a bunch of scientists responding to the question, "What one scientific concept would improve everbody's cognitive toolkit?" I hate the word "toolkit" as it reminds me of marketing-speak ("software solution"), but the idea is to talk about a concept that, if better understood or more widely known, could make us better and more effective thinkers/humans. Here are some excerpts:

Seth Lloyd, a quantum mechanical engineer at MIT:

I can't say that I'm very optimistic about the odds that people will learn to understand the science of odds. When it comes to understanding probability, people basically suck. Consider the following example, based on a true story, and reported by Joel Cohen of Rockefeller University. A group of graduate students note that women have an significantly lower chance of admission than men to the graduate programs at a major university. The data are unambiguous: women applicants are only two thirds as likely as male applicants to be admitted. The graduate students file suit against the university, alleging discrimination on the basis of gender. When admissions data are examined on a department by department basis, however, a strange fact emerges: within each department, women are MORE likely to be admitted than men. How can this possibly be?

The answer turns out to be simple, if counterintuitive. More women are applying to departments that have few positions. These departments admit only a small percentage of applicants, men or women. Men, by contrast, are applying to departments that have more positions and that admit a higher percentage of applicants. Within each department, women have a better chance of admission than men — it's just that few women apply to the departments that are easy to get into.

This counterintuitive result indicates that the admissions committees in the different departments are not discriminating against women. That doesn't mean that bias is absent. The number of graduate fellowships available in a particular field is determined largely by the federal government, which chooses how to allocate reserach funds to different fields. It is not university that is guilty of sexual discrimination, but the society as a whole, which chose to devote more resources — and so more graduate fellowships — to the fields preferred by men.

Fiery Cushman (what a name), post-doctoral fellow in mind/brain/behavior at Harvard:

Some of the most famous examples of confabulation come [from] "split-brain" patients, whose left and right brain hemispheres have been surgically disconnected for medical treatment. Neuroscientists have devised clever experiments in which information is provided to the right hemisphere (for instance, pictures of naked people), causing a change in behavior (embarrassed giggling). Split-brain individuals are then asked to explain their behavior verbally, which relies on the left hemisphere. Realizing that their body is laughing, but unaware of the nude images, the left hemisphere will confabulate an excuse for the body's behavior ("I keep laughing because you ask such funny questions, Doc!").

Wholesale confabulations in neurological patients can be jaw-dropping, but in part that is because they do not reflect ordinary experience. Most of the behaviors that you or I perform are not induced by crafty neuroscientists planting subliminal suggestions in our right hemisphere. When we are outside the laboratory — and when our brains have all the usual connections — most behaviors that we perform are the product of some combination of deliberate thinking and automatic action.

Ironically, that is exactly what makes confabulation so dangerous. If we routinely got the explanation for our behavior totally wrong — as completely wrong as split-brain patients sometimes do — we would probably be much more aware that there are pervasive, unseen influences on our behavior. The problem is that we get all of our explanations partly right, correctly identifying the conscious and deliberate causes of our behavior. Unfortunately, we mistake "party right" for "completely right", and thereby fail to recognize the equal influence of the unconscious, or to guard against it.

A choice of job, for instance, depends partly on careful deliberation about career interests, location, income, and hours. At the same time, research reveals that choice to be influenced by a host of factors of which we are unaware. People named Dennis or Denise are more likely to be dentists, while people named Virginia are more likely to locate to (you guessed it) Virginia. Less endearingly, research suggests that on average people will take a job with fewer benefits, a longer commute and a smaller income if it allows them to avoid having a female boss.

David Eagleman, Assistant Professor of Neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine:

In 1909, the biologist Jakob von Uexküll introduced the concept of the umwelt. He wanted a word to express a simple (but often overlooked) observation: different animals in the same ecosystem pick up on different environmental signals. In the blind and deaf world of the tick, the important signals are temperature and the odor of butyric acid. For the black ghost knifefish, it's electrical fields. For the echolocating bat, it's air-compression waves. The small subset of the world that an animal is able to detect is its umwelt. The bigger reality, whatever that might mean, is called the umgebung.

The interesting part is that each organism presumably assumes its umwelt to be the entire objective reality "out there." Why would any of us stop to think that there is more beyond what we can sense? ... Our unawareness of the limits of our umwelt can be seen with color blind people: until they learn that others can see hues they cannot, the thought of extra colors does not hit their radar screen. And the same goes for the congenitally blind: being sightless is not like experiencing "blackness" or "a dark hole" where vision should be. As a human is to a bloodhound dog, a blind person does not miss vision. They do not conceive of it. Electromagnetic radiation is simply not part of their umwelt.

The more science taps into these hidden channels, the more it becomes clear that our brains are tuned to detect a shockingly small fraction of the surrounding reality. Our sensorium is enough to get by in our ecosystem, but is does not approximate the larger picture.

I think it would be useful if the concept of the umwelt were embedded in the public lexicon. It neatly captures the idea of limited knowledge, of unobtainable information, and of unimagined possibilities. Consider the criticisms of policy, the assertions of dogma, the declarations of fact that you hear every day — and just imagine if all of these could be infused with the proper intellectual humility that comes from appreciating the amount unseen.

Beatrice Golomb, Professor of Medicine at UCSD:

Key presumptions regarding placebos and placebo effects are more typically wrong than not.

1. When hearing the word "placebo," scientists often presume "inert" - without stopping to ask: what is that allegedly physiologically inert substance? Indeed, even in principle, what could it be??

There isn't anything known to be physiologically inert. There are no regulations about what constitute placebos; and their composition — commonly determined by the manufacturer of the drug under study — is typically undisclosed. Among the uncommon cases where placebo composition has been noted, there are documented instances in which the placebo composition apparently produced spurious effects. Two studies used corn oil and olive oil placebos for cholesterol-lowering drugs: one noted that the "unexpectedly" low rate of heart attacks in the control group may have contributed to failure to see a benefit from the cholesterol drug. Another study noted "unexpected" benefit of a drug to gastrointestinal symptoms in cancer patients. But cancer patients bear increased likelihood of lactose intolerance — and the placebo was lactose, a "sugar pill." When the term "placebo" substitutes for actual ingredients, any thinking about how the composition of the control agent may have influenced the study is circumvented.

2. Because there are many settings in which persons with a problem, given placebo, report sizeable improvement on average when they are re-queried (see 3), many scientists have accepted that "placebo effects" — of suggestion — are both large in magnitude and widespread in the scope of what they benefit.

The Danish researcher Asbjørn Hróbjartsson conducted a systematic review of studies that compared a placebo to no treatment. He found that the placebo generally does: nothing. In most instances, there is no placebo effect. Mild "placebo effects" are seen, in the short term, for pain and anxiety. Placebo effects for pain are reported to be blocked by naloxone, an opiate antagonist — specifically implicating endogenous opiates in pain placebo effects, which would not be expected to benefit every possible outcome that might be measured.

3. When hearing that persons with a problem placed on a "placebo" report improvement, scientists commonly presume this must be due to the "placebo effect" - the effect of expectation/suggestion.

However, the effects are usually something else entirely. For instance: natural history of the disease, and regression to the mean. Consider a distribution, such as a bell-shape. Whether the outcome of interest is pain, blood pressure, cholesterol, or other, persons are classically selected for treatment if they are at one end of the distribution - say, the high end. But these outcomes are quantities that vary (for instance from physiological variation, natural history, measurement error...), and on average the high values will vary back down — a phenomenon termed "regression to the mean" that operates, placebo or no.

Strange phenomena, reprise

2011-05-13T14:24:00.002-04:00

I'm re-posting this due to the Blogger blip, in case it doesn't re-appear on its own. Comments on the original post are lost for now.

The movie Catfish: Real? Not real? John and I watched it last weekend, believing it was a mockumentary. By the end we realized it was supposed to be real. But is it? I don't know. Has anyone seen it?
A mountain lion was shot at the H&H Car Wash in El Paso, Texas. This is one of my parents' favorite lunch places. They have good carne guisada.
Marfa, Texas, has become a hipster destination (or, if you prefer, the object of postmodern tourism). There's even a restaurant in NYC designed to emulate it: "Marfa NYC captures the spirit of its West Texas namesake within the urbanity of the East Village." It's so banal, it's sublime.
I lived in Texas for 22 years and the only thing I ever heard about Marfa was that it had lights. (I always thought they were like aurora borealis but apparently not.) See also Prada Marfa.
See also: Taos Hum (just one of several geographies with unexplained hums, AKA The Hum).
See also: "Julia" and other unexplained sounds. (Sexism or no sexism, pages like these are my favorite thing about Wikipedia. See also: Inventors killed by their own inventions.)
By the way, this Slate article is bullshit: "The idea that these gender imbalances represent gatekeeper bias was demonstrably false even before the Wiki reality check ... Famously, Wikipedia has no gatekeepers. Anyone can write or edit an entry, either anonymously or under his or her own name. All that is required is a zeal for knowledge and accuracy ... Wikipedia provides a naturally occurring control group to test the theory that females' low participation rate in various public forums is the result of exclusion." Spoken like someone who has never actually tried to write or edit a Wikipedia page. It's de facto, not de jure, gatekeeperism, and anyway the problem is not who is doing the editing per se but the implications of that on the resulting content, given our pervasive reliance on it as a source. (Also, I thought DoubleX was Slate's attempt at a feminist "department"? So why are they publishing writers who say things like "the shameless legerdemain with which contemporary feminists and their allies preserve the conceit of a sexist society"? Ugh.)

Strange phenomena

2011-05-11T13:43:00.000-04:00

The movie Catfish: Real? Not real? John and I watched it last weekend, believing it was a mockumentary. By the end we realized it was supposed to be real. But is it? I don't know. Has anyone seen it?
A mountain lion was shot at the H&H Car Wash in El Paso, Texas. This is one of my parents' favorite lunch places. They have good carne guisada.
Marfa, Texas, has become a hipster destination (or, if you prefer, the object of postmodern tourism). There's even a restaurant in NYC designed to emulate it: "Marfa NYC captures the spirit of its West Texas namesake within the urbanity of the East Village." It's so banal, it's sublime.
I lived in Texas for 22 years and the only thing I ever heard about Marfa was that it had lights. (I always thought they were like aurora borealis but apparently not.) See also Prada Marfa.
See also: Taos Hum (just one of several geographies with unexplained hums, AKA The Hum).
See also: "Julia" and other unexplained sounds. (Sexism or no sexism, pages like these are my favorite thing about Wikipedia. See also: Inventors killed by their own inventions.)
By the way, this Slate article is bullshit: "The idea that these gender imbalances represent gatekeeper bias was demonstrably false even before the Wiki reality check ... Famously, Wikipedia has no gatekeepers. Anyone can write or edit an entry, either anonymously or under his or her own name. All that is required is a zeal for knowledge and accuracy ... Wikipedia provides a naturally occurring control group to test the theory that females' low participation rate in various public forums is the result of exclusion." Spoken like someone who has never actually tried to write or edit a Wikipedia page. It's de facto, not de jure, gatekeeperism, and anyway the problem is not who is doing the editing per se but the implications of that on the resulting content, given our pervasive reliance on it as a source. (Also, I thought DoubleX was Slate's attempt at a feminist "department"? So why are they publishing writers who say things like "the shameless legerdemain with which contemporary feminists and their allies preserve the conceit of a sexist society"? Ugh.)

Kentucky Derby Horse or Variety of Tomato?

2011-05-10T15:03:00.003-04:00

Big Rainbow
Cherokee Purple
Derby Kitten
Yellow Perfection
Native Dancer
Mr. Stripey
German Johnston
Stay Thirsty
Brandywine
Mr. Hot Stuff
Red Beefsteak
Djena Lee's Golden Girl
Nebraska Wedding
Chocolate Candy
Solar Fire
Twice the Appeal
Sweet Million F1

Inspired by Jonathan Mayhew and my mom.

A little less meaning, please, Johnson, or, Why nobody reads poetry

2011-05-07T16:22:00.006-04:00

A poet asked MetaFilter why many ardent readers choose not to read poetry. A selection of the responses:

"When I read poetry, I feel like I really have to concentrate and pay attention to each word."
"Poetry can seem very pretentious"
"Another problem I find is that I have met so many insufferable poets"
"Reading poetry takes more of an effort, and seems more like work"
"I enjoy discovering, exploring and understanding new things through reading fiction and nonfiction. Poetry--it seems to me--will only bring greater understanding of one particular person's inner thoughts and feelings: the poet."
"I read fiction, mostly science fiction and fantasy, because I want to think about new ideas. The stories I really love are the ones that show me something that's never occurred to me ... Without pointing any fingers or insulting anyone's craft, poetry just hasn't done that for me."
"Digging through the bad poetry to find the good stuff, is certainly not a good use of time. I devoured all the books by Terry Pratchett. They were fun. What poetry is fun like that?"
"This is going to sound stupid, but I think part of it for me it's the columnar format/line breaking of most poetry. If you could take a poem and put it in paragraph form, I would be more likely to attempt to read it. I guess though at that point it becomes prose."
"I find it too dense with meaning and associations."
"I read mostly nonfiction because I think when I read, I want to sit down and learn something - what life is like in North Korea or how to become more productive."
"I have a strong sense that it is contrived."
"I usually have to read it three times just to figure out how to emphasize the right words so it rhymes. And then rearrange some of the sentences to form actual understandable English, and then ponder out what all the metaphors and similies and symbolisms are supposed to mean"
"Why should I spend some of my precious leisure time trying to crack a bit of meaning from language deliberately crafted to be a kind of puzzle?"
"Poetry always feels like it's about the poet; good prose is about the story."
"Mostly, the insufferable introspection, the navel-gazing, the disregard for meter or rhythm, the sticky-poignant high-school girl quality of it, and the fact that I just don't plain like the word 'poetry.'"
"Poetry is too self indulgent, too obsessed with the minutiae"
"It's the rare poem which feels whole and bright but also edgy, revealing, tender, and vulnerable. When that happens- God Damn! Poetry is amazing. But I really don't find it that much, though I would love to find more of it."

The first statement and the last (in this list, not the full thread) are the only ones that ring true. Poetry does require more concentration than prose, and you do have to read every word. And yes, most of it fails. Everything else is a rationalization. (Poetry is not only about the poet's feelings any more than music is only about the musician's feelings; poetry is not a puzzle you need to translate into English any more than music is a puzzle you need to translate into English; TV is strongly contrived; good poetry is full of ideas, etc.) Most people don't read poetry for the same reason they don't read art books or listen to classical music: because they would have no idea where to start. In other words, most people don't read poetry because most people don't read poetry. We live in a prose culture; poetry is hopelessly sub-.

P.S. After writing this I see that one bloke (I can call him a bloke because he uses the word "whilst") did answer thus: "It's because I don't know where to start."

Crush

2011-05-06T14:35:00.003-04:00

I have such a crush on this red-headed model. Her name is Cintia Dicker (not the most elegant name in the world). Whenever I see her in an ad I stare at it for about a minute.

Epigraphs, Part 2

2011-05-02T20:53:00.004-04:00

Do you know the song "The War Criminal Rises and Speaks" by Okkervil River? It's been in my head a lot lately, coincidentally. I'd include a video but YouTube only has live clips of crappy quality. It's an amazing song.

More epigraphs! From The Economy of Cities, by Jane Jacobs (1969):

A few years ago the United States and the European Common Market engaged in what was called a chicken war. Each was trying to push its surfeit of chickens off onto the other. But this does not mean that the industrialized and urban economies of the United States and Western Europe were built upon surfeits of chickens.

From "Why I'm a Pacifist" by Nicholson Baker in the May issue of Harper's:

When are we going to grasp the essential truth? War never works. It never has worked. It makes everything worse.

Are You "Sure"?

2011-05-01T08:57:00.004-04:00

My latest perfume column is up, and it's on deodorants. Yes, deodorants! I reviewed the scents (not the functionality) of 19 deodorants and antiperspirants for men and women. Go read the astonishing results. Here's an excerpt:

Dove Ultimate Cool Essentials Cucumber & Green Tea – Great branding here: this actually does smell cool and green. In functional settings, cucumber is usually combined with melon, a tired, sour combination that never fails to remind me of Tranquil Breezes, a scent Victoria’s Secret used to carry in the early ‘90s, which was wildly popular with sixth graders. By skipping the extra melon (cucumber already has a similar smell profile) and adding green tea, Dove achieves an accord that feels both fresh and refreshing. Unlike Original Clean, this one smells a little sweeter and fruitier on skin than in the packaging. I can see women wanting to smell like this all over, and accordingly Dove sells lotion and body spray in the same scent. A pleasant, summer-appropriate deodorant.

Mitchum Power Gel Shower Fresh – A more literal interpretation of the “clean” theme, Mitchum Shower Fresh actually smells like bleach: tile cleaner with a splash of Diet Sprite, a real nose-burner of a fragrance. Why smell like you just got out of the shower when you can smell like the shower itself? This is the one that I already owned – there was no unscented option when I purchased it, and it seemed like the next best thing – so I can report that the scent fades quickly after application. (And you know antiperspirant works better if you put it on at night, right?)

In other news, I'm reading at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival in a couple of weeks. I'll be "opening" for the headline event on Saturday night, May 14, at 7:30 pm, also starring Mark Doty, Patricia Smith and musician Kim Richey. Read more about the performers here. The festival is a weekend-long event in Salem and other poets present will include Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Brian Brodeur, Brian Turner, Daniel Pritchard, David Rivard, Gail Mazur, January O'Neil, Jericho Brown, Mike Young, Simeon Berry, Stephen Sturgeon and many more. Check it out if you're local.

Mexican Fried Rice

2011-04-29T18:24:00.003-04:00

A little recipe: fast, cheap, easy and "fusion."

Mexican Fried Rice

1-3 tablespoons oil

1 small onion or half a large onion, sliced vertically

1 small tomato or a handful of cherry tomatoes, seeded and chopped

2 eggs, beaten

1 cup (about) leftover rice

1 lime

handful of chopped cilantro

hot sauce

salt & pepper

Heat the oil in a frying pan over medium-high heat, then toss in the onion and sautee until tender and browning in spots, about five minutes. Toss in the tomatoes. (If you had a fresh jalapeño, you could slice or chop that and throw it in with the tomatoes.) Season with salt and pepper. When the tomatoes have softened, lower the heat a bit and pour in the eggs. Quickly soft-scramble them. Before they're finished cooking, toss in the rice, the juice of the lime, the cilantro, some hot sauce (I used the green Tabasco), and more salt and pepper as needed. Stir until heated through. Top with shredded cheese, avocado chunks, etc., as desired. Serves one hungry lady.

John Ashbery on Sense and Self

2011-04-29T11:39:00.002-04:00

From an interview in the Boston Review:

F: Does it bother you when your work is described as a refutation of common sense?

A: No, I couldn’t agree more. [Laughs]

F: Is it hard, therefore, for you to enjoy reading work too rooted in the laws of common sense? I can’t help thinking of a Rimbaud or Ashbery poem as an occasion to go a little screwy, not unpleasantly, with logic.

A: You mean like Robert Frost? Yes, I would say that is hard for me to enjoy. Then again, I don’t know if you can divide up poetry into what makes sense and what doesn’t. In any case, Rimbaud’s poetry accepts and feels beyond common sense, as you were saying, and feels, as I was saying, like the stuff of dreams. No other French writer did this. I’ve often thought that the French language was far too meticulous to allow for such wanton freedom. The fact that he managed without even thinking about it is miraculous. I’m not sure if it ever happened again, even in the poetry of the surrealists, though they’d like to think so.

F: You write, beautifully, “The self is obsolete” as a counter-riff on this famous phrase. Could you elaborate?

A: The self has been replaced by the simultaneity of all of life, everything happening in a given moment becomes the source of the poem, rather than the writer thinking about what he or she is going to write.

F: So writing’s a healthy way of escaping our good ol’ selfhood?

A: No, I think it’s unhealthy! [Laughs] The cubists’ coexisting views of objects that could not be seen by the human eye the way they’re portrayed on the canvas is a way of going beyond the self, or acknowledging it’s no longer doing its job.

F: That a single perspective is inherently limited when it comes to art?

A: Or that there’s no reason why multiple ones shouldn’t exist, too.

Free Epigraphs

2011-04-27T21:05:00.003-04:00

Some interesting tidbits from things I've been reading lately:

If I watch the end of a day--any day--I always feel it's the end of a whole epoch. And the autumn! It might as well be the end of everything.

That's from an excerpt of The Sheltering Sky in a reader called The Portable Paul and Jane Bowles. I first read "Pages from Cold Point," a short story by Paul Bowles, which is fascinating; it's very suspenseful and the whole thing hinges on a father's realization about his son, but the realization is never made explicit. I didn't understand what had happened, and when I asked John, he wasn't sure if he had read the story, but he guessed that the realization was that the son was gay; at the time you would have had to tiptoe around that. In hindsight I'm sure that's what it was, but it hadn't occurred to me while reading. From the details and the tone you get the sense that the son contains a secret darkness, is evil; the people of the town think he is a "bad boy." I tend to be naive about these old codes. Now I'm reading "Camp Cataract" by Jane Bowles, which is very funny.

Here's another epigraph up for grabs:

There are no colors in nature, only electromagnetic radiation of varying wavelengths.

That's the part I think is most epigraphable, but here's the rest of the passage: "If we were aware of our 'real' visual worlds, we would see constantly changing images of dirty gray, making it difficult for us to recognize forms. Our visual stimuli are stabilized when the brain compares the variations in the different wavelengths of light; the consequence of these comparisons is what we perceive as 'color.' The brain creates a sense of 'color constancy': no matter the lighting conditions--bright sunlight, filtered sunlight, or artificial lighting--colors remain more or less the same. This phenomenon is not fully understood. But colors themselves are not in our surroundings. Brains therefore create something that is not there, and in doing so they help us to make sense of our environment." That's from a review of Oliver Sacks's new book by Israel Rosenfield in the April issue of Harper's.

Buy The French Exit for $6

2011-04-21T12:45:00.003-04:00

In honor of my being named "Boston's Best Poet" by the Boston Phoenix, Birds LLC is offering a special limited-time deal on The French Exit. Right now you can get The French Exit for just $6 (50% off the cover price) or get a copy free with any other Birds LLC purchase. Yay! Hot deals! Act now, at prices like these, they won't last long! Etc.

Also, thank you to everyone who voted! Especial thanks to Janaka Stucky, AKA the wind beneath my wings, who passes the crown/sash on to me, and who is fully responsible for launching this kooky write-in campaign. It was an honor just to be not-nominated.

LOVE>>>