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2009-11-13T09:49:00.001-08:00

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ishmael: thinking about gardens

2009-11-02T07:51:00.000-08:00

It's Week 5 (beginning Week 6) here in Nuevo Laredo, which means my time here is rapidly approaching the half-way over mark. TIME! How do we go about measuring and conceiving it?? Every week that passes, I greet with astonishment: “Gosh, I can't believe I've been here for three weeks. Holy cow! A whole month in Nuevo Laredo! Hijole. Five weeks, over as quickly as it came...”

I've been a little obsessed with time lately. Time management of the present moment, how we conceive time and how we measure it personally. It's been a theme this year of mine, to flip through old journal entries and feel fascinated as I read what I did on the 2nd day of last month, two months ago, six months ago. Man, how crazy is it that I can read journal entries from 2006, or god forbid, 2005 or even further back than that, and recognize this distinct “voice” I had, as though I were reading a narrator in a novel! Within that recognition is also the acknowledgment that this voice of 2006 and backwards is no longer me: it was me, but it is no longer the voice that I use now. I guess this means in ten years, when I'm reading this blog entry (I wonder how that is going to work, exactly) I'm going to be freaking out even more.

The main event that got me thinking about time is fairly simple: I watched The Full Monty, the amusing British comedy lent to me in a stack of DVDs by my boss. The last time I watched The Full Monty was in 1997, when it first came out, when my sister and I were first really getting into seeing movies and renting them from blockbuster. Twelve years ago, I was twelve. When I was twelve, I couldn't even SAY the sentence “I remember twelve years ago when...”, because I would have remembered nothing! So this is one of the first times in my life when I could say “I remember twelve years ago...” What is it going to be like to say “I remember thirty years ago”? Or forty? Fifty? That was the main thing I wanted to ask my grandma, when she was showing me old photographs of her with her high school boyfriends. Did you ever think you would end up here Grandma? I wanted to say. Did you ever think you would be a Grandma? Did you ever think you would be eighty-five? Time, dude. It's a puzzler.

What else did I do when I was twelve? I was in sixth grade. I saw Titanic. I got really into reading all the movie reviews in the New York Times. I remember playing a game with my sister, where we would go to a page and then we would have to pick the one movie out of all the adds listed there that we wanted to see. (During Oscar season this game was fun, once February and March hit it definitely became an exercise in the lesser of two evils.) I guess I would say sixth grade was the time when I sort of became aware of culture, popular culture, and began wanting to integrate myself into it. Sixth grade was also the year I bought my first CD (the Titanic soundtrack—thanks, Mom!). I think it was also the summer before sixth grade that my sister and I first began buying music for ourselves in the form of cassette tapes: the Backstreet Boys, Hansen. Cassette tapes, dude!! Fortunately, we bought a cassette tape of Grammy nominees of '96 and Paula Cole, Fiona Apple and Shawn Colvin were on it, and our path for preferring sensitive female singer-songwriters with pianos or guitars seemed to be set.

Another thing I did in sixth grade was read Ishmael. My brother was reading it for a class of his—social studies? World History? God knows, some hippie Canadian teacher assigned it to him. I always read my older brother's books and textbooks; I read one huge English Lit textbook of his from cover to cover, starting with Milton and ending with the play version of The Diary of Anne Frank. Reading “older kids' books” always felt tremendously exciting to me. I would always sneak into his room when he wasn't there and read them while lying on my stomach on his bed, my chin hanging off the edge and the book on the floor (I still read like this sometimes, but it makes all the blood rush to my head).

I was definitely way too young for Ishmael at the time. I think the only part I really “got” was the part about the creation myth, in the first 40-50 pages. I thought that was really clever, when the jellyfish said, all proudly, “And then, there were jellyfish!” as its conclusion to its story about the creation of the universe. It was an eye-opening moment, to say the least. I'd definitely never really thought about the world like that before, that we had a specific way of narrating about our place in the world. Even during Humanities 110 class, years later, in between the slides of the Greeks and Romans projected at the front of the auditorium, I would still think every once in the while “and then there were jellyfish...”

So these were some of the things I thought about while re-reading Ishmael in the Estacion Palabra reading cultural center, while little kids shouted and whooped while making Halloween decorations in the children's sections. At some point a girl dressed up as a pirate walked up to me and offered me candy; I took a green lollipop which broke as I was trying to unwrap it (I ate it anyway). I rushed through the last 60 pages in fear that I wouldn't be able to finish it before it got dark; I wanted to walk home while there was still some light outside.

It was a good book, and I enjoyed reading it. Ishmael places an interesting emphasis on how the control and use of food supply is so important for defining culture and the formation civilization. It feels very much ahead of its time for a book written in 1992, especially Quinn's commentary about First World farmers fueling Third World population explosion. It's missing the specificity and urgency that Michael Pollan brought to the argument, but it's definitely there. It feels very relevant.

It's an interesting book to read at this point in my life, as well as in this point of history. I love reading the articles about food and good eating and urban farming and agriculture that seem to be consistently appearing on the NY Times and Salon and Slate and so on... When I walked into Powell's to buy The Wings of the Dove and The Brothers K and other huge books to lug along with me to Mexico, in the front displays there was book after book about permaculture and bike riding and green living and good eating. It made my heart feel really warm. It made me want to believe that our consciousness is changing, that a very definitive, clear shift is taking place... I don't want to think that it's just Portland, either (though Portland is definitely a place where a lot of good things happen!)

I also think it's interesting how Ishmael focuses so much on this idea that things can't continue on this path for much longer, or else we're pretty much doomed. Doomed in what sense? The apocalypse is pretty scary to think about (I can't watch zombie movies for exactly that reason) but I find it SO interesting that the more people I meet who are interested in things like gardening, permaculture, gathering culinary mushrooms and sustainable development also seem to be very much comfortable (not sure if that's the right word? Aware, maybe) with the idea of apocalypse. I could go on a rift about apocalypse that adapts themes from my postmodern fiction class, but I think I will leave it at that and take it up in another blog entry.

The last thing I want to say about reading Ishmael is how freaking interesting it was to me to read this book and be like yup, this is definitely how I feel; yup, this is definitely a conclusion that I've reached. Consuming the world as our prison industry that keeps us trapped: check. Man belongs to the world instead of the other way round: check. Human settlement isn't against the law, it's subject to the law: check, check. Teaching is enough, you can't begin anywhere unless you begin changing people's minds: triple check unto infinity. I would even go so far that you can't begin anywhere unless you begin changing your mind. Oh my God, how can I possibly go about helping others unless I know how to help myself?! I think more than anything, this is the biggest lesson that I have learned in the past three years. It sounds so basic and self-explanatory, right? And yet, it is really revolutionary, but once you begin practicing kindness to yourself, it proceeds to open the door to oh so many other things...

I also REALLY liked how Ishmael tried to be positive at the end, so that I wasn't left with this feeling of “Great, we've messed up this planet and now we're screwed, start building the bunker.” Instead he does a good job of trying to make us feel good. He mainly does this by saying that we need a new vision of ourselves that's more inspiring that being scolded about how we need to recycle more and pollute less. Somehow, it's more helpful to view all of this as necessary. This lesson can be personal: If we didn't go through all of this, then we wouldn't have learned. It's more helpful to think that humans needed to go through all this, to be “the first species to experience it without being the last,” as Quinn puts it, in order to KNOW how to do things DIFFERENTLY. So instead of beating ourselves up about the past and thinking we're screwed, instead we can LEARN from our EXPERIENCES. How's that for constructive thinking?!

What I like best about this mentality is how well it works in regards to viewing ourselves as individuals. We can view our flaws and mistakes as these terrible things: “God, I've messed this thing up, this one side of my personality is like this, so now I'm basically screwed!” But instead of this vision of ourselves, we can have a vision of seeing these flaws as necessary. If you didn't have these tendencies, then how would you learn? And you can always learn. Now is never a better time.

The one last thing I want to say is that I found it incredibly ironic how after reading this book I went home to my apartment ate some ramen, the only food available in my apartment. Definitely not part of the Slow Food movement. But I figure that you gotta accept the gifts that are available to you... There's a time and a place for certain things. For example, in Portland, I can learn about gardening and permaculture and botany from Corey, who has really been quite influential and formative in setting me down this path. Oh, to date a botanist...
Urban gardening in Nuevo Laredo appears mostly in the form of papaya trees in people's front yards. Homegrown chiles are definitely the most popular.

Some songs about gardens:

Ani DiFranco's "Garden of Simple"

Tori Amos wants you to get out of her garden.

"The highway is alive tonight": Murakami and Steinbeck in Nuevo Laredo

2009-10-22T08:30:00.000-07:00

This novel begins with such a normal scene: the narrator in the kitchen, boiling spaghetti and listening to an opera, “which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta.”(5) There's absolutely no indication in the first 100+ pages that the story is going to end as weirdly as it does.

This was absolutely the most perfect book in the world for me to read at this particular point in my life. The friend who gave it to me told me he'd read it during a time in which his “flow was obstructed,” and I guess the same goes for me. There was just something so warm and reassuring about reading this book. I would be in the office or in the field all day in Nuevo Laredo, learning all these new concepts and absorbing all these incredibly draining, intense experiences, and yet, at the end of the day it would all be okay, because I knew I could come home to my little apartment, sit on my beat-up couch, eat my cornflakes and yogurt and read another 100 pages of Wind-Up Bird. It was like coming home to cuddle a stuffed animal, albeit one that talked a lot about the Japanese military efforts in Manchukuo.

I loved reading this book. *Loved* it. I wanted to hug it to the chest and clap my hands gleefully with happiness, like a happy seal. I love all the different Joycean techniques Murakami employs to tell his tale: computer chats, letters, newspapers, hallucinatory dream sequences. It feels important that the story begins with a very straightforward, realistic narrative that is almost boring in its simplicity: a man begins searching for his wife's missing cat. In the last couple of chapters, you're no longer sure if what's going on is happenning in this world, a parallel universe, inside somebody's head, or inside several people's heads (that's about as spoiler free as I can be). Also, as a history geek, I loved reading the parts about the Japanese army in Mongolia or the Japanese occupation of Manchuria and the prison camps in Siberia. There's so many parts of the world and of history that I have yet to learn about...

My absolutely favorite thing in the world about Murakami is all his descriptions of what the characters eat. A ham, tomato and cheese sandwich. Stir fried green peppers. Coffee, constantly. These little details sounds so simple, and yet they add so much to the story: it grounds it in something that's so real and very much every day. The literary cliche gods help me, but I have to call it Kafkaesque: we believe all the crazy things that happen later, because everything that happens early on is so credible, to the point of being monotonous almost. It really is clever technique.

This is a very postmodern novel in the sense that it deals a lot with the question of the self. As in, do we actually have one? Can you ever actually “know” yourself, let alone another person? More than anything else, I think this is the central question of the novel. It reminded me a lot of Tori Amos' concept album, American Doll Posse, in which she assumes the persona of five different female archetypes, each representing a different side to the female personality. This idea of having several different selves, as opposed to one that is already neatly, conveniently formed, is a theme I believe I've already brought up in this blog. I really like the idea of having this “wise self” inside of me, this very pure, intuitive wisdom that I can turn to, time and time again, in order to reassure myself and calm myself down, make myself feel like everything is going to be all right. What about all my other selves? Is complete integration an illusion? Is being mildly fragmented the best that any of us can ever hope for? The question feels even more relevant if you consider victims of trauma like war (as in Wind-Up Bird) or rape (as in American Doll Posse). Trauma can shatter you, splinter you apart. How do you go about rebuilding yourself, making yourself whole again?

This idea of rebuilding and coming together appears in a very different form of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, the other book I looked forward to coming home and reading these past few weeks. Steinbeck is about as straightforward as narrative realism gets, not much I can call postmodern here (though please feel free to correct me!). I liked how this book made me want to listen to Bruce Springsteen (which makes sense, since Bruce Springsteen has obviously read Steinbeck. I was surprised by how easily you could update The Grapes of Wrath to a 21st-century tale of immigration to the U.S., if you just substituted the Joads for a Mexican family, changed Okies to mojados, throw in a scene of crossing the Rio Grande.

Oh, it just makes me sad, it makes me angry, it makes me want to—I don't know, I was going to write “run into the street, burn something, write to a Congressman,” but to be completely honest, what it makes me want to do is read more. I want to read more about the history of labor movements in the early 20th century, I want to read more about the development of 21st-century immigration policy, I want to read more about socialism. I want to sit up late reading drinking my carrot juice, underlining passages in pencil and maybe even scrawling a note to myself in the side margins (yes, I am thus revealing myself to be a book vandal!). I want to read and think and write my thoughts down and them talk about them, late into the night with other people. And then I want them to give me more books to read and tell me, “I think that you would like these ones.” More than anything else it makes me feel hopeful and happy to think that there are other people like this in the world, other people who can relate to the feeling of your heart beating as you hand a book over to another person, the words in your throat bursting with eagerness as you say “oh! This one—you really need to read this one!” What would the world be like, after all, without all these people who want to read great books and think silly thoughts about them and then go out and do completely random-seeming things like intern for a microfinance institution in a border city?

Nobody's fooling nobody about where it goes.

Gabo in Nuevo Laredo

2009-10-12T07:39:00.000-07:00

Even though this is my third week of living in Nuevo Laredo, I feel like the main thing I want to talk about is all the food I've been eating because that's one of the things I find most exciting about being in Mexico. Like yesterday I went to this giant market with my co-workers and their kids that everyone calls las pulgas (the fleas). There's a saying that "para calidad, hay que ir a liverpulgas" because apparently there's a trendy department store in either Mexico or Texas that's called Liverpool... hence the ironic play on words "liverpulgas." For lunch we had a big steaming bowl of menudo, or soup made of lining from a cow's stomach. I'm not going to lie to you... it was hard to finish. I poured on the little green chilis and onions and cilantro like nobody's business. But yeah, I'm proud to say that unlike the tripe tacos (I could only eat one, and it made me horribly ill), I ate the whole bowl of menudo. Go me. And then we walked for what seriously felt like 2 kilometers through the stalls. I ended up only buying one shirt even though I seriously need more, I'm sure all my co-workers have noticed by now that I wear the same rotating set of six shirts every week.

The main thing I wanted to write about here, though, isn't so much the food or what it's like to live in Nuevo Laredo or what I'm doing here (you can read all that on the Kiva Fellows blog). What I wanted to say here was that yesterday I found a plaza right near my apartment that not only looks like a good place to go running, but more importantly, there is a LIBRARY right near by! Well, I guess it's not really a library, because you're not allowed to check books out, it's a "center to promote reading." But they have shelves and shelves of books of photography and novels in Spanish and English. I spent an hour reading "Richard the III," struggling to understand how everyone was related but loving the hell out of it. I only left because the place closed.

The coolest thing is that it's named after none other than Gabriel Garcia Marquez, autor nacional de la tierra de mi alma. Yes, apparently he donated serious monies to build the place and came to the inauguration naming ceremony and everything. Apparently (according to the informative plaques inside the building) Gabo has a special affection for Nuevo Laredo because it was the first part of Mexico that he passed through.

The reading center built right by the railway track, which is where he took the train with his family. It's an awesome, well-lit space with a snazzy little cafe. And a children's center that is filled with the EXACT SAME inflatable green turtles from IKEA that I wrestled mightily to blow up for the Boys & Girls Club! A strangely small, surreal world indeed. I wish I'd taken a picture for proof.
Garcia Marquez's books translated into different languages such as Estonian, Czech and Danish. Reading = Growing Lovely old copies of Don Quixote behind a glass case.

Oh, it just all brought tears to my eyes, the sight of books lined up on shelf after shelf. It just seemed like such a tranquil, lovely scene of beauty in the middle of a city that gets such a bad rep from everyone. It's discovering places like this that makes me so glad and grateful to have the opportunity to travel to cities that are brusquely dismissed as "not worth it" or "unsightly and dirty" in guidebooks. Lago Agrio and Coca in Ecuador. Tijuana and Nuevo Laredo in Mexico. Cali in Colombia isn't exactly spoken of as a haven of beauty either. But I love these cities! It's what I'm used to, what I grew up with. Cracked sidewalks covered in grass. Dogs with the dirtiest, most disgusting eye sockets you can imagine, all runny with pus and so gross it just makes you want to vomit. Street food. Sugary drinkable yogurt. Men hissing ooh beautiful white girl wherever I go (okay, this I can live without).

I think something a lot of people get out of traveling is the feeling that they're suddenly experiencing what it's like to see themselves through someone else's eyes. When I moved to Portland I experienced the opposite effect; it was like suddenly and magically becoming invisible. Suddenly, I could blend in, I wasn't the white girl with the hair that always inevitably stood out in the crowd anymore as an obvious foreigner. In Portland I can lie and say that I've grown up in Oregon my entire life and that I'd learned Spanish in high school and no one would ever be the wiser. How weird, right?. How funny that when I travel to Spanish-speaking countries I get the feeling like I'm coming home, that I'm returning to a comforting site of familiarity, that "standing out" as the obvious clueless foreigner is the state I'm more used to.

Some cartoon drawings hanging on the walls of the reading center.

"poor" people

2009-09-19T23:36:00.000-07:00

Poor People is not a pleasant read. Indeed, it is a very difficult and challenging read, and I don't doubt that its author intended it that way. There is nothing I can say in critique (or in praise) of this book that hasn't already been said by writers more articulate and with more experience and clout than me. For me, it's enough to read the title and listen to myself as I say it aloud and hear everything implicit and subtly lurking behind that phrase: “poor people. Poor, poor people. Poor! People!” In those words I hear pity, fear and inevitable relief, that the speaker by default cannot be considered as one of the “poor,” since she/he can speak of them as something seperate and apart, something radically other and different from themselves. Disconnected. If you can view others as poor and thus by default radically separate from yourself, are you automatically saying that you by definition must be considered rich?

I read this book in between all the microfinance-related reading I've been doing over the past two weeks or so in preparation for my rapidly impending internship with Kiva (I'm getting on a bus to head to San Francisco for training tomorrow). I've read some pretty interesting stuff (especially the discussions about the commercialization of microfinance and the tension in MF about being focused on economic development or the marketplace, poverty vs. profit). Depressingly enough, I don't think microfinance would offer much in the way of a solution to the “poor people” profiled in this book. To be given a loan to start a business or purchase supplies or improve your house, it's already implied that you have already have started with something, as opposed to absolutely nothing. The people in these book really have nothing: they're the the sickly old beggar women, the smelly drunk and indigent, the crippled, the beggars in subway stations holding out palms or rattling plastic cups full of coins, the refugees, the fevered mothers holding their babies and staring down at the ground before them. God, this book is depressing.

I did not particularly enjoy reading this book, which makes it hard for me to recommend it to people. I first stumbled upon it several years ago, in my stacks-shelving job at the college library. I flipped through the black and white portraits at the end and was intrigued by the number of photos that were of people from Colombia, and it's never really left my mind since. The images of beggar women in burqas in Afghanistan during Taliban rule are definitely remain the most affecting (Vollmann's discussion of poverty-as-invisibility ties in nicely to these images). The strongest bits of this book involve Vollmann-as-reporter, during which he simply profiles the folks he's interviewing. I liked the portrayal of the Russian family in which the husband was too sick from Chernobyl to work, and his foray into an off-limits oil refinery in Kazakhstan has the elements of a really angry documentary. He veers away from this simple reporting in the middle part of the book, instead going off on long tangents from his personal list of what defines poverty, such as “accident prone-ness” and “unwantedness.”

At one point in one of my flights and bus rides (it's hard to keep track of them lately!), I started doodling in my journal a list of WHY SHOULD WE FIGHT AGAINST POVERTY? The main reasons I came up with weren't so much academic as they were from my emotional gut. reason #1: Empathy: we're all born in this crazy ass world without really asking for it, and being that we're all in this sick mess together, we might as well help each other out... be a giver rather than a taker. Reason #2: Karma (in its most simplified definition): by helping others, you're helping yourself, and more importantly you're putting out a little positive energy out there into the black toilet hole of a universe for future use. Not exactly award-winning reasons, but for what it's worth that's what I succeeded in skimming off the top of my curdled-by-Greyhound brain.

I'm sure I'll have a lot more interesting things to say about poverty after I start Kiva internship, which I plan to blog about in more detail than I have so far in this space. In the meantime, one thing that really stood out for me in the wiki biography of Vollmann's life is how he dropped out of a Comparative Literature program at Berkeley “after one year with the intention of engaging life instead of just studying.” What an interesting phrase, “engaging life.” How does one go about doing that, pray? Is life something you just walk around and eventually find if you keep your mind open enough, or do you have to adopt a more proactive, aggressively-seeking approach?

For me at least, life as I've engaged it in the past week has been pretty pleasant, visiting my various girlfriends in Los Angeles and staying with my grandma in San Luis Obispo county. This evening my grandma and I looked at old photographs and I learned about Cosmo and Al, the guys my grandma “went with” before she met my grandfather. Poor Cosmo (a Navy fellow) was rejected on the account of insulting my great-grandfather's lawn, and Al (whom she “went with” for three years—long-term relationship, grandma!) went so far as to get her a ring, a fur coat and some kind of fancy box thing, all of which she rejected because “I didn't have feelings for him that way.” Poor Al.

(You can check out the non-profit(s) I'll be interning for until Christmas here and here.)

Attempts on Her Life: Truth and Self in "Portrait of a Lady"

2009-09-07T09:03:00.000-07:00

Well obviously the apartment would be beautifully furnished. Obviously it would have high ceilings and tall windows and date in all probability from the end of the nineteenth century when the rise in speculative building coincided with the aspirations of the liberal bourgeoisie to create monumental architectural schemes such as I'm thinking particularly now I'm thinking of the Viennese Ringstrasse which made such an impression on the young Adolf Hitler as he stood one morning before the Opera.
--Or one of the great Parisian boulevards.
--Or one of the great, exactly, Parisian boulevards.

--from Martin Crimp's Complete Plays: Volume 2, page 209-212, “Attempts on her Life.”

I read this play while staying in my friend's apartment in a suburb in Paris. The other book I was reading at the time was Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady, another attempt of sorts on a lady's life. It felt highly appropriate to be reading Henry James during a two-week poor man's jaunt through England and Paris. The boulevards were definitely good representations of "the aspirations of the liberal bourgeoisie to create monumental architectural schemes;" "total Illuminati," Corey mused while contemplating them. They made me think of imperial imagery and the cult of the Roman Emperor, like we learned in my freshman year humanities class, in which dead emperors were made into gods and his cult was spread through coinage, architecture and fashion. There seems to be a lot of dangerous implications when you try to definine something absolutely.

This is the first Henry James novel I've ever read, other than his short stories in college and The Turn of the Screw in high school for AP English. I read David Lodge's novel Author, Author, an Amadeus-like story of James' failure at the theatre and his friendship with an author who was super famous at the time, but whom nobody remembers now (have *you* read George du Maurier?). His books always lined my mom's bookshelves at home, nestled in between Dickens and Vanity Fair. "Henry James is so subtle," my mom once told me (I don't know in what context, maybe we'd just finished watching Wings of the Dove or something). "You'll read a whole page, and then look up, and be like, I know that something really, really important just took place... butwhat?" That's as good of a summary of Henry James' style as I've ever heard. I mean, it says a lot that the key scene in this novel consists of Isabel sitting motionless in a chair (how did they turn this into a movie, again?).

Despite this initial fear that this novel was going to leave me feeling like I was an absolute idiot, in the end I was surprised at how much I enjoyed reading this novel. Maybe my brain has just gotten really big over the past year (ha, ha, ha!) but I honestly didn't find it that hard (I can haas literary smarts?). I definitely didn't have the same reaction as my housemate, who read the first page of Wings of the Dove and threw it across the room shouting "WHAT THE BLEEP?!" (Oh, biology majors.) I got really into the characters in Portrait of a Lady; I finished each chapter with a feeling of eager anticipation, like I was waiting for the next episode of a TV series. I would update the ever indifferent Corey on their conversations and decisions: "Oh oh, it looks like Isabel is going to accept Gilbert Osmond's marriage proposal. It's all downhill from here." "Henrietta the journalist really represents modern America! While Caspar Goodwood is a total embodiment of penetrative capitalism!"

This was an interesting book to read while traveling as a tourist. Isabel wanders through London, Paris, Rome, Florence, Venice, looking at old ruins and art, attempting to "collect" experiences like those little barbed seeds that cling to your clothes when you pass through a tall field. (Collecting is a big motif in this novel; much is made of Gilbert Osmond's art collection and his desire to keep Isabel and his daughter shut up in his nasty claustrophobic old house like expensive portraits.) There's a lot of annoying stupid rich Americans and Brits in this novel, traveling for no point or purpose, living off their inheiritances. Isabel is smart enough to see through the emptiness, commenting with typical astuteness that "doing all the vain things one likes is often very tiresome." (309) Why yes Isabel, it is very tiresome indeeed! She goes on to ponder:

The desire for unlimited expansion had been succeeded in her soul by the sense that life was vacant without some private duty that might gather one's energies to a point. She had told Ralph she had 'seen life' in a year or two and that she was already tired, not of the act of living, but that of observing. What had become of all her ardours, her aspirations, her theories, her high estimate of her independence and her incipient conviction that she should never marry?

This is my favorite quality of Isabel's: her introspection, her ability to ask those kinds of questions. When asked by the odious Madame Merle to define her idea of success, Isabel's response is "to see some dream of one's youth come true." (206) I like how Isabel philosophizes and reflects on her actions, and I'm sure it's this quality of hers that has captivated readers and literary critics for over a hundred years now.

Another thing I want to mention is the exchange Isabel has with Madame Merle in one particular section, as it sets up two different concepts of the ever popular topic in modernism, the Question of the Self. As Madame Merle puts it:

"When you've lived as long as I you'll see that every human being has his shell and that you must take the shell into account. By the shell I mean the whole envelope of circumstances. There's no such thing as an isolated man or woman; we're all each of us made up of some cluster of appurtenances. What shall we call our 'self'? Were does it begin? where does it end? It overflows into everything that belongs to us--and then it flows back again... One's self--for other people--is one's expression of one's self; and one's house, one's furniture, one's garment, the books one reads, the company one keeps--these things are all expressive." (207)

In contrast, Isabel replies, "I don't know whether I succeed in expressing myself, but I know that nothing else expresses me." (208) And thus we have two opposite viewpoints of how the self is constructed that are set up very intriguingly. A footnote from this page helpfully quotes a passage from Henry James' brother William, the famous psychologist, who writes that "properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him." Whoa! How do you express yourself truely, if there are so many "selfs" for you to express? Are you doomed to forever be divided into American Doll Possee fragments, or will you ever add up to a complete and wholly integrated person? And, more intriguingly, what does this imply about the problem of understanding--not just understanding yourself or other people, but understanding and interpreting ART (which can be understood as the expression of a self). AAAAAAAAAA! Now do you see why this novel isn't the typical Victorian-Realist marriage plot?!

Because this novel is so INTENSELY focused on the thoughts and meditations of the main female character (The Portrait of a Lady is an extremely appropriate title), I think the whole novel can be understood as an attempt to deal with the problem of the self: how to form it, understand it, and then communicate that self effectively with others. There's a lot of discussion about the importance of experience in this book, and I think that relates back to this idea of how do you go about constituting the self, which I see as Isabel's main struggle throughout the book. I remember reading in Derrida's The Truth of Painting, way back in junior the year, something about how the frame of a painting doesn't just close off the artwork, but also opens it up, because we're forced to view the artowrk in whatever context in which it's been presented, which in turn prevents our understanding of the artwork from ever being complete. I don't know if I'm remembering this correctly, but the basic gist is that the supposedly firm lines that "close" a portrait are ultimately misleading. This is what makes Gilbert Osmond such a creepazoid, he tries to define and trap Isabel in this aesthetic wifey little role (it goes deeper than that--doesn't it always in Henry James?--but again, that's the gist of it).

The last thing I want to touch base on is how Henry James is definitely not the author you'd read if you wanted to get an idea of how most people (that is, the working class as opposed to the rich and upper middle) were living--the coal miners, the tramps, the dishwashers, George Orwell's peeps, basically. Henry James' characters are such spoiled brats--I mean, these people really don't do anything. They just travel around Europe, looking at old ruins and collect art, in an attempt to--what? Better themselves? Improve their souls? One of the commendable aspects of Portrait of a Lady is that there are characters like Isabel and her dying cousin Ralph who actually ask themselves the essential question of what is the freaking point.

But typing up this blog entry has been a bit of a surreal experience, because I'm also simultaneously Skype chatting with someone from the microfinance office where I'll be interning this fall (yay multitasking!), in an attempt to sort out my living situation there (it looks like I'll be staying with the family of someone who works in the office, which is super bien). In the Egyptian section of the British Museum, there was this little information card talking about the lives of the farmers and workers who worked on the land and were sometimes employed on state construction projects (if my computer wasn't retarded, I'd upload the photo). To quote from the plaque: "They were not wealthy enough to be buried in decorated tombs. They were illiterate, and so their names and experiences are almost entirely lost, as in many societies. The study of human remains in poor cementeries is the only way of learning of the short lives of most ancient Egyptians."

It's weird to me, reading these Victorian novels of marriage and intrigue and travel through Europe, and think about all the short, illiterate lives that are being ignored, that have been lost to time. I think it's incredibly stupid and ignorant to criticize books for what they're not about, and that's definitely not what I'm doing. I just wanted to comment that it was just an interesting experience, to wander through these boulevards in Paris built by kings and dictators, to go home to my friend's apartment and read about characters doing the same thing, and now, I'm trying to sort out an internship where I'll be working with people whose lives definitely do not revolve around questions like "should I go to the British Museum today or the National Gallery?", or, "how is an art work simultaneously 'closed' by the artist for a deliberate aesthetic effect, yet opened up to interpretation by the audience?", or, "when we say we 'like' a painting, or a book, what does that mean? Does it mean that there was a certain 'truth' shining through the painting or the words on the page that somehow got through to us? And if so, how? How do you reveal the truth of a work of art, if the artwork itself is concerned with showing how it is difficult and even dangerous to try to limit things to a single mesage or meaning?" And so on and so forth. Yeah.

To close, here is another portrait of a lady, from the website I'll soon be working for.

Are you looking at her? Or is she looking at you?

life, London, this moment in June

2009-09-06T12:50:00.000-07:00

I just got back last Wednesday from a two week trip to England and Paris to visit friends and family. While walking through the streets of London, through Trafalgar Sqaure and down Tottenham Court Road (how grandiose and epic and historical those names sound!), I loved reciting fragments from Mrs. Dalloway to myself, muttering these precious sounding phrases under my breath: what she loved, life, London, this moment in June. What a lark! What a plunge! Feeling as she did, that something awful was about to happen. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so. (3-4) I felt secretive and powerful, walking around and muttering these phrases absentmindedly to myself, as though I was one of those ancient pagan female magicians mentioned in the footnotes of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, casting a spell of protection, or maybe just chanting a mantra.

She always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. (8)

This is such a beautifully written book that no matter how many times I reread it, it never fails to shock me that Virginia Woolf killed herself. This is the number one book that I think of when I think of joyful writing, of writing that hums and writhes and wriggles in ecstasy from sheer joy and lust for life. It seems so puzzling that someone who could have written this also simultaneously decided that life, this life, was not worth living.

This book reminds me of something Tori Amos said about her most recent album: she said that she wanted it to be like a snapshot of time of what it was like to be a woman in this day and age. In Amos' case, she's chronicling the economic recession; in Woolf's case, her focus is on Victorian society of post World War I. I'll never really "know" what it was like to be a woman in that time and age (let's stay away from the giant can of metaphysical worms). But Mrs. Dalloway is as engaging of a snapshot of a very specific historical period as they come. There's tons of stuff to unpack here about post World War I society trauma and repression--you can easily make a parallel to the Iraq War, too (that's another thing about this book that really got me: how easily you can apply it to life today, how contemporary it feels). "It was over; thank Heaven--over," (5) Mrs. Dalloway thinks of the War, but of course it's not (it never is), not for anybody.

No character better embodies the sense of the war not being over than the interestingly named Septimus Smith (his name is reminiscent of numbers, which feels important in a novel where the passage of time, the constant ebb and flow of "the hour, irrevocable" (117) and the ringing of the clocks is constantly emphasized). Septimus seems to suffer from such an excess of feeling that at times it sounds like an extremely bad acid trip: leaves were alive; trees were alive. And the leaves being connected by millions of fibres with his own body; ... the spaces between them were as significant as the sounds. This problem of "over-feeling" seems to emerge as a reaction to his initial condition following the death of his friend Evans in the war, in which he "could not feel." And then, with such hyper awareness and overdose of sensory input, it's little wonder that Septimus found it difficult to get through the day.

Septimus' plight made me think of Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception,: "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite." That seems to be Septimus' problem; the infinity and deeper meaning of everything appears as too glaringly apparent to him, to the point where he can't condense his experiences or make any sense of them anymore and they just become overwhelming. Upon viewing a motor car that contains someone in the Royal Family (perhaps the Queen? It's never made clear), for Septimus it appears to him as "this gradual drawing together of everything to one centre before his eyes, as if some horror had almost come to the surface and was about to burst into flames, terrified him. The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames. It is I who am blocking the way, he thought." (15) He almost sees the centre, but not quite. At the moment when Septimus throws himself off the balcony, he cries out "I'll give it to you!" (149) Is he referring to this ungraspable center, always out of his reach?

In the end, death seems to be the only way of bringing it all together, as Peter Walsh muses while the ambulance carrying Septimus' dead body whirs by: "a moment in which things came together; this ambulance; and life and death." (152) Mrs. Dalloway discovers this for herself as well, upon hearing of Septimus' death of her party: "Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death." (184) In the end, Mrs. Dalloway "felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away... He made her feel the beauty, made her feel the fun."(186) With this sentence, I feel like Woolf herself is saying that she's glad that it is Smith who is doomed, the artist, madman and poet, as opposed to Mrs. Dalloway, the socialite everywoman, the woman of the earth. In Mrs. Dalloway, death emerges as a moment with a potential for understanding and knowledge, however brief. As Muriel Spark wrote, "Remember you must die," and as Ali Smith writes (in her Mrs. Dalloway rewrite of sorts Hotel World, a highly recommended book), "Remember you must live, remember you most leave, remainder you mist leaf."

This is a good book to read every other year or so, especially around the time when you grow a year older. (I just celebrated my birthday a few days ago.) There's a lot of juicy "what-have-you-done-with-your-life? times-a-passin'!" passages. "How remorseless life is! A little job at Court!" (74) Remorseless indeed. It's scary, overcoming so-called banality. I think that's Woolf's main point by making the titular character someone who could easily be mistaken for someone shallow and lacking depth: a housewife who likes to give parties, "the perfect hostess," who at the same time is capable of these most incredibly poetic reveries:

"a grown woman coming to her parents who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she neared them, grew large and larger in her arms, until it became a whole life, a complete life, which she put down by them and said, 'This is what I have made of it! This!' And what had she made of it? What, indeed?" (43)

What, indeed. How do you define what makes a meaningful or non-banal life? To whose judgement do you need to subject it to? How do you know that you're making the right decisions, that you're taking your life in the direction it needs to go in?

Then (she had felt it only this monring) there was the terror; the overwhelming incapacity, one's parents giving it into one's hands, this life, to be lived to the end, to be walked with serenely; there was in the depths of her heart an awful fear. (185)

I dunno. It may sound cliched and silly, but lately I'm really digging the mindset that it is REALLY not about the destination at all, it's gotta be about the path. It sounds so mundane and banal when you put it like that. What I mean is that we really don't get anywhere. We're just on the road. You can get some things, some goals, some destinations you'd like to arrive at in your life--but you will never get it all. There is no idealized plateau where everything is suddenly going to click into place for you, click, and all of a sudden everything makes sense and you wake up every morning feeling content and fufilled and satisfied and you never have to worry about feeling otherwise. I mean, c'mon--that is NEVER going to happen (as this excellent clip discusses). That is as utopian of a vision of humanity as you're going to get.

But I like what Richard Dalloway thinks about his days as an idealistic youth:

"He had been a Socialist, in some sense a failure--true. Still, the future of civlisation lies, he thought, in the hands of young men like that; of young men such as he was, thirty years ago; with their love of abstract principals; getting books sent out to them all the way from London to a peak in the Himalayas; reading science; reading philosophy. The future lies in the hands of young men like that, he thought." (50)

I couldn't agree with him more.

Still, the sun was hot. Still, one got over things. Still, life had a way of adding day to day. (64)

During this particular reread, another theme that stood out for me was the idea of simultaneous connection and isolation between people. I especially like the part where Richard Dalloway visualizes his connection to his wife as a "spider's thread of attachment." (115) It feels important when Richard buys Clarissa flowers instead of jewelry for a present and embarks on a grandiose mission, "walking across London to say to Clarissa in so many words that he loved her." (115) Richard confronts the problem of how difficult it is to say exactly what you mean: "The time comes when it can't be said; one's too sigh to say it." He thus comes to embody a very modern problem concerning language, that "it is a thousand pities never to say what one feels." (116) Or more specifically, to be unable as weel ignorant as to how to say what you feel. How do you give words to a feeling like "I love you" in face of a dilemma such as Richard's: "thousands of poor chaps, with all their lives before them, shovelled together, already half forgotten; it was a miracle. Here he walking across London to say to Clarissa in so many words that he loved her." Needless to say, when the moment comes, he fails at his mission. But it feels somewhat redemptive that on the last page, Richard becomes capable of telling his daughter that he is proud of her: "He had not meant to tell her, but he could not help telling her." (194) So there's some hope there, at the end, of being capable of speaking, of putting feelings into words.

some names

2009-08-15T08:00:00.000-07:00

(These names have all been changed.)

Sara, her mouth always half-open, barely able to walk, her head always flopping around like she was unsure how to keep it mounted on her body. Unable to really talk other than to say her sister's name over and over again: “Where Wanda?” Instead of being at the club, this girl almost certainly needed to be involved in some kind of developmental therapy program.

Wanda, the girl with the biggest brown eyes you'll ever see in your life. “What did you do today, Wanda?” I'd always asked. She'd think for a moment, then reply: “Pwayed.”

Taylor, the 6-year-old with a lisp who always ran with his hands held in a certain kind of way that made you think that he was almost definitely going to grow up to be homosexual. He loved singing a song about ants on a log. Playing Patty Cake was enough to send him into convulsions of ecstasy.

Jocelyn, one of my best buds at the Club. A little headstrong and stubborn. She had this way of hugging that consisted more of climbing all over your body like it was rock-climbing wall. When she smiled it looked like her teeth were all crowded together, like there wasn't enough room in her mouth for them all.

Alexis E., either Jocelyn's cousin, brother or foster sibling (it was always hard to tell family relations at the Club). “HI JUJEE!” he would always screech out whenever he saw me. Also a hanger-oner.

Brian A., one of my earliest buds at the Club. He was always crying over everything. I fetched a ladder to get his bouncy ball out of the nasty-ass vent. He wanted to be a tattoo artist when he grew up and was always drawing dragons and other crazy designs on the back of scrap paper. He was also completely obsessed with and addicted to playing computer games.

Alexis V., my earliest nemesis at the Club. Two suspensions later, he is pretty sweet. I think I just got off on the wrong foot early on with him just because of my own early nervousness and uncertainty about how to work with kids (needless to say, I've definitely learned a lot.) Our relationship thawed from him always mimicking what I said in a retarded-sounding voice and shouting “come here baby!” to us playing Speed and him helping me to make ice cream with the younger kids.

Adam, the 6-year-old who was taken away from his mom 'cause she was sexually abusing him. I learned this from his aunt after several incidents in which she had to be called because he kept unzipping his pants and rubbing himself on other kids. “Give me a kiss!” he was always saying to me, puckering his lips up. God, the whole situation was just so wrong in so many ways. Imagine how much therapy this kid is going to need later on.

Daniela, the sweetest angel girl. Scars on her face from the time she fell off her uncle's motorcycle. When she first showed up with the scabs I was speechless, thinking that someone (parent, schoolmate) had beat the shit out of her (which is usually the case when kids show up with injuries.) Always gave tours to the new kids and parents visiting the Club. She's gonna grow up to be something, just you wait and see.

Matthew, one of the autistic kids. Always shouted “Boo!” at me. He liked asking me, “Julie, Knock Knock,” and then responding to my “Who's there?” by saying things like “Do You Know Where Tinky Town Is?” Something about the way he spoke just demands capital letters.

Colin, one of the Club's biggest characters. Another one of the autistic kids (probably Asperger's.) When he's sweet, he is very, very sweet (except for his unfortunate boob-grabbing stage), but when he gets into one of his tempers, he is just wretched. This is the kid who screamed at me “You're the meanest staff EVER!” before throwing a chair at me. A wonderfully creative mind though—so imaginative. One of the best ways to get him to go to meeting was to tell him that he needed to go on an undercover mission for the Autobots (I know more Transformers lingo than I ever thought I would need). He's probably going to grow up to be an artist or author, or video game designer (maybe all three.)

Jonah, yet another one of the autistic kids. Definitely, definitely Aspergers. They were my homeboys, I guess. Glasses with a Pillsbury doughboy-like face. Man, this kid was difficult to deal with. A biter and a hitter. All he ever wanted to do was play on the computer or talk about Pokemon. Very smart though. He liked to run over to me making squeaking noises and give me a big hug.

Benito and Miguel, brothers: Benito so fat with his mouth permanently half open. Always showing up with their identical new shoes and haircuts, buzzcuts with star designs.

Alex and Francisco, brothers. Bullies, yet capable of being so sweet and creative. During my spiel about not picking flowers in people's yards while walking to the park, he raised his hand and said that he would like to add something, and told the other kids that they shouldn't pick flowers in the park because they were planted there by the federal government. Francisco had a shy, soft-spoken way of slightly dragging his feet behind everyone and absolutely loved soccer.

I could go on and on. The main thing is the names, all of them, so many of them. Araceli and Roman. Samantha and Florencia. Orlando and Salvador. Noe C., with his big smile. Bethlehem and Fatinah from Ethiopia. “I need my Julie!” Fatinah would always say, running over to give me a hug. Nate and Nubia from Somalia. Brisa from Guatemala, who left her plastic bag full of her wet towels and clothes at the park that I walked all the way back to fetch. Henry C. from Guatemala, so charming and yet so troubled, capable of calling someone a motherfucker and socking them, then laughing it up and hugging his skinny little arms around my waist minutes later. He disappeared; I wonder where he went. Chubby Juan, chubby Jesus and his skinny, spiky-haired eternally trouble-making younger brother Ziggy. (“ZIGGY!” is the most common shout you'll hear echoing off the Club hallways). James and Tristen, twins, always drinking out of the toilet. Aldo, Oscar and Leti, triplets. Alma with the unpronounceable last name, only 6-years-old and her face framed by dark hair, it was already clear she was going to grow up into a real beauty. Jacqui, all business-like, sharing her food (mostly spicy Cheetos) with the staff. Citlali, so pretty and such a quiet, well-behaved kid, who loved looking up the names of faeries on the Internet. Rigoberto, so good-natured and easy going, with this weird layer of dried skin circling all around his lips, I don't know if they were mega chapped or what. Pablo and Marta, who could barely speak English. Marcus, Alicia and A.J., siblings always traveling in a clique together, so polite yet withdrawn. That's the case with so many of the middle-schoolers; their social cliques just become their entire world, and everything else (school, family, the future) just falls by the wayside.

So many kids, most of them related to each other somehow. I never, ever thought I would remember the names and faces and individual personalities of 400+ children. I've been reading a lot of Borges, Piglia and Cortazar short stories lately, which have appropriately mirrored that labyrinthic feeling. There's a lot of stuff in there about circles without centers, doubles, mirrors, mysterious deaths, tigers roaming without explanation through houses, ghosts without faces. It all feels strangely and compelling appropriate as I get ready to leave for England on Monday with Corey. I want to bring Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and Mrs. Dalloway along with me to reread; somewhere along the way I want to find the time to read Nabokov's Pale Fire and Calvino's If On A Winter's Night A Traveler. I want to continue exploring labyrinths in fiction, I guess.

I really like this quote from Borges' short story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Terius": "The metaphysicians of Tlön are not looking for truth, nor even for an approximation of it; they are after a kind of amazement. They consider metaphysics a branch of fantastic literature. They know that a system is nothing more than the subordination of all the aspects of the universe to some one of them... Tlön may be a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth plotted by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men."

Will I ever decipher the labyrinth of the time I spent with these kids?

the circle game

2009-08-09T13:50:00.000-07:00

There is always something terrifying about purchasing plane tickets, in all their stark finality:

September 12th- Fly from PDX to L.A.
- Visit Cara, Laura, other California people (Ana?)
September 16th- bus to San Luis Obispo to visit my Grandma
September 20th- bus to San Francisco
September 21st-25th- Intern training in San Francisco
September 26th- Fly from L.A. to Laredo
11pm that night CROSS BORDER INTO MEXICO (either that or sleep in the airport)
December 23rd- Fly from Laredo to PDX

August and September are gonna be some crazy months. Corey and I leave for England on August 17th. We get back on September 2nd. I work for one more week, and then I leave. AAAAAAH! Change can be scary. But change is good, I think.

I've been doing this thing since April where every day I write down in a little notebook What I Did That Day. No analysis, no introspection, just bare naked facts. My drive to record things amazes me, sometimes: how much do I really need? Paper journal, livejournal, this blog, and this notebook? Anyway, it's interesting to flip backwards and see What I Did on a certain day of the month. For example, here is What I Did on the 9th:

April 9th- sick day. Sleep a lot.

May 9th- Wake up early to go to coast with Solange and Aiden [visiting friends from Paris]. Long drive to Cannon beach. Play music from ipod. Beach windy, weather beautiful. Farmer's market in morning. Gumbo for dinner delish. Catch 4 fat mice in traps.

June 9th- Wake up from nightmare of falling in black void. Corey comforts me. Alarm at 6.20 AM. Roll out of bed and catch Max. Buy sandwiches at Safeway, $33. Big sandwich makes me sick, leave it by library for homeless. Arrive at work, program planning with Allie + Jose in Learning Center. All computers broken, I greedily grab #9, the only one that works. Trip to Starbucks with Alex for a soy latte. Talk about her caffeine overdose and hospitalization.

July 9th- Wake up late, 6.20. Bagel + coffee breakfast. Write sketch of book review and start typing up story. Take kids to Shute Park, Plaid Pantry field trip to buy seeds for bird feeders. Animal presentation by Zoo people underwhelming. Take 10-12 year olds to park in afternoon, Alexis left behind, cries. Long Max journey home. Caught without ticket by Max officer, given ticket. Cry hysterically on phone with Corey, feel better. Hang out with Laura at Laughing Planet and Hotboxx as she leaves for CA the next day.

And for an even more entertaining reference, here is What I Did in August of 2008, when we were in Ecuador!

August 9th- Rainy in morning. Wet boat ride to Cojimies, [seaside town where the Corvina or Sea Bass festival was taking place] meet up with Mariana [our tour guide friend]. 4-hour lunch. Beer and rum. [I didn't mention this, but Corey had the most amazing lunch, a soup filled with lobsters and crab and shrimp and Queen conch. Mmmmmmmmmmm.] B+J [Travel mates] leave for Quito. Corey and I watch volleyball game, dance to salsa band. Chris [other travel mate] harassed by drunk man. Bed early at 12:30pm.

Man, isn't the passage of time crazy?! I've been really fascinated with that lately: how time passes, who you were three months ago, three years ago, ten years ago. I was talking with my sister yesterday about 1999 and it's interesting the things we came up with when discussing what that year meant to us. The year we got really into movies saw Fight Club, American Beauty, Boys Don't Cry. The year we first started listening to Tori Amos. The start of 8th grade. Oh man. What do you think of, when you think of who and where you were in 1999?

Tori Amos' cover of Joni Mitchell's "The Circle Game" started playing on my shuffle just now as I type this, which is a little eerie. "We're captive on a carousel of time," indeed. I like this quote from this NY Times blog on happiness, on the difficulty of happiness and being in time:

"To really live is to accept that you live “for the time being,” and to fully enter that moment of time. Living is that, not building up an identity or a set of accomplishments or relationships, though of course we do that too. But primarily, fundamentally, to live is to embrace each moment as if it were the first, last, and all moments of time... I find it impressive how thoroughly normal it is be so tentative about the time of our lives, or so asleep within it, that we miss it entirely. Most of us don’t know what it actually feels like to be alive. We know about our problems, our desires, our goals and accomplishments, but we don’t know much about our lives."

This emphasis on the present moment links in nicely with the quote from Rayuela which I used to close the last entry: "We must establish ourselves in the present once more." I think the central struggle of "Rayuela" (which I finally finished last week) is exactly that, how to fully enter the present moment of time. Oh god, I don't even know where to begin saying even a quarter of what there is to say about this book. (I feel like so many of my reviews begin with that sentiment.) I do know that I am definitely going to have to read this again. (Again, another phrase that is popping up more and more often here.) What do I say about Morelli, the author-like figure who dominates the 99 "expendable" chapters that readers "hopscotch" through?

My favorite thing about this novel was definitely the rapport between the groups of friends. Cortázar does an excellent job of capturing the rambling dialogue of friendships that have lasted a long time. This characteristic is closely related to the other aspect I liked best about the novel, which was how much it reminded me of Bolaño. As I wrote earlier, characters sitting around, drinking, bitching, wandering, pontificating: it all feels very relevant to the mid-20's, post-college lifestyle.

I have no idea where I read this (somewhere online--I swear!), but I read a quote by Cortázar, in which he said that "Rayuela" was his homage to people of his bohemian generation, and how they dealt with whole getting old and feeling irrelevant and purposeless. He also said that it was interesting that it was the young Latin American youth of the 60's who ended up really connecting with his book, as opposed to his generation. (I am gonna try to find the source for this quote, I swear.)

I dunno, it all makes me think of this letter from my favorite advice column, and how the advice he gives is really true. When I read old entries from this blog, or my paper journal, or my livejournal, or any of the 1001 ways that I've tried to record all the craziness that goes on in the small box of consciousness that I call Myself and My World, what keeps coming up for me, again and again, is how I've changed. In this case, change is definitely, definitely a good thing. I am so unspeakably and inexplicably glad and relieved that for whatever reason, over the past year I have significantly drifted away from the crushing pressure of the assumptions that Cary Tennis critiques in his column. Doing well at tasks does notbring us happiness. These preconceived, ridiculous standards and notions of what it means to "succeed" and be a successful college graduate are just... they make me want to vomit in my mouth a little. I'm smart enough to know now that it's not a game... but if it were, I'd definitely say that I'm winning. (And not in what you'd consider the traditional way, either.)

And so again: here's to not always looking to the future and instead embracing the prsent. It's Wacky Water Week with the 8 & 9-year-olds this week at the Club, and it's gonna be a week they'll never forget.

Rayuela, Part I

2009-07-26T11:15:00.000-07:00

It's so hot in Portland right now there's little else I want to do other than sit in front of the fan and eat popsicles from the little Mexican tiendita. Corey and I will probably swallow our hypochondria and go swimming in the public pool down the street later this afternoon.

In a way, I guess it's good that this feels like an exceptionally hot summer in Portland (according to Corey and other long-time PDX dwellers; this is only the second summer I've spent in Portland). Last week I learned that for my internship in the fall with Kiva, I'll be interning with Fundación para la Vivienda Progresiva (FVP), in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. So it looks like I'm heading back to the U.S.-Mexican border after all... interesting how these things work out. I'm going to have to make myself some cut-offs and buy some more wife-beaters to prepare for life in the desert.

I like how my life's narrative is increasingly becoming defined by the quest for the random and marginal... I'm not exactly sure how all these experiences I'm seeking are supposed to add up to make a coherent, cohesive whole, but then again I'm not sure if I want it to.

This quest for the weird and marginal feels particularly relevant to me, maybe due to the current Big Book I'm reading, Julio Cortázar's Rayuela (or Hopscotch). My sister read this book way back in the day in high school, and then read it again three years ago in Spain. She told me that although she enjoyed it when she read it the first time and knew with certainty that it was a great book, she didn't "get it." As I read it for myself now, I can easily see how there's a lot of stuff here that would make a nice big whooshing sound as it flew over a ninth-grader's head (like what happenned to me and Lolita when I read it in eighth grade and totally didn't "get" the beautiful, erotic love story). I've been reading it in Spanish, and while it's been slow going, almost frustratingly so at times, it's been much more rewarding than reading it in English.

The most exciting aspect of this book is its similarity to the Choose Your Own Adventure series. As the little note by the author on the first page informs us, there are two different ways of reading the novel. In Reading #1, you can read it straight through to Chapter 56, “at the close of which are three garish little stars which stand for the words The End.” (All excerpts from the novel in English are taken from Gregory Rabassa's 1986 translation.) In Reading #2, you begin with Chapter 73 and then hop around the chapters (including Chapters 57-155, described as “expendable), based on the little number printed at the end of each chapter. If you confront the list at the beginning, the one that lists the order in which you'll read all the chapters for Reading #2, you'll discover that you'll eventually be suspended in an infinite loop, hopping back and forth between Chapter 58 and Chapter 131. I'm only on Chapter 37, ending Park One (Del lado de alla/“From the Other Side”) and beginning Part Two (Del lado de aca/“From This Side”), but I'm interested in seeing where I'm going to end up inevitably suspended. It's all really quite ingenious.

Other competitors for the Trippy WTF literary devices category include chapter 28, which skips from page 162 to page 179, without explanation. As this is the chapter when an important character is found dead, I'm assuming these missing pages have something to do with this. To make things even weirder, in the English translation I have checked out for reference, these pages are included. I haven't read them for fear of “spoiling” something that will later be revealed to me as the book progresses, but still, how strange! Where did these pages come from? Are they still waiting for me somewhere, lurking in the back of the pages I have yet to read? Where on earth did the English translator get them from? What a weird situation. At least it highlights the dramatic contrasts that can be found between reading a book in the original language versus the translation (the other translation problem I have with is the translation of “papas fritas” as “fried potatoes”--wouldn't this be French fries? What do you call “fried potatoes” in France?).

Chapter 34 is also an excellent candidate for one of the weirdest reading experiences of my life. So that you can try it out for yourself, here's an excerpt:

"IN September of 1880, a few months after the demise of my
AND the things she reads, a clumsy novel, in a cheap edition
father, I decided to give up my business activities, transferring
besides, but you wonder how she can get interested in things
them to another house in Jerez whose standing was as solvent
like this. To think that she's spent hours on end reading tasteless
as that of my own; I liquidated all the credits I could, rent out
stuff like this and plenty of other incredible things, Elle and
the properties, transferred my holdings and inventories, and
France Soir, those sad magazines Babs lends her. And moved to
moved to Madrid to take up residence there. My uncle (in truth
Madrid to take up residence there, I can see how after you swal-
my father's first cousin), Don Rafael Bueno de Guzman y Ataide,
low four or five pages you get in the groove and can't stop read-"

(Rabassa 191) If you figured out that you're supposed to read this by skipping every other line, then you're a lot smarter than me (to be fair I was reading it in Spanish, and I kept plunging gamely on with the hope that this was some kind of avant-garde rap and that it would begin to make sense to me eventually. The broken-up words like “swal-” and “read-” were what eventually gave it away). How clever, no? As you go on reading this chapter, you realize that the odd lines are from one of the trashy novels that Magda loves to read, and the even lines are Horacio's interior monologue as he reads the very same lines that you've just read, criticizing the book as he reads it (like with the Madrid sentence in the passage above). How clever, no? I don't know if I've ever come across a better attempt to reproduce the experience of reading, by means of spatial arrangement right there on the page. On the last page the lines from the trashy novel drop off and you're left with Horacio, imagining himself and Magda wandering around the city but never meeting, “two points lost in Paris that go from here to there, from there to here, drawing their picture, putting on a dance for nobody, not even for themselves, an interminable pattern without any meaning.” (197) There you have Part 1 of Rayuela in a nutshell: aimless wanderings, a quest for a missing center, the lack of meaning, the concern with geometry.

This is a good book to be reading following the graduation of college. There's a lot of sitting around and Bolano-esque talking, smoking cigarettes, drinking, wandering through the streets of Paris and the eating of fried eggs and potatoes (I love it when authors inform us of what their characters like to eat; Bolano and Murakami are masters of this). There's a lot in the book about wandering around without any direction. The main narrator so far is Horacio Oliveira, an Argentinian writer who lives in Paris with his Uruguayan girlfriend, La Maga. He spends a lot of time either walking around Paris with la Maga, hanging out with his group of bohemian friends who call themselves “El Club,” and having weird and random adventures, like in Chapter 23 when he attends a concert by an eccentric modernist pianist. Part 1 ends with a death, Maga's disappearance, and Horacio's Dante-like descent into degradation and sordidness, which ends with him getting deported back to Argentina. We'll see what Part 2 has in store for him.

Horacio is definitely looking for something. As la Maga tells him, “I think I understand you... You're looking for something you don't know. I've been doing the same thing and I don't know what it is either. But they're two different things.” (76) I like the part when Horacio ponders that “this mate might show me where the center is.” (78) There's this the very Borges-esque thread running throughout the novel, the Argentinean preoccupation with the search for an absent center, the desire to come back to an origin, the desire to understand, the desire for meaning. Ironically enough, while searching for these very structured concepts, Horacio also stubbornly rejects “the idea of unity [which] was worrying to him because it seemed so easy to fall into the worst traps.” (79) Much is made of Maga's lack of intellectualism, but as Oliviera observes, while he imposes “the false order that hides chaos, pretending that I was dedicated to a profound existence while all the time it was one that barely dipped it toes into the terrible waters. There are metaphysical rivers, she swims in them ... I describe and define and desire those rivers, but she swims in them. I look for them, find them, observe them from the bridge, but she swims in them. And she doesn't know it.” (95) There's a lot to unpack there, but suffice it to say, it sure does sound pretty. There's also a lot of Buddhist-related meditations on death and connectedness and the importance of the present moment, which surprised me.

There's lots more I could say about this, but I think I'll leave it at that, mainly it's currently the hottest part of the day and it looks like we'll be going swimming after all. Time to return to the present moment.

“My hand pokes around the bookcase... I take down Roberto Arlt... Today fascinates me, but always from the point of view of yesterday (did I say phascinate?), and that's how at my age the past becomes present and the present is a strange and confused future where boys in baggy sweaters and long-haired girls drink their cafes-cremes and pet each other with the slow gracefulness of cats or plants.
We must fight against this.
We must establish ourselves in the present once more.” (94)

mid-year review

2009-07-13T16:49:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd do a little mid-year review of the books I've read to date.

Amazing: 2666 (Bolaño), Ghosts (Cesar Aira), Last Evenings on Earth (Bolaño), La casa verde (Mario Vargas Llosa), El juguete rabioso (Roberto Arlt), A Mercy (Toni Morisson), The Seven Madmen (Roberto Arlt), Revolutionary Road (Richard Yates), Los Rios Profundos (José Maria Arguedas), The Ministry of Special Cases (Nathan Englander)

Good: Distant Star (Bolaño), Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (Anne Tyler), The Wild Palms (William Faulkner), Keep the Aspidistra Flying (George Orwell), By Night in Chile (Bolaño), Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, The Easter Parade (Richard Yates), Nazi Literature in the Americas (Bolaño)

Trippy, Need to Reread: An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, How I Became a Nun (Cesar Aira), The Name of the Rose (Umberto Eco), Los adioses (Onetti), The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz)

Philip K. Dick: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Ubik, Flow My Tears the Policeman Said

Good Non-fiction: This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Drew Gilpin Faust), True Crime: Rodolfo Walsh and the Role of the Intellectual in Latin American Politics (Michael McCaughan), When Things Fall Apart (Pema Chodron), Deep Economy (Bill McKibben), The Meaning of Life (Terry Eagleton), Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (Jon Lee Anderson), Team of Rivals: the Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (Doris Kearns Goodwin), First Stop in the New World (David Lida)

Comics: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Alan Moore), The Dark Knight Returns (Frank Miller), Understanding Comics: the Invisible Art (Scott McCloud), Fables Volume 1: Legends in Exile (Bill Willingham)

Ultimate Comfort Food: Eat, Pray, Love (Elizabeth Gilbert)

Comfort Food (Sort of Bad But You Enjoy it Tremendously Despite Yourself): Deaf Sentence (David Lodge), Pilgrims (Elizabeth Gilbert)

Okay, I Guess... Sort of Boring, Actually: Banker to the Poor (Muhammed Yunus), Home Truths (David Lodge), The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Sherman Alexie)

Just plain bad: Thirteen Moons (Charles Frazier), Dry (Augusten Burroughs), The Price of Fire (Benjamin Dangl), The Last Full Measure (Jeff Shaara)

Re-read: Siddhartha (Herman Hesse), The Accidental Tourist, Saint Maybe (Anne Tyler), Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card), Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (J.K. Rowling)

I Can't Believe It Took Me This Long to Re-read This After 6th Grade When I Obviously Didn't Get It. Amazing Read: Lolita (Nabokov)

Read in English after having first read it in Spanish. Amazing Read: Artificial Respiration (Ricardo Piglia), Don Quixote (Cervantes, Edith Grossman translation)

Read in the Boys & Girls Club during brief, rare intervals of desperately snatched peace: The Tales of Beedle the Bard (J.K. Rowling)

Couldn't/Didn't Finish: Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen), Barefoot Gen (Keiji Nakazawa), Dreams from my Father (Barack Obama), The Means of Reproduction (Michelle Goldberg)

Yeesh.

Aira's ghosties

2009-07-12T13:39:00.000-07:00

Little kids used to scare me. Though maybe "intimidate" is a better word. Kids are so emotional, you know? These little events upset us so much and remain deeply ingrained in our memories and psyches as moments of momentous injustice that we never, ever forget. I remember crying as a 5-year-old when a girl wouldn't share her potato chips with me (we're friends now on a social networking site, another testament to the weirdness that is the Internet). I guess I really, really wanted those potato chips (it was also the first day of kindergarten, so I was probably already pretty emotionally drained). There are so many moments at my job when I'm dealing with a kid who is just incredibly upset by something that seems so trivial to an adult (someone cutting ahead of you in a line is a big one).

The kids themselves in this novel aren't as scary as the situation they're in. Childhood was an important theme in Aira's How I Became a Nun (perhaps more important than I realized when I first read it) and plays a similarly prominent role in the most recent of his works that I've read,Ghosts. Ghosts is my favorite of the three Aira novles I've read, maybe because it's the one written in the most realistic tone. The focus of the novel is on a Chilean immigrant family living in an apartment building under construction. The father is the night watchmen. A lot of references are made to his heavy drinking, but all in all, this feels like a happy family. The children run up and down the stairs, play in the empty swimming pool, but an uneasy, ominous feeling hangs over everything.

And then there are the ghosts. Aira's treatment of the ghosts is what makes this novella worth reading. It's an understatement to say that I've never read anything quite like it before. They first appear sitting on the sharp metallic edge of the giant satellite dish, "on which no bird would have dared to perch, three completely naked men were sitting, with their faces turned up to the mdday sun; no one saw them, of course." Here is the first full descriptive passages of the titular ghosts, from page 12:

The naked men shouted louder and louder as if competing with each other. They were dirty like builders, and had the same kind of bodies: rather stocky, solid, with small feet, and rough hands. Their toes were spread widely, like wild men's toes. They were behaving like badly brought-up children. But they were adults. A builder who happenned to be passing by with a bucketful of rubble on the way to the skip stretched out his free hand and, without stopping, grasped the penis of one of the naked men and kept walking. The member stretched out to a length of two yards, and then three, five, ten, all the way to the sidewalk. When he let it go, it slapped back into place with a noise whose weird harmonics went on echoing off the unplastered concrete walls... The two ghosts laughed more loudly and frenetically than ever.

Yeah.

It feels significant that the rich folks that are being given a tour of their future apartment can't see the ghosts, but the workers can. Aira never explains where the ghosts come from, how the workers first saw them, or how long it took for them to get used to naked men floating around the air and through walls. In a way, this is probably the best way to handle the ghosts. It's like an extreme version of Kafka or Garcia Marquez, where we come to accept the fantastical elements of a story because they're written in such a matter-of-fact, realistic way. In the end, we accept the ghosts because the characters accept them in such an unquestioning, logical fashion. For instance, the next passage in which the ghosts appear (after the member-pulling) concerns the father's innovative wine-cooling system: "It consisted of resolutely approaching a ghost and inserting a bottle into his thorax, where it remained, supernaturally balanced. When he went back for it, say two hours later, it was cold." (29) How practical!

The sense of impending doom (or "climate of malevolence") (67) that hangs like a cloud over the children throughout the novel comes not so much from the ghosts (who come off more like a "flying puppet show" than a genuine menance or threat), but from how dangerous it is to have the children roaming around unsupervised in a roofless building with exposed electrical wiring. During a standard trip to the supermarket, the mother is described as "that anomaly, not nearly as rare as is often supposed: a mother immune to the terrifying fantasy of losing her children in a crowd." (23) Is this attitude is an effect of becoming numb to the presence of the ghosts? Needless to say, we're being set up: by the novel's end, one of these kids is done for.

In David Lodge's essay "The Novelist Today: Still at the Crossroads?" from his book The Practice of Writing (I've been on a huge David Lodge kick lately and have several of his lit theory books lying around the house for Corey to trip over and curse), he writes about how fabulation in works such as The Satanic Verses "aims to entertain us with the humorous extravagance and inventiveness of its story while offering this as a kind of metaphor... for the extreme contrasts and conflicts of modern experience." (7) This could be applied very aptly to Aira, especially since humor plays such an important role in his fiction. My favorite character in Ghosts is Abel Reyes, the night watchman's nephew, who embarks upon a Kafkaesque grocery shopping quest to buy lunch for the workmen. I love how he obstinately refuses to use a shopping basket and with arms full of bread and meat picks up the Coca Cola bottles with the index finger and thumb of each hand, "which was all he had free." (20) I'm tempted to type up the entire passage that describes him: he is described as looking eleven years old despite being fifteen, "thin, ugly, awkward." Much is made of his long gross hair that makes him look like a girl: "Being young, foreign and therefore naive, he didn't realize that the Argentineans with long hair belonged to the lowest social stratum, and were precisely those who had condemned themselves to never escape from it... In Chile, [with hair that long] he would have been interviewed on television, or, more likely, thrown into prison." (18) It's funny, but "thrown into prison" catches us off guard slightly, as we ponder how true this might be.

Even though Abdul Reyes sadly disappears from the pages of Ghosts following his shopping expedition, I think his appearence sets up the subplot of Patri, the teenage daughter, whose musings and interactions with the ghosts comes to dominate the second half of the book. The other characters are consistently reminding Patri that she is reaching a "marriageable" age and worrying aloud about her lack of a social life, neither of which seem to interest her much. When her choice of men are people like Abdul Reyes, it's unsurprising that Patri's interest is piqued by the "virility" of the ghosts, who invite her to a party. The results of said party are not spoiler-friendly, and I leave it up to you, dear reader, to discover for yourself. I will say that Patri's interactions with the ghosts definitely represents a sort of crossing-over journey for her, from childhood to womanhood.

That's why I feel like childhood is one of the more important themes of the book. The children are made to seem just as freaky and otherwordly as the ghosts in this novel: "compared to an adult, they were always tiny. They were human in every way, but on another scale. And that alone could render them unrecognizable, or give the impression that they had been produced by the baffling distortions of a dream." (51) For Patri, the ghosts also appear to her "as the opposite of obscenity, as a kind of innocence." (54) I won't attempt to unpack the long interlude about Australian aborigenes and Polynesian interactions with sleep, dreams and rite of passage that takes up a good 10-15 pages in the middle of the book, but anyway, it all feels connected in an important, obscure way (while simultaneously feeling quite random and disorienting).

So what are we left with in the end? Are the ghosts an appropriate metaphor for the impossibility of coping with the modern experience? Are the ghosts spirits of laborers or immigrants who died working on the building, or in one of Argentina's military regimes? The last sentence of the novel is "Man and ghost stared at each other," (139) and apart from Patri, it could be the first time that any of the characters really "sees" the ghosts (and, more significantly, the ghosts see the living). There are quite a number of scenes concerned with "seeing" throughout the novel, such as when the characters turn off the lights during the New Year's Eve party in order to see the stars, or on the next to last sentence of the book, when one of the ghosts hands over a pair of glasses.

Lodge writes that one of the prominent marks of contemporary writing is a pronounced concern with communication, as opposed to self-expression (as with the romantic writers) or with innovation and creation of symbols (as with the modernists). Maybe this concern with communication is the result of genuine communication becoming an illusion; maybe it's the result of the saturation of communications: internet, phones, twitter, blogging, Skype, faxes, e-mail... on and on and on. We live in a hyper-communicative age. I like to think that, like anything, this is a power that can be used for good just as easily as it can be used for evil. For better or worse, it's the world we live in.

We'll just have to see, I guess.

mad clubbing

2009-07-01T21:26:00.000-07:00

This week has been full of

Seemingly endless shopping for supplies at the Dollar Tree and Fred Meyer: measuring spoons, alka seltzer, baking soda, white vinegar, corn starch, half-and-half, plastic zip lock bags...

Playing in the fountain in downtown Hillsboro and getting head-to-toe soaking wet, much to the delight of the kids

Breaking up a fight started by this foster home kid who'd entered this obstinate Beserker rage that reminded me of the Bloodwrath of the badgers from Salamandastron in the Redwall novels.

Life-saving yoga classes in the evening on Alberta street.

Dodging and praying not to run into Max ticket officers. It's like clockwork: I don't buy one, I get checked, I buy one, I'm never checked. I'm just waiting for Laura to get back from Montana so she can help me arrange having one of her college student housemates buy me one for 1/2 the price.

Dealing with the wrath of the kitchen lady (NEVER borrow a kitchen lady's garbage can, and then forget to return it.)

Daily 6AM wake-ups.

Missing Corey, in Las Vegas for the World Series of Poker until Thursday.
Missing talking to my sister about stupid stuff.

Getting tons of e-mails now from Kiva. The internship has officially begun. It's both exciting and a little scary at the same time. Another new chapter and crazy adventure is coming up here pretty soon...

Half-heartedly applying for part-time jobs, even though I really really enjoy my current schedule of 30-35 hours per week. I have yet to work the "standard" 40-hour a week job; those hours sound so crazy and soul-sucking to me...

Learning to play "Once Upon a Dream" from Disney's Sleeping Beauty movie on the keyboards, as well as playing the babyfied version of Moonlight Sonata over and over and over and over again.

Getting helped out by A., probably the Club's biggest problem child, while making ice cream (he helped bring ice cubes from the kitchen). VICTORY! Small steps! Small steps!

Never-ending program planning and refining. Animal Camp is next week for 10-12 year olds and it's been a nightmare to plan for, especially after the two field trip places I had lined up canceled on me. Groan...

I've also been reading Arlt's The Seven Madmen, the 1984 edition translated by Naomi Lindstrom. (Arlt is really ripe for a rippingly good, modern-day translation, in the style of "The Savage Detectives" or Elizabeth Grossman's "Don Quixote.") I've only read Part I, but some stuff has really stood out for me. In Piglia's Respiracion artificial, one of his characters has a long rant about how Arlt is a bad writer, but how that's ok (it goes much more in depth than that). But yeah, that was definitely my first impression of this novel: I could never have gotten away with using some of these similes in the few creative writing classes I took. Take this gem of a sentence: "He felt each spasm of grief hopping like an owl from branch to branch in his misery." (25) How visual is that? Or how about this one: "Like a horse with its guts torn out by a bull, mucking around in its own viscera, every step he took drained his lungs of their lifeblood." (17) O dear.

Strangely enough, the book this has reminded me the most of is Fight Club. The main character, Erdosain, is fired from his dead-end job as a bill collector for embezzling six hundred pesos and seven centavos on the same day that his wife leaves him for a creepy dude called El Capitan. In order to get the money he needs to avoid jail, as well as refind structure and sense to his life, he turns to a strange figure called the Astrologer, who is this book's Tyler Durden mastermind character. The Astrologer has this ridiculously convuluted plan that is never clear: we're not sure if it involves the Ku Klux Klan or Lenin-loving Marxists. In the words of the book cover summary, his plan is "a terrorist conspiracy to help the unemployed that will lure workers to mountain stronghold factories and enslave them. For start-up capital, a chain of bordellos is proposed. To finance these, the murder of Erdosain's wife's rich cousin is planned." Believe me, it's never made as clear as all that.

The main character, Erdosain, reminds me of a hero from a novel by Camus or Satre, bringing way back to memories of middle and high school days of me lying on my stomach on my bed reading dusty, battered books pulled out of my parents' shelves, based on how interesting the cover art looked to me, as well as the novel's fame (Nausea, the Stranger). On page 6, Erdosain is already asking of himself, "What am I doing with my life? What kind of soul do I have? What have I made of my life?" (6-7, 12) That ought to be the first indication that this novel isn't going to be your regular, run-of-the-mill crime caper or pulp fiction that Arlt supposedly adored.

Anyway, in the one of his ponderings, Erdosain makes an interesting point:

"I'm nothing in everyone's eyes. But still, if tomorrow I throw a bomb or murder Barsut, [his wife's rich cousin] suddenly I'm everything, the man who exists, the man for whom generations of criminologists have prepared punishments, jails, and theories... That's really weird! And yet, only crime can affirm my existence, just as evil is all that affirms the presence of man on earth.. Really, this is all so weird. Still, despite everything, there is darkness and mankind's soul is sad. Infinitely sad. But that can't be how life is. If tomorow I figured out why that can't be how life is, I'd pinch myself and disinflate like a balloon spewing out all these lies I'm filled with." (81)

Depressingly enough, this reminded me of the whole Michael Jackson debacle. I can't believe how swiftly news of the frontlines of Iran has been banished from headlines to make room for story after story of a dead entertainer (the L.A. Times receives a particularly big FAIL in this regard--I mean, I know it's L.A., but come on! Seriously?). Also, somewhat depressingly, this passage made me think of some kids where I work. It's tough dealing with troubled individuals from what are defnitely some very messed-up home lives, because so much of your time and energy and attention and focus goes into trying to prevent these kids from having one of their explosive temper tantrums or freakouts (or calming them down when they do). This summer, it feels like there's just been an explosion of eccentric individuals (all worthy of their own novel) at the workplace. Isn't it weird how, in the end, these are the kids who seem to "exist" the most strongly for me, the ones who take up my daytime time and attention to the point where they've even started making appearences in my dreams?

The other thing the novel touches upon that I found interesting (which I won't write about too much now because it's nearing 10:30 and I'm exhausted and need to get to bed) is the characters' search for truth and (in Erdosain's own words) that wonderful phrase, "the meaning of life." Ha! Let me end this with a quote from the Astrologer:

"In the old days we could have taken refuge in a monastery or traveled to unknown and marvelous lands. But today you can eat a morning sherbet in Patagonia and be eating bananas in Brazil in the afternoon. [This book was published in 1929, mind you.] What are we supposed to do? I read a good deal, and believe me, in every book from Europe now I find that same undercurrent of pain and bitterness you describe in your own life." (87)

June Books

2009-06-27T14:22:00.000-07:00

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

This book punched me in the gut and wouldn't stop. Those who say this is just another Updike/Cheever-esque angst-ridden rant about life in the suburbs is so, so wrong. It's not angst that Revolutionary Road is channeling. It's rage. Yates is one pissed-off MF. And it's not suburbia life that Yates is angry about (that would be far too simplisitic), it goes much deeper than that.

I read the majority of this book while The Real Housewives of Orange County played on my friend's TV set. "Close the book, you're being rude!" one of my friends told me. Maybe I was, but I couldn't help it--I couldn't put it down. I honestly can't think of a more appropriate context in which to have read it, either: women getting their Botox shots, taking their pilates class, buying their teenage daughters cars, while Yates writes (of the audience leaving a play in the opening chapter):

"There was nothing to watch now but the massed faces of the audience as they pressed up the asiles and out of the main doors. Anxious, round-eyed, two by two, they looked and moved as if a calm and orderly escape from this place had become the one great necessity of their lives; as if, in fact, they wouldn't be able to begin to live at all until they were out beyond the rumbling pink billows of exhaust and the crunching gravel of this parking lot, out where the black sky went up and up forever, and there were hundreds of thousands of stars."

This image of the infinite universe stretching out expansively overhead with "hundreds of thousands of stars" is contrasted with the petty, poisonous squabbles going on below. How sad that none of these people ever thought to take a pause, take a breath and crane their necks upwards. I just love these end-of-chapter gems that Yates sprinkles throughout the book.

I've wanted to read this book since I saw the film back in April, on Corey's laptop on the flight back from New Orleans. Along with Faulkner's The Wild Palms, it made me really, really grateful for the freedom I have over my body. It's really true: if you can't decide what you want to do with your won body--who to give it to, what to give from it--then shit, girl, you are really not free at all.

Most of RR is narrated from the point of view of the husband, Frank Wheeler, who comes off as pitiful and pathetic, rather than hateful. April Wheeler may be selfish and self-absorbed, but at least she's trying to figure out who she is and want she wants, you know? I can't believe that someone out there had the balls to think that this would make a good film: "Woooo, a movie about a couple who were once in love but now can't seem to stop fighting because they don't know who they are or what their desires are anymore!! WEEEE!" No wonder so many people I know didn't like it--it certainly hits close to home, and this fear of connecting to the book or film can definitely be related to the fear that it will somehow relate to your life.

I think the universal theme of Yates' book can be summed up in the words of John Givings, the madman character, who waltzes in at two critical points to turn the Wheeler's lives upside down. In response to Frank's sardonic comment about "the hopeless emptiness of everything in this country," John responds, "Hell, plenty of people are on to the emptiness part... but it takes a whole hell of a lot more guts to see the hopelessness." (164) Yates has got the guts. He taps into the feeling of "this is wrong, this is not working for us, this is not the way things should be, this is not the way we should be going" that I think really sums up the past 8 years of the Bush administration. Frank and April's attempt to escape to Paris can be analogous to people getting out there and voting for Barack Obama: the feeling that they've had enough of this trap, that there had to be a different way of life out there.

In the end, I think Yates has two main messages in his work: 1) people are very lonely, and death is the loneliest experience of them all, and 2) counterculture rocks in a life-saving way. After reading and watching RR, I am now more than ever extremely grateful for the counterculture movement that arose in the 60's as a reaction to the McCarthy conformity of the 50's, which in turn was a reaction to the infiltration of the military mindset into everday life of the 40's. Here's to the sketchy figures like Arnold Friend in Joyce Carol Oates' "Where are you going, Where have you been." Yay for my friends like B. with their shaved heads, mascara and huge piercings. Yay for tattoos and piercings, for non-goal and professional advancement oriented careers, for environmentalism, for psychedelic culture, for Look at This Fucking Hipster, for Vice Magazine, for the Oregon Country Fair, Renn Fayre and Burning Man, for progressive leftist anarchist feminist hippies, for Naomi Klein and George Orwell, and for all the good bike-riding yoga-goers of Portland, Or.

Take this one for a knock-out punch:

"But the worst part--the worst part of the whole weekend, if not of his life to date--was the way April was looking at him. He had never seen such a stare of pitying boredom in her eyes. It haunted him all night, while he slept alone; it was still there in the morning, when he swallowed his coffee and backed down the driveway in the crumpled old Ford he used for a station car. And riding to work, one of the youngest and healthiest passengers on the train, he sat with the look of a man condemned to a very slow, painless death. He felt middle-aged." (61)

The Meaning of Life by Terry Eagleton

A good, fast read. I liked the idea of dissecting the question "what is the meaning of life" in less than 90 pages. I liked Eagleton's approach to the task, by discussing the phrase word by word (what do you mean by "meanng"? what do you mean by "life"?). He points out, very astutely, that the question itself of "what is the meaning of life?" is not a very good one, as it presumes/anticipates that the answer to that question needs to be very compact, like "42." How can you get a good answer if you don't have a good question? A very good point.

I also liked his discussion of how just there are good and bad questions, there are also good and bad answers. For example, "asphyxiating dormice" is not a very good answer to the question WISTMOL (my abbreviation). Literature nerd that I am, I enjoyed how he used examples from literature (like Beckett and Macbeth) in order to back up his arguments. In the end, Eagleton seems to say that people have come up with several answers as to what constitutes a meaningful life: love, happiness, altruism, nature, family, friends, art, etc. He uses the memorable example of a jazz band in order to describe how important it is to have a balance of all these different things, how you can sort of pick and choose between them, but you don't necessarily need to have one thing take center stage all the time. Our lives are never straightforward narratives, he argues, and few and far in between are the people whose lives have neatly wrapped-up introductions, climaxes and epilogues.

I also liked his discussion of Aristotle's definition of happiness (man, if I were to take HUM 110 again, I would so rock that class--that whole experience = wisdom thing, I guess), of how happiness is not a state of mind, but rather is connected to actions. Yeah, this is a good read, very thoughtful and involving, the kind of book where you could underline passages on every single page.

To this date, in June I've also read:
--The Easter Parade by Richard Yates (a fast, pleasant read, if not particularly challenging or moving)

--Eleven Kinds of Loneliness by Richard Yates (good Carver-esque short stories, none really earth-shattering)

--Dry by Augusten Burroughs (Boring. The only interesting part is his description of smoking crack.)

--The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie (Cute for teens. Cartoony. A lot of unrealistic parts. Did he *really* have to suddenly transform into this amazingly successful basketball player? Even if I were 15, I'm pretty sure I would still only find this merely mediocre.)

--An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by Cesar Aira (another WTF?! mindbender from Aira. Aira is gonna have to get an entire post to himself here pretty soon. This is yet another book that easily captures the title of one of the weirdest I've ever read. Whatever Aira is smoking, I want some of it. There's a lot to unpack in here: a 19th-century landscape painter travels to Argentina, gets hit by lightning, and continues wandering the country with his horrendously scarred face covered by a woman's funeral shroud. Is this a manifesto about art? A reflection on foreign influences in Argentina? The question of civilization vs. barbarity written as fiction? All this and more, in less than 90 pages. It's really quite impressive. I think if I reread it (and in one slow, drawn-out sitting, as opposed to broken up fragments from me getting on and off the bus and other constant interruptions) I would get a lot more out of it.)

Right now I'm currently reading Aira's Ghosts and Arlt's The Seven Madmen, still feelin' the Rio Plata love. What next? Cortazar's Rayuela? Moby Dick? Should I try to finish Ulysses, once and for all this time? (eeeeh...) It's gonna be a long summer on the Max...

2666: no angel came

2009-06-21T11:50:00.000-07:00

I went to Juarez spring break of 2005. I was a college freshman and the main preocupation of the trip was worrying about whether my Spanish would be accent-free enough to impress the Mexicans, and how much attention my ex-boyfriend (who also came along) would give me. Typical mindframe of the self-absorbed spoiled 19-year-old (I'm being hard on myself, but lah dee dah!). There are a couple of things I remember about the trip. I remember feeling completely terrified as we walked over the border from El Paso into Juarez; I was convinced that as a large group of white kids, we were going to be mugged immediately just walking down the streets (we weren't). I was impressed by how the people for the labor union we interviewed smoked inside their offices. One of them invited us to stay back at their house for the night and I remember being shocked that it was made of mud and tin--I guess I thought that since she wore nice clothes and worked in an office, the house would be nicer. It was very touching. I remember the anarchists whose house we slept in one night and how in awe I was of them. All in all, I think I was too young and inexperienced to absorb or analyze the experience properly. It was experiences like that that make me really believe in the validity of experiential learning: you really gotta get out of your self-absorbed head and experience education for yourself, first-hand. Your early experiences where you're kind of dumb and in over your head are like bricks that you're stacking for experiences later on in life, where hopefully your eyes and ears are a little more open.

In the same way that Che Guevara ate my May, Bolaño has completely swallowed my June. Maybe that's why this entire month has felt so weird and unbalanced to me: how can you expect to be in a sort of stable mind, when you're reading page after page of descriptions of horribly mutilated bodies of women found in the desert? Then you gotta put the book away, get off the Max and then hang out playing with kids for 6-8 hours. Talk about disjointed!

Unsurprisingly enough, there's a lot to be said about this almost 900-pg monster. I'm not even sure where to begin. I kind of feel the way I imagine I would feel after finishing "Ulysses" or "Moby Dick": simultaneously drained and exhilarated. I borrowed the book from a friend, so I couldn't underline any passages or fold the corners of the pages over when I read an excellent quote or a passage that felt particularly meaningful, so that makes me sad, because now, faced with the prospect of this "review", I have this 893-beast in front of me, and I have even less idea of where to begin than I would otherwise. So in advance, let me proclaim I am definitely going to have to re-read this, and thus analysis is definitely going to be very sketchy and first-impressiony, at best.

This book is very different from a lot of Bolaño I've read before--"epic" is definitely the first term that comes to mind. While other Bolaño books felt like the novels that Borges would have written (had he ever written one) "2666" is unmistakably and clearly Bolaño; there's no mistaking his style for another author's. What do I mean by Bolaño's style? I guess when I think of Bolaño, I thinkof the Murakami-like flourishes of what the characters ate or drank for dinner. The plotless plots where nothing really happens and nothing gets explained or resolved. His morbid gloomy view of life contrasted with the fierce joy his characters feel for reading and writing (a characteristic strongly reminiscent of Arlt's "El juguete rabioso" hero). That is Bolaño for me: witty, gloomy, harsh social realism, subtle political commentary, passionate crusader for the validity and worthiness of writing endeavors.

The book is divided into five parts, which all have titles like "The Part about the Crimes" (which unfortunately reminded me of the way "Friends" episodes are titled--the similarity ends there, thankfully!). The first book is the one most similar to the Bolaño I've read before: four literary critics, in the style of "The Savage Detectives", travel to the Mexican-U.S. border town of Santa Teresa (a fictionalized version of Juarez that easily deserves to be mentioned in the same breath of Macondo and Santa Maria) to track down an obscure German author, who may or may not have been last seen there. "I know the two of you will understand," is the last sentence in book one, but we don't.

Out of the five books, the fourth (the one documenting all the murders) is ironically both the most gripping and the most difficult to read. I feel sick about myself typing this, but it gets almost boring, turning the pages: oh, another murder, another death by strangulation, another unidentified decomposed body in the desert, another closed case, another police investigation that goes nowhere... I rached a point where I just felt numb reading name after name after name. The deaths quickly come to seem depressingly similar. Anally and vaginally raped. Body unclaimed and unidentified. Maquiladora worker. Eleven, twelve, thirteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, twenty, thirty-three years old. Bolaño isn't stupid, so this numbing effect is obviously what he was going for. What Bolaño does with thepolice detective genre is very intriguing, as he writes in this very matter-of-fact, CSI-documentation tone. The following quote is a pretty good example of most of the descriptions of the deaths:

In the middle of November the body of another dead woman was discovered in the Podesta ravine. She had multiple fractures of the skull, with loss of brain matter. Some marks on the body indicated that she had put up a struggle. She was found with her pants down around her knees, by which it was assumed that she'd been raped, although after a vaginal swab was taken this hypothesis was discarded. Five days later the dead woman was identified. She was Luisa Cardona Pardo, thirty-four, from the state of Sinaloa, where she had worked as a prostitute from the age of seventeen. She had been living in Santa Teresa for four years and she was employed at the EMSA maquiladora.

And so on and so forth in the longest chapter of the book. Anyway, so it's interesting that Bolaño uses this detective tone to describe this very physical, material evidence in the form of mutilated bodies, and yet despite all their materiality, this bodies embody absence more than anything else: there's no explanation for how they got there, no solution for the crime, and no resolution. Meaning is ecliped and absent despite this very matter-of-fact, supposedly transparent prose. Again: talk about disjointed.

This treatment of meaning (or as my blogspot tag puts it, "the form of truth") by Bolaño is something that definitely deserves a lot more thought (and not just because of his professed admiration for Borges, who loved writing his way out of stories without centres). For a lot of modernist authors (like Kafka and Conrad and so on), meaning was still around recently enough for them to still be pretty bummed about it draining away. That's why so much of modernist fiction seems to centered around the absence of meaning, something empty and silent and critical: hence the empty caves in E.M. Forster's India, Joseph K's crime, Virginia Woolf's lighthouse, Onetti's goat, Godot, Addie's monologue. There's definitely still traces of that critical silence and absence here in Bolaño. One of the questions I have is whether or not Bolaño he sees this absence of meaning as something to be all angsty and anguished about, or whether he sees literature and fiction as sufficent compensation for the disorder and meaninglessness of the world.

On that note, I think one of the most important things to mention when discussing what makes something "Bolaño-esque" is his use of absurdity. In the face of some things that could just never make any coherent sense (like why someone would shove a metal pole up at 12-year-old girl or bite a woman's nipple off and dump her body in the desert), sometimes absurdity is the best (and perhaps only) option. By absurdity, I mean all the extraneous details that go on for pages and pages: what characters dreamt last night, and all the random people who pop in for one scene of the novel and just as quickly pop out, never to be seen again (WTF is up with the psychic lady on TV? The Indian carpet-vendor girl one of the literary critics falls in love with? I could go on and on).

Another thing to consider when trying to define the Bolaño-esque is this quote by the one and only Eric Blair: "a novelist who simply disregards the major public events of the moment is generally either a footler or a plain idiot." With his use of Santa Teresaa as his stand-in setting for Juarez, Bolaño is definitely making very powerful political commentary about violence and power. I see violence as one of the main themes in this book: this dark beast that we have in all of us, which we need to get in touch with in healthy ways (a la Pip from American Doll Posse), but when we let it take control of us--yikes. Even the first book, the one about the literary critics, has this very interesting passage where they randomly beat the shit out of this Pakistani taxi driver. No one escapes, it seems, irregardless of your literary and academic pretentions.

The second book ("The Part About Amalfitano") is a character study of a university professor who may or may not be going crazy. It felt like the most random of the five parts to me. The image at the center of the second book involves a geometry book being hung out on a laundry line, slowly getting eroded by the elements as the professor waits to see how long it takes for the desert to destroy literature (this feels like a very important metaphor for the rest of the novel to me: how does literature stand up to the eroding, corrosive effects of the really harsh, fucked up reality that is our everday lives?).

The fifth book is the the one about the German author, Archimboldi, whose name is apparently a homage to the the painter Archimboldo, whose work is depicted in the picture above--his paintings are of individual subjects that together form an apparent whole, just like how the five Parts in 2666 are meant to form one entire work. This book is the most surreal and dream-like. What to make of the last 3 pages? Why does this book end with a guy in a park talking about the different ice cream flavors his ancestor? Is it a commentary on the impermenance of art? The randomnee of life? A homage to Cesar Air and his fondness for strawberry ice cream in How I Became A Nun? Man, I don't know! Good God, give me a place in a PhD program and maybe I'll give it my darndest to figure it out!

"Apocalyptic" is another word that comes to mind for this book. When one of my co-workers saw the cover, he asked me if it was a book about the devil. "It doesn't seem to be yet," I answered honestly. I haven't even touched upon all the apocalyptic imagery and references to the Four Horsemen and the reoccurring images of the abyss and voids that keep coming up, again and again (as the review in Slate handily pointed out). Mental institutions and jails also appear in each of the five books, so I think that's probably important as well. There's also a lot of scenes that play with light and dark: on the last page, "Suddenly the park lights came on, as if someone had tossed a black blanket over parts of Hamburg." (893) Similarly, on the last page of Book 4 (The Part about the Crimes), "Some of these streets were completely dark, like black holes, and the laughter that came from who knows where was the only sign, the only beacon that kept residents and strangers from getting lost." (633)

For Bolaño, is literature the only beacon that keeps us from getting lost? Why else would the story of writers (university professors, academics, journalists, authors) be juxtaposed with the story of these crimes? Does Bolaño think fiction can save us, or is it a petty refuge, a distraction from the savageries of realism implemented by bourgeoise folks like the Jesuit priest in By By Night in Chile in order to distract us from the torture going on beneath the floorboards of our houses? In By Night in Chile and Distant Star, the violence always took place "off-screen." In contrast, the violence in 2666 is very front and center. I think that's why Germany plays an important role in the fifth and final book: if you want to write a book about torture and mass crimes and the apocalyptic end of eras, then yeah, WWII Germany is about as good of a setting as it gets. "The bones, the cross, the bones," is all one character can say in face of it all, and that's about as close to the the expression "the horror! the horror!" that Bolaño gets.

A lot of people are going to write their doctoral dissertations about this book in the next 5-10 years. This book makes me feel proud to be alive during the period in which it was written.

For further reading:
- A list of all the names of the women who have been murdered in Juarez, from 1993-2006, with a brief synopsis of death.
- Very good article from the Nation about 2666.
- The best article on Juarez I've read on the Internet, written for Salon by Max Blumenthal.
- Tori Amos' solo performance of her song "Juarez" from 1999--she looks like she's about to burst into tears at the end.

Never Stop Reading: I Must Give So I Can Live

2009-05-31T11:01:00.000-07:00

"We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain."

It feels good to end the month on a high note! Yesterday Laura and I got dirty from digging her garden, walked down Alberta St., drank a lot of coffee, had Happy Hour at the Tin Shed, and wandered into a music instrument store. Laura has her heart set on getting an oud but alas, her quest has been a bit hard-going. I'm pretty sure I'm going to get a keyboard, because it's a) cheaper than a banjo and b) I already know how to play it, you know? Sometimes, laziness does play the winning card.

I'm pretty excited about June and the summer in Portland. The Boys & Girls Club is closed for the next two weeks for summer maintenance and to get ready for summer programming, so that's been a nice little break, albeit a bit boring (there's only so much dusting one can do without getting bored). Right now it's so unbelievably hot in the house I'm not sure how much more of this getting-caught-up on silly computer stuff I can take, but I'm sitting in front of the open window where there's a nice breeze so I'm gonna give it my best shot.

How I Became A Nun by Cesar Aira

This is the weirdest book I've ever read in my life. I can definitely see why the Bolaño rave is on the front cover. The back cover summarizes the book as "a modern day 'Through the Looking Glass,' that begins in cyanide poisoning and ends in strawberry ice cream." That's probably about as good as a summary you're going to get.

It's also important to mention that although the main character has the same name as the author, it's never clear whether the narrator is male or female (she appears as a female more often than not). The NY Times book review focuses on this gender ambiguity quite a bit, viewing it as the key unspoken part of the novel: namely, more than anything else, this book is about a girl trapped in a boy's body. I don't know if this interpretation is what Aira intended, but it definitely makes for an interesting reading.

I liked the first chapter, involving said cyanide poisoning. The last chapter, involving a kidnapping, is quite Fargo-esque. The main word I would use the describe this book is "surreal." Or maybe "dream-like." What's up the section involving the main character's friendship with a boy who likes to play dress up with a plastic nose and his grandmother's teeth? What to make of the character's inability to "read" when he/she rejoins kindergarten, after his/her extended hospital stay? What does the title refer to? (The NY Times book review thinks it's a reference to Spanish picaresque novels.) What to make of this book, period? Damn, I've never read anything quite like it, and it's doubtful that you have either. It's pretty damn cool to read contemporary fiction like this.

Rating: Read This Book Before You Die

A Mercy by Toni Morrison

I OWN I am shock'd at the purchase of slaves,
And fear those who buy them and sell them are knaves;
What I hear of their hardships, their tortures, and groans,
Is almost enough to draw pity from stones.
I pity them greatly, but I must be mum,
For how could we do without sugar and rum?
(William Cowper, Pity for Poor Africans)

How could we do without sugar and rum? I mean, we like sugar and rum, right? We like our little comforts. They make our lives easier. We don't need them on the level as we do, say, shelter and food and warmth, but they sure do make our lives a lot better and a lot more comfortable. And when it's our own ease and comfort that's at stake, it gets very, very trick when we start considering where that comfort comes from, and at what cost.

This is just one of the questions asked by this very powerful, well-written book. Toni Morrison kind of reminds me of Tori Amos, in the sense that they can both pump out these absoultely brilliant masterpieces with an ease that would be monumental and earth-shattering for any other author. This book reads as a very effective companion/prequel to "Beloved." There's a lot to like here: the Faulknerian narrative, the poetic language, the history of early European settlement and the beginnings of slavery on U.S. soil, some Bruce Springsteen-worthy imagery of a man's dream house rising on a hill above the Virginia fog, a New World-esque motif of a girl struggling to fit into and get used to her shoes. Themes dealt with include debt, freedom, family, and ultimately how “to be given dominion over another is a hard thing; to wrest dominion over another is a wrong thing; to give dominion of yourself to another is a wicked thing.”

This book made me think a lot about Power and how I use Power in my everday life. There's this essay by George Orwell called "Such, Such Were the Joys," in which he describes how his experiences at prep school were his earliest experiences of fascism. Blind Justice being dealt out arbitrarily, for no rhyme or reason that you can see. Sometimes I feel like I'm teaching kids about Facism at my job. "Line up, it's time to go to meeting!" "But why?" they ask. "Why can't I just run around screaming? Why can't I just throw things on the floor? I don't like him, why do I have to stand next to him? Why? Why? Why?" It all must seem very silly, these exercises in How To Be A Socialized Polite Human Being I'm responsible for implementing, day in and day out. I think in the end, as Tori Amos sings on her new album, "I must give so I can live." A good mantra. You get what you give. You can use power (over yourself and over others) wisely, for good rather than for evil. You can be aware of it and the consequences of abusing power. It can make you appreciate, above all else, your Freedom, all the more so if you're a young woman.

Anyway, in the end I think the less you know about this book, the more you'll enjoy it, because that's one of the things I really appreciated: having no idea where the story was going and being constantly thrilled and awed by the skillful writing and plot development. Damn Toni, you write like a motherfucker, and you put us all to shame. It's the kind of book you put down and stare into space for a while after turning the last page. Highly recommended.

Rating: Read This Book Before You Die

By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño

A very memorable, powerful book that asks the very difficult but important question: what is the relevance (if any) of literature to Real Life, especially when said Real Life involves political turmoil? (Specifically a military coup when people are being tortured and killed in basements while literary salon-like parties of the intellectual elite are taking place upstairs.) Is it brave and wise to read Thucycides and Plato when a democratically elected president is being overthrown, or just hopelessly stupid and out-of-touch? With this novella, narrated by a Jesuit priest who gives classes in the history and aesthetics of Marxism to Pinochet after the coup, I can see why Bolaño liked "How I Became A Nun" after reading this book. Oh, Bolaño. You make my life so much better. More than anything else, Bolaño has shown me that truly great literature has a strong connection to the relevant, to what is going on the world.

Rating: Read This Book, Bolaño Fans

Last Evenings on Earth by Bolaño

Amazing. Simply amazing. A must-read. Bolaño makes me feel happy to be alive, and how can a book be anything other than amazing if it makes you feel that way? Bolaño's characters fuck, drink, swear, travel, smoke, live in exile, feel homeless and above all else readreadread and writewritewrite. Standout stories include the title one (a contemporary interpretation of Borges' "El sur" ), "Mauricio ('The Eye') Silva" (which reminded me of "The Ministry of Special Cases," in the way it serves as a eulogy for the victims of the "disappearences" in Chile and Argentina), "Enrique Martin" (scary and disturbing, and more than a little Phillip K. Dick-esque), "Anne Moore's Life" (one of the few Bolaño pieces where the main character is female), "Vagabond in France and Belgium" (I liked the ending: "But she doesn't hang up.") and "Dentist," which contains the closest manifesto of Bolaño-esque fiction that he has perhaps ever written, as well as the following extraordinary sentence: "We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain." Oh, it just makes me want to sigh happily and hug myself with blissful, satisfied, sated contentment.

(The NY Times book review of this book is particulary well-written and makes for a good introduction if you've never read any Bolaño before.)

Rating: Read This Before You Die, If You Know What's Good For You

Nazi Literature in the Americas by Bolaño

The kind of novel Borges would have written, had he written a novel. Basically, this novel is an encyclopedia of fictional fascist right-wing writers; mostly from Argentina, some from the U.S., Germany, and Chile. Apparently Bolano told an interviewer, "(Its) focus is on the world of the ultra right, but much of the time, in reality, I'm talking about the left.... When I'm talking about Nazi writers in the Americas, in reality I'm talking about the world, sometimes heroic but much more often despicable, of literature in general." A very interesting take. Overall, the book's "gimmick" got a little much for me after 150+ pages. All of author's names started to blur together in my mind. I was slightly confused when I realized that the last chapter is basically the same story as "Distant Star;" I'd be interested in knowing which one he wrote first (I assume this one, as it's much less fleshed out and detailed as DS). I'd recommend this only to Bolaño fans because I can see how it might be tough going for someone who isn't used or into this kind of intensely referential writing (think of the footnotes in "House of Leaves" times 190 pages). The NY Times has another really good, well-written review for both the Bolaño fan and novice; it makes the interesting point that had the Nazis won World War II, this book could very well be true, you know? History is all about the point of view; in the case of this novel, it's from the loser's, which creates poetic irony but also makes it a little disturbing when you consider how it could all so easily be true.

Rating: Read This Book, Bolaño Fans and Followers of Borges

First Stop in the New World by David Lida

I read this book in a day. I'm very impressed with myself (as well as slightly horrified by how much time I spend per day commuting). I heard of this book when Corey and I met the author on the plane back from New Orleans; he was very nice and I am very pleased to say that I enjoyed this book very much! It's the kind of book I wouldn't mind writing myself someday: a nice balance of tone, a journalism and literary hybrid. Man, it sure did make me miss Mexico... those sizzling street tacos, mmmm. This book is about as informative and in-the-know as you're gonna get about the D.F. Lida interviews politicians, the richest inhabitants of the city, glue-sniffing street kids, crack-smoking cab drivers, newspaper vendors, artists and more.

I liked how he made use of Octavio Paz's "The Labyrinth of Solitude" when discussing Mexican culture and Mexican behavior. The use of "masks", both personal and cultural, is pretty central in Paz's essay, and it makes me think of what masks I use in my life. In terms of my cultural/racial heritage, I'm mostly British and Portuguese, with some Irish and German thrown in there. I'm basically a child of Empire. I was inventing this theory with Corey on the Max about how maybe historical and cultural baggage can have a subconscious effect on your own self-perception. Maybe that's why Searching and Self-Absorption and Who-Am-I can be understood as Stuff White People Like: we're all carrying around this weighty historical guilt from facilitating or implementing imperialism and colonialism. This is a really badly articulated argument that was formed when I'd had a few beers, so apologies for that. Anyway, all this reminiscing about Mexico makes me all the more pscyhed to see Luis Alberto Urrea at Powell's books on June 3rd. (The Devil's Highway is a really powerful, great work of investigative journalism.)

Rating: Definitely Read This If You're Interested in Mexico City/Mexico

Oh, Ernesto

2009-05-22T09:57:00.000-07:00

The person who wrote these notes died upon stepping once again onto Argentine soil; he who edits and polishes them, 'I' am not I; at least I am not the same I was before. That vagabonding through our 'America' has changed me more than I thought.

The whole month of May has been swallowed by the 750-page behemoth that is Jon Lee Anderson's biography of Che Guevara. I've been keeping Corey fully updated on the different stages of Che's life for the past three weeks: “Che's bumming around in Guatemala with not much idea of what to do with himself. God, it makes me feel so much better about my life!” “Che just arrived in the Congo. Things are not looking good.”

This whole month of May feels like it just got swallowed. I could write something about how it's been a year since I've graduated and so now I have this great manifesto... but I don't, so I won't.

My favorite part of the book was the first part, entitled “Unquiet Youth,” mainly because it dealt with what I was most interested in: what Ernesto was like as a young man and what drove him to pick his particular life path. This was my favorite part because it was what felt most relevant to me personally, as a young person still trying to figure out the best way to manage my freedom, my privilege and my choices. It was almost with a sense of relief that I read about Ernesto's lack of direction and pervasive sense of uncertainty following his graduation from medical school. I thought it was really interesting that even though Ernesto was surrounded by all these radical Communists, Socialists and Marxists in Mexico and Guatemela, it wasn't until after (as opposed to before, or during) the American intervention/CIA overthrow that he made the decision that he wanted to be more involved. As he wrote in a letter to his mother, “The bad thing is that at the same time I haven't taken the decisive attitude that I should have taken a long time ago, because deep down (and on the surface) I am a complete bum and I don't feel like having my career interrupted by an iron discipline.” (162-163) I almost felt like cheering when I read this: Ernesto gives a big stamp of approval on bumming around for a couple of years!

I thought it was fascinating to read about the gradual formation and changes of Ernesto's sense of self. It was really interesting to me reading about how your childhood can have such a monumental effect on you throughout your life: as a little kid, Ernesto was so constantly sick with asthma, he was babied a lot by his mother, but also developed this incredibly fierce iron will to compete (like in rugby) and be considered as “good” as the other kids. As the biographer describes it, his asthma also led to his sense of isolation and resulting craving for camaraderie, which the author sees as the main reason for Ernesto's fierce adoption of the Cuban cause and intense loyalty to Fidel Castro. Being a guerrilla made him feel like he was a part of a group, that he had friends, he had comrades. God, it makes me wonder how my childhood is affecting my current life. It also makes me wonder if life can really be seen as a narrative this convenient, that this straight lines can be drawn from our childhood right up to the present day. I guess it's helpful to think so.

When Ernesto adopts 'Che' as his name, I couldn't help but think of Into the Wild and Alexander Supertramp. “Call each thing by it's proper name,” he writes in his journal near the end of the movie, signing his death note with his birth name, Christopher. Man, how hard is that, trying to figure out what your proper name is! Talk about easy say, hard do. It's something that might take a lifetime to do.

At one point, one of Che's comrades says, “In spite of everything, you can't help admiring him. He knows what he wants better than we do. And he lives entirely for it.” I think this is an accurate reflection of my own feelings. I could never, ever live like Che Guevara—hell, very few of us could! It takes an incredible iron will to do so. At times, he was a hardcore maniac to the point of insanity, justifying the executions in Cuba as “justice at the service of future justice.” (458) I thought it was funny how he was particularly enraged by “individualistic” university students with “middle-class' mentalities: “perhaps in the students he saw his self-absorbed former self, and it rankled him. He had given up his self, his 'vocation' for the revolution; why couldn't they?” The answer, Che, is we're all different. We are all different people with different paths in life, and it's not helpful to say that one path is better than others or is the “right” path or whatever. Some of us are constantly seeking happiness and contentment, others find it pretty quickly and effortlessly. That's just the way it is. That's what makes us so valuable as human beings, right? Our individual, crazy, unique messed-up selves, these ridiculous consciousness we're carrying around in the mushy gray matter enveloped behind our thick skulls?

In the biography there are some parts that indicate that Che felt isolated at times, like he was living this double life, due to his commitment to the “revolutionary cause.” At one point he says to Alberto (his old travel companion from The Motorcyle Diaries) “I live like someone torn in two, twenty-four hours a day, completely torn in two, and I haven't got anybody to tell it to. Even if I did, they would never believe me.” (608) As he writes to his mother, “I am still the loner I used to be, looking for my path without personal help, but now I possess the sense of my historic duty. I have no home, no woman, no children [I'm sure his wife and daughter were a bit bummed to read this], nor parents, nor brothers nor sisters, my friends are my friends as long as they think politically like I do and yet I am content, I feel something in life, not just a powerful internal strength, which I always felt, but also the power to inject others, and an absolutely fatalistic sense of my mission which strips me of all fear.” (433-434) I don't know if I could throw my life in a similarly all-in fashion in pursuit of one single goal.

It makes me feel so young saying this, but I remember watching The Motorcycle Diaries with my freshman year boyfriend in theaters on our very first date together and being extraordinarily moved. I was particularly struck by the montage of black and white photos at the end of the different people that Alberto and Ernesto. Here's an excerpt from my personal journal that I wrote on March 19th, 2005, (Gaaaah!) shortly after I came back from the spring break service trip to Juarez:

These are some things that I cannot quite get my head around yet:

1) The difficulty between making a connection between what you think and what you do. This is something I was discussing with Ian the other day in the rhodadendron (god help me, I can never spell that word) gardens. It’s very easy to think that “I”m liberal” or “I’m creative” or “I’m a good person”, but if you don’t acutally DO anything physical in this world that serves as a concrete, physical testament to that belief, well then it just doesn’t sound very realistic to say it anymore, innit? This is something that I admire very greatly about Che Guevara upon reading “The Motorcycle Diaries”: say whatever you might like about him, but he was extremely effective at forming a connection between his ideas and his actions. The equal images of a clenched fist and a mouth streaming ideas, resting side by side... I think I’m going to have to check out some books from the library in order to learn more about him and Cuba from a more academic, scholarly point of view, because all I’m going on here is the adoring worship of the people that I’ve been surrounded by throughout my life. I think it’s creepy that “The Motorcycle Diaries” affected me much more than I ever thought it would. At the time I just thought it was a big deal because it was my first American date or whatever, but look at me, I don’t know how many months later and still thinking about it. I guess it must have resonated very deeply within me, and I have this picture of my soul being struck like a guitar string and still quivering back and forth, months later.

I went on to rant a little about how I was changing my major to General Literature or Spanish as opposed to English and Creative Writing, because I felt it would be more useful. I used an interesting phrase, about "learning to balance the Howard Roark and the mother in me." A struggle that still continues to this day. God, I'd forgotten how excruciating reading old journal entries can be. If nothing else, they serve as a reaffirming validation that yes, it is possible for people to change, and yes, I *have* changed since I was a freshman. Thank god. Anyway, I just thought it was funny, reading what I wrote all the way back then, in context of me in the process of finishing this enormous biography.

It was fun reading about Ernesto's early life because his writings were equally melodramatic. I think he brought a very good definition to being a traveler rather than a tourist: roughing it, being dirty (his lifelong nickname was “El Chancho” (the pig) from how infrequently he changed his clothes and how nasty he consequently smelled), being as open and receptive as possible. I've been thinking lately that I want to try to be more like a “tourist” in my everyday life; that is, to adopt the same mind frame that I aspire to have while I'm traveling here in what I consider my “static” period: working, living in Portland. My definition of being a good traveler is to be as open as possible to new experiences, to try to stay away from judgment. When you're having an experience, to not so much worry about quickly judging it or summarizing it as “good” or “bad,” but instead try to reflect that “oh, this is an experience that I'm having,” and just kind of try to be in the moment, and then reflect upon it in full later. I think this is a good way to avoid the kind of stress you inevitably run into while traveling: late buses, mean people, bad food. I mean, I run into that kind of stuff here in Portland as well, but to some degree it feels less heightened, less intense than it does when I'm in a different country... maybe because I've been living here for a while now.

Here's to being a good tourist in everyday life.

Lying introspectively like Jorge Malabia on his back: a common motif among young brooding men of the Rio Plata region.

April Books

2009-05-07T09:48:00.000-07:00

Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future

A very well-written, readable and well-argued book. McKibben basically argues that we need to redefine our understanding of classic economics: namely that more doesn't always necessarily equal better, not just for sustainable reasons (we're running out of resources on our planet) but for personal reasons (more stuff, bigger businesses and expanding economies aren't making us happier). It's an interesting argument and he follows through with it pretty well with practical suggestions on how we can refocus our energies on building more local economies and communities. I really enjoyed McKibben's discussion of behavioral economics and the science of happiness, two topics I find really interesting and know very little about. There are a few moments that are a little too "oh god, you are such an environmentalist from Vermont," like when he suggests giving bus drivers your personal mix CDs to slap on the stereo. Also, McKibeen seems to be writing for an audience that he automatically assumes is anti neoliberal and free trade, so if you're not, that might be a problem for you. (Disclaimer: it wasn't for me, I'm just trying to be fair and balanced here.) However, overall McKibben does quite a good job of making practical suggestions for how to make the world a better place and how to be more hopeful in general, which is a nice change from the more general "oh-god-we're-all-doomed" feeling of recent months.

The one part of the book that I keep summarizing and quoting to all of my co-workers and friends is the section where McKibben talks about the science of happiness. He asks the very interesting question of what was the time in our lives when most of us would say that we were happiest. For most people, they would say volunteering, with family, with friends, etc.... being around others. Being *out* of yourself and your chatty little head, and instead feeling like you're a part of something bigger than yourself. That really hit the nail on the head for me, and put into words something I'd been struggling to articulate to myself for a while now: what has brought me some of the highest levels of joy in my life was when I felt like I was "out of myself," part of something larger, whether in the hugeness of nature or within a community of people (like Los Embajadores in Tijuana), not as this self-internalizing super efficient/proficient utility machine.

Whether my enjoyment of finally having this particular feeling put into words actually leads to me doing or deciding something concrete remains to be seen. I think of my advisor's advice to me of why not to go to graduate school, at least not for literature, and it really rings more and more true for me by the day. He was like "travel! Get out in the world! Work with kids!" This summer, I'm gonna garden.

Rating: Read This Book Before You Die

Keep the Aspidistra Flying (George Orwell)

An enjoyable if not earth shattering read. Orwell is the master of succinct, perfect sentences. Along with watching "Revolutionary Road," this book definitely helped put me in a weird mindset about the whole settling down into a comfortable career and lifestyle deal, while thinking that you're this person who's "better" than everyone else around you. The happy ending feels a little forced; if Orwell had been truer to the tone of earlier parts of the book, the characters' fate would have been a lot darker. Orwell said in a letter that when he wrote it, "I was half starved and had to turn out something to bring in £100," which explains a lot. All in all, a nice fictional companion to "Down and Out in Paris and London."

Rating: Read This If You're An Orwell Fan

El Juguete Rabioso / The Mad Toy (Roberto Arlt)

Another book about a character whose life is really affected by money (namely his lack of it). I would have really dug this book in high school, a lot, and probably would have had a little bit of a crush on Silvio, the main character.

The Mad Toy took me a long time to get through, despite its 142 pages. I don't really know why. I don't exactly know what to make of this book. I'm not sure what the title refers to, for one. I guess "the mad toy" is Silvio himself, and the title refers to the way in which he often finds himself inevitably being used as "a toy" by people in power and by the mentors he consistently keeps seeking (and failing) to find. The final chapter (ominously titled "Judas Iscariot"), in which Silvio deliberately betrays a mentor/friend, can be understood as Silvio's attempt to subvert this feeling of always feeling like a plaything to others whims, and instead claim some agency of his own (at the stake of his friend, which is troublesome).

The first chapter is about Silvio as a young boy and his adventures in inventing amateur weapons of war and his life of crime as a book thief, smuggling encyclopedias and Baudelaire out of the school library. I love the sentence that he uses to introduce an anecdote about one of his inventions, copying the language of the pirate and Dumas paperbacks he loves. "A resounding adventure was that of my cannon, and happy am I to recall it." I like to repeat this phrase quietly to myself. It adds so much, narrating the events in our lives with a deliberate aesthetic style!

Needless to say, it says a lot about Silvio that his first career is as a book thief. He goes on to try working as a bookstore assistant, an apprentice airplane mechanic for the military, and a paper salesman, without finding much satisfaction. However, what seems to keep him going is his ability to aesthetically narrate his life and his surroundings, infusing it with what he experiences as an inexplicable joy:

I'm not crazy, one thing is certain, though... I know that life will always be extraordinarily beautiful for me. I don't know whether other people will experience the force of life as I do, but inside me there is joy, a full, unconscious kind of joy. Everything surprises me. Sometimes I have the feeling that it's just an hour since I arrived on earth, and everything is flaming new, fresh, beautiful. (150)

Silvio's goals by the end of the book are to "see glaciers and mountains and clouds." That sounds pretty good to me. The last sentence of the book is "I tripped over a chair, and kept going." It reminded me a lot of the last sentence of Catch-22. You jump out of the way of the whore's knife, life tangles you up and catches you off guard, but you gotta keep going.

Silvio's final mentor figure is the policeman who receives his confession/ratting out his friend, but doesn't arrest him. The wisdom he imparts to Silvio is "we obey a brutal law that's inside us. That's it. We obey the law of the jungle." A very true thing it is, human brutality. And yet it's not the only true thing. We feel as human beings, profoundly and deeply. What is it that drives some people to not just see life as a drudgery and a chore, life as 9-5, as a series of steps: college, job, marriage, children, retirement death? What is it that drives some people to make the conscious choice to love life, to see it as sweet?

I'd like to keep joy inside me. I'd like to aesthetically narrate my life, my day-to-day.

Love, poetry, gratitude toward life, toward books, and toward the world would send an electrical charge through the blue sinews of my soul.
It wasn't me, but the god inside me, a god fashioned from pieces of mountain, forest, sky and memory. (123)

Rating: Read This Before You Die

When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times by Pema Chödrön

A self-help book written by a Buddhist Canadian nun. I first heard of this book when my yoga teacher read aloud a passage at the end of one class that really connected to me. I recognized a lot of her advice from stuff my counselor gave me to read way back in junior year. She talks a lot about loving compassion, the importance of breathing in and out, exercising non-judgment. It's not just all theoretical, there's a lot of practical advice in her. All in all, a very wise book by a very wise lady. Even if you're not in a time of your life where things are falling apart, there's definitely some stuff in here that you could use.

Rating: Read This Book Before You Die

In April I also read Phillip K. Dick's Flow My Tears the Policeman Said and Ubik, both good reads if you're a Dick fan (hee), but not necessarily vital. I also read Faulkner's The Wild Palms, which hopefully I'll be able to devote an entire post to this weekend. And that was my April.

What a lovely afternoon

2009-04-25T11:12:00.001-07:00

So much has happened since the last time I updated that this entry is likely going to be a big splurgy mess, trying to summarize everything:

- I sprained my knee on the dance floor on Corey's birthday night out at the Crystal Ballroom, during 80's night. For a week I could barely walk. However, as of today I'm walking normally, and went to yoga class this morning, the first thing remotely resembling physical activity (other than walking or limping as fast as I could to the Max) that I've done in the past week. Hurting my knee has been a chronic injury since I first sprained it playing basketball in high school; this is at least the third time I can remember it popping out of its socket. I think I'm going to be fine. I'll do some strength-building exercises and continue taking my housemates joint power-building vitamins (he's a weightlifter).

- Corey and I spent four days in New Orleans for French Quarter festival. It was wonderful. I tried making a list of everything I ate but it was too long. Highlights included alligator sausage, turtle soup (delish), grilled oysters (or maybe they were clams? I dunno, but they were AMAZING), crawfish and goatcheese crepes, spicy gumbo, incredibly buttery BBQ shrimp, ("there's some shrimp in your butter!" Corey told the cook), beignets, and an enormous crawfish and crab boil that Corey's uncles dumped all over a table covered in newspapers (we diligently worked our way through it, occasionally sweeping the piles of carcasses we accumulated into a bucket on the floor). Basically the whole weekend belonged to thisiswhyyourefat.com. It was wonderful. I ate so much garlic it reeked through my pores for 24 hours.I forgot to pack the camera, but his mom sent Corey some photos, so maybe I'll post those on the long-neglected travel blog.

- I was offered the Kiva Fellow position after a lengthy application process. So it looks like for 10 weeks (maybe more) in the fall Corey and I will be somewhere in Central or South America and I'll have the chance to opportunity here. Hopefully I'll find out about my placement as soon as possible... it hasn't really sunk in at this point.

So here's what the rest of the year is staring to (tentatively) look like: I'll be leaving my current job before I journey with Corey to England for two weeks, from August 17th to September 2nd, in order to visit family for the first time in three years. From September 9th to the 20th I'm thinking about doing 10-day vipassana meditation retreat. From September 21st to the 25th I'll need to be in San Francisco for training, and I'm thinking maybe I can cram some time a couple of days afterwards to visit friends in California (Ana? Cara? Leah and Kyndall? At least Grandma, if nothing else)...

Then I'll need to depart for my placement any time between October 1st and the 15th (it's pretty flexible, thankfully so). If I end up placed in South America, Corey and I still have that return ticket to Ecuador that we never ended up using, so maybe we could fly to Quito and then just bus our way to wherever. It probably won't work out that way because our flight date will fall on a year after we bought it (September 17th '08), so they'll probably charge us a chazillion bucks to change it. Yuck. Well, we'll figure it out!

This week sees the arrival of many friends visiting from afar: Los Angeles, France, Connecticut... I think my brain and heart might self-implode from happiness. Today so far: went to yoga class and did some grocery shopping, ate a yummy spinach-lettuce salad with oranges and balsamic vinegar, had a cup of super Irish english breakfast tea, read blogs about babies (don't worry, I'm not getting any ideas, I just got trapped by how weird and alien and fascinating they were) and listened to Ani DiFranco's latest album online. Happiness. Now it's time for laundry...

People Who Don't Know the Answers

2009-04-12T14:28:00.000-07:00

If I could write fiction like any author, I'd want to write like Anne Tyler. The first Tyler novel I ever read was Saint Maybe, which my sister checked out of the Colegio Bolivar library. It's the same copy I have with me now; I guess one of us in an act out of an audacious sense of entitlement must have stolen it. If you look at the little flap of paper in the back (how old-fashioned and antique that seems now!), where the librarian would stamp the due date under FECHA DE VENCIMIENTO, the earliest date is 24 March 1998—more than ten years ago! Next to the due date we were supposed to write the grade we were in (who knows why), so there is also a historical record of the changes in my sister's handwriting as well as mine. The small squat sixes of sixth grade, the taller and more elegant eights of eighth grade. A single thin nine. I guess it was after ninth grade, once we realized that we were the only people checking the book out, over and over again, that we decided that we were the proper owners of the book. Sorry, Bolivar library, forgive us! If it's any consolation/defense, it has definitely found a loving home in our bookshelves.

I started re-reading Anne Tyler at exactly the right time. I've been sick since Sunday with an upper respiratory tract infection. TMI Warning I've been producing all this absolutely grotesque green phlegm, with the consistency of yogurt End TMI. It's equal parts fascinating and disgusting—I am kind of amazed that something like this could come out of my body. On Friday night I took some Dayquil, drank some Visoda and bravely went out on the town with Corey for a birthday night of dancing at the 80's dance night at the Crystal Ballroom. In the middle of "Burning Down the House," I slipped on a puddle of water and dislocated my left knee, the same knee I've been injuring chronically since high school. This is at least the fourth time it's been sprained. It's much better today than yesterday, but it still feels weird, all stretched and unsteady. I'm taking Matt's joints rehabilitation vitamin pills and icing it a lot. I can sort of hobble now, which is a big improvement.

Thus it feels like subconscious psychic foreshadowing on my part that I had the foresight to check out all these Tyler novels last week, like The Accidental Tourist and Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. I re-read Tourist , lived vicariously through Macon's injury and recovery and am now plunging eagerly through Dinner, which I'm not sure if I've ever read completely. I have this weird deja-vu feeling reading it, so I'm thinking that maybe I started reading it at some point, but just never finished.

There is something so wonderful and comforting about an Anne Tyler novel. When I'm keeping an injured leg elevated about heart level to encourage reduced swelling while reaching for the roll of toilet paper and hacking my guts out, I can't think think of any other author I'd rather read. "The perseverance of human beings suddenly amazed him," realizes one of the characters in Dinner. It's this perseverance and doggedness that Tyler is particularly skilled at highlighting. Or as a character in Tourist observes,

'You ever wonder what a Martian might think if he happened to land near an emergency room? He'd seen an ambulance whizzing in and everybody running out to meet it, tearing the doors open, grabbing up the stretcher, scurrying along with it. 'Why,' he'd say, what a helpful planet, what kind and helpful creatures.' He'd never guess that we're not always that way; that we had to, oh, put aside our natural selves to do it. 'What a helpful race of human beings,' a Martian would say. Don't you think so?'

It's just really nice to read books about people who are genuinely trying to be good, even if their actions don't always make it seem that way. Tyler has a lot of love for her characters and it shines through in a way that makes me think of that famous quote about Salinger, that he loved his characters more than God loved them. (Further research led me to learn that this quote was by John Updike, and was meant as a criticism of Salinger. I never liked your writing anyway, Updike.)

Saint Maybe particularly hit home for me at this point in my life, mainly because it's about a character who spends most of the book taking care of children who are not his own. Ian's wry observations about taking care of children had me nodding my head vigorously, yes, yes:

He wondered how people endured children on a long-term basis—the monotony and irritation and confinement of them.
You could never call it a penance, to have to take care of these three. They were all that gave his life color, and energy, and... well, life.
It wasn't easy. A lot of it was just plain boring. Just providing a warm body, just being there; anyone could have done it. And then other parts were terrifying. Kids get into so much! They start to matter so much. Some days I felt like a fireman or a lifeguard or something—all that tedium, broken up by little spurts of high drama.

The other part of the book that drew a straight line between my heart and the pages were the sections about the incertitude of knowing. A lot of the book is about learning how people who seem to "know all the answers" really, well, don't. In fact, nobody does. Understanding the meaning of someone or something in your life is eventually understood as something that's ultimately impossible to do:

Apparently, he thought, there were some people in this world who simply never came clear. Reverend Emmett, Mr. Brant, the overlapping shifts of foreigners... In the end you had to accept that the day would never arrive when you finally understood what they were all about. For some reason, this made him supremely happy.

It's the "happy" part that's key. Ian's main conflict in this book is kicked off by the "arrogant certitude" with which he informs his brother that his wife is cheating on him. At the time, he feels like he definitively "knows" this as a fact, but over time he has to admit that no, he really doesn't know it at all. More than anything else, this book seems to me now to be about surrendering that need for possessive control, to "know" how things are and how things are going to turn out. In the opening pages, Ian is described as someone who is always imaginng his life as seen from a distance, as observed by an outsider:

There were moments when he believed that someday, somehow, he was going to end up famous. Famous for what, he couldn't quite say; but he'd be walking up the back steps or something and all at once he would imagine a camera zooming in on him, filming his life story. He imagined the level, cultured voice of his biographer saying, 'Ian climbed the steps. He opened the door. He entered the kitchen.'

This passage really hit home for me with a particularly sharp pang because I used to do the same thing as a really little kid. I'd make lists of all the novels I was going to write. Sitting on the toilet or high up in the mango tree in the yard, I'd talk to myself and answer questions about my life, pretending I was being interviewed on a talkshow or by a reporter. Yeah, I was a particulary imaginative kid, but more than that, I had this ambitious, feroscious drive in me that I had to *BE* someone, you know? My ego was a hungry-hungry-hippo, and it wanted to feed. It still does.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about ego lately (thanks Siddhartha!). When you graduate from college, you're really forced to think about what you want to do in a grandiose, epic fashion: "so are you going to be one of those people who are going to *BE* somebody??" the ego hungrily, greedily chatters at you. "You're not just going to waste and fritter your days/years away, right? You're going to *DO* something, right?? You're going to be GREAT!!" Sometimes this voice is helpful, because it can drive you to do things you wouldn't normally do. Other times, it can be quite exhausting. Your ego is always demanding knowledge, knowledge, knowledge, defitive plans, facts, schedules. Sometimes you just can't have that in life, though.

In Saint Maybe, another one of the main lessons that Ian learns is about "leaning into his burden." About viewing it as a gift, rather than a weight. This is the only life you'll have. So you might as well not get stressed out about things, you know? Next week I won't be working as a prestigious research assistant with a really important professor in a well-known university, but I will be building submaries with third graders. And for now, that's enough. It's enough for now to listen to Alex Murdoch's "Orange Sky" and the Dixie Chicks' "Travelin' Soldier" on Corey's pandora country music station and daydream about the piece of bread with melted cheese I'm about to get up and make myself in a minute. Maybe this afternoon I'll work on some applications for some potentially cool summer/fall stuff. And maybe learn the Higitus Figitus.

"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.”

--T. H. White, The Sword in the Stone (found on Slate's The Happiness Project blog, my latest fascination/addiction)

The emerging monster: La casa verde

2009-04-04T18:54:00.000-07:00

At first I tried reading this book in Spanish. After 3 weeks I'd read about 50 pages. Depressed and defeated, I conceded by putting down La casa verde and picking up The green house. (Trans. Gregory Rabassa. New York: Harper, 1968.)Reading it in English wasn't that much easier, but at least I wasn't looking up all these jungle-related and boat navigation terms at WordReference every 10 seconds.

It took me a while to realize that the structure of the book is like the film 21 Grams: a lot of cutting back and forth between scenes from the past and from the future, and it's only until you're well into the book that you learn the chronology. Umberto Eco said that he was aware that the first hundred pages of The Name of the Rose were the hardest, because he wanted the act of reading to be like an initiation ritual for the reader: like the monks, the reader was meant to be immersed in this really stressful, dense experience that makes you wonder “My God, how am I going to be able to get all the way through this?” Thankfully enough (as tends to be the case for these sorts of books) once you get used to the language and the structure, it's relatively smooth sailing. I'm definitely left with the feeling that I'm going to have to read this again, in order to let all of its nuances and complexities sink in properly. For the time being, I'm going to offer up this paltry review.

Overall, I'm very impressed by the narrative structure and writing style of La Casa Verde. Mario must have had post-its stuck all over his desk in order to keep track of the chronology (or who knows, maybe even he isn't completely sure of it). This would be an ideal book on which to write a dissertation because there's a lot of stuff to unpack in here. Civilization vs. barbarity (modernity vs. savagery) is obviously a big one. There's a lot of scenes of people's eyes floating greedily over beads, jewels and rubber, feeling that Sacred Hunger. Most of the relationships between people originates from commerce and trade. The main character is an Indian girl called Bonificia, who is kidnapped from her family by the military and nuns in the opening scene of the novel. If I had to say what this novel is about in one sentence, I'd have to say it's about Bonificia, and how she goes from living “saved” by the nuns to becoming a prostitute called Wildflower. Her story reminded me a lot of Pocohantus in The New World, especially in the scenes involving her relationship with her shoes.

There's another narrative thread involving Fushia, a guy with Japanese ancestry who runs away with this girl called Lalita and they end up living in the jungle together, and their dealings with Aquilino, an old man who rides his boat up and down the jungle river and trades canned goods and weapons for rubber with the Indians. There's a group of four friends who go to a bar. I'm not even going to get into the criminal gang led by this master boat captain Nieves because I'm not sure I fully understood it. And then lurking in the background above it all is the story of the Green House, how it was founded by this mysterious guy called Don Anselmo, who reminded me of Jewel from As I Lay Dying in the beginning, frolicking about on his horses, but turns into this withered lonely old man. He remains very much an enigma to the end. One of the characters call him “the one who brought civilization to Piura.” Whether that civilization is good or bad is a whole 'nother bag o' beans.

The important thing about all of these characters is that none of them are depicted as bad guys. Fushia is a little deplorable in his treatment of Lalita in the jungle, but he probably doesn't deserve the fate he ends up with (not many people would). Even the nuns have a sympathetic scene with Bonificia. Near the very end of the novel, after a description of a torture scene that sheds a lot of light in events earlier in the book, someone describes the Captain involved: “He had his weaknesses, like any human being, Don Pedro: but on the whole he was a good person.” (361) I see a lot of parallel themes between La casa verde and Sacred Hunger, especially concerning the question of how far will humans go in their treatment of each other in order for material goods.

The blind girl that Don Anselmo (the founder of the titular Green House brothel) has a relationship with is also very intriguing. The fact that she's blind isn't just in itself interesting, but the way she got blind—I don't want to spoil it—let me just say that it was grisly enough for me to put the book down for a minute, and that the blind girl is essentially a corpse come back to life. During one of Don Anselmo's monologues, he says a few things that I think may be quite key to the whole work:

And you didn't realize, you I'm so stupid, how terrible not to understand, sweet, never knowing what's going on with you, unable to guess. And there, again, your heart is like a fountain, and the questions, her sparkling, what do you think I'm like, and the inmates, and their faces, and the ground you're walking on, where does what you hear come from, what are you like, what do those sounds mean, do you think that everybody is like you?, that we hear and do not answer?, that somebody feeds us, puts us to bed, and helps us upstairs?

I found the question raised by this passage particularly relevant to some of the topics I touched upon in the previous post: how do we go about relating with other people? "How terrible not to understand," indeed. It's all the more pertinent since the book itself is difficult to understand, and Vargas Llosa obviously knew that. The most obvious example is the dialogue that's written without any breaks or signs to indicate that it is in fact two different conversations taking place at two different points at time (I hope that makes sense). By doing so, Vargos Llosa appears to be challenging the reader's concept of the "present"--that when we read, we are reading events in a certain order. In The Green House the present is all mixed up. What a provocative word, the present. Living in the present moment is difficult. And yet it's what a lot of us are striving to do. I spent a lot of time this weekend really sick from yet another cold (I am officially clipping a bottle of hand sanitizer this week) and spent a lot of time in bed reading blogs about meditation retreats and ashrams. There's so many people out there, trying to figure out the secret behind truly living in the present. It's no wonder that novels that mess with time feel particularly meaningful.

In this talk by Vargas Llosa, he discusses how in colonial times (back when the Spanish were still tramping all over Latin Americ), the language of novels was seen as this intensely subversive force. The two greatest forces in colonial Latin America were the church and the military, and the language endorsed by both didn't have much space for language in which signs were muddled and unclear. Novels were seen as frivolous, sinful even—a language of lies. It was the kind of environment where Don Quixote had to be smuggled over from Spain in the bottom of wine barrels in order to reach South American audiences. Reading a novel back then must have evoked an illicit thrill; the experience must have been a lot like reading Orwell's “1984” in Burma today. I think one of the things Vargas Llosa is trying to do in La casa verde is evoke that same subversive power that the novel must have had back then, through using this innovative language.

I am definitely going to read this book again someday. I feel like I'm just skimming the surface of the potential ideas and theories it has to offer about human nature, language and literature. Right now I can see what elements and ideas stuck out for me; in the future it'd be cool to develop a theory and argument in more detail.

Medidating on the word "present" immediately brought to mind a passage from Virginia Woolf's "The Waves" that I memorized for a final exam, way back in 2007.I feel like it is connected to the mission of this blog (specifically concerning the attempt to connect "the present moment" to poetic forms) in some vitally important yet oblique way:
"It is the first day of the summer holidays. And now, as the train passes by these red rocks, by this blue sea, the term, done with, forms itself into one shape behind me. I see its colour. June was white. I see the fields white with daisies, and white with dresses; and tennis courts marked with white. Then there was wind and violent thunder. There was a star riding through clouds one night, and I said to the star, 'Consume me.' That was at midsummer, after the garden party, and my humiliation at the garden party. Wind and storm coloured July. Also, in the middle, cadaverous, awful, lay the grey puddle in the courtyard, when, holding an envelope in my hand, I carried a message. I came to the puddle. I could not cross it. Identity failed me. We are nothing, I said, and fell. I was blown like a feather. I was wafted down tunnels. Then very gingerly, I pushed my foot across. I laid my hand against a brick wall. I returned very painfully, drawing myself back into my body over the grey, cadaverous space of the puddle. This is life then to which I am committed."

"This I say is the present moment; this is the first day of the summer holidays. This is part of the emerging monster to whom we are attached."

On Learning

2009-03-31T22:35:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking a lot these days about the value of curiosity. During our early getting-to-know-you conversations, I asked Corey how he would describe himself in one word, and he said, "curious." (I didn't know my one word at the time, but now I think it would have to be "dreamer.") But then I just think about this innate curiosity within me and damn, maybe I am just stupid and naive and this is going to get me into trouble, but the joy of wandering lost through the PQ sections of the SE stacks in the Hauser Library, writing book reviews in my stupid blog, rambling with my co-workers about Borges, or just reading, reading, reading, underlining passages, thinking, writing--it brings me a great joy I don't get anywhere else. No one can take that curiosity away from me, you know? It's in me, it is me. I'll always have it. If I have a way to use it, to the best of my ability, I will be happy. And all these ridiculous badges that supposedly constitute prestige and success can never hold a candle to that, ever.

This has been an introspective year for me so far. Having lots of time on the Max to read will do that for ya, I guess. One of the things I've been thinking about lately is the role of books in my life. I just finished Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, one of the most glaring titles on my list of Books I Really Should Have Read Already, Don't Know Why I Haven't, Really. In this case, I think it's for the best I waited this long. I definitely got a lot more out of this book with an undergraduate degree.

For one thing, I've read a lot more Borges now than I had in high school, which makes certain aspects in TNOFR like the blind librarian and the labyrinth in the library stand out a lot more (read more about the connection between Borges and Eco here). The introduction is puro Borges and Nabokov, especially in the fictional translator's cheerful pronouncement that the volume lacks any relevance for our present day. Another benefit of my undergraduate education are the lit theory classes, which makes the book's discussion of the roles of signs a lot more interesting. The part where William identifies the abbot's horse (by means of the tracks he left behind in the snow and the flustered monks pursuing him for example) is really ingenious, demonstrating (in William's view) how the universe speaks to us quite clearly through signs. The main question that he (and Borges, and Nabokov) grapple with is how to interpret those signs—is there any order to them, other than the flimsy order imposed by our own minds to make our surroundings seem meaningful? (Probably not.) What is the value of interpretation? Can it ever arrive at any definitive truth, or will it just go on and on forever? (Probably yes. But that's not to say that some interpretations are more valuable than others—read Eco's thoughts on this here, an interesting talk that may be a little confusing if you haven't read his books.)*

The other thing I found unexpectedly intriguing in TNOTR was its discussion of “simple people.” I'd just re-read “Siddhartha” for the first time since high school a couple of weeks ago, and Hesses uses the same term, to refer to people who are purely controlled by their desires. That is to say, people who go through life controlled by what they want: get a job, get money, get married, get a house, get a big TV, get a nice car, and so on. Most of the people in the world are like this—not that there's anything wrong with that. It is vital to note that a major part of Siddhartha's enlightenment is that he eliminates his judgment for the “simple people,” and instead of thinking that his way is superior or vice-versa, he simply accepts that they are different. It is not wrong to be one of the “simple more” any more than it is better to be someone like Siddhartha's—they're just different. The ending of “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” reiterates the same message: “Some of us are dancers, some of us are mothers, etc,” Brad Pitt intoned solemnly in a voice-over. Or as my Grandma Mary is fond of saying, “We're all different, Julie—different strokes for different folks.”

In The Name of the Rose, the “simple people” are discussed in context to how words affect them, in the sense that they can be more easily manipulated by language. People like William are more akin to a class of readers, because he's constantly trying to read the signs around him, as opposed to accept them at face value. Not to sound incredibly arrogant and place myself on the same level of Sherlock Holmes, but I like to think that it's the same drive in me that inspires me to plough through an entire Phillip K. Dick book in one day, or stubbornly struggle with Mario Vargas Llosa's La Casa Verde. I can think of a lot of people who would think it was pretty crazy to spend my time trying to read Ulysses and La Casa verde. In a way, it is kind of silly. But to me, it feels incredibly valuable and important and precious and there is really no other way I'd rather spend my hours here on Earth: thumbing through these books, inhaling them into their brain, thinking about their words, wondering about their effects and their relation, among each other, among societies, and with me. If I had to describe myself in one word, it would be “dreamer.” I'm just not settled yet, you know? A lot of us aren't. Me, I have little clouds floating out of my ears...

I've been trying to think of a way to explain why books are so personally appealing to me, mainly because my co-workers keep asking me how I liked majoring in literature, and I always respond immediately that I loved it, that it was great, and then my answer to their follow-up question of “why?” is always hopelessly confabulated. Here's one of the reasons I came up with: I was thinking that one of the things you will never be able to do while you are alive on this earth as a human being is to see yourself through another people's eyes. You are always going to be you, indefinably and inexhaustibly you, tied to the ego of your self, your memories, your desires, all the little building blocks that construct you as a person (many of which you are probably not even aware of—maybe that's what life is for, trying to figure out what those tiny little building blocks are). As close as I am to people like my sister and Corey, I'm never going to know what it's like to *be* Corey—to be inside his head, to see the world as he sees it, to know what he's thinking at any random moment. There's this really interesting part in Wizard of the Upper Amazon where during his shaman training, the main character drinks ayahuasca in many ceremonies and learns what it's like to be different animals: anacondas, jaguars, pink river dolphins. At one point he goes inside the mind of everyone in the tribe, and this experience helps him become an especially emphatic and alert healer. Thus, therein lies some of the magic of reading. On one level, reading purports to allow you to “see” the world through another's eyes. I will never know what it's like to be an Italian monk in the 13th century, trying to solve a seemingly unsolvable mystery. But goddamn, I probably know more now that I would have if I'd never read it. Reading is a gateway, a vehicle to different experiences that I otherwise would never be able to have.

Another joy of TNOTR was recognizing myself in the characters. Yes, I definitely cackled to myself, nodding vigorously in recognition as I thumbed eagerly through the pages—yes, these crazy library people, “men who live among books, with books, from books”--these are my people. As one of the monk puts it, “It's true. We live for books. A sweet mission in this world dominated by disorder and decay.” (112) In contrast to the “simple” people, the monks are presented as the “learned' population, living the so-called life of the mind. (I'm glad that my experience of living the life of the mind didn't end with me drowning in a barrel of pig blood, though it came pretty close at times.)

This discussion of having a certain privileged “learned” population who are particularly good at interpreting makes me slightly uneasy, because to me it automatically raises the question of authority: what happens if authoritative interpretations, as designed by this select group, gets in the way of individuals interpreting for themselves? I'm not necessarily thinking of grad school students taking over the world. In one provocative section, Adso discusses learning as something for the few and elect - “Learning is not like a coin, which remains physically whole even through the most infamous transactions; it is, rather, like a very handsome dress, which is worn out through use and ostentation. Is not a book like that, in fact? Its pages crumble, its ink and gold turn dull, if too many hands touch it.” (185) Comparing learning to a book that can grow shabby, decayed and eventually crumble from overuse sets up the biggest danger in the end of the novel—namely, people who think that it's better off if certain kinds of learning (found in specific books) are kept solely to themselves, even if it meant having to kill to keep it secret. William has an interesting monologue in which he discusses the problem of giving learning to the simple:

"The simple have something more than do learned doctors, who often become lost in their search for broad, general laws. The simple have a sense of the individual, but this sense, by itself, is not enough. The simple grasp a truth of their own, perhaps truer than that of the doctors of the church, but destroy it in unthinking actions. What must be done? Give learning to the simple? Too easy, or too difficult. The Franciscan teachers considered this problem... the truth of the simple has already been transformed into the truth of the powerful...How are we to remain close to the experience of the simple, maintaining, so to speak, their operative virtue, the capacity of working toward the transformation and betterment of their world?"

Since for William, “the experience of the simple has savage and uncontrollable results...” his solution is that “we must be sure that the simple are right in possessing the sense of the individual, which is the only good kind.” (205) I can see a lot of sense in that. Being a living individual is a unique, singular experience. I will never know what it's like to be you, you will never know what it's like to be me. That's something that really shouldn't get lost--this understanding and appreciation of our unique, singular existence. Nobody quite like you, with your thoughts-visions-dreams, has ever existed, nor will ever exist again. Even if the kids I work with every day don't turn out to be graduate students or university professors, they nontheless deserve to think of themselves as *individuals* who can decide for themselves what they want. They don't have to go into the Army just because that's the authorative interpretation of what they should do with their lives imposed upon them--they are individuals with unique personalities and thus unique decisions (I think you could argue that authorities try to erase this, in order to encourage only one interpretation). I'm probably not making this point as clearly as I want to... but in summary, this book helped me figure a couple of important things out, in unexpected ways. I think I'm slowly but surely coming to terms with my own decentered nature, my detective-like character, my unsettledness, and I'm slowly but surely beginning to learn how I can use those qualities as a gift, not just to better others, but also myself. I may not be any closer to creating any more order in this world, but at least there is the smallest semblance of more order in this poor head of mine.

“Learning does not consist of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do.” (97)

* There's an absolutely crazy anecdote in this talk straight out of Philip K. Dick, where Eco describes an incident in which he found himself living a scene straight out of TNOTR: thumbing through a beat-up old book in his library, its pages stuck together in a gluey fashion, and realizing it was this lost, incredibly valuable translation of Aristotle. This really blew my mind. There is something crazy going on with this whole life-imitates-art business...

The Empire Never Ended

2009-03-22T17:24:00.000-07:00

Man, it's been hard for me to feel relaxed lately! It's been a little hard for me to figure out why...

1 – I have first-day of school anxieties about running the Mad Science camps during spring break at the B&G Club this week. Oh, it just goes on and on, doesn't it? Trying to get the printer to work so that I can print out the instructions. Finding the time with Corey at some point this week to make sure I actually know how to build a bottle rocket before I go about trying to teach 30-40 children how to do so.

2 – This has been true for the past week or so, but lately it feels like the long commute is really getting me down. When I take the Max from my house (as opposed to downtown), it takes me an hour and a half to get to work, as opposed to forty minutes. An hour and a half!! That's something like 15 hours a week, just spent sitting on the Max, to and fro. That's like another part-time job, right there. I dunno, I never really planned on doing this job forever, just because it's neither all that challenging or well-paid. It's good for now; it's definitely better than nothing. I mean, the people with master's in education who work there and get paid just as much as me definitely helps puts things in perspective re: the current job market economy blah blah blah. And if that doesn't do it, then the chirping crickets and tumbleweeds blowing through the job postings on craigslist and idealist will definitely do it for ya.

3 – I applied for a fellowship to work/volunteer abroad, but apart from that I really haven't been doing anything. I mean, I check Americorps every week, craigslist every couple of days... I feel like I'm making an effort to keep looking. There's some journalism internships in D.C. and a non-profit internship in San Francisco that look interesting, but the idea of moving to these brand new expensive cities for an unpaid position just makes me feel like stale jam on the inside. The deadline to teach in Spain still hasn't passed. I dunno, I'm not really into applying for things just for the sake of applying for them anymore (though that's how I got this job and got saved from unemployment). I guess I'm going to just keep doing what I'm doing: keep my eyes open, scan things once a week but not really get too stressed out about it. If I don't get the fellowship Corey and I might just take off to South America and WWOOF it for a while.

4 – #3 is tied in with #4, the whole thinking/pondering/reflecting about the future (I don't want to put worry! Why worry, right?). I think a lot of this general anxiety may have to do with the fact that Laura is thesising, and so she's pretty much constantly stressed out and/or on very little sleep. I was talking to Emily on the phone the other day and I said that when I think about my spring break last year, I almost feel like I have PTSD: my heart starts pounding, my mouth tastes slightly acidic, my hands feel trembly like I've drunk too much coffee, I feel nervous for no discernible reason. Maybe it's because Laura is thesising that I've inevitably started thinking about mine. I dunno, I was reading some Onetti short stories and I picked up Faulkner's The Wild Palms... long story short, I need to easier on myself.

I am trying to learn about my “self” and what that “self” is.... I dunno, in my postmodern fiction class we talked a little about how modernity can really fracture and damage the self... I think the term I ended up using the most in my papers was the “decentered” self. That sounds about right: something not in its right place, teetering uneasily on the edge. And then in some of my yoga classes, the teacher mentioned thinking about our “divine” selves. All this sounds really woo-wooh, but bear with me a little. It was such a mind-blowing, weird concept to me: this idea that I have this self inside of me who is already perfect, already full formed, and the point of my life is to gradually and carefully peel away as many layers as I can in order to get as close to this perfect self as possible. I think of someone who is calm, mostly happy every day, peaceful and positive and satisfied with herself and life. Yeah, this is the self I am trying to approach.

It is so weird to try to think about this “self” in me. It's like trying to get to know a stranger. I'm like asking this self, so what do you do? Are you a writer? An academic? Do you teach in a university? Do you sit at home with your garden and write novels with your laptop in your lap? Do you teach English in a foreign country? Do you work as a journalist and write articles with sharp precise language about important issues? What do you do? What do you want? I want to reach the point where I know this person well enough to greet them as a friend, as opposed to an enemy or uneasy awkward acquaintance, when the day arrives. It t is all really very mind blowing, indeed.

It's hard to balance thinking about things in the long-term, but then also doing the day-to-day stuff that is necessary. Putting healthy food in your belly. Trying (unsuccessfully for two days now) to get your computer back from your boyfriend's sister, after you left your bag in your car, so that you can finally get started on revising your silly nanowrimo, which is so silly, but god help us, you find it so fun and fulfilling and entertaining anyway. Working the day job, making money so that you can pay your rent so that you can live with your lover and save up money to visit your parents in South America and your family in England. My grandmother just turned 93 in January and I really, really need to go see her. My aunt and uncle lost their house to the bank, victims of foreclosure. Yeah, family is important. No matter the anxiety that capitalism trains us to feel when our checking or savings account is suddenly and drastically emptier. What am I saving this money for, if not to go see friends and family now?

This really hit home in a powerful way:
you are going to have to go on a kind of journey.

You're going to have to do certain things and trust that answers will come to you. That involves letting go of a certain amount of control. It involves not doing what you have been doing. It involves change.
I mean, I'm confident that you're going to be fine, and I'd like you to trust me on that, but I'm not saying it will be easy, because lurking in this issue are some subtle concepts about the self and the world that you can only really get through emotional experience.
Just sit with your dreams and desires. Exempt them from the feasibility study. Regard them with interest. Allow yourself to feel the way you feel about them.
This sounds really woo-woo. But, hey. There is no shortcut. You're going to have to head in a new direction.
It takes courage to set out doing things in a new way. You're not going to know, right away, exactly where you're headed. So I suggest that you visualize, or dream, or speak from the heart, or sketch on a piece of paper, what you actually want -- where you want to be right now, what you want to be doing, what you want to own. I guess, eventually, if you find that you really want certain things, then you will be allowed to move to the stage of getting them. But for now, my opinion is that you have been doing too much getting and not enough wanting. So stick to wanting for a while. See if that doesn't relieve some of the anxiety about getting. Let go of getting. Just stick with wanting.

Deep Rivers Run Still

2009-03-18T22:32:00.000-07:00

Before moving on to different topics of interest, I want to discuss one last book that takes the political versus the personal as one of its themes. I read Jose Maria Arguedas' Los Rios Profundos (Deep Rivers) in Spanish because I really missed reading in Spanish, and I wanted to make sure I could keep it up to par. At first I was worried I was going to have trouble getting into the book because it reminded me a lot of something we would read in Ms. Aguirre's tenth-grade Spanish class (not that there's anything wrong with that). I thought it was just going to be another coming-of-age novel, which it is, very much so. Now that some time has passed for me to reflect on it a little more, I'll go out on a limb and say that it's worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as Joyce's Portrait of the Artist.

The first half of the book is mostly episodic in nature. It's with the last few chapters (the ones dealing with the indigenous women's strike and the plague that afflicts the community) that the book really comes together, and all the seemingly disparate elements (the mad women, the various school friends and their dramas, the interactions with the indigenous community) suddenly click together into a cohesively, thematically-related whole. This makes sense, since it's these two events (the strike and the plague) where Ernesto the narrator really comes together as a person. Beforehand, he's very much a watcher, an observer. When the strike happens, he gets much more involved, and once the plague hits he's a drastically more active character.

You can read more about Arguedas in his biography, but basically Los rios profundos is an fictionalized version of Arguedas' childhood. Like the main character Ernesto, Arguedas' father was a country lawyer who traveled a lot, and apparently whenever he was away from home Arguedas' stepmother would lock him up in the kitchen and ignore him, so essentially he was raised by indigenous servants. Like Ernesto, until he went to Catholic boarding school at age 14, he spoke better Quechua than he did Spanish. He went on to study anthropology after writing Los rios profundos and wrote a lot of poetry in Quechua, but he never went on to write another work that reflected on or referred to his childhood. He ended up committing suicide, a fact that inevitably casts its shadow over Los rios profundos, which deals so much with Ernesto's feeling of not belonging, of being trapped in between two worlds.

It's tough, that whole between world things. I don't think about it in relation to my own situation as much as I should, maybe. How did growing up in Colombia, in freaking South America, for goodness' sake, affect me and form me as a person? How has it set me apart or made me different than if I'd grown up in a suburb in Virginia? I won't go into it too much in this forum, but one thing I think tends to be overlooked in these discussions about origins is class. To put it bluntly, I grew up in a well-off family, and that's what has made more of a difference than anything else. I have little things from Colombia: Shakira songs on my ipod, Spanish that vacillates between good, great and exceptional, depending on where I'm living. I went through a phase of reading Peace Corps blogs and a lot of people wrote about the discomfrot they felt at being stared at from being the foreigner, the stranger, the one who stood out in a crowd. And all I could think was “man, that feeling is old-school for me!” In Unicentro, man, in high school, every time I opened my mouth—I'd always be the gringa, la mona, you know? I was pretty excited to go to college in the U.S. because I really looked forward to the idea of blending in, of not standing out, of melting away into the crowd. I thought maybe that would make a difference in relationships with people, if there wasn't this big white foreigner thing in between us all the time. Turns out I still felt pretty different, but it was a gift rather than a burden.

On with the book review. It's the presence and the treatment of the indigenous community in this novel that sets it above and apart other typical coming-of-age novels. It's not written in a vacuum (mainly I think of Jane Eyre, Mr. Rochester's far away wealth coming from the distant islands). The Indians are not treated in a patronized or racist fashion, as they were in books like Aves sin nido, which purported to reveal the injustice of Peru's treatment of Indians, but just ended up depicting them as these pitiful, helpless beings. There is nothing about indianismo on wikipedia, which makes me sad that I can't make a happy-go-clicky link, but basically it was an early 20th-century literary movement in Latin America that was a combination of regionalism, realism and the picturesque, which a focus on indigenous presence. As Wililam Rowe puts it in the introduction, writers of the indigenismo movement more often than not “sever the Indian from his own culture and then attribute to him an outlook that will appear to explain his behavior. As the reipient of alien values which are projected into him, the Indian is merely a static character who reflects the view of outsiders. Any active interrelation with the world, in which culture and consciousness consist, is denied him.” (vii)

The fact that Arguedas avoids this is enough to make LRP a worthy read. How does he do it? Interestingly enough, it's not through inserting a bunch of self-righteous, teary social justice speeches, with characters shaking their fists and bellowing about how unfair it all is. Unlike the other inidianismo books I've read According to both introductions in the two different versions I ended up having to check out (trying to avoid late fees, y'know), Arguedas adopts an “indigenous perspective” of the world not only through the language of the novel, but through Ernesto himself. As John V. Murra puts it in one introduction, Arguedas' intention was “how to transmit to the reader of Spanish not only a compassion for the oppresed, but a sense that the latter also had a perception, a world view of their own, in which people, mountains, animals, the rain, truth, all had dimensions of their own, powerful, revealing, and utterly unlike the Iberian ones.” (pg. xi from the U of Texas Press 1978 edition—apologies for incorrect MLA notation due to my own laziness.) Which is all very well and good, but again—how does he do it? (I can't help but think INDIGENOUS PERSPECTIVE OF THE WORLD M-F—DO YOU SPEAK IT?) I think Arguedas' transcendental, almost ecstatic descriptions of nature and the Peruvian scenery throughout the book has a lot to do with it. The descriptions aren't boring nature porn that become an absolute slog to get through (I'm looking at you, Thirteen Moons); instead, they're charged with an intense, passionate language. I wish I hadn't return my copy so that I could type up some examples. It's pretty interesting. Again, I couldn't help but relate it back to my own personal experiences, working this summer in Ecuador, with the Huaorani and the Siona, reading books like "Savages"... I'm not an anthropologist, but there really is a different worldview of things out there in the jungle, and nature is a huge part of it.

What really gets me more than anything else, though, is the language. Damn, I enjoy speaking Spanish, and man, how I miss it when I'm not. That's what I miss about Colombia, more than anything else: speaking Spanish. I'm grateful for the ability to get that much closer to the language in books like this one....

Laguna Cuyabeno

Here an Intellectual, There an Intellectual, Where to Put the Intellectual?

2009-03-15T19:56:00.000-07:00

The concern of the intellectual is by definition the conscience. An intellectual who fails to understand what is happening in his time and in his country is a walking contradiction, and those who understand but do nothing will have a place reserved in the anthology of tears but not in the living history of their land.--Rodolfo Walsh, Seminario CGT, May 1st 1968

I've been reading a biography of Rodolfo Walsh (True Crimes: Rodolfo Walsh and the Role of the Intellectual in Latin American Politics by Michael McCaughan, Latin American Bureau 2000) which is also an anthology of his fiction and journalism translated into English. Not only has it been an interesting read, but it also has some eerily appropriate parallel themes with my current ponderings. Walsh was an Argentine writer and journalist, born of Irish ancestry and raised in a Catholic boarding school, wrote a In Cold Blood-like non-fiction work called Operacion Masacre, went to Cuba shortly after the Castro revolution in order to work in the news industry there and weirdly enough ended up intercepting a code from the CIA that gave away the location for the Bay of Pigs invasion, abandoned fiction to devote himself full-time to journalism and underground resistance work in the 70's once the political situation in Argentina really went down the drain, and was shot and killed in a shoot-out by the military in the middle of the street (his body was never recovered). He is counted as one of Argentina's 30,000 “disappeared” of that period. Isn't that weird, how you can sum someone's life up like that, in a couple of greatest-hits sentences? (I inevitably wonder what my own sentences will consist of...)

I haven't finished the book yet (I'm at the part where he gets really intensely involved in underground resistance), but there have definitely been some moments in the book that have given me pause and thus merit some reflection here. The short stories are excellent, particularly "Footnote" and "Esa mujer" (check them out). There's a lot of discussion in the book (as indicated by the subtitle) about Walsh's struggle with the role of the intellectual in society, which I found personally quite relevant... I feel uncomfortable about calling myself an “intellectual,” but I definitely read a lot, and like thinking about things that probably a lot of people would consider quite silly, such as “what is the role of the intellectual in society?” (After Barry-O's election and Georgie's reign, this question has been given a bit more attention.) I went to an expensive college, my parents are well-educated. I like reading fiction, writing fiction (goes without saying I need to do this one more), writing and talking about fiction. Yeah... I am pretty much a bourgeois intellectual.

I guess I struggle a lot with how relevant all of this is (the reading and writing and talking about fiction). I like doing a lot of other stuff to, outside of this—I like working with people, I like being with people, I like doing things that feel like they make more of a difference in a day-to-day sense. My job isn't super prestigious or super high paying or anything like that, but someone's got to hang out with these kids and give them something positive in their lives, you know? I dunno, I'll just say that I find it relevant and then leave it at that. My struggle (which I was reminded of again and again in this book) is finding a balance between these two things: the whole isolated hermetic ivory tower writer and intellectual tradition versus the nitty-gritty, down and dirty, involved in the world role. Is there a way to combine the two? Does it really come down to choosing one or the other? Is the role of books in my life destined to be restricted to a hobby, a sideline entertainment, or will it become a career? (The latter's up to me to decide, I guess.) Interestingly enough, in some of the interviews with family members and friends, a lot of them express frustration about Walsh's choice of journalism over politics... there's a certain attitude in their words of "oh, he could have been one of the greatest Argentinean fiction writers, he had so much potential, but then he went ahead and got involved in politics and justice." I don't think there's really a right or wrong choice; it's just a matter of the type of person you are... some of us are content, others of us are a little more scattered and need to explore different roles and careers in order to find that kind of satisfied fulfillment...

I folded over the upper-right corner on the page where Walsh is having a conversation with another young aspiring author, in his early 20's (this really hits home in terms of the theme of this blog):

“These are different times, Nicolas, and this is a time for a bigger undertaking. When you're trying to change important things, then you realize that a short story, a novel, aren't worth it and won't satisfy you. Beautiful bourgeois art! They taught us that it was the supreme spiritual value. But when you have people who gave their lives, and continue to, literature is no longer your loyal and sweet lover—it's a cheap whore. There are times when ... every spectator is a coward or a traitor. This might be a pain for the more intimate questions of the soul but that's the time we're living in.” (218)

You see this same question in a lot of Roberto Bolaño works. I just read La estrella distante (Distant Star), a 140-page novella that makes for a quick and thought-provoking one-day read. This book talks more about writers and poets than anything else, specifically one poet, Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, who gets involved with the Pinochet Regine by writing state-approved poetry in the sky. If you like Bolaño, you should definitely read this work. I never realized how influenced by Borges he was, either. I'm starting to see this as a common denominator in a lot of the stuff I've been reading or re-reading lately (Lolita, The Island of the Day Before). I don't want to give too much away about the book (part of its impact is being shocked by its unexpected development), but the novel deals with the same question discussed in the Walsh biography: what is the relationship between literature and real events? Is turning to literature when unimaginably violent events are taking place in your immediate world brave or just blind and stupid? The insightful New York Times book review of Bolaño's The Savage Detectives makes an important point:

What can it mean, he asks us and himself, in his dark, extraordinary, stinging novella "By Night in Chile," that the intellectual elite can write poetry, paint and discuss the finer points of avant-garde theater as the junta tortures people in basements? The word has no national loyalty, no fundamental political bent; it's a genie that can be summoned by any would-be master. Part of Bolaño's genius is to ask, via ironies so sharp you can cut your hands on his pages, if we perhaps find a too-easy comfort in art, if we use it as anesthetic, excuse and hide-out in a world that is very busy doing very real things to very real human beings. Is it courageous to read Plato during a military coup or is it something else?

Yeah... I'm just trying to figure stuff out, I guess. I am in a certain position of power and privilege, in the sense that I have choices of what to do with my life. And just like in Spiderman, "with great power comes great responsibility." So I am trying to figure what I want to do with my brain, and how I can find something to do with my brain that feels both worthwhile and valuable. So it goes.

Maybe getting glasses is the common denominator behind figuring everything out.

"Everybody is making love, or else expecting rain"

2009-03-08T01:09:00.000-08:00

I can't believe I didn't mention Anne Tyler's Saint Maybe in the previous post. Oh, well.

Today was an exceedingly pleasant and lazy day. It was just so much fun to do nothing—I'd really missed that during the weekdays, when I'm always waiting for buses, waiting for the Max, riding the bus, riding the Max, or being with large groups of exceedingly enthusiastic and energetic children. I woke up at 11:30 AM, rolled out of bed and left for yoga class. Afterwards I went to Fred Myer on Hawthrone for groceries and an electric toothbrush, which I didn't get because they're so durned expensive. Maybe after my dentist trip next week I'll decide whether or not it's worth it, depending on the dentist's verdict of disgust. Then I rode my bike all the way back to our new little shack in NE. I really like our new neighborhood a lot. It's right by the 82nd Max line, so as opposed to Milwaukie, transportation is very convenient. The street we're on (Tillamook) runs along a golf course and a park all the way down to 60th, and after that to 39th it's all cracked paved streets (I have a thing about living on or near unimproved roads) and cute painted houses.

Yesterday was great too: I met Corey downtown after I got out of work and we got sushi off a sushi train and then went to a late showing of Watchmen, which I enjoyed tremendously. Maybe that makes me uncool to say that, but I didn't look at my watch once (more impressive considering it was three hours). I read the book last fall and really liked it a lot. I've had the Smashing Pumpkins song from the trailer stuck in my head all day. I even liked the soundtrack, especially the cover of “Desolation Row” at the end that I now want to track down:

Now at midnight all the agents
And the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do

Anyway, it's so nice to have pleasant days like today. In Eat Pray Love Gilbert discusses the difference between entertainment and pleasure, how it's one thing to just kind of numb yourself in front of the TV or in the late night disco, trying to convince yourself that you're having a good time, and how it's another thing to do things that you find deeply and intensely pleasurable. Like biking through the hail, laughing and grinning broadly while it hits your face and pricks at your hand. Or drinking english breakfast tea with honey and reading David Lodge. Or browsing wikipedia articles all afternoon and feeling completely not guilty about it. Putting the fish in a giant plate of warm water to defrost, so that Corey can cook it and fill my belly with yummy goodness once he gets home later. Such a nice thing, these little treats in life.

I read old journal entries where I made all these lists of things to DO and things that must get DONE and things I had to ACHIEVE and ACCOMPLISH and man, it just sounds so stressful to me. I don't like having that mentality anymore of needing to have this very long list and if I didn't do everything on it, then it would become something in my life to feel really bad about and thus a way to feel bad about myself... uurgh. Dreadful. It's nice to think that I can see a change in myself, even in such a short period such as six months. Such a nice thing, these constant transformations.

Speaking of transformations, everything is covered with snow outside...

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whomever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

- "The Guest House", by Rumi

More Island Time

2009-03-04T22:57:00.000-08:00

You're packing your bag for that other desert island—the one with no electricity—what 5 books do you take with you?

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner -- it's hard to imagine myself going somewhere long term without taking this book with me. I've read it so many times though, that I'm tempted to just take Absalom, Absalom! instead.
Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth -- I could reread this book again and again and always discover something new. Extraordinarily powerful re: the truth of human nature. Great historical fiction. Bonus points for being long.
Therapy by David Lodge -- the ultimate comfort food, the book I can reread again and again and again and it will still make me laugh. Melissa Banks' The Wonder Spot is a very close second.
Ulysses by James Joyce -- a desert island would be the perfect chance to actually finish this thing.
Hamlet -- to read aloud to myself.

I really really wanna put Cien Años de Soledad but again, read it so many times... and what about Onetti? Most of his stuff is so short though. OH OH a desert island would be the perfect opportunity to read *every* piece in the *complete* works of Borges! (poetry, essays, letters... everything. And, and, and--and Orwell! And Kafka! Oh, books.

Chick Lit for the Soul

2009-03-04T10:38:00.000-08:00

If you have a vagina and are kind of hippy-dippy, chances are you will probably enjoy this book. I've devoured it with great relish over the past day and a half. I picked it up in one of my BFF's bedroom while I was waiting to go to dim sum the other morning. It was given to her as a gift from another BFF. It has a little price sticker on it in pounds, so I guess she must have bought it in England somewhere. How appropriate that this book has been passed on hand to hand (I was going to write "vagina to vagina," but that is a little too reminiscent of that line from "Me, You and Everybody We Know." If you've seen that movie, you should know what I'm talking about). The cover proudly boasts a quote from Julia Roberts of all people, exclaiming "It's what I'm giving all my girl friends" in elegant red cursive. (there's also a rave from Minnie Driver, but really, who cares about her?)

This is the kind of book I would expect to be enthusiastically praised by sources such as Gwyneth Paltrow's website. I am very sorry to say that in a fit of interest last December, I signed up for the weekly newsletter. Now, there's been a lot written about this stupid website. What interests me is not so much what it says about this weird alien blond creature, but more what my interest in it says about me. I may not be qualified to give a stirring cultural analysis on the mindset of early-20's females, but gosh darn it, I sure can blab about myself.

Anyway, so basically this book and this website appealed to me as escapist fantasies. It is so, so, nice--almost pornographic--to indulge in these things, to imagine oneself doing them. My BFF's favorite part of the book is the first section, where Gilbert is in Italy, pigging out on pasta, pizza and all those wonderful carbs. But my favorite part of the book is the middle section, where she's in an ashram in India, mainly because it sounds so foreign and strange to me (which is not to say that I'mm pigging out on carbs all the time--I wish!). It's just so appealing. It makes me think, "Damn! I wish I had the money to buy a ticket to India and the time to live in an Ashram and the mindset and capacity to meditate so much!" Yoga has loosened up my hamstrings enough so that I can touch my toes, and that's pretty much it. On that same note, Maybe I'm just strange, but I really enjoy reading Gwynie's recommended recipies for her post-Christmas fast/cleanse and her favorite workout exercise videos. It makes me think "Damn! I wish I had the time and the money to buy almond milk and miso soup and all those other crazy ingredients, and work out that much and do all those crazy ridiculous butt crunches where I'm kicking out my legs behind me and boy, does that exercise look like it would really hurt my knee."

I guess on one hand it's nice that my fantasies are of doing hippy dippy stuff (like cleanses and intense meditation retreats), as opposed to, I dunno, buying shoes. It just makes me feel good, you know? I loved sinking into this book and Gilbert's funny, witty, wise tone and her amusing anecdotes like a warm fuzzy blanket. This book came along for me at the exactly right time in my life, much in the same way as Melissa Banks' The Wonder Spot. I remember reading Banks lying on my stomach in my bed in England, post-breakup, and reading chapter after chapter and just nodding "mm-hmm--been there, done that." My sister underlined several passages in pencil and wrote "That's me" for some particularly eerily parallel scenes. The same thing happenned to me with EPL: it's just creepy how Gilbert writes about some of the exact same things that I've experienced, specifically in the quest for inner peace, fufillment, stability, strength, and all those other good strong-sounding one-syllable words.

I remember finishing TWC, closing it and then sitting up and feeling if not exactly compeltely healed, at least a little more than before (Steve Martin's Shopgirl was also a most unexpected big stepping stone in the heart healing process for me). And then taking out my journal and writing it down: I feel better. That's the same feeling that Eat Pray Love gave me: it just made me feel better, having something so enjoyable to read on the Max, something that taught me about all these interesting things I've been wondering and thinking about lately, like yoga and ashrams and traveling in Asia and Eastern religions and all those other hippy dippy young adult quest things. Again, I repeat: if you have a vagina and are becoming increasingly hippy dippy in your old (young) adult age, you will probably find yourselve folding over page corners or underlining a lot of passages in this book, because they will more than likely really hit home for you.

Bowing, Not Knowing to What

2009-02-28T20:54:00.000-08:00

I like thinking (and reading) about death. Maybe that makes me sound a little too much like Woody Allen. I've kind of been feeling like Woody Allen lately, specifically like the scenes in Annie Hall where he buys her all the books on death theory, and then at the end of the movie when she packs them all up to return to him. It used to scare me a lot: the idea of not existing anymore, of simply not-being. "What about me!" the little voice inside my brain squeaks out. "What about all the things I have built and constituted and gathered over the years? All the books I have read, the songs I have listened to?" There's something very freaky about all that just being wiped out—erased, vanished, like a poor dead computer. There's a really great part in David Lodge's Thinks...:

" 'So you think that when we die we just cease to exist?' she says, when the waitress has gone.
'Not in an absolute sense. The atoms of my body are indestructible.'
'But your self, your spirit, your soul...?'
'As far as I'm concerned those are just ways of talking about certain kinds of brain activity. When the brain ceases to function, they necessarrily cease too.'
'And that doesn't fill you with despair?'
'No,' he says cheerfully, twisting creamy ribbons of tagliatelle on his fork. 'Why should it?' He thrusts the steaming pasta into his mouth and munches vigorously.
'Well, it seems pointles to spend years and years acquiring knowledge, accumulating experience, trying to be good, struggling to make something of yourself, as the saying goes, if nothing of that self survives deat. It's like building a beautiful sandcastle below the tideline.'
'That's the only part of the beach you can build a sandcastle...'"

This is a pretty good representation of the internal dialogue in my head re: death (spaghetti-twirling and all). Mine is a little more hippy dippy, lately. I can't find the quote right now, but Tori Amos said something about her album from the choirgirl hotel once, written in the aftermath of several miscarriages, that it was her attempt to hold hands with death, to laugh and play with it a little. This is something I can relate to, in regards to trying to do concrete, day-to-day little changes and efforts in my everyday life... just hold hands with death a little, from time to time, not let it drag me around, but be aware. Not deny it, not run from it, not let it make me panicky and small-feeling and frenzied. Come to terms with it, that it's there. Death does not come from the outside, it comes from within.

Thinking about death has been my strategy as of late to put things in perspective. Over sushi last night with Corey, he asked what I thought of the first 2 months-ish of Barry O's presidency, specifically regarding his escalation of the conflict in Afghanistan. Maybe it was the terrible ginger cocktail, but my response was "well, we're all going to die anyway, aren't we?" He said my comment wasn't particularly helpful, and kind of a terrible perspective to live with. Agreed. I guess what would have been a better answer was that politicians will be politicians, you know, and in the end, we're all just going to have to live our lives...

Faust writes a very interesting, readable history on the Civil War, using death as a jumping-off point in order to discuss the Confederate defeat and the Reconstruction in a new way. The emphasis in this review ought to be on "readable"; man, they sure teach them at Harvard to write those topic sentences! It's so easy to follow Faust's arguments in this book. I especially like the one-word gimmick for the chapter titles, making it easier to remember what they're about: Dying. Killing. Burying. Naming. Accounting. Good stuff.

Basically, Faust discusses how the kind of death produced by the Civil War--specfically death on a massive, unprecedented scale, caused by technologies whose effect on battle strategies was not foreseen--affected a lot of different things: the desire for the Civil War to end and the formation of a strong federal state post-war, to give the two most-discussed examples.

My favorite parts of the book were Faust's discussion of citizens' understanding of waht constituted "a good death": the proper way to die. Home, on your bed, surrounded by family and friends, able to give your last words in a clear and understandable fashion, make it clear that you're happy about going off to hang with God, etc. The Civil War made this form of the hors mori a tad difficult. You could get blown to pieces on the battlefield, making the issue of resurrection on Judgement Day a very iffy question, if you had no body to be buried (and thus raised). You could get shot randomly by snipers while drinking your morning coffee. You could be one of so many dead that it was very unlikely that you would get a proper burial and would instead have to settle for a mass grave (probably after rotting for a while on the battlefield first). Faust's chapter on bodies and burying is one of the most interesting of the book; she mentiones how Gettysburg citizens walked around for months afterwards pressing perfumed handkerchiefs to their faces because the smell of rot and decay just overwhelmed the town. The little mentioned facts of history.

Over that same sushi meal, I asked Corey what he wanted to do before he died. Mine are:
1- Go to India and Nepal
2- Write and publish a book
3- Travel through the rest of South America
4- Hold my child in my arms
If I can do these things, I think I will be a pretty happy camper come my own hors mori. Here's to doing what little we can to prepare for the inevitable.

FOR THE ANNIVERSARY OF MY DEATH by W.S. Merwin
Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one women
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what

Too many books...

2009-02-26T22:26:00.001-08:00

It's reached the point where I now feel just plain overwhelmed. I went on a holds-placing frenzy, and now as a result I have so many books littered in the hallway of our just moved-into house that I feel overwhelmed and at a loss of where to start. I've reacted by smuggling home children's books from the Learning Center at the B&G Club, the Domain of which I count myself as Master and Overlord (today one of the other part-time staff said that the chick who previously had my job lasted a week, before leaving in tears... it made me feel pleased as punch, there on my knees, picking up the scattered Uno cards). This week I've devoured many childhood favorites: "The Boxcar Children," "By the Shores of Silver Lake," "Ramona the Pest," "Anastasia's Chosen Career," "From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil something-or-other," 'Bridge to Terabithia," "Bunnicula" (a brilliant novel--I read this in 1st grade, apparently it's 6th grade reading level... daymn, was I smart stuff--I feel like Greg in Tori's "Pretty Good Year" just thinking about it, they say you were something in those formative years, hold onto noting as fast as you can.

Despite this impressive-sounding list, sadly enough, everything else sits untouched and unread. The enormous Salman Rushdie book I already know I should return, because there's no way I'm ever going to read it. "Lolita" and "Ulysses," the two main competetiors for the Why Haven't You Read This In Full Yet?! Feel Ashamed category (these two are the others on this shameful list. To be fair, I read "Lolita" in sixth grade, it made a nice wooshing sound as most of its literary value and merit flew straight over my head). Faulkner's "The Wild Palms." A big pile of other random books I'm not even going to list because I know there's no way I'm going to have time for them so they're just going to end up getting returned. And god knows what other holds-arrival notification e-mails will be sitting in my inbox tomorrow.

It's not that I haven't been reading, though. I read Onetti's "Los adioses" in English (Balderston translation), a weird and truly wonderful novella about a basketball player with tuberculosis. My goodreads account claims I'm reading "Pride & Prejudice", which I did, for about ten minutes, back wen I was sick as a dog on its deathbed over the weekend with a flu so bad that even my eyes hurt, making even reading difficult (the ultimate sickbed activity). "P&P" is one of those books I've started 10 times but have never made it past the 50-page mark... now that I've seen the wonderful TV series, I'm wondering if it may be time to just give up the ghost, say "I Do Not Care for Jane Austen" (as opposed to what I really think, which is that Jane Austen really does just sucks).

So basically I think I'm going to tackle "Rios profundos" next, another book recommended to me back in the day by my advisor, mostly because I really miss reading in Spanish, and because I was helping Corey with his Spanish homework the other day, and was annoyed by how many times I had to confess that I wasn't exactly sure of the words for "blender" or "walnut" and had to shamefully retreat to an online dictionary. I have the Spanish version, checked out very kindly by Corey from the PSU library (the absence of Summit in my life has by far been the only sad thing about not being a student anymore).

And then what? I had an epic plan there for a while to read "Ulysses" and Homer's "Odyssey" (the Fagles translation) at the same time, alternating between chapters. I don't know how into that plan I am anymore; it feels a little gimmicky--plus those are damn heavy books, and it'd be super lame to carry them around in my everything-but-the-kitchen-sink backpack all day). Who know? I'll worry about it then, I guess!

One small yet significant (to me at least!) success story is that the books I own are proudly stacked and shelved. Nothing makes me feel more at peace or at home than a shelf full of books. It's the very first thing I did when we moved in, even before putting away my clothes. Here is the first shelf:
The Corrections
Sacred Hunger
Fight Club
Staying ALive- Real Poems for Unreal Times
The Story and its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction (huge green Bible-sized compilation from CTY days)
The Art of the Tale
Life of Pi
Respiracion artificial (stolen from Argentinian in Ecuador--I have officially become a person who borrowed a book and never returned it)
The Ruins
The Duchess (Mom's)
La muerte de Artemio Cruz
El Matadero
The Safety of Objects
Cien Anos de Soledad (Corey reading this one right now and greatly enjoying it!)
Asi que pasen cinco anos
Ariel
The years of Rice and Salt (I had two copies of this--why?)
The Yellow Wall-Paper and Other Stories
Sophie's World
The Woman Warrior (taken from free box at Wesleyan)
Se's Come Undone
How Far Can You Go? (<3 David Lodge)
Neverwhere
Kafka's Complete Short Stories (the typeface in this book is so bad that a ton of periods are missing... so in sixth grade or something I went through and replaced a lot of them with a pen. It makes reading the stories so annoying and distracting that I think I am just going to have to buy a new copy)
Extremely Loud and Everything Close
Everything is Illuminated

There is definitely a story behind every book purchased, about the time in your life when you read it, and so on...

History as the Only Refuge: "Artificial Respiration"

2009-02-15T12:17:00.000-08:00

Man, this is one of my favorite books. I've never read anything else quite like it. It's like reading all the notes and theories and ideas from my advisor's classes condensed into a single volume of fiction (which would make sense, since Piglia was his advisor at Princeton). I read it over the summer in Spanish and have now recently re-read it in English, in a version translated the same guy who translated the Onetti versions I used for the T (why am I still talking about this thing a year later? Suddenly I understand why you get more than one year for your PhD dissertation... nine months is just not enough time, not at all).

The best way to describe Piglia's fiction is literary criticism masquerading as fiction. Or perhaps fiction masquerading as literary criticism. I can definitely see someone reading this and throwing it across the room, complaining loudly that "nothing ever happens in this book!" That is definitely true. The last 100 pages or so consist of a Polish expat espousing on his theories on the relationship between Kafka and Hitler, the theories of Wittgenstein and other such deliciously philosophical nuggets. I for one loved it, and I think whoever says that these parts of the book are irrelevant or distracting from the main storyline are missing the entire point (upon second reading, I now seriously think the Kafka-Hitler section is the key to the whole book, and not just because how the description of Kafka's death from tuberculosis in a sanatorium provides a key to the book's title).

In the introduction, Balderston cites a useful quote from Piglia on the importance of literary coding in his work:

"Piglia argues that it is a mistake to read Artificial Respiration as a simple product of a period of state terror. "I believe," he says, "that coding is the work of fiction in any context... I believe that fiction always codes and constructs hieroglyphs out of social reality. Literature is never direct... What I do believe is that political contexts define ways of reading."

Codes and attempts to decipher play an important part in this book (isn't that all what literary criticism is anyway? An attempt to "decode"?). As the Polish character says near the end of the novel, "To read, one must know how to associate." More than anything else, AR asks us to associate, to decode--to be good, active readers, which is imperative considering the subject at hand.

It's interesting that Piglia mentions the period of state terror in which AR was written, because I can definitely imagine someone (albeit someone a bit clueless and stupid) reading this book and just plain not getting the state terror angle at all, because it is never directly referred to, not at all, not once. One thing that makes this translation particularly useful to read is that Balderston includes all these endnotes explaining Piglia's references to different historical figures and events in Argentine history. You can definitely tell that Piglia was a historian by training. Balderston raises the interesting possibility that the books title refers to the Argentine Republic (Respiracionn Artificial--Republica Argentina). Is it be possible to read this entire book as a sort of retelling/narration of the history of Argentina itself? Probably yes x1000 (there's definitely enough endnotes to reinforce that argument).

Anyway, it's interesting to see that Piglia sees state terror as such an important presence in the work, and yet it is hardly mention. That deliberate silence in the novel completely changes everything, casting a giant shadow over everything that takes place, from the character that everyone waits for in the last 100+ pages who never appears, to the stand-in-for-the-reader character pouring over old letters and notes, looking for codes and hidden messages. It's like a giant Voldemort lurking on the edges of the pages, a dark He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named. As the Polish guy says, "To speak of the unspeakable is to put in danger to survival of language as the bearer of human truth." (213)

In reference to this silence of trying to speak of the unspeakable, the famous quote by Wittgenstein is cited several times by different characters: "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence." In AR, what cannot be spoken about refers to both events and knowledge. As I see it, all of AR revolves around the following question: how do you speak about the unspeakable? That's why the section that describes an imagined encounter better Kafka and Hitler is so important. Kafka is described as "the one who knows how to listen," (206) "attentive to the sickly murmurs of history," sitting at the cafe table, listening to Hitler's angry rants and passionate plans for his future domination. History = his-story. Kafka writes fiction that masquerades as coded messages from the past about the future; he speaks of the unspeakable. Piglia writes about the state terror of Argentina while not writing about it, and it doing so, he is making a lot of interesting implications about how it is possible to write about reality (the same dilemma Joyce attempted to tackle). He seems to be saying to do so is impossible, which is why he focuses so much on characters talking, on letters, on outlines and drafts for potential novels, on techniques that are the logical follow-up to Borgesian fictions. Wow, it all just kinda really blows my mind.

The last thing about this this book I want to briefly touch upon is the theme of the classical Bildungsroman. There's a lot of talk by the characters on the importance of experience in the formation of characters and lives (I think it is here where PIglia's fanboy Onetti homage is most evident). Let me share with you some of my favorites:

"Sooner or later, I thought, I am going to become a great writer, but in the meantime I should have adventures. And I thought that everything that happened to me, no matter how idiotic, was a way of accumulating that depth of experience on which I assummed great writers built their work... what can one have in life but two or three experiences? All of us invent a variety of stories (ultimately versions of the same story) so as to imagine that something has happened to us in the course of our lives: a story or series of stories that ultimately are all that we really have lived, stories we tell ourselves so as to imagine that we have had experiences or that something meaningful has happened to us. But who can guarantee that the order of the story is that of life?"

This is so related to my thesis that it makes me want to die.

Here's my other favorite quote, from the chapter narrated by the Senator, who is perhaps the most Faulknerian character in the appropriately most Faulknerian chapter:

"Sometimes, I think I understand it all.. The understanding lasts but a moment and in that moment no doubt what has happened is that I have fallen asleep when I thought I was thinking or understanding... how could I expalin that? How would I--how could I--do that? That's why I must stop talking now I, the Senator, should, for a moment, stop talking. What I cannot explain without words I prefer to keep silent," said the Senator, "as I am unable to explain without words."

This quote sounds a lot better in Spanish; it reads a little clunky it English, which is unfortunate.

I have six more pages of handwritten notes about AR, but I think it's best that I stop here. It's books like these that make me glad I'm alive.

I'm not looking for you to see like me, feel like me, or be like me

2009-02-12T06:45:00.000-08:00

While I like my little routines (bread with pepperjack cheese for breakfast... making my lunch the night before... really, really hot showers), at times I'm afraid that they make my life a little monotonous, as opposed to comfortably reliable.

I really like my jobs, and maybe it's just February (it SNOWED two days ago), but at this point working on an organic farm in Nicaragua or Honduras for an indefinite period of time is beginning to sound more and more appealing.

Aaaaand I don't want to miss my bus.

Expect a really great entry I've been working on (time! where is the time?!) the Civil War and death this weekend. I like writing long book review-based entries, but that style may find itself replaced by the short sound-byte style above, 24-hour AP news cycle, for the time being... at least until I figure out how to cram more hours into my day. Depressingly enough, getting my own computer so I don't have to use Corey's would help.

poverty

2009-02-09T06:45:00.002-08:00

I am so sick of this nasty, sugary peanut butter my bro got at Fred Myer that it has driven me to return to blogging (and now I will probably miss my bus).

However, there is absolutely nothing else in the house to eat. There is not even a stick of butter or a drop of oil with which to fry an egg.

I will update this again soon

2009-01-25T22:56:00.000-08:00

I promise.

For now, let me just say that at my new job, I get to hand out smiley face stickers. I carry them around in my back pocket while working, and in my purse when I'm not. As a result, I now have smiley face stickers over almost everything in my purse. I find myself pulling out random things like my passport or Betty Boop wallet, only to see yellow or pink smiley faces stuck in odd angles all over them. It amuses me :)

Things I will need to update about:
- trip to Vancounver (most likely on silly travel blog)
- my new job, what I do (in disguised ambiguous language, in order to preserve anonymity), what it's like working with so many kids in such a high-paced environment and what it makes me think about what it felt like to be a kid and kids in general
- Part I of Don Quixote and Dreams of My Father, depending on which one I finish first
- I'd like to do A-Day-in-the-Life entry, now that my schedule is somewhat stable

"Watching the painter paint, it's the best mistake he could make"

2009-01-12T17:31:00.000-08:00

Today I impulsively bought a sketchbook, some acrylic paints, paintbrushes, a fancy schmancy pencil and white rubber eraser. Much to my pleasure, the store was having a 20%-off sale, and I got all this stuff for $21.

And I now just drew this duck.

I went into that art store for two reasons: 1) I've been listening to Kate Bush's "Aerial" a lot--the concept behind the album is that it takes over the place of the day, from dawn to dusk to midnight to the sun rise and repeat, which also neatly works as a meditation on the artistic process of creation (read an interesting transcribed article summarizing Bush's canon here). Reason number 2 is I figure that if I'm going to be organizing (and possibly teaching) art classes to kiddies, I might as well brush up on my old art "skills." I also drew one atrocious comic page for a short story I've been working on. I'm sort of shocked at how much fun it is. It's like I'm using a part of my brain that's been left to get neglected and dusty for years. I guess at some point in high school or something I gave up on art because I felt I wasn't talented or good enough. Well, poo poo on that, you don't have to be good or particularly talented to draw stupid ducks, 's long as you have fun, methinks. All of the time, we gotta be changing.

I think I just died and went to heaven

2009-01-11T14:24:00.001-08:00

I've been waiting for something like this for ages-- I AM SO EXCITED!

On flexibility

2009-01-10T21:06:00.001-08:00

In yoga class today I tried to really focus and concentrate on not letting my elbows hyperextend. I'm double-jointed, which means that when playing basketball in high school, my knee would often pop in and out of its socket and I would freeze mid-dribble and ignore my teammates yells as I let the ball roll out of bounds, staring down at jutting-out boneof my suddenly extremely fragile-feeling and wonky-looking knee in equal parts horror and fascination. A girl with similar joint structure on the soccer team was nicknamed "Rubber Lady" by her teammates, and I always silently thought that it would be a highly appropriate nickname for me as well (as opposed to my official team name Mona, or Blondie, which is not very accurate--man, anyone whose hair isn't jet black in Colombia is basically considered a mona!).

Anyway, doing yoga has definitely raised some interesting ideas and/or points of reflection for me. The idea that you have this sacred time and space (your mat) where you can just be with your body: learn about it, reflect upon it. I like the idea of making the muscles around my joints stronger, of trying to gently but firmly correct bodily behaviors that have been entrenched in me for years.

Flexibility in general has been a new concept for me to learn. I've always had incredibly tight hamstrings, for whatever reason (epic bike riding?). I was always one of the girls who dreaded the gymnastics portion of P.E. class. I have yet to ever turn a somersault. And yet, after years of never, ever being able to touch my toes, I can finally do so. I'm even reaching the point where I may be able to lay my hands flat on the floor without bending my knees. Sure, it isn't much, and I'm sure it's yoga candy for most folks, but for me, it's pretty exciting! Trying to learn to think of my body as flexible and bendy, as opposed to tight and wound-up. A suitable metaphor for emotional and mental states as well.

It's a good lesson for life in general--learning to be flexible. It's hard for me sometimes to not get jealous of friends or acquaintances of mine who are just packing up and leaving at this point, embarking on jet-setting adventures about the globe. Hong Kong, Vietnam, Cambodia, India, Nepal... countries that sound exciting and different and strange. This is the longest period of time I've lived in the U.S., ever...! During the school year, there was always that ticket home to Colombia during Christmas. Not anymore. My parents are moving to Portland on June 1st. And that will essentially be that. If I ever want to return (home) to Colombia, or travel to a different continent, it'll have to be of my own volition and planning (as well as Corey's, goes without saying). It's so hard for me not to daydream and get itchy feet sometimes, to fantasize about just packing up and going, getting out, buying a ticket and then leaving the very next days. I have responsibilies here, though. There will be time for traveling. "There will be time to make decisions and indecisions, to murder and create, for visions and revisions, all before the taking of toast and tea."

I've been in a "really-deep-thoughts" mood, as Tori Amos sings. I guess the New Year is a good holiday for really deep thoughts. A stranger randomly asked me the other day "who or what motivates you?" I was slightly taken aback and couldn't come up with an appropriate answer. I stammered something out how the formation of communities motivate me (thesis, again... not to mention sweetly reminiscent of one the 5 Components of my summer job two years ago). I asked Corey the same question later that evening and he answered immediately, "curiosity." A good response. I've thought about that question over the past two days, and I guess I still don't really know. It's a big question, no? "Who or what motivates you?" Some of the things that motivate me, just in my day-to-day existence, are the little things: a scheduled yoga class, a planned outing with a friend, a good chapter in a book to finish. That's what I would say helps me get up in the morning, the eagerness for Demera sugar in my English Breakfast and my silly spinach-raspberry-yoghurt breakfast smoothies. (Hopefully that doesn't make me sound completely empty and pathetic!) But then you need the big things too, you know? Curiosity. Community. Simplicity. Wanting to be a good person, to do good things, to be good to others. Sometimes those things can be harder to do. That's why while doing those little, day-to-day things, you still need to be aware of the big picture.

I try to learn something new in little ways every day, I guess. That's where I find the real appeal in traveling: when you're somewhere different, somewhere you've never been before, every experience feels huge and incredibly significant because it's all so new and unfamiliar. You go to bed at the end of each day completely exhausted because all the overwhelming informations and sights and smells and sounds you've had to absorb. Time itself feels stretched out, like a stringy piece of bubblegum, and days feel like a week, weeks like month. It's a feeling I miss. But it's definitely one I'll have again someday. I just have to be patient, to appreciate and enjoy my time here now. Work starts on Monday, which also means new experiences and new people.

To end on a somewhat tangential note (I can't figure out how to connect it to any of the other ponderings in this entry), another interesting thing our teacher mentioned in class today is that since it's the full moon, that can sometimes lead to a lot of erratic energy in people. "Finally," I said to my friend over the phone later that evening, "I've found something else I can pin my 'erratic' energy on! PMS, caffeine withdrawal, the moon's waxing and waning..." So that's my excuse for the erratic nature of this post (and hence blog), just your regular old waxings and wanings.

"The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao"

2009-01-07T16:15:00.000-08:00

My initial review of this book (posted on goodreads) wasn't very positive. Since then, though, if there were little half-stars to hand out on that site, I probably bump it up to 3 ½:

A fast, fun read. I dunno. I was expecting to like this book more than I did. I liked it, but I didn't *love* it. I liked the narrator's style, like how he addressed the reader as "Negro, please." The sprinkling of Spanish slang and words everywhere was fun too, though it definitely made me wonder what people who didn't speak a word of Spanish would think. When I read books with French phrases thrown around like it's nothing at all, I always feel sad and bummed, like "man I really want to know what kind of incredibly funny pun or comment you're making... mais je ne parle pas francais!" Oh, well.

My favorite part of this book was when Oscar goes back to the Dominican Republic to visit his family--the two-page run-on setence describing his experiences is my favorite in the whole book. Diaz definitely captures the whole going-back-to-a-place-you-were-once-a-part-of-but-now-really-aren't feeling very well.

My favorite chapters were the ones narrated by Oscar's sister and her boyfriend. The ones about DR history, concerning Oscar's ancestors and family, were a bit more of a slog for me to get through. I dunno, I just feel like that whole family-history, magical realism thing has been done to death. Every time that stupid magical mongoose showed up, or the characters dreamed about the faceless man, I wanted to throw the book across the room and pick up "The Savage Detectives" instead. PLEASE, NO MORE MAGIC IN LATINO LITERATURE. I guess Diaz was trying to frame Oscar's story in this epic Dominican Republic history, a la LOTR... my problem was that I liked the modern, young characters' voices and stories so much, I wanted more from them!!! Not another rehash of the Latin American extended family history novel. It's not exactly fair to call this book a "rehash" though, since it's narrated in such a unique, fun voice.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that this is the kind of book which I'll either feel differently about once some time passes (i.e. I'll read it again and completely love it), or I'll have forgotten about it completely, and can only offer up a blank face and a neutral "erm, it was a good read" when asked what I thought about it.

Well, since writing that I read the little wikipedia article about the novel and the author, and even though this feels like a huge cop-out to me, I have to admit that it brought some things up that I didn't really think about (but which in hindsight should have seemed perfectly obvious to me, and hence make me feel like a dunce). First of all, I had no idea that the narrator's name was Yunior de las Casas, immediately reminiscent of Bartolome. Thinking of Oscar's story as one in the tradition of the immigration saga makes a lot of sense. The connection between the novel and Hemingway's “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” also opens up a lot of doors in my brain. That deliberate nod to Hemingway makes me wonder if masculinity is a bigger theme in this novel than I'd realized—I me, the basic narrative arch of the story boils down to Oscar trying to get laid. So yeah, it's interesting to see how now that a little time has passed, I'm still thinking about this book and lots of interesting themes and ideas are coming to light

"Team of Rivals: the Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln"

2009-01-01T14:12:00.000-08:00

I chose to read “Team of Rivals” because reference to it became increasingly fashionable in the media following Obama’s election, particularly in the frenzied Who’s-It-Gonna-Be coverage of his cabinet picks. It got to the point that some articles were even making ironic, self-aware references to the media’s obsession with the term, commenting sarcastically “insert obligatory ‘Team-of-Rivals’ reference here!’” Rather than being overrated, "Team of Rivals" deserves the accolades: it's an exceptionally involving, very readable, engaging history book. Goodwin has plenty to interest everyone here, from the hardcore Lincoln scholars, to the Civil War battle plan and strategy aficionados, to the "people's history of the U.S." fans. There's a lot of eerie parallels between present and past that make for particularly fun reading--I folded the corner of the page over every time I read something that reminded me of Obama's campaign or lifestory, so the first half of the book (which deals with Lincoln's pre-president vida) is dog-eared with all these little folds (hopefully things will end better for Barry-O than they did for Abraham). 750 pages is a little dautning, so maybe save this one for when you have long commutes on a bus or subway, or an extended Christmas vacation/snowpocalypse, like I fortunately had.

It can be tricky to go beyond the more obvious parallels between this book and the current state of things—little known Senator from Illinois, famed for his eloquent speeches, goes on to win the presidency in an election where Ohio is a decisive state, winning the party ticket nomination in an upset over his rival, a long-time experienced Senator from New York who was assumed to be the favorite (stop me if this is starting to sound familiar to you). Time will tell if current events continue to reflect (follow?) the path previously set by history (for example, I will be okay with Hilarly and Obama becoming best buds on the level of Lincoln and Seward’s friendship, but I am definitely not okay with a deathbed or assassination scene).

The central thesis of the book is that Lincoln was a cool, chill dude whose biggest asset (or what specifically made him a “political genius”, as described by the book’s subtitle) was his ability to emphasize with others, to put himself into other people’s positions. Near the end of the book, Tolstoy is quoted as describing Washington as classically American, Napoleon as classically French, and Lincoln as the classic humanitarian, thus explaining his appeal to not only starry-eyed hopeful American presidential candidates, but also to wild white-haired Russian authors.

I’ve read at least one article/review arguing that the basic premise of constructing a “team of rivals” is fundamentally false, because by building a team out of political rivals, Lincoln gave himself a lot of unnecessary crap and drama to deal with. This is definitely true in the case of the unfortunately named Salmon P. Chase, one of Lincoln’s rivals of the Republican nomination, who doesn’t come off too kindly in the latter half of the book (i.e. even after Lincoln gives him the prestigious Treasury Main Boss position, he comes off as a whiny pants consumed by the delusional belief that the presidential nomination was still his to be had in the future, instead of just making the best of things with his current position like Seward). However, I’d say for the most part Godwin effectively argues that Lincoln’s “Team of Rivals” (last time I use that phrase in this review, I promise) did a pretty good job, all things considering. Stanton’s badass military plans in particular make Lincoln look pretty smart for choosing him for Secretary of War. Goodwin argues that by choosing the men he thought would be the best for the job, instead of his friends or people who were just going to suck up to him, Lincoln revealed himself to have the admirable quality of being capable of burying old grudges (such as Stanton calling him “a long-armed ape” upon their first encounter as lawyers in Illinois) instead of being bitter or petty. Lincoln also demonstrates an admirable capacity of taking the blame for things (even for things he definitely didn’t need to take the blame for). My general impression from this book is that so much of politics seems to involve this very fine dilly-dalling dance, hopping back and forth between the thin line of offending one person or damaging the pride of another. Que stress. Good luck, Barry.

The book departs from the premise that by understanding the character and conduct of the men who were on Lincoln’s cabinet, Lincoln’s own exceptional qualities as a politician will stand out more clearly. Goodwin does an excellent job at this. By explaining how Seward and Chase had made enemies by appealing to the abolitionists and using a lot of blatant anti-slavery rhetoric in their speeches, Goodwin in turn explains why Lincoln took such a moderate stance on slavery throughout the years of his presidency (doing so without excusing said moderate stance). As I understand it, one of the reasons why Lincoln won the nomination (and then the presidency) was because he simply hadn’t been in politics long enough to make enough enemies, like Seward and Chase (and Clinton).

One of the more interesting points Goodwin makes in the book is that no one can ever know for sure Lincoln’s personal feelings on race, save for the man himself. However, she points out in all the Lincoln scholarship, in all the countless letters and memos and notes he and his secretaries and contemporaries left behind, there is not a single act of racial bigotry or racial slur to be found. Lincoln also gets plenty of respect and kudos from Fredrick Douglas once they finally meet each other (before meeting Lincoln, Douglas bitches a lot about how he isn’t doing enough to help the slaves—fair enough, in my view). It sucks that Lincoln wasn’t this totally radical, ahead of his time guy who from the beginning was like “Aight bitches, no more slaves, equal educational and employment opportunities for all, and lots of other good stuff,” … but as Goodwin argues, that simply wasn’t what the country was ready for at the time. As I understood it, a lot of what being president often entails is taking the middle ground. That being said, the Emancipation Proclamation was a totally great, non-middle ground thing to do (there’s a very dramatic scene that would be great in Spielberg’s movie version, where Lincoln takes a deep breath and tries to calm down before signing the Emancipation act because he doesn’t want his signature to come out shaky and thus leave people believing that he was hesitant). And this is where the whole Lincoln’s Great Empathy Quality comes in again. Lincoln’s empathy entailed him to put himself in the place of the American people, to understand how they felt and what they were thinking and where exactly they stood in public sentiment, what they were ready for. With the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln kind of adopted a common reverse child-psychology technique: when you expect great things from people (and make it clear that you expect them), it’s easier for people to do great things. (This feels incredibly reminiscent to me of Obama’s call to young people for service and political participation)

The book starts out with a biographical description of each man’s early lives. Once Lincoln wins the presidency, he naturally assumes a more central role. I found the latter half of the book the most interesting, as it describes the Civil War and the dealings of Lincoln’s administration in great detail. The book kind of splutters out at the end in the last chapter describing Lincoln’s last term, but perhaps that is to be expected of a 759 volume.

One interesting theme that emerged in this book was Lincoln’s relationship with death. It makes me want to read that recent academic-looking book about Death and the Civil War (hello, Chapter Two of thesis again—maybe I should go all the way and start attacking all kinds of Death Criticism in general). In the early sections (which I’m afraid I can’t remember all too well—so many hundreds of pages ago!) Goodwin talks about the death of Lincoln’s childhood sweetheart and how that affected Lincoln’s attitude towards death. Unlike his peers Seward and Chase, who populated their speeches with grandiose religious imagery and references to a “better life” following this one and the “designs” of a creator, Lincoln tended to avoid such imagery in his speeches. Instead, his rhetorical flourishes were more grounded in man himself, in the individual's capacity for self-betterment, in earthy references (reflecting Lincoln’s fondness for tall-tales, humorous anecdotes and his Kentucky, down-to-earth background). I’d definitely like to read more about attitudes towards death before and after the Civil War (and in the latter half of nineteenth-century in general). I’d like to read more about the history of slavery in the U.S. and the Reconstruction. This book made me want to learn more, it made me think, it made me ponder, it made me crave, and quite frankly that is quite a compliment for any work.

I’d like to close this review with some selected quotes from this book that seem relevant to the title of this blog (in which “doubt’s best ally” is “hope”): “ ‘Having hope,’ writes Daniel Goleman in his study of emotional intelligence, ‘means that one will not give in to overwhelming anxiety, a defeatist attitude, or depression in the face of difficult challenges or setbacks.’ Hope is ‘more than the sunny view that everything will turn out all right’; it is ‘believing that you have the will and the way to accomplish your goals.’ “(631) Throughout the book, whether dealing with his political defeats, the death of his son, the violence of the war, “As he had done so many times before, Lincoln withstood the storm of defeat by replacing anguish over an unchangeable past with hope in an uncharted future.” (521)

To paraphrase Vonnegut: What a man. What a war. What a language.

year in review

2008-12-30T21:02:00.000-08:00

- New Year’s Day on Gorgona, dancing and drinking with the workers.
- Corey moved in with me in March.
- Finished my thesis, learned a tremendous amount about writing and literature and what’s so amazing about really deep thoughts. Spent afternoons at my advisor’s house, going over word after word, page after page, while his daughters ran up and down the stairs and through the garden.
- Wandered through thesis parade in a daze, drunk off of three days of no sleep rather than alcohol, pulled Corey through library with me and Dionysian drumming.
- Did very well in my last year at Reed, made straight A’s.
- Walked across graduation stage and felt startled by how loud the applause and whistles were; the combined noise of all my family and friends.
- My advisor shouting out my name and waving enthusiastically with his enormous grin as I walked by in the line of professors applauding the lined-up graduats as we left the tent.
- Corey playing Eddie Vedder’s “Hard Sun” over and over again on my Mac.
- Worked as adult leader on Plunge; hung out with great kids and met amazing people from Portland community. Riding on buses and walking everywhere, I truly felt for the first time like I was a Portlander, and like Portland was my home, rather than Reed.
- Left with Corey to Ecuador to work on the mycorenewal tour.
- The day and night and aftermath of Bill’s death. Building the little altar in our living room for his ashes while his wife/partner finished the tour in the Galapagos with her daughter who flew in from Canada.
- Worked as guide and translator in Yasuni national park; dealt with rude Swiss, sweet French-Canadians and wonderful Brit tourists; saw amazing sights like a beautiful sunset with macaws squawking overhead, countless monkeys, turtles, pink river dolphins. No matter how many times I went down that river in that boat, with my butt all sore from sitting in the wooden seat, roasting hot during the day and freezing cold at night during the minimu 4-hour boat ride, I never, ever got tired of seeing the jungle.
- Reading “The Prophet.”
- Lying on my stomach on bed listening to Regina Spektor, putting my headphones in Corey’s ears and making him listen to “On the Radio”
- Staying at the coast. Corey fishing. Eating the fish cooked over the bonfire’s ashes on Playa Escondida, delicious fish meat melting in my mouth.
- Staying with Corey in the shaman Don Delio’s town. Playing with the kids on the beach. The night we arrived, “Titanic” was playing on the small TV screen. Swinging his baby in the green jungle hammock.
- Running into Don Delio on the streets of Quito and inviting him to stay with us in our Guapulo house; how good it felt to return hospitality.
- Every single giant crab or seafood boil we had at the house with all our friends, eating out of one giant pot in the middle of the table, licking my fingers clean of shrimp juice and wiping them off on my pants.
- Shopping at the Santa Clara market, walking up those slippery wet stairs to the stinking seafood section, carrying live crabs home in a shopping bag.
- Every single moment I got to spend playing and cuddling with Motor, the world's cutest and toughest kitten.
- Saying goodbye to Cali and Colombia. Visiting CIAT and feeling touched by my father’s kindness. Spending a weekend hiking and going to hotsprings in Coconuco with Corey and my family. Watching “Into the Wild” again with my family.
- Curled up in bed with Corey watching episode after episode of Season One of “The Wire” on one of our housemate’s computers.
- Reading “The Savage Detectives.”
- Reading “Respiracion artificial” and “Portrait of the artist as a young man.”
- Laura and Cara picking us up at the airport; the astonishment and pleasure we felt pulling up the driveway when we saw the house for the first time, which quickly turned into exhaustion and weariness once we realized the keys didn’t work and we would have to go downtown to meet my brother and get his.
- Corey’s dad’s visit; going out to dinner and mushroom hunting on the coast with him.
- Mushroom hunting with Jay and Matt; water squishing between my toes in my sloshy wet hiking boots, looking up at Matt and realizing we were both as wet as though we’d jumped into a swimming pool, but it didn’t matter, because our arms were filled with matsutake.
- Corey and Jay selling mushrooms at the Milwaukie Farmer’s market. Me making their sign out of colored tape from the Dollar Store.
- The first week of yoga classes I took; the pleasure with which I adopted the extremely relaxing technique picturing my eyeballs dripping down from my sockets like water; how centered and peaceful I felt afterwards.
- Plucking chanterelles out of the soil, effortlessly gathering pounds of them in minutes, barely having to walk to look for them--they were everywhere!
- All the Saturday night dinners we had at the house with Laura and Cara, all the wine, the baths, the hot tub, the giggling, the stories and good food.
- Biking on the Springwater Corridor to get to one site of work and all the way down Powell to get home from another. Seeing all the homeless people raise their hands momentarily off their shopping carts or beer cans to greet me and whoop as I sped by. All those days I left late from home or downtown so I had to pedal absoloutely relentlessly fast to get there on time (I always did!).
- The last ESL classes I had with my students at one site where they brought me a card, playing scrabble with them.
- Every moment I got to spend with Jonathan at Homework Club: playing Uno, testing him on his times tables (get those 4’s, Jonathan!). Jonathan is my man!
- Talking with the other teachers in the photo copy room, making friends with my co-workers and boss, getting to really feel like a part of the school community.
- Clamming at the coast with Jay and friends, eating the most delicious food of my life, walking through the ocean waves in my hiking boots and getting absolutely soaked, the thrill with which I pulled my first clam out of the water.
- Thanksgiving with my grandparents’ at Morro Bay. Feeling really touched by their affection and love, really appreciating the time I have with them. Climbing Black Hill with Corey and Thomas, canoeing over to the sand dunes, Thomas digging to the point of exhaustion through the sand for clams (the otters had eaten them all), watching the sunset on the jetty and doing push-ups on the sand while Corey and Thomas plucked crab claws and mussells from the rocks to eat for dinner later that night.
- Not getting the jobs I really wanted; moving on from the disappointment.
- Dim Sum with Corey, Cara and Matt.
- Christmas with my family, Corey and Laura; my mom giving Laura those earrings from Nepal.
- Watching “Happy-Go-Lucky” with my sister; walking through the rain with her to get to yoga class, laughing at her comment "I feel like a Serbian refugee" as she wrapped her scarf over her face. Later in class we almost destroyed shavassana (sp?) by our uncontrolable giggles when she said to the teacher that she couldn't find her--I forget what it's called, that center place thing between the two dimples on your back.
- And what’s next? Echinacea tea with honey and finishing up the last 150 pages of “Team of Rivals” as my family watches “Cold Mountain” in the living room downstairs and I wait for Corey to come home from watering his plants in the laboratory.

on happiness

2008-12-29T15:16:00.000-08:00

The snowpocalype of 2008 has officially ended: most of the snow has melted, save the black dirty stuff on the side of roads; the ducks are back in the duckpond (which is now officially a wetland, having doubled in size), and today the weather alternated between sunny (I raised my eyes to the sky and wondered what was that strange, floating yellow orb), rainy, and rainbowy. Today I will ride my bike for the first time in 11 days to yoga class.

I spent Christmas with my parents and siblings in the family home in Portland, as well as Corey and my friend Laura, whose flight to Montana was delayed until the 27th. My sister and I have been trying to make the most of her time here by going out to see movies. Yesterday we went to the previously unexplored by me Academy Theatre, near 82nd and Stark. It's an awesome place--$4 tickets, great popcorn, pizza and hot dogs. The names of the movies are written in chalk on tiny blackboards hung over the theatre entrances. I'm definitely going back there.

The film we saw was called "Happy-Go-Lucky," by the British director Mike Leigh. Neither of us had seen any of his films before, though we'd certainly heard of him. The movie was about a woman trying to be happy and good in the face of some not so happy or good things. I thought I would be annoyed by the movie, because I'm usually annoyed by people who are cheerful all the time (or at least I was in high school). They came off as shallow and naive to me, the Happiness Police. However, the movie didn't annoy me, much to my surprise. Instead, it really drove home the message I've been trying to preach to myself lately--you gotta give out the positive energy. You gotta have a good mindset about your day, and your life, and the way things are going.

Easy say, hard do. Immediately after the movie, we got lost in the glorious Asian food market on 82nd and Division. My sister was looking for sushi-making materials and I had a long list of food for an epic homecooked huge Asian dinner. I got inexplicably tense and frustrated by not being able to find the tempura battle amongst all the tiny, labeled in Chinese (Vietnamese? Forgive my ignorance...) aisles. Then after a long wait and bus ride, we got home only to find that everyone else in the family ha d already eaten, and that I'd bought the wrong kind of cuttlefishh, and I didn't have as many points on my Oregon Trail left as I'd thought, and, and, and... oh, so it's hard! It's had to remain upbeat? For me, at least. For Corey, it seems almost effortless. Maybe it's because he's been around the block a few more times than I have, taken a few more punches.

I'm trying, though. You gotta have your little goals every day. I have an interview for a paid internship on January 8th, training at the new elementary school I start work at on January 5th (I've got a new job, doing a morning Homework Club now--Homework Club FTW), and return to other Homework Club and ESL teaching on January 12th. Read a chapter a day of "Team of Rivals" (that process is going to have to speed up, now that I've discovered I can't renew it because of all the other holds on it... hello, 500 pages in the next 2 days...). Write in my paper journal (or this one). Do push-ups and sit-ups. Apply for at least one job a day (if not more). Bike to yoga class. There's still our tickets to Ecuador on January 18th, and there's still time between now and then to decide.

"The well-educated unemployed"

2008-12-11T21:50:00.000-08:00

Wow, I guess I know what I am now. “This is very strong evidence that this recession is very hard on college grads, more than usual." Glad it's not just me. This following quote really hit home:

“It’s really grim, and almost everyone I know who was at my level is unemployed,” Ms. Lambie, 29, said. She said she hopes to land at another firm in the city, but added, “If a really interesting opportunity came along in, say, Argentina, I’d jump on it.”

In the meantime, Ms. Lambie is trying to get by on a weekly unemployment check of $405, which she said is “definitely not enough.”

I mean, I'm technically not unemployed. I have a job. You might even say I have two of them (before the semester ended at the other elementary school I worked at, I had three). However, it's "definitely not enough." And unfortunately, Christmas break is fast approaching. Whereas before that meant fun happy playtime, now it just means no work until January 12th, when the after school program kicks in again. And I like/need work. Especially if I'm applying to go back to school this fall.

Which means it's time to start looking for something with better pay, better hours and a better chance of mobility up the employment totem pole. Or maybe I'll just go to Argentina.

oh! sweet nuthin!

2008-12-03T00:14:00.000-08:00

Reevaluation of mission statement
I don't really know what to do with this blog. It just has this weird ambivalent identity to me. I got tired of livejournal, though I still use it as a convenient way to update people about my life. Mainly it felt too "public" for me, because too many people know it's mine (the user name doesn't help). To follow up that statement with a seemingly contradictory statement re: LJ, I also don't like how I friends-lock all the entries... I mean, I *like* reading people's public entries, so I want to have some of my own, just none that are TMI x 3. I think there's a lot that can be said for learning the skills necessary for knowing how to manage and control a public, online identity... like it or not, they're here to stay, so I might as well learn through doing.

I also have the mushroom/travel/exciting activities blog with Corey. I tried to open a wordpress account where I could keep track of the news articles I read, but I'm completely disgusted with the crappy wordpress formula (why does it insist on leaving a space between every paragraph?? I LIKE PRESSING ENTER TWICE OKAY). I originally meant to use this to keep track of the books I was reading... but (as my sister can very well attest) writing good, proper book reviews takes a considerable amount of time and brain energy investment. With my goodreads account, I can type two-three sentences and have it be that (even though, as I've said before, the site's format is le poop).

I read this article in the NY Times about businesses using blogs to expand, and one of the things it recommended for having a sophisticated blog is making sure you include a lot of links to other sites. Well, I can't even do that, since I can't remember/find the article. Oh, irony.

I am in the middle of reading Phillip K. Dick's Valis right now, an extremely well-written and entertaining book. It's a lot more Vonnegut-esque than expected, with a little Tori Amos and Umberto Eco thrown into the blender. It's amazing how much more I appreciate this book than I would have if I'd read it, say, a scant year or two ago, when I wasn't dating someone with a penchant for conspiracy theories involving contact with extraterrestrial reptilian life-forms. "Reality is that when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away."

One thing I feel I ought to dramatically announce is that I finished nanowrimo! Well--"finished." I feel like I cheated in the last chapter, by typing up all these quotes from Borgés and Joyce and Whitman in order to create these fake postmodern-esque collage for (what else?) a character's blog. LOLBAMA. Um, actually the pastiche was meant to subtly imply that this is a character whose own voice is never present in the work. It's called "White Fruit." Um, maybe I should post an excerpt here one day? I'm actually kind of looking forward to editing it, though I kind of need to not look at it for a while. It's just a fun little project to have in my spare time, I guess. We all need our silly little projects that make our lives interesting and meaningful, doncha know. Maybe I'll start talking about it here a little if it feels appropriate/comfortable.

What else is up with me?
* Thanksgiving in San Luis Obispo was fun but a bit draining--I kind of feel like I need a vacation from my vacation. Maybe I'm an idiot for expecting my 18-year-old bro to step up to the plate and shoulder some of the responsibilities that come along with visiting/caring for your grandparents.

* Apparently I'm owed another big cheque from Portland public schools, so I'm not nearly as much as a bottom-feeder as I thought--I'm on regular indentured servant wages, as opposed to slave ones. I found these mad exciting ESL books from PCC buried at the back of the ESL closet. It's kind of annoying I've only just found them now, with just this week and the next remaining. Man, I could have planned a rockin' syllabus! Maybe I'll do one anyway, just to satisfy the OCD nerd in me. Or maybe not.

* I invited my boss and her husband over for dinner Saturday night! Oh, I am so pleased-proud-excited of-for myself! I love trying to make new friends.

Things to do:
- figure out where my packages are getting sent to (not the Milwaukie post office--where could it be???)
- start looking for housing for Corey and I to move into come January
- have the long-awaited job interview on Thursday, wait to hear back, then plan next phase in life accordingly
- buy nasty-tasting nail polish from Walgreens--my habit has reached the point of UN-acceptable, en serio, hace tres semanas ya
- Finish TEFL course (not able to do in full until track down package... siiiiigh)
- do laundry and clean room (TOMORROW)
- be at office to replace missing important wallet card at 7:30 AM

And here is a link to make my blog more sophisticated!

bleary-eyed

2008-11-30T01:15:00.000-08:00

I am so extraordinarily sleepy right now. Corey and my younger brother are out fishing on the Morro Bay rocks. We scanned everything that seemed remotely relevant on the internet and couldn't find any fishing, clamming or crabbing laws (apparently in the 70's the limit was 25 pounds of clams--25 pounds!!), so we've just been taking what we need.

I read somewhere on the NY Times that one of the keys to making a good, readable blog is making sure to include lots of links to other places. Here goes, I guess.

1) Only 7,000 words to go for nanowrimo, which ends today in 23 hours. I'm going to be one of those people uploading it at 11:55pm, basically (hopefully I'll be able to upload it a *little* earlier than that...).

2) I'm really enjoying reading Phillip K. Dick's Valis right now. After reading the first few pages, I was shocked at how Vonnegut-esque it sounded--I guess I have memories of "The Man in the High Castle" and "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" as being very somber, dark and serious.

3) I've started doing the one hundred push-ups program again, after getting to Week 5 and then drifting away thanks to getting involved with silly things such as moving back to the U.S. and finding a job. I only just figured out that I did the wrong column today. No wonder my arms felt like jelly afterwards.

I'm watching a replay of the Raptors-Lakers game where Kobe Bryant scored 81 points (apparently now considered a "classic") and I'm about to pad silently upstairs eat a piece of my grandma's mince pie. Life is good.

Thanksgiving in Morro Bay was as good as always, this time around with the interesting variation of Corey's presence. My grandparents are 91 and 84, respectively. They're pretty mobile, all things considering. I mean, they took the train to Portland for my graduation, and then went to San Diego (in a separate, charter trip) and saw Sea World and stuff.

blog blob blop

2008-11-21T12:52:00.001-08:00

- Last night I had a bit of a breakthrough in the classroom, when I realized that the classes that are the most successful are the ones that focus on learning new vocabulary and speaking, and the ones that are only so-so and are a bit of a drag to slog through are the grammar-focused ones. I'm not sure how much this has to do with the fact that I don't really like grammar myself, which probably comes through when I teach it. Anyway, it's been interesting (re?)learning the foundations of the English language. I get the feeling that this will make it easier to for me to go on learning new languages (hello, French? Russian...?).

- Since my last post Corey made $800 in a single poker session last night. He lent my bro $100 so that he could play, which he promptly lost. Not really surprising. Also, my phone did end up dying a fizzy kaputzy death (thanks, Portland weather!), but thankfully I got a free one in the mail. I had absolutely no idea that once you own your phone for a certain amount of time you can get a free one. It's things like these (along with not being able to figure out how to work the Mr. Coffee machine, or turn on the ice maker) that make me feel out of touch with modern life (not necessarily a bad thing, sometimes).

- I rediscovered my Goodreads account. I think the design/layout on the site is really annoying, ugly and frustrating. But at least it'll help me keep track of the books I read. Just like those long Microsoft Word lists my sister kept way back in middle school. The "Ulysses" slog has stagnated. I'm in a bit of a suburban angst-theme, having just finished "White Noise" and in the middle of A.M. Homes' "Music For Torching," based on one of my favorite short stories from "The Safety of Objects."

So far I'm really enjoying it; it's one of those books you look forward to reading. In particular like the description of a little girl's room as "vagina pink." I wish this book would be made into a movie with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, a sort of Jack and Rose go suburban forty years later type of deal... oh, wait...

- The last time I spoke with my sister on the phone she brought to my attention that it's been six months (and a bit!) since graduating. What a strange thought. Sometimes it seems/feels like a lot has happened, sometimes it's like nothing at all....

- I'm leaving on Wednesday to San Luis Obispo to spend Thanksgiving with my grandmother. Thomas and Corey will be coming too. There probably won't be many mushrooms there (it's kind of a scrubland), but maybe we'll get to go hiking and kayaking.

Have you ever...

2008-11-17T23:31:00.000-08:00

... spent a lot of money on a plane ticket, and suddenly find yourself making excuses like "family is important", "we never get to see each other, only on holidays" and "Grandma's geting old"?

This doesn't stop me from feeling slightly ill.

At least Corey's making a lot of money playing poker.

Things thought about on a long, extremely wet bike ride home, while listening to Sinead O'Connor's "Downpressor Man"

2008-11-12T23:59:00.000-08:00

- "I hope my phone isn't dead. The black screen and lack of little red light and general unresponsiveness is a bad sign."
- "Wow, crashing my bike after going over those wet train tracks makes me want to cry."
- "Wow, crashing my bike after skidding to a stop on my turn-off on the Springwater Trail makes me make pitiful angry squeaks."
- "What happened to the little plastic black thingy on my bike handle? I came out of yoga class and it was gone. Was it stolen? Did it slip off from the rainwater and I didn't even notice it? It's just bare metal now. Makes my hand colder, and slippier. I hope it's not expensive to replace."
- "You know, I actually really like my job. I like that I've gotten to know the kids at this point. I really enjoy playing UNO with them especially. Nicholas, the multitasker, reading his Ripley's Believe it or Not picturebook while writing down his spelling words and playing UNO at the same time. Jonathan, so hard-working, my best bud. Even the older kids who prefer gossiping to working don't even get on my nerves anymore. I feel you, Wintana, I wouldn't want to do that lame-looking social studies homework either."
- "I am really, really looking forward to buy expensive new rain pants."
- "I am really, really looking forward to buying galoshes and not having sloshy water-filled shoes. Wretched Californian-purchased, Cambodian-made merchandise."
- "I have to write 4,000 words for NanoWrimo tonight in order to catch up with the quota I'm supposed to have. When did this stop being fun and start feeling like school again? A) When you no longer have a 3-day weekend. B) When you realized you are 16,000 words in and you have not yet explained why/how your main character thinks he is/actually is a werewolf. Considering this is the supposed central crux of your 'opus,' THIS IS SOMEWHAT OF A PROBLEM. C) You started rereading your work and editing it. NO, FOOL. THAT IS NOT THE POINT OF THE EXERCISE."

Sun-day mor-ning

2008-11-09T21:42:00.000-08:00

Last night and today were great! A dinner party that I originally thought was just going to be five people, but somewhere-somehow along the way it morphed into twelve. Cara had a friend visiting from L.A., and Laura's cousin was visiting from Montana, and then Cara's freshman year roommate showed up with two other Reed alumni, and then Savannah (another spring-fall senior) appeared with her man, and and and... well, the more the merrier! Matt was cooking that night and fortunately he made porcini-sausage-potato soup (an enormous pot of it still sits in our fridge and I've had two bowls today and counting), sauteed tuna steaks and cod rolled in hazelnut crumbs. Mmmmdelicious. I like this traditional saturday night dinner congregation we have going on. We've had people over for dinner every Saturday ever since we got back from Ecuador (almost two months now--where does the time go? I mean, I know it FLIES, but where does it GO?). I like it. I like the feelings of New Orleans-ish hospitality.

Everyone ended up sleeping on our floor. I guess I'm an early riser because I was up for ages before everyone else came downstairs. Corey made johnnycakes (pancakes with cornmuffin mix) and we made ghetto coffee, which involves a paper towel, tupperware and the microwave set on High. I got to talk to Corey's grandfather for a brief bit on the phone this morning. He has a sweet Cajun accent. He talked about how when he was sixteen he had eighteen girlfriends, or maybe how when he was eighteen he had sixteen gilfriends, and asked when I was going to come visit. Soon, hopefully?

We'd originally planned on going to the Bybee Hot Springs, but we got off to too late of a start, so instead we ended up going to Multnomah Falls, which is just as nice.

Not many mushrooms around, surprisingly, despite how wet and misty it was.

Some sad things have happened to some people who are close to me in the past two weeks. As I said to Cara, "It's just one thing after another, isn't it?" Another phrase I've become very fond of repeating is "Que drama." As well as a Colombian saying, "Que lio," which I'm not sure how to translate.

My mother and younger brother get here tomorrow. I have Monday and Tuesday off of work because of Veteran's day (Monday is a planning/meeting day for the teachers, or a puente as we called them in Colombia. It's kind of nice, I guess, though it basically means I won't be making money.

I've read "Persepolis" and "Watchmen" in Powell's the past week. "Watchmen" was great. "Persepolis" didn't grab me as much as I expected it to... maybe just because I've heard a lot of great things about it. Maybe if I go downtown tomorrow I'll continue the comic-books-on-days-off trend and read "Preacher"? Graphic novels are good books to read when I have a limited reading session because I tend to go through them very quickly ("Watchmen" took two sessions, "Persepolis" one).

I also read "The Dogs of Babel," a very engaging read written by a Wesleyan alumn(na? ni? whatevs, grammar police). It was just one of those books that you look forward to reading because it's easy to slip into the narrator's voice, so you make the extra effort to remember to put the book in your pack each morning so you can read it on the bus. I need to go to the central library to pick up the books I have on hold for me there (Orwell's "Burmese Days" and another one... can't remember what).

I'm supposedly reading "Ulysses" right now... but that's definitely a book that you just don't carry around to casually dip into from time to time. "Ulysses" expects dates, appointments. Your full mental attention. I've liked the first chapter so far, with all those ocean and water references. It makes me feel all smart and schtuff, like "oh yeah, I get the parallels with 'The Odyssey' here! Wine-dark sea and all that y'know, bitcheeeez." I love books where characters from other novels reappear (HI STEVEN!!). I love the whole small self-contained literary universe (YEAH SANTA MARÍA THEEZIZ REPREZENT). In that vein, the next book I definitely want to read is Bolano's latest opus. At least, it's his latest considering that it's his last. 'Cause he's dead. And stuff. I also need to track down the list of books I made in Ecuador to read that people recommended to me. Like Phillip K. Dick. I need to start making things-to-read lists again so that I'll have it clear in my mind what to get when I go to the library!

Today Cara told me that my ex-boyfriend asks about me every time he sees her. BOY THAT MADE ME FEEL WEIRD. When we got home from the falls I watched "Fargo" on youtube with my headphones while Corey played some online poker and listened to country music on pandora (my new favorite song is officially "Red Dirt Road"). Maybe these two things ("Fargo" and Caras comment) explain my somewhat ambivalent emotions towards the human race in general right now. Or maybe I'm just cross because I want to floss my teeth.

I wanted to write a post about how creepy/mildly fascinating it is to have such privileged, behind-the-scenes access to Obama's family (especially his daughters), but maybe instead of just writing a whole post about it, I'll just say that it's creepy. And yet mildly fascinating.

yester/today

2008-11-05T02:26:00.000-08:00

Yesterday (...today?) didn't go so good.

I was nervous during class, so I didn't do as good of a job as I feel like I normally do. I was snappish with the kids.

While cleaning up at 8:30, the janitor told me that Obama had won the election.

While biking over to my friends' place, the people whooping in the streets and the fireworks going off served as a resounding confirmation.

We spent a long time in front of the TV and then in the bar.

Now I'm at home, in the armchair, about to get up and make some Sleepy Time tea. I feel strangely melancholy. Just drained, maybe?

I need to remember that I can't do everything right all of the time.
Tomorrow is a new day.
It's time to get to work.

some ponderings regarding "a portrait"

2008-10-30T23:56:00.000-07:00

- "It seemed strange to him at times that wisdom and understanding and knowledge were so distinct in their nature that each should be prayed for apart from the others." (Joyce, James. "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." Time Inc: New York, 1964. 163) Man, I wish I'd read this sentence in time with my thesis... I was wondering about the distinction myself. Thank you, Joyce, for proposing a similar dilemma.

- "His destiny was to be elusive of social and religious orders. The wisdom of the priest's appeal did not touch him to the quick. He was destined to learn his own wisdom apart from others or to learn the wisdom of others himself wandering among the snares of the world." (Joyce 178) The idea of "his own wisdom"... very interesting concept, that for all of us, there is a personalized wisdom to seek out there (or in here *knocks skull*)

- "Words. Was it their colors? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue... No, it was not their colors: it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and color? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language manycolored and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose?" (183)

I love this sentence! especially from "he drew" onwards.

- "Now, as never before, his name seemed to him a prophecy... he seemed to hear the noise of dim waves and to see a winged form flying above the waves and slowly climbing the air. What did it mean? ... a prophecy of the end he had been born to serve and had been following through the mists of childhood and boyhood, a symbol of the artist forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable being?" (186) Joyce sure knows how to write those epiphany moments.

This evening I was thinking about how difficult it is to keep the big picture in mind. So much of our daily lives--going to the can, eating oatmeal, running to get to the bus stop on time to get to where we're going, fumbling a cellphone in order not to miss a phone call from a family member or friend, staying up too late because you're trying to read and understand and gain knowledge about the current events and workings of the world--if you had the *big picture* in mind all the time, it would be incredibly difficult to do these things. At least, for me. When I proposed this to Corey, he told me that when I ask him what he's thinking (as girlfriends tend to do to boyfriends, after long periods of silence in bed together), when he says "nothing," he really means "everything," or the universe (i.e. the workings of it). I told him that I found this hard to believe, "or maybe I'm just too wordly." I dunno. Maybe I am.

It's all about balance, I guess. I'm such an incredibly emotional roller-coaster person anyway... so much about my day-to-day life, hour-to-hour even, is about me trying (sometimes struggling) to master my emotional energies; to maintain (as my counselor at Reed once put it) a middle ground, as opposed to crazy highs and lows. Maybe that's what I need to focus on, the "worldly" concerns of my own emotional-mental life. The rest of it just seems so big... thinking about this feels like a balloon inside my skull that is getting blown up and starts pushing up against the side of my cranium, threatening to pop.

I really like something Jess said to me once, though. She said that in all her traveling and all her experience (ha! that word, again), she felt that her own personal "self" was the greatest and most important project to work on. We can't save the world or even sometimes solve the current problem we're grappling with, but as human beings, we are all always works in progress, you know? I like this idea because it takes away the fear of being too self-absorbed... instead, maybe micro over macro?

anyway. I'm mailing my ballot tomorrow, and then, as my sister oh so sagely put it, "the fate of the world is in other people's hands." The fate of my own emotional and mental state, however... !

"Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race." (281)

"reality of experience!" Whatever *that* means....... another plane ticket bought to go here, to go there? Let me know if you find out, Stephen......

who watches the cheesy poofs

2008-10-25T15:05:00.000-07:00

- Ate Cheetos for breakfast one morning and (unsurprisingly) felt deathly ill for hours afterwards.
- Suffered from a terrible cold (mainly congestion, still ongoing) and called off cleanse in order to hydrate self and take vitamins. Siiiiigh.
- Signed up for nanowrimo. Whatevs, chickens. I can’t wait to type trash for 1-2 hours per morning/late night.
- Had breakfast with my good friend Kati at Jam—it was so good seeing her again! We need to spend a *lot* more time together. She will always be my “jefa.” We even got to ride our bikes together around Hawthorne and stop at Buffalo Exchange in search for a Halloween costume.
- Briefly pondered dressing up as Sarah Palin. I’m probably just going to go as Ophelia again, third year and running.
- Bought underwear from the Nordstrom Rack. When all your underwear has holes in it and you realize you’ve owned the same pairs since ninth grade, it’s probably time to get some new unmentionables.
- Felt decidedly like a competent, capable teacher.
- Had a blast teaching ESL classes with weather and telling-time themes
- Had only two kids (my two favorites! Jonathon and Jon) show up for homework club on Thursday, so we spent an hour and a half just playing board games. Apparently I suck at Operation (I always make the man’s body buzz angrily and his nose glow red) and rock at Chinese Checkers (at least when competing fourth graders).
- Went to two yoga classes and decided I’m going to have to find a different studio. As nice as it is to have a studio close by in Sellwood, its schedule is just plain not compatible with mine. I need early morning classes, more than two times a week.
- Finished “Finding Orwell in Burma”; started “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” which I think I read in high school… at least, I remember the whooshing noise it made as the majority of it went completely over my head (that was a clumsily phrased metaphor).
- Started reading "Watchmen" upon Brian's recommendation, which is strangely compelling and unsurprisingly addictive. After I post this entry (I'm in the PSU lab) I'll probably stroll down to Powell's and read some more.
- Felt pleased about the election for the first time in yonks.
- Had the future become a little clearer. I don’t want to jinx anything, but if all goes well, hopefully we’ll be staying in Portland for the long-term.
- Enjoyed reading my horoscope for the next week, which advised me to exercise more “discipline” (perhaps in reference to the aforementioned cheesy poofs)

Peace and goodness glowing

2008-10-19T15:18:00.000-07:00

Sitting on the Lay-Z-Boy with my feet up, drinking an icy cold banana and strawberry juice--delicious, sweet and perfect. It's so sunny and beautiful outside right now that it's a shame I'm snuggled in here--the air has that kind of crisp coldness to it that reminds me of England.

Things really couldn't be better right now. I saw my mother and young bro off this morning, and while I enjoyed their visit, it's nice for it to be back to Corey and I again. This morning I went to my first yoga class, at this little nearby studio in Sellwood that only takes 15-20 minutes to bike to (depending how ferociously I pedal). I think yoga is going to be very good for me... I mean, my adviser told me to take it, for goodness sakes, so I obviously have to follow his advice, right? (I'll skip on the steak-eating part, though). Not just for stress, but also my body is pretty darn inflexible. I'm looking forward to see what changes take place over the next 4 weeks. I got a beginner's package of unlimited classes for 4 weeks, and even though I'm working in the afternoon/evenings I still have mornings free, so hopefully I'll get to go at least three times a week. I don't know if it's a placebo effect or if yoga is really THAT effective or what, but I feel incredibly calm and peaceful and centered right now. It might also be due to the fact that I'm doing a cleanse this week (the timing just felt right), hence the juice in my belly and the carrot juice jug in the fridge. I'm glad I'm taking care of my body. Biking has been fantastic but I need something else, you know?

The topic sentence of the previous paragraph bears repeating: things really couldn't be better right now. We made our biggest profit yet at the Milwaukie farmer's market today (every week we've doubled it), and next week is the last market, so it's bound to be crazy (especially if the weather is nice, *crosses fingers*). I get to spend time with my friends at bars, at Saturday night dinners at my house which have officially become a weekly tradition. I just read that Powell is backing Obama (surprise? Uhh... no). Last week's lessons went really well and I feel like an actual teacher. Other things are looking pleasingly promising, but I don't want to talk about them just yet because I don't want to jinx things. *knocks wood* Now I'm going to finish my juice, make some herbal tea, put on my warm fuzzy socks from Ecuador, and then indulge in any or all of my sweet, silly comfort foods: watching an episode of "House M.D.", watching high stakes or world series poker online (shutup it's addictive, especially once you start recognizing people and their personalities), or finishing "Finding George Orwell in Burma" (a most engaging and interesting book).

housewifery

2008-10-10T16:45:00.000-07:00

Today since I didn't have work, I spent the entire day cleaning the house. My mother and younger brother are flying in tonight from Colombia for a surprise visit (family drama, which will receive the Bill Clinton treatment in this blog--don't ask, don't tell). They'll be staying for seven to ten days, I'm not really sure. I think it's a good idea, because it'll let my young bro feel like he's actually got a life in Portland, as opposed to just lingering in this stale cloudy limbo. Anyway, so it gave me a good excuse to bust out the vacuum cleaner. I definitely have a crush on that little vacuum cleaner by now. It reminded me of WALL-E, scurrying loyally after me with just a gentle tug of its handle.

Throughout the day as I was cleaning--doing dishes, loading laundry, vacuum-vacuum, scrubbing toilets (OH! how I scrubbed those toilets!)--I kept thinking of songs or stories that have to do with cleaning houses. Liz Phair's "Canary" is one: "I clean the house, I jump when you circle the cherry, I sing like a good canary, I clean my mouth, 'cause froth comes out." Then there's Kate Bush's classic, "Get Out of My House," in which the lyrics "I wash the panes, I clean the stairs," sounds like a strange metaphor for "I wash the pain." Also, the image of the windows of a house weeping water make me think of eyes filled with tears. She also has that other song on her new album, "Mrs. Bartolutzi-whatzit," in which laundry is made to sound very sexy, as a man's trousers gets wrapped around a woman's dress. Ooh, lah-lah. She also squeaks "washing machine!" repetetively. Oh, Kate. I also remembered this Momintroll story by Tove Jansson, the Finish writer, about a Fillyjonk who goes crazy OCD-style scrubbing her steps by the seaside. In the end a giant tidal wave smashes her house to bits and she ends up liberated dancing on the sand. I think the story was called "The Fillyjonk who was afraid of disasters." Man, I loved Tove Jansson, especially her adult novels--I think they were called "A Winter Tale" and "A Summer Tale." Something about the seasons. Anyway. Highly recommended.

So on the whole house-cleaning isn't given a very good rap, at least within the canon of my high-school self's favorite music and literature. I can kind of see why this would be the case. I definitely reached a fillyjonk level of kooky myself there for a while, namely when I was on my knees picking up fluff from the carpet corners that the vacuum cleaner had failed to suck. Or maybe when I jumped in the bathtub bare-footed in my underpants to furiously scrub away the Clorox, yelping in pain from time to time as burning hot water scalded my toes (I always do house-cleaning in my underpants, I dunno, it's just more comfortable that way). Man, I sure hope Clorox doesn't get absorbed through the skin, 'cause I was wiped that stuff off with my bare fingers, apart from giddily splashing around in it. I'm pretty sure I overused it, too. I couldn't help myself... those toilets were mad gross (we were coming back from four months in the jungle, after all... use your imagination... or better yet, don't).

Still, despite its bad reputation, and tendency to make us girls go a little cahrahzee if we get too much of it, I still feel very Zen and satisfied. Cleaning has always been a good way to get stuff done. Throughout senior year and even now, whenever I'm particularly stressed or have had a bad day, I furiously clean the kitchen and load/unload the dishwasher. It's just a little way to feel like you're still a capable human being. You have to not get carried away and get depressed that even after all those hours of cleaning, you didn't take all the empty beer cans in your room out to the recycling bin, or mop the kitchen floor because you weren't sure of the effect of clorox of wood. You just have to know when to stop, you know?

And make the boy you're living with clean the toilets next time.

random notes

2008-10-03T17:01:00.000-07:00

- I chugged the cup of coffee I paid 75 cents to refill because I forgot about it and thus it got stale and cold as I plugged grimly through learning about adverbs for the TEFL course, and as an effect I feel especially jittery and frantic.

- I AM SO GLAD that I put my rain pants on this morning. Getting soaked yesterday while biking frantically around looking for a Fed-Ex place with a fax machine that was still open was a useful lesson. The sunny weather was nice while it lasted, now the English-style weather that my father claims makes Portland especially appealing to my mother has kicked in full-force. I wish my rain pants were 100% rain proof, though. And my shoes. Sad face.

- I biked to one school to sign a contract, only to be told that the contract was not ready yet. Then I was called at 4:30 by the main supervisor there, asking why I didn't show up to sign the contract, which is 100% ready. Guys you need to work on the inter-office communication skills because now I have to come in on Monday, AGAIN, to sign this thing. ALSO! PLEASE GET BACK TO ME ABOUT THE POSITION I APPLIED FOR ON THE DAY THAT YOU PROMISED ME YOU WOULD. Don't suddenly e-mail me out of the blue two weeks later when I've already given you up as a lost cause.

- A mean man yelled an obscenity at me on my bike this morning. It upset me. I think people in Clackamas are less used to commuters, hence the more hostile attitudes. In Multnomah everyone always politely and kindly yields.

- I paid a poodle of money to get my brakes fixed yesterday. Despite Corey's insistence that he could have just done it himself, more than anything I was paying for the convenience of having it fixed NOW, RIGHT AWAY, as opposed to going through the fuss of figuring out what parts I needed, and then cornering Corey when he had free time to fix it (and trust me, he doesn't have much of it). I guess the cost of getting my bike fixed 3-4 times a year still beats out the cost of gas, car insurance, etc.

- Watched the debates last night at Laura's house. We played Palin Bingo. I got a lot of "umm," "Family," and "maverick." GO BIDEN! He is straight out of a Bruce Springsteen song.

- My mother keeps sending me e-mails for jobs like Nestle Customer Service Representative.

sweet

2008-10-02T16:40:00.000-07:00

I now have two part-time jobs, both as an ESL teacher.

Things don't turn out the way you expect them to. The position I thought I wanted turned out to be one I ABSOLUTELY TOTALLY DO NOT WANT, while the interview that I came thisclose to not going to turned out to be for a position that I now really, really want (and hope I'll get... have to wait till tomorrow!).

The interview position that I thought I really wanted took place in a dark and dank smelling building. Every instinct in my stomach and gut twisted in rubber octopus knots and screeched "YOU DON'T BELONG HERE, YOU DON'T WANT TO BE HERE." The interview was conducted interrogation-style across a long narrow table, me sitting at one end, the three in charge-folks sitting at the other end. It was an interview I totally bombed. At one point, I was asked whether I was task-oriented or relationship-oriented. I replied that I didn't really believe in strict categories but I guessed that I was relationship-oriented (although I also liked to do tasks, I added). The person who asked me got really defensive... maybe they thought I was criticizing? Oh, dear. I feel kind of bad because my friend set it up for me, so I secretly hope I don't get it... it'll certainly make things easier.

The funny thing is even though I got lost about 8 times trying to get to my interview this morning (the first one so far in Clackamas), and I came thisclose to not showing up at all and just doing this completely rude bail-out, once I found the place it ended up being the best interview I've had so far (or at least, I think so... but then again I'm terrible at judging these things). Even though I would have to bike across several terrifying freeways to get there, and it'll take me a while to actually figure out how to get there (I still got lost trying to find my back back), I hope I get this one, because it's a) close and b) more importantly I think I'll like the people who work there. You never can tell, I guess. But anyway. Guess I'll know by Friday. There's a leetle bit of a time conflict with the ESL jobs, which start at 6, but the lady who interviewed me knew both the contacts at the school, so maybe if she really wants me she'll help me ask for the ESL classes to be pushed back to 6:15 or 6:30pm? Otherwise I'm going to have a hell of a time. Or at least a decision to make. Ugh.

The fun thing about funemployment (though I guess that starting Monday the "fun" will be gone, leaving "employment"--ha!) is getting to be a mad hardcore biker and exploring all these crazy new neighborhoods in Portland. I never thought I'd be riding around in places like SE 174th and Powell or SE 92nd and Harold, but there you go.

"Goodbye, Mr. Keating"

2008-10-01T18:13:00.001-07:00

I hated that movie. But I like the list of motivations of why people choose to become literature majors. And his discussion of social justice and political ideology.

Milwaukie living

2008-09-28T12:24:00.000-07:00

Corey and I are getting to know our new neighborhood pretty well. In the past week we've biked to the Dollar store and to this awesome sale at REI--we arrived in the last hour at the former, just when the 30% off signs were being switched to 60% off. Pretty sweet. I finally got a rain jacket after four years of being wet and sniffly.

I turned down the job at the Boys & Girls Club because I didn't think I was the right person for it. I'm still looking... I mean, I've only been back in PDX for eleven days, for goodness sakes, so I should go a little easy on myself! I have an interview tomorrow morning to be an ESL teacher. It's such a pet peeve of mine when people don't get back to me or follow up to the applications I send them.

We went to the Milwaukie Farmer's market this morning. Surprisingly, there was no culinary mushroom stand in sight! So we talked to the market managers, and hopefully by Wednesday we'll hear back from them if they have a space available to rent us. They sure did seem excited about having a mushroom stand, so that was definitely a good sign. The idea of going into the mushroom-selling business still feels a little hard for my brain to wrap around. But very appealing. We found about 20 pounds of chanterelles and lobsters last Friday alone.

I have 54 seconds remaining on the public library computer, so I guess I'm going to have to go ahead and post this.

BACK IN PDX!

2008-09-23T15:22:00.001-07:00

I've been back in Portland for all of six days, which is almost a week, I guess. Corey's dad arrived from New Orleans to visit us in Portland exactly 12 hours after we arrived from Quito. It was an exceptionally long journey, complete with food poisoning in the Dallas airport, then arriving at the new house to discover that the keys didn't work. COLOMBIAN KEYMAKERS = FAIL. Laura and Cara (who picked us up) were absolute DEARS and drove us back downtown so that I could meet up with my brother, get his keys and then drive back. All this with cramping and nauseau!

I spent the next day completely wiped out. On Friday I rode 40284934928 buses in strange dark corners of SE Portland. I ended up in the Gateway Transit center TWICE by accident, because I got on the wrong bus heading the wrong direction. Julie's navigation skills = STILL A FAIL! So far, out of the three interviews I had, I have one yes, one no, and one I'm still waiting for. The 'yes' I don't want, the 'no' I wanted, and the 'waiting for,' I am ambivalent. Such is the post-graduate employment quest......

This morning Corey and I biked downtown to PSU so he could meet with his adviser about working in the lab this semester and I could work on job applications and try to figure out how to register for the GREs. I thought that you had to take them on October 25th, but it looks like this may not be the case? I guess you can take them.... whenever you want? Depending on what the respective universities you're applying to request? I also need to remember to stop by the Career Services office to photocopy/borrow their GRE practice tests. Because I am a broke mofo and $35 per book in Powells is a no-no.

Anyway, the bike ride downtown this morning took approximately an hour, which is not bad at all, especially considering my chunky belly from a summer of pollo and papitas. 12 miles, most of it along the beautiful Springwater Trail. When we got to PSU I was high and tingly all over. Bikes are pretty wonderful, what can I say. I'm excited about biking everywhere and getting mad buff.

Other things:
- Went mushroom hunting with Corey and his dad on the coast. We experienced a moment of horror when we thought the porcini were infected with this terrifying white-powdery mold, but then much to our relief Corey deduced that they were another species, Old Man something, which is good because first of all it is waaay too early for the porcini to be out and second of all they are so delicious, a mold that killed them all would be really sad.

LAST DAY IN QUITO!

2008-09-16T11:18:00.000-07:00

I just printed out 984389238402 maps in order to help myself figure out how to navigate around my strange new neighborhood of Milwaukie, especially to and from interview sites.

To-do today: turn in mushroom info poster/sheet to Jungal Tours, trip to market to pick up last minute gifts, and then maybe if we´re ambitious (probably not) a trip to the dentist. Home to pack up the stray things lying around the house, such as toothbrush, pajama pants, etc. Then we need to set the alarm for 4AM in order to be at the airport two hours in advance for our flight (6.45 AM = FAIL)

I´m afraid of going back to the States. I´m afraid of having no health care and media saturation. Well, we have a return ticket in January, I guess.

The thunderous African music orchestra playing on the screen behind me has had the extra effect of making me especially jumpy and jittery.

Books Read So Far in Ecuador

2008-08-16T11:56:00.000-07:00

I´ve been in Ecaudor for almost two months now, so I thought I´d do a little catch-up on what books I´ve been reading here, during that time.

Quarantine by Jim Crace
This is the first book I read in Ecuador, during that first week when we were bussing across the country with Jess´ parents. I´d read it before back in ninth grade, but I think (no, I know) most of it went over my head. The main scene I remembered from the first time I read it is the part when a dead donkey is thrown off the cliff but the other folks in quarantine, and Jesus in his little cave, twitching in a hallucinatory state, thinks that it´s a demon-angel falling from the heavens to further test his will.

I love historical retelling what-if fiction, and this one is particularly delicious since the particular history it reinterprets is Jesus´ 40 days in the desert. Such a set-up leads to numerous great scenes as Jesus descends further into hunger and nakedness and bare desert craziness (to paraphrase ¨Lawerence of Arabia¨: ¨only gods and Bedouins enjoy the desert, Lawrence, and you´re neither¨). I especially like the parts describing just how damn boring it gets, being in the desert for forty days and forty nights--in this novel, Jesus deals with his boredom by writing words from Roman coins with his fingers in the sand and soon he finds this more useful and rewarding than his prayers.

I like how in the end, Jesus´ miracle abilities are left ambiguous. Is he just the Galilean equivalent of ¨Into the Wild,¨ or genuine miracle man? Also, I thought it was really interesting that Jesus´ biggest fan throughout the book was the supposed villain, the merchant. In the end I couldn´t decide if this was a kind of dramatic irony--the reader knows the merchant is right in the end, perhaps granting him a little more sympathy--or if it was supposed to be a kind of commentary on the ultimate commercialization and marketeability of Jesus. It makes sense in a way, that Jesus´ biggest cheerleader would be a merchant: Jesus as brand product has certainly led to a lot of money for a lot of people, as the merchant in ¨Quarantine¨ astutely and accurately sensed.

Rating: Read This Book

I Came Not Alone by I don´t remember

I picked this up off of Jess and Brian´s bookshelf and read it in a single session during one of those rare time-off days we had, hanging around in Quito. I wanted to read namely because it is about a foreigner living in Ecuador in the 60´s, in the same neighborhood as us (good old Guapulo). Unfortunately, reading it for the sake of seeing familar street names and bus routes in print turned out to be the most worthwhile thing about this book. Written by a Peace Corps guy, it made me doubly glad that I ended up turning them down: maybe things have changed in the past forty years, but this guy was a total stooge, partying all the time, looking down on the local people, and generally doing crap at his work. OK, maybe I´m being too judgemental, but he definitely is a poor writer.

Rating: Don´t Read This Book

The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein

I read this before and during the Mycotour. It took a long time but I got through it, whereas I´d never managed to completely tackle ¨No Logo¨ in full. This is an awesome book. I think I finally understand what neoliberalism is--maybe. Mind you, Klein has a thesis and a specific political stance from which she argues that thesis, which is fine by me--what´s the point in trying to be objective or impartial, when that´s obviously impossible? Better to be ballsy. She really hammers you over the head with her argument, though. I´d recommend skipping the chapters on Poland, Russia and China, and instead read the parts on Argentina, Chile and Bolivia (the most interesting of the book), the section on Iraq, and the last chapters on the tsunami and New Orleands. Oh, and the very fine introduction and conclusion, of course. All that should be more than enough to drive her point home.

After writing a puny paltry thesis meeself, I have great appreciation and admiration for Klein´s clear and readable style, the way she carefully organizes the points in her argument, her topic senteces (man! can this lady make transitions!). Very smart lady and very smart, relevant book, which left me with a lot to think about.

Rating: Read This Book Before You Die

Tales of a Shaman´s Apprentice by Mark J. Plotkin

Corey and I slowly but surely read this book together, reading it aloud to each other before going to sleep each night (a hobby we first started with Cormac McCarthy´s ¨The Road,¨ which is a great book to read aloud, by the way!). This is a good book to read when you´re working or even just visiting the jungle. The author is very much not a dry scientist at all, but instead fills his novel with plenty of funny, strange anecdotes (especially memorable is when a hallucinogenic plant dust is blown up his nose with great force by a blowpipe) and lots of interesting asides about the chemistry and use of so and so plant. I could have done with less copy-paste excerpts from eighteenth-century naturalist-botany texts, though.

Rating: Read This Book

Savages by Joe Klein

It took me yonkers to finish this book, namely because it kept disappearing. I finally got to finish it in Yasuni Park, by the Shirpuno River, which appropriately enough is Huaorani territory and one of the primary settings of the book. I even got to meet the guy on the cover, Moi, at the Shiripuno Bridge, which was very exciting. I was appropriately tongue-tied and starstruck, most likely to his great amusement.

This is a great book to read if you´re looking to understand in greater detail the effect of oil development in the eastern Oriente (or Amazon) of Ecuador. Klein´s carries on the great journalist tradition of Orwell, in which the observer´s present and his private opinions of the matters at hand are acknowledged, rather than ignored or disguised. Particularly memorable is Klein´s story of being lost in the jungle with the twelve-year-old Huaorani guides (one of whom who walks everywhere with a single white sock on his foot, slapping against the mud), with no food, no dry clothing and no idea where they are, and Klein is forced to deal with the sentiment that very few of us would every like to confront in our lifetmes: the feeling that one is going to die, in the jungle, lost, wet, and scared witless. Pretty gripping stuff.

Klein ends the book with a simple yet important question: if oil development is to be done in Ecuador (and the argument that it is inevitable is a strong one), and if it´s going to be done on indigenous land, shouldn´t there at least be an effort on the oil companies parts to at least know whose land they are using? In other words, to sum up the final message that I gleaned from the book: what a bloody mess.

Rating: Read This Book

Wizard of the Upper Amazon by F. Bruce Lamb

Wow, the synopsis of this book is crazy: a young Peruvian teenager, working as a rubber tree cutter in the Peru-Brazilian rainforest in the early 20th century, gets kidnapped by an uncontacted tribe of Indians and raised among the community, who has the intention of making his chief. Say what?? Why haven´t I heard of this crazy story earlier, or at least, why hasn´t there been an extensive, detailed ethnography published about it? (I certainly hope so--anthropology is not my field!) The story is so crazy, that I actually wished this book was longer, and went into more detail. Because of the book´s brevity (a hundred something pages), a lot of stuff I wanted to hear more about was skimped over: like the feeling of being in a totally alien community, not knowing the language, the customs, the culture or anything. The book is written with little self-analysis or introspection and kind of just moves from one interesting anecdote to another, which is fine, but I was definitely left craving more. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the story was retold by a source who met the guy, rather than by the guy himself? Anyway, the definite highlight of the book are the descriptions of the ayahuasca ceremonies. Very trippy (haha) and interesting stuff.

Rating: Read This Book

Prey by Michael Chricton

Man, if this book hadn´t been published almost a decade ago, I would call this Chricton´s comeback. I read this on a hammock in Yasuni, in between bouts of leading Swiss and French tourists around the jungle. It was definitely a very good braindead book for my dead stressed brain. I mean, the part where the killer nanorobots start infecting humans and become transmitted by kisses is a little far fetched, but what else can you ask from a book about killer nanorobots? I like typing that: Nanorobots. Yessss.

Rating: Maybe Read This Book, If You´re In the Right Place and Mood

Tropical Nature: Life and Death in the Rainforests of Central and South America by Adrian Forsyth and Ken Miyata

This is a good book to read if you know obviously nothing about rainforests and tropical ecosystems and botany (raises hand). Wait, (lowers hand), I know more now than I did before, ´cause I´ve read this book! The authors go out of their way to discount the stereotypical dry, boring scientist-writing, and instead use a style that is engaging, entertaining and highly readable. Each chapter is about a different aspect of the rainforest, such as fruit, orchids, ants (memorably called ¨Tiny Socialists¨ by the chapter title) and matapalo, or the killer strangler figs. I am now filled with knowledge about the rainforest that is probably basic to all scientists, but extremely exciting for me. For example, did you know that the sloth buries its poop at the bottom of a tree, which possibly indicates a symbiotic relationship between the two? DIDN´T THINK SO. The sloth eats the tree´s fruit and doesn´t move, since he´s a sloth, while the tree benefits from the fertility of the sloth´s poop. SRSLY.

Rating: Read This Book

Respiracion Artificial by Ricardo Piglia

Corey stumbled into this book for me after meeting an Argentenian at a house party in Guapulo and somehow ended up discussing Faulkner and Onetti (THEESISYES!!). I was in the jungle at the time, but the Argentinean ended up lending Corey this book, which he promptly delivered to me in Yasuni. On the first page someone wrote ¨! Este libro no se presta. No insiste.¨ (This book is not to be lent. I don´t insist). So I don´t know whether to be flattered or confused that this ended up in my grubby hands.

Anyway, this is a great, great book. I should have read this book for my thesis. I am seriously grinding the tip of its spine against my skull in self frustration. I used Piglia´s essays from Critica y ficcion, and I remember my advisor reading some excerpts from Respiracion artificial to me, but what with everything going on... I just never got around to actually reading it, I guess. It made for a great, exciting walk down memory lane, right off the bat with the T.S. Eliot epigraph: ¨We had the experience but missed the meaning, an approach to the meaning restores the experience.¨ OH SNAP SECOND CHAPTER! I got a little lost during the last 50 pages, but that was likely a result of the classic Julie-reading-fast-in-eagerness-to-get-to-the-end symptom.

How do I even begin talking about this book and how it´s now offcially one of my favorite books ever? Every page of this book was like a delicious treat, like an interesting, fascinating conversation. The plot is impossible to summarize. On one level (and there are many), it deals with a nephew corresponding with his uncle, who is obsessed with researching the life of a man called Enrique Ossorios, who was writing a novel. This book brings new meaning to the phrase ¨cake layers¨, the novel´s intricate layering go above and beyond the cake. More than anything, I loved this book because it is so obviously written by someone who himself loves books, intensely and absolutely. Indeed, the love of books is an important theme. The second page discusses the nephew´s failed novel, an attempt to imitate the voice of Faulkner, but as translated by Borges, which instead ends up as nothing more than a bad parody of Onetti. Oh, it makes me tingle just to remember it. This book makes me tingle, and when you have time and space in your life, please read it.

Rating: Read This Book Before You Die

go

2008-06-25T11:20:00.000-07:00

This is my travel blog.

housefullness

2008-06-21T12:05:00.000-07:00

Back from the Plunge. This completely fails to sum it up properly, but it was a really great experience. Needless to say, I learned a lot and made a lot of great new friends. I especially bonded with Sarah (the Plunge coordinator) and Clare (another one of the day leaders), both of whom were closest to me in age. I really enjoyed hanging out with all the kids too: they were all really positive and enthusiastic, especially in my group. We did all kinds of different placements during the week, like cooking and serving lunch in the Clark Center (men's shelter), weeding in the community gardens at the Oregon Food Bank (we did a lot of weeding this week, it feels like), and working at Sisters of the Road, the downtown cafe on 6th and Burnside that I had heard about but had never visited. I highly recommend it: there's a really great community atmosphere and the food is good and cheap ($1.25 for a meal and a drink). They have an interesting system where people can get barter points for meals by working at the cafe, so it's a much different atmosphere but the traditional paternalistic church-charity handout.

I think I did a pretty good job as a leader. Our group name was "The Sensational Six Power Plungers Exclamationpoint!" (in our cheer, I got to say to "Exclamationpoint!", in a style reminiscent of Kool-Aid Man). I got us lost basically every day (thank you trimet for telling me to "walk southwest" when I have no idea what that means). We also burned everything we cooked for dinner the one night it was our turn to prepare it: the pancakes were black, the hashbrowns were gray (apparently a result if the potatos are wet; my fault for washing them beforehand), and the sausages were raw in the middle. The only thing we didn't ruin was the soy yoghurt and granola for the vegan girl. We had a great time together, though. There was one afternoon where we all panhandled down by Powell's and Whole Foods, and this girl from my creative writing class gave us all the change in her pocket. When she saw me holding my little "LEARN TO LOVE BEFORE IT'S MADE ILLEGAL" sign slumped against the wall, she was like "JULIE" and I was like "hey, I graduated from Reed!" because it all seemed a little too complicated to explain right then and there. I'm sure I must have seemed like an excellent epitome of the post-grad lifestyle.

Apart from the small group placements there were some activities that we all did together (25 kids--I mean, students, in total), like a tour around Old Town to see where all the differents services, or our last placement, a visit to the Volunteers of America men's rehab shelter, where they send men who just got out of prison or rehab and need to learn how to be members of society after spending thirty-forty years being addicted to drugs or a life of crime and so forth. I was pretty nervous about going there because I wouldn't be surprised if a couple of guys there had been sent for prison for certain acts of violence; namely, rape. But it turned out to be the best experience we had all week: we participated in a neighborhood clean-up with the guys, picking up dozens and dozens of cigarette butts off the little side streets stemming off of MLK, and then had a giant BBQ together. It was really fun. I got asked for my number twice so that was a little uhhno. But it was really interesting, getting to spend a day talking to people whom society has basically told us to completely give up on. Everyone I met was really sweet and polite and I enjoyed talking about football and basketball with them. I even got offered a job by the VOA program director, who told me "if you're thinking about a career in social work, give me a call if or when you get back." That felt pretty good.

More than anything else, what I really enjoyed during the week was walking and taking the bus around all the Portland neighbors I am so unfamiliar with: all of NE and N Portland, basically. We were staying in St. Francis, the church with the big park on 12th and Oak. I remember hanging out there summer freshman year at the VOZ office but I completely failed to make the connection that it was the same place until I got there. Basically, this was the first time I felt like a Portlander rather than a Reedie, and it was really nice. Also, I know I told everyone beforehand that the point of the Plunge was to "live like a homeless person" but I really need to correct that and apologize for it right now. Basically that was a really offensive statement on my part: it wasn't a week about trying to "understand" or "know what it's like" to be homeless or poor or recovering from addiction or mentally ill in Portland, it was more about getting a clearer picture about certain issues that have to do with urban poverty and getting to hear some stories that could be pretty intense at times and meet some people, most who were nice and some who were mean but all who were worthwhile. There are a lot of really lonely people out there...

So it was a very interesting week with a lot of intense conversations but I feel bit deep contemplative-out right now. It was really nice to sleep in a bed last night, and it was great seeing Corey again. We have a lot of packing to do: basically, everything. And so much laundry. And I have to return all those overdue library books. Plus this computer. And e-mail people who aren't here and see people who are in order to say goodbye. I don't like goodbyes, I like see-you-laters.

I feel it's fitting to end with the closing words from Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, which I used in the group discussion/reflection I had to lead on Thursday, with the theme of social justice:

"My story ends here. It is a fairly trivial story, and I can only hope that it has been interesting in the same way as a travel diary is interesting. I can at least say, Here is the world that awaits you if you are ever penniless. Some days I want to explore that world more thoroughly. I should like to know people like Mario and Paddy and Bill the moocher, not from casual encounters, but intimately; I should like to understand what really goes on in the souls of plongeurs and tramps and Embankment sleepers. At present I do not feel that I have seen more than the fringe of poverty.
Still I can point to one or two things I have definitely learned by being hard up. I shall never again think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy, nor subscribe to the Salvation Army, nor pawn my clothes, nor refuse a handbill, nor enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant. That is a beginning."

I like beginnings!