Home Alone

Meg has gone to Portland (or Portopia, depending how you feel about it) for a week, and I'm here by myself for a few days before I head to my ancestral home for summer vacation, part deux. Though I would in no way want to live alone here, I think I'll enjoy the few days of quiet and the knowledge of the loong weekend ahead.

I am feeling very good tonight. I am feeling very good since coming back from California. Good about work, good about life, even good about New York City, despite all the respects in which it is not Big Sur. Which even a casual observer will agree are manifold. This city is full of strange and wonderful things. On my train home from Manhattan tonight (later than usual, since I stopped by an art show -- of art influenced by, invoking, or demonstrating the paranormal, which Gavin has been helping to curate, I think -- after work), a man with dreadlocks and three or four missing front teeth came into the car and played a fast 'n' gritty rendition of "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," accompanying himslef on a harmonica suspended in one of those neck-brace things. So I gave him the eighty-five cents in my pocket when I got off the train at Bergen, naturally.

I am still reading Middlemarch, and am now a bit more than half-way through. (It is over 800 pages. I like the idea of reading one honking huge book each year. Last summer it was Anna Karenina. This year it is Middlemarch. Is it a coincidence that Causaubon and Karenin are such similar characters?) Anyway, I'm dorking out in the extreme about this book. I feel about it like a person standing before the pyramids: I know humans made this, but it's so impressive I can't quite grasp how. The thing that amazes me most, probably, is the force of George Eliot's psychological insight. There are a couple of passages I've dog-eared because they are so blindingly wise, so accurate. When I read the book, I get the same feeling that I received reading Karen Horney. The 'oh my god, she understands *everything*, she understands *everyone*' feeling.

Eliot also has an interesting style of storytelling; she gives you a little action, then a little commentary on the action & the universal human principles it illustrates, then a little more action. That sounds hokey, but somehow it's not.

I am fascinated by the way that, with some of these older novels (I'm particularly thinking of this one and of Jane Austen), the narrator is basically a consciousness with perfect moral and aesthetic judgment of people. To read such novels is to be invited up into the captain's seat with the narrator, and look down and come to see, together, who is good and who is not good. Thus, these books give one the flattering sense of possessing superior powers of moral discrimination. That is a large part of their charm; in short, they make you feel like the coolest girl in the room, an effect especially pronounced with Jane Austen. I don't mean to be glib abou them "imparting a sense," though; I also believe that good books can and do convey knowledge/skills/"emotional intelligence" or whatever, that helps people get along, discern, self-assert, adjust, be happy.

In other news, I wish that I were in better shape. Shall I find some kind of class to sign up for, this fall? Something whole-body and immersive? Any suggestions?

Somebody

has creatively altered the sexual harrassment poster in the break-room at work with Post-Its, so that it reads: "Sexual ass is forbidden by law."

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

I went to Northern California where the coast is long and covered with seaweed and things



I hung out with this handsome guy



And again



We ran around on the beaches



And played on the rocks




...and not long afterwards, my camera ran out of batteries. Thppft.

Boy, Are My Arms Tired

I've been known to wax cranky about the modern world, but I have to
admit that it's strange and wonderful that I, a fairly normal person,
can whisk myself to a paradise several time zones away, and return in
time for work on Monday (albeit via the red-eye).

Here is a brief description of my weekend, in comparisons.

More Eric, less Internet.
More pelicans, fewer pigeons.
More seafood, less cooking.
More redwoods, fewer skyscrapers.
More ice plant, fewer houseplants.
More sunburn, less screen glare.
More snuggling, less pillow-hugging.
More cormorants, less computer.
More ocean, less subway.
More driftwood, less concrete.
More sunshine, less fluorescence.
More hiking, less yoga.
More laughing, less typing.

Text Message From Meg, August 24

Meg sent this from Indianapolis:

"Damn...I haven't been home in summer for too long. Buzzing cicadas, lingering twilight, the place is so refreshingly slow. The loathing is waning, a bit. Weird."

Talking with Meg about town versus country, NYC versus less-rarefied places, and so on lately put me in the mind of this one speech by Touchstone in As You Like It. And then, the trip to Ithaca gave me a good jolt of this classic human feeling:

CORIN: And how like you this shepherd's life, Master Touchstone?

TOUCHSTONE: Truly, shepherd, in respect of itself, it is a good
life, but in respect that it is a shepherd's life,
it is naught. In respect that it is solitary, I
like it very well; but in respect that it is
private, it is a very vile life. Now, in respect it
is in the fields, it pleaseth me well; but in
respect it is not in the court, it is tedious. As
is it a spare life, look you, it fits my humour well;
but as there is no more plenty in it, it goes much
against my stomach.

It is so much sweeter to the ears than that old saw about the grass and the changes in its hue and softness relative to the place where you're standing.

Heard In Our Apartment, #1

I wanted to write something about Ithaca, and maybe I will, but I could not pass up on these remarks made during a Scrabble game last week by me, Meg, Will, and Will's Drunk Friend.

Meg: Are you going to go out on this turn? Are you?
WDF: Well, I was a poetry major at Brown, so.
Meg: Oh. What happened?

"She's really fucking high concept, and knows how to pull it together." -Will, on how his sister managed to live with her husband in a trailer in Topanga Canyon.

Will: The dim-witted oaf plays guitar in Devendra's band?
WDF: Yeah.
Will: Didn't see that coming.

In the course of a conversation about how Will used to look more punk rock, i.e. 'hard,' than he does now:

Meg: I didn't know Hard Will.
WDF: Hard Will?! You were never Hard Will. That's like a poem by John Donne.


The thing is, though, that Will's Drunk Friend schooled us at Scrabble.

Information Fatigue...

...is obviously at least as old as Bob Dylan:

Now I wish I could write you a melody so plain
That could hold you, dear lady, from going insane
That could ease you and cool you and cease the pain
Of your useless and pointless knowledge

-Tombstone Blues, 1965.

Yay, Yay for Weekends Away

It's one a.m., and I've just returned from a salubrious whirlwind weekend trip to Ithaca, NY.

It was:

• The first time I've seen Miss Corinna in a year and a half, since she moved to L.A.
  
  
• The first time I've been back to my old home since I moved away, almost exactly one year ago
  
  
• The most greenery I've seen in a really long time

Reflections on all this and more to come. As for now, I'm a sleepy kid.

What, Me Overstimulated?

My latest cause celebre is "Information Fatigue." From here:

INFORMATION FATIGUE SYNDROME:
Perhaps you shouldn’t be reading this. The term was coined in a recent report from Reuters News Agency, called Dying for Information?, which argued that many people are becoming highly stressed through trying to cope with the huge amounts of information flooding them from books, fax messages, the telephone, journals, and the Internet. The symptoms of Information Fatigue Syndrome include “paralysis of analytical capacity”, “a hyper-aroused psychological condition”, and “anxiety and self-doubt”, leading to “foolish decisions and flawed conclusions”. It is a problem which the report argues particularly affects the group called knowledge workers whose jobs mainly involve dealing with and processing information. The term is obviously based on the name of the medical condition chronic fatigue syndrome and is abbreviated to IFS. Though it is a phrase that sounds as if it ought to catch on, sightings have been rare except in news items about the report itself, so this one may never make it into the dictionaries.

See also this, which I haven't checked out too much yet, but hope to, once I overcome this paralysis of the analytical capacity from which I suffer.

Actually, though, I'm serious, I think this is a real thing. Making it sound like a 'disease' might be foolish, but do minds get plum-tuckered from too much stuff? My intuition (which is never wrong, you know) says yes.

Too many new faces is wearying too (and stimulating), as I appreciate after a Sunday afternoon spent at the McCarren Park Pool Party. You know what's funny? Information, be it the kind you gather from surfing the internet, or the kind you get from checking out thousands of hipsters in the course of a couple hours in the sweet summer sun, may act kind of like a drug. It's really exciting and great at first, and it makes you feel goofy and euphoric and even a little manic. And you just want more. Later, you end up feeling kind of dizzy and sick. I wonder if they work at all similarly, in the brain.

Information fatigue, crowd fatigue, maybe even...New York fatigue. Which segues me nicely into the continuation of 'Hated Despite of Great Qualities,' which I'm working on, and hope to get up later this week.


(At McCarren Park Pool on a Sunday, from some Flickr set.)

New Book In Town

This evening I have started to read Middlemarch, a book that I bought some time ago, but have been putting off starting, because of its intimidating and subway-unfriendly heft.

I've barely gotten underway, but have already found one sentence that I can't resist quoting.

Her mind was theoretic, and yearned by its nature after some lofty conception of the world which might frankly include the parish of Tipton and her own rule of conduct there; she was enamoured of intensity and greatness, and rash in embracing whatever seemed to her to have those aspects; likely to seek martyrdom, to make retractions, and then to incur martyrdom after all in a quarter where she had not sought it.

I am going to continue yesterday's story soon, too -- maybe tomorrow.

Good night.

Hated Despite of Great Qualities

"Hated Despite of Great Qualities" is what I thought was the title of a Blonde Redhead song I like. Then I realized it's a melange of two Blonde Redhead song titles, "Hated Because of Great Qualities" and "Loved Despite of Great Faults." Nevertheless, it is the title of this post.

Meg and I have caught the moving bug. We now live in the top floor of a small brownstone in Carroll Gardens (or Boerum Hill, or something; no one seems to agree on what neighborhood this block belongs to). It's small, with low-ish ceilings and a floor that slopes with the house's redistribution of its hundred and twenty-year-old weight. There are windows on both sides, and out the back we can see into the garden and patio space of our landlords, who live below us, and whose sensitivity to the small but not non-existent amount of noise we make while walking and talking in the evenings adds a certain amount of stress to the whole situation. The light is beautiful, and I painted my walls this soft cocoa/peanut-buttery brown color. They still have the preternatural eggshell cleanness that comes with a fresh coat. The kitchen is tiny, the refrigerator "fun-sized," and the bathroom little, too, though I've calibrated my movements within it and it feels normal now. But Meg's working at home two days a week, and there's not really a devotable place for that. Also the wall between our rooms barely deserves the title; it's a flimsy piece of something just a step up from cardboard. It looks like a wall, if you don't tap on it, and as long as we both remain functionally single the whole arrangement is basically fine, but between that and the working at home thing and the landlord thing, we are feeling a little cramped.

So yesterday evening we went to check out an apartment in Red Hook. Red Hook is notoriously inconvenient to transit, so we carefully timed our walk there from the closest subway, the F/G at Smith & 9th Streets. It took 20 minutes, and a long 20 minutes at that, cross a highway and through a park and past a very big laundromat and a seemingly un-ending progression of housing projects. The building that the apartment was in was white-painted brick, not especially distinguished looking. We rang the bell a few times, but the super who was supposed to show us the apartment didn't answer. We didn't really mind. Between the walk and the looks of the building, we were not, as they say, feeling it.

Picture us walking up Van Brunt Street (leaving Red Hook a different way than we'd come in). The heat wave of the past couple weeks has broken; it's in the lower seventies, the humidity is gone. There's purple twilight over the neighborhood, a gull hanging in it, a light breeze and probably some narrow clouds with tender golden underbellies from the fading sunset. And here we are, feeling a little stunned, a little dejected. Why does New York have to be so damn beautiful? Why does New York have to be so damn hard?

We stopped into a bar on Van Brunt called the Bait and Tackle Shop, or something, to ponder over these very serious questions.

(To be continued...)

Look, I Done Made a Post,

over yonder, at Larry Smith's dojo of bloggy luv:

in context

permalink

"Also," Meg said, "you heard it here first:"

"Fall fashion (as deduced by me after another glance through the UO catalog) is this:

Joni Mitchell times Annie Hall divided by Kim Gordon."

Free Night at MoMA

MoMA is free on Friday evenings between 4 and 8 pm. So I went on Friday after work, to save twenty dollars (!) and see what all the fuss is about. It was my first time.

Impressions? MoMA doesn't do for me what the Met does. It's good, it's just not the same crazy freakout.

Hierarchy of visual art forms, according to Katherine:

(1) Representational portraits of people
(2) Crowd scenes, group portraits, city & townscapes without people
(3) Sculpture, including furniture and "design" specimens
(4) Completely abstract art
(5) Still lives
(6) Landscapes without buildings or people

There are exceptions, for instance my quasi-spiritual feelings about certain really big Jackson Pollock action paintings (of which MoMA has a great one), or my love for those hyper-realistic Dutch still-lives of mounds of food and flowers that are supposed to remind you that sic transit gloria and stuff. For the most part, though, I found myself in MoMA having to walk through several rooms befor finding something I could really sink my teeth into.

But still, I was thnking, and not to sound like Kant or anything, but I really enjoy the exercise of taste. And then, aside from enjoying it as an activity, the whole idea of taste fascinates me. So much of what we do, in our society of hyper-abundance, is decide what we do and don't enjoy, aesthetically. What's up with that? And what's up with all the time and energy we spend justifying and analyzing our judgments of taste?? And looking for people who share them???

My favorite thing in the MoMA is that Jackson Pollock I mentioned. The rooms that house the permanent collections are trippy to walk through because they contain so many 'greatest hits' that we've all seen time and time again in reproductions. But as it turns out, "Les Demoiselles du Avignon" leaves me cold, Picasso mostly leaves me cold (I kind of knew that already)..."Les Demoiselles" is hideous. Which is probably the point. But when it comes to 20th-century Frenchy depictions of humanity gone rancid, give me Toulouse-Lautrec any day, please.

The special exhibition right now is on Dada, which again I found amusing but not all that moving emotionally. More kind of interesting on an intellectual level. Why did nonsense seem like an appropriate way to fight fascism and war? Or the rise of mass production> The latter makes more sense, bt then when it domes to mass production, Dada doesn't seem to have been entirely a protest movement, either.

On a less heady note, the exhibit reminded me of how I used to make a lot of collages, and made me want to do that again.

The design wing, by the same token,

(a) freaked me out anew about plastics
(b) made me yearn to work with physical objects. Seriously, I've always been pretty good with my hands, and now I've got no outlet for it.

Someday, years from now, I'll quit my job to renovate an old house. Lifelong dream and all that. I'll work with three-dimensional things all day, and it will rule rule rule.

To Do

Item #1: Bring back lady gloves.

(You know, the 1930s-50s style ones that fit closely and go up to yr wrists. Just think of the gross encounters with subway poles that could be avoided.)

Forward into the past. A couple of weeks ago, someone told me that I have a '30s movie star thing going on. The more I work with computers, the more I want to bring back elements from a past before my own.

Why?

Maybe it has nothing to do with the computers; I've always had a thing for the olden days. But again: why?

Overheard #4

On 6th Avenue between 52nd and 53rd Streets:

A big, tall, stiff-hipped, slightly retarded (but it's hard to tell)-looking man in a dirty white tee shirt and baggy jeans. He has male-pattern baldness and dangles a plastic shopping bag. Wears an amiable expression on this face. Says out loud, to no one in particular:

"What is this, and where's this goin'?!?"

I'm Changing The Name of This Blog to "Things Meg Said"

From: "meg"
Date: August 2, 2006 11:44:50 AM EDT
To: "Katherine"

Called to me by big burly dude (as i hurry down the street to the subway chugging from my water bottle in blistering heat):

"Ooh, go on girl - refresh yourself!"

Awesome.

Morning Whirl

[So...what the hell? I have no patience. Therefore, I will publish this thing I was a little nervous about, and I will provide the background later.]

[Written last Thursday or Friday or something, in my nice new owl notebook from Rar Rar, that I bought at the craft fair w/ Alison]

So, this morning...I've been reading the Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, which seduced me with its very well-designed cover. Verdict: the first two stories were mind-blowing, and after that, it's gone down markedly. I don't so much like stories about people in extremis, or something. I perfer really well-done excavations of common feelings.

Anyway, "Sea Oak" by George Saunders is a masterpiece, and "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned" by Wells Tower had me from the first line and wouldn't let go. (Update: Stepen Dixon has a pretty great one in there, too.) So from there on out it's been kind of blah, though not un-fun, till this morning on the train when I was reading the second half of "When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine," by Jhumpa Lahiri. I tried to dislike it, because the beginning had this strained note of Salman Rushdie-ness, and also out of a churlish desire to dislike Jhumpa Lahiri herself for being born very rich and very beautiful. But I couldn't keep it up. She's good.

One line, especially, almost kind of made me cry. This is partly Jhumpa Lahiri and partly me. I've been feeling pretty emotional these past few days, both happy and sad, or rather neither one, but just intense somehow. I know why, too, or at least part of the reason. Right, so I've been taking Zoloft since January or thereabouts. And this week I've missed about three doses in a row by accident. I forgot on Monday, and again on Tuesday, then yesterday I only took like half of one so as not to shock the ol' system, and then this morning (I realized on the train), I forgot again.

So, right, I wanted to say something about Jhumpa Lahiri, but I also want to say something about how the world is when I abruptly miss a few days of pills -- which I don't pretend is the same thing as 'the world when I'm just not taking anything at all'; I think that what I'm trying to describe is definitely a comedown effect, a weird brain surprise. It's one's neurons saying "whoa!" Anyway. I wouldn't necessarily say that "colors are deeper and food tastes better" which is how a friend described it to me recently, but that's not too far off the mark. Everything feels more portentous. The skyscrapers are taller, the quality of the light is more vivid, and my reactions to the people on the station stairs of the train and as I emerge onto street level are more immediate and engrossing. I respond to things more. I feel as though I am in it. Overall, it is a likeable state to be in. Exciting. Only later in the afternoon do I notice that I also feel kind of woozy.

But back to the story. So I'm sitting on the train, reading Jhumpa Lahiri's story. It's about the tentative, affectionate relationship between a little girl and a Pakistani refugee who must be reminded by her of his own daughters, whom he can't get back to, because he's stuck in America during the war that resulted in the creation of Bangladesh. Anyway, stories about nice dad-figures always get me, in books, and there was this line:

In the glare of her headlights I saw that our pumpkin had been shattered, its thick shell strewn in chunks across the grass. I felt the sting of tears in my eyes, and a sudden pain in my throat, as if it had been stuffed with the sharp tiny pebbles that crunched with each step under my aching feet.

And that almost made me a little teary, there on the subway. The description of that feeling like gravel in the throat is just such a perfect evocation. It slingshotted me back to childhood; I was remembering things, and the feels of things, that I hadn't thought about in quite some time. The description caused the feeling that it was describing. The swelling up of the throat and a feeling of muchness, and then the exquisite sensation of all this muchness about to break over one's head like a wave.

So then I finished the story, blinked by eyes, got off the train and pushed through the turnstile, past the woman with dark brown skin and heavy red lips and tired blue eyeshadow who holds out copies of A.M. New York most mornings and says "Start your day with A.M.! Start your day with A.M.!" I always wonder about her life; I always feel lucky, and guilty, and crass for thinking about it at all, and then we break up onto the surface, and what's the weather like?, oh good it's sunshine, more people selling more papers, the coffee cart, the fruit stand where I got the good cherries, are they still three dollars a pound, the fruit stands of New York are so lush at this season, I love the fruit stands, I love New York, I look at the one crenellated rooftop across the street, the blue sky, walk past the McDonald's and the place that sells used office furnitire, I should write about the fruit stands, I think, and then, wait, I know her, the girl coming out of the burger place, it's B's friend, I feel so good to have remembered, I think her name's Katy.

Some mornings, things are vivid like that. Every little moment feels ineffably worthy of description, and every description could be drawn out to fill pages, books, years. There's this sense of tiny details spinning off into infinity. It feels great, and also a little unsustainable. Sometimes I feel this way in the normal course of things. Other times, I can trace it to something as prosaic (but also incredibly complicated, obv.) as missing a few doses of something my body's gotten used to. And as much as I enjoy the state I'm describing, it can be unsettling, too, to sense how easily affected by material things one's emotions really are, and how, much like the line between 'thoughts' and 'feelings,' the line between 'the physical' and 'the emotional' becomes purely invisible when you look at it from certain angles. Like this one.

Mission Accomplished Team

.
..
...

I WROTE TO MY COMMITTEE!

Yeah, not so much accomplished as 'got the ball rolling,' but still. Yay.

To celebrate, I ordered myself one of these. Charcoal on pink, dont'cha know.

At the Beach

Pix from a recent trip to Rockaway Beach. And incidentally, the Ramones are right. It's not all that hard to reach. You ride the subway for about an hour, hour and a half, get off, buy a two dollar grass mat on the side of the street, and you are there, there's an ocean and you can swim in it and everything.


Chewing out a rhythm on my bubble gum
The sun is out and I want some.
Its not hard, not far to reach
We can hitch a ride
To rockaway beach.
Up on the roof, out on the street
Down in the playground the hot concrete
Bus ride is too slow
They blast out the disco on the radio
Rock rock rockaway beach
Rock rock rockaway beach
We can hitch a ride
To rockaway beach
Its not hard, not far to reach
We can hitch a ride
To rockaway beach.

-Los Ramones, fr. 'Rocket to Russia'


Awww yeah...

MTV is 25 Years Old Today

MTV is 25 years old today. In honor of MTV's barfday, here -- such as they are -- are some of my MTV memories. (Thanks for the prompt, Abel.)

When I was a kid, we received MTV at home only intermittently. It was technically one of the "free cable" channels, but for some reason, there were years when we had it, and years when we didn't. I spent many hours becoming superficially acquainted with VHF/UHF and the obscure knobs and buttons on the nether regions of our TV and VCR, trying to make MTV come in.

One blissful stretch of MTV-having occurred when I was probably in about 4th grade, and my sister in 1st. It was around the time that my mother first started experimenting with leaving us home alone while she ran short-ish errands. Alison and I were forbidden to watch MTV, so naturally we raced to the set as soon as our mother turned the key in the lock (a process repeated in reverse at the first sign of her re-entering the house), and prostrated ourselves before the MTV gods.

MTV's influence was not really as pernicious as my mother feared, I believe, but neither was it as cool-making as I hoped. Mostly, my sister and I just made fun of things. Here's what was on MTV a lot at the time:

1. A Don Henley video for a song called "A Face in the Crowd," or something. It was very earnest and we cracked ourselves up for hours with our imitations of it.

2. Quite a lot of Tom Petty videos. We liked to make fun of the way he said "Yerrr so bad..."

3. Peter Gabriel videos, which were cool.

4. Depeche Mode videos, which ditto.

5. Paula Abdul videos. The one for "Opposites Attract" where she dances around with that cartoon cat. How cool!?!? I used to want to make music videos, actually. I imagined myself as a music video director, or a "choreographer," which is how Paula Abdul was described in the pages of the Bop and Tiger Beat magazines I sometimes bought with my allowance at the beach.

6. Michael Penn video for "No Myth." I did not make fun of that song, for I secretly loved it. I don't exactly love it anymore, but it still gets stuck in my head with statistically improbable frequency.

7. Motley Crue! There was this one song and video that we made fun of the most of all. The band was all, you know, teased hair like a bunch of Troll dolls, skinny legs in tight leather pants, etc. There was a half-naked woman on a bed, and a white tiger that padded softly through the room. It was the tiger that we thought was so funny and stupid. Like, "How could there be a TIGER there?!?! I mean come on! Really! WTF?!?!?" Why that was the one improbable detail among all the improbable details on MTV that we took the most exception with, I will never know. The song was a little bit sexy, and I think that grossed us out. Also, I would like to think that we were displaying incipient good taste.

8. I also really liked that one song about the father who is a busy executive and misses all the trivial-yet-important events in his son's life, such as Little League practices, etc., until the son becomes a grown man with a family of his own who is, natch, too busy to spend any time with his old dad. It was so sad! But I loved the frisson of its sadness. Somehow much more acceptable than the Don Henley sadness, for some reason. Eh.

So ah, what do YOU remember about MTV?

I Did This Other Thing Too

So, as though I didn't have enough to do on, around, and concerning the Internets, I am doing some blogging over at Larry Smith's clubhouse, aka the SMITH Magazine website. I blog about personal media, natch, and I wrote a post the other day that I am a little bit proud of.

On Friday, Meg and I went to a cocktail party at Larry Smith's place and met some of the other bloggers and folks connected with the magazine. It was about 98 million degrees at street level, but cool and glamorous with a 360-degree view, Hollywood breezes ("cue the breezes!," some celestial talking head must have said), and an orange sunset set off by perfect cumulonimbus clouds. Larry's wife Piper made chicken quesadillas that Meg is now determined to replicate, and a good time was had etc.