Loading
Everyone is scared of being alone. I often think of the parable of the little African boy running through the forest. A little African boy is running through the forest, looking for his mommy. But there is nothing but forest. No mommy. And the camera pans out and there is nothing but forest for miles around. I suppose it’s not a parable, but an old Unicef commercial. But the message is still just as poignant: everyone is scared to be alone, because maybe it’s not that you just decided to stay in one night and work, and then ended up drinking too much. Maybe you’re really trapped in a forest and about to die, and only Unicef can save you, but they need to know which part of the forest you’re in—and they can’t figure that out unless you send them money.
Yoga studios are often thought of as spaces for healing, for retrieving some life balance now lost. Last week, I began an intensive yoga course in my new home, San Francisco (a city with perhaps the same reputation as a yoga studio). I quickly learned that yoga itself isn’t about restoration. As a physical discipline and as a series of philosophical reflections on life, yoga tries to combat the illusion that what most people need is a return to a healthier moment. Instead it encourages a less nostalgic form of participation in the processes of aging/living/dying. Outside the yoga studio, however, the city has a different wisdom about it. One lesson it teaches is that worldly goods, if not constitutionally transient, are at least easily replaceable by the wealthy. I witnessed my first robbery here yesterday. Two dudes sitting in a cafe I was working in grabbed two iphones and ran out. After a short-lived attempt by one former iphone owner to give chase, he sat back down and calmly remarked, “It’s a company phone.” The other barely looked up from her coffee.
The most enduring dynamic in personal testimonials about 9/11, at least for anyone who watched it on TV, is the interruption of the trivial by the terrible. “I had just finished my breakfast when…” “I was coming out of the shower and…” “I was on my way to second period for a vocabulary quiz and…” I’m not sure why this is, but it feels unavoidable for me, too. I was getting ready to go to work on one of my last days as a summer intern for the Chicago film festival. As I got dressed, I flipped on the TV to watch Sportscenter when… After watching for about an hour, and talking to my mom in London (she was okay), a big question became whether I would go to work that day. A few phone calls revealed that they wanted us to come in (there were some catalogs that were going to be shipped out now or never). Public transportation was down, so I took a cab. I remember thinking, on my way to the office, that I had finally entered history; that this was what it felt like to live in history (I was 20). And then also that it must be serious (there were still questions at that point about how serious it was), because the Starbucks where I normally got my coffee before work was closed. And Starbucks was never closed. Which was the kind of detail I remember thinking it would be good to include when people asked me (as they inevitably would) what my 9/11 had been like. As if the most interesting news I could share regarded how it had disturbed my morning routine.
Saturday morning at about 5 am, pilgrims from all over southeastern Michigan roll into Ann Arbor to welcome the first game of the college football season. What seems a bit odd is that the people traveling the longest and arriving the earliest are not in college and haven’t been for a decade or two. We muscle our SUVs up to the perimeter of the football stadium and park in rows on the neighboring golf course, not parking-lot style, but with each car a throne commanding a twenty foot kingdom of personal space. Then, from each flipped-open trunk comes everything you need to feel at home in nature (i.e. the golf course): a plastic canopy, an inflatable sofa set, a triple-barreled crock pot, and a sheet cake from Costco with “Go Blue!” printed enthusiastically on the top. Out comes the 47″ plasma TV, the satellite dish on a tripod, and the 500 watt sound system (“it sounds like you’re really there!”), with surround sound. Why the TV? Because we do not intend to actually go to the game. Not because of ticket prices—a parking plot is $50.00 after all, never mind what we shelled out for the sheet cake and portable buffet ensemble—but because the golf course is so much more comfortable, and spacious. And who isn’t at home on a nine foot inflatable sofa with surround sound? But then why not just stay on your permanently inflated sofa at home, where you have the benefit of absolute triumph over nature and an even broader swath of personal space? The man with whom I am sharing a sloppy joe agrees: because of the community. Not the community of the roaring, 100,000 seat stadium, but the kind of community to which one grows accustomed in the suburbs, one in which nothing really has to be held in common (there are two separate television screens within ten yards of me) and we each get to have our own experience, together.
You know you are in love when the other people you sleep with start to seem as dull and sad as your partner.
The political party system is made by groups of individuals fighting in parliaments for the interests of the class or group they represent. For better or worse, it’s dead. Labour parties are liberal, liberal parties are conservative, conservative parties are liberal, socialists are both conservatives and capitalists–and despite this process of “democratization,” individual politicians are no more representative of the population than they ever were. But politicians and parties linger on, like zombies, having traded their previously sophisticated interests for just one: to feast on the living, and survive.
This week Joseph Epstein wrote a column for The Wall Street Journal entitled, “What Killed American Lit?” The article is not really about the death of American literature, but about the death of American English departments, which he calls “intellectual nursing homes where old ideas go to die.” Of course, it has already become an old idea that English departments are dying. For at least a dozen years, reaching back to Andrew Delbanco’s “The Decline and Fall of Literature” (1999) in the New York Review of Books, some journalist, critic, or former English teacher can be counted on at least annually to declare the English department “bankrupt,” “dead,” “in decline,” a “laughingstock,” and possibly a menace to society. What remains peculiar about these attacks is only the utter silence of their target. For whatever power those who have transformed English departments into a branch of cultural studies still wield in universities, they appear to have abandoned the realm of actual culture to their critics. We hear whispered the rumor of long-ago “culture wars”; there is clearly no war anymore, nor even a skirmish. Rather, there are an unending string of attacks that go unanswered and make no difference. Who will stand up for the contemporary English department, with its motley collection of Marxists, multiculturalists, and specialists in cartoons? Those of us still insisting on studying literature in universities ask the question earnestly: We know the lines of attack, what we don’t know is what exactly is left to defend.
I’ve learned a lot about writing from writing everyday. I’ve learned that writing is similar to someone who is vaguely competent at woodworking and so goes into his studio and makes a thousand shitty coffee tables and armoires and chairs every year and hopes for improvement by the sheer repetition of the act. And I’ve learned that the only real hope for him would be burning everything he had made at the end of each year, or the furniture will pile up, making it easier for him to hang himself from the ceiling beam.
Question: Is it easier to get what you want, or to stop wanting what you can’t get? So far in my life I’ve tried to take the latter course, out of a cowardly reluctance to enter into any battle I’m not sure of winning. But I’m forced to admit that it hasn’t worked. I just DO want things I don’t have, dammit! So the only authentic course is to follow the first option and strive to get the things you want. You may, of course, fail to get them.
ABC’s Bachelor Pad is like a laboratory for the observation of human nature at its most amusing. Unlike Survivor, in which the votes that send contestants home at least have some relationship to reality—the strength or weakness of an individual in a low-calorie environment—the votes on BP float around on a surface of nothingness, or, at best, refer back to the voting itself in a navel-gazing simulacrum worthy of the most banal poststructuralist theorizing (you’re welcome for the paper idea, cultural studies major #27,391!). But this irreality is also what makes BP the laboratory that it is: faced with a situation in which there is no real reason to vote one person off rather than another, America’s hot, young reality stars have to invent their reasons. And that provides no end of amusement. Almost all of the contestants (the most notable exception being the oddly posh Ames Brown) lie and deceive with regularity, pledging faithfulness to those whom they will blithely betray days, hours, or even minutes later. Yet, without fail, the ones who wind up with the short end of the stick complain of everyone else’s treachery—while the ones who come out on top boast that “it’s just the way you need to play the game.” What I personally enjoy most (really, to a shocking degree) is seeing this contrast in one and the same person. Inspired, I have decided that the real winner of Bachelor Pad 2 will not be the contestant left standing at the end, but the contestant who utters the most amazingly self-contradictory things over the course of the season. The loser so far is almost certainly Justin “Rated R” Rego, a Canadian who bemoaned in decidedly un-Canadian fashion that the only problem with Bachelor Pad 2 is that it’s just not as easy to deceive people on the show as it is in real life. I applaud him for his Nietzschean sentiments, but he leaves me without the Schadenfreude that the current frontrunner provides me in spades. Kasey Kahl. Kasey’s whining about his near-ejection from the house in the most recent episode was like music to my ears. Having earned, in his mind, a place among the greats of cinematic history for his successful scheming—Kasey has declared himself both “the Godfather” and a “Jedi master” (a “Jedi genius master,” in fact)—he resorted this past Monday night to playing the “friendship” card and accused archrival Jake Pavelka of being “a manipulative bastard” upon discovery that he of all people was, in the language of Bachelor Pad, “on the chopping block.” But Kasey did survive to see another episode, and to perhaps bless us with ever more elegant expressions of moral hypocrisy. He remains my frontrunner, but not entirely without competition. His muse, Vienna Girardi, has some real potential. Vienna, who psychotically informed Kasey that she wanted to have his babies on national television, seems to have just the right mixture of cutthroat competitiveness and liability to complete and utter meltdown needed to regain the lead in this particular race. No matter what, I will be watching—with the mouth-watering anticipation of the connoisseur.