Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Astrophysi-guitarist-ist
This just in via Susan‘s brilliant emails....
(no i haven’t left the house yet, shut it. and my hair dried naturally and looks just like this icon, in black. dang it.)
From Susany Q (via NY mag):
“Astrophysicist to Offer Conclusive Evidence That Fat Bottomed Girls Make the Rockin’ World Go Round: Queen guitarist Brian May, who recently earned a doctorate in astrophysics, has been named the next chancellor of Liverpool John Moores University. Wait, what?” (reuters)
See ladies? So do your part, eat on Thanksgiving. Eat and repeat. Give spanks and thanks on turkey day.
I’ll be in Susan’s kitchen, getting in the way while she makes an awesome dinner.
Wing It on Foot
For months now I’ve been putting off going the bank in person. Part of the problem is that I can’t remember how to get there. It’s only Tribeca.
This bank was close to two of my past offices. I went to that area by subway for at least a year, almost daily. Now I can’t even be sure which station I want. This knowledge has just fallen out of my brain.
I know that my bank is near Bubby’s, who has that great pie and mac n cheese. I remember going there for lunch with Adam, Dan, and Jeremiah. I remember walking down that street and the corner where Jeremiah fixed how I wore the lapels of my new coat, because he can’t help but fuss and critique when he’s right, and that the lapels are fixed open like that to this day.
Then I remember the time at Derrick‘s birthday party when I was having “a bad face day” and Jer told me I was wearing too much powder, but in a nice way, and besides, I knew I was. Then we all danced, The Russian picked me up and swung me around, I got dizzy and escaped by bending backwards until my hands touched the floor. I tucked and rolled back. I break-danced and got down, and got two big splinters from the unkept wood floor, one in my hip through my jeans, and one in my palm. I showed them to people, pulled them out, and kept dancing.
Charles was there. He was smiling. I was wearing a handmade “special thanks to my vagina” shirt with the zipper opening at the neck that I’d bought at a rock show that he had taken me to, earlier that month.
When The Russian drove me home in his pickup truck (how surreal! a personal vehicle in brooklyn!) my clothes and hands were dusty and filthy from the floor. I couldn’t remember the Russian’s name, Peter, something obvious. We had worked together but not really together. I didn’t make out with him or anything. It wasn’t like that.
All this was two and three years ago.
Meanwhile, I just had to look up a simple transfer to the 2,3, that I have made at least 600 times. Except this time I transfer from Jay Street. I plan to get out where I think I need to be, then wing it on foot.
Wing it on foot? heh
Oh my filling head.
Today’s lesson: sometimes you have to figure out how to get to an old place in a new way, and it’s not as easy as you’d think.
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Hard Work, Harder Work, Karma and Kismet
Last night I had my third critique, and finished the Evelyn Waugh’s Unconditional Surrender for my War and Politics lit class tonight. Tomorrow night, I’ll read at our student reading. I think I’m the only non-fiction person reading, so with any luck, they’ll forget immediately and assume everything out of me is fiction. There’s an eight-minute time limit, so I have to cut my story way, way down. I’ll edit the tone so that it sounds better “performed” because I’m an insane-o who doesn’t want to suck (from a journalistic read to comedy in a few hours of editing, step right up folks).
I’d like to describe the miracle of having finished the novel last night, instead of finishing it this afternoon as per usual. There is a relative wealth of free time. I slept in til 11am and dreamed. There is time to go to The Strand and find books for a “Young Adults as Narrators” weekend workshop . It’s at school, taught by the professor Ann Hood, so far, so fabulous — and free of charge. Luckily I’ve already read three of the four books, and can’t wait to read Pessl.
Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird
Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics
S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders
Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
Remember when I wrote about The History of Love? Now I get to read it for class and pick apart the craft.
Remember when I blogged about Shelley Jackson? Um, she’s going to be my lit professor in the spring!
On Halloween, I saw her before classes started. Shelley had made a life-sized paper mache human head and attached it next to her own (like the main character in Half Life. It was well made, hilarious, and brilliant. Knowing why she’d done it wasn’t necessary, though it made it funnier.
This is our reading list for her class themed “The Unnamable” (The unsayable, the unspeakable, the unreachable, the unknowable.)
Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
Christa Wolf, Cassandra
Franz Kafka, The Castle
Joseph McElroy, Plus
Stanislaw Lem, Solaris
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Bruno Schulz, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass
Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading
Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.
Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure
Georges Perec, A Void
Lyn Hejinian, My Life
I have only read one of these, and am thrilled to get my brain all bendy. Maybe I should try to grow another head just to handle it?
And last in my list of “why I’m a kid in a candy shop,” remember (Susan) how I used to sometimes go on and on until i was teased (by Susan!) about how much I loved my college prof Vassily Aksyonov? In my current lit class we read his mother’s memoir about being caught up in Stalin’s first purge and living in various prison camps for twenty years. I got to be a nerd and tell the class all about Aksyonov, the man, his Gogol class, his amazing amazingness. And the smart kids took notes. How did I get here? (hard work, harder work, karma and kismet)
In other news, I need more, many more bookshelves, and to join a gym or dance class (years recovering from martial arts injuries makes me think i’m too violent and clumsy to keep that up). I re-sprain my wrist every time I hold a heavy book vertically to put it back on the shelf. That’s not a good thing. Meanwhile, even though I still rock the 0.7 waste to hip ratio, the measurements have gone up because I’m older and I sit, and something clearly needs to be done about that.
Nice to hear I’ll make smart babies, but I rather not be so curvy before they’re in my lap. teehee
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Norman Mailer, RIP
NPR has a broad and informative retrospective on Normal Mailer, Co-founder of the Village Voice, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes and the National Book Award, and, very near to my heart, the person considered to be the first to write creative nonfiction. I like NPR’s definition: “appl[ing] the narrative style of the novel to real events”.
Regular posts will begin again soon, regular like you haven’t seen in years. It should be a good thing.
Update Monday morning aka The continuing education of Mintjelly:
I received an informative comment via email from a former editor at The Voice, regarding the whole “first to write creative nonfiction” issue:
“Not to sound like an old guy quibbling, but I don’t think you can say he was the first person to do creative non-fiction. Could probably say he was the first novelist to utilize fictional techniques in the way that he did. But the real New Journalism, ie creative non-fiction, groundbreakers in that period were Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Gail Sheehy and Clay Felker at NEW YORK magazine (where all three worked.)
Even Mailer’s non-fiction sort of transcended the genre, and unlike Wolfe, Breslin and Sheehy he wasn’t a model for young writers of non-fiction because you couldn’t aspire to be him stylistically or intellectually. He was a near-genius novelist who was out of reach of mere journalists, even ‘creative’ ones.”
Thank you, Quibble, very educational and interesting. Maybe you can’t learn everything in school and from NPR after all?
Maybe when we die, we get credit for things we’re only partially responsible for. For instance, I started the “pink” trend a number of years ago, before you could buy pink things. I coined the phrase Hacking the Body, and I made chipped nail polish cool. (legal note: When I die, I want a Viking funeral. Push me out to sea to the tune of “And She Was” by Talking Heads. If someone says “this is what she would have wanted” the appropriate response is “heck yeah")
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