This one: Bobbert really likes it: That's at 12x zoom (stabilized), unprocessed except for resizing. <3 <3urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:deadwolfbones:875452006-07-17T14:42:00Last night,2006-07-17T18:42:49Z2006-07-17T18:46:12ZLast night I dreamed that I was living in some kind of strange hybrid of my Chicago and Jupiter apartments (I've actually had several dreams set in the same hybrid). Amidst the chaos of some grotesque frat party simulacrum taking place inside, I sat on my stoop(!) and realized that I hadn't finished my graduate school education. Somehow, of course, the thing that I hadn't finished was dream-transformed from the two papers I still need to write into the string of calculus classes I took and dropped in undergrad. Suddenly I found myself in class, learning calculus, except that this "calculus" didn't involve math at all and was instead some kind of abstract conceptual calculus which I, nevertheless, was still completely awful at. I failed, got upset, and woke up in the midst of freaking out.Last night, before the dreams, I went with Jeanette to meet Will for coffee at Dunkin Donuts. We got there and found him sitting on a half-broken bench in front of the soon-to-open Carvel, reading some underground novel. On our way down the strip toward the store we noticed that the place was uncharacterisitically deserted. Will and Jeanette had a little debate over whether Dunkin Donuts is ever closed, a debate that was made moot when we got there and found that it was, indeed, closed. We also found, however, that the employees had left several big jugs of coffee and a few dozen donuts sitting outside, along with the note that the store would reopen at 6am. We gorged on coffee and plain cake donuts and talked about homebrew tattoos. I had a heart palpitation and blamed it on the coffee, but wondered if, maybe, some fiend had poisoned the batch.Last night, before the coffee and the dreams, Jeanette and I watched the 1948 Errol Flynn vehicleDon Juanon Turner Classic Movies, my new favorite channel. Aside from the obvious irony of Flynn playing the greatest seducer of women this side of Cassanova, the movie was pretty surprisingly entertaining. Lessons learned: men aresofickle, thinly veiled dick jokes were a-ok in 40s Hollywood comedies, and Errol Flynn is awesome.Last night, before the coffee and the dreams and the swordfighting, Jeanette cut my hair again. It was getting out of control.urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:deadwolfbones:870802006-07-05T12:49:00Tennessee2006-07-05T16:50:00Z2006-07-05T17:24:47Zurn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:deadwolfbones:868222006-07-02T16:32:00deadwolfbones @ 2006-07-02T16:32:002006-07-02T20:34:49Z2006-07-02T20:34:49ZBecause sometimes you just have to quote a passage:; ; ; ; ;I have written to disclose myself to myself, and I am writing now because I will, I know, sometime read what I am now writing and wonder.; ; ; ; ;Perhaps by the time I do, I will have solved the mystery of myself; or perhaps I will no longer care to know the solution.; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;Gene Wolfe,The Fifth Head of Cerberusurn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:deadwolfbones:867042006-06-28T15:21:00dave was a lost cause, a real psycho; spent half his time wishing he was a man2006-06-28T19:21:30Z2006-06-28T19:21:30Z...rather than being a man.Two days without the World Cup. What am I to do with myself? O, what will occupy the worthless hours at work? I've grown to enjoy getting up a few hours earlier than normal, but what will I do with all that time now? Read on the balcony, I guess, though 10am-12pm really can't compete with 5pm-8pm in the sitting on the balcony and reading deliciousness stakes.Here's a sneak peek at my daily routine of late:09:30-10:00am:Wake up, shower, turn on the World Cup.10:00-11:55am:Watch the early game. Make lunch. Scream at the TV a little, hope I don't wake Ryan up.11:55-12:00pm:Bike to work. Park bike in bookstore back room. Say hi to Mike/Carol/whoever's working with Mike.12:00-01:00pm:Quickly settle in at the office, then (depending on the game schedule) either a) invent a pretense to leave the office so I can watch the second half till 1pm or b) invent a pretense to leave so I can go talk to Mike/generally avoid the office.01:00-03:00pm:Dick around, do what's asked of me (usually nothing), post on the board, browse wikipedia, browse the library, listen to NPR junk, think about posting on Girlpants, think about posting here, feel guilty for not working on my papers, browse craigslist for Atlanta houses, etc etc.03:00-05:00pm:Blatantly leave work to watch the late game in the Burrow.05:00-06:00pm:Either camp in the bookstore talking to Drew or come back to the office and do nothing for the last hour of the workday.06:00-06:05pm:Bike home.06:05-08:00pm:Read on the balcony, talk to next door neighbor and his girlfriend(?) and daughter, talk to Bryan and Ryan, listen to music.08:00-10:00pm:Unassigned tomfoolery.10:00-02:00am:Hanging out with Drew/Jeanette/Joel/Mark/Sara/etc.03:00-09:30am:Sleeeeeeeeep.That was probably far more detailed than anyone could possibly want, but I hope it capture the mundanity of the whole thing.Last night I eschewed the early screening ofSuperman Returnsto finally seeA Prairie Home Companion. Its main effect on me was to make me want to be really good friends with Garrison Keillor, which is the same effect I recall the show having on me, so I guess Altman did a good job of capturing its essence.Might take a trip to New Mexico in early August, probably just before the Atlanta move. Mom's been wanting me to get out there and it looks like the proposed me-Jeanette-Bridgette-whoever Vermont road trip has fallen through, so it seems like a good substitute. All that remains is to see if I have the cash to swing it.Had a dream last night that Rachel came back from Japan even earlier than her supposed July 20th return date, but she got lost trying to find our new apartment so she turned around and went back. What the hell?Finally, my World Cup predictions from here on out:Quarterfinals:Argentina over Germany (but I'm sketchy on this one)Italy over UkrainePortugal over EnglandBrazil over FranceSemifinals:Argentina over ItalyBrazil over PortugalFinals:Argentina over BrazilPortugal over Italy for 3rd...but if Germany beats Argentina, I expect them to take the same route and then lose to Brazil. But there's no dishonor in losing to Brazil.urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:deadwolfbones:863902006-06-23T13:49:00deadwolfbones @ 2006-06-23T13:49:002006-06-23T17:49:09Z2006-06-23T17:49:09ZI'm forever buying more books than I can possibly read, but after seeing Allison's rather impressive collection over the weekend I don't feel quite so bad about my spending habits. Today's haul, mostly paid for with that Borders gift card that I kept forgetting I had:Flann O'Brien,At Swim-Two-BirdsJeff Vandermeer,City of Saints and MadmenThe Adventures and Misadventures of MaqrollI'm currently wrapping up Allende'sHouse of the Spirits, which almost caused me to purchase100 Years of Solitudein the above order. Then I realized there are probably hundreds of $1 copies at used bookstores around here and decided to go for something more difficult to find. Nevermind the fact that I won't get around to reading any of these for at least a few months.urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:deadwolfbones:860812006-06-20T12:27:00lustrous, full2006-06-20T16:27:08Z2006-06-20T16:29:02ZI grabbed a ride to work from Ryan today, as I left my bike at work last night. On the way there, that motherfucker once again rubbed in the fact that his job provides him with chef-cooked meals for lunch and dinner. But it's alright, I know where he sleeps.After he drops me off in front of the dorms, I've just started walking toward the office when I hear a voice calling, "Hey! Hey dude! Wait up!"I look over my shoulder and see nothing, so I duck a bit so that my vision can clear the treeline and there's a slightly chunky mountain of a man sprinting across Main Street and flagging me down. I meet up with him on the median. "Sorry," he says, "Are you a college student?""I used to be.""Oh, cool. I, uh... I just wanted to ask you how old you think I am."I gaze at him in some kind of perplexed contemplation."I'm doing an informal survey... been asking people all over.""...huh.""So, what do you think?"I look more closely at him. He's probably 6'4" or so, mildly pear-shaped, with either blond or prematurely graying near-shaved hair. He's smoking a cigarette and carrying a plastic Publix shopping bag, wearing gym shorts and a loose t-shirt. From the way he's formed his question he's obviously either far older or far younger than he looks, and given the condition he's in, I'm guessing it's toward the younger end. So I give him my best honest estimation, based solely on his appearance."Um, maybe 31 or 32?""31 or... damn. I'm 26, man. 26! People have been telling me I'm starting to look old, so I came out here and just started asking... I figured you'd be a good--what do you call it?--a, uh... litmus... litmus test? Yeah.""Hmm.""Yeah, I've gotten as low as 24 and as high as 35 but... yeah, most people say around 30. Damn!""Yeah...""What do you think, y'know... does it?""What makes you look older?""Yeah."I ponder for a moment and he sucks nervously at his cigarette. I think to myself that his voice is kind of higher than I'd expect and a little warbly."I guess it's probably the hair," I say. "How short it is.""The hair, huh? How... that's weird, no one else has said that so far. How old do you think I'd look with a, um,lustrous,fullhead of hair?""Er... I don't know. Late 20s?""Yeah. Yeah, I guess so. Well, thanks, man. How old are you?""24.""Wow, I'm 26. Graduated college in 2002.""Oh, I was 2003.""Damn. Damn. When'd you graduate high school?""1999.""Yeah, 1998. Wow.""Well, thanks, man." He reaches out to shake my hand and I notice that his is twitching a little. I shake it anyway, give him a smile, and mumble something about having to get to work."Yeah, man. No problem. Thanks.""Yeah, I'll... see you around or something."I walked the two-minute walk to work, stopping in the bathroom on the way to wash my right hand, which had begun to itch.urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:deadwolfbones:859692006-06-14T13:34:00inane2006-06-14T17:34:41Z2006-06-14T17:35:08ZThe squeaking coming from the toe area of the sole of my right shoe is starting to hit unbearable levels. Anyone have any ideas for fixing it that don't involve buying new shoes? I'm considering duct tape. Anyone know what causes it?!!!urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:deadwolfbones:855712006-06-13T11:36:00sports are for nerds2006-06-13T15:35:58Z2006-06-19T04:40:24ZI think I've watched more soccer in the past half-week than in the rest of my life combined and I think I'm starting to understand why the rest of the world loves it so much. (It's the drama, stupid.) I doubt many people who'll read this have any interest in the Cup, but here's a quick list of the matches I've seen, ranked in order of entertainment.Watched all of:1. Brazil v. Croatia (1 - 0)2. Germany v. Poland (1 - 0)3. Trinidad & Tobago v. Sweden (0 - 0)4. Poland v. Ecuador (0 - 2)5. Italy v. Ghana (2 - 0)6. USA v. Italy (1 - 1)7. S. Korea v. Togo (2 - 1)8. Saudi Arabia v. Tunisia (2 - 2)9. England v. Trinidad & Tobago (2 - 0)10. Germany v. Costa Rica (4 - 2)11. Brazil v. Australia (2 - 0)12. Spain v. Ukraine (4 - 0)13. Ecuador v. Costa Rica (3 - 0)14. Australia v. Japan (3 - 1)15. France v. Switzerland (0 - 0)16. USA v. Czech Republic (0 - 3)17. England v. Paraguay (1 - 0)I never thought a 0-0 draw would be an exciting game, but watching T&T hold Sweden off--a man down for the second half of their first ever World Cup game--was impressive indeed. Ecuador's defensive show against a huge and imposing Polish team was pretty stunning, and Ghana's (another first-timer) spirit and speed were really something to watch. South Korea was great if only for the energy from their massive crowd of supporters, but that game had some fantastic goals as well. The bottom four games all had their moments (Germany's long goals in particular), but... eh.Didn't see (or didn't see all of):Argentia v. CSerbia & Montenegro v. Netherlands (0 - 1)Mexico v. Iran (3 - 1)Angola v. Portugal (0 - 1)I'll be updating this as the tournament progresses.urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:deadwolfbones:852912006-06-09T11:43:00goooooooooooooooooooooooal!2006-06-09T15:43:34Z2006-06-09T18:05:21ZWell, the World Cup starts in about 20 minutes and I'm irrationally psyched for it. USA is the #9 seed, which is not bad at all. Historically, they tend to choke in big tournament games, but I have some faith.Too bad Finland didn't make it... I would have loved another Finland v. Sweden matchup, if only to watch Niina get all excited.eta: really exciting first game, even though it was pretty clear the krauts were going to take it all along.urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:deadwolfbones:851392006-06-02T21:21:00some things that happened today2006-06-03T01:21:42Z2006-06-03T01:23:28ZCalled my dad for the first time in about a month and had a lovely conversation that unfortunately included the revelation that I've been driving for the past year or so (since I got back down to Florida) without any kind of insurance coverage. I had assumed that I was on his plan, as I had been before I left, but I (and apparently he) forgot that we'd taken me off of the plan while I was in Chicago. It took his getting the plan renewal papers in the mail for the error to come to light. So, I took a quick trip to progressive.com and grabbed some cheapo insurance for ~$55/mo, and it's like that whole year of lawlessness never happened.Immediately after that, my toilet exploded and I spent the next hour or so working in tandem with Ryan, sopping up the mass of soapy water that coated roughly 75% of the floor space in my room and 100% of the bathroom. My shoes are soaked, my rug is soaked, and a whole mess of towels and t-shirts are soaked, but it's finally cleaned up. At least it was mostly clean (even sudsy, thanks to the load of laundry going on upstairs) water. The whole ordeal did make me miss Mike K.'s show at Ray's, though. Sorry, Mike. I really did want to go.Was feeling pretty gross after spending an hour working with sewage so I took a shower, forgetting that I'd used my towel to evacuate the floorwater. Had to dry off with a t-shirt, and that was the cherry on top.Now I'm starving and waiting for my shoes to become less soggy. Crackers and cheese just aren't doing it. Wah wah wah.Life's pretty decent as a whole, though, so this stuff wasn't really damaging to my equilibrium. There are things to look forward to, problems to be solved, books to read, music to listen to. So it goes. I will get through this year and I'm relatively certain it won't kill me.urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:deadwolfbones:849382006-06-01T02:02:00more like RSSuck2006-06-01T06:02:17Z2006-06-01T06:02:17ZWell, the girlpants livejournal syndication has been down for a few weeks now. Some of you have no doubt noticed this. I have no idea what the problem is or how to rectify it, but I'm still googling madly for you guys.In the meantime, here's a post to let you all know that the long-delayed GirlpantsAprilMay Mix is nowup and ready for the grabbing. Go check it out.urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:deadwolfbones:845432006-05-25T01:39:00on the unreality of realism2006-05-25T05:39:23Z2006-05-25T05:41:29ZTaking a break tonight from readingBook of the Long Sun(which is, by the way, one of the more exhausting/frustrating but also rewarding/enlightening reading experiences I've had), I decided to do a little googling on Gene Wolfe (the author, durr). I found several interesting articles and a few interviews. In one of the latter, I found the following exchange, which proposes a view of reality that I haven't often heard discussed:Q:What's available to an adult, adventurous reader in science fiction? Why should they read that genre? Why should they move past realism?GW:The adventurous reader has probably already moved past realism. I realize that sounds like a smart remark, but I mean past the kind of fiction that is called "realism" as a literary genre, and that's what it is: a literary genre. It is archtypically the story about the college professor who is married to the other college professor.Did you read Ursula K. LeGuin's novel,The Dispossessed? It was about the college professor who's married to a college professor, only science fiction, and this planet is Russia and this planet is the United States. When I read it I was so disappointed. I'd had a dozen people tell me how wonderful it was.Q:Yeah, I heard that too. Then I read it.GW:I've read that book before; I've read it as realism many a time. It's a John Updike kind of book. I've read that story so many times ... now I read a book until I can recognize the story, and say, "This is what it is," and that's as far as it goes, since I have no urge to finish it. I'm long past feeling so guilty that I have to finish everything I start. I don't finish ninety percent of what I start.Look, the reason someone should go past that sort of realism is that it is narrow, stultifying and ultimately false.Q:And the fantastic genres aren't?GW:No, not the better stuff. We're dealing with the truth of the human experience, as opposed to what we are willing to accept from other people.Q:Wait, I don't see that distinction. The truth of experiences versus other people's experiences?GW:That you are willing to accept.Q:You must forgive me; I don't follow that.GW:I mean that if you were to tell me the pivotal events of your life, as they actually occurred, I wouldn't believe you. And vice-versa.Q:(laughs) That's a pretty radical viewpoint!GW:I think it's the truth. Have you ever tried telling people the pivotal events of your life, as they actually occurred?Q:Usually edited down so they'll believe it.GW:See? See? Okay.Q:But that's a pretty radical point.GW:You're dumbing it down for the audience! Let's write literature in which we don't dumb it down. Let's "smart" it up.Q:That's a wild spin on reality ...GW:Yeah. There's a great scene in one of (Neil Gaiman's) Sandman books. Do you remember the Emperor of America?Q:Emperor Norton the first.GW:Yes. And there's a scene in one of the Sandman books where he and Death are walking off into the sunset, and she's wearing his hat. That's real. Yeah.Q:So realism is dumbed-down reality?GW:It's a dumbed-down part of reality -- an acceptable part. It's mid-twentieth century upper-middle-class reality.Q:Would you call it "materialism"?GW:It is materialistic, but it's not materialism. Materialism is one of those things that's so barren you can't do much with it.There was a materialist philosophy student who used to write to me, and would argue all of this stuff. He'd get enormously mad. (Do you know Tree's Law? Sir Tree, the famous British actor, coined the law, "Madmen write eight-page letters.") So this guy would send me these philosophical tracts, and they were full of outrageous pieces of bullshit, like, "Everybody wants to live!"And I would say, "A guy jumps off an eighteen-story building. What could he do to convince you that he wants to die?" I tried to get him to answer that question, and of course he wouldn't. He'd dodge around, and he'd get madder and madder.So he'd say, "A piece of paper is really just hydrogen and oxygen and six other elements, and that's all it is."And I said, "I believe it's actually a piece of paper."And he'd say, "No no no, it's a bunch of elements!"So I wrote him, and said, "Okay, but remember now, every day of your life you'll have to adopt my viewpoint to live, to go down to the store and buy a ream of paper."Then he said, "We cannot get along without logic."Hell, half the people I know are getting along without logic! Most of 'em are doing just fine! All of the animals do it, except on a very basic level. No, the one thing that we really can't get along without is the realization that a piece of paper is a piece of paper. If you're a mouse you've got to say, "That's cheese. Nobody's fooling me about that. That's not chemicals, it's not gas, it's not some sort of fake cheese. I know cheese."That's what you've got to do to live on the animal level.Q:Identifying things in their relationships? On a "thing" level? Knowing what's useful, what's functional, what you need?GW:Knowing what it is. It is paper. It is cheese.What I realized -- years after this correspondence was over -- the thing that made him the way he was, was that he had never tried to take the piece of paper, and reduce it into carbon and hydrogen and whatever. If he had done that he would have learned that it was really a piece of paper, because he would have found out how resistant it was to being broken down.Go into a laboratory, start working on it with re-agents or heat or whatever, and break it down into its constituent elements. That's how you learn that the theoretical stuff is all very well, but you're going to get an awful lot of glassware dirty.It's a thing garage mechanics know. It's the difference between them and politicians.There's something in this idea that really appeals to me: that the fantastic genres (fantasy, magical realism (which Wolfe elsewhere in the same interview calls "fantasy written by people who speak Spanish"), and the less plot-driven SF) offer in their non-conformism to the traditionally acceptable--physically, socially, and in the minute details of everyday experience--a truer reproduction of life. The same can be said of more oddball mainstream fiction--the upside down daydreams of Barthelme, the reconstructed realities of Borges. The outrageousness of their surface plots allow for a greater range of detail under the surface.Anyone got anything to say about this?(Niina, don't yell at me. I'm working on Allende too, I promise.)urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:deadwolfbones:844002006-05-20T17:27:00some light summer reading2006-05-20T21:27:22Z2006-05-20T21:27:22ZA week or so ago the NYT posted their list of the best works of American fiction of the last 25 years. Here's what they came up with:Winner:Beloved- Toni MorrisonRunners Up:Blood Meridian- Cormac McCarthyRabbit Angstrom Series- John UpdikeUnderworld- Don DeLilloAmerican Pastoral- Phillip RothThe Times' film/lit critic A.O. Scott followed it up with a rather lengthy essay that examines the process of making such a list, its inherent pitfalls, the kind of responses you get from authors/critics when you ask such a question. The product, he says, is "a rich, if partial and unscientific, picture of the state of American literature, a kind of composite self-portrait as interesting perhaps for its blind spots and distortions as for its details." The essay is really worth a read if you're at all interested in canon formation and the psychology of listmaking. I'm posting the whole article under a cut because not everyone's signed up for the Times online.Link to articleIn Search of the BestBy A. O. SCOTTPublished: May 21, 2006More than a century ago, Frank Norris wrote that "the Great American Novel is not extinct like the dodo, but mythical like the hippogriff," an observation that Philip Roth later used as the epigraph for a spoofy 1973 baseball fantasia called, naturally, "The Great American Novel." It pointedly isn't - no one counts it among Roth's best novels, though what books people do place in that category will turn out to be relevant to our purpose here, which has to do with the eternal hunt for Norris's legendary beast. The hippogriff, a monstrous hybrid of griffin and horse, is often taken as the very symbol of fantastical impossibility, a unicorn's unicorn. But the Great American Novel, while also a hybrid (crossbred of romance and reportage, high philosophy and low gossip, wishful thinking and hard-nosed skepticism), may be more like the yeti or the Loch Ness monster - or sasquatch, if we want to keep things homegrown. It is, in other words, a creature that quite a few people - not all of them certifiably crazy, some of them bearing impressive documentation - claim to have seen. The Times Book Review, ever wary of hoaxes but always eager to test the boundary between empirical science and folk superstition, has commissioned a survey of recent sightings.Or something like that. Early this year, the Book Review's editor, Sam Tanenhaus, sent out a short letter to a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages, asking them to please identify "the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years." The results - in some respects quite surprising, in others not at all - provide a rich, if partial and unscientific, picture of the state of American literature, a kind of composite self-portrait as interesting perhaps for its blind spots and distortions as for its details.And as interesting, in some cases, for the reasoning behind the choices as for the choices themselves. Tanenhaus's request, simple and innocuous enough at first glance, turned out in many cases to be downright treacherous. It certainly provoked a lot of other questions in response, both overt and implicit. "What is poetry and if you know what poetry is what is prose?" Gertrude Stein once asked, and the question "what is the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years?" invites a similar scrutiny of basic categories and assumptions. Nothing is as simple as it looks. What do we mean, in an era of cultural as well as economic globalization, by "American"? Or, in the age of James Frey, reality television and phantom W.M.D.'s, what do we mean by "fiction"? And if we know what American fiction is, then what do we mean by "best"?A tough question, and one that a number of potential respondents declined to answer, some silently, others with testy eloquence. There were those who sighed that they could not possibly select one book to place at the summit of an edifice with so many potential building blocks - they hadn't read everything, after all - and also those who railed against the very idea of such a monument. One famous novelist, unwilling to vote for his own books and reluctant to consider anyone else's, asked us to "assume you never heard from me."More common was the worry that our innocent inquiry, by feeding the deplorable modern mania for ranking, list-making and fabricated competition, would not only distract from the serious business of literature but, worse, subject it to damaging trivialization. To consecrate one work as the best - or even to establish a short list of near-bests - would be to risk the implication that no one need bother with the rest, and thus betray the cause of reading. The determination of literary merit, it was suggested, should properly be a matter of reasoned judgment and persuasive argument, not mass opinionizing. Criticism should not cede its prickly, qualitative prerogatives to the quantifying urges of sociology or market research.Fair enough. But there would be no point in proposing such a contest unless it would be met with quarrels and complaints. (A few respondents, not content to state their own preferences, pre-emptively attacked what they assumed would be the thinking of the majority. So we received some explanations of why people were not voting for "Beloved," the expected winner, and also one Roth fan's assertion that the presumptive preference for "American Pastoral" over "Operation Shylock" was self-evidently mistaken.) Even in cases - the majority - where the premise of the research was accepted, problems of method and definition buzzed around like persistent mosquitoes. There were writers who, finding themselves unable to isolate just one candidate, chose an alternate, or submitted a list. The historical and ethical parameters turned out to be blurry, since the editor's initial letter had not elaborated on them. Could you vote for yourself? Of course you could: amour-propre is as much an entitlement of the literary class as log-rolling, which means you could also vote for a friend, a lover, a client or a colleague. But could you vote for, say, "A Confederacy of Dunces," which, though published in 1980, was written around 20 years earlier? A tricky issue of what scholars call periodization: is John Kennedy Toole's ragged New Orleans farce a lost classic of the 60's, to be shelved alongside countercultural picaresques like Richard Fari(Page 2 of 5)THE question "what do you mean by 'the last 25 years'?" in any case turned out to be a live one, and surveying the recent past caused a few minds to wander farther back in time. One best-selling author (whose fat novels seem to have been campaigning for inclusion in this issue long before the editors dreamed it up, even though not even he bothered to vote for any of them) reflected on the poverty of our current literary situation by wondering what the poll might have looked like in 1940, with Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald - to say nothing of Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather and Sinclair Lewis - in its lustrous purview. The last time this kind of survey was conducted, in 1965 (under the auspices of Book Week, the literary supplement of the soon-to-be-defunct New York Herald Tribune), the winner was Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man," which was declared "the most memorable" work of American fiction published since the end of World War II, and the most likely to endure. The field back then included "The Adventures of Augie March," "Herzog," "Lolita," "Catch-22," "Naked Lunch," "The Naked and the Dead" and (I'll insist if no one else will) "The Group." In the gap between that survey and this one is a decade and a half - the unsurveyed territory from 1965 to 1980 - that includes Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" and William Gaddis's "JR," as well as "Humboldt's Gift," "Portnoy's Complaint," "Ragtime," "Song of Solomon" and countless others.Contemplation of such glories lent an inevitable undercurrent of nostalgia to some of the responses. Where are the hippogriffs of yesteryear? Could they have been dodos all along? Not to worry: late-20th-century American Lit comprises a bustling menagerie, like Noah's ark or the island of Dr. Moreau, where modernists and postmodernists consort with fabulists and realists, ghost stories commingle with domestic dramas, and historical pageantry mutates into metafiction. It is, gratifyingly if also bewilderingly, a messy and multitudinous affair.It is perhaps this babble and ruckus - the polite word is diversity - that breeds the impulse of which Sam Tanenhaus's question is an expression: the urge to isolate, in the midst of it all, a single, comprehensive masterpiece. E pluribus unum, as it were. We - Americans, writers, American writers - seem often to be a tribe of mavericks dreaming of consensus. Our mythical book is the one that will somehow include everything, at once reflecting and by some linguistic magic dissolving our intractable divisions and stubborn imperfections. The American literary tradition is relatively young, and it stands in perpetual doubt of its own coherence and adequacy - even, you might say, of its own existence. Such anxiety fosters large, even utopian ambitions. A big country demands big books. To ask for the best work of American fiction, therefore, is not simply - or not really - to ask for the most beautifully written or the most enjoyable to read. We all have our personal favorites, but I suspect that something other than individual taste underwrites most of the choices here. The best works of fiction, according to our tally, appear to be those that successfully assume a burden of cultural importance. They attempt not just the exploration of particular imaginary people and places, but also the illumination of epochs, communities, of the nation itself. America is not only their setting, but also their subject.They are - the top five, in any case, in ascending order - "American Pastoral," with 7 votes; Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian" and Updike's four-in-one "Rabbit Angstrom," tied with 8 votes each; "Don DeLillo's "Underworld," with 11; and, solidly ahead of the rest, Toni Morrison's "Beloved," with 15. (If these numbers seem small, keep in mind that they are drawn from only 125 votes, and from a pool of potential candidates equal to the number of books of fiction by American writers published in 25 years. Sometimes cultural significance can be counted on the fingers of one hand.)(Page 3 of 5)Any other outcome would have been startling, since Morrison's novel has inserted itself into the American canon more completely than any of its potential rivals. With remarkable speed, "Beloved" has, less than 20 years after its publication, become a staple of the college literary curriculum, which is to say a classic. This triumph is commensurate with its ambition, since it was Morrison's intention in writing it precisely to expand the range of classic American literature, to enter, as a living black woman, the company of dead white males like Faulkner, Melville, Hawthorne and Twain. When the book first began to be assigned in college classrooms, during an earlier and in retrospect much tamer phase of the culture wars, its inclusion on syllabuses was taken, by partisans and opponents alike, as a radical gesture. (The conservative canard one heard in those days was that left-wing professors were casting aside Shakespeare in favor of Morrison.) But the political rhetoric of the time obscured the essential conservatism of the novel, which aimed not to displace or overthrow its beloved precursors, but to complete and to some extent correct them.It is worth remarking that the winner of the 1965 Book Week poll, Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man," arose from a similar impulse to bring the historical experience of black Americans, and the expressive traditions this experience had produced, into the mainstream of American literature. Or, rather, to reveal that it had been there all along, and that race, far from being a special or marginal concern, was a central facet of the American story. On the evidence of Ellison's and Morrison's work, it is also a part of the story that defies the tenets of realism, or at least demands that they be combined with elements of allegory, folk tale, Gothic and romance.The American masterpieces of the mid-19th century - "Moby-Dick," "The Scarlet Letter," the tales of Edgar Allan Poe and, for that matter, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" - were compounded of precisely these elements, and nowadays it seems almost impossible to write about that period without crossing into the realm of the supernatural, or at least the self-consciously mythic. This is surely what ties "Beloved" to "Blood Meridian." Both novels treat primordial situations of American violence - slavery and its aftermath in one case, the conquest of the Southwestern frontier in the other - in compressed, lyrical language that rises at times to archaic, epic strangeness. Some of their power - and much of their originality - arises from the feeling that they are uncovering ancient tales, rendering scraps of a buried oral tradition in literary form.But the recovery of the past - especially the more recent past - turns out to be the dominant concern of American writing, at least as reflected in this survey, over the past quarter-century. Our age is retrospective. One obvious difference between "Invisible Man" and "Beloved," for instance, is that Ellison's book, even as it flashes back to the Depression-era South and the Harlem of the 1940's, plants itself in the present and leans forward, to the point of risking prophecy. "Beloved," in contrast, concerns itself with the recovery of origins, the isolation of a primal trauma whose belated healing will be undertaken by the narrative itself. And while "Blood Meridian" is far too gnomic and nihilistic to claim such a therapeutic function for itself, it nonetheless shares with "Beloved" a vision of the past as an alien realm of extremity, in which human relations are stripped to the bare essentials of brutality and tenderness, vengeance and honor.In some ways, the mode of fiction McCarthy and Morrison practice is less historical than pre-historical. It does not involve the reconstruction of earlier times - the collisions between real and invented characters, the finicky attention to manners, customs and habits of speech - that usually defines the genre. But to look again at the top five titles in the survey is to discover just how heavily the past lies on the minds of contemporary writers and literary opinion makers. To the extent that the novel can say something about where we are and where we are going, the American novel at present chooses to do so above all by examining where we started and how we got here.(Page 4 of 5)IF "Beloved" and "Blood Meridian" pull us back to a premodern American scene - a place that exists beyond realism and in some respects before civilization as we know it - the other three novels trace the more recent ups and downs of that civilization. Indeed, it is only a small exaggeration to say that "Underworld," "American Pastoral" and "Rabbit Angstrom" are variations on the same novel, a decades-spanning tale rooted in the old cities of the Eastern Seaboard. Needless to say, the methods, the characters and the voices are quite distinct - no one would mistake Roth for DeLillo or Updike for Roth - but these are differences of perspective, as if three painters were viewing the same town from neighboring hillsides.The three novels do what we seem to want novels to do, which is to blend private destinies with public events, an exercise that the postwar proliferation of media simultaneously makes more urgent and more difficult. Rabbit Angstrom, high school basketball star, typesetter-turned-car-dealer, as carelessly loyal to his country as he is unfaithful to his wife, is an incarnation of the American ordinary made exemplary by the grace of God and of Updike's prose. Especially in the later novels, his consciousness becomes the prism through which the unsettled experience of the nation is refracted. The war in Vietnam, the racial agitations of the 60's, the moon landing, the Carter-era malaise, the end of the cold war: all of these are filtered through Rabbit's complacent gaze. So are less dramatic but no less consequential shifts in manners and morals, in taste and sensibility. Food, sex, cars, real estate, social class, religion - everything changes from "Rabbit, Run" to "Rabbit at Rest," even as the deep continuities of American life, embodied in the hero's transcendent laziness, appear to triumph in the end."Rabbit Angstrom" is not, strictly speaking, a novel of retrospect; it was written in the present tense and in real time, each segment composed before the end of the story could be known. Because of this - because Updike's gift for observing the present has always outstripped his ability to animate the past - "Rabbit," like the great Russian and French realist novels of the 19th century, becomes an unequaled repository of historical detail. Next to it, Updike's attempted multigenerational chronicle of 20th-century American history, "In the Beauty of the Lilies," looks thin and stagy.Alongside Rabbit there is Zuckerman, his near contemporary, and like him the product of a small, industrial mid-Atlantic city. More pointedly, perhaps, there is Swede Levov, the hero of "American Pastoral" (Zuckerman being the self-effacing narrator), who is, like Rabbit, a star athlete in high school and whose nickname curiously recalls Rabbit's ethnic background. But while Rabbit is, for all the suffering he endures and inflicts, a fundamentally comic character, his destiny arcing toward happiness, Swede's trajectory is tragic. Fate has raised him high in order to see how far he might fall. He contains traces of Job - his fidelity to America tested by brutal and arbitrary misfortune - and also of Lear, snakebit by one of the most floridly and obscenely ungrateful children in all of literature.The agonized question that ripples through "American Pastoral" is "what happened?" How did the pastoral America of Newark in the 40's and 50's - an Eden only in retrospect - come apart? And its selection over Roth's other books is indicative of how important this question is taken to be. Over the past 15 years, Roth's production has been so steady, so various and (mostly) so excellent that his vote has been, inevitably, split. If we had asked for the single best writer of fiction over the past 25 years, he would have won, with seven different books racking up a total of 21 votes. Within these numbers is an interesting schism. The loose trilogy of which "American Pastoral" is the first installment - "I Married a Communist" and "The Human Stain" are its companions - accounts for 11 votes, while 8 are divided among "Sabbath's Theater," "The Counterlife" and "Operation Shylock," and another 2 go to "The Plot Against America." The Roth whose primary concern is the past - the elegiac, summarizing, conservative Roth - is preferred over his more aesthetically radical, restless, present-minded doppelg(Page 5 of 5)A similar split occurs among DeLillo's partisans, who favor the historical inquiry of "Underworld" over the contemporaneity of "White Noise." (There were also two voters who chose "Libra," a more narrowly focused historical fiction and in some ways a rehearsal for "Underworld.") Like "American Pastoral," "Underworld" is a chronologically fractured story drawn by a powerful nostalgic undertow back to the redolent streets of a postwar Eastern city. Baseball and the atom bomb, J. Edgar Hoover and the science of waste disposal are pulled into its vortex, but whereas Updike and Roth work to establish connection and coherence in the face of time's chaos, DeLillo is an artist of diffusion and dispersal, of implication and missing information. But more than his other books, "Underworld" is concerned with roots, in particular with ethnicity. Nick Shay, at first glance another one of his tight-lipped, deracinated postmodern drifters, turns out to be a half-Italian kid from the old East Bronx, and the characteristic rhythms of DeLillo's prose - the curious noun-verb inversions, the quick switches from abstraction to earthiness, from the decorous to the profane - are shown to arise, as surely as Roth's do, from the polyglot idiom of the old neighborhood.So the top five American novels are concerned with history, with origins, to some extent with nostalgia. They are also the work of a single generation. DeLillo, born in 1936, is the youngest of the five leading authors. The others were born within two years of one another: Morrison in 1931, Updike in 1932, Roth and McCarthy in 1933.Their seniority, needless to say, is earned - they have had plenty of time to ripen and grow - but it is nonetheless startling to see how thoroughly American writing is dominated by this generation. Startling in part because it reveals that the baby boom, long ascendant in popular culture and increasingly so in politics and business, has not produced a great novel. The best writers born immediately after the war seem almost programmatically to disdain the grand, synthesizing ambitions of their elders (and also some of their juniors), trafficking in irony, diffidence and the cultivation of small quirks rather than large idiosyncrasies. Only two books whose authors were born just after the war received more than two votes: "Housekeeping," by Marilynne Robinson, and "The Things They Carried," by Tim O'Brien. These are brilliant books, but they are also careful, small and precise. They do not generalize; they document. Ann Beattie, born in 1947, is among the most gifted and prolific fiction writers of her generation, but her books are nowhere to be found on this list; not, I would venture, because she fails to live up to the survey's implicit criterion of importance, but because she steadfastly refuses to try.Expand beyond the immediate parameters of this exercise, and the generational discrepancy grows even more acute: add Thomas Pynchon and E. L. Doctorow, Anne Tyler and Cynthia Ozick, John Irving and Joan Didion and Russell Banks and Joyce Carol Oates and you will have a literary pantheon born almost to a person during the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. Further expansion - by means of a Wolfe here, a Mailer there - is likely to push the median age still higher. Think back on that 1965 survey; it's hard to find an author on the list of potential candidates much older than 50.IS this quantitative evidence for the decline of American letters - yet another casualty of the 60's? Or is the American literary establishment the last redoubt of elder-worship in a culture mad for youth? In sifting through the responses, I was surprised at how few of the highly praised, boldly ambitious books by younger writers - by which I mean writers under 50 - were mentioned. One vote each for "The Corrections" and "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay," none for "Infinite Jest" or "The Fortress of Solitude," a single vote for Richard Powers, none for William T. Vollmann, and so on.But the thing about mythical beasts is that they don't go extinct; they evolve. The best American fiction of the past 25 years is concerned, perhaps inordinately, with sorting out the past, which may be its way of clearing ground for the literature of the future. So let me end with a message to all you aspiring hippogriff breeders out there: 2030 is just around the corner. Get to work.urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:deadwolfbones:840402006-05-19T15:47:00Two bizarre happenings...2006-05-19T19:47:18Z2006-05-19T19:48:47Z...at the movie theater/outdoor mall/monument to Middle America last night:1.I arrive early with Drew for the 7:40 screening ofArt School Confidential. As we're driving up to the complex I can see that the parking lot is uncharacteristically full for a Thursday night. Turning the corner into the lot, I see a news van parked at the curb, satellite disk raised to the sky. As we get closer, I can see the massing swarm of humanity on the upper deck, at the movie theater box office. A last-minute rush forArt School Confidentialtickets? Seemed unlikely. So we park in the unattended valet section and walk over. As we swing around the corner of the building and head toward the box office it's apparent that the swarm is really one long, snaking line, probably three hundred people deep. Every segment of non-homeless, non-obscenely wealthy humanity was present in this line. Every age group. Every ethnicity. Directly in front of us is your average emo/screamo kid, carefully coiffed jet black hair hanging strategically over his eyes and poking out from under his jauntily-angled black hat, hiding much of his nigh-transparently pale skin. Ah yes, girlpants. "Our target demographic," I say to Drew. The boy's arm slides around a blond girl in capris. His mother, clearly an ex-goth, stands nearby, talking to what I'm guessing is his art school-aspirant sister: strawberry-red dyed hair, three different layers of peasant skirts in various clashing colors, a patchwork jacket. Behind that group stands a middle-aged couple in polos and cardigans. On the other side of the platform, much further back in line, is a hipster (full beard? check. girlpants? check.) with his cute but slightly pudgy but also clearlytotallyinto Broken Social Scene girlfriend. Other various figures dot the landscape: a disfigured victim of some kind of horrible genetic anomaly, a njguido candidate with his boobs-hanging-out girltoy, a mom with at least six young girls in tow, and so on and so on and so on and so on. We spent the fifteen minutes between our arrival and Mike/Minna showing up by slotting dozens of them into neat little categories (which is basically whatArt School Confidentialdid for the next hour and a half). I suppose you've already figured out why they were there--what could have possibly drawn that many diverse people to one place (a movie theater) on a Thursday evening--but let's just go ahead and say it:The DaVinci Code. I guess these people don't read reviews?2.Upon exiting the movie, we looked down into the courtyard at the center of Downtown at the Gardens and found about a hundred middle-aged family types sitting in collapsible white deck chairs, facing toward a giant projection screen that was showing--no joke--Will and Grace. Behind the seats was a buffet table manned by servers and official-looking types. The four of us boggled for a few minutes. I ran over to the other side of the platform to see if the NBC truck from earlier was still there, and it was. Now, I understand public gatherings for the purposes of watching films. Or sporting events. Or theater. Or, I dunno, stand up comedy. But... television? Sitcoms? In a mall?We've crossed the Rubicon. (And all of them, every single one of them, laughed in unison with the laugh track, and all of them, every single one of them, sat with eyes fixed on the screen.) It was seriously one of the most surreal experiences I've had in recent times.urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:deadwolfbones:837772006-05-17T13:13:00I can't believe how wretched this movie looks2006-05-17T17:13:36Z2006-05-17T17:13:36ZThisalmost makes it worth it, though.urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:deadwolfbones:834832006-05-17T11:48:00you are where2006-05-17T15:48:11Z2006-05-17T15:48:11ZI'm surrounded by detritus of various sorts and I have no desire whatsoever to clean it up. For now, I'm going to marinate in plastic, glass and aluminum and hope I come out smelling pretty on the other side.I had some strange, interconnected dreams last night, in which many of the people who were around last night made guest appearances. At some point I had sand in my hair that wouldn't come out. At another point I was driving down a US-1 that was entirely underwater (but that was ok). I made friends with people and lost them within the space of a few hours. The dreams weren't particularly enjoyable, but when I woke up a little while ago, I still somehow didn't want them to end. Maybe it was because of this large and not entirely unexpected headache, or maybe it was something else.urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:deadwolfbones:829892006-05-15T12:51:00deadwolfbones @ 2006-05-15T12:51:002006-05-15T16:51:50Z2006-05-15T16:51:50ZSometimes I worry that all this fried chicken is going straight to my thighs.urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:deadwolfbones:828362006-05-14T15:52:00(all travel is time travel)2006-05-14T19:52:07Z2006-05-14T21:29:05ZI think about time travel more than any other abstract concept. Today in the shower, for instance, I imagined: a person goes into the future and retrieves a brilliant paper on gene mapping or something, then returns to the present and publishes it, whereupon it's hailed as a great advance for humanity. We get the technology that results from it earlier than we should have. The person who should have made the breakthrough and actually written the paper doesn't, because it's already been written, and languishes in obscurity. Lacking funds and confidence, s/he never makes the subsequent breakthroughs that would have unlocked the secrets of curing cancer/extending life/creating mutant armies of bichon frises. Humanity loses.Time travel scenarios generally sound just about that stupid, but lately I've (along with Drew and Bobby) been putting all this pondering to somewhat constructive and, I think, creative use. If we manage to pull off the project we've been developing, I think it'll be something to see. Humanity wins.Other kinds of travel have also consumed my thoughts of late. For example, I've been biking to and from work. This not only saves me ever-increasingly precious gas usage, it's also, y'know, healthy and kind of fun. I'd almost forgotten how much fun. Thanks, Leisinger. Unfortunately, the skyrocketing police presence in Abacoa is curtailing my late-night biking and driving and even walking. Not more than a week after Mike and Drew got harassed walking over to my apartment, Bobby and I got stopped coming back from Drew's at 2am for, um, being outside after dark. I mean, the cop stopped in the middle of the fucking roundabout to get me in front of him and then tailed me for about a mile and a half trying to find some reason to pull me over. (Finally settled on the way my license plate is displayed.) It's clear that he just wanted an excuse to interrogate us. Thing is, I appreciate that they're out in force trying to keep burglaries down (assuming that's actually what's going on), but I don't like feeling like I can't be outside after the sun goes down in my own neighborhood.Anyway, since there's light outside I'm going to take a walk over to the bookstore to retrieve the bike. If I don't return, assume I'm locked up somewhere in a detention camp for undesirables.urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:deadwolfbones:826052006-05-07T13:27:00Annoying thing about having uninterrupted sleep:2006-05-07T17:28:22Z2006-05-07T17:28:22Z8:32am: Wake up.No.9:17am: Wake up.NO.9:44am: Wake up.NO GODDAMMIT....1:15pm: Wake up.Fuuuuuuuuuck.But hey, I'll readjust.Going to take a trip home today and rummage through the garage full of old furniture... see what I can salvage. My room is coming together nicely, and I ought to have pictures sometime soon for those of you who can't actually come check it out (Allison, mom). The rest of you should probably get over here and party down.I've already been reading a lot more, and I'm looking forward to that continuing over the summer. As I put all my books on their new bookshelves this week, I realized exactly how much of my collection I haven't yet read (66 of 128!). In the process I also laid my eyes onPierreagain, which sent a sort of uncontrollable shiver down my entire body. But I will beat this thing.urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:deadwolfbones:824002006-05-03T14:38:00when the coyote bought the catapult2006-05-03T18:38:22Z2006-05-03T18:40:35Zand stood in front of itand pulled the stringand thenthe boulder hit himand then stood behind itand pulled the stringand the rockrolled offonto himand then crawled under the catapultand pulled the stringand the catapult fellaparton top of himbasically the funniest shitever.***Let's see here:Last night I slept in my own bed for the first time in at least six months. I mean, I've crashed at my dad's house a couple times and I had a bed when I was in North Carolina and I used Rob's and Ryan's when they were gone over the winter break, but this is the first time since at least September that I've slept in a bed in a house that I had either some non-expired hereditary right to or was paying rent for. I slept really well.This morning I took my first bath in probably a year, because the new apartment doesn't have shower curtains yet. I immediately remembered why I hate baths (they're fucking disgusting, but they seduce you with that warmth).A few nights ago I let Leisinger buzz my hair. Some of you know that I've been gradually working myself up to it for weeks now. It was the last day of April and I was moving into the new place the next day and... I dunno, the time just felt right. It feels a lot cleaner and it's cooler (in the temperature sense) and I don't have to deal with it all the time, which is lovely. I do seem to have a rather persistent cowlick situation, but I think that might be owing slightly to the fact that the cowlick region didn't get cut quite as closely as the rest of it. John, I might need some touchups tonight. Preferably before you crack the fridge... I don't want to have to bic it.Here's somepictorial evidence. This is the shortest it's been since '95. And please do pardon the dark circles... this was couch-era Ben.Something changed rather suddenly a week or two ago and things have been much clearer since. I said a little while back that I was ready for this phase of my life to end and the next one to start. I still am, but I feel like I'm slipping with ever-growing speed into the event horizon of that next phase. It's kind of a rush.Summer is fast-approaching, people are dispersing. I'm not sure what the social landscape will be like over the next few months, but I hope it doesn't completely fall apart. Graduation is only a couple days away and I can't believe this year has gone as quickly as it has. Congratulations to Niina and Ryan and Bryan and Luke and Rob and Liz and everyone else who's wrapping it up here. I'm really proud of you all.urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:deadwolfbones:819382006-04-30T10:13:00deadwolfbones @ 2006-04-30T10:13:002006-04-30T14:13:49Z2006-04-30T14:13:49ZI'm going to be moving into my new apartment on Monday or Tuesday. This is awesome.On the downside, however, the apartment is entirely unfurnished. I have an air mattress and, well, that's it. So, if anyone has any furniture they won't be using for the summer, or that they just want to get rid of, please let me know. I'd be happy to take it off your hands.