tuckova

so tangible it was almost painful

Hilton Als and I have a deal (he doesn't know; it only benefits me), which is that he writes about theater performances in New York that I will never see and I read his reviews anyway because he is usually writing about performance in general in a way that is engaging enough that whether he influences you to see or avoid the performance is almost beside the point. Through reading Hilton Als articles, I have learned a lot about how to watch actors, how to find the fingerprints of a director, and when you can wholeheartedly blame the writer. I was stunned a couple years ago to learn that he is a sweet-faced gay black man not much older than I am, which is funny because if pressed I am sure I have no idea what I was picturing but each of those things surprised me, so maybe a wiry older straight white man, Van Dyke beard and a tendency to look over his glasses at things? Who knows. I like that I have a picture of him now in my head when I read his writing. 

What I like about Hilton Als is that he teaches me to look at and think about theater in a way that of course applies to any performance and in fact to life. Chekhov's gun is everywhere. Watch the edges. Listen for the curtain. But I do also appreciate the little bits of him that slip into the critiques and what is interesting is how often I feel MORE connected to him when this happens, because we're pretty different. But he knows himself, and he knows the human experience because he knows how to observe it, and that is how he can write sentences like this, from a September review of "This Is Our Youth":

How can two people get close to each other in the minefield of their unspoken doubts and fears and the back-stories they're unwilling to share?

or even better:

We have all left home; we have all tried to make love suffer by turning our backs on it, if only to prove how little we need or deserve its warm, brutalizing complexities. 

And I felt like: ohhhh, yes, WE HAVE. I have. I needed that. And if I had skipped this review because I am not in New York, not a particular fan of Michael Cera or Kieran Culkin, and don't have any special interest in Kenneth Lonergan, either, I would have missed that sentence.

Anyway that's one of the reasons sometimes it takes me a ridiculously long time to read the New Yorker. 

Marvelous Nut Tree

You guys, I am in love with Emily Nussbaum, the television critic for the New Yorker. I have a crush the size and scope of which is not fathomable to me since I do not even know what she looks like, but I know I want to live with her so I can have her giant brilliant brain within reach all the time. She is so smart I feel smarter just READING stuff she writes, can you imagine what a year (oh, or more!) of living with her would do for me? I'd be an unstoppable force; I would lift Don Draper with my personal mind and throw him out the damn window already. 

No, listen! We'd get up in the morning and drink coffee (or tea! if Emily likes tea!) and then settle in to watch something and I'd be totally silent and attentive and try super hard to think of all the smart things that Emily would say and then afterwards I'd turn and for once keep my mouth shut and listen to her unspool all the meanings for me, tease out the rewards that come from paying attention to things that are deliberate from the questions that arise when those things are apparently unplanned. For lunch we'd take a picnic basket away from the TV and sit in a park somewhere and nod wryly at each other about feminism and false nostalgia, creativity in the 21st century, everything. 

Then we'd go home and sit at our respective computers and she'd drop brilliance out into her next review and I'd edit some medical papers or whatever. I'd restrain myself from offering to edit for her, even just to be her first reader, because the New Yorker editor is still my job crush, and you should only have one crush at a time or it gets confusing.

It's been a while since I've had a crush on a writer, really -- usually I'm pretty good at understanding that beautiful sentences don't make beautiful souls (and/or the reverse, I guess). But ohhhh she's always just so great, and she's been on fire lately, and her break-down of Fargo in the June 23rd issue is exactly why I just need her and her brilliance to be in my life. "How good does a violent drama need to be to make the pain of watching worth it?" THIS. And her True Detective review a while ago, also. The way she has of looking at entertainment, at television, as a reflection and a projection, as intent and accident, as diversion and focus... sigh. 

I'm actually just happy having her in the world, for as long as she keeps writing. But boy, I could use a lot more of her in my brainspace, and a lot less of brilliant serial killer misogynist stuff. And I say that as someone who likes television so much that I used to say goodnight to the TV set. But like good television, her writing transcends what it's set out to do, and I'm just so grateful to have her, if not in my life, at least in my mailbox, almost every week.

U Nork, oh tee hee

Adam Gopnik bugs me. I expect it's the thing where someone is super-similar to you so you see your own flaws writ large in them and HATE them. He's so smug and so "my experience is universal" about his upper-middle New-York etc etc and it grates. I'll be reading an article and start feeling myself getting irritated and look back and aha! it is Adam Gopnik, of course. 

So okay, just out the gate we have problems, Adam and I. But the Shakespeare article in the recent (okay, it's not recent; it's from April. I was busy!) New Yorker was just so uhhhhhn. The article is ostensibly about a book that Shakespeare might have owned and a portrait that might be of Shakespeare. Gopnik interviews the owners of both objects and presents opinions supporting and refuting their claims. Fine. He also goes into excruciating detail about oh, everything. What Manhattan used to be like twenty years ago vs. how it is now is a long little bit of meander for an opening paragraph, citing Jane Jacobs and broad-shouldered strollers, and it's nice I guess but what has it to do with Shakespeare? Uhm nothing, just a piece of pretty prose.

And then and THEN, he really gets going. He casts Wallace Shawn and Paul Giametti as the book dealers, he describes accents in such detail that I suspect he's been reading a book on accents and wanted to show off, he's got sentences like "They find a great deal of nourishment in this word salad" where you just KNOW he's getting up and patting himself on the back after he writes them. In this he reminds me of Michael Chabon, who also yanks on my nerves with his excessive cleverness. Yes, you are very smart, now go and get mama a plot of some sort. I mean because... meanwhile, back at Shakespeare? Can we...?

Alright. Gopnik's main point (I think) is that we are fascinated not only with Shakespeare's writing, but with him as a person, with the world that he inhabited and the objects and people that surrounded him. We want to believe we can better understand the masterpieces if we know the master. And so in service of this sort of celebrity-crush hunger for knowledge, Gopnik is offering up a similar details-rich portrait of the two objects. That's kind of elegant, conceptually. I don't like how he did it because for example there was a particularly straining sentence about "the tallest mountains produce the most abominable of snowmen", seriously. BUT if I am right (and I hope I am right) and all the flourishes were meant to create a frame for the objects in the same way that the objects are hoped to create a frame for Shakespeare, then at least I can say that I admire the idea.  

You can still skip the article, though. Adam Gopnik has had enough attention for one day.  

Abiding the Great White Dude

Roger Angell's article in a February New Yorker about getting old (he's 93) started off pretty well and I was really enjoying it. I do not personally want to live that long, I think. I am sharp as a tack and do not wish to have people saying that about me when it is no longer true. People don't keep me around for my good looks, so I am not terribly worried about losing them, but nor am I particularly loved for my slow and easy charm (as I do not have much). Once I've lost my quick wits, I'm of no use to myself or anybody else, and I can't imagine I'll hold on to those into my nineties. Still, there is Angell, keeping it together pretty well, maintaining at least a sharp wit (though whether he is quick I can't say; the article may have taken ages). So in sum: he's getting old and his body is falling apart; this is pretty much what I would expect from getting old and I'm not excited about it but it's not unpredictable. People die around you left and right if you live long enough, and he finds this survivable (I am not sure. I take old people dying pretty well. I deeply resent it when people die young. So I am not sure if I start outliving people in great gulps how I will be.). He's learning different ways of communicating, and I found this part of the article fascinating -- how your thoughts get shorter and you adapt the things you think about to fit that. Short poems and short witticisms, both easily memorized and easily dredged when appropriate. So he's got me, I'm thinking, my mind is with him, and then: THE PENIS. Oh my god, dudes, can you really not write five pages without sticking your penis in there? I just wonder. Fascinating thing you may not have realized about aging dudes: they still like getting it on and talking about it. Which would be ugh I guess a little boring but fine except he does insist on going on about it with that exhausting icky coyness that he's managed to keep off the rest of the article entirely. Sex! It's not just for young people! Nudge nudge! And his wife was totally okay with him doing it with other ladies if she died first! Ladies, Roger is single and primed for action! 

I'll be over here trying to keep my smartypants mouth shut over whether he lies about his age and height on OKCupid. Well, never mind: I can assure you that he does, because the Great White Dude can get old and liverspotty and wise and know all of Auden off by heart, but he's still looking for a nice young woman to cook for him and arrange a porter for the baggage he will insist he does not have. Barf.  

Storyboard Art

The article in the New Yorker this month about Storyboard P will not leave my brain. I keep thinking about how we learn (though doing, through repetition, through the desire to achieve some goal, etc), about creativity, about success. 

 

I'm trying to learn to play the ukulele. I stink, frankly; I can't hear the differences in the notes, which makes it difficult, and I'm easily frustrated by any learning process that is difficult. Most things I've wanted to learn, I've suffered through the learning to get through the goal of knowing. And if the goal is not easily reached, I give up. See also: Japanese. Usually, the only time you can get me to learn something I don't need to know is by sneaking it on me. Like I learned basic manners because my parents valued them, but I learned details because Judith Martin is a great writer. Ukulele is maybe the only thing I've actively tried to learn simply because it seemed like a neat idea, and it's hard. Storyboard P getting an idea for how a movement might look, and drilling himself on it for ages, and just for the joy of it, is so out of my reckoning that I can't imagine it.  

 

In the article, there's a bit where he talks about a series of gestures to convey feeling beautiful, smearing cream on his skin, and then having that gesture morph into peeling his skin off. My friends, I have turned a phrase from time to time, but I have never come up with an image that powerful (and now I cannot erase it from my mind). I have a friend who makes art and when she explains it I think -- I understand the idea, I just don't understand how it came from her head into this expression, although it makes sense. I get the origin and the destination but I cannot comprehend the journey. And isn't the journey the point? When I've tried to make visual art, it's so LITERAL that it's almost absurd. I can't get away from the words of the idea, and I'm never particularly creative beyond metaphor. I don't know how the mind gets there; is it naturally so or does it take a certain kind of training? 

 

And success... I don't know how artists manage this. I've been talking to some people lately who make some or all of their living from art, and some people who assiduously avoid accepting any money for their art, lest it become commercial. Not that success is only measured in terms of money. But here is this guy, and probably this New Yorker article is going to be a factor in his success, his fame, whatever. What does this say about media, about the nature of success, about all of those things. Do I care? Not personally. But it is still important to think about.

 

And I was thinking that it is interesting that an article about art (not the art itself) is what got me thinking about it, and how this is how I often approach art: thinking, not feeling. Which is not wrong, but is part of what the article stirred up, here in gray January. How are you doing? 

 

I nearly missed a rainbow

The recent New Yorker cover with the picture of Bert and Ernie cuddling on the couch in front of a black and white screen showing the Supreme Court Justices, which is intended to be a celebration of the end of DOMA and a cute nod to the idea that Bert and Ernie are a gay couple, is super offensive to me.

Sesame Street says they're not gay. Specifically, the Children's Television Workshop and the puppeteers themselves have responded on multiple occasions that (variously) they do not have sexual orientations, that they are puppets and not people, that they were based on the relationship between Jim Henson and Frank Oz and are thus a representation of friendship, not of romance, that they are meant to teach children that it is possible to get along with people who are different from us.

I find it annoying that people, especially people who have so worked hard to have their sexual orientation accepted, would be so eager to co-opt somebody else's. It's not like they're in the closet and a certain amount of good-natured taunting is going to get them out. Asked and answered; move on. 

And then there is a part of this that I find really difficult, which is that while I absolutely support the idea that sexual orientation is not a "choice" and that people are "born this way" (whatever way), I do think that discussions of sexuality specifically in terms of children gets into an ugly little area really fast. Bert and Ernie should get to not talk about it, and children should know that this is okay for them too. To be open to the discussion with your own children and/or with other adults is one thing, but to go into the kids' room and start using their toys for your narrative is... well, tacky.

It is okay to be gay. It's okay to be straight. It's okay to be bisexual, asexual, whatever. It's okay to feel like those questions are nobody's business. In my opinion. 

The Jill Lepore article about Jane Franklin was pretty great, though. 

you connect the dots

‎"all that a woman of forty-three need do to become invisible is to go without makeup, leave her hair uncolored, and wear ordinary clothes" -from an article in the New Yorker about Daphne Guinness.

At the Burger King at the bus station in Prague, you can get 10 Kc off your meal if you first have a ticket from the bathroom proving that you paid 10 Kc to use it. The rule used to be that BK would give you a ticket that you could take to the bathroom, and get in for free, but now it's reversed. No signs anywhere to explain this to you of course, which resulted in the BK employee getting all mad at me, and me reminding him that it wasn't my rule, etc. It was necessary to ring up each order separately in order to get the full available discount (10% of the total, so it seems worth fighting for). I have nothing more to say on that except obviously one should never use public bathrooms or eat in restaurant chains and then be surprised to need to argue other concepts of "fairness" with anybody.

On Facebook this week, Squire was inadvertently signed up for a group of "Let's show the atheists how much better it is to be Christian!" Uhm. Also a friend of mine posted a "One nation UNDER GOD; Love it or leave it!" thing. And another person went on a rant against feminists. What this proves is that Facebook is the devil. No, but I should probably not take things so seriously. Still, it is hard to look at people the same way when they are so clearly putting a blanket of hatred over me, even if they didn't know I was standing there. Not that I can't hate with the best of them, but my hatreds tend to be either specific individuals or are targeted at some behavior. I don't know, correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't it feel like --and isn't it meant to feel like-- a punch in the stomach when somebody hates a group you belong to? And so why are people stomach punching? What does that get done?

You know how when you dream of home it's often the same house, and it's not the one where you actually live? For years I have lived in the stairwell of a large apartment building, but lately I have also been inhabiting a small room hidden under the floorboards in a house downtown. It is a very nice room, kind of nest-like in its coziness. 

What else? It's fall. My parents came to visit for a few days and we managed to not see a whole bunch of things. We did drink a fair bit of booze, though. And I tracked down the cabbage they wanted. So: mission accomplished. I got a box of chocolates with a pretty orange ribbon around them. 

Splish, Splash, Splush

It is spring now and the trees are in blossom; also the young girls wearing their gossamer dresses and running everywhere. On Wednesday we waited for thirty minutes for a bus that did not come and watched at least a hundred people walking almost jauntily to where they needed to go instead. Then we went back home and cancelled the appointment because we were too late to make it anyway. The conversations that take place while waiting for a bus are less awesome than the ones that take place on a long train trip or in a car, but they are better than many others. I of course primarily favor the drink in one hand and the cigarette in the other, the plume blown upwards exposing the neck and the stories stories stories exposing the soul, but I'll take a bus stop if that's what's on offer. 

It occurs to me that I do not remember the last time someone wanted to kiss me. Did you read the David Foster Wallace story in the New Yorker about the boy who was kissing himself? I can kiss the inside of my elbow still. The freckles on my knees. Also my fingers though more often I bite them, gnawing off pieces of skin. There is so much I don't need. I may die before my clavicle is ever kissed again; I can't reach it. How to feel about that? I sometimes think if nobody touches me I will collapse into dust. I sometimes think that if someone touched me I would collapse into dust, too. And shock. The truth is we're all going to dust anyway, right, so it's just math and probability at this point. 

Speaking of the New Yorker there was a Stephen Dunn poem that sort of killed me about imaginary people and what they give and take away from real people. Imaginary people are so important, not just the fully imaginary ones but the ones we imagine people we know to be. Way to project, yo. How you thought somebody was that way and then they weren't... because they never were, and because you didn't THINK, you IMAGINED. Dreamed. And how I thought myself so awesome because I stopped stretching the skin of my wishes over the faces of my loves but still. There was a film in my eyes and maybe I didn't see well. Though it is nice that moment when your eyes fill with tears and it's like you have a tiny microscope in there, everything so sharp and bright and pretty. But still not quite true, is it. 

Some days I can't leave the house; other days I flit from one thing to the next and it's a good day that ends with someone holding their sides and laughing and there have thus been many good days. Some days I hold my keys so hard they cut into my palms; other days I stomp around mud puddles with the frank pleasure of a child, splashing. Some days I think I'll never write anything I'll ever want to read and other days it comes out faster than I can transcribe. Some days I miss you, but then some days I don't, or not much.