My thoughts today have been jumping around, maybe as a result of coffee when I was already somewhat off, and so I went for a run just now. The weather’s pretty good for Miami August: maybe mid-80s, humid but not suffocatingly so. After the run I found my chest and back covered in little black bugs, which I’ll admit isn’t the most pleasant feeling; a shower will get rid of them, once I’ve finished cooling down and listening to this Animal Collective album.

While I was running, I reflected a bit on a correspondence I was engaging in earlier, wherein a friend and I were talking about Freytag’s pyramid, dramatic structure, and linear/nonlinear narrative. I was trying to explain why, despite his distaste for it, I find stories that don’t conform to that structure to be often frustrating. Somehow, I felt particularly inarticulate, and finally ended with an analogy, rather than a pure conclusion. I’ll begin by elaborating on that story:

When I was in the latter years of high school, I wrote a lot of poetry. I probably wrote my first poem that I cared about that year as well, and then my friend Michael organized a series of open mic events, and I would regularly write poems to read at them. Obviously, some were better than others. Eventually, someone more knowledgeable than I explained to me that, while free verse was a lot of fun, sometimes a poetic structure makes the ideas stand out more, because the mind no longer needs to focus on the line length or meter (this is a paraphrase; I don’t actually think he was so specific). (I sort of mentioned this concept when I wrote about writing poetry a while back.) Essentially, when a strict form is [mostly] observed, and observed well, it lets you do something stronger. I don’t necessarily mean that every poem should be able to be measured in metric feet, or that free verse is unwise; I often write in free verse, and so do poets who are much better than I. But these rules exist because they make sense, and when they’re broken we take note, even unconsciously.

Obviously, sometimes form is used for another reason—Dr. Seuss is Dr. Seuss for his anapestic tetrameter as much as for the narrative of his poems.

To bring this back to stories: I was planning on presenting case studies, but I don’t particularly feel like doing the Freytag version of sentence diagramming, and besides I’d hate to spoil any short stories for you, o dear reader. The essential question is this: What makes a good story? Does it need, or benefit from, a linear structure: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, dénouement? Is plot necessary to a good story?

When I’m talking about linearity here, I don’t mean the more concrete idea of linear time. A story can carefully follow that dramatic structure while jumping about in time. What does it really mean to break this structure? What is a short story that doesn’t conform to it? Clearly, a story without plot can’t follow this structure, or not well. But the thing is, a super-short story (e.g., John Cheever’s awesome “Reunion”) can still tell a full story, have a complete plot. (That story very decidedly also applies the Hemingway/iceberg theory of not giving any details that aren’t strictly necessary.) But even such a short story still has a clear exposition, a clear rising action, a series of small climaxes, a falling action. The dénouement is a bit more vague, but it always is.

I can certainly think of [post]modern stories that don’t follow traditional dramatic structure. Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse.” Gertrude Stein’s “Miss Furr & Miss Skeene.” Stein’s story is almost absurdist; Barth actually talks about dramatic structure straight-out, but that story is kind of the poster child of metafiction.

It’s funny, though. When you get down to it, most narratives have that driving force, somewhere in there. A beginning, middle, end. Which should be clear. Otherwise, it’s not really a story. The brilliance in a good short story is watching the author play with the structure—use it to her advantage, mold it. Make it new.

I have a few songs I keep getting stuck on my head the past few weeks. A few are kind of irrelevant, but I keep coming back to this one. I mean, Bomba Estéreo are a weird band—lots of songs that I only kind of like, but then also music like this. Beautiful and sad. “Let me cry,” she sings¹, and later she tells us that “I dreamt that I was sleeping / and you woke me up / in the full light of the night / becoming dawn, / and I changed into salt water, / and now I am one with the sea.” I love the way she plays with sweat and tears; I love the way she sings this.

I also spent all of Friday with Patti Smith’s “Because the Night” stuck in my head, but that’s perhaps less exciting.

I’ve been thinking rather often about story-telling, and what makes people good or bad at it. It’s a conversation that happens in my head pretty regularly, at least for the past nine years or so. I’ve never found a perfect way to illustrate my thoughts, which is frustrating (and, incidentally, fairly demonstrative of the very issue I’m talking about). The gist of it is this: I have some friends who are fantastic story-tellers. They can describe a trip to the supermarket in a way that makes it engaging, while someone else would tell the story in one sentence: “I went to the store and bought some cookies.”

I think I fall somewhere in the middle. I can’t create a story out of nothing. If I went to the store to buy cookies, I might remember it as a non-story, and then it is one. But if something interesting happens on the way—I run into an old friend, someone flash mobs the store, I’m sleep-deprived and stumbling—I can usually find a way to fit it into a story. But it doesn’t come naturally to me, despite how much I like doing it. I have to mold it. This is a surprisingly-exacting process; it requires actual effort. So I’m often lazy with it.

When I was younger, I used to use my blog/online journal to write thoughts down. They were often disconnected; even more so than today, I liked to number paragraphs to keep things separated into sections. But these days, I prefer to try for connected, coherent posts. I would rather write a whole piece that makes some sort of [non]sense. It’s kind of sad to lose that container-for-everything mentality that my blog used to have for me, but it’s also quite pleasant to try to craft an essay, rather than just throw something out into the internet². This does mean that I post less often, as I’m trying to find things that can be framed in the way of a story—or ideas that have a conclusion, at least.

1. In Spanish, in case that isn’t clear. I installed a footnotes plugin! Awesome. And a music one, too, so that song should play up top there.
2. It also means that this post has no real room for me to talk about all of my awesome cooking I did this weekend. So I’ll throw it into a footnote! I made three kinds of ice cream for some friends last night: chocolate sherbet (from David Lebovitz, here), , to which I added a pinch of cinnamon and a pinch of cayenne pepper; strawberry sherbet, which I adapted from another Lebovitz recipe; and coconut ice cream, which was vegan because hey!, why not (recipe here). The coconut might have been the best, although I love the chocolate. I accidentally melted the strawberry one a bit (didn’t put it away soon enough) and so it wasn’t quite as tasty. Right. Here’s a photograph of all three, in the ice cream-maker. I made Ramos Gin Fizz drinks last night, as well, and used the reserved egg yolks this morning to make super-rich French toast. Hurrah!

1. I wish you would write me back, he says.

2. When we were younger, I felt convinced of my innocence. Never omniscient, not even as a freshman*, but fully blameless. Not responsible. O self of the past, put up your sword: you know not what you do. Yet who am I to blame myself?

3. Once, I met a friend I’d never met before, and it was the most mundane excitement I’ve had in years.

4. I am afraid that you might misunderstand.

5. In my second year out of high school, I learned to stop interpreting and overdetermining. This is a lie: I will never learn. I find it impossible to not secretly believe that everything is directed at me. It can be wearying, you know.

6. A young girl I had a crush on, at summer camp in North Carolina, sitting with the fan whirring in the background: I think I’m a solipsist†, she tells me. How can I believe you’re truly there? Later, the other boy in the room will make a movie about two solipsists who meet each other. It will be silly and wondrous.

7. I write long letters to my imaginary fiancé, each one meticulously penned. It gives me some solace.

8. I lit the small pieces of grass afire, and soon the entire fire-pit was ablaze, the evergreen wood crackling as its sap ran.

9. We are skipping through the open meadow. She curtsies deep in the wild grass. This is no untruth: we do erect a gibbet of woven vine, and on its solemn rigidity we hang the skinned rabbit, and watch the flies buzz pass.

10. I spent the summer after I finished college doing two things: dreaming, and wasting time‡.

* ah, verve pipe
† i do not exist
‡ nothing is truly a waste of time

I haven’t read it, yet, but it was fun to see Russell in Miami. She’s young—not quite 30—and somewhat nervous in front of audiences, but I liked hearing her read (she gets into her stories, but then will jump out for an interjection). I wanted to ask, but didn’t, about how people in Miami interpret her Everglades-based stories differently from folk in the northeast, or in the pacific northwest. I just remember, seeing her at Penn, thinking that there was some element to her fiction that you missed out on by not being a Florida kid. Not too much; she does an excellent job of describing it. But you experience it differently, when it’s novel vs. when it’s comfortable.

Last Thursday, my friends Tom and Carlos joined me for a poetry reading at Legal Art Miami, this organization I don’t quite get who have an artist residency downtown. The poet was Sandra Beasley, who none of us have heard of. In general, we enjoyed her poetry—she has a knack for ending poems—and the space was very cool. I was glad I went. After, we went to the Biscayne Triangle Truck Roundup, where they got tacos and I got a bacon-and-bleu-cheese grilled cheese sandwich. Fun, actually. (We made it to an open mic, too.)

I shouldn’t knock Miami. We can do literary events. I don’t know if I ever talked about the Book Fair—I think I mentioned it briefly—but that was pretty wonderful. Aw, Miami. I could grow to like you if it weren’t for the weather that was coming.

I think what I like about this poem, though, is the way the speaker mixes up his life with the ballad, both structurally and textually. He becomes Mary Hamilton; she becomes the woman in his car accident. I also think I kind of just like the sound of it, the words themselves.

The reason that I came across the poem was that I was reading the print edition of an article that is available online, a pretty cool piece on Nintendo and one of its main designers. I circled this passage:

The Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga, in his classic 1938 study “Homo Ludens” (“Man the Player”), argued that play was one of the essential components of culture—that it in fact predates culture, because even animals play. His definition of play is instructive. One, play is free—it must be voluntary. Prisoners of war forced to play Russian roulette are not at play. Two, it is separate; it takes place outside the realm of ordinary life and is unserious, in terms of its consequences. A game of chess has no bearing on your survival (unless the opponent is Death). Three, it is unproductive; nothing comes of it—nothing of material value, anyway. Plastic trophies, plush stuffed animals, and bragging rights cannot be monetized. Four, it follows an established set of parameters and rules, and requires some artificial boundary of time and space. Tennis requires lines and a net and the agreement of its participants to abide by the conceit that those boundaries matter. Five, it is uncertain; the outcome is unknown, and uncertainty can create opportunities for discretion and improvisation.

In any case, I recommend continuing with the article — read the whole of it.

The boat was sailing in the shallow waters off of Key Biscayne, dipping through the swells and riding cross the troughs. Occasionally, its bow plowed under the crest of a wave, soaking the sailor with its tender lappings. The water was warm, but it carried with it tidings of the deep sea, of far-aways and not-quite heres.

Perhaps you’ve never sailed a one-man boat, and perhaps you’d rather not. The nice thing about such boats is that you can set off in whatever direction you choose. As you will. The wind has its own opinion.

Two
In which a task is assigned.

After every end must come a beginning. It need not be a true beginning, or a beginning in kind. But nonetheless.

A pause is rather like an ending, is it not?

You call yourself lazy, you who looks to windward, you who spends the days dreaming. But it is not enough to sleep. Somewhere in the evening, a task was imparted. There are plans to be carried out.

Three
In which we learn to dance.

In some cultures, celebration is tantamount to dance; a child learns to move his or her feet with the a semblance of rhythm. For some women, and some men, the beating of a drum calls the heart to keep time.

Once, dancing was a rite of passage. Dancing meant learning dance-steps, and keeping time. It was heady, frustrating at times, sometimes awfully prudish. But it was normalized. Today, so many of us treat dancing as work. We have never learned to dance with ease, and even as our head nods the time, our feet lose track.

Four
In which water is useful.

He closes his eyes under water, eyelids squeezed tightly, the soft light not penetrating his thin, wrinkled skin.

Water washes clean. Skin feels elastic, pliable. His hair swims alongside him, his fingers prune, his nostrils let out bubbles of air.

Swimming below the surface is a different world from such actions above. The stroke is more fluid, and water eddies about your body more softly, more elegantly. The human body stretches and revels in its own fluidity, its own elegance. Skin is slippery, seamless. Liquid clears the mind.

His strokes are smooth and strong, until he breaches the surface.

Five
In which Justin rolls into a ball like a kitten.

Sometimes it’s easiest to stay in a fetal position.

2. Go to your local library and check out Ilya Kaminsky’s slender volume of poems, Dancing in Odessa. Or purchase it from your local faltering-but-still-vibrant book store. (Call ahead and get them to order it for you if they don’t have it.) And then sit with your copy of the book and this youtube video open on your computer, and read along (he begins reading shortly after the 6 minute mark). I’ve linked to him reading before, perhaps? He’s got this almost religious sentiment in his voice. He was born in Russia and has been deaf since he was four, so the way he speaks is… I don’t know. I want to say transcendent. It brings the poems from good-and-perhaps-great to brilliance.

Este blog voy a escribir primero en castellano, y luego traducir a inglés. Así debes sospechar que voy a hacer unos errores más que normal, aunque probablamente no hay mucha gente leyendo aquí quien lee en castellano como su primer idioma.

Bueno. Hace un mes y medio ahora, leí el libro nuevo de Carlos Ruiz Zafón, El Juego del Ángel. Lo dejé en Madrid, pero noté unos pasajes que me gustaron. Lo leía durante el mes que pasé viajando—que es descrito en los blogs anteriores—y en general me gustó. Es verdad que no es un libro literario como uno de las obras del canon, o por lo menos en mi opinión no es de la literatura alta. Pero es buen escrito, en general. Ruiz Zafón sabe muy bien escribir como una poeta, y crear una misteria. El problema empieza en su manera de describir las tinieblas—quiere tanto a construir un ambiente misterioso, oscuro, que empieza a usar las mismas palabras cada unas páginas, repetiendolas hasta que se hacen sin significancia. Quizás esto no es justo. Siempre entendí el aura que quiere instigar. Pero ¿qué causará tantas imagenes del oscuro? Y no es solo esto—hay tantos clichés de las novelas policiales, tantos dichos cuotidianos…. “Ben hombre, pero se ahoga en un vaso de agua.”

Al final, leí los doscientos páginas al final del libro en unos cinco dís. Era divertido y me enganchó. Pero no entendí muy bien lo que pasó al final. Al principio, creí que había un problema de comprensión de lenguaje, pero después de leer un poco de lo que hay en el red, descidí que no, que el problema era que Ruiz Zafón no sabía muy bien como terminar su obra. Eso es una situación que pasa mucho (a mi sorpresa)—un escritor construye su vehículo del cuento, pero se hace tan complicado que no puede resolver todos de los obstaculos que ha creado. A veces, así el escritor escribe una conclusión que se deja mucho impreciso. A veces, como que creo ha pasado aquí, el autor intenta a unir todo en vueltas, resultando que el lector se deja incompleto, con preguntas. A mi me encanta los libros de fantasia, de magia o ciencia ficción. Pero si te vas a crear un mundo nuevo, tienes que seguir tus propias reglas. No puedes dejarlas cuándo lo quieres. Hay dos tipos de misterio: los en que puedes solucionar el misterio por leer, y los en que no hay ni una pista hasta el final. En El Juego del Ángel hay muchas cosas que puedes adivinar desde el principio—¡empieza con el título!—pero hay mucho en las páginas finales que no tiene nada a ver con el resto.

En cualquiera caso, creo que sí, recomiendo el libro para alguien demás a leer. Pero no voy a leer el otro libro de Ruiz Zafón, La Sombra del Viento, como mi proximo libro en castellano. Acepto consejo de que debe ser el proximo.

Aquí presento una cita del libro, que empieza a la página 169 de El Juego del Ángel. Si has leído La Sombra del Viento, quizás la reconocerás.

Enfilé una pasarela que conduceía a una de las entradas [al laberitno] y penetré lentamente en un largo corredor de libros que describía una curva ascendente. Al llegar al final de la curva, el túnel se bifurcaba en cuatro pasadizos y formaba un pequeño círculo desde el que ascendía una escalera de caracol que se perdía en las alturas. Subí las escaleras hasta encontrar un rellano desde el que partían tres túneles. Elegí uno de ellos, el que creía que conducía hacia el corazón de la estructura, y me aventuré. A mi paso rozaba los lomos de centenares de libros con los dedos. Me dejé impregnar del olor, de la luz que conseguía filtrarse entre rendijas y de las linternas de cristal horadadas en la estructura de madera y que flotaba en espejos y penumbras. Caminé sin rumbo por espacio de casi treinta minutos hasta llegar a una suerte de cámara cerrada en la que había una mesa y una silla. Las paredes estaban hechas de libros y parecían sólidas a excepción de un pequeño resquicio del que daba la impresión que alguien se había llevado un tomo. Decidí que aquél iba a ser el nuevo hogar de Los Pasos del Cielo. Contemplé la portada por última vez y releí el primer párrafo, imaginando el instante en que, si así lo quería la fortuna, y muchos años después de que yo estuviese muerto y olvidado, alguien recorrería aquel mismo camino y llegaría a aquella sala para encontrar un libro desconocido en el que había entregado todo cuanto tenía que ofrecer. Lo coloqué allí, sintiendo que era yo el que se quedaba en el estante.

Ofrezco también una traducción a inglés, abajo.

Okay, now in English. I’m translating from Spanish this time, but you shouldn’t notice much difference.

Okay. A month and a half ago, I read the new book by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel’s Game. I don’t believe it’s yet released in English; I read it in Spanish. I left it in Madrid, although I noted down some passages I liked. I read it during the month I spent traveling—as described in previous posts—and in general I rather liked it. It’s true that it’s no member of the literary canon; it’s not high literature in my opinion. But it’s well-written, in general. Ruiz Zafón knows how to write like a poet, and how to create a mystery. The problem begins in his descriptions of darkness—he wants so badly to create this dark, mysterious mood that he begins to use the same words every few pages, repeating them until they lose meaning. Perhaps that’s not fair. I always understood the aura that he’s trying to inspire. But I wonder what so many images of darkness cause. It’s not just this… there are so many clichés from detective novels, so many repeated sayings… “A good man, but he’d drown in a glass of water.” (“A good man, but he makes mountains out of molehills” would be a non-literal translation. Or without using such a shit expression, maybe, “A good man, but he can see a lake in a glass of water.”)

At the end, I read the last 200 pages in maybe five days. It was fun and engaging. However, I didn’t understand entirely what happened at the end. At first, I thought I hadn’t understood something with the language, but after reading a bit on the ‘net, I decided that, no, the problem was that Ruiz Zafón didn’t really know how to end his work. This is a situation that comes to pass surprisingly often—a writer constructs his story vehicle, but makes it so complicated that he cannot resolve each of the obstacles he’s created. Sometimes, in this case the author writes a very vague conclusion. And sometimes, as I think has happened here, the author runs in circles trying to bring everything together, leaving the reader incomplete, with questions. I love fantasy books, or science fiction. But if you’re going to create a new world, you have to follow your own rules. You can’t ignore them when you feel like it. There are two types of mystery: those in which you can solve the mystery as you read, and those in which there’s no hint until the end. In The Angel’s Game there are many things you can guess from the start—start with the title!—but there’s quite a bit at the end which has nothing to do with the rest of the book.

In any case, I think that yes, I would recommend this book to someone else. But I’m not going to read Ruiz Zafón’s other book, The Shadow of the Wind, as my next book in Spanish. I’ll accept advice as to what it should be instead.

Here’s a translation of a quote from the book, beginning on page 169 of The Angel’s Game. If you’ve read The Shadow of the Wind, you’ll probably recognize something.

I started down a narrow passage that led to an entrance [to the labyrinth], and hesitantly entered a long corridor of books which curved upwards before me. At the end of the curve, the tunnel split and circled into a spiral staircase that rose up, until it was lost in heights. I climbed the stairs until I reached a landing, at which three new tunnels began. I chose one, thinking that it would bring me to the building’s heart, and started forward. As I walked, I brushed my fingers along the spines of the hundreds of books in my path. I let myself fill up with the smell, and with the light that managed to filter in through the cracks, from the glass lanterns affixed to the wood above me, the light that floated in mirrors and half-darkness. I walked aimlessly through the space for almost 30 minutes, until I arrived at a small enclosed room which held a table and chair. The walls themselves were made of books, and appeared solid except for a small gap which suggested that someone had removed a book. I decided that this would be the new home for Footsteps in the Sky. I contemplated the front cover for one last time and re-read the first paragraph, imagining the instant in which, if luck would have it, many years after I was dead and forgotten someone would take that same path and arrive at that same room to find an unknown book, a book in which I had put everything I had. Then, I fit the book into the space, feeling as though it were I who would stay there in the shelf.

The original in Spanish is above.

A veces, él recibe notas del pasado,
bruscas en la redacción pero directas en su importancia;
salen del mar como burbujas
y le siguien a algún muro olvidado.
Cuándo vienen a él,
están como luciérnagas abajo de una luna menguante
y él cierra sus ojos ante de ellas
en un movimiento de vergüenza.
Las palabras siempre están escrito en una letra dura,
la escritura más hendidura que perfil,
la tinta negra a veces disipada.
Siempre están inevitable.
Cuándo cena con su novia,
o cambia líneas en las profundidades del metro,
de vez en cuando ve reflexiones,
o palabras en relieve
en las arrugas de la cara de ella,
o en las cajas plásticas que alojan los anuncios.
Un día, en frustración, ella le llamó a las altas horas de la noche
y le preguntó a explicar sus distracciones.
“No puedo,” él dijo a traves del transmisor,
“y no sé si es algo que quiero.”
La presente no es ineludible
no más que el pasado es incapaz de olvidar;
sus sueños no le dejarán en paz,
porque él todavía no los ha dejado.

Translating a poem is more difficult than translating much anything else, in part because one tends to use words very specifically. I’ve never taken a translation class, which I’m sad about, because I think translation is fascinating; here are some general observations:

• translating to Spanish is interesting because pronouns become debated — where are they necessary? I could write this entire poem without making the sex of its characters clear, something that’s quite difficult to do in English. I decided to use pronouns quite a bit, because otherwise a lot would be unclear. For example, in the line “en las arrugas de la cara de ella” (“in the wrinkles on her face”), I could translate this as “en las arrugas de su cara” — but then it becomes unclear whose face I’m speaking of. To me, at least.
• This translation made two oddities in the English apparent: (1) “script more indentation than outline” — this doesn’t quite make sense. I’m trying to imply that the ink is less important than the impression on the paper, but really both words describe the same thing. I didn’t change this. (2) “‘I can’t, he said into the receiver” — it seems okay to me to use the word “receiver” to mean “mouthpiece.” But really the receiver of a telephone is the earpiece, no? I’m not sure if I should change it. The word “receiver” really could mean either part. But in Spanish, I decided to go with “transmitter,” “transmisor.” I’m pretty sure this makes the most sense.
• As with any translation when you’re not fully bilingual, and even sometimes then (I’d imagine), I used a dictionary a fair bit. Sometimes just to check where an accent goes (I’m sure I forgot a few), and sometimes for words — ineludible (inescapable) is a new favorite. I’m still unsure as to exactly what I mean by “short” (“short in their wording and direct in their import”), so my translation (brusco, brusque) might not be quite right.
• I’m not sure how I feel about the last lines. In English: “his dreams will not leave him alone, / because he has not yet given them up.” In Spanish, I translated them using the same verb, as though it were “his dreams will not leave him alone, / because he will not leave them alone.” In Spanish, to me, it sounds less awkward. But I’m shaky about it. Equally shaky: “and hold him to a forgotten wall” doesn’t translate well as “y le siguien a algún muro olvidado.” But I don’t think “and they follow him to some forgotten wall” is exactly wrong, either. I’m not quite sure that I mean “hold” as a synonym to “press.”

In any case, this was a surprisingly fun exercise. I should do it again.

I got my stitches out of my lip today, which is good. I’m looking forward to my lip healing entirely.

You know, I rarely post on here like I used to — like I used to five years ago, I mean. This sort of thing — each paragraph treating a different topic, loosely connected perhaps but perhaps not at all. Also there were entries that were numbered because they were so completely unrelated. Sometimes I like looking back and reading something I wrote, say, five years ago. Things have changed a lot; they also have changed very little. (It should be noted that these old posts aren’t here on this website.)

I’ve been following the World Cup, which means that for the first time since the last World Cup (when I rooted for France), I’m watching entire association football matches. It’s fun; it also means that I’ve had more conversations with my roommates than ever, since we can talk about sports for once. It’s kind of fun, although I still don’t know most of the players. I’m rooting for the US, and for Spain. If it comes to it, I’ll transfer allegiances to Argentina, or perhaps Brazil. But we’ll see what happens. I’m watching Argentina play Greece right now.

Now to break some rules, and follow some others;

Sometimes he receives notes from the past,
short in their wording and direct in their import;
they break out of the seas like bubbles
and hold him to a forgotten wall.
When they come to him,
they are like fireflies below a waning moon
and he closes his eyes before them
in a movement of shame.
The words are always written in a heavy hand,
script more indentation than outline,
the black ink sometimes faded.
They are always unavoidable.
When he dines with his girlfriend
or transfers lines in the depths of the subway,
he has been known to see reflections,
or embossed words
in the wrinkles on her face,
in the plastic boxes that house advertisements.
Once, in frustration, she called him late at night
and asked him to explain his distractions.
“I can’t,” he said into the receiver,
“and I don’t know if I want to.”
The present is not inescapable
any more than the past is incapable of forgetting;
his dreams will not leave him alone,
because he has not yet given them up.

I think this is a good example of why I haven’t written a poem in quite some time. But that doesn’t [necessarily] mean that it’s bad.

I made Madeleine’s pumpkin pasta last night, and am eating its leftovers with some bacon to give it a different flavor. I made the dish in the first place because I found a can of pumpkin I bought last November, and then forgot about; it’s a great recipe.

When I first started living here, in October, I disliked cooking for just myself, since I was so used to always cooking for three or four. But I’m not averse to leftovers, so I’ve been enjoying the idea of cooking for myself one night and eating it for three or four. As I’ve mentioned before, I try generally to spruce up leftovers — it’s a lot more fun to eat the same thing when it’s not quite the same thing. Roasted chicken turns into roasted chicken tacos. Spicy peanut sauce and pasta turns into pasta with pan-seared chicken and a creamy spicy peanut sauce. Pumpkin pasta becomes pumpkin-bacon pasta. The other day, I made a vegetable dal, with a gigantic cauliflower and some pepper and other veggies. Without meaning to, I made a huge amount, and literally ate it for five meals (lunches included); it was good since I couldn’t chew as well as normal. By the last day, I was tired of it, though; I turned it into more of a soup than it usually is by adding water and small pasta, and a bouillon cube. The flavor transformed — it was the same, but varied.

I’m going to miss living in Spain. But I don’t think I’ll miss it that much, somehow.

When I was in Bilbao, then, I spent some time sitting down and trying to think of some tips I should’ve given him. They are still contradictory; that’s part of the fun. I think, with this kind of thing, you need to pick and choose. Every so often, I come across an article — in a magazine or newspaper, usually — with tips for writers, from well-known authors. Half of them are always complete shit. Some of them are actually pretty good. Sometimes they’re ridiculous; sometimes they’re way too detailed. And sometimes one of them will ring true. So maybe I’ll put down something along those lines, here. None of these are new; they’re just the pieces of advice that have stuck to me. They’re not particularly in order. Some of them are more exercises than advice; some are more encouragement than anything else.

• Read books of poetry by a single author, and then try to emulate the style — or try to write nothing like it at all.
• Play with structure. Write something following a strict form, and then write something formless. See what fits. There are many good forms to play with.
• Don’t ask anyone to read your poetry until you feel like it. When you do, take it to someone who’s actually going to critique it, and then take their criticism with a thick skin. Sycophants might make you feel good, but they’re not actually going to help all too much.
• You don’t need to finish every poem you begin. It’s okay to throw something away.
• Be daring.
• Re-use something that didn’t work.
• Don’t write poetry when you’re drunk.
• Don’t force a rhyme. Don’t use feminine rhyme (rhyme using more than one syllable) unless you’re a rapper.
• It is, however, okay to rhyme. But realize that it doesn’t always sound good — so be aware of when your poetry is being shaped by a need to rhyme. If your couplet is being formed based more on the rhyme than on the thread of thought, scrap it. Rhymes should feel natural.
• Rewrite. If you feel like it.
• It is rarely enjoyable to read a poem written entirely in metaphorical language.
• Describe in actions, not just in adjectives.
• Avoid flowery language or language that feels like nothing new. Phrases like “silent scream,” “void,” and breathless descriptions of darkness are generally to be avoided. A poem about sadness or inner confusion needs to be really good for anyone other than you to want to read it.
• Show action and emotion — not just description.
• Pay close attention to line breaks.
• Learn how to read poetry well. Hint: You shouldn’t pause at the end of a line if there’s no punctuation, unless there’s a rhyme or something necessary. Spoken poetry is not the same as read-on-the-page poetry, and you shouldn’t try to make it so.
• Listen to (recordings of) poets reading their work. Read along.
• Learn how to end a poem. It’s not always easy.

Perhaps these thoughts are more useful to me than to anyone else. But I am curious: what advice would you give to someone writing poetry? It would be fun to hear some thoughts other than mine.

I had started it back a year ago or so, and I finally finished it yesterday, on the train coming back from San Sebastian. (Which merits its own post. The train, as well, but I’ll post on San Sebastian.) I ended up reasonably well-pleased with the book. I don’t think it was ground-breaking, and I have a few places where I wrote something akin to “fuck you, Danielewski” in the margins, but all-in-all I’d say that I found this to be a fascinating book, and I am unlikely to forget it any time soon.

To re-cap: the book is ostensibly about a film called The Navidson Record, a quasi-horror film in which Will Navidson, his wife, and their two kids move into a house in Virginia that has a basement that is more than a basement — it is a creature, an almost-living malevolent being. The innermost heart of the novel is a book that is essentially a descriptive critique of the film, heavy on external sources except for where these sources are rebutted. This part of the novel is excellent — replete with sections where the design of the page reflects what’s going in the text. This text then, is being compiled by Johnny Truant, a bum/tattoo-parlor-worker/genuine-crazy who intersperses his eclectic experiences with comments on the text. I found myself interested less in him — his story, as Julien pointed out to me, is really fairly unoriginal — and more in how he interacts with the text. There’s a scene, for example, wherein his own dream replaces one Navidson should have; Truant intertwines his own story with Navidson’s.

In some way, the book is very traditional — certainly in the way it resolves it is pleasantly straightforward. Despite its play with traditional modes of criticism and its intended subversion, I think it’s still trying to be enjoyable. It’s work, but it wants to be fun work.

I’d like to re-read it some day. But at the same time, I’m not sure that I ever will.

Nonetheless, I quite like this poem.

It’s called “Big Box Encounter,” and it’s by a woman named Erika Meitner. I’m assuming you’ll follow that link on your own, but let me sum up the poem by saying that it’s about confusing feelings of desire for a (past?) student of the speaker’s.

I’m partially fascinated by this poem because I feel like there’s this continual move toward poetry that embraces a very specific space between the taboo and the mundane. Poetry that is exciting to read often plays with this, and I think Meitner’s poem does so quite well. For example: “I tried not to look at his beautiful terrible chest, / the V-shaped wings of his chiseled hip-bones.” I like her detail, I like her drawing our focus to where her attention is. And I like the way she reads it, as well. (Slate always posts the author reading his or her poem; I like this.)

The line I quote, and the poem itself, is just the sort of thing that James Wood critiques in last month’s New Yorker, in his sort-of-review “Keeping It Real: Conflict, convention, and Chang-Rae Lee’s ‘The Surrendered.’” I don’t really think Wood’s article reaches any conclusions, and I’m frustrated by his simplification of the Barthes piece (although I acknowledge that I’ve never fully understood Barthes myself). Still, it’s certainly the case that many writers fall for “the cinematic sweep, followed by the selection of small, telling details.” And perhaps Meitner is doing this. And so what?

I have written down, somewhere, a note to myself: “write more poetry that is daring.” I think I mean by this: poems that hint at something, that are exciting and make us think. There’s a good comparison, at least according to google (by which I mean — I’m reporting what other websites say, and not something I feel is decidedly true; all I’m sure of is that he wrote these poems). Allen Ginsberg has two poems, both written about Neal Cassidy. One is called “On Neal’s Ashes,” and is moving but slightly vulgar. The other is called “Please Master” and is primarily just vulgar and explicit. (It’s also probably NSFW.) I imagine you’ll see what I mean? I think the first one has got something there. I think the second is interesting, but not particularly so. And I love Ginsberg — “Footnote to Howl” is one of my favourite poems. That fits this bill, as well.

I’m curious to hear what anyone bothering to read this thinks. Does something vaguely taboo engage your interest in poetry? Where can it go wrong? What do you think of the poems I link to, here?

Meitner’s poem accesses the daring on two levels — it addresses female sexuality, which we so rarely do in normal publications; and it considers the question of a teacher’s (professor’s) lust for her student, which is one of the ultimate taboos of academics. In the poem, at least, her narrator does nothing wrong — she simply agonizes over her desire for this much-younger man. (She does imply something more, since she’s corresponding with this student.) But why does it feel transgressive to me? It’s not the line-breaks, although I like some of them quite a lot (“He is both more / and less striking without a shirt on”). I’m always fascinated by the use of curse-words in poetry or literature, when it’s not wholly warranted. (Here: “I was fucking a guy who…”) Sometimes, as here I think, the words jar the reader to attention. They remind us that the speaker is lusting, not falling for, her student. We never get a description of him except this detailed continuing articulation of how he looks shirtless.

There’s definitely still power in curse words, and power in the unexpected. I don’t think this poem would be as good were it called “A Desire Uncalled For,” or something implying its contents. The subtlety. the side-stepping while being up-front, these are important. (This is also why I have trouble with “Please Master.”) Obviously, this power in the unexpected is the case in all manner of ways — don’t think that I mean to suggest that the only way to write an interesting poem is to be lewd or lean towards the taboo.

I think I’ll be more conscious of this current in poetry in the future. As always, I’m not really reaching a conclusion. But this is a blog, and I’m not a good essayist.

I do think we can draw a parallel between this play in poetry, and its play in visual arts. In both mediums, we have to pick somewhere to draw our lines — but you can show non-sexualized nudity in art more easily than you can in writing. (See, for example, this (NSFW?) art collective. Hat tip to Ben for linking me.) But really there’s lots of not particularly sexualized nudity in art. Maybe we’ve become accustomed to it, but for whatever reason nudity isn’t as titillating as it once was. You have to play with something else.

Anyway, I think the wiki article on the subject is super-fascinating. We don’t usually even have any idea what subjunctive is. This is the coolest part: “The verb ‘be’ is so distinguishable because its forms in Modern English derive from three different [emphasis mine] Old English verbs: beon (be, being, been), wesan (was, is), and waeron (am, art, are, were).” WHAT?

I started thinking about it when I was explaining how you had to say “If I were smarter” rather than (the seemingly correct, and oft-misused) “If I was smarter”. Of course, both sound okay — but the former is subjunctive (to be is only conjugated as “were” in subjunctive) while the latter, while carrying the same meaning, doesn’t really fit. (Both express an unreal situation, so both fall into subjunctive.) In Spanish, it should be “Si fuera más inteligente…” Unsure Spanish-speakers like me might say something else (“If I am smarter”?)… For example, even here I’m unsure: it could also be “Si sea más inteligente…”, although I think conditional statements don’t use present subjunctive. The real problem is that the use is a lot more complex in Spanish, so you can’t really understand it by translation.

(Edited a day later to be more understandable and correct a mistake.)

I went and saw the band Yeasayer on Wednesday night. They were originally playing in a small bar-or-so venue, but ended up in something slightly bigger — a place called Sala Caracol (The Snail Room), which was actually pretty great. It’s just a no-frills concert venue, like maybe the Troc in Philly, but a bit smaller?

When I got there, Hush Hush was playing. Hush Hush is this ridiculous singer guy and his recorded music and backup vocals, or such was as it was when I saw him. He danced (quite well) and sang, and honestly while I’m not a huge fan of his myspace selections (they’re not bad, either), I enjoyed him live quite a bit. (His myspace was a bitch to find. Try googling “Hush Hush”.) His songs are sexy and silly, and he danced wearing a black suit jacket, a tie, etc. — the full get up. As he went on, he removed his coat, his tie, his shirt, ending bearded and shirtless. I’m not sure why musicians like to take off their shirts — besides it just being hot as hell up on a stage — but he managed to do it rather endearingly.

During his set, I finagled my way towards the front of the crowd, getting within the first six rows or so; a space I like. After he finished singing, I started talking with three American girls standing near me. They were nice; two of them were studying abroad and the other was visiting. We didn’t really talk about anything meaningful, but it was still nice to chat. (I also saw Mateo and Ashley’s French roommate and her boyfriend, which was funny.) We worked our way forward slightly, talked a bit more, and then Yeasayer came out, around 22:00.

They played a set which was between an hour and an hour and a half long; it was plenty long enough, all in all. It was amazing. This is the second concert I’ve ever gone to alone (the first being Xiu Xiu, a few years ago), and I guess since I’m going alone because I like the band enough that I don’t care, both have been wonderful experiences. Yeasayer’s live set was at least as good as I’d been led to expect. The lead singer was wearing this amazing one-piece suit (they exist?!), and the guitarist/back-up vocalist was in a one-piece camo outfit, but honestly they could’ve been wearing whatever so long as they brought the same energy to their performance.

I was worried at first, since they looked sort of tired, but they definitely found the energy to put on an amazing show; they played most (all, actually, I think?) of the songs from their recently released album, Odd Blood. It’s a dancier and more accessible set of recordings than their previous release, 2007′s All Hour Cymbals. Both albums are pretty eclectic in terms of their offerings; Yeasayer is regularly compared to a number of artists (I’ll leave you to find other reviews); I’d add in some odd names probably. I definitely recommend listening to some of their music; the selections on MySpace are all great, and I really like their two live songs from Les Concerts a Emporter, although to be fair in general La Blogotheque has great taste and does really good videos. This was their first show in Madrid, and they seemed genuinely excited about it; they’ll be playing at Primavera Sound in May, too, so I’ll get to see them again.

In any case, I found myself dancing in the venue, my coat over my arm, laughing with people I didn’t know, singing along when I knew the words, wishing I knew the words, drinking a beer, squeezing out of the crowd to run to the bathroom and following some random girl back through the crowd to my place, dancing some more. They ended the set with “Ambling Alp,” which is their single of the moment, I guess, and was a lot of fun to get to dance with in a group of people all smiling. And then they came back for an encore, and ended their show with the absolutely gorgeous song “Red Cave,” or at least I think so. I know they played it. Then again, who’s reading this and’s gonna contradict me?

“Red Cave” is actually an awesome song. The lyrics of it, or some of the most repeated lyrics, are these: “Mary’s house in the hollow of the white hazel rapid whirlpool and the church of the red cave.” Which is just an English translation of the name of a village in Wales. I like this a lot, for some reason. Nonetheless, I don’t know that they actually played it last.

I actually awoke this morning with “2080,” another song from their older album, stuck in my head, and at this point I’d actually say they played that one last, although like I said my memory’s blurred and I don’t know song names that well anyway. “2080″ is an awesome song, but the lyrics are ridiculous and pretty incomprehensible when you’re listening.

They also have a song called “Mondegreen“, which is kind of funny when you consider that their lyrics are all more or less incomprehensible. Anyway, awesome fun. Hurrah!

Ayer, veía el grupo Yeasayer. Originalmente, tocaran en un pub, pero al final tocaban en un lugar un poco más grande, la Sala Caracol, que me gustó un montón. Es un sitio para conciertos y nada más, un poco como el Trocadero en Filadlfía, pero un poco más pequeño.

Cuándo llegué, Hush Hush, el telonero, tocaba. Hush Hush (lo cuál significa silencio o super-secreto) es un cantante raro, con musica del fondo, o sea así cuándo yo le veía. Él bailaba (bien) y cantó, y de verdad aunque no soy un fan de las selecciones en myspace (no son malos tampoco), me gustaba verle en directo. (Su myspace era dificíl a encontrar. Busca “Hush Hush” en Google.) Sus canciones son eróticos y tontos, y él bailó llevando un traje negro, una corbata — todo formal. Siguiendo, quitó la chaqueta, la corbata, la camisa, acabando con barba y sin camisa. No sé porque los músicos siempre le gustan a quitar las camisas — probablemente porque hace mucho calor en el escenario — pero cumpló a hacerlo de manera encantadora.

Durante su interpretación, caminé sigilosamente al frente de la muchedumbre, llegando a las primeras filas. Después de que terminó Hush Hush, empecé a hablar con tres chicas americanas cerca de mí. Estaban amables; dos de ellas estudian aquí (Erasmus) y la otra esta visitandolas. No dijemos mucho de importa, sino estaba bien a chatear con alguién. (También, vi la compañera de piso de Mateo y Ashley, con su novio.) Con las chicas americanas, nos movemos un poco más adelante, hablamos un poco más, y entonces empezó Yeasayer, a cerca de las 22:00.

Tocaban para más o menos una hora y cuarta; estaba bastante larga para mí. Y estaba increíble. Esto es el segundo concierto a que he ido solo (el primero fue Xiu Xiu, hace unos años), y supongo que puedo irme solo porque me gusta tanto el grupo, y por eso los dos conciertos eran magnificos. La interpretación de Yeasayer era a lo menos tan bueno que esperaba. El cantante principal llevó un traje enterizo (¡existen!) y la guitarista lleva un traje de camo entero, pero de hecho que podían llevar cualquiera con la energía que llevaban también.

Estaba un poco ansioso, porque parcían cansados, pero en efecto econtraron la energía de hacer un espectáculo. Tocaban mucho (todo, creo) de las canciones del álbum más reciente, Odd Blood (Sangre Rara). Son unos grabaciones más accesible y más dado a bailar que los de la salida anterior, All Hour Cymbals (2007; Címbalos de todas las horas). Los dos álbumes están un poco ecléctico en sus canciones; Yeasayer es comparada a muchos artistas (puedes encontrar cuales en criticas). Seguro que recomiendo escuchar a su música; las canciones en MySpace son todas buenas, y me gusta mucho las canciones en directos de Les Concerts a Emporter, aunque sea verdad que en general La Blogotheque tiene buen gusto y hace videos super-buenos. Era su primera vez tocando en Madrid, y Yeasayer parecía muy entusiasmado con el concierto; tocarán también en Barcelona en Primavera Sound en mayo, así que podría verlos otra vez.

En cualquiera caso, bailaba en la sala, mi abrigo sobre un brazo, riendome con gente que no conocí, cantando con la canción cuando sabía las palabras, esperando que conociera las palabras, tomando una cerveza, apretandome dentro de la muchedumbre para ir a los servicios y siguiendo una chica al azar para volver a mi sitio, bailando un poco más. Ellos terminan su interpretación con “Ambling Alp,” que es su canción de exito ahora, supongo, y era muy divertido a bailar en un grupo de personas todos sonrientes. Y entonces volvieron Yeasayer para un bis, y terminaron el concierto con la canción preciosa, “Red Cave” (Cueva Roja), o creo que sí. Seguro que la tocaron. Pero también, ¿quién está leyendo esto y va a corregirme?

“Red Cave” es de hecho una canción increíble. La letra, o alguna parte de la letra repetida, es: “Mary’s house in the hollow of the white hazel rapid whirlpool and the church of the red cave.” (La casa de Mary, en el hueco de la avellana blanca, remolino rapido y la iglesia de la cueva roja.) Lo cuál es una tradicción de galés a inglés del nombre de una villa en Gales. Me gusta este hecho, para ninguna razón. Sin embargo, no sé si en serio la tocaron al final.

En efecto, desperté esta mañana con “2080,” otra canción del álbum mas antiguo, en mi mente. En este momento, dirré que esta canción fue la ultima, aunque como dije mi memoria no es exacto, y no conozco los nombres de canciones muy bien en cualquier modo. “2080″ es brillante, aunque la letra es ridiculo y casi incomprensible cuándo escuches.

También, Yeasayer tienen una canción que se llama “Mondegreen“, una palabra inglesa que significa exactamente esto — las palabras que inventas cuándo no entiendes que dice un cantante. Es gracioso que tiene este grupo una canción así, según que su letra en general es incomprensible. De todos modos, muy divertido. Hurra!

In any case, I was looking over his page on non-errors this evening, and I came across two things that I was interested to find. This particular page is filled with usages that others often cite as wrong, but which Brians says are pretty standard, at least in American English. For example: split infinitives, which aren’t wrong despite so many people disliking them; ending sentences with prepositions; the pronunciation of the word forte. There are two that interested me because they are about things that often bother me when people do them, but I’ve never had someone to point to in the past.

1. The phrase “feeling bad”. To quote this page: ‘”I feel bad” is standard English, as in “This t-shirt smells bad” (not [emphasis mine] “badly”). “I feel badly” is an incorrect hyper-correction by people who think they know better . . . People who are happy can correctly say they feel good, but if they say they feel well, we know they mean to say they’re healthy.’

My reasoning has always been two-fold on this: first off, it sounds weird to say “feel[s] badly.” More logically, however: An adverb (“badly”) modifies a verb; to say “I feel badly” would be to imply that the way you felt was not being done well. As in, “I feel badly” — “I’m not very good at feeling.” Similarly, a shirt can’t smell badly — it can’t smell at all. It might smell bad. It can’t smell grossly, either. Just gross. “Well” is a little more complicated — it can function as an adjective as well as an adverb. This blog post from a few years back highlights the questions — why do people do this? Is it hypercorrection? I think it is. So saying “I feel well” is fine (implying as it does that you’re healthy), but you probably don’t “feel badly.”

2. Healthy vs. healthful. Again, the quote: ‘Logic and tradition are on the side of those who make this distinction, but I’m afraid phrases like “part of a healthy breakfast” have become so widespread that they are rarely perceived as erroneous except by the hyper-correct. On a related though slightly different subject, it is interesting to note that in English adjectives connected to sensations in the perceiver of an object or event are often transferred to the object or event itself. In the 19th century it was not uncommon to refer, for instance, to a “grateful shower of rain,” and we still say “a gloomy landscape,” “a cheerful sight” and “a happy coincidence.”‘

Mostly I just like the examples of emotions being transfered to an event, but I’m also glad to see that he’s of the mind that while technically best to refer to food as healthful and people as healthy, it’s pretty much fine to refer to both as healthy.

It’s called “Signs and Symbols,” or “Symbols and Signs,” and I heard about it from this amazing podcast the New Yorker puts out, wherein the fiction editor discusses a short story published some time ago with another writer, who reads it. This one was picked by Mary Gaitskill, herself a talented writer, who has this amazing reading voice. And hearing them discuss it was really cool, as was just hearing the simplicity of language.

Not everything on the podcast has been good — I really disliked Junot Diaz’s way of reading — but almost everything.

Here’s a quote to give you a feeling of how weird Lynch can be, taken from the wiki page to give it context:

In an NPR “Weekend Edition” interview, Laura Dern recounted a conversation she had with one of the movie’s new producers. He asked if Lynch was joking when he requested a one-legged woman, a monkey and a lumberjack by 3:15. “Yeah, you’re on a David Lynch movie, dude,” Dern replied. “Sit back and enjoy the ride.” Dern reported that by 4 p.m. they were shooting with the requested individuals.

Now here’s the thing about this film: it doesn’t have a plot, but that doesn’t mean it’s not about anything. In some sense, it’s about this woman’s inner life; I definitely see connections between this and Mulholland Drive, although I liked that film a lot more. But I doubt even Lynch would say that the film makes complete sense. It is an art film, as much as it is a film about Hollywood, or a film about violation and the hole to oneself. I don’t know. I guess I’m curious about it because of the mystery, because I want to make sense of it. And that’s not so easy to do.

The part I liked best at first thought is the part from roughly 15 minutes in ’till maybe the end of the first hour, where the lead actress (Laura Dern, playing an actress named Nikki) is cast in a film called On High in Blue Tomorrows and we see her life beginning to blur with her character’s life. I thought this part was really cool.

When Joe was visiting (Joe visited!), we tried watching Synecdoche, NY (dir. Charlie Kaufman, 2008), which we didn’t get all the way through. It just seemed too weird, too unrelated. I wonder if I would’ve sat through Inland Empire in the same circumstances — probably not. But I nonetheless sort of feel like I liked it more than Synecdoche; I felt like Kaufman was just pushing a bit too hard, and Lynch somehow has his crazy ideas linked in a way I prefer. Synecdoche is also about the links between theater and real life, but more heavy-handed about it somehow. And maybe I disliked it because unlike Inland Empire, the characters did feel real and then they disappeared, while Dern’s character always felt like a caricature, a stick figure.

I also have in recent days watched:
Matilda (dir. Danny DeVito, 1996)
Joe had never seen this, so we watched it. On youtube. Still good every time.

On the plane, coming back and forth from the US, I had some shitty-as-hell movie options. As such, I watched:
* Dragonball Evolution (dir. James Wong, 2009). Honestly wasn’t that bad. It was silly and ridiculous, but it was kind of fun.
* Eragon (dir. Stefen Fangmeier, 2006). I read the book and thought it kind of fun but also hilariously bad. The movie more or less had me feeling the same way.
* Whip It (dir. Drew Barrymore, 2009). I kind of liked this film. They played it on my flight from LA to Chicago, I think, for everyone to watch. It was embarrassing but also kind of cute, and I do like Ellen Page. I know. Still. It was fun, and kind of silly. I like Drew Barrymore. Shrug.

Here in Madrid, with some friends, I went and saw Up in the Air (dir. Jason Reitman, 2009), which was actually a lot better than I thought it would be. Amusingly, two of my friends thought we were going to see Up, which was amazing but was not by any means the same film. This one stars George Clooney as a business man who is constantly traveling, firing people for companies. It’s surprisingly touching, and quite interesting; I really rather liked it. I don’t think it should win a Best Picture award, but I did enjoy it.

Anyway, quite a few movies in the past while, considering how rarely I’d watched films in the months before. Good fun.

Joe’s visit was really nice, too; we hung out around here, made awesome Alfajores, and I got to show him around Madrid, and take him to El Escorial. Overall, a good time.

There was a three-part All Things Considered piece the 21st and 22nd of January about bail [bonds] and their impact on poor Americans. You can check it out here on NPR’s website (second part; third part). I thought the pieces, by Laura Sullivan, were really good, although I’ll certainly acknowledge that I think she’s a bit biased towards the same direction as I am.

My junior year of college I was lucky enough to get to take a class with Barb Toews, who does restorative justice in Pennsylvania. The class was part of the Inside-Out program, wherein students in college take a class inside of a jail or prison, alongside currently-incarcerated men or women. I very much felt like this class gave me a viewpoint that would have been severely lacking in a class based on a college campus. It was experiential as much as it was academic; although we did quite a bit of reading and had some pretty good discussions, much of our work was anecdotal, as it must be. Still, I came to be pretty severely convinced that our prison system in the US is [still] part of the problem facing society, rather than something that helps. Even before taking this class, it seemed pretty clear that building more prisons is not and never has been the solution.

NPR seems to have a focus (lately?) on demonstrating some of the problems with current law and with the current prison system. A while back, they did a great series on California’s Three Strikes law (by Ina Jaffe). I remember hearing a fairly recent piece about sex offenders, focusing on Florida’s crazy laws. And now this.

These pieces are moving and, to be honest, make my skin crawl. One of the things my class with Barb discussed was programs intended to keep people out of jail — pretrial release programs. Our class focused on restorative justice — it’s pretty self-explanatory in basic idea. (See here.) I’ll grant that it’s ridiculously optimistic as a philosophy, but I think there are pretty clear results in its favor, and it’s not as though a punative justic system seems to demonstrate great results. (Oh no, not at all.) In any case, the NPR pieces are about how bail doesn’t seem to be helping anyone except for bail bondsmen, and how in fact they seem to be severely hurting (poor) defendants and the government itself.

Bail is intended to insure that a defendant, released pre-trial, returns to court to stand trial. If you can’t pay it, you sit in jail until you plea or until you get a trial — which may take months or more than a year. Many of the guys in my class were in this position. You generally only get a bail if your crime is nonviolent. If you can’t pay it, you can instead pay a few to a bail bondsman, who then puts up your bail for you. You don’t get the fee back. The way the system is supposed to work is this: if you then don’t show up to court, the bail bondsman pays your bail to the court, and uses bounty hunters (legal ones) to get you back. But as the NPR story explains, that doesn’t even happen. As in, the bail bondsman makes money from you, but the court loses money. And then police officers end up getting you back themselves. In any case, I’m perhaps focusing on a small part of this — the important point really is that many people can’t afford the $500 needed to pay a bail bondsman. And as such, they languish in jail, which hurts their chances of fighting their case, overcrowds jails, and makes it more likely for them to give in to prosecutors.

Short version: listen to the NPR story.

2. Super cool: Phineas Gage daguerrotype found.

3. Autism on On the Media and Fresh Air.

On the 5th, NPR’s fantastic On the Media had a rather mediocre piece on autism, focusing on the medical journal The Lancet, which formally retracted Andrew Wakefield’s disastrous paper this month. The paper was published in 1998, and is the one that made the bogus claim that vaccinations might be causing autism by using bad science. Immunologists like Paul Offit have worked hard to dispel this idea, but people persist in believing it. What frustrated me about NPR’s story was that they really didn’t do a good job of explaining just why it was retracted, and why even before it was retracted it had still been repeatedly demonstrated to be bullshit.

I really think that was a bad choice.

I got to see Offit speak at Bryn Mawr in April last year, and he was really a good speaker (he works in Philadelphia). My favorite part of his talk was an anecdote he told about his wife’s pediatric practice. As I remember it, he explained that his wife was seeing a young girl, who was supposed to be getting vaccinations that day. In the waiting room, the girl had an epileptic seizure, the first of what were apparently to be many. But imagine that the seizure had waited a day, or an hour. And imagine trying to explain to that girl’s mother that the vaccination had nothing to do with it. Think you’d get very far? Just because they might’ve been linked, however, would by no means reflect on causation. Post hoc ergo propter hoc.

In any case, much more impressive were the three Terry Gross interviews of Temple Grandin on February 5′s Fresh Air. I felt like Gross asked some interesting questions; I also just find Grandin to be a really interesting woman. I no longer remember where I first heard about her, but she’s a professor of animal science who has high-functioning autism, and is also an activist in autism treatment and awareness. I recommend listening to the piece (they also have a glowing review of the HBO movie about her, starring Claire Danes — I am curious indeed), or at least reading up on her — Oliver Sacks’ article about her in An Anthropologist on Mars is a great place to start.

And with that, I’ll leave you. Some more personal updates soon.

When I was in eighth grade, I think, I started reading a series called The Wheel of Time, written by a man known as Robert Jordan. (That’s a pseudonym, for no good reason that I know of. He just always wrote this series with this pseudonym, and others with different ones.) It’s epic fantasy in the most ridiculous way possible. By which I mean: it’s quite literally epic, in that there are currently 12 books (with two more forthcoming) and over 10,500 paperback pages (thanks, wikipedia). Yeah. By comparison, The Lord of the Rings is three books long. George R.R. Martin’s The Song of Ice and Fire (which I read three books from in high school, and ended up finding surprisingly distasteful) is four books long (although three more are projected). Terry Goodkind’s godawful (the first two were good, and then I got disgusted) Sword of Truth series is eleven books long, I guess. WoT (as it’s often abbreviated) has sold almost twice as many books as the Goodkind series, around 44 million copies. Martin’s series is considerably shorter. The only fantasy series I ever liked as much as WoT was Tad William’s Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy (beginning with The Dragonbone Chair and feeling very much like something Lloyd Alexander might’ve written). (To be fair, I didn’t finish the third back in that series until years after I first tried it. But that doesn’t fault the beginning.) There is also some more elf-heavy fiction, which I’ve managed to almost block out of my mind. Like Terry Brook’s Shannara series, which I’m kind of happy to forget.

Anyway, I guess the point is that most fantasy isn’t quite so large-scale as Jordan’s, and clearly I’m not the only one who admires that. Anyway, over break I picked up the series (I started on book two, and ended up just keeping on going), and now I’m reading book eleven. Twelve was released in November, I think, co-written by Brandon Sanderson because Jordan died three years ago, now. Leaving copious notes, and a wish that the books be finished.

I do acknowledge, reading these for my third time, that there are lots of things that bother me. I especially notice the things that maybe only happen twice a book, but happen twice every book. There are things like braid-pulling that happen way too often. Phrases like “his cloak would’ve made a tinker blush” are used every time a certain character appears (he’s supposed to wear a too-colorful cloak). I am frustrated when characters do stupid things. For example, characters who are not only on the same side, but also friends, don’t share important information with each other. Sometimes motivations are weak — I still don’t quite get why many of the villains switched sides not just to a different side but to the evil side. It’s one thing when the villain is, you know, a king who wants to rule the world. It’s another when the ultimate villain is the Dark One, a devil who touches the world and enjoys torture, death, and destruction, and expects his followers to as well. Someone who’s jealous might turn on their friends, but not so far as to embrace sadism. Or maybe once, but not over and over again. Right? Maybe I’m being re-naïve.

In any case, this is tons of fun. I like reading these books. I’m reading the eleventh one for the first time, I’m pretty sure (I didn’t own it, and I don’t remember it), and then I’ll have to switch writing styles and read (well, listen to, on audio book) the twelfth. And then I’ll be dry at least until November.

I’m not even going to try describing the plot. Wikipedia does an okay job, but if you’re at all interested then you should pick up the first book, The Eye of the World. It’s kind of pulp fiction, but well-written and well-thought-out for the most part. The characters have distinct personalities. Occasionally you get lost, but there are websites for looking that sort of thing up. Also a brief glossary in the back of the books.

Actually, there are a ridiculous number of websites dedicated to WoT. Not just wikis, of which there are at least two, but “scholarly” sites where people write up their theories, or think about the roots of Jordan’s ideas, or any such thing. It’s quite fun. And useful, when you’re lost, or want to know whether people think the same thing you do. Unfortunately, the websites DO assume you’ve read everything (obviously), and so sometimes give out spoilers.

In other news:

Today, I went rock climbing! It was quite a lot of fun. I feel a bit more comfortable at the place, although I still don’t really say more than two words to anyone other than the woman working at the desk. Still, it feels good to be exercising more than yoga on occasion, and if I couldn’t do anything difficult and felt tired quickly, then it’s well that I finally bought a ten-visit pass and will be going in ten times over the next three months. At least. I’ll try and use it faster. If I go twice a week, then I’ll buy a monthly membership. That’d be fun!

On Tuesday, despite being exhausted, on a whim I bought a tiny (1.5 kilo) chicken from the butcher’s (that’s a bit more than 3 pounds) for €4. The guy threw in two chicken carcasses for free, too, which was nice. So I roasted the chicken that night, more or less following this recipe. More “more” than less, except that I only left it to rest for an hour and a half or so. Even so, it turned out splendidly. Crispy skin, moist breasts, maybe a tiny bit soggy since the lemon had a lot of juice. I had the chicken and potatoes for dinner that night and last night as well.

I also saved two things: first, the chicken carcass, bad meat, joints, and skin. Second, the oil and drippings left in the pan. The latter I used for tonight’s dinner, which was fantastic: I took the last pieces of chicken, and fried them in a bit of (lemon) chicken fat with green peppers, just to warm them. I made rice with stock. I sautéed mushrooms in butter (Michael Ruhlman has an excellent meditation on how best to cook mushrooms, which I didn’t quite follow, since I used butter, but sort of did). And then I made tacos, just peppers, mushrooms, rice, and chicken. Delicious.

The reason I had stock to make rice in, of course, is that I made it. Two raw chicken carcasses, plus one roasted chicken carcass, plus a €1 selection of celery, leek, and carrots from the supermarket, plus some leftover cilantro and some garlic and an onion. I bought a new, bigger pot today, primarily because we needed one (for €15 — I doubt it’ll last more than a year, but I’ll be gone then), and it sat with water turning into stock for around five hours. (I followed Ruhlam’s book for this one. He knows that stuff back-and-front.) I’ll put the stock in the fridge for the night, and then make soup tomorrow, I think. But for now, it made some very soft, flavorful rice.