Hello fine readers!
So I’ve gone and changed the layout again. As much as I enjoyed the panache of the previous layout, I had reservations about the FREAKING GIGANTIC HEADER. It looked a bit totalitarian, like it was designed by Joseph Stalin. Here is yet another poll. I do love the poll widget. Please let me know what you think so I can gauge if this design is more palatable to you than the last…
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Today I received my class book for my upcoming ten-year Stanford reunion. The book is a compilation of pages alumni from my graduating class made about their lives since college. Since I am an absolute sucker for that kind of nostalgia, I tore it out of its envelope and spent the whole afternoon devouring its contents. Nom nom nom nostalgia, you are so tasty.
After absorbing a few hundred pages of my fellow alumni, I did start to feel a bit inadequate. After all, I had never dived the Great Barrier Reef, or built hospitals in Africa, or won an Olympic medal, or created my own start-up, or backpacked in Patagonia, or cut cancer out of grateful children. Then I realized I was being utterly absurd. Of course the pages would only feature the impressive achievements of seemingly well-adjusted people! For my own page, I didn’t very well write about the two and half years of harrowing pain that had me in & out of hospitals, the surgeries, the creditors calling about medical bills, the conviction that I was slowly dying, the loneliness, the terror. I mean, I didn’t want to be a bummer.
Once the book was closed I sat there wondering about all that was elided from those pages, about the people who didn’t send pages at all. Then I thought how grand it would be if all the pivotal moments from people’s lives had been included, even the tawdry and painful ones. Sentences like:
But no no, I am being foolish. Such things never happen to Stanford graduates. We are all exemplary. Everyone of us as beautiful and serene as the flower-heavy night wind rustling the palms on the main quad.
People who went to the Ivies though, they are fucked up.
I think we should re-institute the word whence. Isn’t I don’t know whence this comes so much more elegant than I don’t know where this comes from? Actually, let’s go whole hog: isn’t I know not whence this comes much nicer than I don’t know where this comes from? When did English decide that stating something in the negative requires the addition of the verb to do?
Spoken like someone who reads a lot of old stuff. I also think we should bring back shall. What other word has a meaning so delicately poised between should and will?
Should I do this? Shall I do this? Will I do this?
Not to mention, I freaking love shan’t.
Okay, okay, since so much of what I write on this blog makes me sound like I was born during the Jackson administration, I will also share some of the movements I like in modern American English. I love the word dude. For my first dozen or so years in California, I manfully resisted this word. I had the same moral objection to it as to the unchecked proliferation of the word like (which I still, like, don’t like, but like, live with). Then one day I completely surrendered to dude, because it can be so expressive, and has so many applications. For instance, witness this clip:
Isn’t dude awesome? (NB at some point I also surrendered to the word awesome.)
I also like when offensive words with nasty histories are re-appropriated. Bitch used to mean “recalcitrant woman,” but now it rather means “whiny person.” It’s being de-gendered, and I think that’s a good thing. It always gives me a little subversive thrill to say that a man is being a bitch. I also approve of what’s by and large happened to the word nigger, that it’s used as a form of address within the black community. I’m a little puzzled by white people who complain they can’t use it–I mean, why would they want to? Coming from a white person, this is a word of exclusion. The whole point of its re-appropriation is turning it into a word of inclusion; that’s why it’s supposed to stay within the black community. Of course, inclusion implies exclusion of someone else–I suppose that’s why it being a black word bothers some whites (this is the nicer interpretation, the less nice interpretation being that it signifies the lessening of their power as the privileged race). But shit, when we live in a society where no one is being systematically oppressed because of how much melanin they have in their skin, then we can open up the use of that word. Then we would see that that word, in a truly all-inclusive society, would be of no interest to anyone. It would be as obsolete as the word reprobate in the Calvinist sense. Would it turn into something like what reprobate means now?
No, I think it would do what is best. I think it would simply and quietly disappear.
(1) My husband and I have always surmised that face wash would be very difficult to market to men (eg “X-FOLIATOR! It will punch your face clean!”) yet, this morning, I discovered that such a product actually exists. It is called Facial Fuel. It comes in a blue bottle with a picture of a biplane on it. The smell also aspires to manliness. I expected it to have a sort of musky flavor like Old Spice or shaving cream for dudes (which is generally blue, and seldom comes in mango or passion flower scents), but it went in a surprisingly briny direction. Because a metrosexual product like face wash cannot smell even remotely pleasant, or it might as well come in a pink bottle that reads “you are gay.”
The copy on the bottle did make sure to let me know that the contents are not “gentle” or “exfoliating” like those lady face washes; they are “energizing.” By “energizing,” the copy means, “burns the skin slightly on contact.” Really. See? This is a manly product, because its use is physically uncomfortable.
Facial Fuel made my whole morning by reminding me how hilarious all marketing is, especially when it is gendered. If you need a good laugh in the shower, I recommend it.
(2) My husband and I stopped on the street corner, trying to figure out where we were relative to the Museum of Modern Art. Before we could even pull up our location on our iphone, a guy stopped by and said, “hey, where are you going?” It took us a moment to realize that he was talking to us, and another moment to understand that he was offering his help. “Oh, um, MoMA,” my husband sputtered. “How come it took you so long to get that out?” our new friend asked, before he gave us the directions. He was being a spontaneous good samaritan, but he simply couldn’t do something nice without being a dick about it. We thought his fine mélange of helpfulness and douchiness captured something essential about the New York spirit.
(3) There were two kinds of art works at the MoMA. For one kind, the placards were unnecessary because the pieces spoke for themselves. For the other kind, the placards made me laugh my ass off. For example: a gigantic white canvas with a big dark blue smear on it. The placard explained that the artist had theme parties during which he had a nude model soaked in a shade of blue paint he’d named after himself roll around on a piece of canvas. He served blue cocktails, and congratulated himself on “not having to get his fingers dirty” to produce art. Magnificent, no?
My favorite piece, however, was a chair covered in plates, cutlery, and leftover food glued sideways onto a wall. The placard explained that the artist had been inspired while watching his paramour eat breakfast. He glued her meal’s discards to the chair where she’d left them, and epoxied the whole deal up onto the wall. That was his work for the day. This piece is now in the Museum of Modern Art. Tell me this guy wasn’t (a) Loki, God of Mischief (b) a marketing genius (c) a huge pain in the ass to live with.
Look for my next art installation forthcoming at the MoMA. It will feature such pieces as “Husband’s Shirts Mixed with Concrete, Poured over Marital Bed,” “Husband Asleep with my Underwear Glued to his Face,” and my personal favorite, “Infuriated Cat Rocketing through Museum, Covered in Crisco and Flecks of Tissue Paper.”
See? I wasn't kidding about the biplane.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged art, facial fuel, Loki, marketing, modern art, MoMA, New Yorkers
This week I found my cell phone in the bottom of my purse clutching a tiny empty bottle of Valium and displaying the text message GOODBYE CRUEL WORLD. Rest in peace, valiant purple Motorola flip phone, and feast well in Valhalla.
So, I have to get a new cell phone, and I am facing a dilemma. I know that the days of having a plain flip phone with number keys are over, because people keep texting me, and texting them back takes me like twenty minutes without access to a keyboard. I am always tempted to call people back when they text me to expedite the proceedings, but then I never do, on the off chance that they are messaging me from a movie theater or a funeral. So, I surrender. I need a phone with letter keys. Really, I should get an iphone. Yet I pause at the threshold of such an acquisition, like a tremulous virgin unsure whether the man to whom she is about to give herself is the right one.
The iphone is a wondrous invention. Ever since my husband acquired one, his patience knows no bounds. Because of this thing, he can sit in perfect calm while I agonize for twenty minutes over whether I want the blue dress or the red one, while I get fidgety when he does the same thing with USB drives at Fry’s. He says I should get an iphone for the tranquility of our marriage, and I agree. So, why so much anguish and hand wringing? I do have a reason, but it makes me sound about 200 years old. Please loosen my corset, I feel I am about to suffer a paroxysm of the vapors.
When I am at home, I am almost never separated from the electronic teat that is my laptop. I keep it by me even when I watch television, should I want to look something up on google or read a funny article during a commercial break. The only time I am apart from the world’s sum of knowledge in aether form is when I leave the house. If I get an iphone, I will lose this last disconnect. The aether will literally be on me at all times, inescapable. Frankly, I fear this. There is a crotchety old lady inside me who insists that occasional boredom is good for the soul. Perhaps she is not entirely wrong. Why would I ever stare dreamily out the train window when I could have my nose in some engrossing app? My husband says that an iphone would be good for my writing because I could take notes whenever and wherever an idea strikes me. My response: but an idea will never strike me again! I will be too busy looking at LOLcats!
So, you see my quandary. But what quandary is that? My fate is inevitable. The aether reaches for me and already I feel myself swoon.
Last week, my writing ground to a slow halt. I was all depressed and wondering what was the matter with me. Then my throat began to feel sandpapered and every hollow in my head and lungs filled with mucus. Aha. A cold. What is that icky taste on your tongue when you get sick? Is it all the white blood cells who died bravely on the battlefield?
This is the sort of thing that reminds me that I’m really just a meat puppet; any high falutin’ aspirations I might have about art and intellect completely evaporate when the body is displeased. My thoughts look something like this: bleaaaaaaaaaaaarghaaaaaaaaaa*snort*help! Sorbet is ambrosia
l to me this week: it’s fruity, it’s cold against my flaming esophagus, and it won’t make me puke. Oh, fruit sorbet, I love you almost as much as Sudafed and the six-year-old codeine cough syrup I’ve been sucking down in a little plastic shotglass. (Yes, that means the cough syrup is extremely expired, but I like to think of it as finely aged.)
In non-snot related news, my agent made it to the London Book Fair last week despite the fact that Iceland exploded. So, possibly I will soon get news that 13 rue Thérèse was sold to some more foreign markets–I hope! So far it’s been bought by the UK and Italy. I get asked if I intend to do the French translation myself should France buy it, and I always laugh–hell no! I’ve done a bit of translation and it is bloody hard, plus French is pretty much the only language in the world this book can’t be translated into since it has French sprinkled in it, and it is partially about translation. (I guess there’s a moral here about how you can never go home again.) So, to whoever might translate this thing into French one day–good luck and godspeed. I will ship you a bottle of JD. Or codeine cough syrup, whichever floats your boat.
In this computer I have a translation I did of a collection of prose poems by Paul Valéry. I also wrote an accompanying introduction and conclusion about the pleasures and trials of translating it. Technically, if I wanted to submit it to an academic press somewhere, there isn’t that much more work that needs to go into it. But, I am lazy. Also, I am guessing submitting it will be a lot easier once I have a book out. It was a fun project, the challenge of finding a voice for it was much the same as finding a voice for a piece of original writing. The voice had to be based on Paul Valéry, but of course it could never be him. It was something like how I imagined he would sound if he spoke English, or rather, how he would sound if he spoke French in English. So, you can imagine this endeavor gave my brain something to chew on for a while. Anyway, the professor who supervised me while I was doing this thing said he hoped I would finish it off and try to publish it even though I am leaving academia. He is right, I should. But, as stated above, I am lazy.
Right now I am picturing Darth Vader standing over my prone pajamaed body pronouncing: “Entropy is strong with this one.” Yes, yes it is. I am hoping if I chug enough cough syrup I will dissolve right out of consciousness.
A feature of wordpress that I find pretty neat is that it tabulates a list of the google searches that get people to my blog. Most of them are searches for my name, or the title of my book. Sometimes I wonder who these mysterious people are out there looking for me. Given that some of them searched for my maiden name (my current name minus Shapiro), some are obviously people who knew me back when I was a young spark. Some must also be curious students. (Hi curious students! I miss you guys!)
Then there are hits from people who were looking for something that is obviously not me. I do have a doppelganger who is all over the internet, a girl who has my name minus the “Mauli.” She was a lovely ballerina who was killed by some asshole drunk driver, so there is lots of stuff out there about her. Pretty sad, plus there’s something spooky about having a homonym who died a violent death–a bit like someone walking over my grave. Some of the hits are from people out there looking for information about her. I am frankly creeped out by whoever reached me by googling “9-11 call elena shapiro.” Why would you want to read and/or hear that?
There are also hits from people looking for information on books or movies that I’ve mentioned on here. I hope my thoughts on them were informative! Then there are hits of pure randomness. I enjoy those immensely. Sometimes they’re inadvertent poetry like “art sex flower” or “words written in smoke.” Sometimes they’re just hilarious, like “white tiger vs eagles” (was somebody looking for some kind of weird cage match footage?), or “what is academic prose” (I wish I knew). Even better: “academical prose” (no comment). Best of all: three people have reached my blog by googling “glandular secretions.” People, let’s aim to make my blog the number one hit for “glandular secretions.”
And, inevitably, there are the bizarre horny searches. Somebody out there has a boner for my family tree: “sex with a mauli,” along with several different iterations with the words in different orders (were they looking for instructions?). Then there is, simply: “elena shapiro horse” (ew–double ew if they were looking for the dead ballerina). Then there’s the horny search that slides back into inadvertent poetry territory: “making love images” (aw).
So, every once in a while I will make sure to check the growing list of ways people get here. It’s like my own little virtual peep hole. Except, online, the door is always open to whoever knocks.
My laptop is emitting a rhythmic chirrup that sounds as if it is housing crickets. I google the problem, and the fix-it suggestion is to hit the bottom of the computer, hard, with a closed fist. It works. Sometimes the most complex modern technologies require the most ancient forms of maintenance.
—
On my walk from work to the train station in the gathering dark, I am accosted by a lass who spills forth a frantic story about having just been rendered homeless this very night, about needing money to get back to her mother’s in San Diego. She bursts into tears, hiccups, “this is so embarrassing.” I do not know whether the story is true, but her distress is genuine. Her young face is known to me; there are many such faces in my classroom. I heave a big sigh and take a twenty out of my wallet.
—
I watch Polanski’s movie version of The Pianist. It is moving and harrowing, but in some places disconcertingly boring. Sometimes films cannot do what literature can do. Watching a man hidden in an apartment starve to death is not nearly as interesting as reading his thoughts about what it felt like.
—
I am missing someone cruelly; his absence is like a pall over my life. It seems to dim color, dampen taste, restrict breath. 13 rue Thérèse has a French title–never mind that the English title is also a French title! The title is Pensées de l’absent. Sometimes I think that would be an apt title for everything I write.
—
My office mate asks me whether I know that the MLA has changed its format for citations. I consider this news for a moment, then burst into laughter. “I don’t care!” I realize this at the same time as I say it. I am hit with a rush of gleeful freedom. At the same time I am disoriented and scared. It’s like being dropped in the middle of the ocean. Cold and filled with unfathomable life all the way to its lightless depths.
I finally saw Avatar today. Visually, it was stunning–but I was hoping that a movie that took a decade and half a billion dollars to make would have a tighter script, and better editing. (It was nearly three hours long, and in the last hour of endless nonsensical violence I leaned over and asked my husband how long this movie was going to be, for my brain was numbed and my bladder was full.)
What offended me about this movie wasn’t that it was derivative claptrap (I was sort of expecting that). It was the perniciousness of its self-congratulatory message. It reveled so unabashedly in the toxic meme of the Noble Savage that even the shade of Jean-Jacques Rousseau was like, really, no shit? The natives are such beautiful innocent children at one with nature, and did you know that, like lovebirds, they mate for life? And of course, being beautiful innocent children, they must be saved by a Great White Messiah who understands the loveliness of their simple ways–a Great White Messiah who is so awesome that he is better at being them than they are after hanging out with them for three months. Gag.
The characters are all shallow cutouts who seldom resemble actual human beings, but I suppose I can forgive that because the story is supposed to be a heavy-handed allegory, and thus presents only archetypes. (The noble blue savages are a cultural mishmash of various American Indian, African, and Asian tribes, signifying Everything that is Not White in a way that would have made Edward Said whimper.) Allegories use archetypes as shorthand to dramatize conflicts between various drives inside the human animal, but the movie still failed on that count because the archetypes were not even internally consistent.
For instance:
The premise of the movie is that a corporation is trying to colonize the beautiful alien jungle filled with beautiful alien children in order to mine some precious element called–I shit you not–unobtainium. The Corporate Hack takes the advice of the Evil Soldier in deciding to exterminate the Noble Savages and level their Idyllic Forest despite the Benevolent Scientist desperately trying to tell them that the Idyllic Forest is a sentient God that can literally be accessed by a brain USB cable that snakes out of the back of one’s head. Corporate Hack says “kill everyone and burn everything” because he is jonesing so bad for that tasty unobtainium–but what kind of piss-poor Corporate Hack is he? How fucking marketable a commodity would it be to be able to plug yourself into Mother Earth and communicate with God?! And how about the anti-gravity fields that make freaking mountains float in mid-air? Those cool-ass levitating jellyfish dandelion seed thingies would sell way better than sea monkeys! Come on, Corporate Hack, you’re thinking too small!
(Let me take a moment to express my gratitude, however, for the fact that when our Great White Messiah finally makes love to his feisty-yet-sweet forest nymph in the Sacred Humping Grove, we are not actually subjected to a graphic sex scene in which they merge USB ports or whatever. But–I’m sure that’s coming in the director’s cut.)
Another internal inconsistency that bothered me was the idea that the Noble Savages could plug into various wild animals with their USB ports and make them do their bidding. It would have been more consistent with the message of the movie if, when plugged in, they were one with the horse or some such new age faux-buddhist thing–but no, they literally telepathically order the animals around, and the animals have no choice but to comply. One inadvertently funny scene features our hero, in his manhood-induction ceremony, picking out a pterodactyl dragon to ride and call his own. The forest nymph informs him that not only must he choose his dactyl, the dactyl must also choose him. He asks how he can tell that the dactyl has chosen him, and she replies that it does so by trying to kill him. Well, sounds like consent to me!
So, you know, all that stuff about unity with Gaia and singing mourning songs when you kill animals for food rings a little hollow when you enslave them with your USB ports. Maybe James Cameron was making some sort of canny oblique statement about the dangerous hypocrisies that pop up in religious belief systems but somehow, I don’t think so. The allegory was so heavy throughout that my soul felt violated (really, I think James Cameron wrote this script because he was convinced that he needed to serve a market that found Dances with Wolves too subtle). It also used bits of 9-11 imagery in somewhat troubling ways, but I will not open that can of worms. I will instead go to bed, and dream of buying a sachet of those cool levitating jellyfish dandelion seed thingies–you know, they would be dehydrated in a little packet that would read: “just add water and you too can be Chosen by the Great Mother!”
Elena Mauli Shapiro 