happenin'

Some stuff about the weekend.

Finally: an in-store appearance by the internet's own Nikita, creator of one of my favorite website names this past year, "Fuck Trent Lott's Porch," and general all-around person of awesomeness. See: understands the love of karaoke. See: pulls off "wicked." See: Trivial Pursuit. See: more comfortable in 4-inch stilettos than 2-inch sandals. Not only was she superlatively cool, she was incredibly gracious about our rogue mouse chewing a hole through her important file to get to a piece of chocolate inside. (Stan, I swear to god, let's just get the snappy traps. Messy Schmessy.) She also reminded me that I never posted a picture of the tattoo I got in 2004:

Click to enlarge.

Excitingly: this weekend, Karen and Pete had a baby and turned it into a shrine to me! At least, that's what I assume, considering the baby's first name is my boyfriend's, and his middle name is that of someone very famous in the history of my -- my -- country. Or, I suppose, they might simply have liked those names. Luckily, I do too, or I would not be poking fun, as I would be terrified of them discovering I think their baby's name is stupid. Very very happy congratulations are in order, and a present as soon as I send some embarrassingly overdue wedding gifts for other friends. Come to think of it, it would probably be better for me to plan on sending Karen and Pete's baby some decorations for his university dorm room.

The only other cool thing that happened this weekend, and this is still pretty exciting for me, is that we got an air conditioner for our living room. It's nice to be able to live in my entire apartment, and not just my bedroom! So that happened.

Sadly: oh, and also Charles Darwin's tortoise died.

Not pictured: Charles Darwin, Charles Darwin's tortoise. This is just a photo of a really big turtle.

chekhov

Civilized people must, I believe satisfy the following criteria:...

5) They don't run themselves down in order to provoke the sympathy of others. They don't play on other people's heart-strings to be sighed over and cosseted. They don't say: "No one understands me!" or "I've wasted my talents on trivial doodlings! I'm a whore!!" because all that sort of thing is just cheap striving for effects, it's vulgar, old hat and false...

File under "early mockery of livejournal."

isherwood

From 1929 to 1933, I lived almost continuously in Berlin, with only occasional visits to other parts of Germany and to England. Already, during that time, I had made up my mind that I would one day write about the people I'd met ... those individuals whom respectable society shuns in horror: an Arthur Norris, a von Pregnitz, a Sally Bowles....

Then, in the summer of 1951, John van Druten decided that he could make a play out of Sally Bowles ... When I arrived in New York to sit in on rehearsals, I had first to go to a studio and be photographed, for publicity, with our leading lady, Julie Harris. I had never met Miss Harris before. I hadn't even seen her famous performance in The Member of the Wedding.

Now, out of the dressing-room, came a slim sparkling-eyed girl in an absurdly tart-like black satin dress, with a little cap stuck jauntily on her pale flame-colored hair, and a silly naughty giggle. This was Sally Bowles in person. Miss Harris was more essentially Sally Bowles than the Sally of my book, and much more like Sally than the real girl who long ago gave me the idea for my character.

I felt half hypnotized by the strangeness of the situation. "This is terribly sad," I said to her. "You've stayed the same age while I've gotten twenty years older." We exchanged scraps of dialogue from the play, ad-libbed new lines, laughed wildly, hammed and hugged each other, while the photographer's camera clicked. I couldn't take my eyes off her. I was dumbfounded, infatuated. Who was she? What was she? How much was there in her of Miss Harris, how much of van Druten, how much of the girl I used to know in Berlin, how much of myself? It was no longer possible to say. I only knew that she was lovable in a way that no human could ever quite be, since, being a creature of art, she had been created out of pure love."

summer reading pt. 1

Read Mary Wesley's Part of the Furniture on Sunday and found it disappointing. Granted, it is not the most-loved of her books. I have Not That Sort of Girl waiting at home, and maybe that one will feel more ... written. And I'm still trying to get my hands on The Camomile Lawn. But I admit my hopes were inflated, after reading so many complimentary things about Wesley lately (coincidentally, as far as I can tell).

I couldn't find anything in the book's main character, Juno, to latch onto; she was vapid and infuriatingly passive. In fact, none of the characters were very likeable. Some of them had good surface qualities like hospitality, but they didn't have any emotional depth. Furthermore, none of the men seemed like men.

I was also irked, in a passing way, by some references that didn't fit historically. For example, Juno remembers her childhood neighbors playfully naming their horses Isherwood and Auden. This doesn't really make sense, as Juno's memories would have been of the early- to mid-1920s, before either Christopher Isherwood or W.H. Auden began publishing work. There was another like this but I can't remember now.

Obviously it's anal of me to be bothered by that, since Wesley didn't start writing until she was well into retirement age, and WWII was decades past, but the text didn't give me enough to hold on to, to make me want to ignore little mistakes.

Also obviously, this isn't a review -- I am not enough a writer OR reader to compose an actual book review. I am hoping to scribble a few thoughts on each of the books I read this summer (and beyond), and that's all this is.

The Constant Gardener is next, only because I recently Netflixed the movie and can't watch it until I've read the novel.

the rules

Just an interesting little tidbit -- John Updike's rules for book reviews, written in 1975.

injuns

There was something in Russell Shorto's Times review of Mayflower (Nathaniel Philbrick) that bothered me. The book is about the relationship between the Mayflower Pilgrims and the American Indians. Shorto writes that,

"symbolically speaking, there are legitimate reasons for thinking of them as America's parents: their religiosity, their isolationism, their earnestness and grit."

It struck me as exceedingly wrong-headed to attribute American national character to the peoples who were systematically eliminated to make room for us. I composed in my head a brief tirade about this. I logged into Movable Type to write it up. I went back to the article to re-read the quote. And, of course, I realized that Shorto was talking about the Pilgrims, not the Indians.

Duh.

summed up

Implicit in the Powell Doctrine was the assumption that the wars of the future would be large, uncertain, expensive and therefore infrequent. Implicit in Rumsfeld’s thinking was the expectation that future American wars would be brief and economical, all but eliminating the political risk of opting for force.

from the London Review of Books