ALR's Prose, Etc.

proof

2010-02-05T06:28:00.000-08:00

step all the way in why wait to go home
again just to keep reading just
cross this block of church
there is a special problem with serial commas
this void daguerrotype this movie set this crime scene

© alr 2010

forward

2010-02-03T20:06:00.000-08:00

attached please find
a red 3 blinking
in a black tunnel please
repeat all music
find a commute
attached in flashback

© alr 2010

little lennon elegy

2009-11-16T20:22:00.000-08:00

turn the corner early nobody
on carmine
sudden slender anon
round glasses, wave hello,
would this be you
at fifty
to not know this
is like woolworth apex
invisible in cloud

© alr 2009

noir transit

2009-11-04T17:55:00.001-08:00

to the wrought building’s subway threshold rush,
plush russet chamber, drop us from our day
gondola to a bygone avant-garde

the gust and push, the letterbox and ash

is dying easy — taking off a suit —
the way you miss
a train
pulling away —

© alr 2009

Physician

2009-03-29T09:24:00.000-07:00

What anger in
this rough patch
of skin.

How I would rather linger
on the memory
of surprise,

the way it took a minute
for the simple eros
of diagnosis to sink in:

a hand had reached up
and was touching
a face.

© alr 2009

little elegy for s. trinkaus

2009-03-21T16:17:00.000-07:00

how can this be new york blank cloud of screen
how can this be partita white cord into ears
word glow, sound stream, i leave them
last night and see lincoln center from the sidewalk
which was very alive was this what you knew
if i am not playing how will i keep you teacher

© alr 2009

Bayside

2009-03-06T14:15:00.000-08:00

go out and come back with words and coffee
forgetting old errand at kwikmart
ah city nested in bays this long island which is not long island
in the sweet march air on a boulevard called bell
I wonder why I thought Manhattan was so great anyhow
also why spring makes me think of the british novel

© alr 2009

search

2009-03-03T15:00:00.000-08:00

walking down 5th i turn on 13th
joe this coffeeshop is still there
just on this one block the city
becomes briefly home but then
on university place i am alone
again

a woman found floating in the river
survived but blacked out re: last week
this was called dissociative fugue

at W4 starbucks hear blackbird
but it’s only someone else
trying to sound like paul

© alr 2009

Phase (II)

2009-02-18T11:44:00.000-08:00

On platform listening to phase music

two trains two loops

b d f v, when did I stop playing the typewriter?

Flirt with a genius. Squint in the light.

∼
© alr 2009

Phase (I)

2009-01-28T07:09:00.000-08:00

listen to reich this morning in subway
is it
gonna rain
rain gonna
read allen in chelsea
writing flesh-pile vietnam
poem rain this war
allen what changed
wishing for your hum bom
on the lower east
instead rain
rain
rain

~
©alr 2009

The Electric Starbucks Acid Test

2009-01-16T12:01:00.000-08:00

Starbucks is quite possibly the straightest, squarest, least beat place to be reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

I mean, think of. . .

La Honda. . .zooming down through the redwoods. . .Route 84. . .the Intrepid Traveler. . .

There are no intrepid travelers at Starbucks.

And the way Tom Wolfe (the wolf in the white suit) grooves on language! Yes in fact yes it could become exhausting after several novels but no kidding this has some style, magical combinations of English like rusky-dusky neon dust and radiant limelit, the merry pranks of the Pranksters all blurring together in the beautiful hallucinogenic poetry of the prose. . .

Can you grok that after saying the phrase "grande caramel macchiato"?

But then! A sign!

We're serving. . .clover small batch coffee
Each cup is crafted one-at-a-time, just for you, on the clover machine, which combines french press and vacuum technology!

Look at those ellipses! Look at the way the sentence just keeps on going, man, the commas, the flow (just for you! on the clover machine!), the final fizzy and delicious irony of the exclamation point after "vacuum technology"!

The clover machine. . .the clover machine, the combiner, the coffee Combine of America. . .transformed by Wolfian syntax. . .

What do you think of my java?

~

journey to fields

2008-08-30T15:37:00.000-07:00

platform with a curved edge
island between dark rivers

question at 72nd
lose something

yes

why do I still come back to look
when none of the faces here is you

© alr 2008

Poem

2008-07-24T09:51:00.000-07:00

For Frank O'Hara

A calendar reminds me of you
this rainy morning when I’m in Cambridge
but thinking about New York, as you did.
It is July 24, the day before you died
in 1966. You missed Queens
when the Beatles came, but it’s too bad;
you might have liked them in a year,
poet of friends and days
in the life, looking for love, reading the news.

© alr 2008

so we beat on

2008-07-20T12:24:00.000-07:00

On Friday night it was humid and I walk out of the house to get ice cream, a romantic thing to do if I hadn't been alone. I happen to be on Brattle and there's a guitarist busking there as usual who's singing "Don't Let Me Down" and so catches my ear. I stop. Don't let me down. No rooftop concert, but there is a lag in the way he takes it (a rubato) which jives doubly with the heaviness of the summer air and the sultry-slow feel of the lyric.

Later I walk home pensive with a mint oreo cone and on Mount Auburn a car approaches with the stereo pulsing. I don't recognize these hip-hop words as they stream by but one jumps out, "Stella McCartney," as the ride passes.

And so even in this year when only one of the Beatles plays goodbye to Shea Stadium, their ghosts and their children inhabit the soundscape, making musical a July night mild melancholy, intersecting in the streets.

Summer Reads

2008-07-08T09:29:00.000-07:00

A brief roadmap of pleasure reading from the past month or so.

Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner, 1954.
I had never read this novel. I liked A Farewell to Arms better, though. More plot, less drinking.

Lippmann, Laura. What the Dead Know. New York: William Morrow, 2007.
A good travel read: a missing persons case, mildly noir, not too pulpy.

McEwan, Ian. Atonement. London: Jonathan Cape, 2001.
Fantastic fantastic fantastic. Structural complexity plus gripping crime and romance plus Mrs. Dalloway-esque descriptions of wartime London.

O'Neill, Joseph. Netherland. New York: Pantheon, 2008.
When a review in the New Yorker cast this novel as a combination of V.S. Naipaul and F. Scott Fitzgerald, I knew I had to read it. The narrator's voice didn't always compel; I would have upped the Fitzgerald quotient. But it gave me pleasant pause when I saw some cricket players in Cunningham Park over the weekend.

Roth, Philip. Goodbye, Columbus. New York: Modern Library, 1959.
Beautiful if dated prose. This is what would have happened in The Graduate if Elaine had gone to Harvard. It doesn't get much better than finishing this book in the cool basement of the Barker Center, then walking out into a soft humid night in the Yard.

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
I read this on the high recommendation of a friend, and wondered why I hadn't read it in a seminar I took on Romanticism a few years ago. Wait, I think that was because I was struggling through Kant. They would have gone together well, though. I love a good theorization of the sublime, along with some incidental miasma, occidentalism, and monstrosity.

If I Could Tell You

2008-04-16T12:41:00.000-07:00

Last night I was reading Think Denk, blog of pianist Jeremy Denk. JD mentioned a piece he had written for Adaptistration, and I zoomed right over, across the world wide web, to read it. One can never think enough denk. (By the way, I wish my last name could make a blog title-worthy bilingual wordplay.)

Here is the concluding paragraph of the essay, which is extremely articulate about live performance, the classical concert, and the "weird mixture of waste and intention" which is art.

"Falstaff suggests that performance is a chance to unmask ourselves. Immersed in the stress of our lives, like a bottle, we are not always willing to let the air in. But this amazing music has a way of sneaking around your defenses, of tricking you…As if…indulge me for a moment…you were in your house, on a summer evening, on the top floor, concentrating, and it (the music) sneaks in the backdoor and begins to creep around the ground floor; safe in your room, you hear its creaking on your floorboards, along with the sound of crickets. And you wonder, is this sound a burglar or is it my long-lost lover? There is only one way to find out."

There is only one way to find out. In the summer of 2002, I wasn't in my house. I was in the library of the American Academy in Rome late on a hot afternoon. My mind wandered further and further from the book in front of me, because strains of the Goldberg Variations kept coming across the lawn. I had just entered a Goldberg phase (read: Glenn Gould fixation) and so the kosmos was definitely sending me a message. I had to find out who was playing.

So I walk across the lawn and knock on the door of this pastoral practice room, imagining a perfect romantic-comedic moment. The pianist has his shirt off and is obviously surprised to have anyone come knocking. As I try to put words into the situation ("I'm working on Goldbergs, too"), the moment becomes, um, awkward. Partly this is because I'm 19 and he's an established composer. But mainly it's awkward because I interrupted this process, this practicing—this intensely private work of making a particular sound happen. Is this sound a burglar, or is it my long-lost (or cosmically predestined) lover? Thinking about this incident produces, now, a not unpleasant fusion of embarrassment and nostalgia. But I should have known before knocking on the door: sharing a soundscape was intimate enough. Talking ruined it.

A year later, I was in Goodspeed Hall fiddling around with Bach's Toccata in E minor. Someone knocks on the door and comes in to tell me how much she loves this piece, she's so happy to hear it, she played it in high school, something something something. It's a little weird. One of my favorite things about Goodspeed is the way it creates community—there aren't too many rooms, and each of the doors has a window. If you're there often, you see people, run into people, get to know what they're working on. And yet I don't know what to say to this girl. Thanks or I'm glad you like it or some similar would be gracious. I can't remember what I actually said, just that I felt a combination of pleased and inadequate and taken aback. Would I have come in if I'd been in her place? I don't know. Probably. When should we say something? When should we just listen?

So. Not so long ago, maybe last week, I'm reading JD's description in Think Denk of almost crying in the middle of performing Charles Ives's "Concord" Sonata. Writing about that moment—well, there is something undeniably romantic about it, Denk, and I want to tell you so. Again the question: when does a soundscape in common, or a piece of prose, ask us to talk back? How can we know what will be awkward interruption, and what will be something else? Will I knock on the door and break in on the writerly equivalent of Established Composer X practicing the Goldberg Variations? But: "At the concert that evening...a very childish thing happened: my lip began to quiver, as though I were about to cry. Even while playing I had to confront this, this possibility of life cracking open, and raining on the illusion of the stage." You can't write this and not have me fall a tiny bit in love with you.

Luckily, it isn't just performed music, or performed writing, that can sneak up on us—that can cause us to take the risk of speaking, the risk of misspeaking, or the risk of falling in love. I've felt troubled lately by the lack of playing and listening in my life: one day I stopped taking piano lessons and suddenly my CDs were turning into furniture. But two days ago, for whatever (subconscious) reason, I decided to listen to Yevgeny Kissin playing the Bach-Busoni Chaconne.

I used to think the world of this piece, and then it started seeming totally excessive; at this point, I'm midway between those two reactions. But as I stood in my apartment, I was caught up by the shift between D minor and D major, which comes about a third of the way through the piece. The shift is so clear, so self-aware: it is surprising and simple and beautiful (or, as Busoni puts it in the score, quasi tromboni). The progression that follows is also straightforward: with good, traditional voice-leading, and using standard tropes for creating (Western) musical tension, the music here always seems to "want" to come back to D major. In the following pages, it builds and builds and becomes very Busonian and octave-rich and notey—you didn't think it was possible to emphasize D major any more, and it is. But all that power, all that sonority, all that joy just barely contained by the framework of key signature, comes from a single moment, a single change, so many pages ago. Now I'm the one almost crying.

Later that afternoon, I found myself listening to "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" as I walked to campus. The first part of the song varies and repeats, varies and repeats: kind of minimalist, but more sexy, less zen. Where is this going? you wonder. How will this tension be released? And then, at 4'26", John Lennon articulates the definitive Beatles affirmation: ye—ea—ah. It takes four long, incredible seconds. In the catalog of Beatles songs, the transformation of this single word is amazing: it goes from from backup lyric to expression of raw power, and by the time John's voice is breaking on it in "I Want You," the song can barely hold it in. And (I realized as I walked along Oxford Street) this is the experience of Busoni's D major, too: something on the verge of breaking, of being too much—and yes indeed actually being too much—but having a framework at the same time. Excess and structure; hyperbole and moderatio; explosion and constraint at once.

Maybe that's music. Maybe that's why we listen.

Now if I just had someone to tell.

Are You a Musician?

2008-03-16T22:02:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday up at Columbia, two congenial young men sat next to me at the Argento Chamber Ensemble's concert at the Italian Academy. We had heard an intermission interview between Argento's director and Helmut Lachenmann, the composer whose work the group was performing; and we had just heard Lachenmann's Dal Niente, a piece of "pointillist texture" which "explores the different ways in which the clarinet can produce sound." (I'm quoting the program notes here.) When Dal Niente ended, as we waited in the half-light, I was scrawling on the program with a pencil, "sound versus sound effect."

I've already spoken several times to the guys next to me and now one of them asks me what I'm writing. I definitely come off sounding very brilliant. "Oh...just...what the music makes me think about." Hoping that an example can have at least a tiny chance of salvaging (socially) this response, I epexegetically add, "Like right now I was thinking about the difference between sound and sound effect." "Are you a musician?" he asks.

Not an easy question. Say yes and I flash back to a highschool musical rehearsal when I was ashamed in front of everyone because I was supposed to be playing the piano and couldn't because I hadn't looked at my part until right then and I couldn't count and didn't follow and couldn't sightread and the conductor stopped the whole orchestra to call attention to this wretched combination of facts. Say yes and I flash back to my very ordinary performance in the one music theory course I took in college. Say yes when I can't analyze chord progressions or read figured bass or take rhythmic dictation or talk about scale degrees or the Neapolitan to save my life, say yes when I've barely touched the piano in the past four years, say yes when I don't miss practicing, and even when practicing was a daily activity the piano was still a frequent object of narcissistic projections and overblown fantasies? Am I a musician? Hell no I'm not I'm not I'm not (sorry, James Frey style took over for a minute).

But say no when I can't hear the piano without hearing specific pitch, say no when I hear music alluding to other music, say no when I am reading (with a student) so many words about music (Adorno, Dahlhaus, Kerman, Said, others), say no when for a time a recreational pianist was who I was, say no when I have been taught how to listen, how to play, how to do this? Am I a musician? I don't know, I wish so, I guess so.

On Wednesday before going to New York, I stood in a professor's office, telling him about an idea I had had for a dissertation chapter. "That sounds like something somebody would want to publish," he said, with seeming enthusiasm. But: "The thing will be to read enough to convince yourself that you can speak with authority about it." Going away and letting that remark seep in, I wonder why I didn't say, "Isn't that what I'm supposed to do with every chapter I write?" And then I wondered, What do you mean, convince myself: does that mean that a confident and passionate and articulate interpretation would still look like a façade to you, just because I hadn't read enough?" And finally I wonder—and here's where the questions of literary criticism and musicianship coincide:

Why can't it ever be enough just to love—and that also means live—it?

mezz & street

2008-01-07T10:39:00.000-08:00

Back on the East Coast, two more phone portraits. Again immobile, these phones, and a simultaneous rushing and abandonning happens around both. But they hold a different nostalgia from the West Coast pay phone lodged in suburbia, non?

Also, does the word mezz occur anywhere else inside the network of New York City subway signs? By combing the helvetica lexicon of the MTA, my work addresses this crucial question, one sadly neglected by the city's transportation historians and subway sign literary critics.

Signage in SoCal

2008-01-01T11:38:00.000-08:00

Some texts from my recent journeys through the LA landscape.

In the underground parking structure of the Getty Museum, a floating light box, glowing imperative and flat statement of fact, a fat haiku:

From the parking lot of a commercial strip in Yorba Linda, unabashed tackiness, hot pink (perhaps suggestive of a cuticle) on baby blue...

And on the edge of an Asian strip mall in Rowland Heights, this announcement, which picks up some nostalgic quality in the cell age, for a Mobil but immobile phone:

Dare I say quarter-life crisis?

2007-12-17T21:58:00.000-08:00

At the beginning of one of my favorite books, Virginia Euwer Wolff's The Mozart Season (New York: Henry Holt, 1991), a young violinist named Allegra has the following visceral response to a photograph of the Juilliard Quartet she sees in her teacher's studio at the end of a lesson.

"While I was putting my violin away, I saw on Mr. Kaplan's desk a photograph of a string quartet I hadn't seen before. It had the most gorgeous guy holding a violin, with messy curly hair and an incredibly handsome roundish face, sort of smiling.

'Who's this?' I asked.
'That's the Juilliard Quartet. You must hear them in person someday.'
'I mean who's this?' I pointed to the gorgeous one.
'Oh. That's Joel Smirnoff. Their second violinist. Excellent musician.'

Instant crush. Lightning love. Allegra and Joel. Joel and Allegra. Duets."

--------------

Why am I thinking about this passage? The other day, I happened to rent a DVD of 24. (I know, people have Netflix now, but I still maintain this nostalgic consumer behavior of actually walking to a store.) Anyway this 24 is a TV show apparently a lot of people like. And it stars one Kiefer Sutherland, playing a rebellious and often violent yet admirably stalwart and sensitive counter-terrorism agent named Jack Bauer. And I guess some people are apprehensive about the show's politics, and others are upset that the new season will be disturbed by the current writer's strike, but none of those things matters for the moment. Because suddenly I was completely consumed by this protagonist. Instant crush. Lightning love. ALR and Kiefer. Kiefer and ALR.

What the hell is wrong with me? My brain turns to mush, my scholarly motivation drops to zero, and all I want to do is sit at home and watch anything, everything, this actor ever did? What am I, 13? How can I forget that this is a premeditation of the pleasure industry, not a spontaneous encounter with real-life potential? Jesus, how has it come to this?

Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

In other news, I still want pink hair. Maybe that will help.

functional piano

2007-11-28T09:31:00.000-08:00

On a flyer spotted in Lamont Library:

PIANO LESSONS

Learn to:
Enhance your expressiveness and tone
Optimize your learning speed
Play effortlessly without fatigue

The website to which this flyer points its readers, functionalpiano.com, assures: "Functional Piano Training lets you...experience music the way it should be experienced—as a life-enriching adventure that outperforms any pleasure you can buy by allowing your core creativity to manifest itself."

What a method! What a promise! (What a lark! What a plunge!) By being a functionally trained pianist, I can outperform performance, I can transcend the ordinary practice aesthetic voided by commodity fetishism ("any pleasure you can buy"), instead dwelling solely in the estranged expression-object, the hand itself, the manus in manifest, which, apparently, is the "core" of creativity.

Play effortlessly without fatigue! Ah, Yevgeny, this master has absolutely nothing to say to your description of public performance: "I give a lot. In fact, I give everything I have at that particular moment, during my concert." Now you don't have to give: how free, how expressive, we can be when playing is replaced with player function. Viva Foucault!

It is past midnight in New York a Friday

2007-11-22T22:01:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving was home plus guests this year and we cooked up a storm. After dinner we drive people home, Manhattan at night through some overpass fence looking like a flipbook of skyline as we zoom back via the Cross-Bronx.

Snapshot

2007-04-24T13:33:00.000-07:00

Last week, leaving the vigil in Memorial Church for the Virginia Tech students and faculty, I see two undergraduates sitting next to each other in a pew. In the muted glow of their candles, I see these two Harvard sweatshirts, these two boys' bent heads. In the moment of this vision, I silently ask forgiveness for all I have ever said or thought about college students' sense of entitlement. The paper had run a photo of Virginia Tech students behind glass, waiting: sweatshirts, jeans. This is also a snapshot: youth, vulnerability, grief. I feel old. They shift, I move; it's gone.

The things you hear

2007-02-07T06:38:00.000-08:00

One line of a cell phone conversation overheard
on the Columbia campus last week:
Guy: "Maybe I should just try to be less arrogant."

A snatch picked up walking through the Yard yesterday:
Girl (talking to anoher girl): "I hate the subjunctive."

This American Life

2006-12-09T17:26:00.000-08:00

Starbucks is my comfort food. I go there because I am fascinated by the rows and rows of perfectly traingular brownies and cold square slabs of pumpkin loaf, which I sometimes allow myself to have. In Starbucks, complete conformity is simultaneous with immense freedom of choice: the American dream. When you specialize your drink, as I did today by ordering an "extra hot hot chocolate" (redundant, but not a chiasmus), you know that so many other twenty-something Cantabridgians have specialized it in this exact same way that the phrase "extra hot hot chocolate" comes professionally, nonchalantly, but still somehow agitatedly, off the tongue of the red-and-green-clad, feverish, glassy-eyed, and also twenty-something barista. Oh man. I love it.

Something tipped the balance today, though. As I sit at the bar drinking my EHHC, I start to hear in the background a sugared, holidaze-lite soprano singing John Lennon's "Happy Xmas (War is Over)." "And so this is Christmas; and what have we done; another year over; a new one just begun." And so this is Christmas: a day after the 26th anniversary of Lennon's assassination, someone is asking in a Starbucksified, mellifluously mass-reproduced voice: "What have we done?" John, if only you could hear yourself now, hear America getting that question canned, a cover, in the no-consequences, no-weight version. War is over if you want it: but order another venti no-whip decaf peppermint mocha, baby, because it'll probably be another decade before the US is out of Iraq.

Maybe there's a redemptive side of this Starbucks anecdote. A woman I recognize as an employee is sitting in the shop, too, and a fellow baristo asks her this question from across the counter. "If you ever have children, do you think you'll do it the traditional way, or try something else?" She doesn't seem fazed. "I don't know," she says. "Maybe I'll try something else, but only if I don't find the right person."" That's the end; he goes back to doing something else. Two baristi, and a two-minute conversation about having kids.

As I leave, I see someone just starting the NY Times crossword, someone who has clearly blocked off this time for the pure pleasure of the Saturday puzzle (which is too hard for me). Coffee, crossword: I can almost (almost) forget the "Happy Xmas" cover.

And so this is Christmas.

Quite Frankly

2006-12-05T13:09:00.000-08:00

"Quite frankly": a phrase which has come to my attention recently. When used in correspondence, it means: "I am about to be overtly rude, and there is nothing you can do about it."

Please be careful when you email. Please be polite. Or, if you intend to be agitated, do not try to mask your upset with politeness. Some tell me I read too many nuances into language, but learn this: words carry weight.

An Open Letter to Yvgeny Kissin

2006-09-19T20:08:00.000-07:00

What are you up to now, Yvgeny Kissin? It's a rainy humid night in Cambridge and I just listened to that recording of you playing Chopin's 3rd piano sonata live at Carnegie hall. It's the perfect weather for the 3rd movement. I love how you play it. You must get that a lot, but it's true, I do. God. It really is gorgeous.

Walter Benjamin would probably have something to say about a live recording (that is, just another recording) inspiring me to write this letter. Or, like, making me want to practice again. Deep down I know that's completely ridiculous. I won't ever get the sound out of the instrument you do. I wasn't even there when this Chopin recording was made, although now I know some guy yelled "Bravo." And I have been to a performance in Carnegie hall since my friend gave me the recording. That was when I was sixteen. One is particularly susceptible to Chopin at that age.

Anyway, I'm sure we've both come a long way since the last time we saw each other, which was in Chicago, 2004, I think. I haven't seen your name around recently, but I know you must still be doing great work. As for me, I stopped playing for a while so I could read some books. Suddenly that's not seeming like such a good exchange. But maybe if I listen to you some more, I'll go back to it.

Keep on carrying on, Yvgeny, and maybe we'll see each other on the street in New York sometime.

Yours ever,
ALR

Pre/Post

2006-09-10T14:53:00.000-07:00

In the past week, it's been impossible to escape a weird, anticipatory 9/11 grief. It is everywhere: public and commercial radio, the papers, TV. As if we could preemptively remember, preemptively commemorate, and thus lessen (maybe even avoid) the painful meditation which can only occur on the anniversary itself.

For me this has been coupled with another kind of preparatory anxiety: a foreknowledge that, because 11 September is the date of my departmental exams, it will inevitably become a date, now, of celebration. (I hope.) I have been anticipating the end of these exams for weeks now. But just as no amount of pre-post-9/11 commemoration can stand in for the actual calendar anniversary, no pre-post-exam anxiety can stand in for the event and its passing.

And because I have been reading New York cityscapes all summer, I often think about the New York I know: the twin towerless one. My love for the city emerged after the Trade Center was gone. My view from work on the 15th floor of an office at 5th Ave and 12th Street had the tiptop of the Williamsburg Bridge in it (and, looking north, the Empire State Building) but never the towers, and when I saw the hole in 2002, I couldn't mourn for what I didn't remember. Knowing New York now, though, often I feel I should remember, should have seen, should have known: and so reading city texts becomes retrojective. If exam anxiety, anniversary anxiety, is pre-post, this kind of reading is post-pre: looking for the before from the standpoint of after.

The preemptive 9/11 anniversary segments, today's manufactured tearjerk manoeuvers for tomorrow: they get to me; they work. This morning during breakfast, I was listening to a radio station which was running a program called "Acoustic Sunrise." And this acoustic sunrise featured songs that were in some superficial way evocative of heroism and Americanness and solidarity and triumph in the face of adversity. And as the lead member of Coldplay was singing, acoustically, about how lights would guide me home, and how he would try to fix me, I started thinking about about the 1-year anniversary of 9/11, when maybe something was still raw and we hadn't completely channeled our nationalism into soundbites and acoustic sunrises. My parents' next-door-neighbor in England came over that night and hugged us and gave us flowers and she knew I hated flying and had to fly back to school that week and that it was hard. That was it, that was everything, a neighbor, a hug, a flower, that was 9/11's paper anniversary, and it meant more to me than anything I've heard or seen this week, and that memory came back: came back during a maudlin Coldplay song, which I recognized from equally and intentionally maudlin previews of Oliver Stone's World Trade Center film, a song on a radio show whose host wanted me to rush out and buy some kind of double freedom album. It came back.

And Walt Whitman, whom I may see tomorrow on my exam, becomes, then, my only response today:

"Ah, what can ever be more stately and admirable to me than mast-hemm'd Manhattan?"

Like A Complete Unknown

2006-09-06T07:05:00.000-07:00

It's 9:30 in the morning, and I'm on my way to the library. There's already a guitarist in front of the Au Bon Pain on Mass Ave; he is doing a cover of Bob Dylan's "Like A Rolling Stone." Ah. Just the thing to start the day. Then there is the sound of a phone. Hum, is that me? No: it is the busker! Like this:

"As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes
And ask him, do you want to make a deeeeeeeeeeeal....

How does it—oh, excuse me while I take this call—
how does it feeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeel...."

One Who Is Both

2006-08-29T19:05:00.000-07:00

"Some poets are great beginners. Others are great enders. Rarely do you find one who is both."

—R. A. Strier

Sailing to Byzantium

I

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees,
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish flesh or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten born and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unaging intellect.

II

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

III

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

IV

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

—W. B. Yeats

incipit lamentatio

2006-08-27T19:25:00.000-07:00

Listening to Schubert's "Die Frühling" and then Stephen Paulus's "Pligrim's Hymn" and then Eric Whitacre's "Lux Aurumque," back to back to back, on my iPod, I start to think I did it just to make myself cry. Something clicked: I miss being a pianist. And soemthing else is missing, too: the something those two choral pieces always bring back. Rockefeller Chapel in the dark and the cold and the winter, dark at five mid-Advent and a two days' space of reading. These things, whatever they are (some mix of music, faith, Chicago): where did I lose you?

As I listen all this starts spinning and all gets all mixed up with love and then I think John Lennon's dead and Frank O'Hara's dead and I think about Iraq and long-range nuclear weapons and terrorism in the London subway and an NPR documentary I just heard on post-Katrina Biloxi and wonder how I can possibly sit here feeling sorry for myself (which is to say celebrating myself and singing myself) when: well: just look.

The Urban Landscape is a Collage

2006-08-11T11:15:00.000-07:00

"They came out on deck into a dazzling September afternoon. The water was greenindigo. A steady wind kept sweeping coils of brown smoke and blobs of whitecotton steam off the high enormous blueindigo arch of sky. Against a sootsmudged horizon, tangled with barges, steamers, chimneys of powerplants, covered wharves, bridges, lower New York was a pink and white tapering pyramid cut slenderly out of cardboard."

--John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer (New York: Mariner, 2000), 235.

Painful Metropolitan BQE Sublime

2006-07-12T15:58:00.000-07:00

It is stop-and-go traffic from the Williamsburg Bridge until Darien, CT yesterday, a slow departure from Manhattan. From the highway, I see the skyline, a paper cutout against a smoggy background of pink-yellowy grey. Taking the Q46 across Queens, switching from the V to the 6, stopping for coffee, finally walking sweaty up Canal street; then these views, a drawn-out panorama: all remind: I don't live here, I don't live here, I don't live here. Two years after deciding not to come to this city; two years living elsewhere; two years' worth of weekends and breaks and summers spent here. Maybe that time, in which so many ordinary memories have accumulated, is the reason: that even now, still, it hurts to leave.

Two Recent Dialogues

2006-06-22T11:55:00.000-07:00

Dialogue 1:

I call the bank this morning to say I will be travelling overseas next week, and to make sure that my ATM card will work there. In my quest to escape the automated voice system, I keep staying on the line and pressing the number for "other options." Right before I talked to a human being, this happened:

AUTOMATED VOICE (male, smooth, insincere): In order for us to serve you better, please enter the last four digits of your social security number.

(There is a pause while I stare into space, surprised at having to recall this information.) Right before I enter the number:

AUTOMATED VOICE (with the same smoothness, which now becomes incredibly creepy): Go ahead.

Dialogue 2:

While browsing in the Harvard Coop, I overhear this conversation between a mother and her daughter. The daughter is a teenager with several friends in tow.

GIRL shows Harvard T-shirt to MOM with look that says "Hey, Mom, can I have this?"

MOM: It'll be a really nice shirt until you get that rejection letter in the mail, and then you'll never want to wear it again.

Made With Not From Concentrate

2006-05-29T10:49:00.000-07:00

I told myself I was going to eat better when the semester ended. The pressure of writing three seminar papers in two weeks was a great excuse to have takeout and au bon pain and starbucks all the time. Depressed about writing? Have some junk food. Emotional eating: the American way.

It has turned to summer, though, so even when I'm at the supermarket (buying cereal, canned fruit, and ritz crackers: this must be at least one step up from takeout), I am tempted by ice cream and lemonade.

I refrain from the ice cream, thinking of Tom Wolfe's description in The Bonfire of the Vanities of "that manner of women who is neither very young nor very old, who has laid in a lining of subcutaneous fat." But lemonade, unlike ice cream, is not directly responsible for such a lining. Especially when mixed with water.

Today when I pour myself a glass, I notice the label. Tropicana Pure Premium: made with not from concentrate.

Slogans don't need correct grammar to be effective: "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should"; "Metra: the way to really fly." Still, this is astonishing. Does it mean "Made with [a] not-from-concentrate [substance]"? (In which case, "Fresh!" or "Not made from concentrate!" or "Made with real lemons!" would be more direct.) Or maybe: "Made with, not from, concentrate?" This seems unduly subtle.

Shaw's, place of syntactic enigmas.

Attention Library Patrons

2006-05-11T14:29:00.000-07:00

Yes, it's so cute that you and your boyfriend are studying for finals together. I was an undergraduate once so of course I love to reminisce when I see you two exchange a little endearing little nuzzle before he leaves to go check his email in the other room and you pretend to be working on that paper but are really facebooking other people in the reading room. And yes I love to see you holding hands across your chairs and saying loud whispery joking reassuring things to each other while you fortify yourselves with red bull in preparation for the impending doom of exam week at this weird little elite academic zoo.

But please, quit kissing when the temperature in the reading room is already like a million degrees and even when I'm listening to my music through these really nice headphones, which I can only use in the library and are way better than my faux ear buds, I can't concentrate on what I'm trying to say about Virginia Woolf and oh God this paper is terrible and I still have six more pages to write and nine more pages of that other paper so please stop kissing please.

Blue and Pearls

2006-05-05T23:53:00.000-07:00

"Since it was a very hot night and the paper boys went by with placards proclaiming in huge red letters that there was a heat-wave, wicker chairs were placed on the hotel steps and there, sipping, smoking, detached gentlemen sat. Peter Walsh sat there. One might fancy that day, the London day, was just beginning. Like a woman who had slipped off her print dress and white apron to array herself in blue and pearls, the day changed, put off stuff, took gauze, changed to evening, and with the same sigh of exhilaration that a woman breathes, tumbling petticoats on the floor, it too shed dust, heat, colour; the traffic thinned; motor cars, tinkling, darting, succeeded the lumber of vans; and here and there among the thick foliage of the squares an intense light hung. I resign, the evening seemed to say, as it paled and faded above the battlements and prominences, moulded, pointed, of hotel, flat, and block of shops, I fade, she was beginning, I disappear, but London would have none of it, and rushed her bayonets into the sky, pinioned her, constrained her to partnership in her revelry."

—Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

In the past week or so, this passage has singlehandedly turned me from a morning person into a night person. A dusk person.

Cambridge in May, as in December, is writing season, but the writing is different. Now it takes place on gorgeous, warm nights. It takes place with the knowledge that the year is ending, must end; it takes place among memories of past writing, among memories of past Mays.

What I Remember

2006-04-23T13:12:00.000-07:00

When I was in elementary school, my parents still slept in the same room and would wake up every morning to NPR. Their clock radio was brown and boxy and was on my dad's side of the bed.

And one morning after waking up I went in and the radio was on and our fat brown cat was on the bed, too, and my mom was crying and both my parents were listening to the radio which was saying the Berlin Wall had come down.

And now I am reading about the Wiedervereinigung in a text for class; in the novel a couple is watching the unification on television; and I remember this, remember remembering that it must be something important: the bed and the boxy radio with its staticky voices and the cat called Cocoa and my mom crying in 1989.

Recent Reading List

2006-03-10T07:13:00.000-08:00

Reading of the past week or so: all highly recommended (unless you're looking for romantic comedy, in which case do not read any of these).

Coetzee, J. M. Disgrace. New York: Penguin, 1999.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes From Underground. Tr. Mirra Ginsburg. New York: Bantam Classics, mass market edition, 2005.

Ishiguro, Kazuo. A Pale View of Hills. New York: Putnam, 1982.

Kafka, Franz. Amerika. New York: Schocken Books Inc., 1946.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Harcourt, 1925.

Speak, Subconscious

2006-02-26T11:24:00.000-08:00

The following is a recollection of what I dreamt last night. There are so many elements begging for amateurish psychoanalysis...but I'll just provide a skeletal narrative and leave the commentary up to you.

I dreamt I was taking a course on the works of Vladimir Nabokov, taught by the author.

It was the first day of the semester, and I realized I didn’t know where the class would meet. It was only 10 minutes before class was supposed to start, but thinking quickly, I went to the "my.harvard.edu" portal so that I could find the link to course schedules and room listings.

Instead of finding a room number, I found a photograph of the classroom, which I immdiately recognized as Fulton Recital Hall. The fact that this space is in Goodspeed Hall, the music building at the University of Chicago, didn't really seem out of the ordinary. I was just happy to know where to go.

I headed to Goodspeed and got in the elevator. In my dream as in real life, the elevator was incredibly slow. It kept wavering between the third and fourth floors. I got so sick of this that I finally just jumped out.

As students came into class, Nabokov was handing out what looked like a questionnaire or quiz. I sat down and looked at the single sheet. On the front, it asked for name, concentration, and email. Under that, it asked:

“Are you currently in a relationship?”

Then it said:

Date of end of your last relationship:________________________.

Without writing anything, I turned the sheet over. There was a series of quotations, each of which came from a work by Nabokov. We were supposed to write down the source of each one. Wow, this guy is pretty arrogant, I thought. Then there were some multiple-choice vocabulary questions.

But before I could strategically work out the answers to any of these items, Nabokov was asking us to turn in the papers. I hadn’t finished yet, so I turned around and said to Mrs. Nabokov, who was sitting in the back of Fulton, “Maybe we can just keep working on this during class.”

FINIS.

Happy New Year

2006-01-01T19:09:00.000-08:00

Several years ago, I read an article in the New York Times that said that whatever you did on New Year's Day was a prediction of what you would do throughout the coming year.

If that is indeed the case, here's how I'll spend 2006:

1. Freaking out about finishing papers that absolutely have to get done.

2. Wondering why going to church is worth it.

3. Taking pleasant long walks with Kimmy.

4. Watching brilliant movies that I've seen already (because other people need to see them, too).

5. Eating baked goods despite resolutions to eat healthier.
5.a. Eating Chinese food, because I can't cook.

a few words

2005-12-07T09:07:00.000-08:00

I like Cambridge in the snow, when it is Advent season; music season; writing season; memory season.

Imagine: Redux

2005-10-03T21:57:00.000-07:00

Strawberry Fields, urban microcosm, site of spontaneous polyphony. Every time I’m there, a little one-act drama unfolds.

This time it’s Saturday, a beautiful October afternoon. A silver-haired man in a Beatles t-shirt is playing Yellow Submarine. (Sparse clapping for this.) At first he’s all nervous and earnest, but then he breaks into the end medley from Abbey Road and really starts to jam.

Opposite the dapper guitarist is a guy who looks like he’s been around life in the park for a long time. He’s listening to the radio, giving a running commentary to whoever. He sells roses for the Lennon pilgrims to put on the mosaic; today, one pilgrim has also offered an apple. Next to it, another has placed a cigarette.

Radio Guy gets up and takes the cigarette. “Anybody got a light?” Yes, a twenty-something bachelor type. A smooching couple also offer. Radio Guy has already gotten the light from Slick Bachelor, but smoochy couple give him their lighter for keeps. He gives them one of his roses in return: “Hey, man, it’s all about peace.”

Enter overweight man on cell phone. He sits down and asks his invisible conversation partner whether the Yankees won. Radio Guy answers instead. “We won, my brother.” Cell Phone Man has to confirm.

The dapper guitarist goes over to chat with Radio Guy. In the meantime another guitarist enters the circle and starts covering the Lennon solo career: Watching The Wheels, Jealous Guy. Then he does some Beatles crowd-pleasers: Let It Be and Eight Days A Week, during which another friend of Radio Guy comes over to schmooze.

To me as he walks past: “You know he’s lying, right? There’s only seven days in a week.”

I Know What I Read This Summer

2005-09-07T13:41:00.000-07:00

ALR's summer reading list of completed, finished, published books...there were lots more in manuscript form.

Albert, John. Wrecking Crew. New York: Scribner, 2005.

Baer, Will Christopher. Kiss Me, Judas. San Fransisco: MacAdam/Cage, 2004.

Brookmyre, Christopher. All Fun And Games Until Somebody Loses An Eye. London: Little, Brown 2005.

Coyne, Tom. A Gentleman’s Game. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2001.

Hosseini, Khaled. The Kite Runner. New York: Riverhead Books, 2003.

Moore, Judith. Fat Girl. New York: Hudson Street Press, 2005.

Nersesian, Arthur. Chinese Takeout. New York: Perennial, 2003.

Picoult, Jodi. My Sister’s Keeper. New York: Atria Books, 2004.

Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince. New York: Arthur A. Levine (Scholastic imprint), 2005.

Segal, Eric. Love Story. New York: New American Library, 1970.

Tartt, Donna. The Little Friend. New York: Knopf, 2002.

Theroux, Paul. Chicago Loop. New York: Random House, 1990.

Thomas, Scarlett. Going Out. London: Fourth Estate, 2002.

------. PopCo. London: Fourth Estate, 2004.

Wolfe, Tom. I Am Charlotte Simmons. New York: Picador, 2005.

Writer's Note on "Imagine"

2005-08-12T18:38:00.000-07:00

A poem from this week.

I wanted to preserve the original line breaks here, so please excuse the overlapping texts...eventually the blog will work its way down the page and will no longer go over the stuff on the side.

--ALR

Imagine

2005-08-12T17:32:00.000-07:00

Eight ten, strawberry fields, the park,
a little matins meditation

already all wrong because there are these barricades
around the word IMAGINE and also caution tape
and signs from the park conservation commission,
“No Vehicular Traffic,”

and then a park drunk retches a couple times on the grass
and some guy from conservation comes to fix the caution tape
and pick up the love letters and flowers etcetera, stoically, with trash clippers,
and frankly it’s enough reality for one morning so I slip into the C at seventy-second—

cool tube where anyone, bum or beatle, could walk in.

Blogging for Peace

2005-08-07T19:14:00.000-07:00

Here’s why I decided not to try to get last-minute tickets to the Eminem concert at Madison Square Garden tomorrow:

I saw a musical about John Lennon.

“Lennon,” which previewed for three weeks or so and opened on August 4 on Broadway, has a couple of problems. One, with its nine-person cast (everyone plays all roles), it sometimes verges on the overly-musical-theaterish. Also, it takes some of the music out of context: a song John wrote to Julia Lennon (“Mother”), who died when he was a teenager, is presented at the point of her death in the chronological narrative, when in fact the song was written long after Julia’s actual death. And sometimes the fake Liverpool accents just sounded—well—off.

But the Beatle fan(atic) in me wanted to see this. And the John Lennon admirer in me also wanted to see it. Neither of us was disappointed.

When the end came, a policeman—alone onstage—described how he had arrived at the Dakota after John had been shot, how he had been stunned, how he could barely follow protocol. “When somebody gets shot or wounded, we’re supposed to ask them some simple questions, like ‘What’s your name?,’ or ‘Who’s the president?’ So I asked him, ‘Do you know who you are?’ And he said, ‘Yeah.’ So I guess his last words—last word—was ‘Yeah.’”

Nobody in that theater moved. Nobody breathed.

After the bows, the company started a reprise of “Give Peace A Chance.” We joined in, clapping and singing: “All we are saying is give peace a chance.” Again: “All we are saying [here someone from the cast called, ‘Now say it like you mean it!’] is give peace a chance.”

Each of us was about to step out of the theater into a New York City John Lennon never knew. Into a fucked-up post-9/11 America, in which the Sunday Times headline story would describe how sixteen men from a single Marine unit in Columbus, OH, had all been killed in Iraq. And here we were together, sharing a moment, sharing a song. Decades after John wrote it, and the words came out louder and clearer. Give peace a chance.

So, on Sunday night, I was still trying to decide whether I wanted to see Eminem. Tickets are definitely still available, and they range from $70 to $400. There are tons of postings on Craig’s List: “Eminem Tix!!!” etc. No shortage there.

As my boyfriend, my close friends, and my parents all know, I experienced an Eminem revolution this year. When I, ever several years behind in terms of pop culture, first listened to The Marshall Mathers LP, here’s what I thought: Wow! Eminem is a clever wordsmith! He plays with identity…he plays with notions of authorship…I think I like this!

As I sat surfing Craig’s List postings and wondering whether I really wanted to get in on the so-called Anger Management Tour, my thoughts presented themselves in multiple-choice format.

Why do I want to go to the Eminem concert?
a) I love his music
b) I don’t like all of his music, but I want to see him live in concert anyway
c) I want to go to a show at Madison Square Garden and tell my friends about it
d) I want to go to a show at Madison Square Garden, buy an Eminem T-shirt, and proudly wear it to work the next day so that people will start conversations with me.

I decided that, while I was incapable of picking a single answer from these choices, my answer was dangerously close to (d).

And I kept coming back to “Give Peace a Chance,” to that moment in the Broadhurst Theater. Sure, the John Lennon who played with the double syntax of the word “please” in “Please Please Me” might appreciate the Eminem who perfect-rhymed “cantelope” with “can’t elope” in “The Real Slim Shady.” But:

"You are now allowed to remain violent...
Get in your car, start drivin'
Over the island and cause a 42-car pileup." ("Drug Ballad")

“What ever happened to wylin’ out and being violent?” ("Marshall Mathers")

“If it’s not a rapper that I make it as
I’ma be a fuckin’ rapist in a Jason mask.” ("Criminal")

Christ. Did I really just ignore this stuff?

Sorry, Marshall. I can’t make it to your show Monday. I’m still thinking about John Lennon, whom I liked way before I heard you. And who, unlike you, sang about peace. And who was an actual victim of violence. Not that you didn’t have a tough life so far, or never experienced violence on the streets of Detroit or anything, but I just can’t support.

And, in an act I hope takes me—even for one millisecond—out of the group of privileged liberals who criticize current policy but don’t really do anything about it, I’m blogging. For John. And for peace.

July 4: Blogged

2005-07-06T20:59:00.000-07:00

This past 4th of July, I found myself compiling a mental list of my recent July 4's.

2000: I am an exchange student in St. Etienne, France. The 4th brings partying at the house of an American friend's host family. Some small-scale fireworks. By 10 PM, the disco party is going full force in the basement; I'm being a wallflower and watching French teenagers shake their booties to Britney Spears and contemporary Euro poptrash equivalents.

2001: In San Fransisco. It is foggy and freezing. I need to learn my Greek verbs for class the next day. Back to Berkeley on BART the next morning.

2002: Outside Rome. In contrast to 2001, it's incredibly hot. After a long day with a lot of site exploring, the director of the American Academy in Rome Classical Summer School buys some local sparkling wine so we can celebrate back at the Centro that night.

2003: Salemi, Sicily. The archeologists of Monte Polizzo are happy to leave their trenches early that day to prepare for the huge party back at the dig house. After eating what passes for a hamburger in the region, I watch Stanford undergrads get sloshed on punch. And I also watch the dig director dance to Michael Jackson's "Black or White."

2004: Chicago, IL. Back with Kimmy for a weekend after graduating from the University of Chicago in June. I don't live in Hyde Park anymore, and this weekend is a pleasure jaunt before we both head into the unknown of long-distance relationships during graduate school, so everything is blurred with this-is-the-last-time sadness. Downtown, I jump in lake Michigan (every U of C grad needs to do it at least once). Then we go to Chinatown for one last meal at Ken Kee's, and see a movie afterwards("Terminal"). On the escalator on the way down from the movie theater, we pass one of my English professors, Oren J. Izenberg, on his way up to a movie. He and I just manage to recognize each other and wave (goodbye).The next day, I'm back on the train to Ann Arbor, studying Chinese characters for Chen Laoshi's class at the University of Michigan the next day.

2005: July 3rd: Kimmy and I are driving home from a party in New Jersey. In the backseat are a couple of slightly hungover Columbia grad students. We drop them off in Manhattan, then take a walk in Battery Park. While we're parking, I take note of a sign in the window of a beat-up looking van in front of us. It's hand-drawn stars and stripes in the shape of a heart. Underneath, it says: "God, Bless America."

I think I like this imperative a lot more than the optative, comma-less "God Bless America."

July 4: Main Street, Flushing, Queens. After a late breakfast/early lunch of dim sum, at which I score quite well on the chopstick technique test, it's time for Kimmy, his mom, his sister and me to get jump-started on the day's main task: shopping for a mattress for Grandma. We visit 4 furniture stores, and each one brings a new little dramatic episode and cell phone calls to various relatives. I love the fact that Kimmy's mom's t-shirt says "Celebrate America."

Then, in HSBC, while Kimmy's mom is withdrawing money from an ATM, Kimmy, Margaret and I are reading a sign on the wall. It takes a whole village: I'm sounding it out in Mandarin, Margaret's doing the same in Cantonese, and Kimmy's correcting both of us. We keep up the Mando-Canto banter even after we've finished with the sign (which says something like "HSBC: Celebrating 28 Years in New York," plus the fine print). Then, as he's walking out, the guy from one ATM over says, in super-native-sounding Mandarin, "Nimen jiang de na me hao." You guys speak so well.

He's white!

(And cute.)

And we run into him again around the corner. He's about to zoom off in his cream-colored Mini Cooper, but he rolls down the window to ask me (still in Chinese, all of this) where I learned to speak. I tell him. He says he grew up in Taiwan. Then he says to Kimmy, "Wow, her accent is so mainland." I say, "Nice car." "Saves gas," he says, and heads off.

"Her accent is so mainland," said in tones of praise to my boyfriend, by a classy guy with sunglasses in a Mini Cooper, just redeemed about a million mintues of suffering and self-doubt during 3rd year Chinese at Harvard.

And at night on Roosevelt Island Kimmy and I watch the firworks over the Manhattan skyline, and everybody around us is happy, kids and adults and everybody speaking all sorts of different languages. I think about the Kantian sublime and the fireworks come up shaped like smiley faces and eventually we get the F train home and it's another 4th of July.

Tall

2005-05-20T06:42:00.000-07:00

Scene: Hamilton's Deli, near Columbia University campus, New York City

Dramatis Personae: Kimmy Szeto, Columbia graduate student; several sets of out-of-town parents visiting for Columbia graduation; deli cashier.

It is the morning of the Columbia University convocation. Kimmy Szeto is in Hamilton's Deli circa 9:30 AM, purchasing sandwich for lunch. Enter gaggle of well-dressed parents. Parents loiter at counter, then approach cashier.

Well-dressed parent: I'd like a coffee, please. Tall.

Deli cashier (confused): Tall?

Well-dressed parent no. 1: Yeah, tall.

Cashier: Sorry?

Parent: You know, TALL.

Cashier (recognizing parent as product of Starbucks hegemony): Oh, you mean regular?

Parent: Yeah, uh, I guess so. [Pronounces word as if for the first time.] Regular.

--As told to the author

I Almost Had One

2005-05-05T10:09:00.000-07:00

I witnessed this scene yesterday from within the impenetrable bubble of my iPod.

Two people, a man and a woman, are asking an older guy for directions in front of the Harvard Square Au Bon Pain. The couple (though I'm not sure if they're a couple: they hug goodbye casually after the incident) looks vaguely European, tastefully well-off. The woman has on a long dress and a leather backpack. The man has a pen and paper to write down the directions.

On the back of this piece of scrap paper is printed in bold block letters:

THE FEMALE ORGASM

Underneath is a quotation:

"When I heard about this, I almost had one!"

Suddenly Harvard Square didn't seem so much like the heart of anonymous globalized capitalism.

Identity Politics

2005-04-28T05:18:00.000-07:00

Or: Some Personal Anecdotes to Counter Harvard's Humiliation Policy of Language Teaching

1. I love someone Chinese.

2. In Yenching Library last week, I stood in the stacks and listened to some Chinese businessmen tell their colleauge (who was white) how good his Chinese was. Then he said that his wife was Chinese, and they all got a big kick out of this. One of them joked that if the guy's wife was Chinese, of course he must like Chinese culture. Heh-heh. I picked up the whole conversation.

3. Chinese words occur to me when I'm trying to speak German.

4. I have a Chinese name.

5. I respond to it.

6. I know how to hold a bowl properly.
6a. I learned this because I was holding it improperly at the dinner table and my dining companions had no qualms about discussing my error amongst themselves, and then pointing it out to me.

7. I can read the cell phone ads ("do you want unlimited free calling?") on Chinese news websites.

8. A few weeks ago, I met with a professor to discuss my little research report for Chinese class. I asked him about the May 4th Movement. He looked surprised: "You know nothing of this?" he asked. Subtext: you, a graduate student, know nothing of the most important Chinese political and cultural movement in the 20th century? What is this University coming to? I imagined what must be going through his head, and Eminem's line (from "Whatever You Say I Am") suggested itself: "I just have not got the patience/to deal with these cocky caucasians..."

(Okay, I'm not sure why I'm including this. Maybe because rather than feeling fazed by this guy's seeming dismay, I preferred to amuse myself by thinking that he was imagining a version of an Eminem lyric.)

9. Reprise of (1). I love someone Chinese.

Squeeze

2005-04-04T07:15:00.000-07:00

The following dialogue is excerpted from the X-Files episode entitled "Squeeze" (Season 1, Episode 3).

Background: FBI Agents Dana Scully and Tom Colton (et al.) are on the trail of Eugene Victor Tooms, whom they believe responsible for a series of unusual homicides. Despite Scully's Bureau partnership with Agent Fox Mulder, Colton has denied Mulder permission to work on the case because of his non-traditional methods and "spooky" theories. Mulder nevertheless arrives at the stakeout site (the parking garage of a high-rise office complex in which one of the murders occurred).

Scully: Mulder, what the hell are you doing here?

Mulder: He's not coming back here. His thrill is derived from the challenge of seemingly impossible entry. He's already beaten this place. If you'd read the X-file on the case, you'd come to the same conclusion.

In fact, Tooms presently emerges from a ventilation duct. This is hardly the conclusion of the episode (or the end of Tooms). But it does cause Mulder to remark to Scully at the end of the scene, "You were right."

I read my recent return to Hyde Park as a (loose) version of this. "Why did you come back?" someone asked, a bit incredulous. Subtext: "You've already beaten this place." True, but I felt compelled to be there.

Ah, the early X-Files episodes.

Cute Campus

2005-04-01T19:26:00.000-08:00

Scene: dinner with parents, Italian restaurant on Michigan Ave, Chicago, IL

Dramatis personae: Waitress, ALR, ALR's mom and dad

Waitress: So, have you eaten here before?
Dad: Yes, actually...quite a number of times.
ALR (explaining): I went to school here.
Waitress: Oh really? What school?
ALR: University of Chicago.
Waitress: The one in Hyde Park?
ALR (a bit taken aback at the notion of U of C as nationwide chain): Yep.
Waitress: Great campus you guys got. It's really cute down there.

The Marshall Mathers Poem

2005-03-23T22:29:00.000-08:00

Why is Slim Shady so compelling?
Maybe I just hit my twenty-something rebellion
so I'm telling you I'm kind of hooked on your slamming
and violent enjambing and cramming and jamming
words together (like cantelope and antelope)
(and there IS no reason a man and another man can't elope)

And it's true that the closest I've ever been
To the hell of that 8 Mile wasteland scene
Is, like, driving to Northville on M-14

But that internal rhyme and that metrical force:
It's more than just coarse
language (which I can use too);
it made me want to write all about you.
The graduate space might not seem like the place
to debate what Maureen Dowd loves to hate
Well fuck that (that's a quote); and I'll quote you again:
Damn, how much damage can you do with a pen?

Talking to the Phone

2005-03-06T20:01:00.000-08:00

I have a new cell phone. Among other ways, I can personalize it by selecting my own banner greeting, the message that appears at the top of the cell phone's screen. And so, as I was discovering all the features of my new phone (which will, in its novelty and its personalizations, make me like everyone else) I agonized about how I wanted to be greeted.

One of my school's mottoes, perhaps. But "Crescat Scientia Vita Excolatur"? Too long and unwieldy. Plus, do I really want to equate talking on the phone with the increase of knowledge? Hmmm. "Veritas"? Too weighted and gloaty, and, as in the previous example, inappropriate to the topos of the phone conversation. Luckily, I soon realized that I couldn't have a banner if I had a digitized clock. The clock digits obscure the text at the top of the screen. So, thank God, I didn't have to spend any more time wondering how to get the line break in Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" to show up correctly. (Although I still think that "The apparation of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough" would be a pretty cool text to put in this setting.)

But by far the most intruiging feature is the speaker phone. I know, landlines have had this feature for ages, but I've never really used it. Now, though, since I regularly spend a chunk of my evening talking to Kimmy, I wanted to know what hands-free option would be best. Earpiece? Speaker phone? Headset? The earpiece that came with the phone was lousy, so I picked option (b).

It was strange. One night last week, I decided to make a cup of tea while talking, so I moved the phone over to the kitchen and set it on a chair. I put the kettle on, and when I replied to something Kimmy said, I felt I had to turn and look at the chair, where the phone was "sitting." I half expected to see Kimmy sitting there. Of course, I found myself adressing the anonymous little mechanism through which a voice--and JUST a voice--had been transmitted. And instead of Kimmy looking at me, the keypad was grinning its glowy blue grin.

When it is not attached to my ear, the receiver becomes a weird technological metonymy for the person on the other end. It's too much for me. I don't want want to talk to the phone, the way I talk to a person; I want to talk on it or into it.

Can you hear me now?

Reiteration

2005-02-11T22:15:00.000-08:00

I wrote and gave this homily two years ago for the Ash Wednesday service in Bond Chapel at the University of Chicago, and I still believe it's the most coherent statement of what I think about the Lenten season. So, as Lent comes around again, I publish it here. (Reading this piece now, in the afterglow of a paper about the performative silence of Frank O'Hara's elegy "The Day Lady Died," I'm struck by the version of my argument I articulated in 2003: absence is presence.)

ALR Bond Chapel Homily, 5 March 2003
(Text: Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21)

They say you preach what’s on your mind.

Last week, as if in unintentional preparation for a season of penitence, I had an enormous fight with one of my best friends. The bitter details are unimportant, but let me just say that it concerned love and time: love, because I fell into it recently, and time, because I had forgotten to enjoy it with other people.

And so when I read the words we will all read together in a few minutes— “O God, we have not loved you with our whole heart, and mind and strength; we confess to you, O God, our self-indulgent appetites and ways”—I must mediate them through the lens of that experience. Those words strike home in a way I never could have imagined before last week. Suddeny I think of a God bereft by a world too wrapped up in itself, abandonned by the self-love of creation—a creation brought into being by God’s own divine authority. At the core, this is what we confess in the litany: making God the fifth wheel in our otherwise engaged and engaging lives. Not the easiest thing to hear from our own mouths. But in the recent and harsh light of an all-too-human ability to hurt, misinterpret, and say the wrong thing to another person, I come around to the question again: what does it mean to live Lent?

In the words of the Book of Common Prayer, Lent is a period of “prayer, fasting, and self-denial.” Yet this definition is strangely unsatisfying. Prayer, fasting and self-denial are all outward signs of an inward mental state; they ought to reflect the way we feel, not become the feeling itself. Saying that Lent is a period of prayer and fasting never reaches the heart of the “how” question; that is, it never shows in detail what the prayerful life must mean. Instead, hearing these words, it becomes convenient to be self-denying for the accompanying comfort: the sacrifice of pleasure brings with it, paradoxically, a pleasant sense of virtue. Repentence is easier than true realization of fault; in the same way, to bear the exterior signs of self-denial is often easier than to ask the reasons denial should occur. This psychological solace of forefit, or the strange, pious pleasure we derive from giving something up, can hardly be the place to which Lent is supposed to guide us.

It is exactly this psychical placebo against which the familiar and ever-challenging Lenten Gospel warns. “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them,” says Jesus. “And whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that your fasting may be seen not by others but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.”

It has surely struck other people before, this seemingly hypocritical gap between the Ash Wednesday theory and the Ash Wednesday practice. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return,” we say to one another in the words of imposition. If Matthew’s Jesus asks us to practice our faith discretely and quietly, we disregard that request almost immediately by marking the sign of the cross on each other’s foreheads. As we do so, we make obvious the sign of our faith. Praying to a God who responds only to isolated and the lonely acts of prayer doesn’t seem completely sound either, but there is no getting around it: the inscription of ashes is a disfiguration of the face, and a means to show others that we are, in some sense, dismal. Like giving something up, this act can bring with it an ironic moral superiority: “I realized my fleshly status today. Did you?”

But the message that we should pray to God in our own rooms and keep humility private does not, ultimately, nullify the symbolic act of the ashes. Yes, we are marked with a visible sign. Today is one of the few days when we signify ourselves outwardly as Christians, and the act of signifying feels oddly out of line with the Gospel. Yet the signification is as much an absence as it is a presence. For what we take with us through the days of Lent is not the ash itself but the memory of it, the feeling it leaves after we wash our face. We know where the ashes used to be: and God who sees the unseen knows, too. And perhaps this is the nature of the divinity that responds to secret devotion. Praying in secret is not equivalent to emotional shutdown: instead, it is a response to the God who speaks as much in silence as in words, and who is with us in the metaphysical as much as in the physical.

During Lent, we recall the time when Satan tempted Jesus in the wilderness, a time when the usual joy of the alleluia is departed—or at least suspended. That suspension culminates on Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Eve: the three days’ space Christ spent away from the human life. But even then, we are left with a space where the divine feels present. Even without astonishing reality of God incarnate, we are still left with faith. In fact, it might be this absence that makes faith what it is: trust without touch, belief without sight. Lent, therefore, calls us to testify to our belief not only through visible signs, but through the traces those signs leave. After we assume the literal inscription of the cross, we remember our faith by the lacuna as much as by the letter itself.

Remember. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” These words, too, speak to an absence; they are a nod towards the mortality we rarely like to acknowledge. Like the mark of ashes, the something which eventually becomes nothing, so too will we return to nothingness. But in these words of imposition, it is not the word “dust” that is as important as the first word in the sentence. In the end, more than it is a season of berating ourselves, a season of quiet desperation, a season of extra piety, a season of admitting our own faults, or even a long season without latte from the Div School coffee shop, Lent is a season of memory.

In that season of memory, there’s a lot to remember. Because our existence is earthly—because human experience, and especially human experience in Christianity, is one of communion—we remember the painful about this life, first. Words we said and words we didn’t say; those we loved and those we didn’t love; times we ignored each other; times we ignored God. But confession of these things is secondary to their remembrance. In the end, memory and prayer become intertwined. Put differently, the act of remembrance serves as its own, unspoken confession, a tacit humility that never runs the risk of false piety, never runs the risk of being hypocritical.

And after those memories of earthly inadequacies, we are called to remember who brought us out of dust, who granted us the ephemerality at which we sometimes despair but often rejoice. We remember that God sent us his only Son; we remember that God’s Son was tempted, felt foresaken, and died. We remember passion; we remember death.

But finally, we ought to remember that Lent is not an end in itself. It is indeed a time to come back to the aspects of life, both the spiritual and the dully quotidian, that we prefer to push away. But on the last of the forty days, Lent is a place of tension for Easter’s place of repose. We remember not abandonment but love; we remember that we do not achieve Easter by giving up what we enjoy, but that God gives it to us no matter what. We remember the risen Lord, and we remember how to say alleluia again.

Memory comes about in different ways. By marking ourselves with ashes, we remember that we are dust; by the absence of the ashen mark, we remember, with difficulty, that God sees in secret, and that absence is its own sort of presence. Trying to wrap our minds around that simultaneity may be the way to experience this day in holiness, and the way to endure the days that follow. Lent gives us days for rememberance: rememberance of God who is absent but present, Christ who died but rose again.

Or maybe the best way to speak to the Lenten spirit, spirit that challenges us to prayer and inspires us to Easter, is in the words of Li-Young Lee, Chicago poet who gave a reading on campus last week. He writes: “Memory is sweet. Even when it is painful, memory is sweet.”

AMEN.

AnnE

2005-02-04T20:57:00.000-08:00

Since the (so-called) spring semester has started on Wednesday, three people have misspelled my name in their correspondence with me. They include one of my professors from last term and my landlord.

Sigh.

Don't Google Me

2005-01-06T20:45:00.000-08:00

Top 10 Alternate Names for the Harvard Reading Period

1. Eating Out With Friends Period
2. Breaking New Year's Resolutions About Eating Out Less Period
3. Writing Two Sentences Per Essay Per Hour Period
4. Wondering Why Someone Already Checked Out Library Books You Need Period
5. Googling Yourself Period, which leads to
6. Wondering Why You Have No Web Presence Period, and
7. Obsessively Organizing Old Emails Period
8. Caffeine Period
9. Relearning The Entire Chinese Language Period
10. Guiltily Enjoying Pleasure Reading Period

"I"

2004-12-12T11:00:00.000-08:00

I was sitting next to an English teacher in Starbucks this afternoon. She was grading a stack of exams, so of course my eyes wandered from my rather dense reading on metaphor and allegory in Darwin to what her students (7th or 8th graders, I estimated) had written, and the comments she was writing. The normalization of the martini-glass method starts early: write an essay with an introductory paragraph, two or three body paragraphs, and a conclusion.

Someone had written a sentence that began with "In my eyes..." Another wrote, "I will show you..." She underlined these and wrote, "Avoid these types of statements--elementary."

Oh yes, this doctrine was drilled into me, too: don't write with "I think" or "I will show." Instead, strengthen your claims by saying: "In Paradise Lost, Milton and Satan ARE interchangeable..." ; "These examples show that Marlow's lie to the Intended IS unforgivable..." ; "Prufrock DOES measure out his life with coffee spoons."

Suddenly I became outraged. It's all changed now: how many times this semester have I read "my reading challenges...," "my essay will take on," or the kissing cousin, "we need to rethink the assumption that..."? Why is the I allowed to emerge from its hiding place only very late in scholarly life? What, exactly, is elementary about writing "in my eyes"?

For how better to enter a discussion than to mark one's own opinion with an up-front I? Who else's eyes could we read with? Why all this ado about interpretive communities, about the real meaning of the readerly act, if it weren't for the fact that [another expression I am permitted to use now], just as we can never experience any consciousness but our own, we can never know what it's like to read with another set of eyes?

Top 5

2004-12-10T19:59:00.000-08:00

Top 5 Things I Thought About This Week:

I wished I could go back to age 4 and start a career as a professional pianist. I think I've been reading too many CD liner notes and artist bios. Also, at a department party I went to tonight, the Director of Graduate Studies kept talking to me about how, when the committee decided to accept me, they were "worried that they wouldn't be able to accomodate" my pianistic needs. Sigh. I mean, I know I said in my application essay that the piano was important to me, but said needs are not really so great.

I read "Heaven's Coast," a memoir by Mark Doty (the poet), and wrote a paper proposal about a poem of his from the volume "Sweet Machine." I don't think the paper is going to work out, though. The professor didn't seem too wild about the project.

The University of Chicago's finals week is over today.

Walter Benjamin, in the Arcades Project, says that mailboxes in the entrances to the subway are the last opportunity to make a sign to the world one is leaving.

I could win a Land Rover, because I made a donation to Boston's NPR station (i.e., succumbed to the pressure of the fund drive). The donation allowed me to enter this sweepstakes thing. They'll let me know in a few weeks whether I've won.

Ray of Light

2004-11-23T21:02:00.000-08:00

On January 22nd, 2003, I did something with unforeseeable consequences. I listened to music on the way to class.

It was a mix CD my friend Michelle had made me for my twentieth birthday. She'd given it to me the night before, at a totally surprise birthday party she'd organized down to the last detail. I'd fallen asleep, late, with confetti everywhere, and woken up the next day to go sit in on a physics class. (I went, that one time, just to say hi to Michelle. I have no idea what went on in the class.)

On the way there, I listened to my new CD. I was listening to that music for nearly the first time: taking it all in through my ears at the same time my mouth and nose took in the air of 57th Street, Hyde Park, on January 22nd.

Tonight, on a whim, I decided to listen to that CD. Suddenly I was there again: walking down 57th Street on a bright, cold, January morning. It was a time when I was happy and confident to participate in discussions of Marxist theory--i.e., when class didn't have the intimidation factor it does now. When I was reading Thucydides. When I wasn't worried about graduate school applications or the subsequent choices those applications forced me to make. When I was giddy from having a boyfriend for the first time. When I wasn't 21 yet. When my parents lived in England.

All those things got melded together in that music that day, and now Madonna's "Ray of Light" has assumed a kind of fragile poignancy.

This must be one of those moments of übersaccharine nostalgia recent college graduates are bound to have. But just the same, there is an immense power in listening to music while walking. It's a dangerous act, a double inscription: you inscribe yourself in a landscape, and music inscribes itself with you in that place.

Inscription is not undone easily, if ever. iPod owners, watch out.

Found Poetry

2004-11-19T11:08:00.001-08:00

I was checking my email in Lamont Library last night when I saw this piece of scrap paper, only a few inches wide. On the blank side was a phone number (508-308-8962). On the other side was the following.

ve him with us, that I figured it w
hings that made me uncomfortable
e table, hands clasped around a hi
d about and would only speak whe
arry on a meaningful relationship.
bout approaching their mid- to lat
nior by roughly ten years) withou
o much. Drank too much. Spent
eaningless outside of what they c
o was speaking—only occasiona
ld tell straightaway that I didn't

—Anonymous
found by ALR 11/18/04

How AM I doing?

2004-11-16T20:49:00.000-08:00

It has been brought to my attention that my recent posts do not exactly reveal how I am doing, aside from being frustrated with some of the voices in "the intellectual life of the profession," as English 299 is subtitled. So how am I doing? In short, I oscillate: when I was reading S/Z last week(Roland Barthes), I loved graduate school. When I left Chinese class today, I didn't like it so much. I am trying to maintain my love of languages even though this particular class is...is...not doing too much to inspire my confidence.

And I would like to know how Frank O'Hara's poetry would be different if the iPod had been invented in 1959.

To this, Kimmy responded with the brilliant riff:

"iPod. Eye pod. I pod. I am in a pod. When I'm listening to the iPod, I'm in a pod of music."

I pods? I, pods? I like iPod? "I pods: Necessity of Grammatical Violation in the Age of Digital Reproduction." "Podding the i: Subaltern Pronouns of the Apple Empire."

Seriously: I recently downloaded all of Handel's Messiah to my iPod, and, as the Chinatown bus approached New York on Friday afternoon, the rush hour weekend traffic on the Bklyn-Qns Expwy appeared to me as so many sheep that had gone astray.

Can The Subaltern Please Explain?

2004-11-06T15:11:00.000-08:00

"My view is that radical practice should attend to this double session of representations rather than reintroduce the individual subject through totalizing concepts of power and desire. It is also my view that, in keeping the area of class practice on a second level of abstraction, Marx was effectively keeping open the (Kantian and)Hegelian critique of the individual subject as agent. This view does not oblige me to ignore that, by implicitly defining the family and the mother tongue as the ground level where culture and convention seem nature's own way of organizing "her" subversion, Marx himself rehearses and ancient suberfuge. In the context of poststructuralist claims to critical practice, this seems more recuperable than the clandestine restoration of subjective essentialism."

--Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can The Subaltern Speak?"

I'd like to hear George W. Bush explain this.

Or anyone else, actually. "Clandestine restoration of subjective essentialism?" Get real! Nobody taught ME to write like this!

Critical Update

2004-10-29T02:40:00.000-07:00

"In this essay, I will try to focus what I see as the centrality of this question of femininty to an aesthetic theory which has crucially influenced a whole tradition of how we conceptualise literary writing, and to the psychoanalytic theory which was being elaborated at exactly the same time, at the point where they converge on the same object--Shakespeare's Hamlet--described by Freud as an emblem of 'the secular advance of repression in the emotional life of mankind.' "

Jacqueline Rose, "Hamlet--the 'Mona Lisa' of Literature"

ALR's marginalia: "Bad writing. If I can't understand this sentence, there's no hope for the rest of the essay."

You Know You're Out of Touch When...

2004-10-17T10:34:00.000-07:00

...you read a headline in The Harvard Crimson that says "Professors Ask To Clone Cells" and think it's referring to phones.

Ask ALR

2004-10-15T13:04:00.000-07:00

Dear ALR,

I have a confession: at the beginning of my graduate career, I am finding myself addicted to Starbucks drinks again. (I also went through a Starbucks phase in college.) I know that, as a huge corporation, Starbucks possesses (a) no character and (b) the power to destroy small neighborhood businesses. But I am strangely attracted to overfriendly baristas and this seemingly magical transformation of "small" into "tall." Sometimes, I am able to dismiss my community's Starbucks-bashing, but other times, I find in it some validity. (Despite the inherent difference between signifier and signified, should "small" really be called "tall"? Maybe not.) What do you think: should I feel ashamed to express my Starbucks preference to my loved ones?

—Confused and Caffeinated in Cambridge

Dear Confused and Caffeinated,

Sigh. If only that latte weren't four dollars and change. (Ever notice the "bucks" in "Starbucks"?) But it sounds like you've already made the decision to fetishize the Starbucks commodity, so take a look around at your fellow capitalist latte drinkers, and realize: hey, do you really have it so hard off?

And no matter what the vicissitudes of academic life, you know you can always count on the staff asking whether you want whipped cream on that tall/grande/venti mocha. In these dark woods of postmodernity, you just need that sometimes.

Buzzwords encore

2004-10-09T23:01:00.000-07:00

"Radical": "Radical liberation struggle." "Radically chic." "Radical imperative." I understand the literal use of "radical" as referring to the radix, the root, but enough is enough, people.

Buzzwords

2004-10-06T20:24:00.000-07:00

I realized today that I would be happy if I never heard the phrases "at stake" and "made available" in class again.

"What is at stake in so-and-so's argument?" "How high are the stakes for Derrida/De Man/Fish/[fill in the critic of your choice]?" It doesn't matter how high or low a writer's stakes are, whatever "stakes" means for writers and readers, anyway. If writing-reading is an endless, repetitive cycle, or if language is destined to repeat and rip apart and resynthesize (simultaneously) for eternity, then stakes are meaningless. In that case the stakes start over; and nothing is ever in danger.

My problem with "available" ("What kind of claims does Levi-Strauss make available?") is less profound: it just sounds too ditzy-corporate, like something Fleet Bank or Starbucks would say. "Anne Rounds, we'll make your checking account balance totally available! No questions asked!" "Skim Sushi Lattes now available!"

Okay. Back to the reading now.

Disseminate This!

2004-10-02T19:23:00.000-07:00

I have to learn to read again. It's very frustrating.

The following is taken from "Plato's Pharmacy," in Derrida's "Dissemination."

"Thus, on the one hand, repetition is that without which there would be no truth: the truth of being in the intelligible form of ideality discovers in the eidos that which can be repeated, being the same, the clear, the stable, the identifiable in its equality with itself."

Does anyone really get this?

Afterthought: wouldn't Plato-cum-Socrates (and maybe Derrida too) be so appalled by blogging? Talk about orphaned writing: this stuff is floating around, out of my control, on the internet for anyone to read.

Notable Quotables from Week 1

2004-09-24T09:51:00.000-07:00

"We hear a lot of people talk about how such-and-such a reading will'destroy' or 'ruin' a text. Well, in my opinion, these texts are strong. They can take it. Really."

"I didn't give you anything on this syllabus that I hate."

--Marjorie Garber, professor, English 299

"I know this week is shopping week. Not a metaphor I appreciate for intellectual endeavors."

--Svetlana Boym, professor, Comparative Literature 261. (Her book, "The Future of Nostalgia," was praised by one back-cover critic as having "sexy narrative drive." I can only hope my dissertation will have sexy narrative drive.)

Student: Do you know this area well?
ALR: Well, where do you need to go?
Student: Where can I get a falafel?

Harvard: Day 1

2004-09-20T15:59:00.000-07:00

Only today do I realize fully just how formative college is. Waiting for class to start, in the corridor of Vanserg Hall, I see students run into each other, ask how summer was, wonder which room to enter. "Isn't there a 10 o'clock section of this class?," etc. In my class, we sit down and I look at the girl next to me. We say hi and that's it. I suddenly feel my noncollegiate, non-Harvard identity take hold. This means (1) I feel old and (2) I feel anonymous and (3) I feel the need to keep my graduate status a secret.

Later, sitting in the complit proseminar among my peers, I feel twinges of the same things. Afterwards, I go to the Coop to buy textbooks, and it sinks in: the very idea that I am buying textbooks somewhere else than the Seminary Co-Op Bookstore (which has two syllables, thank you very much); that I am going to class in places other than the Classics Building and Cobb Hall and Harper; that I live here now: preposterous! Absurd! I'm not in this landscape: I'm simultaneously alienated from it and above it.

The proseminar was odd, too: out of nowhere, with no text on the table, we're talking about theory and comparative literature and people are saying things like "I think it's more like a sieve than a chainsaw" and "how does comparative literature relate to Kulturwissenschaft" and then John Hamilton uses the word "scientificity."

In fact, to myself I was wondering why we even talk about theory separately from text. Is "theory" not itself a text--that is, a communicated thing? Does not a "text" always propound its own theories--that is, have its own perspective on the world?

Anyway, I don't understand the origin of this dichotomy, and I didn't understand today how a discussion one girl called "thought-provoking" arose from nothing.

Orientated

2004-09-15T11:18:00.000-07:00

GSAS Orientation happened yesterday, with a full slate of speakers in the morning, an information fair, and a lunch from Crimson Catering. (As Director of Graduate Studies William Mills Todd III said, the latter was "not as good as SAS, better than United.") The morning's talking heads told us that graduate school was where we would and should do any number of the following:

a. Stop being amateurs and start becoming professionals
b. Get married
c. Have kids
d. Do what we love
e. Face unprecedented challenges and be miserable half the time
f. Be bold
g. Leave

I must say this mixed bag of advice left me yearning for the University of Chicago's freshman orientation message. All I remember was Ted O'Neill, after the Motet Choir had sung the alma mater (with its wonderful line "Bless her with our benisons"), telling us:

"Soon, you too will be using words like 'benison.'"

The Big Apple's Chocolate Milkshake

2004-09-08T16:40:00.000-07:00

I spent the long weekend in New York City, visiting Kimmy. I think I am finally starting to feel at peace with New York, and with the fact that I did not go to school there (though I don't want to call it "The City," as though Boston and Cambridge--though admittedly smaller and lamer--were not cities). I hope that as the years go on, I will eventually memorize the subway map.

Over the weekend, I had many wonderful things to eat, including Korean-style tofu, Chinese cafe food, and a chocolate milkshake from Angelika (the movie theater in the Village). Getting said milkshake was a surreal experience. Read on.

The cafe inside the theater boasts, among other things, its milkshakes and ice cream. Perfetto. So I went to the counter and said, "I'd like a chocolate milkshake." The staffperson spent a good 10 minutes making me a drink which, as soon as I touched the cup, I knew was no milkshake. It came in a cup designed for hot drinks, complete with java jacket. I could see the frothy steamed milk under the lid. I said, "Why is this hot?" She said, "You wanted a milkshake, didn't you?" I said, tentatively, "Aren't milkshakes made with ice cream?" "Oh, an ICE CREAM milkshake," she said.

My mistake, I'm sure.

Thoughts On Unpacking

2004-08-27T12:29:00.000-07:00

THOUGHTS ON UNPACKING

By Thom Gunn

Unpacking in the raw new rooms, I clear,
Or try to clear, a space for us, that we
May cultivate an ease of moving here
With no encumbrance near,
In amplitude. But something hinders me:

Where do these go, these knick-knacks I forgot?
—Gadgets we bought and kept, thinking perhaps
They might be useful someday, and a lot
Of others that were not:
Bent keys, Italian grammars, Mickey Mouse caps.

And there are worse grotesques that, out of sight,
Unpacked, unlabelled, somehow followed too:
The urgencies we did not share, the spite
Of such and such a night,
Poses, mistakes—an unclean residue—

That drift, one after other, till I find
They have filled the space I carefully prepared;
The sagging shapes I thought we left behind
Crawl out within in the mind
Seeming to sneer 'This is the past you shared.'

I take a broom to them; but when I thrust
Round the diminished luggage, some roll back,
Surviving from my outbreak of disgust
As balls of hair and dust
Made buoyant with a kind of fictive lack.

I need your help with these. They rest unseen
In furniture we know, and plot a changing
To grey confusion of the space between.
Now, as I sweep it clean,
I realize that love is an arranging.

Einsamkeit

2004-08-23T07:34:00.000-07:00

I am pricklingly lonely, miss Kimmy (who went home today), and want to go home, except I don't know where home is anymore. I haven't felt this way since I went to summer camp. I guess I knew this was coming.

Harvard: First Impressions

2004-08-20T07:54:00.000-07:00

I arrived in Cambridge and Somerville on Tuesday, to a new apartment filled with dust and cats. I can't decide whether to love or hate Harvard Square: the Yard is lovely, but the Square is very globalized and commercial, with Gap, Starbucks, Addidas, Ben and Jerry's, Staples, Loew's Cineplex, etc. etc. While this is convenient, it is not exactly interesting.

As I predicted, my parents went into Parent Mode when we moved my stuff into the new place. My mom scrubbed the floorboards of my room and swept and cleaned. I stood by feeling guilty and annoyed. I wanted her to think that this time, I wasn't going to live in squalor. It didn't help that the previous tenant of the room had left his sheets on the bed, and a toothbrush and towel of unknown provenance next to it. Meanwhile, my dad stripped to his undershirt, and, after lifting the heavy stuff, had a beer.

It's very hot and humid, which doesn't help the stresses of moving and settling in, but Kimmy is visiting from New York, so we've been hanging out, exploring, and eating. I think today we are going to Chinatown so that I can experiment with my Chinese.

Last 36 Hours in Ann Arbor

2004-08-14T18:47:00.000-07:00

I have another full day here, but no sense of nostalgia has hit yet: I have been here transitorily, but that is all, so no sad parting. Am trying to think what to write about reconciliation (John Nieman asked me to write a 500-word essay on the subject). No literary inspiration springs to mind immediately. Herbert? Mmmm. Doesn't excite me, really. T. S. Eliot? No way: he is on the shelf, in exile for half a year at least. I've got to think of something by September, anyway.

What did make me feel wistful was the last day of class. I really, really want to take more Chinese at Harvard. I'm sad to have begun studying the language so late in my college career. Right now, I'm only scratching the surface: I can't imagine what it would be like to have long-term memory of all the characters I knew yesterday, or to be able to read for pleasure. (Actually, I can't quite imagine pleasure reading in French or German, either, but those feel like much more attainable near-future goals.)

Just started reading a Beatles biography called Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History (graduation gift from a friend). It is written by Devin McKinney, one "independent scholar living in Brooklyn" (jacket bio). When I got to a section epigraph that said, "Collarless jackets as castration symbol?," with th citation, "A note I once scribbled," I groaned inwardly. Once, my first year in college, I wrote an essay whose epigraph came from my own writings. Now I understand why I did it my first year in college, but not in subsequent years. Grow up, Devin...

X-File

2004-08-12T19:15:00.000-07:00

Holy cow!

If you never see another post on this site, please know that it's because blogger is a bit crazy. For the past few hours, it was telling me all about how it didn't know my username or information, and I was sitting at my computer with my hands tied, unable to understand what was going on. There were these emails with useless links in them. Am I the victim of blogger hacking? Identity theft? Who knows? It's not like I have a wide readership, but if you're one of the few, I just want you to know that if I disappear from the wide world of blogs, this is why. As many people will testify, my relationship with any kind of technology has always been rocky.

I really ought to be studying for my Chinese exam tomorrow, but I thought this was more important.

I finally finished My Life and am ready to start on something new. Suggestions welcome.

I'm off to cram more vocabulary words into my head for the moment, however. I hope I can regain access later, but if I can't--well, it's been real. I'll be in Somerville if you need to contact me...

It Takes One to Purl One

2004-08-08T17:25:00.000-07:00

In a sudden spasm of abnormalcy, I want to learn how to knit. It's very trendy nowadays (and now undoubtedly those ads at the top of the page will be promoting knitting accessory websites). I started a little practice piece and I think I've improved since age 12, the last time I attempted this. Still don't have much of an attention span for it, though.

In today's NY Times; an article about becoming a DJ, and special classes you can take in Manhattan to learn how to scratch records properly, overlay two records, etc. (Vinyl is even cooler than knitting.) According to the writer, finding the downbeat is very important. Article refers to learning to count as an "elementary lesson in music theory." Ah, rhythm and meter. Makes me think of Peter Martens's paper called "Glenn Gould's Constant Rhythmic Reference Point" (of which I only heard a synopsis, but that's beside the point). (What would Glenn Gould's DJ name have been?) Article also reminds me a paper from the same conference on the NTM Affair, in which the author referred to the French rap group's scratching Edith Piaf's "Je Ne Regrette Rien" during their song "Nique La Police" (thereby demonstrating a finely-tuned musico-political sensibility.) Anyway, these aspiring music theorists should get out there and take DJ classes. I think that would be great.

No Nombre

2004-08-04T19:53:00.000-07:00

Our caller ID speaks Spanish and no one knows why. One day last month, my father poked its innards. Now it shows a history of llamadas to our house. Calls from Hong Kong show up as "no nombre."

(What I sense of Hong Kong comes, in part, from contact with this no nombre. Last week I heard a car on the street. Today I heard what sounded like people setting the table. And when I called across the dateline today, I spoke Chinese to an aunt on the other end before talking to Kimmy. Thought to self: Yes! I lapsed into English once but switched back undeterred. She asked who it was. " 這是他的女朋友," I said. This is his girlfriend.)

Last night I dreamt about switching planes in Pittsburgh. I kept looking for a boarding pass and finding what appeared to be the stub of the boarding pass I had when I went to Ithaca, NY, in March. But I couldn't find the right one. Then I asked myself why I was changing planes in the first place, because I was home already, and it was silly for me to fly elsewhere just to fly right back again.

Since when do I live in Pittsburgh?

August 1

2004-08-01T13:15:00.000-07:00

I played the piano at church today: Bach and Albeniz, as well as the usual fare. Among others, several ladies came up to me afterwards and congratulated me during coffee hour. One of them said, "That was wonderful, Fran."

August 1! Only 14 more days until Kimmy comes back to the US, and only 15 days until I move from the town of my birth, Ann Arbor (where one sidewalk chalk artist warned pedestrians to "Beware of Fake Hippies"), to the much-anticipated East Coast (where I imagine no such caveats are necessary). My father has put a bike rack on top of the car. I think it makes the little Corolla look much more manly and rugged. Too bad we aren't driving through Colorado (or any of those other states where they film SUV commercials) to get to school.

nostalgie

2004-07-29T17:10:00.000-07:00

Subways: yesterday I thought about subways. Undergrounds in poetry. "A History of the Metropolitan: Poetry in Motion, Motion in poetry." (Hey, that's better than some dissertation titles I've read. No kidding.) Also, I decided to start reading Le Monde and Die Zeitung online in order to prepare for school. I mean, at least I can read the French and German pop-up ads.

At page 450 of My Life, Bill has been elected and is getting ready to move to the White House. Some say that he shouldn't have written his autobiography so early in life. But I can say that it's strangely enjoyable to hear an authoritatve voice narrate what you clearly remember from childhood's perspective. Like when my mother said to my father at the breakfast table, in a distressed tone: "I just talked to Aunt Sarah on the phone, and I think she is going to vote for Ross Perot." (At 10, I didn't really understand the source of the distress, but it was all very compelling.) From the pages of his tome, Bill is giving me—in the first person—full permission to be nostalgic.

At 21, I think that's actually its own kind of privilege.

Bill Clinton et alii

2004-07-26T14:34:00.000-07:00

Since the initial post, I've taken a trip to Chicago (in the language of Bridget Jones, a mini-break), started reading Bill Clinton's autobiography, and begun wondering what to take with me to Cambridge when I move there in August. So far I've collected two boxes of books, some hats and mittens, and a map of the Bost0n-Cambridge area. Also a map of the New York City subway--which audaciously calls itslf "The Map"--for when I head to the chic land of R. W. Apple, Hillary Clinton, the aforementioned Jeremy (Posadas), and, of course, Kimmy Szeto.

I've also been pondering potential dissertation topics, which Kimmy urges me to write down. One day, I thought about political satires by Chinese writers living in Germany. Dismissed (not enough knowledge on any of those fronts). Adam Shapiro suggested a comparison between Bill C.'s autobiography and St. Augustine's Confessions. Also dismissed. Then the other day, I thought about the effects of modernism on satire, especiallly lyric satires, and especially urban satires. I like that: from Juvenal to John Donne to Lisa Jarnot. I'd like to think that postmodernity, whatever it might entail, has had some hefty consequences for satire's criteria.

Since I gather that no one has been poring over every word in my newly-inaugurated blog, I'm not worried that these insights will be pilfered and written into a dissertation faster than I can say Entfremdungseffekt. But don't steal my idea.

Tomorrow in Chinese class, we're supposed to discuss the differences between Chinese and American families. I could talk a book in English, but luckily, my target language vocabulary is limited. For a second, I pictured myself staying up all night to draft a moving speech in a Mandarin just flawed enough to be endearing. Soon that vision fled, however, and I'm not feeling especially verbose right now, so I'll save it for another blog.

(In a few years, maybe.)

Inaugural

2004-07-06T12:46:00.000-07:00

I don't know what I've done: my good friend Jeremy has a blog (www.JeremyPosadas.blogspot.com), and while I was browsing through his, I decided to create my own. Who knows where it'll lead: I've always had an aversion to journaling. Maybe that aversion is about to change.