Happy King Junior Day

Max keeps referring to MLK as "King Junior."  The other day, he got into our bed at around 4 am and proceeded to orate about how, "King Junior wanted things to be more fair, and it wasn't fair how some people had to ride on the back of the bus, so he made it fair so everyone could ride on every part of the bus."  After listening for a while, I said to Matt, "I think he thinks that Martin Luther King was actually a king," and Max interrupted and said, "No he wasn't.  He was a HERO."  It's pretty fun to hear a four year old figuring this all out, with some guidance from his preschool teachers, who seem to have their own special curriculum de-emphasizing race and stressing fairness.  It's a Spanish preschool, so he's getting all of this in Spanish, and perhaps there are some language gaps.  I'm also reminded of last month, when the topic of discussion was "families," and he'd come home and say, "You have to respect ALL families.  For example, if a child has no mother and no father, you still have to respect that family...."

Max loves nothing more than public transportation--bart, subways, busses--and right now he's really focused on the bus anecdote.  He usually wants to sit in the back row, however.  Tomorrow, to celebrate "King Junior Day," we are going on a train ride.

Why I loved Tiny Furniture

It has been a long time since I've posted here, and I've decided to use it in a slightly different way for a while.  I spend a lot of time writing reviews for publications.  Although I understand The Believer's position on "snark" (there are so few book reviews, why waste time on negative press?) I do feel that it's important, when assigned something to review, to be honest with the reader.  Often this means being critical.  Now as someone who is also trying to produce art, knowing how hard it is to find the discipline to sit down each day and create, with no assurance of how it's going to turn out, I sometimes feel guilty calling attention to the faults in someone else's work.  (And I've noticed that I am harsher when the faults are ones I share in my own work).  However, I feel that I owe it to the person deciding whether or not to go out and buy that book, or see that movie (or eat that meal, from the days when I did food writing) to say if I don't think that the thing measures up.  Also, it's in my nature.  If I dislike something, I have a hard time holding back.  And I'm pretty picky.  When people ask me to share the titles of great books I've read recently, it's sometimes hard to come up with anything.  But I far prefer to write positive reviews than negative ones.  I love it when a work of art inspires me so much that I need other people to hurry up and experience it too, so that we can talk about it together, gush together, figure out what made it new and meaningful and rare.  So I'm going to use this space to gush a little, to exercise my critical muscle in an uncritical way.

Yesterday I watched Tiny Furniture, and I had to keep stopping and rewatching scenes because I thought that they were so funny and smart, and now I can't stop thinking about it.

I had heard of the movie before this, first from my mother, who walked out of the theater.  At the time, she was dating a man who had PTSD from the Vietnam war.  Because of his PTSD, she told me, he couldn't stand to see movies with a lot of violence or conflict.  This, she said, was why they'd walked out of "Tiny Furniture."  This seemed odd to me, having read a bit about the movie, created by and starring a young woman (Lena Dunham) who graduates from Oberlin and returns to live with her mother and sister in New York, struggling to figure out what to do with her life next.  It hardly sounded like PTSD-triggering material.  Now that I've seen it, I can't stop thinking about what might have provoked this reaction, to such an extent that they had to leave the movie.

I think that this movie is more "real" than anything else I've seen in a long time, and this might be why the conflict in it felt almost unbearable to him.

One of the first things that I noticed, as the movie started, was that there is a lot of footage of Aura, her mother and sister (the actresses are actually her mother and sister) walking around their loft in their shirts and underpants.  Some of it is shot from below.  It's not the most flattering angle for anyone.  There was something so real about this "costume" choice, the way it conveys the intimacy and lack of self-consciousness of these three women living alone together, that it made me realize how unreal the staging of "reality" TV is by contrast.  This is a first-person movie and a "semi-autobiographical" one (maybe more than just semi) and it's to Dunham's credit that she isn't trying to flatter herself.  But nor is she trying to depict herself as grotesque.  Physically, she is bigger than most movie stars, but the movie isn't about "being a chubby girl," although I do think it is at least in part about interfacing with the world when you're not conventionally beautiful.  There is a great scene in which her friend from high school, who is conventionally beautiful, reads the comments on a video that Aura posted on YouTube, which mock her or refer to her as a whale.  The film doesn't dwell on this--Aura doesn't even say anything in response--but I did.  I thought it was brave of Dunham to let this criticism of her body be part of the story she was telling, but only a small part.  It's also about the difficulty of separating from your family at an age when it's expected, the pressure to create art and make a mark in a world that's lousy with marks, the desire to be sought after, to  connect, to find that same intimacy from people not in your family, and what happens when you bare yourself to them.  Dunham is very funny, and in a way this is a comedy, but unlike most comedies (movies at least) it doesn't follow any recognizable formula or offer a happy ending.  When these family members fight, they say brutally honest, even cruel things to each other, but  they usually apologize and make up shortly thereafter, with a weariness suggesting that they have no choice, really, because they love each other and they're stuck with each other.  Both daughters still want to sleep with their mother, competing for the spot in her bed.  I remember hearing the interview with Terri Gross on Fresh Air, how she couldn't believe that any girl this age would want such a thing, and Lena Dunham admitted that this (like much of the film) is based on reality.  There is something weird about this detail, but as a parent who guiltily loves sleeping with my almost five year-old son, it doesn't ring false to me.  It seems like another moment--like the women walking around in their unflattering thermal undershirts and underpants and control-top stockings--in which Dunham is giving us a peek behind the door of how people really live, a glimpse of the secrets of intimate family life, as opposed to staging a censored version of it.  After watching the movie, I read some reviews in which Dunham is faulted for making a movie about people of privilege, New Yorkers, middle class artists, the tone invariably suggesting that here is "yet another" glimpse of rarified life.  While I agree with the first part of this, to an extent, I'd argue that there are few movies showing how anyone really lives--rich, middle class, poor--and it didn't seem like "yet another" anything to me.  

Tsunami

Like so many others, I've been following the news from Japan, feeling heartsick with every development as things seem to go from unimaginably bad to even worse, and suffering is layered upon suffering.  I was in the northwest of Japan, on the Sea of Japan, while the tsunami struck on the Pacific side.  Still, architecture in Japan doesn't vary that much, and the homes and trees that were seen swept out by that wall of water could easily have been on the Noto Peninsula.  Also, I did live in a town with a nuclear power plant, so it's all too easy to imagine this same kind of tragedy striking there, and also how devastated and frightened the people all over Japan must feel, waiting for further news of the extent of the radiation leak.  Even here in San Francisco, where everyone says that it's a question not of if but when the next earthquake will hit, everyone seems shaken and subdued.  Watching the footage of families and individuals stumbling, stunned, across the rubble that was left behind, it's hard to believe that these were vibrant coastal communities just a week ago, with no premonition of what was to come.  It looks like something out of Cormac McCarthy's The Road.  Such a reminder of the fragility of life as we know it.

I've been asked by several people where to give money to best help people in Japan.  I did a little research, and this seems like a good site:

https://secure.unicefusa.org/site/Donation2?df_id=9640&9640.donation=form1

I also thought I'd share part of this email from a family friend who lives in Japan, who had to evacuate his house because he lives in a town near the plant.  For someone directly affected by what's happening, he is remarkably hopeful:

I think it was 2000, wasn't it?, when the World Cup was held in France (?)  The workers responsible for cleaning the stadium complained about the Japanese fans who picked up after themselves, leaving their seating section as clean as they'd encountered it.  Japan will be fine in the aftermath.  They've got an amazing group work ethic.

In a country that experiences natural disaster after natural disaster, they've developed a spirit of resilience.  One of their sayings is "fall 7 times, get up 8 times.

As I type this, I almost wish I'd stayed behind to help pick up at my school today, which is Monday.  We've been given Monday and Tuesday off, though, and a rest in the mountain hot springs away from potential radiation isn't a bad thing.

Cook the books!

I'm excited to have appeared in a ... webisode? of "Cook The Books," a terrific author interview show conducted by Emily Gould, herself a terrific author (check out her wonderfully sharp and honest memoir, And The Heart Says Whatever, if you haven't already).  We made spicy tuna sushi and filmed the show on a blazing hot day in June, in her enviably tidy Brooklyn apartment.  I mention the blazing heat to explain the shine of my face.  We had to keep pausing the filming so that we could mop ourselves off with paper towels.  All this said, now that we're going on a month of solid fog and 50-60 degree temperatures here in SF--that month being July/August--I wouldn't mind sweating a little.  What happened to summer?  It's almost gone before it ever started.

http://www.theawl.com/2010/08/cooking-the-books-how-to-make-spicy-tuna-salad-sushi-with-malena-watrous

Friendiquette

Where does the "social" part end and the "networking" part begin?

I have had the odd experience, over the past week, of receiving two "friend" requests from people previously unknown to me, that were immediately (well, minutes later) followed by favor requests, of a professional sort.  This made me slightly cranky.  Granted, I know that Facebook is a "social networking tool," but sometimes I think that the word "friend" is a bit misleading.  I might have been less cranky to be asked for the favor, had the request reached me via the email account that I use for work.

I thought of a friend of mine--a true friend, made face to face, our friendship deepened over years of shared experiences, good and bad--who has a policy of not accepting friend requests from a) former students, b) anyone she doesn't know.  In my crankiness, her policy made good sense.  But then again, I do like the possibility engendered by the site, of connecting with someone I might not otherwise have had the chance to overlap with, and forming something like a friendship--if not quite.  It has happened.  There are people on my friend list who intrigue and delight me from afar, when I happen upon their status updates.  But more often, these "friendships" with strangers stagnate.  And ones struck back up with old acquaintances often remind me of why we drifted apart to begin with.  All of this has as much to do with my character--I dislike the term "people person" as much as people who consider themselves "people people"--as the limitations of the site.  I hate the idea of going to a social event because it might be a good "networking opportunity."  They never lead to much, and they're usually a drag.  It's like we're supposed to feel like everything is fun now, but instead everything that used to be fun now feels like an extension of work.  Friends are really colleagues.  It's all mixed up.

When I was back in Oregon, an old friend from high school (with whom I'd reconnected on Facebook, of course) mentioned how "You have to put up about 8 to 9 random and interesting status updates for every 1 that has to do with self-promotion."  I thought about how right she was, even though I'd never heard the rule articulated, how otherwise people look a bit greedy and grabby, trumpeting their successes or asking for audience members, readers, fans, whatever.  Not friends.

But then again, and I know I'm in the minority here, I'm not sure I need to know when someone is "making cookies on a foggy morning, yum!" or "gearing up to watch Girl With a Dragon Tattoo on Netflix."  Even when I do read about someone doing something that sounds like fun, I wonder what it really adds to their pleasure, to see me add my thumbs-up sign along with thirteen other friends who "like this!"

Recently, an old high school classmate that I'd never known in person joined Facebook with a lot of fanfare.  A friend request was followed by daily messages and wall posts galore, many of which seemed copied to everyone on his list.  I found out about everything that had happened to him over the fifteen years that I had not been wondering about, since I never really knew him to begin with.  I learned of his illnesses--startling, for a man his age--his career highs and lows.  He was quite candid, given the public nature of his correspondence.  And then, after a few manic days of posting, he sent all of his new friends a message announcing that he had decided to leave Facebook.  "It's just not for me," he wrote without the confessional zeal I'd come to expect.  He had seemed to love it, to be made for it, but I guess it wasn't what he'd been hoping for after all.  After an initial greeting, I for one had not responded to his daily messages.  I had work to do, and he wasn't really my friend.  I can't say that I truly miss him, although now I do wonder how he is.

What is your earliest smell memory?

Mine is of the smell of wood chips baking in the sun.  The wood chips in question lined the playground at my first elementary school, that I attended as a four year old.  This school was in the Haight, where it is seldom sunny, but in my memory the playground always smelled of sun baking into wood, and it's a smell that still makes me feel a little queasy.  I remember sitting on top of the parallel bars, where I felt myself to be (or ought to have been) safely above the throng of playing kids, and where every day a slightly larger and older child named Omsi (could it have been spelled this way? but how else could it be spelled?) would sneak up on me and spit in my ear.  I tried everything I could think of to get her to stop, including telling on her, but the adults I told didn't seem to take the offense all that seriously, maybe because I couldn't really prove it and there was little to show for it.  One day Omsi was on the bars when I got there, and without really thinking about it I ran up and pushed her, as hard as I could, off the bars, and she fell hard and cut her face and bled on the wood chips, and I swear that I could smell the irony tang of her blood too, baking into them in the sun, and I swear I meant it when I said that I was sorry, that it was just an accident. 

I write like...

http://iwl.me/

Check out this very strange website that analyzes a few paragrpahs of your writing and tells you who you write like.

I apparently write like Chuck Palaniuk, a fact I find hilarious and way off target, not that I'd mind writing like the author of Fight Club.  I remember hearing him read and talk once, and how how said that he emulates Amy Hemphill, which also seemed like a strange and unlikely comparison to me.


UPDATE: Someone inputted a section of the phone book into this database and was told that they write like Thomas Hardy.  So: maybe not such a good judge of authorial influence.  Good to know that as of yet, computers can not do a writer's job.