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October 31, 2005
Most Original Costume
Posted by Holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (3)
October 28, 2005
Taunt the Gremlins and They'll Taunt You Back Part II
Read Part One
"Omigod," I said when she told me this. "Omigod."
"Are you going to stay on campus and wait for them?" she asked.
"I don't have any choice," I said. "I don't have my car keys to drive home, or my house keys to get in my house even if I got a ride from someone else. I don't have my wallet or my coat or my umbrella--if it weren't raining so hard, I'd just go look for the cop. But everything is in my office."
"Do you have a cell phone number where I can call you in case I get through to someone?"
"I don't have ANYTHING," I said, "except the clothes I'm wearing, which includes a skirt with a couple of great big blood stains on it. The whole reason I left my office was so I could go to the restroom and deal with the fact that I had bled all over the back of my skirt. Which is why I wasn't thinking clearly enough to grab my keys, because I pretty much never do things like this."
Which is true. In the past 20 years I've locked myself out of my house a grand total of once. In my entire life I've locked my keys in my car a grand total of once. It's precisely this kind of thing I'm trying to avoid by "just checking" everything, and I usually do pretty well. So I'm blaming this on the gremlins. I wrote those provocative entries last week about how to outsmart them, and they found a way to outsmart me, waited until I was distracted, then moved my keys out of my line of vision so I'd leave my office without them. Keyless, I wandered the halls in my bloody skirt for 40 minutes, gratefully attempting any solution my colleagues offered, though the main thing they did is talk about how weird it was that no one was available to open my office for me, since they'd locked themselves out of their offices at 8 a.m. on a Sunday morning or 10 p.m. on a Saturday night and had no problem getting someone over in five minutes or less with a key to unlock their doors and give their lives back to them.
Finally someone from maintenance arrived and let me into my office; there, huddled in an undignified lump in the middle of my desk, were my keys. I stuffed them into my pocket, then called campus security again. The receptionist and I had become good friends; I'd called her half a dozen times to see if the cop had begun answering his pager. "This is the woman who was locked out of her office," I said, "and I just wanted to let you know someone from maintenance unlocked my door, and I also wanted to say THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU for spending forty minutes on the phone tracking down someone to help me."
Then I called my Buffy colleague--whom I'll call Spike--to tell him I'd be late; then I went home and changed out of my bloody clothes. For those of you who don't know, blood stains are notoriously hard to remove from clothing; it helps a lot if you can rinse the stain while it's still damp, but these had (of course) dried in the meantime. The main thing you must NEVER do to a blood stain is wash it in hot water; hot water cooks the proteins and sets the stain, so that you'll never get it out. I am happy to say that after a good long soak in cold water, the stains disappeared.
Dressed in black pants so that if I bled on them, it at least wouldn't show, I went to pick up Spike. We had originally planned to go to a nice, quiet coffee shop so we could concentrate, and eat healthy sandwiches and drink herbal tea so we could stay focused and alert. "Would you mind terribly if we went someplace that serves alcohol?" I asked. "The past hour or two has been totally shitty and I am not in the mood for healthy and wholesome; I want a reuben overstuff with corned beef and sauerkraut, a greasy side of fries, and a pint or two of Guinness." Mercifully, it was not a hard sell.
Because Spike and I are brilliant people and Buffy is an incredible show, we came up with some great things to talk about in our panel this weekend, even in an Irish pub with celtic-flavored rock and roll wafting from the speakers. And I was glad I'd done something to redeem the day instead of staying home and sulking, which is what I came close to doing--I almost canceled. But I think I have learned my lesson, which is this: If you are going to lead a life of vigilant "just checking" in an attempt to outsmart the gremlins, DON'T TELL THEM, BECAUSE THEY CONSIDER IT TAUNTING. And if you taunt them, they'll taunt you back.
Posted by Holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (3)
October 27, 2005
Taunt the Gremlins and They'll Taunt You Back Part I
I finished a long day of teaching Tuesday at 5:15 p.m. I was tired and hungry but I still had work to do: I had to prepare to meet a colleague at 6:30 to discuss a panel on work and sex in Buffy the Vampire Slayer we're putting together for a Halloween horror conference. I sighed hard, sat down, and rolled my chair forward to my computer, rolling over and catching the hem of my skirt in the process. I disentangled myself, stood up to smooth my skirt, and noticed that my fingers came away from the back of it damp and tinged with red.
"Shit," I said aloud, though what was on my fingers wasn't shit; it was something else. I dragged my skirt forward and craned my neck back to inspect the damage and sure enough, smack-dab center on the back of my skirt, was a great big soggy blood stain.
I sat down for a moment, my face red as the back of my skirt, while I thought about the fact that the class I'd just finished contained a dozen freshmen boys and one freshman girl; if there was a group to whom I didn't care to announce my fertility, it was that one. "Let it go, Holly," I said, reminding myself that I'd been seated for most of the class, reading them instructions for a writing exercise, and that they never seemed to pay that much attention to me anyway.
Of course I keep appropriate supplies in my desk for just such emergencies, so I found what I needed and headed to the ladies' room. I addressed the problem, discovered that I'd acquired a second big stain in the moments I'd been seated at my desk, carefully swept up part of my skirt so the stains didn't show, and, carrying the extra fabric in my hand like a train I wanted to keep off the floor, took a deep breath and headed back to my office.
At this point I should mention that this was one of my favorite skirts, an ankle-length three-tiered skirt I had made myself. The background of the fabric is pale blue; the predominant pattern consists of blue and green paisleys coupled like yin/yang symbols; the whole thing is scattered with a small print of blue, green and rust-red roses. The skirt also has nice deep pockets concealed in the side seams. One reason I like making my own clothes is so I can put pockets in them--I hate the fact that women's clothing almost never has pockets. I don't like carrying a purse, and I don't like worrying about losing my keys. I like to put them in my pocket and leave them there, knowing they're safe.
Back at my office, I reached into a pocket for my keys, then reached into the other pocket. No keys. I tried the door, hoping either I or the gremlins had unlocked it; no such luck.
"Shit," I said again, and this time it was shit I was in--not deep shit, maybe, but shit nonetheless. A master key was kept in the main office as a remedy for precisely such situations, but as 5 p.m. had come and gone, the staff in the main office had gone as well. I went to find a colleague who was still in his/her office and could call campus security for me.
I tried Sweet Baby Jesus first, but ever-popular professor that he is, a string of students stood outside his door, and judging by the expressions on their faces, they were starting to get annoyed at the student who was sitting in his office and talking for so damn long. It wasn't a scene I wanted to interrupt, so I kept looking. Mercifully I soon found someone else willing to let me use his phone.
And that should have been the end of it; I should have called campus security and someone with a master key should have been dispatched to unlock my door. Unfortunately one of the campus cops had not come in to work that day and the other was not answering his pager--the poor receptionist absolutely could not reach him. Nor could she reach anyone in maintenance--the entire office seemed to be shut down, or maybe they were all out attending to leaky ceilings or overflowing culverts, since all day we'd had torrential rain left over from one tropical storm or another.
To be continued.
Posted by Holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (0)
October 26, 2005
My Mother Sends Me Stuff
My mother has begun doing this really annoying thing: she has begun emptying filing cabinets and drawers that haven't been opened for 20 years, and if the contents bears any relation whatsoever to me, she sends it to me.
Monday I got a big package containing my report cards from first, second and sixth grade; a bunch of my elementary school photographs, a few of which I'm posting just for the hell of it; the program from my kindergarten graduation ceremony (apparently I won the coveted role of Mama Rabbit in the classic play "The Little White Rabbits Who Wanted Red Wings," and I also got to play the Queen of Hearts in "A School Day in Storybook Land"--I actually remember the costume for that: it was this fabulous confection of a white dress with red hearts all over it, and I wore a tiara and carried a heart-shaped scepter); and lots and lots of really BAD poetry written before I had mastered cursive handwriting.
I can see why she saved that stuff. And I guess I'm glad she's sorting through it now, so we don't have to do it all after she dies. (I know my father is going to leave us a huge mess of papers, bills, uncashed but no longer negotiable checks--sometimes he just can't be bothered to go to the bank--and stashes of decades old sugar-free candy to sort through and discard.) But I admit I'm sort of resentful that I'm supposed to become the custodian of my own childhood at this point. After all, that's what parents are FOR: to maintain a shrine to our childhoods so we can grow up and forget about them, right?
I mean, what do I do with a canceled check for $5.00 dated December 16 1972, a birthday gift from my great-grandparents? On and around the memo line, my great-grandfather wrote, "Holly, always speak the Truth and you won't have to remember what you say because the truth is imprinted on your mind." I feel sort of guilty throwing it out but I lived 33 years quite happily without it in my possession, so why should I keep it now? Besides, if I stick it in a drawer or a box or a filing cabinet, I'll just have to discover it and have to deal with it later.
My mother also saved a bunch of stuff from HER trip to Taiwan. (My parents picked me up at the end of my mission and spent ten days touring the island with me.) She even saved a bunch of receipts for god-only-knows-what, just because they had Chinese characters on them, and now she has sent those to me. At least I don't have to debate about what to do with things like that: they went straight into the trash, because I already have enough stuff with characters on it.
But with the other stuff, the stuff that concretizes the vaguely pleasant memories that remind me how safe and privileged and valued my childhood was.... how could I throw it away? I admit I succumbed to...guilt or nostalgia or I don't know what that feeling was, and shoved the papers and photographs into an envelope, then shut them in a trunk in my extra closet--the trunk that also contains other remnants of my childhood, including my two favorite dolls and their clothes, my last pair of toe and tap shoes, and my favorite board game from when I was five, "Pig in the Garden."
As I mentioned the poetry is awful, and I thought about posting some of it here just for kicks. Unfortunately it's the kind of awful that seventh grade girls think is good, and it occurred to me that someone might come across it and think I'd put it up because I was proud of it. So instead I'm going to post a brief story, written probably when I was seven or eight.
The BearWe went to the mountains and stayed one week. We stayed in our cabin. My father was fixing the roof so there was some tin roofing lying around. One night my father saw a bear jumping on the tin roofing like it was a trampoline. Then the bear walked across the porch railing and jumped into a tree, swung around then ran off. Then about two or three or four hours later, the bear came back. This time he poked holes in our garbage can lids and toys, and kicked our ball around. Then our father came to where my sister and I were sleeping. He shined the flashlight on the bear so we could see him. Then he ran away and did not come back.
Here are the photos I promised. Unfortunately they are quite large and I couldn't figure out how to shrink them, so you'll get a screen full of my very young face. Here's second grade:
Here's third grade:
Posted by Holly at 8:58 AM | Comments (1)
October 25, 2005
Self-Portrait as Cultural Creative, Whatever the Hell That Means
A few week agos, Jana took this quiz designed to gauge your world view and posted her results on her blog. A few days later her husband John took the same quiz and posted his results, and not so long ago Wayne followed the links in my webroll to one of those places and took the quiz himself, though he didn't post his results on either his first or second blog. Instead, he read me his results over the phone, and told me to take the quiz. So I did. Turns out I'm a Cultural Creative, and
Cultural Creatives are probably the newest group to enter this realm. You are a modern thinker who tends to shy away from organized religion but still feels as if there is something greater than ourselves. You are very spiritual, even if you are not religious. Life has a meaning outside of the rational.
I didn't just score highest in the Cultural Creative category; I scored perfectly in it. I don't particularly know what the term means or how long it's been around, but I guess I really truly am one, if I buy into it 100%. I'm rather glad that "new ager" is not a category; I appreciate quite a few new age ideas, but there's so much annoying posture that goes along with being new age. As for the other terms, many of them don't mean to me what they seem to mean to the creator of this quiz, so I'm not sure how revealing the results are. To me, a Romanticist is someone who studies early 19th century British poetry (not many of those around these days) and a Modernist is what I almost became, someone who specializes in British and American lit written between the two world wars, and a postmodernist is a silly person who writes badly whose work you have to read in graduate school. At least I'm absolutely NOT a fundamentalist (which I would have predicted but am glad to have confirmed nonetheless). Anyway, here are my results:
Cultural Creative 100%
Idealist 94%
Postmodernist 69%
Existentialist 63%
Materialist 38%
Romanticist 38%
Modernist 19%
Fundamentalist 0%
If you take the quiz yourself, let me know how you score.
Posted by Holly at 7:57 AM | Comments (6)
October 24, 2005
Self-Portrait as Modest Desires
When I was finishing up my first master's degree, I saw a career counselor who told me I should figure out what I would want if I could have any kind of life at all. My desires were modest: I wanted to live alone in a pleasant house with lots of windows. I wanted to spend most of my day writing, alone. In the evening I wanted to get together with friends and eat pasta out of big pretty bowls, and then I wanted to go home alone. I didn't care whether or not I was rich or famous; I just wanted to be comfortable. I also wanted all of this to take place in Italy. And wouldn't you know I got it all, six years later, except that as far as the place goes, all the universe got right was the first letter: it happened in Iowa, not Italy.
What if I had wanted something grander, more elaborate? Why didn't I want something grander, more elaborate? One reason is, I think, that I was tired. Life had been pretty stressful up to that point and I wanted some peace. I wanted less to be expected of me.
At this point I'd like to want more. I want more to be expected of me and I expect more of me and I expect more of the universe. What, after all, am I allowed to want? That has been part of my thinking all along: If you have this, you can't want that. If you are a Mormon you can't want a life full of drugs and orgies. If you have even a certain level of enlightenment you can't want the ease of living a stupid, unenlightened life. Furthermore, if you want certain things, then you can't really want other things. If you want to eat whatever you want whenever you want no matter how many calories it has or what it does to your liver or your pancreas or whatever, then you can't really want to be thin and healthy. If you want to smoke then you can't really want to breathe well. If you want to be nasty to your neighbors then you can't really want to be enlightened. If you want to be a writer then you can't really want to be not a writer. If you don't really feel like writing then you must not really want to be a writer.
Some of those probably hold true and some probably don't. I want to want everything I can possibly want. I want to want so many things that I get at least some of them, even if they are contradictory.
Posted by Holly at 8:45 AM | Comments (1)
October 21, 2005
Outsmarting the Gremlins Part II
Read Part One.
The biggest things Mormons plan for, of course, is the Second Coming and the Apocalypse that will precede it. Gotta be righteous, so you don't get burned with the heathen! Also must stock up on a two-years' supply of raw wheat (don't forget the hand-cranked grinder so you can still grind it when the power goes out), a two-years' supply of potable water, and a two-years' supply of toilet paper. Mormon pantries are a sight to behold, as are the spaces under Mormon beds: cans of dehydrated potatoes and cornmeal and god only knows what.
At some point, when the church grew large enough that its membership wasn't concentrated in the spacious intermountain West, where people could have huge basements in which to store foodstuffs well beyond the expiration date (ever walked into a basement where two dozen cans of potted beef have exploded? That stuff stinks even when it's not rancid), someone in charge said, "OK, we'll let you scale back to just a ONE-YEAR supply of all those necessities. And don't forget to rotate your canned goods!"
You may think I'm kidding, but in her attic, my mom really does have a one-year supply of toilet paper. Outside the house, my father has a ten-year supply of rotted firewood, as well as dozens of old car batteries that can be hooked up to a generator and recharged and power various special appliances he has bought because they will run off old car batteries. (He also has two old Cadillacs: a 62 with rocks in the gas tank courtesy of some nasty neighbor boy, and a 49 that still runs, which he periodically has repainted, drives for a day or two, then parks again for ten to fifteen years. In addition, he owns an ancient aluminum motor home, a piece of junk whose only virtue is that its exterior is recyclable; a small RV in which he and my mother have driven across the country a time or two; a 40-year-old green Chevy pickup, the vehicle in which I learned to drive and which we all agree Dad should keep because sometimes, you need to haul stuff; a hideous white suburban with a broken driver's seat that he refuses to sell because it might come in handy, but which never will because of the truck; and a Ford Yukon he drives every day and complains about every day because it's not a Lincoln, which is what he really wanted, but he bought that damn little SUV brand new because my brother could get him a deal on it through his job, and Dad was too cheap to fork out the cash on a Lincoln, even though he could afford it. The front of the house looks fine, but the side view.... I swear to god, it looks like the opening shot of a movie about people who leave their empty whiskey bottles under the bed and tether a goat to the lawn so they don't have to mow it. The only thing that redeems the scene is the fact that none of the cars are on blocks.)
Adults were taught to Buy in Bulk and Never Throw Anything Useful Away; as for young people, we learned about Goals! That's what the Mormon church teaches its youth: the Importance of Setting Goals! For six years, from the time I started junior high until I graduated from high school, as part of official Church curriculum, I had to set two goals every month in areas covering my spiritual, emotional, intellectual, physical, social and artistic development. I was good at setting and meeting goals. "Run three miles every morning." "Earn straight A's." "Never be tardy." We were told that "a goal not written is only a wish." I guess that's why I ended up serving a mission and getting a PhD instead of marrying a nice Mormon boy: I forgot to write down the goal to get married!
Anyway, the point of all this is that I learned, well and truly, how to plan ahead--not just for things I know I'll have to deal with (like three classes full of students every Tuesday and Thursday), but for emergencies. I keep a valid passport around, even if I have no plans to leave the country, because what if I suddenly have to fly to Italy on a moment's notice? I check the ten-day weather forecast so I can plan what I'm going to wear during the next week. I change my clocks BEFORE I go to bed when the time arrives to go on or off Daylight Savings Time (which I loathe) so that when I wake up, I know as soon as I glance at the clock what time it really is. I even plan ahead with my blog, so that I always have backup material in case I am having WAY too much fun living my life to write about it. I do this because it makes my life easier and more orderly in the long run, but I also do it to outsmart the gremlins, whose purpose in life is to cause chaos in mine, and I like to keep the chaos at bay.
Posted by Holly at 9:19 AM | Comments (2)
October 20, 2005
Outsmarting the Gremlins Part I
I have always been someone who spends a lot of time "just checking" things. It's not like I think the world will stop whirling frantically on its wobbly little axis if I don't look up every so often and make sure the sun is progressing across the sky in a timely fashion. But I do harbor the suspicion that if you don't rattle the knob of your door at least three time to make sure it's locked, gremlins will come along and unlock it as soon as you are out of sight.
Preparing for contingencies and anticipating consequences, that's what I believe in, because you've got to stay ahead of the gremlins! In order to do this well, not only must you Check on Things, you also have to Remember Stuff and Keep Lists and Plan Ahead.
The Remembering Stuff--well, I'm not as bad about remembering everything as I used to be; I now let myself forget things. (I also admit my less efficient memory might also be a result of aging--I'm told that memory impairment can start around, well, around 40.) I have one sister whose memory is even better than mine, though she uses it to remember political information (she was five or six during the Watergate hearings and can tell you everyone in Nixon's cabinet) and street layouts--she NEVER gets lost. Me, I use my memory to remember appointments, deadlines, obligations, significant historical dates, poems and passages of prose, what everyone has ordered for dinner when I go to a restaurant with friends, and details about other people's lives. A boyfriend once related a minor anecdote involving a bunch of people I'd never met and I questioned the details, saying, "How can that be? After all, your friend Maggie is allergic to cats."
He was driving my car (I don't really like to drive, especially not in snowstorms, and it was snowing) and became very intent on the road for a moment. "You're right," he said finally. "It wasn't Maggie. It was Melanie who kidnapped Mike's cat." He pulled up to a red light and put the car out of gear. "Damnit!" he said, slamming the steering wheel. "Your memory is so good, I can't even lie to you about anything!"
"Do you normally lie to your girlfriends?" I asked.
"Well, yeah," he said. "There's always been something I've needed to hide. And there's usually a point where I screw up the details of some story I've concocted. But normally when something I tell them doesn't add up, I can convince them that THEY are misremembering. I've never met anyone who remembers my life better than I do."
"Well, I'm glad I can be the one to help break you of this nasty, nasty habit," I said. And I did help. He's one of the exes I'm still friends with, and he's pretty damn honest these days.
The Keeping Lists part--not only do I have lists, but I have lists that are cross-indexed. I have lists of everything I've ever published, one arrange alphabetically by title of the work, another arranged alphabetically by title of the publication the work appeared in, and still another arranged chronologically by date of publication. I have three lists keeping track of unpublished work as well, including where and when I've sent it. And then there's my List of Things To Do, with headings like "Teaching" and subheadings for specific preparations for each class and activities planned for a particular day. To make this list, I have to integrate all my various course syllabi, and then add things like birthdays, doctor's appointments, social engagements. I would hate to live without it. There are other lists I could tell you about, but you get the idea.
All the lists are part of my effort to Plan Ahead. I know people who are beset by generalized anxiety about the future, but never attempt to allay that anxiety by Planning Ahead. I could have been one of those people, had I not grown up Mormon.
To be continued.
Read Part Two.
Posted by Holly at 8:06 AM | Comments (2)
October 19, 2005
China Crisis
OK, so I didn't come up with that title myself: It's the title of an article in today's Independent UK, about China's environmental problems. (And for those of you who don't remember or don't care to remember, China Crisis is also the name of an 80s British pop band who achieved modest success with a single called "Arizona Sky," which, now that I read the lyrics, is kind of lame, but I always liked the lines praising the vast, brilliant blue sky of Arizona.)
Anyway, this article makes some truly dire predictions, which I have no problem believing are very, very likely. For instance:
deforestation is only one of the threats to the planet posed by an economy of 1.3 billion people that has now overtaken the United States as the world's leading consumer of four out of the five basic food, energy and industrial commodities - grain, meat, oil, coal and steel. China now lags behind the US only in consumption of oil - and it is rapidly catching up.Because of their increasing reliance on coal-fired power stations to provide their energy, the Chinese are firmly on course to overtake the Americans as the world's biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, and thus become the biggest contributors to global warming and the destabilisation of the climate. If they remain uncontrolled, the growth of China's carbon dioxide emissions over the next 20 years will dwarf any cuts in CO2 that the rest of the world can make.
The article then discusses population growth in China and other parts of Asia, and quotes an expert who offers this opinion:
The bottom line of this analysis is that we're going to have to develop a new economic model. Instead of a fossil-fuel based, automobile-centred, throw-away economy we will have to have a renewable-energy based, diversified transport system, and comprehensive reuse and recycle economies. If we want civilisation to survive, we will have to have that. Otherwise civilisation will collapse.
I lived in Shanghai for several months in 1991. It was the most polluted place I had ever been, though Kaohsiung, a filthy port city in southern Taiwan, ran a close second. I can only imagine how much worse it it is now, with more cars and more people and even more people who can actually afford to heat their homes in the winter. (It was also very poor.) And supposedly Shanghai isn't nearly as bad as Beijing, which becomes particularly polluted each winter.
In Taiwan, we had actual washing machines (though they were little and strange and hard on clothes and had to be monitored, with all these steps where you turned the water on and turned it off and set the cycle to spin or agitate or whatever) but in Shanghai, we just put our clothes in the bathtub and stomped on them to get them clean. Then we'd hang them on the balcony to dry. I never got used to wearing clothes that smelled like car exhaust even before I put them on. I never got used to the horrible black stuff that came from my nose whenever I blew it. I never got used to how filthy my face was at the end of the day. I never got used to the dismal sky or the smell. And it's worse now, apparently--much worse.
This morning it is quite cold in my house. I am all bundled up in thermal underwear, socks, slippers and an extra heavy bathrobe, because I refuse to turn on my heat until it's really truly WINTER, not just AUTUMN, and even then I never set the thermostat above 65 because I am A) cheap and B) anxious to reduce the amount of fossil fuel I use. I paid my gas company almost $1200 last year; I'm not looking forward to the coming year, with heating costs that will be even higher because of the various hurricanes.
I admit my hands get quite cold no matter how many layers are on the rest of me, and I guess I will deal with that by acquiring some of those gloves that have no fingertips, so you can still do things like type. But overall I don't mind this business of coping with the cold by wearing lots and lots of clothes. That was what my Chinese roommates always said to me when I complained about being cold on my mission: "Chwan dwo yifu!" or "put on more clothes! " That was about all you could do in Taiwan, because most homes did not have heat since it was only needed two or three months out of the year--that and close the windows when it was 40 degrees outside, which a couple of my roommates refused to do. (They had this idea that freshly polluted cold air wafting through our apartment was healthier than warm air that had been in our apartment for a while.)
But piling on layers of padded clothing (there is evidence that the Chinese invented quilting--quilted clothing is remarkably efficient in preserving body heat) seems to be going out of fashion in Asia, where the growing population aspires to use as much gas and oil as we do. I wish, that instead of prompting us to eat all our food by admonishing us to think of starving peasants in China, adults had admonished us to use less whatever so that there would be more whatever left over for others in the world: use less fuel, less timber, less water, less food so there will be more fuel, more timber, more water, more food for everyone else. I wish we'd really truly been taught to share.
p.s. Just for the heck of it, here's an article on Mao.
Posted by Holly at 9:26 AM | Comments (0)
Bone-Eating Snot Flower
Um, so, British scientists have discovered a new worm, which they have cleverly named Osedax mucofloris, Latin for "bone-eating snot flower." Remarkably enough, the bone-eating snot flower is not related to some zombie worms living off the coast of California, the name of which was not provided in the article I read. In any event, you can read all about the BESF here.
Posted by Holly at 9:21 AM | Comments (0)
October 17, 2005
Chocolat
This is a review of the movie Chocolat that I wrote in 2001 for a class on, well, on writing reviews. The teacher liked it but suggested that it was a bit too idiosyncratic to be appropriate for most publications, so I never bothered to do anything with it, but it seems it might find a home here, especially since I posted all this stuff about movies.
****
Once at a party a friend of mine who had been sitting near my television said to me, "I can't believe your movie collection. It's so...brazen."
"You mean ‘cause they're almost all chick movies?" I asked.
"It's not just that," she said. "It's that you have them out, where people can see them. I mean, some of my friends own a lot of these same movies, but they put them away before people come over. But you're not even embarrassed."
It's true: I like chick movies, I watch chick movies, I buy chick movies; I don't care who knows. I might add that my collection is alphabetized, ranging from Annie Hall, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Chasing Amy, Clueless to Sense and Sensibility, Singin' in the Rain, Sixteen Candles, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Truth or Dare. I feel entitled to add that I like other kinds of movies as well--I love Lawrence of Arabia and The Pride of the Yankees, and I don't think those qualify as chick movies. But then, I haven't gotten around to buying those movies. Maybe I should. Nothing in my collection starts with L or P.
Chocolat, directed by Lasse Hallstrom and up for Best Picture in the 2001 Academy Awards, is the best chick movie I have seen in a good long time. First of all, the clothes are terrific. Juliette Binoche and Victoire Thivosol (who plays Binoche's daughter) arrive in a tiny French village at the end of the 1950s dressed in matching red cloaks that would make Little Red Riding Hood jealous. They carry two medium-sized suitcases, but you'd need at least two suitcases more to hold the entirety of Juliette Binoche's marvelous collection of straight skirts, full skirts, cute sweater sets and colorful high heels. I especially loved her bias-cut circle plaid skirts, one of which has really cool patch pockets. When Binoche sets about painting the dingy walls of the patisserie she intends to turn into a chocolaterie, she does so in a fabulous fitted off-the-shoulder purple blouse, and not one drop of paint is spattered on that blouse, which is good because it's really flattering and shows up again and again. I imagine she also has a decent collection of push-up bras in one of those suitcases--at least, I'm guessing she wears one under that purple blouse.
Carrie-Anne Moss, who was so drop-dead cool in black leather and vinyl as Trinity in The Matrix, is here a prim widow who wears elegant suits and pillbox hats a la Jackie Kennedy. Her mother is played by Judi Dench, and while not all of Dench's costumes are particularly remarkable, she is provided with a very flattering haircut and wide-brimmed hat just in time for her birthday party. Even the mayor's absent wife has a closet full of fabulous clothes--and when the mayor, played by Alfred Molina, takes garden shears to a flowered chiffon party dress because he's angry at his wife for running off and leaving him, I had to suppress a gasp of horror.
Nor are men's fashions ignored. The hair and make-up crew did a wonderful job of adding striking blond highlights to Johnny Depp's dark hair, which he wears pulled back in a severe, straight ponytail. Depp plays a vagabond whose presence threatens the towns tranquility, and he is suitably vagabondish in a ratty leather blazer, fraying sweaters and tattered pants. Alfred Molina looks quite dignified in a series of well-cut suits, and the priest, a curly-headed, doe-eyed, callow actor whose name I forgot to note, gets to wear exceptionally lovely and elaborately embroidered vestments.
The movie is set in France, and while no one actually speaks French in the movie, at least most of the actors--only three of whom are French--speak with French accents. An exception is Johnny Depp, who acquired a fairly awful and unconvincing Irish accent for this film. The French setting means that we get many nice shots of quaint homes and large trees along a slow green river.
I don't want to make it sound like clothes, hair, accents and a picturesque setting are all this movie has to offer. Keep in mind, it's about chocolate. I suggest you bring some with you while you watch this movie. There are lots of scenes of melted chocolate being stirred around in big bowls, and you can get pretty hungry. At one point Lena Olin licks the knife she is using to stir such a pot of chocolate, and while I winced at the unsanitariness of that act--after all, this chocolate is going to be for sale--I couldn't help wishing for a chocolate-covered knife to lick myself.
The movie also has a plot, which I found compelling and moving. It's a story about the cost of self-deprivation and petty intolerance, and the rewards of generosity. One of the things I liked best about this movie was its generous attitude towards its characters. None of them are whole-heartedly bad; all are offered redemption. The fact that redemption arrives in the form of chocolate might seem cloyingly sweet to some viewers, but there was enough darkness and bitterness in this chocolate for me. I'm going to buy it when it comes out on video, even though I already own a couple of movies starting with C.
****
Just for the record, I never got around to buying a copy of Chocolat. Several of the other movies I mentioned are no longer in my collection, because I sold most of my VHS cassettes after I got a dvd player. I now own Lawrence of Arabia on dvd, and watch it regularly.
Posted by Holly at 8:09 AM | Comments (2)
October 14, 2005
Heat
Another piece culled from old files, this was written five or six years ago.
I was very depressed last week until Wednesday night, when my friend and former f*ck buddy Sergei came over. I called him because I hadn't heard from him in weeks. He himself was terribly depressed, having just been named "Employee of the Month" at Barnes and Noble, an honor that means he's a responsible grownup who must renounce all claims to being a hip, cool bad boy. Since we were both depressed, we decided to commiserate. He showed up with a bottle of tequila and Heat, this long Al Pacino movie, because there's a scene featuring the very Heckler and Koch assault rifle he owns (and which I fired one day at the shooting range). We watched the movie and downed a few shots and he gave me a back rub and then we ended up wrestling and it was just like Ado Annie says: "Every time I lose that wrestlin' match, I have a funny feelin' that I won...." So I have this very attractive man straddling me and pinning my hands to the ground, and all he does is say, "OK, kiss me." So I get one lousy kiss and then he gets up and goes home because after all he has a girlfriend and I don't approve of infidelity.
Posted by Holly at 7:57 AM | Comments (2)
October 13, 2005
Checking My Fluids
Tuesday I collected a batch of essays and yesterday I went to a coffee house to start grading them, a time-honored technique adopted by graduate students everywhere: grading is often so boring at best and so loathsome at worst, that it helps to go someplace where you've really got to grade stuff, can't get up and check your email or wash your dishes or start a load of laundry instead of plowing through the papers, no matter how awful they are. I sat down with my decaf medium mocha, regular milk but no whipped cream, served in a mug instead of a paper cup (my standard order these days), hauled out my folder and my pen, and started reading. At the top of the stack was an essay that began, "The as an average student I carry many things with me schoolwork, personal items, utensils for completing the tasks at hand, and not to mention the emotional aspect of my day."
The only thing to do at that point was to bury my face in my hands and mutter, "Dear god, help me." Which prompted a man seated at a table near me to say, "Kids getting you down, are they?"
I looked up. "They are indeed," I said. "Just listen to this," and I read him the sentence.
"That's pretty awful," he said. "What are you reading this stuff for?" he asked.
"I'm an English professor," I told him, and asked what he did. He was significantly older than the kind of guy I usually go for, but I have a long history of dating men who are too young for me, and decided recently that I would cultivate an interest in age-appropriate men. This guy had, I learned, a grown son, but he also had a full head of well-coiffed hair, and he was in good shape, wiry and lean. Which is why I felt a twinge of disappointment when he told me he invested in real estate for a living. Shit, I thought. That might mean he's a soulless, money-grubbing Republican. Still, I was even more disappointed when he quit chatting me up in order to turn to his newspaper and his extra large beverage in a paper cup.
So I turned back to my stack of papers and graded a few more. But then the guy and I happened to look up at the same time, and he asked me, "So what made you decide to become an English professor?"
"I love books," I said. "I knew pretty early what I wanted to be when I grew up." I mentioned that I'm a writer too, and he had questions about that. I told him I'd written a book about being a missionary in Taiwan before renouncing organized religion entirely. At that point he was intrigued enough that he left his table and sat down at mine, which was OK with me.
"Before I elaborate, let me ask you this," I said. "Are you devout in any way? Because if you are, I want to avoid telling the story in a way that will offend you." Which was true. But I also knew that if he said, "Jesus Christ is my best friend, as well as my Lord and Savior," I would feel compelled to say to him, after telling him about my mission in the blandest of euphemisms, "Well, it's been lovely chatting with you, but I must get back to these essays."
Instead, he said, "I appreciate religion in general, but I'm more of a spiritual seeker than someone dedicated to a particular path. I spent a lot of time studying things like Buddhism and yoga." Which was pretty much the right answer. It's good to meet a man who can spell chakra.
So we proceeded to spend 45 minutes or so discussing charkas, how gorgeous Arizona is (a topic always dear to my heart), woodworking (which he does and which I have long wanted to do) and chocolate, which he doesn't eat, but which I eat a lot of. Turns out he eats a very healthy diet--that was green tea in his big paper cup, not coffee--but has never had acupuncture.
We also talked about what we like to do for fun. As it happens we both like hiking and don't care for sky diving, and neither of us owns a boat. It was pretty obvious he was interested in me, even before he asked me if I dated much. "Not lately," I said. "Not here. Haven't had the opportunity." And soon thereafter we exchanged email addresses.
He extended his hand, and I, always a fan of a good, firm handshake, was happy to take it. But after shaking my hand, he held onto it, moved his thumb and forefingers down around my fingers, and, quite obviously and deliberately, palpated my knuckles. Given some of the things we'd talked about, I wouldn't have been surprised or distressed had he turned my hand over to reveal my palm so he could inspect my head, heart and life line. But feeling up my knuckles, before he'd even asked me on a real date.... Well, I wasn't sure what kind of girl he thought I was, but I needed to find out. "What's that about?" I asked. "Trying to see if I've got arthritis?"
"I was checking your fluids," he said.
"How are they?" I asked.
"Better than most people's," he said.
"I try not to get dehydrated," I said.
"It's not good for you," he said.
"No," I said.
I admit, no one has ever closed a conversation with me quite that way before. And I also admit flashed for a moment on the rant Sterling Hayden, in the role of Brigadier General Jack D Ripper, delivers about Communist efforts to "impurify our precious bodily fluids" in Dr. Strangelove. But actually the gesture seemed--well, odd but not creepy. Idiosyncratic but not scary. Perhaps I could even be convinced that it was a mark of genuine concern for my well-being.... Well, maybe not. But I still rather hope he emails me before too long.
Posted by Holly at 7:38 AM | Comments (4)
October 12, 2005
Self-Portrait as Recluse
A piece salvaged from old files, this was written in August 2001, when I first moved back to Arizona.
"People look better back-lit," my photographer friend told me. It's also true of mountains. This evening I rode my bike down to the Gila River a mile north of town, which involved passing the old sewer pond and the new wastewater treatment facility, both of which smelled especially bad, perhaps because it has been so long since it rained. The clouds were orange for a long time and then they were gray. The mountains had contours for a long time and then they were just a stark, dark outline before a diminishing brightness. I had never noticed before how the Pinalenos and the Santa Teresas look like a felled dinosaur, the head pointing southeast and the massive tail jutting northwest.
These two ranges, connected by a long, low ridge, look like they could be one mountain range, but they're geologically different, I'm told. The Pinalenos, which are taller and thicker and longer, have nothing in them worth mining. The Santa Teresas contain gold, silver, copper, etc, and if anyone wanted those minerals badly enough, they could get them out.
I haven't done anything exciting in the past eight years except: get a PhD, fall in love and get my heart broken, write a book. Each of these activities has hampered the rest of my life in certain ways. Getting a PhD involved being in graduate school in the Midwest for eight years. I hated many things about being in a PhD program, course work being at the top of the list, poverty running a close second. Once I finished course work and could just sit at home and read the books I needed to read for teaching or for research, graduate school became a lot less vile. I had lots of time but not a lot of money. I started to knit and quilt again. I took up yoga. I began to garden. All of that was enjoyable but it doesn't exactly rank high on anyone's list of huge thrills.
Then there was the "fall in love and get my heart broken part." I am still somewhat bitter about that whole enterprise, as it could have been avoided: I knew when I first met the guy that he had all kinds of problems and issues; I knew better but for reason that seemed good at the time and seem really lame now I went ahead and fell in love with him, and he went ahead and broke my heart. That pretty much destroyed my desire to date anyone else. It did, however, make me feel like I should just shut myself up in my house and write a book, which is what I did, and why I succeeded in getting the PhD--they don't give you one of those unless you write a dissertation.
The problem with writing that book was that it took over two years and I got fairly good at writing it but I forgot how to write anything else but it. Except for email, which doesn't count.
In the past eight years I have not: traveled out of the country; bought a car; been arrested; given birth; profoundly disappointed anyone I love (having done enough of that in the previous decade or so); left a church or a political party; joined a new church or political party; attended many rallies or demonstrations (preferring to donate money to causes I care about, because I hate crowds); saved any money; found a lucrative post-PhD job; published a book. I have: attended two funerals (my favorite great aunt and my grandmother died on the day after Easter and the day after the day after Easter, respectively, seven years ago); buried a cat I really loved after she was run over and replaced her with a cat I merely like; begun practicing yoga, which has many benefits but which, I am beginning to think, is one of the reasons I haven't done anything exciting: I have moments of inner peace and contentment and don't really feel the need to amuse myself with exotic activities or to seek out the company of very many people.
Either I am a bit reclusive or I am more content with solitude than most people, which are perhaps ways of saying the same thing.
Posted by Holly at 8:09 AM | Comments (2)
October 11, 2005
The Deep Green Door
As I mentioned, a few weeks ago a friend and I visited Kirtland, Ohio, an important site in Mormon history. I've been sitting here preparing to write the sentence, "Church history doesn't really interest me," but something stopped me, because it isn't quite true: I've always found the story of the Saints Crossing the Plains thoroughly compelling, but I think that's partly because it involves the vast, expansive landscapes of the West. I guess it's more accurate to say that "Church history in Ohio never really interested me;" all that stuff about how Joseph Smith and his hardy band of trusting converts moved hither and yon after Joseph exhausted his credit or a bank failed or whatever always struck me as feeble preamble: after all, they were moving distances of a hundred miles or so, from one small- to medium-sized eastern state with trees and stores and ROADS, to another. That is an enterprise much less romantic than carving a thousand-mile-long path across a wind-scoured landscape where you encounter more wolves and buffalo than people, and where, if you want something like grains or vegetables, you either have to bring them with your or camp for several months while you plant, grow and harvest them.
Can you tell I'm a little homesick right now? We had a string of glorious fall days, but autumn has well and truly arrived now, not as the culmination of summer but as the harbinger of winter, with vicious cold rain flung from a sullen sky. I can't help checking the weather report for Tucson.... Anyway, this was not supposed to be a post about why I still prefer the parts of this country west of the Mississippi to the parts east of it; it's supposed to be an opportunity to post a picture of myself, so I'll get back on topic.
The walls of the Kirtland Temple are now an elegant, understated cream; the building is roofed with unassuming gray shingles. However, our tour guide told us that when it was originally built, its color scheme was anything but understated: the treatment the shingles underwent to make them fireproof rendered them a vivid, vibrant red; the plaster (which may or may not have contained bits of ground china, fine tableware sacrificed by the women of the church so that the House of the Lord would glitter like the jewel it was intended to be) was a rich blue like the late afternoon sky when it's barely tinged with gray; and the massive double doors at the front were painted a deep green that various members of the staff struggled to describe: not quite olive, one said; sort of a forest green, another explained.
The (once sparkly) plaster has subsequently been covered by many coats of paint, and the red roof has been replaced. However, the building has its original doors, which were recently removed and stripped, and in the process their original color revealed. They were repainted that shade and rehung. They're FABULOUS! I had my picture taken in front of one of them, and you can see it here. The color of the door is not truly captured, but still, I wanted to share.
Posted by Holly at 7:58 AM
October 10, 2005
My Past Lives, and Maybe the Future
I frequently hear this inane argument against reincarnation that "no one ever imagines a past life where they're just some ordinary yahoo; everyone always believes they were Cleopatra, or Attila the Hun, or Casanova, or Joan of Arc." Not me. I once got hypnotized in order to do some work on my early childhood and ended up progressing right through three past lives, each one every bit as nasty, brutish and short as Thomas Hobbes would have imagined. In the most recent I was a British farm girl raped and murdered during some civil war. In the next I was some hot Teutonic babe, imprisoned in some fortress on some cliffs over a river. I hated my husband, a nasty little rodent of a man, and I was very mean to him--I was very mean to everyone, in fact, except my children, whom I loved devotedly. To punish me, my husband had me shut up in this tower unless I agreed to be nice, and since I wouldn't agree, I died of starvation and heartbreak.
In the earliest past life, I was some six-year-old child taken captive and enslaved during some ancient war--the Peloponnesian or something--and had to watch my parents' brutal murders. That was bad enough, but what really upset me about that past life was the realization that that particular time around, I was male--I remember the hypnotist asked me, "Are you a little boy or a little girl?" and I responded, in complete indignation, "I'm a little boy!"
Anyway, skinny, starving, abused little boy that I was, I didn't stay a boy for long. I was housed under some mildewy stone staircase, fed next to nothing, beaten often, raped a time or two. I died soon thereafter.
Understand: I'm not claiming that these "memories" constitute evidence that reincarnation is a fact. I remain skeptical of memories retrieved under hypnosis. But I'm as willing to entertain the possibility of reincarnation as I am any other idea of an afterlife or prior life--including oblivion. And while I can't and won't say absolutely that I was hot Teutonic babe in some past life, I can't and won't say absolutely that I wasn't.
There are also past lives I haven't "remembered," just imagined. I occasionally suspect that I was a Viking warrior who died of a festering stomach wound, and a Mongol invader of China who really, really wanted to go home.
I've been asked what I want to be in my next life, if I'm offered one: my answer is, "Me, only smarter." I think it's a good answer. I'm sticking by it. I want to put the things I've learned in this life to good use, and I'm fairly happy with the personality I've got. I wouldn't mind being me again at all.
Posted by Holly at 8:13 AM
October 9, 2005
All Hail Jim!
Those of you who have visited my blog before will notice some changes: It's no longer utilitarian and spare, but spiffed-up and fancy! Check out the picture in the upper right corner--that's one of my favorite photos of me. Check out the Chinese character in the upper left corner--that's my surname and my tattoo! Check out the soothing green palate and the larger, easier-to-read font!
I owe all of this to my friend Jim, who generously offered to host my blog and custom-design the template.
I couldn't be happier with the results, or more grateful for his work.
Feel free to leave enthusiastic comments praising the beauty of my blog--but remember, Jim is the genius behind it all.
Thanks, Jim!
Posted by Holly at 10:37 AM | Comments (2)
October 7, 2005
Wasabi Potato Cakes
There have been three or four times in my life when I've lost a significant amount of weight (fifteen pounds or so) without dieting. Instead, something awful has happened--a serious illness, clinical depression, a devastating breakup, or some combination thereof--that has made it hard to choke down food, and made the food hard to digest once it was down.
Recently I lost over ten pounds without trying. I wasn't depressed or ill, but I was extremely anxious. It had to do, first of all, with the standard post-traumatic Sunstone syndrome I go through every year. But what I didn't want to admit to many people (though I did tell Tom and his wife about it) was that what troubled me most was this visceral certainty that I lacked a fundamental piece of bad information about the romance I'd begun at Sunstone.
Every morning for a month I'd wake nauseated and grossed out. I'd raise a carton of orange juice to my mouth (I live alone, so I feel entitled to drink straight from the carton) and my throat would contract after a swallow or two. Along about noon, I'd find myself ravenous and toss a salad, but I could never finish it. At dinner I'd grill a cheese sandwich and end up throwing the last few bites away. As for dessert, I couldn't even go there! The way I felt reminded me of how my sisters described morning sickness, except that instead of random smells making me want to puke, it was random thoughts: I'd think suddenly of this guy I was utterly enamored of, and I'd feel dread, foreboding and a trace of sheer physical revulsion, which, to state the obvious, is not a good sign.
Eventually I discovered what it was I hadn't known. Soon thereafter, the relationship went away, and with it, much of my anxiety. But my appetite didn't return immediately, which was OK with me. I'm generally quite healthy, with an appetite to match; I'm a decent cook, and I enjoy food. But I discovered that fitting into clothes I haven't been able to wear for four years offers certain enjoyments too. Having begun losing weight, I rather wanted to continue.
And I managed to be good enough most of the time, losing a few ounces every couple of days. But I had to work at it, had to tell myself to order a small mocha, no whipped cream. Had to say to myself, "No, Holly, you DON'T need to make cookies." Had to make myself cover my plate and say, "I'm done here" before I finished all my french fries.
But this morning I awoke again with that violent internal retching that prevents me from even thinking about solid food. It's not anxiety today--well, maybe a little, because I do feel harried and harassed by the many, many things I have to do, like shower, get dressed and go to a 4 p.m. meeting on campus. But mostly, it's wasabi potato cakes.
One of the nicest duties of my job is meeting the visiting writers we bring to campus, attending their readings, then going out to dinner with them. It's always a fun evening: food, drink and conversations with some cool writer, six or seven members of the English and creative writing faculty, occasionally a partner or two. We have a standard reservation at one of the nicer restaurants in town, and the service is almost always provided by a genial, efficient waitress who knows us and our preferences quite well. When she's taking drink orders, before I even have to ask, she tells me what the martini special is. If it sounds good, I'll try it; if not, I go with a cosmo.
The flip side of going to a restaurant so often that the waitress knows what you'll ask before you ask it, is that you know what will be on the menu before you open it. I have a favorite standard item I can always fall back on: a nice steak covered in a delightful piquant pepper sauce. And sometimes they have cool and interesting specials. But sometimes they don't.
Earlier in the day, I'd taught a Stuart Dybek essay about a bunch of sixth-graders going on a field trip to a slaughter house, and the descriptions of cows being clubbed to death, of an assembly line of swine hanging by their hind feet to facilitate the slitting of their throats, after which they are allowed to watch each other bleed to death as they squeal in terror and pain.... well, discussing that with a group of undergrads left me with the sense that I didn't want to eat red meat again any time soon.
But this restaurant isn't known for its vegetarian items. Fish, I thought, I'll order fish. I almost went with the tuna.... but it was on the cheap menu and didn't come with any side dishes. One of the specials was crispy-skinned salmon, accompanied by a few spears of grilled asparagus--AND wasabi potato cakes.
I couldn't help it: I was skeptical. It was farmed salmon, for one thing, which just doesn't taste as good as wild salmon, and isn't as healthy, either. And then there were those wasabi potato cakes.... I hated to be accused of culinary cowardice: after all, this wasn't any random pairing of a strangely colored condiment with a familiar white starchy food, like ketchup-covered banana chunks; no, it was nouvelle cuisine, the blending of east and west! My colleagues on either side of me announced their intention to go with the salmon. I figured I might as well ask this trusted waitress for her honest advice.
"Oh, I serve so many of those wasabi potato cakes! We can barely keep ‘em in the kitchen!" she assured me. And I placed the fateful order.
As you should surmise from my subtle foreshadowing, the entire meal SUCKED--well, I guess the asparagus was OK. When our plates arrived, a colleague who had wisely ordered something else commented, "Oh look, it's the dish with hair," because each item in the meal was stacked on top of each other, the entire structure covered with finely shredded, deep-fried potatoes, mounded high on top and trailing down the sides in curls, so that the whole thing looked like a fuzzy brown muppet. The salmon was not only bland, but covered by an especially greasy tartar sauce I had to scrape off. There were a couple of breaded, deep-fried tomato slices buried in there (had that element been mentioned in the menu, I would never have ordered the dish, because I don't like tomatoes), and as for the wasabi potato cakes, they were just spicy patties of hashed browns, undercooked on the inside and burnt on the outside.
The meal was so bad, it even put me off dessert. I ordered a black forest trifle, but didn't have the appetite to finish it. I wasn't even as buzzed as I wanted to be because we have a two-drink limit, but I guess there's something to be said for being sober enough to drive home at the end of a two-and-a-half-hour long dinner, whether the food is good or bad.
I got home, got ready for bed, couldn't sleep, took a sleeping pill. I did manage to fall asleep soon thereafter and stay asleep for a long time, but I woke up feeling just like you'd expect. I've been up for seven hours and have yet to put anything of substance into my stomach. I think it might be seven hours more before I do. The only consolation for feeling so queasy is that the evening of excess won't show up on the scale or on my hips.
Posted by Holly at 3:27 PM
October 6, 2005
It's Out
Yesterday I met a friend for coffee at Barnes & Noble. (Yeah, I know: how terribly corporate of me. But my little home in the Rust Belt doesn't offer much else. I have tried and rejected as thoroughly inadequate the various non-corporate alternatives for book acquisition, with the exception of my university library--that rocks. And even non-corporate coffee is hard to come by. The one entry in the corporate coffee delocator for this area was provided by me, and that place is a million miles away, with mediocre mochas.)
My friend was late, so I browsed the books. On the "New Arrivals" table, I saw several copies of Best American Short Stories 2005, but couldn't find the other titles in the series. Finally I located a sales clerk. "Where's the Best American Essays?" I asked.
"What do you want?" he asked.
"The same thing as this," I said, holding up the collection of short stories, "except with essays."
He led me to a display, and there it was. I picked it up and scanned the table of contents: twenty-five essays, by the likes of Jonathan Franzen, Edward Hoagland, Oliver Sacks, David Sedaris, David Foster Wallace--and me.
That's right: me. The last essay in the collection is something I wrote about my love of textiles and some of the homemaking skills I acquired as part of the training for wife-hood all Mormon girls get in early adolescence.
It's jarring to see my name at the end of that list--not bad, definitely not bad. But though I fully intend to get used to it at some point in the next 52 weeks (just in time for the issue without my name at the end of the table of contents to appear), right now the fact that it's really cool is still competing with the fact that it's jarring and unfamiliar, much as it was to run my tongue across smooth teeth unemcumbered by metal wires one magic afternoon after three traumatic years of intense orthodontia.
It's very strange. I'm 41, I've been writing since I was 15, I've produced two books though neither is in print, but I garnered this very cool honor. Part of me hopes this is an omen of good things to come, and part of me fears this is about as good as it's going to get.
The essay was rejected by any number of prestigious journals, and printed in a small, yearly journal of women's writing called PMS, for Poem Memoir Story. I turned to the list of Notable Essays and saw that my little offering was considered superior to (among other things) something by E.L. Doctorow printed in The Kenyon Review.
Yesterday afternoon at B&N, my friend insisted on buying a copy so I could autograph it, and since we were on our way out the door, she gave it to me to take home, so I could write a note instead of just signing my name. This meant I got to peruse the book at my leisure. (I'm supposed to get a clothbound copy, but so far it hasn't shown up--I'm guessing they sent it to my agent, and perhaps she hasn't gotten around to sending it on.)
I went to campus after that and ran into Tom. "It's out," I said, and handed him the book.
"Wow," he said. "Were you surprised to see it?"
"Nah, I knew it came out today," I replied. "I've been checking the release date on Amazon every so often."
"You're the anchor," he said, looking at the table of contents. "The very last one."
"I'm the end of the alphabet," I corrected.
"Yours has the best title," he said. I admit I agree: the title is great, borrowed though it might be from a shirt Tori Amos wore on one of the four different covers of her album Strange Little Girls, which I briefly owned.
"This is huge," he said.
"I hope so," I said. "I hope it does some work for me. But I can't help imagining these reviews where someone says, ‘All the essays are really good, except for that last one, about fabric! What's up with that?'"
"That won't happen," he said. "I can tell by the first few paragraphs that it's really good." He read for a moment, then said, "Wow! You've got a semi-colon right after the close of a parentheses! That's so adventurous!"
"Yeah, my flamboyant facility with punctuation gets all the editors hot and bothered," I said. "It's what everyone likes best about my work."
The collection, I should mention, was edited by Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief--that's right, someone interesting enough to be played in a movie by Meryl Streep likes my work. I am intensely flattered and gratified and thrilled that she does--there is NOTHING about that fact that sucks. But I confess I read the essay and think, "OK, I like this and I'm proud of it, but I don't even think it's the best thing I've written. So why is this getting attention when my book, which I think is great, isn't even in print?" I can only figure that either I'm a lousy judge of my own work, or angst-filled stories about religious despair just don't strike the publishing world as big-time money makers.
I wish I could say that I have other exciting publications in the pipes, but I don't. The issue of Sunstone currently at the printer's has an essay by me on "Why I Go to Sunstone" and I have a few poems forthcoming in various respectable journals. But I haven't been very good about submitting my work lately, and there's also the fact that aside from a few pieces I have purposely tried to make really short, most of my prose is long enough that it exceeds the word limit imposed by many journals. You can get an idea of that from this blog, where pieces are often so long they have to be split up into two or three posts.
I don't know. I guess I just have to write more, then put it all in envelopes and mail it to editors.
Anyway, I would ask you all to rush out and buy the anthology, but I don't get royalties, just a small honorarium, so it doesn't make any difference to me if you buy it or just read the essay in the coffee shop. (It's a mere eight pages, one of those things I tried to keep short.) But if you do read it and like it, I would be grateful for praise and congratulations--it's the most prestigious publication I've ever had.
Posted by Holly at 7:51 AM | Comments (3)
October 4, 2005
30-second Movies, with Bunnies
Go here:
They're all good, but I especially liked the 30-second version of Pulp Fiction.
Posted by Holly at 1:17 PM
October 3, 2005
The Artist Sleepover
I would love to invite Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, Frank O'Hara, Wallace Stevens and Oscar Wilde to my house for a sleepover. I rather suspect that Jane and Wallace might be disposed to decline the invitation, but I would wheedle and flatter, tell Jane how much I admire the navy and promise Wallace I'd buy all my insurance from him, until their resistence would deliquesce like a snowman and its mind of winter thrust suddenly into the orderly heat of Key West. Before my guests arrived, I would bake a batch of my special chocolate chocolate chip cookies, because those cookies always garner me praise, admiration and gratitude. I'd stock up on different flavors of Ben & Jerry's, because after all, the only emperor is the emperor of ice cream. I'd buy a case of Bass Pale Ale, as well of plenty of tequila, triple sec, limes, salt and ice, because who wouldn't like to see Emily Dickinson completely shitfaced? We'd lay our sleeping bags out on the living room floor and play Truth or Dare.
Actually we'd play Truth or Truth. Like I'm going to dare Frank O'Hara to make out with Oscar Wilde? I mean, yeah, I'd love to watch that, but I'd bet my entire poetry collection it would happen on its own. I'm far more interested in what they can tell me.
I'd ask Jane about sentences. She's considered one of the greatest prose writers in the English language, but in her work, metaphors are as scarce as racy lingerie in the underwear draw of a middle-aged Mormon matron. Was it a choice? Did she want clean, elegant prose, free of baroque ornamentation that might distract from her withering characterizations of fools and the wisdom achieved by her heroines and their paramours? So much of her work focuses on the ways people communicate and miscommunicate; was she working to communicate as directly as possible as with her readers? Does she think that's one reason her work has aged so well?
I'd give Frank O'Hara the complete works of David Sedaris and beg him to read some of it aloud. I'd ask him what he thinks of Oscar's statement in The Critic as Artist that "That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul." I'd ask him what he really thinks of Andy Warhol's work. I'd invite him to lunch, hoping he'd write a poem about it later. I'd play some Madonna and convince him to dance.
As for Wallace--first of all, I'd want to know how he came up with the name Holly for his daughter, way back around 1910. (Of course I think it's a fabulous name, but there aren't many people my age or older with that name. The character who popularized the name was of course Miss Holly Golightly, but in her case, Holly was short for Holiday, and her real name was Lula May.) I'd give him Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror, then ask him to discuss "The Man on the Dump" in terms of Kristeva's notion of the abject. I'd ask him how we recognize and reckon with the mess. If you're Eve in the garden and you can't tell the garden has become a junk heap, then what's going on?
I'd ask Emily about friendship and death. I'd ask about mastering homemaking skills, since when she was 25, she "won second prize in the bread division at the local cattle show." I'd ask about dwelling in possibility. I'd ask if she ever had her astrological charts done. (Emily, Jane and I are all Sagittariuses--Jane and I share the same birthday.) I'd ask about her refusal to be baptized into the religion of her family and if she was ever afraid of God. I'd ask her about this poem, one of my favorites in the whole word:
There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons--
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes--
Heavenly Hurt, it gives us--
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the meanings are--
None may teach it--Any--
'Tis the Seal Despair--
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air--
When it comes, the Landscape listens--
Shadows--hold their breath--
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death--
I'd ask about internal difference. Her answer would probably make me as earnest and overblown as a Tony Kushner character, so to lighten the mood I'd show her my meticulously ordered closets: one for shirts and blouses, one for skirts and dresses, another for trousers and miscellaneous items, and of course my coat closet (I just bought the coolest lightweight sky blue quilted walking coat), and ask if she wanted to try on any of my clothes.
And Oscar? First of all I'd ask him if his last words were really, "Either this wallpaper goes or I do." I'd ask if he still loves Bosie. I'd ask if he has truly forgiven Bosie. I'd ask him about Constance, where his wife fits into the memory of his life. I'd tell him that in the first year of my PhD program, I wrote a paper about him that was returned with the comment that it was "wonderfully well written and enormously entertaining. It feels like it could be published in Vogue, say, beginning as it does with ‘boredom' and ending with a rowdy affirmation" and a grade of A-. (Anyone else who's done work toward a PhD ever have a professor tell you your critical work could appear in Vogue?) I would read him this paragraph from another paper I wrote about him:
For Eliot, who got away with his dictum that "good poets steal; bad poets borrow" partly because Wilde had already announced, "Of course I plagiarise. It is the privilege of the appreciative man," his proximity to Wilde (and perhaps his homophobia) was too great: he is Wilde's hypocrite lecteur but the familial slot Eliot occupies is not frere but fils. Eliot as Oedipus is aware of Wilde as Laios, and is very uncomfortable with his brilliant, tragic, homosexual, disgraced and already dead father. He could not allow himself to acknowledge or appreciate Wilde, not only when borrowing from and expanding on, but also when reacting against and attempting to refute, Wilde's work. He is anxious to see completed the erasure of Wilde begun after Wilde's fall from grace.
I'd get him to agree with me that Eliot is thoroughly overrated and The Waste Land really kind of sucks. I'd ask him about this passage from de Profundis:
Great passions are for the great of soul, and great events can be seen only by those who are on a level with them. We think we can have our emotions for nothing. We cannot. Even the finest and most self-sacrificing emotions have to be paid for. Strangely enough, that is what makes them fine. The intellectual and emotional life of ordinary people is a very contemptible affair. Just as they borrow their ideas from a sort of circulating library of thought--the Zeitgeist of an age that has no soul and send them back soiled at the end of each week--so they always try to get their emotions on credit, or refuse to pay the bill when it comes in. We must pass out of that conception of life; as soon as we have to pay for an emotion we shall know its quality and be the better for such knowledge.
Then I'd cry and cry and tell him that I have always loved him.
I'd haul out my copies of their work--especially the ones I read and cherished like love letters as an undergrad, the filemot pages now brittle and loose in their cheap bindings--and beg them for autographs. I'd give every last one of them the address for this blog and ask them please to comment. I'd stare out the window at the darkness beyond my neighbors' houses and think about nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. Then I'd shout, "Who wants more margaritas?"
p.s. Saviour, you are absolutely invited this time.
Posted by Holly at 6:17 AM | Comments (2)