I entered the Internet World over a decade ago, on March 23, 1999.
It was not the first time I had set foot in the World Wide Web that was the topic of so much discussion then. I had dabbled at school and at friends' homes, but never for more than brief periods. In early 1996, for example, was the first time I ever saw pornography on a computer screen, standing around a desk in a living room dimmed by drawn blinds beside two boys with a lhasa apso frantically trying to sniff my asshole through my pants. It was suggested in less precise terminology that I imagine the small, hyperactive dog were a woman giving me a rimjob, but I no more wanted to imagine that than I wanted to see the pyramid of faceless vaginas formed by half a dozen nude women lying on top of each other, legs spread.
I'd seen the Internet before. I'd been captivated by the stream of stupid but live remarks that people across the world could post in a chat room. I'd already learned the importance of typing "a/s/l?" when you enter one, though I hadn't quite figured out why the answers to such questions were really necessary.
On my fourteenth birthday, however, with eighth grade drawing to a close, I became a badge-carrying member, and my new official name was El-Queso@webtv.net. My mom had gifted me with a WebTV, a VCR-shaped box that would broadcast a simplified version of the Internet through my bedroom television. It had a small, wireless keyboard that I could only hunt and peck at, and it droned ragtime midis that I actually somewhat enjoyed. The load time was atrocious and the connection would sever anytime the phone rang, but it was the Internet. I finally had the Internet at my disposal. All those alluring URLs that were fashionably plastered on everything back then--www.pepsi.com, www.burgerking.com, www.nick.com--were finally mine to consume. All those, of course, turned out quite dull, but I had also eagerly anticipated IMDb--something I had read about in a section of the Yellow Pages dedicated to surfing the web--and though it wasn't quite the dreamland I anticipated it to be, it's still a website I visit daily even after ten years. I can't say that about any other webpage.
My mom had purchased me the WebTV to help with my schoolwork. It did, of course. My first productive use of the Internet was to research background information for a paper on To Kill a Mockingbird. I learned that Braxton Bragg Underwood, Maycomb's newspaperman, was named for the old typewriter that Harper Lee wrote on, a gift from her father. That had impressed my teacher, who had grown accustomed to giving me less than stellar grades when previous research assignments (define "Moral Majority," define "Big Brother") proved too difficult to complete merely by hunting through indexes at the Kempsville Library.
Research is still a major part of my Internet life. I spent today trying to hunt down literature from the Falkland Islands (there isn't any, except for some short, jingoistic poems), Easter Island (there's none, and the rongorongo glyphs of the Rapanui remain one of the last undecipherable languages, assuming they are in fact a language), the Galapagos Islands (there's nothing native, but a penniless Herman Melville did write a fiction-esque novella about the "Encantadas," which he considered brutal and hellish), Svalbard (in 2007, British novelist Georgina Harding wrote a novel about the Arctic island, called The Solitude of Thomas Cane), and the North Pole (in 1912 Matthew A. Henson published a short memoir titled A Negro Explorer at the North Pole, which (aside from the title) is controversial for two reasons: 1) his associate Robert Peary accused him of being merely a servant and stealing glory from what was rightly his discovery, and 2) some researchers today suspect that Peary (nor Henson) never actually made it to the pole).
But I digress... which is a substantial, though unfortunate, habit that the Internet has accustomed me to: digression. How easy it is to lose oneself in the endless labyrinth of links. One way to kill a few hours is to follow an endless trail of information through Wikipedia. When I'm feeling less studious I use IMDb (trivia for Spider-Man 2! goofs from Pulp Fiction! quotations from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind! an entire message board of jokes about I Know Who Killed Me!).
I even invented my own game that's something like Six Degrees of Wikipedia. Here's how to play. Pre-select a topic--let's make it Patrick Swayze. Go to the Wikipedia homepage. Without typing anything into the search bar, follow the available links until you get to the entry about Patrick Swayze.
Here goes: Nazi Germany--Adolf Hitler--Valkyrie--Tom Cruise--Minority Report--Academy Award--Academy Award for Best Original Song--Dirty Dancing--Patrick Swayze. I'd get a score of 8. Can you do it in less?
I'm sure I wasn't the first person to think of this game. Aside from being an endless distraction that merely bankrupted my attention span, the Internet has also given me firm proof that we are never alone in the world, that most of what we do, when compared on a global scale, is never truly unique, no matter how eccentric or innovative. That can be a disheartening thought--imagine having a great idea for an invention or a story or a website, then searching for similar results on Google and discovering that it's already been done. Almost everything has already been done. Even nonsense phrases have often been said before.
(There's another game--which I didn't invent--that involves typing an unusual search phrase into Google and trying to get one--only one!--search result. I think I've only succeeded once, unless you count "flim flam creature," which is on multiple webpages all citing the exact same quotation. Now that I've typed "flim flam creature," however, it'll be on two separate webpages, which alludes to the evanescent nature of the "googlewhack"--as soon as it's discovered, it ceases to be a rare and hidden creature. I'm still wondering why anyone other than me would ever utter "flim flam creature" other than to affectionately describe my boyfriend.)
It's not always disheartening, though. Sometimes it's very important to realize that we're not alone. It prevents us from feelings of insanity and hopelessness. Since before I was forming memories, I've been a bed rocker. Most of my life I rocked myself to sleep, lying on my back, with my left leg flat, my right leg bent, and my right foot flat on the bed controlling much of the sway. Since I started sharing my bed I've learned to eliminate it; though it used to be impossible, I can now fall asleep without rocking. Sometimes I still do it unconsciously in my sleep, which has frightened unaware boyfriends. It's an embarrassing admission, and for most of my life I considered it a result of some freakish developmental disorder or lurking mental impairment. I still don't know what its etiology is, but I know that it has a name--Rhythmic Movement Disorder, one of several Stereotypic Movement Disorders--and I know that many normal adults share the exact same experience with me. It's nothing to be afraid of.
When we were at the store purchasing the WebTV, the teenage clerk made a half-serious reference to my mother about installing certain security measures on the box that would prevent me from seeing adult material. My mother, trusting in my maturity, assured him that she needn't worry about me doing things I shouldn't be doing, and the clerk--knowing the habits of teenage boys better than my mother apparently did--assured her that she shouldn't be so sure. He was right, but my mom never bothered trying to figure out the privacy measures, instead eliciting my promise that I wouldn't do anything illicit.
That first night, being the fourteen-year-old that I was, I couldn't wait to get my hands on pornography. I had seen pornography before--my brother had found magazines in dumpsters, had stolen magazines from stores, had ordered catalogs from 1-800 numbers, had hijacked the cable box into unscrambling the Playboy channel--but I had never seen the kind of pornography that really interested me. The kind that didn't have any women.
In those first days in March I had a crucial mystery to unravel: I had to determine once and for all why I was more interested in boys and penises than girls and vaginas. I'd been captivated by them since third grade when I realized that Travis, who rode my school bus, was more than just the funniest storyteller. I had tried to unlock the reason Stand By Me made me so sad (it was because I wanted so desperately to hug Wil Wheaton and tell him he'd be okay). I had rationalized why I skipped the parts of my brother's magazine that had just huge-breasted women and went straight for the parts that had men fondling those erections: I merely wanted to compare myself to those men, nothing more! When a boy in my theater class described being sweaty and naked beneath a toga during a performance, I wasn't quite sure why my crystal clear images of his description horrified me so--but I knew that they horrified me. They depressed me utterly. That happened right before Christmas in 1997, and in lay in my dark room staring at the ceiling and crying. Something was wrong. My popularity had been steadily declining for some time, and I knew it had something to do with me being different from other boys, but I had no idea why and the fact that I masturbated to pictures of Leonardo Dicaprio from Titanic didn't quite clue me in.
I knew what "gay" was. It was an insult. I'd had it directed at me (mostly from my brother), and I had directed it at others (one popular game in third grade was to place your hand on a distracted boy's shoulder and quickly start counting out loud; the number you were able to reach before he violently shrugged you off was the percentage of gay he was). It wasn't something that anyone was, any more than people were "dumbasses" or "buttholes." I would no sooner admit to being gay than to confess that, yes, I was an idiot and a dork and I smelled awful.
But then why was I going to websites that openly and proudly announced that they held gay content? Why was I hesitantly violating the law by clicking the link that said "Yes, I am over 18"? (I tried clicking the "No" once and ended up on Disney's website. I quickly backtracked and chose the dirty path.) Why did I know what a "twink" was when I'd never heard it used by anyone in speech?
In those early days of Internet I had to admit--if only to myself--that I was gay. I mildly fought it off at first--refusing to continue my enrollment in theater classes despite loving theater classes--but soon acknowledged that there wasn't much I could do about it. As cool as they could be, I simply didn't want to date girls. And here's where the small world of the Internet came in handy--though I couldn't discover many gay kids at my high school (the ones who were most frequently labeled as gay were also the least cool and the most obnoxious), I could find them on the Internet. I essentially had no friends in real life (except for a boy at my bus stop who, I later learned, was also gay and had a crush on me), but in the cyber world I frequented a chat room for gay teens. I could openly express my thoughts. I could be honest about myself. I even had a boyfriend from upstate New York named travis227, who I shared affection with by hugging him like this: ((((((((((((((travis))))))))))))))).
Looking back I realize that Travis was probably a middle aged married man. My suspicion of that was the reason I broke up with him after a few months. In either case he was probably a lot uglier than the blond soccer player he made himself out to be. Other friends I knew were real, including a handsome older boy in Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania, who assured me that--despite my present loneliness--one day we could "fuck like rabbits." Our friendship went beyond lewd expressions of sexual desire--but it was important to know that one day I could have someone in my life, even if it meant moving from the barren queer-wastelands of Virginia Beach to the paradise of Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania, where there was someone else like me.
The Internet taught me to be skeptical and honest. My first night in a chatroom I talked extensively with a stripper from Atlanta who had huge breasts and who had just been beaten by her drunken husband. I was a twenty-nine-year-old film critic who wrote for The Virginian Pilot and was currently working on a column about my Oscar predictions. When I became a regular in a movie trivia chatroom and other regulars started asking about the man behind the El-Queso nick, I adopted the life of a twenty-four-year-old furniture salesman bachelor. At that age it was difficult for me to think of occupations that twenty-four-year-olds could realistically have. Now that I'm twenty-four, I'm glad I'm not a furniture salesman. I do, however, wish that a newspaper would publish my movie reviews.
I became good friends with a woman from Queens named Margaret. She was essentially my best friend in ninth grade, and we would engage in a lot of hijinx online and on the telephone. She was the first person I came out to, technically. We were as close as two people could be on the Internet, but she thought that I was ten years older than I was. Eventually that lie became too much for me to continue handling. I severed the friendship without explanation--not a difficult thing to do on the Internet--and only later, after panicked emails from her, did I confess my true identity, though by that point the friendship was unsalvagable. I remember her fondly and try to never let deception and lies interfere with my personal relationships.
I've broken up with a boyfriend on Myspace. I've met a boyfriend on Myspace. The first isn't worth mentioning, but the second caused six months of my life to be drastically different than they would have been otherwise without the Internet, for better or for worse. I like seeing the bright side of cause and effect, and though there was nothing disastrous about that short-lived romance, its most positive outcome was that it helped me to realize how much I preferred my present love (who was then just a beloved friend) more than all other boys.
I was on the cutting edge of the ebb and tide of Internet trends in high school and college. I started actively listening to music--and, soon after, good music--when I downloaded Napster. Coming from a poor family, I couldn't have listened to much music otherwise, and I already thought lowly of the radio and much of what was on MTV. After Napster, through which I was able to get the entire Elliott Smith discography (after seeing Good Will Hunting, I hopped on Audiogalaxy, which introduced me to Okkervil River, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Belle and Sebastian, Modest Mouse, Bright Eyes, and other bands I would have never heard of in 2000. I followed Audiogalaxy's collapse with KaZaa, and KaZaa with Soulseek, which is still going strong, though my qualms about stealing from artists tend to prevent me from downloading too much music these days. Now I use MySpace Music to listen to music I don't own, and that works pretty well and is legal and free.
I was on Friendster before it got so popular that the server started crashing. In September of 2003, I spent all my time on Friendster. I coined the word "fakester"--to describe a fake Friendster profile--and entered it in the Urban Dictionary. It's been voted on 816 times and was the Urban Dictionary word of the day on March 30, 2007. That's probably the one single thing I've done that's had the widest impact. "Vaginal diarrhea" hasn't had nearly has much staying power in the English lexicon (36 votes, 20 of them positive, though I think a few of those votes are from me).
I transferred to MySpace. I wrote clever things in my About Me, actively thought about what I could change my headline to, bought a camera mostly so I could take profile pictures, bragged about all the cool bands I listened to in my Music section, and befriended all the local bands. Once my profile picture was stolen by somebody in North Carolina, and I learned the simultaneous narcissistic pleasure and impositional discomfort of Single White Female syndrome.
As I've aged I've become more discerning of fads. I joined Facebook only after everyone stopped using Myspace, and only years after it became popular. I originally resisted because it only allowed college students and many of my friends weren't in college. Now it's more egalitarian, but I still think about canceling the account every so often. I'm too verbose to Tweet, and I'm too meticulous about grammar and spelling to use chatrooms. But I do have this blog, which seems to be about the only hope I have that anyone will ever read what I write, and I'm using the infinite resources of Google to improve my life--managing my money responsibly by setting up a budget spreadsheet on Google Documents, using Google Sites to promote my quest to explore and popularize world literature. I use the submissions tracker and the literary magazine database at Duotrope Digest in my quest to publish my fiction. I've watched Wikipedia grow from a poorly written pet project (my first encounter was at my college library while trying to cram the essentials of Indian history) to a massive text with the (almost always accurate) answer to just about anything. I look forward to what Google Books can do to the world of literature. I've saved tons of money by buying used things on the Internet--books and textbooks especially--rather than having to buy them new and overpriced at the store.
I've pretty much stopped watching television, and I've therefore cut off most of my exposure to advertising (I've learned to ignore most of Internet ads), which always bothered me before. I don't even have cable, which is one less bill to pay and one less time-consuming distraction to deal with. Granted I fill a lot of that distraction time with time spent browsing the Internet, but at least now I'm learning more than I would be watching repeats of "Hanging with Mr. Cooper."
The Internet has guided me toward better things--better music, more diverse books, better movies. They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? has introduced me to some great films from history and from around the world, which sure beats watching 88MM and thinking that that's quality filmmaking.
The Internet has instilled in me an obsessive quest for completeness (I can find out infinite trivial things about anything now) and listmania, and those are mixed blessings. It's probably ruined my posture and my eyesight. Rather than make me more reclusive, though, it's introduced me to more people, helped me to bridge social gaps, and allowed me to broaden my interpersonal horizons. It's made me more knowledgeable, more discerning, and more honest. It's saved me much money. And it's granted me extensive laughter by allowing me to countlessly watch the video I've posted below. Looking back on ten years of the Internet, I guess it's been a pretty good friend.
Showing posts with label personal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label personal. Show all posts
01 September, 2009
22 July, 2009
Attention Paid
It's high time I post something new, huh?
It's occurred to me that my blog is entitled Bibliophonic--a neologism that I fancy conveys the meaning "the music of books"--and yet the past six posts have been strictly about movies, there hasn't been anything of a literary subject since late March, and I haven't written about any of the books I've read since February 11, which perhaps suggests that I haven't read anything since then when in fact I've finished fourteen books (plus a couple by Dr. Seuss during an outing to Books-a-Million).
And that doesn't seem right to me.
I enjoy a lot of things in life. I enjoy the art form of narrative cinema and how it uses so much to try to express something of truth--dialogue, a story, music, framed and arranged visuals, facial expressions, the nuances of human behavior, editing and cinematography that can focus and redirect our attentions, that can influence our emotions through automatic nervous stimulation. Maybe that last part doesn't make sense, but think about how frantic your heart and mind feels when during an action scene the camera keeps cutting every few seconds. And imagine applying those frantic cuts to some other type of scene--a romantic one or an extremely serious moment--and think about what reactions that would evoke. I think movies are a great way to share one vision of the truth.
I also enjoy books. I love the way you can climb inside them. I love how time moves differently when you're reading; how you never quite know what the clock is going to say when you look up from the page, and how it's surprising sometimes to discover that the sun has set and you're sitting in a dark room, struggling to continue seeing the print.
There's a lot of talk lately about the death of the book. Not many people read these days. I don't need to see statistics on declining reading habits (though I have seen them, and they're pretty depressing, as well as anger-inducing); I know from experience. I don't spend a lot of time talking to other people about what they're reading because many people aren't reading anything. What I've described in the last paragraph may be an unknown experience to many people. I've witnessed the awkward silence that comes when I talk too long about whatever book is occupying my mind.
But having said that, I don't believe in the death of the book. Even though I've seen countless Myspace and Facebook profiles with witty descriptions like "book?? wots a book?" I trust that many people like the idea of reading, that most people enjoy reading but don't feel the urge to develop the time-consuming habit of sitting down and devoting hours of concentration to a single book.
And yet I know Harry Potter has stirred many souls (including my own), and those books are quite long. Those books benefit from a cultural pull that allows people to overcome their urges not to read. In addition to the well-marketed, blockbuster films, there are people in the know who reassure new fans, "Oh, but they left out such great, important stuff!" On top of that, more impatient viewers will want to read the subsequent books to gratify their cliffhanger yearnings rather than wait a few years for the next movie. Plus, it's impossible to avoid the Harry Potter phenomenon; I knew what Quidditch was long before seeing any of the movies or reading any of the books, and that's a bizarre fact to wrap my head around. When the seventh book came out, it was impossible on any given subway trip to not bump into a dozen people carrying the book. We want to be a part of that community. We want to know what all the fuss is about. We want access to all this seemingly important cultural/trivial knowledge about horcruxes and Muggles. And so--like the compulsion to get a cell phone plan with a text messaging service, or to get a Twitter account--we make way in our minds and our lives for this new demand on our attention.
If only books and reading in general could have such a strong cultural pull?
I know many people are against devices such as the Kindle, and out of Luddite-prejudice I was, too, at first. Who wants to take such a device to bed with them? That's a common argument. You can't flip through a Kindle book to see what startling words or images strike your eyes. You can't smell the ink or the paper or the glue on the binding, can't smell the decades of use. You can't proudly display a well-creased Kindle spine on your shelf.
But so what? There are plenty of other things to smell. And the vanity of a huge bookshelf isn't that vital--in any case, there's always Goodreads and LibraryThing for showing off.
I have a lot of books--perhaps close to a thousand--and I've moved them six different times amongst three different cities. Up stairs, down sidewalks, through narrow corridors. It's incredibly difficult, moving all those hundreds of pounds of books. I'd have significantly fewer belongings to cart if I didn't have any books, and if I were to ever move overseas, it would be almost impossible to take my library with me. With each new move I find myself wishing for a shrinking machine. Which is what a Kindle is: eight hundred or so books that can fit in your pocket.
And of course it's more eco-friendly, too. No dead trees in a Kindle book.
But most importantly, I think Kindle can inspire reading in people who wouldn't normally want to. Maybe not on a large scale, but at least it's movement in the right direction. Kindle may be killing the "book" (which will never, of course, happen--people will always love having some colorful titles on their shelves and coffee tables), but it's certainly not doing anything bad to literature itself.
I think my goal in life (and I know this blog post is rambling all over the place) is to work toward a world where reading resumes the vital role it once played in our lives. In addition to my personal goal of finding truth and meaning (and who doesn't have that goal?), I want to help create a world where reading and writing are more common. I like Better World Books, which gathers discarded, unwanted, and unneeded books (often from landfills) from all over the world and redistributes them at a cheap price (with free shipping!). Some of their proceeds also go toward Books for Africa, which (this is a no-brainer:) provides books for Africa.
I've wanted to be a writer since at least the age of eight, when I discovered during writing assignments in third grade that I actually had a talent with words. I had always had books while growing up. My mother loved reading Green Eggs and Ham to me as much as I enjoyed hearing it. By kindergarten, I took for granted that I was literate. I remember reading a picture book about Winnie the Pooh during playtime while my teacher commented to her assistant that a classmate looked so cute "pretending to read" while running her index finger under the words. What did they think was so special about her pretending, I remember thinking, when I was actually reading without the need of a guide finger?
I had a closet full of books about all the crazy things that could be dreamed of--dinosaurs, castles, monsters, talking goldfinches. I didn't think about where those books came from and how they were made until one morning my grandfather showed up with a typewriter. I was six or seven. I realized that I could match the letters in my dinosaur book with the letters on the typewriter keys and after a great deal of noise and whirs and dings a page that had previously been nothing but a white sheet would become a carbon copy of the book.
I took a keen interest in the typewriter (and I still have it, in my closet), and my grandfather never denied me access. In spite of the banging racket, I was never told to keep quiet. So by age eight I was applying my knowledge of castle keeps and moats to stories about kings bestowing their land upon virtuous knights. By age nine, inspired by the movie Clue I loved so much, I was dabbling in ensemble mysteries. By ten, I was writing a better version of the Mortal Kombat movie while also maintaining a biweekly newspaper with the latest goings-on around the living room (my grandpa chopped down a tree, my sister went to New York and will hopefully bring back souvenirs), glowing reviews of the movies my grandfather had taken me to (The Sandlot: 5 stars; Mortal Kombat: 5 stars), and made up sports scores that my brother found ridiculous (Dolphins 56-93 49ers). My aunt just focused on how humorous the misspellings and typos were, but my grandma was my most loyal customer, always willing to dish out the steep ten cent fee that my grandpa had recommended.
At the end of fourth grade Mrs. Carolino passed around a ballot sheet with twenty-five different superlatives, and next to each one we were to write the name of a different student. There were only twenty-three students, and so everybody was to receive something (Best Smile, Best Athlete, Best Singer...). At the very top of the ballot list, even before more obvious categories like "Best Dressed" was the somewhat unusual "Best Writer" category, which I knew was meant for me. There's a picture of me grinning and holding my certificate, and it still hangs on my mother's fridge.
Reading and writing are an unshakable part of who I am now. Though at times I toyed with the idea of being a lawyer, a doctor, a meteorologist, or a criminal psychologist (Silence of the Lambs was a damn good movie and an excellent book), when I applied for college there was no doubt I wanted to major in English, even though I wasn't sure what such a degree would accomplish. I tacked on a minor in creative writing and a concentration in world literature, and just this past May I received my Masters in fiction writing. I'm to be published in The Ne'er-Do-Well soon, and hopefully other publications are forthcoming.
But the point I'm making is this: I had books all around me as a child, and now I seek happiness through reading and writing. I seek to connect with the voices of everyone who's ever told a story, made a film, or composed a song. Each voice shines a light on what it means to be alive, to be a human, to occupy a place on this earth. Dead people have spoken to me, as have anonymous people, recluses, and elderly women on the other side of the earth. I have learned and am learning to deal with death, love, forgiveness, anger, god, catastrophe, and everything else through the books I've read, the movies I've seen, the conversations I've had, and the music I've enjoyed.
There's so much in the world that doesn't teach us much of anything, that doesn't bring us any closer to enlightenment. Eating a bag of Doritos. Reading about the fictional gossip surrounding Michael Jackson's death. Watching advertisements that scream at us from the television. Worrying about what's going to happen if we miss the bus tomorrow morning.
Though we collectively have no time (or attention span) to dedicate to reading, we find the time for this distracting bullshit. ADHD has become an American way of life. Even I have read books that afterward I didn't recall, realizing that I hadn't in fact paid attention to anything except the naggings, worryings, and distractions in my mind, scanning all the words with my eyes but not really reading them. And I'm somebody who's well-trained in reading. What about people who aren't?
There's an ad for a phone that's playing at the beginning of movies at Landmark Theaters these days:
The first time I saw this ad, I grabbed at my head and wanted to have a nervous breakdown. Nevermind who would need such a bombardment of information--why would anyone want it? It's impossible to process so much at once. It's foolish to believe that one ever could. Humans weren't meant to multitask (and less than a hundred years ago, we didn't); when multiple activities go on at once, a different area of the brain activates--the area that controls rote actions and muscle memory predominates. So though you may think you're maximizing your time by carrying on a phone conversation, cooking dinner, watching television, and studying your Spanish homework all at the same time, odds are you're not really doing any of them at all, except maybe making the dinner. You're not really paying attention to your friend, not really comprehending what's going on in the show, and certainly not remembering anything you're studying. Only when we concentrate on one thing at a time do we use higher levels of brain power and actually accomplish something that can be productive and memorable.
Consider this: many times I fix myself a sandwich, sit down at my computer, read some movie trivia on IMDb, and then realize that I'm holding an empty plate. The food will have been eaten without me once stopping to think about how it tastes or smells or feels in my mouth, what it looks like, what it'll do to my body. And so my mind's still hungry and I return to the kitchen to continue munching and overeating.
But not anymore. The laundry room in our apartment building has a table that serves as a freeswap, and on it one day I was stopped in my tracks by a book called Rapt by Winifred Gallagher. The book is about paying attention and focusing on what's really important, and whoever designed the book cover certainly knew how to grab attention because I wanted to read it instantly. I once read a New Yorker article about itching that made me itchy the entire time I was reading it; Gallagher has chosen a perfect subject to write about. It's impossible not to pay attention to a book about the values of paying attention.
Few books have changed my life. This one has. Using experimental, behavioral, and cognitive science, as well as the stories of exemplary focused people, Gallagher establishes that the best way to take control of your life is to harness the reins of what you're paying attention to, to focus not on nagging self-doubts, petty judgments, worries of the future, regrets of the past, the bombardments of cultural overload, hyperactive multitasking, the woes of our jobs or our aching bodies, but to focus on what we want to be thinking about, who we want to be, what's going on all around us, and how to stay on the path that leads where we want to be going.
Suddenly I'm walking the streets not staring at the dirty sidewalks and the trash in the gutters, distractedly thinking about how bad work was, fearing that passersby are judging my appearance, hoping that nobody mugs me, pretending to not notice panhandlers while they're yelling at me--instead I'm looking up, smiling, making eye contact, listening to the birds, admiring architecture, and getting inspired by everything that's around me. I look forward to the future; I feel like I have as much control over it as possible, instead of feeling hopeless and doomed.
There were muscles in my neck that throbbed with cramps for a few days. I wasn't used to holding my head up high.
And though I've passed a certain building down the street hundreds of times, it wasn't until a couple weeks ago that I noticed the half dozen devilish gargoyles hurling boulders on top of it.
So here's what I'm focused on: making the world a smarter, more peaceful, and thriving community through literature. Writing a book (and then allowing others to read it) is an excellent way to share one's knowledge of the world, but kids in Burkina Faso can't share that knowledge if they don't know how to write. And if they don't have books, then odds are they can't read or write. Odds are they will never share their vision through words. So I believe in supporting world literacy and organizations like Books for Africa.
I want to be an advocate for world literature, and a supporter of translations. There are nations with vast canons of diverse literature that are inaccessible to Americans because of a lack of translation and publication. Some Nobel Prize contenders have never been translated into English despite teaching so much and sharing so much beauty with their native speakers.
I want to learn languages, and I'm currently working on Russian. I'm fascinated by the ways in which language shapes and is shaped by our minds. I'm mesmerized by how language adapts and unfolds and blends over time. I even like fictional languages, which hypothesize how fictional people could express their own unique thoughts, and I plan to dabble in creating them some day.
I want to read literature from every culture in the universe, which is why I've set up Bibliotrekking, which is still under construction. The world is full of many viewpoints, secrets, obstacles, and solutions--and by exploring and understanding all of them, by really living inside a writer's heartfelt words for a few hours, we can bring ourselves closer to compassion and happiness. Who would want to kill a Palestinian after reading his poetry? Who wouldn't think twice about slaughtering a rabbit after reading Watership Down? Who could read all of Beloved and still think that slavery was a pretty good idea? Perhaps excluding political vitriol and propaganda, most people don't put down a book and feel like killing. Most books about war written by people who have been involved in it don't feel too keenly about the joys of war.
I want to share the little that I've learned about my own small world through my own writing. I want people to read what I've written and maybe feel a little fuller as a person.
I want to inspire people to read as much as I do. I want to have conversations about great books. I don't want to judge people for liking The Da Vinci Code. My first adult book was Stephen King's The Shining, and I read it in sixth grade. Before I had finished it, my mom had bought me his Desperation, so that I would have something to read once the one book was finished. And every time one book was finished, she'd always let me get another. My grandfather never refused a request to take me to the library, and I don't recall ever being told what I could or couldn't read. I'm grateful for that. And if I hadn't have begun my habit with fun, easy, and sensational stuff like "The Langoliers" (all of which had the further pleasure of movie tie-ins that further cemented the stories), then maybe I would have never moved on to Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo. And I still enjoy Harry Potter (and, having seen the sixth film already, am looking forward to beginning the sixth book tomorrow).
My mother tells me that my niece--"just like me"--loves to read and always has a pile of books around her. I want to encourage that. I want to be an uncle who arrives with a treasure chest of stories. I want to read to my own future children. I want to teach literature and share the beautiful things I've learned, the wonderful pastime that has followed me through life.
Anyway, I've been rambling for a long time, and maybe some of this doesn't even make sense. I was going to write my thoughts so far of Watership Down, which I started reading a few days ago, but I'm running out of steam.
There's going to be more Bibliophonic in the future--I'll continue with the movie reviews from the They Shoot Pictures list, but I'm also going to be writing a lot more about what I'm reading. I have to tell myself not to think of everything I write for this blog as a scholarly essay. Sometimes I can just write about my gut reactions to things. And I think I'm going to be doing more of that in the future.
So stay tuned.
And thanks for bearing with me.
It's occurred to me that my blog is entitled Bibliophonic--a neologism that I fancy conveys the meaning "the music of books"--and yet the past six posts have been strictly about movies, there hasn't been anything of a literary subject since late March, and I haven't written about any of the books I've read since February 11, which perhaps suggests that I haven't read anything since then when in fact I've finished fourteen books (plus a couple by Dr. Seuss during an outing to Books-a-Million).
And that doesn't seem right to me.
I enjoy a lot of things in life. I enjoy the art form of narrative cinema and how it uses so much to try to express something of truth--dialogue, a story, music, framed and arranged visuals, facial expressions, the nuances of human behavior, editing and cinematography that can focus and redirect our attentions, that can influence our emotions through automatic nervous stimulation. Maybe that last part doesn't make sense, but think about how frantic your heart and mind feels when during an action scene the camera keeps cutting every few seconds. And imagine applying those frantic cuts to some other type of scene--a romantic one or an extremely serious moment--and think about what reactions that would evoke. I think movies are a great way to share one vision of the truth.
I also enjoy books. I love the way you can climb inside them. I love how time moves differently when you're reading; how you never quite know what the clock is going to say when you look up from the page, and how it's surprising sometimes to discover that the sun has set and you're sitting in a dark room, struggling to continue seeing the print.
There's a lot of talk lately about the death of the book. Not many people read these days. I don't need to see statistics on declining reading habits (though I have seen them, and they're pretty depressing, as well as anger-inducing); I know from experience. I don't spend a lot of time talking to other people about what they're reading because many people aren't reading anything. What I've described in the last paragraph may be an unknown experience to many people. I've witnessed the awkward silence that comes when I talk too long about whatever book is occupying my mind.
But having said that, I don't believe in the death of the book. Even though I've seen countless Myspace and Facebook profiles with witty descriptions like "book?? wots a book?" I trust that many people like the idea of reading, that most people enjoy reading but don't feel the urge to develop the time-consuming habit of sitting down and devoting hours of concentration to a single book.
And yet I know Harry Potter has stirred many souls (including my own), and those books are quite long. Those books benefit from a cultural pull that allows people to overcome their urges not to read. In addition to the well-marketed, blockbuster films, there are people in the know who reassure new fans, "Oh, but they left out such great, important stuff!" On top of that, more impatient viewers will want to read the subsequent books to gratify their cliffhanger yearnings rather than wait a few years for the next movie. Plus, it's impossible to avoid the Harry Potter phenomenon; I knew what Quidditch was long before seeing any of the movies or reading any of the books, and that's a bizarre fact to wrap my head around. When the seventh book came out, it was impossible on any given subway trip to not bump into a dozen people carrying the book. We want to be a part of that community. We want to know what all the fuss is about. We want access to all this seemingly important cultural/trivial knowledge about horcruxes and Muggles. And so--like the compulsion to get a cell phone plan with a text messaging service, or to get a Twitter account--we make way in our minds and our lives for this new demand on our attention.
If only books and reading in general could have such a strong cultural pull?
I know many people are against devices such as the Kindle, and out of Luddite-prejudice I was, too, at first. Who wants to take such a device to bed with them? That's a common argument. You can't flip through a Kindle book to see what startling words or images strike your eyes. You can't smell the ink or the paper or the glue on the binding, can't smell the decades of use. You can't proudly display a well-creased Kindle spine on your shelf.
But so what? There are plenty of other things to smell. And the vanity of a huge bookshelf isn't that vital--in any case, there's always Goodreads and LibraryThing for showing off.
I have a lot of books--perhaps close to a thousand--and I've moved them six different times amongst three different cities. Up stairs, down sidewalks, through narrow corridors. It's incredibly difficult, moving all those hundreds of pounds of books. I'd have significantly fewer belongings to cart if I didn't have any books, and if I were to ever move overseas, it would be almost impossible to take my library with me. With each new move I find myself wishing for a shrinking machine. Which is what a Kindle is: eight hundred or so books that can fit in your pocket.
And of course it's more eco-friendly, too. No dead trees in a Kindle book.
But most importantly, I think Kindle can inspire reading in people who wouldn't normally want to. Maybe not on a large scale, but at least it's movement in the right direction. Kindle may be killing the "book" (which will never, of course, happen--people will always love having some colorful titles on their shelves and coffee tables), but it's certainly not doing anything bad to literature itself.
I think my goal in life (and I know this blog post is rambling all over the place) is to work toward a world where reading resumes the vital role it once played in our lives. In addition to my personal goal of finding truth and meaning (and who doesn't have that goal?), I want to help create a world where reading and writing are more common. I like Better World Books, which gathers discarded, unwanted, and unneeded books (often from landfills) from all over the world and redistributes them at a cheap price (with free shipping!). Some of their proceeds also go toward Books for Africa, which (this is a no-brainer:) provides books for Africa.
I've wanted to be a writer since at least the age of eight, when I discovered during writing assignments in third grade that I actually had a talent with words. I had always had books while growing up. My mother loved reading Green Eggs and Ham to me as much as I enjoyed hearing it. By kindergarten, I took for granted that I was literate. I remember reading a picture book about Winnie the Pooh during playtime while my teacher commented to her assistant that a classmate looked so cute "pretending to read" while running her index finger under the words. What did they think was so special about her pretending, I remember thinking, when I was actually reading without the need of a guide finger?
I had a closet full of books about all the crazy things that could be dreamed of--dinosaurs, castles, monsters, talking goldfinches. I didn't think about where those books came from and how they were made until one morning my grandfather showed up with a typewriter. I was six or seven. I realized that I could match the letters in my dinosaur book with the letters on the typewriter keys and after a great deal of noise and whirs and dings a page that had previously been nothing but a white sheet would become a carbon copy of the book.
I took a keen interest in the typewriter (and I still have it, in my closet), and my grandfather never denied me access. In spite of the banging racket, I was never told to keep quiet. So by age eight I was applying my knowledge of castle keeps and moats to stories about kings bestowing their land upon virtuous knights. By age nine, inspired by the movie Clue I loved so much, I was dabbling in ensemble mysteries. By ten, I was writing a better version of the Mortal Kombat movie while also maintaining a biweekly newspaper with the latest goings-on around the living room (my grandpa chopped down a tree, my sister went to New York and will hopefully bring back souvenirs), glowing reviews of the movies my grandfather had taken me to (The Sandlot: 5 stars; Mortal Kombat: 5 stars), and made up sports scores that my brother found ridiculous (Dolphins 56-93 49ers). My aunt just focused on how humorous the misspellings and typos were, but my grandma was my most loyal customer, always willing to dish out the steep ten cent fee that my grandpa had recommended.
At the end of fourth grade Mrs. Carolino passed around a ballot sheet with twenty-five different superlatives, and next to each one we were to write the name of a different student. There were only twenty-three students, and so everybody was to receive something (Best Smile, Best Athlete, Best Singer...). At the very top of the ballot list, even before more obvious categories like "Best Dressed" was the somewhat unusual "Best Writer" category, which I knew was meant for me. There's a picture of me grinning and holding my certificate, and it still hangs on my mother's fridge.
Reading and writing are an unshakable part of who I am now. Though at times I toyed with the idea of being a lawyer, a doctor, a meteorologist, or a criminal psychologist (Silence of the Lambs was a damn good movie and an excellent book), when I applied for college there was no doubt I wanted to major in English, even though I wasn't sure what such a degree would accomplish. I tacked on a minor in creative writing and a concentration in world literature, and just this past May I received my Masters in fiction writing. I'm to be published in The Ne'er-Do-Well soon, and hopefully other publications are forthcoming.
But the point I'm making is this: I had books all around me as a child, and now I seek happiness through reading and writing. I seek to connect with the voices of everyone who's ever told a story, made a film, or composed a song. Each voice shines a light on what it means to be alive, to be a human, to occupy a place on this earth. Dead people have spoken to me, as have anonymous people, recluses, and elderly women on the other side of the earth. I have learned and am learning to deal with death, love, forgiveness, anger, god, catastrophe, and everything else through the books I've read, the movies I've seen, the conversations I've had, and the music I've enjoyed.
There's so much in the world that doesn't teach us much of anything, that doesn't bring us any closer to enlightenment. Eating a bag of Doritos. Reading about the fictional gossip surrounding Michael Jackson's death. Watching advertisements that scream at us from the television. Worrying about what's going to happen if we miss the bus tomorrow morning.
Though we collectively have no time (or attention span) to dedicate to reading, we find the time for this distracting bullshit. ADHD has become an American way of life. Even I have read books that afterward I didn't recall, realizing that I hadn't in fact paid attention to anything except the naggings, worryings, and distractions in my mind, scanning all the words with my eyes but not really reading them. And I'm somebody who's well-trained in reading. What about people who aren't?
There's an ad for a phone that's playing at the beginning of movies at Landmark Theaters these days:
The first time I saw this ad, I grabbed at my head and wanted to have a nervous breakdown. Nevermind who would need such a bombardment of information--why would anyone want it? It's impossible to process so much at once. It's foolish to believe that one ever could. Humans weren't meant to multitask (and less than a hundred years ago, we didn't); when multiple activities go on at once, a different area of the brain activates--the area that controls rote actions and muscle memory predominates. So though you may think you're maximizing your time by carrying on a phone conversation, cooking dinner, watching television, and studying your Spanish homework all at the same time, odds are you're not really doing any of them at all, except maybe making the dinner. You're not really paying attention to your friend, not really comprehending what's going on in the show, and certainly not remembering anything you're studying. Only when we concentrate on one thing at a time do we use higher levels of brain power and actually accomplish something that can be productive and memorable.
Consider this: many times I fix myself a sandwich, sit down at my computer, read some movie trivia on IMDb, and then realize that I'm holding an empty plate. The food will have been eaten without me once stopping to think about how it tastes or smells or feels in my mouth, what it looks like, what it'll do to my body. And so my mind's still hungry and I return to the kitchen to continue munching and overeating.
But not anymore. The laundry room in our apartment building has a table that serves as a freeswap, and on it one day I was stopped in my tracks by a book called Rapt by Winifred Gallagher. The book is about paying attention and focusing on what's really important, and whoever designed the book cover certainly knew how to grab attention because I wanted to read it instantly. I once read a New Yorker article about itching that made me itchy the entire time I was reading it; Gallagher has chosen a perfect subject to write about. It's impossible not to pay attention to a book about the values of paying attention.
Few books have changed my life. This one has. Using experimental, behavioral, and cognitive science, as well as the stories of exemplary focused people, Gallagher establishes that the best way to take control of your life is to harness the reins of what you're paying attention to, to focus not on nagging self-doubts, petty judgments, worries of the future, regrets of the past, the bombardments of cultural overload, hyperactive multitasking, the woes of our jobs or our aching bodies, but to focus on what we want to be thinking about, who we want to be, what's going on all around us, and how to stay on the path that leads where we want to be going.
Suddenly I'm walking the streets not staring at the dirty sidewalks and the trash in the gutters, distractedly thinking about how bad work was, fearing that passersby are judging my appearance, hoping that nobody mugs me, pretending to not notice panhandlers while they're yelling at me--instead I'm looking up, smiling, making eye contact, listening to the birds, admiring architecture, and getting inspired by everything that's around me. I look forward to the future; I feel like I have as much control over it as possible, instead of feeling hopeless and doomed.
There were muscles in my neck that throbbed with cramps for a few days. I wasn't used to holding my head up high.
And though I've passed a certain building down the street hundreds of times, it wasn't until a couple weeks ago that I noticed the half dozen devilish gargoyles hurling boulders on top of it.
So here's what I'm focused on: making the world a smarter, more peaceful, and thriving community through literature. Writing a book (and then allowing others to read it) is an excellent way to share one's knowledge of the world, but kids in Burkina Faso can't share that knowledge if they don't know how to write. And if they don't have books, then odds are they can't read or write. Odds are they will never share their vision through words. So I believe in supporting world literacy and organizations like Books for Africa.
I want to be an advocate for world literature, and a supporter of translations. There are nations with vast canons of diverse literature that are inaccessible to Americans because of a lack of translation and publication. Some Nobel Prize contenders have never been translated into English despite teaching so much and sharing so much beauty with their native speakers.
I want to learn languages, and I'm currently working on Russian. I'm fascinated by the ways in which language shapes and is shaped by our minds. I'm mesmerized by how language adapts and unfolds and blends over time. I even like fictional languages, which hypothesize how fictional people could express their own unique thoughts, and I plan to dabble in creating them some day.
I want to read literature from every culture in the universe, which is why I've set up Bibliotrekking, which is still under construction. The world is full of many viewpoints, secrets, obstacles, and solutions--and by exploring and understanding all of them, by really living inside a writer's heartfelt words for a few hours, we can bring ourselves closer to compassion and happiness. Who would want to kill a Palestinian after reading his poetry? Who wouldn't think twice about slaughtering a rabbit after reading Watership Down? Who could read all of Beloved and still think that slavery was a pretty good idea? Perhaps excluding political vitriol and propaganda, most people don't put down a book and feel like killing. Most books about war written by people who have been involved in it don't feel too keenly about the joys of war.
I want to share the little that I've learned about my own small world through my own writing. I want people to read what I've written and maybe feel a little fuller as a person.
I want to inspire people to read as much as I do. I want to have conversations about great books. I don't want to judge people for liking The Da Vinci Code. My first adult book was Stephen King's The Shining, and I read it in sixth grade. Before I had finished it, my mom had bought me his Desperation, so that I would have something to read once the one book was finished. And every time one book was finished, she'd always let me get another. My grandfather never refused a request to take me to the library, and I don't recall ever being told what I could or couldn't read. I'm grateful for that. And if I hadn't have begun my habit with fun, easy, and sensational stuff like "The Langoliers" (all of which had the further pleasure of movie tie-ins that further cemented the stories), then maybe I would have never moved on to Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo. And I still enjoy Harry Potter (and, having seen the sixth film already, am looking forward to beginning the sixth book tomorrow).
My mother tells me that my niece--"just like me"--loves to read and always has a pile of books around her. I want to encourage that. I want to be an uncle who arrives with a treasure chest of stories. I want to read to my own future children. I want to teach literature and share the beautiful things I've learned, the wonderful pastime that has followed me through life.
Anyway, I've been rambling for a long time, and maybe some of this doesn't even make sense. I was going to write my thoughts so far of Watership Down, which I started reading a few days ago, but I'm running out of steam.
There's going to be more Bibliophonic in the future--I'll continue with the movie reviews from the They Shoot Pictures list, but I'm also going to be writing a lot more about what I'm reading. I have to tell myself not to think of everything I write for this blog as a scholarly essay. Sometimes I can just write about my gut reactions to things. And I think I'm going to be doing more of that in the future.
So stay tuned.
And thanks for bearing with me.
22 April, 2009
This blog isn't dead.
I've been sorting out some business in my life this past rainy month, including but not limited to the completion of my graduate course, attempts to get published, and an excess of work accompanied by the influx of tourist season. For once I can say that I've been very busy and not feel like I'm kidding myself and making excuses. I am full of motivation and--gasp--actually doing something about it.
Anyway, I'll be back with real posts soon, and to keep you on the edge of your seat and to keep me organized, here are some topics I may cover:
-Movie reviews of Manhattan, In the Mood for Love, Runaway Train, Yi Yi, the entire Jim Jarmusch filmography, Alien and Aliens, The Untouchables, Videodrome, Life Boat, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, The Last Emperor, The Accidental Activist, The Grand Silence, Django, and/or Dear Zachary.
-Fiction possibly involving pickpockets, a Thanksgiving road trip, and/or a confused mother.
-A report on music, musicals, and drum kits.
-An analysis of my days at Johns Hopkins.
-Book reviews referencing Moby Dick, Middlemarch, The Coquette, and the stories of Richard Ford.
-A conversation with this article about Doris Lessing's Briefing for a Descent into Hell.
-My feelings about travel, prescription drugs, gay marriage, and the Russian language.
Anyway, I'll be back with real posts soon, and to keep you on the edge of your seat and to keep me organized, here are some topics I may cover:
-Movie reviews of Manhattan, In the Mood for Love, Runaway Train, Yi Yi, the entire Jim Jarmusch filmography, Alien and Aliens, The Untouchables, Videodrome, Life Boat, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, The Last Emperor, The Accidental Activist, The Grand Silence, Django, and/or Dear Zachary.
-Fiction possibly involving pickpockets, a Thanksgiving road trip, and/or a confused mother.
-A report on music, musicals, and drum kits.
-An analysis of my days at Johns Hopkins.
-Book reviews referencing Moby Dick, Middlemarch, The Coquette, and the stories of Richard Ford.
-A conversation with this article about Doris Lessing's Briefing for a Descent into Hell.
-My feelings about travel, prescription drugs, gay marriage, and the Russian language.
01 February, 2009
An Accomplishment, a Recollection, and a Resignation
Just wanted to say that it's been exactly one year since I've touched a cigarette. It surprises me very much--as a former chainsmoker and smoking advocate--that the thought of cigarettes now nauseates me. My lungs feel wonderful, and my gums are relieved. Fuck Camels.
This weekend one year ago, I smoked my last bummed cig, fell down a flight of wet stairs (possibly cracking a rib in the process), passed out on a train, walked out on a job without saying anything, and enjoyed watching a sporting event by myself. I'm in an extremely different place right now, and it's all rather strange. But, all in all, on the up and up!
And finally, I have a Facebook now. I resisted for four years and I still don't really understand all it's capable of, but Myspace has practically died and I want to remain in touch with people. Look for me if you want. My name is over there in the right margin.
Thank you for reading my blog.
This weekend one year ago, I smoked my last bummed cig, fell down a flight of wet stairs (possibly cracking a rib in the process), passed out on a train, walked out on a job without saying anything, and enjoyed watching a sporting event by myself. I'm in an extremely different place right now, and it's all rather strange. But, all in all, on the up and up!
And finally, I have a Facebook now. I resisted for four years and I still don't really understand all it's capable of, but Myspace has practically died and I want to remain in touch with people. Look for me if you want. My name is over there in the right margin.
Thank you for reading my blog.
10 January, 2009
I am 8,694 days old.
So it's fairly common knowledge that I'm obsessed with lists and tabulations, statistics and spreadsheets, complete documentation. It hasn't yet reached the point where I'm like Nicholas Feltron, recording every beer imbibed and every subway trip traveled, but if you'll look in the right hand column then you'll see that I've racked my brain to recall and rate every movie I've seen and every book I've written (EDIT: read, haha). I have a detailed, scored, sortable inventory of all the 900 or so books in my library with aspirations of adding additional denotations for place purchased and date read and price paid and pagination and condition and god only knows what else I can imagine. I've considered writing an encyclopedia of all of my memories and impressions of every person I can ever recall meeting, and at one point a couple years ago I was writing a maximalist autobiography of all my life's details, both personal and trivial--from my first day of kindergarten to the temperature and wind speed at the time and location of my birth.
I've used the Social Security Death Index to research the obituaries, Myspace pages, newspaper articles, etc. of all 66 of the American citizens who were born on my birthday and have since died. I've expanded my family tree from about 15 known people to over 300. I know unillustrious ancestors ten generations back; I know every address my maternal, maternal great grandfather has ever lived at. Eventually I'll probably draw up some formula to calculate what my genetic life expectancy is.
I'm sentimental. I cling to arbitrary documents. I have most of the movie tickets I've ever purchased. Until twelfth grade I saved every receipt from every purchase I ever made with my own money, and when I started smoking I saved every empty cigarette pack for almost a year.
I've obsessed over canons--which is the point I'm eventually getting to. Time's 100 greatest novels of the twentieth century. Harold Bloom's Western Canon. The 1001 Movies You Must See Before You
Die. The Nobel laureates. The Pulitzer winners. The largely bullshit IMDb Top 250. The AFI 100 Greatest American Films. All of the 78 Academy Award Best Picture winners, which eventually grew to the over 400 Best Picture nominees, which is in the process of growing into the thousands of movies that have ever been nominated for any Oscar whatsoever--as if I really care to see U-571, unsuccessful contender for Best Sound in 2000.
I realize all the list-making and trivial documentation is a national plague. The Wall Street Journal recently did a very forgiving analysis of the trend. Life used to be simple, I imagine, with religious duties and physical science and local warfare imposing all the necessary duties and order. Now we're bombarded with lists of the Greatest Snowbound Horror Movies, trying to figure out how this somehow has anything to do with our place in the world. It's a way to waste time while being active, a time-consuming form of procrastination, a way to make sense of an extremely complicated world, and a way to hold onto memories and ideas and personal mementos in a throwaway, consumerist culture.
But, alas, I'm getting too serious. I wanted to talk about the They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? list of the 1000 greatest movies of all time as determined by a consensus of all international film critics and publications of merit. It's a list that's updated about once a year, which is good because it's kept current but also bad because each year, when about 100 movies are swapped out for new, supposedly better choices, the number of movies I've seen on the list tends to drop. I've more or less seen 225 of them at this point, and it'll take me almost 62 days of nonstop watching to see the remaining 775.
I've never ascribed any particular motive to this blog, which though called Bibliophonic is more about movie reviews, often about book reviews, occasionally about gender and media studies, and much less frequently than I'd hoped about my own fiction writing. I just wanted to state that my journey down the TSP list is going to be one of my new foci.
And goddammit, I'll try to post more fiction, too.
I've used the Social Security Death Index to research the obituaries, Myspace pages, newspaper articles, etc. of all 66 of the American citizens who were born on my birthday and have since died. I've expanded my family tree from about 15 known people to over 300. I know unillustrious ancestors ten generations back; I know every address my maternal, maternal great grandfather has ever lived at. Eventually I'll probably draw up some formula to calculate what my genetic life expectancy is.
I'm sentimental. I cling to arbitrary documents. I have most of the movie tickets I've ever purchased. Until twelfth grade I saved every receipt from every purchase I ever made with my own money, and when I started smoking I saved every empty cigarette pack for almost a year.
I've obsessed over canons--which is the point I'm eventually getting to. Time's 100 greatest novels of the twentieth century. Harold Bloom's Western Canon. The 1001 Movies You Must See Before You
Die. The Nobel laureates. The Pulitzer winners. The largely bullshit IMDb Top 250. The AFI 100 Greatest American Films. All of the 78 Academy Award Best Picture winners, which eventually grew to the over 400 Best Picture nominees, which is in the process of growing into the thousands of movies that have ever been nominated for any Oscar whatsoever--as if I really care to see U-571, unsuccessful contender for Best Sound in 2000.
I realize all the list-making and trivial documentation is a national plague. The Wall Street Journal recently did a very forgiving analysis of the trend. Life used to be simple, I imagine, with religious duties and physical science and local warfare imposing all the necessary duties and order. Now we're bombarded with lists of the Greatest Snowbound Horror Movies, trying to figure out how this somehow has anything to do with our place in the world. It's a way to waste time while being active, a time-consuming form of procrastination, a way to make sense of an extremely complicated world, and a way to hold onto memories and ideas and personal mementos in a throwaway, consumerist culture.
But, alas, I'm getting too serious. I wanted to talk about the They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? list of the 1000 greatest movies of all time as determined by a consensus of all international film critics and publications of merit. It's a list that's updated about once a year, which is good because it's kept current but also bad because each year, when about 100 movies are swapped out for new, supposedly better choices, the number of movies I've seen on the list tends to drop. I've more or less seen 225 of them at this point, and it'll take me almost 62 days of nonstop watching to see the remaining 775.
I've never ascribed any particular motive to this blog, which though called Bibliophonic is more about movie reviews, often about book reviews, occasionally about gender and media studies, and much less frequently than I'd hoped about my own fiction writing. I just wanted to state that my journey down the TSP list is going to be one of my new foci.
And goddammit, I'll try to post more fiction, too.
12 December, 2008
In which I complain about US Airways
I made plans over three months ago to go camping under the stars at Death Valley National Park, the darkest, deepest, driest, hottest place in the country (or is it the world?). The night sky is so unpolluted by light and clouds that you can see pretty much any star you'll ever be able to see with the naked eye, plus the Milky Way galaxy on its side, stretching across the horizon.
I was excited. I very much have a romantic attachment to stargazing, as well as campfires and uncomfortable tent sleep. I eagerly anticipated abandoned mines, paleolithic artifacts, coyotes, and seventy degree sunshine in December. I also cautiously anticipated a thirty-nine degree night by packing a suitcase full of blankets, sleeping bags, sweatshirts, insulated jeans, a tent, and some pillows. A bag so heavy and big that I had to check it while my carry-on contained little more than a book (I'm working on Middlemarch by George Eliot now, and it's not very compelling three hundred pages in, but it's okay).
Paul, who's staying with his family in Las Vegas this week--Las Vegas, a city I despise, full of hungover, miserable tourists who have been drinking and gambling and eating at buffets for thirty-four hours straight, miserable tourism industry employees who have to deal with said tourists, no notable cuisine, no common fashion sense, giant blinking billboards of Bette Midler's airbrushed legs, overpriced everything, immigrants thrusting out litter describing women with stars on their nipples, people convinced you really can get something for nothing, hundreds of obese people in cowboy hats, and for some reason my sister and her daughter whom I miss--and I had made all the plans, reserving the rental car, getting the directions, figuring out the campsite, packing the bags, and timing everything so that I could arrive Tuesday evening, we could camp Tuesday night, hike Wednesday morning and afternoon, and hang out with my sister Wednesday night all before I had to fly back Thursday morning (a total of eleven hours of travel, plus the time zone differential) to return to work today.
Fifteen dollars to check the bag each way on an airplane that didn't even offer complimentary water or in-flight entertainment of any kind. (Not even headphones? Come on!). I arrived in Las Vegas. My baggage did not. Not until six hours later, when it was too late to do anything involving a national park. So I spent two nights in Vegas. Two nights in motherfucking Vegas, and I barely got to see my sister. All this money I spent... for two nights in Vegas.
And the woman in the baggage claim office says, "No, there's no refund. The baggage claim only guarantees the transportation, not the time." Are you fucking kidding? What does that even mean? What kind of customer service is that, US Airways? You ruined my goddamn vacation.
I shall seek retribution soon.
I was excited. I very much have a romantic attachment to stargazing, as well as campfires and uncomfortable tent sleep. I eagerly anticipated abandoned mines, paleolithic artifacts, coyotes, and seventy degree sunshine in December. I also cautiously anticipated a thirty-nine degree night by packing a suitcase full of blankets, sleeping bags, sweatshirts, insulated jeans, a tent, and some pillows. A bag so heavy and big that I had to check it while my carry-on contained little more than a book (I'm working on Middlemarch by George Eliot now, and it's not very compelling three hundred pages in, but it's okay).
Paul, who's staying with his family in Las Vegas this week--Las Vegas, a city I despise, full of hungover, miserable tourists who have been drinking and gambling and eating at buffets for thirty-four hours straight, miserable tourism industry employees who have to deal with said tourists, no notable cuisine, no common fashion sense, giant blinking billboards of Bette Midler's airbrushed legs, overpriced everything, immigrants thrusting out litter describing women with stars on their nipples, people convinced you really can get something for nothing, hundreds of obese people in cowboy hats, and for some reason my sister and her daughter whom I miss--and I had made all the plans, reserving the rental car, getting the directions, figuring out the campsite, packing the bags, and timing everything so that I could arrive Tuesday evening, we could camp Tuesday night, hike Wednesday morning and afternoon, and hang out with my sister Wednesday night all before I had to fly back Thursday morning (a total of eleven hours of travel, plus the time zone differential) to return to work today.
Fifteen dollars to check the bag each way on an airplane that didn't even offer complimentary water or in-flight entertainment of any kind. (Not even headphones? Come on!). I arrived in Las Vegas. My baggage did not. Not until six hours later, when it was too late to do anything involving a national park. So I spent two nights in Vegas. Two nights in motherfucking Vegas, and I barely got to see my sister. All this money I spent... for two nights in Vegas.
And the woman in the baggage claim office says, "No, there's no refund. The baggage claim only guarantees the transportation, not the time." Are you fucking kidding? What does that even mean? What kind of customer service is that, US Airways? You ruined my goddamn vacation.
I shall seek retribution soon.
31 October, 2008
I got a rock.
My nose is stained red from my blood-filled prosthesis. I was a zombie again this year; woke up early, put on the makeup and shredded, bloody clothes, went to work. I especially love the Midwestern tourists who were completely unfazed by my rapidly decaying flesh--who ordered their skim lattes as if everything were perfectly normal. "Well, so far I've seen black people, homeless vagrants, and homos holding hands. Might as well just accept this."
29 September, 2008
The Commuter
I occasionally see an old woman schlupping up and down Connecticut Avenue, her head painfully cocked askew, her eyes cautiously glued to the sidewalk, her back humped and limbs arthritic. She'd be a depressing sight if she had let herself fall to shambles, but instead she's always impeccably dressed. Not fashionable exactly, but grandma fashionable. Colorful blouses and clean holiday vests and shiny broaches, everything exquisitely laundered and pressed, well-tailored and appropriately adorned. I wonder how difficult it must be for her to dress so primly, but she's never disappointed.
The other morning, during rainfall, I saw her walking to the Metro at seven, a floppy American flag hat pulled over her head and a photographic identification card dangling around her neck. I'd never realized she was going to a job everytime she trekked to the busstop, but I can picture her at her desk, working slowly but surely, never complaining. All the young employees call her Granma affectionately, and at Christmas time she buys a Hallmark ornament for everyone without prejudice, and for the really special coworkers a stuffed reindeer. Maybe sometimes she makes jokes that would be scandalous by 1940s standards, letting them out in a slow and small but very precise voice.
Anyway, I love this woman.
I've been sick the past few days, but going to work in spite of it (as if I had a choice). I've watched some movies (Parents, Tropic Thunder, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920), King of the Zombies, Burn After Reading, Trouble the Water), and some reviews for some of them should be coming soon. I've been studying Spanish, keeping up (however angrily and bemusedly) with the news, and slogging my way through Gravity's Rainbow, which I'll also one day post an analysis of if I ever actually finish it (I've read 632 of 887 pages, and there's no telling how many of those pages I understood, though I've enjoyed enough of it, I guess). Things are good.
p.s. Paul just told me he saw the old lady with the floppy hat this morning, hunching down to pet a pedestrian's Pomeranian. "She sounded just as nice as you'd imagine," he tells me. Maybe I can lure her into starting a conversation by walking someone's dog up and down the street....
The other morning, during rainfall, I saw her walking to the Metro at seven, a floppy American flag hat pulled over her head and a photographic identification card dangling around her neck. I'd never realized she was going to a job everytime she trekked to the busstop, but I can picture her at her desk, working slowly but surely, never complaining. All the young employees call her Granma affectionately, and at Christmas time she buys a Hallmark ornament for everyone without prejudice, and for the really special coworkers a stuffed reindeer. Maybe sometimes she makes jokes that would be scandalous by 1940s standards, letting them out in a slow and small but very precise voice.
Anyway, I love this woman.
I've been sick the past few days, but going to work in spite of it (as if I had a choice). I've watched some movies (Parents, Tropic Thunder, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920), King of the Zombies, Burn After Reading, Trouble the Water), and some reviews for some of them should be coming soon. I've been studying Spanish, keeping up (however angrily and bemusedly) with the news, and slogging my way through Gravity's Rainbow, which I'll also one day post an analysis of if I ever actually finish it (I've read 632 of 887 pages, and there's no telling how many of those pages I understood, though I've enjoyed enough of it, I guess). Things are good.
p.s. Paul just told me he saw the old lady with the floppy hat this morning, hunching down to pet a pedestrian's Pomeranian. "She sounded just as nice as you'd imagine," he tells me. Maybe I can lure her into starting a conversation by walking someone's dog up and down the street....
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