Oh shizzle! Lincoln Center screened a Brian de Palma filming of The Performance Group's Dionysus in 69 last Saturday. This is the one theatre piece I've most wanted to see and never could. Did anyone catch the screening?

Several years ago, in the throes of directing a theatre production for the Seattle Fringe Theatre Festival, I made an ill-fated attempt to create a blog where I would talk about my directing process, and respond to theatre-related stuff—productions and books. It died an unhappy death when I had no time to do anything outside of rehearsal and couldn't publicize the problems in rehearsal.

But the other day I came across this abandoned post, dated August 27, 2003. (Warning: this won't be interesting to anyone not already under the spell of Letters to an Unknown Audience.)

It seems to be a law of nature that almost no good writing about theatre exists. Writings about theatre are like unstable combinations of fundamental particles, I think, and they quickly disintegrate or become less meaningful. It's related to the fact that performance depends largely on the presence of the actor, making "performance documentation" a specious practice. Videotapes of theatre events are scant shadows of the original sense of time and space, and the opportunity afforded by live performance to choose what you look at.

When I initiated this site, I resolved to read one theatre book per week. So far I have read about two.

The first was Anne Bogart's A Director Prepares. Bogart is to be reckoned with, as a director. She's done a string of well-respected productions with creative perspectives on classic texts, always using a lot of what theatre people call "movement"—that is, her productions avoid becoming talking heads. She even developed her own, widely-taught, approach to generating movement, an approach known as "Viewpoints."

The book is divided into seven sections that deal with problems a director is supposed to encounter in rehearsal. The choices are interesting: Memory, Violence, Eroticism, Terror, Stereotype, Embarrassment, Resistance. These are interesting axes along which to view a rehearsal, and to my knowledge they haven't been dealt with by other writers on theatre.

In "Memory," she is confronted with the fact that Americans have no performative tradition from which to draw in creating performance material—or so she thinks, at first. By contrast, performers with clear ethnic roots, or with ritualistic religious backgrounds have memories of movements in their bodies, which they can revisit while developing gestures and actions for their characters.

But on further consideration, Bogart decides that she herself, and generally, an American, does have performative tradition and memory on which to draw, citing vaudeville, operetta, and the evangelical tradition.

My favorite chapter of Bogart's is "Violence." In rehearsal I am constantly working to elicit answers from the actors. Unlike talking over a set design, or building a piece of software, I can't just cycle between brainstorming and ciriticizing. Every idea needs to be held gently because the actor's delicate personal associations with it are the origin of his performance. But inevitably I get to a point where the actor and I directly disagree on the meaning of a moment. At that moment I do an act of violence, discarding the actor's coddled belief and substituting a new one. Then we have the hard work of rebuilding the associations that will allow the actor to actually perform it. Bogart urged me to get comfortable with that feeling of violence, and I'm slowly getting there. But it is a delicate balance: too much violence and the actor has nothing personal to motivate himself. Too little and he will slip out of phase with the rest of the piece.

I've become so artistically lazy since then!

The Guardian "In praise of Jay-Z":

Most people will not have heard of Jay-Z until this week, when newspapers reported that Glastonbury's top billing for some American rapper had led to disappointing ticket sales. ... The subject matter is standard hip-hop fare, reflecting an upbringing in Brooklyn's housing projects and a street culture of drugs and guns (along with tiresome sexism and money-worship), yet the lyrics avoid cliche: "Blame Reagon for making me a moster / Blame Oliver North and Iran Contra / I ran contraband that they sponsored." His later work is marked by increasingly inventive delivery: instead of firing off words, the rapper slows down, stretches his words or simply stops.

(The Guardian, April 10, 2008, p. 36.)

In a gift of insomnia last night, I read loads of Robert Hass. This morning I awoke bubbling language. I imagined many comments on this entry (or some similar jejune specimen). They were just the kind you want: lots of misspellings, grammatical twig breaks. Independent minds working. I relished them, even as they evaporated in dawn waking.

All the new thinking is about love, in my case. In this it dissembles the old thinking.

Here I was thinking Hemingway was an opposite to the Sylvia Plath strain of literary creation, the boom-and-bust, burn-it-all school. He was diligent and measured, conservative and careful, surely, and lived out a long, grumpy old age filled with arrogance and pride—for sure.

No. According to Wikipedia, "Hemingway is believed to have purchased the weapon he used to commit suicide at Abercrombie & Fitch, which was then an elite excursion goods retailer and firearm supplier."

Cracking good cold February springtime here in Auld Reekie. A fine haar comes in over the town many days, other times it's crystal clear to the stars, and when the sun shines, warm, too. Six weeks now I'm full of hope; my monastic life is doomed: I'm swayed by life's temptations. It's all uphill from here.

Threw myself a big raging party yesterday. Edinburgh Council came to the door on noise complaints—that covers that. Deep in the night, got to looking around the crowded room and said, I know all these people. I like all these people. I created this life for myself, in a foreign country, and it only took two years. Not bad. Not bloody bad.

So, yeah, I've been waiting to tell you about this great Hemingway book I just read, called A Moveable Feast. It's about his years in Paris, 1921–’26. You can hardly stop reading when you've started, it's like a slide. Nothing to make you tired, and little wasted; he works efficiently & says just what he needs to. There's a lot of stuff in there about famous people he knew—writers and artists, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein—but, too, he turns up a lot of details, cagily, about his working methods and his feelings about his work.

It was either six or eight flights up to the top floor and it was very cold and I knew how much it would cost for a bundle of small twigs, three wire-wrapped packets of short, half-pencil length pieces of split pine to catch fire from the twigs, and then the bundle of half-dried lengths of hard wood that I must buy to make a fire that would warm the room. So I went to the far side of the street to look up at the roof in the rain and see if any chimneys were going, and how the smoke blew. There was no smoke and I thought about how the chimney would be cold and might not draw and of the room possibly filling with smoke, and the fuel wasted, and the money gone with it, and I walked on in the rain.

There's a whole digression about horse racing and how he controlled his use of it for money and the excitement of the vagaries of racing. I thought of Robert Irwin, another great artist who made a living betting on horses for awhile before getting out of it and, luckily, not getting addicted. You can read about that in the great Lawrence Weschler book Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees.

Old Hem says something in there about his "distrust of adjectives" and his love of the mot juste, the "one true word" that says just what it needs to say, and I could understand that because I just read a book that was about 90% adjectives and none of them said anything useful. I wouldn't believe any guff, if anyone tried to say it, about this style being truer, in the sense of veracity, than any other. If anything this book tells a surprising story about how much you can distort and alter by leaving things out or by other true-seeming tricks of the pen. But this sparse, declarative style, which is marked also by a preponderance of actions and relations instead of glossy, emotive descriptions, this style which I also observe in other great writers I dig like J. M. Coetzee and Colm Tóibín, is so true in another sense, in the sense of being sharp and strong, like an arrow flies true, of hitting you hard, when it hits you. As a work of imagination, this book is very pleasing and has many useful insights for all of us here on the Letters to an Unknown Audience staff, and to all of you poor souls who read it.

Dinner was at the ultra-hip Semiramis Hotel, one of five hotels that Joannou owns in Athens, in which the public spaces abound with art from the Deste Foundation of the Joannou collection. In the morning, we were going to the island of Hydra for the weekend, on Dakis’s ninety-foot cabin cruiser, Protect Me from What I Want. (The name comes from one of Jennny Holzer’s aphoristic L.E.D. Sculptures.) Bickerton nearly missed the boat; he had been arrested, for unspecified activities, in a late-night bar near our hotel and detained briefly; the night manager had helped to free him, but he had overslept.

After Bickerton absorbed some sea air and several cups of coffee, his resurgent sense of mischief fastened on Deitch, who was dressed, as usual, in one of his Caraceni suits (no tie, but still a suit). “This guy is so uptight,” Bickerton announced, hugging Deitch affectionately. “He has an iron rod from his anus all the way to his neck.” From time to time, Deitch would withdraw from the others on the boat to have a brief, intense cell-phone conversation, presumably with a client, about the upcoming London auctions. The trip to Hydra took about an hour. We anchored in a cove at one end of the island for lunch, which turned out to be a Greek banquet, served on the fantail. Everyone swam off the boat except Deitch (another source of merriment to Bickerton, who swims like a porpoise), and by late afternoon, when Protect Me from What I Want pulled into Hydra’s harbor and we loaded our luggage onto donkeys for the ascent to the Joannous’ place , about halfway up a steeply terraced hillside, Holzer’s message had lost some of its ironic bite.

—Calvin Tomkins, “A Fool for Art,” The New Yorker, November 12, 2007

Once I read to my girlfriend over the phone, because we were very far apart and had nothing else to do. I read a good section I'd just discovered, out of E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, a rich descriptive bit near the beginning that paints a small town in colonial India, getting into the geology and the lay of the land, as well as the social scene. In those days, whenever I thought of beautiful nature, especially landscapes, I thought of her. That little town in the book, and the hills that surround it, and the water coming down, and the strange separation between the Indians and the English, were so vivid in my mind I couldn't wait to share it with her. And I thought I had a good way of reading—even she said so once, though it was ages before all this. So I wound up my humblest, most dynamic voice and went through, breathed out two pages, listening for her response all the way. Then I stopped and waited. It wasn't a final finish, just a tidy one, and she didn't say anything, so I said, "That's it." Then I said, "What did you think?" She said, "It was nice."

I was well infatuated with her then and I knew she was subtle, didn't shout out her thoughts like some would; no, she was quiet and kept things to herself; I reckoned that she let things sink in a lot before saying a little something, and that was a fine quality she had. So I waited.

A while later I read a whole story to her. This took a good long time, and I had to stop and rest a few times. I asked her how it was going when I rested. "Okay," she said. "I can stop," I said. "No," she said. So I read the whole story, and it was a decent story, with various actions and intentions in it, which we could have discussed, if we were hard pressed, and we were. It was a long way from her to me and it was hard to keep things going but we did because we cared terrifically about each other, or so I think, and each thought the other was really special, and still does. When I finished the story I asked her what she thought. "Nice," she said. I waited a good while to see if anything else would come and nothing did. I hung up and went to bed. Times like these took their toll and we ended up parting ways, but two years later I still feel we made a mistake. Who did the wrong thing, whether I did too much or her too little, I still can't tell.

I can't believe it, but I read all the way through Women in Love, by D. H. Lawrence. Anyone who knows anything about this book will wonder why I did; anyone who doesn't know it may also wonder why I did. I blame the sexy blurbs inside the cover.

Some contemporaneous novels had worked well for me recently. I'd read Howards End, you know, and there was scarcely a dull or a false note in it.

Sadly, Women in Love is 450 pages of steak, nearly all fat. It's a shame: it has good themes. There's a tension between a very idealistic, but nihilistic, young man, Birkin, and a more practical industrialist, Crich; between the mannered social status quo and an impulse to be direct, spontaneous, and close to nature. There's a great scene where the boys visit London and have a nice night out with some flappers. He's pushing hard for libertinism, and that's appreciated. These themes are quite familiar since the 60s, at least, but the context of Georgian England puts a different (less acid-stained) color on them.

But, in this instance, he can't write for beans. He slathers so many adjectives onto his characters, and almost none stick. He's pushing them to feel things, to emote, but it doesn't work; I always wonder what the adjectives are trying to convey: "Gerald's eyes became hard and strange." What? "She greeted him with a mocking, enigmatic smile in which was a poignant gaiety." How now?

Over and over, too, the themes are treated in the narrator's own omniscient voice, which makes them clear but dull to follow. Here's a good one:

Suddenly he had conceived the pure instrumentality of mankind. There had been so much humanitarianism, so much talk of sufferings and feelings. It was ridiculous. The sufferings and feelings of individuals did not matter in the least. They were mere conditions, like the weather. What mattered was the pure instrumentality of the individual. As a man as of a knife: does it cut well?"

These musings can be interesting, but no more compelling (rather less) in an Georgian novel than in a Times op-ed. Drama must persuade through character, situation, and action, not through authorial statement.

If Women in Love tempts you, too, resist.

Further glorious remarks heard in a chalet in France:

Ain't it so good, though—poker? Ain't it so much better than chatting to girls, though?

The Darjeeling Limited wants to be a portrait of the shallow "spiritual journey" that a group of Americans might take after a tragedy. There's plenty to discover in that setting; but this film doesn't dig for it. The main characters, three brothers, are weakly defined: they have "characteristics" but no character, nothing in particular seems to drive them. There are only vague implications about the history of the family. The brothers all have a flat affect: they take the antagonisms as if they've grown accustomed to them, and have learned not to respond—they're calloused against each other. When they do respond, they burst out with action that soon sorts itself out, usually by the intervention of some eye-rolling outsider. It seems assumed at the outset that the brothers will restore their initial relationships, and keep their original quirks: this is a movie about going on a journey for change and then deciding you like yourself, and your family, even with the flaws. The problem with this is that they don't even try, there's no push for change. The only effort made is buying tickets to India; on the train they could just as well be in their childhood bedroom. This theme, the failure to step outside yourself in a foreign place, was well-nailed by Sofia Coppola in Lost in Translation. But by the midpoint of The Darjeeling Limited we realize they're not going anywhere on this train, and it keeps dragging us through more "significant" experiences and silly rituals. Even as the movie is light-hearted, it's not much fun; these ugly Americans could be living it up; but their high idea of fun seems to be shagging an Indian girl in a train loo (oo-er, Indian!).

The best, most human reaction in the entire film is Bill Murray's, who only has about thirty seconds of screen time, but does loads with it. The brothers use two hours to make cardboard cutouts.

If The Darjeeling Limited works at all, it's as cool media: if you have siblings, if you have family dynamics to work out, if you're an American hipster try to deal with a tragedy, you might be able to project yourself into this film. It has nothing to show you, but you might find a space to dwell in for a while.

"with few exceptions, she notes, 'the words of women in antiquity are not extant'"
—anon. review, The Murder of Regilla, by Sarah B. Pomeroy, The New Yorker, Dec. 10, 2007, p. 113

There's not a shot in Anton Corbijn's new movie Control that isn't a beautiful black-and-white photograph. Muted in color, and in drama, too: Corbijn scrupulously downplays the drama of making a band; there's no awkward first rehearsal, no working-out of the first single or album; little excitement of early shows, or any of the drama that fans usually crave in band stories. In one scene, our man Curtis is singing along with the radio; in the next he's putting himself forward for frontman, in the next they're playing a gig, and minutes later they're on TV, all with little fanfare. This low-key dramaturgy lends appeal to Curtis and his friends: they're not whores for fame, and nor are they self-effacing anemics, disdaining society. Slightly melancholy, adventurous chaps, they'd like to be famous, they're playing it cool, and they're making some music.

I'm a Joy Division ignoramus, but this film made a believer out of me, like Rob Gretton (Toby Kebbell), the amusing manager, who, after his first gig, grabs the band, throws up his hands and says, "I am a believer in Joy Division, hallelujah." Not least among the seductions here are the production values: previously Joy Division sounded thin and spare to me, but in this film the songs have a rich tone, deftly adapted from lo-fi punk to crisp electric New Wave as the band gets into better studios. And Corbijn's eye comes in handy here, too—witness the brief sequence in a studio where the drummer adds a rhythmic white noise to a track by expressing an aerosol can on beat: Pssht, pssht-pssht... pssht, pssht-pssht. The music is modern and creative in a way I hadn't imagined before; it yearns, mellow and fresh.

It's not quite clear why Curtis feels the desperation that leads him to take his life at 23. To be certain, he's pressured: a wife and baby, a lover, the demands of fame, and his epilepsy. But given the story we're told, it seems he could have made some compromises: maybe a divorce, maybe cut off his lover, maybe toned down the rocking-out, or found a way to deal with the epilepsy. He doesn't seem driven, over the top—not a Jimi Hendrix pushing himself to the edge—if anything he's quite temperate, but then, morose. Is something missing from the story? Maybe so: the film is from a book by Debbie Curtis, his estranged wife. But then, maybe not: maybe this is a story, not unfamiliar to us in the Letters-Unknown family, of a young man with everything, who just doesn't feel it, just doesn't feel loved and free, just doesn't have the brain chemistry or the special, mysterious ingredients that make life really sing, sustainably.

Consider The Morning News - Hand Job (a compendium of hand lettering).

"Type" refers specifically to printed lettering, issuing from the notion that all instances of, say, Didot 12pt 'w' are cut identically. As such, this is the same notion of "type" that occurs in the sense of "stereotype," "archetype," and "I don't like his type," not to mention the notion of "type" in programming languages and mathematics.

What goes on out there? What goes on?

Last Spring, friend Dominika Kretek said that she started subscribing to The New Yorker for the poetry—which sounds to me something like subscribing to Playboy for the articles, except that with Playboy the articles are supposed to be good. (Oh, but I don't think Dominika would appreciate this metaphor; barb sunk, I retract!) More to the point, she notes, and rues, the narrow selection, & rightly.

To be fair, I often read and sometimes enjoy the poems in the New Yorker, but I rarely love them. One such exception is "There Is No Time, She Writes" by one D. Nurske in the August 6, 2007 issue. I hope you'll read it, Unknown, as it is so good. When we get together (if!) then we can talk about it and lead lives like it describes.

UPDATE: Some years ago I tried to articulate what I think is the problem in The New Yorker's poetry selection. David Orr, it turns out, said it better in the Times this year:

But there are two ways in which The New Yorker’s poem selection indicates the tension between reinforcing the “literariness” of the magazine’s brand and actually saying something interesting about poetry. First, The New Yorker tends to run bad poems by excellent poets. This occurs in part because the magazine has to take Big Names, but many Big Names don’t work in ways that are palatable to The New Yorker’s vast audience (in addition, many well-known poets don’t write what’s known in the poetry world as “the New Yorker poem” — basically an epiphany-centered lyric heavy on words like “water” and “light”).

—David Orr, "Annals of Poetry." New York Times, March 11, 2007.

On this foggy, drizzly Sunday afternoon, I'm reflecting on difference—on how people process their feelings in such different ways. Some people like to have people around so that they can always talk about their feelings; other people want to avoid being drawn out, and prefer to ponder their responses internally. Some people quite like to have their feelings confirmed and validated, or else sharply contradicted, by people around them; other people are suspicious of such confirmations, recognizing how people can be influenced to make snap judgments that may not have the weight of truth in them. Some people are very aggressive in pursuing what they want, while others prefer to let things come, to make gentle movements around the target of their desire.

And, too, no person seems to me pigeoholable. Each person who I take up in my mind, trying to put him or her firmly in one camp or another, also offers facts to contradict my first categorization.

Take me, for instance: Am I aggressive or passive? Do I move directly or arcwise toward my goals? Do I try to absorb other people's positions, when making a decision, or do I first assert my own and expect resolution to come from the contest of opposing views? Do I mainly mull things over in solitude, or do I expect the social process to draw me out?

The answers are complex! In domestic questions, I believe I'm easy-going, allowing things more often than restricting them, but then I keep to myself and expect not to be bothered much. In interpersonal interaction, I tend to make much allowance for what others want, often hoping to get everyone's participation up front. But in professional matters, as my co-workers will likely attest, I'm aggressive: I tend to have a vision that I want to impose on the work, and I expect to force my co-workers into that mold.

Everyone I think about seems to have a kind of in-built balance, though I don't find it to be predictable. I think "He's quite a pushover, isn't he?" and then I think, of the same fellow, "He's quite obstinate in this area." Or, "She's quite loud and tough," but also, "She's quite tender in these other ways."

I wonder if we do tend to balance ourselves, in unique, individual ways, by responding to our own self-image. I don't particularly believe in a yin/yang split with certain traits on one side and certain traits on the other—I suspect the balancing is much more idiosyncratic, with each person finding his own personal response to his own biggest traits.

My friend Nina gave me the word: withholding.

Elsewhere, an event: I was waiting for some entrée, to tell her everything I felt, to ask her those plaguing questions, but no entrée ever came. If I showed weakness, she showed no compassion. If I showed strength, she showed no admiration. If I was contrite, she was curt.

It was five years ago this week that I wrote my first Letter to an Unknown Audience (with a strange dream about New Zealand) and started "blogging." Back then I didn't know what I was getting into, I was just full of raw excitement; I just wanted to get in. I wanted to say something to the people out there who were reading, who were writing, and who were ultimately participating in this great big community: people who were thoughtful enough to write a couple of paragraphs on a regular basis and respond to other people who were doing the same. Those are my people.

Since then, this column has been an always-ready seminar room for me, a chance to make use of the truest thing I've ever been told, that "You don't learn something until you've spoken up and been told why you're wrong." It's always been here, taunting me, a gaping maw for the food of experience, and dozens of times, just having it here has been an inspiration to go out and live, to observe, to bring back life and process it. It's introduced me to people (now some of my best friends) and ideas and experiences. It's been like a lover.

There've been dry spells, times when it's been hard to write (hard to live) and arguably this year has been one of them. There's a temptation to get out of the game by the five-year mark. How much can one person have to say, after all? Especially when tapping that stream on a daily basis, rather than saving it up for years like a novelist (like a proper writer). Yet, although it's arrogant to think so, I believe I've got more in me. I intend to keep writing, here and elsewhere, on a semi-regular basis. Whatever I haven't said over the past five years is only a hole, only a gap that needs to be filled. In the future I hope to leave fewer gaps.

If you, reader, grow weary of this column, you have two options: one is to leave a note, and the other is to unsubscribe. I heartily encourage you to take advantage of the first. Be polite—but don't be quiet. I value nearly every comment that's ever been left, every note I've ever received on this blog. As they say, "Feedback is a gift" (Hello, David).

As it is, we are young, we are fierce, and there is lots more to be done. Onwards and upwards; blog on.

This NY Times op-ed about the dangers of raising your baby on a vegan diet was insightful: "Death by Veganism." I had never thought about the implications of keeping vegan when pregnant or raising a baby, and thus depriving it of certain proteins.

The only fault I find in the article is the implication, in the second-to-last paragraph, that vegetarianism and veganism are just fashions, and that "food is more important than fashion." In fact there is are long traditions of vegetarianism, particularly in India, as the author notes earlier in the article.

My own ideals of vegetarianism are a reaction to factory farming, and if I had a baby, I'd happily feed it whatever it needs, so long as I could establish that the meat was responsibly raised.

I just watched the movie Closer, and give it a thumbs-up.

At first the dialogue seemed wooden, but it picked up pretty quickly. The succession of scenes, with big gaps in time, leaves you to figure out a lot of what takes place, but it was pitched just right: I never felt completely lost.

(Spoiler alert! Don't read on if you haven't seen the film.)

I was losing patience with the characters, with the huge back and forth changes of feeling: How could X think that Y is his/her soulmate?? I kept asking, then getting used to the idea, and then it would change again, exhausting me. But really, people sometimes do this: rationalize a story, then (when things go wrong) repudiate it and rationalize the new world, then repudiate that one and re-rationalize another world like the first one. The film nailed that.

But as I was saying, I was losing patience with the characters, but I was quite pleased how Alice "wins" at the end, how she plays them all. The film could easily have ended with two grim life compromises, but it settles for one, and Alice escapes for a new beginning. Hurrah!

Eighty years ago, the leading lights of the Bauhaus started designing buildings and furniture that put their materials and production center stage. They thought machinery was cool, and they made it cool: so we have buildings that show their I-beams, and chairs that appear to be made out of bent steel pipe (because they are). The industrial age was already a hundred years old when they made it chic.

Today everything around us is still made in factories; but more and more of it is made of information, too. Information has changed the way supply chains work, but also poeple become more and more inured to (and more interested in) consuming information, packaged in dynamic and playful ways. So we have bar charts on the nightly news and everyone has a computer with a row of cute icons that display the current time, weather, battery life, wifi availability, unread messages and friends' IM statuses. Some people even look at data for sheer fun, through screensavers or music visualizers.

But whereas the Bauhaus made industrial machinery cool, the machinery of the information age is still not cool. The network is powered by fascinating assemblies of intuitive (if abstract) concepts, but we have precious little admiration for them as a society. Where's the art and design that reveals how code works? There's scarcely any.

I can illustrate this with a comparison.

This kinetic sculpture is interesting to look at because it continually changes, acted on by fairly understandable forces: wind, friction, balance.

The automatic system below (called Conway's Game of Life) is also interesting to look at, for the same reason. Its behavior is incredibly complex, though it all emerges from simple forces.

Click the image to set it in motion; click again to stop it.

(requires FireFox or Safari)

(The rules are these: if a cell is alive (black) then it contines to live only if it has two or three living neighbors; if it is dead (white) then life will spawn there only if it has exactly three living neighbors (the neighbors are the eight cells to the North, South, East, West, NE, SE, SW and NW).)

As a system, it is as complex as anything computers can offer (that is, if you have a big enough sheet of it, it can "do" anything any other computer program can do), and I could watch almost forever--as long as I could watch waves on the shore, anyway.

Regarding the news, I should say that the New Yorker article on Google's book-scanning project is not particularly good. In cynical hands, it could be read as an extended ad for the company, with lots of direct quotes from Google's PR people, and uncritically presented CEO spin such as this:

"'We've had this fortunate streak that when we've done things that have impacted our users and society as a whole—positively, in a significant way—we've been rewarded by that downstream in some way.'"

That's glossing the success of Google text ads, if you didn't read the article. And of all Google's accomplishments, I'm not sure text ads are the one that has most "positively impacted society as a whole."

Then, is it possible that Toobin didn't know that Amazon's doing the same thing, and did it first? He mentions competitors, like the "Open Content Alliance," but not Amazon. I'm sure the bias wasn't deliberate.

Indeed, let's assume it's not a 5-page textual Google ad. I can also forgive the blatant typo on page 31 (never caught one of these before), also a PR quote, where a stray numeral "8" has wandered in. (An OCR or a speech-recognition glitch?) And it's easy to stifle the titter when Toobin says that the book-search feature is "up and running in a beta (or testing) version" (Guess he didn't get the Web 2.0 memo).

A deeper flaw is that it sheds no light on the legal or technological implications of the idea. I'm still in the dark as to why this isn't plainly illegal. I've heard that "fair use" allows copying 10% of a work, but mousing about, it seems a good deal more is being copied. In my experience, Amazon's "Look Inside the Book" shows three out of every four pages (for Anne Carson's "Plainwater" it let me read the first 24 pages straight). For some reason, the article doesn't convey how much of a book is displayed in Google book search. Surely Google has exact figures; I know Amazon does. Toobin misleads us when he says they only put "snippets" of books on the site, saying "Google searches turn up only the search term and about twenty words on either side of it." That's true for ordinary web search, but the book search features give several pages running before missing out a few. To a layman, it seems obvious this is more than your average "fair use" snippet.

The only counterargument is, again, company spin: "Google asserts that its use of the copyrighted books is 'transformative,'" [excuse me, is it leveraging any synergies by the by?] "That its database turns a book into essentially a new product." This is explained at some length, then a law professor is quoted as saying, vageuly, that the project does not necessarily fall under fair use. Toobin is a law journalist; why doesn't he press this issue?

I'd be curious to know the legal implications if a site were to reveal a different subset of pages to different people at different times, thus potentially leaking the whole book, though not to any individual user. Won't there be sites that capture and archive sets of book pages captured from Google, Amazon and the rest—pages contributed by users—thus building up an alternative free library? (Bookipedia, anyone?)

How about technical and design issues? The article mentions the interesting idea that those "elegant algorithms" of Google's, the ones we're always hearing about (grumbles about that persistent phrase are relegated to a future post), will be ineffective for book search, sine books don't have (at least not so manifestly) the interlinked quality of web pages. But this is dropped as "a huge research area."

The only sharp point in the article is this one: "The most striking thing about Pajama Day at Google was how few people participated. Most of the rank and file saw the stunt for the manufactured fun that it was." Unmasking the enforced-fun culture of the present corporate moment (O let's have it on a bit—late internetism?) is a worthy goal, but Toobin sets out for something else—forecasting the law of a future era of ubiquitous digitized books—and gets lost, unable to apply much significant journalism to the task.

If you're booking flights and want to know,

Can I change terminals in Charles de Gaulle airport in under one hour?

The answer is "No." Not unless you're really, really good at Charles de Gaulle.

Long overdue.

A man and a woman live across an ocean. They talk every day. They share confidences, events of their days, stories of people they know. They trade memories of themselves they've never shown others. They dream of a future. They discuss science, human sympathies, great books read and unread. They imagine touching one another. They pine.

The man is frustrated. He wants to go places. He wants to touch the world, and repair it just slightly. He wants someone to believe in his careful, studious energy. He wants to be proud. He is looking for someone who is tolerant of and even excited by the perverse talent he has always nurtured alone--someone who sees that the future will prize it. He needs someone to prop him up, assuage his doubts, carry energy when he has lost it: to stay focused on the long turn of life.

The woman is worried. She feels pressure to work hard & work smart, to be ambitious: not to let things fall through. She finds the office life tiresome, wants to be free of it. Her compassion is her greatest virtue, she feels. She dreams of using it, of being valued for it. She dreams of caring for children, animals, a home. She wants to love someone—someone intelligent, someone capable and deft but not ambitious, not too driven; someone leisurely and enjoyable. She wants to be cherished for her tenderness alone.

The man never speaks of his strange talent, for which he yearns to be applauded, which he wishes to discuss but only in hushed whispers, which must be guarded from the world. The woman likes what he does but never says so, not wanting to be caught naive or misunderstanding his passion. Instead she stages her delicacy, her difficulty, her need. The man wants to protect her, to nurture her, to embolden her and bring her into a life, full and glad and messy. But she is too delicate, too slow, too fearful; he doesn't get what he wants; he doesn't protect her; she doesn't get what she wants.

Some will be appeased by this line from The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud:

"Thank you for your question about Lowell," he said. "It's a relief to find a young person who knows that once upon a time, poetry did make things happen."

It's a good enough book that I'm getting sucked in. The book jacket calls Messud "a nearly perfect writer." She's proficient, but so often writes terribly overweighted, digressive sentences, like this one:

Murray was revisited, in his desk chair, with the subsiding ror of the late night traffic at his ear, by a vision of his childhood home, the paneled vestibule and dining room, the cramped darkness of it, and the meanness, everything spare and bleached and doubly worn, and only their mother, their beautiful mother, with her patrician profile and wavy dark hair, like Ingrid Bergman, his mother the fantasist, who in spite of her ability to peel and prune and scour and press, in spite of her eternal apron and hospital corners, read novels and magazines and dreamed for herself and her son: of wider vistas, of glittering cocktail parties on Park Avenue, of fancy hotel rooms and travel to Europe.

It took me forever to find the period at the end of that. This book needs a referee to blow a whistle on these sentences.

John Reid is an interesting figure. As Britain's Home Secretary, he staged the "London Terror Plot" this year, resulting in the liquids ban when we fly. Some indications (timely speechifying, etc.) point to a possible bid for Prime Minister in the future. The BBC calls him an ex-Communist.

"Mr Reid lists his hobbies as football, history, crosswords and playing the guitar."

Me and You and Everyone We Know is awfully good. It brings me back in time; it seems a time-capsule of what we are now—"we" defined as, I don't know—a certain set of people including me. Or what we were three years ago.

I was reluctant and skeptical, but after five minutes I was thoroughly mesmerized. Where did I read that it was unfocused, cold, and sly, a work of textbook postmodernism? That's off! What other film of the past five years is as warm? (Tense, and disturbing, but still warm).

I thought I read somewhere that it was set in the Northwest (US)? Once I saw the landscape, I was sure it was the Northwest. The modern low-rise apartment buildings (those peculiar concrete-mesh decorations), the lawns, the dull iron railings and suburban alleyways. The preposterously christened apartment buildings: "St. Tod" in the movie, "Fireside Lanai," "The General" and "Excalibur" were in my old neighborhoods. I find it so sweet—honestly—this tiny effort to differentiate, to make special, to personalize.

Could this movie have been made at any time? No, I think—it could only have been made in the gentle waking sleep of my childhood, and simultaneously in the optimism of my own young adulthood. I say this, and I love it, I treasure the film and its people.

But all these Death Cab for Cutie aesthetics make me worried. This paragraph is your spoiler alert. If you haven't seen the movie, you shouldn't read on—and You know who you are.

An observation: Me and You... is like loads of stories I've taken in lately, which turn on a special romance that is uttery unexplained, yet obviously inevitable. Here's the refresher: After a random meeting, Christine (single, creative, cute but not gorgeous, supremely well dressed) and John (separated, impulsive, urban, vaguely mystical but down to earth) hit off well for a few minutes, indulging in a child-like fantasy while they walk to their cars—from then on they have to get together (the fractured narrative throws us off the scent, but it comes around in the end). After many fits and starts, the film ends with a long, delicate, enigmatic hug. Recap: John, the slightly-broken, leathery-stubbled, yet mostly open-hearted and honest man is held sweetly by the thin arms of the fragile, porcelain-skinned, introspective, yet quietly-daring Christine... who knows almost nothing about him. Their lives are on the cusp of changing, we think. They will change each other. Her bravery in reaching out to him, his acceptance of the truth, the beauty, of their encounter, not to mention their celebration of the random events that eventually brought them together across the vagaries of (fractured! fractured!) contemporary life: these are their final virtues, which give the narrative its closure, which send us out of the cinema in grace.

I call foul. Is this it? Is this how it works? What does she see in him? Is it possible they could prosper together? They know nothing about each other—the fiction of their destined unity is trumped up: it's built on circumstantial evidence. Evidence of a kind that's easy to find in our random (fractured!) contemporary world.

If there is anything to believe in here, it is that her tender, tender embrace (and it is tender), and his stunned gaze into the distance, are an exchange of something, something important—some love, not eternal, not perfect, but some act of love, of appreciation. This would be a fine poem. Ships passing in the night; but imparting some wonder, some happiness, as they pass.

Still, I smell rats.

Miranda July is a sophisticated, original artist. Does she see herself as the tender, vulnerable woman who just needs to reach out? Is it her life to work a lowly job (some form of caretaking, ideally), doing art as much as she can, living humbly within her means, idolizing her own private fears and crushes, trying to connect, trying to care. Hoping some scarred, fallen, but once-perfect (in his child's imagination, perhaps), young man needs her feminine touch, her caring, her launched empathy? That he will give her the chance to impart that bit of wonder, that bit of love, even if the man's pragmatism pulls him away (because no romance is ideal anymore, no—we are fractured fractured).

It seems to me to be everywhere: in life, in films, in books, this trope, this idea.

Have contemporary women completely forgotten what their 2nd-wave forebears fought for—that is, the right (maybe even the obligation) to participate: in the hardship of life, and the glory, the pleasure, of confronting that hardship?

"We have the rest of our lives to spend together, but you have to call me first," she says—what a heartbreaking thought.

Woke up this morning to the news that a 'terror plot' was foiled in London; loads of transatlantic flights out of there are cancelled and Heathrow is generally disrupted.

Twenty-one people were arrested, and the TV news keeps showing helicopter shots of some ordinary houses in the London suburbs.

A few news agencies had some vague remarks about the plot itself, that it may have involved liquid explosives in carry-on luggage. Most of the coverage so far is about what a good job the police and MI5 did in arresting the plotters, or what a nuisance it is to be stuck in a London airport.

Says the Guardian:

The events unfolded just hours after Mr Reid used a speech to a thinktank to accuse critics of the government's anti-terrorism measures of putting national security at risk through their failure to recognise the serious nature of the threat facing Britain.

Here's hoping the news keeps asking starts asking hard questions about what happened.

UPDATE: The New York Times has a few more details today.

You will pay for your loose thoughts, man.
Getting to and from the airport takes time,
Even the best airport. The smooth
machinery of international air travel will not wait
while you rush to fetch your passport from the bedside drawer.
The captain's hat is on; he will fly.
His family in Stirling expects him at eight. They will eat,
play games, fight, a family. Families do not
stop for you. You will pay for your calm mind, my friend.
The man behind the counter, long shift, will joke
with the heavycloak-laden woman before you.
They have every right,
like you in your office with the admin beside you.

You will pay for your wracked independence: no one
will come running after you, hands held high,
waving the passport aloft. No one will come running,
the telephone is useless, you have not cultivated,
you have nurtured nothing.
You'll pay for that mind, my friend, but you'll give easily.
You are honest and proud.

There was a great house full of people in suits meeting for a dinner party. In an upstairs room, edged with white gauze curtains, was Unknown, clad in black. Unknown said, "I love you," and we hugged one another. The dream dissolved.

Hello sweetheart: I don't think I'll get drunk anymore. I didn't do anything to regret—it just wasn't as much fun as being sober. Last night around 9:30 I was working when the husband of the woman who talks so loud asked me over to their house to celebrate VE day. So I went, and drank more wine than I ever did before. And I got drunker than I ever did before too. I didn't even think I could act sober if I wanted to—I was making a lot of noice (they got me my drum), etc. I don't like it because I know I didn't drum good or make good jokes and I wasn't all there to appreciate other people's jokes—I sort of got "individual" and gound it hard to pay attention to other people. We went all over the town singing and beating drums, pots and pans, etc. It sounds like a lot of fun but I know I would have enjyed it better were I more sober.

—Richard Feynman, letter to Arline, May 9, 1945. From "Don't You Have Time to Think?" ed. Michelle Feynman.

Note. I am on page 280 of Andrew Hodges' 527-page book, Alan Turing: The Enigma.

These 280 pages are summed up, with little lost and exactly nothing gained, in the first 4 pages of Jim Holt's 6 page article on Turing's life in the February 6, 2006, issue of The New Yorker.

The shopping mall at Ocean Terminal in Edinburgh has a view of the water itself (that inlet known as the Firth of Forth, as it is mouth to the Forth River). A huge open bay on the second and third floors (first and second by British reckoning) contains seating for several restaurants (not a "food court" per se as the seating areas are separated). The light there is lovely. Adjoining certain shops are more intimate tables.

Some theatre company with a fantastically large budget and remarkably little insight was half-hourly giving demos of its current slack-nosed musical, Jekyll & Hyde. The flyers were exquisitely produced, with a title in the style of (if not stolen directly from) Ralph Steadman, that great intimator of the inkblot. Since they had got use of an atrium of a major shopping mall, and were making use of a PA, I imagine they must be well-funded. They were all dressed in themed black T-shirts and black jeans, except for a couple of cast members in baggy gray T-shirts or loud shoes. One imagines these hapless singers slapping their foreheads on arrival at the mall: "I forgot my black T-shirt!" he laments. "Just wear your gray one, it's only a mall show," coos a fellow actor. The choreography was blunt, inaccurate, and even clumsy when fitted to the given space, a stairwell rotunda with passing traffic. They did the same four numbers over and over while I obsessively patrolled a nearby bookseller's, sucking from the commercial rock some tidbits on the history of typography, architecture, and food.

Sharp drops in barometric pressure can cause potentially explosive methane gas to migrate into work areas, according to the Mine Safety and Health Administration. The explosion occurred during a thunder storm.

—"Blast Traps 13 in a Coal Mine in West Virginia," NY Times, Jan 3, 2006

How grateful am I not to be a coal miner?

The pure energy value of coal is as much as 29 MJ/kg. In 2004, the US produced 178 million MWh of electricity from coal and consumed 93 million tons of it, yielding energy at a rate of 7.55 MJ / kg (this discounts the energy costs of mining and transporting it, at least). The average retail price of that electricty was US$0.10 / kWh (ibid.). By my calculations, that's $2.10 / kg.

Today, to raise awareness of climate change, some tens of thousands of people made a public demonstration around the world. I learned about it late, so I decided to do some learning instead. Most of what I learned had to do with emissions trading. Here's some of the stuff I learned.

The Chicago Climate Exchange is a market for trading emissions-reductions. It's voluntary: if you run a facility that outputs greenhouse gases, you can join up. Your emissions over four previous years is measured, and that establishes a target for the next four years: determined by a reduction of 1% each year. If you miss your target, you can buy credits on the market; if you manage to beat it, you can sell. A corresponding futures market reduces exposure to price volatility.

Australia has a law (enacted 2000) which makes large consumers of electricity liable to pay for some of it in the form of wind power. This is managed through Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs). For every 100,000 MWh of electricity you buy, you have to surrender 1250 RECs, which you can earn by operating a wind power plant or by buying them from someone who does. I'm not sure what other countries have such a law.

TerraPass is a product you can buy at home to effectively reduce your own greenhouse-gas emissions by as much as giving up driving your car (without lifting a finger!), by harnessing the power of emissions markets. For US$30–80, you can buy 6,000–20,000 lbs. of CO₂. TerraPass has several ways of accomplishing this reduction. They can buy up credits on the CCX, for example, thereby removing that much from the market; other methods include buying wind power and funding projects that neutralize CO₂. On their website they have a detailed log of all the emissions they've eliminated this year.

TerraPass claims to offer 3rd-party certification that your money will actually buy the advertsied amount of emissions-reduction. I don't understand how they do that; presumably they're giving themselves a safe margin. On top of that, TerraPass is a for-profit company with a target profit margin of 10%. Even so, $80/year is less than the cost of internet access and it apparently cancels the CO₂ emissions of an SUV.

On the other hand, presumably the price would go up as it becomes harder and harder for emitters to cut back. The Kyoto Protocol's target is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions of industrialized countries by 5.2% from 1990 levels by 2012. With a growing population, can this be accomplished through obvious tricks and applications of known technology? Or does it depend on innovative breakthroughs?

Starbucks purchased 34 million pounds of CO₂ this year. It's not clear to me whether this is an ongoing commitment or a one-time stunt.

There is a magazine, Carbon Finance, aimed at people who want to follow the financial aspects of carbon emissions.

The Wikipedia article on the Kyoto Protocol is an interesting source of details about the treaty. The protocol went into force this past February and the Parties to the agreement are currently this week in Montreal.

Blimey, it's hard to open a bank account in the UK.

I waltzed in to Bank of Scotland today hoping to quickly deposit my first paycheck and walk away with a temporary ATM card. No such luck. Here's the conversation, close to verbatim.

"Hi, I'd like to open an account," I said cheerily.

"Right, how long have you been in the country?" said the tall man at the "Advice & Help" station near the front.

"Oh, a month already. And I have proof of my permanent address."

"Well, what sort of account would you be interested in?"

"Just a checking account."

"A checking account?" he retorted, somewhat as if I had just asked him to surrender all the ponies in the building. ("The ponies, sir?")

"Uh, yeah, maybe you have a different word for it here..."

"Just to deposit cheques into, then?"

"Mmm, yeah."

"So you won't be needing a chequebook?"

"Oh, no I'd like one of those, too."

"Right, well. You can apply for such an account, which you're well within your rights to do. But there will be a credit check and if you've only been in the UK for a month, it's doubtful we'd be able to offer you one."

"Hm; well is there another kind of account I can have?"

"Well, we have our basic account." Basic! Blast! I should have used the word "basic" when I walked in.

"And what does that involve?"

"Well, there's no credit card and no chequebook, but you can put a standing order on it." ("Standing order" translates into American as "direct debit" or the amusingly classic "auto-pay" and it's the only way to pay for some things, such as rent)

"Ah. But how do I get my money out? I mean, there must be some way..." I actually said this to the man at the bank.

"Well, you won't have a credit card, but you will have a bank card—" (Aha! Not all cards are the same here.) "—which you can use to get money out from an ATM."

"Oh, great, that sounds like just what I need. I'll take one."

"Well, we can't actually open a basic account at the branch here..."

A sign at the Royal Scottish Academy said, "Gaugin." Another said, "Foosball Table.^† We need your participation!"

"They must be quite hard up for patrons," I thought. Since it was free, I dropped in.

It turned out that an Austrian artist had built a custom foosball table, using ceramic fertility figures as the "men." For the balls she had balls of felt and two colors of paint, both earth tones; gallery attendees are invited to play. For each game, an assistant puts down a piece of paper at the floor of the table. Each player chose one of the colors: after scoring, a new felt ball, dipped in your chosen paint, was dropped on the table. After the match, they pulled out the paper to reveal a nice two-toned splatter painting formed by the game. During the game, a photographer took pictures, and the players could leave their addresses to have the photos delivered.

The wall text mentioned that sports and competitive table games are traditionally all-male activities, which is what inspired her to use fertility figures as the pawns. Surely the gallery context, and the helpful woman artist (very genial, Yoko-like), had as much to do with permitting/encouraging women to play as did the fertility figures—but one appreciates the symbolism. The wall text also had some blather about the "table" being a place of domestic rituals (Get it? Foosball table!) but that concept apparently ran out of steam before influencing the work. (Would that it hadn't! A foosball table that looked like a dining room table or a kitchen chopping block would be something, eh?)

What I love about interactive performances ("performance art" is a dubious term, you know) is watching people themselves—unsuspecting attendees-cum-performers—deal with the facts of the work. Playing foosball is a particularly good activity to put them to. It requires enough concentration that they're not much worried about what people think. They know people are watching, and that affects their behavior, but they're distracted enough that they don't just mug—you can watch them work at something: the squints and worries, the frustration and relief. Here I saw two young asian girls (friends) play the game, and then a mother and young son. Without putting too fine a point on it, I can easily say that these four players reacted to their games quite differently than the more experienced males I'm used to playing with.

Brilliant concept, good execution; kudos.

^† "Foosball table" is apparently spelled "football table" in the UK.

It's ten to one here in Edinburgh; I'm moderately tired and slightly culture-shocked, but otherwise still afloat. Tons of things to do right away.

I didn't write during my stop in London because I was ensconced in a story by Alice Munro about a family from near Edinburgh that emigrates to Canada in 1818. The effect, under the circumstances, was similar to what might happen if you clamped alligator clips to my finger tips and applied a few thousand volts. That family's experience is the reverse of mine, in every way.

The buildings are beautiful; the sky is just barely overcast so the light is diffuse, not glaring, and it's windy as get-out.

I saw a sign yesterday, painted on the road by a parking spot, that read SOLO M/Cs ONLY. Feeling very much like a solo mc right now.

While expressing sympathy for the dispossessed people of the Louisiana coast, the American president couldn't help signalling his aristocracy, and I can't resist writing it down.

"The coast has been devastated," he said in his folksy-executive voice, his I'm-your-dad-and-it's-gonna-be-alright voice. "But out of this devastation we're going to make it even better than it was. Trent Lott's house was destroyed; it was a beautiful house. But we're going to build it back just the way it was and I look forward to sitting on the porch with him. . . . Now the first step is a 10.5 billion dollar appropriation, but that's just the beginning. . . ."

They evacuated the city of New Orleans. Refugees (refugees!) from the city of New Orleans are being taken to Houston (Houston! Texas!) and I'm watching on TV. Amidst helicopter footage of residential neighborhoods flooded attic-deep, the TV cuts away to Air Force One landing in Biloxi; then they have flashbacks to this morning: the president speaking on a sunny day in Washington.

"I'm headed down there right now," he says. Right now! As if we had suggested he were running to fetch an umbrella first.

"The response hasn't been good enough," he says, "And we're going to work with the authorities there, and FEMA, to work out a strategy to solve this thing. And get help where it needs to go." He has nothing to add to the situation, so he speaks vaguely. Later, the authorities in Biloxi have more generalities to give back to the president: "This is the worst natural disaster in American history," says one of the governors. "Right now we're at a ground zero, and we've got a long way to go but we will get there and we will build back." I'm reminded how much fluffy nothing there is in the job of the most powerful man in the world.

[Now, an inset picture! While the president is consoling the governors, and dealing his general pap for the cameras, a woman in a white shirt is carrying bottles of water from a helicopter! Where is she going? Will she make it? The camera pans! She's going to set the bottles down on the lawn! She's hugging someone on the lawn! The milk of human kindness! Now wipe away the inset.]

A young man from the Coast Guard is telling the president how, looking down from a helicopter, he sees “stars”—flashlights of people stranded on rooftops—there's no better time for sentimental metaphor, I guess, than when you're briefing the president on the worst national disaster in American history—this man, this young man from the Coast Guard, he chooses which stars to pick up, flies them away, returns for more.

"I'm headed down there right now." The most specific thing, the most active thing, the president said all morning.

Somebody out there has my stuff. I think that person might be Mary Romeiro, of San Joaquin, California.

This morning I received ten of the boxes I'd shipped home to my parents' place. Two of them turned out to have only half the stuff I'd put into them; the other stuff in the boxes was someone else's.

After getting a shrug and a not-my-job from a few postal service employees, I finally found someone at the central Rochester office who was willing to take down my name and address, in case anyone else comes out of the woodwork with my missing books.

There was a clue in the box: a form for some kind of book-of-the-month club which was printed with the address of a Mary Romeiro in San Joaquin, California—maybe Mary has my stuff, or maybe Mary knows the person who has my stuff. Either way, if you know where it is, I hope you'll get in touch with me.

Also, if you received some boxes today, and half the stuff in them is not yours, and if that stuff includes a bunch of paperback books and some hardbound journals (sentimental value! priceless!) it might be mine. I don't remember what titles I had, but they probably include some fiction, maybe some plays, maybe some philosophical stuff. I see that you have similar interests! You are also into psychology (particularly "existential psychology") and Hebrew literature which I can't even read, so I'm impressed. It also appears that you can read Spanish, even poetry in Spanish, and are interested in writings by Federico Garcia Lorca and Jorge Luis Borges. In spite of my frustration, I'm glad to have accidentally exchanged books with someone having such an interesting collection.

If you like the books you got, feel free to keep 'em! But I hope you'll send anything handwritten or personal that was in there. I can be contacted at the email address ezra at ezrakilty.net. I turned in your books at the Rochester, NY central post office, the 14623 location.

Today I found a poem I'd copied out longhand from The New Yorker, Aug 23 & 30, 1999, when it was new. Here is what it says.

The Purification of Space for Dorothy

She has hair the color of rust.

She wears a red dress

and three watches:

one for her daughter in California,

one for her daughter in New York,

and one for her sister in Scotland.

She smokes cigarette after cigarette.

She takes lithium and tells everyone,

"Love, and do what you want."

She listens to the same play on the radio

and tries to convince me

that Ibsen is American.

"He was like me, of course.

he can't be anything else."

She has a love who works for God, she says.

"I've never met him,

so I wear this red dress

so he will recognize me

and know I am the fire."

I pretend not to understand her.

I pretend I'm in a hurry

when she asks me, almost silently,

"What do you do

up in your apartment:

do you laugh or do you cry?"

I would like to answer her.

I would like to take her hand with three watches

and caress her

as if she were an orphan,

but she is on fire.

Below our mailboxes,

each morning,

she leaves a cup full of coffee,

a pack of cigarettes,

and, near them, a card which says,

"Live your life in beauty.

I leave these so you may partake,

as if in the body and the blood of Christ."

When she meets me running up or down the stairs,

she says the same thing:

"Fly if you want, but don't run.

God loves us all,

but those who fly he loves the most."

Quietly, Dorothy with rusty hair

and dress red as fire

sings,

"Raspberries ripen only in summer,

only when I dream of my love,"

and she shows me her empty wallet.

"Everything I touch turns to gold," she says,

"then into silver, then into tears."

It's by Lillian Ursu and it's translated from Romanian by Ursu and Bruce Weigl.

Could NOT get out of bed. A man on the radio was reading excerpts of Hiroshima survivors' diaries. I'd like to get hold of that.

Drove out to my storage unit (adjacent to the Golden Gate Railway Museum, a treat) and there it was, my unit, that fine pine box, standing in a stately stance beside the forklift ramp. Then I found that I didn't have the key. Drove home, tore apart my room looking. The nice Liverpudlian man at the office said "Wall, we can coot it, I suppoos." I drove back and had two chaps from the warehouse cut it open. "You're going to love Edinburgh," they said. "Ye'll do some of your best drinking there."

Back at the ranch, my tempered-glass tabletop burst apart, when I touched it to the ground. I was gentle; it was fierce. It was warm, and maybe it had taken some stress between the pine box and the three UHaul rides. Somehow or another it spread its shards from the third stair, down the hallway, all the way out the front door, twenty feet or so. The glass-dust came out of my arms in the shower. It served me well, that tabletop.

On to FedEx to send out my UK Visa application. Along the way, I found my derailleur cable had frayed and split, leaving me with two gears to choose from. I chose "low" which didn't get me back up the hill. I walked.

Finishing all this, I rendezvoused with Pica Pica and donated some furniture. I gave Pica a good readin' chair; I trust it is in good hands.

The second episode of 30 Days, the pseudo-documentary TV series produced and directed by Morgan Spurlock (of Supersize Me fame), tracks the tribulations of a beefy Christian from Michigan, just out of college (that's Ryan), who lives for a month in a small room in the apartment of a gay man (Ed) in San Francisco. Since Ed lives on the very same block where I last lived in San Francisco, and since Ryan did his football-tossing in Alamo Square Park, where I've loafed, I am of course uniquely qualified to comment on the proceedings.

For one, I'm impressed that Ryan seems to have entered the whole thing in a spirit of understanding and without defensiveness. During the show, Ryan adopts gay men as friends, as respectable people, as potentially lovable. But in every conversation with Peggy Nixon, the minister at "gay church," the question is whether homosexuality "is a sin." What "a sin" is and what it means for the people who do it, is left up the viewer's imagination. It puzzles me that people who eschew abstraction in every other aspect of their lives (who don't ken the stock market, say, or have trouble with algebra) can so easily, breezily discuss this pressing issue (homosexuality) in terms only of this diffuse abstraction (sin), and rely only on the Biblical statements that connect the one with the other. The show's man-on-the-street, I will note, uses a different word, "abomination"—but this is surely more obscure than "sin." Ryan, unlike the protesters with the "God hates fags" signs, acknowledges that this wantonness is natural and human; but he (and the preacher, too), keep returning to this phrase, is a sin.

What does it mean, "—— is a sin"? The best answer I know comes from the crême-de-la-crême of preacher-versus-fags documentaries, Trembling Before G–d. This was the 2001 film about gay folks who are (or were) nonetheless devout Orthodox Jews (and if there is a religious sect that sticks to its traditions and condemns homosexuality, this is it).

In Trembling Before G–d there is a sincere orthodox Rabbi who says to the camera that the Bible calls homosexuality—some Hebrew word which I don't know—and he translates it into English as, "You're making a big mistake." "God is a supreme being and is your spiritual guide and he's telling you you're making a big mistake."

"You're making a big mistake" makes a lot more sense to me than "is a sin," and I regret that midwestern college football players don't use such concrete words. Taking this rabbinical direction seriously, we might imagine that life is more than just this idle journey on Earth, that it includes a much longer string of experiences, and in the larger venue, there are Earthly pleasures which have unearthly echoes. The thought that some supreme being would give hints in Hebrew to what was foolish or wise in the great beyond is somewhat comforting.

But the Bible was jotted down by men, and copied by men, and translated and interpreted by men. In my opinion, there is quite a lot of opportunity for cultural values, conscious and subconscious, to be inscribed through such a process. An account has been given of how homosexuality threatens a certain legal system (a certain notion of lineage and property), and also threatens a process of doing business; these threats could plausibly account for a systematic bias intertwingled in everything we do. I'm not ready to endorse that account, but I'm not available to condemn it, either. If someone could prepare the bibliography of good writing on the subject, I'd be grateful!

In closing, a final thought: when he gets on camera, Morgan Spurlock nods way too bloody much.

With uncharacteristic lassitude, the New York Times today bit into interactive art with a piece on the current Boston Cyberarts Festival; the author, Sarah Boxer, advances four "problems" with this medium, or genre, or trend, or adjective, whatever it is. Her four "problems" are neither specific to the phenomenon, nor particularly problematic, I daresay, but the ways she gets it wrong are informative. With her main point, I agree with her: "Interactive art is irritating." I'll drink to that. But why is it?

Let's take the four "problems". First, "potty-mouthed machines." She cites some piece that, when you lean close, whispers gross banalities at you. Plenty of contemporary art (not to mention modern) has obscenity as its only apparent goal. Associating this with machines is either ignorant or in bad faith.

Number two: "Two much ritual, too little time." It's not clear what ritual has to do with anything. Breaking this down, she notes how visitors shy away from one knobbed noisemaking device, and when someone finally turns the knobs, it's not clear how they're affecting the sound. These are good points; lots of electronic pieces don't take their physical form seriously enough. The work is conceptual, perhaps. Fine; but to make interactivity an element, the piece must afford relevant interaction. I wish more of these technical artists would take note of how their pieces beckon or repel human beings, and of the machine's presence in the room. Oh, and if interaction doesn't seem to affect the piece, you've really failed the "interactivity" test. At that point, you're nothing but an artist in the medium of wall-labels.

The next example, of the Roshambo machine, "Janken," sounds intriguing, but the way she describes it, it sounds simply slow. This machine just sucks. Machine-art that fails as an evocative image, and also sucks as a machine, is somewhat disappointing, to say the least. Let's hope there was a dimension to the interaction that our happy reviewer didn't grasp. "Ungraciousness" is the problem derived from this one; by some tortuous associations I suppose this could be understood as a point against the inflexible machine's sluggishness & a detraction from its value as a work of art.

Lastly, problem four, "moral superiority." The piece illustrating this point, "Applause" sounds like it may in fact succeed in coaxing the viewer into an uncomfortable, illuminating relationship with the piece, and also with history. This isn't superior, though it's apparently moral. If it's discomforting, I applaud it.

---

Even to consider "interactive art" as a knowable thing is doubtful at best. She seems to impute "electronic" as part of its definition, which is poppycock. One of the best pieces of art I've ever interacted with was a basin of warm milk in which I was advised to wash my hands; I did. The fact that "interactive" has somehow become synonymous with "electronic" in society at large is a sign of something; maybe a loss of interactivity amongst the unwired, or maybe a diminished attentiveness on the part of art critics and historians. I suspect the latter.

After all, it's a classic sophistry of the philosophy of art that any art is interactive. The viewer projects his own experience even when he's sitting, apparently passive, oggling a Gaugin. But "interactive art" is interactive in a different way. It calls for you to step up in the gallery space and project yourself in a way that other people can see. This is deeply embarrassing, of course, for someone trained to view art only as a distanced critic, someone whose smarmy, learned derision is deferred to Section C of the Sunday edition.

This is bad criticism, written by a critic trained to deal with artists' surprising creations, but lost when those creations pop surprisingly off of the canvas.

In fact, one of the decisive problems in this kind of art is the overwhelming tendency for cosmopolitan urbanites (the audience) in a public space (the gallery) both to remain aloof and also to try to make something interesting happen. To "make a show," that is—yet without stooping to some indignity, without falling into some trick of political incorrectness, or of cultural ignorance (how gauche). The piece is incomplete until it is touched or entered into (overtly). This puts the consumer on the spot. It's no wonder most artfans are left either making some gawky show, or else stuck watching the other fellow flounder gawkily.

The flux of articles like this, that purport to cut through the pretension of the work, really displaces the important critique that should be happening on this art and its principles. Fascinating artistic possibilities are opened up by computers, because they can give rise to this complex & mysterious behavior. This raft of interactive artists need to be told just how they suck, and need to be held accountable. But let me be more specific.

Even though this body of work posits wholly new relationships between artist, object, spectator, and community (to name a few participants), it needn't be ignorant to older, more static values in art or in image-making. Scott Snibbe's piece, Shadow Play (the only one mentioned that I've had the good fortune to see) is a terrific example of this. The looped silhouette movies that visitors create within the piece are connected to moving images and performance. These little pieces have everything to do with silent cinema, with interstitial fragments in TV ads, music videos, and other filmic venues. In this piece, the mind catches on such things as the many shapes of bodies, the fetishism of gesture (how many people have this!), the sense of drama that silhouettes bring. At least these things will circulate in your head when walking through the piece or watching the loops.

We could write a pensive ethnography of the ways people act when they are creating a silhouette loop. Some flap their arms, some dance, some just try to walk as natural and un-signify-ingly as possible. When I saw Shadow Play, the most interesting loop of all was made by a child of about one year, who sat in front of the projector's blinding light, and did nothing more than to look into it, with curiousity. The projector's own beam denied the machine's effort to make silhouettes, and instead, the child's features were illuminated in flat black and white (no grays). For half an hour, my companion and I watched this 10-second (?) loop repeat, and repeat, and repeat, in a cell alongside fifteen others: fifteen movies about cosmopolitan grown-ups trying to make something interesting happen.

There must be someone who curates reruns for sitcoms.

I had been walking a long time with a box. Over the weeks and months that I carried this box, it grew heavy on my arms and many times I stopped to look what was inside. Yet upon opening the four flaps, I saw nothing inside but some dust. Each time, I refolded the four flaps, mounted the box on one shoulder, and continued walking.

After some months of walking I found there was a pain in my shoulder which I couldn't avoid thinking about: a sharp soreness that pressed itself on my mind. I stopped in the next village and found a doctor. He examined my arm and pronounced a harsh diagnosis: surely my arm would fall off at the shoulder within the next six months. He continued examining my arm and then took a curious expression on his face. Handing me a baseball, he led me out into the courtyard, walked several dozen yards away, and asked me to throw.

[Continue reading "'As Long As You Like' Draft"]

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"Before the law sits a gatekeeper..."
—Franz Kafka, "Before the Law"

Continuing our "Mourning In America" series here at Letters...

Apologies for the lighter tone; no slight is meant by it.

In other news, Ezra Cooper reports that he is a selfish alcoholic, living by gathering twigs and berries from the urban parks of Bunghole, California. Over the past four years, he has broken five glass coffee presses and three hearts. His biggest challenge this past year, he says, was paying the gas and electric bill on time, and he's hoping to adopt the use of a chest of drawers to keep his shirts apart from his underwear. His writing was recently dubbed "mediocre" by the ETS, and he's hoping to follow up that performance with a similar one on the TOEFL.

He is pleased to hear that 67% of you are getting along in your Investment Banking careers and is astonished at the sums you collectively donated to the college this past year. He's looking forward to seeing you all in hell at next summer's reunion.

We at the Alumni News hope that he meets up with Cheryl Oppenheim, who recently settled in Bunghole after completing her round-the-world sailing journey (also an environmental education project for the children of Phoenix, Arizona). Cheryl lives with her husband Jeff, a retired professional poker player, their two seraphic children, and their dog Beethoven (the eponymous film star). We wish Cheryl luck as she leads the Bunghole PTA to another statewide award-winning year. We think Ezra and Cheryl would have a lot to talk about!

In "To Be There Now," Jen Getto of Carissa's Wierd sings, "Don't forget just how it made you feel / Don't forget it made you want to die. / [guitar jng jng jng jng jng] And all these stars just don't ever seem to go away." That makes sense to me: frustration at the stars' persistence. They do seem to hold out some original hope, after all.

If you listen close enough, you get wind that she might be singing, "And all these scars..." But that would seem to make it a line about heroin addiction. And if your hopeless comes from heroin addiction, well then you're just not trying hard enough. That's not bedrock.

As I loaded my laundry yesterday, I thought: Must be sure to check all the pockets so that I don't wash a phone or a pen or some such.

By the second pair of pants, I thought: There's probably nothing in these pockets.

When I fished them out—of course!—something heavy clanked within the pantlegs. It was a set of earphones, wound up around a little spool inside a little case. Dry as can be.

Let's get one thing straight: Michael Moore is a demogogue, a panderer, a meanderer, and an exaggerater.

Not content to let his subjects feel their way to something they want to (or have to) say, he pushes and prods, leads and goads to get the strongest statement of his own message, and then cuts the film to leave only the bits that weigh in on the case he's making.

With those favorable to his politics (particularly, in the case of Fahrenheit 9/11, those who have a book on the subject to promote, and thus a vested interest in squeezing the most liberal viscera out of any given material), his approach is to interview them, sympathizing and encouraging them in their populist-pitched laments and quick digs. With those unfavorable to his politics, his tactic is to catch them unawares, and see if they do something stupid while in a state of surprise.

The recent film dwells endlessly on footage of people in positions of power reacting slowly or clumsily to unprecedented situations. Should we presume that Michael Moore would react more quickly, more decisively? Of course not; even when cornering Senators on the street, he's slow with a comeback or anything to keep them from sauntering away. On the street corner, then, he plays the quiet fool, who with the slightest gesture, makes those with a greater burden seem greater fools than himself.

There can be no doubt, he catches some amazing surprises in Fahrenheit (did I get it right? Did Bush really say to a room of wealthy donors, "Some call you the elite. I call you my base"?). But Moore constantly drives at conclusions that seek to undermine some subject or other without much force: just making Bush or some statesman look a bit doddering or callous. If he could quite playing the preacher, his films could be fantastic sociologies of the rich and powerful as well as the powerless and aspiring. If there's anything he does right, it's to act the fool himself and get down off his high narrative horse. When he does so he catches people in the enactment of instincts; a difficult and powerful thing to catch.

When you're a kid, they say very loud DON'T LOOK DIRECTLY AT THE SUN. But even when you get older. You still can't look directly at the sun.

If anyone in New York City, friend or stranger, would like for me to cook his or her dinner party on the night of Wednesday, Aug 4, 2004, that person should send an email to ezra @ the present domain—that is, the author of this column, that is, Ezra who will occupy that city for two nights with no observable work responsibilities. The cheffery goes to the first plausible respondent.

I will cook a dish of your choosing (I retain veto power) and a dessert of my choosing. Alternatively, you may defer to my choice for both items.

A few ground rules:

I do not cook meat.

The meal will contain the colors red, yellow