27.6.06

Uh, Thanks for the Compliment

Reading Ben Yagoda's About the Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made, I'm having a hard time reconciling the squeamish side of founder/editor Harold Ross (Yagoda reprints a letter in which Ross insists on maintaining the "satin tissue" euphemism: "Nevertheless, the word toilet paper in print inevitably presents a picture to me that is distasteful and, frequently, sickening.") with the following, presented last in a batch of gushing letters to writers, from Ross to his 'old friend' Frank Sullivan:
Your piece was on my desk (as we say here) when I arrived at my office today. I was right on the verge of my morning movement and I took the play with me to read. I can't say which I enjoyed more, the play or the passage of my bowels. Looking back on it now, I guess it was the combination. The piece sort of relaxed me. I think your stuff has this effect, Frank, and that if you would do one a week for us awhile a lot of people in this town who are taking pills, now, would stop taking them.

22.6.06

Obituarium

  • X. choked on a spicy tuna roll while listening to his blind date espouse her political views. He died as one of the restaurant's shokunin attempted to perform CPR.
  • N. suffocated himself with a tyvek shipping envelope.
  • Z., a suicide, is found by his brother, who rewrites the suicide note before calling the police

I collect these in my Moleskine and never do anything with them. They're inspired mainly by two things: The local news briefs I read in the Gainesville [Fla.] Sun while we were living down there and Chekhov's notebooks, which are coming back into print. You can also read the notebooks at Project Gutenberg. There is no better book ever -- or at least this week.

19.6.06

Two nudes

My entry in the contest surrounding Lawrence Weschler's new book, Everything that Rises.





Please let there be no narrative to explain Henri Rousseau’s perfectly insane Mauvaise Surprise, the forest scene of a blasé nude, ferocious bear and hidden gunman. Nothing could do justice to such a bizarre image.

It’s a painting made all the more strange by its reflection in Morris Hirshfield’s The Artist and His Model. The women are undeniably similar. Both have stripped off their last piece of clothing (check the tree behind the nude in the Rousseau) and their faces are empty of any exprression. Hirshfield paints himself into the bear’s place in his painting (both appear at profile) where, instead of claws, he holds up three long brushes.

For me though, the convergence doesn’t end at the composition; I can’t find a hint of sexuality in either of these paintings. I don’t know why I expect a bear attack to be sexualized but both image – especially side by side – seem that much stranger for their chastity.

17.6.06

A1-20, A1, B1, A2, B2…

I have no idea what to pullquote from David Mitchell's essay on Complex Structures for the BBC's Get Writing site, an impressive collection of articles and advice on the craft of writing.

13.6.06

Quarantine

Sunday night I put some old books we're trying to get rid of up on Amazon. Within twelve hours,someone from the CDC bought Jennifer's paperback of The Color Purple for five bucks. I'm hoping this is the result of a top-secret study of diseases being transmitted via used books. Also hoping they'd like a copy of The Elephant Man.

9.6.06

Uncanny Valleys

I did this piece in Wired about why it’s impossible to do animation of the [human] face. They can make perfect animations of hands and crowds and so forth, of people walking, but they keep on bumping against the wall with the face, and they can’t do it. And one of the theories is that it is possible that it is theoretically impossible to do. And the great guy in this field is a Japanese Buddhist roboticist named Masahiro Mori. He has the notion of the “uncanny valley.” Which is basically that you can take a—if you make a robot that’s 70 percent lifelike, that’s fantastic. 80 percent, incredible. 90 percent unbelievable. 95 percent, people are going crazy how great this robot is. 96 percent, it’s a disaster. Because it’s entered the uncanny valley. Which is to say that a 95-percent lifelike robot is an incredibly lifelike robot. And a 96-percent lifelike robot is a human being with something wrong.

--Lawrence Weschler, during a long interview with Robert Birnbaum (who is, I would argue, not entirely unlike a 96-percent lifelike robot). The Wired article Weschler references is here. His book Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder is one of my favorites. Everything That Rises is truly capable of walloping the way you see everything.

7.6.06

Ministry Fiction Irritant: New ¢ry

The first three paragraphs of a thing I've been working and reworking for almost three years now.

Ranthus was tired of globetrotting. He'd been a reckless traveler, accruing debt and making enemies. On his way out of Flagstaff, with nowhere to go next, he bought a bus ticket home. He was born in New Century, an acne-scarred suburb in that part of the Midwest charged with creating Bambi-eyed girls with raw pink cheeks and wide foreheads. His parents, who left him no siblings, died there but were buried separately, in their respective hometowns, Pittsburgh, Lincoln. Ranthus knew that some people who stayed in New Century but not why. Those who had remained weren't exactly friends. Not anymore.

It was the type of place made you want to leave it. The Chinese buffet and the new gas station, with its buzzing fluorescence, were weekend hotspots. Strip malls clogged every street like commas in sentences that went on and on. A town of myrmidons who commuted to larger suburbs with larger office parks. Industry had come to the town in the '70s and collapsed ten years later but the housing prices kept rising until they razed the old industrial buildings to make residential subdivisions.

Before Ranthus and Jonesy could drive they spent Saturday nights loitering in the empty parking lot of an old, dead factory, its asphalt warped and cracked, weeds crawling up from below. They read comics and played Slaughter House or Wall Ball until the sun went down and then smoked cigarettes -- bought off the same kid who sold old Playboys -- until eight, when the security guard usually turned up. Every week, he drove up in his golf cart and threatened to call the real police if he ever caught them trespassing again. Though he was the largest man they'd ever seen, his nose was still too big for his face. He was the quintessential New Centurian except that he lived somewhere else. In New Century, everyone knew everyone and no one cared.
When I read George Saunders' Pastoralia three or four years back, I discovered I wasn't the fan everyone else was. Maybe I need to check out the new book though -- everything of his I remember seeing the last few years (the New Yorker pieces, the Esquire story) have been golden. The pinnacle* though is this bit from a Powell's interview/questionnaire Saunders completed:
Ships, planes, trains, or automobiles? No, I am a Luddite, and also a radical Catholic, so only travel by crawling on my belly while mumbling an incantation of the many ways I am unworthy. Time-consuming, sure, but worth it.


*The "pinnacle"? How could I really know?