I won’t ever cry for you/and you won’t ever shed tears for me … It’s not that I don’t care at all/ we lost touch so long ago/it may be our anniversary, but I, I wouldn’t really know
Some dates, like the birthdays of people you went to elementary school with, just stick in your head. I wonder if by the time we’re close to death, if every day will start with a memory clouding it.
If you read Junot Diaz, you’re familiar with his omnivorous approach to language. He takes phrases from everything—Spanish, New Jersey, comic books—for the perfect words to tell his story. In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Lola track friends were ciguapas; in “The Cheater’s Guide to Love,” Elvis sits shiva with Yunior as he tries to get over his ex-girlfriend. With such specificity, it’s not surprising that Diaz publishes rarely. But between books, he’s a prolific poster of news to Facebook. And he posts about everything, from happenings in Hispaniola to immigration in Korea. It’s impossible to know how any writer writes, but seeing what this writer consumes is a close second.
Bonus endorsement: The Annotated Oscar Wao
One of my toenails, which I lost in March, has grown in. My left ankle, which I sprained in 2008, feels fine. There’s no swelling under my left kneecap as there was two years ago. My hip, which tends to ache if I stand in the wrong shoes for too long, has been fine. I had some pain along the left side of my rib cage last month, but that’s gone now. The burn on my arm is healing nicely. I go through a few tissues every morning, but I don’t have the flu. Nothing medically major has happened to me in more than five years. Like family money and unconditional love, good health can feel like an entitlement. It’s something that goes unappreciated, almost unnoticed. But there’s nothing better than being healthy, and if you are, take a moment to appreciate whatever’s not hurting.
A friend I had met as a 15 year-old in summer camp and then again at an internship at 20 was visiting Denver this week for work. Even though he and I have never been completely out of touch and do not reunite every seven years exactly, our friendship reminded me of the great documentary series 7 Up! I recently rewatched 49 Up! in anticipation of his visit. I suggest you do the same, or if you know nothing of this program, start at 7.
The series is based on the Jesuit maxim, “Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man.” What started as an examination of the British class system in 1964, has continued for 42 years as an exploration of 12 people’s lives in seven year increments. Of all the cultural experiences I’ve had, I can’t think of one that’s affected me more. Even though I don’t know these people in a real way, I’ve also known them for 42 years. There’s a value in just the length of that relationship, and in some ways, the films made me understand and appreciate family in a way I hadn’t before.
If you’re curious about people and time, this is a good movie. Plus, 56 Up! will be released in America early next year, so you won’t have to wait seven more years to see how later middle age has treated these people.
this dinner I had in Lugano, in southern Switzerland, which is basically Italy. It had just become summer, and we were eating outside. Across from us was a large group of teenagers who had all the beauty and none of the awkwardness of youth. The girls and boys were all moving around their long table, and flirting madly with one another. It seemed to be a night they wouldn’t remember, because that summer would have many nights like that, all out together, the sun not setting until late, the evenings often ending with a darkened swim in a lake. This was more than ten years ago; I was a teenager then, too. I wonder where they all ended up, if any of their pairings or friendships stuck, if they had to grow up and quit smoking cigarettes.
Oh no goddamn!
Apparently, white people on vacation.
My two favorite ingredients for any recipe are time and money. I’m not one for precision, and measuring cups are almost irrelevant when slow cooking expensive meat. So for my potluck Thanksgiving, I offered to make the turkey.
I used a recipe for duck fat rubbed turkey from New York Magazine. I can’t endorse this recipe because like most New York Magazine recipes—and many New York Magazine articles—there’s some flash to its concept, but little follow through. The instructions are basically rub duck fat on a turkey and two days later, roast that turkey. I’m still not sure if I did the right thing with the head of garlic, which was listed in the ingredients and never mentioned again. Despite the recipe’s failings, the turkey came out amazing because having a turkey sit in duck fat for two days makes for a rich and delicious bird.
Which brings me to my endorsement: duck fat. As fats go, this one should be used more. It tastes good, is easily acquired at specialty food shops, and is not as expensive as you’d think. Plus, any recipe involving fat from a duck sounds special, even if you’re only using it to replace the butter in a pot of rice.
Thanksgiving is part of every Americans’ origin story, but mine in particular because my parents fell in love over Thanksgiving weekend in 1971. My mom still remembers the check pants my dad wore on Thanksgiving Saturday, their last date before she went back to college in Boston and my dad returned to New York. For that reason, this weekend always holds a certain romance to me. Also, it’s about eating. And I’m into that romance, too.
Only 3.5 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 59 do the minimum amount of physical activity recommended by the Department of Health and Human Services: 150 minutes a week of moderate activity.
If living in New York made me think that everyone reads, living in Colorado has given me a false impression on how active most Americans are.
Philip Roth has been such a fixture of American Literature, that it’s easy to take him for granted. More than take him for granted, to resent him for his misogyny and anti-Semitism. But when Philip Roth started, the New Yorker wouldn’t print a story that had plot points based around a diaphragm. But since then and now, Philip Roth has been a standby, making gloves interesting, flirting with Terry Gross, writing an entire novel about the decay of the body.
I specifically endorse reading, or rereading, Goodbye, Columbus. It seems like the only way to tell a love story, to get into the mechanics of what works, is to tell its break-up and show what didn’t. Brenda and Neil: they’re attracted to each other, but kind of hate the other, and themselves, too. Their self-disregard matches up nicely with the other’s disdain. And while the first part of the novella feels like a love story, there’s foreboding in the title.
There’s an earnestness to Goodbye, Columbus that’s missing from Roth’s later work. The Plot Against America, for example, is an intellectual exercise—what if America became violently anti-Semitic? In fact, a lot of Roth’s later works are a question: What happened to the Swede? What if you were mistook for a racist? Goodbye, Columbus is the story of a girl from Short Hills breaking a boy from Newark’s heart, not the question of what it would be like if that happened.
As for the charges of misogyny and self-hatred go, as anyone who has ever been through a break-up knows, or as The Lumineers put it, the opposite of love is indifference. I’m not saying that Philip Roth’s characters are sweet on women or are abstaining from pork. But their complicated relationships with women and their faith show the significance of both in their lives.
And just as an aside, my friend whose last name is Roth briefly lived in the same building as Philip Roth. Once Friend Roth said to him, “You’re my favorite writer,” to which the Writer Roth replied, “In the building?” “No,” Friend Roth said. “In the whole world.” Then some time passed, and dry cleaning got delivered to Friend Roth’s apartment, which he accepted, thinking the pants were his stepfather’s, though they are really Writer Roth’s. After the pants were returned to the rightful Roth, Writer Roth acted as if the dry cleaning mix-up were some Larry David-esque attempt on Friend Roth’s part to build a relationship.
“Nearby was an iPhone he had bought recently. “Why?” he said. “Because I’m free. Every morning I study a chapter in ‘iPhone for Dummies,’ and now I’m proficient. I haven’t read a word for two months. I pull this thing out and play with it.”
Then he corrected himself: “I haven’t read during the day. At night I read. I read for two hours.
”
I have a Belgian Aunt-in-Law who lives in L.A. What brought her there was watching an old Hollywood movie on a rainy day in Europe. When a Gene Kelly type reached out his kitchen window and picked an orange off of a tree, she thought, “That is the life for me,” and eventually, she made it her life.
My Western origin story began in Palm Desert in December, 2008. I was with my then-boyfriend and his friend from L.A., who was driving us to the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway. Among much clutter, she had The 50 Best L.A. Hikes in her car. I didn’t move for another two and a half years, but living someplace where keeping a hiking book in your car made sense, that was the life for me.
There’s outdoors to do in New York. I’ve even taken public transportation to go kayaking. But a trip to Mohonk or Breakneck Ridge is the whole day. What I wanted was to do an errand in the morning, not be sure what to do with my afternoon, look over to my passenger seat, see a guide book and go from there.
Of course I don’t keep Run The Rockies: Classic Trail Runs in Colorado’s Front Range in my car. (I’m way too neurotic about time, wicking gear, and clutter.) But I could, and every time I go trail running as just one part of my day, I feel very happy to live in Colorado.
I have been listening to the Slate Culture Gabfest a lot lately. Well, a lot being every week, since that’s how often the podcast comes out. I wouldn’t say the Culture Gabfest is my favorite podcast, but it is the easiest to listen to. Each episode is like a smart person’s dinner party where no one talks about their children or their dogs. And like a dinner party, if you miss any conversation to the sound of washing dishes, it’s not a big deal.
At the end of each episode, each host endorses something, usually cultural, occasionally esoteric, they have enjoyed in the past week. I think it’s a good practice to recognize one good experience weekly, and I’m going to start.
My endorsement this week, along with the Slate Culture Gabfest, is “Undergrowth With Two Figures,” a 1890 Van Gogh painting that is now on display at the Denver Art Museum. I had never seen that painting before I went to a lecture on the exhibit. Even though purple on the bark of trees is rare, I know what Van Gogh means. Trees in twilight feel purple. I also like how the two figures sort of seem like trees, how they have the same verticality. Plus, and maybe most importantly, the walk those two figures are going on seems like something they’ll remember, like it’s the moment they fell in love or fell out of it.
To see this painting, you have to live in Cincinnati, where it is normally shown, or visit the Becoming Van Gogh show at the Denver Art Museum. And for that, I endorse making reservations online and going early.
I started this evening making asparagus and watching Page One, the documentary about the New York Times. Early on in the movie, someone says, “News will still exist, but the quality will change.” That guy was right on, because I spent the rest of the night on Twitter reading about the Hurricane. During a weather crisis, no well-produced, rumor-free article can be as fast or as easily digestible as 1,000 people spouting information in 140 character increments. But the accuracy isn’t great. Every time I went back to Twitter after doing something analog, I’d read that some story I hadn’t heard about–like ConEd workers being trapped in a power plant–was a rumor. Fifteen tweets down, I’d see the story posted as true.
I still think it’s a little weird that tonight I was getting my news from the same place I get my retweeted GIFs. While 90% of my twitter feed was about Sandy, occasionally, there was news from a bar or a picture of the sunset in L.A. During a national crisis, can we all agree not to send foursquare updates in?
Maybe the Washington Monument.
I ask because I now have a banana holder. And while my bananas are in great shape, they aren’t turning ripe as fast I would like. I have a whole jar of nutella waiting for them to get yellow. Not that nutella can wait, nutella is a hazelnut chocolate spread that has no capacity to take on verbs, but my point remains.
I’ve been thinking about bananas more lately since listening to this Terry Gross interview with this guy who wrote a book about bananas, fittingly called, “Bananas!” That title is sort of a gimme, but still works because anything else would have been a disappointment. And also, ever since I was in Berlin, in a bath, drinking sparkling water and eating a banana with nutella, I’ve decided that where possible, I want my life to include the pleasure of nutella and bananas.
So my apartment in Denver is more or less set up. I mean, I have a banana stand. No TV, obviously. On one of my first nights in my apartment, before I had a bed, and I was trying to fall asleep in a sleeping bag, I had a brief bout of anxiety about how I would pack up all the pots and pans I had just bought when the time came to move. I mean, I’m not going to die in this apartment—right?—so how will I transport allthese things?
And even as I was buying this banana stand, I was thinking about moving it. Probably the most (or only) appealing thing about living with people from the internet is never having to acquire such stuff. Because stuff—I don’t know, it’s the worst. But also, the best: my bananas have a home.
Everybody owns a piece of Coke. What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca Cola, too. A coke is a coke and no amount of money can get you a better coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the cokes are the same and all the cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.
- Andy Warhol
The first time I was allowed to walk alone to my dad’s midtown east office building, I was 11 and had no sense of direction. When I called my dad from a pay phone from the the corner of 47th and 6th, he suggested a cab. On my way over, his partner told him, "Just like a woman to get lost in the diamond district.“
But by her first fall, Fran was happy to be on Broadview Avenue, though it wasn’t for anything she could have told Isaac that she wanted. It was simply that the leaves on her street were beautiful. Their block in Brooklyn was nice in the fall too, but Broadview was different, different than even the streets in their neighborhood. On Bayeau, the leaves on the birch trees became a sickly yellow before falling off. But Fran’s street was lined with oaks, maples and sweetgums, and all of their leaves turned red and orange. The block was fragrant with decaying leaves, a smell Fran had forgotten about after spending the last seven falls in the city. Across the street from her house was her favorite tree, a maple whose leaves stayed red for all of October before becoming a bright, almost translucent orange. Besides the tree, all she knew about her neighbor was that she drove an old Saab and lived alone.
During Fran’s first suburban fall, she spent her weekends reading about the Mondale-Reagan campaign in the living room by the window overlooking the front lawn. Between page jumps and sometimes paragraphs, she found herself staring out at the tree. From the distance of across the street, she had a better view of her neighbor’s tree than if it had been on her property. Eleven years later, she still spent her fall weekends watching the tree change colors: it was still the thing she loved most about New Rochelle.
Returning to New Rochelle tomorrow. Hoping the fall is happening
A while ago, two people I had met in real life but mostly follow on the internet broke up. They both started posting a lot of stuff online. The ex-girlfriend, who, to be fair, does have an excellent sense of style, put up pictures of each day’s outfit on her Tumblr, as if to say to her ex, “Look at these fashionable scarves you’re missing out on!” It’s unclear from Facebook what role the scarves played, but the couple did reunite, bought some land upstate and got an adorable dog. Recently, they married. They seem to share a pretty great life from what I can discern from their online presences.
Without getting into too much embarrassing detail, this is not a practice I am above employing or projecting onto failed suitors. Break-ups cause me to put a lot more flattering material of myself online. It’s only when a semi-forgotten friend comments on a post that I had hoped would sway the course of my romantic life that I remember that social media does not consist solely of my crush and me.
These posts don’t disappear after I have moved on. The other day, I came across a blog post I had written about obvious dreams. The star of my obvious dream has been gone for a while now, but reading my old writing felt like looking at a childhood photo of myself, a snapshot of how I wrote.
I realize most everyone in the world does not care about my internet presence. This is just something I’ve been thinking about lately: how we often have specific, fleeting motives for our online creations. For better or worse, these ideas of ourselves become real to the people who see us only online. And with enough time, they become real even to ourselves.
